Well, Here We Are. . .

When I'm Sixty-Four (John Lennon - Paul McCartney)

When I get older, losing my hair, many years from now,
Will you still be sending me a Valentine,
Birthday greeting, bottle of wine?
If I've been out 'til quarter-til-three
Would you lock the door?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

Every summer we could rent a cottage on the Isle of Wight, 
If it's not too dear.
We shall scrimp and save
Grandchildren on your knee - 
Vera, Chuck and Dave

I could be handy mending a fuse when your lights have gone.
You could knit a sweater by the fireside,
Sunday mornings, go for a ride.
Doing the garden, digging the weeds,
Who could ask for more?
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

You'll be older, too. . .
And if you say the word,
I could stay with you.

Send me a postcard, drop me a line, stating points of view.
Indicate precisely what you mean to say - 
"Yours sincerely, wasting away."
Give me your answer, fill in a form - 
Mine forever more;
Will you still need me, will you still feed me,
When I'm sixty-four?

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When I got up this morning, Birthday Breakfast was waiting on the table for me.  And there are rumors that my kids and grandkids (none of whom, oddly enough, are named Vera, Chuck or Dave) will be joining us for a celebratory meal, which may or may not culminate with pumpkin cheesecake. . .

Looks promising, indeed. . .  ;)

Oh, Brother. . .

It was 10 years ago this month that Jenn's sister ended her own life.  She had been the 'black sheep' among Jenn's siblings, sort of the 'wild hippie child' type, and I usually enjoyed my own interactions with her.  Even so, for whatever reasons of her own, at 47 years of age, she decided that her life was not something she wanted to continue doing, so she ended it.

I immediately thought back to her when I got word last night that my brother (call him S; he was really my step-brother, but in our blended family, we quickly dispensed with any 'step-' designations, since we were effectively a new family, starting from scratch) had ended his own life.  He was 59.

I had a very, uh, complex relationship with S.  When his mom married my dad, he was the oldest of three kids that she brought with her into the new marriage, and I was older of dad's two kids.  To make things even more fun, we were only six months apart in age, and in the same grade in school; we were both 10 years old.  So, the first year we spent together was mostly engaged in establishing a proper pecking-order for alpha-hood.  And, at least at first, S was a better pecker than I was. . .

He had grown up largely on the mean streets of our hometown Up North (which, you might surmise, weren't all that mean, but you get the idea), whereas I had grown up as a pretty sheltered nerd-boy.  Most of the disputes between us devolved pretty quickly into him punching me repeatedly on my shoulder, until I cried and gave up.  But the long-term effect of our association, at least as far as I was concerned, was that I became less sheltered, more social, and more inclined (to say nothing of able) to physically defend myself.

At some point (probably around the same time as I had my pubescent growth-spurt), it dawned on me that I really didn't need to back down from him.  One time, when we had a group of neighborhood boys in our backyard for a pickup football game, he started teasing me, riding me pretty hard, and I decided that it was time to take a stand, so I chased him around the yard for several minutes, while our friends (mostly his friends, really) watched with amusement.  And I saw fear in his face.  Our relationship improved after that.

At the same time, we fairly quickly found a couple significant points of common interest - we shared a passion for the Detroit Tigers, and baseball more generally, and for the Beatles' music.  Together, we would stay up late at night, listening to a Tigers game from the west coast, or savoring the latest Beatles recording (33-1/3 rpm black vinyl, thank you very much).  We had some epic wiffle-ball games in the backyard.  And in those moments, we were brothers, and forgot all about who was pecking whom.

S was not a dumb guy, but school was never his thing, whereas I loved school, and excelled at it.  Our sister, next-younger than the two of us, one grade behind us, told us how one year, on the first day of school, her teacher, who had had both S and I the year before, called her name, and recognizing the surname, looked up, scanning the class, and asked, "Are you like S, or are you like Craig?"  Poor kid.

S always had a tense relationship with Dad.  Having spent most of his formative years without an effective paternal presence, he didn't take well to Dad's more, um, interventionist approach.  On the eve of our junior year of high school, S ran away one night, and never really came home after that.  He was taken in by a family a couple hundred miles away, who called Mom and Dad, and they worked out an arrangement for S to live there and go to school for that year.  The following year, he moved on again, lived on his own and got a job in the instrument-repair shop of a large music company.  Sports and music were the two large themes of his life.

Our family moved to a large metropolitan area in another state, basically simultaneously with my going to college.  Around the same time, S took a transfer to a place in the same metro area, so the family was, at least nominally, back in the same place together, and S re-integrated himself into the ebb and flow of the life of our family.

In his young adulthood, and really, into his 40s, S had a series of really interesting jobs, interspersed with periods of. . . less interesting jobs.  He spent time working in the sales/marketing staffs of both the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs (a couple times, he got me tickets to games and got me into the clubhouse), and even went to LA for a while and worked for the Lakers (I live in Magic Johnson's hometown, but he got an autographed Lakers media guide for me).  He did some freelance journalism (he was a talented writer, his lack of schooling notwithstanding), and promoted a few concerts (off the top of my head, Arlo Guthrie is one of the bigger names he ever promoted).  Really interesting stuff, but somehow, none of it ever really took hold for the long-term.  He had at least one 'serious' girlfriend, but never married.  How shall I say it?  Ummmmmm. . . substance problems. . .

The last decade or so, things didn't go well for him; work became sporadic, then nonexistent.  He moved in with Mom and Dad, until Mom went to a nursing home, and Dad moved to assisted living.  His final crisis seems to have been triggered when his indulgent landlord finally decided that he couldn't afford to be quite so indulgent anymore, and homelessness loomed (and homelessness, with snow already on the ground and another hard winter in the offing, is not a happy prospect).

As when Jenn's sister killed herself, my first thought is, "What the hell did you go and do that for?"  I confess, I haven't lived his life; I don't know the despair that lurked in his soul.  I want to think that he was loved enough to have seen his life through, but then, I ask myself, have I done enough to make him know that?  (Ironically, the medical examiner found cancer in him that might well have killed him before too much longer, anyway; it's unclear at this point whether he knew about that or not)

It's a little late to say that I will miss him.  In his last years, he wasn't much of a presence in our lives; he would come to family gatherings, and mostly sit quietly in a corner, away from the rest of us.  So I never really knew the raw, unvarnished state of his life, until it was nearly over.

But I will miss him.  We shared an awful lot of our formative years together.  We fought.  We reconciled.  We came to respect, and, I daresay, love each other.  I am so sad that his life went so badly at the end, and I wonder if I should have done more to help it go better (though, at the same time, I doubt that I could have).  In the end, I am left with the sure knowledge of God's mercy, both for S and for me.  And I'm grateful to have shared such of my life with him as I have. . .

Connections Through Time. . .

"The years of our life are threescore and ten, or even, by reason of strength, fourscore. . ."

So says the 90th Psalm, and fair enough, I suppose.  Although, I admit, being 57 just at the moment, and recalling having been 44 just the day before yesterday, the 13 years left between me and my threescore-and-ten seem pretty much like the-day-after-tomorrow.  And those 13 years are by no means guaranteed; my high school class will be holding its 40th anniversary class reunion this summer, and the number of my classmates who haven't lived to see it is distressingly large.  70 just doesn't seem nearly as old as it once did. . .

I was thinking about my dad recently, as I do from time to time, especially on Father's Day (and tomorrow would have been his 91st birthday), and it not yet being two years since he died.  I got to thinking about my ancestry more generally, and I had a thought that utterly fascinated me (but then, I get fascinated by weird stuff sometimes).  Virtually all of us have known our parents, and these days, most of us have known and had relationships with our grandparents.  So far, so good, right?  Now, turning it around to the other direction, many of us have children, and the vast majority of those of us with children have known and had relationships with them, although that is not quite as guaranteed as we might wish it to be.  And then again, if we are fortunate, we will also know and have relationships with our grandchildren, as well.  Some few of us will even be fortunate enough to have known a great-grandparent or two, and some few of us might be fortunate enough to know a few of our great-grandchildren.  But, on average, two generations in either direction seems pretty 'nominal'.

So, my dad having died just recently, I got to thinking about his grandfather.  Dad had certainly known his grandfather, who died in 1944, when Dad was in his early 20s (and, alas, twelve years before my own auspicious arrival).  My great-grandfather, Egbert (for whom I was very nearly named; narrow escape, right there) was born in 1866.  His grandfather, Jacob, died in 1875.  I don't know if they ever knew, or even met each other, since Egbert was born in Indiana and came to Michigan as a boy, whereas Jacob lived his entire life in upstate New York (not far from Cooperstown, in Otsego County).  But their lives overlapped by nine years, and they certainly could have met each other.  Jacob was born in 1812.

So Egbert spent 78 years living on the face of this earth.  Squarely inside the biblical brackets.  But between his grandfather, whom he at least might have known, and my dad, his grandson, whom he did know, the span of his life's connections is stretched to within a year of two full centuries.  And I'm sure, if I look at all of my dad's grandparents and their grandparents, somewhere in there, the two-century mark will have been surpassed.  Which is a heck of a lot more than threescore-and-ten, and, in a lot of ways, seems a truer representation of the significance of our lives on this earth. . .

And even besides biological/familial connections, I think of the elders - teachers, coaches, family friends, etc, etc - who enriched my formative years, and I am coming into my own set of young friends my kids' age, or even younger.  And I wonder how far into the past those relationships reach, and God only knows how far into the future.

Fascinating. . .

The Best Man I've Ever Known

Yes, yes. . .  I've posted this same item the past two Father's Days.  But today is the first Father's Day since my dad died last August, as well as being his 90th birthday, had he lived to see today.  So, you would be very kind to indulge me. . .

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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, until he died last summer, my dad was one of the very few utter, rock-solid, take-it-to-the-bank constants in my life.

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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 - 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. Up to the day he died, I didn't want to arm-wrestle him; I don't think my ego could have taken getting slammed by an 89-year-old man.

Dad was 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.  He also shared his time on campus with a future Hall of Fame baseball player.

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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 was not the most outgoing of people (although he could be 'social' when he had to be), and I often longed to just sit down and engage in a relaxed, flowing conversation with him. With few exceptions, though, Dad just didn't do 'relaxed flowing conversation'. But he showed 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 got to know my dad over the years, he was not always the easiest of men to live with. But, even so, he was, 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 our family is  still 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 can't remember ever hearing 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 became a kinder, gentler man than he started out being.

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As I said above, my dad is still 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, taught me volumes. I know that I am not, nor will I ever be, even half the man he was, but if I can even get close to being half the man my dad was, I'll have done well, indeed.

Being his son is one of the very best things that has ever happened to me.  I miss him still, but at the same time, I am utterly grateful for all that he has meant, and will continue to mean, for my life.

Thank you, Dad, and Requiescat In Pace; it has been a privilege. . .

Up In Smoke

I have never really been a smoker, of substances either legal or illegal.  But I want to be utterly clear that I make no claim to any particular virtue of my own, for that particular transgressive lack in my Curriculum Vitae.  Back in the days of the Clinton White House, I might have been the only US citizen (or heck, the only living person on earth, for all I know) who could give at least a partial nod of recognition to our erstwhile president's claim that, while he may have lit up a fatty or two back in the day, he didn't inhale. . .

Folks under 40 or so, who have lived their whole lives under the anti-smoking regime, really don't have any way to understand what it was like back in the '50s and early '60s (which were really just the latter part of the '50s; 'The 60s' of popular imagination really happened between about 1965-74; but that's another discussion for another time), when smoking was widely perceived to be hip, cool and sophisticated.  Every talk-show host on TV had a cigarette in his hand, to lend an air of sophistication to the conversational art.  Heck, there were even candy cigarettes for the kids (like after-dinner mints, rolled into a stick; they even had one end dyed red, so you could pretend that it was lit), so we could practice looking cool while holding a cigarette (the girls held them daintily between their fingertips, while the guys held them further down in the 'crotch' between their first two fingers).

My own extended family was a pretty smoky crew.  I don't remember ever seeing either my grandmother or grandfather smoke, but two of my uncles were very dedicated cigar-smokers, and my dad also went through various periods during which he appreciated a good cigar (actually, as I think back on it, I don't think the cigar in question even had to be all that good. . .).  One uncle in particular, was very fond of his cigars; so once, when our family took a trip to Mackinac Island, I bought one of those giant novelty cigars - a foot long and at least an inch in diameter - to give him as a Christmas gift (he told me that he actually lit it and took a few puffs from it, but that, even by his standards, it was pretty awful; but he appreciated the thought).  And most of my aunts could often be found with a cigarette pinched between their fingertips.  The holiday gatherings when the whole extended family got together were smoke-filled affairs, and no-one thought anything of it.

(As an aside, some years ago, I had to put a new furnace in one of my previous houses, and the old ductwork was wrapped in asbestos.  So I did a bunch of research on just what risks I was exposing myself to with the asbestos, and how I should handle it, and one of the sources said that, even if the asbestos in question was 'friable' (ie, flaking off), the exposure from a small job like mine was roughly equivalent to spending a couple hours in a smoke-filled room.  And I had spent many, many hours in smoke-filled rooms in my formative years, so I worried a lot less about the asbestos thing after that.  But just to be clear, we still took the proper precautions - wetted down the surface, wrapped the ducts in plastic wrap, and wore masks.)

My parents were more ambivalent smokers than the rest of the extended family, I think.  At least, they would quit from time to time.  I think that my dad had essentially quit smoking for good by the time he married my stepmother (I feel it more-or-less necessary to be clear that I refer to her as my 'stepmother' just for purposes of clarity; I've never called her anything other than 'Mom'), although I do remember him going through one final cigar fling for a couple years when I was in high school.

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Dad's remarriage was the near occasion of my own first pass at smoking, around the time I was ten years old, or so.  My step-brother (again, I've only ever called him my 'brother') was roughly the same age as me, and I would occasionally tag along with him, to play ball in the summertime, or whatever.  It was after one of these summertime ball games that he and I huddled together in the shadow of the school whose ball field we had used, and he asked me if I wanted to learn how to smoke.  I nodded, and he produced a pack of cigarettes and popped one out for me.  He showed me how to hold it between my lips, then how to strike a match from the little book of matches (you don't find so many of those anymore, either), and puff on the cigarette while holding the match to it, to draw enough air to light the cigarette.  I managed to actually get the thing lit, all by myself, without any help, which gave me a sense of satisfaction, that I was on my way to becoming a grown-up.  Then I puffed on it a few times, actually burning the tobacco, and producing an ash on the end of the cigarette.  Cool!  This smoking thing was really pretty easy!

Then my brother, with an air of disdain, told me that what I was doing didn't really constitute 'smoking'; in order to actually smoke the cigarette, I needed to inhale the smoke.  A silent 'uh-oh' passed through the far back corners of my brain.  Something about inhaling smoke just didn't seem like it would be pleasant at all, and I kind-of looked at my cigarette warily, like, 'I don't think I'm gonna like this'.  But, unpleasantness be damned!  Sophisticated grown-up-hood was at stake here.  So I bravely took a deep drag on my cigarette, and with smoke filling my mouth, I inhaled.

And at that point, either God's mercy, or my own tragically-flawed biochemistry (or, you know, both at the same time) kicked in.  The smoke travelled roughly two centimeters down my windpipe, and caused acute irritation to my bronchial lining, producing an effect that could be roughly described as, "Get that shit the HELL outta here!"  I coughed, I choked, I gagged, I broke a few thousand blood-vessels in my face, and damn-near gave myself a mild stroke, trying to clear my airway of the offending particles.  I tried again, figuring that, like coffee (which was my other marker of 'grown-up-hood'), I just had to persevere until I figured out how to like it.  But to no avail.  I inhaled a second time, and a third, and probably a few more than that, but the result never changed - every introduction of smoke particles to my trachea was met with violent spasms of rejection from my body.  Eventually, I figured that a ten-year-old like myself could only give himself so many mild strokes in a given day, and I gave up.

I tried again a month or so later, with the same result.  And a couple more times in subsequent years, when I was 12 or 13, and I don't think that any actual smoke particles ever actually got into my actual lungs - every single attempt ended with me coughing and choking, and none of the smoke actually, you know, inside my body.

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Fast-forward to my high-school years.  I was probably 15 or 16 when my brother and a few of my friends started talking about how cool it was to smoke weed, and the mellow buzz to be had thereby.  Now, by the early '70s, we'd had ample exposure from our parents, schools and churches, to the idea that marijuana was a Very Bad Thing.  But it is perhaps a measure of the perversity of the thought-processes of 15/16-year-olds that, when our parents, schools and churches said, 'Very Bad Thing', we processed that information as 'Unutterably Cool'; I mean, heck - the Beatles had all gotten high, and no-one was cooler than them.  (It was of course, also possible that we processed some of the dire warnings from Those In Authority as 'Way Overblown'; on the other hand, we also thought that we were Freaking Invulnerable, so it is at least an open conversation as to who was In Touch With Reality to a greater/lesser degree).

So at one point, I decided that I at least wanted to check out the whole 'Weed' thing, just to see what was so doggone cool about it, after all.  I gave my brother $5, and he brought me back a baggie full of chopped dried herbs.  He gave me one of his rolling papers, and showed me how to roll a joint, which was kind-of exotically cool - rolling your own, and all that.  Then he told me it was just like smoking a cigarette.  And the same 'Oh shit' voice that I'd heard five years before, went rattling around the back of my brain again.  I took a couple of tentative puffs, and my brother impatiently explained to me that, look, if you want to get the buzz, you have to inhale.  And just to drive the point home, he explained that, to maximize the buzz, you wanted to draw more air, making a hissing sound as you took a pull on the joint, and then hold your breath, to let the smoke swirl around your lungs for as long as possible (which, I have to admit, did provide me with good training for use of an Albuterol inhaler, years down the road).  Now I had a sinking feeling that this was another Marker of Hipness that was just gonna go by the wayside for me, but, you know, I was at least gonna go down swinging, so I took a deep draw on my homespun little doobie, and strove mightily to induct the smoke into my lungs.

But alas, my 15-year-old lungs were no more tolerant of marijuana smoke particles than my 10-year-old lungs had been of tobacco smoke particles.  I coughed, I choked, I gagged, and darn-near puked, so violently did my lungs reject the smoke.  My shoulders sagged, and I knew that I'd been defeated, betrayed by my own biochemistry (and, you know, God's mercy; although I had really been hoping to have a different kind of 'Cosmic Experience', if only God had been agreeable).  I made a few more half-hearted attempts to experience the elusive Buzz, but I could never manage to actually ingest smoke into my lungs.  Probably the closest I came was during my first year or so of college (in the early 70s, 'The Sixties' were just winding down), when, on Friday nights, the dope smoke hung like a cloud in the hall, somewhere around eye-level; it's possible I inadvertently experienced a 'second-hand high', but it wasn't sufficiently 'cosmic' for me to actually, you know, notice it. . .

So yeah - I'm definitely down with the whole, 'Yeah, but I didn't inhale' thing.  Me and Bill, we understand each other. . .

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In my college years, and into my very-early-married years, I made a couple more passes at smoking, but in ways that didn't bring inhaling into play.  In college, a few of my friends took up cigar-smoking; and, as fate would have it, there was a very good little tobacco shop in our college town.  So, every so often, for whatever occasion we deemed suitably 'special' (a buddy's wedding, or something of that order), we'd pop into the smoke shop and pick up one or two $3 cigars to enjoy with our beer (and I will admit that there is something very cool and mellow about conversation over beer and cigars).  But cigar-smoking was always a 'special-occasion' kind of thing for us, and never remotely rose to the level of a 'habit'.  And I didn't have to inhale.

When Jen and I were still pretty newly-married, I picked up The Lord of the Rings for the first time, and I'm sure that I remarked to her on more than one occasion that Tolkien portrayed pipe-smoking in a very cool, mellow, almost romantic, way.  And so Jen, eager as she was to please her young husband, gave me my first pipe as a gift (I don't recall if it was a birthday gift, or what; but she gave me my first pipe, a really nice briar, with a pearlescent mouthpiece), along with a bag of very nicely-aromatic vanilla-blend tobacco from the smoke shop.  And so, for a couple of years, I was a very occasional pipe smoker - once or twice a week, at the very most (and of course, you don't inhale pipe smoke, either, so it was perfect).

I enjoyed several things about smoking a pipe - the smell of the (unburned) tobacco; the smoke swirling around my head (somehow, cigar and cigarette smoke doesn't swirl around one's head; or at least, it doesn't conjure up those images in quite the same way pipe smoke does), like something out of The Night Before Christmas; even the little 'Pipe Culture' bits, like tamping the bowl, and cleaning it afterwards.  But I could never really tolerate the taste in my mouth the morning after a night of smoking - someone has likened it to the Russian Army marching through your mouth, and I can't really quibble with that simile.  So, after a couple years, once the 'romance' of pipe-smoking had worn off sufficiently, I decided that the charred/ashy aftertaste just wasn't worth it anymore.  And, for all intents and purposes, I've never smoked since.  Oh, if someone offers me a cigar on a Special Occasion, I'll smoke it with him, for comradeship and the honoring of the occasion.  But I'm not any kind of Smoker; and I've never been any more than a failed Toker.  I'll happily cop to 'Joker', though. . .

And you know. . .  I don't really feel like I've missed all that much. . .

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I posted another telling of parts of this story, on a somewhat different spin, a couple years ago, on my old blog.  So, you can check it out (and maybe get some extra texture) (Hey, is that another ex-Beatle reference?)

Advent. . . Eventually

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. . .)

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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. . .

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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. . .

Catholic Signs?

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. . .

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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. . .

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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. . .

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. . .

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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? . . .

Busy Days in Us-Ville

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.

God Bless Us, Every One

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.

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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. . .

Day of the Turtles; And, a Count

This past Saturday, we had a family reunion, at my cousin's house, about an hour's drive from Our Town. My cousin and her husband have a great place, nestled into the woods in the midst of what is otherwise mainly farm country. Her husband Mick also dug out a small pond at the lower end of their property, which is fed by no less than two springs on their land, which he diverted to fill the pond. So, when we go there, some of the folks fish from the pond; he also has a little pedal-boat, and some of the kids like to just paddle around on the pond. And, he brought in a load of sand, which he dumped on a corner of the pond, to make a little beach for the kids to swim on. So, we always have a great time at this particular reunion, which is for the descendants of my paternal grandparents. Mainly, these days, that means my cousins and their kids and grandkids (and some of my cousins, who are only a few years older than I am, but married young and got right down to the business of begetting, are getting distressingly close to becoming great-grandparents). My dad is the only one of my grandparents' children still living, but his health hasn't allowed him to make the five-hour trip to be at the reunion for the last few years. One of his brothers' widows - the mother of my cousin who hosts the festivities - is in her 80s, and still comes to the reunion, but she is the only one from her generation who can still come. When I was a kid, I always loved the holidays, when we'd all get together at Grandma & Grandpa's farm, and play in the barn, and whatever else. I just really enjoyed my cousins, and the whole extended-family thing. But around the time I was in junior-high and high school, we stopped seeing quite so much of each other, for various reasons, some of which I'm sure I don't even know. But, around ten or fifteen years ago, possibly spurred by the growing awareness that our parents' generation was passing from the scene, several of my cousins started organizing a reunion, and it has been a very good thing, even recapturing some of the relationships that we had all those years ago, when our grandparents were still alive. My cousins have gone in various and sundry directions in their lives; some went to college, some didn't. Some have strong marriages, some have been through a succession of spouses and significant-others. But, when we get together, it's just us, and it's good. ------------------------- Last year, at this reunion, Mick (my cousin's husband, and our host) created a mild sensation by passing around, as a kind of show-and-tell, the shell of a large-ish snapping turtle that he'd caught out of his pond; it was about twelve inches across. He'd killed it, butchered it (if 'butchering' is what you do to a turtle), and, in the fullness of time, ate it. It was cool to see how the turtle's backbone was integral with the shell, and just passing it around and checking it out amounted to a small science lesson. Which was very cool, all in its own right; Mick is a carpenter by trade, and one of those 'outdoors-y' guys who hunts and fishes, and just generally lives 'closer to the earth' than us more citified cousins do. He's not 'educated' in the formal sense, but he's a story-teller, and I have learned all manner of fascinating stuff just sitting and swapping stories with him. Now, the idea of killing and eating a turtle just captured Jen's imagination, and she told Mick that, if ever it were possible, she would be delighted to partake of turtle at some future date. So, this year, Jen and I, and the three of our kids who came with us (5M, 6F, and 8M; the others were all otherwise occupied in various and sundry directions) arrived early, and were standing around the kitchen, talking with a couple of my cousins, and my aunt, when one of the cousins made some mention about the oven, and how soon the turtle would be done. Which caused Jen to perk right up - "There's turtle? You made turtle?!?" Indeed. So, when we were all seated around the tables in the garage (it was raining), partaking of our potluck feast, Mick came through with a small bowl filled with bits of meat. "Who wants to try some turtle?" Of course, he came first to Jen, and she took a couple pieces and sampled them. I was sitting next to her, so the bowl came to me next. I looked into the bowl; there were bits of light meat, and bits of darker meat. Some of it looked a bit gristly, but it was otherwise unremarkable. Mick said that, in general, the lighter meat was more tender, so I grabbed a bit of that. I looked at it questioningly for a second, popped it into my mouth, and began chewing it. And guess what? It tasted just like chicken (terribly, terribly cliche'd, I know, but it did). A tad chewier than chicken, but that was pretty much the basic flavor. . . I watched as Mick took his bowl of turtle-meat around the garage, and offered it to everyone there. Some folks (maybe a quarter of them) wanted no part of it, and passed on the opportunity. Most of the 'city cousins' had a reaction similar to mine - not quite sure what to expect, and not quite sure they really wanted to try it, but they were game to give it a shot. So, a real life experience there - I've eaten turtle. And I liked it just fine. . . ------------------------- A while later, the rain stopped, and the kids headed down to the pond, either to fish or to swim. 8M wanted to swim, so Jen and I, and the parents of the other swimmers grabbed seats near the 'beach'. Suddenly, a couple of the kids were jumping up and down, all excited, and they came to show us what they'd found - a baby turtle, with a shell about an inch across. It was pretty newly hatched, too, since its shell was still leathery soft. Within a couple days after hatching, the shell would be hard, just like an adult turtle, so this was a pretty new one. As we held the baby turtle in our hand, one of the other kids came running up, with another baby turtle in his hand. And then another, and another. We had the kids take the babies down to the water, and let them swim. And before long, we saw a couple more, who were slowly making their way down the beach toward the water, with the unerring sense that has been programmed into generations of snapping turtles since the dawn of turtle-kind - get out of your shell, and head for the water. And not a one of 'em headed away from the water, either; they popped out of their shells, and they just knew where to go. And then, sitting back and taking the whole scene in, we saw a tiny movement in the sand. From a small hole in the sand, maybe an inch or so in diameter, a small head popped up. Six or eight pairs of human eyes watched in fascination as yet another baby turtle, his head the size of a pencil eraser, crawled out of the tunnel into which he'd been laid. He paused for several minutes as his head popped out of the hole. Perhaps he was adjusting to the bright sunlight; perhaps the presence of so many human creatures staring at him was the least bit scary. Or perhaps, as is the way of turtles, he just wasn't in that big a hurry. At length, he decided, for whatever reason, that he needed to get on with his business, so he pulled himself up out of the hole, turned toward the water, and crawled down to it. The parents who were on hand to view the baby-turtle spectacle, were all pretty well in awe of what they were seeing. But we were laughing because the kids, who were all 8M's age (eight) or younger, were no doubt thinking that this sort of thing happens all the time, and might even be disappointed if, at next year's reunion, there are no baby turtles going down the beach for the first time. . . ------------------------- Yesterday, I went out on my bike, as I am fond of doing during the warm-weather months (and even some of the not-so-warm ones). I planned on a 45-mile ride, which would put me over 1000 miles for the year, the fourth consecutive year I've made four-digit miles on my bike, and the earliest I've passed that milestone in at least the last 15 years. I was just past the 30-mile mark, when I ran over a sharp stone, causing my rear tire to go flat. I pulled off the road, and dug through the little gear bag on my bike, looking for the spare inner tube that I always carry with me. But alas, I had no spare inner tube. I called Jen on my cell phone, asking her to look around the house to see if there was a spare tube anywhere in the house. She looked around for a while, but there was no tube to be found. She hung up and called a couple of the local bike shops, to see if they were open on Sunday afternoon, with an inner tube she could buy for me. They were all closed. So reluctantly, I told her she might as well just come and pick me up, since my ride for the day was done. I snapped my cell phone shut, and stood by the side of the road waiting for Jen to arrive. A woman drove up in an SUV, pulling to a stop in front of me. She rolled down her window. "Do you need anything?" Not unless you've got a spare inner tube, thanks. "I've got one." You do? Well, it has to be a Presta valve (at this point, I should explain, as briefly as possible, that there are two types of air valves that are commonly used on bike inner tubes. The large majority of bike wheels are made to accept Schrader valves, which are the same as the ones on your car tires; the 'higher end' bikes tend to use Presta valves, which to the uninitiated, can seem like a fairly 'bike-snobby' thing; maybe it is, but the salient point here is that my bike needs a Presta valve, and Presta valves are not nearly so commonly found - if someone has a Presta valve, they don't have it by accident) "Yes, it's a Presta valve." And at that point, my jaw hit the ground. I don't know what the odds might be that a random person driving by might just happen to offer me a Presta-valved inner tube, but it would likely be on the order of one-in-multiple-thousands. And yet, here she was, my Presta-tube angel. She called her husband on her cell phone (it's occurring to me that cell phones are playing a rather prominent role in this story; I wonder how we managed to get home from flat tires in the days before cell phones), and within 10 minutes, he pulled up alongside me and tossed an inner tube to me. I tried to pay him for it, but he'd have none of it. We swapped a couple DALMAC stories, and he was on his way. I should mention that I was just able to contact Jen before she left the house, to ask her to bring the bike pump to me, instead of just taking me home. Because I've left myself a fairly gaping hole in my roadside-repair readiness. I carry a small toolkit with me, and a spare tube, but I don't have a frame-mounted pump. So if I get a flat (and this year, I've had at least three of them; I can't ever recall having so many in a single season; I've gone several entire years without ever having to fix a flat), I can get the wheel off the bike, remove the dead inner tube, install the new inner tube (assuming, that is, that I have one), and put the wheel back on the bike. But I can't inflate the new tube. (*sigh*) So that means that, three times this year, I've had to call Jen to bring me the floor pump that we have at home, just so I could pump my tire back up, after having done everything else. But for now, the major point is to count the incredible blessing of a passing motorist tossing me a thousand-to-one shot, just so I could finish my ride. Incredible. (And I didn't even get her name, or her husband's; if either of them happen to be reading this blog post, my gratitude knows no bounds. . .)

A Midsummer's Miscellany

So, did somebody at NASA, or someplace, decide that it was just too crass to pronounce 'Uranus' as 'Yer-Anus' (which did, after all, make for a whole line of, um, 'earthy' humor)? OK, I suppose maybe I can sorta see their point, kinda; but did they really think that pronouncing it as 'Urine-Us' was a major improvement? Just, you know, wondering. . . ------------------------- I don't know what it's like where any of the rest of y'all are at, but around here, the corn on the 4th of July is more like 'me-high' than 'knee-high'. Seriously, when I go out riding my bike among the cornfields around Our Town, it's at least as tall as I am. . . ------------------------- Spent the holiday weekend visiting my parents, and it was a really good time. Dad is doing well, but it's good for him to have visitors from time to time. We spent some time working on some new information we've recently gotten on the family tree, and he gave me copies of some wonderful old photos that I'd lost track of. I had probably the best visit with my mom since she's been in the nursing home. Several times, in response to some little bit of humor, from me or one of the others (I went with my brother, his wife, and their two daughters), Mom just burst out laughing. At the appropriate time, and everything; like she understood and got the joke. Even though it wasn't apparent that she even knew who I was. . . ------------------------- Yesterday, we spent the day clearing out the debris from the maple limb that fell in our yard a couple weeks ago. And I do mean we spent the DAY. And it was a really, really HOT day, pushing 100F if it didn't actually quite get there. Jen and I and the younger kids, along with Pat and John, a couple of teenaged neighbor kids, spent the morning trimming and binding up all the 'small' branches (ie, the ones with leaves on the ends of them), using an assortment of nippers and loppers and hand saws and axes (the teen boys - and 7M, who's 12 - really liked swinging the ax) (so yes - ax-swinging lessons were given). In the afternoon, 4M and 5M came out, and our other neighbor Jim came over with his chainsaw, and we cut and carried away the big stuff. I wish my digital camera were working better; the photo-sequence from beginning to end would be pretty striking. In the morning, it was like we were working in a jungle - we could barely see each other's heads through the dense foliage. By dinnertime, we pretty much had our yard back. And all it cost me was a new chain for Jim's saw, and a six-pack of beer for us to share. And we all slept really well. . .

Roots

I have a somewhat 'manic' personality. Which is to say, that when I become interested in something, I tend to jump in with both feet, so to speak. When I bought my first touring bike, it wasn't long before I was going on tours, riding centuries, and piling up miles at the rate of thousands per year. I read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion all in one month. In the first year of our marriage (Yeah, I know. . .) Heck, once I started begetting children, I didn't stop until I had eight of them. So, you can see the full scope of my situation. It was back in the spring of 1986 that I was bitten by the genealogy bug. I'm not sure exactly what set it off - I recall my dad sending me a short account of our family history, which his aunt had compiled, and it was utterly fascinating to me. Of course, I could remember my grandparents, but Aunt Mildred (who was my grandfather's sister) had taken things several generations farther back than that, to a fellow who'd been born in 1780, only four years after the Declaration of Independence, in New York state (it turns out that the large bulk of the immediate-pre-statehood settlement of Michigan was from New York, the more-or-less direct result of the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825). This early ancestor had ten children (seven sons), and the fourth of those sons had three children, the youngest of whom left New York and came to Michigan. His oldest son was my great-grandfather, who died a decade or more before I was born, but I could recall seeing his name painted on the side of the barn on what had been his farm, next door to my grandfather's farm in rural Michigan. And of course, my dad had known his grandfather, and would occasionally tell us stories about him. I had a friend at work, and we often used to sit together in one or the other of our offices, talking about this or that or the other thing, on our lunch hours; he was quite a bit older than me (in fact, he was the father of a girl I'd known in college). So when my dad sent me the little hand-typed genealogy from Aunt Mildred, I showed it to him. And he just lit up. "Wonderful!" he exclaimed, and he began telling me about his recently-taken-up hobby of genealogy. When I told him that it all sounded quite interesting, he promised to take me with him the next time he went to the library to do some genealogical research on his lunch hour, which he did. At first, he just pointed me to the reels of microfilm for the US Census, and encouraged me to start by just documenting what I already knew. There was something fascinating about looking at those old census records, from 1880, or 1850, or even earlier, and seeing the names of my ancestors written there, and realizing that the page I was looking at represented a census taker standing on the front porch of my great-great-grandfather's house, talking directly to him (or, more likely, my great-great-grandmother). And it wasn't long before I'd branched out, and begun documenting other parts of our family than just the succession of fathers who all shared the surname that I still bear. It was amusing to find my great-grandmother in the census, at age 18, just a couple entries away from my 17-year-old great-grandfather, knowing that just a few years after that record was taken, they'd be married to each other; and also just to realize that they'd grown up in pretty close proximity to each other. There was a period of time when I was spending a fair bit of effort on cemeteries - if I knew that a particular ancestor had lived in such-and-such a town, but didn't know when they'd died, I could get a listing of the nearby cemeteries, and go looking for their gravestone, which would almost certainly tell me what I needed to know. Usually, I would plan out my cemetery visits as part of a trip we were already making; many of the cemeteries in question were not too terribly out-of-the-way on a trip to Chicago, for instance. I didn't think it was all that big a deal, but after a while, when we were on a road trip, the kids would point out the cemeteries we were driving past, and ask why we weren't stopping. Before long, I'd done all that I could (for the time being) with the census, and I'd graduated to the published genealogies, and the old town records. Several of my family lines, especially from my dad's mother, went back into New England; and New England town records - most towns in New England kept records of every birth, death, and marriage, all the way back to the founding of the town, usually in the 1600s - are an amazing storehouse of information, and in short order - within a year or two - I'd extended what we knew of our family tree, in several directions, and in several cases, 'back to the water's edge'. In a few cases, I was able to reach back across the ocean, and establish connections in 16th-century (or even earlier) England or Germany. In 1987 we planned out a vacation to upstate New York, so I could do a bit of on-site research (and check out some of the cemeteries in New York). As it turns out, the part of New York our family is from is very close to Cooperstown, so we could include a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame. And when I told my dad about it, he decided to do likewise, and he and Mom stayed at the same resort we did. Looking back, Jen still gets a wry chuckle from the way I sold that vacation to her - "We can go check out some cemeteries in New York! And visit the Baseball Hall of Fame!! And my parents are coming, too!!!" But we had a great time, even so (and I won't even mention the possibility that 3M may have been conceived on that trip). Those of you who recall my 'book posts' from last summer might recall that, at one point in my young life, I went on a bit of a James Michener binge. And doing genealogical research was a lot like making my own Michener novel (only 'in reverse'), for our family - tracking the progress of various of our ancestors, from New England to New York, to Ohio/Indiana, to Michigan, all in the context of the history that was happening around them. I found, for instance, that a couple brothers of one of my ancestors had been thrown in jail during the Revolution, as suspected Tory sympathizers. And apparently, they had been firm in their Loyalist convictions - after the war, they took their families and went to Canada. Which I learned when I was contacted by a distant cousin living in California, who shared my surname, who had traced his own ancestry back across Canada, where he'd stalled; and I could then connect him to the family in New York. Another of my ancestors (my 2g-grandfather, mentioned above) had left New York, and gone to live with his father's cousin in Indiana, in 1863, under circumstances that could look suspiciously like draft-dodging (which, of course, my own 'boomer' generation thinks we invented). . . When I searched for my birth-parents, the skills I'd honed doing genealogy came in really handy, looking through various public records and compiling the information I'd need to find them. And of course, once I'd found them, I had whole new chunks of family to track down (my birth-father's family was from Mississippi, and included a few slave-owners; which is something I'd hoped never to find, but alas. . .) Sometime in the early 90s, my duties to the 'production side' of the family tree made it nigh-unto-impossible for me to devote time to furthering the research effort, but when my dad retired, he took up where I'd left off, and has 'pushed things back' a bit further. Of course, now, much of the information that I'd gone to the library for, is available online, and in place of the large 3-ring binders that I'd spent years compiling, I now have a CD-ROM, and genealogy software to keep track of things for me. Aside from the brute facts of who all my ancestors were, and of their 'march through history', I think that genealogy also fosters a 'sense of continuity', and a certain kind of 'existential humility'. At the most basic, earthy level, it reinforces the point that each of us, and every person who has ever lived, is the product of an act of sexual intercourse between our birth-parents (I sidled up to this idea in this earlier post). None of us is here by our own choice; each of us exists because of the choices and actions of other people - a whole chain of them, in fact, stretching back beyond recorded history. And that reinforces the idea that our lives are not simply our own; we have duties (on an 'existential level') to both past and future generations. . . Simone Weil, I think, had some poignant things to say about 'the need for roots', and that resonates with me. I recall one of my uncles expressing a degree of astonishment that I, who am not even blood-related to my family, would dig in to the family tree so vigorously. A friend of mine, a psychologist, told me that he thought I was subconsciously searching for my birth-parents (and, given the timing of how things turned out, he may even have been right). But honestly, it's not so mysterious as all that - it's my family; it's where we came from, and how we got to where we are today. And it's utterly fascinating. . .

Methinks Some Folks Doth Protest Too Much. . .

A while ago, I was in the checkout line at the supermarket, when a headline from the cover of one of the tabloid magazines on display there caught my eye. (I hasten to interject here that I am absolutely a commited member of the 'Who-gives-a-rat's-ass?' school of attending to tabloid headlines, but you know, sometimes you just notice stuff, in spite of yourself.)

"HOW MANY IS TOO MANY?" blared the headline. "The Duggars Under Fire" was the sub-heading. Now, Jen and I have had occasion to make a degree of common cause with the Duggars from time to time, so, in spite of my better judgement, I read on. It seems that our good friends Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have recently welcomed their 19th child into this world, four months prematurely, and the health 'issues' of little Josie were the occasion for such soul-searching on the part of the tabloid writers. (Have you noticed how much easier it is to search other people's souls than your own?) (Also, Michelle was 43 years old at the time of Josie's birth; which, just for the sake of saying so, is two-and-a-half years younger than Jen was when 8M was born).

Now, my first reaction whenever I see something in the media pertaining to the Duggars is always, "Well, God Bless 'Em!" It takes an admirable measure of courage and self-sacrifice to raise such a large family in today's world. And my second reaction is usually, especially when the commentator in question adopts a tone of "Those people have got to be stopped!" (which is a distressingly large proportion of them), "What do YOU care how many kids some couple in Arkansas has?" I mean, here we have people, in print, in a nationally-distributed journal, sanctimoniously debating the Morality of Family Size, and at least theoretically prepared to consider invoking some manner of coercive authority, because a couple in Arkansas has Too Many Kids.

And I am thoroughly at a loss to account for the visceral vehemence of that reaction. I mean, really - why do the Duggars seem to bother so many people so much? By all accounts, their kids are well provided for, properly educated, well-behaved, and no burden to the society-at-large, so why all the angst? 'Better Them Than Me', I could understand, and even, to a degree, sympathize with. I mean, if someone feels like nineteen kids is more than they could handle, I can definitely understand that (heck, depending on the day, two kids can be more than I think I can handle); and nobody is forcing anyone, or even proposing to them, to have one child more than what they want to have (and just as an aside, many of the same folks who are so eager to tell the Duggars that they've got 'Too Many Kids' would pitch a monumental bitch if anyone so much as arched an eyebrow at someone else's choice to remain childless; "It's Nobody's Business But Mine!" Unless you're the Duggars, and choose to have 19). It's just out-of-proportion. Exactly what skin is it, off the nose of anyone not named Duggar, if they have as many kids as they want - or, more to the point, as many kids as they believe God is inviting them to have?

Is it because of the southern-accented evangelical Christianity espoused by the Duggars? I know that, in the part of the country where I live, southern accents can evoke a stereotype of 'ignorant and uneducated' with some folks (even so admirable a young man as Tim Tebow, the Heisman-Trophy-winning quarterback from the University of Florida, can evoke a similar visceral reaction, so maybe that does account for some of it). But Jim Bob Duggar (and yeah, that name 'Jim Bob' also evokes stereotypical images of 'hayseed' among many northerners) is hardly uneducated; heck, he's served in the same state legislature over which Bill Clinton, much beloved of the northern elites, once presided as governor. . .

We have eight children, so we've gotten a few comments on the order of 'How could you?', in the course of our parental lives, but nothing like what the Duggars seem to inspire. We are good friends of two families who each have eleven children, and one with thirteen (I will admit that Jen and I do appreciate any opportunities we have, rare as they are, to use the words, 'Only Eight'). Heck, Jen is one of ten kids herself, and I'm one of seven; which has mostly served to greatly increase the esteem in which we hold our parents. Another couple we know has seven children; the mother is one of 14 children, and the father is one of 16 (so maybe they've practiced an admirable restraint, eh?); their kids have 50-some aunts and uncles, including spouses. One can only imagine what their family reunions must be like. . .

But really - why do the Duggars, by their very existence, seem to provoke such extreme agitation in so many people? I understand that they have, to at least some degree, embraced the public spotlight, and a measure of 'celebrity', by agreeing to appear in various TLC and Discovery Health shows (which, I admit, I've never seen; like the Duggars, we don't have cable). And maybe they do mean to promote a certain vision of family life - the Quiverfull Movement, and all that. But again - who is being harmed by their message? A simple 'No Thanks; I'll Pass' ought to suffice (it did for us, when some of our friends embraced Mary Pride's message many years ago), but it seems not to. And why is that?

Just wondering. . .

(Sorry if this is more of a rant than it needs to be. I guess it just struck a nerve. . .)

The Final Word

As we have for the past few years, our community again this year marked the Advent/Christmas season with a presentation of 'Nine Lessons and Carols', and ensemble of nine Advent/Christmas themed Scripture readings, each one paired with a musical piece. As we did last year, our family sang one of the carols. This time, we sang Michael Card's The Final Word, in conjunction with John 1:1-14 on the theme of 'The Incarnation of the Word of God'. . . ------------------------- The Final Word by Michael Card You and me, we use so very many clumsy words; The noise of what we often say is not worth being heard. When the Father's wisdom wanted to communicate His love He spoke it in on final perfect Word. CHORUS: He spoke the Incarnation, and then so was born the Son. His final Word was Jesus, He needed no other one. Spoke flesh and blood so He could bleed, and make a Way divine. And so was born the baby Who would die to make it mine. And so the Father's fondest Thought took on flesh and bone. He spoke the living luminous Word; at once His will was done. And so the transformation that in man had been unheard Took place in God the Father as He spoke that final Word. CHORUS And so the Light became alive, and Manna became Man. Eternity stepped into time, so we could understand. CHORUS ------------------------- (And we brought down the house when 8M stepped up to the mike for his solo on the last line of the final chorus. Because yeah, it was just that cute.) I love this song, in part because (as I mentioned last year, pertaining to a different song) it makes the connection between the Incarnation and the Passion - between the Baby in the manger, and the Cross and Resurrection, which is a large part of the whole point of the Incarnation. It also captures the sense of Jesus' kenosis, His self-emptying, in taking on human flesh and blood - 'eternity stepped into time'. Or, as one of the early church Fathers said, a manger in a stable contained the One who held the Universe in His hand. . . Because of Christmas - because of the Incarnation - our humanity is filled to its fullest, and our dignity as made in the Image of God can be restored. All because God is With Us. And I wish a richly blessed Christmas to all my family and friends. . .