Category Archives: Family matters

In which we discuss matters of the family.

Family matters

Confessions of a Hall Boy done good

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Today’s Summertime Rewind guest writer is a close friend of the Butterscotch Sundae family. Rockford and I went to high school with Don, and now he and his family live less than 2 miles from us. Don is in a lot of our summer memories, but none of them involve quite as much cole slaw, grease and debauchery as the story you’re about to read.

It all started the day I decided to begin work during the summer of 1990 at the age of 13. It was a tough decision in June of that year. It also violated child labor laws.

You see, my friend James and his family had tickets to see an Atlanta Braves / San Diego Padres game in Atlanta. Me? I decided to skip the game and begin work at a restaurant in North Georgia. Getting paid cash under the table was not something I was familiar with, but it spent. And that was more important than baseball at the time, even though the Cubs were coming off a division championship.

I was the restaurant’s official Hall Boy — which I assumed at the time was some rite of passage that would pay dividends in the form of lots of chicks, a Grand Prix with a built-in CD player and subwoofer, a pair of Oakley’s and a Starter jacket, and enough cash to buy all the baseball cards and Grateful Dead bootlegs I wanted from the nearby Flea Market.

I wore a black Mark Grace t-shirt and a pair of jeans to work that first day. They were ruined.
Continue reading Confessions of a Hall Boy done good →

Family matters

He still likes to bother the cat

I’m taking a break from blogging this month and sharing some words from friends, some posts from the past and other assorted bric-a-brac. This post was originally published on July 29, 2010 as “Evenings with Petey.” I can’t believe how much he’s grown in the last two years.

Pete wouldn’t go to bed? Here’s some more of the conversation we had before I finally got off my hindquarters and took Little Boyhim back upstairs.

Pete: Remember what happened when they fell down in that dark basement? Maybe that’s not good.

Me, somewhat alarmed: Who fell down in a dark basement?

Pete: Wonderpets did that. They fell down in dark basement. They won’t see anything down there. Remember what happened to that? I’ve never seen “Wonderpets All Began.” Can I put “Wonderpets All Began” on my wish list? Can I please?

Me: Yes.

Pete: Maybe we should get a new one. Maybe we should get a new one. Maybe we should get a neeeeewwww oooonnnneee.

Me: OK.

Pete: That’ll work. [turns attention to poor, long-suffering Marsha] I’m gonna get you kitty. A-poke poke pokey poke. [Marsha runs under couch; Pete gives chase] Down there? I’m all done taking naps. [He picks up a photo album.] Let me see this picture of this, Mama. Let me see this picture of this. Oh. Oh, there’s the cars. There’s Mater and McQueen and Dinoco McQueen. Oh there’s McQueen Dinoco Mcqueen, and there’s Petey and peas. There’s Petey and peas, Mama. There’s Poppy and Addison, and there’s bubble playing time, and there’s Mommy and Daddy, and there’s Lightening McQueen and Dinoco McQueen and that’s the pictures. Let’s look at them again. [rinse and repeat] Well, it’s time for me to wake up. I want to watch a cartoon.

Me: It’s time for bed, honey.

Petey: But I already take one, Mama.

Me: It’s time for night-night, all the way to morning. [Do I really talk that way? Sometimes. Whatevs.]

Petey: But it’s too late. But I was asleep. I wanna lay in Mommy and Daddy’s bed. I want to Mama. I really want to. Meow. Meoooooow. Meow meow.

Family matters

My dad’s summer with the Boy Scouts

Today’s Summertime Rewind guest writer is more of a guest speaker, because it’s the only way I could get my dad to share a summertime story with us. I dragged this one out of him while he made potstickers to go with our leftovers from Forbidden City last week.

“You could write about riding the bus all over town,” I suggest. My grandma was a city bus driver, and my dad and his siblings used her passes to traverse the town.

Dad doesn’t like that idea, though.

“That’s the highlight of my childhood?” he says. “Riding the bus?”

“It doesn’t have to be a highlight,” I say. “Just a memory. What about the time you hitchhiked to Florida?”

“That was Easter.”

“Didn’t you do anything during the summer?”

And then the big reveal: “I broke my leg one summer.”

“That’s a good story!” I say. And one I don’t think I’ve heard before.

“That’s not a good story,” he protests.

“But it’s a story,” I tell him, and he finally agrees to share it.

“I was in the Boy Scouts,” he says. “The Boy Scouts was a traumatic experience. I was a Boy Scout for one summer. Maybe a year. In the wintertime I went on a ‘polar bear’ …”

“What’s a ‘polar bear’?” I ask.

“I slept outside in the winter in a tent,” he says. “And then in the summertime we went on a canoe trip and I spent the rest of eternity selling cookies and working at pancake suppers and trying to raise money to go to camp for two weeks. And the week before I went to camp? I broke my leg riding my bicycle down the soapbox derby hill. So I couldn’t go to camp. And I spent my summer in a cast.”

“That’s a sad story,” I say.

“They’re all sad stories,” he says.

And then we sit down to a dinner of leftovers, pot stickers and corn nuggets. Which is a strange combination but not a sad story at all.