Amy pointed out, rightly, that although my blog is called Dad and the Franchise I haven’t written much about the Dad character lately.

He’s good, really. He’s going to be 88 in a few weeks. He still drives up to BC when he wants to, when the weather and the roads are good. He still lives downstairs and comes up for dinner at least once a week. We see him every day, and he gets to see The Franchise every day.

I think that part of the reason I write about The Franchise more than Dad is that The Franchise is almost pure happiness these days and Dad just isn’t. I mean, I still have no regrets about moving Dad down to live with us. It was the right thing to do.

But I think that Wy’s life is about what he’s gaining, what he’s getting: Every day is full of something new (albeit sometimes bad things, like dropping yourself on your head from the bed), something he’s doing for the first time, learning for the first time, saying for the first time, feeling for the first time, seeing for the first time. His trajectory is upward.

My dad: His trajectory is not upward. Every day may be good, but I think every day for him is at least partly about what he’s lost. My mom. The town he used to live in, where he knew everybody and everybody knew him. The church where he was the pastor and where he had a purpose.

And living with him reminds me at least partly about what I’ve lost. And one of the things I’ve lost, I sometimes think, is my dad. Not to dementia or Alzheimer’s or anything like them, not yet. But his memory is not great, especially short-term. And his hearing is not great, ever. His tendency to tell long rambling stories given essentially no provocation seems to be increasing. What I’m trying to say is that in some ways he is not the man I grew up with. And maybe that’s inevitable for all of us.

I want him to be happy. But what it would take to make him that way is, as it always has been, a hard thing to figure out. He won’t tell you. “Oh, it’s fine,” he says. I can’t tell whether that’s (a) really the way he feels, that he honestly doesn’t care; (b) a byproduct of growing up during the 30s, which perhaps led him to ask little more of life than that he continued living it; or (c) a sign that he’s kind of given up. Maybe it’s a little of all three.

And yet. He’s here with us. If something happens to him, as it did when he was burning up with fever and fell last summer, and he cries out, we can hear him and help him. He gets to eat dinner with us a whole lot more than he ever would have if he’d stayed in Canada. He certainly gets to see more of The Franchise than he ever would have, and that little dude just radiates happiness and goodwill. He has a half share in a cat who sleeps on his couch (or easy chair, when Dad gets up) and who yaks up about 50% of his hairballs downstairs. He has a downstairs suite that’s comfortable if not, um, exactly finished, but one with a view of the water and the mountains and the setting sun at the end of the day. He’s a regular at Michoacan, where he doesn’t even have to order his veggie burrito anymore and where the waiter will come and sit down and talk to him.

This weekend it was beautiful here. Warm in a most un-May-like fashion for Puget Sound. We spent Sunday in the backyard digging a new flower bed for Amy; Dad had dug up the sod over the last couple of weeks, and I removed it so we could mix in a new load of topsoil. Dad was out there with us, alternately digging, resting on a stool propped against a post of the deck, playing with Wy. When he got tired he went inside and sat in his chair and slept.

And Sunday reminded me of what is that we are giving him: A family. He has a son who tries. A daughter-in-law who helps him with his taxes and his healthcare and a thousand other things. A grandson who smiles and laughs at him and hides behind his chair during family dinners. And a geriatric cat who sleeps on the sofa with him.

Amy has pointed out that my dad has spent the vast majority of his life alone. His 27 years of marriage to my mom are less than a third of his life (the odd thing is that I’ve been married to Amy for almost half my life (!)). Maybe he likes it. Maybe he’s just gotten used to it. Whatever it is, he still has his alone-ness, his solitude, his independence.

But he also has a family.

This is in the category of things I want to write down before I forget them.

Usually we’re in the kitchen finishing dinner, maybe around 7 or 7:30. The timing often depends on how diligent I’ve been in leaving work at a good time.¹

“Hey, Wy,” one of us will say. “Should we go have a bath?”

His typical response is to immediately take off down the hallway toward the bath.

I usually duck into his room on the way to grab the two towels, the adult-sized one and the kid one with the regulation animal head on one corner (duck, frog, monster).

In the bathroom I pull the soap dish out of the tub area. Otherwise the soap either gets tasted or thrown into the bath. I put down the crocodile non-slip tub mat and turn on the water. I get the temperature right² and then Wy grabs the handle and turns it to cold. We go back and forth. I pour in some of whatever bubble bath we’re using right now. Used to be orange. Now it’s I don’t know what.

I pull off his clothes while we wait for the tub to get full enough. He stands by the side of the tub watching the water rush in and foam up, lifting up first one foot and then the other so I can take off his pants.

When I get down to his diaper I occasionally have to shut off the water and deal with a situation that I call a Code Brown in my internal monologue.
I lift him in. Our tub is the standard 1960s-issue pink tub with failing tile all around it, which has led to a moldy floor problem. It’s on the list to fix. The original cabinets are water-damaged in places.

I don’t think he’ll remember the shabbiness. Maybe I’m wrong.

He splashes around. The toys we have in there these days are foam cutouts of sea creatures that stick to the tub sides when wet. We stick them all up and then he jabs at them with his finger and I identify them. “Fish,” I say. “Fish, fish, starfish, scallop, turtle, sea horse, sea cucumber. Fish. Fish.” And so on.

Baths are pretty functional these days. Anything that he eats or plays with ends up in his diaper, either by the, um, conventional route, or by falling down the neck of his shirt and getting funnelled into the top of the diaper. He had his ears full of sand from the beach³ the other day.

We splash around. I usually sing to him. I’m not sure why I started. Maybe because Amy always puts him to bed and I rarely get a chance to sing to him otherwise. My repertoire consists these days of mostly Raffi songs, or at least songs on one of his albums that I have in my car. Baby Beluga. Over in the Meadow. Morningtown Ride. To Everyone in All the World. And The Big Rock Candy Mountain, which is not on the Raffi album.

Lately it seems that he’ll often stop what he’s doing and listen to me sing, like it’s a performance.

He usually stands up at some point, and sometimes hides behind the shower curtain. He plays with the valve that sends water up to the shower. He plays with the stopper handle and usually lets out about a third of the water by the time we’re done.

We’re done after I wash him, after he stands up and pees in the tub (this is getting to be a nightly thing), after he does some, um, self-exploration⁴, and definitely after I wash his hair and dump water over his head.

Then I haul him out, lay him down on the rectangular towel and dry him off, typically while enumerating all the parts I’m drying off. “Gotta dry the hair, and the ears, and the cheeks, and the neck, and the chest, and the armpits.” You get the idea.

Then I sit him up, put the animal-head part of the kid towel over his head, wrap him up, and stand up so we can beam at each other in the mirror. This is my favorite part of the whole experience.

I take him into the bedroom, and usually we look out the window and twang on the strings that hold up the blinds before getting a new diaper on and putting on the PJs.

And then I sit on his floor, cross-legged, and he grabs a book, walks over to me, holds on to my shoulder with his free hand, and steps into the space in the middle of my lap with one foot, then turns around and snugs his back up against me. He opens the book. We read.⁵

Noodles

Wy eating handmade noodles at Judy Fu’s Snappy Dragon and hamming it up with Grandpa.

Several things:

1. The kid can use a fork.
2. He sometimes chooses not to.
3. He loves the pan-fried noodles.
4. He also loves getting his grandpa to mimic him, which Gramps was doing off-camera.

So Amy coordinated a wedding on Saturday, something she used to do more often. That meant The Franchise and I got to hang out together most of the day pretty much by ourselves.

Since it was a nice day, I executed my go-to move and put him in the backpack for a hike around the neighborhood. We walked west down 85th, then down 32nd to Sunset Hill Park, then east and back to the ‘hood.

There’s a little playground not far from our house, and I thought I would stop to let him out of the pack for a few minutes. We got there about 3 PM.

I put him in the little-kid bucket swing and push him for a while, which he always loves. Then I pull him out and let him go. He sits in the chips and piles them up and taste a few. I give him half a little snack bar, which he crams in his mouth.

He takes off on the asphalt paths that lead to the tennis court. Bites it. Pops up. No prob. He takes off running toward the zip line. I go get him. He takes off. You get the idea. He goes down a half dozen more times before we leave, but no crying. My rule is that if there’s no head-ground contact things are most likely OK.

It’s a sunny day, warm in the sun but cool in the wind and I’ve underdressed in shorts, a T-shirt, and a fleece vest. Wy’s in long pants, long shirt and thick sweatshirt, so he’s fine.

Over to the slide. I lift him up, help him slide down on his butt. Pretty fun. I lift him back up. He flips over and slides down on his belly. Turns out this is his thing. We do that a bunch more.

Meet a mom with her little boy, who is a couple of months older than Wy. She’s on him like pick-your-cliché (a cheap suit, etc.). Hover Mom. I am overtly trying not to be Hover Dad, but even I have my limit (which is about 100 feet). I chase him down.

An older guy comes by with a dachshund. A full-size one, maybe 18 inches or more long, not a mini. His name is Nicholas. The dog, that is. He’s friendly. Wy loves his wiry fur, and the nose. The fact that he’s shorter than Wy doesn’t hurt.

Then a couple come by with two border collies and two Aerobies (ring-shaped Frisbees). One dog seems to think I’m his designated thrower so I spend a while throwing, down the hill onto the baseball field, where there’s no baseball being played. Wy is at the bottom of the hill and the dogs race past him on their way to and from the Aerobies. My dog gets extra-confused and drops his Aerobie at Wy’s feet. Wy picks it up but doesn’t really know how to throw it. The dog waits for a few seconds before grabbing it and finding someone to throw it for him. The dogs move on.

We run around the field. I let him get a ways away and then run at him, dodging back and forth before running past him. He thinks this is hilarious. I think I’m lucky not to have torn an ACL.

Back to the slide. I feed him the leftover half a grilled cheese I made him for lunch. More sliding. I hold his hands and help him walk up the slide and help him flop over on his belly. He slides down himself. I’m freezing at this point and imagine he is too but every time I pick him up his hands and face are warm.

Finally I’ve had enough and pile him in the backpack to go home. He squawks for maybe 10 seconds but then pipes down. He’s tired too. It’s 5 PM.

At home I change his diaper. Sand falls out, from the little sand area around the slide, that’s been ground into his clothes and diaper by face-down sliding. I make a little dinner. I reheat cauliflower-cheese soup for me and try to feed him some. Nope. He eats part of a banana. I’ve made some toast for myself. He grabs a slice and chews the edges. I make the mistake of dipping a piece of toast in the soup. So he waves his gigantic piece of toast at the soup and gets it all soggy around the edges and gets himself a little soggy around the edges too. I get some mango-apricot yogurt out of the fridge and get him a little plastic spoon.

I have to prime the pump, by which I mean I let him feed me a spoonful. Then we’re off. He holds the spoon, close to the bowl, and I steer with the handle. He eats so fast that he practically lunges at the yogurt. I can hear him gulping. I can feel it; he’s on my lap.

I run him a bath and sing him songs and dry him off. We beam at each other in the mirror as is our custom, he in one of those little-kid duck towels that have a built-in hood.

I sit, cross-legged on the orange and red interlocking mats on the floor of his room. He grabs books, crawls back into my lap and sits down, and we read. He is tall enough now that I can rest my chin on the top of his head, which smells like the calendula soap and shampoo I use to wash his hair these days.

We read books the way we do now: Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 2, 4, 1, close and throw. I accept that it’s meditation. My mantras are, “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” and “One, two, peekaboo!” and “Up pup. Pup is up,” and “1. One dog. Woof!” and “Oh, the wonderful sounds Mr. Brown can do!” There is enough in my weekday life that is unknown and uncertain and here I know what to do and it’s clear what I am to read and it’s refreshing, in a way.

“Fish,” I say, reading his “Little Animals” book. “Shish,” he says. “Yes!” I say. “That’s right.”

Cute. I don’t know that I really had cute in my life before Wy. Not for a long time, anyway. It’s not really a word in the Acceptable Modern American Male Lexicon, anyway.

In certain use, it’s OK. That girl is cute. That’s about it, really.

But Wy is cute. Cute implies small. Cute implies high-pitched. In an absolute sense, Wy is still small and high-pitched. Compared to some babies of his age, he has never been small or high-pitched.

But he’s cute. Undeniably cute. He sometimes wakes up in the morning and (I think) wants to practice his sounds, so he’ll start saying things in the softest little voice, as though he doesn’t want to wake us up. That’s cute. It’s cute when you ask him “What does the dog say?” or “What does the cat say?” or “What does the cow say?” and you get a soft little “ow-wow-wow” for all of them. That’s cute.

It’s cute when he crawls up into my lap and drags a book with him. It’s cute when he walks over to me and wants to sit in my lap in the red glider and it’s cute when he leans his head back on me and goes to sleep as I sing every song I know in the Raffi songbook. It’s cute when I get up in the morning and he gets up too and walks unsteadily over to the edge of the bed to get picked up and taken to the kitchen to help me make coffee and oatmeal. And when he says “Dad-dad-dad.” And when I pick him up after drying him off after a bath, and he’s wrapped in one of those little-kid towels with the built-in duck or monster or frog head, and I turn him to the mirror and we beam at each other for a while. That’s cute.

I know he’s not doing this stuff to be cute. He just is. He’s just being Wyatt. Everything’s new to him, and everything’s fascinating, and he’s just genuine with it all.

And likewise everything about him is new to me, and everything’s fascinating, and I just try to be genuine about it all and to let him know how much I love being his dad-dad-dad and then I try to write as much of it down as I can so I will remember how I felt and so someday maybe he will read it and realize how much we like him.

Probably I’ve written about this before. Whenever Wy and I ( hey! That rhymes.) look at ourselves in the mirror, or a photo of him and me or him, me and Amy, I say the same thing.

“Who’s that, buddy? It’s us!”

Usually he says, “Ussss.”

Today is our anniversary. Eighteen years. Of us. Now with over 33% more us!

I was able to take a half day off and hang out with us. We did normal things: Pho for lunch, coffee, a walk around Green Lake. Amy had a massage while Wy and I bought the ingredients for the dinner that Amy cooked and that we just finished eating.

All pretty mundane stuff. Except that it was us.

Amy and Wy spent most of last week in the bay area. The solitude was nice, for a day or two. Then it got lonely, which is the last thing this only child introvert might have said a few years ago. But I missed us.

As I write this, at our kitchen table on my iPhone, by candlelight, Wy decides he can’t sleep and cries. Amy goes to try to comfort him, but comes back a few minutes later. “He won’t let me put him down,” she says. She brings him with her out to the kitchen. The eyes close, then open again. The cat shows up. I scratch his head and he walks away. Downstairs, my dad yawns and the heating ducts carry the sound upstairs.

The candles still flicker.

It’s us.

I feel like I’ve been quoting movie lines to The Franchise ever since he was born. Or imagining him saying them.

Many are from The Lord of the Rings:

• “They are not for eating!” Originally said by one of the Uruk-Hai to one of the other orc types in reference to Pippin and Merry. I use it in reference to all sorts of things—my fingers, cat food, bars of soap.
• “They are young, they are tender. Eat them, eat them!” I say this when I want him to eat, despite the fact that you probably can’t realistically describe Cheerios as young or tender.
• “The way is shut.” I say this whenever Wy is trying to get past the gate in the hallway. If I really mean business, I add the rest of the line: “It was made by the dead, and the dead keep it. The way is shut,” using my best King of the Dead voice. This may start frightening him in the future. ¹
• Lately, whenever somebody makes a complimentary observation about The Franchise (e.g. “Hey! He likes croissants!” or “He’s holding the book the right way up!”) it’s all I can do not to say: “Course he is! He’s a Baggins, not some blockheaded Bracegirdle from Harbottle.”
• “What is this new devilry?” Originally said by Boromir about the Balrog; now I imagine Wy thinking this about a lot of things: Popcorn, eyeglasses, etc.
• “We can’t eat elvish food.” Or wear elvish pants, or elvish socks. Even elvish diapers are iffy sometimes.
• “That would kill us! KILLL USSS! Oh….” For example, wearing elvish pants.
• “There will come a day when…but it is not this day!” You can fill in the blank with all sorts of useful phrases. “There will come a day when we run around naked and pee on the floor, but it is not…oh.”

So. The Franchise is walking now. Running sometimes. Maybe I should just say ‘walking…with authority!”¹ He and I were playing soccer last night, using this fabric ball with a bell inside that someone gave us. I say soccer² even though about 95% of the time he just grabs the ball with his hands. Still. He loves it. He even kicks it once in a while.

These days, having my dad live with us feels like a duty. It feels like the right thing to do, which is good. It feels like a good thing for him, especially when he needs us and we’re just upstairs instead of six hours away, or when he wants to see his grandson and The Franchise is just upstairs too, ready to laugh at him or growl or get Dad to shake his head at him, or all three at once.

But my relationship with Dad is odd, to me. I interpret the world for him. I help him figure out where to go, tell him what is recycling and what is compost and what is garbage, and reassure him that the guy the FBI caught in Washington DC was not wearing an actual bomb but that it was a sting.

It’s hard to remember when my dad was the kind of guy who would (or could, really) play with me. But he was. And when I was playing soccer with Wy last night I had this moment of déja vu, remembering when my dad used to play couch hockey with me. My mom would make balls out of old socks, and we would use my grandmother’s cane (she had passed away by this time), which was an old-school, thick curved piece of wood.³ We had a long living room, maybe 20 feet by 12 feet or so, and we had this ratty old yellow couch at one end.⁴ The goalie would defend the couch, equipped with a yardstick. The shooter would stick-handle (cane-handle?) as best he could and finally shoot. The goalie could attempt a glove save, which usually sent the ball up and over the couch into the sunburst-style wall-mounted clock, which would fall behind the couch. Or the goalie could execute a kick save, which if done with the left foot would shoot the ball up toward the top of the china hutch in the dining room, where it would take out one of my mom’s collection of kerosene lamps. My poor mom. She was pretty philosophical about most of the lamps, but I do remember her losing it at least once, which was perfectly justified.

I remember my tenth birthday party. We had a bunch of my fourth-grade classmates over for a scavenger hunt and cake, but what everybody wanted to do was to play living room hockey with my dad. He would have been 56 by this time.

He was a good dad to ten-year-old me in so many ways. I think I’m only starting to realize some of those ways now that I’m trying to be a good dad to my own little dude. And I’m starting to realize that I’ve forgotten a lot of the ways in which he was a good dad in the 30+ years since I was ten.

Ferriss Bueller once said, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t slow down you could miss it.”¹

I always supposed this to be true and now find it increasingly true. I routinely underestimate the ages of friends’ children, and have started purposely overestimating my underestimates, which is actually working pretty well. She’s, what, 11? Better guess 12…Oh, she’s 13?

What I don’t know is whether this is due to being a father, to being busy or to being forty. OK, forty-plus.

I am dismayed at how helpful reading glasses are to me now. I am dismayed at the realization that it has been a quarter-century since I graduated from high school.² I am dismayed at how quickly time seems to move from Saturday to Wednesday, and how slowly it seems to move thereafter.

I guess The Franchise is serving as a kind of living clock in that respect. Sort of. In some respects, he makes inexorable progress. He gets around on two feet, mostly. Still a fair amount of head-to-ground contact, with less howling than I might have imagined. There was a time, a little over a month ago, when we were still waiting for him to take more than one unassisted step. So thinking about the time (when was that?) when we were all waiting for him to roll over, or to sit up, or to pull himself up, all seems so long ago, even though it wasn’t more than a few months ago.

And yet. When he gets up with me in the morning, and I’ve had a few early-morning calls at work, so this last week he’s had to get up earlier than usual, he insists on being held. Making coffee one-handed is interesting. As is oatmeal, and toast, and Trader Joe’s veggie sausage patties ³. Brushing one’s teeth with a Sonicare and having little hands either trying to get in one’s mouth or trying to yank the Sonicare out, also interesting. My point is that there was a time not long ago when I could put him down on the floor and he would crawl or walk around and amuse himself in the morning rather than needing to be held.

Actually I’m not sure what my greater point was now. Oh, right. Life moving fast, the need to slow down, etc. I will say this: One great thing about having The Franchise is that time with him always feels well spent.

So this has been quite a month. Amy and Wy have spent a good chunk of it ill, first with a nagging cold (Amy), then with a cold/teething/ear infection trio (Wy). I came home from a whirlwind business trip to Europe and felt great for about 18 hours, until waking up with a fever and, um, on what a blog I read once described as ‘the accelerated weight-loss plan.’

I decided that it was most likely norovirus, the sort of virus that’s infectious enough that it wipes out entire cruise ships at a time so they have to turn around and return to port because the captain can’t keep his Perrier down. The good news is that it’s one awful day, then one poor day, and then you’re fine. I wondered whether I was Patient Zero in a new outbreak and sadly I think I was. I’m not sure whether to blame it on a dodgy calzone or on the substantial monoglot Ukrainian woman I sat next to on the plane.¹

So pretty much everyone I know got it. Not sure if it really was all me, but I can’t imagine that I helped things any. Wy sat up one night about midnight and just puked up whatever was in his stomach with a vaguely surprised look on his face. No crying. I just remember holding him on the bathroom counter, leaning him over the sink, pale as a beluga, and that slightly resigned “oh, well” kind of look on his face. Honestly, the four molars he cut (and is actually still working on) caused him more anguish than the vomiting.

Then we had the snow around here, from six to 12 inches depending on where you live, that pretty much brought the city to a halt for a few days. It was pretty, though. We don’t generally get days of snowfall, but it snowed pretty steadily all day Wednesday and Thursday too. It’s all melted now, just the occasional remnant of a dirty parking lot snowpile left.

And The Franchise has just powered through all of it. Stopped eating for a while there, just because I think he didn’t want to use his swollen and bleeding gums for anything, but that’s over now and he’s chowing again. He’s walking, toddling around laughing at everything with that growly little laugh of his. Anything even vaguely mechanical is still of extreme interest. The laser printer, for instance, gets opened and closed many times a day. Many test pages are printed.

He’s good company. The pre-parent me is amazed to hear the post-parent me saying this. Amy had a meeting Sunday afternoon and so he and I ran some errands. We went to pick up a suit, and the guy remembered me even though he’d seen me once maybe two weeks ago (honestly, I think Wy’s kind of hard to forget), and then to Macy’s, where I put him down on the floor and then thought I’d lost him, except he was leeched on to my leg, and where the woman who helped me seemed kind of crazy about him, and then to the grocery store, where he just rode around in the cart, vaguely disappointed that Whole Foods appears to have no ceiling fans. I talked to him and he talked back, sometimes, as he does. “Ights!” is a typical comment.² On the way home he squawked when the Raffi CD ended so I put it on again and when I looked back a little later his hand was on his leg and not moving, so we sat in the car in the driveway for half an hour while he finished his nap. He’s very much a little person, and I continue to be amazed at his transformation from smiley blob into real little boy. It’s just going to accelerate when he starts saying more recognizable words, although he says quite a few and understands a whole heap more, I think.