Running In the Yard Next Door

Winter Miles

2012-02-05T07:15:00.008-05:00

Yesterday, it was in the mid-40s (F) here, warm and sunny, the nicest day of a whole week of nice days, which, taken together, served to rid the ground here (and, what is more to the point for my purposes in this post, the roads) of the six inches or so of snow that we got a week-and-a-half ago. So (you knew I was gonna get around to this, didn't you?), I got to go out on my bike. 14 miles. In February. Which I haven't done in many, many years. Woo-hoo!

Together with the 39 miles I got out on the road in January, I now have 53 miles for 2012, which is fairly typical for my total by the end of March. Add that to the 56 miles I got to ride in December, and I've done over 100 miles in the three winter months, during which any miles at all are pure gravy. So, 100 miles of gravy; and there's still three more weekends left in February. I checked my records, and the last time I actually got out on the road in each of December, January and February was '91-'92. Just to time-scale it for you, Jen was newly pregnant with the fifth of our eight children at the time. So, you know, it's been a while. . .

I've got a decent stationary bike that I typically use in the winter months. It's not so bad, to spin the pedals while I watch a football or basketball game, with snow blanketing the ground. But it's nothing like actually getting out on the road. The first few miles, my legs, and even more, my lungs, are getting used to the idea of working quite that hard again. But once they get 'dialed back in', it's just pure joy to be out in the fresh air and sunshine.

The cynical part of me wonders how many feet of snow we'll get in March and April, to take back the miles that the mild winter has given. But, you know, tomorrow's troubles are enough for tomorrow. Or something like that. . .

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And, since today is Super Bowl Sunday (and whoop-de-freakin'-doo, eh?), I'll re-post, at no extra charge, my recipe for Jalapeño Cheese Dip, which has become a traditional staple of SBs at our house:

1 24oz container cottage cheese
1 16oz container sour cream

(just recently, we've taken to substituting plain Greek yogurt)
2 cups shredded cheese – Monterrey Jack or mozzarella
(Pepper Jack is also good)
3-5 chopped green onions or scallions
3-5 garlic toes, pressed or minced
1-3 jalapeño peppers, chopped
(mix in a habañero pepper for a hotter bite)

(This is the basic recipe; we have also occasionally added other ingredients, like salsa, chili powder, or cayenne powder, as variations; feel free to be as creative as you feel like)

Combine ingredients at least 24 hours before serving, and refrigerate; serve with tortilla chips (we like blue corn best, but we’re not dogmatic about it), and DON’T rub your eyes (or any other 'sensitive tissues') without first washing your hands, preferably a few times. . .

Eschew Obfuscation; or, Politics as Usual?

2012-01-29T07:21:00.008-05:00

One of my all-time favorite humorous bits is one that I first saw in Mad Magazine when I was 14 (does it cause you to think less of me that I read Mad Magazine when I was 14?). Just in the interest of giving credit where it's due, I found it here. It's a wonderfully obfuscatory piece of vocabulary-stretching brilliance (although I promise you, when I was 14, I had no idea what 'obfuscatory' even meant).

Since 2012 is a presidential election year, we are already well into 'all politics, all the time'. So, as a brief, subversive respite from the exaggerated self-importance of all things political, I offer it here for your enjoyment and edification. (OK, 'edification' might be a stretch; but I hope you'll find it enjoyable. . .)

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Guaranteed Effective

All-Occasion Non-Slanderous Political Smear Speech

(By Bill Garvin; MAD #139, December 1970)

My fellow citizens, it is an honor and a pleasure to be here today. My opponent has openly admitted he feels an affinity toward your city, but I happen to like this area. It might be a salubrious place to him, but to me it is one of the nation's most delightful garden spots.

When I embarked upon this political campaign I hoped that it could be conducted on a high level and that my opponent would be willing to stick to the issues. Unfortunately, he has decided to be tractable instead -- to indulge in unequivocal language, to eschew the use of outright lies in his speeches, and even to make repeated veracious statements about me.

At first, I tried to ignore these scrupulous, unvarnished fidelities. I can do so no longer. If my opponent wants a fight, he's going to get one!

It might be instructive to start with his background. My friends, have you ever accidentally dislodged a rock on the ground and seen what was underneath? Well, exploring my opponent's background is dissimilar. All the slime and filth and corruption you could possibly imagine, even in your wildest dreams, are glaringly nonexistent in this man's life. And even during his childhood!

Let us take a very quick look at that childhood: It is a known fact that, on a number of occasions, he emulated older boys at a certain playground. It is also known that his parents not only permitted him to masticate excessively in their presence, but even urged him to do so. Most explicable of all, this man who poses as a paragon of virtue exacerbated his own sister while they were both teenagers!

I ask you, my fellow Americans: is this the kind of person we want in public office to set an example for our youth? Of course, it's not surprising that he should have such a typically pristine background -- no, not when you consider the other members of his family:

- His female relatives put on a constant pose of purity and innocence, and claim they are inscrutable, yet every one of them has taken part in hortatory activities
- The men in the family are likewise completely amenable to moral suasion
- My opponent's second cousin is a Mormon
- His uncle was a flagrant heterosexual
- His sister, who has always been obsessed by sects, once worked as a proselyte - even outside a church
- His father was secretly chagrined at least a dozen times by matters of a pecuniary nature
- His youngest brother wrote an essay extolling the virtues of being a homosapien
- His great-aunt expired from a degenerative disease
- His nephew subscribes to several phonographic magazines
- His wife was a thespian before their marriage and even performed the act in front of paying customers
- And his own mother had to resign from a women's organization in her later years because she was an admitted sexagenarian

Now what shall we say of the man himself?

I can tell you in solemn truth that he is the very antithesis of political radicalism, economic irresponsibility, and personal depravity. His own record proves that he has frequently discountenanced treasonable, un-American philosophies and has perpetrated many overt acts as well.

- He perambulated his infant son on the street
- He practiced nepotism with his uncle and first cousin
- He attempted to interest a 13-year-old girl in philately
- He participated in a seance at a private residence where, among other odd goings-on, there was incense
- He has declared himself in favor of more homogeneity on college campuses
- He has advocated social intercourse in mixed company -- and has taken part in such gatherings himself
- He has been deliberately averse to crime in our streets
- He has urged our Protestant and Jewish citizens to develop more catholic tastes
- Last summer he committed a piscatorial act on a boat that was flying the American flag
- Finally, at a time when we must be on our guard against all foreign "isms", he has unashamedly announced his belief in altruism -- and his fervent hope that some day this entire nation will be altruistic!

I beg you, my friends, to oppose this man whose life and work and ideas are so openly and avowedly compatible with our American way of life. A vote for him would be a vote for the perpetuation of everything we hold dear.

The facts are clear; the record speaks for itself.

Do your duty!

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And, just because I'm kind of a geek on history, and my home state. . .

Please join me in raising a celebratory glass in observance of the 175th anniversary of Michigan statehood, this past Thursday. January 26, 1837; God bless Andy Jackson, for signing the statehood bill just before he left office (and even though we got jobbed out of Toledo, the Upper Peninsula is more than sufficient compensation; just imagine if it had taken two governors, and two state legislatures agreeing, to build the Mackinac Bridge. . .)

It's Personal

2012-01-22T07:56:00.044-05:00

Today is the 39th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision on Roe v. Wade, so I'm giving you, one more time, a (lightly edited) re-post of my 'Abortion' post. In past years, I've tended to put it up around the time of the anniversary of my reunion with my birth-mother, but it might be even more appropriate today. It's one of my better items, if I may say so myself; perhaps even the best I've ever done. Whether or not it was my best, though (by whatever standard such a question might be decided), the topic resonates with me at a deeply personal level. . .

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Sometime when I was in college, the realization dawned on me that, as an adoptee, I had been somebody’s ‘unwanted pregnancy’ once upon a time. And in the fullness of time, especially once Jen and I married and began having children together, that became one of my strongest motivations to search for my birth-mother – I wanted to thank the woman who, though I had never met her, had carried me in her womb for nine months, and seen me through to the beginnings of my life in this world. (And just as an aside, for me as an adoptee, even such a basic concept as that I'd been carried in someone's womb once-upon-a-time could be disconcertingly abstract).

Along with that realization, I came to understand that, all things considered, I was probably fortunate to have been born before 1973 and Roe v. Wade. I had never particularly staked out a firmly-held position on abortion (My younger self was probably mostly ‘pro-choice’, without having given it much thought), but once I understood that, had I been conceived in another time, I would have been a pretty likely candidate for abortion (white college women abort roughly 98% of their ‘unwanted pregnancies’), the question took on an entirely different, and personal, aspect.

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I recall a conversation I had with my birth-mother some time after our reunion. She was talking about her life as a pregnant-and-unmarried woman in the 1950s, and how difficult it had been for her, and she said something like, “I just wish I’d had the choices that women have today.”

I nodded sympathetically. . . until the penny fell all the way to the bottom. Ummmmm. . . you understand, right, that we're talking about ME here? I mean, we’ve had a really, REALLY happy reunion, and both of us are glad for the opportunity to know each other, and our respective families. If you had exercised the ‘choice’ you’re alluding to, none of that would be even a remote possibility. You might still wonder who I’d been, but without any possibility of ever knowing. . .

She understood. Not that she was wishing that she’d aborted me; only that she’d felt so trapped when she was pregnant, and wished that she’d had anything at all she could have done about that. Now, I could understand how trapped she felt. Frederica Mathewes-Green has written and spoken insightfully about women who “want an abortion the way an animal caught in a trap wants to gnaw off its own leg” (and I would highly recommend her book which is the source of that quote; it's an utterly unique book, just for her refusal to take part in the standard shouting matches.).

And I get that. I have the utmost compassion for women who are pregnant when it is nigh unto catastrophic for them to be so. My daughter was one of those women, not so very long ago. And my heart ached for her, wishing there was something, anything, that I could do to make it easier for her. . .

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But, back in 1955-56, that was ME in my birth-mother’s belly. Not merely a clump of cells, or a faceless ‘fetus’ (honestly, as we sit here, you and I and every other human being are living, breathing clumps of cells) – it was me, with my own genetic code, distinct from my birth-mother's (or my birth-father's). And if my birth-mother had had an abortion, it was me who would’ve died.

And the ripples go out from there. My adoptive parents might’ve adopted someone else; who can say? But they wouldn’t have adopted me. My classmates and friends and Little-League teammates could scarcely be said to have missed me – how do you miss someone who, as far as you know, never even existed? – but something of the life we shared together would never have happened. Jen would most likely have married someone else (I mean, she’s an amazing woman; she'd have had guys standing in line for her); but she wouldn’t have married me (and who can say how that might have gone for her?). And our children would never have come to be – her children, if she had any, would be someone else entirely (I've occasionally gotten a chuckle from the thought that I'm the personification of the 'population-control' movement's worst nightmare - an 'unwanted pregnancy that turned into eight more mouths to feed). . .

And so it goes. In fact, those of you who were born after 1973, have you ever wondered how many children who might have been your friends or classmates or Little-League teammates, or heck, husbands or wives, were never allowed to be born? Cold statistics tell us that, in the US alone, the number would be on the order of 50-60 million by now - a sixth again of the population of our country (worldwide, the number would be many times that). Do you ever wonder who those people might have been?

But just to cite a number misses the point. What music was never made, what literature was never written, what cures for which diseases never came about, for want of the men and women who might have done those things, but were never born?

And even still - to talk in terms of 'who might have done what' misses the point, too. It's not so much that, eg, the late Steve Jobs (an adoptee like me) was so worthwhile for what he did, but that every human life is intrinsically valuable in-and-of-itself. And 'humanity-at-large' benefits from every one of its members, whether they 'accomplish anything' or not. Certainly, we've all benefitted from the fact that Steve Jobs, or Beethoven, or anyone else, were born and not aborted. But we'll never know, in terms other than bloodless, colorless statistics, what 'humanity-at-large' has lost for those tens of millions who were never born. . .

My point here is not to guilt-trip any woman who has ever had an abortion; my heart absolutely goes out to those women, for they, too, have had violence done to them; they've been sold a bill of goods, given a false promise. I only hope to put a more ‘human’ face on the question, and challenge anyone to think of ‘unwanted pregnancy’ not as a ‘problem’ with an easy technological solution, but as something real, and human, and flesh-and-blood. And life-and-death.

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I don’t think my birth-mother is terrible for wishing she’d had more choices available to her (honestly, on one level, it’s easy for her to say; she’ll never bear the cost of having chosen otherwise) (but, to be utterly clear - the very last thing I mean is to trivialize what it cost her for me to be here).

No, I actually think she’s pretty cool; as birth-mothers go, she’s definitely one of the best, and I am as happy as I can be that we’ve known each other for all these years. I understand how trapped she felt 50-odd years ago, and I absolutely appreciate, and am utterly grateful for, the sacrifice it was for her, for me to be here today. It’s personal for her in an entirely different, but analogous, way to how it’s personal for me. And I understand that.

Existence itself is a gratuitous gift, the only fitting response to which is gratitude. I am as grateful as I can be for my life, my family, my wife and children, and all of my friends, including those of you who are reading this; for existence in this rich and fascinating Universe, and for the Hope of the World to Come. And none of that could ever have come to pass for me, if I'd been snuffed out before I could be born.

So you see, it's personal - it involves persons, created in God's image and likeness, with inherent worth and dignity not conferred on them by any other human being. Mothers and fathers and children - persons, one-and-all. And my birth-mother is one of them. And so am I. . .

When Math Nerds Dream. . .

2012-01-15T08:06:00.049-05:00

Ever since I was a pretty young kid, I've been a lover of mathematics. Numbers, and the many and varied things that can be done with them, caught my fancy at a young age, and never left me. By the time I was in college, I came to perceive something stately, elegant, and intrinsically TRUE about mathematics, as though it was built into the Universe on a foundational level. As someone once said, Mathematics is the language with which God called the Universe into being. . .

I remember learning to add and subtract pretty quickly, when I was in kindergarten or first grade, then going to my dad and asking him what came after adding and subtracting. So he taught me how to multiply, and how multiplication was just repeated addition, except you could do it all at once, without having to go and do all those additions, which I thought was pretty cool, and really powerful. Then he showed me how to divide, and how it was 'reverse multiplication', similar to how subtraction was 'reverse addition'. When I asked what happens when you try to subtract a larger number from a smaller one, he showed me negative numbers (I didn't know the 'minus sign' notation, so I would just write an 'n' next to the number, to show it was negative).

Once I'd mastered multiplication and division (at least enough to convince myself that I understood how they worked; I wasn't doing five-digit division problems just yet), I was pretty happy with myself, and figured I must have learned just about all the math there was to know. So I went to my dad (I was in the second grade at the time) and asked him, heh-heh, if there was anything else besides adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, half-expecting him to tell me that, no, that was about all there was. So imagine my surprise when he showed me how to raise numbers to powers, and how it was repeated multiplication, just like multiplication was repeated addition. At that point, I was starting to suspect that there might just be more math available for me to learn than I was going to master in the next few days, at any rate. Once I'd gotten the hang of doing powers, I showed my teacher how to do it; 'cuz, you know, all she ever did was add and subtract, although she did seem to have some inkling of how to multiply and divide. She looked at me (2nd-grader that I was) a little funny, and expressed a degree of amazement at what I was showing her. For my part, I was just happy to help her out. . .

(As a side note, I eventually got around to the idea of extracting roots as the 'opposite' of taking powers, much like division is the 'opposite' of multiplication. I learned how to extract square roots by hand, which actually looks pretty similar to doing long division. I'm told there's a similar method for extracting cube roots, but I've never seen it. In the fullness of time, I learned about imaginary numbers, which arise from the problem of extracting roots of negative numbers in like manner to how negative numbers themselves arise from subtraction. Man, there's no end to this stuff. . .)

Bookish kid that I was, I read a lot, and my parents always kept me supplied with new and interesting books to read. But my favorites (aside from anything by Dr. Seuss; who, by the way, shared his birthday with my friend Suldog) were always the math books - the ones showing how the ancient Greeks and Egyptians used math to prove the earth was round (and to make a pretty good estimate as to its size), or to build the pyramids, and all that good stuff.

From that point on, I was just a voracious math nerd. When I was in 6th grade, our school district (backwoods northern hicks that we were) started a pilot program to identify kids with math talent and run them through an 'accelerated' math program. So, when I showed up for my first day of 7th grade (which was,coincidentally, also the first day that I had separate 'classes' taught by different teachers, where we students had to move from classroom to classroom in the course of the day), I went to my math class, and the teacher handed us 8th-grade math books. At first it seemed a little scary, like we were going to be in over our heads all year (and bright kids really hate feeling like they're in over their heads; they don't like it at all), but the teacher reassured us that we were gonna be just fine, and in the fullness of time, we were.

When I was in 8th grade, we had algebra, and I had one of the best math teachers I ever had (Mr. Lewis, if you're reading this, thank you). When we were doing a unit on graphing, and I was just loving it (the visual aspects of math have always held a special fascination for me). Once I'd gotten the hang of graphing lines and parabolas, and absolute-values, and all that stuff, he took me aside and gave me an equation that we hadn't seen in class, and asked me if I could graph it. I took it home and worked on it, and played around with different approaches to the problem (as much as my 12-year-old brain was equipped to do), and eventually figured out that it was a circle. My teacher was pleased that I'd been able to figure it out, and gave me a few more circles to practice on. Then he gave me another equation, a little different from the circles I knew how to do, and had me play around with that. I spent probably a week or so, but I couldn't figure it out, so I went back to my teacher, and he showed me that it was an ellipse, and then he gave me a few more ellipses to play with. The entire school year was like that - every couple months, Mr. Lewis would give me something to stretch what he was teaching us in class, and just let me play with it, feeding my own sense of having fun with math.

As the years went on, the number of kids in the Accelerated Math program got smaller; some kids just weren't all that interested in math, regardless of whatever 'aptitude' they might've had, and some of the 'marginally gifted' kids (if I can say it that way) just didn't want to run with such fast company. By the time we got to high school, there weren't enough of us left to fill a whole class anymore, so instead of having separate sections for the 'accelerated' kids (the kids from the accelerated program; we didn't move any faster than anyone else; if anything, we were probably more sluggish, as far as that goes; but, I digress), they just put us in classes with the older kids. Which was a little weird, at first; especially when I walked into my first day of Advanced Algebra, and the teacher, who was also the basketball coach, addressed the class. "I see," he began, with a slightly menacing tone, "that we have (here he paused for dramatic effect) sophomores in the class this year." (he said 'sophomores' with an air of utter disdain) "Well, let me tell you my philosophy of what to do with sophomores - Fail Them. Fail Them ALLLLL. . ." Of course, it was all a joke. Heh-heh-heh. Funny guy. But once again, there was the slightest sense of wondering if I was getting in over my head, again. But again, once we got used to the new surroundings, we were fine. My senior year, I finished third in a statewide math competition, which won me a small scholarship for my university studies.

The Accelerated program basically put us a year ahead of the 'regular' math program, which meant that, when we finished our junior year, we'd taken all the math that there was to be taken at our high school, and what to do with us as seniors was an as-yet-unresolved question. The resolution was to dual-enroll us in the junior college, so we could take Calculus at the college our senior year. Which was all sorts of cool. First, we got to leave the high school campus in the middle of the day, to drive across town to the JC. And we were taking a real, live, bona-fide college class, taught by a real, live, bona-fide college instructor. And again, immediately, on the first day of class, I was confronted with the fact that this was something new and different than what I'd seen before. I was young, even among my own class - 16 at the beginning of my senior year. And sitting across the aisle from me was a 29-year-old Viet Nam vet. At least, at the high school, everyone was within a year or two of my age (and social maturity level, altho that might have covered a slightly wider range). But this was like my first step out of the 'protected' world of school-as-I'd-known-it, and into something more like Real Life. Which, once I'd gotten used to it, was really pretty exciting. I also found that college classes move along at a significantly quicker pace than I'd been used to in high school - when our family moved, two months before graduation, I was placed into the high-school-level Calculus class at the new school, but I was already considerably farther along than they would be by the end of the school year, so I basically ran an independent study with the teacher on the side, and acted as a tutor in the class.

When I finally got to the University, I started as a Math major. It was what I liked, and I was good at it, so it seemed obvious. By virtue of my year at the JC, I was already through all the freshman math classes, so by the end of my own freshman year, I was starting to take classes for my major. Without trying to bore you all to tears, I'll just say that I encountered my first Abstract Algebra class, and I realized that, if I was going to be seeing significantly more of this stuff (and I assuredly was), then Math wasn't really what I wanted to study after all. Looking around for another plausible field of study, I settled on Mechanical Engineering. I considered studying Physics, but when I thought about it, that could take me into realms just as abstract as Mathematics. So Engineering, I reasoned, would involve me in lots of good math problems, of a suitably concrete nature, that I might even get paid to solve, someday. I kept taking math classes 'on the side' (with my 'elective' credits), and by the time I finished my Bachelor's Degree, I had more math credits on my transcript than my roommate, who was a Math major (I've occasionally thought about going back to see if I could finagle a 'second major' in Applied Math, or somesuch, out of the classes I'd already taken).

(Another side note. . . when I took my GREs, in preparation for applying to graduate school, I was initially undecided as to whether I wanted to study Engineering or Applied Math, so I took the exams for both, and had the results sent to the corresponding departments. By the time the results came back, I'd decided in favor of getting another Engineering degree. But the Math department still got my test results; and I did well enough that I got a letter from the Math chairman, saying that they'd gotten my test results, and they were really good, and they wanted to admit me, but there was a small problem - I hadn't applied yet. So. . . would I please apply? Which was nice for my ego, but I'd already made my choice. I probably should have written back, explaining my decision - or heck, just walked across the street and told him myself - but I was still a little too green for that. *sigh* )

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All of which makes for a nice story, and a nice insight into my life and psyche (if you're remotely interested in such things; God only knows why you would be), but it's really only background for the story I set out to tell you (I hope you don't feel deceived) (and Lord knows, this post is already long enough). . .

When I was in high school, I rather enjoyed my reputation (such as it was) as the school's 'Math Whiz'. But, as noted above, I mainly did it out of my own enjoyment and love of math. I did all the 'Extra Credit' problems, and sometimes, just for my own interest and challenge, I'd do the 'hard' problems at the bottom of the page, even if the teacher hadn't assigned them. Of course, those 'challenging' problems were often, um. . . challenging. Even to me (hard to believe, I know, but it happens. . .). And sometimes, I'd become the least bit, uh, obsessive about 'conquering' them. Sometimes, I'd spend an hour or more, trying as many different approaches to a problem as I could think of, in order to crack the problem, and make it give up its answer to me. And sometimes, I'd go past my bedtime banging away on a problem, without success, and go to bed frustrated that I hadn't been able to beat the problem into submission.

I don't remember the first time it happened, but I clearly recall several of them, all when I was in high school. There might have been a few in college, but I clearly remember the times it happened in high school. I went to bed, and fell asleep, still agitated that I hadn't been able to solve the problem. Then I began to dream. And I dreamed the solution to the problem I'd been working on. I remember those dreams, even today. I'd be right back where I'd been, at my desk, grinding away at the problem, staring at the page in front of me. Then I'd have a crucial flash of insight, and work the problem through to solution. I'd check and double-check my work, until I was satisfied that what I had was really right. Then, at the end, still in my dream, I'd remind myself to wake up and write it down, before I forgot it. Then I'd wake up, excited, still remembering the 'key insight' that had come to me in my dream, and write down the solution, which was invariably correct. Shades of Kekule?

I don't know if that's indicative of how deeply I was obsessing over the problem, or if, once I was relaxed enough to sleep and dream, my brain (mind?) could work more efficiently, or what. But I still get a chuckle from the very idea of dreaming the answers to math problems. . .

Has anything like that ever happened to any of you?

The Truth Is Out There. . .

2012-01-06T07:11:00.032-05:00

Since it's Epiphany. . .

I think that this cartoon has an interesting/cute/clever take on the Incarnation, and how we 'moderns' think of the Universe, and our place in it. What do you think?

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Baby, It's Cold Outside

2011-12-31T07:40:00.018-05:00

My friend Lime has posted about dear friends of hers from Trinidad who came to visit over the Christmas holidays. Trinidad qualifies to be called 'tropical', and her guests had explicitly hoped to share a White Christmas with Lime and her family (alas, if the weather in Lime-ville is anything like it is in Our Town, that may have been a forlorn hope). But actual snow on the ground and in the air, such as is typically to be found where the Lime family lives, qualifies as a major novelty for most Trinidadians.

Besides which, it reminds me of a story or two from my own young life. . .

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At the university I attended, there was a dormitory that was more-or-less reserved for housing foreign graduate students, and late every fall, with the first significant snowfall, a wonderful scene unfolded as dozens of African, South-Asian and Latin-American grad students would gather on the lawn, snapping photos of each other in the first actual snow any of them had actually seen in their lives.

There was another graduate student at my school in those days, not foreign, but American-born, who was known campus-wide (and it was a very wide campus) as The Mad Hawaiian. He was, as the nickname might imply, a native of Hawaii, and when he arrived on campus, he didn't even have a pair of long pants to his name. Now, one might presume that a Hawaiian coming to live in Michigan, in all its wintry wonderful-ness, might, soon after his arrival, equip himself with some typical Michigan-type winter-compatible clothing. But not The Mad Hawaiian; he reasoned to himself that 'cold is just a state of mind', and why should he spend a big wad of money on clothes, anyway? (He was studying Computer Science; 'nuff said.) And so, in the bleak mid-winter, with snow and wind and sub-freezing temperatures, The Mad Hawaiian could be seen walking around campus in a T-shirt and shorts. . .

(As a footnote, some years later, a friend of ours, who hadn't attended our university, and had only moved to Our Town after Jen and I had long since graduated, told us about this unusual guy he worked with, whom everyone called The Mad Hawaiian. I couldn't believe my ears, and double-checked the name, and it was indeed the very self-same Mad Hawaiian. I aksed if he dressed unusually, and he said no, it being a somewhat professional business office, he was obliged to wear long pants and a collared shirt. Which seemed a little disappointing, somewhow. . .)

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Our family hosted a Nigerian grad student, years ago. It was a wonderful experience for us, to spend a year getting to know a man from a culture very different than our own. It was delightful just to sit with him and talk for hours about life in Nigeria, and his hopes and aspirations for when he returned (he was married, with four children, so his presence at an American university was a huge sacrifice, not just for him, but for his wife and kids, as well). He came from northern Nigeria, which is a predominantly-Muslim part of the country, and he told us some eye-opening (and occasionally hair-raising) stories about living as a Christian in the midst of a Muslim majority. The Nigerian Students Association on campus held a few events during the year, to which our family was invited as esteemed guests, and treated to authentic Nigerian cuisine (of which exotically-spiced cream-of-wheat seems to be a staple).

Over Christmas, the folks who were sponsoring his studies (a missionary society; he was getting a degree in counseling to benefit his church back home) brought his wife over to spend the holidays with him, and they were both grateful for the opportunity to spend a couple weeks together in the midst of the long grind of his studies. It was the first time she had ever been out of Nigeria, to say nothing of America, or even The West more generally.

-----

A brief aside - several of our friends have hosted foreign students over the years, mostly from Latin America. Since the American school year encompasses the cold-weather months, they always tell their guests to be sure to pack a warm coat. Which, to the ears of someone from, say, Costa Rica, evokes what Americans would call a 'wind-breaker' - a light jacket, suitable for spring or fall. But in Latin America, it is 'a warm coat', and is only worn on extremely cold days, when the air temperature drops below 15C (59F). One poor girl got off her plane in the midst of a raging blizzard, with snow, below-zero (F) temperatures and howling wind. When her hosts saw her 'warm coat', they took her immediately to buy a REAL 'warm coat', before they even took her home.

Another family we know hosted a student from New Zealand (the South Island, which is the colder of the two). He arrived in October, and stayed for six months, returning home in April. But, New Zealand being in the Southern Hemisphere, the poor fellow lived through 18 consecutive months of winter (or something close to it). . .

-----

So, returning to our Nigerian student's wife. . . As it turned out, we proceeded to have a record-breaking cold snap the whole time she was here - below-zero temperatures virtually every day of her two-week stay. There is absolutely nothing in the experience of any Nigerian that would remotely prepare them for below-freezing temperatures; but this was cold that made even us hardy northerners shiver. The poor woman wore about five layers of sweaters and thermal long-johns, and I don't think she ever got warm, the whole time she was here. Even sitting in our dining room, next to the heat duct, and near the stove, she would just sit shivering. We felt terrible that we couldn't do something to relieve her discomfort. And of course, the cold broke the day she flew out. . .

God With Us

2011-12-25T00:01:00.057-05:00

This is from a Christmas meditation I wrote in my 'paper journal' back in 1987 (and yes, it does strike me the tiniest bit oddly to think that 24 years ago, I was 7 years married, the father of three children, and writing theological meditations in my journal. . .)

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"Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son,
     and they will call his name Emmanuel - 'God With Us'."
          - The Gospel According to Matthew, chapter 1, verse 23
              (ref. The Book of the Prophet Isaiah, 7:14)

God is no longer remote from us; He has come to us - God is with us.

How differently would we understand our lives if we were more consciously aware of this foundational truth - God is with us.

How differently would we relate to our minor trials (or our major ones, for that matter) if we knew - really knew - that God is with us.

How different would our sins look to us if we really understood that God is with us?

What a privilege, what an awesome possibility is laid before us - God has become one of us, that we might become like God.  And yet how little do we - do I - take hold of it and venture so bold as to live by means of God's grace?

O God, have mercy on us; help us to take hold of what you've laid before us, to take on more of your divinity, as you've taken on our humanity. Make us holy, as you are holy, and help us to live more truly as your presence in the world. . .

O Emmanuel

2011-12-23T07:07:00.008-05:00

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

(ref. Isaiah 7:14)

O King of the Nations

2011-12-22T07:06:00.007-05:00

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

(ref. Isaiah 9:6, Isaiah 2:4; Isaiah 28:16, Ephesians 2:14)

O Morning Star

2011-12-21T07:05:00.006-05:00

Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

(ref. Isaiah 9:2; Isaiah 60:1-2, Malachi 4:2)

O Key of David

2011-12-20T07:04:00.004-05:00

Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui aperis, et nemo claudit;
claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

(ref. Isaiah 22:22, Isaiah 9:7, Isaiah 42:7)

O Root of Jesse

2011-12-19T07:03:00.010-05:00

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

(ref. Isaiah 11:1,10; Micah 5:2, Isaiah 45:14, Isaiah 52:15, Romans 15:12)

O Adonai

2011-12-18T07:02:00.007-05:00

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

(ref. Isaiah 11:4-5, Isaiah 33:22; Exodus 3:2, Exodus 24:12)

O Wisdom

2011-12-17T07:01:00.041-05:00

For the last week of Advent, I am posting the O Antiphons, verses to an ancient Advent hymn (dating back at least to the 5th century), sung at Vespers, one verse each day from December 17-23. These may seem somewhat familiar to some of you; the familiar Advent hymn/carol O Come, O Come Emmanuel is based on them (rendered into consistently-metered rhyming English). . .

I am here giving both the ancient Latin text, and the English translation, as well as the Biblical references provided in the excellent Wikipedia article. . .

-------------------------

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

(ref. Isaiah 11:2-3, Isaiah 28:29)

Godspeed, My Children

2011-12-15T11:32:00.003-05:00

In the general busy-ness of the season, I find that I have neglected to mention to you all that two of our progeny - 2F and 4M - will be flying off tomorrow morning to spend Christmas with friends in the UK - London, Glasgow and Belfast. This is the second time in the last three Christmases that they'll have been off-continent. And, more to the point (at least where Jen and I, and the rest of the family are concerned), apart from us.

Of course, we wish them Godspeed, and joyous times with their friends. Their friends are our friends, too. One is a young woman who has shared many a meal with us around our table (and with whom we saw Paul McCartney last summer), who is spending a year in London doing missionary work. Another is a young man from Glasgow who spent a year-and-a-half in Our Town (and who dearly wanted to see Sir Paul with us, but he got terribly sick the day of the concert; so 4M ended up using his ticket) doing the same thing, and became a close family friend while he was here (at his 'going-home party', one of the kids pasted his face onto a Harry Potter life-size 'cutout', and it has stayed in our dining room for the entire four months since he left). 2F and 4M will carry our greetings, and our love, with them.

2F is actually looking into returning to Europe as a 'missionary' in her own right, and part of the purpose of her trip is to make connections in that regard. Which thought makes us immensely proud of her, and a little bit sad, to think that she could be so far away from us, for an extended (and possibly indefinite) period of time. But those things will happen, when one undertakes to live radically for something (Someone) bigger than one's own preferences and comfort. So you could pray for 2F, that God will give her clear discernment, and open or close the appropriate doors in her path. And for both of them, that He will 'guard their going-out and their coming-in', and return them safely to the bosom of their family. . .

-------------------------

Could I also solicit your prayers for an immensely perplexing situation in which Jen and I find ourselves? Without going into detail, I'll just say that two friends of ours are caught in a massive, emotional breach of their relationship. We are trying hard, 'insofar as it depends on us', to be at peace with both of them, but it's not easy. Pray that we can maintain friendship with both of them, and that the breach between them can be healed.

(*sigh*)

Come quickly, Lord Jesus. . .

Perspectives

2011-12-11T06:59:00.009-05:00

The Optimist says the glass is half-full. . .

The Pessimist says the glass is half-empty. . .

The Engineer says the glass is twice as big as it needs to be. . .

-------------------------

Among Roman Catholics, today is popularly called Gaudete Sunday (because Catholics like to be all high-falutin' and throw Latin words around all the time, an' stuff; 'gaudete' just means 'rejoice'), the Third Sunday of Advent; the 'rejoicing' being because Advent is (at least) half-over, and it's all downhill to Christmas (so to speak).

Our family traditionally procures our Christmas tree on Gaudete weekend, although we might not set it up for a few days (if it's cold enough outside, we'll just stash it behind the garage), and we won't decorate it until it's at least less than a week 'til Christmas.

But - it's gettin' close. . .

Good Day, Sunshine; or, A Day In the Life

2011-12-08T13:53:00.006-05:00

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've been considering burning my last day of vacation for 2011 on the first sunny, 40-degree day that came along, so as to sneak in one more ride on my bike before pulling down the curtain on the riding season. In checking the online weather forecasts, I came to the easy conclusion that yesterday was that day. . .

Besides which, I've piled up a few of those 'getting-ready-for-winter' projects that needed to get done, and the weekends have seemed to fill up with other things (what with Christmas approaching, and all that). And last week's snowfall was a major warning shot across my bow. The fact that it melted off so quickly can only be counted to God's mercy. . .

First, I needed a pair of new front tires on my car (in order to hold down the magnitude of single expenditures, I usually buy tires in pairs - fronts and rears, staggered by a few months so as not to hit the budget all at once). I've known that for a while, and last week's snow served to accentuate the urgency of it. But it's always a bit of a hassle to pull off. Weekends, as I said, tend to fill up with other stuff, and it's hard to set aside the 1-2 hours just sitting in the waiting room. Sometimes, Jen and I will trade cars for the day, so she can cover that detail for me, but her schedule is fuller than it used to be, and it's not such a simple matter for her, either. So, having the day off, I showed up at the tire store at the opening bell, to get in at the front of the line. And then, Jen had an errand for me to run, at a store walking distance up the street from the tire place, so I was gainfully engaged while the car was being worked on. An hour after dropping the car off, I had my new tires, and Jen had some staples restocked in the pantry.

Next was the roof. Our back roof has always had a pretty significant ice-damming problem, and a key component of our strategy for dealing with that has been a heat tape which we run in a zigzag pattern over the bottom three feet or so of the roof. But this past spring, we had our back roof re-shingled, and the roofers had to remove the heat tape in order to put the new shingles down (heck, just to get the old shingles off). So, once the new roof was in place, I needed to re-install the heat tape. It would have been smart of me to do it in the summertime, or at least the early fall, when the asphalt of the shingles was still reasonably soft and pliable; but I wasn't that smart. And again, last week's snowfall highlighted the urgency of getting the heat tape done; that the snow melted so quickly was pure grace from God.

So, after I returned from the tire store, I grabbed 5M, and the two of us went to work - he worked on the roof, installing the clips for the tops of the zigzags, while I worked from a ladder along the edge of the roof. We borrowed 6F's blow-dryer to soften the asphalt in the localized areas where we needed to mount the clips. The process is a little bit tedious, involving mounting the clips, running the tape through the clips, and then going back and readjusting everything to get the tape where it needs to be, while more-or-less matching the length of the tape to the required coverage area. It was a bit chilly out - high 30s (F), but the blow-dryer kept our hands warmer than they'd otherwise have been, and the sun was shining. We finished in a little over an hour, and now our new back roof is ready for winter's onslaught.

Having finished both of those, it was still before 1PM, so there was plenty of time for me to go out on another 17-mile bike ride, which, with the sun shining brightly, was a very happy one, even if it was a few degrees colder than last Saturday's ride had been (and the wind wasn't blowing quite so hard, either, so that was nice, too). I even had time to ride over to the bike shop when I'd finished my ride, because the ride had exposed my need for a new rear tire on the bike, as well.

I went home, showered, and was preparing to take a short nap, when 7M reminded me that he had a basketball game on the other end of town last night. With my long commute, I hardly ever get to his week-night games, so I had a rare opportunity, which I was only too happy to take (his team played their worst game of the season, so far, but he seemed reasonably philosophical about it afterward; perhaps my presence helped him reach such equanimity) (or, you know, perhaps my presence had nothing to do with it; who knows?)

So - one solitary vacation day, in the middle of the week, in December. And what a day it turned out to be. . .

Miles and Miles to Go. . .

2011-12-04T07:39:00.006-05:00

For the last five years (roughly coinciding with my renewed commitment to seriously riding my bike), the weather around the turn from November to December has just been uncanny - within a day either side of the First of December, we've gotten the first significant snowfall of the year, which stays on the ground, and marks the change in temperatures from generally above freezing to generally below. Meaning that, once the snow comes to stay, it really stays, and my riding season is effectively ended. Five years in a row. You'd think that, one of those years, the Sender of Snow would slack off just long enough for me to sneak in a quick 15 or 20 miles on the 3rd, or the 5th maybe, but no dice.

So when we had a run of warm weekends this November, I was hopeful that maybe this year, winter would hold off a few days, and I'd be able to get a few December miles in. And all the moreso, since, as of Thanksgiving weekend, I was at 1388 miles for the year, and it would only take a dozen miles for me to pass 1400.

But, when I checked the weather forecast Tuesday afternoon, Our Town was predicted to get 6-10 inches of snow. Which is a lot of snow, especially for the first real snow of the season. I took my laptop home from work, and made arrangements to work from home on Wednesday if the forecast proved accurate. Which it did. The snow started falling Tuesday evening, as I was maybe 20 miles from home at the end of my commute, and it snowed hard all night and into Wednesday morning. When we went out to shovel the sidewalk and driveway, by golly, there was anywhere from six to ten inches of wet, heavy snow on the ground.

So I called my boss, and told him I'd be staying home. He seemed surprised, since where he lived, they'd only gotten a bit more than an inch. So I checked the weather map online, and it turned out that the 'snow belt' ran right up the middle of Michigan's mitten, virtually centered on Our Town. Fifty miles to the east, or fifty miles to the west of us, barely an inch of snow fell, but from the Ohio/Indiana border, running right up the middle of Michigan, it was 6-10.

So I just laughed, and noted ruefully that Wednesday was the Last Day of November. Right on schedule. But Wednesday itself was a pretty warm day, with high temperatures going into the 40s (Fahrenheit), so even by the time we went to bed on Wednesday, there was quite a bit less snow on the ground than there had been that morning. Our street, which is only two blocks long, and a dead end, never did get plowed, but by the end of Wednesday, we had no problem getting in and out with our cars. So, for a 6-10-inch snowfall, it was pretty benign, as such things go.

But of course, there's a big difference between what you can reasonably drive a car through, and what you can reasonably ride a bike in. Patches of ice aren't that big a deal in a car, but on a bike they can be treacherous. And, riding as we do along the edge of the pavement, if the snow significantly impinges on the available pavement, it quickly becomes a pretty dicey situation, sharing even less pavement than usual with the motorized vehicles, which are ten times heavier, and at least three times faster, than I am. So I was not particularly hopeful that I would be able to get a real, outdoors-on-the-pavement ride in.

Thursday and Friday were warm-ish (for December), with high temperatures in the upper 30s (F), which is above freezing, but won't turn snow into water at a very rapid rate. Plus, we got maybe another half-inch or so over Thurday night.

Yesterday morning, it was overcast, but again in the low 40s. I wasn't optimistic, but I really wanted to ride. So, after my usual round of morning errands, I decided to reconnoiter the route I would take if I did ride. And I found that the pavement, for the most part, was clear and dry, especially on the country back roads that I'd mainly be riding on. The busier country roads all have paved shoulders, and even those were clear. The biggest problems were all in the city, and they were manageable, if I just exercised some common-sensical caution.

So I scurried home, got into my 40-degree riding gear (regular riding gear, with an extra pair of wool socks, sweat pants, and a blaze-orange hoodie, and real gloves with fingers and everything) and got out on the road. I had a great ride (especially once I got out of town) - 17 miles, brisk fresh air, and no significant issues with the motor-vehicles. My heart, lungs, and legs hummed happily along, and I even got home in time to get to 7M's basketball game (and before the rain started).

So it's 1405 and counting. I've got one more vacation day left for this year, and I'm thinking of burning it on a 40+-degree day, should one pop up in the middle of the week, and get one more ride in, before I pack it in for the winter, and take my bike for its annual winter tune-up.

Man, this is just more fun than a human being ought to be allowed to have. . .

-------------------------

And alas, my Spartans went down to defeat in the Inaugural Big Ten Championship game last night. Great game, if you didn't care who won; we've had a few of those with the Badgers, in recent years.

(*sigh*)

Honestly, though, in August, I'd never have expected us to be this good again. I figured we'd be good, but our graduation losses from last year's co-championship team, along with a really gruelling schedule, seemed to portend a small regression, at least in the wins and losses. But here we were, playing for another conference championship. Whaddya know. . . maybe, just maybe, we're becoming pretty good.

Wouldn't that be fun?

Advent. . . Eventually

2011-11-27T06:42:00.017-05:00

We had a good time at my sister's for Thanksgiving. It was the first major holiday without Dad. It wasn't this deep melancholy thing; in fact, my brother, who is the executor of Dad's estate, brought some of the last of Dad's things to have us sort through, and take what we wanted. I took an old tie-tack of Dad's, that was a 'working' pair of square gears. It was very emblematic of Dad, and something an engineer like me can appreciate.

My sister is in the process of a divorce from her husband of 31 years (they were married the same summer as Jen and me). So, for her sake, it was probably good to have some company to fill her house for the holiday; and filling houses is something our family excels at. . .

Alas, the Lions lost, and the less said about that, the better, probably. . .

But my Spartans finished their second consecutive football season with double-digit wins, something that's never been done before in school history (although, to be perfectly fair, our best teams, back in the 50s and 60s, only played nine or ten games, so double-digit seasons were a little harder to come by. . .)

-------------------------

We got to spend some time with our grandchildren and their parents yesterday evening, and had a really warm, wonderful time together. Some really fine kids, being raised really well, there. . .

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We've had a surplus of warm (albeit windy) Saturdays this November. So, the 30 miles I rode yesterday brought me to a total of 1388 for the year. If I can get in one ride in December (which I haven't done in fifteen years or so), I'll sneak past 1400 again. Wish me luck. . .

OK, then. . . on to the main event. . .

*************************

This next is a re-post of something I wrote back in 2006 (and re-posted again last year. Who knows? Maybe this will end up being a Tradition around here. . .)

At any rate, 'tis the season. . . And while I'm at it, I'll give a shout-out to my good friend Suldog, whose 'Thanksgiving Comes First' campaign against premature Christmas-y-ness partially inspired my dredging this up from the archives. . .

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In our culture, the Friday after Thanksgiving marks the more-or-less 'official' beginning of the commercial season of 'Christmas', with the sales, the extended hours at the malls, special advertisements, etc., etc (although, honestly, the stores have been in 'Christmas mode' pretty much since they took down the Halloween stuff; maybe even before that). It's what much, if not most, of our culture thinks of when they think of 'Christmas', but less and less does it have any discernible connection with the actual content and meaning of Christmas.

One time I was visiting family in a large, midwestern city over Thanksgiving, and the following day, the local TV news had several reporters on site at various malls, doing interviews with shoppers. They asked one guy what the 'true meaning of Christmas' was, and he said, "We gotta get out here and spend money to keep the economy going strong." I am not making this up; he actually said that.

I sometimes wish that they would come up with a different name for the year-end consumerist feeding-frenzy. Just leave Christmas out of it. Or, maybe we should come up with another name for the celebration of Christ's Birth and Incarnation. Let 'em have 'Christmas' for the 'shopping season' - admit that we've lost it, and start over with a new name.

(*sigh*)

Anyway, today is the First Sunday of Advent - the beginning of the Christian season of spiritual preparation for Christmas. As I've gone along, I've come to really love Advent, imperfectly though I may observe it. In rough terms, Advent is to Christmas what Lent is to Easter, just with not quite the same 'penitential' emphasis. Rightly done, Advent is a time of contemplation, a time to step back from the normal frenzy of daily life, take a few deep breaths, and anticipate the coming joy of Christmas. Advent is pretty much the polar opposite of 'consumer Christmas'. Pausing for contemplation is not a thing Americans are terribly inclined to do (perhaps I should rather say it's a thing that we're inclined to do terribly).

In the larger American culture, the 'Christmas season' runs from the Friday after Thanksgiving until Christmas Day, but in traditional Christian circles, the Christmas season begins on Christmas Day and runs until Epiphany (January 6) - thus, the 'Twelve Days of Christmas'. So, when most of our neighbors are finished with Christmas, we're just getting started. It always perplexes me just a bit to see all the Christmas trees out on the curb on the 26th; when Jen was a kid, Catholics didn't even put their trees up until Christmas Eve. And, just as I'm getting pumped to sing 'Joy to the World' and 'O Come, All Ye Faithful', most of my neighbors are sick of hearing them.

Maybe I should blame it on the Magi - they started the whole giving-gifts-at-Christmas thing. I doubt they had any clue how far it would get out-of-hand, though.

When it comes right down to it, though, I suppose I've got to admit that my spiritual preparation for Christmas is my own responsibility. It's not up to American culture to get me spiritually prepared. It might be nice if the culture were more supportive (or even just less disruptive) of what I'm trying to accomplish, but it is what it is.

So, our family is setting out on Advent. If, over the next few weeks, I seem a little reticent and low-key about Christmas, you'll understand, won't you? And then, if I'm getting all Christmas-y just when you're getting tired of it all, you'd be very kind to indulge me. In the meantime, I'll be over here, singing 'O Come, O Come Emmanuel', in a minor key. . .

Grief. . . And Gratitude

2011-11-20T07:46:00.018-05:00

It's nearly three months since my dad died. And introspective fellow that I am, it hasn't hit me like the ton of bricks I thought it would. I was prepared for huge, crushing grief, an utter earthquake in my life. Dad was one of the very few constants in my life; mothers have come and gone for me (strange as that is to say, and I really don't mean it in the least bit pejoratively toward any of them). We've changed houses and cities; friends have come and gone, but since the day he adopted me (before my memories of anything earlier had kicked in in earnest), Dad was always there for me. So I was prepared for some pretty significant emotional churning (and recalling what I experienced when I met my birth-mother, that wasn't an unreasonable thought).

But it hasn't been that way at all. I miss him. Oh, without a doubt, I miss him terribly. Ever since Mom went to the nursing home, I'd had a pattern of calling Dad roughly weekly. The calls weren't always terribly stimulating; often as not, he'd just keep me up-to-date on his current medical status. Sometimes we'd talk about recent progress on the family genealogy (and in the last year before he died, he made a really significant breakthrough, tracking our surname-family back across the ocean, into 1600s Germany), or just what my packet of his grandkids (the 'production side' of the family tree) were up to. It wasn't terribly burdensome - I'd usually call him on my cell phone driving home from work (my daily commute covers many miles of lightly-traveled freeway, so it wasn't a big deal) - and it was always good just to hear his voice. I miss those calls.

On one level, I've been mentally preparing myself for his passing for the last 20 years; his brothers were 47 and 58 when they died, and my grandpa didn't see 70, either. So once Dad hit 70, I figured he could be leaving any time. So maybe that's helped; I don't know. . .

Mostly, I've just felt a sadness. Not a big, up-front, dominating-my-consciousness sadness, but just a background sadness that's just kinda. . . there. And doesn't go away (at least, it hasn't yet). I'm not depressed; I still enjoy my life. I take joy from my marriage, and my kids (all of them), and my network of good friends. I'm enjoying the challenges of my job. I just miss my dad, that's all.

They tell me that, in time, it will mostly go away. That the sense of sadness and loss will soften and heal. And I believe them. But just at the moment, I miss him. Ever since I moved out of my parents' house, I've often, when I found myself wrestling with some conundrum of life, asked myself what Dad would do about it. I rarely ever called and asked him directly, but it was always comforting to know that I could. And now I can't anymore. But I can still draw on the internal resources that his own strong character provided for me; only now, I have to pull it from my memory of him. And I suppose that that's comforting in its own way. . .

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Thanksgiving is coming soon, and this Thanksgiving promises to be as significant as any we've had in quite a few years. Perhaps most obviously, this is the momentous First Holiday since Dad died; the first time our family will be gathering for the holidays without our parents. And who knows how that will be? But I am gratified that we are all inclined to keep our family connections alive (and given the Yours-Mine-and-Ours nature of our family, perhaps all the moreso).

So, it being Thanksgiving, I am grateful for my family. And I am especially grateful for 55 years of life with my Dad in it. I am grateful for his strong character, his sense of duty, and the strong example he gave me. I can't even begin to say how my life has been better for him having been my dad. . .

Sick to My Stomach, Again. . .

2011-11-10T07:16:00.024-05:00

I really don't want to say anything about the whole mess that's going on at Penn State right now, but on another level, I really don't want to let it pass without comment, either. It's just nauseating, sickening, and sad, depending on which angle you're viewing it from. And I have multiple perspectives that probably don't add up to a single coherent set of thoughts, but as I've listened to the sports-talk shows (I have a long commute), there's been a distinct shortage of rational commentary, and even what passes for reasonable, isn't always. (*sigh*) Fools rush in; Lord, have mercy. . .

For those of you who may not have read the sports pages (or heck, the front pages) over the past week, the situation started coming to light with the arrest over the weekend of Jerry Sandusky, who, back in the 70s-90s, had been the defensive co-ordinator of Penn State's football team, on charges of sexually molestating young boys. Which was a fairly big deal, and not quite your garden-variety sexual-abuse story. Penn State is a pretty prominent football program, and their head coach, Joe Paterno, is one of the most beloved figures in all of college athletics; Jerry Sandusky was Paterno's right-hand man for decades, and widely expected to be his successor when (if) he ever retired. Until he (Sandusky) suddenly and unexpectedly retired himself in 1999 - he had started a foundation to help 'at-risk' kids, and he wanted to devote more of his time and energy to the foundation.

So far, so good, right? Except that it turns out that, from at least 1994, until at least 2009, Mr. Sandusky sexually abused at least 9, and possibly 20 or more, boys who he'd met through his foundation. In 2002, he was seen 'in the act' by a graduate assistant, who, after much anguished soul-searching, told Coach Paterno the next day what he'd seen (though perhaps not in very specific detail). Paterno told his 'boss', the university's Athletic Director, about it, and the AD told his boss. And the upshot of it was. . . basically nothing. Sandusky was told not to bring boys onto university property anymore. No-one called the police; no-one even bothered to find out the name of the victim. And Sandusky got to abuse kids for seven more years. Unbelievable. . .

Now that the situation has come to light, it winds up being utterly devastating - an all-consuming fire that ends up with one of the great coaches of all time, who is, by all accounts, and in all sorts of ways, a good man, and a decent human being, being summarily fired from his job of 46 years, the Athletic Director and at least one other high-ranking university poo-bah fired, and the president of the university resigning under a cloud. And it's all so sad. Except when it's sickening.

Of course, it all starts with Jerry Sandusky, who was obviously something very, very different than he appeared to be. But the responses of those who might have done something about it were unbelievably, unfathomably lame.

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And the thing is, I understand it. I understand, which is not to say that I excuse it, or that the behavior in question is remotely defensible. It's not. But I understand. Sinful human being that I am, I understand.

I played football, and my sons have played football. Football coaches are a pretty unique breed of human being. The most successful ones (I stop short of saying 'the best ones') are usually pretty monomaniacally focused - all they do is football, all they know is football, all they care about is football (one famous coach, when he finally got the coaching job of his dreams, told his wife, "just go ahead and file for divorce, 'cuz this is the last you're ever gonna see of me." What a prince, eh?). Football coaches are not, as a general rule, great intellects (except where football is concerned), or moral philosophers. They're football coaches, and that's what they do. And so, I can understand Joe Paterno taking the report from the grad-assistant and passing it on to his boss, and going back to the business of coaching football. And hoping that it goes away, so it doesn't distract anyone from football stuff. And never having it bubble to the top of his consciousness that, Holy Shit, a kid was molested by one of my coaches, right here in the football building showers.

The young graduate assistant, who in the meantime has become an assistant coach, has come in for a ton of criticism, and justly so. Most of it has been on the order of, "You accidentally come upon a 60-year-old football coach raping a 10-year-old boy in the showers, so. . . you go home and ask your dad what you should do? How the hell do you walk away, and leave the kid to keep getting raped?? And yet, on another level, I can understand. Let me explain. . .

Years ago, in our Christian community, we had a very strong, very charismatic leader. The kind of guy who walks into a room, and everybody turns to notice. The kind of guy that other guys - even really strong guys in their own right - wanted to follow. The kind of guy whose approval other men (and, let's be candid - women) craved. In the fullness of time, his feet of clay became all too evident, but by that time, we were all trained to think that he was 'special', and the normal ways of doing things didn't quite apply to him. The evidence was right in front of our faces, but we didn't see it; we didn't want to see it. And I can easily imagine that Jerry Sandusky had carved out a similar niche for himself at Penn State. I mean, he was the guy who coached the linebackers at 'Linebacker U'. I can easily imagine a grad-assistant having some serious soul-searching with himself, just because of the cognitive dissonance between what he'd seen, and what he'd always known of Jerry Sandusky. . . And then wondering who the hell would believe his word against Jerry Sandusky's, anyway. . .

Another story from my own life. When our older kids were single-digits young, Jen and I became friends with another couple, who lived down the street from us, and had kids the same age as ours. They even joined our community, and we spent quite a bit of time together, for a while. Then, after we'd known them for a year or two, suddenly the husband was arrested and charged with child molestation - his daughter had a little friend over, and he 'helpfully' offered to give the girls a bath (no, the 'little friend' was not our daughter; as far as we were ever able to discern, our girls were never his victims). And the thing is, I was absolutely certain that the charges were ridiculous. I knew this guy. He was a family man's family man, devoted to his wife and kids. And yet. . . Big life lesson there for my young self.

There's a part of me that wonders about Mrs. Sandusky - certainly, it's not unprecedented for a husband to be engaged in behavior of which his life-partner is clueless, but I wonder what, if any, clues she might have had. . .

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When I scrape all these thoughts into a pile, I don't know what conclusion, exactly, they lead me to. I hasten to reiterate that, by saying 'I understand', I am in no way excusing anyone's behavior, or making light of the heinous-ness of the crime. In part, I am invoking The Log and The Speck - I am not certain that, in the same circumstances, I would do significantly better. Part of what I find grating in much of the public commentary is the sanctimoniousness, the affected moral superiority of so many of the commentators, as if THEY could never do anything so DISGUSTING as that (and good for them, if they couldn't, eh?). I just hope that I know myself, and my own potential for sinful bahavior, a little bit better than that.

On another level, everything coming out of Penn State in recent days is just more data to confirm what GK Chesterton once said, to the effect that, of all the teachings of Christianity, none was more empirically obvious than the fallen-ness of human nature. Feet of clay all over the place in State College, PA these days. And therein lies the bulk of the sadness. It wouldn't have taken very many people to be very 'heroic' at all, to make a much better (though still sickening and sad) situation of this, but nobody, not even the formerly-sainted JoePa, found it within themselves to do so. The guy who is at the center of it all, who was once a Respected Leader and Former of Young Men, is now a poster-boy for 'We Had No Idea'. . . And somewhere out there are 20 or so young men and boys who got dragged through experiences that no-one, much less children, should ever have to endure, at the hands of a trusted mentor (I will admit that there is a part of me that isn't beyond observing ruefully that Catholic priests don't have the pedophilia market cornered; but there is absolutely no joy to be taken from that observation. . .)

Things are only just getting underway in earnest, and by the time you read this, even more facts may have come to light. It is entirely likely that things will get worse before they get better.

Lord, Have Mercy. . .

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(add November 13)

In reading through the indictment, it appears that there was an incident in 1998 which seems to have led to Sandusky being told by Joe Paterno that he would never become the head coach at Penn State, which in turn seems to have precipitated Sandusky's out-of-the-blue retirement after the '99 season. In that case, the police were involved, but the District Attorney decided not to bring charges against Sandusky. It is never stated why the DA decided that, and the DA seems to have dropped off the face of the earth, but if anything, that situation seems even more egregious than what happened in 2002, and reeks of the DA 'protecting' a prominent person. Although, again, the DA isn't around to give his story. . .

So, if Joe Paterno knew enough to tell Jerry Sandusky he wouldn't be getting head coaching job in 1999. . .

Man, much as I might wish otherwise, this just keeps getting worse and worse. . .

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(November 14)

And here is an op-ed (from the NY Times, of all places) that makes a similar point to the one I started out making. . .

Life Is Like That, Sometimes. . .

2011-11-01T07:31:00.007-04:00

Recently, I was cleaning out my desk, and I came across a file of some of my favorite old cartoons. Now, I don't have any plans to turn this humble blog into a Xavier-style clearing-house of visual humor, but perhaps some of you will appreciate a few of my favorites (quite aside from the insight they might provide into the bizarre twists and turns of my psyche) (and of course, my ego must be simply titanic for me to think that any of you might even want such insight. . .)

Anyway, in honor of All Saints' Day - this one hit me where I was living, a few years back. . .

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I rode another 33 miles this past weekend, which gives me a total of 1238 miles for the riding season, through October (which is down a bit from my usual mileage, because of my dad's death, and a couple bouts of unplanned illness) (but hey - who plans their illness?). In past years, I've had three or four good riding weekends in November (recent years haven't afforded me any rides in December, but if the weather is agreeable enough, I'll go out any time), although my miles will start to decrease with the temperatures (once it gets below 40F or so, it becomes an issue of keeping my toes warm, and that limits my rides to around 20 miles; below 32F, I stay indoors). So, I've got maybe another 100 miles or so before the season ends. . .

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Also this past weekend, Jen engaged in her annual ritual of Providence and Resourcefulness, aka The Canning of the Applesauce. I don't know how many bushels of apples she started with, but by the time she finished, we had 75 quarts of applesauce in the pantry.

Mmmmm. . . home-canned applesauce. . .

I love my wife. . .

All Wet

2011-10-23T07:01:00.019-04:00

I have lived virtually my entire life in Michigan, surrounded by four of the five Great Lakes. We have more miles of shoreline here than any other state, except Alaska, and an awful lot of it is really nice, sandy beaches. The town I grew up in was right on the shore of Lake Huron, and for a couple years, we lived in a house which had Lake Huron as its back yard. While we lived there, it was a pretty good working model of Heaven.

In my hometown, we would go down to the beach pretty much whenever school wasn't in session, roughly from early June until the end of August. A really warm weekend in May might coax a few hardy souls into the water, but you couldn't really count on the lake being warm enough to swim in, that early in the season. September was similar - you might get a weekend warm enough to head down to the beach, but once football season started, we were usually otherwise occupied.

(Once Jen and I were on a 'getaway weekend' at a B&B on Lake Michigan; it was a lovely weekend in April, and a warm breeze was blowing in off the lake. We took a leisurely, romantic walk along the beach, and as the waves lapped gently onto the sand, we thought it would be fun to let the water roll over our toes as we walked. But then, in April, it's only been a couple weeks since all that majestically beautiful water was ice. And 35-degree water has a decidedly un-romantic effect on the toes; not for nothing do we speak of taking cold showers to, um, cool our ardor)

Now, Lake Huron, at least where I grew up, was typically around 65 degrees during the summer months, but we counted anything much above 60 as eminently swimmable. If you really had your heart set on getting wet, you might wade into water in the upper 50s, but you didn't stay in for very long.

I had a friend who grew up in Marquette, Michigan, on the Lake Superior shore of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Now, Lake Superior is COLD. . . Really, REALLY cold. . . C-O-L-D. The old quips about the balls on a brass monkey, or witches' mammary glands, or well-diggers' backsides, were really invented with Lake Superior in mind. Folks in Marquette, my friend told me, don't really go swimming much, at least not in the big lake; it's just too cold. But even so, everyone in town listens to their radio all summer long, waiting for the one glorious day in August when the weatherman comes on the radio to tell them that the water temperature is above 50 degrees, and then, like a civic ritual, the whole town goes down to the beach and swims, until they can't feel their toes anymore. Which takes about a minute or two.

When Jen and I were on our honeymoon, we were driving along a lightly travelled road in the UP (when it comes to the UP, 'lightly travelled' means a car might or might not have come by in the last 24 hours; a story is told of an old Yooper who pulled up and moved to Alaska when he started seeing neighbors once a week or so; it was just getting too darn crowded. . .), and we happened upon a lovely beach. I pulled the car off the road, directly onto the beach, we changed into our swimsuits right there in the open air, and ran into the lake for a quick dip (Jen still refers to this as her first serious act of marital submission, as I insisted that she not miss out on the experience). When I go into Lake Superior, I will wade in slowly, giving my feet and legs time to ~~go numb~~ get used to the water; usually by the time I'm knee-deep, I can look into the crystal-clear water and see two strikingly white things that look suspiciously like my feet, as all the blood has by then retreated to warmer places. At that point, one should either just jump in and get totally immersed, or call it day and get out of the water; trying to slowly wade in past the, uh, T-bag line is an exercise in masochism. . .

I set a goal for myself, when I was in my teens, to swim in all five Great Lakes - full immersion; wading in knee-deep doesn't count. And I'm happy to say that I achieved that goal, before my 30th birthday. Since Lake Ontario is the only one of the Great Lakes that doesn't lap onto the shores of the state of Michigan, we had to make a special point of vacationing at a cottage in Grimsby, Ontario (from whence the Toronto skyline is visible across the lake on a clear day), in order to collect Lake Ontario (and Niagara Falls, while we were at it) (no, I did not get 'fully immersed' in Niagara Falls); and thus did I duly accomplish my goal. So I expanded my goal to include both of the oceans that wet the shores of the United States.

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I added the Atlantic Ocean to my collection when our family went to Florida for spring break, more than 20 years ago. The proximate cause for our trip was to meet my 'first mother', after not having seen or heard from her in more than 20 years. But we had a standing offer from my aunt, who lived on Florida's Gulf coast, to stay with her, so we took her up on that, and we had a great time.

When we left Michigan, it was 35 degrees, and a gray, dreary rain was falling. As we drove southward on I-75, the air got warmer with each passing mile; by the time we were in Kentucky, the grass was green. By Georgia, we saw flowers blooming in the red clay soil. We stopped at the little 'Welcome to Florida' rest stop just across the Florida line, for a complimentary cup of fresh-squeezed orange juice, and 2F (who was about four at the time), spying a palm tree, spontaneously ran over and laid a big friendly hug on it. By the time we arrived at our destination, south of Tampa, it was 85 degrees, and we felt like we were really getting one over on the Universe.

The next day, it was another delightfully sunny, 85-degree day, and we announced our intention to go swimming. My aunt chuckled, and said that we'd probably be the only ones in the water, since the locals didn't get in the water in March. Undeterred, we drove down to the beach, on one of the keys (a 'key' in Floridian geography is a geographic entity somewhere between a sand-spit island and a glorified sand-bar), and, as my aunt had predicted, we had the entire beach virtually to ourselves. For miles in either direction, we saw nary another human soul beside ourselves.

And what a beach! The beaches on the Great Lakes are nice - brown sand, with patches of tall grass appearing here and there. But this beach on the Gulf coast of Florida was the most amazing beach I'd ever seen (still is, as far as that's concerned) - fine, white sand, the consistency of flour, stretched as far as the eye could see, and gave the water itself a greenish hue unlike anything we see in Michigan. It was simply spectacular.

Although, the idea (which ocean-dwelling-types just take for granted) of having to take a shower after swimming, just seemed wrong. I get the whole thing about not wanting to walk around with a salt-film all over yourself, and I didn't like it, either. But up here in the Great Lakes, we tend to think of going swimming as roughly akin to taking a bath (OK, kind of a cold bath; and you have to kinda get used to the vaguely 'fishy' smell). So, needing to shower after swimming seems to sorta defeat half the purpose of going swimming in the first place. . .

Now, 1F was a fairly cautious child, and bright enough to know that things live under the water, where she can't see 'em - fish, and whales, and sharks, and jellyfish, and all sorts of things. As a very young child, she would resist even wading into the Great Lakes, for fear of the unknown critters and thingies that might be lurking where she couldn't see 'em. We were finally able to convince her that there were no sharks, or anything else that might be inclined to make a meal of her, in the Great Lakes, that those things only lived in the ocean, and not the Great Lakes; and that assuaged her fears. But now, in Florida - THIS was the ocean, by golly, and there ARE sharks in there, and she wasn't about to put herself so rashly in harm's way like that. I finally got her to get in the water by telling her that sharks can't swim when the water is shallow, and I promised to always keep myself between her and the deep water where the sharks were (she didn't so much mind the idea of her dad becoming a meal for a shark). . .

There was a mild dispute, though, as to whether the Gulf of Mexico really counted toward my 'both oceans' goal, or whether the Gulf should be considered as a separate body of water unto itself. No matter, though - my mother lived on the Atlantic coast of Florida, and when we drove over to visit with her and her husband (geographic note: the 'middle' - ie, non-coastal - parts of the state of Florida are singularly boring to drive through; unless you can convince your kids to make a game of counting dead armadillos, or somesuch), we took our opportunity to avail ourselves of the beaches on that side of the state.

The Atlantic beaches reminded us much more of our good-old Michigan beaches, than the Gulf-coast beaches had. The sand was a familiar brown, and the wind whipped on-shore just like it did back home, creating some much-more-impressive waves than we'd seen on the Gulf side of the state.

At one point, we were walking along, and we spied, maybe 50 yards or so ahead of us, what looked like a sandwich bag that someone had discarded on the beach. Now, Jen is a very committed picker-upper of trash, so she 'tsk-ed' in the appropriately disapproving manner, and walked ahead to dispose of the offending refuse. By the time she was just bending down to pick it up, I was close enough to notice the long 'stringer-things' spreading out from it, and I quickly yelled at her not to touch it, and leave it alone. When I got close enough to get a good look at our 'sandwich bag' (which even looked like it had grape jelly smeared on its insides), it was apparent that this was no piece of human-generated litter, but a beached jellyfish. And we breathed a heavy sigh of relief that Jen hadn't gone ahead and grabbed it up. . .

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I checked the Pacific Ocean off my list when I went to visit my birth-mother the first time after our reunion. She and her husband live in California, near San Diego, which, as long as I'm on the topic, is about the most perfect climate I've ever experienced - 75F pretty much every day, 50F pretty much every night. That visit was also the first time I ever experienced jet-lag, going virtually face-down in my dinner-plate, because my body thought it was 11PM; and then, the next morning, I popped out of bed at 5AM, feeling like I'd slept in, bright-eyed and ready to go.

My first full day in California was beautiful, like pretty much every day is in Southern California. Looking out over the ocean, there were a dozen or so surfers taking advantage of the six-foot breakers rolling in. There is an underwater 'shelf' a couple hundred yards or so out from the beach, so the swells that roll in from Hawaii, or Tahiti, or wherever the waves come from that roll in on the beaches of Southern California, break sharply, and consistently, when they encounter the shelf. I wondered to myself how they manage to keep the kids in school there; where I grew up, on the Great Lakes, the school year roughly coincided with when it was uncomfortable to be in the water. But if it's 70F outside in November, I could imagine myself weighing an imaginary balance in my hands: 'let's see. . . school. . . or surfing. . .?'

I took several walks on the beach there, and I encountered sand crabs for the first time - little critters that are almost insect-like, that burrow into the sand on the beach. You can always tell where to find them, because they leave a tell-tale pattern of little holes in the sand. So, when you see the holes, you can just scoop up a handful of sand, and let the wet sand slip through your fingers, and you'll be left with a half-dozen or so of the little crabs, wiggling and crawling on the palm of your hand. It's a little disconcerting at first, but after a while, it's kinda cool.

The Pacific is also where I first encountered tides in a major way. Of course, there are tides on the Atlantic coast, but when we were in Florida, we just spent an hour or two on the beach, and returned to the house; we didn't spend a sufficiently extended period of time at the beach to notice the difference in the water levels. But where my birth-mother lives, we could see the ocean pretty much all the time, and there is a sea-wall, perhaps 10 feet high, between the water and any inhabitations. So, at high tide, the water laps up against the bottom of the sea-wall, and there really isn't a beach. Which was a little disappointing, when I wanted to walk on the beach and there was no beach there for me to walk on. But at low tide, the beach was yards and yards wide. So I learned to read the tide charts, so I could plan my walks more intelligently. . .

The first day I was in California (after rising at 5AM), I announced my intention to go swimming, as that would mark the completion of my goal of swimming in all five Great Lakes, and both oceans. Immediately, my hosts adopted concerned looks. "Oh, no," they said. "You can't do that. At least, not without a wet suit."

"What?!? Why not?" I wasn't about to wear any freakin' wet suit; I wanted to feel the ocean on my own skin, doggone it. . .

"Well, it's November."

"It's 75 degrees."

"Yeah, but the ocean is only 60."

I looked at them incredulously. "Let me tell you about Lake Huron. . ."

So I changed into my bathing suit, climbed down the sea-wall, and waded into the ocean. The water was a little on the chilly side, but in justr a few minutes, I was used to it, and I had a ton of fun wading out to where the waves were breaking, and feeling them smack against my back.

Then I went back to the house, showered the salt off myself (I still can't get used to that idea), and smiled with the satisfaction of having completed my hydrological quest. Now, I suppose I'll have to look for an opportunity to collect the Indian Ocean. . .

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I'm sorry, but I have to take just a second to mention the football game my Spartans played last night against our friends from Wisconsin (who just happened to be ranked #4 in the country coming into the game). What a wild, zany, crazy game. We were almost instantly behind 14-0, having run only one offensive play (a fumble). Then we were ahead 23-14 at halftime, having blocked both a field goal and a punt, and scored a safety, besides. We went ahead 31-17 early in the 4th quarter, but the Badgers stormed back to tie the game with just over a minute left. It looked like the game was headed into overtime, but my Spartans threw a 'Hail Sparty' pass on the last play of the game that bounced into the hands of our receiver on the 1-yard-line, and it was initially ruled that he hadn't scored. But the call was reversed 'upon further review', and we won 37-31. What a crazy game!

Of course, I'm glad we won, but what a kick in the head it has to be for Wisconsin, to lose like that. I know how it would've been for me if we'd lost, after playing so well the whole game, against a superior opponent. . .

Which, I suppose, is just one more reason to enjoy sporting contests, but stop well short of investing them with anything approaching ultimate significance. . .

Roar of the Tigers

2011-10-16T19:25:00.003-04:00

OK, with apologies to all my non-sports-fan readers (which is to say, pretty much all of you except Suldog); you know how some guys are with their sports teams. . .

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My Detroit Tigers had a pretty darned good year in 2011, winning the American League's Central Division, thus reaching the post-season for the first time in five years (unless you count the 12-inning play-in game they lost to the Minnesota Twins in '09), and only the sixth time in my own young life. Then we beat the mighty Yankees in the first-round series, earning us the right to be defeated in six games by the Texas Rangers for the American League championship. Alas, of our four losses to the Rangers, one was by one run, and two were in 11 innings (although getting beat 15-5 in the final game tends to stick in people's minds). That said, the Rangers are a really strong team (such hitters!), and they'll acquit themselves well in the World Series, I'm sure.

I'll beg your indulgence for a few paragraphs while I briefly review the season. . .

It was an odd season, beginning with a sense that this was a pretty good, competitive team, and that the Central Division was ripe for them to win it, with even the better teams all flawed, to varying degrees. And yet, us Tiger fans spent most of the season in frustration, wondering when the team was going to stop struggling so much, and show its true quality. Well into August, the Tigers were only six games above .500, and a game or two ahead of the second-place Cleveland Indians (or was it the Chicago White Sox? It varied from day to day). Then suddenly, in mid-August, everything started clicking, and the Tigers finished with 95 wins, winning the division by 15 games. Amazing.

For much of the season, the only real attention given to any individual Tiger was focused on Justin Verlander, their ace pitcher, who will undoubtedly win the American League's Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in the league. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that JV won 24 games (a really large number, in these days of five-man pitching rotations), allowing 2.4 runs per nine innings. Opposing hitters could only hit .192 against him, and he amassed 250 strikeouts during the season, besides throwing his second no-hitter. As phenomenal a season as any Tiger pitcher has ever had.

There was also our closer, Jose Valverde, who collected 49 saves without blowing a single opportunity (which isn't to say that we were never nervous when he was in the game). Miguel Cabrera had a relatively quiet season, by his standards, but still led the league in batting average, while hitting 30 home runs and driving in 105 runs.

A couple of the Tigers' young players had breakout seasons - Alex Avila made the All-Star game as the best catcher in the American League; not many of us saw that coming. And Brennan Boesch developed into a steady, productive major-league outfielder, which was not obvious at the end of 2010.

The pitching looked to be a strength, given how well Max Scherzer had pitched the second half of 2010, but he never really found that groove in 2011. Rick Porcello is still a promising young pitcher, but the fulfillment of that promise remains mostly in the future. But the acquisition of Doug Fister at the trade deadline was a stroke of pure genius; he'd gone 3-12 in Seattle, but with an ERA of around 3.3, so he was pitching well, without much to show for it. Then, practically from the minute he arrived in Detroit, he was right on a level with Verlander for shutting down opposing hitters (and frankly, in the post-season, he pitched considerably better than Verlander did).

In fact, several of the Tigers' deals this year paid big dividends. The big off-season free-agent signings were Victor Martinez and Joaquin Benoit, and both were huge contributors to the team's success. If Martinez did nothing else, he earned his pay for making opponents pitch to Cabrera; a .330 batting average (and close to .400 with runners in scoring position, or when Cabrera was walked ahead of him), with 103 RBIs, were above and beyond. And Benoit, after some early struggles, settled into a lights-out 8th-inning guy, handing games over to Valverde.

At the trade deadline, the Tigers picked up Wilson Betemit and Delmon Young, besides the aforementioned Mr. Fister, who both contributed solidly to the amazing stretch run, capably filling gaps in the lineup. In the past, these deadline deals have often as not turned to dust (*cough* Jerrod Washburn *cough* Aubrey Huff *cough*), but this year, it seemed like every single player addition (with the exception of Brad Penny, and even he had his moments) just worked out wonderfully. I love it when a plan comes together.

So, it was an odd season - four months of frustratingly mild success, capped off with an incredible final six weeks. And in the end, this was one of the better teams in Tiger history, for sure.

And the nice thing is, the team looks to be set up for a nice run for a few years to come. With few exceptions, most of the Tigers main players are young - 28 and younger. And if some of the younger players start living up to their potential (which, I realize, is never guaranteed), we could be having a lot of fun for the next few years. It would be nice to have it be our turn to win the division for four or five years in a row. We've never done that (at least, not in my lifetime); it would be nice to see how it feels. . .

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And, as long as you're indulging me my sporting affections, can I also mention that yesterday, my beloved Spartans were victorious over our intense in-state rivals from Ann Arbor? And that this was our fourth consecutive victory over the Wolverines? And thus, an entire senior class will have graduated from the University of Michigan never having defeated their 'little brothers' from up the road? I can hear the Wailing of the Victims from 60 miles away. . .

All kidding aside (well, most of it, anyway), these are good times to be a Spartan. . .

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Thank you; you all are very kind to indulge me in my reverie. We will return to our regularly-scheduled programming with the next post. . .

You Can't Go Home Again. . .

2011-10-05T11:17:00.010-04:00

Okay, my friend Suldog has done it again (this is becoming quite a habit with him. . .); with his recent post (which was really a fairly old re-post), recalling the house he grew up in, he has provoked a whole set of reminiscences to bubble up from the back corners of my brain, and into his comment-space. Which, in its turn, has provoked me to write a more complete account for your enjoyment. Or, you know, whatever. . .

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When I was a young child, our family moved around quite a bit. Just sitting here keying this in, I can think of eight different houses that I lived in before I went away to college, six of them before I was ten years old. The house I was adopted into, in suburban Detroit; our first house Up North, which we only lived in for about a year, when I was four; then back to the Detroit 'burbs to start school, and yet another house in the same 'burb; then back Up North, to the house on the shore of Lake Huron. We lived there for about two years, and I can still conjure up a tear when I think about moving out of that house when my parents divorced. We moved to a house 'in town' for about a year, and then, when my dad remarried, we moved to another house closer to the edge of town, where we actually lived for seven years, virtually until I graduated high school. Then my parents moved to suburban Chicago virtually simultaneously with my graduation, so after that summer, I went back to Michigan for college, and my family commenced morphing into Chicago-ites (or whatever they're called); rooting for the Bears, the White Sox (ugh!), and (please God, no) the Bulls. It's funny - my family lived in that house in suburban Chicago for 35 years, but I never really 'lived there'. It's the last house Up North, where we only lived for about 7 years, that holds most of my memories. . .

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As I said, we moved there after my folks got married, just before I turned ten. That's where all the 'new-blended-family' drama played out, and where my two youngest brothers were born (okay, they were born in the hospital; we didn't live that far north; but that was the house they came home to). I was in 5th grade when we moved there, and we moved out less than two months before I graduated (I only consented to move to Chicago if my credits could be transferred back, and I could get an Up North High diploma) (I'm sure that my folks were really worried by my little ultimatum; at any rate, they found my terms acceptable). . .

Sometime when I was in junior high (I want to say it was '68, since my memories are intermingled with the Tigers' world championship, and twelve seems about right for how old I was), in order to leverage the available space in the house, Dad decided to turn a third of the basement into a deluxe, three-boy 'boy-cave' bedroom. Each of us had our own little 'niche', with a bed, a closet and a built-in desk-and-shelves all our own, so it was almost like we each had our own room, even though it was all contiguous open floor-space; it was quite cool.

The construction of the bedroom was also the occasion for a goodly bit of training for my brothers and me. We helped Dad frame in the walls, run the wiring, and hang the drywall, so by the time it was finished, those things weren't so daunting anymore. To this day, I don't mind doing a bit of electrical work, and I always think of constructing that bedroom whenever I have to do some.

Our yard was something like a quarter-acre, on the wooded dead-end of our street, a block from our closest neighbors. On a snowy day, the walk down our street was like something out of Currier & Ives. The house itself sat on the top of a little mound, with the basement open on one end to a walk-out. The back yard was pretty open, and we would often have our friends over for backyard whiffle-ball (in the summer) or football (in the fall) games.

In the corner of the yard, there was a mountain-ash tree, which produced delightfully-colorful orange berries in the fall, which the birds loved to eat (my brother and I, though, tended to fixate on what a pain those berries were to rake off the lawn, and the way they gave the birds the runs, which also involved more work for us). In the late fall, the berries, whether still on the tree, or fallen to the ground, would ferment. Which gave rise to the annual ritual of The Day of the Drunken Birds - the birds would gorge themselves on the fermented berries, and for that day (and maybe a day or two after), we'd have birds staggering and falling in the back yard, struggling to take flight, but not quite getting their wings to work properly. Or, if they did manage to take flight, they'd fly into the windows, or perform bizarre drunken aerobatics. Good, good times, those. . .

Truth to tell, though, 'wooded' is a little bit of a misleading adjective for the end of our street. Our yard was bounded on two sides by what could only be justly called a swamp (although, to be sure, there were plenty of trees). Many a baseball of ours became water-logged and useless for having been errantly thrown into the swamp, and found/retrieved only several days later (of course, we never really knew for sure that the baseball we pulled from the swamp was the one we'd most recently lost, or the one we'd lost six months ago). When I was in high school, Dad assigned my brother and me to drain the swamp. For a couple weeks that summer, we were out in the swamp with shovels, knee-deep in, um, swamp-goo, dredging a channel down to the main drainage ditch that ran along the street (okay, it was a dirt road, but it was inside the city limits, and for postal purposes, was designated as a 'street', so I'm going with that). It was nasty, smelly work, but once we'd met Dad's specifications, the swamp sho-nuff drained, and our errant baseballs landed on a floor of damp leaves, instead of eight inches of standing fetid water (and, you know, whatever else).

The standing water accounts for the mound that the house sat atop. Actually, the basement floor was maybe about a foot above the local water table, so the house was built basically as low as it could have been, and then the mound was back-filled around the foundation wall to leave it looking like the ranch house it was supposed to be. Not long after we moved there, we had a massive rain storm that left our basement filled with about a foot of water, destroying several boxes of 'important' papers (including my adoption order). Which was remedied, in large part, by opening the walk-out at the far end of the basement, and letting the water run out into the yard (and ultimately, the swamp).

That mound also made for some, uh, unique challenges for young drivers-in-training, as it required a subtle touch on the accelerator pedal to balance having enough power to climb the hill, but still go slow enough to safely guide the car into the garage, whose opening was roughly three inches wider than the land-yacht 9-passenger station wagon that was necessitated by the size of our family. The first time I drove the family vehicle, I left it so squirrelly-sideways inside the garage that my mom couldn't get it back out without peeling the trim-strip off the side of the car. Yeah, Dad was real pleased with me that day. . .

I've written elsewhere about some of our snow-bound winter adventures, living on a dead-end street, and what that meant for snow-shoveling duties. Especially the time we got 42 inches of snow in a week, and it became an open question as to whether we were strong enough (especially after a few hours' shoveling) to throw the snow to the top of the existing piles. . .

So it was with a degree of wistfulness that we left that house, with all its memories, and moved to metropolitan Chicago. Which could hardly have been a bigger cultural shock to us north-woods bumpkins. But that's another story, to be told (if at all) at another time. . .

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When our family moved to Chicago, my grandma continued to live Up North, so for a few years, I had a place to stay when the urge struck me to renew contact with my roots, and I stayed with her a few times for short visits. But not long after my ten-year high-school reunion, Grandma died, and it was a bit more of a chore to 'go back home'; and for several years, I didn't go back.

But when I got the invitation to my 20-year reunion, I was eager to go back and see the old hometown again. I booked a room at a motel by the shore, that had once-upon-a-time been one of my customers on my paper route; right next door was the local miniature-golf establishment, where I'd spent many happy summer hours in my youth (especially since it, too, was a paper-route customer, and when I'd go collecting, I'd have a big wad of cash in my pocket, which just seemed to call out to me that I should play a round or two of miniature golf). I went to the reunion and got reacquainted with several of my old friends (although there were twinges of sadness, to find that the football captain and the cheerleader, who had both been friends of mine, were in the midst of an acrimonious divorce, and seemed bent on using the reunion as a contest to see 'who-has-more-friends'; nice).

The day after the reunion, I decided to do some retrospective sight-seeing around my old hometown. The schools I'd gone to were still there. Well, except for two of them, which had been torn down, and there were green, grassy parks where they had once stood. One of the old ball fields I'd played on was overgrown, although the old chain-link fence marking its boundaries was still there, leaning askew, and rusting.

The downtown, which in my day had been a typically bustling commercial district (well, as 'bustling' as a town of 15,000 souls can conjure up), was almost completely given over to little shops catering to the tourist trade, selling T-shirts and baseball caps and coffee mugs emblazoned with the name of the town and maybe a deer, or a fish, or a lighthouse. All the 'real' stores had moved to the mall that had gone up at the edge of town a few years previously.

Then I drove over to the other edge of town, where our house had been, to see what it looked like.

For starters, it wasn't a dead-end street anymore, and it had neighbors. The swamp was gone, with new houses standing where it had been. There were houses next door, and behind it; and the woods to the side of our yard were thinned to the point where other houses were visible between what trees were left.

The mound our house had stood on had been removed, the foundation-wall standing exposed to the air. A new garage had been built, on the level of the basement, and what had been our garage had been converted into living space on the main floor. The back yard was fenced in, which it had never been in our day (what would have been the point?)

I got out of the car and stood, leaning against the car, surveying the house that I'd grown up in, and yet, so very different, both in itself, and in its surroundings, from the one I'd grown up in. As I stood there, the owner of the house came out onto the porch and asked if he could help me with anything. I explained that I'd grown up in his house, and was just recalling having lived there, once-upon-a-time, and I'd be moving along soon, if he didn't mind. It turned out that he was still the same guy who'd bought the house from my dad, and he asked if I'd like to come in and look around. I thanked him and told him that, if he didn't mind, I'd like that very much.

So I went in and had a look around. The main floor was still pretty much the way I'd remembered it, except for the new family room where the garage had been. I was especially eager to have a look in the basement, and the bedroom that my dad and my brothers and I had put so many hours into building. But when we went downstairs, there was no bedroom to be found; just a regular old basement, mostly used for storage and laundry, and 'utility-type' stuff like that.

I thanked him most graciously for affording me the opportunity to come in and have a look at my old house. Then I left and proceeded on my way back home, having been confronted most directly with the truth of what Thomas Wolfe had once said, that You Can't Go Home Again. . .

(*sigh*)

Re-Blog

2011-09-25T10:38:00.053-04:00

And now for something completely different. . .

I have been chosen by my good friend Suldog to participate in a nifty little exercise of vanity called a Re-Blog Something-or-Other (and honestly? I'm flattered, and honored, and all that, to be chosen by as talented a blogger as Suldog as someone he regards as worthy of your attention) (But - Suldog? Really? The same guy who responds to awards proferred upon him by reaching up the awarder's a**hole and disemboweling them from the inside? Okay; if you say so). Which means I'm supposed to give you all links to seven of my old posts that meet certain, uh, Standards of Excellence. As determined by me, so you can take those standards with the appropriate Grain of Salt. (So, okay, re-posting old stuff isn't exactly 'unusual' around these parts; and heck, in recent months, a large proportion of my posts come, if not as a result of a direct request from Suldog, at least as provoked from something I read at his blog, so that's not so unusual, either; but work with me here. . .)

Anyway, the challenge (and, honestly, it's not exactly all that 'challenging', either, but that's what they're calling it) is to come up with seven posts that fit into the following categories:

1) My Most Beautiful Post
2) My Most Popular Post
3) My Most Controversial Post
4) My Most Helpful Post
5) A Post Whose Success Surprised Me
6) A Post I Feel Didn't Get the Attention It Deserved
7) The Post of Which I'm Most Proud

So then, I'm supposed to provide you links to the erstwhile posts-of-excellence, and then impose upon five of you to do likewise (although, I'm not sure I even have five regular readers anymore; especially if I'm not supposed to nominate Suldog, or any of my fellow-Suldog-nominees). Anyway, between this current incarnation of my blog, and the previous one (when I was blogging under the pseudonym Desmond Jones - you know, the fellow who had the barrow in the marketplace, wife Molly, and 'a couple of kids running in the yard' in the Beatles' song, Ob-la-di Ob-la-da), I've written something like 250-300 posts over the past five-plus years (and I know that some of you do that many in a year), through which I'll now sift with a fine-tooth comb, for your edification and enjoyment (cue the whiny teenager-voice, directed at Suldog - "You always make me WORK!!")

Anyway, without further ado. . .

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My Most Beautiful Post

I'm not often accused of being 'beautiful', but I can think of a couple posts that could qualify. Here is a post I wrote to honor my father, which, in light of his recent passing, is all the more poignant for me. . .

The Best Man I've Ever Known

Now, those of you who have known me for a while know that I often find it difficult to be ruthless in trimming these lists down to the specified number of items (for example, I once compiled a list of 15 favorite books that ended up being something closer to 50, spread over two posts). But this next one is pretty darned beautiful, too, if I may say so myself (and it has its own relevance to recent events in my life) . . .

In Dying We Are Born to Eternal Life

My Most Popular Post

I'm not real sure how to 'quantify' the popularity of my posts. I'm inclined to just count the number of comments they've received, although sometimes that just means that one commenter and I have gone back-and-forth on some tangent for a few turns. I could count views, but (shameful confession of bloggerly ineptitude) I don't know how to do that. Anyway, I went through my list and checked which posts generated the most comments, with a minimum of tangents, and a loose pattern emerged. Several of the posts of mine that have generated the most comments have been 'retrospectives', of the sort that 50-something guys like me often enjoy, such as

Where Were You. . . ?

I could also note that, in my old blog, there were a few posts of a more, um, risque nature that were quite, uh, popular, but I took 'em down (possibly at my wife's urging), and they're not coming back. Sorry. . .

My Most Controversial Post

I am not typically much of a controversialist in my blog. I'm not much into politics at all (I have some definite political opinions, to be sure, but I also believe that politics is vastly over-rated as to what it can actually accomplish, and at any rate, the portion of our life that is more-or-less directly affected by politics is, mercifully, pretty small) (wait - is that a controversial statement?). But I am passionate about a few things that might be counted 'controversial'; and a couple of them have made their way into my blog, like

It's Personal

my take on abortion, which, I think, is a little bit different than a lot of what gets put out for general public consumption; definitely colored by my own status as an adoptee, and thus a one-time 'unwanted pregnancy' my own self.

And again, since I'm so numerically-challenged on things like this, I'll give you one that comes out of the fact that my wife and I are the parents of eight children, which can be controversial in some eyes, all by itself -

Methinks Some Folks Doth Protest Too Much. . .

My Most Helpful Post

Again, 'helpful' isn't really a direction that I take very often with my blog. I mostly fancy myself as a story-teller, with stories drawn from my life (and I'll leave aside the question of how vain a person must be to think that his life is so freakin' interesting that he'll post it on the Internet, because, you know, it's just that good). But the rules say I have to give you something in the category of 'Helpful'. And, in the sprit of self-help testimonials, a few of my life experiences have provided me/us with wisdom that might actually prove helpful to someone else (and yeah, I'm just that freakin' wise. . .)

Gratitude

A Post Whose Success Surprised Me

Again taking the measure of 'Success' as roughly equivalent to 'popularity', as measured by the number of comments, I think the post whose popularity most surprised me was

All My Grandchildren

Which was also a high comment-generator and, depending on who you are, and what tugs at your own personal heart-strings, might also be counted as Beautiful. . .

A Post I Feel Didn't Get the Attention It Deserved

You mean, besides the sports-related ones?

Of course, this could easily become the sort-of grumpy, effete, 'we-artists-are-so-misunderstood' category. But honestly, the posts which come to mind here mostly suffered from bad timing - being posted when my readers were otherwise occupied; holidays, or summer vacation. I once posted a Christmas poem that I think is really excellent, and then re-posted it a few years later, and it never generated much commentary either time; apparently, not many folks are blogging on Christmas morning (or it may be that not many of you are much into poetry; but thank you, Lime - I can always count on you) (and, by not actually separating it out and citing its title, the Christmas poem thus doesn't actually count against my tally) (as if it matters). . .

I thought my Mother's Day post earlier this year was pretty good, but evidently my readers were all out to the Sunday Brunch Buffet with their mothers (or their kids)

Random Thoughts On Mother's Day

And I wrote a post about growing up on the Great Lakes that I thought was pretty good, but seemed to coincide with all my readers' summer vacations -

Big Water

The Post of Which I'm Most Proud

This could also be the 'abortion' post I mentioned above, but since I already mentioned that, and have other candidates, let's not cheat the system by trying to double-dip, shall we? A couple years back, I wrote a piece on my experiences with black folks, inspired by Suldog's and Michelle Hickman's tandem posts on their own growing-up experiences.

Ebony and Ivory

I also wrote a post on the Theology of the Body that I'm kinda proud of (which, again, depending on who you are, might even be counted as Helpful) (or, you know, not) -

With My Body, I Thee Worship

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OK, so I gave you eleven posts for the price of seven (somewhere in there, there's a 'crap' joke waiting to be made); no extra charge. I hope you enjoyed the tour.

I'm supposed to pick five of you to carry on the Tradition (tags are the chain-letters of blog-space; but one doesn't want to be a jerk about it); but Suldog has done it already (and besides, the rules stipulate 'no tag-backs', or something like that), and he picked Lime; if my seconding his nomination will provide extra impetus toward her actually doing it, then well and good.

Michelle Hickman's The Surly Writer is a worthy blog; I'm a little surprised she didn't score one of Suldog's nominations instead of me. Michelle, if this strikes your fancy, go for it.

I'd nominate Bijoux, but she just announced that she's going on hiatus. And I'd nominate FADKOG, too, if she wants to; but her blogger-momentum isn't what it once was (neither is mine, for what it's worth).

Anyway, thanks, Suldog. If I was as clever as you, I'd call down some really creative curses on you. But I'm not; so, just thanks. . . ;)

Here, Girl!

2011-09-18T07:22:00.012-04:00

OK, this was the post that I originally had up a few weeks ago, then took down when my medical drama, and then my father's death, intervened. Things have finally returned to normal (or at least, normal enough), so we can now return to our regularly-scheduled programming (and Bijoux can have her comment back). . .

I was having a conversation with another blogger recently, and this story, which I originally posted almost five years ago, came to mind. So I decided to re-post it for your edification and enjoyment. . .

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All new parents go through a kind of 'break-in' period, during which they slowly figure out the real ways in which being parents is different from how they were before. For Jen and me, this lasted quite a while - even past 1F's first birthday, we were still discovering unanticipated ways in which our lives would never be the same.

Once, the three of us went out to dinner at a restaurant which the childless Jen and me would have counted very 'family friendly', and in fairness, it probably was, as long as none of the children were younger than five or so. 1F was about a year old on the evening in question, though, and by the time we finished our dinner, there was a circle about five feet in diameter, centered on 1F's high chair, littered with an assortment of food fragments, torn napkins, pieces of silverware, and other miscellaneous items. I left a very large tip, and we realized that taking 1F to a 'nice' restaurant with us was not going to be a live option for a while.

I've always been a bit of a gadget buff, but I really like gadgets that have a certain simplicity about them, and Kid-world is rife with elegantly simple, practical gadgets. When 1F was a baby, the little seats that you can sort of hang off the edge of the table were new, and we got one of those right away. Suddenly, we could eat at friends' houses, or church potlucks, or at a picnic table in a park, without having to pack a full-blown high chair with us. A very cool, simple contraption.

Around the same time, we met a couple who were visiting from Germany, whose daughter was just a bit older than 1F. They had a little leather harness that they put on their daughter when they took her to a crowded public place; they would clip a short tether to the harness, and they could keep the child close to them, without all the bad posture that goes along with holding her hand, to say nothing of the struggles that invariably occur when the child in question decides that she doesn't want to have her hand held anymore.

I loved it - so elegant, so simple, so practical. And all the moreso, because the child actually had a lot more freedom of movement - a lot more freedom to go where she wanted to, within a much larger radius, than she would if her hand were being held. We were so taken by this little item that we asked our German friends to send us one, since they hadn't appeared in the US market yet.

A few weeks later, we received a package in the mail from a German address. We opened it eagerly, and put it to use at our first opportunity. It worked really well, and we were pleased - 1F could roam about more freely, engage her curiosity more freely, and we hardly had to exert any effort to keep track of her. In fact, we were so taken with it that we decided to make a modest improvement - in place of the short tether, we used a 25-foot retractable leash, so 1F could have even more freedom of movement.

The Fourth of July was coming up soon, and the harness setup seemed perfect for such an occasion - a large crowd in an open public place. 1F could wander to her heart's content within a 25-foot radius, and, as long as we kept hold of the leash, Jen and I didn't need to worry about where she was.

Our first inkling that this would work out just a bit less than perfectly came as we walked into the park. We were walking alongside another young family like us, with the toddler being carried on his father's shoulders. They were looking intently at the harness/leash setup we had 1F in. I smiled, knowing that they were appreciating the ingenuity, the elegance, the simplicity, the practicality of it, and preparing to tell them how we had friends in Germany, and this was all the rage among European parents, and how they could get one for themselves. Instead, the dad sort of sneered and said, "Kind of a sick joke, man."

What?!? Sick joke? What the heck does he mean by that? Ah, well; obviously a philistine who doesn't appreciate ingenious gadgets when he sees them. We found a spot suitable to our liking at which to settle, and we spread our blanket. Jen and I sat down on the blanket, while 1F wandered around on the end of the leash. When she reached the limit, she would just turn around, and poke around in a different direction, checking for bugs in the grass, or whatever else captured her eye. We were enjoying ourselves immensely, just watching her exploring her expansive little piece of turf.

While we were sitting there, a woman approached us to talk. I smiled in friendly greeting, but 'friendly' wasn't her own personal orientation at that particular moment. Rather, she immediately ripped into us. "How could you?!" she shrieked.

What the hell? I looked at her in utter bewilderment.

"Treating your child like an animal!"

No, wait, you don't understand - see, she's so much more free to roam about. . .

But the woman would have none of it. See, this was a leash, and leashes are for dogs, and that was that. At the very best, in her mind, this was an inappropriate transfer of technology; at worst, it was slam-dunk evidence of depraved child abuse. And nothing I could say would dissuade her.

Before the night was over, and all the fireworks had flashed, two or three other folks wandered by to very helpfully yell at us and call us colorful names.

We were more circumspect about taking the harness out in public after that, and we eventually decided that the elegance, simplicity, and practicality didn't quite outweigh the grief we had to endure from well-meaning ~~idiots~~ fellow-citizens.

So you see, a thing can be wonderfully practical, elegantly designed, and a vast improvement on the existing technology. But, if you don't take account of public reaction, you can still wind up with a marketplace failure. . .

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Back here in the present (OK, the near-past), I rode my bike 35 miles yesterday, in glorious fall weather - around 60 degress, with brilliant blue skies and a few puffy white clouds; it's just a bit too early for the fall colors, or it would've been perfect. Yesterday's miles make a total of 1053 for the year, my 5th consecutive year over 1000 miles. I've got two months or so left in the season, so I'm on pace for around 1300-1400. Life is good. . .

And, hey, while I'm thinking of it, my Tigers are American League Central Division champions! Playoff bound! (Maybe even against Suldog's Red Sawx!) I'm sure I'll have some manner of elegiac post at the end of the season, but for now, you'll all share my joy, won't you?

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I just put up a sidebar link to 2F's blog; if you want to get an independent, inside perspective on what life in our family is REALLY like. . . (not like anyone's inheritance is riding on the outcome, or anything. . .)

A Day of Unfathomable Evil

2011-09-11T08:45:00.001-04:00

Today is the tenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, 2001. . .

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I think it was a Tuesday morning; for whatever reason, I was running late that morning, and didn't get in to my office until after 9:30. As I arrived, and began getting my work-station set up for the day - unlocking file cabinets, turning on my computer - one of the three co-workers who shared my four-person cubicle was all aghast, asking me if I'd heard the news.

Oddly, I hadn't. I usually spent a good portion of my commute with my radio tuned to a sports-talk station, but on that day, I'd left my radio turned off, so I arrived at my office completely unaware of what was happening 600 miles to the east.

She went on to explain that a plane had crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and at first it had seemed like an accident. but when another plane crashed into the other tower, and a third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, it was clear that this was no accident.

I linked to one of the News websites, and for the rest of that morning, there wasn't much work done in our office, as we all watched the drama play out on our computer screens. What I remember is the confusion - four planes had 'fallen off the screen', but only three had crashed into what were obviously targets of choice (although whose choice, and to what end, were as yet unknown); where the fourth plane might be, or what its designated target was, weren't yet known. Then there were rumors of a plane crash in Pennsylvania, and while all that was still churning, the WTC towers fell, first one, and then the other.

And that absolutely stunned me. I am an engineer by profession, and by now, I understand what happened, but at the time, I was utterly stunned and flabbergasted that a plane crash could lead to the collapse of an entire building, especially one the size of the World Trade Center towers.

A group of folks wandered down to the cafeteria, where there were TVs tuned to CNN. For a while, we were just glued to the screens, as the images played over and over of planes crashing into the WTC towers. The second plane was essentially caught live, as the cameras were trained on the smoke billowing from the first crash. And then, as the towers continued to burn, we watched them collapse live.

After a while, I couldn't watch any more, as it began to sink in that I wasn't just seeing a plane crashing into a building, or a building burning and collapsing, but I was seeing thousands of human lives ending before my eyes - each spectacular fireball of a jet crashing into a building was the instant extinguishment of hundreds of human lives, and the slow, agonizing collapse of each tower was the end of perhaps a thousand more. As the obscenity of it all finally began to sink in, I couldn't watch anymore; I had to turn away.

I struggled to make any kind of sense of it. The pure evil of it was unfathomable - the unprovoked murder of thousands of innocent people whose only 'crime' was going to work that morning, was - and still is - incomprehensible. I had a deep sense of the profound corruption of human nature, and in the back of my head, the thought was lurking that I didn't want to live in a world where people who were supposed to be made in God's image and likeness could do such things.

A couple days later, my comapny gave all of its employees time to participate in the national Time of Mourning. I went with a couple guys to a nearby church; it wasn't my church, since I worked (as I still do) over an hour from home; it wasn't even a Catholic church. It was just relatively nearby. I joined in the mourning, and I was simply overcome by the sadness of thousands of widows and orphans made bereft of their fathers and/or their mothers, and thousands of lives snuffed out, in an hour's time three days earlier, at the hands of an unfathomable, demonic evil. For a long time, I could only sit there and weep. The tragedy hadn't really touched me personally - as far as I know, I didn't personally know any of the victims, but you know, the dead were all my countrymen, and my neighbors, and I was clear enough that the perpetrators of the evil regarded my life, and those of my family and friends, with the same degree of contempt they did those who had been on the planes, or in their offices, that morning.

I still cannot begin to understand the depth of evil, the viciousness of hatred, the bloodlust, that animated the events of that day. And honestly, I hope I never do. . .

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A couple other random memories from those days. . .

Of course, as soon as the nature of the attack was understood, all planes in US airspace were immediately grounded indefinitely. For a few days afterward, there were no planes in the air over the entire United States. I remember how odd, even spooky, it was, as I drove to work on subsequent days, to see no planes in the air, no contrails snaking across the sky. And I remember thinking how odd it was that such mundane things as a lack of contrails would register so large in my awareness.

And how oddly comforting it was, a few days later, when I saw my first plane in the air after flights were resumed. . .

+++++

A few days after September 11, there was the whole 'anthrax scare', in which a few apparently random (or at best, tenuously connected) individuals were infected with anthrax sent to them in the mail. And for weeks, anthrax added another layer of texture to the overall terror of the times.

One day, I was driving to work, on a rural stretch of freeway that I traveled every day, when, all of a sudden, in the middle of noplace, traffic came to a complete and utter halt. For over an hour, we just sat on the road, not moving, wondering what in the world was causing the problem. I called my office to let them know that I was stuck in traffic, and would be in as soon as I could.

Then a small plane appeared, and began crop-dusting the field adjacent to where we sat halted on the road. A cold chill ran down my spine while the crop-duster made his back-and-forth passes across the field, as I considered the possibility that a trap had been set for all of us on the road that day, and wondering whether one of the passes of the crop-duster might be right along the column of parked cars, 'dusting' us all with anthrax, or some equally-lethal bio-toxin.

I switched my car's ventilation system to 'internal recirculation', and watched intently as the small plane finished dusting his field and flew off. And then I breathed a sigh of relief. . .

And, in the fullness of time, the accident ahead of us that had blocked the freeway, was cleared, and we continued on our way. . .

Catholic Signs?

2011-09-04T15:10:00.002-04:00

While we were down for my dad's memorial, we were driving along a road that was lined with several fast-food places. 8M, who is 9 years old, seemed particularly interested in one of the establishments, and asked Jen and me, "Are they Catholic?"

What?

"Are they Catholic?" he repeated, pointing to a particular franchise.

Um, why do you ask, son?

"Because it says, 'Pope Yes."

Pope Yes?

And at that point, Jen and I could only burst out laughing, because 'Popeye's' could easily be read as 'Pope Yes', if you're not too careful about where the breaks are. . .

-------------------------

And to make it even more, um, fun (and, you know, keeping it in the family). . .

Another time, we were driving along in a minivan with one of my brothers and his wife, when she pointed to a glass storefront we were driving past. On one side of the door, the word 'Roman' was painted on the plate-glass window, and 'Tic' was painted on the pane on the other side of the door.

"Now," my SIL mused, "what the heck do you suppose a 'Roman Tic' is?"

"I think," I replied, with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, "that it's one of those 'Catholic guilt' things; when a Catholic feels remorse for his sins, he develops a nervous twitch."

"Oh. . . really? I guess that could make sense. I don't know, though; why would they paint it on a storefront?"

Finally my brother, who is a singularly reticent man, chimed in. "Ummm," he began, with a bemused smirk on his face, "I think that's supposed to say 'Romantic'. . ."

The she punched him for pointing it out. . . 'Cuz, you know, she's always tryin' to get him to be more romantic, and all. . .

And, you know, the funny thing is, there's not even any genetic connection between 8M and my brother's wife. . .

*************************

Dad's memorial was good, and blessed, and rich. I got to give one of the eulogies, which I basically took from my recent Father's Day blog post. My youngest brother also gave a eulogy, and between the two of us, I think we gave a pretty good account of Dad's life. I was able to say some things about his early life that most of the others might not have known about, and my brother said some things about him from after I'd left home, that I was less intimately acquainted with. Jen and I and our kids sang a couple of songs ('For All the Saints' is a great funeral/memorial song); I was a little surprised by how many of the folks in attendance hadn't known how musical our family is, or even that I play the guitar. . .

The whole time we were there, it was just great family time, full of reminiscences and fond affection. I even got invited to one brother's house for the first time in the 15+ years he's lived there. . .

I've shared some about our wacky, yours-mine-and-ours family, and I was appreciating my family on a whole new level this time. I couldn't help thinking that it was, in lots of ways, a uniquely happy place for an adoptee (at least, this adoptee) to land - our family was formed out of folks coming from so many different, odd directions, that my adopted-ness was really no stranger than anyone else's path into the family. And, given what I've come to understand in the intervening decades, about the unique challenges of 'blended' families, I cherish all the moreso that our family is still together, and we still love each other. And it was very gratifying to experience that again this past week, in what could have been a particularly stressful time for us. . .

Requiescat In Pace. . .

2011-08-28T21:41:00.002-04:00

My dad died Saturday evening.

I drove down Friday and went to the hospital to visit him. He was asleep; I never saw him conscious. We met with a lady from hospice, and made arrangements for his final care. No-one could give us a very firm prognosis; it could be a few days, it could be 2-3 weeks, or even a month.

When I arrived on Friday, I was met by all my siblings but two - one brother who is local, but didn't have transportation, and my youngest brother, who lives in Arizona. He called and told us he was flying in on Saturday, and we made arrangements to pick up the other brother, so we could all be together Saturday afternoon. I had originally planned to return home Saturday morning, after all the hospice issues were decided, but when I heard he was coming, I decided to stay longer so I could see him.

Saturday morning, I had nothing in particular to do, so I went to the hospital and just sat at Dad's bedside by myself for a few hours. I alternated between reading, and occasionally speaking to Dad, telling him that the other two sons were on their way, and would be there soon, telling him how grateful I was for his fatherhood, and that I loved him (all of the medical people assured us that, even though he looked to all the world as if he was unconscious, he could hear everything we said). It was a surprisingly good and rich time, for just sitting there for a few hours, and occasionally taking a walk around the ward.

It was mid-afternoon when my brother arrived from Arizona. It really was good to see him; because he lives so far away, we don't get to see him very often. Shortly after that, the other brother arrived, and all of us were together at Dad's bedside (for some background on our family, you can go here). We spent an hour-and-a-half, maybe two hours, just talking, reminiscing and joking with each other (although tears were not absent from the proceedings). Then we went to another brother's house for dinner.

I had planned to head home in the early evening, so I could at least be home by midnight (I had some things to cover back home Sunday morning and afternoon). We were sitting out on my brother's deck, enjoying a beautiful late summer evening, and each other's company, and continuing with the reminiscences. The dinner dishes were cleared, and we were just getting ready to break into dessert, when the phone rang. It was the hospital, informing us of Dad's passing.

We went back to the hospital to spend a little more time with what was left of Dad. At first, none of us said a word, for a long time. Then one of my sisters asked if we could join hands and pray together. I led us in a short prayer, and then we prayed the Lord's Prayer together. It seemed fitting, like we were on some kind of Holy Ground, on the narrow margin between this world and the next one. Just a short time before, Dad had been there, and now he had taken his leave.

There are mysteries here too deep for words. It comes to seem as though Dad was just waiting for the last of his children to arrive, and once we were all present and accounted for, he could bid us farewell. It's a little bit awesome, honestly. . .

-------------------------

Peter Kreeft is one of my favorite authors; probably my favorite living one. Many years ago he wrote a book titled Love Is Stronger than Death, which is probably my favorite of all his books, and I've read quite a few of them.

Kreeft is wonderfully perceptive, and draws some really sharp insights. For instance, he notes the double meaning in saying that death is the 'end' of life - both its termination, but also its consummation (or even its 'goal'). "If death is not meaningful, then life, in the final analysis, is not meaning-full. For death is the final analysis...Life cannot be meaningful in the short run and meaningless in the long run, because the long run is the meaning of the short run."

He draws an analogy between death and birth that is acutely perceptive. A child in the womb is warm and secure, and outside the womb is - he knows not what (although he might have some inklings of the 'world beyond' - muffled voices and such). Birth is a painful thing, and yet he is born into a world infinitely wider and richer than the womb; he is infinitely freer in the 'outside world' than he was in the womb, and he spends his entire life 'growing into' this larger, richer world. Even so, we are comfortable in this world, and at any rate, this world is all we know (although we might have inklings of a 'world beyond'). Death, like birth, involves pain. Is it possible that death, like birth, brings us into a wider, richer, freer existence than we have here?

And, as the child in the womb draws his life from his mother, he can't SEE his mother, much less KNOW her AS A PERSON until he is born. Is it possible that, just as, in this world, we can't see God, death brings us into a new relationship with Him ("then we shall see face-to-face")?

Of course, we can't know for certain. But the analogies are at least intensely provocative, don't you think? . . .

Getting Answers

2011-08-24T23:23:00.001-04:00

Okay, things are getting clearer as to what, exactly, happened to me on my bike ride this past Sunday. As you recall, I was feeling great, and riding well, for the first 15 miles of my ride. Then I stopped for a short break, and a bottle of sugar-free Gatorade, and all hell broke loose with my body.

I have suspected that the Gatorade was the culprit, since the symptoms appeared immediately after I drank it. And, in discussing my situation with our nurse friend, while we were trying to decide whether or not to go to the ER, she mentioned that an electrolyte imbalance can cause arhythmia, which also seemed to point to the Gatorade. But the blood work I had done showed nothing unusual regarding my electrolytes, so that seemed like a dead end.

Then, after I got back home, I was telling another friend about what had happened, and he perked up his ears when I mentioned the Gatorade. He asked me specifically whether it was regular Gatorade, or sugar-free, and I told him it was sugar-free, since, with my diet, I'm off sugar. (Just to get the full irony of the situation, I would normally have a bottle of unsweetened iced tea, but it was late in the afternoon, and I didn't want the caffeine.) Then he pointed me to this web site, which describes the link between aspartame and something called Sudden Cardiac Death. The article cites numerous cases of otherwise very-healthy individuals dying suddenly while engaged in strenuous athletic activity, during which they consume aspartame. And the description fits virtually exactly what happened to me. To quote the article: "the shock from strenuous athletics in combination with aspartame consumption. . . leads to activation of shock mechanisms. . . the cardiac conduction system that generates the impulses regulating the heart suddenly sends rapid [and/or] chaotic impulses." Which is pretty much exactly what I experienced. Aspartame poisoning; who knew? The fact that the article references something called 'Sudden Cardiac Death' is sobering in the extreme (I experienced a milder form called 'Sudden Cardiac Feeling Like Shit')

Of course, the FDA has approved aspartame, but one could reasonably wonder why. You all are adults, and I trust you are competent to make your own decisions as to what foods you purchase and consume. But aspartame (and virtually all 'sugar-free' foods/drinks contain aspartame) damn near did me in; and thousands of folks every year are less fortunate than I was. If this is news to you, I'd encourage you to give serious consideration to deleting aspartame from your diet. Or at least, don't engage in strenuous athletic activity while you consume it. That shit is deadly. . .

-------------------------

Alas, the news concerning my dad is not so happy. The stroke he had was a massive one, involving two-thirds of one side of his brain, and we are now basically waiting for him to die. It may be soon, or it may be not-so-soon, but Dad as we've known him is gone. I will miss him terribly. I've said elsewhere that Dad is one of the very best things that ever happened to me, and I will always be grateful that, of all the families I might have been adopted into, I was adopted into his. . .

Not Just Yet. . .

2011-08-23T15:02:00.002-04:00

I know that I had another post up here, and at least one of you left a comment on it. I promise I will re-post it later, but recent events have come to pass that I thought you all might be more interested in, than a five-year-old re-post about my youthful parenting skills (or lack thereof). . .

-------------------------

I usually ride my bike on Saturdays. But this past Saturday was rainy, and besides, we had a family reunion to go to, so I put my ride off until Sunday. Which worked out just fine, actually, since Jen had to go to a baby shower for one of our neices, and a ride would keep me suitably out of trouble in her absence. Sunday was a delightfully sunny day, and I planned a 42-mile ride on one of my favorite routes.

As I began my ride, around 4PM, I felt absolutely great. Sometimes, at the start of a ride, I feel a little sluggish, and it might take 4 or 5 miles to get into my groove; but on Sunday, I just felt great, right from the start of my ride.

After 10 miles or so, I noticed that my mouth was feeling a bit dry, and I was going through my water a little quicker than normal. It occurred to me that I hadn't had much to eat since just after church, and that I'd forgotten to have glass of water before I left, like I usually do. No problem, though - there's a little party store at about the 15-mile mark, and I just figured that I could grab a bottle of Gatorade, and maybe a bag of trail mix, to tide me over through the rest of the ride, and easily stretch my water supply through the end of the ride. So I stopped at the party store, and bought a bottle of Gatorade, and drank it down over a 10-minute break.

When I got back on the bike, though, I instantly felt like utter crap. It was the damnedest thing. Minutes before, I'd felt absolutely great, and then after taking a 10-minute break and a pint of fluids (and replenishing my electrolytes in the process), I felt utterly terrible. I had no energy anymore, and I was laboring twice as hard as normal to go half as fast.

At first, I thought that I'd guzzled the Gatorade too quickly, and was feeling the effects of an overfull stomach. But if that were the case, the bloated, lethargic feeling would go away in a few miles, and this wasn't going away. I was starting to get concerned.

There is a gas-station/party-store at about the 25-mile mark, and I stopped there for another break, and the trail mix that I didn't get at the previous stop. While I rested, I thought maybe I should check my pulse, so I put my two right fingers against my left wrist. I didn't have a stopwatch, but I was instantly alarmed that, even resting, my pulse was extremely rapid and irregular. A quick self-inventory revealed no pain or tightness in my chest, but something was obviously not right.

I was still 17 miles from home, though, and Jen was out town at the baby shower, so she wasn't available to come get me, so I thought I could just cut the power, and limp home at a reduced speed. As I recommenced my ride, my cell phone rang. Jen was stuck in traffic an hour from home, and wanted me to give her an alternate route home. So I stopped for five minutes, and worked out an alternate plan for her, and then I continued riding. Ten minutes later, she called again, having gotten confused with some of the directions I'd given her, so I had to help her undo her mistake, and get her re-oriented in the right direction. And when we hung up, I got back on the bike and rode some more.

And I still felt like crap. In fact, I had started the ride going around the loop in the opposite direction from what I usually do, because the hills are more challenging that way, and I was feeling good. But now that I felt lousy, it was a really unfortunate choice. Every time I climbed a hill, I had to slow to a virtual snail's pace just to get up it at all, and then it took three times as long just to recover back to the level of 'feeling like shit'.

And Jen continued to call every ten minutes or so - seven times in all - asking for directional assistance (we often joke between us that I'm her own personal GPS). And I was getting increasingly frustrated - that Jen was interrupting my ride every ten minutes, yes, but even moreso because of my own all-too-obvious health problems. And the fact that, between my own reduced physical capacity, and all the time I spent on the side of the road talking to my wife, I was starting to move into the realms of 'will I get home before sunset?'

I continued taking periodic stock of my physical status. On the flat-and-level parts, I wasn't doing too badly, if I didn't push myself too hard. And I wasn't having any chest pain, or anything like that. But, somewhere around the 31-mile mark, in moment of lucidity, I thought to myself that a heart attack isn't required to send up a warning flare, and there were plenty of stories of guys who had heart attacks with virtually no warning whatsoever. So I stopped, and called 1F to come and pick me up. She didn't answer. I called 4M, and he didn't answer, either. 3M was at work. So I called my friend Richard (who just made an appearance in my last post), and he said he would come out and pick me up.

I continued limping along in the mode I had been, until, at the 35-mile mark of my ride, Richard pulled up, and I gratefully got off my bike and threw it into the back of his van. As we rode home, I told him what was happening. By the time we got home, Jen had just arrived, and I filled her in on the situation. I had Richard check my pulse, and he gave me a concerned look - it wasn't rapid, now that I'd had a chance to rest, but it was still wildly irregular. We all went into the house, and tried to sort through a reasonable plan of action. With rest, I no longer felt so bad, so I was wondering if a trip to the hospital was warranted or not (and besides, on Sunday night, none of the 'urgent-care' places are open, and ER visits are not treated happily by my health-care insurance; so if I could avoid a trip to the ER, I viewed that as a good thing). Jen called our family doc, and he thought it would be good just to get an EKG, so why don't we just go on in. Then Jen called a friend of hers who is a nurse, and the nurse-friend urged us even more strongly to go to the ER; and besides, she said, if we told the triage-nurse at the ER that 'my doctor wants me to have an EKG', that was pretty much a ticket to the front of the line. So I said, OK, let's go.

And I just got home this afternoon, to tell you all about it. Without going into stultifying detail, we still don't completely know what happened to me out on the bike Sunday afternoon. As of now, we're just calling it a 'Cardiac Event'. Of the various indicators of a heart-attack, all of them were negative, except one, which was, in the ER cardiologist's words, "slightly elevated, not at all what we'd see if you'd had a heart attack." And I generated several odd-looking EKGs, "but that might just be you, and the way your heart works."

I had an Echocardiogram done, and that showed my heart working pretty doggone well, for what it's worth, Then I had a Heart Catheterization (which is just more fun than a human being ought to be allowed to have), which showed one of my coronary arteries less-than-40% blocked; they don't even think about putting in a stent until the blockage is more than 70%. So the diagnostics, while not quite sunshine and light, just don't seem to correspond to what I was feeling on the bike.

But now, at any rate, I have a cardiologist, with whom I will be becoming friends over the next few weeks. So at least I'll be in touch with people who know how to figure out what's happening.

If any of you are moved to pray for me/us, I would be grateful. . .

-------------------------

And just because the Universe is a bastard. . .

While we were sitting in the hospital room, waiting for the final discharge papers, my sister-in-law called, informing us that my dad had had a stroke. They'd just found him in his room just this morning, an hour before her call, conscious, but unable to talk or move his right side. As I write this, that's all I know.

And he can certainly use your prayers even more than I can. . .

Another Midsummer's Miscellany

2011-08-16T07:12:00.045-04:00

As I posted previously, the week before last Jen and I, and four of our kids (8M was a camper; 4M, 5M and 6F were all on staff in one capacity or another), were gone off to summer camp. We had a wonderful time, full of sunshine, water, trees, good friends, and even God.

On Friday of the camp week (the last full day at camp; Saturday is 'Going Home' day, full of songs like 'Country Roads' and 'Sloop John B'), I was playing softball in the afternoon with a typical mix of campers and staff (and seriously - there are few things in life much happier than jumping into a chilly-ish lake after getting baked under the hot sun on the softball field for an hour or so). Thankfully, we didn't have any softball 'incidents' this year that were remotely on the order of last year's line-drive-off-the-face.

Anyway, I came up to bat at one point in the game (actually two or three times; but this story is just about one of them). I have maintained a reputation among summer-camp softballers as a pretty fearsome power hitter, but truth be told, I can't quite jack the ball to the far reaches of the camp anymore, quite like I could when I was still spelling my age with a '3', or even a '4'. Especially since the advent of the mush-balls. But I can still stroke a nice line drive most of the time, even if I no longer have the legs to turn most of those line drives into home runs, or even triples. Aging is such a pain. . .

So, on the at-bat in question, I stroked a screaming line drive to the deepest corner of center field, and as I watched it bounce, I saw it heading for a gap in the trees which, if the ball made it through, would give even a lumbering old man like me a decent chance at circling the bases. So I turned on the jets (such as they are) as I rounded second base.

And - *ping!* - my hamstring stretched and recoiled back on itself. I yelled out in pain, and I had all I could do to make my way safely to third base, in the fashion of a deranged, wounded walrus. I stood on third for a few minutes, trying to ascertain the extent of my injury. It seemed not to be too bad - I could still stand and walk, albeit a tad gingerly, so I stayed in the game. Fortunately, the next batter stroked another line drive to the outfield, so I could limp home without further issue, and I got through the last day of camp with nothing more dire than some stiffness and soreness in the back of my leg.

But, you know. . . I was MAD! A pulled hamstring is the classic 'old man injury' (those of you who remember such things, think Joe Montana with the KC Chiefs); the classic sign of a brain that is willing to try anything that the body has ever done before, except that the body can't pull it off the same way anymore. By rights, I should've sped around those bases as lithely as I ever did (which, let's be honest, never exactly rose to the level of 'gazelle-like', even in my prime). I hit the ball hard, and I knew what I had to do, but my stupid body (which, I am thinking, Saint Francis of Assisi was all-too-apt in calling 'Brother Ass') rebelled. I was angry and frustrated.

The anger and frustration eventually gave way to something more like disappointment and resignation to the simple fact that I am getting older, and now I have to work out the implications of that 'aging-ness' in terms of my behavior. Which can stir up the resentment that I should even have to worry about stuff like that, if I let it. But, you know, life is what it is, and it behooves me to conform my life to the actual Universe, rather than demand that the Universe conform itself to my wishes (the Universe is notoriously stubborn on stuff like that).

The funny thing is, even while I was still at camp, I found that climbing stairs didn't bother my leg at all. And on Sunday, the day after we got back home, I went out to test my leg on my bike, and ended up going 32 miles. Even though it hurt to lift my leg to put my socks on. Very weird.

But, you know, I'm not complaining. . .

-------------------------

While six of our family members were at camp, 7M was on a week-long hike with a group of jr-hi boys from our community, on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. He had a great time, taxing himself physically, strengthening his friendships with the other boys, and enjoying God's creation in the process.

One day, toward the end of the hike, 7M, as jr-hi boys will be from time-to-time, was feeling a bit down; perhaps his will had run afoul of one of the adults-in-charge (as will also happen to jr-hi boys, from time-to-time), but he was moping about, and wandered off a short distance from the campsite. He found a log to sit on, and began picking up stones from the ground and randomly tossing them in no particular direction.

One stone in particular caught his attention - flat and maybe three inches across or so, it was sufficiently buried as to require a bit of effort on 7M's part to coax it out of the ground. When he finally did, he found that the stone had been inscribed in purple-Sharpie with the message, "Smile, God loves you".

Which, you know, isn't necessarily the most profound of all possible messages, but right at that moment, it met my son where he was living. . .

-------------------------

This past weekend, the town where I live (OK, actually the college town right next door) hosted the annual Great Lakes Folk Festival, a weekend event in which various flavors of 'folk' groups from all over the midwest (and actually, much farther afield than that) come to perform. The festival has been going on for something like ten years, but Jen and I have only gone for the last three years (and now wonder why we weren't more strongly motivated before that). It's a really great time to hear some really fine, really fun music performed by some really talented musicians that you might never hear on your radio.

It turns out that our town is something of a regional hotbed of folk music, especially bluegrass and blues. There's a music store in town to which people come from multiple states away, just to shop their selection of 'folk' instruments - mostly stringed instruments like guitars, bass guitars (an acoustic bass guitar is a pretty impressive-looking instrument), mandolins, ukuleles, dobros, dulcimers, etc., etc. I've even seen a few harps on the sales floor, over the years. A friend of mine went to Germany a few years back, and one of the Germans he met asked where he was from. When my friend told him, he said, "Ah!" and named the music store. . .

Jen and I went to the festival this past Friday evening, and saw a Hawaiian guitarist, a Michigan-based bluegrass band, a klezmer band ('Jewish soul music'), and an Irish Celtic group (with every bit of the rollicking good humor that you might associate with such a label). Each of them played about a 45-minute set, and each was wonderful in its own way. Part of the charm of such a festival is being able to sample so many disparate musical styles in one venue, over the course of a weekend.

And part of the charm of living in Our Town. . .

-------------------------

Jen and I went to the festival on Friday night with our very good friends Richard and Stef (Richard and I were each other's Best Men, and Stef was my once-upon-a-time date to see Paul McCartney). As we relaxed during one of the breaks between sets, I noticed an elderly gentleman (well, he was at least fairly obviously older than me) (at least, it seemed fairly obvious to me), who was seated directly in front of us, carrying on a conversation with two men seated on either side of him. I was sort-of idly people-watching, when the thought arose in my head that this gentleman looked familiar, somehow, although I couldn't quite place him (at this point, I hope I wasn't crossing into 'creepy' territory as I intently checked out his face for clues as to where I might have known him, once upon a time).

Then the penny dropped. The man reminded me A LOT of a Catholic preist who had been at the student parish back in my college days. I wasn't sure it was really him - it's been more than 30 years since I'd have last seen him, and this gentleman was thinner and frailer than the priest I remembered; to say nothing of white-haired, and sporting a white beard, whereas the priest I remembered had a thick black mustache (Italian as he'd been). I turned to Richard and whispered in his ear, "is that Fr. Jake sitting in front of us?" He turned and replied that he'd been thinking the same thing.

We debated for a few seconds as to how we might best determine the answer to our curiosity, when one of the men he was speaking with called him 'Jake' by name, and we knew we'd been right. Before we could interrupt and (re-)introduce ourselves, he turned toward us with a broad grin and said, "You look familiar to me; do I know you from somewhere?" When we told him our names, he remembered us. Mostly, it seems, from a class that he'd taught at the university, that Richard and I had both taken, more than from anything associated with the student parish (although, after we'd talked for a while, he suddenly turned to me and said, "You used to play the guitar, didn't you?"; so the data points were slowly falling into place for him, too). We had a pleasant conversation for a few minutes, before he left to see another group play at one of the other festival venues.

The thing is, Fr. Jake is one of the utterly unique people I have ever known. He is just instinctively kind and gracious, and everyone who has ever met him has felt utterly loved and cared-for. In the course of our conversation, I thanked him for his part in bringing me into the Catholic Church, and Jen thanked him for helping keep her in the Church in her college years, when she'd been seriously considering changing her Christian affiliation.

As I grew deeper in my faith, Fr. Jake came to frustrate me greatly, as well. In his kindness, he often resisted speaking the 'hard truth', and I feared (and still do, although in maturer ways than I used to; I hope) that in his very great kindness, he was misleading some folks as to what the actual truth of the gospel was, or what God might require of us as response to His mercy. And I would guess that a fair bit of that frustration was mutual. But Fr. Jake never treated me with anything other than open, gracious love and kindness, and even for all the frustration, I have always remembered him fondly. He taught me a valuable lesson, that it is possible to disagree with someone, even deeply and passionately, and still love and value them at the same time.

He is 82 years old now, still active and fit (he was complaining that he'd screwed up something in his knee, playing tennis the day before), still teaching the class at the university. He's no longer associated with the student parish, but he is still a faithful Catholic priest.

And it was good to see him again, after 30+ years. . .

-------------------------

(*sigh*)

I HATE it when I screw stuff up. . .

Alas, I have hurt one of my very good friends, through my own culpable carelessness. I am hopeful that our friendship will survive my stupidity, but it will necessarily be different than it was before. My friend didn't do anything wrong; all my friend did was be in the wrong place when the consequences of my, um, stuff came down, and got splashed with the fallout.

If my friend should happen to be reading this, please understand that hurting you was the very last thing I ever intended. I hope you can forgive me. . .

Wonderful-ness; or, Happy Anniversary to My Beloved

2011-08-09T07:54:00.021-04:00

Another re-post, this one from five years ago, in honor of Jen's-and-my 31st wedding anniversary. . .

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There are times when I’m simply overwhelmed by the wonderful-ness of my wife. Times when I just look at her and ask myself, “How is it that the most amazing woman in the universe threw her life in with me?” And I’m just in awe of my good fortune.

There might be a few women in the world (stress on ‘might’ and ‘few’) who are physically more beautiful than Jen, but when I consider the strength of her character, the beauty of her soul and spirit, she blows them all away. I’ll say it again – she is the most amazing woman in the universe. I almost feel bad for the rest of you guys that she’s my wife. Almost.

And the thing is, I’m well aware that I did nothing in particular to deserve her. I’m still not real sure why, all those years ago, she brought that rubber ball to me, when it seems like there must have been lots of more desirable guys than me available to her. But I’m glad she did. I’ve often described how we knew each other pretty well before we ever got to the point of courtship. And that’s what’s most amazing of all to me – she’s told me many times how God told her, before I even proposed to her, “What you see is what you get with him.” She had a pretty good, sober assessment of my character. AND SHE STILL MARRIED ME! That blows me away, and I’m grateful for it every single day I’m married to her.

And even now, after 31 years, I’m still blown away. She knows me way better now than she did back then, and she still throws her life in with mine. For all the clear-eyed, sober appraisal of my character she had when we were courting, there are lots of things, not all of them good, that she’s only learned from living with me for 31 years. And she still stays married to me. Amazing!

“Somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, I must have done something good.”

Simply flat-out amazing. . .

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Happy Anniversary, Sweetheart. You have made my life immeasurably richer. . .

Happy Birthday, Jen! (and We'll See Y'all in a Week)

2011-07-31T09:08:00.033-04:00

Today is Jen's birthday. Which brings us into the seven months of the year that she and I are the same age, at least as far as integral numbers of years are concerned. In our family, we are fond of telling each other on our birthdays, "I'm glad you were born." And I can say with all sincerity that, with the possible exception of my own birth-parents, I am gladder for Jen's birth than any other person on the planet. I don't even want to contemplate what my life might have been like without her existence.

Happy Birthday, Sweetheart. My world is a sweeter, richer place for having you in it. . .

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We're gone to Summer Camp for the coming week, so I'll be incommunicado from Blog-space. But, just so you have something to remember me by, here's a photo of my friend Jason and me, regaling the campers with our rousing rendition of Loudon Wainright's 'Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road'. . .

(Tie-dye ~~napkin~~ do-rag by Lime)

Yesterday. . .

2011-07-25T10:47:00.010-04:00

. . . 2F and I went to Comerica Park, on a muggy and sporadically rainy evening in Detroit (we endured a light shower for 10 minutes or so just before the band took the stage, but there was lightning in the sky all around us for a good part of the evening, and a few drops fell at random points during the show itself), to see Paul McCartney in concert, along with 40,000 or so of our closest and dearest friends.

It was the fourth time I've seen Sir Paul in concert, going back to 1993, when he played the Silverdome (and my best friend's wife was my date). I saw him with a buddy in '02, at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and Jen and I saw him at the Palace in '05, as part of our Silver Anniversary celebration. The open-air venue this time was a cool ambience, even including the few spits of rain we had to endure. During the 10-minute shower above, I leaned over to the guy next to me and wondered if we should break into the 'No Rain!' chant, a la Woodstock. He smiled at me and said, "Actually, when I was at Woodstock, the rain was much worse than this." OK, then. . .

I'm just old enough to remember when the Beatles were first on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of '64 (seriously? that was almost 50 years ago?!?), and I followed them into my teens, then Wings through my college years. At any rate, to a large extent Paul McCartney, and the Beatles more generally, have provided the soundtrack for a large portion of my life.

2F has been a Beatles fan from early on in her life. When she was in 6th grade, I think, she did an Academic Fair project on the Beatles, complete with a tri-fold board adorned with the Sgt. Pepper album cover (I suppose, if I were a more astute father, I'd have been quicker to recognize her desire to form a connection with her dad; but I did have a lot of fun helping her with it). So, when Jen and I came home from the concert in '05, having been cut off in mid-'na-na' from such sharing of McCartney's greatness with our daughter as we could manage at the time (I rang her up on my cell phone for the 'Hey Jude' singalong, but an usher saw me and threatened to bounce me from the concert; no further comment in that regard), I promised 2F that, the next time Sir Paul came to town (or heck, within a manageable drive of town), I'd take her with me, so I was duty-bound to fulfill my promise (and don't you wish your duty included going to McCartney concerts?).

We went to the concert with one of 2F's friends - a young woman who has become one of her best friends and an honorary member of our family, even apart from a shared fondness for McCartney and the Beatles - along with the young lady's mom (who, conicidentally, has actually met - and been photographed with - Hugh Jackman, as her husband is a sometime film-industry hairdresser; please don't hate her, Lime) although their seats weren't by ours. They were originally going to be joined by another friend, a young man from Scotland, who has also become a close family friend over the course of the past year, but he took ill at the last minute, and couldn't come (he must have been really, REALLY sick); the girl and her mom offered his ticket to 4M, so I got to go to the concert with two of my kids, which was quite cool.

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The band was the same crew Paul has played with for the past 10 years or so, with Paul Wickens on keyboards, Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray on guitars and backup vocals, and Abe Laboriel on drums (and backup vocals; he also provided a bit of visual hilarity during 'Dance Tonight'). It's a tight group, and they really seem to enjoy playing together.

In case anyone is interested, here's the setlist they played last night:

Hello, Goodbye
Junior's Farm
All My Loving
Jet
Drive My Car
Sing the Changes (from his album Electronic Arguments under the pseudonym The Fireman)
Hitchhike (a Marvin Gaye number added just for his Motown friends)
The Night Before
Let Me Roll It (ending with a jam on 'Foxy Lady')
Paperback Writer
The Long and Winding Road
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five
Let 'Em In
Maybe I'm Amazed
I've Just Seen a Face
I Will
Blackbird
Here Today
Dance Tonight (from his '07 album, Memory Almost Full)
Mrs. Vanderbilt
Eleanor Rigby
Something
Band On the Run
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (you don't think he reads my blog, do you?)
Back In the USSR
I've Got a Feeling
A Day In the Life (ending with 'Give Peace a Chance')
Let It Be
Live and Let Die
Hey Jude

(1st encore)
Lady Madonna
Day Tripper
Get Back

(2nd encore)
Yesterday
Helter Skelter
Abbey Road Medley (Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End)

36 songs in all (which has been pretty standard for him in his recent shows) - 23 Beatles songs, 10 Wings songs, 9 that he's never done live before (at least in front of an American audience), spanning three amazing hours. I've long thought that his '90 concert (the one chronicled on the CD Tripping the Live Fantastic) was the best of his recent live shows, and I've regretted ever since that I missed it. But this show was right up there, on a par with the one 21 years ago. And I can only hope to have anything close to Paul's energy level when I'm 69.

McCartney is a consummate performer and showman. His concerts have always left me happily satisfied, and yet wanting more at the same time. Having seen him on multiple occasions over the course of nearly 20 years, it has seemed to me that, as the years pass, he is coming to a greater and greater appreciation of the warm affection in which he is held by his audience; he added a couple singalong numbers (beyond 'Hey Jude') to his setlist this time, but it almost didn't matter - all through the show, we were hearing the band in one ear, and in the other, 40,000 people singing along. It was a magical evening.

I don't know how many more of these concerts I'll end up attending (heck, I don't know how many more of 'em Paul is gonna play), but every time I start to think that it's becoming 'old hat', I'm just blown away by the one I'm seeing today. It was an amazing evening; an amazing show by one of the great performers of all time. . .

Two Girls and a Boy

2011-07-18T07:10:00.007-04:00

Our first two children were girls. I wasn't really all fixated on the idea of having a son, but there was that part of me that hoped for one - someone to carry the family name forward from me, and all that. In the mid-80s, though, just as I was passing into my 30s and gearing up my genealogy hobby, it was a matter of some small concern to me to consider the generation of my cousins, the descendants of my paternal grandfather. My grandfather had three sons (ie, bearers of the family name); my Uncle Neville (as I'll call him here) had three daughters, so the name wouldn't be passing on through his kids; Uncle Levi had six kids, four of whom were sons, but none of them had gotten married, much less had kids, as they were passing into their own 30s; and my Dad had seven kids, five sons, of whom I was the only one married, and up to that point, I only had girls. So the survival of our family name was somewhat of an open question at that point.

Of course, I needn't have worried. Within a couple years, I had the first of what would eventually grow to a group of five sons (none of whom is married as I write this, but there's still plenty of time). Three of Uncle Levi's sons married, and each of them had at least one son, and three of my four brothers married, producing one more son between the three of them. So the family name seems reasonably safe for another generation or two (and I wouldn't even be all that concerned about it, but our name is not a common one, and we're kinda proud of it).

Anyway, I hasten to be clear that, 'passing on the name' aside, I love my daughters (and nieces), and cherish their place in my life just as much as I love and cherish my sons. And even where The Name is concerned, what was I gonna do about it, anyway? God gives us the children He gives us, and we bring them all into our family with gratitude and love. Just, you know, for the sake of saying so. . .

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My first three children gave me small opportunities to observe certain, shall we say, tendencies, demarcating differences between girls and boys. Which is an interesting idea, all by itself, because neither Jen nor I are very 'stereotypical' in terms of 'gender roles'. She was a pretty tomboy-ish girl who liked playing in the mud, and working with tools, and all that, and I was a pretty bookish, nerdy boy (tea parties and doll-houses never much interested me, though). Even now, I tend to be more emotional than she does; we often joke between ourselves that she's a pretty 'guy-ish' woman, and I'm a more 'chick-ish' guy, at least as far as many of the common stereotypes go.

But, as has been noted on occasion (although it's not such a popular idea just now), stereotypes don't just appear out of thin air; they usually arise out of some basis in 'general' fact, even if it isn't terribly helpful in specific cases.

We have often gotten a chuckle from the disparate responses of our kids to things like weird bugs that they found on the sidewalk. Toddler 1F would spy the strange-looking critter, and run away from it, maybe even crying. Little 2F would most likely squat down for a closer look, maybe even pick it up in the palm of her hand and pet it. But 3M's response was more, um, 'elemental' - he'd stomp on it, usually with a triumphal shout.

So, you know, the contrast was pretty clear. . .

Testosterone - it's a wonderful thing. . .

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And estrogen! Estrogen is wonderful, too! If, you know, you happen to rock that way. . .

;)

Potty Talk

2011-07-11T08:22:00.007-04:00

OK, my friend Suldog has done it again. A while back, he posted about HIS WIFE'S accidental misadventure (at least, he presented it as accidental, and I have no reason to doubt him) with a public restroom. Which, as Suldog's posts often seem to do, called forth a couple of stories from my own young life, which I left in his comment-space, but later decided that they would work just fine for taking up some space in my own humble blog. You all can tell me whether or not I assessed their quality accurately. . .

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Many years ago, Jen and I were at the annual Mackinac Bridge Walk, held every Labor Day, in which a couple lanes of the majestic bridge joining Michigan's peninsulas are given over for a few hours, so that Michiganders (or, really, anybody who shows up) can walk the 5-mile span. Something like 50,000 people do the bridge walk every year, proceeding from north (St. Ignace) to south (Mackinaw City). Bridge-walkers can park their cars at either end of the bridge, but south-to-north bus transport will be required, either to take you from your car on the south end to the beginning of the walk, or from the end of the walk to your car on the north end. Michiganders have learned, from 50+ years' experience, that, if you are in the UP on Labor Day, and want to drive south, you either cross the bridge before the sun rises, or you wait until later in the day.

So we walked the bridge, and we had a great time. There is something fairly awesome about walking across a five-mile expanse of open water, with its views of Michigan's two peninsulas, and Mackinac Island (which is probably my favorite place in all the earth). And it is not unusual for a freighter to pass under the bridge, and thus, beneath the walkers' feet, in the course of the hour-plus it takes to complete the walk.  At the highest point of the bridge, the walker is more than 200 feet above the water (and the center lanes of the suspension portion of the bridge are decked with an open steel grid, for aerodynamic reasons; if a walker suffers from vertigo or acrophobia, he is well-advised to keep to the solidly-paved outer lane)

Anyway, with so many walkers, the, uh, need for toilet facilities is particularly acute, given that the normal population of Mackinaw City is a bit under1000 souls (altho, during the summer tourist season, the town is considerably more crowded than that). One of the years I went, I got to the end of the walk and really had to go.  There were something like 50 porta-johns lined up in an open field near where the buses were lined up to take us back to the north end of the bridge, where our cars were parked. Half of 'em were labeled 'MEN' and the other half 'WOMEN'. For some odd reason, there were long lines at all the 'MEN's' porta-johns, but none at all at the 'WOMEN's' (which, I think, is the absolute only time I've ever seen that, but that's how it was).

I was somewhere around 20th in line, crossing my legs and urging the lines to move faster, when the thought slowly crept from the deep recesses of my brain to the level of outward conscious thought - 'Waaaaiiiiit a miniiiiitttt. . . only one person at a time can use a porta-john. . . They don't need to mark 'em for MEN and WOMEN at all. . ." Evidently, the exact same thought percolated to the front of several other men's minds virtually simultaneously, because several of us together wandered over to the WOMEN's porta-johns and quickly availed ourselves of their amenities. By the time I emerged a minute or two later, having finished my business, and being considerably more relieved than when I'd gone in, the 'MEN' and 'WOMEN' signs had all been taken down, and all the porta-johns had lines, half as long as the previous ones, and, uh, urinary throughput was doubled. . .

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Another time, I was at a conference at a small liberal-arts college in Michigan. During a break between sessions, I made use of the restroom facilities. The urinals (ladies, if you really don't know what 'urinals' are. . . uh, ask your brother, or something) were of an odd type that I hadn't seen before - sort of a 'pedestal' design, away from the wall, that required the, uh, user to sorta split his legs on either side of the, uh, receptacle, in order to 'do his business'. Afterward, I was commenting on the uniquely-configured urinals to one of the other (male) conferees, when an employee of the college, standing nearby, overheard us.

"Oh, that is quite intentional," he informed us. "They're unisex urinals." I invested a few seconds' thought toward how that might work if I were, you know, an actual woman (and it seemed to me that, in actual usage, it might not work quite as, um, cleanly as what the designer originally thought it would) (I should also mention here that I never wandered into the women's restroom to see if they had also been installed there).  Then I quickly shook my head to clear the image from my brain.

Only, you know, at a college (probably the same folks who dream up stuff like this). . .

The Patent and the Formula

2011-07-05T07:09:00.001-04:00

A while back, Uncle Skip gave me a bloggity award, the acceptance of which entailed me telling you all a few things about myself. And so I did, without actually telling you much at all about myself. Except for one thing - I mentioned that I have a patent to my name, and possibly a mathematical formula. Which struck a few of my commenters (I'm lookin' at you, Bijoux, Sailor and Lime) as interesting, and they asked me to give more details. So I left my own responsive comment, giving the short version of the two stories. And, in the ensuing months, I've come to think that those stories might be worth a full-blown post, giving a fuller account. You know, for posterity, and all that. (See, I'm just vain enough to think that somebody, somewhere, centuries in the future might stumble across this blog, and say, "Wow, this dude had a patent and a formula! I wonder who the hell he was?")

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The Patent

When I was still working at my first job, I did some work on a project that was a bit unusual, for a customer that usually worked closely with one of our competitors. They had an idea for a non-pneumatic spare tire/wheel, to save space and cost (as against the typical pneumatic mini-spare, or even moreso, an actual full-size spare). They had gone first to our competitor, with whom they had a long-standing working relationship, and asked them to develop the design for them. But the competitor was unable to come up with an actual working design, so they came to us.

When we got the design, we could see immediately that, as given to us, it wouldn't work. But our company had had, for many years, contracts with the US Defense Department, to make wheels for tanks and other tracked vehicles, which were also non-pneumatic, and there were a couple of design 'tricks' that made such a wheel actually work.

So when I was given the project, I did my usual analysis and immediately saw that the stresses were way too high. But, I told my bosses, this was really a pretty similar thing, conceptually, to a tank wheel, and what if we applied tank-wheel design principles to it? So I did a re-design according to tank-wheel design principles, and when I analyzed it, lo and behold, we got a working design! So we made a few prototypes and tested them, and they seemed to work just fine. And I, having done my job, was happy, and moved on to my next project.

At that point, our top management got a little nervous (and not without reason), that our customer could just take all our great design/development work and hand it back to our competitor, with whom they had a nice comfortable business relationship. So they decided (unbeknownst to me) to seek a patent, in order to protect our 'intellectual property' rights.

Thus it was that, a year or so after I'd worked on the project, and had all but forgotten about it, I was called into a series of meetings to describe to a bunch of lawyers what I'd done, and blah, blah, blah. And the upshot was, that when the patent was granted, my name (among others) was on it. It had been an interesting project, and I was a little proud of having made the 'conceptual leap' to incorporate tank-wheel design principles, but as far as I was concerned, I was just doing my job. Getting the patent was never my idea (although I was certainly not opposed to it); someone else sought the patent, and in the end, because I'd worked on it, my name was one of the ones that got slapped on it. So they paid me a dollar for rights to the patent, and I was invited to the annual Patent Luncheon for as long as I worked for the company (which turned out to be just a couple more years).

So now, I've got a patent to my name, which is nice. (Honestly, though - my dad has something on the order of 20 patents, in half-a-dozen countries, so I don't make a bigger deal of it than it merits. . .)

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The Formula

(OK this is math; if your eyes start to glaze over, feel free to stop at any time)

This one comes from my first job, as well. In the course of doing Quality Assurance on our parts, we would scan them in a machine that essentially took a series of points (typically a number in the hundreds, or at least the tens) from the surface of the part. Then we had to take those hundreds of points and generate the key dimensions we were trying to measure from them - a radius, an angle, or what-have-you, in order to determine whether they were within the specified limits, or not. Getting an angle from the point data was pretty straightforward - there are lots of well-understood methods and formulas for computing a line (and thus, an angle) from a set of points (I should note that the key thing here is that we had so many points - if we only had two points, then it's straightforward to calculate the line between them; any middle-school student could do it. But when you have more than two points, to say nothing of hundreds, it gets more complicated to compute the line that 'best fits' the large set of points.)

For a circle, though, there weren't any readily-accessible methods or formulas available, as far as I could tell. From high-school Algebra, I knew that I could calculate a circle from three points, but I had no idea how to do it for five, or fifty, or five hundred points. I played with calculating a circle from every possible set of three points taken from the larger point set, and that gave me a 'bracketed' answer - the limits between which the 'real answer' had to lie - but that wasn't a very satisfying answer. I even went to the Math Library at the University, to see if there were any obscure formulas published anywhere, but they couldn't easily point me to one, either.

So, over the course of six months or so, I played around with the problem, trying to figure out a way to attack the problem. From time to time, I'd have an idea that seemed like it might be fruitful, and I'd make some progress on it, but it was slow. And I still had to work on my regular job, so I didn't just have unlimited time to work on the 'best-fit-circle' problem.

Then one day, I had a flash of insight (it involved choosing a workable error-measure, if any of you are math-y enough to know what that means), and cranked the formula through (it involved a LOT of cranking). Then I wrote it into a computer program, and ran a few point sets through it, and what do you know? It worked! It calculated a circle that by-golly corresponded to the set of points. So, I put the computer program into a more-usable form, and we went on our merry way, using the formula in the day-to-day work of checking radius dimensions on the parts we manufactured.

Now, I didn't for a minute suppose that I had actually derived an original formula. I thought all along that someone, somewhere, had derived this formula years before, and I just wasn't clever enough to track it down. No big deal - many times, in Math classes I'd had over the years, we'd derived the classical formulas that were in our textbooks, just for the instructional purpose of seeing where they came from. And I was sure that this was one of those - I could have looked it up, but failing that, I just derived it myself.

Fast forward 15 years - A guy I know runs a 'Math' column in a little engineering journal, and I'd written a few articles for his column over the years. He was running low on columns 'in the can', and he asked me if I could write another article for him. I showed him my notes for the 'best-fit-circle', and he thought that would make a great article, so I wrote it up, and a year or so later, he published it.

Now, whenever I've written one of those 'Math columns', I always get a few emails in the aftermath of it being published - it's a lot of fun to hash over the column with other interested folks. Once, I wrote an article on how the sun's position in the sky varies over the course of a year, and I got all sorts of interesting emails, from guys wanting to talk about how to design their house to get more sun in winter, and less in summer, or a professor sending me a little 'solar calculator' he'd invented.

When the 'Best-Fit Circle' article ran, I got emails from a couple of pretty high-powered academic-type guys, thanking me for the article, saying that it was obviously really useful, and asking me where I'd gotten the formula from. When I said, sheepishly, that I hadn't found it anywhere, that I'd worked it out myself, and by the way, could they tell me where it might be published, they wrote back, congratulating me for deriving a really useful formula. One guy was on the development team for one of the major commercial computer-graphics codes, and he said he'd searched all through the literature for all the various different methods for computing a circle, and he'd never seen it before. Which kinda stunned me, actually.

Then one day, one of my kids did one of those things that kids will do - he googled his dad's name - and found, among various letters to editors I'd written, and whatnot, at least two instances of college professor-types assigning homework to their classes, involving the formula I'd published in my friend's little journal (properly attributed, and everything). Then, when 4M had a calculus class at the junior college, he mentioned to his instructor that his dad had written a math article, and the instructor asked if I'd send her a copy. She really liked it, and started assigning it to her own classes. I spoke to her once, and she mentioned it to me, and I told her that I couldn't really believe that it was original with me. But she said she'd never seen it anywhere else, and as far as she was concerned, it should properly be called [Craig]'s Method, and I'd be within my rights to call it that.

So there you have it - nothing is officially 'written in stone', or anything like that, but if anybody wants to make reference to the Best-Fit Circle formula by that name, I welcome you to do so. . . ;)

Oh, Deer. . .

2011-06-27T14:05:00.000-04:00

You may have noticed (both of you), in the course of reading this blog (or its predecessor) over the years, that I am a semi-avid bicyclist (here is an example of something I've written before) (and here is another one) (and, oh, heck, another one). One of the things I like best about cycling is the 'out-in-nature' aspect of it - things like noticing the crops in the farmers' fields as they progress from little sprouts just sticking out of the ground, to 'knee-high-by-the-4th-of-July' corn crops, to something in the fall that I can use for a needed potty-break without any concerns about being seen. . .

I cherish a few memories of some unique experiences of nature when I've been out on my bike. Like the time, one November, when I was out on dry roads on a chilly (but warm enough to ride) day, and wound up riding through a light snow-squall that lasted for about 2-3 minutes, and barely even got the road wet. Like riding inside one of those 'snow-globes', just after somebody shook it.

Or the time, on another fall day, this one not quite so chilly as the one above, when I crested over the top of a hill and surprised a flock of sparrows who were sunning themselves on the warm pavement on the sunward slope of the hill. Instantly, I was riding through a swirling cloud of startled little birds (none of which, perhaps miraculously, were startled directly onto my person).

Which reminds me of the time that I was riding down a country road just after a farmer had commenced manuring his field. He had hauled the manure-wagon from his barn on the east side of the road, to his field, a half-mile down on the west side of the road (and when I say 'wagon', I'm talking about something just slightly smaller than a gravel-hauler). The wagon had been filled to the brim, so there had been some, uh, 'slosh-age' onto the surface of the road. So for a half-mile, I was riding through what looked to all the world like mud, but was really something considerably more, uh, organic. When I got home that day, Jen declined to wash my shirt, and just threw it in the trash (she may even have burned it; I don't remember).

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Yesterday, I was out on my bike, and I had another of those one-in-a-million experiences of nature. I was about 25 miles into a 35-mile ride, on the outskirts of one of the small towns near the city where I live, when a family of five deer bounded across the open field I was riding past, and across the road, perhaps ten yards directly in front of me. I say 'family', although I don't really know that they were all related to each other. There were two larger deer, two 'middle-sized' ones, and a little spotted fawn the size of a small-to-medium-sized dog (with really long, skinny legs, if it had been a dog). So it looked like Mom & Dad & the kids, although I have no idea if deer even form family units like that. . .

There was a large SUV approaching in the oncoming lane, and the first two deer bounded right in front of him, causing him to come to a stop. The 'middle' pair continued on in front of him, apparently heedless of his presence, or any danger appertaining thereunto. But the little spotted fawn was tracking directly into the driver's-side door of the SUV. He stopped himself, pitching forward on his forelegs as he did, wavered confusedly for a split-second, and, once he realized that the SUV wasn't moving, he spun and followed his clan across the road. As I passed him, the driver of the SUV and I just grinned at each other and shook our heads.

And thanked our lucky stars (or, you know, whomever one thanks for stuff like that) that neither of us had arrived at that juncture a second or two earlier. . .

The Best Man I've Ever Known

2011-06-19T07:43:00.051-04:00

For Father's Day, and with your indulgence, I'm re-posting what I wrote last year (lightly modified, as necessary). Because yeah, it was just that good. If I may say so myself. . . ;)

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In honor of Fathers Day, I'd like to tell you about my dad. My father has been, in many ways, the rock of my life. Mothers have come and gone for me, over the years (strange as that is to say, and I really don't mean it in any way to denigrate any of them); my family has moved from town to town, and from house to house even when we stayed in the same town; I have changed schools; friends have come and gone. But from the time I was adopted around my first birthday, my dad has been one of the few constants in my life.

As well as it being Fathers Day, his 89th birthday was this past Friday; it has not been unusual for his birthday to fall on Fathers Day (as it will again next year, on his 90th). Actually, I count myself extremely fortunate that my dad is still with me - his two brothers were 47 and 58 when they died, and his own father didn't live to see 70, either. Ever since Dad turned 70, I've been mentally preparing myself for him to leave anytime; even so, I know that when he does, it will be an utter earthquake in my life. That he is still living midway through my 50s is a blessing of the highest order.

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Dad was born and raised on a farm in central Michigan, the oldest of five children - three boys, two girls. He attended a rural one-room schoolhouse (to which, of course, he walked five miles through the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways). Those were the days before Rural Electrification; chores were done, and so was schoolwork, by kerosene-lantern-light. Electricity didn't come to my grandpa's farm until Dad was in his teens.

By a combination of genetic endowment and abundant hard work, Dad grew into a large man - he's 6'-4" tall. When he was young, he was rail-thin - about 180 pounds or so (by the time I came into his life, he was a fair bit bigger than that) - but his 'Popeye-esque' forearms bespoke many cows milked, and a good deal more physical strength than might first meet the eye. When I was in high school, and doing weight training for football, I got pretty proud of how strong I was becoming, and so I challenged my dad to arm-wrestle. The fruit of all my training was that I could then 'hold him off' for a second or two before he slammed me. Even to this day, I don't want to arm-wrestle him; I don't think my ego could take getting slammed by an 89-year-old man.

Dad is one of those 'Greatest Generation' guys, whose lives, well into their 20s, were defined by the Great Depression and World War II. As a boy growing up, my grandpa always had the farm, but there were significant stretches of time during which the family lived in a larger city about an hour away, where grandpa ran a gas station, when farming wasn't so lucrative. Eventually, even that bit of provision went away, and they returned to the farm. My aunt recalls her dad saying that, as long as they had the farm, they wouldn't go hungry.

Dad graduated from high school in 1940, part of a graduating class of eight. He went to college 20 miles from his dad's farm. He wasn't the first of his family to go to college - both his parents had attended college, although neither of them had earned a degree. After two years, he transferred down to the larger school which I later attended, to study Chemical Engineering.

He only completed one semester there before he was drafted, and became the lucky recipient of an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe, courtesy of the US Army. He was in an artillery unit, which was probably fortunate for him, in that he generally stayed 15-20 miles behind the front lines, and so, besides firing his own big guns, he was not often being shot at in anger. He doesn't tell many 'war stories', but he has a few about being strafed, and diving for his foxhole. And during the Battle of the Bulge, the front lines got considerably closer to his position than was usual, or comfortable.

Dad survived the war (obviously), and even stayed on after the war for two years, working for the US State Department in the post-war reconstruction. During that time, he met and married my 'first mother', returning stateside in late 1947. He finished college on the GI Bill, earning his BS degree in Chemical Engineering in 1949. I have his college yearbook, and I was amused to find among his fellow-graduates a future head basketball coach at our mutual alma mater, and a future governor of Hawaii.

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The one huge, overriding lesson that my dad taught me, by example much more than by anything he ever said, was a commitment to duty, and the deep connection of duty to love. Dad always - ALWAYS - did his duty, and I came to understand that 'duty' was how my dad expressed love. He is not the most outgoing of people (although he can be 'social' when he has to), and I often longed to just sit down and engage in a relaxed, flowing conversation with him, but, with few exceptions, Dad just doesn't do 'relaxed flowing conversation'. But he has shown his love to me hundreds of times over, often as not without saying a word.

He and my 'first mother' were married for nine-plus childless years before they adopted me. I had a conversation with my aunt - Dad's sister - not long before she died, and she told me that adopting hadn't been his idea - that his wife had dearly wanted children, but he'd been ambivalent about adopting. But, out of care and concern for his wife, he'd signed on for it, and I came into their life. A year or so later, they adopted my brother. All of which became almost bizarrely ironic after Christmas of 1964, when my mother left him, and, in the process, my brother and me. I have no idea exactly why she left him, or exactly what her grievances were. I will say that, as I've known my dad over the years, he has not always been the easiest of men to live with. But, even so, he is, at one and the same time, the best man I've ever known.

So anyway, my dad, who'd been ambivalent about adopting in the first place, was suddenly a single father to two boys. We moved out of our house on Lake Huron (which, while we'd lived there, had been a pretty good working model of heaven), to a house in town where my brother and I could look after ourselves a bit easier. For a year, we ate a lot of mac-n-cheese, and I got introduced to kippered herring; Dad was not exactly a gourmet chef.

In the finest fashion of doing his duty for us, he quickly set about finding a new mother for us (and not incidentally, I'm sure, a new wife for himself), and by the following fall, he was engaged to the woman who would be his second wife, and my-brother's-and-my 'new mother'. She was a divorcee herself, with three kids, two girls and a boy. So when they were married in 1966 (just before my tenth birthday), Dad was suddenly the father (step or otherwise) of five children, spanning less than three years in age. Which was pretty intense right from the start, as we were all trying to figure out how to live together. To say nothing of what it was like when all five of us were teenagers at the same time.

In the next five years, Dad and Mom had two more boys together, so my dad, who might have been content to be a childless husband in the mid-50s, was, by the end of 1970, a father of seven. Without going into brutal detail, I'll just say that blended families have a unique set of challenges all their own, and Dad, in the course of doing his duty to his new family, endured more grief than he deserved, for trying to do right by his new wife, and seven kids. It is a testimony to his and Mom's love and perseverance that today, 45 years later, our family is intact and strong.

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Dad was my baseball coach for much of my youthful 'career'. Not because he was so deeply versed in the subtleties of baseball; he wasn't, and the 'baseball guys' in our town tended to regard him with a degree of mild contempt (but come on, he wasn't as dumb as they took him for, either). But, as our dad, he knew instinctively that he wanted to have his hand on our lives, and coaching our Little League teams was just obviously a really good way to do that.

He was also very solicitous of our schooling; one of my enduring memories, especially of my young childhood, was that I had all the books I ever wanted, and maybe even a few more besides. It wouldn't surprise me, though, to find out that he got into the whole baseball thing when he started thinking I was becoming too much of a sedentary nerd. . .

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As my own family has grown, and I have endured the trials that come along with raising my own kids, I have come to understand and appreciate my dad in new ways. As I've coped with my own kids' troubles, it has occurred to me, many times, that Dad had endured similar stuff, and at the hands of kids who weren't even 'the fruit of his own loins'. And he did it without complaining. Honestly, I never once heard him whine about the latest outrage that one of his kids had perpetrated, or the latest of their messes that he'd had to clean up after. I am sure that he grew from the experience, and is today a kinder, gentler man than he started out being.

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As I said above, my dad is the best man I've ever known - by far. His quiet strength, his patient endurance, his utter faithfulness to his duty, no matter how unpleasant, have taught me volumes. I know that I am not, nor will I ever be, even half the man he is, but if I can even get close to being half the man my dad is, I'll have done well, indeed.

Happy Fathers Day, Dad. Being your son has been a privilege. . .

Jim Northrup, RIP

2011-06-09T12:20:00.008-04:00

The timing of events leads me to post this today, even though I put up another post just yesterday. I try to keep things more-or-less well-spaced around here, and I rarely post twice in the same week anymore, much less on consecutive days. But do be sure to go back and catch up on yesterday's post, if you haven't seen it yet. . .

And those of you who aren't sports fans, you'll indulge me this, won't you? I mean, I post about sports maybe a couple times a year. Besides, this is about my own boyhood, almost as much as the specific subject-matter. . .

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This morning's news brought tidings of the passing of Jim Northrup, at the age of 71 (and seriously - I'm supposed to just blithely accept that my boyhood heroes are in their 70s? When did that happen?). Mr. Northrup was a member of my beloved Detroit Tigers during the 1960s-70s, and in particular the 1968 World Championship team. He was a personal favorite of mine - one of those guys who was a pretty key player on the team, a good player, and key contributor to the team's championship; but outside of Michigan, he may not have attracted much notice at all. The thing about Jim Northrup, which was also true of several members of the '68 team, was that he was a Michigan kid, who grew up to play for the Tigers, which was the cherished dream of every kid who grew up in this state.

Northrup grew up in Breckenridge, which is a small town roughly between Saginaw and Mt. Pleasant (he graduated from high school when I was roughly two years old); he attended Alma College, and was drafted by the Tigers in 1960. He played his first game for the Tigers in September of '64, and by '66 he was getting 400+ at-bats.

By 1968, Northrup was essentially the everyday right-fielder, when Al Kaline went down with a broken arm from being hit by a pitch (in fact, when Kaline finally returned from his injury, manager Mayo Smith had to figure out what to do with his Hall-of-Fame outfielder, since Northrup was playing too well to sit him down). Northrup led the team with 153 hits and 90 RBIs. Of his 21 home runs in '68, four were grand slams; two in one game against the Indians, and another five days later against the White Sox (the three grand slams in a week are still a major-league record). Northrup himself told the story of how, in that latter game, he actually came to bat yet again with the bases loaded, and thus an opportunity to hit his fourth grand slam in a week, but he struck out, swinging over-anxiously at three bad pitches.

In the '68 World Series, Mr. Grand Slam struck again, putting the crowning touch on the Tigers' 10-run third inning in Game 6. Then in Game 7, Northrup had probably the defining moment of his entire major-league career, hitting a two-run triple to deep center off Bob Gibson (who barely gave up any runs at all in '68, and in World Series games, most especially; it was the only triple that Gibson surrendered that season), in the seventh inning of what had been a scoreless pitchers' duel between Gibson and Mickey Lolich, and propelling the Tigers to the World Championship.

Northrup continued to play well for the Tigers; from '68-'71, the peak years of his major-league career, he hit for a .273 average, and averaged 21 homers and 77 RBIs. He was never an All-Star, a fact that has always struck me as a bit odd; there are certainly lesser players than him, who have been All-Stars at least once in their lives (and speaking of which, here's one of my favorite baseball trivia questions: who's the only MVP who was never an All-Star? answer below. . .). . .

When Billy Martin became the Tigers' manager in '71, Northrup's days as a Tiger were probably numbered. He was a fairly acerbic and outspoken person, and Martin always seemed to take particular delight in putting Northrup 'in his place', which Northrup, by his own nature, was not about to suffer quietly. So he ended his playing days as a member of the Baltimore Orioles.

For a while in the 80s-90s, Northrup was a color-commentator on the Tigers' TV broadcasts, but his penchant for acerbically calling it like he saw it eventually rubbed his bosses the wrong way, and that gig ended (during a time in Tigers history when there was no lack of things about which to comment acerbically) (I'm really liking the word 'acerbic' today; can you tell?)

(OK, Answer to trivia question: Kirk Gibson (you just knew it was gonna have something to do with the Tigers, didn't you?), who was the NL MVP in '88, but never an All-Star)

But just because he played for the Tigers, and played such a key role in one of the high points of my own boyhood, I've always harbored a fondness for Jim Northrup.

And may he rest in peace. . .

Busy Days in Us-Ville

2011-06-08T12:08:00.003-04:00

These are some busy days around here. Truth to tell, for the last few years (and by 'few' I mean 'somewhere between five and ten') June has been Family Psychosis Month, as it seems that the Universe has conspired to use June as its Dumping Ground for Calendric Excess. Just to give a few examples.

- 5M graduated from high school this year. We couldn't be prouder of him; he's a great, solid young man, and he even got a couple of nice scholarships to help get him launched into his college career. But (at least in our local culture, which is considerably different than it was in the days when I was graduating from high school), that also entails the hosting of the Graduation Open House. Jen and I having the meager organizational gifts that we do, we've learned over the years that it behooves us to join forces with one or two other families-of-graduates to throw a combined Open House. But this year, our open-house compadres had some trouble distinguishing between what constitutes a 'Graduation Open House' and what constitutes a 'Wedding Reception'. Detail piled upon detail, and nifty frill upon nifty frill (we had a 'slushie' machine, which required over an hour to get to Full Slushy Freeze Mode, rather than the advertised 15-20 minutes), all of which constitute (a) expenses, and (b) grist for the mill of Murphy's Law; both of which seemed to escape the thinking of our friends (fortunately, we established early on a financial limit which we would not go beyond, and the other families were fine with leaving us to our penuriousness, so the cost overruns mostly missed us). Among the things we learned, was that chicken wings are a really bad idea for open-house fare; at least if you expect to have teenage boys at your open house. 75 minutes into a 3-hour open house, there were no more wings (and this after making an emergency run to the local wing joint, which basically shut down the restaurant until the following Monday); you really need something that the teen boys can't just pile up on their plates, heedless of any guests who might be so unfortunate as to arrive after them. . .

- Pursuant to the whole 'graduation' thing, my birth-mom and her husband came to visit us for nearly a week. Which, I hasten to say, was wonderful, and greatly appreciated. But it was more 'things to do/deal with', and threw the calendar into another Chaotic Order of Magnitude.

- 6F is feverishly preparing for her summer mission trip to Costa Rica, for which she leaves in just over two weeks. Today, for example, Jen is taking her to the Health Department for her Central American Jungle Fever vaccinations. She also had to get a passport, but we wanted to wait until her 16th birthday (in late April) to apply for it, since 16+-year-olds get 10-year passports, but 15-and-unders only get 5-year passports. So, we were sweating, just a little, that her passport would arrive in time (and while I'm thinking of it, I'm not sure if my own passport is current, or if I need to re-up it. . .) Plus all the planning/packing/sundry-getting-ready-to-travel stuff, like collecting a separate suitcase full of shoes to donate to the orphanage where she'll be working. . .

- Jen and I are preparing for a four-day conference a couple weeks hence, which includes listening to four on-line preparatory talks, complete with homework assignments. 6F is flying out on the third day of the conference; we haven't quite figured out how we're gonna work that out, yet.

- It seems that all of the summer youth sports leagues play their games in June; some extend into early July, but for our purposes here, in the midst of the above-delineated calendric chaos, 7M has two baseball games each week, plus two practices for his summer-basketball team, which plays out-of-town tournaments nearly every weekend. We wouldn't normally have him on two teams, but a friend's father offered to pay his registration fee for the basketball team, and drive him to all the tournaments, as an inducement to his own son to play on the team. So that's nice, but we still have to manage 7M's day-to-day schedule, and all the days when basketball practice overlaps with baseball games.

- Also, Jen is running a four-day Day Camp for 5-7-year-olds next week, the planning for which is always stressful, since administrative gifts are not hers in abundance (it's one of those 'somebody's-gotta-do-it' things). Probably more than tending to the 5-7-year-old 'campers', she also has to ride herd on the 12-13-year-old 'counselors'. Please pray for her. At least, this is her last go-round with the Day Camp; after this year, she's retiring, and passing it on to younger moms. . .

On top of these, there are other 'Details of Life' which I'll decline to go into right now (suffice it to say that, just because your older kids are Out of the House and Living On Their Own, doesn't mean that they no longer add to the familial chaos levels; and that's about all I'm gonna say about that). And Laundry still needs to be done, Meals Prepared, etc, etc, etc (and we're still working on the kids doing their own laundry, without prodding from Parental Units). . . So we're kinda in Zombie Mode these days - just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and wait for the calendar to flip to July. . .

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On the plus side, we've done a couple of home-maintenance projects. The back roof needed to be replaced, which provided the perfect opportunity to install a pair of skylights in our family room that I've wanted for a while. Which was quite cool - the day they were installed, I came home from work, walked in the back door, and reached for the light switch, because the room was that much brighter than before.

Had some work done on my car the other day. I drive an '06 Chevy Aveo that has 217,000 miles on it, and still running strong. The heater fan had ceased to work, so I was having that fixed. In the course of just checking the car over, the mechanic found a serious problem in my suspension that he fixed by tightening a few bolts on the control arms, for no extra charge. Then, they found a wire that had been chewed by a critter, causing the AC to go out. I'd been driving the car without AC for two years, figuring that was just how things went with econo-cars that have 200,000+ miles on 'em. But for under $200, I got the AC rendered operative again. And not one moment too soon, with the mercury hitting 90F+ both yesterday and today. . .

God is good.

Forget Me Not

2011-05-29T16:05:00.006-04:00

My friend Xavier posted a hilarious piece a while back about a 'missing' child. In the comments on that post, I told an 'abridged' version of this story. And now I'm re-telling it in the 'full version' for all of you. . . (Somehow it seems sorta 'ironically apropos' for Memorial Weekend) (or is irony inappropriate on such an occasion? I hope I'm not giving any offense; I certainly don't intend any. . .)

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"Can a woman forget her nursing child, or have no compassion on the child of her womb? Even if she may forget, yet I will not forget you." (Isaiah 49:15)

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When 2F was three or four years old, and we had three children, Jen's sister, with her four kids, came to our house for a visit. While they were here, we took the kids to a science museum, one of those 'hands-on' places that are just great for kids. We had a great time, although with three adults and seven kids, the oldest of whom might have been eight, it was, at least for the adults, largely an exercise in crowd control (the old commercial about herding cats comes to mind). Even so, we had a great time; when it was time to go, we collected everybody up, counted noses to make sure we weren't missing anybody, piled into the van, and drove home.

It was not long after we got home that it occurred to Jen that she hadn't seen 2F since we'd gotten home. Jen called for her, but she didn't come running. We spent a few minutes looking for her, but she was nowhere to be found. And none of the other kids had seen her recently, either.

We wracked our brains, trying to figure out what could have happened. We had counted heads at the museum, so we were pretty sure that she'd come home with us, so where could she be? Then 1F (who'd have been six or seven at the time) said that she didn't think that 2F had been in the van.

What? But we had made sure that we counted everybody before we left the museum. But, just to be safe, Jen called the museum, and asked if, possibly, they had a little girl there.

"Well," said the very kind woman on the other end of the phone, "I do have a little girl here. What's the name of the girl you're looking for?" Jen told her that we were missing a three-year-old girl named 2F.

"Well, then, I have wonderful news! We have a three-year-old girl named 2F standing right here!" (It turned out that, after we'd done the head-count in the museum lobby, 2F had decided she needed to go to the bathroom, and left without telling anyone what she was doing. And six kids in a van doesn't look all that different from seven kids in a van.)

The very kind woman asked Jen if she'd like to talk to 2F; Jen said yes, she would absolutely like to talk to her. So the kind woman handed the phone to 2F.

"Mo-o-o-om?"

"Yes, 2F?"

"Did you forget me?"

(*tears and snuffles, from both ends of the phone*)

"Ummmmm. . . yes?"

Fortunately, it was only about a mile from our house to the museum, so she was safely back in our arms in just a few minutes. But it was one of those hilariously heart-breaking things that abound in large families. . .

Quote of the Day

2011-05-18T07:35:00.008-04:00

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.
Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."

-- Simone Weil

Random Thoughts on Mother's Day

2011-05-08T11:58:00.009-04:00

For Mother's Day, a collection of random thoughts, most of which I've posted before, in one form or another. . .

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I have always been in awe of women, for several reasons, probably foremost among them the capacity of their bodies to nurture within themselves a complete, distinct PERSON, and to feed and sustain that person from their own resources after its birth. When I think about that, it seems to me that it touches on the holy. . .

I've also said to Jen 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' theology that speaks of the Holy Spirit as 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 - heck, between Jen and me - can issue forth (and in fact, has) in another person (or, you know, eight of them). Awesome. . .

I also recall, in the aftermath of my reunion with my birth-mother, a growing appreciation of Motherhood, and what it means - that what I'd seen of our kids growing in Jen's belly, and felt of them kicking her from inside herself, was also true of me and this very woman; I had never related to Motherhood in quite such a REAL way before, at least as pertaining to myself. It was a mild disappointment to me, after our reunion, that she had no photos of her pregnant self from 'back in the day'. Completely understandable, of course - she (and her family probably all the moreso) was in no mood to capture the experience for posterity - but it would have given me an odd comfort to see a picture of her bulging belly, knowing that I was inside. . . Anyway, 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 as much as I love Jen for the wonderful, amazing woman that she is, and the love that has grown between us over 30+ years of marriage, it is made all the richer for me to understand what it means that she 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. . .

So, Happy Mother's Day to my Beloved Wife, Jen - the Mother of My Children, and the Love of My Life. . .

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And Happy Mother's Day to all the mothers among my blog-friends - I honor you for your sacrifice, for your love for your own children, and for the (how shall I say it?) intrinsic wonderfulness of your femininity. . .

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A friend sent me this (which is more-or-less a sequel to this), which I'm happy (even eager) to share with you all. . .

Facial Hair

2011-05-01T18:52:00.005-04:00

My old friend Xavier recently put up a post, a tiny little thing, really, urging upon his male readers that they try, at least once in their lives, to grow a beard, calling it "one of the manliest things in the world".

I had to smile at that, because I've worn a beard more-or-less continuously since the end of my sophomore year of college, and therein lies a tale. . . or two or three. . .

I've always been one of those hairier-than average guys. Certainly not the hairiest guy you've ever seen, by any means, but more than average. I've known a few of 'Those Guys' - the ones with nicknames like 'Bear' or 'Ape' - who, when they take their shirts off, you can't quite see their skin; the guys who have to choose a more-or-less arbitrary line where they stop shaving, because their chest hair just flows continuously up onto their chins. That's not me.

But I started shaving when I was twelve (I wrote about it here, once-upon-a-time), and, without getting any cruder than I have to, I was one of the guys who made a mild sensation in the after-gym-class showers in seventh grade. I made my first efforts at growing a mustache when I was 15, and by the time I was 16, my upper lip had disappeared forever, never to be seen again, to this very day.

As I said, I first grew a full beard toward the end of my sophomore year of college. It was 1975; Grizzly Adams was a popular TV show, and Loggins & Messina were at the height of their popularity. I grew my first beard mainly because I was curious what it would look like (and, to be candid, there was certain 'hippie/natural' vibe that I found appealing, as well). It took me about a week-and-a-half to not look just scruffy, and like I really meant to have a beard. And I liked how it looked, so I kept it.

I understand what Xavier is saying about beards being all 'manly' and all - facial hair is one of the most outwardly-visible things that distinguishes us men from women, for sure (I suppose I should say 'most men' and 'most women' but I really don't wanna go there) (at all). But that didn't really loom all that large in my thinking; it's not like I was insecure in my manhood, or trying to prove my manliness. Mainly, I just liked how it looked on me. I have a bit of a 'weak chin', and the beard did a nice job of, um, hiding that fact, aside from projecting a certain 'rugged' image. And besides, I reasoned, if God went to all the trouble of putting hair on my face, I couldn't quite see the logic of going thru all the time/hassle/irritation of cutting it off every day for the rest of my life. . .

After I first grew my beard, I can recall cutting it off twice - once, during my junior year, when I had a job washing dishes in the dorm, and they told me I'd have to wear a mask unless I shaved. So I shaved my chin, leaving behind a 'Gay-90s-style' set of mutton-chops that flowed smoothly into my mustache. When the school year ended, and I didn't have to care about public-kitchen hygeine rules, I grew it right back.

The other time I shaved it off was toward the end of my Master's program, when I was interviewing for jobs; in 1978, the association of facial hair, especially beards, with 'unbusinesslike' was still fairly strong, and I thought it prudent not to unnecessarily provoke any of my more, uh, conservative interviewers (cowardly, yes, but I got a good job). After I'd been on my new job for three months, and was past the 'probationary period', I went to my boss and asked if there would be any objection to me growing a beard. He said it wouldn't bother him at all, and he didn't think it would a problem for any of his bosses, so I grew it back, and I've had it ever since. Within six months, half-a-dozen other engineers in our office sprouted beards; probably the only time in my life that I've ever been any kind of fashion trend-setter. . .

I've had women ask me, "What does your wife think of that. . . that thing?" apparently imagining to themselves (and in pretty unfavorable terms) what it might be like to kiss a man with hair on his face. But I have to tell you, she loves it (even if she does occasionally have to pick a stray beard hair out of her teeth). Given the time-line of when we first met, and when I had a hairy chin or not, Jen has certainly seen me without my beard. But it was all before we were married, or even dating, so she doesn't have many major associative mental images of me without my beard. One time, after we'd been married maybe five years or so, she happened to pick up my high-school yearbook, and of course, she flipped right to the page with my picture on it. Instantly, she gasped, then turned to me and said, "DON'T YOU EVER SHAVE!"

Uh, well, gosh, Sweetheart, I wasn't planning to. But, uh, you know, that's still me in the photo. . .

I have five sons, and three of them are grown enough to shave; and between the three of them, they can barely push out five hairs on their faces and chests, combined (Jen comes from a, uh, smoother gene pool than I do; although the 'smooth' genes do seem to have a certain tenacity). Which doesn't keep them from trying, to occasionally humorous effect. But whatcha gonna do? Anyway, 7M is a newly-minted teenager, and he's showing some promising signs of hirsute-ness (hirsutitude?), so maybe there's hope yet. . .

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On a (possibly) related note - my kids got me this T-shirt as a Christmas gift a couple years ago. . .

I like it. . .

Good Friday. . . And Resurrection

2011-04-22T09:00:00.035-04:00

But He was wounded for our transgressions;

He was bruised for our iniquities

Upon Him was the chastisement that made us whole,

And with His stripes we are healed.

(The Book of Isaiah, Chapter 53, verse 5)

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(edit Easter Sunday morning, April 24)

The rest of the story -

"Death is swallowed up in victory."
"Where, O death, is your victory?
O death, where is you sting?" (I Corinthians 15:54-55)

". . . he who raised the Lord Jesus will raise us also with Jesus
and bring us with you into His presence." (II Corinthians 4:14)

I wish a very happy and blessed Easter - the Feast of the Resurrection - to all my friends.

(Here is last year's Easter post, if anyone is interested;
and here are three more, from my old blog.)

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(The photo is one I took myself at Cross In the Woods, up north at Indian River, MI. The cool 'cloud/halo effect' is completely serendipitous, as the sun, which was very bright against a richly blue sky that day, was just outside the frame of the photo. In my efforts to get a good angle on the crucifix (I wanted Jesus to be more-or-less 'looking down at' the viewer), while keeping the sun out of the picture, I got a reflection inside the camera, and the effect was simply golden. . .)

If I Had a Hammer

2011-04-14T06:33:00.016-04:00

I was sorting through some old family photos recently, and I came across one that has a funny story attached to it. A story which I told once, way back when, in my old blog. And so I thought you all might get some enjoyment from me re-posting the story, and this time with the photo attached. . .

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When he was little, our son 4M (now 20) was fascinated by 'working man stuff' - tools and machinery and suchlike. One summer, the city re-worked our sewers, which meant that the street was torn up all summer, and a whole menagerie of heavy equipment passed in front of our porch the whole time. 4M was in juvenile testosterone heaven.

Hammers, in particular, held a kind of 'Jungian archetypal' fascination for him. A hammer was like a symbol of power for him - "I hammer, therefore I am". Jen bought him a little tack-hammer, and he carried that hammer around with him like it was the Mighty Hammer of Thor.

Of course, this also took us into the realms of parental nonsense - "I gave you this hammer, but don't hammer anything." I eventually gave him a 2-foot chunk of scrap two-by-four and a little box of nails, so he could hammer away to his little heart's content.

One time I was working on some minor maintenance project, which required the use of my hammer. I brought 4M along with me, thinking that I could give him a few small hammering jobs where he could actually be helpful, and he was. But he also noticed that Dad's hammer was bigger than his, which made perfect sense in his three-year-old cosmology - Dad was bigger and more powerful than he was, so it only stood to reason that Dad would have a bigger hammer. And it was hard to miss the vaguely (or maybe not-so-vaguely) ~~phallic~~ uh, Freudian aspect of it.

That year for Christmas, we went to my parents' house for the holidays. One day while we were there, the wheels got to turning in 4M's head - if Grandpa is Dad's dad, then. . . He went to my dad and asked, "Grandpa, how big is your hammer?" My dad didn't understand the question, and asked him to repeat it.

"How big is your hammer, Grandpa?"

My dad gave a little chuckle, got up from where he was sitting, and went down into the basement, calling "I'll be right back" over his shoulder as he went. A minute later, he returned, carrying a 12-pound sledge-hammer.

4M's eyes bulged out of their sockets. "Oh, Grandpa - you've got a BIIIIIG hammer!"

"That's right," my dad told him. "And don't you forget it!" While we all rolled on the floor. . .

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And please join me in wishing a very Happy 13th Birthday to 7M, thus restoring our family to its traditional allotment of three teenagers. . .

Some of My Favorite Recordings

2011-04-05T07:32:00.015-04:00

A while ago, my friend Suldog posted a pair of lists of 15 Recordings (analogous to the book lists that were going around a year or two ago), both his own and his swell pal Cricket's. Worthy lists, both of 'em, and of course, it got me to thinking what a similar list of my own might look like (I did post this, once-upon-a-time, but that was single songs, rather than complete albums). I left a long comment at Suldog's, but it probably should've been a post in its own right, and so I'm here to set that particular little wrinkle in the space-time continuum to right (and because I'm just lazy enough to copy my own comments on someone else's post into a post of my own, knowing that some of you never go to Suldog's, and would never know the difference).

I'm sure that my music collection is nowhere near as large or as varied as either Suldog's or Cricket's. Both of them complained of the rigors of trimming their list down to only 15 entries. I would have the opposite problem - putting together a list as LONG as 15 that isn't just 'Everything the Beatles Ever Did' (and that doesn't get you to 15 by itself, anyway). But then, I'm the guy whose list of 15 Books expanded to include a few dozen, distributed over three posts; counting (or maybe just social co-operativeness) has never ranked high on my list (HAH! 'list' - get it?)

So I'll do what I always do, and just give a kind of impressionistic hodge-podge of some of my favorite stuff (however many of them there may be), and see how it slides down the wall. . . (in no particular order)

Abbey Road is, of course, a given. As Cricket mentioned, there is a worthy discussion to be had as to the relative merits of Abbey Road, Sgt. Pepper and Revolver (and there are those who would include the White Album in that discussion; but seriously - "Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine. . ."?; there are a few wasted track there. . .) But AR is the greatest band of all time at the pinnacle of their craft.

Band On the Run; is it OK for me to put a McCartney album on the same list as The Beatles? Honestly, though, I think this is a great album - not a single weak track on it. (I'd like to give a mention to Sir Paul's Ram, as well; I think it's a much better album than it generally gets credit for. . .)

Best of Dark Horse, George Harrison; are you picking up a trend here? I'd generally resist including a 'best-of' compilation in a list like this, but I found this one in a used-CD shop, and just found it irresistible. And, since I had basically stopped listening to George after Living In the Material World, this came to me as utterly fresh (and it was good to know that he actually had some good stuff left after 1975. . .)

I also love John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band; it's so simple and raw (though I don't particularly endorse his theology, here or on Imagine).

OK, I won't try your patience with any more Beatle or ex-Beatle stuff (unless you need me to mention Ringo, just for the sake of ex-Beatle completeness; which was a nice album, don't get me wrong. . .) (And I haven't even mentioned any of the live albums, like McCartney's Tripping the Live Fantastic, or the Concert for George. . .)

A few of my favorites of what might be called 'classic rock' (at least those are the stations that would play 'em anymore. . .)

Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, Simon & Garfunkel; 'The Poet and the One-Man Band'. Love their urban-folky style, and Artie's sublime voice and harmonies. I might rather include one or another of their many 'greatest hits' collections, but for just one original album, this is probably my favorite. . .

Cosmo's Factory, Creedence Clearwater Revival; Creedence is just plain fun (which, come to think of it, is also why I fell in love with the Beatles in the beginning). And what I said about S&G is true here, as well; I could probably just include a 'greatest hits', but this is my favorite of their original albums. . .

Tommy, The Who; the original rock opera. I can't tell you how many hours I spent in my teens, listening to this record. "I climb the mountain, I get excited. . ." Classic rock at its finest. . .

Brain Salad Surgery, Emerson, Lake and Palmer; I love ELP's rock/classical synthesis, and Keith Emerson's keyboard virtuosity most especially (in my college days, I was more of a piano/keyboard player). A story - one day, when I was in grad school, I was in an electronics lab, and they had us doing stuff with a frequency generator. When the lab was over, I had a little extra time to fiddle around with the equipment, and I saw a pair of headphones in the equipment box, so I plugged 'em into the freq-generator, just to see what the different-shaped waves sounded like. They were mostly pretty unremarkable, until I got to the square wave, which had a unique, buzzy sound that I could swear I'd heard before. Suddenly, it hit me - 'Lucky Man'! Emerson's keyboard solo in 'Lucky Man' was a square wave! So I spent the next 20 minutes twiddling the dials on the freq-generator, trying to play the 'Lucky Man' solo. Man, I was such a wild man in college. . .

Aqualung, Jethro Tull; you might think I include this purely for the lyric, "Snot is running down his nose. . ." and I admit, that's a powerful attraction, but mainly, I love Ian Anderson's rocked-out take on the Bach Bouree. . .

I love fingerstyle acoustic guitar music; three of my favorites -

LJ, Laurence Juber
Only, Tommy Emmanuel
Beyond Nature, Phil Keaggy

Each of these guys is simply a wizard on six strings (and having seen each of them in concert, I can testify that most of the stuff that sounds like three guys are playing, is being played by one guy, all by himself, at the same time. . .)

And some smooth jazz -

One on One, Bob James and Earl Klugh; a shout-out to Jim and Dick, a pair of college buddies of mine, who put me onto smooth jazz, and Earl Klugh most especially. His Late Night Guitar, Naked Guitar, or Solo Guitar could also be included on this list.

Since I keep mentioning my favorite rock/classical syntheses, maybe I should mention my favorite classical pieces. Which would start with Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp Minor (his Prelude in G Minor is also a favorite of mine), and continue with Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (which is actually called Sonata Quasi Una Fantasia, or something like that). Neither of those are album-length pieces, though (I do have a recording of Beethoven's three great piano sonatas - the Moonlight, the Pathetique, and the Apassionata; so you can count that if you really require only full-album recordings). Anyway, as you can see, I like my classical music on the dark and brooding side . .

So - what do you think?

Tragedy and Grace

2011-03-27T15:36:00.009-04:00

Last Wednesday, 6F got a text message on her phone from one of her Facebook friends in a town an hour away, explaining that he wouldn't be able to see her at an upcoming youth retreat, since his brother had died that morning.

What?!?

I knew this young man, and his older brother; their whole family, in fact. His sister had married the son of one of our neighbors. All of the kids had been to the summer camp that I've volunteered at the past 20 years. He was dead? How could that be? He was only barely out of high school. . .

6F texted back, asking what had happened, and the friend said something about his wife having a bad day. I did a quick on-line search of the newspaper from the town where they lived, and the lead article was about a young wife shooting her husband to death (no names were given) after an argument. Please, God, no. . .

But it was true. The young man, who I hadn't known all that well, but as I said above, I had lots of contact with his family over the years, had been shot to death by his wife after an argument. He was 20 years old; Saturday, the day of his funeral, would have been his 21st birthday. . .

Utterly, utterly tragic. . .

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1F and I went to the funeral on Saturday. The young man came from a large family, and an even larger extended family. They are members of a Christian community related to the one Jen and I belong to, about an hour away from us. The church was packed. As I looked around the room, I was surprised by how many of the people there I knew - had served with at the summer camp, or had met in one context or another over the years. We sat with the parents of 1F's daughter.

A group of musicians played quietly at the front of the church. The church grew quiet, and the young man's father stood up. He thanked us all for coming, saying that he was honored that so many of us had come to support the family and celebrate the life of their son. He made a few brief comments about his son, relating to his recent military service in the Middle East, and how he'd recently seen some positive changes in his son's life.

Then he paused for a second, and continued with one of the most inspiring things I've ever heard. "Please pray for [our son's] wife. She will be facing some hard things in her life, dealing with the consequences of her actions. She is very much in need of God's mercy, as we all are. So please pray for her."

And then he sat down, and the funeral Mass proceeded.

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I don't know if I could be that gracious to my son's killer, much less three days after his death. I am still not so kindly disposed to 1F's baby-daddy, even five years later, seeing all the blessings that have flowed from it. So this young man's father, with whom I have been acquainted for many years, though I can't say that I've known him well, is my newest hero. . .

And may God have mercy on all of us who stand in need of it. . .

A Lenten Miscellany

2011-03-20T20:45:00.015-04:00

OK, by way of setting the scene for the story I'm about to tell, I need to tell you that, in our community, we have a small 'brotherhood' of celibate men, who function as a kind of 'monastic order'. Their 'unencumbered-ness' frees them to do all kinds of, um, radical service that those of us of a more married persuasion could simply never hope to do. They are, pretty much without exception, great guys, and a great blessing to the life of our community (Jen wants all of our sons to at least spend some time living with the 'brotherhood'; even if they never embrace the brotherhood life as their own, she thinks it will make them better husbands; always thinking ahead, my wife).

Now, 2F, with her Child Development training, is much intrigued by the Myers-Briggs personality index (and heck, who isn't?) (although I get a little impatient with some of the M-B 'true believers' who want to put people into little 'boxes'; but I digress), with its 'four dichotomies' of Introvert/Extrovert, Sensing/iNtuitive, Thinking/Feeling, and Judging/Perceiving. She has identified herself as ENFP (I'm INTP, for what it's worth; I think Jen is ESTJ, which is pretty close to my polar opposite; which might explain why we form such a good team - between the two of us, we've got pretty much all the bases covered).

2F has a friend - a young man, who is in the early stages of investigating a commitment to the 'brotherhood' I mentioned above (and thus, he is absolutely a friend and a brother to her; not, at least at this point, a potential suitor). The two of them share an interest in Myers-Briggs, as well as being of the same type - ENFP. The two of them were talking recently, and the young man mentioned that, as he spent more time around the 'brotherhood' guys, he perceived a subtle shift in his personality, to more of an ENFJ type.

"Oh," said 2F, "I would mourn the loss of your P-ness."

(*awkward silence*)

(*really REALLY awkward silence*)

"Good grief," he finally replied, as 2F turned 29 shades of mortified red, "I'm only talking about a subtle shift in my personality; I'm not surrendering my manhood. . ."

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And now for something completely different (and aren't you glad it is?). . .

In our house, we have three toilets (OK, are you still sure you're happy about the change of topic?). Two of them are of the newer, government-mandated low-volume type (and the third is in the farthest corner of the basement, so it's not real convenient of access; especially if the, uh, need is particularly urgent) (and honestly? What the heck is the government's 'compelling interest' in the size of my toilet tank? I've given some (not at all serious) thought to starting a smuggling business running black-market toilets from Canada; but I digress. . .).

Of the two 'low-volume' cans we have in our house, one is a newer design that is actually pretty effective at accomplishing its task. The other one, however. . . not so much. In that bathroom, a second flush is not at all unusual, and the plunger, which is kept ready right next to the tank, is a well-used item.

Recently, that toilet had a particularly, um, stubborn clog. One which didn't readily respond to the application of the plunger. Time and time again, I plunged away at the bottom of the bowl, and the water line didn't budge. So I plunged more vigorously, which did lower the line a little bit, but that was because I was plunging so aggressively that the water was splashing onto the floor (and I was in my sock-feet; which just made the whole experience that much more, uh, 'special').

I got Jen to call around to see if anyone we knew had a plumbing 'snake' we could borrow, because this clog was simply not gonna budge. Finally, when she was on her third or fourth phone call, I heard the telltale gurgle, followed by the 'swoosh' of the water draining out of the bowl. Hallelujah. I went to wash my hands, and I saw this result of my very dedicated and vigorous plunging:

And I wondered if I should show it to my priest, in case my cause for sainthood ever comes up. The Wounds of Christ, and all that. . . (Or, you know, maybe I'm just showing you, on my handy pocket map of Michigan, where I live. . .)

And then I thought of some of the, uh, 'colorful' words I had uttered in the course of acquiring said wounds. And I thought about the investigator from the Vatican (whatever it is that they call him) going over the paperwork, wondering to himself, 'he got the Wounds of Christ from plunging a toilet?' . . .

So yeah, OK. . . probably not. . .

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This bit should probably be a separate post, but I'm kinda lazy that way. . .

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Jen and I spent four days last week in Detroit, on a kind of mini-mission-trip, right here in our home state. It is certainly no secret that Detroit has been in a bad way for the past 50 years and more. I am just old enough to remember when Detroit was a vibrant, bustling city (our family lived in the Detroit suburbs for all but one of my first seven years), but even by the 60s, the downhill trend was getting noticeable (especially after the riot in '67), and by the 70s, the bottom had fallen out.

Part of our time there included a tour of the city, along with a historical account of how things got to where they are now. I won't bore you with the details, but I will say that one of our tour guides said (very insightfully I thought) that it essentially boiled down to a loss of natural human community - people became disconnected from their neighbors - and what you see is basically what you get when people stop giving a shit.

I think a detailed account of what-all we did would get pretty tedious. I'll mention that we spent the largest part of our time doing cleaning and painting on a couple houses in the process of being restored. But the things that will stick in my mind are mostly an impressionistic hodge-podge of seemingly random, disconnected vignettes. In no particular order. . .

- When we arrived, before we even knew where we'd be sleeping, or unloaded our bags from the car, we were taken to work with a gutsy little nun, who takes sack lunches to homeless folks ("put lots of peanut butter on the sandwiches," she told us; "this is probably the only meal most of these folks will have today."). She'd just drive up to a vacant lot, or abandoned house, and honk the horn on her minivan, and half-a-dozen folks would appear, almost eerily, out of the shadows. They would invariably smile and be happy to see Sister, and greet her 'helpers' (ie, us) cheerily. Some would ask us to pray for them for some need or other; many inquired after Sister's well-being, which made me smile - they were the homeless ones, after all. One time, we drove up to a vacant block - all the houses on the block had been torn down - with only a pile of junk in the middle of the block; sister tooted her horn, and three people appeared out of the pile of junk.

- We visited a bakery which functions as a kind-of 'bridge' for ex-cons to make their way into 'regular life' - keeping a schedule, showing up on time for work, being responsible, stuff like that - usually for the first time in their life. We met a man who had spent a few years in prison, who told us a harrowing story of miraculous survival of taking multiple point-blank gunshots which, in the fullness of time, led him to the conviction that what he'd been doing wasn't working, and maybe he ought to get to know the Author of his miracle a little better. He also made some really excellent oatmeal-raisin cookies.

- We met an energetic, visionary young pastor who, if there were twenty others like him, might yet revive Detroit in my lifetime.

- We saw one of the 'best' neighborhoods in the city - maybe three blocks by eight blocks of homes which, were they not in Detroit, would be worth well over a million dollars. And we drove along the street which separated that neighborhood from the vacant lots and burned-out houses on the next block. And all the 'nice' houses had eight-foot privacy fences at the back edge of their yards, so they wouldn't have to look at (or think about?) the poverty next door. . .

- The site of old Tiger Stadium was just a half-mile or so up the street from where we spent quite a bit of our time, so we passed by it a few times (if you knew what you were looking for, it flashed by in the Eminem Chrysler commercial that aired during the Super Bowl). The stadium is completely gone now; all that remains is a section of ornate fencing along what used to be the first-base line, and the center-field flagpole. It was just incredibly sad to me that the stadium where Ty Cobb and Hank Greenberg and Al Kaline played, where Sparky Anderson managed, and Ernie Harwell broadcast their games, where the Tigers played in nine World Series, and won four, is just another dirt-covered vacant block in Detroit now; yet another instance of nobody giving enough of a shit to do anything more. . .

- We also spent a bit of time on our tour at the old Michigan Central train station. In its day, it was one of the most beautiful train stations in the country. When it closed 23 years ago, it took six months for it to be reduced to a massive standing testimony of urban blight. First the outlaw scrappers came in and pulled all the copper and iron pipes out of the building, as well as the marble. The vandals followed, breaking all the windows (it just seemed gratuitous that all the windows were broken, all the way up to the 20th floor) and covering the interior with grafitti. Then the homeless squatters moved in, and burned out what was left of the interior (it's hard for me to blame them much; mainly, they were just trying to keep warm in the winter, burning whatever they could find at hand). So now you've got a huge burned-out hulk with 20 stories of broken windows, visible from pretty much anywhere in the city. Terribly, terribly sad. . .

- We walked through the Heidelberg Project, a famous bit of delightfully bizarre 'trash art' encompassing a full city block. . .

- We spent half a day working at the Capuchin soup kitchen founded by Fr. Solanus Casey, including attending an AA meeting with some of the most brutally-honest people I have ever encountered. . .

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Now the thing for Jen and me is to figure out what to do with this experience. If all we do is fly in for four days of do-gooding, then fly back out, and that's the extent of it, that would strike me as really lame, and a massive missing of the point. Something more seems to be called out from us, some deeper degree of human solidarity. The folks we worked with became, in whatever limited degree, our friends, and friendships (at least mine) are not meant for four-days-and-out. We need to figure out some way to be 'with' our friends in Detroit, in some kind of ongoing way. And as I sit here, I really don't know quite what form that will end up taking; but I'm pretty sure it won't be nothing at all. . .

(As a postscript, I'll mention that our program was run by Youthworks Detroit. If any of you are just itching for an opportunity to do some mission-type work in Detroit, or even just want to make a contribution to their work, give 'em a look; I'm sure they'd love to hear from you. . .)

Dueling Selfishness

2011-03-10T07:37:00.006-05:00

This is another re-post, from four-and-a-half years ago. But it seems decently apropos as we head into Lent. . .

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I've been blogging here for [almost five years now, off and on], and I've told you several great stories from Jen's and my lives. In the course of [30+] years of marriage together, we've really come a long way, and I've enjoyed sharing with you all some of what we've learned over the years.

But we're not this wonderfully saintly couple living in a faint glow of unearthly light. We can be as petty and selfish as anybody else; probably the biggest thing we've learned over the years is how to repent and apologize sooner than we used to.

(I'm going to wander off on a parenthetical tangent for a moment here. I used to work for a company that forbade us to utter the word 'problem'; there were no 'problems', went the cliche, only 'opportunities', or at worst, 'challenges'. So our inside joke was, "Houston, we've got an opportunity. . .")

From the beginning years of our marriage, our most persistent, uh, 'challenge' has been what I call 'Dueling Selfishness', or, as Jen puts it, 'My Needs; No, My Needs'. For various reasons, I think we both grew up being fairly accustomed to getting our own way. Which meant that we were ripe for some real choice ego-clashes when we were married: "Of course, you can easily see that I need thus-and-such, so you should just step aside and let me have my way." "But, it's even more obvious that you should defer to my needs, isn't it?" And so it went.

Over time, we got tired of the endless circle of 'My needs; no, my needs', and started learning to deal constructively with the situation. Sometimes, it meant one or the other of us had to defer to the other; sometimes it meant finding an agreeable compromise. But the most fundamental change was to our attitudes.

The biblical epistle to the Romans tells us that we should strive to "Outdo one another in showing honor," and that was a real straightforward challenge to us. We had been outdoing one another in asserting our will, and here the apostle was urging us to outdo one another in looking after each other's good, rather than our own. And what a fundamental transformation that brought. Rather than trying to manipulate Jen so that I got what I wanted, I needed to simply look after her good; and likewise, she needed to look after mine before her own. And the result was that both our needs got met, without all the bickering and anxiety.

Of course, this entails a pretty significant 'leap of faith' - that, if I give up worrying about my own needs being met so as to look after Jen's, my needs will indeed be covered. And likewise for her. I honestly don't remember if one of us 'went first', hoping the other would 'catch on', or if it was something we worked out together, but in the fullness of time, the magic worked.

Someone has said that marriage is not a 50/50 proposition, it's a 100/100 proposition. That is, it's not about me giving half and Jen giving half; it's about both of us giving all we have - my life for hers, her life for mine. And it's not about 'keeping score' of who's putting in more or less than the other. We both just 'go all-in'.

And of course, we've learned this perfectly, and our marriage is a smoothly-running machine, all the time. . .

Well. . . no - not really.

. . .

The thing is, the 100/100 marriage takes a LOT of trust between spouses, and when trust is damaged, it isn't instantly built back up [human beings being what we are]. The hurtful stuff doesn't just dissolve when the apology is made and accepted; it leaves psychic wounds behind that take some time to heal. But we're building some 'good history' with each other, and establishing a firm base of trust which we can stand on, even when some peripheral chunk of trust is damaged. Because we've got many years' worth of experience now that the other is looking out for our good, it's easier to treat specific instances of selfishness as aberrations.

So it's worth me telling you that we aren't this perfect couple with a perfect marriage - I'm as selfish as anyone else, and I can be as petty and pissy as anyone else. But, by God's grace, we've learned how to be married in some good and life-giving ways.

And may God have mercy. . .

Living In the Mitten

2011-03-03T07:02:00.006-05:00

I have lived in Michigan virtually my whole life. I really like it here, even with the bad economy (which, it must be said, hasn't always been the case). Up North, where I mainly grew up, it is really quite beautiful, with abundant beautiful lakeshore scenery (and the corresponding beautiful beaches), and wooded wilderness. Northern Michigan has one National Park - Isle Royale, in the middle of Lake Superior (it's actually considerably closer to Canada than to any land in the US) - and two National Lakeshores (which, apparently, don't quite rise to the level of being National Parks) - the Pictured Rocks, along the Lake Superior shore, and Sleeping Bear Dunes, in the northwest Lower Peninsula, on Lake Michigan.

In actual fact, Michigan can be roughly divided into three parts: the southern half of the Lower Peninsula, which is the most urban/industrial part of the state, but also the most agricultural (over 90% of Michigan's population lives in the southern Lower Peninsula, and nearly half in the three counties around Detroit); the northern half of the Lower Peninsula, which is mostly wooded, and has a heavily tourist economy, especially along the lakeshore (a hundred years and more ago, it was a lumber-based economy, but not anymore); and the Upper Peninsula (UP), which is even wilder and more sparsely-populated than the northern LP. Once upon a time, the UP economy was built on copper and iron mining, and lumber; there's still some mining going on, but the economy is way more tourist-based than it used to be.

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We Michiganders (or Michiganians; we haven't really decided which), at least us denizens of the Lower Peninsula (the Yoopers call us 'trolls', 'cuz we live 'below the bridge' - ie, the Mackinac Bridge, which spans the strait between the two peninsulas; get it?), have an odd habit. Because of our state's unique geographic shape, we've taken to using the back of our left hand (or, conversely, the palm of our right; just so long as the thumb is to the 'east') as a handy (nyuk!) pocket-map of our state. Detroit, for example, is roughly at the base of the thumb; Mackinaw City is the tip of the middle finger; Traverse City is the little notch between the tip of the pinky-finger, and the ring-finger; Lansing is roughly in the middle; and so on. Jen's hometown is roughly the first knuckle of the thumb, and mine is the first knuckle of the index finger.

(Lest my Yooper friends feel all slighted, I should add that it is also possible to do a half-decent map of the UP with the palm of the left hand, if you fold the pinky finger over, and turn your hand sideways, so your fingers run 'east/west'. Then the Keweenaw Peninsula is the thumb, Marquette is roughly the base of the index finger, Whitefish Point is the tip of the index finger, Sault Ste. Marie is near the tip of the middle finger, and St. Ignace is near the tip of the ring finger.)

All of which, as far as I can tell, is just completely bizarre to residents of other states. When my family moved to the Chicago area two months before my high-school graduation, my fellow-students at my temporary new school were eager to learn about the 'new kids'. "Where are you from?" they'd ask.

"Michigan," we'd tell 'em.

"Where in Michigan?"

And we'd hold up our left hands, palm facing away from us, and we'd point to the first knuckle of our index finger. "Right there," we'd tell 'em. And they'd look at us like we'd just said we were from Uranus. "What the hell are you doing?" was not at all an uncommon response.

And so we'd tell 'em that, you know, Michigan is shaped like a mitten, and so it's handy (nyuk!), and kinda cool, to use our hand as a map. And they'd nod, and say, "Oh; yeah, I guess it is." And then they'd say, "that's really weird; don't do that anymore."

Well, you know, excuuuuuse me. . .

-------------------------

So, last summer, when I came across this T-shirt, I just had to have it. . .

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And Happy Birthday to me! (and to Suldog, yesterday)

Sweet 55 and never been kissed (OK, that last part isn't really true. . .)

Really??

2011-02-24T12:39:00.010-05:00

Well, it seems that Uncle Skip has given me an award, for being a 'Versatile Blogger', or somesuch as that.

Well, gosh-all-fishhooks. Thank you, Skip! I am truly honored. And flattered. And whatever-elsed one is supposed to be when one is given an award by a fellow-blogger.

In pronouncing me worthy of the august award (that's small-'a' 'august'; I know it's February), Skip (who just became my favorite uncle) said:

". . . because he used to be Desmond and he's a Michigander and I have an affinity for them. . . mostly because two of my brothers-in-law are Michiganders."

OK, it's true - I did used-to be Desmond, complete with wife Molly and all those kids running in the yard (get it?) But - being a Michgander makes me 'versatile'? I mean, a guy can only live in one state at a time, am I right? But hey, if living in Michigan has taught me anything, it's that, when someone wants to give you something, you accept it. And gratefully! (But hey, while I'm thinking of it, kudos to Skip's sisters for marrying classy guys) (or are we talkin' about his wife's brothers? I'm so confused!)

(OK, when I pressed him on it, he mentioned something about the Ernie Harwell piece I posted last spring; and Ernie Harwell is one of the very best people ever to be associated with this Great State, so if Skip wants to link me up with Ernie Harwell, I'm triply honored; and flattered; and, you know, whatever-elsed.)

-------------------------

OK, so the 'Terms and Conditions' of the award are as follows, per my new favoritest uncle:

- Curse Suldog and whoever sent it to him, under your breath (this rule is optional but may be repeated as often as desired) (for those of you who don't know Suldog, he routinely ~~curses~~ roasts those who give him bloggity awards; and so, Uncle Skip detects the faintest hint of, um, irony in the fact that Suldog sent the award to him) (and, while I'm thinking of it: those of you who don't know Suldog - why the heck not? Hie your fanny over to his place posthaste, and make his acquaintance at your earliest opportunity!) (and, while I'm thinking of it: curse you, Suldog!) (check mark for one optional requirement fulfilled)

- Thank me (ie, Uncle Skip) and link back to this post (thanking me is optional) (See above re the 'thanking' part; you know I'm all about the optional requirements) (and, Oh, look! the link is done, too!)

- Tell us a little about yourself (make stuff up) (*sigh*; see below)

- Impose on six others to do the same thing to somebody else (heck, these days, I don't think I've even got six readers of this li'l ol' blog; how 'bout I take the cop-out route and say, if you really want to do this, feel free; just remember to mention my name)

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So, OK - About Me (and those of you who know me, know how much I LOVE to talk about myself like this). . .

- I've been married to my wife Jen for just over 30 years.

- I love her, madly and passionately.

- We have eight children (which might possibly have something to do with the aforementioned).

- My favorite sports teams are the Detroit Tigers (hence the business over Ernie Harwell which seems to have gotten me into my present predicament), and anything from my Alma Mater, Michigan State University.

- I was at MSU at the same time as Magic Johnson (and I have always thought that the local sportswriter who initially gifted young Earvin with the nickname 'Magic', gave him one of the great pickup lines of all time - "Wanna find out why they call me 'Magic Johnson'?") (and, just for the sake of sayin' so - if you've read his autobiography, he seems to have taken it to heart; or, you know, whatever)

- I was adopted, and have met both my birth-parents (one of whom shares a state with Uncle Skip).

- I have a patent to my name. And possibly, a mathematical formula.

- And I won a prize at a chili cook-off, once.

- But I've never won an Oscar. Or a Nobel Prize.

- I have never been to Antarctica. Much as I would love to.

- Nor have I ever been to Mars. Much as I would love to (well, OK, that's not quite true - I've been to Mars, IL; but not, you know, the planet Mars)

- I have been to California, though. . .

- And OK, I'm curious (but NOT yellow) - if Skip is 'Uncle', how come his wife is 'Grandma'?

Well, that's about all the self-revelation I've got in me, for the time being (unless you want to go back here; but that was five years ago). If you want to know more, I guess you'll just have to come back around. Not that there's anything wrong with that. . .

He Got Wore Out. . .

2011-02-13T15:42:00.005-05:00

My friend Bijoux (the blogger formerly known as Cocotte) was recently talking about her high school honors English class, and it reminded me of a story from my own high school days. . .

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One of my high school classmates, and a good friend besides, was a guy named Jon. Jon was bright and ambitious, and, since both of us were honor-student-types, we tended to have a lot of our classes together. Jon aspired to a certain type of suave sophistication (which wasn't always the most natural thing in the world, growing up as we did in the middle of the North Woods; and occasionally, his sophisticated aspirations came across as, how-shall-I-say. . . pompous; but a kid can dream). Rather than football, basketball and baseball, which were my favorite sports, Jon was on the swimming, tennis and golf teams (which might or might not give you a better picture of my friend Jon, but there it is).

Jon and I often ended up being engaged in a kind of friendly competitiveness - I tended to do better academically than he did, but he was more punctilious than I was about not allowing himself to get B's in classes he wasn't so interested in, so he actually graduated higher than I did. And, as I noted above, he was more, uh, 'socially motivated' than I was - more concerned about how his hair was cut, what kind of clothes he wore, how good-looking his girlfriend was, and stuff like that. Not that I was exactly UNconcerned about any of those things (altho, to be perfectly candid, my 'concern', such as it was, manifested itself more at the level of 'Gee, I wish I had a girlfriend'), but suffice it to say that I didn't assign them the priority that Jon did.

We met each other in about fifth or sixth grade, I think, and quickly became friends; our friendship was solid all the way through high school, although we haven't kept in real close touch since then.

-------------------------

Jon and I were in the same Honors English class pretty much all the way through high school. Our junior year, I think, we read, as virtually all high school students seem to, The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. Every day, our teacher would assign various students to read parts in class that day, and we just read our way through it in class like that, over the course of a couple weeks.

One of the days, Jon was assigned to read one of the parts; I don't recall the name of his character, but he was one of the men of Salem who was most earnest to see the young witches brought to a justly deserved end. One of Jon's lines was simply to shout, accusingly, "Whore! Whore!" at one of the accused women (I'm sure my more literarily-inclined readers will be able to cite Act and Scene, the name of the speaker, and the 'witch' to whom it was directed; to which I say, Good for You; c'mon over here, and I'll paste a Gold Star on your forehead). With his flair for the dramatic, and his sense of literary sophistication, Jon straightened his back, sat upright, and fairly yelled, according to character,

"WORE! WORE!"

The class sat in stunned silence - did we hear that right? Did he really say 'wore'?

I knew instantly what had happened. Jon certainly knew the word, 'whore', but it was one of those that he'd often heard, but rarely seen in print (looking back, it seems almost touchingly quaint; but hey, we were WAY up in the North Woods, and printed sightings of the word 'whore' were not easy to come by). So when he saw it in print, he didn't recognize it. And he just 'sounded it out' according to 'standard rules of pronunciation' as best he could.

But to the class-as-a-whole, it looked for all the world that Jon - clever, bright, suave, sophisticated, occasionally-pompous honor-student Jon - didn't know the word 'whore'. The silence held for a second or two, then gales of uproarious laughter cascaded forth. Of course, it wasn't just the mistake; it was the hilarious irony that Jon was the one who made it.

The teacher was merciful, and silenced the laughter more quickly than he'd have had to. Jon, who still had no idea what was going on, just sat at his desk looking utterly bewildered.

Our teacher was a bit of an effete sort, and he just leaned against the wall, gazing at Jon with a bemused expression. Finally, he spoke. "I believe," he explained, "that that word is pronounced 'HORE'."

Instantly, Jon's face went beet red. The class resumed its laughter, as Jon became embarrassingly aware of his error (and of course, almost no-one else would have been quite as embarrassed as Jon was, which just amplified the effect), and the joke of which he'd unwittingly made himself the butt. As the laughter began to die down, Jon stood up at his seat, clenched his fists and fairly shrieked,

"WHOOORRRE!!!!"

at the top of his lungs. And after that, we could all get back to the business of reading The Crucible. . .

-------------------------

Both yesterday and today have been beautifully warm and sunny days, with temperatures pushing 50F. We can even see the pavement on our street, which has been snow-covered for over a month by now. This morning, it was even above freezing as we walked to church. I took my warm hat with me, not least because Jen and I have been trading sicknesses for the past month, and I didn't want to needlessly set my recovery back. But even 32F felt warm enough that I soon removed my hat, the better to enjoy the unseasonable warmth and sunshine.

I suppose it's one of the benefits of living in Michigan that, by mid-February, even 32 degrees feels like summer. . .

Now, Harvey. . .

2011-01-30T18:52:00.002-05:00

In the course of 30-plus years of my engineering career (which, perhaps surprisingly, has yielded a funny story or two over the years), only once have I ever interviewed a candidate for employment, when I was at my previous employer.

A young hotshot named Andy, fresh out of college, was applying for a job with us. I'm not really sure why they asked me to interview him; I wasn't in any kind of supervisory position. It was probably because the job he was applying for had something to do with computers (although not really with anything I was doing at the time), and in those days, computers were still mostly mysterious to boss-types, and they wanted someone to talk with him who understood what he'd be talking about. We talked for twenty minutes or so, and my main impression of Andy was that he was more than a little, uh, cocky. Arrogant, even. He was certainly not lacking in self-confidence.

At the end of the day, I told the guys who'd be deciding whether to make him an offer that, if he was even half as good as he thought he was, he could be a decent hire. And they did hire him (how much of that had to do with my recommendation is doubtful).

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Over the ensuing few years, Andy and I bumped into each other with some regularity. And I came to see that my initial hints of his exaggerated sense of his own importance were not, alas, mistaken. Again and again, Andy showed himself to be all about one thing - Andy. One time, I didn't reply to one of his emails promptly enough to suit him, so he sent a scathing email to my boss, decrying my 'egregious lack of professionalism'.

Fortunately, by that time, Andy's schtick was well-known, and my boss told me I had nothing to worry about from Andy. Which was a relief. But Andy showed, on many occasions, and not just to me, that he had no qualms about throwing anyone and everyone under the bus, if he thought it might be to his advantage.

And so it was that, a while later, I found myself in a meeting with Andy, and his boss Anwar (a Pakistani; which fact might add some 'texture' to the story as it develops), and a guy named Harvey. Harvey and Andy both worked for Anwar, although their duties didn't really overlap at all. Harvey was pretty much the stereotypical 'crusty old Navy guy', complete with the former-sailor's vocabulary. If he cussed you out, it just kind-of rolled smoothly off his tongue, and you knew it really wasn't anything personal; it was just Harvey.

And, you might well imagine that Harvey, the 'crusty old Navy guy', and Andy, the cocky new-hire, might clash just a bit. And you'd be right. And you might well imagine that, when such clashes occurred, they might provoke some, uh, colorful language from Harvey, directed at his young ~~puke of a~~ co-worker. And you'd be right about that, too.

So, then, as the meeting began, and we were sitting around the table, Anwar turned to Harvey, raising an admonitory finger, and with a thick Pakistani accent (it really does add to the story if you can sort-of imagine it in your head), said one of the funniest things I've ever heard in a corporate setting: "Now Harvey - you must not be calling Andy a c*cks*cker." Because, you know, Andy had pissed him off, and Harvey had done just that. And Andy, in his turn, had gone and ~~whined~~ complained about it to their boss. . .

Harvey sat there, getting redder by the second, exercising every ounce of self-control he could muster not to jump across the table and choke ~~the young twerp~~ his co-worker.

And everyone else around the table nearly blew their eyeballs from their sockets, and snot from their noses, trying to hold back the howling laughter they wished they could let out. . .

Snow? I Got Your Snow Right Here. . .

2011-01-20T07:23:00.011-05:00

A little while back my friend Suldog (who only just gets upset when I try to say nice things about him, so I'll just say he's my friend and leave it at that. . . ;) ) posted some really spectacular photos of an 18-inch snowfall at his house. And that, as many things do, reminded me of a couple stories from my (mostly un-sordid) past. . .

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I grew up in Northern Michigan (if I'm talking to someone from New York or Chicago, or heck, even Boston, I say I grew up in a small town; but truth to tell, we actually fancied ourselves as something like the Metropolis of Northeastern Michigan; at least, you had to drive 150 miles to find a bigger town in pretty much any direction). And Northern Michigan, being the northern part of a northern state, and being situated as it is in the middle of the Great Lakes (Michigan and the Great Lakes pretty much define each other, geographically speaking; if it weren't for Michigan, the Great Lakes would just be one Great Big Blobby-Shaped Lake, and Gordon Lightfoot wouldn't have any reason to write songs about that, now would he?). . .

Uh, okay, where was I? (Too many damn parenthetical comments, that's where. . .)

Oh, yeah. . . Being way Up North, and in the middle of the Great Lakes, we had the two most important ingredients in the recipe for Snow -

(1) Cold temperatures
(2) Lots and LOTS of water

In fact, around the Great Lakes, we get this thing called 'Lake-Effect Snow', which might not exist anywhere else in the world (any of my Siberian readers - do you guys get lake-effect around Lake Baikal? Just, you know, wonderin'. . .) I'm not sure exactly what the thermal physics of lake-effect are, but I do know that, if you live anywhere near one of the Great Lakes, and you get a lake-effect snow, you get snow Up the Yingyang (that's a technical term), like you've never seen. . .

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Jen accepted my proposal of marriage in February of 1980, and a couple weeks later, I took her to meet my parents (who had moved to the Chicago suburbs roughly simultaneously with my high-school graduation). While we were there, I thought it would be fun to take her downtown to see some of the sights and sounds and smells of downtown Chicago. So, on a bright and sunny suburban morning with temperatures in the low/mid-30s (which, by late February in a northern climate, can feel a lot like Daytona Beach), we hopped on the commuter train and headed downtown.

As the train made its way toward downtown, the bright, sunny, cotton-candy-cloud skies gave way to something grayer and more overcast, and by the time we got downtown, it was snowing. Which didn't bother us too much, except that we'd both dressed for the sunny mid-30s we'd seen out at my parents' house in the 'burbs. By noon, there was six inches on the ground, and our sight-seeing plans had devolved into quick hops from one storefront to another, trying to keep our feet warm. By mid-afternoon, there was a foot of snow on the ground, so we gave up and headed back to the train station.

By the time we got back out to my folks' place (which is about 35 miles from downtown), it was bright and sunny again. I asked my mom how much snow they'd gotten, and she looked at me like I was nuts. "We didn't get any snow," she said.

So, 35 miles from a 12-inch lake-effect snowfall, it was bright and sunny all day. . .

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In my hometown of Alpena, I think an average winter is something on the order of 90-100 inches of snow. Which, by the time it thawed a couple times, meant that we spent most of the winter walking in little canyon-sidewalks two or three feet deep. My parents' house was the last house on a dead-end street, about a block from the nearest house, and two blocks from the nearest paved street.

Our house sat on top of a little mound, so our driveway ran maybe 40 feet or so from the garage down to the street. When it snowed, my brother and I would shovel the driveway, so Dad could put the car into the garage when he got home from work at the end of the day. Our car was a nine-passenger Plymouth station-wagon (the car for which the term 'land yacht' was coined), so Dad held very exacting standards for what manner of shoveling job he required - first and foremost, the shoveled driveway had to be wide enough for him to get the car through.

Our mailbox was down at the bottom of the driveway, where it met the street; Dad rigged up a deal out of 2x6's embedded in concrete in a 55-gallon drum, to keep the mailbox from 'moving around'. And part of our shoveling duty was to clear out around the mailbox so the mailman could deliver our mail ('cuz if the mailbox was buried, he just wouldn't deliver it; 'neither snow nor sleet' has its limits. . .) When we had finished shoveling to Dad's specifications, our driveway/mailbox/front porch were a functional work of art; we liked to think of it as an 'Integrated Domicile Accessibility System'. . .

Now, I think it was my sophomore year of high school (which would have been the '70/'71 school year), we had a teachers' strike, which meant that we started the school year about three weeks late. In order to make up the lost days, school ran a week later into June than usual, Christmas break was shortened by a couple days, and they scheduled half-a-dozen or so Saturdays. Which really kinda rotted, but whatcha gonna do?

All of which is to set the stage for that winter, which, as far as I know, is still the snowiest on record for Alpena. One fine Monday morning, we arrived at school as we normally did on Monday morning, and shortly thereafter, it began to snow, and snow hard. So hard that, by noon, the powers-that-be decided to send us all home, while the rural kids who had to ride buses could still get through (I being a 'city kid', stayed at the school to play some pick-up basketball in the gym, since I lived five or six blocks from the high school).

It snowed hard all Monday night, and into Tuesday, until there were 24 inches on the ground. And this was not the light, fluffy stuff, either; it was the heavy, wet kind, that weighed roughly half-a-ton per shovelful. School was called off for Tuesday, since it was still snowing. My brother and I got up (or, more likely, Dad got us up) to shovel the driveway. I don't know if this was the time or not, but I do recall one time, Dad charging the car down the two blocks of snow-covered dead-end-street, only to get high-centered on a snow drift about halfway there, so my brother and I had to go down and shovel the snow out from under the car so he could keep going.

You can be sure that 24 inches of wet, heavy snow was no picnic. And every shovelful that came off the driveway had to be lifted at least two feet off the ground, just in order to pile it on top of the snow that was already covering the yard. By the time we finished, our driveway was a canyon about four or five feet deep.

And even at that, as much satisfaction as we derived from the creation of this snow-canyon, our work wasn't complete until the plow came, and dumped another couple feet of what we called 'snow hash' - the hard-packed chunks of plowed snow - across the mouth of the driveway. We wouldn't even shovel out the mailbox until after the plow came, because we'd just end up having to do it twice. Clearing out the 'hash' was, without a doubt, the worst part of the job; partly because you sorta felt like you'd finished, and then had to go clean up a mess somebody else made for you, and partly because it was just miserable stuff to shovel. Our street didn't even get plowed until Wednesday morning, so school was called off for Wednesday, as well, since the rural back-roads hadn't been completely plowed by then, either.

It looked like we were all set to go back to school on Thursday morning, but on Wednesday night, the snow started back up again. By Thursday morning, there was another six inches down, and it was still snowing like crazy. So school was called off for Thursday, too. It snowed all day Thursday, until we'd gotten another 18 inches on top of the 24 we'd gotten earlier in the week - 42 inches in all, in the space of four days.

When my brother and I went out to shovel this time, we faced a significant challenge in simply being able to throw the snow (which was pretty similarly wet and heavy to the first batch) high enough to get it on top of the piles that we'd made earlier in the week. When we finished, the piles on either side of the driveway were over seven feet high.

School was called on Friday, as well, and it was late Friday when the plow came and 'hashed' us again (Dad had us shovel an extra five yards out into the street, and along the street either side of the driveway; partly to try to help him get down the street a little easier, partly to try to decrease the amount of hash the plow would leave when it finally did come, and partly to keep a couple of teenage boys occupied).

Now, as it turned out, that Saturday was one of the 'strike-added' Saturdays, which was scheduled to be a school day. But nobody, including the principals and teachers, was much in the mood to go in for a single day on Saturday, after 42 inches of snow, so school was cancelled on Saturday, as well (and you know, I'm sure the 'back-county' roads still weren't plowed by then, anyway). So we actually had five-and-a-half snow days in a single week.

I think our final total for that winter was something close to 180 inches - roughly double our annual average. 15 FEET of snow, in a single winter. . .

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(add 21 January)

Well, Suldog has done it again, putting up a post about the Blizzard of '78 (Boston version). Which, combined with what I've posted above, reminded me of this old post. . . (And, just for the sake of saying so, I remember reading, the following fall, that the birthrate in Lansing was 30% higher than normal in October '78; one new mother said, "Well, you can only play so many games of Monopoly". . .)

Lord, Have Mercy

2011-01-11T07:24:00.007-05:00

I'd solicit your prayers for a couple of situations that have come close to our family in recent days. . .

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Our neighbors across the street are a young couple (well, younger than us), members of our Christian community. Jen takes a bit of pride in, years ago, having played something of a 'matchmaker' role for them. They have four children, three girls and a boy, ranging in age from 11 down to 5, for whom 6F has been a frequent babysitter. The husband/father (call him Al) is 36. I've known both him and his wife since their college days.

Last Wednesday, Al had a stroke. When he was very young (maybe four, or something like that), he had a brain tumor. It was treated agressively, with radiation, and probably some other stuff, and he never had any kind of recurrence. But the radiation and other agressive stuff that was done three decades ago, caused that part of his brain to 'age' more rapidly. Whatever the case, 36 is terribly young to be having a stroke. The immediate effects are paralysis of his left side, and significant difficulty speaking. His prognosis for survival is excellent, but it remains to be seen how much function he regains, and how long it takes.

Which, of course, leaves all sorts of unanswered questions for the future, as to what their life will be like, how they'll pay their bills, what will be the effect on their kids, etc, etc etc. . . Needless to say, it's a pretty freaky time for them. Al's wife hasn't had a 'real job' (ie, outside the home, for pay) in many years, and suddenly she's looking at having to do that again (and you may have noticed, all talk of recovery aside, the economy is still running somewhere short of 'robust')

It's been good to see our community rallying to their support. Another young family (with eight kids of their own) (no, not us; does it freak you out that there's more than one?) has taken their kids in indefinitely, so Al's wife can be with him in the hospital. And folks are putting together a meal schedule for them, so they can come home without the immediate pressure of putting food on the table.

Anyway, if you all could lift them up in your prayers, they can surely use them. . .

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My youngest brother and his wife live in Tucson, Arizona. They met when they were both in college in Montana (Jen and I, and 7M, who was a newborn at the time, went to their wedding in Missoula - in the church that was used in filming A River Runs Through It). After graduation, they moved to Tucson, where his wife's family lives. My sister-in-law is an elementary school teacher.

My brother has always enjoyed telling the story about the time he stopped at the vacuum-cleaner store to pick up some bags for their vac, only to encounter Paul McCartney picking up his own vac from the repair counter (the McCartneys had a ranch outside Tucson; I've always gotten a kick from the idea of Paul McCartney picking up his own vaccum cleaner from the repair shop, and not just sending someone to pick it up for him) (or, for that matter, that Paul McCartney gets his vacuum cleaner repaired, instead of just pitching it and getting a new one).

Last Saturday morning, my SIL was out doing some shopping at a shopping center near their home. Suddenly, from the other side of the shopping center, shots rang out, and everything was thrown into confusion. In a matter of minutes, med-evac helicopters were taking victims to the hospital. Yeah, she was there.

She's OK; at least in a physical sense. But it has shaken her terribly. The 9-year-old girl who was killed attended a school near their house, which their nephew also attends. The 'degrees of connection' of the tragedy spread out all over their neighborhood.

I cannot fathom what could possibly motivate someone to kill a 9-year-old girl to make some kind of twisted political statement. I have my own political opinions, some of them quite firmly held, but I cannot imagine taking a gun to shoot up a shopping center in the hopes of killing my political 'adversaries'. This ain't freakin' Nazi Germany. . .

The victims and their families need our prayers; and Rep. Giffords, and the other wounded, for their recovery. Quite apart from their status as public servants, or members of one or the other political party, these are nonetheless human beings, with families and loved ones of their own. And please pray for the people of Tucson, including my SIL, who didn't ask for this to happen in their back yard, and are, as you might imagine, pretty deeply shaken by it.

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Oh Lord, have mercy. . .

Imitatio Christi

2011-01-06T07:12:00.002-05:00

A few times over the years (most recently, here and here), I've mentioned that Thomas a Kempis' Imitatio Christi (The Imitation of Christ) is on the short list of my very favorite books ever. First published around the year 1420, it reads like a medieval Christian Book of Proverbs - pithy wisdom for daily Christian life. Thomas was mainly writing for a monastic audience, but the wisdom in the Imitatio is just as applicable for any life of dedicated Christian discipleship.

I first picked up the Imitatio years ago, after reading a book about the 17th-century French Jesuit missionaries to the New World. Among the meager possessions they took with them into the wilderness were two books - the Bible and the Imitatio. I considered that to be a pretty compelling recommendation.

The wisdom of the Imitatio can be extremely challenging. More than once as I've read through it (more than once), I've found myself squirming in my seat, as Thomas brought Truth to bear, uncomfortably close to where I live.

I could go on and on, but honestly, it's unlikely that I could do any better than just to give you a brief sampling of wonderful quotes. . .

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"On the Day of Judgment, we will not be asked what we have read, but what we have done."

"It is a hard thing to leave evil customs, and it is harder to break our own will, but it is most hard forever to lie in pain, and forever to lose the joy of Heaven."

"We seldom consider our neighbor in the same light as ourselves. Yet, if all men were perfect, what should we have to bear with in others for Christ's sake?"

"If you had a good conscience, you would not fear death so much, and it would be better for you to abandon sin than to fear death."

"All men are glad to live at peace, and prefer those who are of their own way of thinking. But to be able to live at peace among hard, obstinate and undisciplined people, and those who oppose us, is a great grace. . ."

"A pure heart penetrates both Heaven and Hell. As each man is in himself, so does he judge outward things. If there is any joy to be had in this world, the pure in heart most surely possess it. . ." (cf. Matthew 5:8, Titus 1:15, Psalm 18:26)

"A wise lover does not so much consider the gift of his lover as he does the love of the giver."

"Therefore make right use of this world's goods, but long only for those that are eternal."

". . . [H]e is not truly patient who will suffer only as much as he pleases, or from whom he pleases."

"All is not lost, though some things happen contrary to your will."

"'Come to me,' You say, 'all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you'. . . But who am I, O Lord, that I should presume to approach You? The very Heaven of Heavens cannot contain You; and yet You say, 'Come to me.'"

"Do not let [another] speak to me, therefore, but You, my Lord Jesus, . . . lest perhaps I die and be made like a man without fruit, warmed from without, but not aflame within, and so receive the harder judgment, because I have heard Your word and not done it, known it and not loved it, believed it and not fulfilled it."

Amen. . .

God Bless Us, Every One

2010-12-29T07:10:00.000-05:00

It was Christmas Eve at our house, which, according to our family traditions, begins our celebration of Christmas. We had all ten of our family members present, along with a pair of overseas guests, one from Scotland, one from Lebanon. We started with our traditional Christmas dinner of Chicken Kiev, with asparagus and brown/wild rice. After dinner, we got in our cars and hurried across town to where a small church puts on a 'Live Nativity' - a short dramatization of the Christmas story, complete with angels (wearing mittens and earmuffs, to protect them from the 20F cold), live sheep/goats (the shepherds have got to have something to tend, right?) and even a donkey (I don't even want to think about what it took to get the permit for the live critters out of City Hall). The part of Baby Jesus was played by a realistic-looking rubber doll (not a hidden 40-watt bulb). Returning home, we gathered around the tree in the living room for our annual reading of O. Henry's short story, 'The Gift of the Magi', after which we handed out the presents under the tree, and opened them. Most everyone seemed to enjoy their gifts. After a few rounds, all that remained were a few envelopes, mainly containing cards promising Gifts to be Delivered Later. One of the cards pointed 8M (who is eight years old) to a fishbowl surreptitiously stashed at the neighbors' house, containing six goldfish, five of which had died by the time he got to them. The sixth died by the time we left for Midnight Mass, so there was much teasing of the poor boy, on the order of, "On the Sixth Day of Christmas, my True Love gave to me. . . Six Dead Goldfish. . ." One of the last to be opened was an envelope marked for 6F, from 8M. At this point, I should mention that 6F is hoping to go on a mission trip next summer, either in Costa Rica or Honduras, and she is just getting ready to gear up her fundraising campaign of letters to various relatives and friends. When 4M went on a similar trip a couple years ago, to the Dominican Republic, we were stunned by people's generosity. 6F opened the envelope, which contained a few dollar bills and a small handwritten note. Her upper lip quivered briefly, and she passed the envelope and its contents to Jen, who read the note and dabbed at her eyes, passing the note along. In short order, it was passed to me, and I beheld four $1 bills, with a note from 8M saying, "It's not much, but this is for your mission trip. Love, 8M." There was nary a dry eye in the house by the time the envelope finished circulating. After that, we went to Midnight Mass, which ended with the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel's Messiah (one can never sing the Hallelujah Chorus too often), after which we returned home to indulge in some celebratory treats. ------------------------- All in all, a most satisfactory celebration of Our Lord's Incarnation. And that note from 8M will stay with me for a long time. . .

Good Is the Flesh

2010-12-25T00:01:00.001-05:00

For Christmas, another re-post, from four years ago, of one of my favorite poems. I hope you like it as much as I do. . .

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Good Is the Flesh (by Brian Wren)

Good is the flesh that the Word has become
Good is the birthing, the milk in the breast,
Good is the feeding, caressing and rest,
Good is the body for knowing the world,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body for knowing the world,
Sensing the sunlight, the tug of the ground,
Feeling, perceiving, within and around,
Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the body, from cradle to grave,
Growing and aging; arousing, impaired
Happy in clothing, or lovingly bared,
Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh.
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

Good is the pleasure of God in our flesh,
Longing in all, as in Jesus to dwell,
Glad of embracing and tasting and smell,
Good is the body, for good and for God,
Good is the flesh that the Word has become.

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I love this poem because it is so ‘incarnational’. It bespeaks God, in Christ, taking on human flesh – that life in the body is good, and the dignity of human bodily life is only enhanced by God taking it on Himself. Through the Incarnation, God takes our embodied-ness, and fills it with Himself. No longer is He remote from us; His knowledge of us is not merely that of ‘Creator on High’ – He has walked in our world as one of us, hungered and thirsted, stubbed His toe, and ultimately, died.

Good is the flesh, indeed. It is not merely that God created human flesh, although it has a dignity that inheres simply to that, and in His image, no less. But even more, the Word became flesh. Emmanuel – God with us. Awesome.

How Come Is It. . .

2010-12-19T19:32:00.004-05:00

. . . that Oakland County, Michigan, which not so very long ago was one of the Ten Wealthiest Counties in the United States (alas, an ebbing tide can founder even really wealthy boats), can't seem to find any salt to put on its roads, while neighboring Genessee County (county seat - Flint), which is something like the poster child for the current economic troubles (and the ones before that, and the ones before that), can? Just askin'. . . See, 'cuz I drive, like, 84 miles to work (yeah, that's one way). On a normal day, it takes me about an hour-and-a-quarter, which is long, but not terrible, since it's about 90% freeway driving. When it snows, like it did last Sunday/Monday (about 6-8 inches), it can take longer. Sometimes a lot longer. My record for a one-way commute was three-and-a-half hours. Until last Monday. But, I'm getting ahead of myself. One of the benefits of living in Michigan is that we're pretty good at handling snow, and those grueling commutes are virtually always one-time events - by the next day, roads have been cleared, at least to the point that traffic can flow pretty smoothly, even if not quite at posted speeds. At our place, last Sunday (the 12th) was a pretty snowy day. As I said, we got somewhere between 6-8 inches. And after the snow fell, the temperatures dropped into the single digits, and the wind blew. Which, generally speaking, takes a bad snow situation, and makes it that much worse. And the kids were duly rewarded with a snow day on Monday, which was called just after they'd gone to bed. I expected Monday morning's drive to be difficult. But I was hopeful, since the snow itself had stopped late Sunday afternoon, that the counties had had time to get the salt trucks out, and the roads might at least be passable. And they were. I set out on the freeway, and it was a typical morning-after-the-blizzard drive - the freeway had one clear lane, in which it was possible to go 50mph or so, and one snow-covered lane, in which 35 or so was about the max possible. And of course, there are always those timid souls who can't bear to go faster than 30-35 in the 'good' lane, so other drivers were constantly having to weigh whether or not it was worth it to pull out into the 'bad' lane to try and get around the slowpokes. But traffic was moving, even if at a slow pace, and it took me about an hour-and-a-half to cover what normally takes just under an hour. Which took me to the Oakland-Genessee county line. And suddenly, the marginally 'clear' lane disappeared, and drivers were confronted with three lanes of polished glare ice. Instantly, the speed of traffic dropped to around 20-25mph (and if you've ever gone even 20mph on polished glare ice, you know what kind of an adventure that is). I was calculating in my head that, at this rate, I'd be another hour getting in to work. And not a stress-free hour, either. But hey - a two-and-a-half-hour commute the day after a blizzard really isn't awful. So I called my boss on my cell phone, and told him about how late I expected to be. Of course, he understood: "Just take your time and get here in one piece." And so we trudged along, until, about seven miles from my exit, traffic came to a complete and utter halt. Not good. I had the radio on, and expected to hear about some massive, grisly accident, but no word came. And we just sat. In the car directly ahead of me, a group of college guys got out of their car and took a group-whiz against the concrete barrier, followed by a snowball fight. If it had been warmer than about 5F, I might have just turned the car off, and waited it out, but the heater was a necessity of life at that point. Slowly, at odd intervals, traffic would inch forward. The sports-talk show that I had on the radio ended, and was replaced by another one, with a different host. And still the traffic inched ahead, when it wasn't stalled completely. Finally, two hours later, when we were about a mile from my exit, I saw the reason for the delay. There was a long (though hardly steep) uphill grade on the freeway, and a dozen semi-trucks were effectively stranded on the grade, spinning their wheels, unable to gain any traction on the glare ice. The trucks were distributed across three lanes, one here, another in a different lane a few yards further on, two side-by-side, and so on. So that the cars had to dodge and weave among the stranded semis like a trail of ants, sometimes even having to leave the nominal roadway to get past. By the time I finally arrived in my office, I was into the third sports-talk show of the morning (now early afternoon) on my radio, and it was just over four hours since I'd left home that morning. A new record. I'm so elated. And it was all because Oakland County didn't send out their salt trucks. Some explanation was given to the effect that, with the cold temperatures, the salt wouldn't have done any good. And I'm enough of a scientist to know that, yeah, the salt will be less effective in cold temperatures than if it had been just slightly below freezing. But the poorer counties I'd driven through on my way to Oakland County had gotten their salt trucks out, and the contrast couldn't have been more stark. I worked about a five-hour day before getting back on the road to head home. And on the homeward leg, the roads were a bit better. It only took an hour-and-a-half to travel the 25 miles of Oakland County this time. But once I crossed the county line, traffic was moving at posted speeds (see, we really do know how to deal with snow; unless, apparently, we live in Oakland County). So I got home in about two-and-a-half hours. You have not lived until you've spent six-and-a-half hours driving to work and back, let me tell you. Tuesday morning was better. I again made the first hour's-worth of my drive in an hour, but it took 45 minutes to cover the 25 miles of Oakland County. Tuesday evening was the same, and Wednesday wasn't much better, although I did see one salt truck on my drive home Wednesday evening. Which elicited a sarcastic cheer in the back of my brain - the kind you'll hear when the home team scores a touchdown late in the game, so that they end up losing 65-7. It wasn't until Thursday morning - the fourth day after the snowstorm - that Oakland County finally had I-75 clear of ice, and I could get to work without feeling like I was taking my life in my hands. I actually work in Pontiac, which, as it happens, is the county seat of Oakland County. Which puts me uncomfortably close to the ~~morons~~ public officials who made the worst road-maintenance call that I have ever seen (or, more truly, they failed to make a no-brainer) (which would imply something like negative brains, wouldn't it?) If they had sent the trucks out Sunday evening, Monday morning would still have been slow and difficult, but by waiting, they made the situation orders of magnitude more treacherous, and extended it over three days, instead of one. Brilliant. Just brilliant. ------------------------- I really aim to keep this blog pretty much rant-free, and I do apologize for going off today. But this was just the most stunning, egregious, display of pure moronic idiocy, by people who are nominally responsible for other people's lives, that I have ever seen. Anyway, Christmas is coming; I'd better be good. . .

Love Hurts

2010-12-12T19:48:00.000-05:00

Yet another re-post, from a couple years ago. . . ------------------------- “If I never loved, I never would have cried.” Simon & Garfunkel “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing, compared with love in dreams.” Dostoevsky “[Jesus], having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.” The Gospel of John, chapter 13, verse 1 Mother Theresa was fond of saying that our main task in this life is learning what it really means to love. She was also fond of saying that there is no spiritual growth without suffering. And I’ve come to understand that the two – love and suffering – are not so very separate from each other. I think we’re sort of conditioned by our culture to think of love in terms of mellow warm feelings toward another person. But if warm-fuzzies is all that we mean by love, it winds up being pretty shallow and lame. Real love has as least as much (and honestly, probably a lot more) to do with changing shitty diapers in the middle of the night (or cleaning up after the Beloved's messes, more generally construed), as it does with beautiful sunsets, or walks on the beach. In a fallen world, it comes to seem that any love worthy of the name inevitably has a tragic aspect about it. We are all fallen, broken persons, and our fallen-ness and broken-ness redound to the pain of those who love us. And hobble our ability to love others as we ought. We inevitably hurt and disappoint those who love us, and in many ways, the measure of love is the manner in which it deals with those hurts and disappointments. Our kids have taught some of this to Jen and me. When 1F was the ‘perfect’ adolescent, it was pretty easy to love her; to soak up the accolades we received for having raised such a wonderful girl. But, I don’t think I’ve ever been more deeply wounded than I was when she walked away from our family. And I never, in my worst dreams, would have imagined one of my daughters having a baby out-of-wedlock. But, you know, in the ensuing years, I think we’ve come to a stronger love for each other. I found out that my heart could bear more pain than I thought it could, and that I loved my daughter even though she had hurt me like I’d never imagined I could be hurt. Likewise for 3M – it was easy to love him when he was a cute and precocious child, when we got appreciative pats on the back for his wit and intelligence. But when he ran away from home, and defied us in every possible way, he simply broke our hearts. And such is the tragic aspect of love – real, down-and-dirty, harsh, dreadful love. He is not yet quite all that I would really want him to be - what he himself could be - but he's making real progress. And I think we have learned to love each other for who we are, apart from any questions about ‘approval’. All of our kids, in one way or another, have suffered from my (and, I suppose, Jen’s, although for me even to say so evokes thoughts of the Log and the Speck) failures of love. 1F and 3M have just been the glaring, nuclear examples. 2F suffers greatly to this day that we didn’t love her as she needed us to – that we were so dazzled by her sister’s ‘perfection’, and too easily put off by her more strong-willed personality. 5M has too easily gotten lost in the chaos that swirled around his older siblings. And I'm sure, if I thought about it just a little, I could come up with examples in the lives of each of our kids. But perhaps we are learning, just a little bit better, what it means to love. Perhaps we can dig a little deeper, and give our kids the love they need, where once we’d have come up short. Perhaps. At least, I hope so. . . It’s not just the kids, either. As much as I love Jen (and she me), there is, even still, a tragic aspect to our love. She has not avoided disappointing me (or, to be certain, I her), even though she is still the most amazing woman I’ve ever known. Some part of the measure of our love is coming to know – really know, where it hurts to know – each other’s weaknesses and character flaws, and keep moving forward. Even to cover for each other’s weaknesses (whether or not we ever thought we should have to). So, again - the measure of our love is not the absence of our disappointments with each other. The measure of our love is what we DO with the inevitable hurts and disappointments that we inflict on each other – can we let “love cover a multitude of sins” (I Peter 4:8), or not? And then we have the example of God Himself, who “demonstrates His own love for us in this – while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Jesus didn’t wait for us to get our, uh, stuff together in order to make a gift of Himself for our sake. He loved us, “to the end,” even in all our fallen, broken, garbage. In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said that, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” And I think it’s likewise when it comes to ‘learning what it really means to love’. To love greatly is to risk being hurt greatly. To ‘pour ourselves out’ for the sake of the Beloved, with little or no regard for what we have left when we’re done. “And greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13) Jesus, with all trepidation, I ask of you. . . teach me how to love. . .

'Twas the Season

2010-12-05T19:24:00.006-05:00

Well, the arrival of the first real snow of the winter, along with temperatures persistently below freezing (and seriously? it was like the calendar flipped to December 1, and the Weather Switch flipped to 'Instant Winter' mode), have effectively marked the end of the 2010 bicycling season for me. You can be sure that if, any time between now and the nominal arrival of spring 2011, we get temperatures above freezing, and ice-free back roads (and all on a weekend, or at least a day I don't have to work) (thank you, Dr. King), I'll be out, grabbing whatever miles I can. But this past weekend, the temps topped out below freezing, and the snow (which wasn't really all that much) stuck around enough to create a bit of a 'black ice' hazard. So, with a heavy heart, I fired up the stationary bike in front of a football game on TV (something about athletic young men running up and down the field helps inspire me to keep my own legs moving) (or at least takes my mind off how much my own legs are hurting, especially in the last 15 minutes or so), and bid a peaceful winter's rest to my two-wheeled steed. But hey - the (provisionally) final tally for 2010 - 1609 miles. Which is the most I've done since 1992. When I was still in my 30s. Heck, 5M was born that year, and he's a high-school senior now. So it's been awhile. Since I got back on my bike a few years back, when I started with the weight loss, my max was just over 1400 miles, which was enough to make me proud. But this year, I thought if I really went for it, didn't take any weekends off, and pushed myself for just a few more miles on the rides I did, maybe I could make 1500. And I went past that by over a hundred miles. Sweet. . . ------------------------- And hey, I don't want to make TOO big a deal of it ('cuz I know what happens when I post sports-related stuff here) (*crickets chirping*), but my Spartans successfully finished their football season with 11 wins (the most in school history; but that's mostly because the Bubba Smith teams from back in the 60s only played 10 games) against only a single solitary defeat (for which, hats off to FADKOG's Hawkeyes, but goodness, it seems to have shot them all to heck for the rest of their season). For which, they earned the title of Co-Champions of the Big Ten. Woo-hoo!! It's 20 years since my Spartans were Big Ten champions in football (the basketball team has had a bit more success, of late). Even longer than it's been since I rode more than 1600 miles. Heck, it was so long ago that we only had four kids at the time. (It was SO long ago that the Big Ten only had ten members.) So now we get to go bowling in some pleasantly warm place on New Year's Day. Woo-hoo again! ------------------------- Anyway, a couple of noteworthy seasons in my life have just come to a close (well, almost; enough to have a 'sense of completion' about them, at any rate), and in most happy manner. Neither of them is of particularly 'ultimate' significance, but I do take a bit of happiness from them, y'know?

Advent

2010-11-29T07:08:00.012-05:00

This is a re-post of something I wrote back in 2006 (I don't know if my bloggity muse is napping, on vacation, or gone forever; time, I suppose, will tell. . .)

At any rate, 'tis the season. . . And while I'm at it, I'll give a shout-out to my good friend Suldog, whose 'Thanksgiving Comes First' campaign against premature Christmas-y-ness partially inspired my dredging this up from the archives. . .

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In our culture, the Friday after Thanksgiving marks the more-or-less 'official' beginning of the commercial season of 'Christmas', with the sales, the extended hours at the malls, special advertisements, etc., etc (although, honestly, the stores have been in 'Christmas mode' pretty much since they took down the Halloween stuff; maybe even before that). It's what much, if not most, of our culture thinks of when they think of 'Christmas', but less and less does it have any discernible connection with the actual content and meaning of Christmas.

One time I was visiting family in a large, midwestern city over Thanksgiving, and the following day, the local TV news had several reporters on site at various malls, doing interviews with shoppers. They asked one guy what the 'true meaning of Christmas' was, and he said, "We gotta get out here and spend money to keep the economy going strong." I am not making this up; he actually said that.

I sometimes wish that they would come up with a different name for the year-end consumerist feeding-frenzy. Just leave Christmas out of it. Or, maybe we should come up with another name for the celebration of Christ's Birth and Incarnation. Let 'em have 'Christmas' for the 'shopping season' - admit that we've lost it, and start over with a new name.

(*sigh*)

Anyway, yesterday was the First Sunday of Advent - the beginning of the Christian season of spiritual preparation for Christmas. As I've gone along, I've come to really love Advent, imperfectly though I may observe it. In rough terms, Advent is to Christmas what Lent is to Easter, just with not quite the same 'penitential' emphasis. Rightly done, Advent is a time of contemplation, a time to step back from the normal frenzy of daily life, take a few deep breaths, and anticipate the coming joy of Christmas. Advent is pretty much the polar opposite of 'consumer Christmas'. Pausing for contemplation is not a thing Americans are terribly inclined to do (perhaps I should rather say it's a thing that we're inclined to do terribly).

In the larger American culture, the 'Christmas season' runs from the Friday after Thanksgiving until Christmas Day, but in traditional Christian circles, the Christmas season begins on Christmas Day and runs until Epiphany (January 6) - thus, the 'Twelve Days of Christmas'. So, when most of our neighbors are finished with Christmas, we're just getting started. It always perplexes me just a bit to see all the Christmas trees out on the curb on the 26th; when Jen was a kid, Catholics didn't even put their trees up until Christmas Eve. And, just as I'm getting pumped to sing 'Joy to the World' and 'O Come, All Ye Faithful', most of my neighbors are sick of hearing them.

Maybe I should blame it on the Magi - they started the whole giving-gifts-at-Christmas thing. I doubt they had any clue how far it would get out-of-hand, though.

When it comes right down to it, though, I suppose I've got to admit that my spiritual preparation for Christmas is my own responsibility. It's not up to American culture to get me spiritually prepared. It might be nice if the culture were more supportive (or even just less disruptive) of what I'm trying to accomplish, but it is what it is.

So, our family is setting out on Advent. If, over the next few weeks, I seem a little reticent and low-key about Christmas, you'll understand, won't you? And then, if I'm getting all Christmas-y just when you're getting tired of it all, you'd be very kind to indulge me. In the meantime, I'll be over here, singing 'O Come, O Come Emmanuel', in a minor key. . .