A Rain of Frogs

My daughter turned nine yesterday.

While talking to her on the telephone, I mentioned to her that it was the last single-digit birthday she’d ever have, and that seems to have given her pause. She thought about it a bit, then finally told me that it didn’t really matter, she was just happy to be the age she was. That she’d worry about ten when she got there.

We spend so much time preparing our children to survive and compete in the ‘real world’ that we sometimes forget to let them be children. We do this because we are following the lessons of our parents – bold, driven people from a generation so large that everything was a competition.

Because our generation is so small, the lesson is a bad one for us. We don’t have to compete with each other, and we can’t compete with our entrenched elders. But we still measure ourselves against the success yardstick of our parent’s generation. And we’re beating the same erroneous message into the minds of our children.

Today I’m not going to worry about tomorrow or yesterday. Today I am going to happy to be where I am.

For the last year, I have been without a proper bed. First, I had a queen sized mattress on the floor, later, when spring came and I moved onto my boat, I slept in the V-berth. For those not versed in nautical terminology, this is a triangular shaped bed wedged into the forward section of a boat. Quite comfortable, but not a ‘proper’ bed. And then, when it became apparent that I would not be retaining possession of my boat, we moved into our amazing apartment, and the queen sized mattress once again graced the floor.

I have been meaning to build a bed for the last few months, but limited finances, a busy schedule and the fact that I don’t have access to any of my tools have conspired to keep me from doing anything.

But this last weekend, I borrowed a few tools from my father, and last night, we returned from our friendly neighbourhood Home Despot laden with some very lovely wood, many many fasteners, and a plan.

It has been a long time, more than a year and a half, since I actually built something with my hands. Though the bed was not completed last night (the runner-couple who lives in the basement apartment beneath ours goes to bed at 10:30, and lets face it, power tools are loud), we did get a healthy start on building the bed. All the wood is cut, and the assembly started.

It felt so good to be making something tangible after such a long period of making ethereal, intangible progress in my life.

Hopefully the bed will be done tonight or tomorrow night, and we will be able to enjoy the fruits of our labour. To make our bed, and sleep in it.

Holy crap.

You know, eventually you just have to take the old horse out back and put it out of its misery.

My 1996 VW Golf, with 310,000 kilometers on it, just blew a brake line. The car can still be driven, it just cannot be stopped. Obviously this presents a problem, but it’s only part of the larger problem – namely that the car is really old.

The hatch rusted so badly that the locking mechanism eventually fell off. This necessitated tying the hatch down. Very ghetto indeed. The solution was to purchase an rust free hatch from a different car. The car is black, the hatch is silver, lending it a nickname – Silverback.

The resonator fell off, so we replaced it with some stock pipe instead of a new resonator. It sounds like a Honda Civic with a cherry bomb muffler, but its livable. Twice the ghetto power.

The power door locks don’t work any more. This isn’t much of a problem, except that some of the doors might be unlocked when one arms the alarm, making it that much easier to wake the neighbors at 3 in the morning when I come home from a gig. Ghetto ghetto ghetto.

The silver hatch has a different key than the rest of the car. This wouldn’t be a big deal, except that the junkyard didn’t have the key for it. There is a ‘ripcord’ in the back seat that is tied to the latching mechanism of the hatch. 4x ghetto factor.

Sometimes the front passenger door lock freezes when its cold, meaning the person in that seat must clamber over the gear shift. Ghetto jackpot.

And these are just the things actually wrong with the car, not things that are impending, like replacing the original clutch, or replacing the brakes, or doing the wheel alignment. Or any of a million other small problems that I have grown so accustomed to I can’t even remember.

It might be time to take the old girl out to the pasture and put her out of her misery. Of course, this means I will need a replacement car, and that’s going to present problems of its own.

Long red hair, cute turquoise headband. Large green eyes and rosy cheeks. Red lips, white teeth. Tight blue turtleneck sweater, tight blue curves. A flowing knee-length lime green skirt, purple tights. Black and grey argyle socks. Attractive black ankle-high boots with excitingly chunky heels.

A riot of color on a beautiful, sunny Toronto day.