Left of the Dial

context

It's so important. 

From the other room, I hear one of my spawn murmur, "oh my god."

Top Management looks up, concerned. "Is everything okay?" 

"Everything's fine," I reassure her, recognizing that precise tone of voice, one the people in the family only ever—but also always—use whenever take their first bite of one of her special dishes, in this case, her fried potatoes.  

Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@maxim_tajer?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Maxim Tajer</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/burning-wood-x3S1aGQNgro?utm_content=creditCopyText&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=unsplash">Unsplash</a> and not actually an example of Top Management's culinary artistry

 

What has it got in its pocketses?

In our house, it is the obligation of each person to go through their pockets before putting their jeans in the laundry. I check anyway, almost every time, and if I find money, it’s mine.
(I mean, I’ve never followed through on that, but they don’t know that…for sure.)

But as with many other things, the rules are different for my good lady wife, for a variety of reasons. The first is that she works easily twice as hard as I do, and maybe thrice. and I work, conservatively, 5x as hard as the rest put together. So different sets of standards on different things apply.

Also, I simply love her more than I love them. So.

So. I didn’t expect Top Management to empty her pockets before I washed her jeans tonight, because I’m the one who grabbed them and brought them down. But I went through her pockets anyway.

Did I find money? I did not.
Did I find pens? I did not.
Did I find gum? I did not. (Semi-suprisingly.)
Did I find love letters to or from her to another man, known by our offspring as The New Guy? I may or may not have.

Did I find peanuts? In both front pockets?
I most certainly did.
Quite a few peanuts?
You betcha. 

Why?

Because, of course, she keeps peanuts on hand at all times.

To feed the crow army she’s assembling.

I don't stand a chance. 

year of the lemon pigs

As no doubt every one of my 193,428 readers remembers, we have a long-standing (4-year-old) unbreakable tradition (this is the second time) of creating a lemon pig. It went over huge and made us all very happy until we realized, several months hence, that it had given birth to a few thousand fruit flies but hey omelets, eggses, all that. 

On the bus over a few days ago, The Bean was assaulted by a lemon. Which is to say, one was rolling down the aisle and she picked it up and screamed, "who the hell does this damn lemon belong to?! Answer me now or as the FSM is my witness I was STEAL it!" Shortly thereafter, she arrived with a lemon for our venerated tradition. 

Which we then forgot to do. Until New Year's Day! Which is close enough, I have been reliably informed by absolutely no one. 

The Golden Weasel and I worked together for hours (nearly three minutes) to create this majestic and nigh upon if not quite entirely sacred beast. 

The Weasel decided our photos were not quite capturing the innate power of the lemon pig, despite being between the toaster oven and the butter bell and where else is embued with such gravitas, outside perhaps Weathertop? 

So we spruced up the atmosphere just a tid. 

Satisfied at last, we sent the photographic evidence to the pig's original procurer, who promptly turned around and somehow against all odds did the impossible and made it even better. 

I have never been so excited for a new album to drop in my life. 

The lemon pig, of course, is meant to bring good luck to the year and I now think back upon it, we did the first one just before 2020 and COVID and oh my god what have I done? 

three, it turns out, is not always a magic number

So Top Management walks into the kitchen and starts telling The Rose, The Bean and The Golden Weasel about how when we were kids Pop-Tarts came in a box with 8 Pop-Tarts, 4 pouches with 2 tarts each. And how when there were three kids in the family, this meant the tarts didn’t divide evenly and therefore someone was going to get more than the others. 

And then she says, “this shirt doesn’t fit me.”

And holds out this:

The shriek that instantly erupted from three sets of vocal cords nearly shattered every piece of glass in the house.

tear drops rolling down on my face

I grab my cup of coffee and head down to the basement to get to work. The Bean is lying on the sofa, curled up under a blanket, in a shaft of sunlight, reading. It looks so cozy I am moved to say for perhaps the first time in my life, "Bean, I have thought about it, and I think you should know that I love you." 

"Yay!" is the perhaps somewhat expected but still gratifying response. 

I take a few more steps and then hear: "I'll get back to you on how I feel." 

one of these things is not like the others

I am luckier than most parents in that most of my kids are pretty unpicky when it comes to foods. The problem is that there are so many of them, so that some will love a given meal, some are okay with it and at least one dislikes it. And because I am the most sensitive of souls, I try to avoid making my children unhappy. I fail. I fail every single day, many times. But I try. (I just hide that I try.) 

Which inevitably leads to scenes such as this:

I like to think it's a bonding moment. Because what brings kids together like sneering at a sibling who's being good? 

so THAT's where she got it

Top Management sighs the sigh of the deeply and justifiably exhausted. 

"Man," she says. "I ate so many frogs today. I ate all the frogs today." 

I look over at her. "What?!" I say, not unreasonably. 

She looks surprised that I'm surprised. "You know, the Mark Twain thing." 

"What?!" I again say, still not unreasonably. 

"You know, his thing about how if you're served a plate full of things you have to eat and you like all of them except there's also a frog there and you have to eat it, you should eat it first?" 

I start laughing. "This explains so much," I say. 

guilty as charged

It's a weekend morn and we've been lazing in bed, reading. And for an hour, we've been going back and forth, saying we need to get up, it's time to get up, we're hungry, we're starving, we should really get up. 

Finally, after an hour my very deep need for coffee gets the better of me and I roll out of bed and shamble towards the door. 

I catch a glimpse of my good lady wife and there's a look of utter betrayal on her face. 

"Traitor," she says in disbelief. 

for the record, she was eating the chips I'd just bought

ME: Why are you smiling like that? 

THE ROSE: Because you're being mean to me. 

ME: How'm I being mean to you? 

THE ROSE: You just said I was terrible!

ME: That's not being mean. That's just stating a fact. 

a nutter in a haystack

"I'm still hungry," Top Management says. 

She's just finished breakfast, a typically light affair. Which means despite having just consumed a whopping 150 entire calories, she's somehow not sated. Especially since by now it's noon. 

"I could make you an everything bagel with cream cheese and ham," I suggest. 

She demurs. 

"How about an everything bagel with salami and provolone?" 

She again passes. 

"Carrots and hummus?" 

She sighs. 

And then the truth comes out. 

"These are all such good ideas," she admits. "But none of them are Nutter Butters and milk." 

Message [eventually] received. 

o grant thy faithful hedgehog's boon

I am not a smart man. But even I, after nearly 50 years with the same person, learn a thing or two. Such as the insanely vital importance of never ever keeping secrets from your significant other.

Unless the secret in question is what you discovered, as you went to grab a beer sometime after midnight so you could get to work on the script you're writing, crawling up the wall next to the stairs, is your good lady wife's second-least favorite thing in the entire known universe. 

toasted

The 21-year-old comes downstairs at the crack of 10:15am and scratches my back. "Am...am I old enough that...I can just make myself cinnamon toast? Even though I'm not sick?" 

I am not a good father. You know those fathers you see on TV—or even in real life!—who are great about teaching their kids how to change their oil and take them to all their hockey practices while it's still dark and go on cross-country vacations to camp in the Grand Canyon and do their homework with them and make sure they're not eaten by rabid badgers and all that? Yeah, that ain't me. 

But there is precisely one thing I do really well as a father, and that's make cinnamon toast. Generally, yes, I only do it for each kid a few times a year, when they don't feel well, but since I have 4732879 children, that still means I end up making quite a bit, even if it doesn't seem that way to, say, Kid #7397 (what, like I can remember all their names). 

I try to glare at her but my heart is too shattered. The one and only fatherly thing at which I'm even moderately proficient and she wants to rip that single thing away from me. 

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry!" she says. "You can make it if you want! I just didn't want to be a hassle." 

I get up in a snit (a very manly snit) and go make what is not my finest cinnamon toast ever but is still probably in the top 10% of all cinnamon toasts I've ever created. I keep it in the toaster the exact right amount of time, down to the millisecond. I pretend to hand it to her baby sister, which outrages and horrifies the 21-year-old, before she snatches the plate away, chirps "thank you, Daddy!" and goes into the dining room to eat it. 

I sulk down to my office and sit down and that's when it hits me how thoroughly I had just been played. 

She's definitely her mother's daughter. 

things I never thought I'd hear #739942

“You know how people always say, eat the frog first?“

...no! No, I don’t.

 

 

 

haunted by taters of turkey day past

So I casually mention some foodstuff, and Top Management's eyes grow misty. "Oh, Marge and I used to get that all the time," she says, referring to her college roommate and eventual maid of honor. "It was her absolute favorite." 

"Really? I thought her favorite was your leftover mashed potatoes," I say, showing off my encyclopedic knowledge of her culinary history by referring to the one and only tiff they'd ever had, when Top Management had returned to their dorm room, famished, only to discover the Thanksgiving leftovers she'd brought back to school had been finished while she was in her Men's Images in Literature class. (Yes, really.) 

Eyes which had been misty only milliseconds before grow suddenly hard as diamond at the mention of that tuberous betrayal from [does some quick math] literally 32 years ago. "Too soon," she whispers menacingly. "Too soon." 

heroic words befitting heroic deeds

It's New Year's Eve, and the Bean has to work. 

Top Management sends me this incredible twitter thread, which includes such fantastic images as

and 

so naturally I text the Bean and request that, if possible, the necessary fruit be brought home for our good luck in the coming decade. 

An hour later, I receive the following text in return: 

I Have Acquired the Lemon

and any issues I might ever have had with her entire generation's dependence upon screens vanish when weighed against the majesty of that one sentence. 

May your new year be filled with equally noble and loving gestures. 

math checks out

So I'm putting stuff in the recycling. "I know," Top Management grumbles, as I pick up a Coke can. "I just wanted one, okay? I hadn't had one in a while." 

She gets a look on her face, as we both think more or less the same thing. 

"I mean, except for the one I had yesterday." 

I bury my face in her neck, overcome with adoration. "What are the odds?" I murmur. 

She doesn't have to ask "of what," because we both know I mean what are the odds that her first college would be sold to the Japanese and that we would meet half a continent away shortly after our 20th birthdays in a play in which she was amazing and I mostly knew my lines and what are the odds we'd still be together 30 years later and more in love than ever? 

"Slim," she replies matter-of-factly, then recalculates using her characteristic method of estimating something, anything. "Seven or eight miles, maybe." 

I don't know how I didn't guess

"Hey, Dad—what are we supposed to do with Cicero?" 

"...Cicero?"

"Oh, we were cleaning the kitchen and that's what we named the chicken bones left on the counter. Bean wanted to name them Bartholomew and I thought they should be called Caesar so we compromised." 

not quite the same as the old boss

So Top Management and I have a standing date on Tuesdays to grab a quick and cheap lunch at the little taco shop two blocks away. "Have a nice time!" the Rose calls as we're walking down the front steps. 

"You're not the boss of me!" I snarl, which doesn't make my good lady wife laugh, as I'd foolishly hoped, but does make her smile, which is more than it deserves. 

"Actually, I am—I got put in charge last week," the Rose replies, which does make Top Management laugh, and justifiably so. 

"I need a raise, then," I say. "I don't get paid nearly enough."

We have a delightful lunch and upon returning back home 20 minutes later, I see this:

"Why is there $1.02 on my desk?" I call upstairs. 

The Golden Weasel giggles. "That's your raise." 

(Damn right I'm keeping it.) 

all is explained

So I've just finished making lunch for Top Management and myself and given that part of said meal is leftover rice, which is by its very nature rather crumbly and somewhat uncontrollable, I have made a bit of mess. 

Just then, The Rose comes into the kitchen to do her post-lunch tidy-up. "I am so sorry about the mess," I say, looking at all the dried rice on the counter. 

"No problem," she says sweetly. 

I look at the mess and really do feel bad. Not bad enough to actually, you know, clean it myself, but still: a bit guilty. "No, seriously," I say. "I'm really sorry." 

She just laughs. "Seriously, it's not a big deal." 

I go back to work. When I come up an hour later, I see the rice is still all over the counter. But the sink has been emptied and the dishwasher's full. 

Which is when it hits me: oh, of course—The Rose wasn't bothered at all...because it's The Bean's job to wipe down the counters. 

The Bean, of course, normally so reliable when it comes to her cleaning, was downtown, voting on whether her union should go on strike or not. 

I cleaned up the rice. 

 

lemonicide

Top Management is cutting a lemon; she has found that if she adds a slice of lemon to her water cup in the morning, she will drink twice as much water that day, or sometimes even more. Because she is talking to me as she does this, and is notorious for her multitasking abilities, she has placed her phone on the perhaps not entirely dry counter. What's more, the phone is located exactly halfway and on a direct line between the lemon being cut and the quite large and quite full cup of water into which she's about to be depositing the slice. 

I grab her phone and move it to a different part of the counter. Although I am my usual oh so unobtrusive and subtle self, she stops cutting and talking to look at me quizzically. 

"Your phone was right between three different sources of liquid," I explained. "I didn't want it to get wet." 

Top Management looks every so slightly offended. Or at least, she starts to look that way. But before the expression can entirely form, The Golden Weasel, keeping true to her name, yells from the studio, "Mom, seriously? Again?!" 

I assume The Weasel is just making a very and perfectly timed joke...until I see the look of guilt on Top Management's face.

"It's not what you...I was watering the plants and...we're really going to have a talk about throwing family members under the bus." 

it's the little (real) things

Top Management comes up to me, smiling sweetly. "Hey," she whispers. "I love you." 

After the dozens of times she's said it, I'm still touched. "Aw, thanks. What brought that on?"

She pauses, pondering, then laughs. "I think it was the sound of you opening a Coke for me." 

guilty as charged

So Top Management is doing that thing where she looks in the fridge, she looks in a cabinet, she looks in the freezer, she looks in another cabinet, she paces. I sense she's searching for something, perhaps food of some sort. 

"I've been really craving something savory," she grumbles. "Salty. Crunchy." 

I have to head to the store to buy stuff for dinner, so I pick up broccoli. It's crunchy and it can be salty. Wisely, I then also buy Doritos. 

I pop into the studio upon my return and hand her the bag. Her eyes light up. 

"You're the devil," she gasps. 

I try to pull the bag back, but her claws are sunk well in. 

"But you're my kind of devil," she adds. 

Jackson Pollock's Homecooking show

You know how once in a while you see a photo online of some moron who didn't make sure the lid to the blender was on all the way? And you wonder who would be that stupid? 

Hi there!

Was I wearing a brand new shirt, that I had specificially mentioned to Top Management I was avoiding wearing for hte first time, because I was afraid of ruining it? Why, yes I was. Fortunately, the liquid previously held by the blender was a nice subtle neutral color.

I sent the photo to my pal Kelley, who asked "Jackson Pollock's Homecooking show?" If only. At least I got a good title out of it. Always half-full, that's me. (Except when making ginger carrot salad dressing, apparently.) 

part of a well-balanced meal

"I need a snack," I am informed. "Where are the Pop-Tarts™?" 

I obliging fetch her a packet. 

She opens it up and takes a bite. Then another. Then a third. At which point she cries, "Hey! These are chocolate!" 

"Yes?" I agree, having gone quite a bit out of my way to find her old favorites, which are only sold in very very very few stores, when they're even sold at all these days, often going out of print for years at a time. 

"I thought you said you bought cherry?" 

"Oh, right, I did," I agree. I fetch those for her and hand them over. 

This time she inspects the delectable pastry before consuming (much less a second or third bite). She nods, satisfied. "A girl's gotta make sure she gets her Recommended Daily Allowance of fruits," she says softly. 

I do not think that means what you think it means

I'm making chili. The Brawn is browsing through the bin of spices when something he sees makes his eyes light up.

"Oh!" he says. "That's where the sprinkles are."

"Well," I respond. "That's where they are now. That's not where they're going to be in a little bit." 

"Why?" 

I look at him over the top of my glasses.  

"No," he says frankly. "I used to eat them, but I don't do that anymore. I used to eat the sprinkles...and the sugar...and the marshmallows, but I've changed." 

I am at least a bit skeptical, but I can't help but smile at what's either impressive self-awareness and honesty or at least thoroughly convinced self-delusion and guilelessness.

But he's not quite done. "And not to throw The Golden Weasel under the bus, but she used to do it too."  

a fair pony

I watch The Rose stare at an apple pie for three minutes before I finally say, "Would you like me to--"

"YES," she says, jabbing the pie slicer in my direction. 

I sigh. "You know, of the many disappointing things about my life, having children who suck so bad at cutting pie is definitely most of them." 

The Bean nods in acknowledgment. 

"You know, though," Max says, "It's not like you or Mom are exactly great at it. So, really, it's genetics." 

(The title comes from a recently botched voice to text translation of "a fair point" and has now entered our family's lexicon. 

horseshoes and hand grenades

So I found a bag of peppermint taffy on sale at the drug store when I was picking up the opioids that have made my life bearable for the past few weeks and, yes, thank you modern chemistry for better living, aka Daddy's Little Helpers™. Every few days I notice the bag, grab a few and walk to wherever my oldest three daughters are and whip one at each kid. Okay, maybe I don't really whip 'em, exactly, but the throw's got a little heat on it, and sure, when a piece of taffy unexpectedly pelts you in the thigh, there's a chance it maybe stings a tiny bit. I have given the girls the choice of no candy or painful candy several times and they have decided, to a one, that it's a worthy tradeoff, as well as being a perfect metaphor for their father's love. 

So just as I'm starting to embark on this endeavor today, Max suddenly leaves her room—and, no, she didn't know what was coming—and goes to her mother's room, since Top Management has muttered something about finding a new font, and that idea's like catnip to Max. I chuck the candies at the other two—actually, I really do bring my fastball with the one to The Rose, bouncing it off the wall to her left and perfectly executing the ricochet so it hits her bicep—and proceed to Victim Number Three. I toss it underhand, so it hits the ceiling and comes down...just missing Max, and instead hitting the floor between her and her mother. 

Who shrieks in surprise, before seeing what the thing actually was, whereupon she bellows, "Yes! Bring me seven more!" 

I grab eight, for I am a kind and benevolent inflictor of sweets, and go back to the room to deliver what she has requested and more. 

I start tossing them in, bouncing them off the ceiling, the wall, a bookcase. Top Management begins to shriek, louder and louder with each gift, ending with an emphatic "ow!" 

"Did any of those hit you?" I ask, trying to sound unconcerned even though on the inside I am quailing. 

After the slightest of pauses, she says defiantly, "One almost did."

her mother's daughter

So we're a family that—like most, I'd guess—have a fair number of rituals. One is that after I finish reading to the bairns for the night, I ask (make) them each to tell me something good about their day, and try not to be too vexed when they have to think for 15 seconds for a single damn good thing that had happened in the previous 24 hours. (To be fair, I rarely let them get away with anything generic like "I had fun playing with The Brawn," even if such a rare occurrence happened to be true. Also, they're not allowed to pick stuff like having ice cream. I'm a harsh man, man.) 

So yesternight I had just gotten to the part where (SPOILERS!) Charles Wallace is taking Meg, Calvin and Mr Murry to see IT and I decided that was a good (read: cruel) stopping point. I asked each kid what their Good Thing of the Day™ was, and The Rose brightly replied, "When you said you'd bake chocolate chip cookies tomorrow!" 

I had, of course, said absolutely no such thing. 

Cut to 16 hours later. 

She's good, man. She plays the long game. Something she did not inherit from her father. 

how you know it's going to be a good day

The Golden Weasel, sighing happily as she pours the milk into her bowl of Apple Jacks: "Sometimes it takes you, like, four hours to figure out which kind of Saturday morning cereal you want to eat, and sometimes you just know." 

Apparently there are Apple Jacks mascots and they look like this.  Only, presumably, considerably less war-like, generally. Big props to DeviantArtist Alex Mann the Action Man, who explained that their names are Bad Apple and Cinna-Mon. Wait, what? Seriously? Oh, Corporate America...

searches I never thought I'd see

I don't know how, but someone managed to wind up on a Left of the Dial page from 2006 while searching for "who sells binks easter bunny in corpus christi."

I have never been so proud.

culinary expertise II

"What's 'polenta'?" 

"It means 'a lot.'" 

"Oh." 

potato potahto, pasta posta

The Brawn looks down at his bowl. "Pass-ta salad?" he says. 

His next two siblings are perplexed and oddly annoyed by his strange pronunciation. "Pasta," they both correct him. 

He looks up, confused. "Salad," he replies slowly, finishing and—clearly, to his mind—therefore correcting them. 

His sister shakes her head. "You said passta, with an a," the Golden Weasel explains. "Not pasta, with an o." 

Okay. So we may need to work a bit more on her spelling, but at least she's her pronunciation down cold. 

a very concrete concept

We've been in the car for well over 10 hours at this point, having driven up to the wonderful San Luis Obispo to see Max for Parents Weekend. The Rose, the Bean and the Golden Weasel all saw her apartment for the first time and then we had lunch downtown and are now on the way back down, just south of Los Angeles. It's nearly 10pm, and we left the house about 7:30am, so to say we're all a little punchy would be an understatement. 

But none more so than the Golden Weasel. She's been amazing all day, a trooper and a half. But she's only 9, and driving five and a half hours, then walking around for about three hours, and then getting back in the car, is just not what she's wired for. She's uttered barely a peep of dissent, but she looks exhausted and, oddly, she barely has the strength to speak in more than a whisper. 

We've been playing our family's modified version of 20 Questions, where the thing to be guessed is generally an abstract concept, such as "Thursday" or "the smell of the road after it's rained" or "the feeling of love you get when you look at a sleeping baby to whom you're closely related." Naturally, these usually not only take far more than 20 questions to figure out. But the answering of each question is nearly as difficult as figuring out what the concept in question is, and is rarely a straight "yes" or "no" but requires nuance and thoughts on the part of the person holding the answer. I mean, sure, you can taste "traffic," but is is a plain ol' "yes" really the right response there? 

Anyhoozle, it's the Golden Weasel's turn to come up with something. 

"Is it an abstract concept?" the Bean asks. 

"No," the Weasel murmurs. 

"Is it broccoli?" asks the Rose.

"Yes!" yells the Golden Weasel hoarsely but happily, and laughs for the next three minutes, before passing out. 

It was a good day. 

things I never thought I'd hear #491782

“Elephants must not have very much snot.”

"Uh...why?" 

"Because they use their noses to suck up water and then drink it. And to give showers." 

I think someone greatly overestimates the sanitary conditions of proboscidean bathing. 

culinary expertise

I overhear the two youngest talking in the kitchen.

"What are those?" 

"Those are erps." 

"What are erps?"

"They're a kind of plant." 

"Oh." 

"You use them in cooking. Like a kind of spice." 

"Oh."