Another Book Post

About a year ago, in my old blog, I put up a pair of book posts. I listed something like 25-30 books that had been especially significant in forming my thinking over the years, with secondary mentions of about the same number (just out of curiosity, did any of you read any of the books I mentioned, on my recommendation?) (It's OK if you didn't; I'm not all ego-invested in it. If you want to be an unenlightened simpleton, that's up to you. . .) (I'm kidding!) I said at the end of those posts that, probably within a month, I'd think of a dozen more books that I'd wish I'd mentioned. Well that wasn't quite true. It's been about a year, and I'm not sure if I made it all the way to twelve or not (for a math guy, I'm really not much into counting. . .)

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Since I ended last time with works of fiction, that's where I'll start this time. . . The Children of Men, by PD James; First of all, if you saw the movie, get it out of your mind before you read the book. This is a very provocative novel about a world in which, for unknown mysterious reasons, there is an utter and complete epidemic of infertility - no-one, anywhere in the world, is getting pregnant, or having babies. Somewhere in the world is the identified Youngest Person on Earth - the last person to be born before the onset of the epidemic. A fascinating study of the psycho-dynamics of a world without a Next Generation. . . And of course, a sharp (albeit understated) critique of the various-and-sundry 'anti-life' ideologies. . .

Contact, by Carl Sagan; Again, if you saw the movie, try to put it out of your mind before you read the book. This is a fascinating book, and pretty good Science Fiction; and all the moreso, coming from an author for whom writing science fiction wasn't his 'day job'. On the face of it, the plot revolves around an inter-stellar message picked up by earthly radio-telescopes (Sagan was very into the whole search-for-extraterrestrial-intelligence thing). But it ends up touching on themes of human nature, and our 'Place In the Universe', as well as assorted other 'religious' themes. The book is all the more interesting for having Carl Sagan as its author; Sagan, who never made any bones about his disdain for religion, wrote a very 'religious' novel. At the climax of the story (I suppose I should give a Spoiler Alert here), our heroes encounter the Caretakers - alien beings who are ultra-wise, deeply moral, all-knowing, and powerful enough to manipulate galaxies. They are super-intelligent, but also personal. You don't get to see them as they really are (you couldn't handle that), but only as they deem it best to show themselves. The impression slowly dawns that they are just . . . like . . . God. Carl Sagan had little use for conventional ideas of God, yet in his novel, he gives us aliens who are a pretty good first-order approximation of God. Very interesting. . .

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OK, back to the non-fiction. . .

One By One From the Inside Out, Glen Loury; One of the most insightful books I've come across on the topic of race and the status of blacks in America. In his prologue, Loury (who is black) states, "The most important challenges and opportunities that confront me derive not from my racial condition, but rather from my human condition." Amen. And he goes from there. White racism, says Loury, is not dead, but it is no longer the main impediment to black progress. Much of what will make for black progress lies within the control of black people themselves, and is more moral than anything else. He is also sharp on the limitations of ideology - "Both [liberal and conservative ideologies] smack of a mechanistic determinism wherein the mysteries of human motivation are susceptible to calculated intervention." I love books that train me to 'think outside the box', and this one did.

Time for Truth, Os Guiness; I'd have loved this book just for one marvelous quote (among many) that I could take from it - "Truth is True, even if no one believes it." But Os Guinness has a few more things to say on the topic than that. Mainly that the devaluing of Truth in our culture - the apparent loss of the very notion that Truth exists independently of us, and that we should conform our minds and wills to the Truth, rather than the other way around - cannot fail to have dire consequences; Truth will have the last word. Such pop-notions as 'true for you/me' cannot be other than nonsensical. I might have wished that Guinness had given a few examples showing that the Loss of Truth isn't simply a 'leftward' phenomenon; it would seem less like a partisan screed (it isn't, but it could be susceptible to such a reading). But as Cardinal Ratzinger used to say, before he was pope, "Truth is not determined by a majority vote." Or Solzhenitsyn - "One word of Truth outweighs the world." And Os Guinness concurs.

Psychology as Religion, Paul Vitz; Vitz, a practicing psychologist, confronts the 'ultimate pretensions' of what he calls Self Theory, which has been the dominant, popular version of psychology since the 70s. Self Theory has tended to claim for itself a Golden Key to Meaning, reinforced by its apparent ability to claim for itself the mantle of Science, which, in our present age, is taken as the final arbiter of Truth. Vitz demonstrates convincingly that these 'religious' aspects of Self Theory are not merely anti-religious, but bad science, resting on unsupported hypotheses (sort of a Proof by Persistent Vehement Assertion). Vitz is even more devastating when he turns to consider the outcomes of Self Theory, and the kind of society that is composed of sovereign individual selves, each a god in his own universe, to whom self-denial is a foreign or even evil concept. And the past 30-40 years have not given happy testimony in that regard. . .

The Idea of a University, by John Henry Newman. Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), who was, at the time of writing this book (1858), a fairly recent convert from Evangelical Anglicanism to Roman Catholicism, and was also trying to found a Catholic university in Dublin, gives a solid account of how the Life of the Mind relates to Christian faith. Suffice it to say that he doesn't view the two as opposites; his maxim, 'Truth cannot be contrary to Truth' is one that I have worked to make my own. Next, a pair of books by the martyr to the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

The Cost of Discipleship has justly acquired something of a reputation as a 'modern Christian classic'. His theme of 'cheap grace' is a direct challenge to a lot of what gets put forth in 21st-century America. Rather, as Bonhoeffer puts it, "When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die." Christian discipleship isn't supposed to be easy or comfortable. And Bonhoeffer, who spent most of WWII in a Nazi prison, and was killed as the Third Reich was in its death throes, is a striking example of matching his deeds to his words.

I have also greatly enjoyed Bonhoeffer's book, Life Together, which is Bonhoeffer's vision of Christian community life, and thus of interest to me for obvious reasons. The main idea that I have taken from Bonhoeffer is that, for all the zeal that we might have for Christian community life, we cannot forget that we, and all our 'brethren' are nonetheless still fallen human beings. "He who loves his vision of the Christian community more than he loves the Christian community [ie, the actual men and women who comprise the Christian community], becomes a destroyer of the Christian community." And I have seen the existential truth of that on multiple occasions.

A Return to Modesty, Wendy Shalit; Ms. Shalit makes bold to say out loud what is becoming all-too-empirically-obvious - that the 'emperor' of the Sexual Revolution has no clothes (uh, no pun intended) (really); and that young women are disproportionately bearing the costs of that tragic bit of 'social progress'. Alas, in spite of all the Persistent Vehement Assertion to the contrary, it turns out that men and women aren't put together quite the same; it turns out to make a difference that women are the ones who have the babies. And that accounts, at least in part, for why women are 'wired' for permanence in their sexual relationships. And it is passing strange that the personal and social costs of treating them otherwise - depression, failed marriages (or the increasing incapacity to even form marriages) - are so willingly accepted. . .

A few years back, I received a book in the mail - Couples In Love, by John R. Waiss. The book was sent to me by the author himself (who is a Catholic priest), asking me to review the book for Amazon.com; I don't even remember any more how he happened to find my name, much less why he thought I'd be a fitting reviewer for his book. But review it I did. It is a fine book, presenting the late pope's Theology of the Body in an accessible, 'dialog' format. Fr. Waiss thanked me for the review, and other than checking the 'helpful' votes every so often, and occasionally recommending the book to friends, I really haven't thought about it all that much in the meantime. . .

Until earlier this year, when Fr. Waiss asked me to review his second book, titled Born to Love, which is a similar 'dialog-format' presentation of Catholic teaching relating to homosexuality. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to step into that quarrel, but I told Fr. Waiss I would at least read it, so I did. And I was glad I did. Fr. Waiss does probably the best I've seen at 'speaking the Truth in love'; which ain't always easy to do, when homosexuality is the subject matter. There isn't room enough here for much of an in-depth discussion, but Fr. Waiss did an amazing job for me of getting me to just step back from the ideological 'Culture War' shouting matches, and see instead the people - persons, like me, made in God's image and likeness, and like me, engaged in the moral task of trying to make their way through this world with integrity. And, in that context, he also gets me to confront my own sinfulness and lack of love, and ask myself why I should think that homosexual sins are somehow more offensive to God than are my own. . .

Not long after I read Born to Love, I picked up Sexual Authenticity, by Melinda Selmys, which is, as its subtitle proclaims, 'An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism'. Or, as I think of it, 'Augustine's Confessions Meet the Theology of the Body' (and yeah, I was even sorta wondering to myself just what was up with all the books on 'Catholicism and Homosexuality'). Selmys is simply amazing in the way that she weaves the experiences of her own life into penetratingly deep insight into human nature and sexuality. Having spent several years of her young life as a partnered lesbian, her mind is remarkably 'free of cant', and she calmly points out the fatuities put forth by both sides of the 'Culture War'. Like Fr. Waiss, she puts homosexuality into a full human context, with all the fallen-ness that goes with that (and of course, I am no less fallen than anyone else). And in the course of all this, she tells one of the more brutally intellectually-honest 'conversion stories' I've ever encountered. . .

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And oh, heck - just for fun (and to keep this post from just being totally woolly and highbrow), I'll mention Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs, from which I've probably gotten more belly laughs per word than anything else I've ever read. I do feel duty-bound, though, to repeat Dave's warning at the beginning of the book, that it will reawaken bad songs that are lying dormant in the far back reaches of your brain, causing it to "repeat [them] over and over and OVER AND OVER AND OVER, sometimes for days, until you want to commit suicide by driving off a cliff, except you can't remember where you left your car keys." So, fair warning. But I got multiple huge fits of laughter from recalling to mind just how BAD some of the songs of my wayward youth really were - songs like 'MacArthur Park' (which, incidentally - Spoiler Alert! - came out in Dave's survey as the #1 awful song of all time), or 'In the Year 2525', or 'Muskrat Love' or 'Timothy', or 'Honey', or. . . you get the idea. Heck, even my musical idol, Paul McCartney, gets skewered a couple times (and deservedly so; there's just no way to make ". . . this ever-changing world in which we live in. . ." sound other than insipid) (which is too bad, because, from a purely musical standpoint, 'Live and Let Die' is a pretty cool song) (but I digress). So, with all due caution, I encourage you to check it out. But don't blame me for what happens when you do. . .

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So there you go; I hope that's enough to get you all by until I can scrape together another one. . .

Canning and The Can

OK, I've been debating with myself for a while whether to post this bit or not. But my friend Lime went ahead and posted (a while back, by now) about a long-ago bathroom remodeling, and it poked my brain for this story, which I hope you'll find at least mildly entertaining. . . ------------------------- In my young life, I've installed and/or reseated something on the order of half a dozen toilets. Really, it's not terribly difficult, if you've already got a working flange in place - you just have to undo a couple nuts around the base, and disconnect the water supply to the tank, then put down a wax gasket, reseat the toilet, hook everything back up, and you're good to go. I did my first one under my dad's supervision, one Christmas break when I was in college. Since I've been a homeowner, I've done a few more on my own behalf. With eight kids, it's not unheard-of for miscellaneous sundry toys to end up lodged within the bowels (HAH!) of the toilet. On multiple occasions, I've had to fish various action figures out of the toilet. One or two of my kids have virtually taken on research projects investigating the toilet-clogging properties of various toys. . . I love all of my children. But their toys, stuck inside the toilet? Not so much. I have to say, though, that by the sixth time or so that you have to unseat and reseat the toilet, in order to dislodge He-Man from the porcelain innards, it's not quite so daunting as the first couple were. . . ------------------------- The nastiest toilet job I ever had to do, though, had nothing to do with any of the kids. In fact, for quite a while, I had no idea what was going on. Out of the blue, with no apparent rhyme or reason, our toilet developed an intermittent clog. It would flush just fine for several days, and then, without warning, it would be completely plugged. Not slow, or struggling to flush - when the lever was pushed, the bowl would instantly fill to overflowing, as though no water at all was going down the drain. Which, as you might imagine, made for some fairly exciting times in our bathroom; you never quite knew when The Clog would strike, causing frantic screams to emanate from behind the bathroom door. I rigged up a poor-man's toilet snake out of a coat-hanger, and that usually did the trick, inducing the toilet to drain, to the relief of everyone involved (except the person who ended up having to mop up the floor, which sometimes was, um, chunkier than others. . .) And, often as not, a Clog Episode would be followed by several days of normal operation, which would lull us into a false sense of normalcy, until the next Clog struck. ------------------------- The day inevitably came when none of the unclogging magic worked. The toilet overflowed, the bathroom floor flooded, I poked at the drain with my coat-hanger-snake, and nothing changed. By this time, we'd been living with the unpredictability of The Clog for a while, and the experience was getting old. Given that The Clog wasn't playing nice this time, I resignedly shrugged my shoulders and figured it was finally time to deal with this thing once and for all. I ran out to the hardware store and picked up a new wax gasket, and also a valve to replace the simple angle connector between the main house supply and the supply tube to the toilet tank (plumbing jobs are so much easier with local shutoffs). After hand-emptying the toilet bowl (I have no comment on the 'chunkiness' of the contents), I disconnected the supply tube, unscrewed the nuts holding the base to the floor, and lifted the toilet off the floor. I took it out to the back yard, where I could use the garden hose to get some liquid 'throughput' going. First, though, I turned it upside down and poked at the drain tube from the bottom, to see if I could determine what was going on any better from the opposite end. I heard a metallic *tink* from inside the toilet. Well, that was different; maybe now we were making some progress. I poked at it some more with my hanger-snake; I kept getting the odd metallic *tink*, but nothing came out. I detached the tank from the bowl, so I could more easily flip the bowl around to try different angles. Finally, I turned on the outdoor faucet and ran the garden hose through the drain tube. I heard a little rattling noise, and a shiny golden object fell out of the bowl. It was a large-mouth canning lid. Suddenly I understood. The canning lid had gotten wedged at the tight corner in the porcelain drain tube, and acted as a kind of random butterfly valve. Sometimes, it would be 'open', and the bowl contents could flow past it virtually as if it weren't there. Sometimes, soggy toilet paper would catch on it, and things would clog up and run slowly, until the soggy paper broke up and got washed down the drain. But if the lid turned sideways, across the drain tube, nothing at all would go down, and the bowl would rapidly fill to overflowing. I grabbed up the damning evidence and took it in the house, asking Jen if she had any idea how a canning lid would've gotten lodged inside the toilet. Instantly, her eyes got as big as saucers. She related a story of how, a few weeks previously, she'd retrieved a quart of home-canned peaches from the pantry, that had gone bad, so she'd just dumped them down the toilet. She vaguely remembered, since the topic had come up, hearing a small metallic noise as she'd dumped the contents of the jar, but she hadn't thought any more of it, figuring that, if she'd dumped the lid, it would just go down the drain anyway. Which, obviously, it hadn't. I sighed heavily. At least the mystery had been solved. And all that remained was to put the toilet back together, and all would be well. I took the bowl and tank back into the bathroom. I placed the wax gasket on the flange, seated the bowl onto it, and bolted the base to the flange. Next, I situated the tank on the back of the bowl, with the rubber seal in between. I inserted the bolts that held the tank to the bowl flange, and finger-tightened them. Then I got my wrench and screwdriver and tightened the flange bolts more securely. The tank was still pretty floppy and wobbly on the back of the bowl, so I went to tighten the bolts a bit more. Then. . . *POP!* I didn't know what had popped, but I was pretty sure that there weren't supposed to be any POP! noises at that stage of the process, and whatever it was, it almost certainly wasn't good. A second later, a chunk of the porcelain flange from the bowl, through which the flange bolt attached the tank to the base, fell to the ground. I stared at it with stupefied horror, knowing exactly what this meant - I had just, through my own overzealous ignorant stupidity, broken the toilet flange, rendering the entire toilet useless. For a minute or two, I just stared at it, with my mouth agape. Finally, I made my comment. "SHIIIITTTT!" (Well, you know, I was working on a toilet. . .) Truthfully, I didn't have much time to wallow in my self-loathing - it was getting late, and if I was going to procure a new toilet, I needed to hurry. The guy at the plumbing-supply store was very compassionate, and allowed as to how most every do-it-yourself plumber he knew had popped a porcelain flange at some point. I got the new toilet home (requiring the third wax gasket that I'd seen that day), got it seated and hooked up, and finally all was well. (Well, to get 'technical' for just a second, the new toilet had a different 'setback' than the old one had, so I wound up with a gap of a couple inches between the tank and the wall, which, in the fullness of time required me to build a little 'support bracket' between the tank and the wall. But, at least we had a functioning toilet.) But between my dear wife and her rotten peaches, and my own overzealous bolt-tightening, it ended up being one of the, um, more frustrating home projects I've ever done. . .

Prank You Very Much. . .

Living as we do in a university town (well, we don't actually live in the university town, but we can walk there from our house), late August and early September of every year marks by The Return of the Students. And in honor of the beginning of the new school year, I thought I'd regale you with a few tales from my college years. . . ------------------------- I don't know what it was like where any of you all went to school, but at my school, pranks are a time-honored tradition, ranging in complexity from the simple 'pennying-in' (in which the prankster(s) wedges pennies between the prankee's door and the door frame, thus causing greatly-increased friction between the tongue of the latch and its corresponding hole in the frame, rendering it impossible to turn the door knob), or removing the microphone from the prankee's phone (which becomes much more prankish when followed up by a call to the prankee's phone), or 'beer-canning', in which a 'wall' of beer cans was constructed, leaning slightly into the prankee's door, so that when the door is opened, the cans fell loudly onto the linoleum-tile floor, all the way up to considerably more, um, elaborate pranks. The stories at my school have come down through the generations - the time a group of guys disassembled their buddy's Volkswagen and reassembled it in his dorm room, for example. Or the guys who, when their buddy went home for the weekend, removed all the furniture from his room, and replaced it with a patch of sod and a small tree; when they went down to the river that flows through the middle of the campus and kidnapped a duck, which they then leashed to the tree, the prank was complete, and awaited only the prankee's return to his room. Being a loyal member of the student body, I tried to do my part to carry on the grand tradition. Two pranks in particular stand out on my resume. You would be very kind to indulge my retelling of them. . . ------------------------- In my freshman dorm, there were various groups of guys who tended to hang out together on the weekends. One group of guys usually went out to hit the bars, staying until the bar closed (those were the days when 18 was the legal drinking age in Michigan, so virtually all college students were legal drinkers). I was usually in with a group of guys who played Hearts or Risk until the wee hours. So that, when the bar-hoppers returned to the dorm around 3AM, we were usually the only ones still awake to greet them. One such night, we were just finishing a game of Risk when the bar-guys returned, loud and boisterous. We left our game briefly to exchange greetings. One guy, named Mike, was particularly, shall we say, worse for wear. We watched as Mike staggered down the hall toward his room at the far end of the hall, bouncing off one wall and then the other, until, about two-thirds of the way there, he passed out in the middle of the hall. Now, at this point I should tell you that the particular dorm I was living in was something like a 'science dorm'; which, for purposes of this story, meant that many of us shared the same classes. Which became the immediate occasion for the hatching of our prank. As we stood in the hall contemplating Mike's prone-and-unconscious form, it came together. We quickly returned to our rooms and switched from our Friday-night casual attire (which, in the men's wing of our dorm, involved more skivvies than some of you might want to think about) into our more everyday going-to-class clothes (by the mid-70s the distinction could be pretty subtle, but it was there). Grabbing armloads of textbooks, we gathered around Mike's unconscious form and shook him awake. "Mike!" we yelled. "Are you still here?!? Wake up, man! We've got a Chemistry mid-term in 20 minutes! You just slept through the whole weekend, man!" Mike, now awake, but not appreciably less drunk than he'd been fifteen minutes previously, stared back at us, uncomprehending. "Huh?" he said. So we repeated our line, and slowly, our message seeped into Mike's consciousness. "Are you shitting me?" he inquired. "No, man - you slept through the whole weekend, and now we've got a mid-term in 20 minutes!" Mike was exceedingly dismayed as this knowledge worked its way into his brain. Rising to his feet, he began cursing himself. "Aw, MAN! I can't believe I did that! I didn't study at all! I'm gonna fail for sure!" Staggering the rest of the way to his room, he stripped and got into the shower (which he set at something like 32.6 degrees Fahrenheit), in a forlorn attempt to wake up and/or sober up. A steady stream of loud expletives emanated from his shower. In the meantime, our merry band of pranksters returned to our rooms and reverted to our more 'skivvy-ish' Friday-night attire, then wandered slowly down toward Mike's room. Finding him in the icy shower, we professed our confusion - "Mike, what are you doing? It's 3 o'clock Saturday morning!" Mike looked back at us, still not notably soberer than he'd been when he got there. Slowly, the realization dawned on him that he'd been had. And, in his drunken haze, that realization enraged him. He charged out of the shower, chasing us all down the hall. But of course, he was still drunk. Besides which, he was dripping wet, running on a linoleum-tile floor. So he didn't chase us far before he slipped and fell, right up against a door that someone else had helpfully beer-canned earlier, thus causing the intended metallic racket (it just hadn't necessarily been intended for him). It was all too much for poor drunken Mike to deal with, and he burst into tears, creating one of the more pathetic scenes to which I have ever been a witness - a drunk, naked, wet guy, sobbing in the middle of a pile of beer cans. . . Or is that just mean of me? ------------------------- A couple years later, I was living in a different dorm with my buddy Rich. Early in the spring, we had one of those delightful unseasonably-warm days, the kind where people throw open their windows just to smell the fresh air for the first time since before the winter. Adjacent to our dorm was a women's dorm, and that very fact was more than some of the young men in our dorm could handle. One pair of guys in particular were especially obnoxious, keeping up a steady loud stream of obscenities directed toward the young ladies next door. After enduring this stream of vulgarity for as long as we figured we could (and longer than we figured we should have to), Rich and I hatched a plan. Looking out our window, we ascertained the room from which the disturbance was emanating. In fact, the guys would lean out their window whenever they would yell at the girls. So Rich, who had a bit of the daredevil in him, climbed up onto the roof from the balcony at the end of our floor, and I passed a bucket of water up to him. The plan, such as it was, was that, the next time our guys leaned out their window to yell at the girls next door, Rich would douse them. I watched from our window as Rich took his position, lying with his head and shoulders just over the edge of the roof, waiting for our prey to reappear. Except they never did. Apparently their mood had passed. So Rich and I decided to abort the plan, and dump the bucket harmlessly onto the grass below. Except that, instead of dumping the bucket away from the building, Rich dumped it inward, toward the building. So that a cascade of water fell in through the still-open window of our erstwhile disturbers-of-the-peace. At that point, the pace of events quickened dramatically. In short order, two very angry guys came running up the stairway to our floor, from the one below, where our 'friends' lived. First, they went to the room directly above theirs, only to find a very bewildered resident with closed, but very wet windows, wondering (a) why his windows were wet, and (b) why these angry guys were banging on his door. Rich, sensing that the moment might not be opportune for him to climb back down onto the balcony, nevertheless handed the bucket down to a freshman who lived in the room next door to ours, and who was in some sympathy with our aims. So that, when the still-angry guys from the floor below came back down the hall, wondering who had doused their room, if the guy above them hadn't, they suddenly encountered our young man holding a bucket on the balcony, providing them with a new target for their rage. It turned out that they had a TV set in their room, which they kept directly below the open window through which Rich had poured the contents of our bucket. Or, by that point, I should more properly refer to it as a former TV set, since the watery cascade had, as they say in the industry, gazorped it. And they were ready to do some serious bodily harm to the poor kid holding the bucket. I knew it wouldn't be right to let the kid take a beating for our misbegotten prank, so I casually wandered out to 'see what the commotion was about', trying to adopt the role of peacemaker, and, you know, 'defuse the situation'. Meanwhile, other guys were running up and down the hall, breathlessly announcing that "There's someone on the roof!" Which was sort-of working against my peacemaking, defusing efforts, and moving the angry guys to suspect that my own motives were, shall we say, less than pure. Rich, meanwhile, had gone to the other end of the dorm and climbed down to the balcony at the opposite end of the building. So that he came sauntering down the hall from the opposite direction, wondering what all the commotion was about. Perhaps they discerned something a trifle ungenuine in his demeanor, but in fairly short order, he became the new object of their wrath. The situation was touch-and-go for a while, until one of the guys cooled down a little and convinced the other one that beating the stuffing out of us wasn't worth the trouble, so they left and went back to their room, while the three of us heaved a heavy sigh of relief. When I explained the situation to Rich (he hadn't known about the blown TV), he more clearly understood the nature of their wrath. So he went to the party store across the street from the dorm, and bought a peace-offering of beer, which he and I took to their room. They accepted it, and then told us to never let them see our faces again. Which, so far as it depended on me, I was only too happy to oblige. . . ------------------------- The story doesn't reach its final conclusion until a couple months later. I was returning to the dorm after my last class of the day, and there were three police cars, lights flashing, parked in front of our dorm. As I stood there, wondering what was going on, the police emerged from the building, with our two erstwhile victims in handcuffs. They put them into the back seats of separate cars, and drove off, leaving me still wondering what had happened. The next day's newspaper contained a front-page article describing a major on-campus drug bust. Two guys had been arrested who were doing something on the order of $50,000/year (and these were honest-to-goodness mid-70s dollars, not the meek little things we have today) out of their dorm room. And then my eyes got real big when the article went on to note that the dorm they were taken from was ours. After that, Rich and I got a huge laugh (with a hefty dose of the willies mixed in) from the idea that we'd fritzed the TV of a couple of major on-campus drug dealers. . .

Roadside Angel?

Years back, sometime in the mid-70s, I was working at a charismatic conference in South Bend, Indiana. In order to save money on housing, I thought I could stay with my parents, who lived in metro Chicago; since, you know, South Bend isn't so very far from Chicago, right? (It hadn't really occurred to me to look at an actual map; I was 19 or 20, and still in the 'Learning Things the Hard Way' stage of my life) (It also hadn't occurred to me that I'd be finishing up in South Bend around 11PM, and that, even if my folks lived on the near side of Chicago from South Bend, I wouldn't get to bed until after midnight; but in fact, my folks live almost as far from South Bend as it is possible to live, in the Chicago metro area, so it was closer to 2AM) (Live and learn, right?). A friend of mine named Ron was also interested in saving housing money, so I arranged with my folks for him to stay with me at their house, too. Ron actually owned a car, so he became my transportation, while I was providing the housing, so it worked out well for both of us. In fact, since I was the one who actually knew how to get to my parents' house, Ron just tossed me the keys and had me drive, so at least in terms of available hours of sleep, it actually worked out a little better for Ron than me. Since I was thinking that it would be about an hour or so of driving from the conference to my folks' house, I was growing more concerned as the hour came and went, and we were just starting to come upon landmarks that I knew were still an hour or more from our destination. And I had an eye on the gas gauge, since we were obviously going to be putting on quite a few more miles than I had thought, and at hours of the night when open gas stations wouldn't be easy to find. Finally, we got to the freeway exit for the surface road which would take us to my mom-and-dad's house in just seven more miles, and with the gas needle showing about 1/8 full, I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing that we'd be able to fill the tank in the morning. We'd driven a mile or two of the seven when suddenly, the car sputtered, the engine quit, and we rolled to a stop on the side of the road, still five miles or more from our destination. Ron, who had been sleeping, stirred awake. "What's going on?" Uh, the car just stopped. "Oh, yeah; I meant to tell you - when the gas gauge reads 1/8 of a tank, it's really empty." (*dumbfounded stare*) Man, I wish I'd known that an hour ago, bro. . . "Sorry. So what are we gonna do?" (*sigh*) I have no idea. I suppose we could pray (We were just coming from a charismatic conference, after all). "What good is THAT gonna do? It's 2AM, we're out of gas, and there's no place open we could even walk to." You got a better idea? "No, I suppose not." And so we prayed. Before we had even finished our prayer (which, to the best of my recollection went something like, 'Oh, God - please HELP! Uh, amen.'), a pair of headlights appeared behind us on the road, and pulled in behind us. We were wondering if it might be the police, or someone like that. The door of the car opened, and the driver approached our car. He was a pretty dorky-looking guy, with a funny-looking haircut, a plaid sport-jacket, a bow-tie, and plaid pants that didn't match his jacket. I rolled down my window. "You guys need some help?" Well, uh. . . yeah. We're out of gas. "Oh. Okay. Hang on a second." He went back to his car and opened the trunk (it was difficult to see exactly what he was doing, what with the glare of his headlights, and all). As he walked back to our car, he was carrying a large can. When he got back to my window, he held up a 5-gallon gas can. "Is this enough?" Ummm. . . yeah! That's way more than we need, actually - we've only got to go five miles or so. "No problem!" Then he went to the fill tube and emptied the entire 5-gallon can into our tank, while I looked at Ron with a smug, 'and-here-you-didn't-want-to-pray' smile. We were still shaking our heads at the whole thing - us praying, and then Mr. Unmatched-Plaid-Suit coming instantly, the only other vehicle we'd seen since leaving the freeway, and he just happening to have a full 5-gallon can of gas in his trunk - when we noticed that our mysterious benefactor was gone. We hadn't seen him leave, he hadn't come back to speak to us after filling our tank, we hadn't gotten to thank him, we hadn't noticed his tail-lights continuing on down the road. He'd just done his good deed and. . . vanished. Ron and I looked back at each other, now with more of a 'man-this-is-really-weird' expression on our respective faces. Ron finally spoke. "Do you think. . . that might have been an angel?" I have no idea. But this whole thing sure fits with how I might imagine one. (Though, to be perfectly candid, I hadn't really imagined that an angel, if I ever met one, would be quite so dorky-looking; who knew?) I turned the key, and the car started instantly. A few minutes later, I was letting us into my parents' front door. The next morning (bright and early, you can be sure, now that we knew just how long it was gonna take us to get back to South Bend), my mom fed us breakfast, and (*ahem*) after filling the gas tank, we drove back to the conference. And the second night, we borrowed some floor space with other friends of ours, in one of the on-campus dorms. . .

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. . .)

Thank God for Mush Balls

I'm just over a week removed from my annual tour of duty at our community's Summer Camp. I've been to this camp virtually every summer since 1992, so this was my 19th camp. As I've done every time but one, I was the Camp Clown Music Director. Which just might be the best job in the whole camp. I get to sing and play my guitar A LOT (and this year, I even had some callouses built up in advance on the fingertips of my left hand, so the suffering quotient was less than it has sometimes been), and just generally provide random goofiness levity. And of course, the kids love me. I also do a couple other things at camp - I help with one of the boys' Bible Studies, and run the afternoon softball game, both of which I love to do. One of the other staffers, who was the Camp Director for several years, helps with the softball game; every year we have a light-hearted competition over whose teams win more games during the week. Every day, we pick new teams from the campers and staff who show up to play. Typically, I'll have the players line up against the backstop, and just count 'em off 1-2-1-2-etc. One day, we'll line up shortest-to-tallest; another day, by birthdays (January at one end, December at the other); another day, alphabetically by their middle names (which always seems to take longer than it should); and another day, alphabetically by their mothers' maiden names (I was a little leery of this, given how hard it was to line 'em up by middle names, but they did fine with it). 1's will be my team, 2's my buddy's (or vice-versa; I don't keep that close a track). In bygone years, we played with the tight, hard-ish softballs (which are still a good deal softer than a baseball), and those things would fly when we hit 'em well. I don't know the precise dimensions of our field, but the 'outfield' is surrounded by trees. If a camper hits a ball into the trees on the fly, it's a home run; if a staffer does, it's an out. So the pitchers will feed the heavy hitters among the staff a steady diet of 'meatballs', hoping to goad them into hitting the trees. And if a staffer's team is either ahead or behind by a large margin, he might just swing for the trees anyway, for the ego boost. There is an art to hitting the ball hard, but just short of the trees, so it won't 'draw green' as we call it, but will roll into the woods, which just about guarantees a home run, since it's pretty hard to get a clean throw out of the woods. In all my years at camp, only one camper has hit the ball into the trees during a live game - my son, 4M (*shameless proud-papa grin*). That's mostly because, the way the field is laid out, the trees in right field are a good bit closer than in left or center, so a left-handed-hitting kid who's had an early growth spurt (4M is both) is at a pretty good advantage over the other kids as far as hitting the ball into the trees. A few other kids have come real close to hitting the trees, including 3M and this year, 7M, who both missed by just a foot or two in their 6th-grade year (the oldest kids at the camp). And both of them, after the last game of the week passed without them having reached the trees, stayed after, and took 'batting practice' until they finally 'drew green'. One kid, who'd striven mightily during his camper years to reach the trees, without success, returned as a staffer when he was in high school, and hit the trees at last; even though he was out, he threw his hands in the air, and skipped around the bases anyway. Hitting the trees got a bit more difficult a few years ago, when we decided to switch from the tight, stiff balls, to 'safety' balls, which are spongier and a little bit heavier, and don't fly as far as the balls we used to use. I had no issue with the change; it really only made sense, if we were gonna have 250-lb adults and 50-lb third-graders playing together on the same field. And really, as far as the staff is concerned, a lower likelihood of hitting the trees means a greater likelihood of actually reaching base safely. The 'mush balls' do tend to bounce strangely, especially on fly balls to the outfield (think about balls bouncing over the outfielders' heads in the old Minnesota Metrodome) (better yet, don't think about that), and they have a few other annoying properties, but in general, we've accepted them. ------------------------- So this year, I was struggling a bit at the plate, at least in the early part of the week. These days, I don't play a whole lot of softball anymore, so sometimes it takes me a game or two to get my 'hitting eye' dialed in. Plus, I tend to overswing at first, which results in a lot of weak popups, instead of line drives to the gaps of the outfield. As I relaxed a bit, and just concentrated on making contact, and not on crushing the ball, the line drives returned. And so it was that on Thursday afternoon of camp week, I came to the plate. I'm pretty sure my team was behind when I came up, and we had a couple runners on base. The shortstop for the other team was a 5th-grader named Juan Pablo, who was one of the better players among the campers (which was not unrelated to why he was playing shortstop); he could hit well and field his position, and so we didn't have to worry about 'hiding' him somewhere he wouldn't get hurt. (*sigh*) So I came up to bat, thinking I just needed to make solid contact, and put the ball in play somewhere. The pitch came in, and I swung, not trying to crush the ball, just hit it 'down-and-hard' as we say. And the ball shot off my bat like a rocket, probably the hardest I hit a ball all week. And it hit Juan Pablo right in the face. The ball was so 'hot' that the kid, as good a player as he was, didn't even have a chance to deflect it with his glove, and he went down like he'd been shot, while everyone looked on in horror. The guys who got to him first said that he was never unconscious, so that was good, but his nose was bleeding like a faucet. One of the other counselors scooped him up and took him over to the nurses' station. The nurse got him cleaned up, and induced his nose to stop bleeding. Then she did some basic checks to determine if his nose was broken (she was pretty sure it wasn't), or if he had a concussion (she was pretty sure he didn't). She kept him for observation for an hour or so, and when he was alert and breathing freely, she turned him loose, and a few minutes later, he was horsing around in the swimming area, with a purplish bruise across the bridge of his nose. While all the staff who'd been at the softball game exhaled. It occurred to me that the mush ball had probably done exactly what we'd switched to it for in the first place. If we'd been using the old, 'tight' balls, it would've come off my bat even faster, and instead of mushing onto the bridge of Juan Pablo's nose, might've broken it, or given him a concussion. I shuddered to think of how many games we'd played in the past with those balls, and perhaps how fortunate we'd been that there hadn't been previous Juan Pablos sent to the hospital. As a camp, you always hate to tell a kid's parents that little Willie is in the hospital (much less that a hefty staffer had smashed a softball off his face). . . On Saturday, when we turned the campers back over to their parents, I made a point to seek out Juan Pablo's dad and tell him what had happened, and encouraged him to talk to the nurse about the basic evaluations she'd done. Dad thanked me for telling him, and mostly laughed that he'd be working with Juan Pablo to be quicker with his glove next time. . .

The Love of My Life - 30 Years and Counting

Today is Jen's-and-my 30th anniversary (and on the auspicious date of 8-9-10, no less). In honor of the occasion, I tried to think about what I could say about her, and our marriage, that I haven't said before. And I'm sure there must be something wonderful about her that I haven't said before - her wonderfulness is certainly greater than my meager powers of description. But, the best thing I could come up with (I'm still pretty tired from summer camp, I guess) is a pair of re-posts (the ol' Two-for-One Anniversary Special); which I hope you'll all enjoy. . .

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Our Flashy Wedding

I have many memories of our wedding day. I remember washing my car in the morning, more to kill a couple hours until I had to be at the church, than because my car was so dirty (this ‘what to do until you have to be at the church’ question is a major one for grooms; I’m given to understand that brides don’t typically find themselves at quite such a loss for how to fill their wedding-day mornings. . .)

Once I arrived at the church, there really wasn’t all that much for me to do. All my groomsmen showed up in a timely manner, my brothers took their places as ushers, and I just took some chill time in the sacristy, as the guests started to arrive.

About a half-hour or so before the wedding was supposed to begin, my head-usher, a guy I’ll call ‘Tom’ for purposes of this story, with whom I’d shared a house while I was in grad school, came into the room where I was relaxing, a concerned look on his face. “Ummm. . .” he began. (I don’t know; it just seems to me that your head usher coming to you a half-hour before your wedding, saying “Ummm. . .” might not be a good thing). “Ummm. . . there’s a retarded guy out in the parking lot, exposing himself to the guests as they arrive.”

I just stared at him, blankly. “So, what do you want me to do?” he asked, as I contemplated the image of my grandmother being greeted in the church parking lot by a mentally-challenged flasher. The fact that it was a Catholic church parking lot is probably worth noting, because my family is not Catholic, and some of them, possibly including my grandmother, held less-than-flattering opinions of Catholics and Catholicism, even apart from any consideration of parking-lot flashers.

“Huh?” I replied, quickly grasping the gravity of the situation.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Tom,” I replied, with all the mellowness I could muster at that point, “I asked you to be my head-usher so I wouldn’t have to think about stuff like this. I’m sure you can figure something out.”

For a couple seconds, he stared back at me. “Right,” he finally said, and hustled off. I’m told that the police were called, and our flasher friend was relocated away from the church parking lot before too many of our guests’ retinas were seared with images of his genitalia. The wedding proceeded without too many further glitches, Jen and I were well and thoroughly married to each other, and the rest, as they say, is history. . .

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The Love of My Life

A few years back, a blogger wrote me an e-mail, in which she said, among other things, “You entered into marriage with the love of your life.” And I know what she was talking about. Jen is indeed The Love of My Life, and blessed am I because of it.

A few years ago, Jen had a little daily tradition - when I would come home at the end of the day and she heard the back door open just before dinner-time, she'd call out, “Is that The Love of My Life?” Which was wonderfully heart-warming for me. I'd usually respond by saying, “I sure hope so!” And as time went on, the younger kids joined in the fun. So that, when I opened the back door, 8M would often come running; when he saw that it was me, he’d run to Jen, calling out as he went, “Mom! It’s The Love of Your Life! The Love of Your Life is home!” It doesn’t get any better than that, let me tell you.

But, truth to tell, I didn’t marry the Love of My Life; I’m married to the Love of My Life, but she wasn’t that when we got married. Some of you actually did marry the Love of Your Life – your high-school sweetheart, maybe, or someone whom you just knew, within minutes of your first meeting, would end up sharing your life with you. That wasn’t the case for Jen and me. When we got married, I was marrying a very good friend, someone with whom I shared several important life goals and aims, with whom I got along very well, and whose company I enjoyed enough to think that we could actually have a life together. She agreed with me enough to accept my proposal (heck, the two of us getting married was probably her idea, before it was mine); we got married, and la, la, how the life went on.

It’s almost funny to look back on it now, but Jen still tells people that our first year of marriage was the worst year of her life. Her adjustment to the new ‘life-together’ was a bit harder than mine, I guess. . . But, somewhere along the line, over the ensuing years (30 of 'em, now), she became the Love of My Life. We put in the necessary work, we shared our lives, we suffered together, and in the process of all that, our two lives became one, to the point that I can’t imagine my life without her. This woman, whom I liked and admired way back when, has proven to be even more solid, more admirable, and more amazingly wonderful than I thought she was. . .


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Happy Anniversary, Sweetheart. Spending the past 30 years together with you has been a joy and a privilege.

Gone Fishin' (Except I Don't Fish Much)

Jen and I, and six of our kids, will be gone to Summer Camp all week. We'll see you all when we return. Until then, here's a photo from last year's camp, to remember us by:

(Tie-dye socks and napkin head-scarf by Lime)

Dominoes Falling

My friend Lime has been blogging recently about some once-and-future home-improvement projects over at her house. Which, as it turns out, is a fairly current topic at our place, too. But of course, first you get the history lesson ('context setting', dontchaknow). . . ------------------------- We bought our current house a bit over ten years ago. At the time, we had lived in our previous house for 17 years, and the two of us, with seven kids, were just a bit much for 1400 square feet. We'd tried all manner of space-saving and space-multiplying expedients - I built a loft so that three boys and all their toys and clothes could more-or-less fit into a 12x12 room. Jen and I had even taken to sleeping on a hide-a-bed so that our 'bedroom' could function as the kids' play room during the day. I was just about to draw up plans to add a second story to the rear addition, and possibly even carve an office for myself out of some 'third-floor' attic space. That fall (which, coincidentally enough, was just after 7M's accident), the two of us went on one of our infrequent getaway weekends to a bed-and-breakfast Up North. We had a great, refreshing, relaxing time, but Jen was saving the real point of the weekend (at least, as far as she was concerned) for the drive home. "We need a new house," she said to me, very matter-of-factly. I started to explain about my plans for expanding on our then-current domicile, but she just shook her head and waved me off. Our older kids, by then, were in high school, and she was envisioning the day in the not-too-distant future when they would be marrying and having children of their own. "Our house simply isn't big enough to have any kind of extended-family gathering in it. We can add bedrooms, but the dining room will be just as tiny. It won't work. We need a new house." I couldn't argue with her logic, but I countered with the positives of our situation. Living, as we did, walking distance from the kids' school, and even from church, made for some nice efficiencies, which I didn't really want to give up. So I told her that if she could find a house of at least 2000 square feet (since it would hardly be worth moving for anything much less) and four bedrooms (five would be better), walking distance from school and church, for a price we could afford (I did some quick mental math to arrive at a dollar figure), I would buy it. But, I added - I didn't think she could (yeah, just call me Mr. Supportive). I should have known better than to throw that kind of a challenge down in front of my wife (or, you know, maybe I was dumb like a fox). Within less than a month, she found a 2300 square-foot house, four blocks from both the school and church (we had been two blocks away, but four was well within 'walkable' distance), with four bedrooms, and a little efficiency apartment carved out of the basement (which wasn't even counted in the square footage), for the exact price I had specified. The only thing that remained was to sell our old house, which presented a whole separate obstacle, both real and psychological. We had owned another house previously (the one whose neighbors were burned out, if you recall), and that house had nearly broken us, trying to sell it. It took two years to sell (in the mid-80s), and we ended up dumping it for a loss, just to get rid of the monthly payment. So I was not looking forward to selling another house. But lo and behold, in the year or two leading up to our latest need to sell, the real estate market for our part of town underwent a small boom, and we ended up selling for a fairly substantial profit. Which was a good thing, because our new house was a definite fixer-upper. The house had been abandoned to the government for unpaid taxes (and HUD was the mortgage-holder). By the time we saw it, it was the middle of winter, and abandoning a house in mid-winter does not do kind things to the house. It had hot-water heat, with the old-style cast-iron radiators. But the water had been left in the system, and all the radiators had cracked, leaking water all over the floor. Which was not as bad as it might have been, since the water mostly froze. So our first order of business was to install a new heating system. With a little research, we found that a new high-efficiency forced-air furnace was sufficiently cheaper than replacing the hot-water system, that we could also install central air for the same money. The house was also badly insulated, so we spent some more on tightening up the insulation, and upgrading some of the older wiring. By the time all was said and done, we ended up plowing all of the profit from the sale of the old house into improvements on the new house. ------------------------- Which is a really cool story, all by itself, but it's mostly just a long, elaborate lead-in to the story I started out to tell. . . When the cast-iron radiator in the living room of the new house broke, it spilled rusty water all over the living-room carpet, so that, by the time we bought the house, the carpet was badly rust-stained. Which was low-enough on the priority list that we ran out of fixing-up funds before we got to the carpet. So we just threw a nice area rug over the rust stain, and Jen was content enough with that arrangement. For ten years, anyway. This summer, one of Jen's friends (who is obviously fussier about her carpets than we are), decided to take the carpet out of one of her rooms. It was still fairly new and in good shape, and she offered us her lightly-used carpet, which was just slightly bigger than our living room. So Jen jumped at it, and I came home from work one day a month or so ago, to find all the living-room furniture moved to other rooms, and the carpet torn out. Strike while the iron's hot, and all that. Then, while she was considering how the room would look with new carpet in it, Jen thought to herself that, having taken the old carpet out, this was really the best time to paint the living room, while she was at it, so she went and got color samples, to work out the best shade for matching the new carpet. Good thinking, sweetheart. Then came the coup de grace, which requires a bit of explanation. Virtually all of the old houses in our neighborhood (which are anywhere from 80-120 years old) have lovely old woodwork in them - oak, walnut, cherry, maple; beautiful stuff. In about half of them, that beautiful old woodwork has been painted over (particularly if the house was ever a rental). And ours was one of the 'painted' half. Which might not have bothered us too terribly much; we could always just tell ourselves that it was pine, and not worth our trouble. Until one day, one of the kids, in one of those absent-minded bits of fidgety destruction that kids are wont to have, idly picked away at some loose paint on one of the door frames, uncovering some really beautiful old hardwood. So Jen and I sighed, and went ahead and stripped that one door frame. Which is quite lovely, but it has stood as a taunt to us that, look, all these other door frames and windows, and baseboards are just sitting there, at least as lovely as I am, and you know darn well you're gonna end up stripping them, too. . . But you know, raising eight kids just never quite seems to leave enough time to take on a decent woodwork-stripping project. But this summer, things are different - Jen tore out the carpet, so she might as well just go ahead and paint. And if she's gonna paint, she might as well just go ahead and strip the woodwork in the living room. Thus do the dominoes fall. So, for the past few weeks, Jen has been spending her days stripping in the living room (which, yeah, I'm not above grabbing for the obvious cheap laugh, so go ahead). And it looks really nice. And it'll look even nicer when it's painted. And when the new carpet gets laid. In the course of our married life (which is now closing in fast on 30 years' duration), I have greatly benefitted, on multiple occasions, from my wife's very high energy levels. Which, in conjunction with her occasional penchant for impulsivity, can end up getting some really nice stuff done, which might never get done if it was up to me to sit down and plan it all out. . . ------------------------- And just for the sake of setting the full context, while we were in the midst of full-destruction-mode on the living room, the garbage disposal gave up the ghost. Well, as it turns out, the disposal was OK; the ground-fault outlet it was plugged into died (which was actually a pretty nifty bit of trouble-shooting all by itself). So, as a short-term fix, we plugged the disposal into a surge-protected power-strip on the floor, and she was using the reset switch on the power-strip with her foot; sorta like a pedal-operated garbage disposal. Pretty neat. Then, last weekend, while I was out riding my bike, I heard a *pop*, and suddenly, my handlebars were all loose and floppy. I was able to finish my ride, but, without 'fixed' handlebars, it's hard to do the rhythmic, out-of-the-saddle climbing that is demanded by a few of the stiffer hills in our area. So I had to grunt up 'em in a low gear, which is decidedly less fun. And then I had to take my bike in to the shop for a new stem. And then, the brakes on my car started making a nasty-sounding grinding noise. Again, it's not that big a deal to get my brakes done, but with Jen fully-engaged in refinishing the living room, such a simple expedient as running the car in to the shop for brakes is considerably more disruptive than usual. (*sigh*) In the immortal words of Gilda Radner, it's always something. . . ------------------------- As a sort-of post-script-in-advance, I should mention the built-in china cabinets in our dining room, which, like all the other woodwork in our house, have been painted over. Ever since we first discovered that we had some seriously nice woodwork hiding beneath all that paint, we have known that, in the fullness of time, we would want to strip and refinish those cabinets. But it was just too daunting to think about all that wood, and the work that would go into bringing it to the light of day. But now, having successfully attacked the living room, which is a fair bit smaller than the dining room (at least, in terms of woodwork to refinish), we have a better idea of what-all would go into doing the dining room, and it's not quite so scary as it once was. So - this summer, the living room; next summer, the dining room? It's actually pretty cool to think about. And it just reinforces what I've known for years. . . I love my wife.

Big Water

"By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the shining big sea water. . ." (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Song of Hiawatha)

I have lived virtually my whole life in the state of Michigan. And the dominant geographic feature of the state of Michigan is the Great Lakes. Michigan has shorelines on four of the five Great Lakes, and save only for Alaska, has more shoreline than any other state. In fact, there is no place in Michigan that's more than a two-hour drive from one of the Great Lakes (alas, I think these days I live pretty close to the point that is the farthest one can get from one of the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan. . .)

The lakes have featured large in my own young life. When my family moved Up North 'for good' in 1963, our house was about seven miles south of the city of Alpena, on the shores of Thunder Bay, which is part of Lake Huron. Which is to say that Lake Huron was our back yard. Which, for an 8-9-year-old boy, was a pretty good working model of heaven. Every day of the year, I could look out the back window, and see the big lake stretching to the horizon.

My favorite days were the breezy summer days with a clear blue sky, or maybe some puffy cotton-candy clouds, when the whitecaps stretched off to the blue horizon, and the onshore breeze blew in our faces. On other days, the sunlight and the clouds played on the water, turning it from deep blue to a softer blue-gray to a blue-green, or green color, the colors moving and shifting almost magically. On other days, we'd watch rain clouds out over the lake, their wispy fingers stretching down toward the water. Some days, especially in the spring and fall, when it was too cold to swim, we'd just stand on the shore and watch the freighters slowly travelling back and forth along the horizon.

All summer long, we could walk out our back door and be playing in the waves in minutes. Some days, we'd just wander up and down the shore in the shallow water, looking for interesting stones or dead crayfish. Others, we'd wade out to where the water was about chest-deep. Depending on the wind and water currents, we might ascend and descend multiple sandbars on the way out; it always seemed like magic when the water, which had been belly-button deep, was suddenly only knee-deep, even though you were further from the shore. Chest-deep was about where the waves would start to break. We'd just jump and float in the waves, letting them crash over us, or body-surf them, for hours on end. Prune-skin on our fingertips came to seem like the most natural state for us.

Even in the winter, it was fascinating to watch the ice formations as the lake slowly, progressively froze over. My brother and I liked to walk out on the ice (which was a good bit more dangerous than we realized at the time), playing games around the ice hills that formed as the ice buckled and shifted. One time, we just kept going out on the ice until we encountered a huge ridge in the ice. Climbing up to see what was on the other side of the ridge, we saw open water stretching to the horizon. Very cold open water, which made the ice even more slippery than usual, and for which we were ill-prepared. Turning for the first time to look back to the shore, we realized how very far from shore we were, and for the first time, understood how dangerous our situation was, and how very afraid it was appropriate for us to be. We stayed closer to shore after that.

We lived in that house for two years. When my parents divorced, Dad and us two boys moved to a house in town, and we no longer had the lake for our back yard. Even so, for the rest of the time that we lived in Alpena (virtually until I graduated high school), I could hop on my bike and be on the beach in five minutes. Needless to say, I spent many carefree summer hours on the beach, while we lived in Alpena. When I was in junior-high, I had a paper route that required me to be out delivering papers at 5AM; part of my route was along the shore, so during the summer months, I saw many a spectacular sunrise over the lake. . .

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So much of life in Michigan involves the Great Lakes, eventually. So much natural beauty here has the Lakes as its backdrop, be it Sleeping Bear Dunes in the northwest Lower Peninsula, the Pictured Rocks along the Lake Superior shore in the Upper Peninsula, Mackinac Island overlooking the strait (crossed by a majestic bridge) where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet, and on and on, from Grand Traverse Bay wine country (and yes, Michigan does have 'wine country') to the Keweenaw Peninsula at the far western end of the UP, spectacular lakeshore vistas are in almost embarrassing surplus here. Heck, even Niagara Falls has nothing but Great Lakes water flowing over it.

I once attended Mass at a church in Oscoda (on Lake Huron, about 45 miles south of Alpena), where the entire back wall of the church was glass, overlooking the lake. When I got in line to receive Communion, I realized that I'd hardly paid attention to any of the Mass, having been mentally lost among the whitecaps. When I had my 'conversion experience' in my high school years, it was at a summer camp on the Lake Michigan shore, near South Haven, which included a prayer service on the top of a 200-foot dune, watching the sun set into the lake. At the end of the week, I was baptized in Lake Michigan.

When I was in college, there was a guy in my dorm from Florida, and he took great delight in extolling the greatness of the ocean, and pooh-poohing our beloved Lakes. So one warm spring Saturday, a group of us 'kidnapped' him, tied him up with a pillowcase over his head, threw him into a car, and drove him over to a state park on Lake Michigan. Walking him down to the beach, we removed the pillowcase from his head, and showed him Lake Michigan, and the blue water stretching to the horizon. He acknowledged that indeed, standing on the beach, it looked just like the ocean (except for the lack of dead jellyfish, and the fact that you don't have to take a shower after you swim in it). Which was really the point we were trying to make in the first place. So we had a little beach party to celebrate his 'enlightenment'.

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Jen also grew up about five miles from Lake Huron (not quite as close as I did, but she could still get to the 'big water' with a not-terribly-rigorous bike ride), in Michigan's 'Thumb', north of Port Huron (here is where I mention my favorite tease of my mother-in-law, who doesn't pronounce 'Huron' as 'hyer-ahn', like most Michiganians, but homophonically with 'urine'; I have not been above asking her if the water at the southern end of the lake has a more yellowish hue). The first time Jen took me to meet her parents, we went down to the lakeshore, and I was struck that we were a couple hundred miles from where I grew up, but it was the same lake I'd grown up looking at. . .

My mom's (I'm talking about my 'stepmother' here) father had spent some time before he married, working on the lake boats, and he grew to love the Lakes. He bought a five-volume set of books on the history of the Great Lakes (one for each lake, dontchaknow; and those of us who live in these parts use the acronym HOMES as a mnemonic to help us remember the five Great Lakes). When he died, my mom inherited the Great Lakes set. Sometime in my 30s or so, I asked her (with a degree of fear and trembling) if I could have them; she looked at me long and hard before saying I could (so long as I kept them in the family, and never sold them), and to this day, they sit on my bookshelf, both reminding me of my grandfather, and teaching me more about the beautiful Big Water that has bounded my life. . .

Sunrise over Georgian Bay, in Ontario; taken from the back porch of our vacation cottage in 1985