Tattoos are Silly; Tattoos are Serious

The other night, my husband posed a hypothetical question, the type of question that helps keep marriages alive:

"If you were to win a bet and you could force someone to get a silly tattoo, what would it be?"

"Uhhh...well," I said, but before I really started thinking, he said, "Nothing dirty.  Silly."

"Uhhh...well," I said, and he jumped in.  "Do you want to hear what mine is?"

This is not an unusual situation for us.  I do the same thing; I act like I want to pose a hypothetical situation, but I actually have an answer of my own I want to share.  It's weird, though, to say apropos to nothing as we're making dinner, "Hey, if there was suddenly a rip in the space-time continuum and I could only drink one beverage for the rest of my life, it would definitely be Ovaltine."

So of course I wanted to hear what Dan's answer would be.

"Richie Cunningham from Happy Days."

I busted out laughing.  "What??"

"Like a photo-realistic portrait."  A few taps on his cell phone later, and he turned it towards me to reveal this:

                                                                        (image credit: What ever happened to...)

"You know, like this."

I mean, he could have dropped the mike right there and walked out of the room.  How could I come up with something better than that?  Answer: I didn't.  But what I do have that's better than him are tattoos (perhaps this is only because I have tattoos and he doesn't, but who's keeping track).

It wasn't always so, though.  I used to have one really bad tattoo.

I got it when I was 18, but not during a night of drunken hilarity my freshman year at spring break in Cabo.  No, I got a tattoo with my brother and my mom.  Not the same tattoo, but we all got 'em together, and that's the only non-seedy part of the story.  We went over to this guy's house and into his basement, where he had a space cleared with a chair and a mirror and his tattoo machine.  Now, it's not like this was a cool, finished basement with carpeting and a wet bar.  No.  This was a basement-basement, with cinder block walls and a concrete floor.  But we sat, one by one, and got our tattoos.

Mine?  It came from a greeting card: the Chinese symbol for "peace."  These were trendy tattoos to get at the time, these symbols, and I can't even say for sure that this is what the symbol means.  It feels pretty legit, though, because it was on a card, and card's don't lie, right?  Ink that baby on!

Nearly 20 years later, I'm feeling like this is a terrible tattoo because it is a terrible tattoo.  It's fading, and as it's the only thing I have on my back, it looks like a mistake.  I wanted to get it removed altogether, but my brother forbade it.  "You have to keep it in some way.  It's like your prison tattoo.  You can't erase it."  This allusion to prison was not comforting, but I understood what he meant: he had a bad tattoo from that visit, too (Bruce Lee's ubiquitous dragon), and so did my mom (but hers is actually good--a pelican), so they bound us together.  The tattoo, to me, was silly, but the meaning was serious.

I couldn't just leave it, though.  My brother had gotten many more cool tattoos since that first one, and I'd gotten another, too, but it was small.  Being a tattooed person felt good to me, like I was in a special club of badass women, but I still didn't like the tattoo.  If I wasn't going to erase it, I had no other choice: I had to add to it.

I'll spare the details of getting the piece.  An artist who'd done work on my brother put it on me, a curvy woman with Nordic roots who made me feel welcome and not only humored my idea about what to do with it, she brought it to life:

Yes, it hurt, and yes, the symbol is still there, but it's a part of a whole now.  The white pine, the owl, the pine cone, and yes, the "Peace": all are symbols now, hidden away from others' eyes on my back but never far away.

This is a serious tattoo, serious because it's a no-messing-around, big tattoo, and serious because it speaks my ability to commit.  There are symbols in the images, but there's larger symbolism in tattooing.  Those who have tattoos understand what it means to say yes to art, to trust those who will create this art, and to live with the reminder of their commitments the remainder of their days.  Even if that tattoo is Richie Cunningham.

The Voiceless Dog

I yammer constantly to my toddler on our walks together.  "Look at the pretty bird!" (It's a pigeon.) "What do you see?  So many trees!" (Mostly pine in this figurative neck of the woods.)  "Wow!  A bus!"  (I will then lustily launch into "The Wheels on the Bus," and from my rear view, the dents in my son's cheeks tell me he is smiling.)  We move quickly up and down the sidewalked hills of our neighborhood, stopping occasionally for a garage sale or to take a picture of some interesting-looking bark on a tree:

This morning, as we careened through a more affluent neighborhood than the one in which we currently reside, I saw and heard the voiceless dog simultaneously.  He was small, maybe 20 pounds, with short, dark hair, pointy ears, and a sturdy body that looked terrier.  He jumped up and down, all four legs springing from the ground at the same time.  He was barking, but he wasn't barking.

"Oh, look!  A doggie!"  I said to my son, and he looked.  "Oh!  He's barking, but he's not making much sound because he's had his voice box removed!"  His bark was raspy and windy, a dry cough.  "See?  He is trying to bark, but he can't make much noise," I rambled on.  "Some people might think that's cruel, removing a dogger's voice box, but I have to say, sometimes I've wanted to throttle the Bean Dog when she starts barking like crazy just after you've gone to sleep."  Bean is our elderly and adorable dachshund who barks a normal amount for a dachshund, and that normal amount sometimes feels like way too friggin' much when it messes with the sleep of the people in the house.

We're way past the dog, but I'm not done.  "See, sometimes dogs bark too much, and maybe it drives the owners crazy.  Or maybe the neighbors complain.  It can get to the point where they might have to get rid of the dog because of all the barking, so they decide it's better to get the dog's voice box removed."

I walk on, and my son crosses his feet at the ankles and grabs another graham cracker from his snack bowl.  For me, this is exercise.  For him, this is toddler TV.  

It's another weekend, but it's a long one; Labor Day is Monday, and while my coworkers are planning trips to the Boundary Waters with their adult children, I am trying to figure out two more things we can do on Monday: pre-nap and post-nap fun.  Parenting a toddler is like that, or at least, it has been for me: get him out of the house as much as possible, experiencing new things to help get the energy out and the brain matter growing.  My mother wonders if I do this stuff more for me or for him.  It doesn't matter.  It is how I do.

As a professor, my schedule tends to be fairly "loose"--I must be in the school for office hours, class, and meetings--but the rest of my time is unscheduled.  Last year, when I didn't have specific obligations on one day a week, I had my son stay home with me from daycare.  I was trying to do work and entertain him--an impossible task, to be sure.  This year, he goes to daycare five days a week, even though my Fridays are unscheduled.  Two weeks in, and it feels amazing.  I have TIME!!!! on Fridays to grade things and get things ready for the upcoming week so I'm not worrying about that on top of being a toddler concierge on the weekend.

What happens, then, is that I work very hard during the week (I could, and frequently do, easily work on the weekends) so I can then plan fun things to do on the weekend, like go to the Port Wing Fish Boil (yes, that's a thing: Fish Boil) in northwest Wisconsin.  There's not much time to do pre-kid Kelli stuff, like have breakfast with friends and hit a slew of garage sales, or spend some time making jewelry or sewing.  Pre-kid Kelli is a person of the past.

I push the jogging stroller along, mentally committing myself to walking up one of the steep, five-block-long hills in the neighborhood to add some oomph to my walk.  The dog bouncing on pogo-stick legs, though, leaps back into the front of my mind, and I imagined the husband saying to the wife, "I can't handle it anymore.  Baxter just won't shut up.  Milton and Nellie are going to start making nuisance calls--you know Milt's had it in for me ever since I beat his record at the country club."  The wife, pain in her eyes, might reply, "I've done all I can to train him.  He just isn't learning."  She'll look at Baxter who, quiet finally in sleep, twitches his legs in his dog bed.  The husband will inevitably say, "We need to do it, Susan.  I can't take it anymore."  And Susan, because she knows that he is kind but also pragmatic and because she doesn't have a choice, will agree. "I'll make the appointment on Monday."  And Baxter will "Urf!" in his sleep, a small fellow whose nurture tells him to protect these people and his loud, obnoxious voice the only thing nature gave him to do it.

I take a deep breath and let it out, taking a right turn to head up the steep hill.  "See, kiddo, it's like this.  Sometimes you have to make hard decisions."  

"Mama!" he says, pointing at a squirrel.  

"Hey, cool!" I respond, puffing up the hill.