The Battle Never Ends...

Karaoke

From that time my mom went out with her favorite daughter and also Kasey to go and sing "Brown Girl in the Ring" by Boney M.

Still There...

Remember when  I paid a guy $100 to write my name in my dad's garage floor (small and out of the way) and instead he wrote it in mile-high letters?

Well it's still there and don't tell ol' Hal but I feel a little bit bad about it -- 

Who's Your Favorite Now, Mom?

You'll be happy to know that all of us Hexum girls are still vying for favorite daughter. Now that my mom has breast cancer the competition has taken the form of a one-upsmanship-style group text in which we send photos of how supportive we are. I like to call this our "mass-text-omy".

Wakka Wakka.

Here's an exerpt:

Here we are sporting Pink Ribbons, trying to get my mom to notice us (recognize my purse?):

The caption accompanying Kasey's photo was "Now who's your favorite, Mom?"

Seriously, Hal?

I've shared with all of you the events surrounding my birth, including how my mom went and bought 50 pounds of Purina dog food on the day that I was born...and how my dad was hired by the US GOVERNMENT and probably more excited about that than about having another baby?

Well I just came across this DOOZY.

Readers, when I was ONE DAY OLD, fragile and tiny, deserving of undivided attention by both of my parents, my dad went and bought a 3 1/2 x 13 Taylor Made Hull-Gard Boat Fender at Marks Marine. He must have been excited about his new job and decided to treat himself. Also, we had a boat? That would have been fun. 

What the heck is a Taylor Made Hull-Gard Boat Fender, you ask?


I don't know. It's this. And it hurts my feelings.

Hexum Traditions

There aren't a lot of Hexum family traditions. (Maybe we were too poor to come up with anything good?) But we did have habits. Lots and lots of habits. And those habits feel like Tradition to me.

For example, my dad worked shift work at the Boise Cascade paper mill. 14 days of 28 he worked a 12-hour shift. So 14 days out of 28 he needed a lunch. It was Kasey's and my responsibility to make sure he had a good one. He liked a container of leftovers and a sandwich and so that's pretty much what he got. We made him beautiful sandwiches too, with meat and cheese and lettuce and mayo and mustard. But, man, when you finish making somebody a gorgeous sandwich? It's too impossible not to...

And so for the seven years that it was our job to make that lunch, 14 days of 28, my dad would open his lunch box to find:

Dad

Sometimes my dad calls me and counsels criticizes me, or whatever. It's not on purpose. Mostly he just disagrees with every decision I've ever made. (Can you blame him?) He just likes to continue to mold me, even now that I'm all growed up. I don't mind it at all, I tell you what, I'm just happy he calls. 

Anyway, the other day I told him, "It's OK dad. I already know you love me because you called. You don't have to say anything nice."

Oh how we laughed.

"You have to come now, or be one of them dummies. One of them city people. Look at your cement blocks. Look at your empty cans of beer. The money. And go clubbing. And don't worry about the Lady's Slippers. Why worry about it? Right?"

Present Time!

Parents and smart phones. Something's not quite right. I say: Bring a little nostalgia into the picture!! 

eBay: search for "retro handset smartphone". Now she can put the dumb phone in her purse and talk like a NORMAL PERSON on her headset. (She had been getting a little too "Real Housewives" for my taste...always putting people on speaker and holding the phone in front of her mouth.)

p.s. Extra favorite daughter points for matching the headset to the phone.

Almost Home

The first night I spent with my parents after my big long trip, (and having made the SEVEN HOUR drive from Minneapolis to Roosevelt via my sister's place in Cook, MN), my mom kept my drink filled and my brother Pete played song after sad country song purposely trying to get me crying. (It's not that hard.) I wanted to capture the moment forever because I was so happy and so sad but so happy:

Come on. "Almost Home"? You'd have to be made of stone not to start sobbing at that one. Please notice my supportive and adoring parents and how they react to finally seeing their favorite daughter alive after traveling to the ends of the earth. 

I was happy to see you too, GUYS. Jeez.





p.s. there was never a Cottonwood tree.

Hal-isms, Vol. 26

My dad and I have a tradition. Or we tried to have a tradition. Last year we got really into the Minnesota State Flower, the Showy Lady's Slipper. It was a pretty exciting time. We drove around and stared and pulled over and took pictures and bonded over these beautiful orchids, which grow plentifully up by my parents' place. I swore that for the rest of my life my dad and I would share this every summer. But this year I got lazy and couldn't get up there to see them. Oh, the phone calls! Please enjoy Hal-isms, Volume 26, which is basically a transcription of one phone call in which he berates me for not driving 14 hours in one weekend to see him the Lady's Slippers:

Sorry, Dad.

On my recent trip to Mount Rushmore. "Kady. You drive out to see the president but you don't drive up to see me. It's a stone. And then I go to see a coyote and people say 'ugh'."

"I would sit on the sharpest stick for you. Four feet long. Wait- that would come up under my heart, wouldn't it?"

"It's not ethnic groups. The prejudice that I have in me is city people versus normal people."

"Ignorant isn't a bad word. It just means you don't know."

"My prejudices are more toward...you people from the city, from the big town. You're the problem."

"I'm going on facebook to talk dirty like the rest of you kids."

"I stopped the tractor and I look around. And I'm six feet up. Oh my God, Kady, there are HUNDREDS of lady's slippers on Butch's field. Not five. Not ten. HUNDREDS."

Then I asked how he could possibly burn out Butch's field. "I can't do it. It would be like murdering a Kindergarten class."

"You have to come now, or be one of them dummies. One of them city people. Look at your cement blocks. Look at your empty cans of beer. The money. And go clubbing. And don't worry about the Lady's Slippers. Why worry about it? Right?"

"Kady there's an old expression. You've never heard it. It goes: Stop and Smell the Roses."

"There's more to life than cement buildings, and crime and people who don't have a clue because they've never driven up to the lake and looked at the stars through a telescope where there isn't so much light."

"I knew a guy who was a walking thesaurus. Well I'm a walking encyclopedier."

"Why don't you look at another cement block. And say, 'I don't think I've seen that one before.'"

"There's more to life than not having mud on your shoes, Dear."

"Tell 'em I apologize for misconstruing their perception."

"People say, 'save a whale, they're all dying'. And so I go, 'oh no! the whales are all dying!' Well there's a bunch of whales and they're not all dying."

"It just came to me today. As I'm sitting out looking at my pristene view. Kady, I gotta tell you. Can I change the subject?"

Hal's Response to My Feature on Forbes.com

I called my mom so we could freak out together about my Forbes.com interview, and my dad hopped on the line.

"You're endelved* on MY heart, Kady.  Screw Forbes."

Then my mom told me about how she had to explain my Angelina's Leg photo to him and he didn't get it, even after five minutes of explanation.  He piped in again.  "That's a raunchous* lie.  It was more like 18 seconds.  And just because I don't agree with crazy people doesn't mean I don't get it."

*Glossary:

Endelved:  Engraved, written permanently, or something.
Raunchous:  "Excessively great", according to my dad.

*Please be amazed at my ability to spell properly the words my dad makes up.

Hal-isms, Vol. 22

"Kelly?  Number two?  What a piece of crap.  None of them compare to you Kady.  You're...you're like the whipped cream on top of a big turd.  It's like...I want to eat the whole thing, but would it be worth it?"



The following Hal-isms come to you in the form of some voicemails I will save forever:

"Kady.  I am truly sick and your mom is laughing.  At twelve minutes to one.  I can't take it anymore Kady.  Bye."  *mom laughing in background*

"Kady.  This morning I hear, 'are you ready for breakfast Sweetheart?'  Guess who she was talking to?  Me, or the dog?"

"I don't know if you remember me Kady, but when you were a little girl I was your father.  I'll try to call you back."

"Kady I'm just calling you back.  Anyway.  I should have let you tell your side of the stories.  I love ya.  Let's see.  What else?"

Hal-isms, Vol. 21

"You misquote me at times in that magazine of yours."

"My memory must not be as good as your abbreviations."

"Kelly's off the list.  You're back on top.  She challenged me to a couple things and then remembered stuff from years ago I didn't do."

Sorry Kelly.  It's clear I had "favorite daughter" locked in years ago.

Ice Fishin'

Finally home in northern, Northern Minnesota.  The part of Minnesota where people's conversations revolve mainly around (depending on the time of year) the harvest, fishing, deer hunting, snow and ice conditions.  

In an effort to secure my place as Favorite Daughter, I agreed to go ice fishing with my dad.  Cold doesn't begin to describe it.  Hopefully my photos capture that.

Eat your heart out, Kelly.

Lake of the Woods on the horizon.

Watch and wait.  I should have brought my ice skates, for how perfectly smooth the ice was.

Yah, that's a bucket of fish I'm sitting on.

Happy 45th, Mom and Dad!

It seems like only yesterday I was wishing them a Happy 44th, but I'm sure to them it seems like only yesterday that I was born.  34 years, four months and five days ago.

I think it's kind of gross that I was born when they were only 28 and 30, because my whole life they just seemed. so. OLD.

But really, they weren't.  They were young.  If I were my mom, by this time I would have had 9 pregnancies and given birth seven times.  My oldest daughter would be getting ready to graduate high school and my youngest would be secretly going to kindergarten on the bus with her older sister without my knowledge.  My husband would have left me alone for weeks at a time -- with my six surviving ingrates children in the three-bedroom/one-bathroom townhome where we all lived together -- to trap wolves, coyotes and fox for the government for a cool $7,000 per year.  I would have taken that $7,000 and turned it into 1,095 meals per year and provided clothes, boots, coats, hats, mittens and scarves for my six jags delightful growing angels.  There would be time to teach everybody how to read and write before they entered kindergarden.  We would sew our own clothes and for special events everybody would wear something fresh and new.  We would meet uptown once a week to learn how to square dance with old people and all of us girls would have a cute ruffly slip and bloomers to wear under our adorable square dancing outfits.  Everybody would be bathed and teeth brushed and in pajamas at bedtime OR ELSE.  I wouldn't have a cell phone or a TV or a minute to myself and if I decided to take up oil painting, one of my brats daughters would decide she didn't like the size of the moon in one of my landscapes and take it upon herself to make it just a little bigger with her fingertip.  My son would mortify me by bringing my non disposable douche to the dinner table when company was over, refusing to wait for me to "tell him later" what it was, and completely redeem himself afterward by taking the blame when I farted loudly.

Being that I can't even get out of bed in time for work most mornings, I cannot imagine being responsible for the life of even one other person.

And Dad, I love ya.  You worked hard every day and taught us kids to work hard too.  My heart broke a little today when I picked up my new iPhone and in order to connect it the Verizon people had to delete all the voicemails I had been saving from you.  Like the one about the lady's slippers.  ...and the one last summer when I left for a week and you said: "Just come home now.  This isn't working out."  ...and another when I left for Central America: "My heart is broken."  ...and the adorable loving one from last week: "I think if I had it to do over, I would skip having kids and just get myself four-five answering machines so I could just call up and leave a message every couple days..."

Relish this time, you guys!  You're childless!  Responsibility-free!  And yah, sometimes old age might creep up and you'll have to survive horrible things like prostate cancer and receiving promotional literature from Lark about their mobility scooters.  You might even be targeted by those pesky texting companies who like to charge $9.99 per month to poor unsuspecting elderly people who don't know that the text service they're agreeing to is NOT a photo of one of their grandkids.  But don't worry!  You've got each other.  You've got fishing.

And I'll be back before you can say "ungrateful jag brat".

Congratulations and Thank You for sticking it out for the last 45 years! 

(I don't even want to think about how much nuttier I would be if I were a child of divorce.)

The Bane of Hal's Existence

Perhaps it's a touch of the autism, but my dad really enjoys continuity.  Organization.  Cleanliness.  (We are talking about everything but his booger jeans here.)

And so, much to the chagrin of his six young children, he HATES it when people write in concrete.  We were never allowed to do it.  Boy would he get annoyed in New Orleans.  It's like when a new piece of concrete is poured the whole neighborhood gathers around and writes in it.  There isn't one piece of sidewalk that isn't completely littered with writing:

(Side note: these New Orleans water meter covers are pretty famous...)

Which reminds me of a story.

This summer, my Mom and Dad and I were sitting at home when a truck pulled up to our house, honking like he was an old friend.  A man with a Southern accent asked if we wanted our driveway asphalted.  He was in town working on the road and had some extra, and did we want him and his crew to put some in for us?  My dad yelled 'no thanks' and the man drove away.  About a week later, a different truck and a different man with a Southern accent drove up and honked and asked us the same question.  This time my dad went out and talked to him for about an hour.  I was freaking out because I didn't want this snake oil salesman bilking my dad out of thousands of dollars.  So I marched outside, stood between them, and grilled that Southern man.  Just where the heck was he from?  He said Worthington, Minnesota.  I asked, "what's your street address?"  *pause* THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT.  I said, "don't you think it's a coincidence that just last week another man with a Southern accent came in here trying to sell us asphalt?", and "where are you going to be when we have problems and need to contact you?", and "how are you going to re-sell asphalt to people that the city already paid for?" and "do you have any idea what a full time job it is trying to protect my elderly parents (sorry Mom and Dad) from you shifty salesmen so that they don't spend all of my inheritance???"  *ha.  There is no inheritance.  What a joke.

His bid miraculously went from $16,000 to $10,000 in a matter of five minutes and then down to $8,000.  You gotta be kidding me.  In the end, of course my dad didn't do it, but we got to thinking about doing something about the dirt floor in the garage.

He decided to shop around locally for a contractor right in Roosevelt who could do the work, and CONCRETE, please.  (Who puts asphalt in the garage, anyways?)

We found a guy who did our neighbor's garage floor, and came highly recommended.  He came in at his bid.  He worked fast.  He's even working on future projects for my parents.  Everybody wins.

EXCEPT:  He was set to pour the concrete the day that I left for New Orleans.  And so I wouldn't be able to secretly write my name in the floor of the garage, securing my place as favorite daughter and also world's best prankster.  So, I contacted him and told him I would pay him $100 to secretly write 'Kady' somewhere when he was finished.  Somewhere inconspicuous, hidden.  My plan was that my dad should get mad at me once.  Not every day for the rest of his life.

Well, he did it!  Free of charge.  I was so excited about our little secret.  And my dad called me and freaked out when he saw it which was exactly the reaction I was hoping for.  It was.  Satisfying.

Unfortunately...

Crappy penmanship.  And he wrote it WAY TOO BIG.  No wonder this kind of thing irritates my dad so much.  My mom sent me a photo:

Here it is.  In foot-tall letters.  That's a standard palate there in the photo.

My mom says it looks like Lucy from The Peanuts wrote it.  I guess if you want something done right...you gotta delay your trip to New Orleans.

Hal Hexum, a Real Prince

After my dad had his cancerous prostate gland removed, he had to have a pee bag for a couple weeks.  It was my job as Favorite Daughter (take THAT, Kelly) to empty his pee bag a couple times a day, and also to change it to the 'day bag' in the morning and the 'night bag' at night.  It was the highlight of my Summer, 2010 let me tell you.  And for those of you who might be uber grossed out, I'll assure you that the pee bag was attached to his lower leg, near his foot and so there were pants on and everything.  Little valves and such prevented pee from getting anywhere except where it needed to be.  So the process of emptying the bag went a little like this:

Dad and I enter the bathroom.

Dad slowly, painfully, carefully puts foot up on the toilet rim.

I move the valve to 'open' position, pointing it towards and squirting all pee into toilet.

I swab valve with alcohol to clean any remaining pee drips from valve.

I wash my hands.

So one time we're walking out of the bathroom and I said, irritated:

"How come we go in the bathroom so you can take a leak, then you LEAVE, and I'm the one washing my hands?"

See?  You couldn't even see it.  Hey Kelly, where were you at pee-bag time?

(I think my dad considered this 'peeing and somebody else washing' to be the lap of luxury.  You should have seen him strutting around like some kind of prince after I said that.)

I Heart Trees

(You may remember this poem as the one my shop teacher made me memorize and recite for too many tardy arrivals to his class. But I never forgot it.)

I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest Against the sweet earth's flowing breast

A tree that looks at God all day, And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain; Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me, But only God can make a tree. -Joyce Kilmer

And Hal, my dad.  My dad makes trees.  In fact he's kind of obssessed with them.  I call him Johnny Appleseed, because he's constantly planting trees.  Sometimes he just cuts off a branch of one tree and sticks it in the ground, and voila!  A new tree!  A tree that you better not accidentally scrape with the lawn mower because then you pretty much killed the tree and he'll never forgive you.  I often wonder if he would be as mad if somebody scraped ME with a lawnmower.  Probably not.  He'd probably suggest it was somehow my fault because, stupid, I got in the way. 

Remember this old Hal-ism? "I don't mind killing animals, but I hate killing a tree...unless it's already dead and I cut it up to burn it."

Maybe this is where I get my love for trees.  I love them.  I love taking pictures of them, and seeing their silhouette against the sky.  This year I have seen so many amazing trees.  Here are my favorites:

Bali

Australia

New Zealand, South Island

New Zealand, North Island

Cambodia

Laos

Korea

Panama

Samoa

Singapore

Thailand

But my favorite? My absolute favorite tree in the whole world? This little momma, located in International Falls, MN, on the way up to my job at Island View Lodge. I got to drive by this tree almost every day this summer. I kept meaning to take a photo, but never got around to it. You can't really see it in this shot, but there is a huge crook in the neck of this tree.  I can't get enough of it.  Finally, when I went to dinner with my parents at Island View, I made my dad pull over the car so I could take this shot in the rain. Me and dad and my tree.