Roadside Angel?

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

Day of the Turtles; And, a Count

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

Thank God for Mush Balls

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

The Love of My Life - 30 Years and Counting

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

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Our Flashy Wedding

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

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

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

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

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

“What do you want me to do?”

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

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

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The Love of My Life

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Dominoes Falling

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

Big Water

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cars: The Early Years

It seems like lately, almost all of my new posts are inspired by something one or another of my blog-friends (usually, it seems, Lime or Suldog) has posted recently. And this post is no exception. Lime recently posted about a clunker she and her husband drove back when they were living in Trinidad. And that provoked a few of my own memories. And, well, you know how I enjoy telling stories. . .

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One summer when I was in college (I think it was the summer of '77, when I'd finished my bachelor's degree, and would start grad school in the fall), I was living in a house with six or eight other guys. We all had summer jobs, and transportation to those jobs was somewhat of an open question. A couple of the guys had bikes (of the 'clunker' variety), and most of the guys could use the buses, so even if getting to work wasn't quite as convenient as it could possibly be, it wasn't a huge problem, either.  But one day early in the summer, one of the guys (I'll call him Z for our purposes here) came home with a car - a '71 Gremlin with 45,000 miles, for which he'd paid $50. We were all a bit bedazzled that he'd managed to snag actual working transportation for such a cheap price; it hadn't occurred to us yet to ask whether the price might (or might not) correspond to the value. . .

The little Gremlin ran pretty roughly, but it ran. So we set about working on turning it into something that ran more smoothly and, we hoped, more reliably. Now, mind you, we were a group of college boys from here, there and everywhere, and none of us had particularly spent any time working on cars up until then. So one of the guys went to the library and picked up a basic Troubleshooting Guide, which became our textbook.

The first thing in the book was to check the air filter. It showed us how to remove the lid from the filter unit, and take out the filter ring. "Hold the filter ring up to the sunlight," it said. "If you can see light through the folds of the filter, it can be re-used." So I held the filter ring up to the sunlight. And dirt fell from the filter onto my face. So, OK - change the air filter. And the car ran a little bit better after we did that.

The next thing was an oil change, and that seemed easy enough. We got hold of a pan, placed it under the engine, and removed the drain plug, so the old oil could drain out of the engine. Only nothing came out. That is to say, no old used oil came out of the drain. Nothing at all. After a minute or two, a black glob of tarry sludge appeared at the drain hole. The sludge-glob slowly grew into a sticky black teardrop before breaking loose and landing with a *splat!* in the pan. A minute or two later, another sludge-glob appeared and did likewise. Well, that just didn't seem like the way it was supposed to be - it seemed like the used oil should flow a little more freely than that. The Guide said that we should look for a sticker, which in those days was usually placed on the door, near the latch, telling us when the car had last had its oil changed, so we looked for the sticker. But there was no sticker. Nor was there an oil-change sticker anywhere else on the vehicle. Which didn't necessarily mean that the car had never had its oil changed in 45,000 miles, but it wasn't a hopeful sign.

At this point, the Guide recommended that we run some engine-cleaning stuff through the engine as part of the oil change. So we did - put in an engine-detergent something-or-other, and drove the car for 10 miles or so. Having done that, we pulled the drain plug again, and this time, black fluid came out the drain-hole, so we were satisfied that we'd cleaned out the insides of the Gremlin's engine, and it was safe to put fresh oil into it. Which we did.

After that, though, the car, if anything, ran worse than it had before. We asked a friend of ours who knew cars better than any of us did, about what had happened, and he told us that the black sludge had probably been keeping things 'sealed up' in the engine, and that by cleaning out the sludge, we had actually opened up some of the internal leaks in the engine which the sludge had kept sealed. At that point, we started to think that keeping this car running wasn't going to be quite the simple matter that perhaps we had hoped it would be.

After that, the car suddenly wouldn't start one day. Z got hold of a battery tester, which confirmed that, sure enough, the battery was dead. So he and I went out and bought a new battery, and set about installing it in the driveway. Of course, in the course of installing a battery, you get a fair bit of dirt and crud on your hands, and whenever our hands got too grungy, we'd wipe them on our pants. Installing the battery wasn't terribly difficult - it took Z and me, working together, about an hour, and most of that was just because we were learning as we went. We finished installing the battery, and gratifyingly, when Z got in the driver's seat and turned the key, it fired right up, even if it still ran about as smoothly as a diesel locomotive.

Suddenly, we both noticed that the fronts of our thighs were burning. I looked down, and my jeans were in tatters. I rubbed at my legs to try and relieve the burning sensation, and as I did, the legs of my jeans disintegrated, leaving me with an impromptu pair of short-short cutoffs. And bright-red, throbbing thighs. It was around that time that the words, 'Battery Acid' crept to the forefront of our minds, and we mentally slapped ourselves (being careful not to physically slap ourselves with our acid-laced hands). So we tossed our pants in the trash, and ran off to the shower, to try and wash the acid off our legs. Even so, it was a few days before the burning abated. . .

Still, the car ran terribly, so we continued to work our way through the Guide. We pulled the spark plugs, only to find that four of the six plugs had their element completely encased in a little ball of carbon - no spark at all was getting into four of the Gremlin's six cylinders. So we replaced the spark plugs. Better, but the car still wouldn't start reliably. One of the guys studied up on how to troubleshoot the starter, and sure enough, he discovered that the starter was shot. So Z went out and bought a rebuilt starter, and we replaced the starter. By now, we were thinking that 'Gremlin' was a pretty darned appropriate name for this car. And Z was lamenting that he'd spent four or five times what he'd paid for the car, just to try and keep it running.

The crowning achievement of our Summer of Automotive Education was when one of the guys discovered that we had a bad engine mount, which meant that there was a huge vibration whenever the engine was running. So he went out and bought a new engine mount, and we installed it.

Now, we didn't have a hoist or anything, with which to lift the engine so we could remove the old engine mount, or situate the new one in its place. So we had four guys grab hold of the top of the engine and lean back (a little bit like sailors acting as 'outriggers' to balance a sailboat), to lift the engine off the mount, while another guy crawled up underneath to pull out the old mount, and put the new one into its place. The whole procedure only took a few minutes, but the engine was pretty darned heavy, and after a bit, the guys holding the engine up off the mount-pad were straining, and a tense dialog ensued, with the holder-guys urging the mount-placer-guy to hurry up and finish his stuff, and the placer-guy getting momentarily confused about the proper orientation of the new mount, and yelling at the holders not to drop the engine on his fingers, while the holders yelled back that they couldn't hold on much longer, etc, etc. Until finally, he yelled, "OK, it's there!" and we dropped the engine on top of it. Not exactly OSHA-approved, I'm sure. . .

By the end of the summer, the little Gremlin was running semi-reliably, although it still wasn't capable of reaching freeway-minimum speed. One of the last times I rode in it, before I moved out of the summer-house into the place I'd spend the school-year, Z was driving, and hit a pothole. And the rear window fell off. And by that time, with all that we'd been through with that stupid car, all we could do was laugh.  Looking back, though, as much of a hassle as it was to keep that silly car running, all of us in the house got a tremendous education in auto-maintenance that we probably would never have gotten otherwise. . .

For a $50 initial investment, we got Z's money's worth of education, for sure. And I think Z drove that car for maybe another whole year before he finally got rid of it, so even with all the repairs, I don't think it turned out to be a terrible investment for him. . .

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I know this post is already a bit long, but I also want to mention the first car I ever owned - a '79 Chevette that I bought when I got my first 'real job', after college. I bought it in the first place, mostly because it was cheap, and got good gas mileage (actually, those two qualities have figured large in several of the vehicles I've bought, over the years). I recall the salesman, when I told him I was a freshly-graduated engineer, talking me out to look at all the fancy cars parked in the front of the lot, but I just kept shaking my head, asking to see something a little less fancy, while we moved progressively toward the back of the lot. Finally, with a note of disgust in his voice, he said to me, "The only thing I've got below this is a Chevette." So I asked him to see it, took it for a drive, and told him I'd buy it. While he rolled his eyes. . .

The Chevette was actually a pretty good car for me, and, once Jen and I were married, for us. It even provided us a night's lodging on our honeymoon, when there were no rooms available within 30 miles of Munising, and we went to see the Pictured Rocks. Yes, you read that right - we spent a night sleeping in a Chevette on our honeymoon. I'd recommend that you not spend any more time on that mental image than is absolutely necessary. . .

I drove the Chevette for six years. When 2F was born, and all the seats were filled with Jen and me and two kids, the handwriting was on the wall that we wouldn't be keeping it much longer. The final blow came on a rainy night when Jen and I were on our way to a friend's wedding. I don't know how many of you ever owned a Chevette, but a common flaw in all the Chevettes of those days was that the floorboards would rust out. There was even a 'standard repair kit' for Chevette floorboards. A small hole appeared, and if I hadn't had a rubber floormat, we could have watched the pavement passing by underneath us as we drove. The hole in the floorboard was right where my heel rested while my foot was on the accelerator pedal; with the rubber mat, it was even kind-of comfortable, and I didn't think all that much about it, figuring that I'd be getting rid of the car soon, so why bother fixing the hole in the floorboard?

So, as I said, Jen and I were on our way to a wedding on a rainy evening, and dressed accordingly. Our route to the church took us to a place where the roadway dipped down to pass under a railroad track. The trough under the tracks was poorly drained, and in heavy rains, it would often fill up with water, which was the case on this night. Without thinking, since I'd come that way many times before, I drove on through the deep puddle at the bottom of the trough. And water sprayed up, away from the car as I did. And also up through the hole in the floorboard. And, since I kept the hole covered with a rubber mat, it deflected off the underside of the rubber mat. And completely drenched Jen from head to toe. Dressed as she was to go to a wedding.

We had been married about five years by then, so (I am eternally grateful) I had the momentary presence of mind to pause before reacting. It was, objectively, hilarious. But I knew that, if Jen was traumatized by it, that I didn't dare laugh. So I waited for her response; would she laugh, or cry? For a few seconds she just sat there, stunned. Then she turned to me and broke into hysterical laughter. While I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. My wife is an amazing woman. . .

A Midsummer's Miscellany

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

My Life With Baseball

In recent months, I've made the acquaintance of one Mr. Suldog, a blogger of sterling reputation, who shares with me a love for baseball/softball (something that none of my other blog-friends have particularly shared with me before now). Often, when I read his posts, I am reminded of my own experiences on the diamond, of which I have not written before. Then, a little while ago, my dear friend Lime posted about her own baseball experiences, and I knew the time had come. . .

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My family first moved to Alpena in 1960, when I was four years old. We only stayed about a year, before moving back to the 'downriver' suburbs of Detroit. In 1963 - in fact, the weekend following President Kennedy's death - we moved back Up North, and this time, we stayed almost ten years, just shy of my high school graduation. I loved living in Alpena. Most especially because it sits on the shore of Lake Huron, and every summer, for as long as we lived there, I could be in the Big Water for the price of a five-minute bike ride (there was a period of a couple years, before my parents were divorced, when Lake Huron was our back yard; and that was a pretty good working model of Heaven).

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Alpena was also a baseball town. I'm not sure exactly what-all goes into making a town a Baseball Town, but Alpena was one. Our Little League team challenged every year for the state championship, which is a pretty good feat for a town of 15,000 or so souls (including all of Alpena County, the population is something like 30,000), and one year, when a kid named Lowell (he'll appear again later) was a 12-year-old, they came within a single game of playing in the Little League World Series. I went to high school with a guy who went to college on a baseball scholarship (his college team would play against the team from my school, and I'd always go down to the field to say Hi), and eventually made it to the major leagues, playing three seasons with the Cubs and Indians.

Besides the lake, summers in Alpena were marked by roving bands of boys gathering at various vacant lots around town for pickup baseball games. We'd call each other up, or just knock on each other's doors, and meet at whichever field we decided to play at that day. If we had 16 or 18 kids, we'd just choose up two full teams and play. If we didn't have a full complement of players, we had various ways of covering the shortage. Maybe the hitting team would provide the catcher, but we didn't prefer that, because it seemed to compromise the integrity of a possible close play at home. Sometimes, we'd play without a right-fielder, and if the batter hit the ball to right, it just counted as a foul ball. If we only had twelve kids or so, we'd play a game we called 'Work-Up' - nine kids would take positions in the field, and the rest would hit. When the hitter made an out, he had to go play in the field, and the other fielders would 'work their way up' - the outfielders would rotate counter-clockwise (right-center-left); the left-fielder would move to third, and the infielders would rotate clockwise (3rd-short-2nd-1st); the first-baseman went to pitch, the pitcher went in to catch, and the catcher became one of the hitters. It was a great way to play, especially for kids, since you got to play a new position every few minutes, getting progressively closer to the action; and once you got in to hit, you could stay there as long as you didn't make outs.

Summer evenings (a couple of 'em every week, at any rate) were for 'organized' games. In the early spring, there would be try-outs, and hundreds of kids would gather at the fair grounds to throw and catch and hit, under the watchful eyes of the various and sundry coaches, who would take notes on what they saw, and then hold a draft to assign players to teams.

The Little League played in two divisions, designated 'minor' and 'major', analogously to the professional leagues - the 'minors' were mostly 8-10 year-olds, although if a kid hadn't made the 'majors' by the time he was ten, he might not get selected by a 'major' team when he was 11 or 12, since the coaches preferred to develop younger players. That was the fate that befell me. As a young kid, I was pretty much a sedentary nerd. I didn't even play when I was eight; when I was nine, my dad basically told me I was gonna play, whether I wanted to or not. That year, I was pretty much like the kid in the Peter, Paul & Mary song 'Right Field', "watching the dandelions grow", except the ball never accidentally landed in my glove. I don't remember if I ever got a hit that year, or not.

When I was ten, my dad remarried after his divorce, and I acquired a step-brother who was pretty much a complete jock. So I got more into baseball, and sports in general. And that summer, my skill level increased pretty dramatically. By the time I was eleven, I was That Kid - the Oversized Hormone Case that made the other kids' moms cry, and their dads demand to see my birth certificate. I probably should have been on a 'major' team, but none of the coaches knew who I was, and besides, they preferred for their 'rookies' to be younger, so I stayed in the 'minors' to terrorize young, un-coordinated kids. And the same when I was twelve. I hit a bunch of home runs on balls I didn't even hit that well.

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There was one coach in the 'minors' who seemed to take particular delight in agitating me, perhaps because I was the biggest kid in the league, and his was one of the better teams in the league, and we ended up competing for the 'minor division' championship. He always demanded to see my birth certificate, and even half-heartedly accused my dad of doctoring it once (although why my dad would doctor my birth certificate for me to play in the 'minors' never quite made sense). And whenever I came to bat, he would have a few needling remarks, to try and get under my skin, I guess. I tried to ignore it, and just play the games, but after a while, it kinda pissed me off.

He had a pitcher who was probably the best pitcher in our league, another 12-year-old who probably should have been in the 'majors', but had gotten good too late. The kid could throw hard, especially for a 'minor-league' pitcher, and most of the kids in our league had a hard time getting around on him. So, we were playing this team, and he was pitching. The first time I came to bat, the coach was up to his usual games, making little needling remarks almost under his breath, but loud enough that I could hear him. The pitcher was extra cranked-up, trying to get me out, and he was throwing even harder than usual. His first pitch, I was really late getting around on, but I hit it square, sending a screaming line drive into their dugout. The poor coach never saw it coming; it hit him square on the nose, breaking it, and splattering blood all over his face. He ended up having to leave the game, which we ended up winning, when I got around for a home run off their ace pitcher.

The next time we played their team, the coach actually accused me of having broken his nose on purpose. I wish I was that good, but not many twelve-year-olds are quite adept enough with a baseball bat to put a line drive on somebody's nose when they feel like it. Which isn't to say that I didn't feel like it. . .

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When I turned 13, I moved up to the Babe Ruth League, for 13-15-year-olds. There were no 'divisions', so I was playing with and against kids who had been in the 'major' division (mostly those kids, since fewer of the 'minor' players were motivated to move up to the next level). As a 13-year-old, I was a 'rookie' again, playing against kids my own age and older. But I was still 'Big for My Age', so some of the disadvantage of being young was mitigated by also being big.

One of my first games in the Babe Ruth League, the pitcher for our opponents was Lowell, the kid I mentioned above who had led his Little League team to within a game of the World Series. At 15, he was still something of a local legend for the speed with which he could throw a baseball. Had someone put a radar gun on one of his pitches, I have no idea what it would have said; as far as I was concerned, it was just 'Faster Than Hell'. Lowell was fast, but he was almost as wild as he was fast (rather like a young Nolan Ryan, maybe). In fact, the first time I stepped in to face him, he drilled me right square in my left ass-cheek. Which didn't hurt as bad as it might have, had another part of my body received the blow, but it still hurt plenty. And it also planted in my brain the idea that Lowell was not a guy you could really dig in against (the self-preservation instinct being what it is).

So the next time I stepped in against Lowell, I was considerably lighter on my toes (and readier to get the hell out of there, if need be) than I had been previously. He threw me five pitches, each of which was past me before I could hope to swing at it. Two of his pitches were strikes, and three were balls, and I couldn't muster up a swing at any of them. The outfielders, sensing the extent of my out-classed-ness, all moved in by several steps, until they were only a few steps beyond the infield dirt. As I awaited the full-count pitch, my butt was reminding me of how my previous turn at bat had ended. Lowell went into his windup, and he threw the fateful pitch, as I tensed up.

Then suddenly, I saw it. For some reason known only to God and Lowell, his full-count pitch was a change-up, right down the middle of the plate. Perhaps he was just being overly cautious, not wanting to risk walking a fat 13-year-old who couldn't hope to hit him anyway; I don't know. But I do know that my eyes got real big, and the thought flashed through my mind, "Hey! I can hit this!" So I swung, as hard as I could. And I crushed it.

Those of you who have ever played baseball, if you've ever really crushed a ball, you know that that sweet, smooth feeling that passes from the bat into your hands when you hit the ball really, really well is just one of the coolest things you ever experience in a baseball game. And right along with it, is to see the outfielder freeze in his tracks as the ball takes off like a rocket over his head, and then to see him turn his back to the infield and just run like a bat out of hell after the ball you've just hit. Yeah, that's just what it was like. Alas, I was still a slow 13-year-old, so even though the ball bounced off the center-field fence, I could only manage a double out of it. But I had crushed a ball off the mighty Lowell!

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Another feature of life in the Babe Ruth League was night games. There were fewer available full-size fields, and so there would be two games each night, the second one being played under the lights.

Now, the lights on our field had an interesting feature, in that all of the lights were aimed down, toward the field. Which is to say, none of them were pointed upward, to even the smallest degree. So that, when the batter hit a fly ball, the ball itself was in the lights for the first 50 or so vertical feet of its flight, and then again, when it came back down. So, being an outfielder, I got pretty adept at judging the flight of the ball from the first, visible part of its trajectory; I would run to where my visual/mental calculations told me the ball was headed, then look up into the black sky for a gray dot descending out of the darkness. Then, when the ball descended back into the lights, I could catch it, and proceed normally.

I got better as I went along in Babe Ruth League play. I was never one of the league's all-stars, but I didn't embarrass myself. Except once. I usually played one of the corner outfield positions - right or left field, most often right. Twice, I threw out a batter at first from right field. The first was a guy who was one of the league's better players; he could hit the heck out of the ball, but was pathetically slow. He smoked the ball straight at me; I fielded it on one hop, and seeing that he wasn't even halfway to first yet, I threw the ball in and got the force-out at first. Pretty cool.

The other one was the last game of my 15-year-old season. A pudgy little 13-year-old came up to bat; we pulled all our fielders way in. The kid swung late on the pitch, and it cleared the drawn-in infielders. It rolled to me, and without even thinking, since I was practically an infielder where I was playing, I picked it up and threw the kid out. I didn't think much about it until after the game, when we were in the handshake line, their coach took me aside and said, "I know you didn't mean anything by it, but that would've been his only hit this year." Which made me feel like the world's biggest jerk.

When I was 15, I got one of my first looks at a curve-ball. Fortunately for me, it was another 13-year-old, who didn't throw particularly hard, but he could throw this big bender that got a lot of the hitters off-balance. I recall facing him for the first time, and he threw this big roundhouse curve to me that came in big and slow, with a big neon-flashing "Hit Me" sign. As I saw it coming, I remember thinking to myself, "this must be what a hung curve-ball looks like; I can see why people talk about crushing them." So I did. By then, I was 15, and pretty close to my full adult dimensions. The field we were playing on that day didn't have a fence. There was a drainage ditch that ran along the side of the road beyond the outfield, maybe 150 yards or so from home plate; the ball cratered itself into the mud by the edge of the ditch.

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When I was 16, I went out for the high school team, and I made the JV squad. But I didn't play very much. By now, I was playing against guys who were also in their full adult bodies, so the advantage I'd had when I was younger was gone. I was regularly hitting against guys who could throw harder than I could get around on. Which was bad enough, but most of the pitchers also had real curve-balls, too; not the big round-houses that I'd seen before. I vividly remember stepping in against one of the better pitchers we'd face all year, and he threw me two fastballs that I heard more than saw. And then, ahead of me two strikes in the count, his next pitch came blazing right straight for the ear-hole of my helmet. I couldn't get myself out of the batter's box fast enough, and as I fell backwards, I saw the ball break sharply, crossing right across the heart of the plate. The umpire bellowed and punched me out, and I walked back to the dugout with the sure knowledge that I'd gone as far as I was gonna go as a baseball player. . .