Up and Coming, or Coming Up

When Michael first left, one of the cleaning jobs I had to do was to sort through all the junk that had been left in my spare room. Some of it was Jamie's, some was Michael's, and some was mine. When Michael came up in the summer of 2008, I left several boxes of his things at his grandmother's house. This included towers and monitors from four broken computers.


Michael was a stereotypical tech-geek. Whenever someone we knew was getting rid of a computer, he would take it and add it to his collection. His plan was that someday, he would build one working computer from all of those miscellaneous parts, and end up with a free, somewhat decent system. I never doubted that he could do it. He'd built computers from scratch before. In fact, the only system he ever purchased as-is was the one he bought right before going back to college. So when Jacob started Kindergarten, and began learning the basics of how to use a PC, I asked Michael if he'd be able to use those old parts to make a working computer for Jake. "I think so," he told me, "it should only take me a weekend."


In November of 2008, I reminded him that if he put together this system, it would be a completely free Christmas present. For his birthday in June, my mother's brother had given Jacob several educational CD-ROM games, including Blues Clues and Pooh, and Jacob's new favorite, Pokemon. But he still had no system to play them on, and I was not about to let my then-five-year-old anywhere close to my laptop. At Christmas, Jacob got a Star Wars clone trooper helmet and blaster, both with sound effects. Joy to the World.

When Michael visited in February 2009, I asked him, again, to bring the computer. He confessed that he hadn't built it yet, but swore that he would build it before his March visit. But in March, he crashed his car and didn't come up. He didn't come again in April, May, or June, but did mail birthday presents for Jake's birthday in June. So when I was forced to cut short my vacation with Sue in July, I at least wanted Michael to bring the computer. I mentioned it to him before we left, and I asked him if he had ever built it. "I did," he said, but his tone made me doubt it. It sounded a little too emphatic, like he really needed me to believe it. So I called him from Sue's house on Friday morning, at the end of my vacation, to remind him to bring the computer. "It won't fit in my mother's car," he said. "There's too much stuff for my grandma's birthday party." I half-believed him, but I sincerely doubted that he had yet devoted the necessary time to building a computer for his son.
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We went to the zoo, a small, simple, safari-style zoo where the management offered bus-rides around the park, or one could walk on the gravel paths. "Walking admission" was much cheaper than "riding admission", so I decided on the walk. I bought each of the kids an ice cream cone at the concession stand. Tony stayed in his stroller the entire time, so I only had to worry about two kids trying to pet animals that shouldn't be petted (like the ostriches, which were next to the zebras). There was a petting zoo, within the larger zoo, with goats, sheep, llamas, and camels. Tony and Jake both enjoyed touching the llamas, and Jake got a goat kid to eat from his hand, but when Jane bought goat food from the dispensers, she threw it at the animals and ran back to me. Oddly enough, at the children's museum we visited with Sue, Jane's favorite exhibit was the farming display. She enjoyed giving fake corn to fake kids, playing with the farm models, and riding in the fake tractor, but she ran and cried from baby goats? I really don't understand my daughter some days.
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We stopped and saw my friends on the way home, but they had forgotten we were coming, and were on their way out, so I only got a glimpse of their baby boy, and their girls were quite upset that my kids couldn't stay and play. After a short visit, we were back on the road, on the "home stretch". Two more hours to home. I hadn't stopped at a single roadside attraction, and tomorrow I would have to see Michael and Ashley again. For some bizzare reason, though, I couldn't help but smile as I traveled the hilly, twisted roads on the way home. My five-day vacation had become three days, but they had been packed with family. It was worth the trip.