Suspicious of Gary (and Other Themes from the Abu Halen Family Summer)
Wow, so many things have happened this summer that I haven’t written about. You’re welcome. And, also, I’m sorry. Because now I will write about some of them. Like Chesterfield and Venice, and penniless daughters. And Gary. He’ll only get one sentence though, that home-wrecking roofer.
On our way to the U.S. for vacation, we got to spend a layover in a lounge. This is the second time this has happened to us. The first time was in 2008, I think, in Chicago, on our way from Jordan to Portland. We had three kids ages 5 and under, and we had been flying for innumerable hours through the night.
We had business class seats for some reason that probably involved me speaking Arabic so poorly to Jordanian airport personnel that they glanced at one another and said under their collective breath, “This man cannot speak properly and also smells strongly of Smarties. I suspect he’s an addict. Moreover, look at this cute family following him that he clearly stole from someone else, because why would that attractive woman yoke herself to someone with a Smarties problem? We all know where Smarties problems lead. Albuquerque.”
So we got into a lounge on that occasion based on our business class status, but it was a mirthless couple hours during which we tried to stop the sleep-deprived children from breaking things, and also ourselves from breaking things, because breaking things is what you do when you haven’t slept in what feels like three centuries, which centuries you’ve passed wrestling with toddlers on an airplane.
In the photo above you can see that this recent lounge experience in Dallas was much better. There is Grace regulating herself, inhaling slowly and mindfully, repeating her mantra, “She can’t actually do the Rubik’s cube faster than me, she’s just cheating somehow,” instead of spitting food everywhere and pooping on her socks like she used to.
Shannon is using the energy she is saving from not having small children to write things down in her paper planner, despite the fact that her phone contains all the information that ever existed. But she needs her paper planner to remind her what we’re having for dinner next Tuesday, and also to call Gary the roofer. Shannon calls Gary way too much, and they just sit there and talk about roofs. I am suspicious.
Chesterfield, Idaho is maybe the world’s nicest ghost town. People moved there in the 1880s. They said to one another, “It’s pretty cold here, but the cows seem to like it. We should stay.” Then it was really cold for, like, 40 years, and the cows died, and so did Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge was like, “That stodgy fat man is dead! Let the good times roll!” And they did, until Herbert Hoover started thinking, “I wish they’d build a dam and name it after me. Wait, if everyone lost their jobs, then we could hire them to build a dam and name it after me! Eureka!” People lived in Chesterfield for another 20 years after that, because inertia, but then someone told the other 35 people in town, he said, “Guys, all the cows have been dead for decades and none of us have been able to feel our toes since that sunbreak back in 1912. Let’s move to Boise.” That’s more or less how it went. Probably less.
Now Chesterfield has been restored by an organization consisting largely of descendants of former residents. Volunteers give tours of the town, and also hugs, if you tell them they remind you of your mother. I support hugs. And I support Chesterfield. And I support Hoover Dam, but Lake Mead doesn’t, at least not as much as it used to.
The picture above is Halen posing at an old gas station. If you look closely, you can see a wasp flying right toward Halen’s head. Don’t worry, nobody was harmed, except Warren G. Harding.
I booked a backcountry camping spot at Yellowstone this summer. Then I hauled camping gear in my checked luggage all the way from Central America to southeast Idaho, then I lugged my 35 pound backpack five miles into the wilderness, where I made camp beside Shoshone Lake. The photo above was taken during my hike.
Then mosquitos and biting flies assailed me. I fought back with long pants, socks, and a hoodie. But they bit me relentlessly through my clothing. I sprayed myself head to toe with insect repellent. They drank it up, along with my blood. I tried to call in some guided missiles to take them out, but I didn’t have good cell service. I read for awhile beside the lake but didn’t get further than a page or two, what with all the mosquito slapping, foot stomping, and crying in a fetal position because the U.S. military was ignoring my texts.
Eventually I found refuge in my tent. The flies and mosquitos swarmed just outside the mesh roof, hungry, waiting. I could hear them licking their proboscises. The shadows were lengthening and the bugs were getting thicker. I reasoned that I had three choices: 1) spend the next 40 hours in my tent. 2) Read my book beside the lake until I didn’t have enough blood left to see the words on the page. 3) Acknowledge that life is about the journey, not the destination, break camp, hike back to the car, drive to Dairy Queen, eat a lot of Blizzards, then go home and sleep in a real bed. I chose number three. Turns out there aren’t any Dairy Queens close to Yellowstone, so I had to eat my fingernails instead. Pretty bad day.
On Violet’s first day of 5th grade, a girl in her class invited all the girls to an 80s party at an exclusive club we can’t afford to go to if rich people don’t pay for us. Man, the 80s were a great time, unless you were a Democrat, or Bob Dylan. It’s pretty cool that Stranger Things is bringing that decade back into the popular consciousness. Sometimes I hear my kids watching it (I don’t watch because I’m afraid of monsters), and an 80s song will come on, and my kids will say, “Man, this song slaps.” Then I slap them. Funny every time.
Grace was commissioned to create a chalk mural on a neighbor’s kitchen wall. It is her first commission for anything. Well, apart from keeping her room clean and texting when she’s going to be home late. But she has declined those commissions.
She got twenty bucks for this job, but we told her if she works hard she can become a professional artist someday and make triple that amount. Every single month! Grace also started a dog walking business, wherein she walks one dog and makes five dollars. So… there’s no real way to spin this. She’s pretty poor.
This girl went on study abroad this summer to Europe to study global diplomacy and journalism. She learned how to use a debit card, keep track of her passport, and not make sweeping generalizations about other countries based on three sweaty days of fighting with other foreign tourists. She also learned that maybe she doesn’t want to be a journalist. That’s OK! Nobody likes journalists, except other journalists.
Grace made these stellar cupcakes with her grandma’s help. They tasted really good. If being an artist doesn’t work out, Grace has a bright future ahead of her as a baker, which also doesn’t generate much income. But bakers tend to be less insufferable than artists. And Grace is completely sufferable!
Being a landlord is hard. This summer we spent a few days cleaning up our rental house in atonement for forgetting that it does, in fact, have a yard, which must, in fact, be maintained. By the time we remembered and made it to Utah to do some upkeep, the yard looked worse than the drug houses that flank our house. But after a couple hot days of mowing, pruning, weeding, sawing, and paying some guys to cut down a couple trees, the house and yard were cute again.
At one point, I found a nest of angry wasps while chopping back a massive overgrown bush. I fortunately missed the nest as I blindly shoved the electric pruners into the bush, and I managed to get myself clear before sustaining any damage. But I realized I couldn’t leave a wasp nest dangling from a big bush right where the tenants park their cars.
Even more fortunately, one of our neighbors keeps bees and let me borrow their bee suit. That’s what I call it. Maybe it has a cooler technical name, like “Sting Shield,” or “This Outfit Also Is Suitable for Fencing.” Either way, I got some bug spray, donned the suit, and emptied the whole can through the hole in the nest. Overkill? Perhaps. But “overkill” contains the word “kill,” and that was my goal. I came back the next morning, wearing the bee suit again, just in case, and easily knocked down and threw away the nest. The few remaining wasps just saluted me and flew off. “You killed my whole family,” they said, “but, I gotta say, cool outfit.”
First-day-of-school picture. Halen is a senior, Grace a sophomore. They sort of like each other.
