Blest Be the Bricks that Bind

~ sanebishop ~ Leave a comment

My first memory of legos dates back to Mrs. Baird. She was an old church lady who used to keep me from time to time. She had white hair and kept a plastic pail of the big legos in her closet. When she died many years ago, the pail of legos was bequeathed to me, and I kept it reverently like an urn, at least until Thomas got old enough to dump out the contents and all reverence was discarded. Her legos were once again in the hands of a child. 

I’ve also kept a big plastic tote of my legos, mostly a jumbled mix of pirate Legos circa the 1990s in storage, waiting for Thomas to get big enough to graduate from the pail of big legos to my tote of little Legos. I gave it to him a few months ago, and have secretly found myself enjoying recreating my lego ships of olden times. We also got Thomas some small sets for Christmas, which, after building, he summarily destroyed with a monster truck and all the blocks made their way into my old plastic tote, young and old blocks intermingling. He rummages through this tote, makes his own creations, smashes them again, so on and so forth.  

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My wife finds pleasure not in building or smashing but in sorting. It is the strangest thing, but she is the type of person who doesn’t like peas to mix with corn or butter beans on a plate. I’m lucky because she generally brings order to my disorderly life, but occasionally she can go a little overboard, at which point she commandeers the whole dining room for three days in an effort to bring order to the jumbled mix of legos she has spread out over the table.

She had the look of a person obsessed so I didn’t say much. But she also had the look of a person who was enjoying her task, like she was putting together a puzzle (or deconstructing a puzzle?). In any event, she created a Dewey Decimal system for the lego bricks in our house, based on sets, like Pirates or Jurassic Park, and then miscellaneous bricks based on color. They are now all organized in Ziploc bags, in small plastic containers, and stacked on a shelf.

Personally, I don’t think I would have picked color to classify the bricks by–I think I would have chosen brick type–but let’s be honest, I would have never classified or brought order to anything, hence the jumbled mix of legos to begin with. 

Building, smashing, sorting–it takes all kinds. We’re a family of lego lovers, each in our own way. 

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A Fever Dream

~ sanebishop ~ 4 Comments

This week, I’ve been reacquainted with an old friend. A few years have passed since we last interacted but we picked up where we left off–I swabbed my nose, swirled sufficiently in both nostrils, and waited for my old friend, the Covid test, to wick up my drops of nasal juice and render a verdict: Two lines, positive. 

“We’ve got to stay away from dad for a few days–he’s got Covid,” my wife pronounced. Then she banished me to the guest room. It brought back memories from five years ago when she left gatorade and food outside my door while I sequestered myself. She had the baby monitor set up in my room so she could monitor my progress, while she kept Thomas in the bedroom with her. 

This time I didn’t have a pounding headache, but it was the same old fever, then several days where you feel like you’re living in quicksand. I first got Covid on March 4th, 2021. Back then, when you got Covid for the first time, you worried about whether or not you would survive the next five days. Five years later, the Covid era feels almost like a fever dream. 

Did that really happen?

It did. I know because Thomas was born in the hospital in 2020, with no family or visitors present for fear of spreading the virus. While my wife and I were celebrating our new life in the maternity ward and I was learning to change diapers, up above us in the ICU, people were on ventilators. In January 2022, as a county employee, I had to work at the first vaccine drive thru at our local high school. I’ve never seen people so happy and relieved to get a shot before, but that excitement wouldn’t last. By September 2022, when the Delta wave was peaking, our rural hospital was overwhelmed and turning people away. We had one of the lowest vaccination rates and the highest positivity rate of any county in the state. From that peak (or trough), Covid tapered off and slowly faded from the forefront into the background, into memory–at least for some of us. 

“What’s Covid?” Thomas asked.

I’m glad he has no memory. 

close up of a rapid antigen test kit

The Halftime Ham

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That is Thomas hamming it up front and center. He ran onto the court and lined up with his classmates and got recognized for perfect attendance during halftime at a Gardner-Webb men’s basketball game. Gardner-Webb partners with local elementary schools, giving kids a free ticket who have perfect attendance for the month. It was Thomas’s first game in a “basketball stadium,” as he calls it, and he watched the game enthusiastically, leading cheers of “defense,” often when Gardner Webb had the ball–we’re still working on game fundamentals. 

Watching him, I couldn’t help but remember my own impassioned fanaticism when I was about his age. I have always been an NC State fan and my big brother was a Duke fan. It thrilled my heart whenever Duke lost, which in those days rarely happened because they had Grant Hill and Christian Laettner. My dad and I were in Houston, Texas, visiting his cousin, when Grant Hill hurled the basketball down the court with two seconds left, when Christian Laettner caught it and beat the buzzer, beating Kentucky and depriving me of my brother’s suffering. 

The stakes were not so high in this game between the Gardner-Webb Runnin’ Bulldogs and Brevard Tornadoes, and Thomas has no brother, whose suffering brings joy, but he quickly became invested in the outcome, even if he forgot, from time to time, which team he was cheering for. A cheerleader threw him a rally rag and he maniacally whirled it above his head, and it was his most prized possession until I brought back Air Heads and Nerd Clusters from the concession stand, which was admittedly a bad decision on my part but I had waited in line for a long time and they had just run out of popcorn. What can you do? 

Thomas chomped. He cheered. He danced. He had an all around good time, and afterwards we went to look at Christmas lights in town. 

And he fell asleep in the car. 

Semi-annual Small Talk

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No one has ever accused me of being talkative, but occasionally I do find verbalization pleasant, or at least not quite as painful as waterboarding. Semi-annual small talk is perhaps my specialty. When I see the maintenance light come on in my truck or car, I actually look forward to visiting Jim’s Tire and Auto Repair, not because I enjoy forking over hard-earned money, but because Jim is a hardcore Star Wars fan. You would never know it–he is gruff and rather taciturn himself, but if you ask him about Andor or the Mandalorian, watch out. 

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The Razor Crest

“What did you think about the new trailer?” I asked Jim, walking into the tire shop lobby. I suspect if anybody else asked him this question, Jim would automatically assume they’re talking about a trailer with wheels, like a utility trailer, but Jim grinned and knew exactly what I was talking about without further clarification.

“It was great to see the Razor Crest again,” Jim said, and off we’re conversing about the intricacies of The Mandalorian and Grogu trailer, picking up our Star Wars small talk where we left off six months ago when I last had my tires rotated and oil changed. His son, who works the cash register, has the same stout and hulking stature of Jim, only with more hair. Jim the younger reached out and plopped his arm on the counter. He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a new tattoo of the Millennium Falcon. These are my people–tattooed stout mechanically-inclined men who love Star Wars. On second thought, I may just be a man who loves Star Wars, but the point is we have something in common, something to talk about. 

I have a similar repartee with my dental hygienist. I have been going to Faith for over ten years, and for the first five years our small talk was rather minimal, until she and her husband had their first and only child in the middle of the pandemic, a few months after we had Thomas.

We connect because we’re both older parents to an only child and mostly we compare notes on our children because we have no other children to compare notes on. Last I left her, six months ago, they were struggling with a similar conundrum.

“Which school did you go with?” I asked, and immediately we picked up the conversation where we left off, when they were struggling with whether to send their child to a local public or charter school, just like we were. Admittedly, the conversation is a bit one-sided–it’s hard to form complete sentences when you’re having tartar scraped off your teeth–but she explained their decision to send their child to their local public school, and I grunted that that’s what we decided, as well. 

“How does his school do sight words?” she asked, giving me a brief respite to form sentences. And soon we’re talking about the magical process of watching our children learn to read. 

Parenting is such a fleeting and elusive experience. When you’re in the middle of sleep deprivation or your toddler’s terrible tantrum, it feels as if this will be a scarring experience, seared in your memory forever, but how quickly those memories fade. Sometimes I find myself talking to new parents–trying to remember those sleepless nights just a few years ago–but the instant connection isn’t quite there because memories have a half-life and erode. The disconnect of time arises, when one person is talking of the past and one the present.

But the dental hygienist and I have something major in common. Our only children have both started kindergarten, are both learning to read and write, and are both growing up before our eyes, in similar ways and at the same time. Small talk flows freely, even if my mouth is immobilized. 

Helping Hands

~ sanebishop ~ 1 Comment

A few years ago, at a beekeeper’s meeting, we had a medical emergency in which a speaker from out-of-town fainted. We had to call the ambulance. Turns out, it was an issue with low blood sugar, but at the time we didn’t know exactly what was happening. Luckily, there were several doctors and nurses in attendance who rushed to the speaker’s aid and cared for him until the ambulance arrived. While waiting, it took several minutes for us to track down a sugary substance to help him get his blood sugar back up—yes, in a room full of beekeepers no one had any honey. That got me thinking how important it is to know where emergency items are located in our meeting spaces. First aid kits, fire extinguishers, and defibrillators do no good if we can’t find them fast.  Even something as simple as a piece of candy could save a life, at least if we can find it in time. The whole event reminded me that sometimes in life we’ve got to depend on the benevolence of strangers.

Depending on others doesn’t always come easy, especially for self-reliant types. Personally, I relish my farming and beekeeping pursuits because they do provide alone time—just me, myself, and the machinations of my mind. Granted, there may be nothing more dangerous than an idealist farmer who is the throes of agrarian reverie. Even Thoreau himself, the prophet of self-reliance, accidentally started a major forest fire, and in so doing, he depended on the townspeople of Concord to extinguish the blaze. It was definitely a blow to his ego, and afterwards some townsfolk bestowed him with the moniker “the fool who burnt down the woods.” It happens to the best of us.

Unlike Thoreau, who was merely trying to cook lentils on his campfire, I started a conflagration with the intended purpose of burning the vegetation in a field ditch that was encroaching on my line of bee hives. Over the years, the vegetation rooted in the ditch had expanded and grown unruly with antagonistic plants: briars, wild blackberry canes, poison ivy, etc. I dare not bush hog the ditch for fear of puncturing a tractor tire due to the spikes protruded from the wild Bradford pear trees. So I waited for a bright fall morning, dropped a match and watched as a wall of flames arose and traveled down the ditch, like a sizzling spark flowing down a line of gunpowder. Eventually, with the help of a major wind guest, my quaint little ditch fire detonated itself at the end of the ditch into a small grass fire, racing down the roadside.

Between the time concerned neighbors called 911 and the fire department arrived, my wife’s grandpa Lowry, who had been watching the proceedings from afar, jumped on a tractor, pursued the fire down the roadside, and smothered it with the repeated downward pressure of the front-end loader.

“Nothing to see here,” I assured the fire fighters a few minutes later when they arrived sirens blazing, but it was good to know they were there if I needed them. No man is an island.

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