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2020 Nutshells, Family, Parenthood and Children

Coming to terms with a daughter driving … and soon!

December 1, 2020 No Comments

All year long, it’s been months away. Plenty of time to plan for it. To ponder its meaning and significance. To get myself mentally prepared. To decide how best to handle it. Or even avoid it. You know … how to make sure it NEVER happens.

“That’s 11 months away. Plenty of time.”

“Not really thinking about it. We still have 8 months before that’s an issue. An eternity in dog years!”

“Sure it’s coming, but it’s still half a year from now. And I’m able to put it out of my mind fairly easily … thanks to bourbon.”

And I would have successfully kept going like that if not for the ticking of time, and stubborn family members who keep asking: “So, Brian! What are you doing about your daughter’s birthday?”

“Um … who? ‘Daughter,’ you say? Don’t remember having one.”

“Yes, you do. The pretty one? With the brown hair? The one who is, you know turning 15 and will be able to get her learner’s permit to drive?”

2020 Nutshells, Family, Travel

The travel packer’s transcendental journey

November 17, 2020 No Comments

“Do you think we will travel when we retire?” my wife asked.

I had a long packing list in front of me, and I was meticulously going down it … machete, pocket knife, backup pocket knife, formal pocket knife, pocket knife for casual outing. You know, one that says, “Hey, I don’t want to mug you, but … like … I could.”

“Travel when we retire?” I said. “Sure. I hope so … a lot!”

I got the feeling maybe she was thinking the opposite. Probably because of the whole pocket knife thing. And when I asked, “Can you fit some of these knives in your suitcase?”

Plus, the packing. In general, everything about the packing.

We were heading to North Carolina. A little house outside of Asheville. A few nights there amongst the trees and the streams and the chilly weather. A fall getaway. We took my daughter and the dog, then meandered along the Blue Ridge Parkway. We strolled the trails and sat out on the house’s upstairs porch, watching the sun rise above the mountains. It turned the whole land shades of orange and brown and yellow. Like all the trees had caught on fire. I thought sunrises above the Atlantic Ocean were special. But mountains as a backdrop? In the cool, dewy North Carolina air? It’s my new favorite.

I love to travel. And maybe as importantly, I love planning to travel. It’s as much about getting there as it is being there, and I truly embrace that part of the journey. Especially when it comes to packing.

I like to pack!

2020 Nutshells, Animals, Family, In the News, Parenthood and Children

When surreal elections and real life collide

November 9, 2020 No Comments

I looked back 4 years to see what I wrote after the 2016 election had finally wrapped up. This is what I said: “It’s over. The presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton is mercifully over. Look, forget who won or lost, just for a moment. If your candidate won, you’re still smiling and gloating. If your candidate lost, you’re still researching real estate in Canada. I get it. It’s been a tough one on all of us. It’s been emotional. It’s been trying. It’s tested us, individually and as a nation. But mercifully — whether you won or lost — there is this: We can all start to get our lives back.”

Rings true again today, doesn’t it?

I looked it up because I felt I had said it before. That I had FELT it before. Another time. Another place. What seemed like ages ago, but was just some 1,460 days in the past. (Yeah … I can do math. Not well … but math.)

And I’m feeling it again. Exhausted. Glad it’s over. Won’t tell you who I voted for. But I will tell you about what I’m sure a lot of us feel: Elation that we don’t have to deal with the election anymore. We can start to get on with … well … whatever did we do before there was an election. And no one quite knows what that is.

What did we do before the vote counting went on for days? Before we swiped endlessly at our phones for the latest updates, or sat glued to TV’s talking heads – all remarkably good at saying the same thing over and over again as if it’s always new and profound and full of revelation. Before the debates and the conventions. Before the primaries, and back and back and back.

What did we do?

2020 Nutshells, Family

Soft hands in need of a macho hobby

October 20, 2020 No Comments

My dad just hit the road pulling a tear-drop trailer. He built it by hand. A tear-drop trailer isn’t called that because you cry at how expensive it is. It’s the shape. Like an aerodynamic tear as you tow it down the road, off to some great adventure where you sleep in it under the stars with a little window and some kind of marine-grade battery running your computer. Because stars need Netflix.

And, let’s return to this: He built it … WITH HIS OWN HANDS!

Pretty cool.

More impressive: It didn’t fall apart as he hauled it up the interstate on a trek to drive my sister from Tampa to meet up with her boyfriend in Virginia. He parked at a lake in Georgia and sent photos. The sides didn’t seem to be shearing off. The roof wasn’t peeling away like the lid of a sardine can. It hadn’t hopped the hitch and plowed into a pine tree or dumped its contents all over the interstate before becoming a viral video titled, “Dude’s trailer just threw itself up.”

Remarkable.

“How’s it riding and working out?” I texted after getting a photo of a lake sunset and my sister enjoying it in a foldup chair.

“Beautifully!” he wrote back. Translation: I thought it was going to hop the hitch and plow into a pine tree. BUT IT DIDN’T!!!

2020 Nutshells, Coronavirus, Family, Parenthood and Children, Travel

The dad and daughter drive

October 8, 2020 No Comments

“Wo,” she told me while sitting down in the passenger seat. “I’ve never gone on a trip this long upfront.”

“Wo” was right, as the same thing struck me.

A 3-hour car ride to Tampa. Just a few inches apart. What in the heck does a dad and his 14-year-old daughter talk about for that long?

Wo!

It was just a dad and his daughter getting away to visit some family. The two of us. My sister was in town from Chicago. My dad wanted to show off the tear-drop trailer he was building. We hadn’t seen my aunt in who-knows-how-long, and you always need to make sure she’s staying out of trouble.

It was something we hadn’t done – couldn’t have done – in the longest time as everyone battened down the COVID hatches and stayed close to home. As safe as we were being – masked up and carrying an extra 50-gallon drum of hand sanitizer – it was stretching us out of our safe confines and comfort zones.

2020 Nutshells, Animals, Childhood, Family, Florida, Parenthood and Children

The Lizard Hospital opens for patients

September 23, 2020 No Comments

“Good morning, Lizard Hospital. How may I help you? Oh, I see. You’re looking for a family of suckers who will take in injured everyday Florida yard lizards, nurse them back to health and potentially adopt them for life? Yep! You’ve come to the right place. Let me just go flush the rest of my sanity down the toilet and I’ll be right with you.”

My house is now … a lizard hospital.

There are two reptilian ICU containers sitting in my dining room. Stuffed with grass and sticks and pieces of drying ground beef. YouTube videos are on the computer about caring for injured lizards. A syringe sits in a bowl of water in the kitchen waiting for my daughter to dribble drops into their mouths.

I hope these two critters have insurance. Someone is going to have a hefty bill for this top-shelf care.

It all started a week ago. My daughter returned from walking the dog to recount the trauma she had witnessed: A massacre! Lizard carcasses scattered about the sidewalk. (There was a flat frog in the street, too, but that was a different problem. Speeders!) The lizards must have had a run-in with a cat. An angry cat. With a grudge. He left the broken bodies as a warning to others.

“It was awful!” she said. “There was just one survivor. And as you can see, he’s not doing so well.” She shoved the lizard in my face. He had one eye bulging out. It’s an image you’ll never forget.

2020 Nutshells, Coronavirus, Family

The COVID-induced, back-to-school rush, rush dance

September 2, 2020 No Comments

And then, “BANG!” like a starter gun, we’re off in a flash.

Hurry, hurry. Rush, rush. No time to think. Just do. No time to ponder or worry. No time to reflect or ruminate. No time to consider whether we’re ready. It’s too late. It’s here. We’re out of the blocks. Now it’s just mayhem and early-morning madness. Something akin to normalcy, only not quite normal. The “idea” of normal in an UN-normal world. And the truth is, it doesn’t matter. Because who cares: It has already begun!

And you better hurry, hurry. Rush, rush.

Yep, it’s school time again. School time in the age of the pandemic. “Fake-summer” is over, and the looming fall stopped looming and dropped out of the sky like a sack of textbooks.

It hits particularly hard in a house like mine that runs the education spectrum. My wife teaches pre-school. My daughter just started high school, and for now is taking the remote route online. I work at Flagler College, where part of my gig is teaching journalism students. Throw in the fact that we think the dog has a side hustle lecturing about French romantic poetry with an online course and it’s a world of education in the Thompson household.

After a summer of planning and worrying and speculating and trying to sort it all out, we’re all suddenly thrust back in it, just like that. And it’s kind of anticlimactic really. The starter gun just went off and we threw up our hands one day and said, “OK, I guess we’re running!”

GO!!!

2020 Nutshells, Animals, Family

The porch cat creeps on inside

August 19, 2020 No Comments

So, this is what a near-death experience feels like. It feels pretty … um … furry?

Yes, furry. Not what I expected, but there it is.

Furry, and it screeches with an offended, spine-tingling wail. The sound of a feline who thinks HE has been wronged. That when he plants himself behind me while I’m washing dishes, I’m the one at fault for turning around and nearly toppling over headfirst into the oven, which is on and covered with pots of boiling oil.

Poor critter! That my near-death experience should cause him distress. I woke him from his itty-bitty kitty slumber. Boo-hoo!

“You’re a porch cat,” I cried, trying to slow my racing heart and calm my frayed nerves. “Why are you even in here?”

“Why?”

Such a good question. And one never worth asking, especially when it involves family, your house or something a pet has done. It’s a rhetorical question, isn’t it? Screamed in desperation, and if it garners any kind of answer, it’s never a good one.

2020 Nutshells, Childhood, Coronavirus, Family, Parenthood and Children

COVID crisis meet high school trepidation

July 15, 2020 No Comments

Come on, COVID crisis. Because going to high school isn’t, like, scary enough without you lurking around. Because I mean, like, oh my God! It’s high school, you know?

Shoot, just the thought of it has me talking like a goofy late-80s teenager.

Thanks a lot, COVID-19!

You just had to pile on with fears of contracting your virus and agonizing over whether to send my only child off to her freshman year in a pandemic. Because going to high school in normal times wasn’t hard enough?!?

I mean, most of my memories of the high school experience lie somewhere between being stuck in a vice grip and dropped in a sausage maker. Plus, I still have regular nightmares over how to say “algebraic.”

As we approach this major milestone for my daughter, I’ve found myself reliving more and more of those wonderful days. Transported back to an era when I wore clothes so bright and colorful that it ensured retinal damage to anyone who looked at me. (On particularly dry days, I could even start brushfires.) Shirts were a patchwork of different fabrics that resembled a designer hobo tent. Yet, in spite of this and my poof-ball hair, I fancied myself a pretty cool dude, strutting about the halls in my skinny legs that looked like chopsticks in a pair of oversized canvas boat shoes.

2020 Nutshells, Coronavirus, Family, Parenthood and Children, Travel

Getting away in a mountain stream

July 1, 2020 No Comments

Dang! Dogs sure do love mountain streams. The cool, bubbling, rambling ones. Strewn in river stones where they can run and bound and realize how their little wolf-like paws were meant to tear through the world like a brush fire or a blast of wind.

Free. Frantic. Frenzied.

Oh, to be a dang dog!

Same with kids. They like them, too, those streams. With the same gusto. Even at 14. Big splashes. Shoes soaking wet. Egging the dog on. No care in the world. “Come on, Lily, this way!” they yell, and the dog jerks about and tears down the other way.

Not a care in the world.

There we were. Out along little trails with no one else in sight. Somewhere in the mountains of North Carolina. Near to Blowing Rock, but not really near to anything. Anything civilized, it seemed.

Or anything that started with “c” and ended with “virus.”