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One of my favourite albums of 2010 so far is Sun Kil Moon’s latest “Admiral Fell Promises”. Unreal acoustic guitar accompanied by Mark Kozelek’s plaintive vocals, perfect for the Australian winter. Buy it from .

This is my new favourite photo of Boy Z. I think it just personifies him. In motion. Hair flying (Enjoy that hair, little one. Male pattern baldness is hereditary). A cheeky crooked smile. A little bit feral. It’s just essence of Boy Z.

It has been kind of a lost weekend. Not like those that were frequent in my 20’s – days of memories lost to booze, drugs and the trappings that went along with them. No, lost in the sense of time that is irretrievable. Lost to a combination of driving rain, a dodgy tooth, a croupy kid and the subtle malaise that accompanies the beginning of winter.

I don’t mean to imply that it was a bad weekend. Weekends are never bad. Time with Dr. O’C and Boy Z and Not Max is never bad. Trying? Sometimes. Challenging? Often. Stressful? Usually. But also filled with laughter and the serenity of a good life. This weekend, however, a rapidly festering abcess sent me into a haze of self-pity and analgesia. A haze that made much beyond a basic level of function impossible for your underwhelming narrator and a fair bit of Friday evening was spent supine on the couch emitting soft moans.

Then the rain came and put the kibosh on our planned football outing. And then Boy Z started barking like a seal, which meant a Saturday planted in front of various kids movies on autorepeat. Boy Z wheezing and croaking and me whinging and moaning.

And then the lights went out.

A power outage, a minor occurrence to adults, is a source of much excitement and consternation to little boys, one of whom has a mild fear of the dark. “Where are the lights?” “Turn the lights on, Bubba!” “When the tricity coming back, Bubba?”

But we settled into that rustic groove that a blackout inevitably brings – reading books by candlelight, bumping into various bits of furniture and relying heavily on my battery powered iPod dock for dancing in the dark. But strangely, not to Springsteen.

And to put the final brushstrokes on the whole Laura Ingalls Wilder scene, the after-hours doctor turned up for a house call. He checked Boy Z by candlelight and declared him croupy. Of course he spoke with a strong Persian accent rather than a Minnesotan and trotted off in a Holden rather than on horseback and then the lights blazed back to life and with it 21st century Australia.

But there are a hell of a lot of worse places to be than 21st century Australia. And a lost weekend in 21st century Australia with these particular 21st century Australians isn’t ever really lost.

This post is all over the place and I don’t have much to say, really. I just wanted to point you to my monthly post at The Greenists. And show off some pictures from a weekend past. One that wasn’t lost.

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Calexico and Iron and Wine’s 2005 joint EP “In The Reins” was one of the finest collaborations of the decade. The only weakness is that it’s only an EP. Buy it from .

…and their Mum.

Because this raising of boys is a tough gig, even if they don’t grow up to be cowboys.

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I’m a fan of the original version of this song, but today isn’t about me. I thought my special lady friend might appreciate the Lucinda Williams cover. This one and several other great covers (including a fantastic Dwight Yoakam cover of “Give Back the Key to My Heart”) is from “The Imus Ranch Record” available at .

“And when the boys are teenagers, I’m just going to send them to Florida for the school holidays. Let their grandparents deal with their hormonal butts”, I ribbed.

“That’s OK”, my Dad replied with disturbing solemnity, “I’ll be dead by then.”

Stunned silence. My Dad has a sense of humour so dry that it borders on Saharan, so I coughed a hesitant chuckle.

“No, seriously. I’m 63. My father died in his early 70’s, so did his brother. We [surname redacted] men don’t live very long. I’ll be gone before they’re teens.”

My Dad, always the life of the party.

That being said, it wasn’t a month earlier at a dinner party that I announced to my guests:

“Did y’all know that as of my birthday, I’ll be statistically halfway through my life? Truly middle aged?”

Stunned silence, followed by nervous laughter.

“That’s assuming that we’re talking about the American average life expectancy of 75.6 for men rather than the Australian average of 78.9. If I get the Australian bump then I’m another year away from half way.”

Apparently, a cavalier fatalism is an inherited trait.

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I’m not really a fan of Echo and the Bunnymen, nor any music of the 80’s. It’s all just too…synthetic. But, this is a perfect accompanying track. Their 1980 debut, “Crocodiles” is available from .

The holidays were…fantastic.

I don’t know that I’ve ever thought, spoken or written that particular combination of those four words before. But this year was something special with family visiting and a proper American Thanksgiving and a gaggle of young kids at Christmas.

It wasn’t perfect. With family come the inevitable spats and the predictable dramas. And there are still bad days and sometimes it’s too hot and you’re too tired. And there was the thing at Carrickalinga.

But you take the bad with the good and you get on with wringing joy out of life wherever you can and when the hell did I become such a Pollyanna?

At any rate, I just wanted to pop up and wish you all a Happy New Year and post a couple of holiday themed slideshows for those of you that know me well enough to want to see endless family photos.

First, my family’s visit to Oz at Thanksgiving….

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

and second, Christmas with Dr. O’C’s family…

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

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Nancy Wilson’s cover of the Frank Loesser holiday standard is available on “A Nancy Wilson Christmas” .

But I’m in the festive spirit this year and Sinatra’s Christmas songs bring back memories of some of my favorite Christmases past. My maternal grandparents live in a house they built out in the woods of northern Ontario. Every few years, we would schlep the family up to the north woods for the holidays. For our relatively small nuclear family, this is the closest that we got to the holidays that we saw on the TV. They were fantastic; we were in the midst of cousins and aunts and uncles. Surrounded by the sounds of children playing and paper ripping and Christmas songs and peals of laughter. My grandparents’ house was a virtual playground inside – an homage to Vegas in its prime – and out – a genuine winter wonderland blanketed in feet of snow.

But one of the most poignant memories from these Christmases was the sound of a Frank Sinatra 8-track endlessly repeating on the stereo.

Of course, memories are selective things. One remembers what one wants and I’ve selected the gauzy, warm memories of Christmas past to take with me into adulthood and left the family drama behind me. Just seems the Christmas-y thing to do. I want my boys to have similarly warm memories of Christmas and to that end, I’m stifling my penchant for moodiness during the holidays; becoming less Ebenezer Scrooge and more Clark W. Griswald. And this year my relatively small nuclear family will get to have a semblance of one of those TV Christmas special holidays.

This Christmas we’ll be surrounded by family – Dr. O’C’s Australian kin and more of her family from Europe. Boy Z and Not Max have been reveling in the company of cousins and aunts and uncles for the last week or so and on Christmas day will be surrounded by a score or so of family. They’ll have little to no memory of this Christmas as they get older, but they’ll have the joy of a few midsummer days spent in the warm, if imperfect, embrace of family. I hope that they’ll have memories like mine – hazy but happy.

Of course their Christmases will be on the other side of the world, potentially in the midsummer heat (it was 108F today). There won’t be chestnuts roasting on an open fire and if our Christmas is white, I’m fairly certain that the apocalypse is under way. But Boy Z and Not Max will be in the midst of cousins and aunts and uncles. They will be surrounded by the sounds of children playing and paper ripping and Christmas songs and peals of laughter. On Christmas morning, our house will be a virtual playground inside and despite not being a winter wonderland outside, Boy Z will probably be able to take his new kite and cricket bat to the beach. Shhh! Don’t tell him want Santa’s bringing.

You can’t replicate everything. Nor should you. But Frank Sinatra will be playing on my Bose iPod dock.

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I’ve got grand ambitions of getting another post done before Christmas, but at my current pace of one every week or so that seems unlikely to happen. So, Merry Christmas to you, my gentle readers.

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I don’t think that the Sinatra album that my grandparents had is available any longer. But you can still hear some of his finest Christmas numbers on “A Jolly Christmas from Frank Sinatra”, available at

And that peaceful feeling was irretrievably shattered with two sounds, near simultaneous – a growling roar and a piercing scream.

The next few moments are still a blur. My head whipped around. I saw my son prone on the beach, my dog standing over him. I saw blood. I bolted to them, scooped my son into one arm and grabbed the dog’s throat with the other. I slammed the dog into the sand and clenched. I was driven only by adrenaline and a primal instinct to defend my young.

The only thing that stopped me killing the dog right there on the beach was my father’s gentle hand on my shoulder. “Don’t do this, Chris. Get Boy Z back to the house. Don’t do this now.”

I sprinted off the beach, Boy Z screaming and bleeding against my chest. I ran and ran. Busted into the beach house we had rented for the week. Shouting to Dr. O’C, “Come now! Boy Z is hurt. The dog.” And when she saw the blood streaming down his face, she gave voice to the decision that I had made the moment I heard that roar, “That’s it. The dog is getting put down.”

You see, this wasn’t the first time that Timmins had snapped at Boy Z, but it was the first time he had made contact. Boy Z has been harassing Timmins with the unrelenting persistence of a toddler for six or eight months now. And 99% of the time, Timmins had borne it with the patience of a saint. But every now and then, he had lost patience and growled/roared in a disturbingly lupine way in Boy Z’s face, usually resulting in several minutes of tears and sobs from his torturer. These incidents had worried both of us, had resulted in rules regarding dog and boy never being left alone without adult supervision, had planted niggling doubts about the tenability of the situation in my head.

But we were on holiday. And on holiday, the rules tend to ebb with the tide . And there had been adult supervision on the beach. And boy and dog seemed to be playing happily.

I don’t know what happened on the beach. I really don’t. There was a tennis ball – always the source of ownership disputes. I don’t know if the dog intended the same thing as he had done in the past – issue a stern warning – but Boy Z had flinched the wrong way or Timmins had misjudged. I don’t know what happened. It went from an idyllic family vacation to a scene of horror in the blink of an eye.

At the beach house there were shouts for ice and flannels. There was a frantic call to 000 and a panicked discussion of the nearest medical facility. There was so much blood – the front of my shirt was covered in my sons’ blood – and the bites were so close to his eyes. Deep cuts below just below each eye, so much blood that I didn’t know if Boy Z would lose an eye or even both. There were hurried negotiations and moving of cars and handing off of a now screaming Not Max and the squeal of tires and we were off. To Yankallilla then, after a call from the SA Ambulance Service, to Victor Harbor. 32 km away. But the longest 32 km I’ve ever traveled. I sat in the back with a now sobbing Boy Z, pleading with him to keep the ice on his face. Dr. O’C drove as fast as she could around the winding, undulating roads of the Flerieu Peninsula.

I tried, for Boy Z’s sake, not to cry. But it was my fault. I should have seen it coming. I should have done something the first time the dog snapped at Boy Z. I should have been closer to the dog and Boy Z on the beach. And my beautiful son was bleeding all over me. And I knew that the dog would never live with us again. I tried, for Boy Z’s sake, not to cry.

We got to the small hospital in Victor Harbor about five minutes before Dr. O’C’s Mum and one of her cousins burst into the ER like J.E.B. Stuart’s cavalry. I still don’t know how they made the 90 minute trip from Adelaide in just over half an hour, but I don’t care. This horrifying Sunday night reinforced to me the wonder that is family. My father’s intervention on the beach. My mother and grandmother taking on Not Max with no instruction. Dr. O’C’s aunt working the phones with emergency rooms all over South Australia. Her uncle giving temporary sanctuary to the dog. They leapt into action, without reservation or selfishness. In a way that only family can do. Without them, I don’t know if I could have coped.

After an initial check in Victor we were sent back to Adelaide where there was an appropriate X-ray and eye specialists. Again, I was in the back seat with a now much calmer Boy Z. We sang together. I made him laugh with a baritone rendition of “Baa, Baa Black Sheep”. I tried to hold back tears when he touched his face and exclaimed “The dog bites. The dog bites.” I listened to Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” over and over because it was the CD in the car’s player and changing CDs seemed a trivial thing to do.

Things calmed down back in Adelaide with a series of positive test results – better pain relief, no fractures, eyes working normally, stitches unnecessary. But Boy Z cried every time a doctor approached and clung to me and I didn’t leave him for a moment. By the time we got home, he was almost back to his normal rowdy toddling self. In the days since, the swelling has begun to go down and the cuts have begun to heal and further tests have indicated that there will be no permanent damage. He’s begun to exclaim excitedly every time he sees a dog. And he has begun to ask about Timmins.

Timmins. While I decided his fate the moment I saw blood, I knew I couldn’t see him again. I said so at the emergency room and Dr. O’C’s family was kind enough to go and pick him up from Carrickalinga. I knew I couldn’t see him again, because as it became clear that Boy Z was going to be OK, I knew I couldn’t do what had to be done. Even without looking into his eyes, I began to have second thoughts in the hours after we stumbled home from emergency. I had second thoughts when Dr. O’C’s cousin told her how nervous he had seemed that night. I loved that dog – that poor, dumb dog. Surely he hadn’t meant to hurt the boy. He was as besotted with Boy Z as Boy Z was with him.  It had to have been a mistake.  Maybe we could work something out, find him a place at a no kill rescue shelter with a stern warning that he was not acceptable for families with small children. But Australian law is consistent with natural law – if a dog bites a child, no matter what the circumstances, the dog is put down.

The next day, on the way to tour Victor Harbor, the same town that we raced to the night before with our son bleeding in the back seat, I e-mailed permission to euthanize my dog to the RSPCA. And a couple of hours later, in a blustering wind roaring off the Southern Ocean, I described over the phone, in great detail, what happened the day before and confirmed that my dog had to be put to death.

The dog that I’d had for over eight years. The dog that I’d dragged over three continents. The dog that I’d loved as a member of my family before I had a family of my own. The big, useless sook of a husky that had burrowed his way into my heart and then broke it in a millisecond on a beach in Carrickalinga.

And I hung up the phone and sat, trying not to cry on a damn stupid horse bound tram plodding around Victor Harbor. And my son was whinging and high maintenance and driving me nuts. And, to be completely honest, I couldn’t cry because I was resentful that I had to kill my dog and my son, less than 24 hours after a mauling, wasn’t acting the perfect angel.

I’ve had moments that I could cry and that Dr. O’C and I could cry together. Moments when I go to the back door to let the dog in and realize that he isn’t coming in. When I put the frame of his bed in the shed and threw the padding in the trash. When tumbleweed of white dog hair blows past in the breeze.  Now, the tears are gone for the most part. Life goes on because it has to. We have the blessing of being busy with two small children and overseas visitors and that restricts mourning to the rare quiet times. Like when my eyes finally close as I turn off the light at night. For the days since Sunday, sleep hasn’t come. What comes instead, unwelcome, is flashbacks to the beach and a vision of my dog – my poor, stupid dog – laying down and closing his eyes for the last time. And his body going limp.

I don’t know how long that will last. But a moment ago as I laid down next to my sleeping son, his face still scabbed and adorned with stereostrips. As I stroked his incredibly fragile limbs, I have no doubt that I did the right thing.

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I hope you’ll forgive the length of this post. Actually, to be honest, I don’t care that much. This post was for me. For me to try to come to terms with the events of the last few days. I don’t know that it has. I hope, after you’ve read this, that it is obvious why I am not opening this post to comments. I also hope that you’ll understand why I’ve complied with Dr. O’C’s request that I don’t post any after photos of Boy Z.

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I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to listen to Arcade Fire’s “Funeral” again without thinking of this event. While racing around the winding roads of the Fleurieu Peninsula from hospital to hospital, this album was on repeat play in the CD player. I heard it over and over and while I sang to my bleeding son and tried in vain to keep an ice pack on my face, the appropriateness of this album began to hit home.

It may have a bad association for me, but it’s a wonderful album. Check it out from .

We had a great time rambling the city with my surprisingly resilient family. We had a fabulous dinner with the Florida Girl in Sydney and her clan. We even had a blessedly brief and efficient visit to the American consulate. (As an aside, can I just say how happy I am not to have to see George Bush’s smirking mug every time I walk into an American government building?) In short, 48 hours in Syndey was fantastic.

But I’m glad it was only 48 hours. Glad that I don’t live there. Visits to big cities always make me grateful that I don’t live in one. I like my life at a slower pace and small cities like Athens, Georgia and Columbia, Missouri and Oxford, England have always been perfect for me. They are small enough to allow some room to stretch, but have enough going on to keep one entertained. And as we stepped off the plane in sleepy little Adelaide, I was bathed in a satisfying feeling of being home.

Here are some more photos from the big city…

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Talking Mountain released their debut long player, “Old Gold, Ancient Jamz” earlier this year and like their fellow Omahans are making delightfully upbeat indie pop. Check out Talking Mountain at .

I loved seeing them. My sister and I flew up to northern Ontario for a couple of weeks every summer. Those were the best of times – long northern summer days in the woods with my cousins and my grandparents. There was a freedom and a light heartedness up there that we couldn’t conjure up at home. There was a chance to spend time with my grandparents, to get to know them, to have them shower us with grandpaternal affection. It was awesome.

But I was always a little jealous of my cousins. They lived in the same town as my grandparents and saw them a couple of times a week. My grandparents were a part of their lives in a way that they could never be a part of ours. It is the minutiae of day to day live that drags a family closer together.  In the back of my mind during those halcyon summer days of childhood was a niggling insecurity that my cousins were closer to my grandparents than I was. Because no matter how close we got during the weeks we spent together, we never built the relationship that goes along with a daily interaction.

I know there was a difference because when I was a teenager, my father’s parents moved to our small town in Florida. Now as a teenager, I didn’t take as much advantage as I should have of this proximity. But I know that in the few years before he died, I was able to build a special kind of relationship with my paternal grandfather, one that I wish I had a chance to build with my maternal grandfather.

I wish I was in a position to offer my sons that kind of relationship with all of their grandparents. But one of the adverse effects of an international relationship is that  there is no conceivable way that Dr. O’C and I can live in the same country as both sides of our family, never mind the same city.

My boys will grow up with one local grandparent. Dr. O’C’s mum lives in the southern suburbs and comes up to dote on her grandsons at least a couple of times a week. They adore her and I’m grateful that they are going to have her in their lives on a daily basis.

Dr. O’C’s Dad is in Queensland, which is about as far from us as New York is from New Orleans. Thus, he’s been an infrequent presence in my sons’ lives so far.

And my parents? Well, my parents are in Florida – 16,000 km away. Not conducive to that daily interaction with their Grandkids. And this is a fact that pains me. I’ve gone through all the permutations, but there just isn’t any way that there can be more unless we move back to the States (not going to happen) or they move down here (ditto). So, we’ll have to look forward to the too infrequent visits and make the most of them when they come around.

Like now, for example. Right now they’re probably about 8,000 km or so away – on a flight somewhere over the Pacific.  They are on their way here – my Mom and Dad and my maternal Grandmother. They arrive in Sydney tomorrow and Adelaide on Sunday. We’re headed off on a barnstorm trip to Sydney to meet up with them and get Not Max his U.S. citizenship.

At just shy of three weeks, they will be here for too short a time. And who knows when the next trip will be. But I’m glad that my parents are going to have a chance to get to know their grandsons and that my sons will have a chance to begin to get to know their grandparents. I’m grateful that we have a chance to be together and am going to make the best of the time we have.

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Eels’ “Blinking Lights and Other Revelations” is available from