“No, Jackson!” I heard Diego say, with an urgency that made me brace myself for whatever conflict would come next. “That’s Daddy’s journal.“

They were in our home office, at one of our desks, where they had been doing well for the previous ten minutes or son. I could hear them in there, engaging in imaginative play, which I love, because it requires them to actively use their minds, rather than sitting passively in front of the TV set.

This entreaty by Diego was louder than the banter had been up to that point, and I came in and saw Jackson with a pen, poised to personalize my personal journal, where I write things like this piece in longhand. Truth be told, I don’t really mind finding Jackson’s work in my journals — within reason. He tends to draw odd little sketches, which I simply write around, and they end up being an interesting adornment to my work, when all is said and done.

“Here Jackson,” I said, before he could start loudly pleading his case, and I reached up high on my shelf and handed him his own blank book. (I have a few extras lying around, because I’m an optimist and I count on the next day coming.) He immediately began work on a fascinating seascape, then asked me to draw him a shark, so that he could put a monkey in its toothy mouth.

“Look Dee-AY-go!” he said, all smiles, showing off his new journal to his big brother and before he could whine about not having one, I asked Diego if he would like a blank book too.

“Sure!”

He then wrote the first page of his new journal, which he dated, and titled “About My Life.” His first sentence, which I put right up there with “Call me Ishmael” and “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” is “My name is Diego Reyes Fuchs and I got a dog in April.”

And with that, a proud Fuchs tradition continues . . .

Back in the proverbial
saddle, riding the bike
through the dark
suburban morning,
eyes tearing,
legs and lungs
burning. I am
out of
gas.

And all this for what?
So I can limp into
Super Donuts in our
sad little strip mall,
barely alive in post-
Bush economic times,
and say hello to the cute
little henna-haired
hostess who works harder
than I’ll ever have to.

“Hi there!” she says cheerfully
in her Korean-accented English.
(At least I think she’s Korean.
Could just as easily be Vietnamese,
Cambodian or Thai, I suppose.)
My medium coffee steams
in Styrofoam;
she’s poured it for me,
even before I asked for
it myself.

“Aww, you remembered,”
I say in mock emotion.
She laughs and says, “Ninety-
six cents, please,” in her
sing-song way.

And the inhabitants of
this half-awake
world come shuffling
in and out, ordering
their Kolaches
(“Warm it up for you?”)
and their dozen
donuts. (“Okay, what
kind you like?”) I
sit in the fluorescence
of this little slice of the
American dream, scribbling
words to no one, drinking
watery, over-priced coffee,
and wondering just how
the hell I’m gonna
pedal my fat ass back
home.

Yes, I love my family, and yes, the births of my children are the two greatest days of my life. It is beyond question that I would do anything at all for my family, up to and including “taking a bullet.”

Now let me qualify all those lovely and true sentiments with an even truer one: We have spent these past two weeks plus together and we need some TIME APART. As much as we all love each other, we have spent, essentially, 100% of our time in each other’s presence, since Friday, 12/23. And I don’t care what they tell you, that’s just not right. Parents and their children are not meant to spend all their time together. If you don’t believe me, go rent two films that illustrate the point: Mosquito Coast, in which Harrison Ford decides to take his family “off the grid” and Tempest, Paul Mazursky’s re-telling of Shakespeare’s tale of Prospero, played in this version by an amazing, scenery-chewing John Cassavetes, at the end of his life and the height of his acting powers. In both instances, the notion that a family can spend all its time together is de-bunked, to tragic (and comic) results.

I suppose one could make the argument that there are “other cultures” in this world — pygmies and the like — who keep their young ‘uns with them always. I have no doubt this is true, but it’s a cradle-to-grave thing. We’re a modern American family. We are social creatures outside the nucleus of our little gene puddle. For the children, school plays an important role in this regard. It’s not only the place where they learn to read and write and do math; it’s where they practice navigating relationships, without the help of their adoring parents. It’s practice for real life.

As for me, I’ll be honest: I like working. If I’m in a place that feels professional and that values what I put into it, then I tend to get more than my share out of it. My present job has me feeling more comfortable and “at peace” ( not something you hear from an AP all too often) than I have since I left Satellite Academy in 2004.

I can’t speak for my wife except to say that I know she feels valued at work, despite all the challenges it entails. She has been good enough to look after those people for the past couple of days while I have since gone back to work, breathing a sigh of relief as I backed the car out of the driveway on Monday. I’m sure Mrs. Fuchs will do the same thing later this morning.

Let me repeat: I love my children dearly. For those of you who look, starry-eyed, at your little ones as they slumber in their cribs, wishing you could spend 24/7/365 with God’s Little Blessings, I say three things: 1) more power to you, 2) please try not to judge me, and 3) BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR . . .

Jackson, our six year old, is going through an interesting new phase. After arguing with me (on no one topic in particular), he puts his head down and slumps pathetically into the office, where he finds a piece of paper and pencil and gets to work writing a letter. He then illustrates the letter with a picture that is meant to capture his emotional experience visually.

The one pictured here reads as follows:

“Im sorey theyt i Rohyolises your Rite I live in the Jogol BiY Jackson in im sore tate sremt at uow it MiY fot Biy Jackson” (“I’m sorry that I realize you’re right. I live in the jungle. By Jackson. And I’m sorry that I screamed at you. It’s my fault. By Jackson”

The picture shows Jackson walking away, complete with a hobo’s roll on a stick — an icon he must have picked up from a cartoon somewhere. There is a cloud directly over his head (and only his head) that is dropping big, heavy raindrops on him. There is a tear in his eye as he waves, frowning. The rest of us, including the family dog, Ally are sticking our tongues out, the spittle suggesting loud “Bronx cheers.” (In another, similar picture, a bubble has me saying “Loser” as he walks away.) The sun shines down on what’s left of our family, as the young runaway makes his way toward the jungle.

Privately, Jeanette and I laugh about the dramatic nature of our son’s gesture. Of course, we don’t let him see us laughing. He’s expressing some pretty strong feelings here, and even though I do believe — knowing him as well as I do — that he’s doing it mostly for effect, and in order to deflect attention away from the real issue at hand, i.e. whatever misdemeanor began the exchange, I do also feel he’s telling us something real. In many ways Jackson is unique. There’s no one else quite like him. I think sometimes he must observe us and how easily rule-following seems to come to us and wonder whether he may not, in fact, have another, much wilder family out there in a jungle somewhere, waiting to take him up their tree and embrace him in their waiting arms, legs and tails.

I’ve always been one for “Alone Time.” I enjoy the opportunity to sit, walk, think, drink coffee, read and write on my own. In fact, it’s probably the sort of restorative practice I should insist upon more than I do.

It was sort of “built into” my previous job, in my air travel around the state of Texas each month. I spent a good number of hours in airports and hotels by myself. Nowadays, with this new job that I love, there is no such thing as alone time. It’s all about managing people and the community they make.

This evening my wife is happily indulging in a Zumba class with three girlfriends, and my sons are across the street, playing at their friend Dalton’s house.

So I’m alone.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not a “loner” as such. Like many of us (I’m willing to bet) I both covet my time to myself while also being prone to loneliness. Maybe I’ve just described the human condition. I don’t know.

This evening, as darkness descends on suburban Austin, Texas, the house is almost achingly silent, and it gives me a clawing sense of loss in my midsection. My dog comes to me, back end wagging behind her, and offers me her usual, undying love. Still too quiet, though. I try watching some obscure bowl game, presented by and named after a company I’ve never heard of. Having no affinity for or affiliation of any kind with either school, I switch over to a sitcom — one of the “lovable buffoon married to the quick-as-a-whip wife” variety. This doesn’t hold my interest either.

Now I write in my journal, listening to Kings of Leon and Michael Kiwanuka, trying to make sense of the dual nature of solitude. I know that soon my boys will burst into the house, and the decibel level will go up considerably. They’ll start in with the “can we, can we, can we,” and the conflicts will arise.

Or….I will do what my wife does so well. I will channel their energy and summon up my own, countering their provocations with humor. We will have SO MUCH FUN that they will say, “Daddy, you’re the absolute best,” when I tuck them in. And I’ll say, “Oh please, it’s what I do.”

They will fall asleep, snug and exhausted from a good day of winter vacation, dreaming the dreams of happy children.

And I’ll be alone again, happy for the quiet but a little nervous about all the silence. I’ll make sure there are enough lights on in the house, so that I don’t feel like Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween sitting alone in the flickering glow of the TV set.

Maybe I’ll switch on the Kindle and try to get back into David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a book that thrills me with its language and daunts me with its length. Or I’ll find a good sporting event and continue my quest to take advantage of being on break by drinking as much beer as is humanly possible. Either way, I’ll do so with one ear listening for my wife’s key in the door, breaking up the wonderful horror and horrifying wonder of my “alone time.”

Yes, Christmas has just come and gone, and there are only a few days of the current calender year remaining. So, as is my bent, I turn my reflective eye inward and take a look at this year gone by.

So far, I have written 258 O.S.N.G. blog posts, something of which I am quite proud. The goal was to write 365 for the year, and I’ll be about a hundred short of that. But I’m up from 11 in 2010 and 3 in 2009, so I’m happy about my productivity. Not every post is a pearl; some are downright clunkers as far as the writing goes. What these posts all provide, however, is a record for my children of what was important to their dad, as well as some real-time snapshots of who they were at ages 8 and 6 respectively.

There are some thoughts on education, a little bit of politics, maybe a dash of religion here and there, all of which will give Diego and Jackson a feel for what the world was like in their childhood days of the “early-to-mid-aughts.”

This year I took a technique of my father’s, scribbling ideas (“early tweets,” I called them in a 2010 post) on 3 x 5 cards, and ran with it. For a while there I kept the cards in my pocket at all times, coming home with two or three good journal/blog ideas each day. For a few months I averaged a post a day on Blogger, and I’ve gotten encouragement from a range of people I respect. At my high school reunion in October, several people who have never left a comment on my blog made it a point to tell me how much they enjoy reading it.

Thanks to the technology available to me — the Internet in general and Facebook and Twitter specifically — my writing has an “audience.” This humbles me and makes me aware of how important honesty is to what I write. Used to be that what I wrote was between me, the void, and whomever I chose directly to show my work.

Now I can pretty safely assume that if I put my writing out there, via Facebook status update or tweet, that someone will read it. So it has to be good, if I want those readers to continue to view my stuff.

In the realm of the professional, I’ve just recently changed jobs — moving back into the school arena. I feel back in my “comfort zone,” working with young people and their teachers, trying to help them through the maze of school. It’s much more difficult than the work I was doing at Region 13, and the change is part of the drop off in my blog’s productivity during the fourth quarter this year. But I like the hard work. It makes me think back to my foreman, the poet Keith Althaus, who was in almost constant motion when we worked together at the MarSpec warehouse in Provincetown, Massachusetts during the summer of 1984. He was always working — so much so that I cannot recall Keith without seeing him walking quickly, or checking his paperwork, or operating a forklift, moving inventory. He wasn’t joyless, by any stretch; in fact, I still giggle at some of the snide remarks he came out with, always in motion, with his nose to that proverbial grindstone. My favorite was his sarcasm regarding the Olympic Games that summer. The Soviets boycotted the L.A. games, bringing down the level of competition considerably. Keith came in one morning and said, “Did you guys see what we did to Guam last night? We crushed ’em.”

I once asked Keith, over a quickly-devoured sandwich, why he never stopped moving. “Makes the day go faster,” he said. And he was right. In the past three months, I’ve come to understand that a high school assistant principal’s day goes by extremely fast.

And on the home front, the self-esteem that comes with the new job (although wrapped in a significant pay cut) has paid dividends. I’m able to be more “present” for my family, all of whom appear to be thriving, thank God. Sure, I have my goals, particularly in the areas of personal finance and fitness. All in all, though, 2011 has turned out to be a very good year indeed.

At some point not too long ago, someone thought it would be
cute to connect Google Earth and Google Maps with an application that would
allow children and their parents to track Santa on Christmas Eve. I have no problem with it, and actually find
the app a great teaching tool. The
little videos they post in various places around the globe are educational, and
give my kids a sense of global geography, while stoking their excitement about
Santa’s arrival.

It does require a major paradigm shift for me personally,
however, to accept the fact that the Google people have put Santa’s travels
under the watch of NORAD. I’m of a
generation still old enough to remember when nuclear proliferation and the
threat of worldwide Armageddon were a constant in the news, and NORAD was one
of those scary acronyms, along with OPEC, NATO, and SALT. NORAD is the North American Aerospace Defense
Command and became something much more precious than it was when I was young.

Anyway, I’m not trying to be a Grinch about it. In fact, I’m still benefitting from the
mythology of Santa Claus, and I know it’s only a matter of time before neither
of my sons will believe in Santa any more. The wonder and magical nature of Christmas is written in their
expression with every shopping mall Santa they see. Sadly, that wonder will soon be gone (along
with my ability to mitigate and manipulate their behavior with same) and I just
have to accept this sad fact.

Diego sort of floated the idea, earlier this year that Santa
may not exist. I’m sure he picked up the
notion from one of his fellow third graders. Jackson looked at me during this crucial moment, his six year old eyes
truly incredulous. Thinking fast, I
acted as if Diego had blasphemed. “Dude!”
I said in my best stage whisper. “Do you
realize what could happen if Santa or ANY of his helpers heard you say that?”

“What helpers?” he asked, looking around the Chinese
restaurant where we were having our usual – Chicken Lo Mein and Won Ton soup –
as if he expected to see an elf stick his head above a neighboring booth to spy
on us.

“I’m just saying. Be
cool with that stuff. Believing is key
to staying on the ‘Nice’ list.”

Diego’s large eyes narrowed skeptically. Then he left it alone, turning his attention
to the noodles on his plate.

I don’t honestly remember when my belief in Santa went away,
because I don’t remember ever really believing in him. I don’t mean this in any tragic sort of way;
it’s just that I’m not sure how hard my parents ever pushed the myth on me and
my brother. They enjoyed putting cheeky “To-From”
tags on our presents, in the form of riddles that gave hints about what was
under the wrapping paper based on who’d sent each item. For example, a new baseball glove might have
been sent by Tom Seaver, or a set of “Planet of the Apes” action figures could
have come from Caesar, Cornelius or Dr. Zaius. Nerdy, I know, but we loved it, and it’s a tradition Jeanette and I
continue. Diego’s gorilla slippers are
from King Kong and Jackson’s Playmobile jungle set is from Tarzan. You get the idea.

There’s an innocence in my children that I’m especially aware
of during the Christmas season. They
remind me of myself and my brother and the anticipation that eventually gave
way to sleep.

“Diego wakes me up on Christmas morning,” Jackson told me
last night. “He says, ‘Jackson, he came!
He came! There are presents under the
tree!’”

He’ll say it again tomorrow morning, as the myth stays alive
for one more tenuous year of innocence.