Dispatches from the City of Angels
I'm a writer and humorist living in and writing about Los Angeles. You can catch my novel LOSING CLEMENTINE out March 6 from William Morrow. In the meantime, feel free to poke around. Over at my website you can find even more blog entries than I could fit here, as well as a few other ramblings. Enjoy and come back often.
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"Taint what a horse looks like, it’s what a horse be." - A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
"Trying to take it easy after you've finished a manuscript is like trying to take it easy when you have a grease fire on a kitchen stove." - Jan Burke
"Put on your big girl panties, and deal with it." - Mom
"How you do anything is how you do everything."
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Dad II
Okay, let's just start off with the fact that he's going to be fine. Fine, I tell you. Good as new. Yes, he's very unwell right now. But we are going to fix it. AND HE IS GOING TO BE FINE.
My stepdad is sick. The kind of sick that involves procedures and specialists and long-term plans. (But did I mention he is going to absolutely, positively FINE? He will be. Just so we're all clear on that.)
Stepdad is a weird word. I'm not sure what's so "step" about him. It sounds like one step removed, and nothing could be further from our truth, which is why I suppose he's always been called Dad Number 2....or sometimes Smokey the Bear. But that's really a whole other story.
He's the sort of Dad who goes to all your games wearing the school's booster shirt and then video tapes the entire thing and saves them for that ever popular wedding montage movie. He shows up to pack your stuff and lift heavy furniture no matter how many times you move and will then get in the car with you without complaint and drive 2,000 miles to your new place - even if it means going through Colorado in the dead of winter with a four cylinder engine. And you know he checked the oil and the brakes and all the other fluid levels before you left without telling you because that's the kind of thing he does.
When you think about it, stepdad is right down there with porta-potty-cleaner-outer on the list of jobs sane people volunteer for. Particularly when the prospective stepchild is a teenager, as I was. Normal, biological parents make detailed and well-reasoned plans for drowning their own children at 13. Really, it's only the wiliness of the child and mandatory prison sentences keeping most of them alive. So who in their right mind would want to take on someone else's parenting nightmare?
Dad Number 2.
Probably this is because he's very big on organizing things. Every tool, every bolt, every issue of Field & Stream since 1982 has its place, which is good because he never throws anything away either. (Good for me too.) So when I came along in all of my sullen and obnoxious teenage glory, he just went, "Oh, wait. Teenagers go in this drawer." And he picked me up and put me with his biological kids. Not in the special stepkid drawer, but in the big one with everybody else. (Probably organized according to height and marked with one of those old-fashioned label-making machines.) And that's just the way it was right from the beginning. All of us in one big drawer.
So he's going to be FINE. Because he has to be, and that's just all there is to it.
My stepdad is sick. The kind of sick that involves procedures and specialists and long-term plans. (But did I mention he is going to absolutely, positively FINE? He will be. Just so we're all clear on that.)
Stepdad is a weird word. I'm not sure what's so "step" about him. It sounds like one step removed, and nothing could be further from our truth, which is why I suppose he's always been called Dad Number 2....or sometimes Smokey the Bear. But that's really a whole other story.
He's the sort of Dad who goes to all your games wearing the school's booster shirt and then video tapes the entire thing and saves them for that ever popular wedding montage movie. He shows up to pack your stuff and lift heavy furniture no matter how many times you move and will then get in the car with you without complaint and drive 2,000 miles to your new place - even if it means going through Colorado in the dead of winter with a four cylinder engine. And you know he checked the oil and the brakes and all the other fluid levels before you left without telling you because that's the kind of thing he does.
When you think about it, stepdad is right down there with porta-potty-cleaner-outer on the list of jobs sane people volunteer for. Particularly when the prospective stepchild is a teenager, as I was. Normal, biological parents make detailed and well-reasoned plans for drowning their own children at 13. Really, it's only the wiliness of the child and mandatory prison sentences keeping most of them alive. So who in their right mind would want to take on someone else's parenting nightmare?
Dad Number 2.
Probably this is because he's very big on organizing things. Every tool, every bolt, every issue of Field & Stream since 1982 has its place, which is good because he never throws anything away either. (Good for me too.) So when I came along in all of my sullen and obnoxious teenage glory, he just went, "Oh, wait. Teenagers go in this drawer." And he picked me up and put me with his biological kids. Not in the special stepkid drawer, but in the big one with everybody else. (Probably organized according to height and marked with one of those old-fashioned label-making machines.) And that's just the way it was right from the beginning. All of us in one big drawer.
So he's going to be FINE. Because he has to be, and that's just all there is to it.
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