[sic]

I’ve been dealing with some things you know about — like the death of our upstairs neighbor — and some work-related things you don’t. And I’m just gonna keep that boring crap to myself.

But on the office front, I opened a desk drawer that I hadn’t in awhile and found a frame I’d purchased not long after I started working here. My intent had been to fill it with a picture of my beloved Susan and here we are eight months later and I finally got around to doing that today with one of my favorite of her taken at the Eiffel Tower overlooking the Seine when we were in Paris just about this time last year:

Now whenever I need a smile I can just see her smiling back at me.

My daughter invited me to a concert she was involved in last night. That’s her sixth in from the left in the pink scarf — centerstage, as it should be.

Despite a cold she sang beautifully. I’m so proud of her.

Today was a big day for Ranger. I took her in to the vet’s to be spayed and to get her annual shots, and while she was under the anesthetic we threw in a nail trim and a teeth cleaning. But it’s all done and she’s home safe (if a little grumpy… but can one blame her?).

Susan and I decided to do the spaying now so that she’ll have time to fully recover in the two weeks that I’ll still be home prior to starting my new job September 4.

And from the looks of her right at this moment pretty much wiped out under my desk (sporting the obligatory cone collar, of course) she may need that entire amount of time to return to her regular and rambunctious form.

Such a good girl she is.

I love my wife. With all my heart. Since the second anniversary is designated as the “cotton” one, I got her a new down cover (100% cotton casing), a new 100% woven cotten blanket (just in time for summer!), and because I blew it last year and didn’t get her anything for our “paper” anniversary, I had framed the paper placement I brought all the way home with us from Le Notre Dame Cafe (below our hotel where we stayed in Paris). Then we went out to dinner at Cliff’s Edge restaurant.

I took my daughter to lunch today. Went out to the valley and picked her up from her old elementary school in Encino where her mom works and we went and had tacos and lemonade at Islands, then before taking her home we went and played a round of miniature golf and a little skeeball at Castle Park in Sherman Oaks . Here she is launching the ball off the sixth hole tee at the psycho house:

It was our first time hanging together in close to a year. Last time I saw her was at her birthday party with her family at the Northridge Chili’s in September, and I had a prior engagement so I only was there for about an hour.

Not sure if any are still hanging around, but I know there were some people who found this blog after Shane Nickerson spotlighted my August 13, 2005 post about taking the big leap and reconnecting with my daughter after more than five years apart. Now it’s almost two years since then and I dunno… I expected something different than what we have now.

Not that I’m complaining. Given the five years of hurt we both suffered through, the fact that for the last two I can say “let’s get together” and she answers with “OK” is heaven. I just haven’t been too adamant or often in asking. I never crowded her as a child and I certainly won’t now.

I’m not sure what prompted me to ask to see her this time around. She doesn’t turn 18 for three months and there are no holidays to observe. The truth? I’ve been feeling down a bit these past couple weeks. Stuck in a semi-depressed rut and I jumped at the chance to bust out of it by seeing her and telling her about a billion things, of which not a single one came out of my mouth except at when we hugged at her house and I awkwardly told her I hoped she knew that I was there for her and that if she needed my help or someone to talk to all she had to was call.

When false accusations of child abuse and abandonment by my ex-wife led to things falling apart and I opted to quit fighting and instead completely remove myself from my daughter’s life in the summer of 2000 after receiving a letter from her in which she was prompted to write horrible and hateful things to me, I did a radical thing: I purged my Encino apartment of all traces of Kate. Everything. From the $500 doll house I’d bought her for Christmas a couple years earlier down to the littlest trinket and everything in between, I either threw it out or got it the hell over to Goodwill or into my mom’s Sherman Oaks garage later to be either sold in a yard sale or thrown out or given to charity.

In the matter of one day my one-bedroom flat went from being an obvious shrine to my daughter, to a place that held literally no trace that I was a proud father — albeit an every-other-weekend one — to a wonderful little 10-year-old girl.

Cold-hearted bastard as I can be I didn’t get rid of e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. A number of boxes of her drawings and our photographs and whatnot survived the exorcism. I just stowed them way the hell out of sight and mind. And they stayed stowed through my moves from Encino to Sherman Oaks (2001) to my first Silver Lake address (2003) and my current one (2004) — even o with our remarkable reconiciliation and reconnection last year they stayed put away.

When I moved in with Susan some of the stuff went down into the basement and some went into the storage space above the library closet where it was forgotten about until yesterday when I decided to clean out and organize that storage space that had become stuffed and a mess. During the extraction portion of the proceedings I pulled out an old Crate & Barrel box that was stuck way in the back and when I opened it up to investigate its contents I was greeted with this picture:

The buttons all around the matte are courtesy of Kate who decorated it as a Father’s Day gift. The photo was taken of us I’m not sure when — maybe 1996 or ‘97 — or exactly where… somewhere up PCH around Malibu or perhaps even further north. I do, however, remember the event. It was a fathers-and-daughters outing. I’m not sure who it was organized by but it involved many of her classmates at St. Cyril’s school in Encino. I remember it met at the school parking lot off of Ventura Boulevard from which a mass caravan of dads drove to the ocean for a beach party that at one point included climbing to the top of a bluff and watching for any whales passing by (we saw a couple off in the distant waters as I recall).

It’s always been my favorite picture of me and my little girl during some of our happiest times. And though I finished reorganizing the space above the closet and moved the Crate & Barrel box down into the basement, this picture now sits on my desk. Where it belongs.

There have been a lot of things to write about., but not a whole bunch of time or desire to do so. My daughter stayed with us this weekend — the first time doing so in more than six years. I picked her up Friday night out at the Burger King in Granada Hills where she works and we spent the night in front of the TV with some take-out from our Friday fave Pho before setting her up with one of the air mattresses in the library and calling it a night.

Saturday morning she came with Susan and me for a long walk around the neighborhood with Shadow followed by breakfast at Millie’s (something Susan and I haven’t done since we started watching our calories), and a stop at the Silver Lake farmers market. Later on Kate came with me grocery shopping and I introduced her to Amoeba Records. She was appropriately impressed by the size of the place, but strangely turned down my offer pick out a disc of her liking. After getting back from the market I had the bird rescue to contend with and then we had dinner before Susan and I got ready and left Kate to guard the fort and the recovering bird while we went to see The Black Rider at the Ahmanson (you can read my review of it here on Blogging.la).

Sunday morning I was surprised to find her up when I’d arisen (she didn’t get up until around 10 a.m. on Saturday) and on the phone with her boyfriend asking me if it was cool for him to come pick her up. I had been looking forward to having her with us the rest of the day, but once we cleared it with her mom that it was OK I opted not to stand in the way of the infinitely more interesting things a teenager could do than spend it with her old man. Despite trouble and frustration giving her boyfriend directions here, he somehow managed to find the place and in short order Kate was headed away from my world and back to hers, leaving me with a head full of questions and doubts about my role in her life, Kate’s interest in me being in it

Kate is a wonderful young woman. Polite and well-mannered and respectful and talktative (when you land on a topic that interests her). But she’s also very much withdrawn and cautious — and that’s fully understandable. With me she’s a stranger in a strange land trying to figure out how to fit in or how I fit in with her. And the best I can do is make that transition as easy for her as possible.

The one thing I came to realize from this is that if I’m going to make strides in alleviating the hesitation or awkwardness that she feels then I’m going to have to start seeing Kate on a more regular basis… like every other weekend. Even if it’s just to grab lunch or go catch a movie or toss a softball around in the park. If I wait for her to come to me, then I won’t be hearing from her until the next situation arises that brought about this weekend visit — and who knows how long that might be.

Hopefully she’ll be willing to give that a go.

My daughter’s going to be spending the weekend with Susan and me. I just got off the phone with her mom who’s heading up to Fresno this weekend with Kate’s sister for a skating competition and Kate doesn’t want to go with (it’s Fresno, can ya blame the kid?), so she wanted to know if it would be OK for Kate to come stay with us Friday and Saturday nights.

I double-checked with Susan who gave it the A-OK and now it’s just a matter of me picking her up tomorrow at 7 p.m. when her shift at the Burger King near her house is over.

I haven’t written much about my daughter because there hasn’t been all that much to write about. After our remarkable reunion last summer and a couple subsequent Saturdays spent together, the last time I saw her is when her and a couple friends made a wonderful and surprise visit to the house around Christmas. Since then our relationship has settled in to me sending the occasional email telling her I was thinking about her and wondering how things were going, and her responding cordially with some bit of information about school, her friends, or life in general.

Through these infrequent contacts I’ve learned she’s gotten a job at a local Burger King and that she’s persuing the completion of her high school education via an independent studies program of some kind, and that it’s going well.

I’ve played tug-of-war internally with the desire to want to see her more and my desire to want to be seen. In other words, I don’t want to force myself on her or intrude. For wont of a better or more appropriate analogy I’m a bit like John Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything who shows up at the big party with his dream date only to spend most of it admiring her from afar. For five years that distance between Kate and me had been galactic in scope. For the last few months we’ve been drawn closer by intents far more sincere and respectful and healthy, but at the same time when I cast my mind out with thoughts of Kate it’s still across a wide stretch of void.

But at least there’s a bridge spanning it now. And like the unexpected and unannounced visit at Christmas, she has occasion to cross over it to me:

From: Katie Campbell
Subject: HI
Date: April 10, 2006 7:00:28 PM PDT
To: William Campbell

Heyy Dad,

If you’re not do anything on April 21 (Friday) at like 6:30 I’m singing in a Disney Talent Show at Granada HS.

I wrote her back thanking her for inviting me and telling her I would not miss it. I asked if it was OK to bring Susan.

From: Katie Campbell
Subject: Re: HI
Date: April 10, 2006 10:04:46 PM PDT
To: William Campbell

Yeah, it would be awesome if Susan came as well.

Very cool. So I followed that up asking if she’s decided what she’ll be singing.

From: Katie Campbell
Subject: Re: HI
Date: April 10, 2006 10:14:07 PM PDT
To: William Campbell

Yes, I will be singing “One Song” from Snow White solo and “Reflections” from Mulan as a duet with my friend Meradee.

Fantastic!

I couldn’t help but be reminded of the angry email I got from her back in 2002 in which she made it abundantly clear that I was persona non grata where her future was concerned. She didn’t want me at any skating competition, recital, softball game, graduation, wedding… nothing.

Man, but we’ve come a long way back, huh?