Anniversary Weekend

This is what my wife posted on her Facebook this morning:

Who knew that 30 years ago a red-headed guy in my 10th grade English class would end up having such a big impact on my life. Well, 23 years ago today, he continued to be my best friend and also became my husband. In the words of his favorite singer..., Bruce Springsteen, "Well brunettes are fine man and blondes are fun but ...I'll take a red headed ..man. Love you, Michael. Happy Anniversary!

Yes, it takes a red-headed man to get a dirty job done.


Unfortunately that performance was the show the day before I saw Bruce in DC on the Reunion Tour.

That was a very sweet message and I'm lucky to be as in love with my wife as the day I married her.

Birthday Wishes From Me Via Ted Forth

Loyal and dedicated readers of my blog will know that my wife and I have the same exact birthday. You can read the whole touching heartfelt story here. And clearly, Ces of Sally Forth fame and Medium Large notoriety knew that as well.

In fact, I’m going to go so far as to put on my Weingarten Cap Of Asshattery and declare that the first panel of today’s strip, appearing on my and my wife’s exact birthday, is a touching tribute to a relationship that has now spanned thirty birthdays dedicated specifically for me. For it was on this day in 1980 that I drew her aside while we were at the University of South Florida Model United Nations and gave her a birthday card.

So, my darling wife, if you read this post, let it be known that my love has only grown over the twenty-nine years since I first gave you that card.

And Ces, if you have the original artwork for that strip, the first panel would be the perfect payment for being the only entry in the Medium Large Guy Look-Alike Contest. That first panel sums up how I have felt for nearly three decades about my wife, partner, and friend. The last two frames where Ted petulantly defends himself against jealous recriminations, not so much.

Rest In Peace

My sister-in-law passed away yesterday. She had just turned fifty.

My wife never knew her sisters growing up. Her parents divorced when she was born and her father had custody of the two older girls. Her mother remarried an American and the three of them moved to the United States when she was seven. Two years later, South Vietnam fell and the country was reunited but the family was permanently divided.

In the early 1980s, the oldest sister was allowed to immigrate to the United States. In what I think is one of the great melting pot stories of this country, she met a Cuban Marielito in English class at the local community college and got married.

The middle sister chose to remain in Vietnam. In 2005, our family took a nine-day trip to Vietnam, in part to meet the missing sister. She lived near the center of Saigon (nobody really calls it Ho Chi Minh City) in a four story townhouse with her long-time boyfriend. Because of their jobs, they both spoke broken but passable English. Their neighborhood was full of shops and restaurants and they had two fairly worn scooters that are the ubiquitous form of transportation in Vietnam.

She seemed happy and her life was comfortable. Like many Vietnamese, she and her boyfriend were reluctant to talk about events during the more authoritarian decades of Communist rule, but life has improved immensely over the last decade. Their townhouse which was a standard size for the city was big enough for a family of eight or more but they shared it with just a couple of dogs.

We saw them twice. The day we arrived they took us out to dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant. Near the end of our trip we spent an evening at their house where we talked and ordered talk-out food from a local market. While the house had a small kitchen that Nixon could have impressed Khrushchev with, we were told they, like many Vietnamese, ate out a lot because it is just as cheap as cooking for yourself.

Shortly after our visit, the sister was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She has spent the last year traveling back and forth to Singapore for treatments not available in Vietnam, but it was a losing battle. My wife’s mother went over last week to comfort her in her final days.

The loss, like that of any close relative that leaves too soon, is heartbreakingly tragic. My wife never knew her sister, but she always represented a path her life could have taken but didn’t. Our journeys in this world are often punctuated with forks where events could have changed everything radically. My wife's childhood move to the America was one of those. Because of her sister, she will always have one thread connecting her back to the country that she only has a child's memories of. We will always remember her sister and cherish the one brief moment of connection we had. May she rest in peace.

Carolina Cookie Mission

I may have mentioned it once or twice, but for those that don’t recall, my son is in the marching band at Georgia Tech. The full band plays at all the home games and selected away games (To Hell With Georgia!) but sends smaller pep bands to the more distant road games. Each year one road game is an all-freshman road trip. This year that game was against North Carolina.

Since Chapel Hill is roughly half-way between Baltimore and Atlanta, we decided to road trip down and see him play. We lollygagged around making arrangements and had to buy tickets in the visitor’s section from TicketScalpingWebsite for a significant by not exorbitant mark-up over face value. We also had to book rooms in nearby Durham rather than Chapel Hill proper which was completely sold-out since this was the Tarheels homecoming game.

Part of our mission was to deliver to him two boxes of Girl Scout cookies that my wife had brought along. Gametime was noon and he called us about 10 saying that he had about 45 minutes to kill, but we were still at the hotel. By the time we drove into town, parked at the local mall, boarded the Tarheel Express shuttle bus as the only passengers not wearing Carolina Blue, and got to campus, it was 11 am and we had missed the window of opportunity.

Our strategy was then to go find our seats in the stadium and wait for the band to arrive. But first we had to make it through security. The gate checker was strictly enforcing the “no outside food” rule as applying to our plastic grocery bag of cookies. We appealed to the chief of security who must have had kids of her own and she let us through.

When the band came in, I went down and crowded through the saxophone section to let my son know that we had cookies for him and not to get on the bus without them. We even intercepted him for a quick picture as he made a brief foray out of the band section.

After the game our goal was to follow the band out of the stadium and catch up with them. And here we made a strategic error. As the crowd started clearing, we headed up and out instead of waiting around and following the band out at field level.

As we rounded the back of the stadium, I saw the band disappear into a parking garage tunnel, but the trail went cold when we got to the other side. We eventually spotted a sea of white shirts heading up towards the Dean Dome. A long uphill climb and two cell calls later, we made it to the bus and handed off the cookies. No word yet on whether they even survived the bus trip back to Atlanta.

So when you figure in the game tickets, two night hotel stay in Durham, and gas for the 600 mile round trip, it may be the most expensive care package ever. But as they say in the credit card commercials:

Chance to see your son play on the road: Priceless.

Marley's Millions

This post contains spoilers for a best seller about a pet. Figure it out or read on.


I first heard of Marley & Me, the book about a hyperactive Labrador retriever, in an online chat with a writer that said that he had wriiten a few books, but didn’t make “Marley and me money.” I wasn’t quite sure what that was. It seems it’s 73 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and a movie starring Owen Wilson. It’s pretty flattering when you can get Jennifer Anniston to play your wife.

Normally I avoid schmaltzy books like that as if they were radioactive. When my son had to read Tuesdays With Maurie, I cringed and wondered what was happening to our education system. That sort of sap had no place in a classroom.

But half-way to Atlanta we stopped at a cheesy discount outlet for a stretch break and I found a CD audiobook version of Marley & Me for only six bucks. It was abridged to six hours and read by author John Grogan. I went for it since I knew I had over twelve more hours of driving that weekend, much of through radio unfriendly Bible Belt mountains.

My wife, who had read the kiddie version abridgment was worried it might be too sad. Spoiler Warning: Marley dies. I decided to give it a go anyways. The story of a newlywed couple that cluelessly adopt a highstrung puppy. We found that the story mildly mirrored our own early married life. The Grogans started a family soon after testing their parenting skills with a dog. While the specific details varied greatly, the overall arc rang a bell.

Also, a lot of the book takes place in West Palm Beach during the early nineties when we lived there as well. We enjoyed the sarcastic commentary about West Palm, Palm Beach, and Boca Raton as much as some of the antics of the titular dog.

And some of the tales, even allowing for comic exaggeration are just horrifying. The dog is destructive, neurotic, and poorly disciplined. Behavior that would get him sent to a pound by most owners is laughed off. While I won’t spoil any specific incidents, some are amusing, some are touching, and some are disgusting.

And of course, some of it gets maudlin. As Marley ages and the inevitable end looms (and don’t all dog stories end the same way), we were reminded of the slow year-long decline of our dog and our decision to end his pain less than a year ago. By the time we hit the DC suburbs, we were both crying.

And here is where Grogan earned his Marley money, which may or may not be millions, but it's definitely enough to recover the cost of all the damage that uncontrollable beast did to his houses. The story itself is nothing special. Lots of people do the things he and his family did: raise some kids, change jobs a few times, and bury a pet. He took a rather typical story that millions of people lived and gussied it up into some sort of universal tale of growth.

This is a story arc that millions of middle-class Americans can relate to. And as Groban tells, lots of dog owners are perversely proud of their dysfunctional dogs. Even I once came up with 100 Things About My Dog. If only I had known what a gold mine setting down the life story of a beloved pet was. But it was Grogan that tapped into this part of the American psyche.

And when you have poured your heart out, what do you do for a encore? Marley has already become an empire with special gift editions, the upcoming Christmas Day release, a website with a blog, and perhaps someday a special line of chew toys. In October, Grogan is releasing a prequel about his childhood. But somehow I doubt his childhood was as universal as his love for his dog.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is your pet worthy of a bestselling memoir?

The Next Yellow Jacket

My son goes off to college today. We put him on a plane to Atlanta so he could go to freshman orientation over the weekend. He has to go early because he is joining the marching band and their band camp starts in a week. In between he will be staying with my brother who lives in Atlanta.

Next Friday my wife and I will load up his belongings into our SUV and make the twelve hour drive to Atlanta so that we can move him into the dorm on the following Monday. Then we turn around and leave him on his own and head back to our empty nest.

If you have been following my intermittent posts about college hunting, you would know that my alma mater, Georgia Tech, home of the Yellow Jackets, was on his short list. He called it his safety school, and sadly it was. He applied to three more competitive schools but the roulette wheel that is the admissions process for ultra-selective schools came up double zeroes.

And while I could be accused of some sour grapes, I think he is just as well off. While he is very talented in math and science, we haven’t seen any evidence of the drive needed to succeed at schools as rigorous as some he applied to. Not that Georgia Tech is a basket-weaving summer camp. I have no doubt he will be challenged more than he expects to be. The hubris of youth is nearly unlimited.

The question I get asked most often is if I’m happy that he is going to my old stomping grounds. I am, but not for the reasons people assume. While I wear my school pride on my sleeve (and my internet alias), I was more interesting in getting him into a school that would be good for him.

The time to get a kid thinking about colleges is long before the post-PSAT mail blizzard starts filling your mailbox (and nowadays, your kid’s e-mail inbox). As you can tell by the picture, my subliminal soft-sell of GT over the years has been subtle and low key. But it has never been exclusively aimed at Tech.

From the age that he could walk, we have visited college campuses Over the years we have strolled the grounds and browsed the bookstores of places like Wake Forest, Duke, Chapel Hill, Stanford, Berkeley, Oklahoma State, Virginia and MIT among others. So when it was time to select colleges, we had lots of reference points. For awhile there I was worried that he wanted to be a Blue Devil. All he knew about Duke was that they had a good reputation and were big rivals of his dad's school. Fortunately, that phase passed.

Finding the right college is a game of matching the student with the school. And like personal relationships, there may not be One True Match, but there are fits that work better than others. My son wanted a strong engineering school in a metropolitan environment. And Georgia Tech fits that bill very well for him. For a different kid under different circumstances, I would feel very differently about shilling my school.

Parents want the best for their kids. Sending a kid off to college is the culmination of eighteen years of parenting and coaching and school trip chaperoning. After nearly two decades of daily involvement, it’s hard to let go. As we have been helping him pack, there have been a lot of tears, mostly my wife’s, but some of my own.

My son has been chomping at the bit to go off to college for at least a year now. He is embarking on a grand growth experience and has nothing but exciting times ahead. I hope he does well and has fun. And he will because he is not the one that has to head back to an empty house full of memories.

Father's Day Ride

Father’s Day has few perks since it is the bastard stepchild of Mother’s Day in terms of history and importance. With few firm traditions, its up to the dad in the family to make of the day what he wants. I used to use my Father’s Day prerogative to force the rest of the family to go on a family bike ride every year. I would pick a family friendly trail such as the NCR, the B&A or the Mt. Vernon Trail. I tried not to push too hard and strove to keep the grumbling to a minimum. A few years ago even this modest activity became more honored in the breach and my suggestion for a family ride would be met with general eye-rolling and heavy sighing. And that was just my wife.

Back when I was doing the Tour Dem Parks ride, the last segment of the ride was supposed to be out to the Gwynns Falls Trail and back to Carroll Park. That day was unbearably hot and I was sagging after 25 miles of ride. That is when it hit me that the Gwynn Falls Trail would be perfect for one last father-son bike ride before he went off to college.

I reminded him several times during the week that we had plans for Sunday, but when he asked to stay over at a friend’s house Saturday night, I figured he was planning to ditch me. But to my surprise, he walked in the door at 9 am, if not eager, at least awake. We carbo-loaded a breakfast and loaded our bikes onto my new bike carrier. We started the ride at Carroll Park which is just fifteen miles up the road from my house in the industrial wasteland of south Baltimore.

The Gwynn Falls Trail goes all the way from Middle River to the Security Boulevard Park and Ride and winds its way through southwest Baltimore and Leakin Park. Leakin Park is to Bodymore, Murderland as the Pine Barrens are to Sopranos, New Jersey. The park is big and little traveled and a great place to dump bodies. The trail is an attempt to give the area a little more purpose than just being an outdoor graveyard for drug dealers that have annoyed someone.

The park FAQ has this information:

Is the Trail a safe place to be?
Yes, the Baltimore City Police Department has assigned police officers to patrol the Trail which has experienced no serious incidents since beginning operation in 1999. This is clearly an example of "a used trail being a safe trail."

Methinks they doth protest too much. In our two hours on the trail we saw maybe a dozen people total and were often the only riders in sight. Compared to the traffic jam that places like the NCR and BWI trails are, the quiet and solitude were a pleasant change of pace. Make no doubt about it, the tree lined canopy makes for a relaxing cool ride, but the Gwynn Falls Trail is definitely one of the better kept outdoor recreational secrets in Mobtown.

The path itself is a mixed bag of newly paved dedicated paths and bridges, abandoned roadway, and gravel trail all connected by the occasional detour down or around an active road. Heading upstream there is one long slightly steep stretch that leads to the unpaved part of the trail. This packed gravel section, while muddy, is the flattest part of the trail and a lot of fun if you have good fat tires and don't mind a little splashing.

We went a little past the main trailhead at Leakin Park but turned around rather than go up the last switchback. And like all riverside trails, going downstream was a lot more fun than upstream. When we got back to the car tired and out of water, I asked my son why he came along. He said it was because would have never heard the end of it from Mom if he hadn’t gone since this might be the last chance to do this. I thanked him for the effort.

On the way home, we stopped for gelato and went to a bike shop where he helped me pick out a new rear rack and bag as a Father’s Day present. And I woke up the next morning to find that he had left me a “Happy Father’s Day” message on my Facebook wall. That ride and that message are two of the greatest Father’s Day gifts I have gotten. I want to tell him thanks for the ride. It's been a great eighteen years as a father.

Portfolio Pride

If you get bored about me bragging about my son, definitely skip this post. It is about as syrupy as I’m going to get. May is just a whirlwind of activity centering around him and I have to get in some sappy stuff while I can. Besides, I have to write as much about him on my blog as I can before his grandparents show up and spill the beans about how much I’ve been talking about him. They are notoriously indiscreet.

For his intern mentorship, instead of having a final exam he had to put together a portfolio. Portfolios are the latest trend in education as a touchy-feely way of showing work. Like most things, he didn’t take the assignment very seriously. He claims that most of the effort was in spelling out “PORTFOLIO” in duct tape on the cover. I found the artifacts he place in it very interesting. It has a lot of paper documentation for the things he had done either in school or as an extracurricular activities. There are certificates from his Rocketry Club and Math League competitions. His rather mono-alphabetic transcript is included. He has some graphs and pictures from the nanotube research. But one item struck me as more representative than any of the others.

His internship took him down to JHU APL four days a week. He kept Wednesdays free because that was when most of his afterschool activities happened. This gave him an empty part of his schedule from about 11 until 3. School rules prevent him from hanging around campus, so he had to go do something else.

At the elementary school level, sometimes kids get pushed into the advanced math courses ahead of their grade. It doesn’t happen often, but it eventually causes problems. When the kid hits fifth grade, he runs out of math because he has already taken the fifth grade GT class and the middle school program refuses to touch the kids ahead of schedule. The math teacher has to keep these kid busy for that year without getting too far ahead. There’s never more than one of these in any school at a given time and there isn’t one every year. It just happens whenever one of these advanced students comes along. It always causes problems with the teachers because they have regular classes to teach and with the parents that want to make sure their kid stays challenged.

This happened to my son and it worked out fine mostly because my wife was his math teacher and was able to keep him actively learning. This year my wife knew of another kid in that situation at her old school and suggested that my son might want to help him out. And then in her new school there was yet another fifth grader in the same boat. So every Wednesday he alternated visiting these two kids and working with them for about an hour on the independent study assignments they were doing.

This wasn’t anything he got any sort of recognition for. It wasn’t part of any formal program, and it wasn’t anything he had to do. He didn’t get paid or earn course credit or even accumulate community service hours. Probably the only people that knew this was even happening were us, my son, the kids and their parents, and the math teacher.

It was just him relating to a kid that was going through what he had gone through back when he was in fifth grade. It made the kids realize that they aren’t alone. It gave them a role model, something my son isn’t often accused of being. One of the kids gave my son this picture of the two of them with a Thank You card. The card said:

Thank you for taking time to come and help me with my math! Good luck in college! It was a lot of fun working with you.

Of all the scraps of paper in that portfolio, I think that thank-you note says the most about what my son accomplished his senior year.

Confessions Of A Bad Son

I’m not a very good son. I tease and torment my mother every chance I get. Many of my run-ins with her date back to my college days. Part of the problem was that in my sophomore year, my family got transferred to Italy and that made communicating more trouble than just picking up the phone.

She wanted frequent letters and I would get behind. She once sent me an entire book of stamps with no note or explanation. I wrote back explaining that I could buy my own stamps. She wrote back smugly that at least it got me to write.

Another time she had sent me a copy of Space by James Michener because one of the main characters was a Georgia Tech grad. The book was truly dreadful and I wrote a ten page letter explaining in excruciating detail just how bad it was. Rather than be impressed with the effort I had put into the analysis, she took it as a personal attack on her and broke down into tears.

Yet another letter from me was a long rambling April's Fools joke hinting that I wasn’t who I thought I was and that my whole life had been a lie. I was going to break up with my fiance because I needed to find myself and women just didn't interest me anymore. She completely missed the April 1st date on the letter and called international long distance to make sure I was okay. I could hear my dad in the background saying, “I knew he was just joking.”

That led into another running gag. My college roommate was gay (see this post for that story) and when my mother would visit us, she would pick up a slight tingle in her fairly unreliable gaydar. Anytime she hinted that my roommate might be a little light in the loafers I reacted in feigned ignorance. I would deny it and kept insisting that it was all part of her over active imagination. I kept that game going for several years.

I just loved playing on her trust and gullibility. I don’t know why, it was just fun to do.

And it’s not that she has ever been a bad mother. Twice she has had to emulate a single parent for a year while my dad was on assignment overseas. The first time was with toddlers. The second with teenagers. I’m not sure which was worse.

I still like to tease her when I can. I make fun of her bland New England cooking. I blame my bad driving habits on her easily frightened reactions while she was teaching me. I tell her that her 85-year-old neighbor with artificial knees is faster than she is (because it’s true).

I tease because I love.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: What have you done mean to your mother?

A Series Of Tubes

I don’t spend a lot of time on this blog bragging about my son. It’s not that there’s not a lot to brag about, but because I remember how embarrassing it was to me to have my mother talk me up to people I didn’t even know. And what is a blog but talking to hundreds of strangers in the grocery store check-out lane all at once.

But I have several things to be proud of even if I can’t take credit. About two years ago he became fascinated with the concept of carbon nanotubes. These things did not even exist when I was in college. Think of a sheet of paper rolled into a tube, only the paper is a one atom thick slice of graphite. Carbon nanotubes are so new they don’t even know what can be done with them yet.

Having finished up most of the courses he needed to graduate last year, he got interested in the school’s intern mentorship program. High school students get paired up with people in industry or commerce. He put down carbon nanotubes as his interest. At the beginning of the year he was told there was a chance to work with a researcher that was doing just that.

For the entire school year he has been putting in ten hours a week doing real lab work for a real PhD doing real research. Carbon nanotubes are small and finicky and delicate. He spent a lot of time cleaning glassware, preparing solutions, waiting endlessly for the centrifuge to work its nano-magic and logging raw data. Some of it was boring and tedious, but so are a lot of things.

Overnight, he upgraded his wardrobe from black denim and ironic tee shirts to twill pants and golf shirts. He would come home some days later than me from having to fight traffic from all the other enclaves of Really Smart People that lie between DC and Baltimore.

He never lost his sense of humor or his relaxed attitude to schoolwork that bored him. We had a few bumps along the year, but he is now in the senioritis strewn back stretch and it looks like he might make it.

Someday nanotubes may make the saying that the internet is just a bunch of tubes more than a misguided metaphor. And my son had some small, small part of it. He may not continue on with this field, but the skills and exposure he has gotten will serve him well in the future.

I may even be bragging about him more in the weeks to come. But only because he deserves it so much. Indulge me because I only get to do this once and it’s too exciting to not stop people in the street and tell them how proud I am of my son.

Pandas On Parade

I was in Atlanta recently and made my first ever trip to their zoo. I’m not much of a zoo person, but I never miss the opportunity to see some pandas. There are only three zoos in the United States that have these rare gentle giants.

Pandas are about the cutest animals alive. They just aren’t too bright or particularly frisky. Like their very distant cousins, the three-toed tree sloth, they have found a narrow ecological niche that doesn’t require a lot of heavy lifting and have sunk into a relaxed torpor that is the envy of many.



They spend most of their day eating bamboo and sleeping, not necessarily in that order. As a guy, the only downside to this lifestyle is that the mating season is only three days long annually. The docent at Zoo Atlanta expresses head shaking bewilderment at how many women visitors find that the most envy-worthy part of being a panda.



Because of their indifferent approach to breeding, animal lovers have gone to very extreme measures to mate pandas whenever possible. Zoo Atlanta has bred a pair and the baby, if you can call anything over two hundred pounds a baby, is close to being weaned. We were lucky enough to catch one of his last visits to the teat before he gets put on the all bamboo diet.



When I was in China last summer, we had a free afternoon and I voted for going to the zoo to kill time. The Beijing Zoo is very large and fairly modern. And since they are very close to the source, they have five pandas in captivity. Since it was a very hot afternoon in July, they were doing the only sensible thing: sleeping. Nonetheless, I managed to get a few pictures.



Living near Washington, DC, it’s easy to get jaded with all the opportunities. The National Zoo is part of the Smithsonian and is free to the public, except that parking is a bitch, and a little expensive. I have gotten by there a few times in the late afternoon, but the pandas get rounded up at five so the zookeepers can head home.



The National Zoo also has its own baby, one that was called Butterstick by the blogging world because that it is how big a panda is at birth, which makes baby pandas just that more adorable. This picture of him in a tree was taken nearly two years ago and he is nearly full grown now.



The zoo most famous for pandas is the San Diego Zoo which truly is one of the nicest zoos anywhere. Unfortunately, their panda viewing area tends to be more crowded and less photogenic than other newer zoos. Still, the allure of pandas is irresistible.



I do have to admit without sounding too speciest, that all pandas seem to look alike. The zoo docents will go into detail about which panda has which earmarkings, but all I see are big furry cuddly blobs of black and white.

The only zoo with pandas in the U.S. that I haven’t been to is in Memphis. I was there two summers ago paying a pilgrimage to Graceland, but don’t see getting back there anytime soon. I hope they save the pandas for me.

For more panda pictures, I have tagged a whole bunch of my pictures on Flickr as well as a set of pictures of other animals from Zoo Atlanta, and like everything else, there is a Flickr groups just for pandas.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Do we love pandas just because they are cute, or is there something deeper?

Remembering Grandma

Peggy
1913-2007

Grandmothers are the gold standard of relatives. Their love is unconditional. Their generosity boundless. Their affection undying.

My grandmother was all these. As a kid I always looked forward to the week or two with my grandmother. While my grandfather gave me yard chores, my grandmother took me to the science center. She taught me cribbage. She was always up to Scrabble® even though she never seemed to win. And the baking. While Jewish grandmothers have the “eat, eat, eat” reputation, my grandmother could give any bubbie a run for her money.

During my college years she became logistically and emotionally my closest relative while my father was stationed in Italy. For Thanksgiving she became the default destination. When some medical tests made me too ill to attend class, she dropped everything and drove from Huntsville to Atlanta to care for me for a week. She was a nurse by training, but her care came coated in comfort. She cooked for me and became housemother for both me and my roommate.

Inspired by her hospitality, I embarked on a career of mooching Thanksgiving dinners from indulgent relatives. For many years I trekked annually on the busiest travel weekend of the year from Baltimore to Boston just to be with her and my New England relatives. These were more than holiday meal, they were a weekend of activities and traditions including candlepins and concerts and chili. When she became too ill to travel, I transferred my attentions to equally generous but much more geographically desirable relatives, but I still fondly recall the Boston Bacchanals as the ultimate family feasts.

It was just a week after Thanksgiving that my father called to warn me that she had taken a turn for the worse. The next morning he called to tell me that she had passed away in her sleep after 94 years of event-filled living. She was born while automobiles and airplanes were still in their infancy. In his tear-filled eulogy my father related that her family was the first in their town with an indoor flush toilet. As a newlywed she sent her husband off to fight World War II while she raised a family. My grandfather’s career both in and out of the military took them Florida to Alaska, from California to Massachusetts, and even to Japan. She had four children that are scattered up and down the eastern seaboard, but are knitted together with a bond stronger than love.

My grandmother was tireless and seemingly timeless. I never saw her age or grow tired. When I last saw her in July she had somehow become weak, frail, and forgetful. She was a shell of the vibrant woman that had watched me grow up, marry, and start a family of my own. Even in her infirmity she was cheerful and glad for the company.

Now that she is gone, her legacy is the love of her four children, six grandchildren, and eight great-grandkids. She lives on in each and everyone of us.

Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance

National Blog Posting Month Day 27

I want to thank everybody for their kind words and sympathy on my memorial for Chessie. The most difficult thing I've ever done was going to the vet that morning. I would have done anything for one more day and one more walk, but I had to do what was best for him, not me.

The hardest part of the loss has been adjusting my habits with him not around. There is emptiness in both my heart and my day. My morning and evening routines revolved around his routines. He had a rhythm and pace. If we were slow in moving upstairs at night he would let us us know it was time to go to bed.

My wife who was always jokingly dismissive of the dog is taking the transition to a pet-free house harder than me. She was the one that spoiled him rotten, teaching him to jump onto the bed and buying him rolls as treats. We had just bought a doggie step stool to help him climb onto the couch that he will now never need.

She can't walk into a room without a flood of tear-welling memories. Our housecleaners have dogs, so we gathered all the pet beds and dog dishes and accessories to give to them. Chessie traveled light and didn’t have a lot of toys or doodads. We are trying to find that fine line between memorializing him without being constantly reminded of his absence. We have saved his collar and the bumblebee costume we dressed him in every Halloween.

One strategy to keep him off our minds has been to keep busy. On Saturday, friends invited us to their family’s late Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone was sympathetic and uplifting. We cleaned out the coat closets to have something to do. The outdoor Christmas lights went up in record time without the complications of my always underfoot companion.

It's the little things that keep hitting us. Yesterday we went to OtherBigBoxOfBooks to buy a different calendar to replace the English Cocker Spaniel one we had already bought for the upcoming year. I had to change the wallpaper on my work computer so that I didn’t get hit with a pang of grief every time I minimized Outlook.

I make fun of young newly married couples raising puppies. I call those dogs practice kids. At the other end of the lifespan, pets are also lessons in life. Their limited lifespan makes tragedy inevitable. The death of an animal will never be as tragic as the loss of a loved one or family member, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt any less.

BlatantGriefTherapy™: Tell me a happy story about a pet you've had.

A Good Dog

National Blog Posting Month Day 24

"Chessie"
April 25, 1995 - November 24, 2007

I don’t write about my dog much. I wrote 100 Things About My Dog and about him hunting bread, but I didn’t write a lot of boring things about our everyday routine. Blogs with annoying stories about every cute thing their pet does are tedious.

But my dog was part of my life. And he did a lot of cute things. When we were about to leave the house he would sit at attention at the stair landing and cock his head because he knew we gave him a treat as we walked out the door. He would go upstairs and howl at the bedroom door because he liked the water bowl in our bedroom better than the water bowl in the kitchen.

We went for a walk every morning and I would read the paper while he ate breakfast because he liked company while he ate. He liked company period. He followed me from room to room as I did things in the evening. If I snuck upstairs without waking him up my wife would ask where my shadow was. We would time how long it took for him to realize I was gone and come find me. It usually took just a few minutes.

As he got older he would whimper if I wasn’t around. About three weeks ago the whimpering became so constant that I took him to the vet to get medicine to clear up the skin conditions that seemed to be causing him discomfort. She gave him some pills that cleared up the skin and his attitude perked up. But then he quit eating his dry dog food and I kept having to mix rolls in with it to trick him. Then he started eating just the rolls.

His stomach became distended and yesterday we took him to the vet who took some x-rays. His abdomen was filled with fluid that had drained from metastasized cancer in his chest. The vet said there was less than a 5% chance of being able to treat cancer that advanced successfully. After a night of quiet cuddling with him and one last walk to the elementary school where I always let him run off leash, we took him back to the vet this morning to put him out of his pain. It was quick and peaceful and now we miss him incredibly.

Having a pet is a bargain you make with an animal. You give them food and shelter and they give you loyalty and love. It hardly seems like a fair trade. And when they are gone, all you can do is remember them in your heart. Chessie was better than a friend. He was a good dog. And that is the highest compliment I can pay him.

Giving Back

National Blog Posting Month Day 22

This year my wife made a lateral career move and became a teacher in the English as a Second Language (ESL) program. When she arrived in America in 1972 as a seven-year-old child with little English, the only system for immigrant children was the “throw them in the deep end” approach to English immersion. Since then, as a new flood of residents have joined our country, the system has learned how to streamline the assimilation of those not born here. This is her chance to make a difference to kids that are now in the position she was in so many years ago.

In today’s slightly xenophobic atmosphere, ESL (also called ESOL or ELL) is a much misunderstood approach. It is not bilingual education. It can’t be. Among the twenty-five students my wife works with, there are over a dozen nationalities and languages represented. The goal is to get children that don’t have English as their native tongue up to speed in the regular classroom as quickly as possible. Speaking a foreign language is neither mandatory nor necessary to be an ESL teacher, although my wife’s degree in French, her high school Spanish, and some leftover childhood Vietnamese help.

The other day one of her students, a little Vietnamese girl the same age my wife was when she came to the US, insisted on showing my wife her class assignment. The work involved putting different paper feathers on turkey cut outs. The girl had done the assignment fine, but didn’t know what a turkey was. My wife asked if she ever ate turkey at lunch. The girl had always eaten pizza, the universal food, because it was familiar and safe. They looked up “turkey” in a Vietnamese-English dictionary and the literal translation was “American chicken.”

My wife took the girl to the cafeteria where they were putting together a turkey lunch. The cafeteria lady took time to put together a little sampler platter with turkey and the fixings so the girl could try the meal. That day, my wife passed on a small sliver of our American culture to one of our newest members. It’s these small moments that despite the increasing hassle and frustration of being a teacher keeps teaching fresh and rewarding.

Our one true nation holiday celebrates sharing culture and welcoming new people. And it is about more than thanks, it’s also about giving.

Accepted!

National Blog Posting Month Day 10

My son played his last half-time show with the school marching band last night. Before the game we brought over to the band room a fat envelope from Georgia Tech. The contents of the letter weren’t much in doubt because the words “Congratulations! You’re a Yellow Jacket!” were emblazoned across the front.


After his victorious scream, he said to me “Now I have a safety school.” He does that just to tweak me, but I take it in stride. There are worse places he could go. The timing of the acceptance sharpened the sense of finality as his four years in the marching band and my career as a band parent end. The game was played in cold drizzle, but we proudly walked him to mid-field for the Senior Night recognition. Tomorrow we have to report to the school by five a.m. to head to Allentown for the final competition of the year.



And then the rest of the year is all endgame. As parents of an only child, every milestone is a first and a last. We won’t be going to ChainBarAndGrille after a high school football game ever again. I play it cool as we plan where to hang the HDTV in his room when he leaves, but we are going to miss him.


He’s already making the transition from high school to higher pursuits. Every year the band plays a prank on the band director. This year, they hid all the band trophies and replaced them with the ubiquitous gimme seat cushions the band keeps getting. The posted a picture of my son in his school color duct tape sports coat blaming him. He wasn’t there to defend himself because he was out giving a report on the carbon nanotube research he is interning for. There’s a metaphor there that I just can’t make through my tears.

E Street Band vs. Marching Band

Bruce Springsteen has a new album out that is getting mostly good reviews. He is out this fall touring with the E Street Band. If you read my list of artists I’ve seen multiple times, you know that Bruce is a three-fer, so naturally I wanted to check out the tour for the new album.

Unfortunately, all the dates in my area conflict with my son’s marching band schedule. This leads to one of those ethical dilemmas parents always face: doing something you want to do versus doing something to support your kid. To help make that decision I mentally weighed the relative merits of The E Street Band against The Marching Band.

Band Size	There are 9 people including Bruce in the most recent official group photo.	This year’s band is 35 strong including two drum majors and three color guard members. (Click picture to see a bigger version.)
Tour Schedule	Bruce is playing 26 dates in 17 cities for the US leg of the tour. There were “rehearsal” shows in Asbury Park and the tour kicked off earlier this week in Hartford. The closest shows to me were Philly and DC.	The Marching Band plays at five home football games and travels to five competitions including Hershey, Wilmington, Cumberland, and Annapolis.
Ticket Prices	At the Verizon Center, most tickets were $95 plus service charges for any decent seat. Current prices on StubHub for non-nosebleed seats range from two hundred to over a thousand.	Four bucks gets you into a home football game. I don’t know what the competitions charge since I usually get in free because “I’m with the band.” I bet five bucks sounds about right.
Ticket Availability	The first DC show sold out in less than five minutes. A second show was added but tickets were all gone by the time I learned about it at noon.	Walk-ups welcome.
Set List	Each night’s setlist is a little different, but it tends to be equal parts new material off his new Magic album, big hits, and older gems.	This year's show celebrates the 50th anniversary of West Side Story featuring excerpts from “Maria” and “Officer Krupke”.
Show Length	Bruce shows are nearly three hours long with over 20 songs.	Each band has ten minutes to perform, but with dozens of bands, a competition can go for 6 to 8 hours.
Saxophonist	Clarence Clemons is one of the world’s best recognized and most loved sidemen in music.	My son is a senior and it's his second year as section leader. This year he is playing the tenor sax in the show.

When all the pros and cons are weighed, especially the all-important sour-grapes there-was-no-way-to-get-Bruce-tickets factor, I think I will spend my fall weekends earning Good Parent Karma Points by driving to obscure stadiums to watch my son play out his senior year in the marching band. Bruce will come back to town someday. My son will never be seventeen again.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Who would you rather see, your favorite rock band or your kid's marching band? Come on, be honest.

A Birthday Love Story

I met my wife when we were both fifteen. I had transferred into her English class and the only empty seat near the front of the room was next to her. I quickly spotted her as a soft touch for the borrowing of supplies I was too lazy or negligent to bring. One day she was showing off her learner’s permit and I swiped it from her and announced, “Hey, that is my birthday too.” She didn’t believe me, so I had to whip mine out as proof. She remained suspicious, but the novelty of a shared birthday caught her interest.

In another coincidence, we both joined the Social Studies Club. For those of you not up on geek culture, Model United Nations is the second nerdiest activity you can do in high school. Teams of students research and roleplay the international policies of other countries. As sophomores not deserving the famous countries, we were both on a team representing Gabon, an obscure but oil-rich African nation, at a local competition. On our birthday, I gave her a greeting card to lay some groundwork. A week after I got my license, I asked her to a movie. We went to see Breaking Away and on the way home I made a bit of an ass of myself and scared her off.

For at least the next year, she would continue to rebuff my romantic advances. I knew her entire class schedule and would make appearances. For the first month of English in our junior year, much to her consternation, her assigned seat was next to mine. There is a fine line between romance and obsession and I was in danger of crossing it. Stalker awareness was not as developed then as it was now, but in retrospect I showed warning signs. I would show up at her house unannounced. In the meantime, I dated a few other girls. One girl I had a slowly-going-past-platonic relationship with joined the Dungeons and Dragons group I was the informal leader of. Did I mention that I am a geek?

For my seventeenth birthday I had planned to just have a cake at my weekly D&D game. Unbeknownst to me, this other girl planned a surprise party behind my back. She knew most of my friends, ranging from the D&D guys to the preppy student leaders to some stonerish guys I had met at a computer club. It was a rather wide-ranging assortment. Who she didn’t invite were very many girls. In total there were three women at this party: her, my future wife (who was also celebrating her birthday), and a xylophone player in the marching band I had a crush on.

I was fighting a cold that night and about half-way through the party the xylophone girl and I took a walk down the street to get some fresh air. By the time we returned my hand had slipped into hers. Since I didn’t warn anybody I was leaving the party and I was the guest of honor, our return together was noticed and much commented on. While nothing had happened on that walk, gossiping tongues preferred to believe otherwise. My mom never learned the xylophone player’s name. She would just cup her hands in front of her chest and say “that girl with the big…” We eventually parted ways and I went back to wooing my future wife in earnest.

The Social Studies Club had romantic intrigues that make Degrassi High look tame. The pivot point in the relationship with my wife was when a bunch of us were all supposed to meet for research at the library and only she and I showed up. To this day, she thinks I somehow engineered that. I convinced her to give me another chance and we went to see that Stallone/Hauer trivia answer Nighthawks. The next day she went to Grad Nite at Disney World with another SSC member, but for the rest of the school year I continued to make inroads into her heart.

By the beginning of our senior year, we were a “couple”. We took as many classes together as we could. This time she gladly sat next to me in English the whole year. She was president of the social studies club and I was vice-president. When I won a place on the county Brain Brawl team, I wrangled a way for her to come along to the state National Honor Society convention as the school’s delegate. We were inseparable. For our eighteenth birthday, we planned a joint party and invited all our common friends. The rest is history.

Today is the twenty-five anniversery of that first joint birthday celebration. Usually, its just a dinner out for the two of us except for special dates. For our joint fortieth birthday, we threw an awesome 80s themed party. We have a lot of fond memories together and I look forward to many more birthdays in common.

Blatant Comment Whoring™: Does a love story get any dorkier than this?

Going To The Chapel

Twenty years ago today, I married the person that has been my partner and soulmate for over two decades now. We met in high school and maintained a long-distance relationship through college for nearly four years. We got engaged our sophomore year, but the timing of our wedding was the subject of some negotiation. She finished college a full year ahead of me and had moved to Atlanta. Her family still lived in Florida, but my dad had been transferred by the Air Force to Italy. Since I was still in school, the only times that made sense to schedule a honeymoon was between quarters.

At first, we had wanted the traditional June wedding, but my dad’s tour got extended and we pushed the wedding back to September to coincide with his transfer from Italy to Hawaii. Some people get all the rough assignments. Especially after their eldest son leaves for college.

We decided to have the wedding in Atlanta and organized the event on our own after getting a rough budget approved by my soon-to-be father-in-law. We started planning in February, which was plenty of time to book everything we needed for a September wedding. We even had a few vendors wonder what our rush was. Nowadays there is no way to book and plan a wedding on such short notice. It seems like anything less than eighteen months is impossible. I can’t figure out what is driving that phenomenon. It’s not like more people are getting married. They just seem to be dragging out the process longer.

We were both active with the Georgia Tech Campus Center and asked the priest there to officiate. He had us reserve the Sacred Heart Church in downtown Atlanta for the ceremony itself. For the reception, we booked the penthouse ballroom of what was then the Colony Square Hotel in Midtown Atlanta. The hotel catering coordinator, who called himself Mr. Wedding, warned us that at a reception only one person can actually run the event and it isn’t either of the wedding participants. It can be either the caterer, the DJ/bandleader, or the photographer and it’s better to know who it will be ahead of time. We put Mr. Wedding in charge and he ran it great.

We wanted an elegant but relaxed event but we also had a budget to meet. At the time many things seemed extravagant to us, but by contemporary standards, we were actually fairly spartan. Since the wedding was at 10:30 am, we went with heavy hors d'oeuvres and a buffet for the meal. I hate cheesy wedding bands, so we saved the money and hired a DJ. The reception was only two miles from the church, so we opted to just have a friend drive us from the ceremony to the hotel. Today, nothing short of a stretch Hummer for the entire bridal party would do.

We also kept the bridal party small. The bridesmaids were two of my wife's college friends, her best friend from high school, and my sister. The best man was my roommate, and the other groomsmen were a former Rocky Horror player, and our respective brothers.

Videography was in its infancy, so we skipped having the wedding filmed. I still think that’s the right call. Nobody ever watches the wedding video more than once and people only care about the gaffes and mistakes. Better to remember it the way you want to, rather than constantly see how it really was.

The best budget trimming idea worked out great. My wife had a coworker who did photography on the side. We paid her to take pictures and have proofs developed. Then we used a pro-quality photo store for reprints and assembled our own wedding album and even made separate ones for each set of parents. No professional photographer would have done half as much for twice the price.

We did have a few splurges. The wedding cake had amaretto flavoring, which I have never run across since. It was delicious. I wish I had gotten to eat more of it. And I’m sure there was an ice sculpture or two somewhere. Nothing says throwing money down the drain on a wedding more metaphorically than watching it literally melt away.

The wedding ceremony itself kicked off fifteen minutes late because my grandmother’s unsanctioned family brunch ran long. Also, my mother in her Mother-Of-The-Groom hat got mistaken for a pushy bridal consultant by the church staff. The actual ceremony was beautiful. Catholic weddings run long, but it adds a level of gravitas to the occasion that I think the shorter walk-through ceremonies don’t have. The homily brought more than one tear to an eye, including the priest giving it.

When we arrived at the hotel still in full wedding regalia, the bellman addressed my new bride as “Mrs. Yellojkt,” That’s when I knew I was really, truly married.

The good thing about a morning wedding is that the reception is over before fatigue begins to set in. We did all the dances and greeted all the guests and cut the cake and did the tacky garter traditions all before 3 p.m. As a kickback to us for booking the wedding, the hotel threw in a honeymoon suite and a courtesy “get-away” limo. Since we were just coming right back to the hotel, we had no idea what to do for the hour we had the limo. Just to kill time, I had him drive us over to campus so I could check my exam results. I am such a dork.

My wife's bridesmaids hummed "Chapel of Love", which is a pretty infectious tune cootie, to her all morning as some sort of good luck gesture. The wedding blessings must have taken because twenty years, eight addresses, four cities, two dogs, and one teenage son later, everything is still going strong.

Why My Dad Flies

Career military life is no picnic. I am an eyewitness to that. We lived at six different places between when I was born and when I graduated high school because my dad’s career as a pilot demanded it. Despite all the moving, I don’t think our life was any better or worse than any of the other suburban middle class families we always lived around. I know a lot of children of civilians that moved much more often than I did. And I can't say I ever truly wanted for anything I genuinely needed.

Why did my dad do it? Simple, he loves to fly. He was an F-4 Phantom II fighter jock through and through. In junior high, my friends and I would drop in at the squadron building and mooch sodas. The only price was having to watch grainy gun camera footage from his latest exercise.

My dad served a year in Vietnam and had friends shot down and taken POW. Before the Shah fell, he delivered an F-4 to the Imperial Iranian Air Force and brought home an impressive samovar. I like to call him has an Iranian gun-runner, which is only true when taken entirely out of context. He also had a one year unaccompanied tour in Korea while I was in tenth grade. All my friends thought my mom was a single parent, which in a way she was.

When he was assigned to fly a GSD (Gray Steel Desk), he used his GI Bill benefits to get a commercial pilot's license. On his last tour of duty in Hawaii, he moonlighted as a pilot for an island hopper service. As soon as he was retired, he drove cross country and interviewed at every airline and eventually got hired by TWA, where he flew 747's and 727's for another ten years.

When he was laid off from TWA for six months, I hooked him up with a pilot buddy of his I had met who ran a small courier flying service. Now that he is truly retired, he owns a vintage Stinson Flying Station Wagon (flying VW Beetle would be a more accurate size comparison), which he takes to flying shows. He has shown it at Oshkosh, and he volunteers at Sun-N-Fun in Lakeland every year. On the weekends, he flies the tow-plane for a soaring glider club.

He has spent his life doing what he loves and raised three children at the same time. What more can a man ask for? And what better dad could a son have?

For stories about dads and roadtrips, read Joel Achenbach’s Father’s Day post. Be sure to read the follow-up stories and anecdotes along with the usual foolishness and fooforaw in the Boodle (comment section for you non-Achenoscenti). I even contributed one tale.