Gingers and Wry

By Dwayne R. James

Gingers and Wry is frequently hilarious, occasionally poignant, and consistently honest—sometimes, brutally so.
This book is a collection of quips and comments, originally posted online, threaded together by a narrative that describes four years in the author’s life as he moves from being laid off, and into his new role as a stay@home Dad for twin boys.

It humorously documents the challenges and rewards of raising two tenacious toddlers and an opinionated teenaged daughter, all of them redheads.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dwayne R. James
• Release date: Nov 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780991749614

Dwayne R. James

Writer and watercolour artist Dwayne James lives outside of Lakefield, Ontario where he writes and paints as often as he can, that is when he's not spending time with his very forgiving family.Dwayne studied archaeology in University, and as a result learned how to write creatively. "The most important skill I learned in University," he says, "was the ability to pretentiously write about myself in the third person."With no formal art training, Dwayne has always preferred the self-guided, experimental approach. In fact, he taught himself how to illustrate archaeological artifacts while completing his Master's degree at Trent University. Said his thesis supervisor at the time: "There might not be much in the way of coherent theoretical content in Dwayne's thesis, but damn, it looks pretty!"After spending close to a decade as a technical communicator at IBM, Dwayne opted to look at their Jan 2009 decision to downsize him as an opportunity to become a stay-at-home Dad for his young twins, and pursue his painting and creative writing whenever they allow him to do so. It is a decision that continues to make him giggle with wild abandon to this very day.

Book preview

GINGERS AND WRY

The collected observations of a stay@home Dad

with twin boys and a teenaged daughter,

all of them redheads.

Written and Illustrated

by

DWAYNE R. JAMES

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 by Dwayne R. James

Gingers and Wry website:

www.gingersandwry.com

Also by DWAYNE R. JAMES:

Princess Etheria and the Battling Bucks

Available from www.princessetheria.com

NOTICES

About this book

This book is a collection of quotes that were originally shared by the author with friends on Facebook, that have been threaded together by a new narrative. Although some of the quotes are fictional, most of the material is based on real events (the narrative, for example, is entirely true, although some of the dialogue has been re-imagined).

All of the names have been changed for reasons of privacy.

The attempts at humour in this book (some of which, the author freely admits, are more feeble than others) are often irreverent, frequently self-deprecating, occasionally risqué, but NEVER insulting or disrespectful. There isn’t a whole lot that the author takes seriously in life, and he hopes that you keep this fact firmly in mind as you enjoy this book.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

DEDICATION

I’ve had several requests to gather my comments into book form ever since I started posting them online, but I resisted for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, I didn’t think they were things that other people would find funny, and secondly—because my posts were mostly about newborns—I didn’t want it to be all about the poop.

I would like to thank my old friend Lisa Bendall for finally convincing me that it could be done, and giving me so much encouragment along the way.

Because of her, I am finally at peace knowing that at least one other person in this world appreciates my sense of humour.

For these reasons, I dedicate this book to her.

The first joke that I ever wrote, in Grade 2:

Help! I’ve lost my glasses, and I can’t look for them until I find them!

Apparently, even at an early age, I found irony to be funny.

Or maybe I did. To be honest, I’m still not really sure what irony is.

How ironic.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Ginger Tales

Gingeractions

Questionable Parenting

Childish Humour

Immature Humour

The Wedding Speech

QnoA

Birth Stories

Ginger Soup for the Soul

And, in the Beginning…

Ginger Snaps

Taking a Leap of Faith

Wordplay

Gingers and the Laws of Physics

Acerbic Exercise

Indoor Plumbing

A Tale of Two Gingers

Afterwords

About the Author

Introduction

The Story so Far...

It’s January 21, 2009.

Obama has just been sworn in south of the border, and the world is reeling from a financial meltdown the likes of which nobody in my generation has ever experienced.

Just yesterday, the large multi-national computer company where I work from home as a technical writer reassured all its employees via e-mail that our jobs were secure yet— inexplicably—I’m on the phone with my manager, and he’s giving me some very bad news.

I don’t know it at the time, but my getting laid-off that winter morning was one of the best things that would ever happen to me.

I know that this is an odd way for me to introduce this book, but stay with me—I do have a point, somewhere.

Y’see, many of us define ourselves by what we do, or by what happens to us in life. I know that I certainly did, and for years before this, I wore my company’s logo like it was a badge of honour. So naturally, it follows that, for the longest time after they let me go, I let this singular event of being told I wasn’t wanted anymore characterize my self esteem.

To say that I felt rejected is an understatement. To say that I began to doubt my own abilities even more so.

But then, as time went by, I found that—although I was still talking about having been laid off quite a bit—it was more in the context of how I responded to the event, and it was my reaction that was beginning to define me now.

At the time though, I could only laugh at how ironic the whole thing was, because I had only just begun to feel that things were finally coming together for me. I was thoroughly enjoying spending time with my young daughter Monroe from my first marriage. I was canoeing as often as I could in the summer, and I’d just discovered that I had an innate ability to paint.

If there was one thing that was missing at the time, it was—as I was soon to discover—Ellie.

Have you ever noticed how sometimes, you only become aware of a sound once it stops?

This was the feeling I had when Ellie came along. Once she was in my life, it was almost like she’d never not been there. Seemingly (and more than a little literally) overnight Ellie and I had met, fallen in love, and were now living in a beautiful rented farmhouse on the edge of town. I was working from home in the office of my dreams, and Ellie had just been hired-on as a full-time teacher.

Then, as I mentioned earlier, the bottom fell out.

That fateful morning, the conversation with my manager started as they always did: What have I done now? I asked him jokingly as I answered his phone call.

But, this time, instead of laughing, he replied, This will be one of our more difficult conversations Dwayne.

When he finally got around to putting it into words that I could understand, I naturally wondered what he thought would have been a more difficult conversation.

He used neutral words like resource action, and the right-sizing of the company (which essentially meant I was the wrong-fit). He was obviously reading from an HR approved script, and was having a difficult time of it too since I kept interrupting to make silly jokes.

Sure, I wasn’t exactly thinking straight at the time, but even then, I knew that this was less of a setback and more of an opportunity. Truth be told, I’d been unhappy with work for a while. I’d been at the company for almost a decade and, somewhere along the road, the creativity that I used to enjoy in my job had been lost. Too often of late, I was finding myself sitting in endless staff meetings, giving endless status reports on projects that were long since completed, and trying politely to explain that the reason that current progress was slow was because I was sitting in meetings discussing why I couldn’t get my work done.

So yes, it was an opportunity and, as I hung up, I started to fantasize about all of the things I’d be able to do now. It didn’t take me long however to realize that, with no salary, being able to afford to eat wasn’t likely to be one of them.

So anyhow, Ellie came home from work, and I broke the news to her by greeting her at the door and saying through a forced smile, Great news honey, my company’s giving me a whole bunch of money!

What? she asked, her eyes narrowing. Why?

To leave! It’s a going away present!

We hugged, we cried, we laughed. We burned a tiny computer in effigy and, eventually, we tried to get some sleep. It didn’t help that Ellie was already feeling a tad stressed because her period was late and, the next morning, we found out why. She was pregnant.

Looking back at it, I’m not sure how I was able to cope. If this particular chain of events was happening to me now, I’m quite sure that it would land me an extended visit to the softer, quieter section of the hospital, where they’d be teaching me how to cut my meat with safety scissors. But then, that’s more than likely because, since these events happened, I’ve had to endure three years of perpetual sleep deprivation, a general absence of peace and quiet, and a more than healthy dose of toddler-induced exhaustion. I’m not exactly in the same calm and collected frame of mind that I was in four years ago. Still, even in that calmer, more collected mind-set of yesteryear, I was still freaking out.

Maybe it is true that you’re only ever given challenges by the universe when you have the tools to handle them.

Now, I should point out that it’s not like we were regretful of the fact that Ellie was pregnant.

Were we a little scared? Yes.

Full of trepidation? Absolutely.

But not regret. It was simply that we weren’t planning on it happening so quickly, and the timing—what with me having just been laid off—was a little less than ideal.

I think it was more that we didn’t feel like we were going to be in charge anymore. We’d both had a certain amount of control over our respective lives over the last few years (or, at the very least, a healthy illusion of it), and we both knew that, now that a baby was coming into our lives, neither one of us would be calling any of the shots for a while—if ever again.

Add to that the fact that the whole thing was making me feel my age. I was in my 40’s now, and people were already mistaking me for Ellie’s father. How many people were soon going to be calling me Grandpa?

And lastly, I am loath to admit it, but quite frankly, I was embarrassed.

In just under one month, I’d demonstrated both a complete lack of understanding of birth control, and that I couldn’t keep a job.

I had excelled at both of these activities in my youth. Was I finally starting to slip?

Moreover, was this whole thing a mid-life crisis in disguise? Had I somehow subconsciously conspired to get Ellie pregnant just to prove that I still could?

If this was the case, then wouldn’t the traditional motorcycle have been cheaper?

Looking back, it’s clear that I still hadn’t gotten to the point where I was looking at either of these recent events as the blessings they would eventually become. At the time, the pregnancy was just more ballast when I was already treading water as fast as I could.

Oh yes, this was happening. We knew that nothing was going to change the fact that Ellie was pregnant, no matter how many of those little sticks she peed on.

Anyhow, stuff happened in the next few weeks, but most of it is a blur to me now. I seem to recall saying goodbye to my coworkers at my farewell lunch where I decided to break the happy news to them early. I watched them shift uncomfortably in their chairs as they searched for the right words that were oddly elusive for a bunch of writers.

Part of me wondered if they thought I was making things up in order to garner pity, so I tried to break the tension by saying, Well, statistically speaking, no birth control is 100%, especially if you push the odds as much as Ellie and I did!

I wasn’t sure if they got my point, because they were staring at me mutely, so I hastened to add, We had a LOT of sex. (Apparently, this last part wasn’t necessary, they had gotten my point. It really wasn’t all that cryptic.)

No, it was not an appropriate topic to discuss with your coworkers, but I didn’t care anymore. I mean, what were they going to do, lay me off even more?

Not long after this meal, Ellie and I attended an even larger one at which my entire family had gathered to celebrate my mother’s birthday. I didn’t want to make the evening about me in any way, so I hadn’t yet told anybody else about either the job loss or the pregnancy.

I don’t think I’ve ever had so many questions from my family asking how work was, or when Ellie and I were thinking of having kids. Every time I was asked, I just smiled and answered, I’ve never been happier with work (which wasn’t that far from the truth now that I wasn’t actually working), and I’d love to have more kids because Ellie sure does look good holding my brother’s infant daughter. This last one garnered a playful scowl from Ellie in response.

So, fast forward to a few weeks later, and we’re at Ellie’s first neonatal appointment. Within moments of greeting us, getting the details, and helping Ellie up onto the bed, the Doctor was asking Are you sure you got the date of conception right?

I was getting a bad feeling about this.

Sure, I had noticed that Ellie seemed to be showing a lot sooner than my first wife had in her pregnancy, but I had assumed that it was because different women carry babies, well... differently. I’m not being catty when I say that Ellie was a lot more petite than my ex.

The Doctor continued. There are two options for her being this far along so soon, she told us. Either you got the date of conception wrong... she paused (I’m not sure if it was for dramatic effect, or