Do It Again

A couple days ago, I awoke at the usual time (6:00 am) to the usual sound of Trinity bouncing around in her crib and shouting “Hi Dada! Hi Mama!” I rolled over, looked at the clock, and thought: “I’m not feeling it today.” I may have even said as much to Nancy who, as usual, simply got out of bed and started the day. As I lay there semi-dreading the morning routine – juice for the kids, coffee for us, breakfast for the kids, eating my own breakfast standing up, getting the kids’ diapers changed, getting them dressed, the inevitable toddler skirmish and the equally inevitable tears, getting them packed in the car for daycare, and then the stealth routine of trying to leave daycare without upsetting the kids, all so we could go to work – I thought of one of the many great Kinks anthems to the middle age, middle-class, workaday doldrums: “Do It Again.” Here’s the video for those of you who might be interested. But for those of you not inclined toward British Invasion power rock here’s the gist of the song’s sentiment:

And now it’s back where we started.
Here we go ‘round again.
Day after day I get up and I say
I better do it again, do it again, do it again.

I first heard that song when I was 18 or 19 and starring in my own rock and roll fantasy with my pals Noel and Scott in our band, Joe Rockhead. I loved the Kinks because they seemed to rock better than just about anyone else, but I was clueless about the real force of the song’s point. Now, at the age of 40, I think I get what the song is about. I feel it every morning as I try to summon up the whatever-it-is to get up, go out, and do it again.

And it’s not just some middle-age longing for my lost youth (believe me, I don’t want to be 18 again); it’s more about feeling the weight of my age finally pressing down on me. Last week, the annual Vigo County Fair opened up and, of course, we took the kids. The idea was to see the animals mostly, but we simply couldn’t resist the midway. David was too small to go on any of the rides except the Merry-Go-Round; and Trin could go on that one, too! So we all went: Nancy standing next to Dave and I next to Trin. Now, I’ve never been one for wild, upside down, spin-you-in two-directions-at-once, make you want/need to vomit rides. At least I could handle them, though. But on this night, the Merry-Go-Round made me dizzy. “That’s it,” I thought. “If I can’t handle the Merry-Go-Round, there’s absolutely nothing left for me here.” Except, that is, for the games.

As a new father, I felt obligated to win a prize for each of the kids. So off we went looking for a game that I might have a reasonable shot at winning. It turns out that there are two kinds of games at the fair: those you can’t possibly win (they trade on the male ego’s unwillingness to give up), and those that you can’t lose (they trade on the male ego’s need for bigger and better things). We picked that latter: throw darts at a wall full of balloons. The guy running the game saw us hesitate and preyed on my basic need to be a provider in order to get me to play. He even gave me the first dart free. I threw the dart at the wall of blue balloons, with the occasional red balloon thrown in, and “POP,” I nailed it, holding Trin even!
“OK, now three gets you a small prize,” he said as he handed me three more darts.
POP! POP! POP!
“Oh, he’s good! Two more gets you something on that wall.”
He sets two darts in my hand. I rear back and: POP! POP!
“Two more gets you a medium prize.”
POP! POP!
“Five more and you’re up to the large.”
POP! POP! POP! POP! POP!
“Three more and you can take anything off that wall right there.”
POP! POP! POP!
At this point Nancy stepped up and said to me, “You might want to stop.”
“Yeah?” I asked.
“Um, yeah,” she said. “Each dart is a dollar.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
I had thought he was just letting me go until I missed, all on that first investment of three darts. “OK,” I said to the guy. “That’s it.”
“OK,” he said, not as interested in me anymore. “You can take anything off one of these two walls.” We looked at what he was pointing to and saw some uninspiring “Finding Nemo” dolls no bigger than a bread box. I was pretty sure I had heard him say that I was up to the big prizes, but as a rule I try not to argue with guys with prison ink. I hesitated because I didn’t see anything I liked.
He was tired of us and wanted us out of there now that he had our money. “Or you can have two prizes out of this box,” he said and held up a box of stuff from the Island of Misfit Toys. I chose an orange iguana for Dave and a faux felt flower with a wire stem for Trin.
They were happy and I was out fifteen bucks. Next year, we just look at the animals.

Nancy more than made up for the loss by winning an award at the 63rd Annual Wabash Valley Juried Exhibition held at the Swope Art Museum here in Terre Haute. It’s a show that pulls in artists from around Indiana and Illinois and is always a big draw. The jurors have gotten more prestigious, and getting in, let alone winning anything, has become more competitive. Nancy’s piece, “Gathering,” won the Vernon Cristee Award of Recognition. Seems that Nancy is on a bit of a streak at the Wabash Valley show: she’s won an award six years running now. She’s yet to win the big one, though: The Award of Excellence. I told her that we should create a computer program that compiles all the attributes of the winning pieces going back twenty years according to media, subject matter, size, and color pallet, and then have the computer devise a sure-fire top-prize winner for next year. She thinks that sounds like the opposite of art. She’ll just enter another piece and see what happens. I say we need to take it to the next level.

And speaking of the next level, Dad’s birthday is coming around again this coming week. He’s likely not to be all that happy about it (he never is), but it’s a big one. I won’t say how old he’ll be other than to say that it rhymes with “eleventy.” So, as I sit here and complain about feeling old and all the mid-life angst I’m experiencing, I think about Dad and how much he does day to day. This is the guy who has replaced all the wiring and plumbing in our house (which required a fair amount of alone time digging a ditch in the crawl space). And he’s done much the same kind of work in Chris and Steve’s houses as well. He rebuilt the “family room” in Chula Vista and also just finished building a massive set of cabinets for his next-door neighbors. Plus, he regularly “volunteers” to do repairs for friends as well as St. John’s, where Mom volunteers an enormous amount of time. So, I say, happy birthday, Dad. Take a day off.

Back in my bedroom, my mind races through a range of tenuous associations. My thoughts turn from the routine of the day to the Kinks and from there to the heady days of discovering the Kinks (and the Replacements, X, the Clash, etc) in college and then to playing music in my first band with Noel and Scott. And then I think of something Scott once said at a rehearsal. We were probably mailing it in and not playing very well – more interested in how many Mickey’s Big Mouths were left than getting the song right. Scott said, “If you’re serious you rock even when you don’t feel like it.” And so I get up. I get up because I’m serious about my job as a father, because my parents got up every day and took their jobs seriously, and because hard work and sacrifice really are rewarded. Sometimes the reward is in the form of recognition by your peers, sometimes it’s in a hearty “Thanks” from the neighbor, and sometimes it’s in someone applauding your craft. Or, as in the case of that morning, in the way Dave and Trin find even the simplest game wildly funny.

Do it again, indeed!