Also, I can still kick you in the head. So I got that going for me.

Me: Do you think our souls are the same age?

Herself: I think your soul is about twelve.

One year ago my wife and I were married.

Two days ago our beautiful daughter turned three months old.

I am a very, very lucky man.

Happy Anniversary ma petite. Happy Anniversary to us.

Year in review, 2009: married in January, baby arrived in October.

Went to Paris for the first time. Still struggling to write and express my feelings about that city.

Did I mention we had a baby?  I’m not going to even try and write about the tsunami of emotions involved with my daughter. Too much. Too humbling.

Many other folks, dear to us, had babies. So far we are all of us muddling along in a pretty fair manner and in good health.

Can’t ask for much more. See you around in 2010.

Of course you understand that by ‘parents’ I mean my dad.  Those of you who have met him may be shocked and dismayed to learn that such a nice, polite man told his children enormous whoppers, but I assure you that every word that follows is true. So, in order from least to most egregious, here are three weird things my dad told me. And my sister – she will corroborate every one of the following quotes.

1. “Fish is brain food.”

OK, right up front I’ll concede that this could possibly be true.  There could be an actual, scientifically-proven brain benefit from consuming sea food. However, I do not think my dad was concerned with the development of young minds when he tossed off this gem.  I think he was more concerned that my sister and I stop complaining and eat the damn fish. Fair play to dad – we were probably being quite annoying. On the other hand, if you feed your children boiled hot dogs on a regular basis you can’t really expect them to have an adventurous palate, can you?

2. “Eat your food hot. Like the cowboys.”

I’m going to go ahead and guess that this was primarily aimed me. My sister could not have been bothered to care whether the cowboys ate their food hot, cold or upside down.  Dad would’ve had to invoke Annie or some other such minor deity to influence my sister.

The $10,000 question is, why was dad so concerned that I eat my food hot? The answer is unknown, lost in the mists of my rapidly receding childhood.

3. “If you sleep on two pillows, your neck will be bent like that forever.”

It really helps to have a visual for this one, so those of you who have met my dad will have an advantage here. You must picture him standing before with his head tilted far to one side, almost laying on his shoulder. Also, he is grimacing in a striking fashion, as if to warn you that the same forces that will permanently twist your neck will also leave your facial muscles horribly contorted. And he is asking would you like to be stuck like this forever? Would you?

Why such a strongly worded, and acted, position on sleeping with two pillows? That, my friends, is the $25,000 question, for which I also have no answer. But feel free to share any weird things your parents told you.

My sister and brother-in-law gave me a All Clad Saute Pan, which I used this evening to make gratin. Which reminds me I added about a half dozen recipe annotations for anyone interested in such things.

Anyhow, I hadn’t thought of those Cosby LPs in years. Until this past month of June, which put us on course to the proverbial forty days and forty nights.

We were gullible children, apt to believe all manner of nonsense, but in this case the pitch was queered by its association with school. I liked my 4th grade teacher, but I never bought into the notion that she had some post office connection with the spirit world. Nor did anyone else I should think. It was too official to be true.

And then there are the vampires and other supernatural creature that appear in many contemporary teen novels. Vampires, simply put, are awesome. However, today’s vampire stories are 100 pages of florid descriptions of romance and 100 pages of various people being emo. However much I mock the literature of yesteryear, it definitely had it right when it came to vampires. The vampire was always depicted as a menacing badass. That is the kind of book teenage boys want to read. Also good: books with videogame-style plots involving zombie attacks, alien attacks, robot attacks or any excuse to shoot something.”

Zombie attacks. Any excuse to shoot something. I am comforted that despite society’s best attempt to churn out a generation of eunuchs the essential nature of the American adolescent male remains intact. Give that kid some firecrackers and a copy of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (The book, not the silly movie.)

Tenuously related – a critique of a critique of ‘Great Books’ programs.

I read scads and scads of books as a teen that might be described – charitably described – as junk. The trick, I think, is to inculcate the habit of reading.

UPDATE: I felt compelled to add this ode to the books of C.B. Colby? Did your library have Colby’s books, the ones that featured the same red and white cover design? With titles like Musket to M14: Pistols, Rifles and Machine Guns Through The Years? I recall that my grammar school library must have had twenty or so Colby titles. They were very popular in the fourth grade, along with books about Godzilla and other movie monsters.

One of my early class rooms also had a copy of Colby’s Strangely Enough floating about, and since I enjoyed that kind of spooky In Search Of stuff I read it a bunch of times.