A Dude's Guide. . . to everything

Backyard Burial

The Angel of Pet Death has hit my house so often, I’m afraid I’m going to have to apply for a zoning change so my backyard can double as a cemetery. I cannot tell you the number of animals we’ve buried back there. No, really. I literally can’t tell you the number, but that’s because I lost track of the number of fish we’ve had at around thirteen. It seems as if every animal we bring into the house lasts a couple of months and then brings down the curtain and joins the choir invisible.

We’ve had to bury fish, hermit crabs, birds, rats, lizards by the ton, a snake and — on one memorable occasion — a swarm of fireflies. (Yeah, that was a very strange summer.) Our death touch with reptiles got so horrible, we eventually bought a cat for our oldest little dude so he’d have something a little hardier and resistant to death in all its myriad forms. So, of course, a couple of days after we brought the cat home we learned it had been exposed to feline leukemia and had a fifty-fifty shot at dying. Turns out we got lucky and the cat is still with us. So far it’s only mammals that tend to survive for long in our household. And every time we had to dig up another plot of ground it was traumatic as heck for the little dude that had owned the previously alive pet.

You haven’t really experienced the joy of life until you’ve just finished breaking roots and digging up frozen ground to stand sweating next to a bawling 8-year-old and try to find a few good things to say about a rat you’re about to bury. And, yes, that was oddly specific. Why do you ask?

However, even with all the trauma and hullaballoo that goes along with a visit from the Angel of Pet Death, I still wouldn’t have deprived my little dudes of owning the smaller pets. They learn responsiblity by caring for them, tenderness by making sure to be gentle and a bit about how death works. Plus, as an added bonus, they got to learn that even a small ribbon snake can really stretch out its mouth and body to swallow a fish wider than it is. Now that was cool.

– Richard

My Big Girl

As much as I was ready for summer to end and school to start, I still got run over by future nostalgia roaring through me like a, like a, well, something very fast. I got all teary eyed yesterday when I picked up the four kids from school and I realized that my baby was a big girl.

Of course she had been telling us “I’m a big girl” for herself for months, but yesterday I realized that I don’t get to change any more diapers, rock her to sleep for her nap or carry her in a papoose ever again. I have been waiting for this for a long time because life is a little easier now that many tasks can be done by her or her siblings. But, I am Dude! enough to admit I am going to miss my little blond-haired, blue-eyed cling on.

Dude! enjoy the present because future is inevitable.

– Barry

The Spotlight is Always On

Thank God there wasn’t a flickr, or a twitter, or a facebook or, really, the internet when I was growing up. I can just imagine the utter humiliation I’d still be enduring to this day because of something I thought was funny at the time and threw out to the public. These things will come back to haunt you and then bite you in the a. . . butt.

I thought of all this because in the last week I’ve been contacted by two women I was supposed to have known in the past. One, yep, sure enough, one of my best friends in high school. I hadn’t heard from her in almost 25 years. The other, nope, she thought we dated in college, but I think she had a different dude in mind. They found me through facebook, which I joined so I could keep an eye on my two older little dudes.

They’re getting of an age where they want to start talking to and interacting with their friends in a more or less constant basis. (Something I sure don’t understand, but then again, without my wife, known to some as She Who Hates Long and Involved Nicknames, I’d probably be living in a small cave somewhere in the wilds of Nevada, subsistingon whatever sun-fried lizard happened to be close enough to dead for me to catch. In other, shorter words, I’m a lot less outgoing than most.) Still, I wanted to be able to keep an eye on them and make sure they don’t make the kinds of mistakes I would have had I had the same sort of tech available to me when I was their age.

I mean, geez, the summer of 1982 alone would be enough to get me banned from ever coming back to my hometown of Dallas. And the thought of that showing up all these years later? Yikes!

So, yeah, I’m keeping an eye on the little dudes for as long as I can. Or for as long as they don’t figure out they can always open a second account. I’m still using rocks to the head to keep them from the thinking thing. I think it’s going well.

– Richard