A while back, in one of my posts, I mentioned in passing the old film projectors (and the reel-type movies that came in the big old metal cannisters) that we had back when I was in school. In a comment to that post, my friend Lime, who is probably 12 or 13 years my junior, noted that they still had those projectors when she was in school. Which got me to wondering just when VCRs drove the old-style film projectors out of the schools. Any of you young whippersnappers care to enlighten me?
Those little 'background technologies' are, for me, a fascinating glimpse of history, sort-of a more 'mundane' version of 'Where Were You When. . .?'. I'm not even really talking about the big 'foreground stuff', like how my grandparents were born into a world in which horses were the main engines of transportation and work, and before they died, they saw men walking on the moon. Rather, I have in mind the more 'background' stuff that you don't particularly think about, but that significantly color the day-to-day ways that you live your life. Like my grandma's old wringer-style washing machine, and stuff like that. . .
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My dad is old enough to remember when Rural Electrification (one of FDR's Alphabet Agencies) came to his dad's farm. Which, conversely, means that he's old enough to remember what life was like before his dad's house had electricity - the gas-light spigots on the walls, doing chores by lantern-light, and stuff like that. . . I remember as a kid, being aghast that they didn't have TVs when my dad was a kid (my dad's speech is still full of little idioms like, "Holy mackerel, Andy!" that I found out much later were relics of the radio shows he listened to in his childhood).
This all came rushing back to my mind when my kids were similarly aghast that, when I was a kid, we didn't have VCRs. And how do I explain to them the trips we took to the store when I was a kid, with an armload of vacuum tubes to check on the drug-store's Tube Tester, to find the one that was fritzed, so we could replace it, and get our TV working again?
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Jen and I have tended to be a tad 'behind the curve' when it comes to 'technological innovations' (which at least had the beneficial effect of sparing us from 8-track tapes). It was well into the 90s when, in the space of a year or two, we got our first microwave oven, our first VCR, and our first cordless phone. Most of which was driven by our in-house population boom - microwave ovens meant that we could heat an after-school snack in 30 seconds or so (which becomes more critical when you need four or five of them in quick succession); a VCR meant that we weren't held captive to network TV programming, and a cordless phone meant that Jen could conduct her daily business on the phone without being tethered to within 25 feet of the phone (before we 'went cordless', we bought an extra-long 25-foot cord for the handset, so Jen could reach about half of the main floor of our house). The cordless phone also eliminated the coiled cord snaking through the house for the kids to 'clothesline' themselves on. Although we have found that it's handy to keep an old cord-style phone tucked away, in case the power ever goes out. . .
I still have, stashed away in my attic, boxes of 12-inch black-vinyl discs (and a turntable to play them on, although I'm not sure it would be compatible with my stereo anymore) which constituted my collection of recorded music from my college days. By the early 80s, the market was well on its way over to casette tapes, which were in turn driven out by CDs in the 90s. So, I've rolled over my music collection a couple times. By now, I've got most of my favorite old vinyl albums on CD, but there are a few that haven't been issued on CD yet, and probably never will be. . .
Likewise, my library of VHS movies has mostly been converted to DVDs by now, but there are a few that never will be. We bought a combo VCR/DVD a couple years ago, with the intention of converting some of the old VHS tapes to DVDs, but I think you need at least a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering to program that stuff. But at least the combo unit will still play the old VHS tapes, so as long as it lives, we've still got access to them. . .
With phones, we're already to the point where cell phones are ingrained in our daily lives, and we can't quite imagine how we ever got by without them. I got my first cell phone on a promotional deal from my car-insurance company, when I started commuting an hour one-way to work, figuring that I would be glad to have it if I ever had car trouble 50 miles from home (which I did, and I was). I made maybe a half-dozen 'emergency' calls a year on it, and that was fine. Then, some years back, 4M talked us into getting a 'family plan' so we could all be in closer touch. Of course, he had other things in mind beyond simply keeping in touch with his parents, and we quickly learned that he could receive calls from other people than just us, so we entered into a whole new realm of trying to manage our kids' cell-phone usage. Which I'm not sure we've managed yet; at least, not terribly effectively. Some of our friends have dispensed with their 'land lines' altogether; we're not quite to that point, but it's not an exotic concept to us anymore. . .
It's funny, but I remember when fax machines were this gee-whiz new technology (maybe 15-20 years ago?), and now hardly anybody faxes anything anymore. Mostly because of e-mail. And you can all congratulate Jen, who got her first e-mail account about six months ago, and has finally decided that she really ought to check it, maybe even as often as daily (I think the other day she had something like 75 items in her in-box; so she's getting some rudimentary 'training' just reading and deleting them)
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Here's a kinda cool one - I'm 54 years old; I graduated from high school in 1973. I think that my class was within a year or two of being the last one that was actually taught how to use a slide rule. When I was a college freshman, electronic calculators were still fairly exotic - a high-end 'scientific calculator' still cost something like $750. The Engineering College had one in the library that they kept locked to a heavy table, and you had to sign up for time on it. So you'd systematically work through your homework to get the problems to where they were finished except for the last few calculations that you needed the calculator for.
The college bookstore still carried a full line of slide rules when I arrived as a freshman; by my junior year, they were gone. My freshman roommate had a very basic 'four-function' calculator (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), and we would have a steady stream of guys on our floor, coming to our room to use my roommate's calculator. Until one of the other guys on the floor came back from Christmas break with one that had a square-root key; then everybody (including us, when we needed to calculate a square-root) wore out the path to his door. My junior year, my folks got me a 'scientific calculator' for Christmas (which cost around $60; which shows how the 'market' had changed in just a couple years). And of course, now banks give away calculators - the size and thickness of a credit card - as a 'bonus' for opening a new account (or was that a few years ago, and utterly lame by now?). . .
My dad retired in the late '80s. One Christmas, a couple years after that, we were down at my parents' house for Christmas. All the gifts were handed out, and we were all sort-of sitting back, watching the grandkids play with their presents. My dad stood up, excused himself, and walked back down the hall. He returned a couple minutes later with an oblong black rectangular package. "You might as well have this," he said. "I don't suppose I'll be needing it much anymore." I immediately recognized it to be the leather case containing his slide rule. It was like an old warrior handing down his sword. I didn't know what to say; I was incredibly touched. Jen was in tears at the 'symbolic significance' of it. I still have my dad's slide rule; in fact, I've made a few minor repairs to the black-leather case. I still know how to use it; I suppose I should teach my own kids, if any of them are interested.
I know that, even now, it's mostly a museum-piece. But it wasn't that long ago - within my own lifetime, much less my dad's - that those little sticks of wood-and-ivory were the work-horses of scientific and engineering calculation. . .
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So - what about you all? What 'gadgets' do you remember that were common-as-air, once-upon-a-time, but have long-since gone by the board?
Monday, May 24, 2010
Thursday, May 20, 2010
Generations. . .
For the past few years, there has been a little Starbucks stand tucked into the front of the Meijer store where we do a lot of our grocery shopping. I will stop there once or twice a week, and since my 'usual' order is a tad idiosyncratic (venti fat-free latte; three pumps sugar-free hazelnut, two pumps sugar-free vanilla), the retiree-aged woman who often works there notices me whenever I come by, and we've struck up a friendly little banter over the years. . .
In the division of labor that Jen and I have worked out in recent years, the Meijer shopping has fallen into my pile, while she handles the rest of the grocery shopping, at the farmer's market, and a couple other places. . .
8M's birthday was a few days ago - he turned eight, which is a further indication that our childbearing years are drawing to a close (or that they have already). Which brings something of a combination of sadness and relief, along with being a marker that we're drawing closer to the end of our lives than the beginning. But this really isn't supposed to be a sad or dark post. Really. . . (bear with me; these seemingly unconnected strands will all come together eventually; I think)
A week or two ago, I went out on my regular Meijer run, and I took 8M with me. When you have eight kids, taking them on errands is one of the ways you can wedge in a little one-on-one time with your kids. Which, honestly, works pretty well, for the most part. Except for the days when I'm craving a little solitude, but I've mostly written that off, for the foreseeable future. And 8M is a chatterbox of the highest order (a trait passed on to him from Jen's side of the family). Sometimes I just have to say to him, "8M, my ears are getting tired; could you be quiet for a few minutes?"
Anyway, 8M and I were out doing some grocery shopping together. We filled our cart with all the items on our list, and after we had finished checking out, we wandered past the Starbucks stand, and on impulse, I decided to grab a latte for the road. My coffee-lady was there, and as I approached the counter (I don't even have to state my order anymore - she's memorized it; which is one of those little 'personal touches' that makes me want to keep going back there, rather than a different Starbucks, or whatever), she smiled, and started preparing my cup. Seeing 8M with me, she grinned and asked -
"Is this your grandson?"
Ummm. . . no. . . actually, he's my youngest son. . . I wanted to say something about how well my boys can swim, or somesuch, but I thought better of it. . .
If I think about it, it really shouldn't be terribly surprising - I'm gray enough, and there are plenty of guys even younger than me who are grandfathers. But it was the first time that particular misperception has come my way (and maybe that's the 'truer' surprise; maybe I'm younger and more virile-looking than I think I am. . .) (or, you know, maybe not. . .)
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It reminded me a little bit of the time when I was in high school, and my dad was gone for a few days, and my mom and I, for whatever reason (I can't recall), were out to dinner. We had a nice time together, and when we had finished, the waitress put the check next to my place. With the implication that she perceived us as 'a couple', rather than a mother-and-teenaged-son. Which tickled my mom no end. And that waitress got a very generous tip. . .
Monday, May 17, 2010
Is It Live. . . Or Is It Memorized?
This post goes out with a tip of the cap to my friend FADKOG (that's the acronymic form of For a Different Kind of Girl), in honor of her days spent tending the children's section of the bookstore she works at. . .
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Jen has always worked very hard at reading to our children. Even today, she will spend as much as an hour reading to 7M and 8M after tucking them into bed. She's read The Chronicles of Narnia multiple times over, cycling through when the next group of our kids hasn't heard them yet.
When 1F was very young, maybe two years old or so, Jen found an old copy, at a rummage sale, of Little Bear's Visit, by Else Holmelund Minarik, and instantly, it became 1F's absolute, utter, very most favoritest book, almost to the exclusion of anything else. One story from that book, called 'The Goblin Story', especially caught her imagination, and she would have Jen read it to her over and over and over. The story involved a little goblin (more like a cute little gnome, but I'm not inclined to quibble over nomenclature) who was walking along one day and heard a noise, which terrified him so that he tried to run away from it, all the while hearing "pit-pat pit-pat pit-pat" following close behind him. I won't spoil the ending for you, but the salient point for our immediate purposes here is that, in 1F's universe, 'The Goblin Story' became known as 'The Pit-Pat Story', so that 1F would come to Jen, book in hand, and ask her, once again, to read 'The Pit-Pat Story'.
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After some large, unknown number of such readings, it came to pass one day that Jen's mom came to our house for a visit, and little 1F (who at that point could just as well have been called 'Only-F') toddled over to her grandma with her book, climbed up on Grandma's lap and announced, "I'm going to read you The Pit-Pat Story, Grandma." And she duly opened her book to the proper page. Jen and her mom and I smiled at each other in anticipation of what was to come - no doubt some childish rendering of the story, as best she could remember it, prompted by the pictures on the pages.
1F began, reciting exactly verbatim all the words on the first pair of pages. And then, when she reached the end, she turned the page and recited exactly verbatim all the words on the next pair of pages. By now, Jen's mom was looking up at us like, 'what kind of kid have you got here, who can read at two years old?'
When 1F had finished reciting all those words, she turned the page, and recited the next pair of pages, and so on, until she had recited the entire story, exactly verbatim, including turning the pages at precisely the proper times. Jen and I knew perfectly well that 1F couldn't read - she couldn't even identify all the letters of the alphabet yet. But we were floored by the precision with which she'd memorized the story, right down to the page-turns. That little girl had been paying attention! Jen's mom, though, was a little freaked - it looked, to all the world, like this two-year-old girl had just breezed through 12 pages of first-grade-level reading, and with good expression, to boot! She was stammering in amazement at what she'd just witnessed, when Jen and I had to explain that, impressive as it was, it was merely a prodigious feat of verbal memorization, and not of two-year-old reading. . .
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I don't know for sure whether this next story happened before or after the one above, but it runs in a similar vein.
Earnest young parent that I was, I recalled reading something from CS Lewis when I was in college (The Abolition of Man, perhaps?), in which Lewis was giving something like his own 'Philosophy of Education', and he said, almost in passing (though it became firmly lodged in my mind) that toddlers and preschool children are like little memorizing machines ('poll-parrots', I think he called them) - memorizing is what they do best, and what their little brains are wired for.
And so one Sunday, as we were in church, saying the Nicene Creed, as Catholics do in every Mass, it occurred to me that perhaps we could put Lewis' hypothesis to the test, and see if 1F could memorize the Creed, or some of the other 'set prayers' of the Mass, like the Lord's Prayer. So when we got home, I sat down with 1F, and started teaching her to say the Nicene Creed - "I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth. . ." And over the next couple months, adding a phrase at a time, we eventually got her to memorize the entire Nicene Creed. And then we taught her the Lord's Prayer. It was very cool.
Well, of course, you don't just memorize the Nicene Creed as a kind of parlor trick - it's meant to be prayed. And so we started having her say it at Mass, along with the rest of the Faithful in attendance. I'd hoist her up and stand her on the back of the pew in front of us, and place my face alongside hers, and we'd say the Creed together. I'd love to tell you that such recitation brought about deep theological comprehension, but I'm pretty sure that didn't come until much later. . .
One Sunday, we were sitting in back in the 'Reserved for Families With Squirmy Children' section (we had 2F by then, I'm pretty sure), and when it came time to say the Creed, I hoisted 1F up onto the railing in front of us, and we said the Creed as usual. But the folks seated just in front of us (there's an aisle-way between the 'kids section' and the rest of the pews, so they were maybe 6-8 feet in front of us), hearing 1F's high-pitched, childish voice reciting the Creed word-for-word, turned slowly around and stared at what they took to be this child-prodigy. But I just smiled, and thought that by golly, CS Lewis had been right. . .
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Jen has always worked very hard at reading to our children. Even today, she will spend as much as an hour reading to 7M and 8M after tucking them into bed. She's read The Chronicles of Narnia multiple times over, cycling through when the next group of our kids hasn't heard them yet.
When 1F was very young, maybe two years old or so, Jen found an old copy, at a rummage sale, of Little Bear's Visit, by Else Holmelund Minarik, and instantly, it became 1F's absolute, utter, very most favoritest book, almost to the exclusion of anything else. One story from that book, called 'The Goblin Story', especially caught her imagination, and she would have Jen read it to her over and over and over. The story involved a little goblin (more like a cute little gnome, but I'm not inclined to quibble over nomenclature) who was walking along one day and heard a noise, which terrified him so that he tried to run away from it, all the while hearing "pit-pat pit-pat pit-pat" following close behind him. I won't spoil the ending for you, but the salient point for our immediate purposes here is that, in 1F's universe, 'The Goblin Story' became known as 'The Pit-Pat Story', so that 1F would come to Jen, book in hand, and ask her, once again, to read 'The Pit-Pat Story'.
-------------------------
After some large, unknown number of such readings, it came to pass one day that Jen's mom came to our house for a visit, and little 1F (who at that point could just as well have been called 'Only-F') toddled over to her grandma with her book, climbed up on Grandma's lap and announced, "I'm going to read you The Pit-Pat Story, Grandma." And she duly opened her book to the proper page. Jen and her mom and I smiled at each other in anticipation of what was to come - no doubt some childish rendering of the story, as best she could remember it, prompted by the pictures on the pages.
1F began, reciting exactly verbatim all the words on the first pair of pages. And then, when she reached the end, she turned the page and recited exactly verbatim all the words on the next pair of pages. By now, Jen's mom was looking up at us like, 'what kind of kid have you got here, who can read at two years old?'
When 1F had finished reciting all those words, she turned the page, and recited the next pair of pages, and so on, until she had recited the entire story, exactly verbatim, including turning the pages at precisely the proper times. Jen and I knew perfectly well that 1F couldn't read - she couldn't even identify all the letters of the alphabet yet. But we were floored by the precision with which she'd memorized the story, right down to the page-turns. That little girl had been paying attention! Jen's mom, though, was a little freaked - it looked, to all the world, like this two-year-old girl had just breezed through 12 pages of first-grade-level reading, and with good expression, to boot! She was stammering in amazement at what she'd just witnessed, when Jen and I had to explain that, impressive as it was, it was merely a prodigious feat of verbal memorization, and not of two-year-old reading. . .
-------------------------
I don't know for sure whether this next story happened before or after the one above, but it runs in a similar vein.
Earnest young parent that I was, I recalled reading something from CS Lewis when I was in college (The Abolition of Man, perhaps?), in which Lewis was giving something like his own 'Philosophy of Education', and he said, almost in passing (though it became firmly lodged in my mind) that toddlers and preschool children are like little memorizing machines ('poll-parrots', I think he called them) - memorizing is what they do best, and what their little brains are wired for.
And so one Sunday, as we were in church, saying the Nicene Creed, as Catholics do in every Mass, it occurred to me that perhaps we could put Lewis' hypothesis to the test, and see if 1F could memorize the Creed, or some of the other 'set prayers' of the Mass, like the Lord's Prayer. So when we got home, I sat down with 1F, and started teaching her to say the Nicene Creed - "I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth. . ." And over the next couple months, adding a phrase at a time, we eventually got her to memorize the entire Nicene Creed. And then we taught her the Lord's Prayer. It was very cool.
Well, of course, you don't just memorize the Nicene Creed as a kind of parlor trick - it's meant to be prayed. And so we started having her say it at Mass, along with the rest of the Faithful in attendance. I'd hoist her up and stand her on the back of the pew in front of us, and place my face alongside hers, and we'd say the Creed together. I'd love to tell you that such recitation brought about deep theological comprehension, but I'm pretty sure that didn't come until much later. . .
One Sunday, we were sitting in back in the 'Reserved for Families With Squirmy Children' section (we had 2F by then, I'm pretty sure), and when it came time to say the Creed, I hoisted 1F up onto the railing in front of us, and we said the Creed as usual. But the folks seated just in front of us (there's an aisle-way between the 'kids section' and the rest of the pews, so they were maybe 6-8 feet in front of us), hearing 1F's high-pitched, childish voice reciting the Creed word-for-word, turned slowly around and stared at what they took to be this child-prodigy. But I just smiled, and thought that by golly, CS Lewis had been right. . .
Sunday, May 9, 2010
A Mother's Day Miscellany
In honor of Mother's Day, it seems at least somewhat apropos to regale you all with a story I've told many times before, about the time Jen was grocery shopping, with whichever of our kids was the youngest at the time, in tow. Another woman, taking note of the exceptional cuteness of the baby (as women are wont to do, from time to time), approached her to chat - "Is he your first?" When Jen told her that, no indeed, he was the youngest of whatever large number was current at the time, the woman stepped back with a look of shocked horror. "How could you have so many?!?" she gasped. Jen smiled sweetly, leaned in conspiratorially, and whispered, "We REALLY like sex!" I love my wife. Who is also, by happy convergence, the mother of all eight of my children.
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I've also said many times that reproducing ourselves together is simply the coolest, most amazing thing we've ever done. I'll beg your indulgence if I say, just one more time, that I am still blown away to look at my kids, and realize that each one of them is made of US - literally, they are made of Jen-stuff and me-stuff. Stevie Wonder's song, 'Isn't She Lovely?' has always resonated with me - "Isn't she lovely, made from love?" There is a line of 'Trinitarian' theological thought that says that the Holy Spirit is the Love between the Father and the Son - that the Love between the first two persons of the Holy Trinity is so concrete, so intense, so REAL, that it is a whole 'nother person in itself. And, in the spirit of the late pope's Theology of the Body, I wonder if that isn't yet another sense in which we are made in the Image of God - that the love between a husband and wife can issue forth in another person. Awesome.
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When we were first married, after 1F was born, I was, sad to say, more than a little obtuse about the whole Mother's Day thing. (*sigh*) When Jen asked me what plans I had for observing the day, I said to her, "You're not my mother."
Before all my readers who are mothers grab their pitchforks and torches and come to burn my house down, can I say that I have come to deeply regret those words, and the thinking behind them (if such sentiments can even be said to rise to the level of 'thought')?
In our early years, it seemed that Mother's Day was often the occasion for some of the bitterest arguments between us; and I'm hard-pressed to even say why. But suffice it to say that, in the ensuing years, and as our family has grown, I've come to a richer appreciation of what it means that Jen is the Mother of My Children. And worthy of my honor (and much more) on that account. . .
And so I honor my wife, The Mother of My Children. There are all manner of schmaltzy cards out and about today, paying homage to the sacrifice of motherhood, and selfless love, and kindness, and nurturing and care, and myriad other ways in which our mothers have enriched our lives. But you know, it isn't just schmaltz - there is a deep human reality behind the schmaltz, to which the schmaltz is an attempted response. My life is richer because Jen is The Mother of My Children. I wouldn't be a father if she weren't a mother; and being a father is about the biggest and best and noblest thing I've ever done. And her Motherhood has taught me volumes about what my own Fatherhood means, and how it ought to be done. . . So thanks, Sweetheart. Happy Mother's Day.
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I also recall, in the aftermath of my reunion with my birth-mother, a growing appreciation of Motherhood, and what it means. It was simply amazing to me to realize that she, at last, was the woman who, at whatever cost to herself, had given birth to me - at the most basic, earthy level (and you know how I love the earthiness), she was the woman between whose legs I entered the world. And I have come to a fundamental gratitude for that very basic fact. Whatever indiscretions may have given rise to my existence in the first place, it cost her something for me to be here today, with the life that I've had, and I honor her for that. And for so willingly becoming a part of our life, and our family, and welcoming us into hers. . .
And I recall, and honor my 'first mother', of blessed memory, who adopted me, and raised me for eight years. It was she who instilled in me a love of music.
And I honor my Mom (calling her my 'stepmother' has never seemed appropriate); it is not a trivial thing to me that, when she married my Dad, she stepped fairly smoothly into a large hole in my own life, and saw me into and through my teens and young manhood.
I also honor my Mother-in-Law, Jen's Mom. The happiness of my life today owes much to her having given birth to Jen, and raised her into the woman who has shared my life these past 30 years.
I honor my sisters, and Jen's. And the sundry hundreds of mothers I've known, among my friends, my friends' parents, my kids' friends' parents, readers of this blog, etc. There were a couple of women, mothers of my friends, who, in my teens, were sort-of 'surrogate mothers' to me, and who left their own imprint on my life, for which I am grateful.
Happy Mother's Day to all of you; each of you, in your own way, have touched my heart. . .
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I've also said many times that reproducing ourselves together is simply the coolest, most amazing thing we've ever done. I'll beg your indulgence if I say, just one more time, that I am still blown away to look at my kids, and realize that each one of them is made of US - literally, they are made of Jen-stuff and me-stuff. Stevie Wonder's song, 'Isn't She Lovely?' has always resonated with me - "Isn't she lovely, made from love?" There is a line of 'Trinitarian' theological thought that says that the Holy Spirit is the Love between the Father and the Son - that the Love between the first two persons of the Holy Trinity is so concrete, so intense, so REAL, that it is a whole 'nother person in itself. And, in the spirit of the late pope's Theology of the Body, I wonder if that isn't yet another sense in which we are made in the Image of God - that the love between a husband and wife can issue forth in another person. Awesome.
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When we were first married, after 1F was born, I was, sad to say, more than a little obtuse about the whole Mother's Day thing. (*sigh*) When Jen asked me what plans I had for observing the day, I said to her, "You're not my mother."
Before all my readers who are mothers grab their pitchforks and torches and come to burn my house down, can I say that I have come to deeply regret those words, and the thinking behind them (if such sentiments can even be said to rise to the level of 'thought')?
In our early years, it seemed that Mother's Day was often the occasion for some of the bitterest arguments between us; and I'm hard-pressed to even say why. But suffice it to say that, in the ensuing years, and as our family has grown, I've come to a richer appreciation of what it means that Jen is the Mother of My Children. And worthy of my honor (and much more) on that account. . .
And so I honor my wife, The Mother of My Children. There are all manner of schmaltzy cards out and about today, paying homage to the sacrifice of motherhood, and selfless love, and kindness, and nurturing and care, and myriad other ways in which our mothers have enriched our lives. But you know, it isn't just schmaltz - there is a deep human reality behind the schmaltz, to which the schmaltz is an attempted response. My life is richer because Jen is The Mother of My Children. I wouldn't be a father if she weren't a mother; and being a father is about the biggest and best and noblest thing I've ever done. And her Motherhood has taught me volumes about what my own Fatherhood means, and how it ought to be done. . . So thanks, Sweetheart. Happy Mother's Day.
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I also recall, in the aftermath of my reunion with my birth-mother, a growing appreciation of Motherhood, and what it means. It was simply amazing to me to realize that she, at last, was the woman who, at whatever cost to herself, had given birth to me - at the most basic, earthy level (and you know how I love the earthiness), she was the woman between whose legs I entered the world. And I have come to a fundamental gratitude for that very basic fact. Whatever indiscretions may have given rise to my existence in the first place, it cost her something for me to be here today, with the life that I've had, and I honor her for that. And for so willingly becoming a part of our life, and our family, and welcoming us into hers. . .
And I recall, and honor my 'first mother', of blessed memory, who adopted me, and raised me for eight years. It was she who instilled in me a love of music.
And I honor my Mom (calling her my 'stepmother' has never seemed appropriate); it is not a trivial thing to me that, when she married my Dad, she stepped fairly smoothly into a large hole in my own life, and saw me into and through my teens and young manhood.
I also honor my Mother-in-Law, Jen's Mom. The happiness of my life today owes much to her having given birth to Jen, and raised her into the woman who has shared my life these past 30 years.
I honor my sisters, and Jen's. And the sundry hundreds of mothers I've known, among my friends, my friends' parents, my kids' friends' parents, readers of this blog, etc. There were a couple of women, mothers of my friends, who, in my teens, were sort-of 'surrogate mothers' to me, and who left their own imprint on my life, for which I am grateful.
Happy Mother's Day to all of you; each of you, in your own way, have touched my heart. . .
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Thanks, Ernie
For lo, the winter is past,
the rain is over and gone.
The flowers appear on the earth,
the time of singing has come,
and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
(Song of Solomon 2:11-12)
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Thus did Ernie Harwell, long-time radio voice of my beloved Detroit Tigers, begin every baseball season, at the beginning of his first broadcast from Spring Training in Florida.
This morning's news brought word of Ernie's death, at the age of 92. He announced last September that he had incurable bile-duct cancer, so those of us who have 'known' him have known for a while that his end was imminent.
Even so, his passing is a great sadness for me. Ernie Harwell's voice has been a major part of the soundtrack of my life. He started broadcasting for the Tigers in 1960, when I was four years old, even before I was paying much attention to baseball, or the Tigers. Before he came to the Tigers, he'd worked for the Baltimore Orioles, and before them, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants - and just the locations of those two teams tells you how long he was 'in the business'. He actually had the TV call for Bobby Thompson's famous home run, but in 1951 not many people had TV sets yet, and Russ Hodges' "The Giants win the pennant!" call on the radio has long since become a part of baseball's iconography.
Before I even hit double-digits in age, I would listen to Tiger games on the radio. Living way Up North as I did, the opportunities to go to an actual game were relatively few and far between, so the radio was pretty much what there was for us (in those days, there were only 30 or 40 games a year on TV - about one or two a week). Many were the times when the Tigers were playing on the West Coast, that I went to bed with my transistor radio (remember them?) tucked under my pillow, awakening the next morning with dead batteries.
And Ernie Harwell. How do I explain to those who never (or rarely) heard him, the pure, homespun charm, and calm dignity of the man, and his broadcasting style? His gentle southern accent, with the tiniest hint of a lisp that remained from his boyhood days. Of course, his 'signature call' was, ". . . and it's LOOOOOONNNGGGG gone!" when a Tiger hit a home run. Or, "He stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched that one go by," when the batter took a called third strike. I think my favorite 'Ernie-ism' was when a batter would foul a pitch back into the stands, and he'd call out some obscure small town, such as, "a young man from Paw Paw caught that one." Of course, when I was young, I always wondered how he knew. I nearly jumped out of my chair the time I was listening, and a young man from my hometown of Alpena caught the ball (and the next day in school, we were all trying to think of who we knew that might have been at the game the night before). Once, when the Tigers were playing in Baltimore, I heard him call out a young man from Havre de Grace; which was memorable because, up till then, I hadn't known how to pronounce 'Havre de Grace' (for that matter, I think I've forgotten in the meantime).
And the stories; Ernie Harwell was, above all, I think, a story-teller. Every game he called was just another story of baseball to be told. And his broadcasts were always filled with wonderful stories of Baseball Past - of Ted Williams, and Joe DiMaggio, and Stan Musial, and Jackie Robinson and Bob Feller, and all those wonderful old players whose careers had ended before I was paying attention. Now that I think about it, Ernie is probably largely to blame for my obsession with baseball history. . .
One of my favorite Ernie-stories (which is a story about Ernie, rather than one he told) is one he sometimes told on himself, from one of the West-Coast trips I mentioned above. I think I even remember the game from which the story arose, but for reasons which will soon become obvious, I don't remember the incident itself. The Tigers were playing a night game against the Angels in California, which meant that the game began at about 10 o'clock Michigan-time. As it happened, the game went deep into extra innings, finally ending in the 15th inning or so, when the Angels scored the winning run on a close play at the plate. Bill Freehan, the Tigers catcher, was irate, and pounded his glove on the plate to demonstrate how he'd tagged the runner. And Ernie's call on the radio was, "Freehan is beating his meat - his MITT - on home plate!" But, because it was about 3AM back in Michigan, hardly anyone heard it; which, as far as Ernie was concerned, was probably just as well. . .
Ernie was the voice on the radio for two World Series - first in 1968, with Al Kaline and Norm Cash and Willie Horton and Bill Freehan and Mickey Lolich and Denny McLain. I was twelve years old at the time, and that entire season, I was in pre-teen-boy Heaven. I virtually memorized Ernie's call of Don Wert's pennant-clinching single in the bottom of the ninth, against the Yankees, on September 17, 1968 - "And the windup, and the pitch. . . He swings - a line shot, right field; the Tigers win it! Here comes Kaline in to score, and it's all over. . . the Tigers have won their first pennant since nineteen hundred and forty-five! Let's listen to the bedlam here at Tiger Stadium. . ."
And then again in 1984, with Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, Jack Morris and Lance Parish and my fellow-Spartan Kirk Gibson. I was 28 by then, married and the father of a two-year-old daughter. In such ways do we mark the passage of time in our lives. But Ernie was still there, steady and calm and homespun-charming. . .
Ernie was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981. For those of you who love baseball, there are very few things any more evocative of that love than Ernie's induction speech. . .
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As I grew older, and came into my own Christian commitment, I came to know Ernie also as my brother in Christ. He was one of the founders of Baseball Chapel, which holds small prayer services for the players of both teams, before games, and many players and former players have spoken of the quiet way that Ernie influenced them to persevere in their faith, or come to faith in the first place, in an environment that often isn't particularly supportive of faith. . .
He and his wife Lulu celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary last summer. Which boggles my mind, all by itself. . .
Since the announcement last fall, Ernie hasn't been much in the public eye, except on a couple of occasions to reassure his fans that he wasn't fearful in approaching the end of his life, that he was hopeful, even anticipating, of the adventure that yet remained for him. I only hope that I can approach the end of my own days with such grace. . .
-------------------------
So finally, all I can say is - thanks, Ernie. In ways that I'm not even particularly clear on, and certainly he himself wouldn't know, he has been a wonderful influence in my life, of grace, and faith and dignity and character. And, to a large degree, he has given me the gift of Baseball. And of his own life. For which, inadequate as it is, I can only say, "Thank you."
-------------------------
Thus did Ernie Harwell, long-time radio voice of my beloved Detroit Tigers, begin every baseball season, at the beginning of his first broadcast from Spring Training in Florida.
This morning's news brought word of Ernie's death, at the age of 92. He announced last September that he had incurable bile-duct cancer, so those of us who have 'known' him have known for a while that his end was imminent.
Even so, his passing is a great sadness for me. Ernie Harwell's voice has been a major part of the soundtrack of my life. He started broadcasting for the Tigers in 1960, when I was four years old, even before I was paying much attention to baseball, or the Tigers. Before he came to the Tigers, he'd worked for the Baltimore Orioles, and before them, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the New York Giants - and just the locations of those two teams tells you how long he was 'in the business'. He actually had the TV call for Bobby Thompson's famous home run, but in 1951 not many people had TV sets yet, and Russ Hodges' "The Giants win the pennant!" call on the radio has long since become a part of baseball's iconography.
Before I even hit double-digits in age, I would listen to Tiger games on the radio. Living way Up North as I did, the opportunities to go to an actual game were relatively few and far between, so the radio was pretty much what there was for us (in those days, there were only 30 or 40 games a year on TV - about one or two a week). Many were the times when the Tigers were playing on the West Coast, that I went to bed with my transistor radio (remember them?) tucked under my pillow, awakening the next morning with dead batteries.
And Ernie Harwell. How do I explain to those who never (or rarely) heard him, the pure, homespun charm, and calm dignity of the man, and his broadcasting style? His gentle southern accent, with the tiniest hint of a lisp that remained from his boyhood days. Of course, his 'signature call' was, ". . . and it's LOOOOOONNNGGGG gone!" when a Tiger hit a home run. Or, "He stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched that one go by," when the batter took a called third strike. I think my favorite 'Ernie-ism' was when a batter would foul a pitch back into the stands, and he'd call out some obscure small town, such as, "a young man from Paw Paw caught that one." Of course, when I was young, I always wondered how he knew. I nearly jumped out of my chair the time I was listening, and a young man from my hometown of Alpena caught the ball (and the next day in school, we were all trying to think of who we knew that might have been at the game the night before). Once, when the Tigers were playing in Baltimore, I heard him call out a young man from Havre de Grace; which was memorable because, up till then, I hadn't known how to pronounce 'Havre de Grace' (for that matter, I think I've forgotten in the meantime).
And the stories; Ernie Harwell was, above all, I think, a story-teller. Every game he called was just another story of baseball to be told. And his broadcasts were always filled with wonderful stories of Baseball Past - of Ted Williams, and Joe DiMaggio, and Stan Musial, and Jackie Robinson and Bob Feller, and all those wonderful old players whose careers had ended before I was paying attention. Now that I think about it, Ernie is probably largely to blame for my obsession with baseball history. . .
One of my favorite Ernie-stories (which is a story about Ernie, rather than one he told) is one he sometimes told on himself, from one of the West-Coast trips I mentioned above. I think I even remember the game from which the story arose, but for reasons which will soon become obvious, I don't remember the incident itself. The Tigers were playing a night game against the Angels in California, which meant that the game began at about 10 o'clock Michigan-time. As it happened, the game went deep into extra innings, finally ending in the 15th inning or so, when the Angels scored the winning run on a close play at the plate. Bill Freehan, the Tigers catcher, was irate, and pounded his glove on the plate to demonstrate how he'd tagged the runner. And Ernie's call on the radio was, "Freehan is beating his meat - his MITT - on home plate!" But, because it was about 3AM back in Michigan, hardly anyone heard it; which, as far as Ernie was concerned, was probably just as well. . .
Ernie was the voice on the radio for two World Series - first in 1968, with Al Kaline and Norm Cash and Willie Horton and Bill Freehan and Mickey Lolich and Denny McLain. I was twelve years old at the time, and that entire season, I was in pre-teen-boy Heaven. I virtually memorized Ernie's call of Don Wert's pennant-clinching single in the bottom of the ninth, against the Yankees, on September 17, 1968 - "And the windup, and the pitch. . . He swings - a line shot, right field; the Tigers win it! Here comes Kaline in to score, and it's all over. . . the Tigers have won their first pennant since nineteen hundred and forty-five! Let's listen to the bedlam here at Tiger Stadium. . ."
And then again in 1984, with Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, Jack Morris and Lance Parish and my fellow-Spartan Kirk Gibson. I was 28 by then, married and the father of a two-year-old daughter. In such ways do we mark the passage of time in our lives. But Ernie was still there, steady and calm and homespun-charming. . .
Ernie was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981. For those of you who love baseball, there are very few things any more evocative of that love than Ernie's induction speech. . .
-------------------------
As I grew older, and came into my own Christian commitment, I came to know Ernie also as my brother in Christ. He was one of the founders of Baseball Chapel, which holds small prayer services for the players of both teams, before games, and many players and former players have spoken of the quiet way that Ernie influenced them to persevere in their faith, or come to faith in the first place, in an environment that often isn't particularly supportive of faith. . .
He and his wife Lulu celebrated their 68th wedding anniversary last summer. Which boggles my mind, all by itself. . .
Since the announcement last fall, Ernie hasn't been much in the public eye, except on a couple of occasions to reassure his fans that he wasn't fearful in approaching the end of his life, that he was hopeful, even anticipating, of the adventure that yet remained for him. I only hope that I can approach the end of my own days with such grace. . .
-------------------------
So finally, all I can say is - thanks, Ernie. In ways that I'm not even particularly clear on, and certainly he himself wouldn't know, he has been a wonderful influence in my life, of grace, and faith and dignity and character. And, to a large degree, he has given me the gift of Baseball. And of his own life. For which, inadequate as it is, I can only say, "Thank you."
Monday, May 3, 2010
Roots
I have a somewhat 'manic' personality. Which is to say, that when I become interested in something, I tend to jump in with both feet, so to speak. When I bought my first touring bike, it wasn't long before I was going on tours, riding centuries, and piling up miles at the rate of thousands per year. I read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion all in one month. In the first year of our marriage (Yeah, I know. . .) Heck, once I started begetting children, I didn't stop until I had eight of them. So, you can see the full scope of my situation.
It was back in the spring of 1986 that I was bitten by the genealogy bug. I'm not sure exactly what set it off - I recall my dad sending me a short account of our family history, which his aunt had compiled, and it was utterly fascinating to me. Of course, I could remember my grandparents, but Aunt Mildred (who was my grandfather's sister) had taken things several generations farther back than that, to a fellow who'd been born in 1780, only four years after the Declaration of Independence, in New York state (it turns out that the large bulk of the immediate-pre-statehood settlement of Michigan was from New York, the more-or-less direct result of the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825). This early ancestor had ten children (seven sons), and the fourth of those sons had three children, the youngest of whom left New York and came to Michigan. His oldest son was my great-grandfather, who died a decade or more before I was born, but I could recall seeing his name painted on the side of the barn on what had been his farm, next door to my grandfather's farm in rural Michigan. And of course, my dad had known his grandfather, and would occasionally tell us stories about him.
I had a friend at work, and we often used to sit together in one or the other of our offices, talking about this or that or the other thing, on our lunch hours; he was quite a bit older than me (in fact, he was the father of a girl I'd known in college). So when my dad sent me the little hand-typed genealogy from Aunt Mildred, I showed it to him. And he just lit up. "Wonderful!" he exclaimed, and he began telling me about his recently-taken-up hobby of genealogy. When I told him that it all sounded quite interesting, he promised to take me with him the next time he went to the library to do some genealogical research on his lunch hour, which he did.
At first, he just pointed me to the reels of microfilm for the US Census, and encouraged me to start by just documenting what I already knew. There was something fascinating about looking at those old census records, from 1880, or 1850, or even earlier, and seeing the names of my ancestors written there, and realizing that the page I was looking at represented a census taker standing on the front porch of my great-great-grandfather's house, talking directly to him (or, more likely, my great-great-grandmother). And it wasn't long before I'd branched out, and begun documenting other parts of our family than just the succession of fathers who all shared the surname that I still bear. It was amusing to find my great-grandmother in the census, at age 18, just a couple entries away from my 17-year-old great-grandfather, knowing that just a few years after that record was taken, they'd be married to each other; and also just to realize that they'd grown up in pretty close proximity to each other.
There was a period of time when I was spending a fair bit of effort on cemeteries - if I knew that a particular ancestor had lived in such-and-such a town, but didn't know when they'd died, I could get a listing of the nearby cemeteries, and go looking for their gravestone, which would almost certainly tell me what I needed to know. Usually, I would plan out my cemetery visits as part of a trip we were already making; many of the cemeteries in question were not too terribly out-of-the-way on a trip to Chicago, for instance. I didn't think it was all that big a deal, but after a while, when we were on a road trip, the kids would point out the cemeteries we were driving past, and ask why we weren't stopping.
Before long, I'd done all that I could (for the time being) with the census, and I'd graduated to the published genealogies, and the old town records. Several of my family lines, especially from my dad's mother, went back into New England; and New England town records - most towns in New England kept records of every birth, death, and marriage, all the way back to the founding of the town, usually in the 1600s - are an amazing storehouse of information, and in short order - within a year or two - I'd extended what we knew of our family tree, in several directions, and in several cases, 'back to the water's edge'. In a few cases, I was able to reach back across the ocean, and establish connections in 16th-century (or even earlier) England or Germany.
In 1987 we planned out a vacation to upstate New York, so I could do a bit of on-site research (and check out some of the cemeteries in New York). As it turns out, the part of New York our family is from is very close to Cooperstown, so we could include a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And when I told my dad about it, he decided to do likewise, and he and Mom stayed at the same resort we did. Looking back, Jen still gets a wry chuckle from the way I sold that vacation to her - "We can go check out some cemeteries in New York! And visit the Baseball Hall of Fame!! And my parents are coming, too!!!" But we had a great time, even so (and I won't even mention the possibility that 3M may have been conceived on that trip).
Those of you who recall my 'book posts' from last summer might recall that, at one point in my young life, I went on a bit of a James Michener binge. And doing genealogical research was a lot like making my own Michener novel (only 'in reverse'), for our family - tracking the progress of various of our ancestors, from New England to New York, to Ohio/Indiana, to Michigan, all in the context of the history that was happening around them. I found, for instance, that a couple brothers of one of my ancestors had been thrown in jail during the Revolution, as suspected Tory sympathizers. And apparently, they had been firm in their Loyalist convictions - after the war, they took their families and went to Canada. Which I learned when I was contacted by a distant cousin living in California, who shared my surname, who had traced his own ancestry back across Canada, where he'd stalled; and I could then connect him to the family in New York.
Another of my ancestors (my 2g-grandfather, mentioned above) had left New York, and gone to live with his father's cousin in Indiana, in 1863, under circumstances that could look suspiciously like draft-dodging (which, of course, my own 'boomer' generation thinks we invented). . .
When I searched for my birth-parents, the skills I'd honed doing genealogy came in really handy, looking through various public records and compiling the information I'd need to find them. And of course, once I'd found them, I had whole new chunks of family to track down (my birth-father's family was from Mississippi, and included a few slave-owners; which is something I'd hoped never to find, but alas. . .)
Sometime in the early 90s, my duties to the 'production side' of the family tree made it nigh-unto-impossible for me to devote time to furthering the research effort, but when my dad retired, he took up where I'd left off, and has 'pushed things back' a bit further. Of course, now, much of the information that I'd gone to the library for, is available online, and in place of the large 3-ring binders that I'd spent years compiling, I now have a CD-ROM, and genealogy software to keep track of things for me.
Aside from the brute facts of who all my ancestors were, and of their 'march through history', I think that genealogy also fosters a 'sense of continuity', and a certain kind of 'existential humility'. At the most basic, earthy level, it reinforces the point that each of us, and every person who has ever lived, is the product of an act of sexual intercourse between our birth-parents (I sidled up to this idea in this earlier post). None of us is here by our own choice; each of us exists because of the choices and actions of other people - a whole chain of them, in fact, stretching back beyond recorded history. And that reinforces the idea that our lives are not simply our own; we have duties (on an 'existential level') to both past and future generations. . .
Simone Weil, I think, had some poignant things to say about 'the need for roots', and that resonates with me. I recall one of my uncles expressing a degree of astonishment that I, who am not even blood-related to my family, would dig in to the family tree so vigorously. A friend of mine, a psychologist, told me that he thought I was subconsciously searching for my birth-parents (and, given the timing of how things turned out, he may even have been right). But honestly, it's not so mysterious as all that - it's my family; it's where we came from, and how we got to where we are today.
And it's utterly fascinating. . .
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