Meet The Johnstadts

Relaxation. Recreation. Preparation. And Trivia.

2011-07-25T20:25:00.000-07:00

Not too much time again - it's late; we just watched "Kingdom of Heaven" with Q. Fun but frustrating experience - he got it clear who were the Muslims about 3/4 through the movie. Hey, he's a kid, I guess. Should be expected.

Here are some pictures from the day, which was spent in a leisurely fashion - beach in the morning, combined with pigeon feeding; late lunch; I took a run, then we all walked to a local park (beautiful) so the kids could ride their scooters. Janneke power-walked the perimeter of the park while I sat on a bench and petted Clarabelle; Janneke used T to ferry trivia questions to me, and I would send back my answers. "What's the capital of Ukraine?" "What are the colors of the Belgian flag?"

I countered by using Q to send trivia questions to her. "What breed of horse is the heaviest horse ever?" "What living land animal is the closest relative of whales?" It was a very pleasant half-hour for all concerned.

Though strangely, the lizards that used to populate that park appear to have disappeared. I see them all over the place in other parts of the city, in people's yards, etc., but that park has lost them. It worries me.

Bought some ice cream at Walgreen's, walked home, Janneke made supper, we ate it pleasantly, and T then collapsed into bed, so we threw in the movie. T walked back out to try to worm her way into watching it an hour or so later, but she was put back to bed. A little too gory.

I also bought some swim shoes at Walgreen's. Janneke got some sea urchin spines in her foot yesterday (forgot to mention that) and has been limping since - too deep to dig out, not painful enough to go to the doctor. Today she's a lot better - mostly her calf is sore from walking to protect her heel (where the spines are) from the ground. She's had them, Q's had them - I run barefoot. I can not get sea urchin spines in my foot. I now have swim shoes. The look sort of kung-foo-ey and yet, strangely effeminate. I figure: I have a beard, and I'm bald. That evens it out.

Tomorrow I hit the market again, all day if I have to, as of about 10:00 AM. Janneke is going to go do some "work" at Starbuck's in the early morning to free up my schedule. WIsh me luck.

All right, all right, quit yer caterwaulin'. Here's some dang pictures.

Q and T feed the pigeons before hitting the beach.

"What is this thing? It rolls - and yet, it tears apart when you bite it, and it tastes of delicious fibrous plant life! Just like a stick!"

"Is it a stick? Is it a ball? My God - It's some kind of wonderful, magical.....Stick-ball! It's the greatest, most fabulous object I've ever laid my teeth into!"

"Arraraaargharahhkkkaraaakkh."

December the 24th, 2010

2010-12-24T13:28:00.000-08:00

Hey, folks - again, apologies for the long layoff. It just seems like Facebook has taken so much of the wind out of the blog's sails -I communicate with pretty much everybody that way, and update videos there and give quick news items out and post photos...The blog seems strangely quaint and antiquated. But somehow I don't want to let it go; I like to write, I like to have it out there, like the traps I used to lay for muskrats and foxes, and then occasionally forget about, only to find them, months later, with a skeletal muskrat disintegrating in them. The blog lies out there in the ether, waiting to be stumbled upon or remembered by someone who knows me, and I'm sure somebody occasionally checks it out. I'm attached to it; it's a sentimental space. So I'm keeping it around.

Though I have to say, by the time I have time to sit and write on it, most of what passes for news around here has been communicated. So I wind up painting some particular event in vivid colors. Perhaps that's the tack I should take: it's an outlet for intensely-seen events, things I found moving or which piqued my interest, which I then share in a detailed way. Like what? Oh, I don't know - I could paint for you our Christmas Eve morning.

Rolled out of bed late (for me) - 8:05, which is pretty typical for a weekend day - and found the fire roaring in the woodstove, thanks to the little lady of the house. Well, the larger of the little ladies. Very cozy scene - breakfast had been had by all but me, the pets were lounging by the fire. I dedicated myself immediately to eliminating a minute of footage from the ping pong video in the previous post - I had shown it to Janneke the previous evening, and we both agreed that it had dragged a bit. Didn't take me long. Q watched and approved, but T was uninterested, rapt as she was in a particularly thrilling episode of "Max and Ruby". TV on Christmas Eve?! Yep. We're sometimes that sort of folk.

Mid-morning, the four of us piled into the car to take Clarabelle to the Cole Fields (unofficial) Dog Park, either to let her run in the woods, should there be no hounds about, or to let her cavort and canoodle with her own kind. The kids brought along their plastic toboggans, knowing as they did of the steep path that leads from the football practice locker facilities down to the fields. I didn't think there would likely be much snow to slide on, but I figured, hey, let them have their illusions.

Not a soul around when we arrived - the top of the hill, where the road goes down to the fields, had a sign that said "Road Closed for the Winter". But there was hardly any snow, and the brand-new VW SPortwagen war mit den Schneeraeder ausgerustet. (Sorry - it's hard to talk about the VW ohne dass mein Gehirn sich wieder nach dem Deutschen kehrt.) So, we rolled down the hill, snow tires and all, damn the torpedoes, and parked, then dragged the toboggans back across the field to the slope.

Which turned out to be pretty darned rocky. While the kids scrambled to the top, Janneke and I hand-scooped snow to protect them onto the most up-jutting of the rocks, and they did a few runs without major incident. Clarabelle sprinted up and down after them, her pseudo-dwarfish legs bouncing in that odd, rubbery way she has when she's gamboling along. To me, her legs really look like they have the basic architecture of Basset Hound legs - odd little subtle out-turnings and in-turnings at the joints, high and bulgy, compact musculature - but they're long and quite quick. But that little boing-boing she does, particulary when she's slowing down at the end of a sprint, is the most adorable thing, and I love to watch it happening and ponder whether it's a function of her unexpressed dwarf genes, her rubbery puppiness, or just the way that sort of running works.

Walking around looking for easily-picked-up snow to throw onto the rocky parts of the sledding path, I decided I'd head to the pond, since the vast quantities of uninterrupted snow could be easily scooped into the sled that wasn't in use and hauled wherever necessary. And as I scooped, I was struck by the very fine quality of the ice beneath the snow. "It's too bad we don't have shovels," I said to Janneke. And before long I had convinced myself that the thing to do was zoom back to the house and come back with shovels, and make ourselves a little rink.

Soon all four of us were scooping and shoveling, and in a jiffy we had a small rink cleared. We finally tired out and headed home, but were very excited about the possibilities of the following day. We could spend Christmas skating on our own little rink, with no one else around!

Christmas Eve, Janneke prepared for us a phenomenal meal, with Brussels sprouts, beef tenderloin, and fingerling potatoes. Utterly delicious. Once the kids were in bed, the usual ritual for me and Janneke: Wrapping presents in front of the TV and the woodstove, watching "It's a Wonderful Life" and drinking, Janneke her wine, me the beer I made with Rob Mathews. Just grand. Off to dream land - but not before I had snatched the cookie plate and the milk glass back out of Janneke's hand to replace them by the tree. She's such a fastidious home-cleaner that she'd automatically brought them back into the kitchen. It was a close thing to make sure they didn't get washed and put away.

More later, perhaps - it's starting to feel like a busy day. It's now Tuesday, the 28th, and a few other things have happened - including the Packers dismantling the Giants. It's been a great staycation so far - I feel utterly rested and content. Or as close to it as a guy like me is ever going to get.

Ping Pong Lessons

2010-12-24T13:27:00.000-08:00

Check out the latest video: Q beats me in ping pong. What else is new.

Possessed by the Grinch

2010-12-05T19:06:00.001-08:00

Dude! What the frag!

So we went to the Williamstown Reindog Parade the other day with Clarabelle. It’s this holiday parade involving a drummer, the local riding clubs, and every dog they can find and dress up as a reindeer. For the first time, we have a dog that’s friendly enough with other dogs to participate, so we got creative on how to make Clarabelle look even more adorable. We dolled up her doggie coat adorably, with little green Christmas tree ornaments all around the edges and red garland looped back and forth across her back, and a tiny mouse dressed as an elf pinned on in the position of a rider. Adorable. But the whole arrangement was pretty flimsy – nothing was bolted on, and every time she rubbed up against something, the ornaments on the fringes would come off. So we decided to take her to the gathering place where the parade was to begin, and wait until the parade started to put it on her.

Turns out, though, the judging all happens while the dogs are standing around waiting for the parade to start. Which nobody told us. So while we were standing there, some person or other was quietly ignoring us because our dog wasn’t dressed up. Just before the parade was to begin, they arranged us all for a photograph on the steps of one of the buildings on the Williams campus, and before the photo, said they were going to announce the winners. “What?!”, I thought. “Winners? We haven’t started yet!”

When T heard that this was happening, she said to me, in a quietly nervous sort of stammer, “It’s OK if we don’t win, isn’t it?” “Of course,” I told her. “And besides, they didn’t even get to see Clarabelle in her outfit. So if we don’t win, it’s only because nobody saw her.” This didn’t calm her, and in fact seemed to make her look a little more upset. So I tried to change the subject.

We had two leashes on Clarabelle, originally so that the kids could walk her on the parade route. But between trying to keep her outfit mostly together by keeping her away from other dogs and people, and fighting through Clarabelle’s constant lunging toward every other dog there was so she could sniff them, the kids just weren’t up to it. She jerked T off her feet during the build-up to the parade, and left Q the dust by jerking the leash completely out of his hands on another occasion. It became clear that an adult would have to hold her. But T had the small leash, and I had the big one, and we marched the whole length of the parade route together.

Toward the middle I cut out the middle man and just grabbed the choke collar, or very close to it, and kept such a death grip on it that she was honking hoarsely much of the time. But what else could I do? She was one giant surge of energy trying to get to and wrestle every dog she saw. And there were hundreds of them, it seemed. T stood quietly with her end of the leash, and at one point actually said, “Dad, I think I can take it from here, she really doesn’t seem to be pulling very hard.” “Well, no, to you, she doesn’t,” I said. “Because my left arm is constantly holding her up off the ground.” It was exhausting.

And the streets were PACKED!, people crowding in everywhere, on both sides, waving at us and grinning, some of them unaware, having not seen us in a while, that we had a new dog. And I’m sorry to report that I was not especially festive as we paraded down the street to celebrate the Holiday That Must Not Be Named. I was exhausted from holding the dog in the air and out away from my side, I was embarrassed by the constant rain of green Christmas tree ornaments we were leaving in my wake, frustrated at having avoided Clarabelle even being considered in the whole goofball contest in the first place, and tired and cold from the long wait and the longer march. I think I had a pained grimace on my face the entire time. T had fun, waving to her friends, and I guess that’s mostly what it’s about, in the end. But boy, it was a long walk.

Once it ended, I stood and pitched all the accoutrements of Clarabelle’s outfit into the garbage can, and then began the long march back to the car. Janneke and T went to see Q perform with the fifth grade band at Images Cinema; I was to take Clarabelle home and then return, hopefully in time to see Q honk his way through a few numbers. But once I’d made the trip back across town to the car, I realized I had no keys. So I marched back to Images, got the keys, and then trudged back to the car again. It’s a good half mile, this little trip that I was doing, between Images and the car. So when I finally did wind up at home, I sat myself down and had a damn bowl of cereal before heading out again.

The event had ended at Images, but Q found me and told me that Janneke and T had gone to Thompson’s Chapel to hear Brad’s choir perform in Lessons and Carols. So we went there for the 4:00 show. The music was lovely, but to be honest, I don’t get this whole idea of sitting in a church, doing church-like stuff (listening to readings, singing, more readings, more singing, a sermon, more readings, more singing, etc), without it actually being a church service. I felt like I was nine years old again, pulling my hair our, waiting for it to end so I could go home. The kids, meanwhile, were just as frustrated – though Q sang the carols and seemed to enjoy at least parts of it.

My patience wasn’t the thickest, either, since I had been up at 4:30 that morning to go hunting. Sat in the woods until 8:00, saw nothing, came home. Story of my sporting life. But now it was 5:20 PM, and I was falling asleep in the pew there. As with most things, I wish I could have done better…Just wasn’t to be.

I’ll try to get some more updates on here soon, but this one took me half an hour to write, and I’m bushed. It’ll probably be a while, honestly. Not that there’s a lack of stuff to write about – bought a car, burnt the pumpkin bread, saw a red fox. Lots of thrilling adventure to relate. Just no time. Take care, brush your hair…

Resumptive Depressive

2010-09-24T19:07:00.000-07:00

Hoo, boy...Another post that begins with an apology. I should just copy and paste the apologies from all the other times I've gone months without posting. But that would be still another insult to you, my reader. S. So, no: I will cook up another one, completely original, and heartfelt this time. Here goes:

Sorry, man.

Anyway, on to the hijinks: Q started piano lessons again today. We give him the summers off, what with travel and all (perhaps more about that later on), but then we start him up again in the fall. In the past, he's grumbled about the lessons on occasion - once, famously, he responded to a question about what he would wish for if he had but one wish. And the thing he said he'd wish for was an end to piano lessons. I kind of jumped on him for that one, if you recall - reminded him that he liked to sit and play, that he was proud of himself for what he'd accomplished, that he laughed with Ed every single time he had a lesson.

But this crisis was worse. He cried - yowlingly, sobbingly cried - when we told him it would soon be time to start the lessons again. "I hate them! I hate it!", he wailed. "You're making me waste all my time on something I don't want to do!"

We told him we would talk about it and get back to him.

In the end, a couple of things turned us toward insisting that he start up again. One is the simple fact that we know him, and that he wildly exaggerates his heartfelt emotions into great, combusting fits. He does it regularly - with physical pain, with insults from other kids, with offenses to his dignity doled out by younger siblings and pets. (Seriously. Pets.) He's a wonderfully sensitive, considerate young boy, who is very, very far from being even reasonably tough. So we have learned to read his hyperbolic suffering jags accordingly.

The second clue as to how to best handle this came last Saturday, when Janneke had to take Q to Caretaker Farm with her. Don't recall why, but he would have had to be in the house alone otherwise. (Soccer for T was involved, I think.) And the whole time he was out there with her, all he wanted to do was nothing. "Want to help me pick tomatoes?" "No." "Want to go to the pond and look for frogs?" "No." "Want to go help those guys who are weeding?" "No." Just plain-ol' laziness. Which led us to the conclusion that more leisure time is not what this particular kid needs right now.

So we decided we would say to him, "Fine. If you want to continue just with the trumpet," (a tactic he had deployed through tears days earlier), "we'll find a teacher and you'll have a lesson once a week with the teacher, in addition to your lessons at school."

Convulsions and explosive yowling. "No! I don't need that! The lessons at school are enough!"

"No, they are not, Q. You don't play the trumpet nearly as well as some of the other kids, because you do, not, practice at home. Why? Because we don't make you - you've got plenty of practicing to do for the piano. If you want to continue the trumpet, fine, but we decided long ago not to enforce practicing with that. Well, if, now, you want to replace piano with trumpet, fine - but the lessons to be learned from steady practice and improvement that you're getting from piano, will now have to come from the trumpet."

More squealing and fussing.

But at some point in here, after a couple of ugly stormings-off, we made the following points to him, in just about these words:

"You absolutely do not practice for an hour every day. It's fifteen to twenty minutes, max. Don't exaggerate. And the lesson you go to is not even an hour long, and it's once a week. Which means that four out of five days, you have from the end of school until five o'clock or five thirty to do whatever you want. That often involves soccer practice, but that's your time. You want to do that, and all your friends are there. Four days out of five, you have no obligations. And on the fifth, you lose, effectively, an hour of your two free hours. That is not very much to ask, and the fact that you act as if it were, shows us that you need to learn that it is not.

"You play your Wii every, single, day. This is very generous of us - you play it in the morning for a bit, and then often in the afternoon. You have plenty of time for goofing around.

"Today is Sunday. It's 10:30 AM. You won't have to go to bed until 9:30 - that's 11 hours. You have NO obligations during those eleven hours. The Packers are on, we're going to watch that, your friend Ethan is coming over - it's one long party for you. A lack of free time is absolutely not an issue in your life.

"All kids want to give up on things that start to seem hard. But part of growing up is learning to accept that sometimes, you have to work at something to achieve it. The fact that you're saying 'I'll keep playing the piano, just without the lessons', shows us that you haven't learned that lesson yet either. Because you won't - you've hardly played it all summer. Having a mentor and a teacher who has expectations is an excellent way to grow as a person. It's our responsibility to help you grow into a person who can do that.

"My mother let me quit piano when I whined about it enough. I was very excited not to have to practice or go to lessons. I still remember the giddiness I felt when Mom and Jayne trooped out the door to go to lessons for the first time and I got to stay home with Jim and Jess. I was so excited! You know what I did?

"I don't either. I have no memory of it. I have no idea what I did with that one little hour every week, with those twenty minutes a day. I wasted them. I got nothing at all out of them. And now I can't play the piano."

He got calmer and calmer as the discourse wore on, weaving back and forth between Janneke and me, his demeanor growing more and more free and easy.

"Fine," he said, without petulance. "OK. I'll do it."

And today's lesson? Fan, tastic. Grinning, laughing, never once complaining when I went to pick him up. It may help that the lesson is on Fridays now, and many kids are out of the Youth Center by late afternoon, off to fulfill weekend plans. But I can't tell you how great it was to watch him playing again, watch him interacting again with Ed, that wonderful man. It just made me sigh and smile and snuggle back into my chair.

Which was really uncomfortable. It's held in a practice hall, after all.

So, enough of that. Here's some visual aids.

That's Clarabelle, responding to some obscene sounds being produced by the wife and the boy. Crazy, crazy stuff.

Speaking of which, did I ever show you this:

T showing off her new room. Can't recall if I ever posted it here. If I did, hey, what's the harm in doing so again? And if I didn't, well, good. Now I have.

And finally, here's a video I made to promote the Spanish Guitar Club at my school. On "Back to School Night", it played on a loop on a TV cart in a lobby area. Thought it was a pretty elegant solution to the simple impossibility of being up in my classroom, greeting parents, and downstairs manning the guitar club table. So there was no guitar club table - there was simply this, over and over:

OK, officially punchy. G'night, Grandma...

Barefoot Deck Construction In My Dreams

2010-08-17T21:17:00.001-07:00

Hey. Well, the insomnia is back. I don't understand it this time at all - I am bone-tired. Or was - just after dinner I was yawning and groaning, dragging myself to those post-dinner chores like washing the dishes and smiling at my children and acknowledging my wife and pretending to listen to people with the very last fumes of my day's worth of energy. But then Chris, Q's friend who was here for a sleepover, got sick around 10:00, and I drove out with Q to take him home. And then I tried to catch a few minutes of Keith Olbermann. And then during a commercial I switched over and found an old episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I hadn't seen. (Lame as hell - Wesley frickin' Crusher figured prominently. If that TV hadn't cost us a week's salary I'd have thrown the remote at it.) And then Clarabelle had to go out for one more quick turn so she won't suffer in her crate tonight. And then it was 11:30, and I re-read a couple of portions of "Born to Run". And then I was all wired up, thinking about running.

Because I ran today. Four miles, in one solid loop that didn't repeat itself at all. I've been feeling so fragile lately that I do all my running on a 1.5-mile loop around the house, so that if anything does start to hurt, I can stop and be no more than half a mile's walk from ice and a sympathetic ear. But today, dammit, I was going to go four miles. So I went to Google Earth, mapped out a route exactly that long, and hit the road in the Runamocs.

It was great. I don't try to go fast anymore - I just try to go. Go easy, go light. Just go. Speed will come when my body's ready, when I have slowly built up every susceptible muscle and piece of connective tissue to be up to the job with ease. And in the meantime, I run with an easy joy that doesn't care how fast it goes. Mind you, I do fantasize as I run about the day when I'll once again be able to do six, seven, eight miles. And then about the first marathon I'll run. And beyond that; I do fantasize about going fast. But I don't actually go fast - I just revel in the complete lack of pain anywhere, especially in my feet.

I go barefoot as often as I can. I worked on the deck today (more on that below) for hours and every minute of it was barefoot. I walked the dog around the neighborhood barefoot, dropped T off at day care barefoot. And my feet love it. They love being challenged and stretched with every step, using their muscles in ways that make them interact with the ground. Tomorrow we're going onion harvesting at Caretaker Farm, and I plan to do the whole thing barefoot. Why not? It's bare earth and weeds - the most annoying thing about the dirty work at the farm is the dirt in your shoes. What if you have none? The dirt just rolls off your feet, or pleasantly between your toes. It'll be great.

Re-reading Born to Run, I came across a part where someone who agreed to run the last fifty miles of a hundred-mile race with a Tarahumara Indian runner was struck by the sound they made as they ran. Just a very gentle sort of tap, touch, stroke on the ground, made by their sandals. They didn't pound, they didn't go whap-whap-whap. They treated the ground gently so that it would treat them gently. And it struck me that I have been remarking at that very same sound lately as I run in the Runamocs. There's no scraping, no scuffing. just touch, touch, touch. My feet feel far better at the end of a run than they did at the beginning. It's very exciting and I can't wait to do it again.

Not tomorrow, though. Absolutely not tomorrow. I am not pushing too far, too fast, too soon again.

All that excited thought kept me up. And then the deck! Well, a couple of revelations, first. Here's the biggest one: The Titan Post Anchor. This thing is going to solve every single one of the problems you didn't read about in the last post. The posts are set directly into the wood of the deck, through the decking. Brilliant - I've ordered seven of them for the seven posts I have and will definitely be setting. And then I spent today getting ready to place them. Now I just have to figure out where in hell to get something called a "hole saw".

First, though, before I can set them, I had to trim the edges of the deck to be able to accurately measure where the posts will go. So I did that, with some semi-skilled slicing with my brand-new circular saw. I'm very proud of it - it's this model. I've named it Betsy, in honor of our fallen Wednesday Barefoot Soccer comrade. Not just to honor her, though - Betsy and my new saw have a lot in common. They are both treasured by me; Brad, Betsy's husband, owns an identical model, so she lives in both our hearts; she is precise and exact and causes beauty to be created everywhere she goes; and if you get in her way, she will quickly and efficiently reduce you to sawdust. While making a very strong sound. We evened out that deck nicely, Betsy and I. 'Course, before I could do that, I had to put down the last board. So I did that first.

Now, when I did that, a problem arose. Somehow, I had been hanging all the joists, or at least the ones in the middle, a little too low. Such that this last decking board, which rests on the rim joists, sits a good quarter inch higher than the boards adjacent. Meaning that the spot where I install the posts on that whole side will have one half sitting on the low board, and one half sitting on the high one. There are a number of possible solutions - the Titan Post Anchor comes with washers that you can use to shim up one side or the other to bring it into level. But I'm not going to want a quarter-inch gap on one side (the visible-from-the-picnic-table side) of the post anchor. I could also chisel out a seat for the post anchor in the higher board, but that would then look bad from the angle of the person who walks down the stairs and out into our yard, with the posts quite near eye level. Nor do I like the veeeery visible height difference between that last board and the ones adjacent. I put the board down, and set all the screws, having decided to live with the difference...but now that I think about it in my mind's eye, and picture that damn difference in height and all the problems it causes, I say to myself the following:

"Joe, you gotta pull that board up, trim down the joist a bit, and then replace the board."

I've pulled one board up already - they're made of plastic, so with a little pry bar pressure, they pop right up. Then the screws can just be unscrewed and removed.

How am I going to trim the end joists?

Betsy.

Other news...Heck, you know what? I'm tired now. I think I can go to bed again! Tell you what: If it doesn't work out, I'll come back and tell you all about the nifty parallel I found for our continuing to call Barefoot Soccer "Barefoot Soccer", even though, the next time we do it, people (except probably me) won't be barefoot.

Aw, heck, it won't take long, so I'll just tell you:

It's like people calling two-by-fours "two-by-fours". They're not actually two inches by four inches, and everybody knows it. But they still keep calling them that.

See? Isn't that clever? How I saw that? That those two things are the same? Aren't you proud?

Good night.

The Insomniac's Confession

2010-08-15T21:25:00.000-07:00

Cripers! Well, since my insomnia is back, and since there aren't any big-ticket news items that might occupy me at this late hour, I find myself once again pretending that there's someone out there interested in the goings-on of our little tribe, and pecking out some updates thereupon. To whit:

The deck progresses. Although I am lately preoccupied a lot more by the "should have"s than by the "should"s. For instance, I think perhaps I should not have bought the Azek railing that I bought. Mostly because I did not properly plot out just how my railing would attach to the rim joists of the deck. Mostly because my deck-building book didn't say I really needed to. You just notch the 4x4 posts and plop them down as you need then along the edge, and string the rails between them.

(Things get pretty wordy and impractically detailed here for a couple of paragraphs. You might want to skip ahead to the parentheses below.)

But then there's the issue of the rail sleeves I bought, which fit nicely over 4x4 posts that are not notched, and which disappear neatly into the decking as they plunge in behind the rim joists they were bolted to before the decking was applied. But I already applied my decking, and did not build any posts in.

Nor could I have, to be fair - the outer rim joist would up being double on one side and triple on another, meaning I would have had uneven and oddly-inset posts had I placed them that way. Of course, now I'm faced with the notion of having oddly incomplete post sleeving, since once the posts drop below the level of the deck on the outside, the post sleeve will stop.

Probably - I don't think I can fit the post sleeve over the bolt heads that will protrude from the lower faces of the 4x4 posts. Maybe I can, but I doubt it. Meaning that I would have to end the post sleeves at the level of the decking, and then surround the bottom of the posts with the joist-covering Azek sheeting I also bought. Which, I think, will look weird. So it's beginning to seem that all my remaining options are going to look somehow weird. Leaving me feeling paralyzed and pressed for time at the same time - the summer is ending, here, and I have no rails on the deck. Or stairs. It's covered, and that looks fine, but it's still not serviceable. And I'm not sure how to go about making it so tomorrow. Beginning to feel like I'll need advice from an expert, and that this expert is going to say "You should have thought this through better", which will make me feel very hot and trembly and sweaty. A feeling I am accustomed to having in association with carpentry in general.

(There - That should be enough of that for now.)

So, on to the other big news, which does NOT keep me up at night. Here it is:

Her name, in case you haven't yet heard, is Clarabelle.

She has now been in Massachusetts for a week and a day, and it's beginning to be hard to picture what it was like before she arrived. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - there's a lot to describe around this enormous happening.

Beginning with the trip the three of us - Q, T, and I - took last Saturday. We hit the road around 7:30 with Hobie's old dog crate in the back of the Subaru (it wouldn't fit in the Prius) and were humming down the highway to Glastonbury, CT, for the next two and a half hours. It was probably the nicest day of the summer - sunshine, high, white clouds, and temps in the upper 70s. The drive went phenomenally well, with kids playing with their games, and with each other, as only good sports who are being driven to a puppy can do. (Part of it is probably due to T being hopped up on Dramamine.) As we approached the target destination, the kids became active exit-searchers, and navigated me safely into the park-and-ride parking lot just off the highway where the local dog rescue group coordinates the weekly dropoff.

Now, this whole business is painstakingly and professionally catalogued on a weekly basis much more completely than I can do here, on a television show called "Last Chance Highway". Here's the short version:

New Englanders spay and neuter their dogs. Southerners don't. This leads to an imbalance of adoptive households and adoptable dogs -the South has too many, the North, not enough. And vice versa. Twenty different animal rescue groups across the South adopt dogs out ot homes in the North, and put the dogs on a trailer that drops them off every single week in their northern end cities, with the families that have applied for them online and been approved.

One of those families, August 7th, was us.

Q and T were excited, but dignified. The show sends a camera crew regularly to the Glastonbury site, and the camera crews must whoop people into a cheering frenzy, because they always appear on TV to be about to witness their favorite rock stars coming off the trailers. We had no such raucous buzz happening for our big day, but there was definitely a lot of excitement in the air when we were there. Just quieter. We were all pulled into a circle to listen to a spiel on getting a new dog, and then the truck and the trailer arrived, about ten minutes early, and before you knew it all sixty or so people were lined up in front of a card table, where the driver had a box of files and would pull your dog and its medical records up for you, nod to another fellow at the door of the trailer, who would disappear inside and then come right back out holding the exact same dog you had been going nuts over in photographs for a couple of weeks and just plain hand it to you.

It was very, very fun and emotional. We were thrilled - she was such a little squirm-butt when she came off, all white-faced and waggy and peeing excitedly as she received her first hugs and kisses from all three of us.

I have worked up some video, in a very quick and dirty version, which is available here.

We walked her around the parking lot a bit, then drove to a nearby Petsmart, probably all of 200 yards from the parking lot where we picked her up. She scoped out a couple of toys and some rawhide bones (the kids were eager to see what she might be most interested in), which we purchased, and then headed over to a school with a playground that we had scoped out earlier. But that quickly got old - Clarabelle (whose name had previously been Demi, but whom I decided I was going to go ahead and name my own damn self) was doing a lot of sniffing and the kids a lot of following, when what I think they had imagined was more of a cuddle fest. Walking around in the sunshine behind a dog that was picking up everybody's leftovers from under the picnic tables was a little too stressful, to tell the truth. And by now it was near noon, so we adjourned to the local Burger King, where we parked the car so that the end gate abutted a slight grassy rise. We opened the gate so Clarabelle could see us as we sat in the grass, arrayed in front of her, eating our lunch as she gnawed happily on a rawhide bone in her crate. It was very idyllic - in fact, it was very strangely so. If you ever get to Glastonbury, check out the strip of grass and trees that forms the border of the parking lot of the Burger King across from the park-and-ride lot. It's far, far more picturesque than such a place has any right to be. And we weren't the only ones to think so - a very sad, shabby, and shaky man, probably nearly 90, looked a bit put out by our arrival; he had been parked similarly to us, tailgate of his pickup drawn up against the grass, in the shade, windows down, playing a harmonica.

But now it was our picnic spot, so he stopped playing the harmonica. But he did do just as we did - he went inside, placed his order, and retired to the breezy shade. I hope he enjoyed it as much as we did.

Two hours and thirty minutes later, with a couple of stops built in along the way, Clarabelle made her debut in our home. It's been fantastic - she is one smart cookie. She's curious about everything, and cocks her head in the most endearing way, eerily reminiscent of Hobie. That was the expression with which she first confronted Skittles, whom the kids brought out into the back yard to meet Clarabelle before we brought her into the house. Best to have them meet on somewhat more neutral territory, we thought (and I had read). This may have helped - Clarabelle took a couple of days to catch on, through some gentle scolding and some acclimatizing, that Skittles is not a puppy, and does not appreciate or respond well to puppy-like invitations to chasing games. Now, a week later, Skittles will lie there and recoil her head as Clarabelle approaches to sniff her - "Really? Are you sure? No...?" - and then walks off again; the cat will look a little indignant at having had to snub yet another offer, but will hardly ever go hide any more. They aren't pals, but they're coexisting.

The kids have had many a lesson on how to walk her by now, and are getting pretty good at it. Though they are starting to see it as a chore, it is a chore they take on with grace and a sense of humor. Although the bulk of the serious walking still falls to me and Janneke - she in the early morning, so far, and myself just before bed. Accidents in the house have been few; successes far outweigh failures. Progress is steady and ratchets continually upward.

That very first Saturday night, I finally managed to find "Last Chance Highway" on the TV, and we all settled in to watch it together. And there they were - the same guys whom we'd seen that morning, whom we'd been puzzled to observe absorbing celebrity treatment, stopping work to pose for pictures with giddy new dog owners, handing out hugs as much as dogs. Now we knew why - these guys all feature quite prominently in the program. The episode we watched was particularly touching, I find - I've seen three installments now - and by the time it ended Q and I were clapping and laughing to watch these happy denouments, and T was asleep on Clarabelle's bed, one arm draped around the snoring hound. The very end image of the video above takes place as we watched the same trailer we'd picked her up from earlier in the day. All very odd and circular - I'm still not quite able to get my head completely around it.

Janneke and I were snuggling with her this evening after watching an episode of Last Chance Highway (I'd recorded it for Janneke, who hadn't seen one yet) and were struck by just how much we love hounds. Hobie was a hound, and we've had a soft spot for beagles forever - but Clarabelle is as houndy as they get. Droopy skin on her head, ridiculous ears, bony hips, black back, a plaintive, howling wail (that we hardly ever hear), and a soul that wants out of life only three things: To follow that smell wherever it might lead; to be hugged and thumped vigorously by a person; and to sleep. Provide them with those three, and they want for nothing. And I think there is much to admire in that philosophy.

There is other news. I'm up to 3.5 miles on my every-other-day runs in the Runamocs. I'm making slooooow and steeeeady progress, terrified of getting injured again. But determined to work my way back up to longer distances - just not caring particularly exactly when I get there. These things - the runamocs - are fantastic to run in. I think it's the perfect middle ground for me between barefootedness and shoditude - I don't hurt myself, but I can't heel-toe pound without pain. So I find a great, soft, short-strided method of locomotion, and all of my constituent parts - particulary the feet - are happy. I'm still spending as much time as I can barefoot, including all of Clarabelle's walks and much of the time I spend working on the deck, and all of my yard-care time. In fact, today we spent three hours in the mall shopping, and I wore shoes, in deference to the expectations of society (and in recognition of the fact that the Runamocs, while great for running in, frankly look stupid). And my right foot, home of my erstwhile plantar fasciitis, began to really throb. I had run this morning, and apparently the isolation and protection afforded my foot by the shoe caused the muscles and tendons to do so little that the got stiff. As soon as we got home, I took the shoes off - and the pain nearly instantly disappeared. I am a convert to this whole barefoot thing - just provided you don't do too much, too fast, without building up to it.

Like Betsy did. She broke her toe last Wednesday in our weekly barefoot soccer match...which I feel pretty responsible for, I have to say. I mean, I didn't write the Wednesday Afternoon Barefoot Soccer Association Charter or anything - it just sort of happened. But I have been the loudest and the most annoying about the whole "barefoot is better" thing. We've done it a number of times now and it's been amazing. But there was something amiss last week - a lot of us suffered what I'm calling "toe crumples", where you catch your toes on the ground and drive over the top of them as they bend uncomfortably forward under the pressure from your foot, the top and back of which continue forward, and the whole business causes you to topple in a heap. I did it three times, all with the left foot, and Brad and a couple of other players did it too. And Betsy broke her toe!, though she can't quite say exactly when it happened. It's her left pinky toe, and she has to stay off her feet as much as possible, and absolutely not run, for four to six weeks. This sucks so much I can't quite bear it.

As for me, though...I remain convinced that I am far, far less likely to be injured in soccer if I wear no shoes. The big injuries I have been susceptible to in recent years have been knee twists, which occur when you have too damn much traction, and ankle turns, which are a result of the bottom of the shoe getting stuck while the leg topples over to the side. And I just can't imagine either of those happening if I have no shoes on. The toe crumples hurt, but they didn't especially bother me - I have short, rounded toes, and they weren't really adversely affected. I don't know - I'll stay barefoot in future games, I think, but we may be encouraging the kids to wear shoes. Even cleats - I can take a rake from a ten-year-old. But we'll see. Janneke, post-bee sting, remains an adamant opponent of the whole endeavor. I for one hope it does not go extinct as an institution. It's not what Betsy would have wanted.

(Though she isn't dead.)

Well, seein' as how I stopped being coherent some five paragraphs ago, I think I'll wrap this up and head off to lala land, if I can. Not sure whether I've thought through everything I needed to, but let's hope. I think I'm resigned to my fate deck-wise, though I do have an idea or two on how to get around this whole post business, and apart from Betsy's foot, everything else is all brightness and sunshine. So I should be less than haunted as I lay back against the pillow and sigh.

Wish me luck...

Long Days of Great Import

2010-07-24T19:12:00.001-07:00

Hoooo! What a day! Long, steady, and enjoyable, though there were no really big-ticket items in it. Here's the rundown, as written in an email to Janneke about ten minutes ago:

"Up at the crack of 8:00, out the door around 10:00 to Stop & Shop; from there, here, to put away the refrigeratables, and thence to Caretaker, where we arrived just in time for closing. But we grabbed a few things. Back out the door to Wild Oats and to the vet's, where I bought a bag of Science Diet Puppy Food! Tomorrow we may go to P-field to buy a doggie bed, a little choke collar, etc. We'll see.

"Then back home for lunch, which was eaten heartily; a run to the dump and to buy another 20-gallon garbage can, for the dog food, which is now installed. Around 3:00, Mike from Good Dog Rescue called, and we switched over to the Mungaboo email address. He received the photos, which serve in lieu of a home visit, and we talked about the interview I had done with the foster mom. And he said now he just has to check references, and if all that gets done, then next Saturday we'll be picking her up!

"House cleaning until Kate came, and continuing after her arrival; I started making dinner around 5:30, and we at at around 6:30. Lettuce and shredded carrot salad with a dressing that Q and I liked, but T didn't; cake and chocolates for dessert. We all watched the religion episode of the Simpsons, then went outside for a bike ride that was long & fun. (T fell twice, but she was OK.) Inside, where we watched "Nature" ("The Andes") and ate popcorn; then they brushed teeth and hit the hay. It's now 9:46 PM, and soon I'll go in and tell them it's lights out. (They're in T's room playing "UNo".) I was emptying the dishwasher in order to be able to put all the dirties from tonight into it when I decided I needed a break. So I wrote you this.

"Hoooo! What a day! I'll check the weather tomorrow - if it's hot, we're hittin' the pool. Me cago en Dios y todos los santos.

"Names the kids were brainstorming at dinner (despite being told that we adults (I) would be naming the dog):

"Sunshine
"Biscuits
"Pumpkin

"I have to say, I like them all.

"OK, off to be Mr Responsible. Hope all's well -

"Joe"

So there you have it. Kate is here for a sleepover, and that's going well. They claimed just a little while ago that they couldn't sleep, but I've heard nothing but snoring since. T was upset yesterday because she hadn't fully realized that Janneke was going to be away for a couple of weeks now, and said that she needed to sleep with someone. Q said the same thing. So we all three crowded into the master suite and made a go of it. I slept elsewhere from about 12:00 to 5:00, since I had gotten so many elbows and knees in various tender bits of me and hadn't been able to doze off. But around 5:00 I went back in and lay ON TOP of the covers, with the elbows and knees pinned beneath on either side of me. And slept well 'til morning. That's a good trick - put that one in your back pocket.

Mike, the guy from Good Dog Rescue, did indeed call me today, and it looks like it's all over bar the shouting. They'll call Ronadh and Mark and/or Brad and Betsy, all of whom have been paid off, and then the vet, who has no idea what really goes on here. And then it should be next Saturday! Here's a link to their website - you can see the dogs there that are available for adoption. (I won't tell you which one is the one we're after, but I will tell you that Mike told me that many people - I believe the number 10 was thrown out - have posted a claim on her, but that we're the ones he'd been waiting for for this particular dog, because we have kids.) If all goes according to plan, as I said in the email, come this time next week we'll be cuddlin' a pup! We'll have to drive to Connecticut to pick her up off the doggie Underground Railroad - check out the transportation page, which is cool - probably at the Glastonbury stop, which is the closest to us, I think. (Funny they don't stop in MA. Must be some kind of law agin' it here.) I hauled up the baby gate for the stairs from the basement today, and will probably go get Hobie's old carrying crate when I'm done with this. It's all very exciting.

On the deck front, I will never, ever be able to repay our good friend Matt for the entire workday - The Entire! Day! - that he spent here, basically saving our house from rot and erecting the skeleton of our deck. I helped, but he was confidently in charge the whole time, and gave us any number of things from his house - plywood, insulation, flashing - that he just had laying around. As he was about to leave, I said, "Now, I'll be expecting a bill, Matt." And he said, "Well, don't look for it TOO soon." I'd bet you just about anything he's never going to bill us. But that's OK - I have a counterattack planned. Because I had already invited him and his son Alex to accompany me and Q to the Patriots-Packers game in December. And when we go, and he says, "What do we owe you for these tickets?", I'll say, "I'll send you a bill. Don't look for it TOO soon, though." Which will echo in the halls of human history as the most symmetrical and touching buddy-buddy moment ever. We may just have to clink beer bottle necks as I say it.

Man, I'm beat. I'm off to accomplish a few things and then hit the hay. Take care, brush your hair...

The Deck: Continued...

2010-07-20T21:52:00.001-07:00

So, my friend Matt the contractor came by, very generously, and had another look at the deck and at the rot I found under the sliding door. And he said, "You know what you need? You need me here for, like, half a day." Which is exactly what I deeply, deeply hoped he would say.

Pretty much word for word, too - his being there means things will be done correctly; half a day means that it isn't going to cost me an exorbitant amount. He dropped off a hammer (though I do own one), a cat's paw - which looks like this - for pulling nails, and a saws-all, which looks like this. And he told me to remove all the joists and the ledgers, but to leave the rim joists, which form the outer edges of the deck framing, standing.

And I am proud to say that I have almost accomplished it. I will say that the sawzall is about the baddest piece of equipment I've ever run - it thrums with an electric might that is astonishing, and slices through wood and metal like a slow-motion light saber. I felt very manly indeed in the hot sun, shirtless, soaked in sweat, blasting a slice through a 2x10 with that machine-gun-like piece of testosterone candy. Must have put on quite a show for our retired neighbors.

Which is another thing - I've lately been getting more and more cheesed off at the fact that, out of the seven houses that could be said to directly or diagonally abut our own, five belong to retired couples. And those of you who know our street will know: It is a perfect - PERFECT! - street for kids. Little traffic, level for the most part, back yards that are fun to cross through...Perfect.* And we're stuck with codgers everywhere. Now, I like codgers, but I would also like to see a crowd of kids on bicycles swarming past of a summer evening. All I see are my own two. Who are about as cute as a person can get (I refer you to this video), but I think the quality of their lives would go up substantially if they had buddies living nearby. And these folks living around us pretty much only interact with us to complain that Q is bouncing his basketball at 8:00 AM.

Or to accuse them of climbing over the fence separating our yard from theirs and smashing their glass-top deck table, only to have it pointed out to them that during the weekend, when they were away, there was an enormous wind storm, which would explain not only the numerous branches lying about their yard, but the fact that the enormous parasol that ordinarily stands inserted vertically in their deck table, lying forty feet away, and open, against their opposite fence, just might have been the true culprit and not our then-four-year-old-and-two-year-old children.

But I digress. For some reason, the joist hangers - which look like this - on the outer rim joist are a complete b___h to pull out. (That word back there is "bitch".) Perhaps something to do with the boards they're nailed into not being rotten. So around 5:30 this afternoon I called it quits, and will resume nail-pullin' in the morning. I have until Thursday AM - Matt's coming by then to raise holy hell with the deck.

Apparently we've got to replace the sill underneath the sliding door, which is something Matt says he can do with just the two of us and no giant jacks to lift the house up, or even a diminutive green Jedi Master to lift the house into the air so we can insert the new wood. Matt must know what he's doing.

So that's going on...And the dog drama. A litter of pups upstate in NY is adoptable, but sick, so they keep putting off the date when we could come see them. And in the meantime I've fallen for, and applied for, a pup that's currently in Georgia, and can be adopted (sight-unseen, which is a little (but only a veeery little) worrysome) and delivered to the area via a modified horse trailer that regularly makes the trek to bring dogs from the overcrowded "shelters" of the benighted South up to the nearly-stray-free New England States for adoption. Lots of people in town here have done the same, and been very pleased with it. As it stands, I'm not sure what will happen first: Confirmation of the adoption of the very nearly perfect pup from the South, or a trip to see the suddenly-healthy pups up North. It's a race. Both sets of wheels are turning. I will keep you posted.

But I'm thinking a very simple railing for the deck, and right now I'm leaning toward using pressure-treated wood for the decking itself. Cheaper by far than the composite stuff, and it should last a loooong time, given the perfect - PERFECT! - state of all the pressure-treated stuff that was holding up the deck. I mean, some of the joists were double - they had sistered a new pressure-treated joist alongside the original, non-pressure-treated joists. And the originals are gone. Dust. Nothing there but rusty nails that mark where they once hung. But the pressure-treated stuff looks like it was put in yesterday. So it's not like it would be rotting away soon - and splintering and such can be avoided with some basic maintenance. And we're not feeling quite so flush with money these days.

Not that we ever were, but our stretch of my handing Janneke a ton of money I don't need at the end of each month and our savings growing by leaps and bounds has been interrupted lately. Got something fixed on the Subaru, got an appointment to have the brakes on the Prius looked at on Monday, gettin' a dog...Things pile up.

OK, I've probably worked through the insomnia by now. Off to take another crack at dreamland. Hasta la pasta -

Jose

*And for any lurkers who read this and like the looks of our kids, or our neighborhood: Have I talked on the blog about the many guns I have in the house? And my extensive experience in their use? And the fact that I am a fairly intimidating former wrestler, former rugby player, and generally bad-tempered sort who lifts weights and bites through chainsaw blades in my spare time?

New Room!

2010-07-20T17:45:00.001-07:00

On a strictly newsy, unedited, lazy note: Here's T giving you a tour of her newly painted room...

The Deck

2010-07-19T05:31:00.000-07:00

So, yeah, the deck. It's been pretty sway-ridden and warped lately, as any of you who have been here recently can attest, and so it was time for it to come down. I had a couple of friends look at it, one of whom is a contractor, and the other, a very experienced deck-builder. And both said the posts were fine and the joists, pressure-treated lumber, looked fine. So it should be a question of simply removing the decking and the rails and re-building those to suit on top of the existing infrastructure. So I did this:

Took about a day's work, spread over two. And I found this underneath:

Still running. Casio digital watch - is it yours, Elliot...?

Yesterday I went out to take a closer look at how the deck was bolted to the house. It looked, to me, at first, as if the deck must have been bolted to the concrete foundation of the addition, but it turns out to have been nailed to the beam on top of the foundation. And the deck ledger, as well as the beam behind it, appear to be rotten. I'll have to have someone who knows what they're talking about take a look at it, but it sure as heck looks to me like that beam's going to have to be replaced. So this might end up costing a fair amount.

Further frustration this morning on the puppy front: The litter we had been looking to go see is still sickly. They said to call back at the end of the week - which is what they said last week. And then it was "Call back Monday". I don't blame anyone - hey, if they're sick, they're sick. Nothing they can do about it, other than provide great care, which they've been doing. But it's a roller coaster for us. We want to get the dog in and get as much bonding / training done as possible before the school year starts again, so the sooner, the better.

Well, off to deal with the house issue. I'm going to see if our friend Matt, the contractor, is in the neighborhood working today. If he is, I'll be stopping over with the beverage of his choice to see if he can come take a look. Keep your fingers crossed...

Brief Summer Update

2010-07-13T09:27:00.000-07:00

Wow. So, so sorry about the lay-off - I really can't explain myself. Other than the fact that when I have acres and acres of time stretching out before me, and an able steed beneath me, all I really do is climb down and curl up in the clover and take a nap. Which is a very odd metaphorical way of saying that when I have an open schedule, I somehow get a hell of a lot less done than when my time is restricted somehow. By, oh, I don't know, a job, say. And since in summer I don't have one, the whole day is over before I know it and I haven't accomplished much of anything.

Except a lot of recreating. Janneke and I have made it out to the tennis courts at least three or four times (very good, for us), the kids and we have been swimming a number of times, which has taken up entire afternoons, either out at Windsor Lake in North Adams, up at Margaret Lindley Park in Williamstown, or over at the Sand Springs Pool - the only "public" pool in town, which isn't public, but rather private, and which requires either an exorbitant membership fee or an exorbitant daily pass. We've caved in on the passes a few times, because the pool is wonderful, the poolside amenities are great, and the days have been haaawwt.

So haawwt that we spent several of the last few nights downstairs in the guest rooms, where Q still prefers to sleep - though last night T went down there too, and they shared a bed, out of habit (usually we're all down there, and there are only two furnished rooms), but he came back up after an hour or so because T was snoring. And it had cooled down a lot upstairs by then anyway.

And we've been watching the world cup a lot. Here were the get-ups for the final:

(The Dutch also call themselves "cheese heads".) We were disappointed in the outcome, and in the US' showing in the tournament, but all in all, thrilled by the whole spectacle, and inspired, by our friend Magnus and his son Benni, to make plans for the future. Magnus and Benni, four years ago, decided that they would go to South Africa and watch the WC four years hence, and by crackee, they did it, saving up the money over the four years and going the hell over there. So Q and I have done the same thing, and here's the evidence:

Every day I don't buy myself any junk food, I put $5 in there. And every time Q cleans his room top to bottom, he still gets the $5 pocket money he ordinarily used to get, but we also put $5 in the envelope. (If we made him forego having pocket money to save it for an event four years from now, it would probably actually disincentivize him to save anything at all. So we came up with the "matching funds" program.) And he put about 60% of his birthday money in there. So we should have a tidy sum by the time 2014 comes around - and soon, I think I'm going to start learning Portuguese. With Q. Should be fun.

Dude - T beckons. I'm home alone with her this afternoon. More soon - including the big news of the summer: Gettin' a dog!!

Cincinnati: Growing On Me

2010-06-12T20:00:00.001-07:00

OK, so I just sat in Fountain Square, which is very lovely, and ate ice cream while watching "I Am Legend" on a huge jumbotron poking out the roof of Macy's. Steel and glass canyon walls all around me, a beer garden (I did not partake) keeping people mellow, families drawing up chairs and sitting on the edge of the fountain, red-clad Cincinnati Reds fans filtering in after the ball game 5 blocks away to eat ice cream at Graeter's, the well-known (apparently (and deservedly)) ages-old purveyors of artery damage located there, on the...um...East...? side of the square...It was the nicest, warmest, most relaxing way to wind down my evening. Sure beat watching soccer games on TV whose outcomes I already knew. My day went this way:

Up at 7:00 or so, to do some small amount of exercisin' and catch a little South Korea v Greece on the tele. Saw SK score a goal, and headed over to the convention center to work.

I'm pretty sure there are some propietary things I'm not supposed to tell you, but I will tell you this: There are a lot of us, we work at a comfortable pace, we're well-trained and monitored, and we grade consistently. We get breaks throughout the day, and are served a pretty nice breakfast, lunch, and dinner over there. My colleagues are all nice people. There, I don't think the College Board's competitors (who I do not think exist) can glean much from that. I'm doing well - I got a post-it note from my Table Leader today, congratulating me for following the rubric so closely. I stuck it up on my computer screen for all to see...and then took it down again, because it felt kind of weird.

But I didn't throw it out.

We get out at 5:00, and dinner is served until 7:00, so that's when I've been taking my run. I don't know how far I'm running (can't get Google Earth to work on this computer anymore), but I run 'til I'm tired, exploring as I do so. I ran south toward the riverfront, and did a lap around Paul Brown Stadium, home of the Cincinnati Bengals. It's right next to the Reds stadium - which is named "Great American Ballpark", and is the second awful name of a prominent thing in downtown Cincinnati, the other being "Fifth Third Bank"". I think I had known of the existence of the bank before coming here, but seeing that God-awful name, displayed in such huge, proud, red letters, on top of a very impressive building, made its silliness all the more evident to me. Once done circumnavigating the stadium (Monday, I think I'll use the lunch break to go buy the kids some Bengals gear at their pro shop, which is open 10:00 Am to 5:00 PM), I trotted out toward an elevated highway nearby, and noticed it had a broad sidewalk along it. The sidewalk appears to have been built specifically to allow rabid Bengals fans (and there are a lot of them - this town loves those hapless Bungles) to stand there and watch practice. The practice fields are located right next to the stadium, and while there are hedges and fences separating them from the direct view of people who might be standing at their level, the sidewalk view from up above is fantastic. You can see everything. Or you could, anyway, if anything were happening there. Not nearly close enough to hear much, other than maybe the occasional whistle (it's quite a busy highway), but the sidewalk is broad and long and plain-ol' designed for dawdlers. I jogged that way and scanned the stadium, a very nice one, and the fields as I went.

The sidewalk and highway then turn into a bridge, which goes to Kentucky. I took it. The Ohio River is really a pretty good facsimile of the Wisconsin, about the same size, if narrower and faster - OK, that sounds dumb. But hear me out: I would say that a roughly equal volume of water goes down both. But the Ohio is narrower and deeper. Is my guess. But since it stormed pretty heavily last night and this morning, today it was a very dirty brown and had a lot of flotsam in it. Some natural, and therefore forgivable, but a lot of it was just garbage. Hey, maybe the rivers that flow through Chicago and Memphis and LaCrosse are just as dirty. What do I know. But this river, and this riverfront, struck me as particularly gone to pot. It's a major city, and it's tried a lot of things - they constructed these two stadia right on the river (and the Reds ballpark, whose name I will no longer utter because it is stupid, incorporates riverboat imagery into its ambience), there are a good number of riverboat restaurants, which seem to be popular, with well-dressed people filtering in as I ran past...There's even a huge levee on the Kentucky side, with a giant steel gate (down when I ran by yesterday) that rises out of the ground in the event of a flood to keep the low neighborhoods on that side dry and safe - yet another piece of evidence that they have tried hard to make this river an attraction. And maybe it is nicer at night, with the lights of the nearby downtown twinkling on its surface as the boats slide past. But during the day, it's pretty grim.

I don't know - It's not THAT grim. But it's not that nice.

Once in Kentucky, I found myself in a hotel district. Cheap, small, perhaps even seedy hotels. I touched a metal grate, just to have had a reason to have come across, and turned back toward Ohio. And I so enjoyed the slow rotation around the stadium and the practice fields, that I touched the guard rail at the intersection that led back to the hotel, and turned around and took one more trip to Kentucky, to make sure that grate was still there.

It was.

I'm really enjoying the way I run here. I don't know how far, and I don't care how fast. I go at a comfortable pace, with my newfound freedom from pain in my feet of my ankles or my knees or any damn thing. I run 'til I'm tired and then I stop, and each time I've stopped, I've been no more than a few blocks from the hotel. I've walked to the hotel both times, showered, and headed out to eat.

Yesterday when I did this, I ate at a little pizza place I found on the way to the stadium. You see, I had run past the stadium earlier, and had noticed that all these baseball fans were beginning to filter in. I asked someone when it started; he said 7:10. I thanked him, jogged / walked to the hotel room, and soon found myself standing and chatting with a young Italian man about the secrets of great pizza as my two slices warmed up in his oven. He told me he'd been living in DC four years ago when Italy beat France in the World Cup final, and that he and all his friends had gone to celebrate...in front of the French Embassy. I laughed long and hard at that.

And then gobbled my two slices as I walked to the ball park, joining an ever-growing throng. I wore my Brewers cap, and thought, Hey! The Brewers and Reds are in the same division! Could it be...?!

Nope. Kansas City Royals. Oh well. I scanned the prices and the sections, and bought myself some damn fine seats, ten rows back behind the Reds dugout. Then I bought a beer, walked to my seat, and settled in.

I had missed the top of the first. I was so close I could see which of the Reds had shaved that morning. Dusty Baker, their manager, came charging out of the dugout to challenge the ump, who'd called a Royals runner safe at first. I saw a home run by the Reds, lustily cheered by all of us; I saw some nifty fielding and a bunt that moved a runner from first to second, and that runner then scored on a single. I sat next to a couple from Indiana who have season tickets; they were there with their son and his girlfriend. She told me they were also Colts season ticket holders; she told me she was gaining weight again because she was trying to quit smoking. She told me the old Riverfront Stadium used to host Reds and Bengals games; she told me about her mixed record of success with Weight Watchers. She told me she'd had a hysterectomy. She told me the stadium was only three or four years old, and that the Reds were currently in first place. I told her I needed to get past her to go buy another beer, because this one I'd just finished had been great.

And I walked to the hotel. I had watched the game through the top of the sixth, and that, my friends, turns out to be all the baseball I can take. I'm really glad I went - I now know a hell of a lot more about Cincinnati, the Reds, and a large woman from Indiana. But the experience wasn't going to get any better if it went on longer.

Tonight after my run, I dashed quickly to the eatery in the convention center and managed to snag a meal before they closed up the buffet line. I sat next to a very nice Spanish teacher from Seattle, who's pregnant and is taking next year off to take care of her baby. We exchanged teaching ideas and travel stories with kids, and stories about trying to raise kids bilingually - her husband is Japanese, and only speaks to her son in that language; she tries to speak to him in Spanish, since they once lived in Mexico for three years, and he is still reasonably fluent. It was a very nice chat.

And then back to the room, where I washed some running clothes in the bathtub, and out the door to find Graeter's and have some dessert. Which led to "I Am Legend". Which is still creeping me out a bit, and the fact that I'm listening to Bon Iver as I write this isn't helping in that regard. I may need to stay up a bit yet.

Work tomorrow at 8:00! Hoping to get another positive post-it note. I hope I can sleep, what with the anticipation and all. Wish me luck!

Hell, who am I kidding. It ain't luck.

Jet-Setter

2010-06-10T17:30:00.001-07:00

That is I. I am sitting at Gate F30 at the Philadelphia International Airport, wearing a Sport Jacket, and tapping away at the keys of a Computer. Everyone walking by is jealous of my obvious status and importance. They gaze at me longingly as they pass and sigh once they've gone by, knowing that now, having had this glimpse of my glory, they'll have to return to their own lives, which will pale in comparison.

Possibly. Although my coolness is probably somewhat reduced by the fact that right now I really, really have to use the bathroom.

Getting to the airport was really very stressful. I had to do a bunch of stuff at school before I could go (I'm not going to be there for the last three days of classes (by the way: I'm done teaching for the year!) or to administer the final exams, so I had to have everything laid out in excruciating detail), which bled over past the end of the school day, and I was almost out of gas, so I had to stop on the way home, and after I grabbed my bags and hit the road, I took the wrong highway in Albany for the airport, and lost probably 20 minutes there, and when I got back on the right track, I remembered that there was construction, and I managed to sniff my way to within very little distance of the airport (I was actually proud of how close I got, quickly, without the benefit of signs indicating the airport, and of the fact that I just plain KNEW I was near it, despite not really knowing the city). It was 5:14 PM, and my flight was at 6:05. All seemed lost!...

But then I safely, though illegally, crossed over to a clothing store, stopped a woman on her way out and asked her how to get to the airport, and she showed me a shortcut. The whole stop took 100 seconds, tops. And the shortcut was made shorter still by my (safely) disobeying two traffic signals. And I still parked in the economy lot, and made it to the gate in time to check my bags and write Janneke an email. I am a Jet Setter indeed. Flouting the traffic law! Urging the shuttle driver on to greater and greater speeds! Sport jacket tails flaring out behind me like the contrails behind an F-16...!

And just wait 'til I arrive in Cincinnati, and there's a guy holding a sign for me. How cool will I be THEN!

'Course, it won't say my name. It will say "AP READER", which I am. I'm going to Cinci to spend a week grading the AP exam. It's a paid gig, which my school has allowed me to do to raise my prestige and skill level as an AP teacher. Never mind that I get great results for my AP students by basically ignoring the test until about a month before they take it. Or that I don't believe in the whole AP racket. I know the test, and I'll be a great grader. And we'll be that much closer to financing our Puerto Rico adventure.

The shape of which is kind of changing on us. The more we think about it, the more we feel like 6th grade is a particularly pivotal year for Q to be missing. There's the 6th-grade musical, there's the year of being the Big Kid in Town before transferring up to the high school building, there's the "Travel" soccer team that he and his pals are probably going to join...So we're thinking that we'll do two serious summers in Puerto Rico, with camps for the kids and lots of interactions with people, for two, three months at a time. And possible return journeys during the year. We want to get them immersed, but a full year away is starting to seem like a lot. Besides, it will be easy-peasy to rent out the house for the summer. Not so much for the year, probably.

T lost her front tooth in school the other day! Oh, yeah - I told you that already. Between that and her bike riding (which, weather permitting, she does every night now), this kid is positively transformed of late. She's independent as heck - something happened the other day at her after-school day care as I was picking her up that I just loved. She's not real big, as you know. And there's another girl there who's probably seven inches taller, though they're in the same grade, and who is a little bratty and pushy. T was showing her a little toy tea pot, which she had just figured out - it has a cup that also serves as a lid. She offered me tea, and when I said yes, she lifted the fup out of its hole and wa-lah!, she was ready to serve. She was excited, and walked over to show this discover to the aforementioned girl. Who started grabbing at the tea pot halfway through T's demonstration. But she didn't get angry, didn't panic, didn't give in, didn't get offended - She just calmly moved the teapot out of her grasp before she could get hold of it, continued with her description and demonstration, and when she was done, the girl said "Cool!" And T calmly, smilingly handed her the teapot and came back over to me. No need to be a victim, or the boss - she just defused the situation and moved on. She is one together little lass.

Man, OK, I reeeeally have to use the bathroom. The Chinese food and two macaroons I had for supper just went right through me, I guess. It's been great, but we jet-setters have a lot on our plates. I'll catch you on the flip side.

(That's jet-set slang for "good bye". Dig?)

Fafuta!

2010-06-09T16:02:00.000-07:00

That's what you call someone, apparently, in that uncivilized backwater where Janneke was raised when THIS happens:

And THIS is what happens when you call someone's mother's native land an uncivilized backwater:

La bici y T

2010-06-01T19:05:00.000-07:00

Behold!

Barefootin'!

2010-06-01T12:21:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to share the news of the weekend. First of all, the weather was phenomenal - Absolutely perfect. No day too hot, or rainy; a gentle breeze blowing for much of the time...Just peachy. We did a lot of yard work (and I don't just mean me - T and Janneke did a ton of weeding, while Q, on Sunday, the heaviest lift of the weekend, was away all day at a sleepover), including a reclamation project on the gravel path between our deck and the back yard. I've never known quite what to do with it - it's under the neighbor's ancient and decrepit pine trees, so trillions of pine needles fall on it yearly, as well as the miniature laves from their locust tree. None of that can be easily raked or swept away, so it gets ground into the gravel, and becomes soil and muck; combined with the soil under the gravel, it makes a perfect home for weeds, which come up vigorously.

One of our first years in the house, I found a solution that was very labor-intensive, but effective. I made a sifter out of some scrap lumber and quarter-inch wire mesh, and shoveled wheelbarrow-full after wheelbarrow-full into it. I shook out the dirt and the leaves, washed the gravel with the hose, and eventually had a lovely gravel path again. After only two days and enough calories of gravel-sifting to feed Paraguay for a month. I decided early on that it was a fool's errand, but continued, not wanting the guy we'd hired to install our flooring in the basement, to whom I had described my plan, to see it fail. In the end, though, he when all was said and done, he just asked me, "Was it worth it?" And I simply turned away and gently wept.

So I'm ashamed to say that my solution this year involved a lot less sacrifice on my part, and a lot more on the earth's part. I took the hose to it without doing any real shoveling. Eventually, I got a pretty good scheme going - my thinking was that the rocks, which, while small, are still rocks, and were unlikely to be blasted very far by a glancing jet of water across their surface. But the leaves, dirt, and pine needles, when hit, would be blasted farther. So if I just strafed the surface with an intense jet of water, starting at the top of the walkway and heading down hill, eventually I would wind up with a mound of crud at the bottom and a barely-disturbed layer of clean rocks above it. It pretty much worked out that way, in the end, and the walkway looks a whole lot better than it did. But the Earth is one swimming pool's worth of water less whole. Can't win, I guess, no matter what I do.

In gravel walkway maintenance, anyway. In other areas, I'm becoming a very consistent winner. Like in running. yesterday, Memorial Day, we celebrated by taking the whole family (after T's baseball game, where she hit well but got thrown out two times out of three) up to the U-10 soccer field and playing in a pickup kids-and-adults soccer game, organized by Magnus, our friend and the girls' U-10 soccer coach. Not too many people showed up, so it wound up just being Janneke and me, Brad, Betsy, a guy named Jeff, and Magnus and his wife Margaret against all our kids and a few extras who jumped in for fun. The field was big for such a small team, and we all played barefoot - the unfortunate part of that being that Janneke got stung by a bee on one toe, and had to leave the game. (Mostly to go home and cook, as most of the players were coming over to our house for a barbecue.) But the fortunate part is this: I sprinted and raced and zoomed around that field like I was 12 years old! I had NO pain, ANYWHERE! Not in my knees. Not in my hips. Not in my feet. NOTHING! My feet are getting to be so strong and healthy now, and my fitness level is so improved from all the running I'm doing, that I was downright playin' some damned soccer, and suffered no ill effects what, so, ever. In FACT! This morning, and all day long, I have had no residual stiffness or soreness in my right foot at all - quite different from most mornings, when I grimace and wince a bit on my way to the bathroom. The right foot, while painless during my runs, has been pretty creaky after a night's sleep. But yesterday, I must have simply blasted it into such supple pliancy that there's just no trace left of an injury.

I am deliriously excited. I might start going to the grass fields to do WIND SPRINTS, I feel so dang good! A lot of my athletic identity has always been pinned to running - I wasn't tall, or skilled, or especially coordinated. But damn it, I was strong, and I could motor. And now that I can motor again, look out! I may even look into trying to play some kind of dang SPORT!

(Though it would have to be barefoot. Whenever I had to stop quickly on the field yesterday, I would do so with a very fast series of stutter-steps, chopping my feet to brake without digging them so deep into the grass that I would slip or lose control. If I had been wearing cleats, I'd have been able to stop in one smooth, quick CHOP!, and would very likely have snapped something in one or both knees. I am becoming a barefoot evangelist - I had a blast, and would love to start playing ultimate frisbee, but I do know this: It would have to be barefoot. I know my limits.)

Those limits, by the by, are getting more limiting as the years go by. The most challenging one this spring is the allergies. Holy Toledo! I have never had as bad a time as this. The reason is pretty obvious - here's the culprit:

That scum on the puddle at the end of our driveway is pollen. Pollen, pollen, everywhere, crawling down my throat. My only real symptom from the pollen is a cough - a persistent, insistent, itching, cloying cough that lets you get aaaaalmost completely asleep before it shakes you awake again. Oddly, the only time of day I don't cough is when I'm running. I go six miles without a single solitary symptom - 'course, when I get back, I spend five minutes in the back yard hacking up lungs until it sounds to the neighbors like they live on Frat Row at 3:00 AM on a Saturday night. But it's worth it - those 50 minutes of bliss are about the only decent breathing I get done these days. Today seems better than yesterday, but that's not saying much.

The barbecue yesterday, by the way, after the pick-up soccer, was wonderful. Very nice bunch of kids, who needed pretty much no adult supervision the whole time. No squabbles, no conflicts, just lots of interaction and play time. A great variety of ages (T, 6, all the way up to Benni, 12), genders, and interests. Q got to spend a fair amount of one-on-one time with Benni, which made him feel very big and important, and T was being fussed over and cuddled and pulled along from one event to another by an unending succession of older, patient girls. And the adult company was wonderful too - a great end to a great weekend.

Though I now have to really buckle down and plan all the classes for which I will be absent this coming week. I leave for Cincinnati on the 10th to correct AP exams, and don't come back until the 18th. So there are a lot of instructions to leave.

I was staying down here to meet up with the fambly at Q's soccer game in Pittsfield, but I just heard it's been canceled. So I'll do another thing or two here, then head home. Take care, brush your hair,

Joe

Smugness

2010-05-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

Hey, folks - I just ran six quick, easy, smooth miles, wearing these:

That's right. Swim shoes. The most basic rubber padding available. Hardly even anything you could really call a lace.

My feet love me right now.

Photographic Hijinks

2010-05-18T18:14:00.001-07:00

OK, so it's feast or famine around here. What else is new. Here's some dang pictures:

T does this with her hat on game days. She takes it off and rubs it in the dirt of the first-to-second baseline. (She usually plays in the outfield, which, when you're six, is right about there.) I'm very curious as to why she might do this - it reminds me of pregnant women who eat great clods of earth, or mumbling homeless people who continually streak their hair from puddles of motor oil. It's sort of ritualistic and compulsive. I mean, look how much she got on there! And this is the amount that survived the ride home in the car, too. God only knows how much she had on there originally.

She did really well yesterday, though - she went three for three, and needed only a grand total of about eight pitches to get her hits. A vast difference between now and when she first began, when she would take 25 pitches and finally, randomly hit it. She's downright plunking them now.

Here's another:

This is Q in the Brandon Jennings jersey I bought him for no good reason, and which he opened in the car on the way home from school today, and which has already brought him much joy.

That's the picture that's in focus because I remembered to use the flash. But in the other one, he looks cooler, or so he tells me. So I'll include that one too:

He's wearing it to school tomorrow. With a T-shirt underneath, though. Never fear.

Here's T on opening day of baseball season, back when she couldn't bat her way out of a paper bag:

And here again, waiting to march in the parade, and apparently having heard Mami say, or seen her do, something scandalous:

Her Grandpa sent her that baseball glove, a year ago, I think. And on opening day, her first game, she took it with her to the port-a-potty, and left it there. We had a hard time locating it for about five minutes. "Oh no!", she squealed. "Grandpa sent that to me special! OH NO...!" These kids' memories astound me.

Here's the whole league, assembled for the opening day ceremonies at Bud Anderson Field.

Which, of course, my kids consistently refer to as "Butt Anderson".

Those apples have fallen pretty nigh, I'd say.

T and Friends

2010-05-18T15:23:00.000-07:00

These are the most utterly genuine and natural smiles you'll ever see.

New Tenants on the Porch

2010-05-15T16:19:00.000-07:00

Checken Sie das aus: A new year, a new species!

Forever Running

2010-05-13T19:07:00.001-07:00

Dude! Where in blue blazes does the time go?! Well, I can actually show you where a lot of it has gone. It's gone here:

That took up a couple of weekends and the evenings during the week. We filmed it in our basement - Brad borrowed the camera and the microphone from Williams, we worked up a script, recorded it, and started filming. I did most of the filming, actually - that was probably the most efficient way to do it. And then the editing of the film. There are things I'd like to improve on it, but now that I have a little experience with stop-motion, the next one will be a lot better. Not necessarily higher-tech - I kind of like the low-tech charm it has. (As my left forearm will tell you.) It was cool to do - a lot of fun, and it made me feel much more legitimately like a board member.

Makes me feel like there are other home movies out there that I've made recently that I could toss up here and regain some goodwill with you, my faithful reader(s...?), but looking at my hard drive where I keep them, it looks like no. Not really. There's one that's more than 10 minutes - though I suppose I could break it up. OK, I'll do that quick:

...though "quick" might be optimistic. This is getting to be one creaky computer. Wish I knew more about them so I could make it not so - the most I ever manage to do is throw out old stuff and clear up space on the hard drive. But that isn't really getting me anywhere anymore - it's to the point where even Youtube videos are all herky-jerky. Probably have to upgrade before too terribly long.

So we filmed a lot of T's baseball parade, which I will get into edited format sometime mid-2019. I've still got films from the summer fair at Cummington from last year to do...All kinds of them. It's a wonder I get anything done at all around here.

(This is where Janneke inserts a one-liner that leaves me sliced from navel to sternum on the floor.)

Big news? Not so much lately. T is playing baseball, although mostly, T is having fun in the dugout. That, I think, is the most attractive aspect of it for her. She's not really much of a hitter yet, and fielding rarely happens - though she did stop a couple of ground balls and throw them toward 2nd base the other day, all in a reasonably facsimile of appropriate hurry. What the heck, she has fun. And she's the youngest kid out there. I heard from another parent at a birthday party the other day that there's a tee-ball league in North Adams, and that a lot of parents schlep over there so the kids won't have this looooong game where 90% of the time the coaches are lobbing rainbow balls to kids who can't hit but every twentieth one. And as a two-inning game currently takes two hours in T's rookie league, I have come to think that perhaps that was the way to go with our six-year-old. But then again, it's over in North Adams, the same place that "organized" the "soccer" "league" that Q played in a few weeks ago. So they probably play in parking lots using burnt-out lightbulbs for balls and passed-out crackheads for bases.

(Ha! Perhaps it won't take so long after all - the video loaded into iMovie, and I'm currently exporting the first half of the "Julius Caesar" video. Shouldn't be long!)

Yeah - Julius Caesar. Phenomenal. I can not say enough about Shakespeare & Company, the outfit that our local elementary school hired to come in and teach the kids the play. Those darn kids did the whole play, and I only recall one kid ever calling for a line. (If you sit through the whole thing once it's up, you'll see it. I don't think there are any legal issues with putting the video up - you really can't see much of anyone's face, and I don't give any names. On the online version. The version I have here, I have rolling credits at the end.) Q was living and breathing Shakespeare by the time that unit ended, and he understood that play inside and out - the motivation of so many of the characters, the simple fact that the real star of the play is not Caesar but Brutus...Excellent work all round. I wrote a letter of thanks to the company, and have it here on the computer, but somehow never got 'round to sending it. And thus is it ever further made clear just how different Janneke and I are. She'd never have let the letter languish like that.

Q's playing spring soccer, as a U-12. He's currently 9, and still has two months before he's 10. But it's good for them to play against the older kids - the game is definitely faster than they're used to, and they're coming to grips with that. Q is still more timid than I would like, but I've really matured as a person and rarely say anything during games. And nothing after. Let his coaches do it.

Been running a lot! I read "Born to Run" (which I highly recommend), which has me re-thinking completely the way I run, and it has been like a miracle. Yesterday I ran between 6 and 8 miles, and today I did another 4.5, and I'll rest tomorrow, then do 2 more days on. It's suddenly feeling like there's no reason on Earth why I couldn't run a marathon. Aaaaall the structural damage that I used to think I had in my feet, knees, ankles, etc. turns out to be a result of the weakening of my joints do to their (a) being encased in shoes that encourage me to run on my heels, and (b) being jostled about and shocked by all that heel-running. It's brilliant: Take your shoes off, and walk. There - you are walking the way your feet are designed to walk. Same with running. At the end of both runs, yesterday and today, I felt like I could have gone five more miles. My friend Bridget - Don the Farmer's wife - read the book, and she just ran a half-marathon where she cut TWENTY MINUTES off the time she had run when she was...Well, ten or eleven years ago. She asked me if I was going to run in the half marathon in Lenox, the town where I teach, at the end of the month. And I said, "Why not?" And I mean it! Why the hell not?

I bought myself some running shoes that I don't think were designed for that - they're called the "Retro", by Champion. They look like this:

...Dang! I can't find a picture of them! OK, I'll take one:

But anyway, yeah, like I was sayin': These shoes seemed like a miracle. Because the book says you should run in thin shoes that don't protect your heel, so that if you do run heel-toe, it will hurt. So you don't. You run up on the balls and edges of your feet, as God intended. All these injuries that people get from running - the plantar fasciitis that I've been struggling with these recent years, shin splints, bad knees, bad hips - all these injuries started happening after the invention of the running shoe by the founder of Nike! It seemed perfectly logical at the time that lots of padding and support would make running safer, but it's exactly the opposite. The padding encourages you to run heel-toe, which jars your knees, and all the "support" encases your feet in a coffin in which they vegetate and become weak and susceptible to injury.

So I knew all this, and then I found myself in Target, in the shoe section, and I saw these shoes. They had only one pair - a men's 8 1/2. Exactly my size. I snapped them up, thinking it must be fate.

It's been a week, and oh my goodness! These shoes are so thin that I can feel every rock in the road (though not so much that it hurts), and my feet! My FEET! They feel tougher by the day, flexible, alive, stimulated by the road and the world. My calves are now made of iron, used to running this way as they are, and I can just go forever. It's a great feeling. Read that book, my friends. It might change your life.

Dude! Here's Part 1 of Julius Caesar, wherein T gets her face painted:

And here's part 2:

And that's plenty to keep you entertained for tonight. It's 11:01 PM, and I have a lot of working to fake tomorrow. So I'll hit the hay. Hasta la pasta...

New Video of Easter Hijinks

2010-04-18T07:18:00.001-07:00

Har she blows!

Several Thousand Words' Worth

2010-04-11T16:33:00.000-07:00

By popular demand: Here is the spiral staircase I built for Skittles, originally to come up to our bed, but now moved to enable her to access T's bed, the foot of which can be seen to the right of the feline elevation apparatus:

And here are T and Q, just after Q's performance in "Julius Caesar", about which I hope to tell you a great deal presently:

And here are T and several of her friends, at her birthday party, held at the North Adams YMCA, about which, again, I hope to tell you many a fine thing:

Off to correct papers! Wish me luck...!

Easter: Death and Resurrection. Of Teeth.

2010-04-07T19:47:00.001-07:00

Hey, man! Long, long time, no see. How to explain it? I don't know - A sort of general evening funk seems to have settled about me like a colossal bank of damp fart. come eight, nine o'clock these days, it seems I'm always about to do something, but mostly spend the time until I go to bed not quite doing anything. Not playing the guitar as much these days, not doing this...I think part of it might be Facebook. Seems I'm always checking in on what the various people I know are doing. And it turns out, 90% of it is not really worth knowing. Shocking, I know: "Most people's lives aren't very different or much more exciting than the one you're living right now." Painful lesson, slowly learned. I may be doing a facebook hiatus soon.

But, regardless the cause, tonight I found myself about to go to bed, having done nothing, nothing at all, since the kids went down, and I thought, "This is unacceptable. I must do a thing. Be that thing insignificant, be it a cosmic nothing, I must do it. Else, I'll have frittered away another night, and so by extension my life."

So I'll herewith get to explaining to you the ways in which I am not frittering away my life. Like this way right here:

That's T, this past Saturday night, having just lost her very first tooth! And that's the glory of digital photography, too: This is probably the fourth or fifth shot I got of her. A couple where she holds up the tooth, a couple where she's just smiling to show me the gap. And then this one, where she did whatever the hell she wanted to, and thank goodness she did. This was the night before Easter, so the Tooth Mouse and the Easter Bunny probably met up and had a smoke as they checked their watches and rubbed at their bleary eyes in the predawn gloaming outside our house.

Easter morning was a hoot - we did the eggs in the back yard this year, which, we thought, would be a departure from previous years. But it must not have been, because T found an egg from at least a year ago. It was pristine - Dirty, yes, but totally uncracked. Brilliantly colored still - it must have been out of the rain and out of the sun. But the inside was a dessicated little ball that rattled around inside the shell with a rubbery sound. I was curious about it and kind of wanted to crack it open and see what it looked like in there, but that somehow never happened. It disappeared into the garbage, I suppose, and was lost to science forever.

Like the raccoon my Dad told me about - he'd hunted it as a younger man with a buddy in the middle of the night, and since they were serious hunters then, bagging many in a night and wanting to take home as little weight as possible, they'd skun it right there in the darkness. (Men were men in those days, by cracky.) And after they'd peeled the hide off, he and his buddy saw that there was something embedded in the muscle of one leg that glowed. It glowed! "What the hell is that?", they said, pondering and peering. The dogs, however, were rapidly disappearing beyond earshot, and they hung the carcass up in a tree and determined to come back and get it during the daylight, bring the specimen in to the glaring beam of modern science, and see just what this queer little metallic body turned out to be. But when they returned, lo!, the carcass had gone, and with it all evidence of their discovery. Just as has now done my mummified egg.

That story may have been altered somewhat in my head over the years. But I'm sure any changes are for the better.

Anyhoo, in other news, Q has been playing a lot of soccer. He had been playing in this North Adams YMCA indoor soccer league for kids 10 and under, but it turned out he was the only kid there with any soccer experience at all. I mean, AT ALL. North Adams isn't quite the bastion of liberal, educated, non-football-type folks that Williamstown is. (And anyone out there who's bristling at the description, please know, as most of you must, that there is a great deal of irony in what I just said. For I am of those great unwashed masses of non-soccer types. Started at RB and CB, ran back kicks and punts, gunned on kickoff and blocked on special teams for the North Crawford Trojans back in the day. Wore #20. Cried as the seconds ticked off my final game as a senior.) So Q just destroyed all opposition there. He enjoyed it, don't get me wrong - he actually played a lot harder in this league than I usually see him play in the tougher fall 5-on-5 league. But it really wasn't worth doing - Nobody even brought a whistle to the games. The "coaches" were local parents who volunteered to run teams - there were only three - and bless 'em for doing it, but not a man-jack of them knew the first thing about soccer. It was also a little depressing - North Adams is a pretty down-on-its-luck town, and there were a lot of chain-smoking, gap-toothed grandmas barely keeping tabs on multiple toddlers as they tottered out into the field of play, sucking away on a sippy cup filled with Pepsi, to be ushered back out of the danger zone by players or other parents, myself among them...Coaches who come out to lead the youth in athletic development but can't be bothered to change out of their pajamas and are wearing shower flip-flops...It's ironic and hip to dress that way when you're 20 and going to college, I guess, but when you're 40? And are in some kind of position of leadership...? Time to put the pants on, Chewbacca.

So that was the league where Q would pound five goals and then sit back. But now we've stopped going to that because the Greylock soccer team is putting on a series of clinics on Saturday mornings. 9:00 to 10:30 is U-10s, and 10:30 to noon is U-12s. But Q and a bunch of his friends were invited to participate in the U-12 scrimmages as well, since the U-12 numbers weren't strong. So he gets 3 solid hours of soccer in on Saturdays, ending at noon, and the YMCA thing starts at noon. So he just stopped going to that. And y'know what? The YMCA thing cost more. Bizarre. Somehow I feel guilty about it - the way Q was so obviously the best player there, merely by knowing anything at all about the game, and then just stopped going. There would be 40 people in the gym each week, and you just know that by now, 2 weeks in, they're at least wondering where he went. And possibly arriving at all kinds of conclusions. Some generous, some not. "I bet he thinks he's better that us," I imagine them grumbling through cigarette smoke and Pepsi. "Bet they think it's not even worth coming to our dumpy little town."

Well, on the second one, at least...yeah. Kinda.

Spring soccer has started for Q now too - the official, practice-twice-a-week-and-games-on-Saturdays league, with uniforms and everything. And he and his entire cadre of skilled pals is going to be playing up at the U-12 level, owing again to the paucity of older players. Had their first practice Tuesday, another tomorrow.

T, meanwhile, due to our negligence and sexism, was not signed up for T-ball. But all is not lost, because it ocurred to Janneke that we should ask her if she wants to play, and she enthusiastically said that she does. So she's signed up! Turns out you have to be 6 to play - and guess what? Somebody turned 6.

TODAY!

WAHAA!!! Happy birthday, Peanut! I have her on film reading her birthday cards form far-flung friends and family. Don't believe me? Don't think she can pull it off? Well, wait right there, mister guy. I'll just upload them. There - Once they're uploaded, I'll quick make a film, which I'll quick upload to Youtube, and then we'll see who's laughing. Think I won't? There - Uploading now. You just wait, missy.

And T has become very interested in a sport that is bound to end in ruin. That's right: Horses. Now, some of you will recall the glee I felt when Q took it up, and might well ask yourselves, "Why isn't he as thrilled with T wanting to do the same thing?" And it's a legitimate question. On the one hand, I am thrilled - I love that she's into something that I myself was very interested in as a lad. I love that she and I are going to be able to bond over this noble pastime, with its intrinsic connection to and affinity for an animal that, whenever Q asks me to name my favorite species, I simply cannot avoid ranking as #1. And there is indeed a reason why I express trepidation with T, where I didn't with Q. The reasons are simply these:

1) T is a girl. And:
2) She is more focused and tougher than Q was at this age. Therefore:
3) She is going to stick with this. Ergo:
4) It is going to cost us.

Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and it's all going to be money well spent. And it won't necessarily be completely over the top cost-wise - In fact, the first couple of installments will have been free: Ronadh took T up for her first lesson (video forthcoming), and has offered to take her up again, just the two of them, on Sunday morning. Those two definitely have deep, deep crushes on one another - tonight T and I were out taking a bike ride on the Burley Picolo, and she insisted on stopping over to say hello. Which is when the invitation to take her out Sunday was first proffered.

(Videos are about 70% uploaded now, smartass. Get ready to eat some crow.)

In other animal news, Skittles' spiral staircase, with which she had been able to climb up onto our bed, has been moved to the side of T's bed. We had kind of had enough of her climbing up at all hours of the night and waking us up by walking across our faces. Let the kids deal with that - they'd be thrilled. And shortly after realizing that it worked to get her up to T's bed, Skittles realized that she didn't even need a ladder to get up to Q's bed. So between the two of them, Skittles doesn't miss our bed at all, and all three are happier. I have begun to suspect that Skittles was making me allergic, but I'm less convinced of that now. The allergic reactions are fading, as whatever came out in the spring air must also be petering out. Perhaps it isn't the cat after all. A big relief, because burying my nose in that fur has become my daily ritual upon arriving home or climbing out of bed. She's just the best damn cat ever.

(Videos transferring to iMovie. Get ready to be humiliated, Doubting Thomases.)

Been saving money hand over fist in anticipation of going abroad in a year and a half or so. Still not sure where, or exactly how - essentially, at this point, we'd take a Fulbright Teacher Exchange appointment to anywhere on our list of Countries We're Interested In Living In For A Year (Uruguay, Chile, Spain, Ecuador). But last year, the only country on the list at all was Mexico. So if that's still the case, we'd just up and go to the number one destination on our little hit parade: Uruguay. And if I can scratch some kind of living together while there, fantastic. If not, I'll find a guitar teacher and improve myself as a human being. And keep the house really, really clean.

A big part of us is still veeeery attracted by the idea of going to Puerto Rico again, this time for longer. Love, love, loved that place. But if we're really going to go away, we feel like we should make it a place that's downright completely foreign. Have the kids go on a truly grand adventure, become truly native in the language. And it'd be fun to explore somewhere new. Have I told you this before...?

(Videos still transferring to iMovie. This is going to take longer than I thought. But you're still not starving me out. Forget it. I'm in this til the bitter end. Never mind that I'll have to do rudimentary editing, then sharing of the file, then uploading it, then linking to it. It's worth it. Your eventual debasement is worth it. My inevitable victory will be the light at the end of the tunnel that will see me through...Probably.)

Here:

...Damn. That might not have been worth it...Ah well. We'll know soon enough. Off to bed.

Literature

2010-03-22T18:48:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: T's first full-length book.

The complete text:

MY NAChRE BOOC

P. 1:

YOU HAVE TO BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

P.2:

NAChRE HAS CHRES

CHRES IS WAR ANUMOOLS LIV

P. 3:

THAT'S WIE YOU HAF TO BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

P. 4:

SOO BEE GOOD WITH NAChRE SOO PLEES BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

P. 5:

NAChRE IS PORT UV NAChRE MEENS THAT YOU HAF TO BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

P. 6:

NAChRE IS OL A BAWT HOOSIS UV ANUMLS SOO PLEES BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

P.7:

NACHRE IS ABOUT GROI THIS AND THATS WI I RILE WONT YOU TO BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

P. 8: PLEES BE GOOD WITH NAChRE SOO BE GOOG WITH NAChRE

P. 9:

NAChRE IS WUT WE STEP ON NAChRE SOO B GOOD WITH NACRE

P. 10:

(No words)

P. 11:

RILEY WUS FAREE GOOD WITH NAChRE DIE HOLDI A GRAS HOPR

LILY WUS FAREE NIS PI MOOFI NAChRE TO SUMWAR SAFE IS INT THAT OSUM

P. 12:

HASEL WUSINT HUTIN NAChRE ATOL GO HSEL GO

p. 13:

HAEV YOU BEN GOOD WITH NAChRE LETS SEE

NAChR IS OSUM THTS WIE I RILEE WONT YOU TO BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

P. 14:

DOOT YOU THINGC THAT NAChRE IS OSUM

DOOT YOU DOOT YOU

DOOT YOU THING NAChRE IS OSUM

NAChRE DUSINT CUM FRUM A STOOR

NAChRE NAChRE NAChRE

P. 15:

NAChRE IS GOOD YOU RILEE HAF TO B GOOD WITH NAChRE

DOOT YOU THINGC THAT NAChRE IS OSUM

DOOT YOU DOOT YOU DOOT THINGC TAT HAChRE IS OSUM

P. 16:

DOOT YOU PLEES BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

SOO SOO SOO

DOO YOU LIKE NACRE?

THIS IS RINET YOU RILEE HAC TO BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

P. 17:

NAChRE NAChRE NAChRE THATS WI YOU NED TO LIV YOU NEED TO BE GD WITH NAChRE NAChRE NAChRE NAChRE IS OSUM

P. 18:

(Blank)

P. 19:

FEREE TEL THIS TO OL YOR FENS

PLEES DO IF YOU DO I AM FIREE HAPPY

IF YOU DOT WEL I AM NOT MAD

BUT I STIL WONT TELUM THAT

P. 20:

THAC YOU FOR LISNING TO WUT IV SE

BU I STIL WONT YOU TO BE GOOD WITH NAChRE

THAC YOU THAC YOU THAC YOU THAC YOU

I HOOP YOU LISIN TO ME SUMOOR

I DOOT NUNDE IF YOU DOO

BUT PLEES CUM BAC AGEN

P. 21:

GOOD JOB OSUM JOB

COOL PLES PLES CUM BAC UGEN ITS FARE NINOS TAT YOU CAM TO FIIT

BIBIE GOOD GOOD GOOD JOB

TAC YOU FR CUMING TO RED WITH ME

Secret Places Right Next Door

2010-02-27T18:01:00.000-08:00

Hey, man - Long time, no bla bla bla. All that jazz.

My most recent adventures can be read about at the blog I kept for our trip to Ecuador over the February break. It's at lmmhsecuadortrip2010.blogspot.com, if you're interested. And if you're not. It's still there.

We had a great trip, but it was exhausting. I ate breakfast twice the whole time. I was always charging around, doing something, getting something set up or paid for...Or asleep. That's how I rolled on that trip. 21 kids, too - Too many, I think. It becomes such a production. I want to limit it in future, but then I sit and try to think of the kids out of this group that I would have eliminated. There are a couple, sure, but not that many. Part of me wants to limit it to 10, just because that's a nice round number. But that seems small - so I think about 15, but then that's hardly any different from 21. Who knows. It's a lot to try to figure out in one night.

Q is off on a sleepover at his friend Chris' house. Chris' birthday party, it is, so he, T and I all trooped over to Wal-Mart to get Chris a present this morning. Not that we wanted to go to Wal-mart, but Q knew he wanted to get Chris a nerf gun, and the cool, independent toy store we like to patronize in North Adams (Persnickety Toys) doesn't carry deadly weapons, or plastic simulacra thereof. So we knew we had to go to the Death Star. Might as well get it over with.

That was one of our adventures this morning - another was pancakes. I'm getting pretty consistent about hauling my kiester out of bed to go make the damn weekend pancakes. I experimented this weekend a bit and used a touch less milk (the recipe says they will be fluffier that way). But they wound up very dense and high - the batter was barely liquid. The kids didn't notice anything anyway. But what do they know - they prefer Aunt Jemima's to the local Vermont syrup we get here. Those kids are Philistines.

I just saw some syrup being boiled up this afternoon, actually - dropped over to my friend Mark's house to drop off a soccer jersey I bought for his son Owen, Q's friend, in Ecuador. He has ten sugar maples tapped, and he was getting a head start on boiling the sap down. Owen and Ronadh were out doing a science adventure outing in Springfield, so Mark had taken the chance to stand outside on the deck in the bracing spring air in his red flannel, six-foot-two and bearded and slim and manly, getting a head start on the syrup making. The whole incident made me feel inferior on many levels, so I scurried home to mutter to myself miserably. After only one beer and most of a bowl of popcorn.

But I was made to feel better this evening by an outing we had not seen coming at all. My colleague Stephanie Sears, who, along with her husband Russ, whom I'd never met before, had accompanied me on the trip to Ecuador, had invited us up to the Mount Greylock Ski Club, right here in Williamstown, for their monthly Moonlight Ski. As cool as their website makes it sound, it's cooler than that. Membership is a pittance, the skiing (so they tell me) is great, and it's the friendliest, warmest bunch of local folks I think I've ever met. All very woolen and hearty and down-to-earth, in a shed of a ski lodge that absolutely screams "family" and "acceptance" and "community". I met most of Russ' extended family (they're from Dalton and have been members forever), enjoyed a potluck supper, listened in to some guitar pickin' (Stephanie had encouraged me to bring my guitar, and I had brought it, but I just couldn't bring myself to jump in somehow), and otherwise had a grand time. Sampled local homewade wines, sat around the woodstove...They never fired up the rope tow (they have a rope tow!) while we were there, but next year, I pretty much plan on becoming a member. I got a great feeling from the place. Jiminy Peak is great, for skiing, but everything around the skiing is flat (emotionally) and impersonal. Here, the skiing might be phenomenal for all I know. Doesn't really matter. Because when they cracked out the fireworks that Russ had driven to New Hampshire to buy that afternoon, and T stood under the moonlight with a girl she'd just met and giggled and cackled at the spectacle as the steam rose from her upturned face, there was nowhere else on Earth I wanted to be. Just a fantastic little outing. Big thanks to Russ and Stephanie!

Q, apparently, has entered pre-adolescence with a vengeance. Janneke tells me that he was quite the hellion while I was away, and that she has taken on an attitude of being as patient and accepting as she can. Its sudden onset seems to have convinced her that it's simply hormonal and inevitable, and that the best thing will be to stand clear and keep you hands and feet well away from his moving parts. I, naturally, being an evil person, have considered the possibility that this will enable him to be a more aggressive player on the soccer field in the spring. See? There's just no hope for me.

Q's championship game for his basketball league has been postponed more times than you can imagine. We had a snow day Wednesday, for a storm that started Tuesday night, and they called it off again. But I had been at practice on Monday, for about half of it - I had planned to spend the hour he would be in practice delivering the presents to Brad and Betsy's kids, and also to Owen. But Owen hadn't been home (hence today's dispiriting visit to Mark the Hale and Hearty), and I'd had time to kill, so I'd gone back and watched some of Q's practice. Something I ordinarily wouldn't have done.

The cool thing was that they were practicing in a combined practice with an older team from Lanesborough. The guys who coached the Lanesborough kids were big, tall guys, around 40, who looked to be former ball players themselves. And when they broke out into teams and began scrimmaging, Q wound up clearing out to the corner and firing up a long, arcing jumpshot. It rimmed out, but it had looked very pretty before doing so.

The other team recovered, and Q went back on D. He stood near the top of the key, and read a pass that two of the bigger kids wanted to make. He stepped in quickly and poked the ball downcourt, and followed it with his trademark speed. He collected it and got a couple of dribbles in before laying it up perfectly and in, over the attempted block of one of the bigger kids. And then he trotted back down the court.

One of the Lanesborough coaches, arms crossed against his chest, turned to Q's coach and mouthed, "What's his name?"

The coach told him.

He repeated it, then nodded gravely.

Nice.

A little later on, Q wound up all alone, too far to shoot, with no one to pass to. But he hadn't picked up his dribble - he hadn't dribbled at all. I laughed to myself and said "C'mon, Q, dribble!" Not loudly - just a sort of commentary. The coach was sitting just below me and turned to say, "That's his gift, too: dribbling. He's a very good ball handler."

Har-dee-har!

OK, Janneke's out of the shower, and we're thinking of trying to watch a movie. So, as you were. I'll write more when I'm damn good and ready.

Aging Gracefully

2010-01-31T18:43:00.000-08:00

Powder Hounds!

Hmm...Not much of a greeting. It's the name of the restaurant up at Jiminy Peak, but it doesn't really work as the lead-in here. Let's see - Janneke, c'mere a minute. Can you us your particular genius to warp this into something I can use at the outset?

"Let's see," she replies. "First, I'll have to go several days without thinking of it. Then, I'll have to try to call it up from memory on the fly, sticking the particularly-shaped stick that is my vague notion of the place into the vat of information that makes up my mind, stirring it about, then drawing it out again and see what's gotten tangled in its branches. So let me go off on a conference. Call me long-about Day 3 and ask me about the restaurant."

Done. Ready?

"Yep. Here goes:

"'The Pound Dog'. Is that good?"

Not really, sweetie. Try again.

"Hmm...'The Quarter Hounder'?"

Nope.

"'Hounderbout'?"

'Fraid not.

"The 'Howdy, Pardner'?"

Bingo. Thanks, sweetie.

(Ahem.)

Howdy, pardner!

Big weekend at the Johnstadt household. Friday night, Q had a basketball game, which we all attended. The rubber match between the two Williamstown teams that make up half this little four-team league. Q, on the one hand, had a fabulous game, with lots of people coming up to him to commend him for his ball-handling skills. Twice, independently, friends remarked about how Q was the only one out there who seemed unafraid to use his off-hand. (I was going to say "his left hand", but Alex is left-handed.) He drove the lane just about whenever he wanted - he would stay at the top of the key and start one way, then the other, and when the defender over-committed, zing!, in he would dart to lay it up.

Note I did not say "in". He finished the night with no points, and his team lost for the first time this year.

He wasn't the only one. A few kids on his side were off - by the time the first team (which plays exactly half the game, always, regardless the situation, because Q's coach so totally rocks) left the floor halfway through the first quarter, they were down 10-0. And by the time the second team walked off at the end of the first, it was 15-0. Everybody was getting to the hoop, but nobody was scoring. Weird.

So Saturday afternoon, long about 1:00, when the kids were going a bit stir crazy in the house, I offered to take them to the gym, where they could run off some steam.

And practice some lay-ups.

The one-street "downtown" of Williamstown was jammed with cars, though, and I started to worry about whether we'd be able to get to a gym. Very often in these little college towns, they will have these orgies of athletics, where suddenly every varsity team from some college or other piles aboard buses and invades the burg, and there are seven different varsity sports being contested at the same time all over campus. Chartered buses were parked near the skating rink...It didn't look good. But we went in anyway, with our sneakers and balls in our big-ol' Target bag, and walked to Lasell Gym, the one where you can usually get a backboard.

Full. Two wrestling mats and several varsity teams. Crumbs.

Off the three of us trundled, through the little skyway that passes through the squash courts. Which were teeming with people who were intently watching a match below, clapping vigorously and re-crossing their legs.

(And by the way: Squash fans and players, in this very small sample I've observed, are the WASP-iest of the WASPy folk you ever see at this WASP-y college. They just all seemed to be particularly...what, I don't know - Thin, reserved, lanky, well-to-do, straight-haired; slightly and tastefully overpriveleged (bringing their dog (an impeccably groomed black Labrador) indoors, for example, to watch the match, with no fear of being asked to leave it outside), covered in J-Crew Catalogue-looking clothes that are actually of some make that I'm far too Midwestern to even know about...Whale belts, say. I didn't think to look, but I'd bet money there was more than one whale belt in there. (Which you can read about in a quick and informative article here.) It was actually a little creepy. I hustled my genetic-grab-bag, Midwestern-inflected children through and continued toward the main gym.)

So on we trundled - toward the pool, whence we could see lots of people going in and out of the observation deck. Swim meet fever. Hoo-boy...We sighed as we walked toward the pool, knowing that this same skyway also looks down into Chandler Gym, where we fully expected to see a basketball game.

Nope. Absolutely empty.

Two minutes later we were charging around in there like there was no tomorrow - T with her big blue Dodgeball-style ball, and Q with his basketball, probably overinflated. (I had just pulled it out of the athletic bin on the deck, and it's about 5 degrees out. So I had pumped it up, maybe a bit too much.)

Q shot around a while, with no direction, but then I told him I thought he was putting it up too late on layups. I challenged him to stop dribbling no later than the line demarcating the outermost edge of the second "stall" where players stand while waiting for a free throw to be shot. At first, he thought it was impossible - but then I worded it differently. "You've still got two steps. Stop dribbling before here, and take your two steps starting here." He tried it - and laughed out loud at how easy it suddenly was to make a lay-up.

Then he asked me to play him one-on-one.

I made him do ten such layups first.

And then T and I did some bounce passes and catching with her ball; then I used my watch to time them as they sprinted across the gym floor. And then we went to Brad and Betsy's.

Needed to borrow some Blu-Ray discs, you see, because I just bought a Blu-Ray player, and it appears to be a piece of crap. Won't play any Blu-Ray discs at all - not only the ones that were just released, either, which was the half-arsed excuse the woman on the phone gave me when she talked me through to the point where it became clear that, yes, I did so have the latest version of the software ("firmware", they call it) loaded onto the damn thing. Be sending that back soon.

Saturday night, Q went to a birthday sleepover, and T and Janneke and I went out to have dinner at the home of Don and Bridget, proprietors of Caretaker Farm. They just got back from 2 months in Chile, and we wanted to pick their brain about how it had gone. Although it turned into us telling them about our hopes and plans for our own year abroad. Which is a testament to their coolness - they are so interested in others, and so good at making you feel at home, that you wind up talking about yourself a lot. Or maybe I'm just a self-centered jerk.

"'Maybe'?"

That'll do, Janneke.

Back to the ranch, where Janneke and I watched Michael Clayton. Two big thumbs up. Very enjoyable film, and all the more evidence that the rhythm and lifestyle we've found for ourselves is really very well suited to the people we are. I want nothing to do with the sort of life they depict there...You just have to see it. George Clooney is the best - The guy has everything, but you just can't dislike him. He is so, good at what he does. Fabulous picture.

Snoozed, we did, until 7:30 or so, when T's antics woke us. Grabbed her and dragged her to our bed for some Sunday-mornin' hijinks, and then I went downstairs to run on the treadmill. It's cold out - I'm not going out there unless I have to. (Because I, as my friends in fourth grade would have told you, am a sissy. Only they wouldn't have said "sissy", because I was in fourth grade in 1979, not 1959.)

(Which absolutely freaks me out: When I was in fourth grade, it had only been twenty years since the days of Edsels and greased hair and drag races and sock-hops. Only twenty years! Do you know what I was doing twenty years ago? I was 21 years old! I was in college! Half of you were there! (Assuming someone other than my mother-in-law is reading this. Hi, Monique!) My God...! Tell me the existential gap between 1959 and 1979 isn't five times larger than the one between 2010 and 1990. I dare you.)

Anyway, I went to pick Q up from his playdate around 10:00, but the hosts invited him to continue the day on the ski slopes. Which would mean that T wouldn't go - so I had to take her up, just to make things even. Woe is me.

And despite it only being 18 degrees or so, it really wasn't bad at all. The wind was very slight, and the sun was bright. T and I got in three good runs, then met up with Q and his pals and collected him to take him home.

Where we had time to shower and change before heading out to Coyote Flaco for my birthday dinner. It was super - the kids had made me a card, Janneke had made me a cake...Fantastic. Simple, warm, heartfelt, joyful well-wishes from the three most important people on Earth. (Well, three of the four. Let's not forget about Mr. Clooney quite so soon.) I am a lucky man.

Couple of series of the Pro Bowl (Q wanted to watch it - I tried to talk him out of it, but if the argument was tennis, it was a straight-sets ass-whuppin'. "But, Q," I said, "it isn't much of a game. It's just an exhibition. Nobody really cares, and they don't play hard. Besides, everybody who's in the Superbowl isn't playing." "I know, but I've never seen it. Not once in my life." Game, set, match.), and then to bed. For the kids, anyway. Janneke then sat down to watch Masterpiece Theater (has there ever been one in which there is not a dance scene, filled with meaningful glances as men in high-waisted pants strut like roosters beside a marriageable teenager...?), and I donned my cape and mask and high boots for a night patrolling the skies.

Whoops - not supposed to say that out loud. You didn't hear it from me.

BANZAI!

Hoopin' it up

2010-01-23T10:56:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest from Q's athletic career:

Yllacigolonorhc Sdrawkcab!

2010-01-17T21:02:00.000-08:00

Backwards go, shall we?

Got home around 8:45, and the kids settled in to do some drawing and have some dessert. In front of the budding fire in the stove, drawing afterward at the coffee table, Q reprising the style - forceful, graceful, stark, but soft and subtle - of the drawing he'd done earlier in the day for his homework, T drawing plants and animals and showing me in narrative form just how one goes about making bubble letters. And it struck me that bubble letters might be a very gendered thing - I know relatively few guys who can do them well, but almost no women who can't. And here's T doing them like a pro at 5. Off to bed just thereafter, whereinto they tumbled gratefully.

Because they had been falling asleep in the big booth where we had dinner, at the '6 House out on route 7. Pub fare - the kids had spaghetti and meatballs and grilled cheese, respectively in reverse order of birth. Good place, fine food, great service, nice, roomy yet cozy atmosphere. There's a shelf midway across the big dining area with magazines on it; the kids got squirrelly right before the food came, so we collected two National Geographics and had the kids find their favorite pictures in them. T's was from 1978.

When I was 9 years old, just like Q. But when I was 9, I couldn't ski. Q sure can. We had just come from Jiminy Peak, where we had taken advantage of our passes - which are no good on holiday weekends...until after 3:00. So we shot up there around 2:30, and by 3:30 we were zishing and zhushing down the mountainside. T goes pretty damn fast now, such that whoever pairs up with her for the descent is no longer relegated to smiling and oohing and cheering through a loooong descent. She boogies to the bottom now, with no rest. But Q! On one of the runs he and I went down...oh, I can't remember the name of the run. But it was the two of us, and we zoomed down that thing, sliding up the edges of the run and catching air, as I believe the teenagers call it, off the moguls, and for the first time since we took up this crazy suicidal hobby I found myself whooping out loud for joy. We high-fived at the bottom and caught our breath. What a hoot! We did a total of five runs, with a break after the second one for hot tea (Janneke), cold tea (me), and chocolate milk (James Garfield and Martin Luther King).

Whose day it is tomorrow, and of whom Q spent part of the early afternoon drawing a portrait for his poster. It's the same one he reprised later in the evening. I cut out a thirteen-by-ten bit of graph paper and framed a photo from a book and blew the scale up so that Q is able to transfer it pretty faithfully. It took some grumbling and tears on Q's part, and some teeth-grinding on mine, but we managed to establish a good working relationship where I give him pointers and show him how to see the drawing. It can really come out great when it all comes together. Behold:

But come together it did not for me at lunch. I was just not hungry, so I sat with the other three as they munched and worked on the fire, which was sputtering for some reason. Didn't get the driest of firewood this year again - our firewood guy is about a fifty-fifty prospect in terms of quality wood.

And the reason I was not hungry is that I had made pancakes and bacon for breakfast, at the request of the kids. The bacon was from Caretaker Farm - whereto I recently heard that our friends Don and Bridget, proprietors, have returned from two months in Chile. We'll have to pick their brains. They're going to be invaluable, advice-wise, for our own junket abroad, tentatively set for 2012-2013. I feel confident about their advice - they sure raise fine bacon, anyway. That must be said.

It was a late breakfast - I didn't roll out until after 8:00, and neither did Janneke. Which, if you know Janneke, you probably don't believe. But it's true: we were wiped. Because the night before, we had had a very wonderful, long, warm evening with our friends Brad and Betsy, whom we hadn't seen since before Christmas. We got completely full on both wine and cheese, since we had cheese fondue for dinner. (The grown-ups, not the kids - they all tried it, and to a man were unimpressed. Which is why they got french fries and Quorn nuggets.) We discussed the past and made big plans for the future (involving Christmas in Puerto Rico and Janneke learning to play the drums and Betsy, the bass, forming the rhythm section for the band Brad wants to start, where he and I will share frontman duties - my humble name suggestion: "Püp von Dü"), and didn't say goodnight until damn near midnight. By the time the smoke had cleared and it was time to clear away the evening's detritus, we had pretty much ruined four bottles of wine and at least one beer. No head trouble this morning for me, though, because I remembered the most valuable lesson I ever picked up in my years at University: Drink at least three full, large glasses of water before going to bed. I practically cartwheeled into the kitchen this morning to take care of my fatherly pancake duties- no hangovers for me.

Though had I actually tried to literally cartwheel, I'd have collapsed into (and, given the sheer volume of cheese fondue still working its way through me, quite probably through) the drywall in the hallway, because my back was a complete mess. The previous afternoon, you see, Q and I had wheeled thirteen wheelbarrows (well, actually, one wheelbarrow thirteen times) of firewood into the garage. It was one of the most pleasant little whiles I recall with Q over the last few months - we talked politics, aging, global warming, and Martha Coakley. But pushing that wheelbarrow through slippery snow and up a slight rise while it was heaped high with firewood must have called upon my back to contort in some pretty extreme ways, because even now I'm a little hunched and gingerly.

Which probably means I should get to bed. MLK day tomorrow - gotta be at my best to make sure that poster gets finished. (By the way, for a good long time there, Spellcheck knew that "Sdrawkcab" was up to no good. But it deemed "Yllacigolonorhc" to be perfectly acceptable. Must have stunned it into silence.)

Mirror Images

2010-01-14T17:50:00.000-08:00

Fascinating dinner conversation. I'll condense it into a monologue by T. This is a pretty accurate rough translation:

"I keep thinking things that I don't want to think. Like, if I touch my right cheek with my right hand, I feel like the left cheek is going to be sad because it didn't get touched. Then I think my left hand is going to be sad because it didn't get to touch anything, so now I have to do it again with my left hand. I don't want to think these things because it just makes me tired because I keep touching and touching and touching. I'm trying not to think like that, but I just keep doing it. Sometimes when I feel like there are strings on my left hand that are making me want to move it, I pretend there's a knife in my right hand and I cut the strings, but then I think, Oh, no, the knife wasn't sharp enough, I have to cut it again. And I cut it again and again and again...Ugh!"

Wow. I remember very specifically how I was similarly limited as a kid. Only with me it was with left and right feet - I had this obsession with always keeping an even number of steps on each foot, equal time spent leaning on each foot; always start the stairs with the right foot - that's the odd-number-steps foot - and end on the even-number foot at the top, even if that means you have to take a stutter step on the landing or skip a step at the end. And the extra pressure on that foot caused by leaping over a step could be offset by quickly swinging the other leg around and bending the knee of the left leg so that you wind up in a forward-lurching, but still upright, crouch at the top step. It was an acrobatic move that I tried, probably unsuccessfully, to make look as natural as could be. I knew exactly how many stairs there were in every set of stairs I commonly had to go up and down - our schools, our church, the store, the house, Snapping fingers - snapping on one hand meant I had to snap the other too.

It's like I was watching myself at the age of five - only this five-year-old felt perfectly comfortable bringing it up as a topic of conversation, expressing her frustrations, certain that we would not only listen, but offer suggestions or sympathy. That, I don't remember as a kid. I actually suspected I was slowly going crazy, but couldn't talk to anyone about it. Not that I had specific fears of how anyone would react - it just did not occur to me that anyone would care about my inner life. I knew, somehow, bone-deep, that speaking of such things was taboo, that I would be annoying people by bringing it up - not to mention cluing them in on what would surely be seen only as yet another sign, another confirmation, of my weirdness. So I never told anyone.

Of course, my vast experience in this area did not mean that I had a whole lot of advice for her. I was just making it up on the spot. What I said was that if she didn't want to feel that way, she could say to herself, when she felt compelled to do something, "I'm going to do JUST the opposite. I'm going to rub that right hand all the more into the right side of my cheek, just to show the world, and myself, that it doesn't affect anything at all." We all want the world to be just so, I said, orderly and neat. And it isn't. Sometimes our minds want us to feel that things are all neat and predictable, because things would be easier that way. But you can still be comfortable in all the discomfort of the world. Loose and jangly and off is a nice way for things to be, once you get used to the idea that they're supposed to be that way. If you learn that things aren't always perfect, but are still very, very nice, maybe your mind will calm down and stop wanting it ALL to be even."

I don't think she was fully listening to all of that, because she just said "Yeah" at the end and changed the subject. But I hope at least she felt that she had been listened to.

Hoo-boy

2010-01-07T18:22:00.001-08:00

Happy new year.

Man oh man, what a long time it's been! Seems like every post I write here lately is an apology for the lack of posts. Might as well try to figure out just why that may be happening.

Mostly, I think, it's to do with having taken up the guitar more lately. If I have a half hour to spend these days, that's how I've been doing it. I had been taking lessons, down in Lenox, once a week; but what with the saving we've been trying to do - both for a possible year abroad, and against the possibility that some of my students going to Ecuador in February might need some financial assistance - $40 a week started seeming like a lot. And so I decided to try to do half an hour a day on my own, and improve that way. It's been working out pretty well, all told - though I didn't bring the guitar along to Wisconsin.

Which is where I was until pretty recently. On December 23rd, the four of us drove to Albany and jumped aboard the Amtrak train to Chicago. Huge, huge fun it was - I absolutely love sleeping in a train. And so do the kids. We had two double sleepers, right across the little hallway from one another, and a wee one took the top bunk in each. Dinner on board, breakfast on board, off the train in Chicago by 10:00 AM the 24th. If I can recommend anything to anybody, it's not to check bags. They took a dang coon's age for some reason to come off the train on the way west. Coming back east, they were off almost immediately - although we were not. More on that later. (Maybe.)

Christmas at the Johnsons - first time the entire tribe on that side of the Johnstadts has been together since Mom's funeral. And nobody took a picture! We weren't all there for too terribly long - Jim and Sarah brought Liam and Finley over on Christmas day, and so we had probably eight or ten hours of wholeness. Shoot, we didn't even line up all the cousins for some snappin'. I don't know what we were thinking...But it was nice. Jess and Stephanie left a day or so later, and then on the 27th, Janneke had to fly to Philadelphia for a conference. And that was mostly that for the big reunion.

I drove Janneke to the airport in Madison, and she tried like crazy to get me to dump her in the drop-off lane and bail, preferably while peeling out. But I insisted. What if something goes wrong, I said? What if a flight gets canceled and you have to stay overnight? At least I'll be here to drive you to the hotel. Finally, with much eye-rolling and gesticulating, she acquiesced, although the entire walk from the parking garage to the terminal, she stared holes through me and flipped me an erect, insistent bird, occasionally changing hands as fatigue would set in. I cowered inwardly and tried to resist the temptation to reach up and wipe away my hot tears. Didn't want to give her the satisfaction.

Turns out, I was right to have worried: Janneke's flight from Madison to Milwaukee was a go, but the flight from Milwaukee to Philadelphia was canceled. The only way for her to get to Philly that night was if somehow she could get to Chicago in the next five hours.

We drove to Chicago. Janneke said nothing the entire time. Unless you count a three-hour-long double bird as speech.

Portions of the above may have actually happened differently - I don't recall. But it was really a fun adventure, the two of us in the car for so long. We had dinner together in the airport, and then I turned on my heel and hit the road for the five-hour drive back to Gays Mills. The kids were with Auntie Jayne and Grandpa the whole time, and Auntie Jayne was brave enough even to bathe them. No mean feat - those kids get madder than polecats when they're wet. But she held up admirably.

Saw "Avatar" out there with Auntie Jayne and Q; Janneke saw "The Princess and the Frog" with T, Auntie Stephanie, and Jack. Guess which of us won the coin toss.

That actually might be kind of hard to do.

Back on the train - the way East is longer, and I have all but always done it without Janneke, so it gets a little old. The kids are a bit stir crazy by the time we roll in to Albany at 2:40 PM - especially after the last half hour of the trip, in which we were sitting on the rails at the station while they disconnected the Boston-bound portion of the train. Seems like they could have organized it to let us off first, but they didn't. Doubly frustrating for Janneke, who didn't know what to think, just stared at our train from on high and fumed. And flipped the bird.

Back to work, back to the usual grind. It's great to be home, it was great to be away...Just trying to catch up on some sleep, really. And get some more guitar in - there's another school talent show in February. I'll have to outdo last year's performance. Which won't really be a very high bar, believe me.

I have spent the last ten minutes creating a bit of a recent highlight reel for you - Y'know what else? I think I OD'd on the computer there over the summer and the early fall. I was working on so many home movies - I have one from last April's visit to Gays that's more than half an hour long. And I just got sick of it. That might also have contributed to keeping me away...Anyway, here's a quickly-slapped-together video for you T and Q addicts, with a little Skittles thrown in:

And here's Q with his basketball three-on-three team, the Baconators, winners of the tournament:

My heart soars like a hawk.

Newsiness

2009-12-07T18:30:00.001-08:00

So here's some random thoughts, which are about all I have the concentration for, as I sit and watch the Packers on a Monday night:

T has been struggling not to speak English at home. It's causing a lot of squabbling these days - lots of scolding, reminding, frustration. It's harder for her than it was for Q, because Q had no one to talk to but us. T can talk to Q, and we gave up a while ago on insisting on Spanish between them. It just seems like too much to expect. All the more reason for us to get out of the country for a while - something we're looking into doing in a year and a half or so.

Uruguay is the country we're the most interested in. Economically advanced and stable, veeeery little crime (for Latin America - they have more than Holland, but not more than Italy), and very close to Argentina, which we would like to visit. The kids are less and less horrified by the notion these days - we point to the Puerto Rico experience, which, while fading into memory, still has a lot of positive cachet. It's hard to think of leaving here for a while, but the experience would be too huge to say no to, we think.

Q has a basketball game Friday, but we're not both going to be able to go. And I'm only going to see the first half. We have a tri-family movie night scheduled for that night, and Q is going to be brought home by the mother of one of his friends, and I'm going to take him and the friend there. I'll probably get to see one half. I'm much more healthy in my basketball-viewing than I typically have been in soccer - somehow, deep down, I know that this isn't going to be Q's game. Maybe I'm wrong, but the odds of him getting to six feet tall are pretty slim, and he doesn't seem to take to basketball with the same liquid instinct that he has on the soccer pitch. He himself was just a little bit iffy about even playing this season. The three-on-three tournament was great, but he was hardly a key player...Anyway, I think the odds of my being reasonably quiet while watching are pretty good. But we'll see.

Still no luck on the deer front, and my energy is petering. Saturday night, I just couldn't bring myself to set the alarm for 4:30. There was snow Saturday afternoon, meaning that Sunday would have been the first day with any tracks, but honestly, I don't see myself tracking deer for miles this year. It's getting harder and harder to justify being away all, day, long. I like to get out there and stand during the morning and the evening hours, since that's when they move, but mid-day, it's really hard to stay motivated. I've seen deer, but they were all does / fawns, and I had no doe tag when I saw them. Now I have one, since it's the black powder season, but you watch: I'll never see another one. This is me, after all. I don't kill deer. It's just not meant to happen.

Although I did see a porcupine a couple of times. He leaves the tree I stand next to every morning around 6:30 and walks in front of me, right-to-left. I tried to take a picture - hey, I still haven't uploaded that one. Let's see if it came out:

Nope.

Q's hair is really getting long, and frankly, it looks phenomenal. A couple of different people said at the 3-on-3 tournament, "If there were a trophy for best hair, Q would definitely win."

Definitely.

Skittles has been piddling on the floor again. Not sure what that's about - and she does it on the kitchen floor, sometimes right next to the litterbox. She does it in streaks, doing it for a week at a time and then nothing for six weeks. It's annoying. Nothing beats stepping your bare foot into a cold puddle of piss.

Except, perhaps, stepping into a warm puddle of piss.

Well, hell, I guess I should hit the hay. Packers are up 17-0 at the half...I can probably sleep soundly in the knowledge that we'll be 8-4 in the morning. Who'd have thunk it when we were 4-4?

I say "we" because, as many of you know, I played safety there for three years back in the late '80s.

Also: I am tall.

Big Weekend Fun

2009-11-22T19:17:00.001-08:00

Of the exhausting sort. Here's the rundown:

I hunted, watched Q play basketball, ate meals and did dishes. Very, very little else.

Janneke's been very generous about taking charge of the kids while I walk around in the woods, pretending that there is such a thing as an adult male deer. I've seen deer - Friday afternoon, I went out to stand through the sunset (when they are most active), and two does bounced across my path. I'd have had a fine shot at either, had I thought to acquire a doe permit back in June. But no, I had to hold my fire.

I'm hunting in the Mount Anthony preserve up in Bennington. I have seen one other hunter in the woods so far, so already it's an improvement over Ragged Mountain, where I had been hunting the past few years. And the two does I saw there, plus the two I saw several weeks ago, together quadruple the number of deer I ever saw while hunting in Massachusetts. Plus, you can use an actual 20th-century weapon in VT. Not that I've had much chance to use it.

Actually, opening day I did take a crack at a buck, but I missed, and it's just as well, because I turned out to be on land that did not actually belong to the people I (and they) thought it belonged to. I was somewhat grumpily told to leave. And I did.

Saturday morning I hunted 'til 9:00, then came home to take Q up to the high school for a 3-on-3 tournament. His friend Sean is an unbelievable basketball player, and his other friend Colton is very nearly as good. And they have Q and another kid named Eli, who are find athletes but aren't born to hoop it up like those other two. Their team was "The Baconators", and their first game was at 10:15.

They won two games, against people they knew from Williamstown (I think - they blur together). 20-minute games with a continuous clock; coaches (Colton's Dad in Q's case) get one time-out per game. The Baconators looked to be cruising - Q scored a few in each of their first two games, and on the strength of the Colton-Sean Big Two, looked to be headed for the championship.

Then they ran into a team from another town, wearing Celtics uniforms.

These kids had been coached, you see. They were all four quite good players - none as good as Sean, but two (or even three) were about as good as Colton. They had outside shots, ball-handling skills, and some tactics that were very effective.

Like constant fouling. If the person driving to the basket isn't actually shooting, the only consequence of a foul in this format is that the team fouled gets the ball out at the top of the key (half-court games), so it's to one's advantage to just foul and stop anyone who starts moving netward. The fouling was too consistent, in my mind, not to have been on purpose. Their coach called out "Don't reach in" whenever they did it and were called, but the tone of it, and the kids' reaction, seemed to me to have been arranged ahead of time. As in, "I'll tell you not to foul, but keep doing it." Who knows, I can't read minds. But they were a-foulin' like mad.

And since you have to check the ball in to start a possession, another thing they were all doing was returning the ball to the Baconator player with a low bounce pass, followed immediately by a charge, putting them right in the face of the player trying to in-bound the ball. Again, too consistent not to have been coached. And a little bush-league, in my opinion.

All that was one thing. But these kids were trash-talking, too. Staring our boys in the face, making hip-hop-style "You want some of this?" gestures...They had a very bad attitude, I thought. But the last straw came as the endgame approached: Up by two, their coach called a time-out.

With one minute to go.

Clock kept running.

And they won.

Bush-league.

Q walked out of the gym with me, dejected, past the trophy table. He jerked a thumb toward them. "We're not going to win one of those," he said. He was pretty upset, as were the rest of his team. Tough moment. But they had to bounce back - More basketball yet to be played.

Double-elimination tournament, you see, so the Baconators went to the losers' bracket, where they won out handily, putting them back into a rematch with the undefeated "Celtics" team. they'd cruised through the rest of their schedule and were feeling their oats. (As I have on very good information from the mother of one of Q's friends, who stood near them as they watched the Baconators clear out the last opposition in the losers' bracket and overheard them dirisively mocking everything they could about them.) So they had a rematch - If the "Celtics" team wins, it's over; if the Baconators win, they get to play that team again, in a final game, for all the marbles.

Q didn't score a point in that game, but he became a defensive monster, sealing off his man constantly and making a number of big steals, causing a number of turnovers. It see-sawed until the end, when Colton just took over, having discovered that they just had no answer for him coming in along the baseline and laying it in. As they reached the minute mark, the Baconators suddenly had a three-point lead.

And called timeout. Game over.

Turnabout, and all that.

Setting up the final matchup, where, and frankly, I'm just too tired to make it dramatic, so I'll let you know early: The exact same thing happened. The "Celtics" looked defeated - they weren't fouling anymore like they had been, and weren't doing their bush-league inbounding anymore - their coach may have seen me somewhat exhuberantly miming their antics to anyone who would listen, and may have decided to knock it off. Who knows, though - a lot of the games leading up to this one had started getting very physical, and the ref did talk to both teams before the final game. He may have said "Clean it up, I'm going to be whistle-happy". So it came down to skill again (and height - Sean is a big boy), and the Baconators were just too much. They won, 12-8, and shouted their victory to the rafters.

It was intensely karmically satisfying.

OK, that's all I have the steam for. T's fine, Janneke's fine, Skittles is fine, I'm fine...Still deerless, but fine. I'll write more when I become a better person.

So don't hold your breath.

Overcompensation

2009-11-02T17:52:00.000-08:00

Holy cow! I feel like I do in that dream I have where I've suddenly realized that I'm taking a math class in college, and I haven't been to it for weeks, and the final exam is being handed out RIGHT NOW! Man - I have a blog?! I have readers that number in the double digits, and I have neglected them for HOW long...? I should be horsewhipped. "Fifty lashes with a wet noodle", as someone used to say. I think it was my fifth grade teacher. He used to say a lot of things. He was known for it. "Remember him?", we reminisce, as we stand at the rail in the saloon and smooth our mustaches after every swig. "Remember how he used to say things? Oh!, by Nelson! The things he would say!" And we laugh and throw back another round and turn to send a stream of tobacky juice to the spitoon.

What to bring you up to date on...! Well, first of all, we have not been taking many pictures. The upload program just told me there are a total of 59 in the camera, and that the first one dates all the way back from when Janneke and T went to Switzerland. Which was - well, what's today, Monday? So it was a coon's age ago. So there isn't going to be a whole lot of photographic evidence to be had in this post. It's going to be narrative-heavy. Which fits with the title I have chosen for this particular episode.

And most of the narrative is going to be of the "summation" type, because most things that have recently been going on have come to an end. T's Saturday-morning soccer just had its last meeting of the year. It was run by a very nice man. T loves him, and loves the practices, though she's definitely still on the "observe and report" plan for soccer playing. She remarked to me one day after a practice, "I try to run as fast as I can, but I just can't." And I think that means either that (A) she's not emotionally involved enough to sprint, even though she feels like she ought to be, just to go along; or (B) she's not anatomically cooked up enough yet to break into a true sprint. Q was that way for the first few years, I remember - he was among the later kids in his age group to full-on, fist-pumpin' sprint. It takes a while for that to develop. But she jogs along and cheers and follows the action. The boys are very dominant in kiddie-soccer - so much so that it's a little less than completely safe sometimes. There can be some collisions between super-motivated, churning boys and kids who don't pay much attention.

Another danger is the odd sociopath who's made it all the way to kindergarten undetected. There was some kid there I didn't know whom I observed walking up to another boy and unloading a kick into his shin guard. There were three adults on the field at the time, keeping order, so I didn't feel right about charging out and setting things straight, but I did see it. He wasn't an especially big kid, and the other kid seemed amused. No real harm done. Of course, what should happen but that five minutes later, I'm chatting with someone and I hear the breathless, high-pitched wail that can only be T. And I look up to find her looking at me in complete shock, wide-eyed, mouth agape, being escorted off the field - and in her other hand, the adult in question has clasped the jersey of the same little boy I'd observed doing the kicking. "He just kicked her," the woman explained. (I know her, she's one of the doctors our kids have seen in the past and also the mother of a teammate of Q's.) "Just plain-ol' kicked her, right in the knee." I asked if they'd seen him doing it to anyone else; she said no, and I told her that that made at least twice. So he was asked where his mother was, and was marched off to her. She took him aside and spoke to him for a couple of minutes, and eventually she made him come up and apologize. Although, to my mind, this woman seemed like a "hug-them-all-the-harder-the-more-they-misbehave" type. And I don't have the most patience with that, frankly.

So T isn't completely developmentally ready for competitive sports, but she enjoys being around them, so we'll keep this up. Q's soccer season, meanwhile, was very memorable. He had another year where he's either completely on, or completely off, and there's nothing anyone can do to alter it. That's just where he is, and while he's getting to be a (very, very slightly) more consistently "on" player, he's also going into periods of prolonged deafness where things shouted to him from the sidelines (by the coaches, I'll have you know) simply do not sink in. He roams very widely out of position, which really hurts his team, particularly when he's meant to be a defender. But when he's on, and when he's a forward, look out.

Another parent - whose son is, as the parent admits freely and happily, not one of the top-tier soccer players on the squad - remarked to me during a game, "To my mind, Sammy D and Q are just on another level from the rest of these guys." I was tickled, and spooked, to hear that. Tickled for the obvious reasons, and spooked, because maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe I'm not totally biased in assessing Q's skill level - Maybe he really is as graceful and savvy as he seems to me to be. He can think two, three steps past where things are and has been sending some passes - through-balls, no-looks, chips over defenders - that make one's jaw drop. And scoring a lot, too.

Some of the thrill of the goal has gone out of it for him. Not for any reasons to do with boredom or listlessness, but because he recognizes that sometimes the quality of the opponent cheapens the goal, and he'd rather spend his energy trying to set up someone else who doesn't score as often. Their last game was yesterday, and they played Adams, a team that a Willaimstown all-star team had absolutely massacred a few weeks before. Q's regular team isn't that team, but it has Q, and Colton, and Alex B...Some very solid players. And Q knew this was going to be, as they say in Spanish, "un genocidio". So he played the whole time with a smile on his face, and could be seen a couple of times doing what I'd seen him do in one other game, and fallen all the more in love with him for it:

A player on the other team (which was very young, and not at all skilled, and was slowly getting pulverized), a long-haired boy named Harry, had been looking ill and frightened and withdrawn the whole game. He had very little skill and, apparently, very little confidence. But at one point, Harry got the ball on the opposite side of the field, deep in his own end, and started a run up the line. Q ran with him, but couldn't quite get ahead of him, and Harry went on and on, keeping control of the ball, going deeper and deeper into Williamstown territory. At the end of his run he managed to stop the ball, turned back, and fired a centering pass to the middle. No one picked it up, but the crowd went wild - a lot of us Willaimstowners, who had figured out his name, joined in and cheered him like mad. "What a run, Harry! Super job!"

And in the car, Q, doing his usual post-game breakdown, said this: "Yeah... I felt bad for him. I could have taken the ball away, or gotten in front of him, but I didn't want to. And I didn't want to just stop and let him go, because then he would feel like I wasn't trying, and it didn't matter."

It was a great game to end on, this one from yesterday, because they showcased their talented kids - every one of them scored a couple - but then started manufacturing goals for the kids who don't score a lot. And Q wore a smile the entire time, fairly effortlessly working around defenders and then looking up to see which of his teammates he could pass to. "No, Theo - You're offsides! Come back!", he said, laughing, as the defender circled him helplessly. And when Theo was back onsides, Q pushed a roller into space ahead of him. Theo watched it go, and threw up his arms at Q. "No, Theo," Q said, laughing again and approaching him: "You're supposed to run to where I'm passing. It's OK, I'll do it again."

And he did.

There is other news, of course. Much of it aquatic. T has been taking swimming lessons at the college, but it's Janneke who takes her there, and so I have little to report, other than what we knew going in, which is this: She is daring, coachable, game for anything, and absolutely in love with water. She does the crawl now, and the backstroke, and the dead man's float. Janneke feels so confident that she just gave away the arm floaties T has been using up to now. And that's saying something. I'm protective, but Janneke's clothes are continually filthy from having thrown herself in front of one child or another to protect them from something. Breezes, mostly. And moths.

And I have joined the YMCA in Pittsfield, which lies on my route home, almost exactly halfway. I stop there after a workday and check in and hit the pool for between 20 and 30 laps, depending on the manhood count for the day. And I can rarely resist a stop afterward in the weight room, where I bench a bit before heading home. It's a wonderful facility, costs $41 a month, and provides me all the exercise I need without injury. The place is rarely even close to filled - today was the busiest I've seen the weight room, and there were six guys in it. (I've never seen a woman in the weight room.) Downtown Pittsfield is in recovery mode, so you see a lot of art galleries and other hipster start-ups, but the main clientelle is still the neighborhood, so a lot of urban-neighborhood-types. Lots of neck tattoos and oversized basketball shorts. There's a trio I see in there a lot, who apparently work out and then go to the pool afterward to relax. All big, all fairly muscular. Two are white, and one is black. I see them together or I don't see any of them. And one of the white guys has "WHITE PRIDE" tattooed down his spine. They fascinate me - their interaction seems genuinely intimate, as if they're all good friends. And I just can't make sense of it. Does the tattooed fellow now regret it? Has he learned and grown, with the tattoo just a scar from the growth? Or does he somehow see and feel no antagonism against other races in being proud of his own? And does his friend accept that somehow? I don't know.

The three of them were in the pool the other day. Two were near my end as I readied myself to get in. One of them looked up at the other, who was treading water nearby.

"How far can you go underwater?"

"All the way."

"For real?"

"Yeah. Here, watch." And he took a breath and swam to the bottom.

The floating one chuckled as he disappeared. "No, no - Not..." He waited for him to come up. "Not 'how far down.' I meant 'How far across.'"

They both laughed, and I did too. They heard me and looked up, and we all laughed together.

I like Pittsfield.

Recent daguerrotypes:

T in the mouse ears I made her for "Words are Wonderful", a week-long festival of reading. She went as Chrysanthemum the Mouse.

T and Q in their official "Words are Wonderful" get-ups. T as Chrysanthemum, of course, and Q as Ordinary Boy from "The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy". A book so good that when it's not my turn to read with him at night, I grab it off his bedstand and read what he and Janneke have read, so I'll be up to speed in the morning. They have a character called "The Red Menace", a super-villain, who is a very effectively painted cartoon metaphor for the evils of socialism. (Don't worry - much of the rest of the series is a critique of capitalism.) So effective is this representation of the basic tenets of the ideology that I re-told much of it to my Spanish 5 class, where the year-long theme is "Left versus Right in Latin America". Ordinary Boy is the only person in Superopolis who doesn't have a superpower. His friends all wear superhero outfits, but he just wears a T-shirt and jeans. With no letter on it - but Q had to do SOMETHING to make his outfit not just be a T-shirt and jeans. Though honestly, I think that was much of the appeal of it for him.

T as "Frankenstein Princess". She loved the costume, as did we. Her idea all the way.

T and Q in their costumes. Q did the same one as last year, since he hadn't wanted to put too much effort into it and had been very willing to go along with my idea: Mummy, wrapped in toilet paper. Which was a terrible idea. Didn't work at all, so he scrounged up last year's mask and set out for what was by far his longest jaunt yet. He was out with everyone else (our two, plus Q's friend Owen) for just about the entire legally allowed period - an hour and a half.

Birthday Video

2009-10-20T14:16:00.003-07:00

Hey - Here's a video of T's skating birthday party from this past April. I'm not sure why it's so herky-jerky on my computer - maybe those of you out there with better computers and better connections can actually watch it and have it not look like a slide show. Who knows. But here it is:

Wednesday night silliness.

2009-10-07T16:31:00.001-07:00

Herewith:

Audio-Visual

2009-10-04T20:00:00.001-07:00

This time, WITH audio!

Audio-visual

2009-10-03T19:08:00.001-07:00

Well, visual, anyway. Some things to look at for those of you who are into eye-candy:

T, wearing a dress that originally belonged to her cousin Natasha, now a glamorous law student in Geneva. T stands a good chance of being just as glamorous. But probably not quite as tall.

Hand-picked by yours truly, the better half, and the pups. Absolutely bursting with deliciousness. Some of them, I whisper to you slowly, are Macouns.

And here, T shows her range as an actress - Here, her motivation is that she's just been reminded of her new puppy.

Which is dead.

Because of you.

Me, personally? I want this one to be her passport photo.

Division of Labor

2009-09-27T19:02:00.000-07:00

Holy cannoli, T can sure wail when she feels like it.

Trying to draw a tee-shirt was she this afternoon, frustrated by her inability at first to draw its outline without crossing over inside those lines - that is to say, making a single perimeter with no transections anywhere. She threw her marker and opened her mouth wide and waaaaaaailed, eyes wide. It was such volume, such from-the-diaphragm power - Janneke and I basically just left the room. There was no reasoning with her, no talking to her - we tried. She wailed louder. Not wanting to reward her for such behavior, but knowing, as we do, that trying to impose consequences on her for continuing to act out-of-control once she's already lost control is a zero-sum game, we simply retreated, Janneke to the treadmill downstairs, I outside to put a rain gutter back on the house. (A small section had fallen away from the roof.)

I was up on the roof ten minutes later, finishing up, when I heard T's wailing sudenly get louder. I walked to the front of the house, on the roof, wondering why I could hear her now, and sure enough she had come outside from the front and was making her way to the back. I walked along the edge of the roof, silently, watching this bird's-eye-view of the top of her little head as she made her way around toward the back, where surely she would find me. She could see the end of the ladder, after all - I had to be close! So she got louder and louder.

Then she had to stop and open the gate, which was a little tricky, because it had a stone leaning against it. you have to kind of push the gate forward in order to let the latch swing, but not so much that you push the stone (which keeps Skittles in the back yard) and make it fall. Then you have to open the gate toward you (again, so as not to make the stone fall), and re-close it behind you. This whole process takes a good thirty seconds if you're five and not very big for your age. And during that whole time, the wailing ceased completely.

Only to resume once she was on the other side. Her head looked left and right, and left and right, but never up - ladders, it seems, don't quite compute totally yet. And now it became words: "Daaaaaaddy!"

I called out to her and asked what was wrong, and she explained. I told her I would be down in a moment, and I came down the ladder to total silence. Saving it up, it seems.

I turned to face her, and was hit full-force again. But I managed to fend it off this time - "T, no me podés hablar así. No es hablar, es gritarme. Cuando me puedas hablar, te ayudo. Hasta entonces, no."

Amazingly, she calmed down, allowed me to put the ladder away, and accompanied me inside for some lessons on how to draw a T-shirt outline with long sleeves and one arm bent jauntily back toward the waist. She practiced, got good at it, and then happily churned out twenty of them while I snoozed on the couch. For maybe five minutes, before we all headed out to Q's soccer game.

Q had a day-long 3 on 3 tournament yesterday. Janneke and T stayed home, and I sat and waited and watched from 8:15 to 5:15 in Great Barrington, an hour away. Q had a blast, goofing around with his friends between games and playing during them. And in the end they did very well - there were three groups of U-10 teams, and they came through group play unscathed, 3-0. Putting them into the semifinals against eventual champions Lenox, where they lost, 4-2. Q scored both goals; he had also had a game where he scored 4 of the team's 7, and another where they stopped trying to score at halftime and still wound up invoking the mercy rule at 10-0. A very respectable showing.

But Q is back to his zombie ways much of the time, and I absolutely do not understand it. In the semis, he sleepwalked through the entire first half, and most of the second. Intimidated by Lenox because he knew they had tied the other Williamstown team 5-5 in group play. And of course the other Williamstown team is better than Q's team, or so he believed. So naturally they would lose to Lenox.

Partway through the second half, Q woke up and started playing aggressively, weaving through for two lovely goals. To hear him tell it, it was because his coach told him during a break, "Stop trying to pass. Just dribble past people and score." He was charging toward his third when he was tripped from behind, resulting in a PK, which he missed (off the post!). Time expired, and their day ended.

I was guilty of some loudly-delivered encouragement on the day, and feel terrible about it. BUT! Today I redeemed myself a bit. They had another game against that same Williamstown team, made up of his friends, which Q is convinced is better in every way. And so for the first half he stood and watched everything happen, made token efforts at resistance, saw who he was up again and basically gave up on trying to dribble past them, etc. It was excruciating to watch. The other team went up 2-0 almost immediately, and I am here to tell you, both goals went right past the somnolent Q. He was always behind the play, always lagging, always half-speed and late. By halftime it was out of hand, 5-0.

And then, curiously, in the second half, when the pressure was off and the other team was basically not trying to score anymore, Q woke up. Many long, beautiful runs, several shots, one goal (on another PK after his shot was stopped in the box with a handball) - again, about 25% of the game, we saw what Q can do.

Tragic, then, when the final whistle blew, to see Q's hands go to his head, and cover his eyes, then his face, and see him wracked by sobs. And to see him wordless when greeting our hugs and questions, to see him walk dejectedly ahead to sit on a lonely park bench halfway to the car and stare, slump-shouldered, at the light rain / heavy mist, beaten. To finally coax out of him, an hour later, with a chin wiggle, "I'm sad that we lost."

Because I tell you truly, this did not have to be. That other team has a stronger overall roster, but not a man-jack of them is better than Q, and none is faster. When he's relaxed and wants to play, there is not a kid around to stop him. The best 3-on-3 team in Berkshire County had no one to stop him - he pounded through two, nearly three unanswered, in about four minutes, once he woke up. The team that came in second in his division could do nothing but fall over and flail as he fired through goal after goal - with the left, with the right, from near, from far. When Q is The One, with the fire in the belly, he is as good as absolutely any 9- or 10-year-old in this league. But he often isn't that.

And it is not my job to make him that. It is my job to hug and squeeze him, take him home and comb his hair, tickle him after supper in one of his favorite games (I give him something ALMOST impossible to guess ("I'm thinking of a mammal"), and every time he guesses wrong or needs a clue, I tickle him), smile at him over his dessert and talk about anything at all. Except his own personal performance in the game. That, now, is off limits.

I did all those things tonight. I have a wonderfully beautiful little boy asleep upstairs after a hard athletic day, where he suffered through his bouts of doubts much more painfully than any of us did, wondering why he does this more fervently and more frustratedly than anyone. But now he's dry and warm and loved, and the last three hours of his night, he spent laughing and safe. That's my job.

Anybody can coach him. Only I can be Papi.

Fighting the Good Fight

2009-09-21T19:37:00.000-07:00

So, yeah. T in the car on the way home said, in English, "Today was the worst day of my life."

Which usually turns out to be nothing. She's said this before, on numerous occasions. But I'm not about to dismiss it - I ask, "Por qué, mi amor? Qué pasó?"

And it turns out that, in addition to another event later in the day of less consequence, this is what happened:

Sitting around their table at Kindergarten today, one little girl said, "Raise your hand if you believe in God!"

T was the only one who didn't.

And all the other girls yelled at her.

"What?! You HAVE to believe in God!" "God does so many great things for us!" "The whole world is because of God!" Etc., etc., etc.

And T said that she answered, "Well, everybody gets to make their own choices." Which sounds exactly like the sort of adult-toned speech-parroting that she's so incredibly good at.

And when they still didn't leave her alone, T went and talked to her teacher, who told her that, sometimes, when people are being mean, you just have to ignore them.

After T went to bed, Janneke and I talked, and Janneke, who's been much more on the warpath with this particular issue lately than I have, said that she wanted to talk to the teacher about it. And I think that's probably the best move. Doing nothing is not something we want to do - and talking to the parents of the other kids isn't exactly what we want to do either. But we do want to make sure that there's no anti-anti-religious pile-ons happening, either. I would love to have the teacher explain, in no uncertain terms to these kids, and if need be, to their parents, that belief in God does not make a person good, or nice, and non-belief in God does not make a person bad or mean. I find myself quite insistent on that point, suddenly: We must insist in all classes that atheists are equally valid, nice, and moral. Make that known. And if parents have a problem with it, they will have to lump it. Because this is a public school, and all beliefs, and non-belief, deserve - and will get, by thunder - equal protection.

T absolutely does not like being the odd duck. She asked, as we sat in the driveway, doors to the car open, I not quite arisen out of the driver's seat, she still buckled in in back, whether it was OK for her to believe "in the good God". I said she could believe absolutely anything she wanted. That no matter what she ever decided to believe, we would always love her, and she would always be our little Grugrita.

It concerns me - somehow, Q never got any flak. Or the flak he got was something he could bat aside. T, though, was hurt by the whole interaction. I wonder if I was sufficiently Ward Cleaver for her...Hard to say. She went to bed pretty happy, so maybe I did OK.

But, of course, what should happen tonight before shower time but T comes up to me, smiling shyly, to show how well she's memorized the Pledge of Allegiance.

With "under God" right there in the middle of it.

I smiled and congratulated her effusively, even as Janneke and I locked eyes and grumbled.

There's fights out there, if you want to fight them. And maybe we do...but maybe T doesn't. And maybe she shouldn't have to.

So, Anyway...

2009-09-19T17:47:00.000-07:00

Like I was sayin'...I think between the new school year, Facebook (which makes me feel like I'm in touch with people, though this is illusory, I think), and Skype, I feel much more connected than I used to, and the blog business has fallen by the wayside. Making this a difficult task: Where to pick up? What details have been leapt over that would otherwise have made it into some post or other here? Tough call. Tough call.

T got off to a beautiful start in Kindergarten. (Part of her first day is in a video below.) She loves her teacher, and was a very giddy and bubbly host when she took us on a tour of her classroom at the WES Open House. She was the absolute last student there - we didn't get to her room until 7:40 or so, and the event ended at 8:00. We had been so busy, you see, being given a tour of the classroom over in Ms. Shannon's 4th-grade room, by a tour guide who had a clipboard, on which was a series of items he was required to show us. This list was thirty-five items long. So, yeah, it did take something of a while.

Q's back on the soccer pitch, and is loving it. He scored two against Berkshire Hills Black the other day, and although the team lost, 4-6, it seemed obvious to me that overall, Williamstown were the more advanced side. There are a few players on the team that are young or unskilled or both, and they tended to let some very easy shots by during their tours on defense; meanwhile, W-town had a lot of very near misses, including one that should have been a penalty shot, as you'll see in the soccer video, should you care to watch. Good game, though. There are a lot of 4th-graders who are very good, and there had been talk of having one powerhouse team and another developmental one, but there were a ton of kids out this year and they decided in the end to have three teams and divide the top-flight players up among two of them. So Q's on the field with some great players and some close friends. We've been seeing the Backiels again at games, which is great - they're a hoot, and we hadn't seen much of them since last fall, what with Q not playing baseball anymore.

I don't talk about school much here, but I have to say, I have the best AP class ever. I've decided to focus on short fiction, and have divided up the class into groups of 2 to 3. Every Thursday, one of these groups has to tell to the rest of the group a short story that they have read, and do so with all the important symbolism and such intact, so exactly that the rest of the group is capable of telling the whole story back to them by the end of the hour. Friday, all the other students get a copy of the story, and the presenters use it to anchor a discussion about the meaning and symbolism of the story, the author's intent, etc., and to teach to the rest of the group any interesting grammatical elements, turns of phrase, or expressions they picked up in the text. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, we all read stories together that are not the same ones as the ones the student groups present. We've gone through the cycle once, and man, it was awesome. I felt like I was in grad school again. SUCH a special group of students - I get misty when I think they're leaving this year.

But not before we go to Ecuador! That's right, this year in February we're all heading south again. I've got 90% of the trip planned and reserved. It's going to be great - 22 kids signed up so far, 6 chaperones. Can't wait.

T has also started Irish step dancing. I've not been to a lesson yet, but T came dashing into the bathroom to open the shower curtain and show me her steps when she arrived home after her first one, so it seems to have been a big hit. Believe me, I know this is going to get filmed, and soon.

Man...There's just too much to tell. Best if I start up again with the random everyday stuff, rather than give a ton of past events short shrift. It's starting to feel dull and newsy, and nobody likes that. So I'll sign off - but not before leaving you with the promised school video. You'll laugh, you'll cry. And then you'll feel really stupid.

Chao!

T'S FIRST BUS RIDE on her FIRST DAY of KINDERGARTEN

Long Time, No Screed

2009-09-19T14:54:00.000-07:00

Hey, man - How the hell are you! Sorry I ain't rapped at you for a while, but the Man here's been busy. Kids are well, as you'll soon see; wifey's fine, my own health's good. Summer ended, school started, and T became a kindergartener! It's all been very exciting, and I swear, I'll be telling you most of what's worth telling in the coming hours. But first, let's just pop the latest in video memories at you here. Now, this isn't much - a long video about T's first soccer practice and Q's first game of the fall season. No big deal. But they're the only one I can put up right now - my time video-wise has been taken up principally with a movie about last April's trip to Gays Mills. It's about an hour long, and is absolutely epic. Train travel! 4-wheelin'! Train travel...! And not that much else, really. But there's a lot of each of those things.

All right, with no further ado, here's Part 1 and Part 2 of the soccer video. Batten down the hatches.

Epistles

2009-08-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

Hey, folks...Much to report, little energy with which to do it. But I'll try anyway.

T had a play date with a friend who's a year younger today, and guided her around the house and the yard with one hand in the small of her back, offering her something to drink ("Would you like hot water or cold water?"), laughing in a disturbingly adult way - that is to say, a laugh that was phony - when she didn't understand a joke, but didn't want the teller to feel bad...Spooky to watch, and cool. She might honestly be more mature than I am right now.

She also received a letter from her future teacher today, and wrote a reply. She told me what she wanted to say, I told her how to spell the words, and she wrote it out. Reads like this:

"Dear Miss Johnson,

"I really liked the letter.

"I'm really excited that I'm going to Kindergarden.

"Love,

"T"

A cuter thing was never done.

(Baby donkeys notwithstanding.)

I have a writing assignment for tomorrow: Q's fourth-grade teacher has solicited input. "I invite each of you to take a moment to write to me about your child. What are the things you are aware of that would be important for me to know? What are your child's interests? What do you see as your child's strengths and weaknesses, both academic and social?"

(Just pausing to say that the fact that she said "academic and social" instead of "academically and socially" right there made her stock shoot up through the roof, and I still haven't even met her. (Though Janneke informs me that she's the lady we often see in our neighborhood walking an utterly adorable little black collie mix.))

"What are your goals for your child this year?"

She obviously didn't know what she was asking for, or whom she was asking. Because I'll guarantee, I'm going to spend an hour on this.

One of the things to touch on is going to be his nascent personality shift, and the fact that while it may entail some things that of course we can never condone, we want her to tamp them down, if need be, very gently, without extinguishing the fire completely. Because there is some fire there, and we are liking it.

Up at Windsor Lake the other day, Janneke said she saw Q out in the water near another kid, about his size. The other kid splashed Q, in a way that, Janneke said, seemed friendly. Or maybe not. Q cringed momentarily, then told him to quit it. The kid splashed him again; Q repeated his earlier invective, louder. And then Q started two-hand machine-gun splashing the kid until he turned and waded away. And then Q went back to whatever he was doing. No running to us, no backing down, no crying. And no informing of us afterward, either - he walked back to our blanket some time later and said not one word, unaware that Janneke had been watching.

Nice.

Q had his second real day of soccer practice for the fall - there's a tournament Labor Day weekend, and they've "invited" ten of the stronger U-10 players from town to play on it. Q is among them. He got new cleats - White! His choice! - the other day, and has been rarin' to go. Practice was from 5:00 to 6:15, and I drove over about 5:30 to watch the tail end of it before the end.

There were only six kids at this particular practice, and when I got there they were doing 3-on-3. I only saw the very end, where Q was coming up the right side, feet moving very fast, poking the ball out ahead but keeping his options open, daring the defender to come closer. And when he finally committed totally to Q, he fired a cross to the other side of the goal, where another (much weaker) player put it effortlessly over the line. Much jubilation from Q, and his teammates.

And then a game where the goals are close together, and a one kid stands in each, taking turns firing shots on the other. If you're scored on, you're out, and another kid from your side takes over; if you shoot and miss the goal, you're out. First side to 10 goals wins.

Q's side in this, as in the scrimmage, was him and two weak players, against 3 strong ones. They lost, 10-9, and the last goal was given up by Q - who was bouncing on his toes, in a half-squat, hands spread wide, focused like a laser beam, just before the shot was taken. He dove to the right and got a hand on it, but not enough of one, and it bounced off the post and in. He stood up and kicked the ball into the back of the net again, then turned, looking fierce, and walked to the water bottles. A few seconds later, he was fine, joking with the guy who'd scored.

After the practice, as I helped the volunteer coach, a former Williams soccer player, pull the goals off the field so it could be mown, I asked, "So how are the troops looking?"

He chuckled and searched for words for a moment, then said this: "Q, boy, I tell you - He just looks like a little soccer player out there. He's obviously been watching the pros. He knows what the game is supposed to look like, and he does everything he can to make it look like that. It's really something. He looks older than his years."

Nice.

Q and I were arguing, because he'd done something I thought was wrong, and he wasn't agreeing that it was wrong. And I interrupted him. "Papi!" he said, very firmly. I kept talking. "PAPI! No me interrumpas! Vos me interrumpiste, asi que yo voy a hablar hasta que vos no hables mas, porque no es justo que vos me digas que YO no te interrrumpa a VOS, pero entonces VOS me interrumpis a MI! Asi que no voy a dejar de hablar...Bueno. Ahora, me vas a escuchar?"

Nice.

Q and I were shooting baskets, and he wanted to play 1-on-1. I said it wouldn't be fair, and he said "That's OK. How about, you can't do lay-ups?" Seemed good. Off we went. Every time he left the ball where I could poke it away, I did - and after maybe three times, he never left it there again. When he got me turned around and could get around me, he would sometimes hesitate - wanting to draw he game out, it seemed - and I told him not to. "If you see an opening, you take it, before it goes away. It's just like soccer." So he started going around me the nanosecond he could.

His lay-ups have become 100%, or close to it. He knows just how to do it now, can do it without thinking. He beat me, 8-4.

I told him how impressed I was with his lay-up prowess - something he did not have during basketball camp. "Q, imagine if you had known how to do a lay-up in basketball camp. You would have scored in every game, I'll bet." (Scoring for Q was a pretty rare thing - I think he made one basket in a game.) "You could always drive to the hole, but it rarely went in."

He shrugged, and smiled, half to himself. "Next year," he said, and pulled up to shoot a jumper.

Swish.

Nice.

I like this swagger - it's something he historically has not had. And he is a nice kid, so it's not like he's going to start making fun of anyone or bullying anyone. And it's not like I'll ask his teacher to let him get away with unkindness. But if there's a squabble between peers, and Q holds his own and doesn't back down, and insists on getting his way, even if it means a conflict, all the way to raised voices and pushing, I want her to know that this is new, that this is something that, if anything, he has not done enough of up to now. He's been easy to bully, easy to take advantage of. Those days appear to be ending, and Q seems to be thinking, "I have as much right to that ball / pencil / place in line / spot in the lake / conversational politeness as anyone, and I'm going to fight for it." It's OK to fight for what's right; that fight isn't something to be feared. He's just learning that.

So, if you have to curb it at all...Please be gentle about it. He's a nice kid - don't fear that it's going to turn into over-aggressiveness or bullying. It won't. Quite the opposite - He's going to use his powers for good. You'll see.

Dang. I may already have written this thing.

Revs vs Galaxy: Aftermath

2009-08-10T08:02:00.001-07:00

The game ended, and Q and I stood there a long time, waiting for the aisles to empty out, not bothering to try to muscle our way up through the crowd. Besides which, we're yokels from the Berkshires - there's still plenty for us to gawk at even when the game is over. And after ten minutes or so, a couple of the Revs players came over to the sidelines to talk to and shake hands with the fans. We were all of fifty feet away, so Q started working his way down, Sharpie in hand, to see if he could get the players to sign his France national team jersey. The players were Steve Ralston:

and Taylor Twellman -

- the latter in street clothes, apparently injured. But both evaporated before Q could work his way down, and we headed to the exits to make our way toward Autograph Alley.

This was where three or four Revs would be made available after the game for autographs. We had been there just as we got to the stadium, but now they had moved the barriers to make a long corridor for the players to walk in, allowing the fans all along the barriers to reach across and have them sign their soccer balls or pennants or what have you. Q wriggled his way in and held out his shirt to Amaechi Igwe:

- who looked perplexed, but signed it in the middle of the back, up between the shoulders. And then Q found his way to Sainey Nyassi -

- and held out his sleeve (he'd since put his jersey back on), which the Gambian midfielder quietly signed.

Q was thrilled, and I said I thought we should try to work our way around the stadium to where the visiting team would board its bus, and see if we could get any of them to sign an autograph. I thought the odds were low, but what the heck - they were a lot better then than they would ever be again, probably. So Q, somewhat reluctantly, came along. He really wanted to go back to the hotel and swim - but he really wanted autographs, too, so I had to guide him through the logical process that showed that, no, swimming could happen regardless whether we did this now or not. So it was best to do this.

We walked past an open barricade that said "No Public Access", since the area was thinly populated by people in Revs jerseys, kids, pickup soccer games. Seemed no one was being excluded. And soon we were in front of a glassed-in lobby area, and looking in, I saw Twellman again. I pointed it out to Q - and soon we spotted a number of other players. We probably could have simply walked in there - no one was guarding the door, and it wasn't locked. But that seemed like a bit much to me, and soon they started to filter out anyway. Mostly, they seemed happy to have their pictures taken with people (though Twellman insisted on no flash), and the long and the short of it is that Q also got autographs from Twellman, Jeff Larentowicz:

and Jay Heaps:

After that, Q had had enough, and I wasn't about to make him stand around, or walk another half mile all told to see if we could get close to the Galaxy. His French national jersey is now signed by five New England Revolution players. Fitting, in a way, since the jersey was a gift from his grandmother for his birthday, and the ticket was a gift from his aunt.

Back to the hotel, swimming and hot tub, bed, sleep, home. Man, this has been a lot of writing - a very memorable trip, all in all. For both of us. And we're damn likely to do it again.

David Beckham: Man Crush

2009-08-09T17:39:00.000-07:00

Everybody's back! T and Janneke returned from gay Paris, where T took the world by storm. She now claims she wants to live there, and open a restaurant with Q. It's something they play at a lot - Q is constantly asking me about five-star restaurants (something of a mythic beast, really, given our family's finances, but one that he'll some day get a gander of), wondering how well owners of McDonald's franchises do, wondering whether you make more money as the owner of one five-star restaurant, or five one-star restaurants, etc. And then the other day, at the McDonald's in a rest area as we drove home from the airport, T had a brilliant idea: Restaurant bathrooms - one for women, one for men, one for boys, and one for girls. It's fresh, it's new, it's exciting, it's never been done. Expect big things from this budding tycoon.

Honestly, the ladies weren't home long before another adventure beckoned. Auntie Jayne's birthday gift to Q of a ticket to a New England Revolution soccer match was cashed in just yesterday. Q and I departed for Foxboro, home of the Patriots, at noon on Saturday, checked into our hotel not four miles from the stadium, and then headed for the game.

I don't get to many professional games of any sort, and I really enjoy myself when I do go. The excitement, the crowds, the gorgeous weather (luckily) - it was a very electric atmosphere. And not least because this was to be the Revolution vs the Los Angeles Galaxy - and their erstwhile captain, David Beckham.

You may have heard of David Beckham. Just to keep you interested if you haven't, this is him:

I mean, goodness. If that's not eye candy, you don't have eyes. And he's also very good - former captain of the English national team, played for Manchester United at the age of 17, on and on. Excellent player, who's made a big splash by coming to play in the US.

Now, granted, he's done so at the age of 34, when his skills are in decline. And a lot of the money he makes here, he makes because of who he is, not what he does on the field - he's an automatic draw for fans, not just to the stadium in LA, but all round the country. I mean, I chose this game specifically because of him. It's very unusual for a top European player to decide to play here - so unusual, in fact, that it's unheard of. There's so little prestige here compared to Europe - almost anywhere in Europe. Less exposure, less money, less respect, etc. If they can play in Europe, they do. And frankly, every one of the players in the MLS teams stateside would drop MLS like a bad habit if they could go to Europe. No question.

And yet he's here. It might have been hubris - the US is the only market in the world he hasn't conquered, and perhaps he saw dollar signs in the possibility of capping his legacy by becoming a top draw in this gigantic money machine of a country. TV, movies, his own team, etc.

'Course, last year, he had second thoughts, and tried to break out of his contract to go and play in Europe again, for AC Milan. In addition, according to a recent article and book quoting / written by Landon Donovan, the US' best player and Beckham's teammate, Beckham wasn't really putting his all into his new team in LA. Seemed to be sleepwalking through it, wasn't quite as devoted to his teammates, the schedule, training, as he should have been. Donovan, who had been the captain, was strongarmed into giving the armband over to Beckham, and Beckham didn't do a damn thing with it. No leadership, etc. Then Beckham tried to jump ship, making every accusation of being half-hearted about the US ring all the truer. The Italian league is top-notch, and they wanted Beckham at AC Milan. But the Galaxy said no, and now he's playing out his contract here. Reluctantly, perhaps. Donovan is the captain again, and Beckham either plays stateside, or he doesn't play. So there's plenty of drama.

The Revolution, on the other hand, apparently are another team, and have a lot of players, and appear to have won the championship last year.

So the stage was set.

Q and I had watched the Galaxy play a friendly against Barcelona on TV recently, so we knew something about them. Barcelona was last year's European championship team and is widely held to be the best team on Earth, with the planet's best player, Lionel Messi, an Argentine. Q is crazy about Messi, and we had really enjoyed watching that game. Which Barcelona won, 2-1 - the one goal for LA coming on a set piece, a free kick that Beckham took. He is world-renowned for his free kick prowess - the movie, you may recall, "Bend It Like Beckham", deals tangentially with this particular gift of his. And he lived up to the hype - he bent the shot right, around the wall of defenders, and all the way back left to the left side of the net and in. Holy cow. Q and I were very excited indeed to get to go see him play.

Q talked for days before we drove to Foxboro about the possibility of getting Beckham's autograph. I didn't throw any cold water on the notion, although I knew full well that our chances of getting close to Beckham were close to nil. But even so, I was very glad that we'd decided to book a hotel room there and thus not have to worry about driving back after the game. We'd have time, if he wanted to try, for autograph-hunting.

Q had also seen US vs Brasil, where Landon Donovan had scored two goals and the Americans had taken an early lead; and he had also seen the US beat Spain, 2-0, so he was very familiar with Donovan as well. Fast, fast player, is Donovan, with supreme skills, and not necessarily that big, to be generous. (Putting him close to Q's heart, along with Messi - and making Donovan's autograph and Beckham's pretty much equally valuable.)

Thus setting the stage even further.

Q wore his France national jersey - it's red, white, and blue, so he blended into the crowd. We decided we would be cheering for the Galaxy, since we like Donovan and Beckham, and entered the stadium.

We caught sight of the teams warming up and stood there, watching; I had this strange, morbid fear that for some reason Beckham wouldn't play, and so easily convinced myself that the blonde man stretching there at the corner of the field wasn't him. But the binoculars, trained on his back, confirmed it: There was the signature tattoo on the back of his neck, wings spreading out toward his ears. And then he turned my way and smiled:

Ka-bam. I mean, jeepers. I'm very firmly and comfortably in the "Hetero" aisle at the "Preferences" market, but it just plain leaves you speechless. Like when I see a buck step out of the brush in the woods unexpectedly. I am awed at the beauty of the thing, its majesty - I feel like I'm in the presence of something pure and perfect. Do I want to kiss the buck? No. No, I do not. In fact, I want to shoot it, and when I'm lucky, I do. But I get weak-kneed nonetheless because I'm in the presence of something so gloriously perfect. Similar with Mr. Beckham - Ka, bam.

(And, for the record: I did not have the slightest urge to shoot him.)

The warm-ups were cool, because they looked like any old team warming up - drills, jogging, goofing around, pinnies, etc. Same as anyone. Despite being David Beckham and Landon Donovan. They're just people, we found. Something we who don't deal with fame or with famous people sometimes forget. We found our way to our seats (which were excellent - Row 14 of the main section, near midfield, right on the aisle), got us some beverages (one adult, one less so), listened to the National Anthem, and settled in to take in some damn soccer.

Watching Q play his games over the years, and taking him to soccer events because of his interest, I have come to have a VERY rudimentary understanding of what works and what doesn't in soccer. I watch the high school games my students play in, the occasional Williams game, men's or women's, and then, more lately, I watch more and more of it on TV, thanks to Q's interest and our newfound cable access to the Fox Soccer Channel. And here's what I've noticed, in general, about the top levels of soccer: There is an innate feel, a higher-level command of the field, that certain teams have that transcends individual brilliance. It's a fluidity and a sense of common purpose among the whole team, all 11 on the pitch, that's unsaid, or seems to be - a bone-level soccer tune-in. Many teams at the high levels don't have it - the US national team, for example. We watched them beat Spain, largely due to a couple of very lucky pounces on dangerous situations, and due to the individual skills of the right player, at the right time. But then later in the game, as Spain was trying desperately to come back, there was no doubt as to which team was better. Spain was a hive mind - each individual did what the whole needed done, knowing he could count on the other parts of the whole to do the same. And they had the US pinned back on their end the entire time, because the US could so rarely break up, completely, what the Spanish were trying to do. They couldn't get close enough to the ball to interfere - Spain would effortlessly, wordlessly, bounce away as one, passing and passing and never losing the ball, moving and probing for an opening. And then when the US was at the other end of the field, their own attacks would evaporate almost as soon as they'd begun. They just didn't appear to have a sense of purpose. Donovan was brilliant a time or two, individual defenders were valiant and very skilled, and the US won. But they are not better.

Same against Brazil. The US went ahead 2-0 on the sheer power and speed of Donovan - but thereafter, they were helpless against Brazil's hive-mind. The US was playing checkers, and the Brazilians were playing chess, and Brazil put three (four, really, but one was called a non-goal) over in the second half and won, deservedly. It made me sad, but you had to admit: Brazil was just better.

It was a similar thing to watch the LA Galaxy and the Revolution play. Donovan should be playing in Europe - he's just super-skilled, aggressive, knowledgeable, and ridiculously fast. And Beckham, playing midfield, was the glue that held everything together. Between the two of them, they so elevated LA's game that the Revolution looked like children - or like the US did against Brazil. Outclassed.

Donovan and Beckham communicated wordlessly all game long, weaving past each other and laying passes to where the other ought to soon be, confident that the other would not fail to be there when the pass arrived. And 90% of the time, that's exactly what happened. When other players on the Galaxy were called upon, they looked herky-jerky, clunky, compared to those two - they were George W Bush reading a prepared text, and Beckham and Donovan were Barack Obama. Just no comparison at all.

The Galaxy were up 1-0 at halftime on a brilliant, lightning-strike of a goal by Donovan, who took a cross out of the air with his left foot and bent it some 30 yards around the outstretched hands of the goal keeper and into the left side. Wow. I actually felt on a couple of occasions that he was a titch selfish - he would approach from the right side and Beckham, at the precise moment, when the man marking Donovan would trend inside to prevent Donovan from charging straight to the goal, would blaze around behind Donovan and head for the right corner - all but unmarked, as everyone on defense was still afraid of Donovan toward the center. And it seemed that the universe wanted Donovan to send it toward the space where Beckham would soon be. He did do so a few times, but on what was certainly the best opportunity, Donovan instead shot, and it ricocheted off a Revs player and harmlessly into another, who cleared it. I looked to Beckham to see if he would throw up his hands in frustration.

He absolutely did not. I have to say, watching Beckham play, and that's all I got to see him do, I feel like I got a certain amount of information about him as a person. I'll tell you a few reasons why - One was this refusal to complain about his teammates' play. Even when the obviously junior-varsity Galaxy players would blow something, his only reaction was perhaps a slow-motion, hands-pressing-earthward, "Calm down", reassurance-type of gesture, even as he bounced and trotted to the right spot to make up for the mistake his teammate had committed. He seemed like a very mature player, unselfish and generous.

With the opposition, there was a certain amount of jawing going on - Beckham has set himself up for it with his actions last year, and the Revolution players were letting him have it. Their midfielder, a big, braided-hair guy named Shalrie Joseph (here he is:)

- was continually talking to Beckham. At first it seemed very friendly - Beckham would approach and listen and give a handshake, smiling, and once turned away, laughing, tossing they guy's hand away in either a "You-big-palooka" kind of way or a "F--k you" kind of way - hard to tell, what with the joy in his smile.

(For reference:)

But in the second half, as the frustration and desperation on the part of the Revs grew (it was 2-0 by now), the tackles on Beckham got harder and harder, and he would come up jawing with the players. "That's just stupid," I lip-read once; he would approach in a confrontational way, as if to fight, but would turn it into an "I'm-just-trying-to-help-the-guy" stance at the last second. He's very good at playing the "I'm-not-the-bad-guy" game, the subtle art of provoking without getting a card yourself, that's so maddening to watch in European and South American players. He's brilliant at it.

But eventually the over-aggressiveness and the personal nature of the tackling got to be too much for him. The paper reported that the biggest incident came about because Beckham got an elbow to the head, but from what I could see, he appeared to be upset about an elbow that was thrown against one of his teammates going up for a header. It was on the opposite sideline, but Beckham got right in the Revs player's face, no subtlety anymore, and eventually they were separated. Donovan came over and pulled Beckham away, and Joseph came in and talked to Beckham - playing Beckham's game, approaching in a peacemaker stance, and then saying something nasty, which got Beckham riled again. That ended with Joseph jabbing Beckham in the chest with a finger, and Beckham realizing that he'd get carded soon if he didn't pull out, so he turned and dismissively walked off. In the end, Beckham and the player who threw the elbow got yellow cards, and play resumed. By the way, Beckham was booed thunderously throughout - although, from my vantage point, he looked perfectly justified, and much more the gentleman than the Revs.

Not five minutes later, the player who'd thrown the elbow (I assume) was up against the sideline around midfield, in a bit of a pickle, and Beckham absolutely pounced. It was a very rough challenge and scramble for the ball - nothing overtly intended to harm, no punches or elbows, but a distinct ratcheting-up of the urgency, of the level of violence, which left a few players on the ground. A primadonna, Beckham, unequivocally, is not.

The Galaxy were going left-to-right in the first half, and Beckham tended to stray right, so we got our best looks at him in the first half, when I saw him do a couple of throw-ins. Both times, the ball had bounced just off the field and into the privileged seats that are right there behind the barriers - themselves only three to three and a half feet high - such that someone in the seats there would be able to hand the ball to whichever player came to do the throw. Both times that I saw (or remember), the ball was given to him by a child. The first time, it was a kid I remember as being almost a baby - maybe two or three, given the ball by an adult and then held out toward Beckham to hand it to him. And Beckham's face went fully into Dad mode - a big, exaggerated "Hi!" grin, wide-eyed, with that surprised "Goodness!" look that I've felt myself give to tiny kids, which disarms, delights and reassures them at the same time. In fact, at the pool the other day, I gave it to a one-year-old as he looked at me over his mother's shoulder, and she turned to see me and smiled, saying, "They can always find the dads in the crowd." I laughed and said, "Well, we help them by giving the 'Dad' look." And that's exactly what Beckham gave this kid. It was just perfect - and I suddenly remembered that he is a Dad, of quite young kids. Just that little moment, and I was pretty well sure: Not just a Dad, but a devoted one.

Observe:

The second time, the kid in question was probably nine or ten, and Beckham was in a hurry, so he took the ball from the kid poliltely, with a "Thanks" that I could plainly see, definitely said, but said quickly. Then, though, as he was about to throw, it became clear that his teammates weren't ready - he'd have to wait a few seconds. So he quickly turned back to the kid, stuck out his hand, and gave him a low-five. Fully aware, of course, that he's just made that kid's day - hell, year. Childhood, maybe. Also aware that he was in the middle of a game, and had to keep concentrating - but that this kid's world was also big and important, and that he had the ability to quickly make that world much more fun and memorable, the opportunity, and of course took it, despite the fact that it won him absolutely nothing, other than that kid's happiness. I don't mean to go on about such a small thing, and perhaps I'm not conveying what I found great about the moment - I mean, I saw so many other players that day take the ball from a fan, turn back to the field, and say nothing to the fan. Not one word. "Thanks" would have cost them absolutely nothing, not even time, but it was too much to ask. And that's of course somewhat natural - they're concentrating, after all. But Beckham, despite being far and away the best overall player there, the most focused, the most famous, didn't turn up his nose at the chance to quickly make a fan (of the opposing team) very, very happy. That's important, he believes, so he does it.

I got the feeling that he appreciates all the game has done for him, and earnestly, honestly wants to give back. In just a quick glimpse, sure - but I've seen so many star athletes act like spoiled children, and to see the one active athlete who, world-wide, inspires probably the most fan shrieking and adulation, who's more photographed than any other athlete alive - to see him go those extra three feet, despite there being no obligation, was a very pleasantly surprising thing to see. He has time, even when he doesn't have time. He has the emotional space to keep it up. He's had more demands on him from fans than anybody, anybody - and he's still got more to give, in a hostile stadium, for fans who've been booing him all day and hold signs that malign his heart and his skills.

Yep. I have a man crush.

Eeyore

2009-07-30T18:32:00.000-07:00

Hey.

Y'know, I just watched a commercial for sticky denture goo. It's the one where people with dentures mug for the camera about their distaste for certain qualities of the brands they won't be patronizing anymore. There's a shot of three women singing along to "Bye Bye Love". Except they've changed the words, and now it's "Bye bye, paste".

Then there's another shot of a guy making an "ick" face as he sings along to "goodbye stickiness". Or some such.

And, y'know, I get that they're trying to appeal to denture wearers. And that denture wearers tend not to be the youngest people. But...Certain standard advertising tactics, like making idealized versions of your potential customers appear jubilant because of their decision to use your product? Making them giggle and pose half-self-consciously in spontaneous-looking photo-shoot-type hug-fests in summer settings in bright clothes...That...doesn't really work with old people. First off, the idealized versions of people in general aren't old. In Fake TV Land, they're all young and thin and have perfectly symmetrical smiles, because that way consumers get to pretend for a moment to be those people. And I don't want for the shortest of moments to be any of the people in these ads. And older people don't dress that way, in that primary-color-jumper-and-vest combos, and if they do, it can look kind of weird. Like a ninety-year-old guy in a sideways baseball cap and a Chicago Bulls jersey. It's just not dignified. Not that I really want to buy any denture paste from anybody at all, but if I ever do, I'm going to be less likely to buy it from someone who almost mocks my age by depicting my idealized self as a somewhat addled simpleton wearing age-inappropriate clothing.

Y'know what else? Kelly Ripa needs to go eat a cream puff or six, and then not throw up. Or jazzercize. She's so damn skinny she looks like a leather Bionicle.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm kind of moping lately. Janneke and T are in France, and Q is spending all day at robotics camp. Leaving me with a lot of time on my hands.

Which I manage to use, I guess. I've been swimming for exercise again, which causes nothing at all on my body to hurt. And I can't say that about any other kind of exercise, I don't think.

Not even yoga, turns out. My right wrist is killing me. Been doing an hour of yoga Mondays and Wednesdays with Ronadh, and I love it. I come out of there feeling absolutely great - all the soreness from running goes away, and I feel two inches taller. (Not cumulatively, though. Otherwise I'd be 6'2" by now.) But all the leaning on my palms has caused my old achy right wrist to rear its head again. That stinks. I love yoga. Maybe I have to go get the wrist injected again.

And I've been editing videos. Got a lot of footage from the last several months, and so far I've done Q's soccer video, a video about Christmas last year, and now one about our Team Trivia squad, "Milk of Amnesia". (Which looks a lot better now than when you saw it, Brad, Betsy, Ronadh, and Mark.) And I manage to keep Q fed and clothed and off to camp on time, and to dress and clean myself. I keep Skittles brushed, the floors vacuumed (mostly), and the grass cut.

But largely, these are spasms of activity that interrupt my moping. The house is just so damn big and empty without Janneke and T. I don't get it - Janneke claims to have a grand old time when I take the kids away. Getting tons of stuff done, going out with friends, bla bla bla. I watch Keith Olbermann and wonder why the heck I don't feel like playing guitar, which I swore I was going to do so much of this summer and now have time to do. It's weird.

In the evenings it seems stilted and uncomfortable to just sit across from each other in silence and chew, so Q and I have been watching Fox Soccer Channel while we eat. And there's an on-demand kids' channel on the local cable package, and Q will ask to watch an episode of "Destroy Build Destroy". And I'll usually cave. Sometimes we'll go outside and play basketball, and last night was "Wipeout" night. And tonight, we discovered a telenovela on Univision. It's called "Un gancho de amor" ("A hook (as in boxing) of love"), and he was laughing out loud at some of it. Mostly at the slightly overweight, greasy former boyfriend character who farts and wears loud shirts and blurts out "Bueno, sabes, mi amor, es que...No me importa" in a half-sympathetic, half-impatient whine when someone starts confiding in him. It was really fun - they talk full-on fast, and he had no problem following anything. It was actually a revelation, and I'm going to have to see if this is a once-a-week thing. (Though they tend to be every day, in my experience.) And then, after his TV stints (which, Janneke, he does not always have (oh, who am I kidding - she never reads this)), he tends to go to bed happily after some very pleasant story-reading. So we're good. But...I'm just not a good solo act. Can't find my marks, can't keep time on my own, I go flat all the time...I droop and sag like a pasta sawhorse.

Oh, well. Keith Olbermann is on - I'll just grab the remote...punch in "49"...sit back...

Guest host.

Jeepers...It just gets worse and worse.

Kicks Just Keep Gettin' Harder to Find

2009-07-27T20:08:00.001-07:00

Except here. Because here are some damn fine kicks:

Addendum

2009-07-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

Wow - The steel trap that is my mind just gets rustier and rustier. And so I've had to come back and finish off the relating of the Great Trip South and Back Again, because I had neglected to tell you about the final chapter: The Return Voyage.

We loved Waynesboro, Virgina so much (and I'm not being sarcastic - it's a delightful place, with a clean, affordable Best Western with an indoor pool, exactly halfway between Birmingham and Williamstown) that for the return trip, we decided to have it be our rest stop again. Even though we weren't going straight home: we were planning to spend a day with my brother Jess, his wife, Stephanie, and our kids' eldest Johnson cousin, their son, Jack.

They don't live in Waynesboro. They live in Waldorf, MD, a suburb of DC - which, Mapquest informed us, is twelve hours from Birmingham. Too dang long a drive, we said. Mapquest then informed us that it was three hours from Waynesboro - and that Waynesboro, as we had previously known, was nine hours from Birnimgham. Ergo, we would lose absolutely nothing, time-wise, if we went to Waynesboro on Day One, stayed the night, and headed out bright and early the next day to arrive in Waldorf.

And so it came to pass: another night in Waynesboro, where we ate at a lovely local Italian restaurant (owned by an Argentine, whose niece was the hostess, and who confirmed for us that Argentina is not the place to go if we plan to spend a year abroad - too many kidnappings), and then hit the hay. (But not before picking up dessert at Arby's, a restaurant I had had a hankerin' for for a while, but which circumstances on the highway had prevented us from patronizing up to then. The kids had shakes for dessert. I had a roast beef sandwich. And, by the way, of the 10 or so patrons and staff we saw there that day, 9 were on the verge of morbid obesity. Just saying.) Up and at 'em the next day, and the drive went through at least three Civil War battlefields. Can't name 'em off the top of my head, but I recognized all of them. Weird - sooo long ago, the landscape totally transformed since then, but that's the place. Saw several roadside shacks that hawk battlefield gear, probably dug up with a metal detector. And so on towards Waldorf, though we got stuck in some traffic because of a big-rig wreck. Chemical spill, so we gathered; news helicopters circling overhead, the whole bit. Got some great advice on how to skirt the blockage from the patrons and staff at a stripmall hairdresser's, and then cruised on to Waldorf.

Auntie Stephanie received us, and Uncle Jess and Jack came home in the afternoon, and the kids got on great. T charged around the yard in Jack's battery-powered car - not, by the way, fantasizing about being a race car driver, or a getaway car driver, or, even, as I would have hoped, a postapocalyptic gasoline pirate. (Still thinking about Georgia, I guess.) Nope: T was going shopping. Frankly, I expected better.

Jack is a ball of fire, running pretty much everywhere he goes. And not slowly, either. He also seems to be built on a par with his cousin Liam, whom the Packers should draft, like now. Those boys are going to be tanks - add Jack's stoutness with his need for speed, and soon Jess and Steph's lovely house is going to be sporting some Jack-shaped holes in a number of its walls. Quite the talker at 3 years old - answers every question with a complete sentence: "Yes, I do." "No, they aren't." "Yes, she is." "No." (Ooh- Wait! Maybe he's not going to - ) "...it's not." He wasn't shy with us or the kids, but he was a little reserved - I managed to extract a hug out of him when it came time to go. But it took some work. Not surprising - last time I saw him, or he saw me, he was a baby. And, to be honest, I was just out of rehab at the time, weighing only about 120, and still hadn't had my facial tattoos removed. Didn't have my prosthetic nose yet, either. So if he has any memories of me, they probably aren't pleasant. Time flies, boy...Man! How does that happen...!

Anyhoo, we spent the afternoon playing football in their green and happy back yard, ordered in pizza, chatted until bedtime, and then off to dreamland. But not before Q chimed in that he liked both their house and the Pajaros' in Birmingham more than ours, because the Pajaros had had a pool, and these guys had a pool table. Nice. Good to see those guys, even if only for a bit - it had been a while. We always seem to miss each other back at the ranch in Wisconsin.

Out like a rocket the next morning for seven and a half more hours of drivin'. Up!, Up! we went, and as we moved northward certain things started to disappear. Cracker Barrel, Waffle House...Civil War battlegrounds (which sparked a fascinating conversation with Q, still continuing in fits and starts to this day: "Why are there no Civil War battlegrounds where we live?" Think about it - that's a complicated answer), armadillo roadkill. And African-American men on motorcycles. Strange - Saw a lot of that in the South, Maryland and Virgina in particular. Up here? Honestly, just about never.

New Jersey. New York! VEMONT!

MASSACHUSETTS!

Ahhh. Richer and wiser for the experience, but happy to be back.

Here endeth the reading.

Jiggety-Jog

2009-07-20T19:44:00.000-07:00

As in, "Home again, home again".

What a long, strange trip it was. You know about the first leg - down to Virginny, and then onward. The "onward" portion is what I shall herewith relate.

Our second nine-hour driving day was a long one. I mean, it was exactly as long as the other one, but it felt longer. We were pretty darn punchy by the time we actually rolled into Alabama. The geography was very interesting to observe, by the way - there is a clear geologic distinction between "middle-south", Virginia, and "deep south", or Georgia-Alabama. I can't totally put my finger on it, but things felt very different as we rolled out of the Virginia mountains and into the Georgia mountains.

The cities took on a very different, more-industrial tinge. And the highway that cuts across the far north-west corner of Georgia, basically serving only people who want to get from Virginia to Alabama, is downright post-apocalyptic. Grass that's been allowed to get two and three feet high in all the medians and on the shoulders, oddly purplish-grayish pavement, which, while not terribly bad to drive on, just plain seems unfriendly. And blown tire parts everywhere. That's another line you cross going south: The "nobody-picks-up-the-blowouts" line. Could be that they don't pick them up, could be that they have a hundred times more of them and the boys from the highway department just can't keep up. Either way. You expect every 18-wheeler to be sporting barbed wire and turrets manned by men in shoulderpads, firing crossbows.

Had me some goobers in Georgia. Boiled, salted peanuts in the shell, sold out of a crock pot in a gas station where I damn near bought me a twelve-dollar cowboy hat. I thought the goobers were kind of good, though Janneke thought they looked like cigarette butts floating in a piss-soaked toilet. It is a testament to my manhood that I kept right on eating after that observation.

Before I get to the family business that took place (there was much, and it was grand), I'll give you some general observations about my first trip to the Deep South. Alabama: It is hotter, and humider, but very strangely, it suffers from far fewer mosquitoes. The geography of northern Alabama is very mountainous - I say "very" because I expected it to be flat. Which shows my level of ignorance. Birmingham: Every building there, except the plain on which the city center sits, and in the flattish "village" centers that surround the heart of the city, is very, very hilly. So hilly that almost no one seemed to have a proper yard. They've kept their houses from washing away by leaving practically all the trees standing - it seemed we never saw a house that wasn't deeply shaded and protected by gorgeous stands of lush, full trees. It feels like a jungle sometimes, except that the roads are gorgeously maintained - honestly, I don't think I saw a pothole in all of Birmingham (not that I saw all of it) - my sister-and-brother-in-law do quite well, so it was a better part of Birmingham that I mostly got to see, but even so, no matter where we went, things seemed to be well-taken-care-of.

"Why did this surprise you?", my deep-south friends might well ask me with indignation. That is, they might, if I had any deep-south friends. Well, I'll tell you why: It's by far the poorest region of the US. It regularly outdoes the rest of the country in obesity, ignorance, racism, and hyper-religiosity. (I hereby declare. Though I'm sure I could back those assertions up with some numbers, if I had the inclination.) I expected that to color the whole place to some extent, and in Birmingham, it absolutely did not. You couldn't tell you were anywhere other than a prosperous, tastefully-laid-out upper-class neighborhood or suburban center. Where people talked in ridiculous accents.

(OK, I said that for comic effect. I absolutely do not consider their accents to be ridiculous. They are just as valid and historically justified as any accent, be it the flatness of the midwest, the broadness of the upper east coast, or the drabness and reservation of an English toff.)

(But they do sound funny.)

I also noticed some things with regard to race. We went at one point to a baseball game (the Birmingham Barons, the same minor-league team where Michael Jordan stank it up), and I had a good amount of crowd-watching. There were pee-lenty of African-Americans around - probably close to half the attendees. And I never saw one interracial couple. Not once. In Berkshire County, I truly think it would not be possible to walk through the mall, or go to a high school sporting event, or go to one of the miserable county fairs they have here for random reasons in the summer, without seeing one. None there at all.

Not that they don't interact - my nieces and nephews there appear to have a host of black friends from school. But it was peculiar, this race thing, at least in the eyes of a Northerner, in a lot of other ways - for example, in the Piggly Wiggly, I noticed that apart from the manager, absolutely all the checkers and bag boys and shelf-stockers were black. On my first trip - and, you know, it wasn't even true then. There was one white woman working there on my first trip. So, probably 13 out of 14 employees were black. On subsequent trips, I noticed a few more white employees. But easily 85% were black. Interesting - go to a situation where there will be big groups of people earning little money in Alabama, and the vast majority of them will be black. Go to places where you'll see big groups of wealthier people, and most of them will be white.

"Why should this surprise you? That's true in a larger sense in the rest of the US as well." I don't know - Maybe it shouldn't surprise me. Maybe. But it was different there, I think. Could be that it wasn't really - maybe I'm projecting. But I don't think so. In Berkshire County, for example, you get waited on in the fast-food restaurants by people of any color. Granted, there are far fewer blacks in Berkshire County, but that almost makes the observation more interesting. The argument would go that we have fewer blacks in our low-paying jobs in western Massachusetts, not because blacks are more prosperous here, but because there are fewer blacks. Thus implying, I suppose, that wherever you find lots of black people, they will be doing low-paying jobs, and ergo, it's logical that the checkout staff in Piggly-Wiggly in Alabama should be black? That doesn't square with me either. I mean, it may mathematically be true, but I still find it objectionable that it be so. And so maybe the truth is objectionable...? Perhaps it's just the numbers that struck me. No more prosperous in the South than here, but far more of them. Which made it that much more evident to me that the economic state of African-Americans in this country is by and large very bad.

Surprising? No. But what it points to is the way in which it is possible for me, given where I live, to sail through my day without being consciously aware of that. It isn't something I'm reminded of at every turn. Maybe I'd be better off, in terms of my awareness of the state of my nation, if I were more aware of it. And maybe as a nation we'd be better off if everybody had the sort of tiny, daily "Katrina" moments that would bring this into sharper focus. By that I mean the shock - Shock! - that so many of us, including me, felt when we saw the images of the Katrina destruction and saw that 97% of the victims were black. And we said to ourselves, "What the hey?" Unlike most Republicans, I don't feel that seeing this fact is racism. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, "Pointing out that the victims were almost all black is not being racist. It's being minimally observant." And there's a lot of useful information we can glean from that. "Hey," we should say. "How come, when we evacuate, we leave all the black people behind?" Shouldn't that merit some conversation, at least? I mean, if they had all been wearing cowboy hats, I would have expected someone to say, "Hey, let's try to sort out this cowboy-hat-equals-left-behind phenomenon."

If, every day, dopes like me were forced to observe, "Goodness, look at that. Just about all the lowest-paying jobs are taken up by black people. What's the deal there?", maybe we'd be voting differently.

Anyway...Lots to think about.

So much for Alabama. The family: Octavio and Dominique were as generous as hosts can possibly be. We had the downstairs...um...south...west...?...corner of the house to ourselves. We could close off two doors and have a hallway with our bedrooms and the kids' room, as well as our bathroom, in isolation from the rest of the bunch, or could open it up and let the sunshine in. We had our own door to the back yard, where the swimming pool beckoned.

And Q and T answered the call. Daily. Several times, for hours at a time. T, by the way, learned to swim on this trip! She had been using a life vest for a while now, but at one point, she asked if we could try without it, and then she was managing to stay afloat for a few seconds, then she was lunging from the side of the pool out toward us, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she was dogpaddling her way across the whole pool. It happened really, really fast, and the fact that every time she did it she got thunderous ovations from her gorgeous, beaming, cool-as-can-be teenage cousins can't have hurt in the motivation department.

Gorgeous and cool they all were, too. Flavia in particular, as far as T was concerned - the two of them just click. Flavia wasn't just resigning herself to be the babysitter, either - she genuinely enjoys T's company, and the two of them were impossible to separate. Not bad, considering the nine-year age gap. We kept on trying to rescue Flavia from having to spend too much time with her, but every time we did she'd look at us like we were crazy.

Q, meanwhile, played a lot of video games with the Alabama boys, Stefan and Adrian, and did a lot of pool time with them as well. But I think the biggest revelation of the trip was Oscar and Oliver, the Belgian cousins. (though they will insist that they're Dutch, as that's what their passports say. But they're from Brussels.) We'd only met them once before, also at Octavio and Dominique's, but it was in Florida that time, and it was in 2004. Now Oscar is 21 and Oliver is 19, and they've matured into some fantastically sound, bright young men - with a lot of "chispa", as they say in Spanish. Spark -- Creativity, a knack for finding the fun in any given situation. I've never seen people who can think of so many things to do with pool toys. There was this basketball hoop that floats on the water - basically an inner tube about 20 inches in diameter, and another one about 14 inches in diameter, separated and held together by three inflated rods, making for an overall shape between a cone and a pyramid. It floats in the water and you throw things into it. But Oscar and Oliver put it on as if it were a vest, their heads poking out the little inner tube, the larger one around their waists, and dove off the diving board with it on. Hilarity ensues - they don't quite get their feet completely into the water before the buoyancy of the thing shoots them back up and they land, sputtering, on their stomachs. And then Oliver decides to see if he can swim to the bottom while wearing it, starting from a standstill on the surface. He drives and pulls and pushes himself downward, but his legs, trying desperately to get some purchase, kicking in perfect swimming motions, simply wave and flail in the air above the surface. I have not laughed that hard in years.

Oscar and I took a couple of jogs on a lovely walking path in Birmingham while we were there. It's a mile or two from the house, and we would drive there in the morning. Just about every single foot of it is shaded (due to Birmingham's aforementioned love of trees), and it's probably two miles long. So we would go the length of it and back. He's 21, remember, and quite the field hockey sensation back home, as his his brother. So even out of shape, as he claimed to be, he kept me going a little faster than I probably would have otherwise. Besides which, we talked the whole time every day we went, about careers and family and the legal system in both countries. So I didn't get quite the distance I usually would, but it was easily as much of a workout.

Their Mum, Megs, was there as well, and it was great to get to know her better. We went to Six Flags at one point, near Atlanta, and I drove Dominique's suburban back from there with Megs in the front seat, and we had a great two-hour conversation. About her boys, about child rearing, about everything. (By the way, the exploded-tires-littering-the-highway phenomenon is much more pronounced in Georgia than in Alabama. At one point Megs asked if we had crossed into Alabama yet. I pointed to three or four tire husks and said "Not yet." Tongue-in-cheek, of course - but I turned out to be right.) It was the best chance I've gotten to know her since we met, and I feel much more connected now. It's hard when your extended family is spread across a couple of continents. Of all the sisters, she's the one I've known the least well, and it was a lot of fun to catch glimpses of each of the other three in her mannerisms, turns of phrase, sense of humor. Amazing how well you get to know the in-law side of your family after eleven years of marriage.

I also got to know Octavio a lot better. Driving around Birmingham with him to pick up Stefan from a drum lesson (Stefan has added the drums to his list of instruments he plays - it's now guitar, piano, drums; Adrian, meanwhile, played saxophone with Stefan's band at a party while we were there), Octavio showed me "the view", which refers to a short stretch of street atop Birmingham's probably-highest ridgeline, a gated-at-night-time community that has an unbelievable view of the city center and the hills beyond. There's a lot to be learned about Birmingham - its civil rights history, its industrial history (it still has active coal mines), all kinds of things. They really have found a great niche for themselves there. Octavio gave me some of the inside scoop on what it's like to essentially have two jobs - one teaching and researching at the university, and the other performing surgeries at the hospital. He was called out two or three nights in a row for emergency surgeries while we were there - transplants and such. When we got home Janneke and I started wondering if you could put a number on the lives he's saved over his career. It's got to be in the thousands.

I, meanwhile, had my status as the family "animal guy" cemented more fully. A while ago, a bird crashed into their window and lay there, stunned; they Skyped us to show us the bird and ask what I thought, having just gone through the incident with the falcon that crashed into our window. I turn out to have the reputation of being the guy who knows the most about animals in the family. (The bird eventually just recovered and flew away.) So when someone called out in dismay, "There's a dead animal in the pool filter!", someone else responded, quick as a flash: "Get Uncle Joe!" So I would come running and examine the creature.

Every time it happened (three times - once, with two bobbing there at the same time), the animal in question was a shrew. (I misidentified it as a vole at first. I had the labels mixed up in my head. I knew what it was - insectivorous, voracious, tiny ears and eyes, related to moles - but said the wrong name at first. Voles are to mice what hares are to rabbits.) The pool filter slurps out floating, dead insects and spins them lazily in a basket just outside the edge of the pool; the chamber this occurs in is covered over by a piece of stone with a hole drilled in the center to facilitate the lifting-out of the stone, followed by the basket, which can then be emptied. What appears to happen is that at night, the shrews stray near, and the scent of many accumulated, large, fleshy insects wafts out of the finger-hole. They love holes, particularly holes filled with insects, so they crawl in - and plop!, into the water and the basket, where they eventually drown.

So Octavio gets called out in the middle of the night to harvest and transplant hearts. I get called from my seat at the patio table to walk into the woods and shake dead shrews out of a plastic basket.

We both do what we can to make the world a better place.

Here's some evidence:

WIndow of the information center at the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Which appears to have fallen on hard times - 80% of the complex is unoccupied.

Inside, though, lots of fun to be had.

By kids of all ages.

Kids at the first rest stop we found on the Blue Ridge Parkway. You absolutely must go see this place.

Coppa...cubbuh...cummumma....

Friendlier denizens of the Virginia woods, also on the way up Humpback Mountain.

Q at the summit of Humpback Mountain.

Kids in the rocks. They love rocks.

There are a lot of them up there.

Birmingham: Guess who thought of lifting Q up to do this? ...Oscar and Oliver.

Here's T and Oscar. Not sure why, but we weren't so into picture-taking on this trip. "Enjoying" more than "documenting" the moments, I guess. Though I understand we got some great pics from Dominique.

Who at one point was attacked by a koala.

T and Megs, talking South African politics.

Dominique and the kids at Six Flags, about to ride the log flume.

T about to eat the log from the log flume at Six Flags.

Uncaptionable.

High-Altitude Fabulousness

2009-07-06T18:43:00.000-07:00

Holy cow, what a fulfilling day of familial fun. Crazy, crazy good day. Where to begin, I wonder.

Up at the crack of 6:45 to don my running clothes and hit the streets. We're in a strip mall-type area on the edge of Waynesboro, which we'll never truly enter, and there are absolutely no sidewalks anywhere. Pedestrians do not exist in the mind's eye of the Waynesboro city fathers. I mean, nothing. There was about 100 yards of sidewalk on the street in front of an elementary school (which is basically sandwiched between a Home Depot and a Ruby Tuesday's), probably the result of some obscure by-law dating from the same era as the laws that made 'em let the coloreds into the dang schools in the first place. That was it. All day in Waynesboro, we saw a hundred yards of sidewalk.

I ran 25 minutes in one direction and 25 back, and after jogging in the ditch for a while I took a right at a stoplight and hit a residential neighborhood. Quite nice, ranch homes, seemed a lot like he gated community where my sister in law and her family lived in Florida, but it wasn't gated. It had a golf course snaking through it, which also made it feel tony and private, but it truly appeared to be public. After fifteen minutes or so I can to a public park, which held a swimming pool, softball fields, several open-air performance spaces...it was truly lovely. A gorgeous municipal park. Say what you will about these sidewalk-hatin' Southrons, they build and maintain a mean park.

Back to the hotel, breakfast (I had two bananas - feeling kind of portly lately), and then we hit the road. The lady at the front desk had said "Ain't but one way to git to the poark. Git on 64 and git off at exit 9. You're raht thurr." So we got onto Highway 64, headed east, and promptly saw a sign for exit 95. Turns out, in Virginia, the words "nine" and "ninety-nine" are indistinguishable. Kind of like "there" and "their". Must be hell at auctions.

So we got off at exit "nahahaha", and sure enough, we wound up right at the entrance to the park. Stopped at the visitor center and were informed that there were a number of accessible areas for the kids, including a place 6 miles south on the Blue Ridge Parkway that included a museum of mountain life and a mountain ridgetop called "Humpback Rock" that they'd be able to hike to. Off we went.

This dang Blue Ridge Parkway thing is the eighth wonder of the frickin' world. It snakes along the mountaintops, with a top speed limit of 45, peppered liberally with ab-so-lute-ly spectacular overlooks and hiking trails all along its length, and keeps going south through Virginia and North Carolina for FOUR HUNDRED SOME MILES! How in God's name did I have no idea this thing existed? It is fabulously maintained, incredibly picturesque, and FOUR HUNDRED MILES LONG! It must be paradise for cyclists. I know the motorcyclists love it, as we saw a lot of them, but not nearly as many cyclists as you might think.

(By the way, for you motorcyclists out there: If your engine is loud, you suck. You. Personally. You are an inconsiderate and obnoxious jackass. There is no reason for your damn muffler to be so loud - it's not keeping you safe. If it were, those BMW bikes and Honda Goldwings would be deathtraps, because they make so little noise I think it actually gets quieter in the vicinity when they pass. All you're doing is slowly poisoning the day of every single person you pass on your merry Piss-Off Tour every summer, ruining the scenery with your horrid machine noises, mile after mile after mile. You are a prick, Loud Bike Owner, and I hate you.)

Anyhoo, we went and saw the museum, which is an actual 1800's cabin thats got three people working in it, and they are the loveliest, most open and warm people you can imagine, engaging kids with Jedi mind tricks that make them grin as they sit and play a dulcimer, weave at a loom, play graces, and prowl about a cabin wondering where they'd have slept had they been raised there. We were at the cabin nearly an hour, and the kids left a little reluctantly. Just fabulous people.

On across the parkway to the trail leading up to Humpback Rock. Q was a little whiny (only a little), and T is an absolute mountain goat. Both scampered happily most of the way - Q, at one point, got everyone's attention because he'd seen a snake in a stump. We took pictures, watched for probably a minute and a half - it never once moved. Gorgeous. And later on I spotted a doe, thirty feet away off the trail; we all watched it eat a while and thrilled as it walked within ten feet of us before sauntering off to look for more to eat. Beautiful.

And the view from the top of the mountain, perched as we were atop crags that were the most majestic things our two kids had yet seen in their lives, was perfect. We ate a light lunch, and walked back down.

Where the guys working on the fence near the parking lot looked at our photo of the snake and told us it was a copperhead. Totally deadly.

I came to a few minutes later, let the rangers and workmen help me to my feet, and then we all walked wobbly-kneed back to the car for another hour and a half of the Parkway. We trooped south to look at a waterfall, which turned out not to be worth the trip at all, in and of itself - but every single fifty-yard stretch of this parkway is so gorgeous you just can't feel like time there is time wasted. We got out of the park and back to Waynesboro around 3:30.

Picked up some popcorn chicken and drinks at KFC and hit he park I'd found this morning for some jungle-jim climbin', football tossin', soccer ball kickin', and all-around fun in the sun-havin'. (It had been about 70 degrees up on the Parkway, but it was 82 down in Waynesboro.) Whereupon we retired to the hotel and hit the pool.

Q swam more fiercely and aggressively today than I had ever seen him. He went the whole length of the pool without taking a breath! Which, if you know Q, is a real feat. He's never been that into swimming, let alone anything that requires physical danger or discomfort, but he was all over it today. Working on his crawl, working on underwater strokes...Great. And T! She is so much braver than Q was at her age. Jumping into the pool on her own (with a life vest), standing tippy-toe without a life vest in the three-foot end of the pool so she could practice her strokes (she can't swim as it stands), holding her breath under the water for as long as she could...Great fun. So glad we picked this hotel.

Applebee's for supper, which was clean, predictable, and inexpensive. And then back to the hotel, where we are all on the verge of collapse. A very good, full, unhurried day. Vacation is good.

Hitting the road tomorrow - this time Tuesday I should be writing this from Birmingham, Alabama (or, as T puts it, "Burping Hampster, Alabama"). Wish us luck.

I'll post the pictures as soon as I can turn my camera on without going into anaphylactic shock at the thought of the two or three photos of a co...a cop...copper...cuppamuh...cubbuh...cup....

Excuse me. I have to go lie own.

Food! Glorious food!

2009-07-05T19:12:00.000-07:00

Q and T are asleep in one of the queen-sized beds, Janneke sits and reads the New York Times in the other, and I sit and do this, on the free wireless connection in our hotel room in Waynesboro, VA. We are halfway to Alabama, and we are going to take a breather here for a day before diving back into the car.

A place where our two tykes do remarkably well. Nary a squabble today in 9 car-hours (10 clock-hours) of driving. It helps, of course, to have video games, magic electronic talky-books, DVD players, snacks, and limitless patience on the part of at least one parent. Well, OK, we have everything but that last one. But patience was hardly needed - they were just super. And only at the very end did we do any sort of wrong-turn-type brain freeze - Pulling off the highway, Mapquest directions fluttering to the floor, their purpose served, literally looking at the front of our hotel, eagerly awaiting the turn into the parking lot, we held out our arms in anguish as the intersection we had turned into became not the portico of a Best Western, but rather the return ramp onto Highway 64, this time heading north. Three miles and a recovered directions sheet later, we pulled to the same intersection, drove carefully through it, and THEN turned left onto DeWitt Boulevard, followed quickly by Apple Tree Lane. Disembarked, checked in, changed clothes, and hit the pool (Q, T, me) and the fitness center (Janneke) for our pre-supper wind-down.

We walked to the Cracker Barrel restaurant next to the hotel (frustrated by the lack of a sidewalk linking the two) on my insistence. We've never eaten there! It'll be a new experience - not like going to the KFC four hundred yards further up the strip! Look at the parking lot - it's full! The menu looks great! Let's try it!

Turns out, though, there is a very large machine at the back of every Cracker Barrel restaurant that sucks all the flavor out of the food before they serve it. Another gizmo injects fat, sugar, and salt into the damp, squishy husks of what used to be perfectly good ingredients, and then they truck it out to be devoured at the troughs by hordes of fleshy, gap-toothed, God-fearin', kid-smackin', sleeveless-T-shirt-wearin', Wranglers-seam-bustin' Southerners. Who are very polite.

(The flavor they suck out of the food, by the way, is loaded into tanker trucks and shipped to a factory in Georgia, where it's refined and put into tubes and distributed nationwide as fireworks.)

Tomorrow, we'll hit the Shenandoah National (and not State, Janneke, for the umpteenth time) Park for a day of hiking in the mostly-sunny, high-of-82-degree glory that will be July the 6th. We'll top off the day with another visit to the pool and a shame-faced slink straight past the Cracker Barrel and off to another bright star in Waynesboro's culinary constellation.

Applebee's.

Continued Progress

2009-07-03T13:29:00.000-07:00

Hey, folks - July 3rd, night of the big sleepover. Jay, Chris, and Henry are here, watching "Eragon" in the living room. Their sleeping arrangements are set:

...The inflate-a-beds are in it, the sleeping bags are arrayed, and T is off in another room, watching a far less scary film. Not even sure what it is - Oh. Janneke just told me. "Kit Ketteridge", I think is what she said. From the "American Girl" doll series. Big fun. Here she is:

And here are her sleeping arrangements:

And here's the latest update on the project that has you all on the edges of your seats:

1,100:

Lots of last-minute stuff had to be done for this sleepover. We realized that one of our inflate-a-beds was a thing of the past, having been tossed for repeated leakages; neither of us had realized it until today. So we (I) had to charge out to the hardware store and buy another one. And on the same trip, I picked up the pizza.

1,200:

I'm probably going to go down in local 3rd-grade lore as the strictest and meanest Dad in Williamstown. We had some spitting happening at pizza time, which I put a stop to, and some backtalk at the same time, which I also brought to a close. And then there was the negotiating that resulted in permission to play flashlight tag between the end of the movie and the entry to the tent, during which I told them the history and future use of my compost pile, and made it blindingly clear that it was absolutely, positively off-limits. A couple of the boys, at different points in my speech, turned to other boys, bored, and began to talk, and I brought a fairly gentle end to that as well. No one was injured, but I think I might have taken a little bit of the air out of the proceedings. Which isn't a bad thing: there was decidedly too much air in it at the time.

1,300:

T and I brought Skittles to the boarding facility this afternoon. It's a lovely place, and she'll have quite comfortable digs and daily fifteen-minute play sessions with a staff member (twice daily every other day, which cost us $5 more per day). When she got out of the pet carrier, she curled up in the arms of the staffer and immediately began to purr. That was a great sign that she'll be happy, but I have to say, it also kind of made me grumble. Didn't seem nervous or upset at all to be getting put away in a cage. She's a very dog-like cat, but in the end, she's still a cat, I guess.

1,400:

On the way down the driveway, having dropped her off, I asked T if she was thirsty and would like to stop and get something to drink. I didn't get an answer, so I asked her again. Still nothing, so I lowered the music and looked in the mirror - and saw her lower lip jutting out as she began to shake with sobs. She was very unhappy to be without her Skittly-Bittly. But I tried to cheer her up by talking about how cool it will be to get back in a couple of weeks and see how much taller and longer and thicker Skittles will be. She was kind of into that, but some snuffling still continued all the way home.

1,500:

Movie-watching, by the way, has pretty much disintegrated out in the living room. They're play-acting that they're people from the Indiana Jones movies, with guns and cat toys, while "Eragon" drones on in the background. Part of me wants to offer to turn it off, but another part says "Y'know, they're staying out there until the cool parts come on. The movie is containing them, and allowing you to do this." I think I'll listen to that part.

1,600:

I'm filming a lot of little shots of the birthday party, but I'm afraid of going out there to film any of this. Don't want to encourage them, though. And now the two least-interested in the movie have gone back to Q's room to play with Legos. Meaning they're going to make as big a mess as they possibly can - which will make it all the more difficult to hide my smile when I inform them that they have to clean it up. Call me a party-pooper, but Q has several friends (two of whom are here) who actively try to make as ridiculous a mess as possible and then sneak out the door with their parents without having to tidy up. That's not going to happen tonight, believe me.

1,700:

Am I a jerk? Maybe. But honestly, there needs to be some civilizin' done on some of these fellers. And I'm the man for the job...But, speaking of politics, one of the birthday presents Q's getting this year from his Auntie Jayne, who had asked me to let her know what Q might like, but back to whom I had never gotten (sorry, Auntie Jayne; thanks, Auntie Jayne!), is a ticket to go see an MLS game in Boston. Revolution vs. the Los Angeles Galaxy. Beckham theoretically plays for them, and would be back by the day of the game (August 8th), but I fully expect him by that time to have wriggled his way free of MLS and be playing in Europe again. But what the heck, it'll be fun for us. Better soccer than we're going to see anywhere else.

1,800 (I scraped away the chips between the last one and this one):

We started brushing Skittles daily these past few days, and the difference is unbelievable. She's so soft and fluffy now - we go through a lot of treats, drawing her near and trying to get her to associate nice things with the process (which, by itself, she isn't fond of), and she suddenly even seems cleaner. I would never have thought I'd like having a long-haired cat - time was, I'd have thought of it as an effete pomposity. Something people like us didn't do. But now, I figure, Hey, what's wrong with paying attention to your pets every day? Keeping them trained and happy and tractable? What's wrong with celebrating the loveliness of the tail of a well-brushed Maine Coon as she slinks about the place, looking for the kids, intercepting soccer balls as if they were giant mice?

Nothin', that's what.

1,900:

OK, I've had enough. I'm off to suffer through the last hour or so of the birthday party before they head out to the tent, hopefully never to be heard from again. Until morning, that is. When we eat the waffles.

Attrition

2009-06-30T20:41:00.000-07:00

Hey, folks - Can't sleep, so how's about I do some general newsiness for you? Seeing as how I don't think I have the mental wherewithal at the moment to develop much of a thesis. But you may be curious about things, so I'll inform you, generally.

Get ready. I got a feeling it's all going to read like that...so let me just apologize, right here at the outset.

Say...Remember this:

(Funny how smokers' voices were considered wise and powerful in the early '70s. And also: Why is that kid naked?)

So, then, remember, how, like, a while ago, I was saying how I was going to get rid of a stump in the back yard? A hundred whacks a day with an ax, and see how many it took to get rid of it? Remember? Well, imagine the axe is my tongue, and the stump is the Tootsie pop. Here's zero:

Janneke's former professor, Judith Kornblatt, and her husband Mark are staying with us for a couple of days. Judith is a Williams grad, and is out here for a friend's 60th birthday party. They were a huge hit with the kids last night - energetic, outgoing, caring people who charmed Q and T into submission in a matter of minutes. Q played piano for them, T showed Judith most of her toys...We all had a nice supper out on the deck, and then a pleasant evening of conversation and guitar. I played my latest acquisitions in the Spanish repertoire, and Mark showed us some songs he uses with his fifth graders. They seem happy with their downstairs accommodations - so much so that I feel confident, sitting here in the kitchen in my underwear, that they'll have no reason to come up and be scandalized. Although, hey, it might shake things up in an interesting way. They're heading out tomorrow.

(Here's 100:)

We're heading out on the 5th of July, driving down to Birmingham, Alabama (we've always heard it's best to go to the deep South at the height of summer) to visit Dominique, Octavio, and the kids. We'll stop halfway, in Virginia, and stay at a hotel for a couple of nights, taking a day to explore the national park nearby (is it Shenandoah...? I don't recall). On the way back, we're planning to stop in DC and spend a day with Uncle Jess, Auntie Stephanie, and Baby Jack, who's probably four feet tall by now. Should be fun.

(200:)

Today was kind of the first day of my summer. Yesterday too, I suppose, but yesterday I never got a real block of time in which to do whatever I liked. Today I did: Two hours, from 10:00 AM to noon. And you know what I did...? I played guitar. Two solid hours, working specific skills, getting particular licks and transitions down, questioning my posture, re-tuning, trying different tempos when a piece gave me trouble...Experimenting, learning. And I didn't stop because I got tired of it - I stopped because I had to be in Lenox at 1:00 for a second interview session with some candidates for a position at the school. (I'm consulting, I guess, on the hiring process. Feels nice to be asked.) I felt distinctly disappointed to be leaving the guitar behind when I left - I was just getting into something. With any luck I'll be able to dedicate a lot of time to that this summer.

(300:)

So a few weeks ago I was out here - walking Hobie, I think (heavy sigh), or preparing to - when I heard something rattling against the kitchen window. I looked out and saw this:

That's a frickin' luna moth! I don't think I had ever seen one before, honestly. Pictures, sure, and that story about a luna moth that everybody reads in third or fourth grade. But I was really thrilled - their enormity! Such otherworldly color...! And the poor, fragile little thing was just beating itself to death, trying to access the light that shone in our kitchen window. After I took a few pictures, I went back inside and shut off the lights, and wished it well. Hopefully it floated moonward and met up with its gender opposite. Although it seems just as likely that it bashed itself to death against a streetlight (which I would like to see removed from our street, personally), or was devoured by a bat. But I can dream.

(400:)

Q told us at supper yesterday that he'd made a vehicle with the Legos at his "camp" (glorified daycare at the Youth Center), and he'd left it there, and then he'd come back later to play with it, when a sixth grader came in and said "What are you doing with my Legos?", and had shoved him to the ground and taken it, and that he'd cried. He told us very matter-of-factly, without much emotion, and kind of out-of-the-blue; he didn't solicit sympathy, or answers, or anything. He told us, and then looked ahead, into a space ahead of him, and waited. I can't recall what interrupted us - a phone call, someone at the door, I don't know - but it was left hanging a bit. We got the kid's name, and asked how he'd reacted; he said he really hadn't done anything. And then with the hurly-burly of the bedtime cycle, somehow we never got back to the subject - you want to treat it properly, without hurry, and there was never a moment. Leaving me and janneke to discuss it after the kids had gone to bed.

(500:)

We decided we would give him the green light to react however he wanted. You don't want to say he "should" do any particular thing, setting him up to feel like a failure if his courage fails him and he doesn't do what you think he should. And you don't want to tell him to run and tell on the kid - if he can deal with it on his own, good for him. Although you don't want him not to, exactly, either - we were burning up with fury over the whole incident, and really wanted there to be some kind of fallout. So we decided we would tell him he could do whatever he liked. If he didn't want to react at all, that was OK - it was his life, after all. If he wanted to tell an adult, fine - that makes perfect sense. If he didn't want to, because it wasn't a big deal and he didn't want to be a tattle tale, we could understand that. If he wanted to call the kid names and fight back, hey, we weren't going to say no. Whatever he wanted.

(600:)

But, we told him (this was this morning, once we had our story straight), we were going to tell an adult in the building to keep an eye on the kid because he was bullying the younger kids. Not Q in particular, necessarily, but the kids in general. So that way Q wouldn't feel like we were concerned about him - just about this sort of behavior in general. You don't want him to feel too fragile, you don't want to fly into conniptions and sink to your knees and start searching him for bruises and crying out "MY BABY, MY BABY, THEY'VE BROKEN MY PRECIOUS BABY!" I mean, you want to. But you shouldn't.

(700:)

So that's what happened today - Q surreptitiously pointed the kid out (thank goodness for bilingualism) - a tall and lanky, obviously evil punk with a white baseball cap - and then I sidled up to the director of the joint and poked him in the chest and demanded action with liberal use of four-letter-words, then did the "I'm-watching-you", two-fingers-toward-my-eyes-then-toward-his gesture as I backed slowly away, breaking anything fragile within reach before exiting. Well, not so much that, really. I pulled him aside with my eyebrows and grumbled conspiratorially the kid's name, then said, "He's rumored to be throwing his weight around with the smaller kids. Might want to keep an eye out." The director, a nice guy named Mike, said thanks, and I went about my business.

(800:)

So Q got home and reported no further monkey business. In fact, he said, the kid seemed to be avoiding him, which was alright with Q. And alright with me. Although I have to say that in my mind's eye on the way to Lenox at noon today, I did a whole beating-up-the-kid's-father montage. The theme to "Rocky" was the soundtrack. I had a full head of hair and a handlebar mustache. It looked a lot like an episode of "Starsky and Hutch", actually.

(900:)

That's probably going to do it, kids - I'm finally feeling a little sleepy. Not sure why I can't get to sleep these days- I lay there and suddenly have all these itches everywhere. Although, actually, I was disturbed by something I read about in the book "Outliers", which one of my students gave me as a gift to thank me for three years of Spanish after she'd graduated. It's a neat book, but it raises all kinds of issues around where we wind up and why in life, and one of the middle chapters has some things to say about child-rearing that really had me second-guessing some of my own socio-economic cultural biases in the way I demand certain behaviors of my kids...got me thinking, I guess, and it's hard to sleep when you're thinking.

(1,000:)

Maybe it's the effect of these stump pictures - kind of like sawing logs. More soon, I promise: It's summer, after all. Once I'm done playing the guitar tomorrow, I'll crank out a few more whacks. See if we can't wear this baby down. Take care, brush your hair...

Pics and prose

2009-06-30T05:06:00.001-07:00

Well, pics, anyway. No time for prose these days - summer? Hello, summer? Where are you? Seems I'm running around more than I was when I was working. But, like I said, no time for words - here's the pictures:

Tess' new haircut. It's driving me crazy - I can't quite get used to it. Every time I look at her, it's like I'm seeing her for the first time. Makes my teeth hurt...!

My Father's Day gift. It's incredibly comfortable, except that whenever I lie in it, I tend to suddenly find myself in this sort of situation, which is, shall we say, less than completely comfortable.

Hobie on the Friday morning before his last trip in the car. I had the camera out for something else, and while it was a little morbid, I suppose, to be snapping pictures, I couldn't not do it - had it not been his last day, I'd still have taken it. He just looked so idyllic.

The very last picture I ever took of Hobie. My little Mookalor...

1994-2009

2009-06-20T20:46:00.000-07:00

I’m looking at Hobie’s basket. His blanket is inside, pressed and pleated just the way he left it the last time he lay in it. It’s the biggest reminder of him left here, but not the only one: today I found a footprint of his outside, in the back yard, along with a somewhat waterlogged bit of his business. His leash and collar are on the deck – they were a little dirty, and we lay them out there, not quite knowing what to do with them first. They’re still there. And today I vacuumed the house, as I do every weekend. I watched as the Hobie hairs filled up the canister twice, watched as the opaque cast they give to the rugs they cover faded under every pass of the beater bar. Q’s room was the last one I did, and that’s where the last layer came up into the machine. A few will go rolling past occasionally, like tumbleweeds, kicked by a random puff of air from where they’d been hiding. But by now, there are very few left.

Early last week, Hobie went after Skittles pretty seriously. I don’t think he really meant to do anything beyond getting her to stop bothering him, chase her off with some teeth music. But she had been walking past him – something she could not possibly have thought would be bothersome to anybody, something she should be allowed to do. Hobie got her enough to make her trembly, collapsed up into the corner where she’d leapt to get away from him, piled in behind her littler box. Her back isn’t the best, and these sudden spasms to get away from Hobie can’t be good for it. She walked with her spine arched for a good while afterward, and was difficult to console. Hobie knew he’d done something he shouldn’t have, and stiffly limped over to his basket, anticipating a scolding.

Which he’d never have heard. He’d been pretty much completely deaf for a few months now, and so paranoia had set in. As far as he knew, everybody was sneaking up on him all the time. When that’s me or Janneke, he just got startled, shied away and then laughed at the situation, sidled up for a pat on the head. But when it was Skittles, or one of the kids, a snap was becoming more and more likely. Four weeks ago or so, he’d gotten Q on the finger. Q had been trying to call him over to pet him, and for some reason Hobie saw that as threatening and caught him with a snap. Q was shocked, hurt, heartbroken. And so were we. And so was Hobie, probably.

He’d gotten T some time before that, and had snarled a her a few times before that. We had been training him to tolerate the kids more – suddenly, three or four months ago, it had occurred to me that every time the kids come home, or wake up, they should call Hobie over and give him a treat. And it had been working, too – he would do his front-legs-jumping joy dance when they came out of their rooms in the morning, would greet Q as he sat down to take his shoes off by licking him on the cheek. I was kicking myself for not having thought to start doing it five years ago. But it only went so far – the snapping, it seemed, was only going to get worse. We started to look at Hobie with a much more worried eye, and to look for other signs of things going wrong.

Which finally allowed us to see them. His wandering around the house at all hours, which we’d started thinking was senility, was actually just an endless quest for a way to get comfortable. Every step he took was at least a little bit painful; lying down hurt, getting up hurt, squatting to do his nightly business hurt. He didn’t whine or yip about it, but the more we watched him, the more it became clear: He was in pain pretty much all the time. He’d fight through it when he needed to, but there was no question this was a fight. Just two days ago, I was on the floor petting him, and he shook his head because his ear itched. He creaked himself back into an ear-scratching position, lifted his rear leg about halfway toward his ear…and grunted, and dropped his leg again, and stood up. “Screw it,” he’d said with every ounce of his body. “I’d rather itch.”

The fatty tumors under his skin were getting bigger. One just under his chest, which was tender, and another on his right ribs, which smarted so much he’d wince when we approached that side to pet him. It had seemed like an embarrassed crouch, like he was somehow not deserving the attention we were coming to bestow, but once we started looking for it, we found it: That hurt too. His ears were harder and harder to comfortably pet; his eyes drooped, his hips were losing flesh, his back legs, under the strain of standing still, would begin to droop and sag, prompting him to move on ahead again, looking for a comfortable position that was never going to come.

A little over a week ago, we decided. It was time.

This past Friday, the 19th, final exams were set to start at the high school where I teach. I’d give one from 8:00 to 9:30, and then have no further commitments for the day. So that Thursday, I called and made an appointment. Friday, the 19th, at 2:00. Cremation thereafter. No, we wouldn’t need to get his ashes back; no, we wouldn’t like the plaster pawprint.

I hung up the phone and sobbed where I stood, hand over my eyes. I’d just calmly agreed on a date and a time to kill him.

All this past week, then, every evening, I sat and cuddled and thumped and otherwise loved that old dog so much I think he got a little tired of it. I had second thoughts – Couldn’t we medicate him, at least for a while, against the pain? Wouldn’t that possibly help with the snapping and the paranoia? Look how happy he is to see the kids coming home – Isn’t this continued progress? Can’t we call it off?

I thought all this as I sat in front of him and petted his neck, as he buried his snout in my lap and sighed and snuffed and enjoyed it. And suddenly, he fell over. Toward his left, like a tree, crashing onto his shoulder and his hip. And he thrashed, confused, just for a moment, until the thrashing was prohibitively painful; then he slowly began to heave himself into a position where he could hoist himself up to his feet again. The grunting he did was so low that if I hadn’t been right next to him, I’d never have heard it – continual, high, nearly-whining grunts of effort, pain, and – tragically, horrifyingly for me, who was his master, who was right next to him would never let anything happen to him – fear.

I only had one way to protect him from that.

I counted down the times we would go for our evening walk. It was incredible the way every night, it took longer and longer. As if he were illustrating for me the precipitousness of the decline we were on the edge of, measurable easily from day to day. He still sniffed eagerly to see what was going on in the neighborhood that day (“reading the newspaper”, as T and I like to call it), but he was breathing heavily at the end of every three-hundred-yard turn about Lindley Terrace, head hanging so low you thought his tongue would touch the pavement, back drooping in the middle. His eyes bulged as he looked up at me, seeming to smile, but I now knew that smile was as much fearful as ingratiating. I can’t do it, he must have been thinking. I can’t go as fast as Joe wants me to. And I didn’t want him to go fast – now, I didn’t. I just wanted him to go. But he didn’t know that. Just as he didn’t know that we weren’t sneaking up on him, that no one was out to take advantage of his weakened state, that we hadn’t all just decided to stop saying “Good boy!” a few months ago. He didn’t know any of this, and I couldn’t tell him.

Friday morning, T woke up when I did, and asked if she could come walk Hobie with me. “Of course,” I said. She dressed and put her shoes on, and asked if she could hold the leash. “Claro.” And as she had done at least twice before during the last week, she looked over her shoulder at me, gestured toward Hobie, who was clambering stiffly down the one step form our front door to the porch, and said: “I feel bad for Hobie. He’s going to die soon.”

Of course, we had been preparing the kids for this event for at least a couple of years. Dropping it into conversations that Hobie had had a good, long life, and that his slowing down would eventually turn into a full stop. But T just picked up something in the air, and translated it in her mind perfectly, saw just what was about to come about. I don’t know how she picked up on it – our plan was to tell the kids that we’d come home Friday and found him dead in his bed. They never knew we’d made an appointment, never knew that Friday was the day. But T rolled out of bed to hold the leash for one more walk because somewhere, deep down, she knew. I’m still in awe.

I drove to Lenox, gave the exam, and drove back. We had run out of dog treats, so I was taking every opportunity to give Hobie slices of pepperoni. I must have given him five between 10:00 and 12:00 Friday, when Janneke came home. She pulled into the driveway, where Hobie was sniffing the bushes and I was shooting baskets, just to have something to do. She looked at me through her window and began to cry, and then I did.

One last walk around the neighborhood; one more clamber up into the back of the car – the trick now was to lower one side of the back seat, and have him step in through the back door, up onto the seat, and into the hatch. He was a pro at it by now, knew just how to do it.

Hobie smiled in the wind in the back of the car. His ears lifted on the breeze like they used to do whenever we walked him into a headwind – the reason we’d decided his breed name would be the “Schwaebische Schwebendehund” (Schwabisch gliding dog).

Things happened – papers, checks, nodding, holding, petting, listening, sitting beside – an eternity – and then suddenly, all too suddenly, his warm weight was in my lap, loose and relaxed as it used to be when we would cuddle on the carpet, before marriage, before children, before stiffness and tumors and deafness and age. We were all three together, and I was holding him, Janneke was holding him, and he was my warm, soft boy, my good, good boy, for the last time.

We walked out the back door, through the veterinarians’ laundry room, in a daze, emerging with our arms around each other into the bright, humid afternoon, with Hobie’s collar and his leash, and unknowable numbers of his hairs, clinging to us.

I go to pull the T-shirt form Friday out of the laundry, and find the hairs, still there. Itchy, sticky, and curved, advertising to the world that we have a semi-long-haired, white and orange dog at home.

Over there sits his basket, and inside, his blanket, folded and pressed in the shape of my Hobie. With precisely the number of hairs inside as there were the minute he left.

He isn’t afraid now. He doesn’t hurt.

But we do.

Directions to Dad's House

2009-06-09T18:18:00.000-07:00

Hooray! Google Earth, my favorite playground, now has high-resolution photos of Gays Mills, my home town! Here are some coordinates:

43°19'46.10"N

90°50'48.43"W

That's the end of Dad's driveway.

43°17'32.52"N

90°51'58.46"W

That's the Boehms' house.

43°19'14.64"N
90°52'4.59"W

That's my Aunt Marian's house.

OK, I'll stop annoying you...Check it out, though. The glory that is Gays Mills has never been clearer.

Nature versus Nurture

2009-06-08T18:14:00.001-07:00

Oh, how many things to describe to you! How MANY!

Nature: Fishers were charging through our neighborhood the other night. Thursday night, to be precise. Yowling, yipping, screeching, moaning in the treetops, there were at least three, possibly four, and they were blood-curdling. I heard them as I returned with Hobie from his walk, and quickly stored him inside, grabbed a flashlight, and came back out our open garage door to see if I could get a glimpse of one.

And one was skittering down the trunk of the easternmost linden tree in our front yard. I ran towards it and flashed the flashlight, and saw its silhouette bounding toward the back yard, but the light wasn't powerful enough to illuminate it very well; it remained a shadow, and it ran too fast to focus very clearly on. But I rounded the corner of the house in high hopes of a better look. I heard it clamber over the neighbor's chain-link fence and then silence as it crossed her yard; more clanging as it scaled her back chainlink fence, so I stopped against the gate, and caught it in the beam of my light as it hung at the other end of the yard, splayed out on the fence, eyes glittering at me. It was dark brown, about the size of a large fox, and seemed absolutely demonic. I was thrilled. Two more, at least, were skittering and scratching about in two other trees; I searched for them long and hard with the flashlight, but its beam really was pretty weak, and I never got much of a look at them. Came back in and called them up on Wikipedia, where I learned that they give birth in early spring and the pups leave the den in early to mid summer. So that was what I was looking at, no doubt: a mother and the pups, in the midst of teaching them to maraud.

Add this to the bear prints still visible on the side of the house and the foxes we see slinking through the lamplight on our nightly walk, and we have yet another reason to keep the cat in at night. Fishers are famous for devouring them, or so I read. (But, again, it's Wikipedia. So in truth, cats may actually eat them. It's hit and miss.)

The reason I charged out our open garage door (as opposed to through it, closed, I guess) is that the robins are back, as you may have heard, and have now got four vigorous pichones devourin' worms all day long. And as I lay in bed Thursday night, listening to the fishers (which resumed their clamor a few moments after I came in), I thought how frightened the mother robin must have been. The fisher, after all, had been about twenty feet away, climbing the linden tree, unaware of the tasty babies in the nest in our eaves. Darkness and death all around, and she the only thing standing between her little ones and the toothy night. But I shouldn't get too sentimental about it - had the fishers come close, she'd have simply flown away and left the tots to their fate. Probably already cooking up the next batch of eggs anyway.

Soccer: Q is on a tear. I'll start with the latest game: they played against the Cosmos, the other half of Williamstown's U-10 squad, consisting of ten players or so, with a preponderance of fourth-graders. Colton, Q's buddy, a very graceful and tenacious athlete, is on the Cosmos, and I sat next to his dad, Colin. As he watched the Strikers (Q's team) warm up, he noticed that they only had one fourth grader. It's Crow, who's phenomenal, but still, he's the only one. Everyone there expected the Strikers to lose handily - the Cosmos, in addition to Colton, who's second to none among the third-graders, have the Kleiner twins, Cole D., and Naka, who's just unbelievable - all 4th-graders.

And in the first half, it looked that way - they built up a 3-0 lead. A couple of those goals came, honestly, with Q defending - he was going through one of his stand-and-look bouts, letting people get past him, getting out of position, fascinated darkly by the scary game around him. He got some words on the subject from the coach (always positive, always constructive - we have FANTASTIC coaches here), and before you knew it it was halftime.

And then Q came alive. Hard, long, scrambling runs, poking the ball away from Naka, running right with him, refusing to yield, foiling any number of chances. And when he was playing forward, which was most of the time, he was a blue streak. ("Man," parents of Cosmos were heard to remark, "I knew Q had wheels, but jeepers...!") At one point early in the second half, he was attacking and took a poke at the goal, and it was deflected out the back end by a defender. Corner.

Crow took it - Q stood at the near post, and, to hear him tell it later, felt the man marking him drop away and gesticulated with his eyes and his hands, wildly but quietly, to Crow. "NOW!", he tried to say, pointing to himself. Crow fired, a beautiful, curving, chest-high laser; Q turned to take it in the ribs and it bounced perfectly into the side of the net.

Q raised his arms and sprinted downfield, cheering...then slowed...then bent over...and then went to one knee, then two, grimacing, holding his ribs. That had hurt. He left the game for a while, but as far as I could see, there were no tears. Just a lot of grimacing. (His coach, Hugh, told me later that when the game was over, he'd asked Q, "Was it worth it?" And Q had said, "Oh yeah. You bet.")

Meanwhile, the Strikers had made a change in goal, putting in Q's buddy Henry, and that kid was an absolute wall. Every fourth-grader on the Cosmos took a point-blank shot at him at some point in the second half, and nothing - block after block, save, after save. The crowd was in awe. And Henry had also begun to find the open man with his goal kicks, which meant that it was only a matter of time: Crow pounded one into the upper corner of the goal, over the outstretched hands of the Cosmos' keeper (a kid I don't know), and also lobbed a direct kick from near midfield in front of the goalie, who let it bounce...which was a mistake. Over his head and in. 3-3.

Naka was not to be denied, and at one point he got taken down just outside the box for a direct kick. The Strikers formed a valiant wall, Henry behind, but Naka was pinpoint accurate and put it into the back corner. 4-3.

One more from the Cosmos, I forget who, and it was 5-3.

And finally, for what I honestly think was the first time all game, Naka and Colton took a breather.

The Strikers smelled blood, and Q started making fantastic runs and passes. One shot went wide; another was saved - and then Q found himself relatively alone on the left side. Men closing in from behind, keeper coming out to cut off his angle, Q calmly pulled up and lobbed a long arc, easily 20 yards, over the keeper's head. It bounced behind him and rolled lazily across the goal line, spiked home by a charging Brady. Assist? Goal? Brady, apparently, wasn't sure. And neither cared - the important thing was the score: 5-4.

And these guys weren't done. They swarmed against the Cosmos, running them ragged, and after what could honestly not have been more than three minutes, Colton and Naka came back in, as if to shut down this final threat.

Which was when my favorite sequence happened, because really, nothing changed. Q ran with Naka stride for stride as Naka tried to penetrate and put the game away, stole the ball from him, and then led Naka all the way to the other end of the field and fired off a shot. Wide, but still - Q gave up nothing in this battle. It was the two of them, back and forth, running each other into oblivion, neither giving any quarter. It was a beautiful duel. Others were involved, of course, but Q and Naka stand out in my mind. I mean, Naka is spooky-good, and a fourth grader, but in this, essentially an intramural game, Q couldn't have cared less. It was just Naka, the kid he hangs out with at the youth center and practices with all the time. Pushing, tugging, shouleering each other off the ball, neither able to turn the corner on the other...Beautiful to watch.

Time. 5-4, Cosmos win.

So that was Sunday. Saturday's game had been postponed until the end of the season, and the week before THAT, you already know about, I think. He's been doing great lately, practicing on his own out back whenever he can, with me or Mami when possible, though we just serve as backstops, catching his misses (which are rare) and serving the ball back to him, fishing it out of the back of the net. Big, big fun. And no pressure - during Q's lethargic stretches, I smile and muse on what the glory of Q's development is, as it's laid out in front of me in comical, vivid, exciting colors. The same kid who can go toe-to-toe with the legendary Naka one minute will stand there and watch as the man he's meant to be marking knocks one in the next minute, and that is not maddening or frustrating or bad to me any more. It is simply wonderful. Watching him grow up, I am growing up myself.

Tonight, though I am tired, and it is late. Our firend Brad's project "Roomful of Teeth" is kicking off in W-town today, and I attended a wine-and-cheese this evening, representing our family as Janneke made dinner. Listened to a yodeler, a Tuvan throat singer, and then the yodeler and the Tuvan throat singer together. Freaky, that was, and chilling and hyper-cool.

But now it's very late, and I must yet walk the dog and hygienate. The rest of the week's adventures will just have to wait for another day.

Huzzah!

Glory

2009-05-30T21:09:00.000-07:00

Was had by Q today on the soccer field. I did not attend, as per my depressurizing philosophy of late, but here's what I hear from witnesses:

Q spent some time in goal and did not fare well there. They were shorthanded - a total of 6 players came today. There are 6 on the field at any given time in U-10 soccer. So our boys were going to be stretched thin, and Q spending 1/4 of the game in goal was part of that stretching. They scored on him three times.

But when he was not in goal, he was on fire, scoring three times himself - triple his highest production in any other game so far this spring. Once was a tap-in on a centering pass from Crow, another was a looooong, arcing, high shot, flat, over the goalie's outstretched arms and across the face of the goal from the right corner, that somehow clanged off the top of the far post and in, and the third was a beat-one-man-and-then-tap-it-in-with-the-outside-of-the-right-foot number. That's how they were described to me.

Crow, the fourth grader who's found his legs this spring, scored five times, and Brady, once.

Tally in totum: 9.

Lenox Gold scored 8.

This is one happy li'l eight-year-old we have a-snoozin' in our house.

Therafter, T and I went to the park and flew a kite. A Barbie kite she got as a party favor somewhere. Perfect day for it, and she was a natural, running when she needed to...At one point when we first started she let all the string out, only to realize that it wasn't tied to the plastic thing they wrap the string around. The string leapt away from her...

...and she reached out and CAUGHT IT OUT OF THE AIR.

MY DAUGHTER IS A NINJA!!!!!

Yard Hijinks

2009-05-28T19:07:00.000-07:00

Couple of things recently in the yard. First: T ran around with the digital camera (I alluded to this the other day) snapping pictures, and some of those follow:

Skittles and the soccer goal (which Q has been using like mad lately - in fact, he and I were playing while T shot these).

Me in the distance, T reflected in the window.

Me up close. Armed with beer and a Flip video camera, with which I was filming Q's repertoire of soccer moves. Tightly edited compilation to follow.

Q even upper closer.

Skittles crazy-uppest-closest.

T so ultimately-uppest-closest, the camera is actually inside her.

Fascinating subject matter.

Compare and contrast!

Artifact of another time. That time being a couple of minutes ago, when I was sitting on it in the "me-in-the-distance" picture.

The other thing: Woke up this morning to find that the expensive squirrel-proof bird feeder is not at all bear-proof:

Apparently, he knocked over bird feeders in the yards up and down the street. I knew I shouldn't have had it out, but it was hard to resist - there are so many great birds coming these days. Purple finches, rose-breasted grosbeaks, goldfinches... But in the last few, I should have heeded the signs that it was time to put them away. The bird attendance had really petered out - they have so much to eat in early summer, after all, and don't have to depend on the feeders. But the bears do:

Sons of bitches. He knocked over my birdbath and bent the steel pole the feeder hung from:

He tried to go after this feeder, too - you can't see the feeder in this picture, since I took it down, but it was undamaged, as it was hung up too high for him to get to:

I know he went after it because I found these against the side of the house under the feeder:

I was standing with my arm straight out when I took these, so he was probably a little taller than me when he stretches his head up. You can actually see them in the picture of where the feeder was hanging, too, if you click on the picture and get the larger version. Dirty pawprints, right up on the siding, one and two slats of siding above the level of the fence. He also fell or crashed through the bush on the other side of the fence there in his attempt to scramble up the fence and use it to hoist himself up to feeder level:

Durn lucky he didn't scratch up the siding. I showed all this to the kids, and to Janneke, when they all got home this afternoon, but none of them were as excited as I was. Figures. No one cares about me...

'Cept maybe her:

And, heck, if I got that, who needs anything else.

Perfect Time for Bloggin'

2009-05-23T19:01:00.000-07:00

And I'll tell you why.

First off, Janneke's watching "Impromptu", which I've already seen, and which kind of bugs me somehow. Too dated, I think. When a 1990 movie (or whatever it is) tries to look like 1890 (or whatever it is), all I can see is 1990 (or whatever it is). Or whatever.

Second, I don't have to scurry off to practice the guitar, because I already did that.

Third, I don't have to clean the house in anticipation of Mark and Ronadh and Pete and Deniese coming over tomorrow, because I already did that.

Furthermore, I'm highly energized and wide-awake because of all the exercise I got today.

And lastly, there's all that stuff I just mentioned to tell you about.

Let's go in reverse order, shall we?

The exercise: Got up around 5:45 (before the alarm, for which Janneke is still grateful), bounded out of bed, did my morning exercise routine (stomach and push-ups), stretched, and zoomed off to Brad's to meet up for a 6:30, seven-mile run up and over Stone Hill behind The Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. I had no idea that whole network existed back there, and it is fabulous. Brad and I had a great, great run in perfect weather - slightly overcast, turning sunny, not hot, not cold, just enough damp in the air to keep you breathing easily, ground in the forest just soft enough from the gentle rain that had just ended when I rolled out of bed. I mean, perfect. Nobody got injured, and we finished it off with a nice pseudo-sprint of sixty yards or so.

Home to find T still asleep - she'd gotten sick last night and was sleeping off her late and uncomfortable turn in bed. Q was up, though, playing his Gameboy, and Janneke was also at the breakfast table, glowing after the first night in the last five where she hadn't had to go to the recliner because of her nagging allergy-induced cough.

More exercise to be had at the dump. Or, more accurately, in preparing to go there; and then, upon returning, the mowing of the grass. I had to hurry a bit, as the weather was looking threatening, and I didn't want to be stuck with no chance to cut it before tomorrow, when the guests come. And of course one thing led to another and suddenly I'm pulling up wayward saplings, watering all the grapes I've planted along the fence out back, moving the compost pile, weeding out the gravel bed in front of our guest bedroom window...So bloody much to do.

And then there's tomorrow's guests. We're having all the local Irishmen (Ronadh and Pete) and their respective spice and offspring for a cookout tomorrow evening, and it's going to be grand. Big weekend socially in general - we were over at Brad and Betsy's last night for dinner. The kids watched "Mama Mia", which is one of Betsy's favorite movies these days. ("They call it a chick flick," she grumbled, disbelievingly. "Yes," I should have replied. "And they call 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre' a horror film.") Just a blast - kids engaged and well-behaved, and adults out on their new deck, shootin' the breeze. One of the highlights of the evening was when we began to express our frustration with the dance lessons T has been taking. We get letters reminding us of the dress code that the girls are to follow on their way to the lesson. It's just such mincing, infantilizing poofery, and Janneke and I can't take it much longer. Brad summed up his frustration with this line: "Dance is a pot up on the shelf of our culture for people to pour shit into."

Bull's eye.

On to the guitar practice, which I did after we got back from the park - where T, Q and I had gone around 4:15, having heard from Janneke that her final exam had gone long and she wouldn't be home for a while. (And where I discovered I can again do chin-ups without pain, so I did a few. That only took two years.) So when we got back from there, I grabbed a beer and the guitar and sat on the edge of our deck overlooking the back yard, where Q zipped back and forth, practicing soccer moves, T stalked the cat and Q and me with the digital camera and binoculars around her neck, and Janneke gazed out on all of us as she prepared supper. It was a grand twenty minutes or so, in which I learned a lot about the instrument. It's a real hoot lately to explore that darn thing more and more.

And that's how the day has gone, man. It was long, but not long enough, and now here we are, perched atop Mongo at its end, each doing his or her separate thing. Thank God for laptops...And, heck, for many, many things.

Shower time!

Original Music, Courtesy of Q

2009-05-20T18:23:00.000-07:00

Checken Sie das aus:

Odds and ends

2009-05-18T17:44:00.000-07:00

Friends, Romans, countrymen: Grab me a Coke. Long as you're going.

here's some dang photos, since I really don't have too much time:

Three-quarters of the previously-living Johnson-side cousins gather to welcome Finley, the latest and greatest.

T does her bit to do so personally, one-on-one.

And then Q. Mano a mano.

Don't think Big Brother doesn't want some of that.

And here's yet another for the album cover twelve years from now: Lice treatment a-go-go. Tell me they don't look sensitive and impassioned, yet somehow disinterested and perhaps a bit snarky. Just like true rockers ought to look.

Quick Hits: Q scored a goal the other day and was fired-up and snappy for about 30% of the game. the other 70%, he was his somewhat drugged-looking pseudo-self. And as far as he knew, I wasn't there. So maybe it isn't all me. Though he may have noticed a green Subaru Legacy just on the other side of the chain link fence, where a bearded man watched through binoculars and hoped fervently that there weren't any cops watching. But in a good way.

Q cracked open a new toothbrush the other day because he'd left his old one at Henry's house on a sleepover. You hit the button on the end of this new one and blinky lights go crazy for a full minute, serving as a timer. T thought this was brilliant, so she said:

"Can I use Q's toothbrush?"
"No, T, of course not. You can never use someone else's toothbrush."
"But his is cool, and mine isn't, and it isn't fair!"
"Well, that's just the way it is sometimes. There's nothing we can really do right now."
"How about this: I use mine to brush my teeth, but I just hit the button and watch Q's toothbrush to know how long to brush?"

She is a f___ing genius.

Another soccer update

2009-05-09T14:27:00.000-07:00

Hey all - this weekend, I'm trying to kick the life out of a portfolio I have to get done for MA teacher accreditation, so it doesn't look like you'll get much out of me in the way of blog entries. But I do have a moment to just tell you this: Today, Janneke took Q to his soccer game while I stayed behind and took T to a birthday party. That is to say, no Papi at the futbol. And the results?

Janneke says he kicked heinie. Lots of good, aggressive moves, three shots on goal (none scored, though one, according to teammates standing there, should have been counted), hard-nosed play against an older team that played a very physical game. Great news.

Bad news, if what I want to do is watch - but great news in terms of his development.

T had no problems at the birthday party. She had me stick around for twenty minutes or so, then stuck her head out the back door of the house and shouted, "GO AWAY NOW, DAD!"

So there you have it. Neither kid wants me around - and both are probably better off for it. At least in these particular situations.

Back to portfolio-bustin'...

Quick Update

2009-05-06T19:21:00.000-07:00

Q now knows I'm not going to his game on Saturday. Doesn't really know why, but he knows. Things that Have, Probably Not Coincidentally, Happened Since:

Q has announced plans to spend a few minutes every day kicking a soccer ball so he "won't lose (his) skills".

Q has announced his latest eventual career aspiration: Soccer coach.

Q has played in two scrimmages in practice, yesterday and today, in which he was the only player on his team to score a goal. And in the second of which, and I am witness to this, he was hard-nosed, loose-limbed, speedy, graceful, and aggressive, running down people from behind and taking the ball away, zig-zagging through traffic, standing in idle moments while being coached with his hands on his hips, one leg cocked, listening but sizing up the other side at the same time instead of fiddling with the hem of his shirt and looking around for Mami or Papi. He is trans-frickin'-formed.

In other news, I spent the day at home today (dentist and doctor appointments), and so Janneke took advantage and went to the office early. I rolled out of bed around 7:10 and walked past T's room, where her bed was still a jumbled mass of pajamas, stuffed animals, and pillows. "Let her sleep," I said to myself. Q was in the kitchen eating breakfast. I greeted him and went to the living room to do my morning exercises.

On the floor, I heard the front door open. "Oh-oh," I called out, wondering what Janneke had forgotten. But Q, who could see the front door, cried, "T! What are you doing outside?"

I rolled over and stood up, and there was T, calm as can be, still in her pajama bottoms (she'd changed out of the top), wearing sneakers, with a jacket and her black "Madeline"-style hat on. "I just took a walk," she said.

Why in heaven's name I didn't get a picture I will never !!@#9*!@ know.

Lopsided Anecdotal Evidence of Fragility

2009-05-03T18:30:00.000-07:00

A week's worth of Williamstown, and I'm pretty well grounded again, though there have been some upheavals to keep me from feeling like I never left. Nothing serious, but when I'm thrown out of my usual patterns, I get very disoriented. And there's been a lot of that this week.

Sunday, a day after arriving back from Wisconsin, we took Q to his first spring soccer game, and last season's late-in-the-year tentativeness was on full display. You've never seen a more frightened and reluctant player - adept, now, at arriving JUST a moment too late to get a contested ball; booting any ball he comes in contact with away from himself as fast as possible; following attacking people from the opposite team at a trot rather than running them down like the Q of old. I held my tongue, but as I gradually convinced Janneke that he wasn't just tired, that he wasn't doing just as much as the other kids, it came over me: He's afraid to make mistakes. I think I'm intimidating him from the sidelines.

So I've resolved not to go to several of his games now. See if by not attending, I can help to readjust the space they take up back down to its proper size - reduce the importance of the games so he can enjoy them again. I think I prasied him too much when he was great, and gave too much advice when he wasn't, and now I represent the possibility of failure. It's too much for him - and we've been noticing a real tendency to climb into our laps like he's four again and straddle us, hugging and humming contentedly. He's clinging to his littleboyhood; bigness is starting to scare him a bit. Like the time he figured out there was no Santa Claus, and laughed about it...and then four months later, professed fervent belief again. Innocence is a difficult thing to let go of.

Then on Monday we got the call that Q had head lice. What fun. I got the call, actually - in class. They told me they hadn't been able to get hold of Janneke, and that Q would be waiting for me. I quickly arranged coverage and drove the 45 minutes home, convinced I was itching the whole way. Q launched himself happily out the door of the school the second he saw me, but I went back in with him to consult with the nurse a bit - and to have her check my own bald, but still sufficiently hairy (perhaps...?), head. She fond nothing.

So we stopped at the supermarket for a couple of the DDT shampoos they sell for such occasions, and I lathered Q up and set him down in front of Sponge Bob Squarepants while I scurried around the house, washing and disinfecting everything his head had touched in the last week or so. Such onerous labor, let me tell you - and it's our third bout this year. It's a bleedin' plague in Williamstown this year - we know four other families who've had it and have heard of a number more.

On one of my zoomings past Q, I noticed, suddenly, that he was crying! I sat down with him and asked him if the lice had made him sad. "No - me duele la panza." And that night he was vomiting, and the next day he didn't go to school. Janneke took him to work with her, and Wednesday he was still off, so I stayed home. (Though I had to blaze in at 5:30 and leave my plans on the desk for the sub, then zoom back and take over so Janneke could go to work.) Wednesday afternoon we took Q to his piano lesson, and while he took it I shot off to daycare and picked up T, so we could hit the doctor's office - and when we came back to the piano lesson, Ed, his brilliant teacher, told us he'd been able to do very, very little, between trips to the bathroom and heavy sighing. Poor little guy. We apologized to Ed and hit the doctor's office, and got everything confirmed: Virus, nothing really to do but keep him hydrated and wait it out. Which would be the plan for all of Thursday as well.

Janneke is at the end of her semester, and I'm at the beginning of the fourth quarter - so our stress levels are not at all similar. And she doesn't teach Friday, so if he had to stay then, it would be her day. So I stayed again on Thursday.

That day Q and I drove to Pittsfield to buy a new basketball rim, since the old one, which had come with the house, had given way. (Two years ago I replaced the backboard, which had rotted through; this year, the rim. Next year it'll be the steel arms that hold the backboard onto the roof.) Q's really a pretty darn good shot nowadays - though he could only work up about ten minutes of shooting before retiring back to Sponge Bob. So I stayed outside and went 1-for-22, something like that, and did some really spectacularly bad dribbling.

By this time I had no frickin' idea where I was, what day it was, or what my middle name was. I'd not really taught more than a class and a half in over a week, and was spending long, odd days at home while Q recuperated on the couch watching more "Sponge Bob" and I did yard work or practiced the guitar. And Q was only gradually getting better, able to eat a little more each day, still turning down most of the most basic of foods. Thursday night we were speculating that he might be milking it in the hopes of missing Friday school as well, and did so in German, so he wouldn't understand; then we switched back to Spanish, and Janneke said, "Pero manana, quiera o no, el come. Porque no se puede vivir asi." ("But tomorrow, like it or not, he's eating. Because you can't live like this.")

Which Q, of course, interpreted as "Q is going to die."

That led to another long session of gangly-legged nearly-nine-year-old spread-eagle on our laps, gently sniffling as we explained that that was not exactly what Mami had meant. He really is uncomfortable with getting bigger, I think, with becoming "too big to cuddle", as they say in "Raising Arizona". He felt OK Friday, and went to school, but he really lost weight those few days. He's stretching out, too, but we can't help but feel his back and his arms all the time now and fret over the couple of pounds he lost. He informed us early this afternoon that he didn't want to go to Sunday-night pickup soccer, and we readily agreed. Again, with the sports thing!

Because this afternoon, as he sat on my lap in the park, he said he didn't know how he was going to get enough money when he got older to buy a house. "WHAT?!?! Why are you worried about that?" And the explanation came that he wasn't super-good at any sport, so he would probably never be a professional, and wouldn't earn millions, so he wouldn't have enough money.

Oh!, the many angles from which we tried to gently debunk this latest misconception. I think he hears all his very-sporty friends talking about their bright futures in various sports - Eli, after all, is a superior baseball player; Sammy D and Brady are the MVPs of Q's soccer team (though, I'm telling you, when Q isn't worried about it, he is every bit on a par with them); Jay is an amazing goalie; Sean's Dad is a basketball coach, and he's already dribbling between his legs...Q, meanwhile, is A-OK at all of these, and the best in town at none. So naturally he's concluded that all his friends will be Rookie of the Year, and he'll starve to death.

We talked at him for a while, gently, until he said he didn't want to talk about it anymore - he wanted to play baseball. We grabbed the gloves and played a rousing game of catch, he, Mami, and I, while T finished up a play date in the park with her friend Hazel. Man...Their little psyches are such delicate things. It reminds me of one of the last emails my Mom wrote me before she couldn't any more:

"I remember all the time you were growing up, you were so tender hearted and I thought that I hope you toughen up as you age because you would be hurt by a lot of people who were ignorant and never think of anyone but themselves and howthey feel."

Chilling, the way that could be me, writing to Q. Peas in a pod.

Three nights in a row, he's woken up in the middle of the night and come to our bed to spend the rest of it with us. Tonight we drew the line, though, and said that if he needs comforting, one of us will go to his bed. Whatever the root cause of it, Q needs comfortin'. Luckily, it's what we most love to do.

Don't worry - I'll write about T as soon as she gets sick and has her psyche crushed. Shouldn't be long. I give it a week. Meantime, here's a little something to tide you over: T at ballet, practicing for her upcoming role as a lump of sugar:

Ocooch Swan Song

2009-04-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

Spring peepers out the window in the sloughs by the river as I sit in the dark at my father's place at the dining room table and write this.

Dad's gone to bed - hoping to be up early and not miss anything of our last day on this particular trip. Jayne's downstairs with T, having agreed to have her in for a sleepover; Q's asleep in what used to be Jayne's room. About half the packing is done.

We had a memorable evening - post-supper, we all drove downtown to the park by the swimming pool, where Q and I tried to play catch with Grandpa and the football. But Grandpa couldn't see it well enough to catch it, and his shoulder isn't what it used to be for throwing. So he wandered off, and then I had Q go and round him up so the three men could go to the basketball courts half a mile away and shoot around with the much larger and less velocity-prone ball, leaving the girls to swing and slide.

Q did 75% of the shooting, but Grandpa got in there too, hitting a couple of jumpers once he'd learned the limits of his age and his strength again. He suffers with that, though he smiles as he does - at the end of the evening, when he, Jayne and I sat on a bench and watched T and Q zoom round and round on a merry-go-round, he summed up the basketball experience this way: "Well, I discovered yet another way I'm not worth a shit anymore." But he also reveled in watching Q hit some long jumpers and dribble his way past me (not exactly a difficult thing to do), and stood beneath the basket to rebound for him very happily. It occurred to me while we stood there shooting that I was five times Q's age, and Dad, ten times. We let that sink in with smiles on our faces as another shot swished through.

Back home, T ran toward the house in the very-near-dark, rounding the end of the car just as Blue, Dad's heeler-collie mix, raced around the same corner in the opposite direction, wildly excited at our arrival, and they crashed, T sprawling out into the gravel. So we had tears and an emergency treatment by Auntie Jayne of some abrasions that were vanishingly mild. That fragility combined with the sudden knowledge that she hadn't seen Mami in a while, and when she got on the phone with her, T started a long jag of gentle, shuddering sobbing against my shoulder. Which I did not mind in the least.

Grandpa had taken the kids on a long 4-wheeler ride just prior to supper, each one with binoculars dangling from the neck, down to the river bottom and around a maze of fallen logs to a spot where you can see the giant bald eagles' nest across the river. Q claims to have seen one, but Grandpa wasn't so sure. At any rate, the best thing that place had to offer was the chance to throw sticks into the river, and Q very nearly put a big one across, or so I'm told. Their return saw both Auntie Jayne and me snapping photos and filming like mad. I've never seen three happier people.

All this post-3:30, because that was when we rolled in from our five-hour drive from Uncle Jim and Auntie Sarah's house, where we'd been since noon the previous day. Drove all the way to Two Rivers, which I think is a fantastically picturesque little burg, because Baby Liam, as we call him (and who is now two and a half), just received a baby sister named Finley. She is perfect and gorgeous, and Liam is in love with his cousins. We all went swimming at our hotel the night before in their indoor waterpark (not one but two slides, a lazy river, wading pool, basketball pool, lily-pad crossing, and a hot tub), and then out to supper at a restaurant in the Lambeau Field atrium, and then this morning they'd played together for another couple of hours, and when we left, Liam cried stood in the yard with Uncle Jim and wailed profoundly as he waved goodbye. I will remind him of that scene in joking fashion when Liam turns his meathooks and brawn against mighty foes at Lambeau Field himself as a highly touted rookie defensive end. That kid is all power.

Auntie Jayne and I, then, had 10 hours in the car over two days to talk and catch up, and did we ever. It's been great to get to know her better again these past few days. My fantasies of a life here are bubbling at a full boil now - every trip up on the hill on the 4-wheeler shows me a new are where I'd like to clear the trail better, pull up all the honeysuckle (I actually pulled some at various stops along the way - thanks, Mark and Ronadh!), cut some trees to improve the view, fix the fences, build a horse barn...And then reality comes back in and I know I'm not here anymore. And haven't been for a long, long time.

Poignancy!, thy name is Gays Mills.

Pictures and films to follow - be patient, they'll be worth it...

Gays Mills Express

2009-04-20T19:22:00.000-07:00

Howdy all, and I apologize for the extended absence - events conspired, all that. But there we are.

Where are we? Wisconsin, naturally. I've got this week off, as do the kiddles. (T has off when we say she has, but luckily for her, we say she has.) Janneke stayed behind to man the ramparts while we zipped across the country, courtesy of Amtrak.

That's been the biggest adventure so far: luxury accommodations in a sleeper car, waited on hand and foot by dedicated, chipper, energetic employees in white shirts and ties while gently rocking on the rails. Ainsley was the name of our general steward, a very personable man of 45 or so who came and got us at meal times and made our beds and otherwise made sure we were comfortable; Kwame was the other main character, who amazed the kids with his ability to pour soda from a can while being heaved about at a curve in the tracks without spilling a drop, let alone falling. They loved every second of it. So much more comfortable than flying - tickle fights on a giant couch in our cabin replaced endless hours of whining about your bum being too hot and the guy in the seat next to you oozing over into your space again. Lovely experience that we'll be repeating in just a few short days on the return trip.

Picked up the rental car in Chicago, at the depot, and literally turned twice when leaving Union Station before finding ourselves on 90 heading west and north. Easiest trip ever. Cooperative and thoughtful kids, well-thought-out itinerary...Can't complain.

Gays Mills is poignant as always. I have a hard time seeing the place with forty-year-old eyes. Part of its charm is that my eyes are suddenly 16 again when I'm here, and the particular scale and arc of the hills and the bends in the river ring together in a chord that puts me straight into the same emotional state I was in back in the day. Which, as those of you who know me from then will know, is a mixed bag at best. So I simultaneously feel youthful and anxious, groove-sliding and washboard-bumping all at the same time as the past and the present wrestle with each other. Very fraught.

I took a jog yesterday north on the road my Dad and sister live on, and went probably two miles before turning back. I jogged over culverts where I used to set traps for raccoons, past a giant old twisted oak where, when I was ten or eleven, I found a baby raccoon, which we failed to nurse back to health, dashing my dreams of reliving "Rascal" by Sterling North. I passed two houses, which my Dad had purchased downtown in Gays Mills and then moved on truckback out to their current resting place. We had helped him to pour the cement pads they stand on, and had done some of the hammering and nailing when they were lowered in place by a crane, all of which seemed very grand and entrepreneurial at the time. One of them sold, and has now been re-sided and re-roofed, and stands as a hunting cabin for some outlander I don't know and have never met, surrounded by ground that has been transformed into yard from the thistly pasture it was when we worked there; the other has fallen into rot, looking every bit the abandoned project it is, grown in with weeds, topped with a fallen-in, broken-backed roof. I passed the bend in the river where some years a go a blue bus came to rest and still stands in the long grass, roughly parallel to the swoop of the bank. Its back doors stand open, a heap of nameless refuse lying beneath, thrown out - by Tracy, the ghostly, bearded man who rides his bike slowly up and down the road, hauling a handmade trailer where he piles sticks and treasures, and who lives in the bus, somehow; stays alive over the winters somehow, despite the evident lack of a chimney, past the little corral where his donkey lifted its head and stared at me. Past a farm where there has always been evidence of habitation, but where I have never seen anyone, not since a bizarre birthday party I'd been driven past in the car as a kid, back before the old house that stood there was finally razed - the place had suddenly been alive with people, dozens of them, adorning the porch and charging back and forth across the front yard beneath a colorful banner, only to disappear again along with that original house, leaving only occasional signs of life, like the dog that growled at me as I ran past, or the laundry on the line, but never again any actual humans, not once in the hundreds of times I've been past there. I jogged by a pasture where a palomino horse grazed on the tiniest shoots of grass, and watched as he threw up his head at my passing and began to trot towards the road, as if to intercept me, and I thought certain he would crash against the fence - except there was no fence, and he trotted into my path and stood there a moment, vaguely threatening, before dashing past me, hooves clattering. Toward the end of the road where the Georges live, whose sons were basketball players ages ago, where my sister's dog Lily came barreling out of the woods, having traversed the same distance through the forest on the ridgeline and found me there, as if she'd planned the whole thing. And then we turned and ran back, past Tracy, who was now out, standing above the road, across from his bus, in front of a dilapidated sticks-and-straw wigwam he'd tacked together for his dog, which whined at me and Lily as we passed. All the way home.

And now I have two children awaiting me in a double bed - neither could bear to sleep alone tonight, so I put them in together with the promise that I'd crawl in among them when I got tired enough. A moment which is fast approaching.