The Inevitable

It's happened. Finally. I was always afraid it would, but was unsure when the day would actually arrive. Now that it's happened, I'm not really sure I can undo it. And the scariest part is that I'm not sure I want to.

I grew up. I've become an adult. Yes, Samuel, I'm finally a man now. Bye bye childhood, adolescence, glorious self-delusion, whatever it was I was before, I am no longer. Full fledged big boy now. Do you know how I came to this horrifying realization? All last week, through my wonderful 10-hr. work days, bus rides, diaper-changing, kid bathing, church callings, bill paying, fat exorcising and charming conversations with the representatives from the Chase Visa card I had at Disney who are still calling and telling me I owe them money even though I quit the company 6 months ago and closed out all my expense reports before I left, the biggest thing I looked forward to wasn't a happily irresponsible death session of Xbox glory or some candy-colored popcorn DVD I got at work, but rather WHEN I WAS GOING TO GET TO LANDSCAPE MY BACK YARD.

(Sorry Dad, no offense, but I've always considered gardening, yard landscaping and other constructive outdoor creation activities the domain of old guys. You've always been 28 years older than me, you like landscaping, before there was TV there was mulch, it's only natural).

So, we have a long line of nasty juniper bushes that runs along our backyard fence and leads into a pit of vicious PacNoWe (Pacific Northwest - my brilliant wife's term) creeping ivy that is slowly strangling a couple beautiful and very large trees (don't know the variety, still not that grown up yet) and trying to wend its way onto our lawn. The junipers are on a small slope that leads up to our neighbor's fence as their yard is 3 feet higher than ours. Looking at this big mess and wondering how to make the best of it (because I read somewhere that this is what homeowners are supposed to do) we thought about pulling out all the vegetation (fear not fuzzy tree huggers, there's plenty of the green stuff in the PacNoWe) and building a rock retaining wall at the base of the slope and around the tall trees that would create a terraced garden against the fence and a flattened play area for the boys at the back of the yard. Now, this is a multi-month project requiring some brutally hard work (juniper roots anyone?), several hundred dollars at least in tools and materials and far more skill and knowledge than I have accidentally gathered in this long avoided subject area. And yet as I spent my days trundling through spreadsheets, studio complaints, downtown transit lanes and more little boys' shoes than I thought existed in the world, the idea of tearing out all that springy veggie stuff and throwing down some nice artificially formed gray flagstones or maybe some mottled cobbles and scoping out the grade to ensure proper drainage so that the wee ones could stomp around and the tomatoes could grow tall ... was strangely appealing and the only spot of brightness in my long week.

Now that I've accepted the heartbreaking truth that I've finally grown up, I suppose I have to embrace all the rest of it and just throw in the towel entirely. The balding (no wise cracks monkey crew), weight gain, wrinkles, graying hair (found the first one 2 months after Caleb was born - a frighteningly prescient precursor), back pain (met a chiropractor with surprisingly gentle hands), aversion to popular music, sudden affinity for game shows, conveniently selective memory loss, alarmingly fertile nose hair that has somehow spread to my back, almost uncontrollable urge to dole out advice and the inevitable melting of the buttocks into the upper thighs and the ascension of pants to sternum and beyond are all sure to soon fill the rest of my remaining days. The boy is dead, the boy is dead, God rest the boy.

(Just to try to hang on to a scrap of my previous glory days of irresponsibility and comic book fantasizing and to prove that I hadn't slipped over the age edge entirely I just bought a wicked cool chopping axe and zombie-decimating Ka-bar Kukri machete ... to help me with those pesky juniper roots).