Send-A-Joke Request
My friend and colleague
is in the hospital facing the usual sorts of things one finds in
hospitals: insipid food, over-solicitous midnight staff, the bevy of professionals analyzing
one's chart as if the chart were the whole of the man.
Bob loves a good email laugh. If you have a
moment to spend in virtuality, consider emailing him a joke?
Acrostics
Ms. 7 was telling me about her poetry studies. "Give me a word," she said. "Because," I said. "Okay, now give me one line per letter." I did, between filling lunch boxes. I wasn't satisfied.
"You do one while I shower," I told her. "Give me a word," she said. "Winter," I returned, dashing off to the bathroom.
She read me her result in a shout from the kitchen. I didn't complain about the loud voice. I was very satisfied.
Mine
Because the crow called
even though the sun was not risen
called hauntingly
across the sky
unabashed
selflessly
especially then I thought of you.
Hers
Winter when the snow falls
in the snow we play
not the warmest month
turtles are not out yet
enter the still cold
race to spring time!
"She wrote that?" asks Steve. Yes, and I wouldn't have believed it unless I'd seen it with my own eyes, but this (proud, can we say very proud?) Mom definitely saw. 
Once upon a time there was a beautiful young woman accomplished
in all 
manner of things educational, environmental, social and culinary who desired to create for herself a family. She sought far and wide for an appropriate partner.
In the course of her search she happened upon a rather dour ME, who despite his dubious initial appearance cleaned up fairly well.
In short order the young couple produced a gangly group of urchins 
who engaged in unnervingly non-PC (perhaps one might even say violent) acting out.
Despite this 
unpreposessing start, the young woman put her not inconsiderable resources to the task of straighting out her errant crowd.
She set them to work gathering fuel for the winter's 
warmth, expended unfathomable effort in transporting them cross-country in the standard conveyance of the era, and set them 
properly to dine on plain but wholesome fair.
In the course of time, she managed to create them more-or-less in her image, and eventually even made a fairly attractive crew of them.
With the greatest of love from one of the motley crew, and with the deepest appreciation and a burgeoning understanding of the magnitude of that task of creation:
Happy Mother's Day, Mom!
Input?
My mother and I are having a discussion. Yes, that kind of discussion -- but since we're both mature adults we're handling it okay. I think.
Anyway, this is the topic:
In the modern context, as a parent or caregiver, how does one prepare for, and then handle, teenagers and sex?
[What is your general objective? When do you first tell them? For teens, what rules/guidelines/expectations, if any, do you set?]
Yep, how's that for an easy Monday-morning issue?
What do you think? [and, perhaps more importantly: why do you think so?]
Conversations
Mom: I was reading through my old letters last night and found when you first started going out with Charlie.
Me: Oh.
[I'm a teenager and the warm spring night flutters on the edges of a cement patio where kids shimmy and shake at an after-game party. I've just had my first taste of a screwdriver, and I imagine I'm already feeling an effect. I'm slow-dancing with Charlie and he leans over and kisses me. The world stops turning. Trumpets sound in heaven. I confess it to my girlfriend at the ensuing sleepover. "He KISSED you?!" she squeals, her virginal unkissed lips pursed in envy and awe. I live on the re-lived memory all that long sleepless night.......]
Mom: I remember he turned out to be gay. Is that right?
Me: Yes.
[I'm back on vacation to the suddenly small-seeming hometown. I run into Charlie on the local university campus. He tells me he's a theater major now, and we exchange a few laughs before moving on. Walking away, I think about his tight shirt and jeans and new vocal affectations and come up with a sudden answer to the life choices he only hinted at. I grin at the ironies.]
Mom: Do you think he knew he was, back in high school? Was he just going out with you as a -- safety measure? To look like everyone else?
Me: No, I don't think so.
[Holding hands all movie-long and leaning chin-on-unwashed-hand later, smelling Brut, thinking pink-edged dreams in that teen-girl way. Then steamy windows, the gear shift, the awkwardnesses of a long polyester prom dress, the fumblings at straps, the startling real-world introduction to 'hard,' the mind racing to find some happy medium between teen-boy demands and personal morals. Next week, at the hay ride, watching him put his arm ostentatiously around Mary Beth. Clench-jawed to the queries of friends: "No, he can do what he wants. I don't care. Really, I don't."]
Mom: So what ever happened to Charlie? Do you know where he is?
Me: He's dead, Mom. He died of AIDS.
Mom: Oh. That's so sad.
Me: Yes.
[Sad. That you didn't get the denouement, Charlie. That we can't meet up unexpectedly at the summer band concert, me with the kids and you with your partner, and reminisce and laugh and poke fun, about all those first lessons learned, together and separately. That I got to do middle age, and you didn't. It isn't fair, Charlie. It's just not fair.]
Dropping In on Dropping Out
The great thing about a good book is the virtual impossibility of touching on all its high points in one review, and that's definitely the case with T.C. Boyle's Drop City. It's a fascinating read for myriad reasons, not the least of which is the writer's obvious intimate personal knowledge of the two worlds he explores, first separately and then (incongruously but with significant and successful effect) conjoined: the doped-up, dropped-out, free-love hippies of Northern California, and the hunter/gatherer, cabin-dwelling, survivalist frontiersmen of the Alaskan outback. Both sets of protagonists choose to leave 'straight' life behind, but their similarities, at least on the face of it, end there.
Boyle's decision to narrate through six different points of view adds important detail and texture to his tale and assists in the build-up to a startling (and literal) conflagration that resolves the bitterest, but by no means only inter-character strife.
The first folk to walk off the page are hippies in the Californian commune of the title. Star is a former elementary school teacher turned stoner free-loving hippie-chick; Ronnie is her early companion in the escape from the straight life and erstwhile hippie-cum-survivalist who tries and fails to find his place in both worlds; and Marco is a draft-dodger whose early love affair with drugs-n-rock has settled, as he approaches maturity, into cynicism, resignation, and a certain reluctance to become involved.
There's an equally multidimensional triad on the frontier side: Sess, a seasoned woodsman and furrier whose primary residence is located three wave-tossed hours from any other human; Joe, a bush pilot and former Marine whose enmity with Sess ratchets from dour pranksterism to out-and-out blood strife; and Pamela, a self-sufficient Alaskan weary of life in Anchorage and seeking a mate who'll rescue her from the stifling city grind.
When Star, Ronnie and Marco's commune falls afoul of law-and-order and faces imminent bulldozing, their leader brandishes a fortuitous letter from his uncle, a recent retiree from the frontier. Piling into an old school bus topped precariously by all their luggage and an improvised goat pen, the hippies begin a trek that eventually brings them to the uncle's claim, some miles upstream from Sess's homestead. The mosquitoes are bad, but far worse is the prospect of erecting outbuildings without the aid of either sufficient hash or power to blare their accustomed 24-hour rock-n-roll. Then a wolverine gets into the goats, and the seriousness of their predicament starts to dawn.
Meanwhile Pamela, entering into her long-dreamed-of future as a frontier wife, has begun to understand more about Sess, her chosen mate. The sex is highly satisfactory and the hard work rewarding, but she only realizes the depths to which his feud with Joe has fallen when he guns Joe's exotic roadster into the river. In revenge, Joe strafes their canoe as they desperately attempt to out-paddle an ice storm.
The twists and turns of plot and personality make Boyle's work a riveting read, but what renders it great are the underlying lessons and questions about personal choice, response to adversity, and the universality of both violence and love.
If, like me, you find yourself with a warm fireside and a drippy, cold, late-spring snow outdoors, this is the perfect foil. But do lay on the extra blanket before you begin, 'cause this is not one that warms the cockles of the soul!
"We Have A........"
Colleague #1: So. The new Pope. Wouldn't it be totally cool if we could choose our own professional name like that?
Me: Yeah, like with every new employee we'd announce portentously: "We have....an engineer!" And then you'd come out and say...
Colleague #1: My name is: Kelvinus 87!
Colleague #2: Hey, I'll be The Great Carnot.
Colleague #3: I'm going for Prandtl Unity.
Colleague #2: Faith?
Me: William the Second.
[William is the name of the corporate founder, who's also my Dad. But William could also reference Shakespeare, a la the engineers' name-play. And okay, so I didn't actually come up with my response during the conversation itself -- but what is written history except for the author's revisionism, after all? 
]
What about you? If I say:
"We have a ........ [insert your metier]!"
What's the name you declaim from your pontifical balcony?
Testing, testing.....
For the average Type A, appearance-is-everything, win-at-all-costs parent (such as myself) watching your kid at the kindergarten registration is a humbling experience. Put one way, Ms. 4 just flat-out failed Gross Motor Skills. Put another way -- well. You be the judge:
The line was long, the kids restless, the adults resigned. The kid in front of us, f-i-n-a-l-l-y, stumblingly completed the walking-backwards and the bean-bag throw (1 out of 6; "Great job!" cried the flush-faced young aid with relief. "Next!"). She smiled hopefully as Ms. 4 trotted over. "Okay, honey, can you hop?" Ms. 4, a veteran hopper, jumped up and down solidly on her two sturdy little legs. "Excellent! Now, can you stand on one foot and hop?" Ms. 4 teetered, tottered, and fell over. "Ohhh! Are you all right?" the aid rushed over. Ms. 4 kicked her little legs in the air, giggled, and scrambled up. "Uh -- okay, how about trying the other foot?" Ms. 4 did another pseudo hop and another prat-fall, laughing and rolling on the gym floor. The morose adult on-lookers raised eyebrows. Her waiting peers watched thoughtfully. "All right, honey -- can you skip?" Ms. 4 laughed and scampered haphazardly across the floor. "Mmmm -- no honey, how about this?" The aid took her hand and skipped nicely beside her, hop-switchfoot-hop-switchfoot. Happily prancing at the same pace, Ms. 4's blinker-shoes pattered out an incomprehensible syncopated rhythm. In the line, glazed grownup eyes turned into quirked lips. The other kids, startled from their torpor, giggled. The aid, giving up, smiled tightly and made a mark on her paper (Skipping: 1 point for Tried and Failed). Ms. 4, completely unperturbed, laughed heartily and cuddled at my side.
So why don't they test for 'Merry Spirit'?
Just wondering.
1928
On April 17, 1928, 'Depression' was a shallow spot on the ground; 'Nazi' a curious but meaningless term, Charlie Chaplin the modern hit of the silver screen, the Ford Model T the pride of the roadways, and my Dad the newest baby in Chattanooga Tennessee.
The first son of a beautiful woman and a dashing, entrepreneurial veteran, with two doting older sisters peeping into the bassinet, it was an auspicious beginning. Then the economy crumbled, two more sons were born and other children fostered into the family, the father's prospects faltered, his mercurial temper rose to the fore and the mother fought against depression and disappointment.
But my Dad weathered 'auspicious' and 'adversity' with the same incurious inattention, his mind fixed on musings of his own. He created road-tar bombs in his mother's kitchen, sent the family poultry off the roof of the house on home-made parachutes, and fashioned a diving suit so his best buddy could plumb the local artesian well. He lived in a creative world of his own so disengaged from the reality his family knew that they shook their heads and wondered whether he were merely stupid or truly deranged. Over half a century later, his eldest sister, the powerful matriarch of the clan, informed me firmly that the family had considered my mother (who thoroughly organized my father's life the moment she stepped into it) a godsend. How else would little Billy have ever survived?
I give my mother complete credit for his survival, but I also wonder whether my father's charmed life (survivor of vehicle crashes, dismembered fingers, heat exhaustion, concussions, heart attack, and the conflagration of his workshop) is due largely to the people who always seem to be there to pull him out of the wreckage, or his own ability to simply walk on by.
This is not to say that Dad is oblivious. Indeed, he's entirely focused, but the focus sheers right on past banalities such as family, friends, physical circumstance, the availability of food and shelter, or (most importantly) the opinion of others. The founder and owner of a highly successful high-tech R&D firm, a man with tens of patents to his name, a tinkerer and visionary forever several decades out-of-step with the slow world around him: no wonder many still consider him slightly stupid or possibly insane.
Dad hasn't reached 77 without recognizing that the occasional nod to the mundanities of the here-and-now is a necessary palliative to his fellow man. My childhood memories have him mostly off at work or grumblingly under the car; now he hangs out on the sofa with my daughters and marvels at their artwork. He makes scheduled appearances at the county library to speak on the state of the world. He goes to reunions with his brothers and sisters and suffers reversion to 'Bad Billy' status while they all chatter and laugh around him.
But when he's done grandfathering and proclaiming from the wisdom of age and playing the family game, he goes back to his workshop and invents another machine for a new and better world. Because that's who he is.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DAD!
Sustaining the Overinvolved....?
This entry is a take-off on an entry a year and a half old. I'm using the same illustrations, just for laughs-at-myself. Then, I was handwringing about my six-year-old's disinterest in all extracuricculars pushed her way. Should I force her, I asked? Should I find yet another after-school activity to try, month after month after month of "Mommy, I'm bored with NewActivityX!"
Be careful, as they say, what you wish for. Somehow in the intervening 18 months we've arrived at this week. This week Ms. 7 is recovering from her second bout of Strep and is heavily enough dosed with antiobiotics that her systems are not all go -- or rather, they're too much 'go,' if you get the drift. Nevertheless, it was only with many tears and deep frustration that I wrested from her ONE of her after-school acitivities. She's still doing the two nights of soccer and one night of dance; she's been forcibly stopped from the evening of gymnastics. She happily completed her math homework at the breakfast table this morning because she attended her school's Board meeting with me last night (she and a fellow Board member's child held a Unicorn Board Meeting in an adjacent room). 
One of our local lawyers and I just met in the hall. She asked me how things were and I explained Ms. 7's overinvolvement. I then explained about the Strep. She laughed. "I guess I can see why!" she said.
I myself am not feeling terribly chipper at the moment. Something about too much work, too much volunteerism, and too much soccer-momming. Every time I find myself caught in a moment of self-examination about this kind of insanity, I tell myself it will change. And then it ....... doesn't.
It would be too bad if my eldest were already at this point.
Wouldn't it?
Recent Comments