Vergil’s Coffee

The boys find talking about farting as being pretty funny. And they’ve just spent the trip from South Third Street to piano lessons in the 1993 Ford Escort Wagon while it was snowing trying to come up the substitute words for fart. Lori laid down the law in her frustration with the boys starting the fart-talk riff before dinner and by the time we were almost done, she’d had enough.

“Chris, you deal with the ‘f-word’ thing,” she said.

“Sure thing,” I replied. “Boys: no more saying the ‘f-word’ in public.”

“Uh, dad,” Evan asked. “That isn’t the real ‘f-word’ you know.”

“Well, Evan,” I said. “In our house, that is the ‘f-word.”

“Sure thing Dad,” Evan said.

But Colin hadn’t heard a word I said as he was high with the thrill of saying “fart” and then rehearsing several different situations where the word could be said. And the problem was that Colin had already eaten his food, so we couldn’t tell him to eat the rest of his dinner. (Colin’s our reluctant eater sometimes and many a “1-2-3” magic has resulted a trip upstairs and perhaps, a physical reminder to listen and obey; this, along with the thing he really hates: the timer. We set the timer and suddenly he’s full of anxiety that he might not finish within time).

Instead, he was happy-drunk with the countless possibilities and humor with the ‘f-word.’

This, in short, was not a fun trip to the piano lesson, but not as ‘un-fun’ as making a gingerbread cottage from scratch last weekend.

The story begins with Lori commenting on how fun it would be to make our own gingerbread house. Instead of paying $22.50 for pre-built G-Houses and assembling the exteriors with icing and a variety of candies, she suggested that we do the whole thing a home.

“Why don’t we just buy a kit like we did that one year?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Those were gross.”

And she was right as I remembered some tense words being exchanged between parents while the kids ask to help and the adults snapped “On, no!” and then trying to concentrate as the cheap icing lacked any practical value in holding the walls together. So, like the glue in those assemble-yourself-book shelves: white doesn’t necessarily mean that its main purpose is to stick two things together.

“Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t our prettiest moments…but I remember the house tasting good in coffee.

“I think we should make out own,” Lori said. “The kids will think it’s fun and it’ll be a nice memory.”

“Fine,” I said (secretly hoping that she would forget the conversation).

But she didn’t and so she found a suitable design and I decided to put a smile on my face.

And so that lasted until the adding of ingredients began. Lori is so much better at this sort of thing. If I have some task to do around the house, I’ll usually go off and do it myself. Lori, instead, will have the boys help her out. So, Evan and Colin worked on breaking eggs into bowls and then having the boys mix the recipe by hand. A too-much-broken egg shell in the batter, giggling during the mixing and soon the tones from the parents grew increasingly firm to terse to almost the “snippy.”

Then the walls came out a bit irregular and so was the roof and floor. So that brought us back to two parents trying to hold the walls together while Evan asked “What do we get to do? though we were supposed to help out.” And I was about to get snippy, but Lori beat me to the response and said “Sure thing…why don’t you hold this in place here.”

After the walls settled (or sagged to the side), we then set the roof in place using the homemade icing. One of the roof pieces broke earlier and so we were careful to make sure it would break when we glued it to … and Colin accidentally pressed down on the roof and the roof sagged into two.

Just as a note: icing, like chalking, can cover a multitude of sins.

I think I first recognized this realization of sub-par completion when I put together various plastic models. We had a family friend named Don Garret who had quite an impressive set up to assemble plastic models and I wanted to have model planes that looked like Don’s but I soon found out that by the time I had overglued the fuselage that the wings would be slightly off and by the time I had glued down the now glue-fingerprinted canopy, I really didn’t want to face the decals. And I’m sure the gray pilot was saddened (if he could even see out the glue-cloudy canopy) by the sad, sad state of his plane with half torn decals because no one has successfully been able to transfer those things off the backing onto the desired placement on the plane.

I hated the plane by the end of the fun of building my own version of a famous plane and so I think it’s no wonder that many a boy looked forward to blowing the thing up with firecrackers or just dousing the thing in lighter fluid, taking a match to a wing and launching the ball of flame down the cliff of the creek behind your house.

I would experience the same feeling of building anxiety and disappointment when I would put together those “assemble yourself an entertainment center” from pressed sawdust or really any plumbing task. You hope it’ll take 30 minutes, but usually the task is completed 2 ½ hours later and several versions of the ‘f-word’ have been uttered or at least considered.

On the trip to CVS to get the candy for the landscaping and exterior decoration for our Gingerbread Cottage, I felt I should explain all of the candy. (We’d been calling it a “cottage” because we felt that the structure resembled more shack than a shelter to protect its inhabitants from the elements. Our structure should collapse anytime: something you should avoid in looking for a house, by the way).

“Oh, somebody’s got a sweet tooth,” the CVS cashier says.

“Well, we’re building a gingerbread house from scratch and we just need the candy to decorate it.” I explain.

“Oh, well isn’t that fun,” she offered.

“Maybe, “ I said and took my stuff to the car and drove home.

And as I’ve told people that we made a gingerbread cottage from scratch, the most common response “That sounds fun,” they say. And I want to say “No, it was not fun.”

Even though Lori accused me of being “Scroogey” on her Facebook status this weekend, I do think I like to have fun. But fun isn’t so much defined as making a gingerbread cottage whose walls and floor and roof is so uneven that it seems that only by luck does the thing say together. Fun isn’t having to liter the entire structure with so many pieces of candy only to cover up how sad the thing thing looks (as if candy, now, covers a multiple of sins). Fun isn’t getting testy when the kids are trying to help out in the building of thing that will eventually become a family memory of the time we built that really ugly gingerbread thing full of candy and Dad was cranky.

Perhaps that’s what Lori meant when she said she was tired after finishing the thing, but it is something we’ll remember. Sure we’ll laugh as we’re eating the thing after dinner and drinking coffee, but I still contend that the act of putting the thing together was not fun.

Colin asking me if I had ever heard “Cut the cheese”–now that’s fun.