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? . . .
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Getting Answers
Okay, things are getting clearer as to what, exactly, happened to me on my bike ride this past Sunday. As you recall, I was feeling great, and riding well, for the first 15 miles of my ride. Then I stopped for a short break, and a bottle of sugar-free Gatorade, and all hell broke loose with my body.
I have suspected that the Gatorade was the culprit, since the symptoms appeared immediately after I drank it. And, in discussing my situation with our nurse friend, while we were trying to decide whether or not to go to the ER, she mentioned that an electrolyte imbalance can cause arhythmia, which also seemed to point to the Gatorade. But the blood work I had done showed nothing unusual regarding my electrolytes, so that seemed like a dead end.
Then, after I got back home, I was telling another friend about what had happened, and he perked up his ears when I mentioned the Gatorade. He asked me specifically whether it was regular Gatorade, or sugar-free, and I told him it was sugar-free, since, with my diet, I'm off sugar. (Just to get the full irony of the situation, I would normally have a bottle of unsweetened iced tea, but it was late in the afternoon, and I didn't want the caffeine.) Then he pointed me to this web site, which describes the link between aspartame and something called Sudden Cardiac Death. The article cites numerous cases of otherwise very-healthy individuals dying suddenly while engaged in strenuous athletic activity, during which they consume aspartame. And the description fits virtually exactly what happened to me. To quote the article: "the shock from strenuous athletics in combination with aspartame consumption. . . leads to activation of shock mechanisms. . . the cardiac conduction system that generates the impulses regulating the heart suddenly sends rapid [and/or] chaotic impulses." Which is pretty much exactly what I experienced. Aspartame poisoning; who knew? The fact that the article references something called 'Sudden Cardiac Death' is sobering in the extreme (I experienced a milder form called 'Sudden Cardiac Feeling Like Shit')
Of course, the FDA has approved aspartame, but one could reasonably wonder why. You all are adults, and I trust you are competent to make your own decisions as to what foods you purchase and consume. But aspartame (and virtually all 'sugar-free' foods/drinks contain aspartame) damn near did me in; and thousands of folks every year are less fortunate than I was. If this is news to you, I'd encourage you to give serious consideration to deleting aspartame from your diet. Or at least, don't engage in strenuous athletic activity while you consume it. That shit is deadly. . .
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Alas, the news concerning my dad is not so happy. The stroke he had was a massive one, involving two-thirds of one side of his brain, and we are now basically waiting for him to die. It may be soon, or it may be not-so-soon, but Dad as we've known him is gone. I will miss him terribly. I've said elsewhere that Dad is one of the very best things that ever happened to me, and I will always be grateful that, of all the families I might have been adopted into, I was adopted into his. . .
I have suspected that the Gatorade was the culprit, since the symptoms appeared immediately after I drank it. And, in discussing my situation with our nurse friend, while we were trying to decide whether or not to go to the ER, she mentioned that an electrolyte imbalance can cause arhythmia, which also seemed to point to the Gatorade. But the blood work I had done showed nothing unusual regarding my electrolytes, so that seemed like a dead end.
Then, after I got back home, I was telling another friend about what had happened, and he perked up his ears when I mentioned the Gatorade. He asked me specifically whether it was regular Gatorade, or sugar-free, and I told him it was sugar-free, since, with my diet, I'm off sugar. (Just to get the full irony of the situation, I would normally have a bottle of unsweetened iced tea, but it was late in the afternoon, and I didn't want the caffeine.) Then he pointed me to this web site, which describes the link between aspartame and something called Sudden Cardiac Death. The article cites numerous cases of otherwise very-healthy individuals dying suddenly while engaged in strenuous athletic activity, during which they consume aspartame. And the description fits virtually exactly what happened to me. To quote the article: "the shock from strenuous athletics in combination with aspartame consumption. . . leads to activation of shock mechanisms. . . the cardiac conduction system that generates the impulses regulating the heart suddenly sends rapid [and/or] chaotic impulses." Which is pretty much exactly what I experienced. Aspartame poisoning; who knew? The fact that the article references something called 'Sudden Cardiac Death' is sobering in the extreme (I experienced a milder form called 'Sudden Cardiac Feeling Like Shit')
Of course, the FDA has approved aspartame, but one could reasonably wonder why. You all are adults, and I trust you are competent to make your own decisions as to what foods you purchase and consume. But aspartame (and virtually all 'sugar-free' foods/drinks contain aspartame) damn near did me in; and thousands of folks every year are less fortunate than I was. If this is news to you, I'd encourage you to give serious consideration to deleting aspartame from your diet. Or at least, don't engage in strenuous athletic activity while you consume it. That shit is deadly. . .
-------------------------
Alas, the news concerning my dad is not so happy. The stroke he had was a massive one, involving two-thirds of one side of his brain, and we are now basically waiting for him to die. It may be soon, or it may be not-so-soon, but Dad as we've known him is gone. I will miss him terribly. I've said elsewhere that Dad is one of the very best things that ever happened to me, and I will always be grateful that, of all the families I might have been adopted into, I was adopted into his. . .
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Not Just Yet. . .
I know that I had another post up here, and at least one of you left a comment on it. I promise I will re-post it later, but recent events have come to pass that I thought you all might be more interested in, than a five-year-old re-post about my youthful parenting skills (or lack thereof). . .
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I usually ride my bike on Saturdays. But this past Saturday was rainy, and besides, we had a family reunion to go to, so I put my ride off until Sunday. Which worked out just fine, actually, since Jen had to go to a baby shower for one of our neices, and a ride would keep me suitably out of trouble in her absence. Sunday was a delightfully sunny day, and I planned a 42-mile ride on one of my favorite routes.
As I began my ride, around 4PM, I felt absolutely great. Sometimes, at the start of a ride, I feel a little sluggish, and it might take 4 or 5 miles to get into my groove; but on Sunday, I just felt great, right from the start of my ride.
After 10 miles or so, I noticed that my mouth was feeling a bit dry, and I was going through my water a little quicker than normal. It occurred to me that I hadn't had much to eat since just after church, and that I'd forgotten to have glass of water before I left, like I usually do. No problem, though - there's a little party store at about the 15-mile mark, and I just figured that I could grab a bottle of Gatorade, and maybe a bag of trail mix, to tide me over through the rest of the ride, and easily stretch my water supply through the end of the ride. So I stopped at the party store, and bought a bottle of Gatorade, and drank it down over a 10-minute break.
When I got back on the bike, though, I instantly felt like utter crap. It was the damnedest thing. Minutes before, I'd felt absolutely great, and then after taking a 10-minute break and a pint of fluids (and replenishing my electrolytes in the process), I felt utterly terrible. I had no energy anymore, and I was laboring twice as hard as normal to go half as fast.
At first, I thought that I'd guzzled the Gatorade too quickly, and was feeling the effects of an overfull stomach. But if that were the case, the bloated, lethargic feeling would go away in a few miles, and this wasn't going away. I was starting to get concerned.
There is a gas-station/party-store at about the 25-mile mark, and I stopped there for another break, and the trail mix that I didn't get at the previous stop. While I rested, I thought maybe I should check my pulse, so I put my two right fingers against my left wrist. I didn't have a stopwatch, but I was instantly alarmed that, even resting, my pulse was extremely rapid and irregular. A quick self-inventory revealed no pain or tightness in my chest, but something was obviously not right.
I was still 17 miles from home, though, and Jen was out town at the baby shower, so she wasn't available to come get me, so I thought I could just cut the power, and limp home at a reduced speed. As I recommenced my ride, my cell phone rang. Jen was stuck in traffic an hour from home, and wanted me to give her an alternate route home. So I stopped for five minutes, and worked out an alternate plan for her, and then I continued riding. Ten minutes later, she called again, having gotten confused with some of the directions I'd given her, so I had to help her undo her mistake, and get her re-oriented in the right direction. And when we hung up, I got back on the bike and rode some more.
And I still felt like crap. In fact, I had started the ride going around the loop in the opposite direction from what I usually do, because the hills are more challenging that way, and I was feeling good. But now that I felt lousy, it was a really unfortunate choice. Every time I climbed a hill, I had to slow to a virtual snail's pace just to get up it at all, and then it took three times as long just to recover back to the level of 'feeling like shit'.
And Jen continued to call every ten minutes or so - seven times in all - asking for directional assistance (we often joke between us that I'm her own personal GPS). And I was getting increasingly frustrated - that Jen was interrupting my ride every ten minutes, yes, but even moreso because of my own all-too-obvious health problems. And the fact that, between my own reduced physical capacity, and all the time I spent on the side of the road talking to my wife, I was starting to move into the realms of 'will I get home before sunset?'
I continued taking periodic stock of my physical status. On the flat-and-level parts, I wasn't doing too badly, if I didn't push myself too hard. And I wasn't having any chest pain, or anything like that. But, somewhere around the 31-mile mark, in moment of lucidity, I thought to myself that a heart attack isn't required to send up a warning flare, and there were plenty of stories of guys who had heart attacks with virtually no warning whatsoever. So I stopped, and called 1F to come and pick me up. She didn't answer. I called 4M, and he didn't answer, either. 3M was at work. So I called my friend Richard (who just made an appearance in my last post), and he said he would come out and pick me up.
I continued limping along in the mode I had been, until, at the 35-mile mark of my ride, Richard pulled up, and I gratefully got off my bike and threw it into the back of his van. As we rode home, I told him what was happening. By the time we got home, Jen had just arrived, and I filled her in on the situation. I had Richard check my pulse, and he gave me a concerned look - it wasn't rapid, now that I'd had a chance to rest, but it was still wildly irregular. We all went into the house, and tried to sort through a reasonable plan of action. With rest, I no longer felt so bad, so I was wondering if a trip to the hospital was warranted or not (and besides, on Sunday night, none of the 'urgent-care' places are open, and ER visits are not treated happily by my health-care insurance; so if I could avoid a trip to the ER, I viewed that as a good thing). Jen called our family doc, and he thought it would be good just to get an EKG, so why don't we just go on in. Then Jen called a friend of hers who is a nurse, and the nurse-friend urged us even more strongly to go to the ER; and besides, she said, if we told the triage-nurse at the ER that 'my doctor wants me to have an EKG', that was pretty much a ticket to the front of the line. So I said, OK, let's go.
And I just got home this afternoon, to tell you all about it. Without going into stultifying detail, we still don't completely know what happened to me out on the bike Sunday afternoon. As of now, we're just calling it a 'Cardiac Event'. Of the various indicators of a heart-attack, all of them were negative, except one, which was, in the ER cardiologist's words, "slightly elevated, not at all what we'd see if you'd had a heart attack." And I generated several odd-looking EKGs, "but that might just be you, and the way your heart works."
I had an Echocardiogram done, and that showed my heart working pretty doggone well, for what it's worth, Then I had a Heart Catheterization (which is just more fun than a human being ought to be allowed to have), which showed one of my coronary arteries less-than-40% blocked; they don't even think about putting in a stent until the blockage is more than 70%. So the diagnostics, while not quite sunshine and light, just don't seem to correspond to what I was feeling on the bike.
But now, at any rate, I have a cardiologist, with whom I will be becoming friends over the next few weeks. So at least I'll be in touch with people who know how to figure out what's happening.
If any of you are moved to pray for me/us, I would be grateful. . .
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And just because the Universe is a bastard. . .
While we were sitting in the hospital room, waiting for the final discharge papers, my sister-in-law called, informing us that my dad had had a stroke. They'd just found him in his room just this morning, an hour before her call, conscious, but unable to talk or move his right side. As I write this, that's all I know.
And he can certainly use your prayers even more than I can. . .
-------------------------
I usually ride my bike on Saturdays. But this past Saturday was rainy, and besides, we had a family reunion to go to, so I put my ride off until Sunday. Which worked out just fine, actually, since Jen had to go to a baby shower for one of our neices, and a ride would keep me suitably out of trouble in her absence. Sunday was a delightfully sunny day, and I planned a 42-mile ride on one of my favorite routes.
As I began my ride, around 4PM, I felt absolutely great. Sometimes, at the start of a ride, I feel a little sluggish, and it might take 4 or 5 miles to get into my groove; but on Sunday, I just felt great, right from the start of my ride.
After 10 miles or so, I noticed that my mouth was feeling a bit dry, and I was going through my water a little quicker than normal. It occurred to me that I hadn't had much to eat since just after church, and that I'd forgotten to have glass of water before I left, like I usually do. No problem, though - there's a little party store at about the 15-mile mark, and I just figured that I could grab a bottle of Gatorade, and maybe a bag of trail mix, to tide me over through the rest of the ride, and easily stretch my water supply through the end of the ride. So I stopped at the party store, and bought a bottle of Gatorade, and drank it down over a 10-minute break.
When I got back on the bike, though, I instantly felt like utter crap. It was the damnedest thing. Minutes before, I'd felt absolutely great, and then after taking a 10-minute break and a pint of fluids (and replenishing my electrolytes in the process), I felt utterly terrible. I had no energy anymore, and I was laboring twice as hard as normal to go half as fast.
At first, I thought that I'd guzzled the Gatorade too quickly, and was feeling the effects of an overfull stomach. But if that were the case, the bloated, lethargic feeling would go away in a few miles, and this wasn't going away. I was starting to get concerned.
There is a gas-station/party-store at about the 25-mile mark, and I stopped there for another break, and the trail mix that I didn't get at the previous stop. While I rested, I thought maybe I should check my pulse, so I put my two right fingers against my left wrist. I didn't have a stopwatch, but I was instantly alarmed that, even resting, my pulse was extremely rapid and irregular. A quick self-inventory revealed no pain or tightness in my chest, but something was obviously not right.
I was still 17 miles from home, though, and Jen was out town at the baby shower, so she wasn't available to come get me, so I thought I could just cut the power, and limp home at a reduced speed. As I recommenced my ride, my cell phone rang. Jen was stuck in traffic an hour from home, and wanted me to give her an alternate route home. So I stopped for five minutes, and worked out an alternate plan for her, and then I continued riding. Ten minutes later, she called again, having gotten confused with some of the directions I'd given her, so I had to help her undo her mistake, and get her re-oriented in the right direction. And when we hung up, I got back on the bike and rode some more.
And I still felt like crap. In fact, I had started the ride going around the loop in the opposite direction from what I usually do, because the hills are more challenging that way, and I was feeling good. But now that I felt lousy, it was a really unfortunate choice. Every time I climbed a hill, I had to slow to a virtual snail's pace just to get up it at all, and then it took three times as long just to recover back to the level of 'feeling like shit'.
And Jen continued to call every ten minutes or so - seven times in all - asking for directional assistance (we often joke between us that I'm her own personal GPS). And I was getting increasingly frustrated - that Jen was interrupting my ride every ten minutes, yes, but even moreso because of my own all-too-obvious health problems. And the fact that, between my own reduced physical capacity, and all the time I spent on the side of the road talking to my wife, I was starting to move into the realms of 'will I get home before sunset?'
I continued taking periodic stock of my physical status. On the flat-and-level parts, I wasn't doing too badly, if I didn't push myself too hard. And I wasn't having any chest pain, or anything like that. But, somewhere around the 31-mile mark, in moment of lucidity, I thought to myself that a heart attack isn't required to send up a warning flare, and there were plenty of stories of guys who had heart attacks with virtually no warning whatsoever. So I stopped, and called 1F to come and pick me up. She didn't answer. I called 4M, and he didn't answer, either. 3M was at work. So I called my friend Richard (who just made an appearance in my last post), and he said he would come out and pick me up.
I continued limping along in the mode I had been, until, at the 35-mile mark of my ride, Richard pulled up, and I gratefully got off my bike and threw it into the back of his van. As we rode home, I told him what was happening. By the time we got home, Jen had just arrived, and I filled her in on the situation. I had Richard check my pulse, and he gave me a concerned look - it wasn't rapid, now that I'd had a chance to rest, but it was still wildly irregular. We all went into the house, and tried to sort through a reasonable plan of action. With rest, I no longer felt so bad, so I was wondering if a trip to the hospital was warranted or not (and besides, on Sunday night, none of the 'urgent-care' places are open, and ER visits are not treated happily by my health-care insurance; so if I could avoid a trip to the ER, I viewed that as a good thing). Jen called our family doc, and he thought it would be good just to get an EKG, so why don't we just go on in. Then Jen called a friend of hers who is a nurse, and the nurse-friend urged us even more strongly to go to the ER; and besides, she said, if we told the triage-nurse at the ER that 'my doctor wants me to have an EKG', that was pretty much a ticket to the front of the line. So I said, OK, let's go.
And I just got home this afternoon, to tell you all about it. Without going into stultifying detail, we still don't completely know what happened to me out on the bike Sunday afternoon. As of now, we're just calling it a 'Cardiac Event'. Of the various indicators of a heart-attack, all of them were negative, except one, which was, in the ER cardiologist's words, "slightly elevated, not at all what we'd see if you'd had a heart attack." And I generated several odd-looking EKGs, "but that might just be you, and the way your heart works."
I had an Echocardiogram done, and that showed my heart working pretty doggone well, for what it's worth, Then I had a Heart Catheterization (which is just more fun than a human being ought to be allowed to have), which showed one of my coronary arteries less-than-40% blocked; they don't even think about putting in a stent until the blockage is more than 70%. So the diagnostics, while not quite sunshine and light, just don't seem to correspond to what I was feeling on the bike.
But now, at any rate, I have a cardiologist, with whom I will be becoming friends over the next few weeks. So at least I'll be in touch with people who know how to figure out what's happening.
If any of you are moved to pray for me/us, I would be grateful. . .
-------------------------
And just because the Universe is a bastard. . .
While we were sitting in the hospital room, waiting for the final discharge papers, my sister-in-law called, informing us that my dad had had a stroke. They'd just found him in his room just this morning, an hour before her call, conscious, but unable to talk or move his right side. As I write this, that's all I know.
And he can certainly use your prayers even more than I can. . .
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Another Midsummer's Miscellany
As I posted previously, the week before last Jen and I, and four of our kids (8M was a camper; 4M, 5M and 6F were all on staff in one capacity or another), were gone off to summer camp. We had a wonderful time, full of sunshine, water, trees, good friends, and even God.
On Friday of the camp week (the last full day at camp; Saturday is 'Going Home' day, full of songs like 'Country Roads' and 'Sloop John B'), I was playing softball in the afternoon with a typical mix of campers and staff (and seriously - there are few things in life much happier than jumping into a chilly-ish lake after getting baked under the hot sun on the softball field for an hour or so). Thankfully, we didn't have any softball 'incidents' this year that were remotely on the order of last year's line-drive-off-the-face.
Anyway, I came up to bat at one point in the game (actually two or three times; but this story is just about one of them). I have maintained a reputation among summer-camp softballers as a pretty fearsome power hitter, but truth be told, I can't quite jack the ball to the far reaches of the camp anymore, quite like I could when I was still spelling my age with a '3', or even a '4'. Especially since the advent of the mush-balls. But I can still stroke a nice line drive most of the time, even if I no longer have the legs to turn most of those line drives into home runs, or even triples. Aging is such a pain. . .
So, on the at-bat in question, I stroked a screaming line drive to the deepest corner of center field, and as I watched it bounce, I saw it heading for a gap in the trees which, if the ball made it through, would give even a lumbering old man like me a decent chance at circling the bases. So I turned on the jets (such as they are) as I rounded second base.
And - *ping!* - my hamstring stretched and recoiled back on itself. I yelled out in pain, and I had all I could do to make my way safely to third base, in the fashion of a deranged, wounded walrus. I stood on third for a few minutes, trying to ascertain the extent of my injury. It seemed not to be too bad - I could still stand and walk, albeit a tad gingerly, so I stayed in the game. Fortunately, the next batter stroked another line drive to the outfield, so I could limp home without further issue, and I got through the last day of camp with nothing more dire than some stiffness and soreness in the back of my leg.
But, you know. . . I was MAD! A pulled hamstring is the classic 'old man injury' (those of you who remember such things, think Joe Montana with the KC Chiefs); the classic sign of a brain that is willing to try anything that the body has ever done before, except that the body can't pull it off the same way anymore. By rights, I should've sped around those bases as lithely as I ever did (which, let's be honest, never exactly rose to the level of 'gazelle-like', even in my prime). I hit the ball hard, and I knew what I had to do, but my stupid body (which, I am thinking, Saint Francis of Assisi was all-too-apt in calling 'Brother Ass') rebelled. I was angry and frustrated.
The anger and frustration eventually gave way to something more like disappointment and resignation to the simple fact that I am getting older, and now I have to work out the implications of that 'aging-ness' in terms of my behavior. Which can stir up the resentment that I should even have to worry about stuff like that, if I let it. But, you know, life is what it is, and it behooves me to conform my life to the actual Universe, rather than demand that the Universe conform itself to my wishes (the Universe is notoriously stubborn on stuff like that).
The funny thing is, even while I was still at camp, I found that climbing stairs didn't bother my leg at all. And on Sunday, the day after we got back home, I went out to test my leg on my bike, and ended up going 32 miles. Even though it hurt to lift my leg to put my socks on. Very weird.
But, you know, I'm not complaining. . .
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While six of our family members were at camp, 7M was on a week-long hike with a group of jr-hi boys from our community, on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. He had a great time, taxing himself physically, strengthening his friendships with the other boys, and enjoying God's creation in the process.
One day, toward the end of the hike, 7M, as jr-hi boys will be from time-to-time, was feeling a bit down; perhaps his will had run afoul of one of the adults-in-charge (as will also happen to jr-hi boys, from time-to-time), but he was moping about, and wandered off a short distance from the campsite. He found a log to sit on, and began picking up stones from the ground and randomly tossing them in no particular direction.
One stone in particular caught his attention - flat and maybe three inches across or so, it was sufficiently buried as to require a bit of effort on 7M's part to coax it out of the ground. When he finally did, he found that the stone had been inscribed in purple-Sharpie with the message, "Smile, God loves you".
Which, you know, isn't necessarily the most profound of all possible messages, but right at that moment, it met my son where he was living. . .
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This past weekend, the town where I live (OK, actually the college town right next door) hosted the annual Great Lakes Folk Festival, a weekend event in which various flavors of 'folk' groups from all over the midwest (and actually, much farther afield than that) come to perform. The festival has been going on for something like ten years, but Jen and I have only gone for the last three years (and now wonder why we weren't more strongly motivated before that). It's a really great time to hear some really fine, really fun music performed by some really talented musicians that you might never hear on your radio.
It turns out that our town is something of a regional hotbed of folk music, especially bluegrass and blues. There's a music store in town to which people come from multiple states away, just to shop their selection of 'folk' instruments - mostly stringed instruments like guitars, bass guitars (an acoustic bass guitar is a pretty impressive-looking instrument), mandolins, ukuleles, dobros, dulcimers, etc., etc. I've even seen a few harps on the sales floor, over the years. A friend of mine went to Germany a few years back, and one of the Germans he met asked where he was from. When my friend told him, he said, "Ah!" and named the music store. . .
Jen and I went to the festival this past Friday evening, and saw a Hawaiian guitarist, a Michigan-based bluegrass band, a klezmer band ('Jewish soul music'), and an Irish Celtic group (with every bit of the rollicking good humor that you might associate with such a label). Each of them played about a 45-minute set, and each was wonderful in its own way. Part of the charm of such a festival is being able to sample so many disparate musical styles in one venue, over the course of a weekend.
And part of the charm of living in Our Town. . .
-------------------------
Jen and I went to the festival on Friday night with our very good friends Richard and Stef (Richard and I were each other's Best Men, and Stef was my once-upon-a-time date to see Paul McCartney). As we relaxed during one of the breaks between sets, I noticed an elderly gentleman (well, he was at least fairly obviously older than me) (at least, it seemed fairly obvious to me), who was seated directly in front of us, carrying on a conversation with two men seated on either side of him. I was sort-of idly people-watching, when the thought arose in my head that this gentleman looked familiar, somehow, although I couldn't quite place him (at this point, I hope I wasn't crossing into 'creepy' territory as I intently checked out his face for clues as to where I might have known him, once upon a time).
Then the penny dropped. The man reminded me A LOT of a Catholic preist who had been at the student parish back in my college days. I wasn't sure it was really him - it's been more than 30 years since I'd have last seen him, and this gentleman was thinner and frailer than the priest I remembered; to say nothing of white-haired, and sporting a white beard, whereas the priest I remembered had a thick black mustache (Italian as he'd been). I turned to Richard and whispered in his ear, "is that Fr. Jake sitting in front of us?" He turned and replied that he'd been thinking the same thing.
We debated for a few seconds as to how we might best determine the answer to our curiosity, when one of the men he was speaking with called him 'Jake' by name, and we knew we'd been right. Before we could interrupt and (re-)introduce ourselves, he turned toward us with a broad grin and said, "You look familiar to me; do I know you from somewhere?" When we told him our names, he remembered us. Mostly, it seems, from a class that he'd taught at the university, that Richard and I had both taken, more than from anything associated with the student parish (although, after we'd talked for a while, he suddenly turned to me and said, "You used to play the guitar, didn't you?"; so the data points were slowly falling into place for him, too). We had a pleasant conversation for a few minutes, before he left to see another group play at one of the other festival venues.
The thing is, Fr. Jake is one of the utterly unique people I have ever known. He is just instinctively kind and gracious, and everyone who has ever met him has felt utterly loved and cared-for. In the course of our conversation, I thanked him for his part in bringing me into the Catholic Church, and Jen thanked him for helping keep her in the Church in her college years, when she'd been seriously considering changing her Christian affiliation.
As I grew deeper in my faith, Fr. Jake came to frustrate me greatly, as well. In his kindness, he often resisted speaking the 'hard truth', and I feared (and still do, although in maturer ways than I used to; I hope) that in his very great kindness, he was misleading some folks as to what the actual truth of the gospel was, or what God might require of us as response to His mercy. And I would guess that a fair bit of that frustration was mutual. But Fr. Jake never treated me with anything other than open, gracious love and kindness, and even for all the frustration, I have always remembered him fondly. He taught me a valuable lesson, that it is possible to disagree with someone, even deeply and passionately, and still love and value them at the same time.
He is 82 years old now, still active and fit (he was complaining that he'd screwed up something in his knee, playing tennis the day before), still teaching the class at the university. He's no longer associated with the student parish, but he is still a faithful Catholic priest.
And it was good to see him again, after 30+ years. . .
-------------------------
(*sigh*)
I HATE it when I screw stuff up. . .
Alas, I have hurt one of my very good friends, through my own culpable carelessness. I am hopeful that our friendship will survive my stupidity, but it will necessarily be different than it was before. My friend didn't do anything wrong; all my friend did was be in the wrong place when the consequences of my, um, stuff came down, and got splashed with the fallout.
If my friend should happen to be reading this, please understand that hurting you was the very last thing I ever intended. I hope you can forgive me. . .
On Friday of the camp week (the last full day at camp; Saturday is 'Going Home' day, full of songs like 'Country Roads' and 'Sloop John B'), I was playing softball in the afternoon with a typical mix of campers and staff (and seriously - there are few things in life much happier than jumping into a chilly-ish lake after getting baked under the hot sun on the softball field for an hour or so). Thankfully, we didn't have any softball 'incidents' this year that were remotely on the order of last year's line-drive-off-the-face.
Anyway, I came up to bat at one point in the game (actually two or three times; but this story is just about one of them). I have maintained a reputation among summer-camp softballers as a pretty fearsome power hitter, but truth be told, I can't quite jack the ball to the far reaches of the camp anymore, quite like I could when I was still spelling my age with a '3', or even a '4'. Especially since the advent of the mush-balls. But I can still stroke a nice line drive most of the time, even if I no longer have the legs to turn most of those line drives into home runs, or even triples. Aging is such a pain. . .
So, on the at-bat in question, I stroked a screaming line drive to the deepest corner of center field, and as I watched it bounce, I saw it heading for a gap in the trees which, if the ball made it through, would give even a lumbering old man like me a decent chance at circling the bases. So I turned on the jets (such as they are) as I rounded second base.
And - *ping!* - my hamstring stretched and recoiled back on itself. I yelled out in pain, and I had all I could do to make my way safely to third base, in the fashion of a deranged, wounded walrus. I stood on third for a few minutes, trying to ascertain the extent of my injury. It seemed not to be too bad - I could still stand and walk, albeit a tad gingerly, so I stayed in the game. Fortunately, the next batter stroked another line drive to the outfield, so I could limp home without further issue, and I got through the last day of camp with nothing more dire than some stiffness and soreness in the back of my leg.
But, you know. . . I was MAD! A pulled hamstring is the classic 'old man injury' (those of you who remember such things, think Joe Montana with the KC Chiefs); the classic sign of a brain that is willing to try anything that the body has ever done before, except that the body can't pull it off the same way anymore. By rights, I should've sped around those bases as lithely as I ever did (which, let's be honest, never exactly rose to the level of 'gazelle-like', even in my prime). I hit the ball hard, and I knew what I had to do, but my stupid body (which, I am thinking, Saint Francis of Assisi was all-too-apt in calling 'Brother Ass') rebelled. I was angry and frustrated.
The anger and frustration eventually gave way to something more like disappointment and resignation to the simple fact that I am getting older, and now I have to work out the implications of that 'aging-ness' in terms of my behavior. Which can stir up the resentment that I should even have to worry about stuff like that, if I let it. But, you know, life is what it is, and it behooves me to conform my life to the actual Universe, rather than demand that the Universe conform itself to my wishes (the Universe is notoriously stubborn on stuff like that).
The funny thing is, even while I was still at camp, I found that climbing stairs didn't bother my leg at all. And on Sunday, the day after we got back home, I went out to test my leg on my bike, and ended up going 32 miles. Even though it hurt to lift my leg to put my socks on. Very weird.
But, you know, I'm not complaining. . .
-------------------------
While six of our family members were at camp, 7M was on a week-long hike with a group of jr-hi boys from our community, on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia. He had a great time, taxing himself physically, strengthening his friendships with the other boys, and enjoying God's creation in the process.
One day, toward the end of the hike, 7M, as jr-hi boys will be from time-to-time, was feeling a bit down; perhaps his will had run afoul of one of the adults-in-charge (as will also happen to jr-hi boys, from time-to-time), but he was moping about, and wandered off a short distance from the campsite. He found a log to sit on, and began picking up stones from the ground and randomly tossing them in no particular direction.
One stone in particular caught his attention - flat and maybe three inches across or so, it was sufficiently buried as to require a bit of effort on 7M's part to coax it out of the ground. When he finally did, he found that the stone had been inscribed in purple-Sharpie with the message, "Smile, God loves you".
Which, you know, isn't necessarily the most profound of all possible messages, but right at that moment, it met my son where he was living. . .
-------------------------
This past weekend, the town where I live (OK, actually the college town right next door) hosted the annual Great Lakes Folk Festival, a weekend event in which various flavors of 'folk' groups from all over the midwest (and actually, much farther afield than that) come to perform. The festival has been going on for something like ten years, but Jen and I have only gone for the last three years (and now wonder why we weren't more strongly motivated before that). It's a really great time to hear some really fine, really fun music performed by some really talented musicians that you might never hear on your radio.
It turns out that our town is something of a regional hotbed of folk music, especially bluegrass and blues. There's a music store in town to which people come from multiple states away, just to shop their selection of 'folk' instruments - mostly stringed instruments like guitars, bass guitars (an acoustic bass guitar is a pretty impressive-looking instrument), mandolins, ukuleles, dobros, dulcimers, etc., etc. I've even seen a few harps on the sales floor, over the years. A friend of mine went to Germany a few years back, and one of the Germans he met asked where he was from. When my friend told him, he said, "Ah!" and named the music store. . .
Jen and I went to the festival this past Friday evening, and saw a Hawaiian guitarist, a Michigan-based bluegrass band, a klezmer band ('Jewish soul music'), and an Irish Celtic group (with every bit of the rollicking good humor that you might associate with such a label). Each of them played about a 45-minute set, and each was wonderful in its own way. Part of the charm of such a festival is being able to sample so many disparate musical styles in one venue, over the course of a weekend.
And part of the charm of living in Our Town. . .
-------------------------
Jen and I went to the festival on Friday night with our very good friends Richard and Stef (Richard and I were each other's Best Men, and Stef was my once-upon-a-time date to see Paul McCartney). As we relaxed during one of the breaks between sets, I noticed an elderly gentleman (well, he was at least fairly obviously older than me) (at least, it seemed fairly obvious to me), who was seated directly in front of us, carrying on a conversation with two men seated on either side of him. I was sort-of idly people-watching, when the thought arose in my head that this gentleman looked familiar, somehow, although I couldn't quite place him (at this point, I hope I wasn't crossing into 'creepy' territory as I intently checked out his face for clues as to where I might have known him, once upon a time).
Then the penny dropped. The man reminded me A LOT of a Catholic preist who had been at the student parish back in my college days. I wasn't sure it was really him - it's been more than 30 years since I'd have last seen him, and this gentleman was thinner and frailer than the priest I remembered; to say nothing of white-haired, and sporting a white beard, whereas the priest I remembered had a thick black mustache (Italian as he'd been). I turned to Richard and whispered in his ear, "is that Fr. Jake sitting in front of us?" He turned and replied that he'd been thinking the same thing.
We debated for a few seconds as to how we might best determine the answer to our curiosity, when one of the men he was speaking with called him 'Jake' by name, and we knew we'd been right. Before we could interrupt and (re-)introduce ourselves, he turned toward us with a broad grin and said, "You look familiar to me; do I know you from somewhere?" When we told him our names, he remembered us. Mostly, it seems, from a class that he'd taught at the university, that Richard and I had both taken, more than from anything associated with the student parish (although, after we'd talked for a while, he suddenly turned to me and said, "You used to play the guitar, didn't you?"; so the data points were slowly falling into place for him, too). We had a pleasant conversation for a few minutes, before he left to see another group play at one of the other festival venues.
The thing is, Fr. Jake is one of the utterly unique people I have ever known. He is just instinctively kind and gracious, and everyone who has ever met him has felt utterly loved and cared-for. In the course of our conversation, I thanked him for his part in bringing me into the Catholic Church, and Jen thanked him for helping keep her in the Church in her college years, when she'd been seriously considering changing her Christian affiliation.
As I grew deeper in my faith, Fr. Jake came to frustrate me greatly, as well. In his kindness, he often resisted speaking the 'hard truth', and I feared (and still do, although in maturer ways than I used to; I hope) that in his very great kindness, he was misleading some folks as to what the actual truth of the gospel was, or what God might require of us as response to His mercy. And I would guess that a fair bit of that frustration was mutual. But Fr. Jake never treated me with anything other than open, gracious love and kindness, and even for all the frustration, I have always remembered him fondly. He taught me a valuable lesson, that it is possible to disagree with someone, even deeply and passionately, and still love and value them at the same time.
He is 82 years old now, still active and fit (he was complaining that he'd screwed up something in his knee, playing tennis the day before), still teaching the class at the university. He's no longer associated with the student parish, but he is still a faithful Catholic priest.
And it was good to see him again, after 30+ years. . .
-------------------------
(*sigh*)
I HATE it when I screw stuff up. . .
Alas, I have hurt one of my very good friends, through my own culpable carelessness. I am hopeful that our friendship will survive my stupidity, but it will necessarily be different than it was before. My friend didn't do anything wrong; all my friend did was be in the wrong place when the consequences of my, um, stuff came down, and got splashed with the fallout.
If my friend should happen to be reading this, please understand that hurting you was the very last thing I ever intended. I hope you can forgive me. . .
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Wonderful-ness; or, Happy Anniversary to My Beloved
Another re-post, this one from five years ago, in honor of Jen's-and-my 31st wedding anniversary. . .
-------------------------
There are times when I’m simply overwhelmed by the wonderful-ness of my wife. Times when I just look at her and ask myself, “How is it that the most amazing woman in the universe threw her life in with me?” And I’m just in awe of my good fortune.
There might be a few women in the world (stress on ‘might’ and ‘few’) who are physically more beautiful than Jen, but when I consider the strength of her character, the beauty of her soul and spirit, she blows them all away. I’ll say it again – she is the most amazing woman in the universe. I almost feel bad for the rest of you guys that she’s my wife. Almost.
And the thing is, I’m well aware that I did nothing in particular to deserve her. I’m still not real sure why, all those years ago, she brought that rubber ball to me, when it seems like there must have been lots of more desirable guys than me available to her. But I’m glad she did. I’ve often described how we knew each other pretty well before we ever got to the point of courtship. And that’s what’s most amazing of all to me – she’s told me many times how God told her, before I even proposed to her, “What you see is what you get with him.” She had a pretty good, sober assessment of my character. AND SHE STILL MARRIED ME! That blows me away, and I’m grateful for it every single day I’m married to her.
And even now, after 31 years, I’m still blown away. She knows me way better now than she did back then, and she still throws her life in with mine. For all the clear-eyed, sober appraisal of my character she had when we were courting, there are lots of things, not all of them good, that she’s only learned from living with me for 31 years. And she still stays married to me. Amazing!
“Somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, I must have done something good.”
Simply flat-out amazing. . .
-------------------------
Happy Anniversary, Sweetheart. You have made my life immeasurably richer. . .
-------------------------
There are times when I’m simply overwhelmed by the wonderful-ness of my wife. Times when I just look at her and ask myself, “How is it that the most amazing woman in the universe threw her life in with me?” And I’m just in awe of my good fortune.
There might be a few women in the world (stress on ‘might’ and ‘few’) who are physically more beautiful than Jen, but when I consider the strength of her character, the beauty of her soul and spirit, she blows them all away. I’ll say it again – she is the most amazing woman in the universe. I almost feel bad for the rest of you guys that she’s my wife. Almost.
And the thing is, I’m well aware that I did nothing in particular to deserve her. I’m still not real sure why, all those years ago, she brought that rubber ball to me, when it seems like there must have been lots of more desirable guys than me available to her. But I’m glad she did. I’ve often described how we knew each other pretty well before we ever got to the point of courtship. And that’s what’s most amazing of all to me – she’s told me many times how God told her, before I even proposed to her, “What you see is what you get with him.” She had a pretty good, sober assessment of my character. AND SHE STILL MARRIED ME! That blows me away, and I’m grateful for it every single day I’m married to her.
And even now, after 31 years, I’m still blown away. She knows me way better now than she did back then, and she still throws her life in with mine. For all the clear-eyed, sober appraisal of my character she had when we were courting, there are lots of things, not all of them good, that she’s only learned from living with me for 31 years. And she still stays married to me. Amazing!
“Somewhere in my wicked, miserable past, I must have done something good.”
Simply flat-out amazing. . .
-------------------------
Happy Anniversary, Sweetheart. You have made my life immeasurably richer. . .
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Happy Birthday, Jen! (and We'll See Y'all in a Week)
Today is Jen's birthday. Which brings us into the seven months of the year that she and I are the same age, at least as far as integral numbers of years are concerned. In our family, we are fond of telling each other on our birthdays, "I'm glad you were born." And I can say with all sincerity that, with the possible exception of my own birth-parents, I am gladder for Jen's birth than any other person on the planet. I don't even want to contemplate what my life might have been like without her existence.
Happy Birthday, Sweetheart. My world is a sweeter, richer place for having you in it. . .
-------------------------
We're gone to Summer Camp for the coming week, so I'll be incommunicado from Blog-space. But, just so you have something to remember me by, here's a photo of my friend Jason and me, regaling the campers with our rousing rendition of Loudon Wainright's 'Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road'. . .
![]()
Happy Birthday, Sweetheart. My world is a sweeter, richer place for having you in it. . .
-------------------------
We're gone to Summer Camp for the coming week, so I'll be incommunicado from Blog-space. But, just so you have something to remember me by, here's a photo of my friend Jason and me, regaling the campers with our rousing rendition of Loudon Wainright's 'Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road'. . .
(Tie-dye napkin do-rag by Lime)
Monday, July 25, 2011
Yesterday. . .
. . . 2F and I went to Comerica Park, on a muggy and sporadically rainy evening in Detroit (we endured a light shower for 10 minutes or so just before the band took the stage, but there was lightning in the sky all around us for a good part of the evening, and a few drops fell at random points during the show itself), to see Paul McCartney in concert, along with 40,000 or so of our closest and dearest friends.
It was the fourth time I've seen Sir Paul in concert, going back to 1993, when he played the Silverdome (and my best friend's wife was my date). I saw him with a buddy in '02, at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and Jen and I saw him at the Palace in '05, as part of our Silver Anniversary celebration. The open-air venue this time was a cool ambience, even including the few spits of rain we had to endure. During the 10-minute shower above, I leaned over to the guy next to me and wondered if we should break into the 'No Rain!' chant, a la Woodstock. He smiled at me and said, "Actually, when I was at Woodstock, the rain was much worse than this." OK, then. . .
I'm just old enough to remember when the Beatles were first on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of '64 (seriously? that was almost 50 years ago?!?), and I followed them into my teens, then Wings through my college years. At any rate, to a large extent Paul McCartney, and the Beatles more generally, have provided the soundtrack for a large portion of my life.
2F has been a Beatles fan from early on in her life. When she was in 6th grade, I think, she did an Academic Fair project on the Beatles, complete with a tri-fold board adorned with the Sgt. Pepper album cover (I suppose, if I were a more astute father, I'd have been quicker to recognize her desire to form a connection with her dad; but I did have a lot of fun helping her with it). So, when Jen and I came home from the concert in '05, having been cut off in mid-'na-na' from such sharing of McCartney's greatness with our daughter as we could manage at the time (I rang her up on my cell phone for the 'Hey Jude' singalong, but an usher saw me and threatened to bounce me from the concert; no further comment in that regard), I promised 2F that, the next time Sir Paul came to town (or heck, within a manageable drive of town), I'd take her with me, so I was duty-bound to fulfill my promise (and don't you wish your duty included going to McCartney concerts?).
We went to the concert with one of 2F's friends - a young woman who has become one of her best friends and an honorary member of our family, even apart from a shared fondness for McCartney and the Beatles - along with the young lady's mom (who, conicidentally, has actually met - and been photographed with - Hugh Jackman, as her husband is a sometime film-industry hairdresser; please don't hate her, Lime) although their seats weren't by ours. They were originally going to be joined by another friend, a young man from Scotland, who has also become a close family friend over the course of the past year, but he took ill at the last minute, and couldn't come (he must have been really, REALLY sick); the girl and her mom offered his ticket to 4M, so I got to go to the concert with two of my kids, which was quite cool.
-------------------------
The band was the same crew Paul has played with for the past 10 years or so, with Paul Wickens on keyboards, Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray on guitars and backup vocals, and Abe Laboriel on drums (and backup vocals; he also provided a bit of visual hilarity during 'Dance Tonight'). It's a tight group, and they really seem to enjoy playing together.
In case anyone is interested, here's the setlist they played last night:
Hello, Goodbye
Junior's Farm
All My Loving
Jet
Drive My Car
Sing the Changes (from his album Electronic Arguments under the pseudonym The Fireman)
Hitchhike (a Marvin Gaye number added just for his Motown friends)
The Night Before
Let Me Roll It (ending with a jam on 'Foxy Lady')
Paperback Writer
The Long and Winding Road
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five
Let 'Em In
Maybe I'm Amazed
I've Just Seen a Face
I Will
Blackbird
Here Today
Dance Tonight (from his '07 album, Memory Almost Full)
Mrs. Vanderbilt
Eleanor Rigby
Something
Band On the Run
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (you don't think he reads my blog, do you?)
Back In the USSR
I've Got a Feeling
A Day In the Life (ending with 'Give Peace a Chance')
Let It Be
Live and Let Die
Hey Jude
(1st encore)
Lady Madonna
Day Tripper
Get Back
(2nd encore)
Yesterday
Helter Skelter
Abbey Road Medley (Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End)
36 songs in all (which has been pretty standard for him in his recent shows) - 23 Beatles songs, 10 Wings songs, 9 that he's never done live before (at least in front of an American audience), spanning three amazing hours. I've long thought that his '90 concert (the one chronicled on the CD Tripping the Live Fantastic) was the best of his recent live shows, and I've regretted ever since that I missed it. But this show was right up there, on a par with the one 21 years ago. And I can only hope to have anything close to Paul's energy level when I'm 69.
McCartney is a consummate performer and showman. His concerts have always left me happily satisfied, and yet wanting more at the same time. Having seen him on multiple occasions over the course of nearly 20 years, it has seemed to me that, as the years pass, he is coming to a greater and greater appreciation of the warm affection in which he is held by his audience; he added a couple singalong numbers (beyond 'Hey Jude') to his setlist this time, but it almost didn't matter - all through the show, we were hearing the band in one ear, and in the other, 40,000 people singing along. It was a magical evening.
I don't know how many more of these concerts I'll end up attending (heck, I don't know how many more of 'em Paul is gonna play), but every time I start to think that it's becoming 'old hat', I'm just blown away by the one I'm seeing today. It was an amazing evening; an amazing show by one of the great performers of all time. . .
It was the fourth time I've seen Sir Paul in concert, going back to 1993, when he played the Silverdome (and my best friend's wife was my date). I saw him with a buddy in '02, at the Palace of Auburn Hills, and Jen and I saw him at the Palace in '05, as part of our Silver Anniversary celebration. The open-air venue this time was a cool ambience, even including the few spits of rain we had to endure. During the 10-minute shower above, I leaned over to the guy next to me and wondered if we should break into the 'No Rain!' chant, a la Woodstock. He smiled at me and said, "Actually, when I was at Woodstock, the rain was much worse than this." OK, then. . .
I'm just old enough to remember when the Beatles were first on the Ed Sullivan Show in February of '64 (seriously? that was almost 50 years ago?!?), and I followed them into my teens, then Wings through my college years. At any rate, to a large extent Paul McCartney, and the Beatles more generally, have provided the soundtrack for a large portion of my life.
2F has been a Beatles fan from early on in her life. When she was in 6th grade, I think, she did an Academic Fair project on the Beatles, complete with a tri-fold board adorned with the Sgt. Pepper album cover (I suppose, if I were a more astute father, I'd have been quicker to recognize her desire to form a connection with her dad; but I did have a lot of fun helping her with it). So, when Jen and I came home from the concert in '05, having been cut off in mid-'na-na' from such sharing of McCartney's greatness with our daughter as we could manage at the time (I rang her up on my cell phone for the 'Hey Jude' singalong, but an usher saw me and threatened to bounce me from the concert; no further comment in that regard), I promised 2F that, the next time Sir Paul came to town (or heck, within a manageable drive of town), I'd take her with me, so I was duty-bound to fulfill my promise (and don't you wish your duty included going to McCartney concerts?).
We went to the concert with one of 2F's friends - a young woman who has become one of her best friends and an honorary member of our family, even apart from a shared fondness for McCartney and the Beatles - along with the young lady's mom (who, conicidentally, has actually met - and been photographed with - Hugh Jackman, as her husband is a sometime film-industry hairdresser; please don't hate her, Lime) although their seats weren't by ours. They were originally going to be joined by another friend, a young man from Scotland, who has also become a close family friend over the course of the past year, but he took ill at the last minute, and couldn't come (he must have been really, REALLY sick); the girl and her mom offered his ticket to 4M, so I got to go to the concert with two of my kids, which was quite cool.
-------------------------
The band was the same crew Paul has played with for the past 10 years or so, with Paul Wickens on keyboards, Rusty Anderson and Brian Ray on guitars and backup vocals, and Abe Laboriel on drums (and backup vocals; he also provided a bit of visual hilarity during 'Dance Tonight'). It's a tight group, and they really seem to enjoy playing together.
In case anyone is interested, here's the setlist they played last night:
Hello, Goodbye
Junior's Farm
All My Loving
Jet
Drive My Car
Sing the Changes (from his album Electronic Arguments under the pseudonym The Fireman)
Hitchhike (a Marvin Gaye number added just for his Motown friends)
The Night Before
Let Me Roll It (ending with a jam on 'Foxy Lady')
Paperback Writer
The Long and Winding Road
Nineteen Hundred and Eighty-Five
Let 'Em In
Maybe I'm Amazed
I've Just Seen a Face
I Will
Blackbird
Here Today
Dance Tonight (from his '07 album, Memory Almost Full)
Mrs. Vanderbilt
Eleanor Rigby
Something
Band On the Run
Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (you don't think he reads my blog, do you?)
Back In the USSR
I've Got a Feeling
A Day In the Life (ending with 'Give Peace a Chance')
Let It Be
Live and Let Die
Hey Jude
(1st encore)
Lady Madonna
Day Tripper
Get Back
(2nd encore)
Yesterday
Helter Skelter
Abbey Road Medley (Golden Slumbers/Carry That Weight/The End)
36 songs in all (which has been pretty standard for him in his recent shows) - 23 Beatles songs, 10 Wings songs, 9 that he's never done live before (at least in front of an American audience), spanning three amazing hours. I've long thought that his '90 concert (the one chronicled on the CD Tripping the Live Fantastic) was the best of his recent live shows, and I've regretted ever since that I missed it. But this show was right up there, on a par with the one 21 years ago. And I can only hope to have anything close to Paul's energy level when I'm 69.
McCartney is a consummate performer and showman. His concerts have always left me happily satisfied, and yet wanting more at the same time. Having seen him on multiple occasions over the course of nearly 20 years, it has seemed to me that, as the years pass, he is coming to a greater and greater appreciation of the warm affection in which he is held by his audience; he added a couple singalong numbers (beyond 'Hey Jude') to his setlist this time, but it almost didn't matter - all through the show, we were hearing the band in one ear, and in the other, 40,000 people singing along. It was a magical evening.
I don't know how many more of these concerts I'll end up attending (heck, I don't know how many more of 'em Paul is gonna play), but every time I start to think that it's becoming 'old hat', I'm just blown away by the one I'm seeing today. It was an amazing evening; an amazing show by one of the great performers of all time. . .
Monday, July 18, 2011
Two Girls and a Boy
Our first two children were girls. I wasn't really all fixated on the idea of having a son, but there was that part of me that hoped for one - someone to carry the family name forward from me, and all that. In the mid-80s, though, just as I was passing into my 30s and gearing up my genealogy hobby, it was a matter of some small concern to me to consider the generation of my cousins, the descendants of my paternal grandfather. My grandfather had three sons (ie, bearers of the family name); my Uncle Neville (as I'll call him here) had three daughters, so the name wouldn't be passing on through his kids; Uncle Levi had six kids, four of whom were sons, but none of them had gotten married, much less had kids, as they were passing into their own 30s; and my Dad had seven kids, five sons, of whom I was the only one married, and up to that point, I only had girls. So the survival of our family name was somewhat of an open question at that point.
Of course, I needn't have worried. Within a couple years, I had the first of what would eventually grow to a group of five sons (none of whom is married as I write this, but there's still plenty of time). Three of Uncle Levi's sons married, and each of them had at least one son, and three of my four brothers married, producing one more son between the three of them. So the family name seems reasonably safe for another generation or two (and I wouldn't even be all that concerned about it, but our name is not a common one, and we're kinda proud of it).
Anyway, I hasten to be clear that, 'passing on the name' aside, I love my daughters (and nieces), and cherish their place in my life just as much as I love and cherish my sons. And even where The Name is concerned, what was I gonna do about it, anyway? God gives us the children He gives us, and we bring them all into our family with gratitude and love. Just, you know, for the sake of saying so. . .
-------------------------
My first three children gave me small opportunities to observe certain, shall we say, tendencies, demarcating differences between girls and boys. Which is an interesting idea, all by itself, because neither Jen nor I are very 'stereotypical' in terms of 'gender roles'. She was a pretty tomboy-ish girl who liked playing in the mud, and working with tools, and all that, and I was a pretty bookish, nerdy boy (tea parties and doll-houses never much interested me, though). Even now, I tend to be more emotional than she does; we often joke between ourselves that she's a pretty 'guy-ish' woman, and I'm a more 'chick-ish' guy, at least as far as many of the common stereotypes go.
But, as has been noted on occasion (although it's not such a popular idea just now), stereotypes don't just appear out of thin air; they usually arise out of some basis in 'general' fact, even if it isn't terribly helpful in specific cases.
We have often gotten a chuckle from the disparate responses of our kids to things like weird bugs that they found on the sidewalk. Toddler 1F would spy the strange-looking critter, and run away from it, maybe even crying. Little 2F would most likely squat down for a closer look, maybe even pick it up in the palm of her hand and pet it. But 3M's response was more, um, 'elemental' - he'd stomp on it, usually with a triumphal shout.
So, you know, the contrast was pretty clear. . .
Testosterone - it's a wonderful thing. . .
-------------------------
And estrogen! Estrogen is wonderful, too! If, you know, you happen to rock that way. . .
;)
Of course, I needn't have worried. Within a couple years, I had the first of what would eventually grow to a group of five sons (none of whom is married as I write this, but there's still plenty of time). Three of Uncle Levi's sons married, and each of them had at least one son, and three of my four brothers married, producing one more son between the three of them. So the family name seems reasonably safe for another generation or two (and I wouldn't even be all that concerned about it, but our name is not a common one, and we're kinda proud of it).
Anyway, I hasten to be clear that, 'passing on the name' aside, I love my daughters (and nieces), and cherish their place in my life just as much as I love and cherish my sons. And even where The Name is concerned, what was I gonna do about it, anyway? God gives us the children He gives us, and we bring them all into our family with gratitude and love. Just, you know, for the sake of saying so. . .
-------------------------
My first three children gave me small opportunities to observe certain, shall we say, tendencies, demarcating differences between girls and boys. Which is an interesting idea, all by itself, because neither Jen nor I are very 'stereotypical' in terms of 'gender roles'. She was a pretty tomboy-ish girl who liked playing in the mud, and working with tools, and all that, and I was a pretty bookish, nerdy boy (tea parties and doll-houses never much interested me, though). Even now, I tend to be more emotional than she does; we often joke between ourselves that she's a pretty 'guy-ish' woman, and I'm a more 'chick-ish' guy, at least as far as many of the common stereotypes go.
But, as has been noted on occasion (although it's not such a popular idea just now), stereotypes don't just appear out of thin air; they usually arise out of some basis in 'general' fact, even if it isn't terribly helpful in specific cases.
We have often gotten a chuckle from the disparate responses of our kids to things like weird bugs that they found on the sidewalk. Toddler 1F would spy the strange-looking critter, and run away from it, maybe even crying. Little 2F would most likely squat down for a closer look, maybe even pick it up in the palm of her hand and pet it. But 3M's response was more, um, 'elemental' - he'd stomp on it, usually with a triumphal shout.
So, you know, the contrast was pretty clear. . .
Testosterone - it's a wonderful thing. . .
-------------------------
And estrogen! Estrogen is wonderful, too! If, you know, you happen to rock that way. . .
;)
Monday, July 11, 2011
Potty Talk
OK, my friend Suldog has done it again. A while back, he posted about HIS WIFE'S accidental misadventure (at least, he presented it as accidental, and I have no reason to doubt him) with a public restroom. Which, as Suldog's posts often seem to do, called forth a couple of stories from my own young life, which I left in his comment-space, but later decided that they would work just fine for taking up some space in my own humble blog. You all can tell me whether or not I assessed their quality accurately. . .
-------------------------
Many years ago, Jen and I were at the annual Mackinac Bridge Walk, held every Labor Day, in which a couple lanes of the majestic bridge joining Michigan's peninsulas are given over for a few hours, so that Michiganders (or, really, anybody who shows up) can walk the 5-mile span. Something like 50,000 people do the bridge walk every year, proceeding from north (St. Ignace) to south (Mackinaw City). Bridge-walkers can park their cars at either end of the bridge, but south-to-north bus transport will be required, either to take you from your car on the south end to the beginning of the walk, or from the end of the walk to your car on the north end. Michiganders have learned, from 50+ years' experience, that, if you are in the UP on Labor Day, and want to drive south, you either cross the bridge before the sun rises, or you wait until later in the day.
So we walked the bridge, and we had a great time. There is something fairly awesome about walking across a five-mile expanse of open water, with its views of Michigan's two peninsulas, and Mackinac Island (which is probably my favorite place in all the earth). And it is not unusual for a freighter to pass under the bridge, and thus, beneath the walkers' feet, in the course of the hour-plus it takes to complete the walk. At the highest point of the bridge, the walker is more than 200 feet above the water (and the center lanes of the suspension portion of the bridge are decked with an open steel grid, for aerodynamic reasons; if a walker suffers from vertigo or acrophobia, he is well-advised to keep to the solidly-paved outer lane)
Anyway, with so many walkers, the, uh, need for toilet facilities is particularly acute, given that the normal population of Mackinaw City is a bit under1000 souls (altho, during the summer tourist season, the town is considerably more crowded than that). One of the years I went, I got to the end of the walk and really had to go. There were something like 50 porta-johns lined up in an open field near where the buses were lined up to take us back to the north end of the bridge, where our cars were parked. Half of 'em were labeled 'MEN' and the other half 'WOMEN'. For some odd reason, there were long lines at all the 'MEN's' porta-johns, but none at all at the 'WOMEN's' (which, I think, is the absolute only time I've ever seen that, but that's how it was).
I was somewhere around 20th in line, crossing my legs and urging the lines to move faster, when the thought slowly crept from the deep recesses of my brain to the level of outward conscious thought - 'Waaaaiiiiit a miniiiiitttt. . . only one person at a time can use a porta-john. . . They don't need to mark 'em for MEN and WOMEN at all. . ." Evidently, the exact same thought percolated to the front of several other men's minds virtually simultaneously, because several of us together wandered over to the WOMEN's porta-johns and quickly availed ourselves of their amenities. By the time I emerged a minute or two later, having finished my business, and being considerably more relieved than when I'd gone in, the 'MEN' and 'WOMEN' signs had all been taken down, and all the porta-johns had lines, half as long as the previous ones, and, uh, urinary throughput was doubled. . .
-------------------------
Another time, I was at a conference at a small liberal-arts college in Michigan. During a break between sessions, I made use of the restroom facilities. The urinals (ladies, if you really don't know what 'urinals' are. . . uh, ask your brother, or something) were of an odd type that I hadn't seen before - sort of a 'pedestal' design, away from the wall, that required the, uh, user to sorta split his legs on either side of the, uh, receptacle, in order to 'do his business'. Afterward, I was commenting on the uniquely-configured urinals to one of the other (male) conferees, when an employee of the college, standing nearby, overheard us.
"Oh, that is quite intentional," he informed us. "They're unisex urinals." I invested a few seconds' thought toward how that might work if I were, you know, an actual woman (and it seemed to me that, in actual usage, it might not work quite as, um, cleanly as what the designer originally thought it would) (I should also mention here that I never wandered into the women's restroom to see if they had also been installed there). Then I quickly shook my head to clear the image from my brain.
Only, you know, at a college (probably the same folks who dream up stuff like this). . .
-------------------------
Many years ago, Jen and I were at the annual Mackinac Bridge Walk, held every Labor Day, in which a couple lanes of the majestic bridge joining Michigan's peninsulas are given over for a few hours, so that Michiganders (or, really, anybody who shows up) can walk the 5-mile span. Something like 50,000 people do the bridge walk every year, proceeding from north (St. Ignace) to south (Mackinaw City). Bridge-walkers can park their cars at either end of the bridge, but south-to-north bus transport will be required, either to take you from your car on the south end to the beginning of the walk, or from the end of the walk to your car on the north end. Michiganders have learned, from 50+ years' experience, that, if you are in the UP on Labor Day, and want to drive south, you either cross the bridge before the sun rises, or you wait until later in the day.
So we walked the bridge, and we had a great time. There is something fairly awesome about walking across a five-mile expanse of open water, with its views of Michigan's two peninsulas, and Mackinac Island (which is probably my favorite place in all the earth). And it is not unusual for a freighter to pass under the bridge, and thus, beneath the walkers' feet, in the course of the hour-plus it takes to complete the walk. At the highest point of the bridge, the walker is more than 200 feet above the water (and the center lanes of the suspension portion of the bridge are decked with an open steel grid, for aerodynamic reasons; if a walker suffers from vertigo or acrophobia, he is well-advised to keep to the solidly-paved outer lane)
Anyway, with so many walkers, the, uh, need for toilet facilities is particularly acute, given that the normal population of Mackinaw City is a bit under1000 souls (altho, during the summer tourist season, the town is considerably more crowded than that). One of the years I went, I got to the end of the walk and really had to go. There were something like 50 porta-johns lined up in an open field near where the buses were lined up to take us back to the north end of the bridge, where our cars were parked. Half of 'em were labeled 'MEN' and the other half 'WOMEN'. For some odd reason, there were long lines at all the 'MEN's' porta-johns, but none at all at the 'WOMEN's' (which, I think, is the absolute only time I've ever seen that, but that's how it was).
I was somewhere around 20th in line, crossing my legs and urging the lines to move faster, when the thought slowly crept from the deep recesses of my brain to the level of outward conscious thought - 'Waaaaiiiiit a miniiiiitttt. . . only one person at a time can use a porta-john. . . They don't need to mark 'em for MEN and WOMEN at all. . ." Evidently, the exact same thought percolated to the front of several other men's minds virtually simultaneously, because several of us together wandered over to the WOMEN's porta-johns and quickly availed ourselves of their amenities. By the time I emerged a minute or two later, having finished my business, and being considerably more relieved than when I'd gone in, the 'MEN' and 'WOMEN' signs had all been taken down, and all the porta-johns had lines, half as long as the previous ones, and, uh, urinary throughput was doubled. . .
-------------------------
Another time, I was at a conference at a small liberal-arts college in Michigan. During a break between sessions, I made use of the restroom facilities. The urinals (ladies, if you really don't know what 'urinals' are. . . uh, ask your brother, or something) were of an odd type that I hadn't seen before - sort of a 'pedestal' design, away from the wall, that required the, uh, user to sorta split his legs on either side of the, uh, receptacle, in order to 'do his business'. Afterward, I was commenting on the uniquely-configured urinals to one of the other (male) conferees, when an employee of the college, standing nearby, overheard us.
"Oh, that is quite intentional," he informed us. "They're unisex urinals." I invested a few seconds' thought toward how that might work if I were, you know, an actual woman (and it seemed to me that, in actual usage, it might not work quite as, um, cleanly as what the designer originally thought it would) (I should also mention here that I never wandered into the women's restroom to see if they had also been installed there). Then I quickly shook my head to clear the image from my brain.
Only, you know, at a college (probably the same folks who dream up stuff like this). . .
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
The Patent and the Formula
A while back, Uncle Skip gave me a bloggity award, the acceptance of which entailed me telling you all a few things about myself. And so I did, without actually telling you much at all about myself. Except for one thing - I mentioned that I have a patent to my name, and possibly a mathematical formula. Which struck a few of my commenters (I'm lookin' at you, Bijoux, Sailor and Lime) as interesting, and they asked me to give more details. So I left my own responsive comment, giving the short version of the two stories. And, in the ensuing months, I've come to think that those stories might be worth a full-blown post, giving a fuller account. You know, for posterity, and all that. (See, I'm just vain enough to think that somebody, somewhere, centuries in the future might stumble across this blog, and say, "Wow, this dude had a patent and a formula! I wonder who the hell he was?")
-------------------------
The Patent
When I was still working at my first job, I did some work on a project that was a bit unusual, for a customer that usually worked closely with one of our competitors. They had an idea for a non-pneumatic spare tire/wheel, to save space and cost (as against the typical pneumatic mini-spare, or even moreso, an actual full-size spare). They had gone first to our competitor, with whom they had a long-standing working relationship, and asked them to develop the design for them. But the competitor was unable to come up with an actual working design, so they came to us.
When we got the design, we could see immediately that, as given to us, it wouldn't work. But our company had had, for many years, contracts with the US Defense Department, to make wheels for tanks and other tracked vehicles, which were also non-pneumatic, and there were a couple of design 'tricks' that made such a wheel actually work.
So when I was given the project, I did my usual analysis and immediately saw that the stresses were way too high. But, I told my bosses, this was really a pretty similar thing, conceptually, to a tank wheel, and what if we applied tank-wheel design principles to it? So I did a re-design according to tank-wheel design principles, and when I analyzed it, lo and behold, we got a working design! So we made a few prototypes and tested them, and they seemed to work just fine. And I, having done my job, was happy, and moved on to my next project.
At that point, our top management got a little nervous (and not without reason), that our customer could just take all our great design/development work and hand it back to our competitor, with whom they had a nice comfortable business relationship. So they decided (unbeknownst to me) to seek a patent, in order to protect our 'intellectual property' rights.
Thus it was that, a year or so after I'd worked on the project, and had all but forgotten about it, I was called into a series of meetings to describe to a bunch of lawyers what I'd done, and blah, blah, blah. And the upshot was, that when the patent was granted, my name (among others) was on it. It had been an interesting project, and I was a little proud of having made the 'conceptual leap' to incorporate tank-wheel design principles, but as far as I was concerned, I was just doing my job. Getting the patent was never my idea (although I was certainly not opposed to it); someone else sought the patent, and in the end, because I'd worked on it, my name was one of the ones that got slapped on it. So they paid me a dollar for rights to the patent, and I was invited to the annual Patent Luncheon for as long as I worked for the company (which turned out to be just a couple more years).
So now, I've got a patent to my name, which is nice. (Honestly, though - my dad has something on the order of 20 patents, in half-a-dozen countries, so I don't make a bigger deal of it than it merits. . .)
-------------------------
The Formula
(OK this is math; if your eyes start to glaze over, feel free to stop at any time)
This one comes from my first job, as well. In the course of doing Quality Assurance on our parts, we would scan them in a machine that essentially took a series of points (typically a number in the hundreds, or at least the tens) from the surface of the part. Then we had to take those hundreds of points and generate the key dimensions we were trying to measure from them - a radius, an angle, or what-have-you, in order to determine whether they were within the specified limits, or not. Getting an angle from the point data was pretty straightforward - there are lots of well-understood methods and formulas for computing a line (and thus, an angle) from a set of points (I should note that the key thing here is that we had so many points - if we only had two points, then it's straightforward to calculate the line between them; any middle-school student could do it. But when you have more than two points, to say nothing of hundreds, it gets more complicated to compute the line that 'best fits' the large set of points.)
For a circle, though, there weren't any readily-accessible methods or formulas available, as far as I could tell. From high-school Algebra, I knew that I could calculate a circle from three points, but I had no idea how to do it for five, or fifty, or five hundred points. I played with calculating a circle from every possible set of three points taken from the larger point set, and that gave me a 'bracketed' answer - the limits between which the 'real answer' had to lie - but that wasn't a very satisfying answer. I even went to the Math Library at the University, to see if there were any obscure formulas published anywhere, but they couldn't easily point me to one, either.
So, over the course of six months or so, I played around with the problem, trying to figure out a way to attack the problem. From time to time, I'd have an idea that seemed like it might be fruitful, and I'd make some progress on it, but it was slow. And I still had to work on my regular job, so I didn't just have unlimited time to work on the 'best-fit-circle' problem.
Then one day, I had a flash of insight (it involved choosing a workable error-measure, if any of you are math-y enough to know what that means), and cranked the formula through (it involved a LOT of cranking). Then I wrote it into a computer program, and ran a few point sets through it, and what do you know? It worked! It calculated a circle that by-golly corresponded to the set of points. So, I put the computer program into a more-usable form, and we went on our merry way, using the formula in the day-to-day work of checking radius dimensions on the parts we manufactured.
Now, I didn't for a minute suppose that I had actually derived an original formula. I thought all along that someone, somewhere, had derived this formula years before, and I just wasn't clever enough to track it down. No big deal - many times, in Math classes I'd had over the years, we'd derived the classical formulas that were in our textbooks, just for the instructional purpose of seeing where they came from. And I was sure that this was one of those - I could have looked it up, but failing that, I just derived it myself.
Fast forward 15 years - A guy I know runs a 'Math' column in a little engineering journal, and I'd written a few articles for his column over the years. He was running low on columns 'in the can', and he asked me if I could write another article for him. I showed him my notes for the 'best-fit-circle', and he thought that would make a great article, so I wrote it up, and a year or so later, he published it.
Now, whenever I've written one of those 'Math columns', I always get a few emails in the aftermath of it being published - it's a lot of fun to hash over the column with other interested folks. Once, I wrote an article on how the sun's position in the sky varies over the course of a year, and I got all sorts of interesting emails, from guys wanting to talk about how to design their house to get more sun in winter, and less in summer, or a professor sending me a little 'solar calculator' he'd invented.
When the 'Best-Fit Circle' article ran, I got emails from a couple of pretty high-powered academic-type guys, thanking me for the article, saying that it was obviously really useful, and asking me where I'd gotten the formula from. When I said, sheepishly, that I hadn't found it anywhere, that I'd worked it out myself, and by the way, could they tell me where it might be published, they wrote back, congratulating me for deriving a really useful formula. One guy was on the development team for one of the major commercial computer-graphics codes, and he said he'd searched all through the literature for all the various different methods for computing a circle, and he'd never seen it before. Which kinda stunned me, actually.
Then one day, one of my kids did one of those things that kids will do - he googled his dad's name - and found, among various letters to editors I'd written, and whatnot, at least two instances of college professor-types assigning homework to their classes, involving the formula I'd published in my friend's little journal (properly attributed, and everything). Then, when 4M had a calculus class at the junior college, he mentioned to his instructor that his dad had written a math article, and the instructor asked if I'd send her a copy. She really liked it, and started assigning it to her own classes. I spoke to her once, and she mentioned it to me, and I told her that I couldn't really believe that it was original with me. But she said she'd never seen it anywhere else, and as far as she was concerned, it should properly be called [Craig]'s Method, and I'd be within my rights to call it that.
So there you have it - nothing is officially 'written in stone', or anything like that, but if anybody wants to make reference to the Best-Fit Circle formula by that name, I welcome you to do so. . . ;)
-------------------------
The Patent
When I was still working at my first job, I did some work on a project that was a bit unusual, for a customer that usually worked closely with one of our competitors. They had an idea for a non-pneumatic spare tire/wheel, to save space and cost (as against the typical pneumatic mini-spare, or even moreso, an actual full-size spare). They had gone first to our competitor, with whom they had a long-standing working relationship, and asked them to develop the design for them. But the competitor was unable to come up with an actual working design, so they came to us.
When we got the design, we could see immediately that, as given to us, it wouldn't work. But our company had had, for many years, contracts with the US Defense Department, to make wheels for tanks and other tracked vehicles, which were also non-pneumatic, and there were a couple of design 'tricks' that made such a wheel actually work.
So when I was given the project, I did my usual analysis and immediately saw that the stresses were way too high. But, I told my bosses, this was really a pretty similar thing, conceptually, to a tank wheel, and what if we applied tank-wheel design principles to it? So I did a re-design according to tank-wheel design principles, and when I analyzed it, lo and behold, we got a working design! So we made a few prototypes and tested them, and they seemed to work just fine. And I, having done my job, was happy, and moved on to my next project.
At that point, our top management got a little nervous (and not without reason), that our customer could just take all our great design/development work and hand it back to our competitor, with whom they had a nice comfortable business relationship. So they decided (unbeknownst to me) to seek a patent, in order to protect our 'intellectual property' rights.
Thus it was that, a year or so after I'd worked on the project, and had all but forgotten about it, I was called into a series of meetings to describe to a bunch of lawyers what I'd done, and blah, blah, blah. And the upshot was, that when the patent was granted, my name (among others) was on it. It had been an interesting project, and I was a little proud of having made the 'conceptual leap' to incorporate tank-wheel design principles, but as far as I was concerned, I was just doing my job. Getting the patent was never my idea (although I was certainly not opposed to it); someone else sought the patent, and in the end, because I'd worked on it, my name was one of the ones that got slapped on it. So they paid me a dollar for rights to the patent, and I was invited to the annual Patent Luncheon for as long as I worked for the company (which turned out to be just a couple more years).
So now, I've got a patent to my name, which is nice. (Honestly, though - my dad has something on the order of 20 patents, in half-a-dozen countries, so I don't make a bigger deal of it than it merits. . .)
-------------------------
The Formula
(OK this is math; if your eyes start to glaze over, feel free to stop at any time)
This one comes from my first job, as well. In the course of doing Quality Assurance on our parts, we would scan them in a machine that essentially took a series of points (typically a number in the hundreds, or at least the tens) from the surface of the part. Then we had to take those hundreds of points and generate the key dimensions we were trying to measure from them - a radius, an angle, or what-have-you, in order to determine whether they were within the specified limits, or not. Getting an angle from the point data was pretty straightforward - there are lots of well-understood methods and formulas for computing a line (and thus, an angle) from a set of points (I should note that the key thing here is that we had so many points - if we only had two points, then it's straightforward to calculate the line between them; any middle-school student could do it. But when you have more than two points, to say nothing of hundreds, it gets more complicated to compute the line that 'best fits' the large set of points.)
For a circle, though, there weren't any readily-accessible methods or formulas available, as far as I could tell. From high-school Algebra, I knew that I could calculate a circle from three points, but I had no idea how to do it for five, or fifty, or five hundred points. I played with calculating a circle from every possible set of three points taken from the larger point set, and that gave me a 'bracketed' answer - the limits between which the 'real answer' had to lie - but that wasn't a very satisfying answer. I even went to the Math Library at the University, to see if there were any obscure formulas published anywhere, but they couldn't easily point me to one, either.
So, over the course of six months or so, I played around with the problem, trying to figure out a way to attack the problem. From time to time, I'd have an idea that seemed like it might be fruitful, and I'd make some progress on it, but it was slow. And I still had to work on my regular job, so I didn't just have unlimited time to work on the 'best-fit-circle' problem.
Then one day, I had a flash of insight (it involved choosing a workable error-measure, if any of you are math-y enough to know what that means), and cranked the formula through (it involved a LOT of cranking). Then I wrote it into a computer program, and ran a few point sets through it, and what do you know? It worked! It calculated a circle that by-golly corresponded to the set of points. So, I put the computer program into a more-usable form, and we went on our merry way, using the formula in the day-to-day work of checking radius dimensions on the parts we manufactured.
Now, I didn't for a minute suppose that I had actually derived an original formula. I thought all along that someone, somewhere, had derived this formula years before, and I just wasn't clever enough to track it down. No big deal - many times, in Math classes I'd had over the years, we'd derived the classical formulas that were in our textbooks, just for the instructional purpose of seeing where they came from. And I was sure that this was one of those - I could have looked it up, but failing that, I just derived it myself.
Fast forward 15 years - A guy I know runs a 'Math' column in a little engineering journal, and I'd written a few articles for his column over the years. He was running low on columns 'in the can', and he asked me if I could write another article for him. I showed him my notes for the 'best-fit-circle', and he thought that would make a great article, so I wrote it up, and a year or so later, he published it.
Now, whenever I've written one of those 'Math columns', I always get a few emails in the aftermath of it being published - it's a lot of fun to hash over the column with other interested folks. Once, I wrote an article on how the sun's position in the sky varies over the course of a year, and I got all sorts of interesting emails, from guys wanting to talk about how to design their house to get more sun in winter, and less in summer, or a professor sending me a little 'solar calculator' he'd invented.
When the 'Best-Fit Circle' article ran, I got emails from a couple of pretty high-powered academic-type guys, thanking me for the article, saying that it was obviously really useful, and asking me where I'd gotten the formula from. When I said, sheepishly, that I hadn't found it anywhere, that I'd worked it out myself, and by the way, could they tell me where it might be published, they wrote back, congratulating me for deriving a really useful formula. One guy was on the development team for one of the major commercial computer-graphics codes, and he said he'd searched all through the literature for all the various different methods for computing a circle, and he'd never seen it before. Which kinda stunned me, actually.
Then one day, one of my kids did one of those things that kids will do - he googled his dad's name - and found, among various letters to editors I'd written, and whatnot, at least two instances of college professor-types assigning homework to their classes, involving the formula I'd published in my friend's little journal (properly attributed, and everything). Then, when 4M had a calculus class at the junior college, he mentioned to his instructor that his dad had written a math article, and the instructor asked if I'd send her a copy. She really liked it, and started assigning it to her own classes. I spoke to her once, and she mentioned it to me, and I told her that I couldn't really believe that it was original with me. But she said she'd never seen it anywhere else, and as far as she was concerned, it should properly be called [Craig]'s Method, and I'd be within my rights to call it that.
So there you have it - nothing is officially 'written in stone', or anything like that, but if anybody wants to make reference to the Best-Fit Circle formula by that name, I welcome you to do so. . . ;)
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