Pat Curtis 1929-2011

My earliest memory of my Grandma is of her putting a towel down on the seat of her car (a Mustang, if I remember correctly) because my bare legs were burning on the hot vinyl seats.  It was the '70s, shorts were short, socks were long and everything seemed to be made out of vinyl.

I remember her getting me Cheerios down from the cabinet at her house because she didn't want me eating the dog biscuits that I could reach, so she helped me get something more appropriate (and just as tasty). I've got a lot of other snippets of memories from around the time I was three - about the age that Noble is now - of playing in her back yard with my cousins.  And family Christmas at her house.  And playing her piano - the same piano Kayci now practices her piano on.  And sitting at her table eating.  I remember playing at her house with soap operas on - Days of Our Lives - and of "helping" her in the back yard, which usually consisted of her giving me various errands and tasks to do ("there are some sticks on the ground over there.  Can you bring me all the sticks?") to keep me busy while she tried to get some work done.

But I have two memories of her that are my favorite.  The first is of driving down South Main where it intersects South Post Oak. There used to be a K-Mart there on that corner, and I remember passing by it many times with my Grandma (and of getting some portraits made there, too).  I have no idea where we had been, but we were on our way back to her house.  I was sitting in the front seat (remember - it was the '70s) and I remember her making up a song about my name.  And I remember her teaching me "The Ants Go Marching" - the same song Noble loves to sing with me today on our way to drop him off at school (and sung, naturally, in the same dramatic staccato as Grandma did).  And I remember her singing me a very silly song by Carmen Miranda called Cuanto Le Gusta.

And then there was the day I decided I wanted to go see Grandma, so I walked a block and a half to her house.  Unsupervised.  Unannounced.  We lived around the corner from her when I was three, and I distinctly remember walking down the sidewalk of my street, carefully looking both ways for cars (as I had apparently just been taught) and knocking on her door.  I remember her surprise when she opened the door and saw me.  I remember her calling my frantic mother and telling her that I was there and that I was alright.  And I remember her making me lunch.  Nobody ever made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich better.

I spent a lot of time with my grandma, and I loved every minute of it.  She really seemed to understand me when no one else did.  She understood that kids have a tendency to write on walls, so she gave my cousins and I a special place in her house  - the closet in "the childrens' room" - where we could write on the walls all we wanted.  My first knowledge of science was at Grandma's house when she explained how a potato would grow roots in a vase on her windowsill. She answered all of my questions, and I'm sure there were a lot.  I marveled at her paintings and loved it when she would read stories to me.  I loved hearing about all the wonderful adventures she had had (she lived a really interesting life).  She was adopted, and so I think she had a little bit of a different taste for life.  Everything seemed like an adventure.  And I think I got my love of adventure and mystery from her.

When I think about my Grandma, I think about sun brewed tea (lemon and mint), Avon and costume jewelry.  I think about drinking from the hose in her back yard.  And I remember her patiently reading every one of my Bill cartoons, no matter how dumb the jokes were.  I remember taking trips with her and Granddaddy to all kinds of interesting places - Teague, Richmond, West Columbia and all sorts of cemeteries all over the state (we used to love to see what the oldest grave we could find was).  I remember how beautiful and park-like her yard always was.  The day my sister was born in 1981, I recall a sunny May day picking dandelions in her back yard.  I remember the mint plants in her yard and her making mint jelly (which she vowed she would never do again).  And I think Grandma gave me the nickname, "Destructo."

A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to have Grandma over to the house for a weekend and just sit and talk.  We talked about all sorts of things, but we really talked about family.  I grew up enjoying countless hours of sitting in her chair looking at old family photo albums.  I knew that she was adopted and that she was the keeper of our family knowledge, so it was important to me to sit down and get as much of that out of her as I could.  She brought the family Bibles with her and we talked for hours and hours about as much as we know about the history of our family.  I recorded those talks, and I'm looking forward to sharing them with my aunts and cousins soon.  It was a weekend I'll never forget, and one for which I will always be grateful.

The past three months, Grandma has been in the hospital almost non-stop.  She was finally in a rehab facility getting strong enough to go live my Aunt Peggy.  She was supposed to go home Monday.

I was supposed to have dinner with Grandma and my mom today.

Next week we were supposed to have our first family Thanksgiving in over 20 years.  We still will.

But Grandma died yesterday evening.  The last time I talked to her - last weekend - she sounded great.  She was feisty as every and looking forward to getting out.  In fact, she was trying her best to convince the doctors that she was strong enough to go home early, but she was frustrated because they weren't buying it.

She told me a couple of weeks ago while she was laying in her hospital bed that she was just tired.  She knew that she was still here for a reason, but she didn't know what that reason was.  It turns out that she was here just long enough to see her family come together again in way that hasn't happened in more than a decade.  Everyone is speaking to each other again and we all have new perspective.  Tempers have calmed somewhat and bygones are in the process of being what they are.

I wish that she could have been with us forever.  I wish that she could have watched Kayci and Noble  and Shannon's daughter, Avery, grow up.  I wish that Grandma would've gotten to see Kayci's first piano recital (and to tell her again the story of her first recital when she had to be escorted off the stage). I wish that she had gotten to see Noble grow into the mini version of me that she loved and understood.  I think they would've been great friends.  But they got to meet her, at least, even if they didn't get to know her.  They'll have a memory of her.  And for that I'm grateful.  I'm thankful for her life and for the intangible lessons that she has taught us all.

I'm going to miss her spirit and getting all sorts of crazy e-mail chain letters and hoaxes from her. I'm going to miss her cards.  I'll miss her asking about what the kids are doing.  I'll miss her stories.  I'll miss her breathlessly referring to me when I was a little monster.

Thanks, Grandma.  Say hi to Grandaddy for me, okay?

The Graveyard

We love Halloween! The kids and I have been working for the past several days to build headstones for a graveyard Halloween decoration for our front yard.

We started with some old foamcore conference posters that were going to be thrown away at work. Kayci and I drew the outlines of grave markers on the posters and I cut them out.

Then Kayci spray painted the cut posters gray and both she and I decorated them with marker. Noble got in on the act, too. He spray painted a gold glitter skull that we found in the dollar spot at Target and drew on the backs of the grave markers.

Then - under the cover of dusk - Kayci and I carefully built our graveyard on the hill in our front yard.  I dug up the ground in front of each grave, as if it were freshly opened (either by grave robbers or by the dead rising from their tombs - take your pick!). And the final piece was the skull - I partially buried it in front of one of the graves, and it looks pretty amazing.

But then the cool front blew in. I awoke this morning and looked out the window to see all but one of the graves laying down. So I went out and picked up the gravestones and will put them back in place when the wind dies down a bit. But luckily I got out last night and snapped some photos of the Stone Street graveyard before the wind kicked up.

Conversation with Noble at the mall

Noble: Daddy, a pterranadon eats meat.
Me: they do? Are you a pterranadon?
Noble: no, I'm a Pharaon.

Noble's Tarantula

Noble and Daddy caught a tarantula ... then decided to take it inside to show Mommy...



See the video here if you're seeing this on Facebook:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJuQfss2ZHk

Scenes from a Lunch

Yesterday was my sister, Celena's, 30th birthday, so my dad threw a surprise lunch for her at Fadi's - a Mediterranean restaurant in Houston. I'm pretty sure everyone had a good time, and I'm certain we all left very full. These are some of my favorite photos I took at the lunch:






































See the entire Flickr set here.

Scenes from a Dinner

Last night we went to dinner with GoGo, Angus, Adam, Katie and Johnny to celebrate Adam's 18th birthday. While we were there, I took the opportunity to play a little bit with shooting some video with my new work camera, a Canon 60D.

I apologize for the audio on this - it's kinda tough to shoot video in a crowded restaurant and not get a lot of ambient noise. But I think I got some good shots of the kids playing and a couple of interesting shots of me playing with the focus.

The thing that I like about shooting with the 60D is that you get all the benefits of a DSLR camera - warmth, clarity and the use of the full aperture range, which allowed for some rack focus shots, one of which I threw in here. Zooming isn't smooth with a DSLR and there's no stability control, so the footage is shakier than with a video camera. I don't think that I'd want to shoot a feature-length film on one of these things, but for quick clips - especially at a fixed focal length - it's not bad.

Daddy's Girl

This morning, we were having a light conversation about life expectancy. I said I might live to be a couple hundred years old because I'll be a cyborg.

Kayci looked up and without missing a beat said, "yeah, a cydork..."

I'm so proud of that girl.

Wal-Mart 'Til I Die

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I was doing an impression of a certain relative who is known for being very opinionated and is convinced that he's always right, even when he's way wrong. Great guy, but sometimes really hard to listen to.

That's when my mother-in-law chimed in and said "you know, [family member's name redacted] says that you can buy a casket at Wal-Mart now, but only in the big city stores."

Well, my BS detector started humming and I called BS on that. I've been to plenty of big-city Wal-Marts and I've never seen a single casket. Plenty of dead people, but never a casket. Now, had this person said that you could buy them at Sam's, I probably would've believed it. But Wal-Mart?

So I went to Wal-Mart's website and did a search for caskets. Holy effing sheet, Batman. This relative was right! For as little as $895, you can buy a pretty darn nice looking casket online at Wal-Mart. My favorite is the Sterling Deluxe Stainless Steel model so you can be buried and host a kickin' afterlife grill party all at the same time.

Always Wal-Mart. Always and for eternity...

Making Memories

While waiting to go on the field for Sammy's birthday at halftime, I turned around and saw Kayci standing at the railing in the stands watching. So I went up and got her and brought her down on the field with me. We watched the marching band performance up close and she got to see her old man go out on the field from field level. She really seemed to enjoy it. I hope she did.

This is what watching football is all about.

Three years from the barrio

Kristi had to work this morning, so Noble and I were looking for something to do. Noble found something. He fell asleep, so I went for a drive around the neighborhood that we lived in before we moved to Brenham.

This was the neighborhood we lived in when Kayci was born. The last time I was here was one year ago, when I was in the area taking pictures following huurricane Ike. A year ago I attributed the state of the neighborhood to the pounding it took from the storm. But one year removed, it's apparent that the old hood has just declined significantly.

On my old street it's apparent that some if the older residents that used to live there have moved out and others have moved in. There are houses sitting vacant where families used to live, their yards overgrown. My next door neighbor's house looked completely different. It was a different color, and all the trees and bushes had been chopped down. The door was partly broken and the screen door was hanging off its hinges. Jy old house, however, looks great! It actually looks better than it did when we lived there. They've redone the landscaping, have repainted and have replaced the old door with nice new one. It's good to see that the new owners are taking good care of it. That made me happy.

But then driving around other parts of the old neighborhood, it was apparent that everything had just fallen into a general state of disrepair. There are now cars -and lot of them - on the street and parked in yards and driveways. Trash is piling up around people's houses, including tires and old furniture. It reminded me a lot of my trip out to West Texas last year to some of the little desert towns. People apparently just don't want to get rid of anything, so they keep them in their yards.

But what made me the most sad was the state of our old church. It sits on a full block and two thirds of the block used to be like a park with grass on the ground and tall trees - almost a hundred of them - with a tall canopy that shaded the area underneath. It was beautiful. I know that Hurricane Ike damaged some of the trees, but whoever took the trees down did a horrible job. There are stumps sticking up everywhere - some as tall as I am. My guess is that only about 30 or 40 of the trees are still standing. It was quite depressing.

I wasn't expecting everything to be the same. But what did strike me was how much everything had changed in just three years. It's not as if it was a great neighborhood then, either. It was a lower-middle class neighborhood that was about 40-50 years old. But it still felt like a nice place to be a family. I couldn't say that now based on what I saw.

Daddy is a weirdo

At some point tonight, Kayci slipped a note onto the back of my shirt. I knew she was doing it, but completely forgot about it. Anout 30 minutes later, Kristi went in for a hug and found the note on my back. This was it:



It says "daddy is a weirdo. ha ha ha."

See what I put up with? I wouldn't trade a minute of it.

My Bitty

I've always been very protective of my Bitty. Just ask the two nurses who I almost attacked when she was a baby. I thought they were hurting her, and I blanked out and set out on my way across the room to bust some head. Luckily Kristi snapped me out of it before I could lay a hand on either of them.

So a phone call and subsequent blog post on Kristi's blog explaining a conversation they had this morning has really disturbed me.

I know she can't stay little and innocent forever. And I'm glad we live where we so she doesn't have to be exposed to a lot of the stuff she would be in Houston or somewhere else. But she turns six this week, and it's just going a little too quickly for my taste.

Kristi, Kayci and I were sitting in the car having a little picnic after we picked up Kayci from VBS today and suddenly got very, very sad. There's nothing I want more than to share this time of her life with her, especially during the summer. I would love to take the summer off and to just play as a family with Kristi and the kids - to go to the pool every day, to go fishing, to go to the beach, to walk to the snow cone stand, to take naps, to read, to play in the sprinkler or the hose, to ride bikes, to just be silly. I know that my parents, or at least my dad, didn't have that option and that most parents don't. But that doesn't make me want it any less.

Thankful for family time

Yesterday after Noble went to sleep, Kristi, Kayci and I sat down and watched Elf (one of our favorite Christmas movies) and had soup and cornbread. After we ate, we all snuggled up on the couch and watch the movie and laughed. I love having a Noble, but it was really great to get to spend some time like we used to ... just the three of us together. I really loved that dynamic.

This morning, Mr. Noble decided at 5:55 that it was time to wake up, but Kristi and I had other plans. We put on a movie - National Treasure - and lay in bed watching it. Kayci joined us about 20 minutes later. And we all lay there and watched a movie. It was AWESOME, and it's times like these that I'm really, really thankful for the great family that I have. We knew we really needed to be getting up to get ready for church, but somehow this seemed much, much more important.

I believe that the best way you can serve God is to be the best father and the best family you can. How better to serve God than to teach your children to love and that they are loved unconditionally - not just when there's time.