Dylan Stafford

“Make each day your masterpiece.” – Coach John Wooden

2012 was my best father’s day ever, my first as a father of two: five-year-old Jackson and new baby Christian, three months and three days old.

As a Father’s Day gift, my wife Marisa pulled the night shift with Christian, feeding him at 4:30 AM. I slept-in to the deliciously-late hour of 7:45 when I got up to give him his next bottle. After a good burp on my shoulder, Christian went back to sleep in his crib.

We track bottles on 3X5 cards in the kitchen and I wrote 7:45AM, 4 ounces, new diaper so Marisa would know the most recent feeding when she woke up. Then I quietly gathered my jeans and a shirt and looked in the bottom of the hallway closet for my heavy boots and went to the garage.

My motorcycle was in several pieces because I had taken off the seat to charge the battery the night before. Having a new baby means very few joy-rides and the battery had gone dead from lack of driving. After charging, the indicator light was now green and I crossed my fingers that it would start as I re-assembled the seat.

Donning safety jacket and gloves and helmet, I pushed the bike quietly out to the street before attempting to start it up. The green light spoke true and with a baby-waking vroom my Suzuki was ready for a morning ride.

Side-streets to the 405 north and then a big turn to the 10 west until it curves through a tunnel that drops down and becomes the Pacific Coast Highway. On my left the ocean was pale blue underneath a cotton-white sky, the marine layer coating the ceiling with what’s called June Gloom in LA. The air was cool and I thought I probably should have worn another layer but there was no heading back now.

My 3X5 note to Marisa also said I’d be gone for an hour and I had already used up fifteen minutes putting the bike back together so this would be a short ride, no time to make it all the way to Malibu. I barely made it to Gladstone’s, the place for fish, before I realized I’d better turn around.

With a u-turn I stopped to look at the ocean for a few minutes. A family was camped out on an empty beach, the dad and uncle standing in the water fishing while a young boy with bright blond hair splashed around the water, running in and out. A Tahoe parked in front of me and a hispanic family came out, two young daughters giggling and holding hands to the beach while dad and mom and another adult exited more slowly.

I took a self-portrait with my smart phone, my arm extended and trying to capture the ocean behind me, with the idea of uploading it to Facebook later. It took me six months to figure out how to turn on the front camera for self-portraits, so much for smart.

Going home I took Sunset Boulevard through Pacific Palisades and Brentwood to the 405. I stopped to get a cinnamon-raisin bagel for Marisa, who will only eat fresh bagels. I stood in line with all the skinny-rich Pacific Palisades residents, each making an endless list of modifications to their order. Ten minutes later I stopped again at the Donut King #5 on Sepulveda in Culver City. This time I stood in line with regular-weight patrons, a woman pan-handling me for change before I entered the door, and no one special-ordering anything. Fully loaded with carbs, the successful hunter-gatherer returned home victorious.

Jackson greeted me at the door with a giant scream of “Surprise!”

Marisa and the boys had woken and had gone grocery shopping while I was on my ride. They had the same idea and had also bought Father’s Day donuts. We now had two apple fritters, Daddy’s favorite, but no time to eat.

I had forgotten about Jackson’s 9:40 swimming lesson, and we piled everyone in the car, making sure we had Jackson’s goggles. We’ve been going to swimming lessons for a year now, and after literally six or seven different pairs, we finally found goggles that work well and we can’t leave without them.

The swimming lessons are on little Santa Monica, just past Century City into Beverly Hills. The facility was originally a YMCA but is now a Jewish activity center. The indoor pool is heated and every Sunday morning it is bustling with parents who look like us, weekend-morning-tired but trying to teach their children to swim.

The tiny kids do “Mommy and Me” classes and each parent is in the water with their infant in a circle. They sing “Wheels on the bus” and acclimate the babies to the water, lifting them up in the air and gently splashing around. I hope we will do the baby classes with Christian, since we started too late to do them with Jackson.

Marisa and I sat watching Jackson learning the back stroke and how to dive from the edge while Christian slept in his car seat. Jackson’s twenty-minute lesson was long enough to each send a few Sunday texts to family far away.

As we left we saw another family we’ve become pool-friends with. They were exhausted from moving to a new apartment just a half a mile down the street, but across a boundary to be in a better elementary school district, a family making sacrifices for education.

Back home we spread out the carbs for a Sunday feast. I held Christian in my left arm and he was curled up Budda-like, watching the donut-eating festivity of his older brother and Daddy. It was also 10AM and time for his next bottle so Christian enjoyed breakfast with us.

I started drinking green tea two weeks ago, weaning myself off coffee. My coffee drinking had gotten excessive, with half a pot at home each morning and then another two to three cups at work each day.

My dad gave me the idea when he quit coffee drinking a few months ago by substituting green tea.

So far changing my coffee habit is going well. I noticed how I was using coffee at work to power through the day. I’m hoping that I can bring a little more peacefulness to my days, peaceful both for me and those around me.

After breakfast I put Christian on the bed face down for some “tummy time” and a nap. Our pediatrician said, “His head is perfect, but make sure you do tummy time so he won’t get a flat spot on the back of his head.”

Christian seems to like tummy time naps, especially when the formula isn’t agreeing with him and he’s got a rumbly stomach. He sleeps with his left ear down, and if I give him a binky his little jaw will pulsate as he sucks on it and dreams. Sometimes he pulls up his knees and his butt is in the air and sometimes he splays out flat.

We cleaned up breakfast and I washed a batch of baby-bottles, the four or five that had accumulated since Saturday afternoon. I have a whole system for washing the bottles that I’m very proud of.

I pre-soak everything in a glass bowl filled with soapy water. I wear purple gloves so I can get the water really hot. My tools are the bottle-brush, the regular dish scrubber, the nipple brush and the special pipe-cleaner. There are five parts to each bottle: nipple, screw top, air tube, cap and bottle. We have this drying contraption that holds everything and I’ve gotten really efficient at clean-up.

When we were waiting to adopt, I used to do dishes and tell myself that somehow, doing dishes was paving the way for the adoption to come through, that I was telling the universe I was serious, “See, I’m ready. I’m doing the dishes.”

Marisa took over Christian-watching and Jackson and I headed to the garage for a day of play. I have been cleaning and organizing our garage for about six months and to make cleaning tolerable for Jackson we have turned it into a game of pirates at the same time.

As soon as we walk out the back door, we change to our pirate voices. We’ll switch back to our regular voices when Mommy or a neighbor shows up.

My goal with the garage is to use it to store all the extra stuff we have, but also keep it open enough so we can do projects and have it be an extra room for our house. Since the LA weather is so nice, we don’t have to park the cars inside, only my motorcycle.

I got these heavy-duty plastic shelves at Home Depot and a bunch of 55 quart, clear plastic tubs that fit neatly in the shelves. Slowly I have organized the tubs into categories: toys, Christmas ornaments, Halloween decorations, toys, baby clothes in one-year increments, scrapbooks, toys, work books, baby books, toys, etc. I’m trying to designate one shelf for drygoods since our kitchen lacks a pantry.

Five-year-old Jackson loves to hang out around me while I pursue my never-ending effort to streamline and organize. The clear plastic tubs are great because he continually is re-discovering toys in the various bins.

“Get that one down Daddy,” he’ll point and ask as he spies some forgotten toy.

I got the idea of recycling toys from his daycare at UCLA, where the children’s classrooms have big, built-in cabinets. Instead of all the toys in a big pile, visible all the time, each day the teachers go into the cabinets and meter-out a different activity. Periodically, an activity circles back and it occurs to the kids like brand new since they haven’t seen it for a while.

Growing up in Texas, my mom and dad had lots of garage-stuff in cardboard boxes that A) got really dusty, and B) made it easy to forget what was inside.

With these plastic tubs, it’s easier to see (and remember) what we have and also I periodically open the garage door and blast out the floor and the tubs with a leaf-blower, keeping the garage from being so musty-dusty and endlessly entertaining Jackson.

“Shoot it at me Daddy. Shoot it at me,” he will squeal when the blower is going.

Jackson and I puttered and played and organized for about five hours, no nap for him since it was a special day.

We found two bird nests under the outside eaves on the side. By putting Jackson on my shoulders he could look into each nest.

“Daddy look, I can SEE them!” he screamed.

“Don’t touch them Jackson. It will scare the mommy. And be more quiet; remember, we are really big to them,” I said.

There was an egg in the first nest, and the second nest had three little baby birds, all grey fluff and yellow-lined beaks.

Later, Jackson and I did some sawing and glueing. I took some short pieces of wood and a big clamp and gave Jackson some practice using a saw. Marisa came out with Christian in the Baby Bjorn carrier and watched us for a while; we changed back to our human, non-pirate, voices.

That night, in bed, Marisa told me, “That was so beautiful today, you teaching Jackson how to saw. I don’t think I’ve sawed anything since seventh grade. I got all moved watching you together.”

After cutting four pieces of wood, we took glue and created a sculpture. Jackson variously described it as a heater, a shooter and a light-saber. He’s never seen Star Wars, but from his school-buddy Ian, who has seen Star Wars, he’s gotten an education about all the main characters.

There’s a tree to the side of the garage that I’ve pruned so that it makes a canopy and shades the driveway. I call it a rubber tree, but I’m not really sure what species it is.

We had a card table in the shade and a bench where we’d been sawing and sculpting. I was moving patio furniture and set a rocking chair in the shade and also a long picnic-table bench.

Jackson got an idea and ran into the house. He returned with a blanket and a pillow and then he left again, this time coming back exclaiming, “Let’s have a picnic!”

Marisa had made a bag of microwave popcorn and he carried that plus a bowl of strawberries. He laid out the blanket and pillow on the bench, calling it his “pirate bed” and I sat next to him in the shade in my rocking chair.

We ate popcorn and strawberries and continued our ongoing pirate-dialogue about rascals and treasure and stormy seas and witches.

The afternoon wore out and we finally started to gather everything back into the garage. Marisa was going to take us all out to dinner for Father’s Day that evening and we had to wash our hands and change shirts.

Half-way through Monday, it dawned on me that I had totally forgotten about a memorial service for a friend of mine named Mike from my twelve-step meetings who had died of cancer a few days prior. I had meant to go, but with the pirate-play-garage-cleaning I had forgotten completely.

There was a pang of regret and guilt and shock as it dawned on me. But then too, it offered me perspective on how beautiful of a Father’s Day it had been.

I’ve heard it said that kids spell love T-I-M-E. That afternoon in the garage with my eldest son was exactly that, love and time together. I’d gotten taken away to a land of pirates, my tour guide my five-year-old.

Mike was an artist, a painter. He was fond of saying how grateful he was, for everything, even the cancer. I hope he saw us from heaven, playing pirates and making our day a masterpiece. I hope he got my appreciation of him as an artist, paid forward in a living tribute in my creative time with Jackson.