i am the greatest

Four days ago, Mia asked me to help her spell “Happy Father’s Day.” That’s how I remembered it was coming.

I was reading Sports and eating Raisin Bran (which I’ve recently rediscovered), and she padded down the hallway with a piece of paper folded in half, and I dictated my own Father’s Day card.

Which wasn’t bad.

Then, on Friday, both kids brought home gifts from school, and both of them had named me “World’s Greatest Dad.” Both of them. Two for two.

Which ain’t bad either. I mean, I was joking about that in the last post. But for real. World’s Greatest! Can’t beat that with a bat.

And then? Today? Sarah and the kids took me to my first Dodger game of the year. And, okay. It was 135 degrees. And sticky, what with the ketchup and the sunscreen and the snowcones and Mia eating her “frozen” lemonade over my right leg. And Max, who passed the third inning playing “crush the peanut shells one by one,” spent the fourth inning playing “wipe my feet on Daddy’s shorts.” And the Dodgers got pasted, 10-4, and their First Baseman of the Future nearly lost his right kneecap in a collision with the right field wall. And we had to leave in the sixth because Max was starting to melt in about three different ways, which means that we missed “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” which has been putting Reines children to sleep for five years.

Fine. But you know what? Mia sat on my lap and asked me about the baseball diamond, and we spent the game trying to catch a foul ball, on every play, even the intentional walk. And as I carried him away from the stadium, his legs straddling my belly, Max rested his head on my shoulder and pressed his nose against my neck and pulled me closer.

I love Father’s Day.

 

so much depends on the white balcony

It’s been a strange week for us. For starters, Max has for some reason been dreaming angry of late. He wakes up two, three, sometimes five times a night, screaming and indignant, rejecting his mom in favor of me, then rejecting me for Mommy. He’s been, frankly, a pain in the Alps, and none of us slept well for about five days running, until last night. Last night, something inside him realigned, and he slept peacefully – which is to say, without screaming at anyone – staying in his bed until the sun came up to reveal a balcony full of snow.

These are not minor details, the balcony and the snow. We’ve been waiting for months for that balcony to fill up with snow, but it never did. Snow fell on the Alps, and we went to the Alps to see it, but didn’t fall on us at home. And it fell in our neighborhood, right near us – minutes from us, even. Minutes on foot. But it never fell on us. Not on our balcony.

That’s not to say we haven’t had weather. Just last week, the skies went weird and the rain went all sideways, and an honest-to-god hurricane, Hurricane Kyrill, blew through Northern Europe, with winds up around 125 miles per hour. I never knew Europe had storms like that, but this thing was no joke, knocking out rail service and knocking over trucks and knocking down trees, though it did no damage here. All it did for us was howl and strut like a rooster, leaving our streets peppered with tree branches and disfiguring one shutter that we had foolishly left unmoored. The next morning, though, the balcony was still clear.

Not anymore.

The snow is good news for a lot of reasons. It’s good news because Mia’s been begging for “snow candy” – basically, snow with maple syrup on it – ever since Sarah told her she used to make it as a kid. It’s also good because I’ve only got another three months left in Switzerland, and I was beginning to wonder if I was going to be able to ski the Alps before we go home. And it’s especially good because 35 degrees and rainy is only charming for so long – eventually, you want Mother Nature to just commit already.

Well, she done committed, at least six inches worth, which is how I found out that our company car doesn’t have snow tires. I drove Mia to school this morning at a robust 15 miles per hour, stretching what ought to be a 10-minute drive into close to a half-hour, but everyone survived. That includes, by the way, the oblivious pedestrian who stepped into a crosswalk in Baar just as I was gliding slowly to a halt. She looked up in time to jump back onto the curb as I eased up right next to her, which is good, because even after three months I don’t know how to say “I’m sorry for breaking your hip” in Swiss German.

The snow today is good for one other reason: its impeccable timing. Yesterday morning, Max and I took Susan, visiting from Chicago, to the peak of Rigi, our local 6,000-foot pre-Alp. There was but a dusting of white stuff up there, but that was a fair trade-off for us, since today’s storm would have obscured one of the most spectacular vistas I’ve ever seen: a 360-degree expanse of mountains shooting through a totally still cloud layer. In other words, it would have been Jungfrau, revisited.

Mark Twain climbed Rigi once and wrote about it in “A Tramp Abroad” – of the view from the summit, he said, “We could not speak. We could hardly breathe. We could only gaze in drunken ecstasy and drink it in.” He also described “a limitless expanse of tossing white-caps,” and “peaks draped in imperishable snow,” and “radiating lances of diamond dust shot to the zenith” through a cloudbank, and I’m not about to try to out-write Mark Twain, so I’ll just say, um, “Yeah, what he said.”

I do, however, have a better digital camera than Mark Twain ever had, so I’ll add this bit of information, which is somehow missing from my copy of “A Tramp Abroad”:

(Note: this is just the close-up. Click here to see the whole panorama.)

There’s more to tell, but I’ll tell it later. Right now I’ve got pack, and then I’ve got to sleep. Tomorrow we go to Amsterdam so that Max can try hash.

We’re hoping it’ll chill him out.

 

diamonds and beans

We got home last night, flying back into the fog after a week in the Siberian chill of Southern California and, before that, three days in the relentless drizzle of London. I, for one, find the endless march of clouds and their various gloomy offshoots to be charming, even bracing, so I’m pretty happy with this whole situation.

The trip was all business for Sarah, who had a Meeting of the Five Families to attend in Thousand Oaks. I stayed pretty businesslike myself, running errands and picking up all those things we can’t get here in Zug, like burritos and In-N-Out and burritos and, before it was all over, three more burritos, leaving me with five total (you think that’s a lot in six days, but it still left me about half a dozen short of my goal).

It’s morning now, and the kids are sleeping late. They did beautifully on the trip home, especially considering that they basically spent two days inside one kind of silver tube or another. Not that that’s any great punishment for them, especially given the non-stop movies and coloring, but even so, it’s a grueling trip. No surprise, then, that Max has turned up sick today. He’s vomited on me three times this morning before knocking back out on the sofa. Worth noting, Max did not have any burritos, and so we learn a little something for the next trip.

We organized a layover in the UK on our way out and spent two days looking for the queen and fumbling around in our knapsack for the umbrella. Unfortunately, the queen was unavailable, so we had to settle for her hat, which is on display at the Tower of London, along with some of her bracelets and necklaces and other assorted baubles. Visiting the crown jewels offers two small, discrete shocks, first when you see them (they’re, um, gaudy), and then when you exit the three-foot-thick vault that houses them and see the glass box where visitors are invited to donate pennies to keep the display running, as if the $30 per person we’d just handed over is barely covering costs. I mean, surely there’s a pawnbroker somewhere in London who could give them a few bucks for the enormous gilded punch bowl? No?

In any case, there was one other significant takeaway from the Tower of London: that place has a tremendous loo. So says Sarah, anyway, and apparently she’s not alone in her admiration; framed plaques on the walls certify the Tower’s WC as London’s Finest, six years running. Now, I would think a reasonably competent management team could find a way to monetize that asset so that they don’t have to beg for money outside the jewelry vault, but hey, maybe that’s just the business school talking.

Max is up now and demanding ice water and pants, so I’d better go. Photos and more later.