Fall

This has to be my favorite season! I was sitting out on the patio tonight in an Adirondack chair, ostensibly reading but actually watching the dogs snuffling through the fallen leaves. The air was brisk – my spouse would say cold, but what does she know – and there was an intermittent breeze blowing.

Rustling sounds from the trees that frame our back yard soothed me.   I was reading To Serve Them All My Days by R.F. Delderfield and although I’m only thirty-or-so pages into a six hundred page book, it feels welcoming and familiar and I can’t wait to get back to it in bed this evening.

I have a touch of flu or something, so I should have been craving the couch but the Fall owned me. It’s such an optimistic, selfless season. The leaves and other detritus fall to the ground and rot where they lay, preparing the soil for the spring foliage that will take up the baton. Fall is about letting go and trusting there’s a catcher on the other end.

Wish I could say this more clearly. Random thoughts, I guess.

Passing the baton – but to whom?

Andy Rooney will be delivering his last commentary piece for 60 Minutes this coming Sunday.

I’ve always enjoyed watching and listening to Mr. Rooney. I don’t always agree with him, although I do more often than not. But I do always respect his position.

Mr. Rooney is a charter member of the Greatest Generation, having flown as a correspondent on the first Allied bombing raid into Germany. He’s been there and done that in more ways than most other reporters can imagine. For that matter, more than most other people of any stripe.

He’s always been gentlemanly and his English is a joy to listen to. His wealth of cultural and historical knowledge gives his writing a depth and richness that has seldom been matched and never surpassed.

It’s a tragedy in this democracy that there are no Andy Rooneys being made anymore. Listening to or reading the output of younger “journalists” will convince anyone that the majesty of language is being lost to under-education and over-stimulation.

Reporters these days have barely enough time to record, and nowhere near enough time to notice. Forget sober reflection. Its all about the quick, shocking headline, and there’s no poetry underneath. Wit has given way to dimwit.

I know this is a harsh thing to say. Probably too harsh for a piece in which Mr. Rooney is highlighted. But you see, it’s not that he has been more courageous or smarter or even more artistic than the folks coming after him.

The thing is, Andy Rooney, if he graduated from college today, would never become Andy Rooney. The kids just don’t have the luxury of time. Everything is too immediate.

Andy Rooney is a great wordsmith but that’s not really what’s made him great. It’s sober reflection that set him apart. And these days, that’s an activity few of us take the time for.

The advantage of hindsight

Before I go to bed tonight, Daughter Two’s birthday will have begun. She’s at school on the Least Coast, so she’ll be nineteen there three hours before she’ll be nineteen here. Of course, to be precise, she’d have to wait until 10:43 am Pacific time to celebrate, but we’re counting the whole day as the proud moment.

I’ve been going through an old laptop (the one we purchased for the Ball Of Twine Tour in 2001), making sure I don’t leave anything on it I care about before we donate the thing. When we took that trip, Daughter Two was not yet nine and even then, she was her own person.

Looking at the pics from that decade-ago summer, I can see the curiosity, the brilliance and even the sly cursedness that have become key aspects of her adult self.  As her father, I would have given anything in 2001 if it would have guaranteed she’d turn out the way she has. Now that I’m on this end of the tunnel, it’s easy to see that she was always going to be this wonderful woman. Mary and I need not have worried – we were largely just along for the ride.

Happy Birthday, Sweetheart! Keep being who you are.

Dad

Josh Ripley of Minnesota

I just read a news piece that made my day, er, evening.

This kid is running a three mile high school cross-country race when he notices a member of the opposing team down and bleeding at the side of the road. They’re some distance from where all the coaches are waiting and the injured kid has a to-the-bone hole in his ankle from an accidental spiking.

So Josh Ripley picks up the injured runner and carries him ½ mile to get him to where he can be helped. Josh has enough blood on him that the other runners think he’s the one with an injury, but he goes ahead and finishes the race even though he's totally out of the money.

I say he won the real race that day. He deserves to be just a little famous; hence, the title of this post.

Yet another list

I-i-i-it's list time!

Things you can smell within one city block of my office:

1.       Hot-dog-laced steam from the cart in Westlake park

2.       Cigarettes, bluch!

3.       The sea when the wind is right

4.       The most incredible barbecue

5.       Wood oven baked pizza

6.       Stale urine (in the elevator down to the mezzanine level of the transit tunnel)

7.       Overdone perfume and colognes

8.       Burned brake shoes

9.       Great coffee roasts (NOT Starbucks)

10.   Irresistible Asian food

11.   Fresh bread

12.   Bus exhaust

Remembering Greg

      (Full disclosure:   This is a recycled piece that originally appeared in my column in a tiny market university paper some years ago. I came across it while retrieving files from an old computer and just felt like sharing it again. I hope you enjoy it.  - Brer Michael)    

I was reading in my local paper the other day about what they label “Student Standouts”.  These are usually high school students who have distinguished themselves in some way or another, frequently involving community service activity, excelling in one or more fields of endeavor or overcoming some adversity. These kids (and many more who never come up on the paper’s radar) richly deserve praise and I’m glad to see them get it.

I’d like to suggest a standout student of my own.  His name was Greg Pickering.  I say was because Greg’s been dead more than forty years, but he’s as alive for me today as you are, or you, or you…

I don’t know what Greg’s grades were like, although I suspect he did all right. His mom was one of the teachers at the school we attended and even had that not been the case, Greg never struck me as the kind to do anything halfway. But that’s not what made him stand out for me.

He was as popular a kid as I ever knew, was Greg. He had this wicked smile that made you just know he was contemplating some harmless mischief. That smile of his warmed and warned you at the same time. But that’s not what made him stand out for me, either.

We attended St. Louise School together through the eighth grade and we were in the same class every year as I remember it. Greg was involved in just about everything we did, every class play, every sports team, and every practical joke. Everybody liked him and with good reason – he liked everybody, without qualification or reservation. I never saw or heard any indication he disliked or disrespected anyone.

Greg was one of the best at every sport we played and I was one of the worst. But you never would have known there was any difference in our abilities, not from Greg, that is. He was generally one of the team captains and he always picked me and a couple of the other less-than-stellar athletes. Consequently, he frequently found himself on the losing team, at least according to the final score.

I never really cared all that much about the sports we played in the dirt field next to the church parking lot. I didn’t care about winning or losing or whether I could head the soccer ball. My inability to correctly hike the football mattered to me not one whit. And as for basketball, I thought for years that a fast break was an injury you faked early in the game in order to be allowed to sit on the bench and watch the rest of the team work up a sweat. 

I couldn’t be bothered about field goals or laterals or sliders. But I did care about one aspect of our sporting events. I cared about being chosen. I cared desperately about being waved over by a team captain who wouldn’t scowl and grumble when he realized I was the last available choice. I spent the first few minutes of every recess and P.E. period praying to St. Jude, patron of lost causes not to let the team captain who chose me spit on the ground before pronouncing my name.

St. Jude must have had a direct line to Greg Pickering. Greg always smiled when he chose me and sometimes even took me second-to-last. Trust me when I say there’s a wide gulf of self-esteem between second-to-last and not picked. Somehow Greg knew that although I would never be the best player, it was humiliating to have to acknowledge every day that I was the worst. He always seemed eager to have me on his team and I was grateful to have him choose me.

      
When some of the kids would pick on another for being chunky or having tape-repaired glasses or bringing something unusual for lunch, Greg would refuse to join in the taunting and he’d be particularly nice to that kid for a day or three. Most of us could be cruel from time to time and some of kids were downright nasty most of the time, but not Greg.  He just didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

Greg and I were never especially close. His family operated a private resort on the shore of Lake Sammamish and occasionally a group of us would go there for a church youth group activity. Other than that, I never saw him outside of school. But buddies or not, he was one of the most important friends I’ve ever had. He let me carve out a little bit of space in the uncertainties of childhood where I could just be me without apology.

I have children in grade school now and I get torn up when some other kid hurts their feelings.  I want each of them to have one friend who’ll accept them as themselves no matter what.  I want so badly for them to have a Greg Pickering in their lives. It’s in honor of Greg that I’ve always told my own kids “If you want to have a friend, be a friend.”

I wish you could all have known Greg Pickering. I was about fifteen when he passed away.  My family had moved down to California by then and I hadn’t seen any of the old crowd in almost a year when I got that call. It was one of the worst moments of my life.

We should all have a friend like Greg.  Better yet, we should all be a friend like Greg. Thirty-odd years later, he’s still the very first person who comes to mind when I think about heroes. I’d say that makes him a standout in anyone’s book.

Wasted energy

Mary and I were having one of those really stupid he said / she said arguments tonight. The kind that you get all wound up about and then all you can think of is how you’re going to get back out of it.

We finally did work it out. You knew we would. We knew we would. We were meant to be here together and here we are.  Everything else is noise.

Meanwhile, an old, dear friend was dealing with her spouse having surgery. I didn’t know.

I find myself wishing I could have one tenth of the energy I’d wasted in a stupid argument to redirect to  sending healing vibes where they were needed.

Get well, buddy. My friend loves you and that would be good enough for me even if I’d never met you.

Tunes

Last night Daughter One, freshly back from the Land Of The Mouse, had Mary and me listen to the five or so songs she’s considering for an upcoming audition.  It was a succession of 32-bar clips from some really fine pieces from the musical theatre repertoire.  They were all pretty current - not a fringe on top of a surrey in the bunch.

Since my musical theatre education has been rather spotty since I stopped performing almost three decades ago, I don’t get far off the Les Miz / Wicked track. So it’s always fun to hear newer work.

What makes it especially enjoyable is that it’s my daughter doing the singing. I used to think I had a pretty good voice but oh man, the pipes on this girl! Even just singing casually without warm-up, she’s so powerful and expressive! And when she hits certain notes, it makes your head ring. I wish her well in the audition  but mostly, I wish she would put something on You Tube so I could listen to her whenever I want (Are ya listenin’, MeMe?).

So today, I drove the pickup over the bump to haul the daughter’s “stuff” back to school (you’ll recognize this as a minor victory for Mary and me if you go back a few posts).  Alone in the truck, I played an Oldies mix and one of the tunes was Easy To Be Hard by Three Dog Night.  The lyric got me to thinking about how we treat people differently in macro vs. micro. We frequently act more caring to a mass of strangers than to the one person standing in front of us.  I feel a future blog in the making.

I also got to thinking about how long it’s been since I really listened to a great lyric. I went through some Manhattan Transfer and Oak Ridge Boys during the same drive. Can’t imagine why I haven’t been listening to tunes as I used to. I’m talking about really listening – not just using music to distract me on the treadmill or to block out the loudmouth behind me on the bus or the plane. 

I quite enjoyed the poetry of the afternoon. I believe I’ll do more of this “listening thing” in the near future.

Unexpected advantages

Yes, it’s that time again – a new list!!!!!

Ten things I didn’t know would be cool about both daughters being gone to college but are (cool, that is):

1.       We have guest rooms that don’t involve mattresses on the floor of the rec room.

2.       I can walk around in my skeevies and only have to listen to ONE woman going “E-e-e-ew!”

3.       For the first time in my fifty-eight years, all the colors in the Crayola box are mine, mine, mine!

4.       We can re-design the rec room as a – wait for it – REC ROOM!

5.       We can finally put our television through the Gilmore Girls exorcism!

6.       Only one laundry day per week.

7.       I no longer have to pretend to like the damned cat (although I do still have to feed it).

8.       We can dine on one pizza and still have leftovers.

9.       I no longer have to pretend to understand homework.

10.   We can get out the door five minutes after deciding where to go.

The reading list

Since I’ve recently re-stocked the Dad Shelf with a new load of yet-to-be-read books (thanks to the Borders liquidation), it occurred to me that it’s been awhile since I blogged about reading. A couple of books recently have given me a great deal of food for thought, in addition to hours of enjoyment , so I thought I should spread the good news to my blog fans, who are legion.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot will take you awhile to read and sometimes gets bogged down in minutiae. Nevertheless, it’s one book that we should all read. It’s the story of  a woman who died at a tragically young age of metastasized cervical cancer, leaving behind a husband and children who came a bit undone when the glue left the family.

What makes the story worth a book treatment is that she also left behind one of the greatest legacies in the history of medicine. You see, some cancerous cervical cells taken from Henrietta during her decline became the progenitors of the HeLa line of cells that have had profound impact on medical and genetic research for the last sixty years. Hardly any of the advances in cellular research would have happened without this line of cells.

I might mention that Henrietta was African American and this was the early fifties. So-o-o, the good folks at Johns Hopkins apparently felt no need to obtain permission from Henrietta or her family to take and preserve her cells, or to inform any of them of the profound effect the cell line has had on modern science. Nor did they feel that her heirs should share in the untold millions of dollars generated through the marketing of HeLa cells to and between researchers worldwide.

For those who weren’t around to enjoy Jim Crow or the struggles of the Civil Rights movement, reading this book will help you understand a racial gulf that remains un-bridged in this country. I might also recommend We Lived In a Little Cabin in the Yard by Belinda Hurmence and Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall by Carl T. Rowan. Ignorance of history is dangerous and ignorance of our civil rights history unforgiveable.

Speaking of history, the other book I’d like to recommend is Hardly a Hero by Michael Young. The iconic books about our war on VietNam include The 13^th Valley by John M. Del Vecchio,  Born on the Fourth of July by Ron Kovic, Chickenhawk  by Robert Mason and now one hopes, Hardly a Hero. Most of the young men who served in VietNam were neither helicopter pilots nor became figureheads of the anti-war movement. And not that many of them participated in the great battles at Hue, Ke Sanh, or in the Au Shau Valley.

Most of the young men who marched off to that ill-conceived conflict went there misinformed and came home confused, left to flounder their way through re-insertion into life in The World. They lost friends and their own innocence in a less-than-grand adventure for which the question “Why?” has still not been satisfactorily answered.

Michael Young has some minor wrinkles to work out as an author but his storytelling is spot on. This e-book is brilliant and gripping, compelling and most of all, honest. I enjoyed and learned a lot from the other books I named and I understand why they’re so well read. But if you aren’t moved by Young’s autobiographical treatment, you simply have no soul.  It is one of the few true books about a war that should never have been.

More to come but meanwhile, please consider reading these two books. You’ll be better for it.

Other people's dreams

I’m in Minnesota this week and we’ve taken several road trips getting from site to site. Since I wasn’t the car renter this trip, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to gaze out the window at the country passing by.

Like Washington and many other states through which I’ve passed, Minnesota has no shortage of abandoned homesteads and barns. They always seem to catch my eye.

Don’t get me wrong – I love the look of a nicely kept, working farm. White fences and well-conceived building layouts make me feel optimistic. No small number of such farms are to be seen on the roads north of St. Paul.

But what really gets me to thinking is the sight of a swaybacked, gap-toothed, long greyed out farmhouse with visible holes in the porch planking and perhaps a few blackberry vines growing out through long-empty windows. They draw my mind like quarks intrigue astrophysicists.

I can’t help wondering whose dream this building once represented. It requires almost no effort for me to imagine a young farm couple standing in front of the house, feeling that they’ve finally arrived. I can imagine the long hours, hearty meals and children borne without the aid of a modern hospital.

This old house saw triumph and tragedy, as they say. But mostly, it saw the steady progression of days that make up the life of a family.

I suppose there’s a note of sadness in the decay of these old structures. But they make me happy. Because they represent someone’s dreams and for some period of time, I like to imagine that the dream came true.

I'm a book snob

Today, Mary and I went to Borders Books to take advantage of their close-out sale. It was a bittersweet excursion. On the one hand, I was able to pick up a boat load of books for about 20%. On the other hand, I can’t get past the fact that the closing of Borders is a harbinger of the way things are going for the publishing industry.

As I’ve commented before, there’s no question that in the age of e-books, the economics of hauling blocks of wood around the country just won’t pencil out. Gutenberg has had his day.

As much as I love reading a book that I can hold and feel, comforted and invited by the combination of good paper, expert design and typesetting and the ability to make marginal notes, I have to admit I’m part of the problem. Because although I read almost entirely paper books when at home, I find my Nook infinitely more useful when traveling.

My e-reader has about thirty books in it at any one time, so no need to carry several pounds of wood in my carry-on bag on my frequent business trips. And on the bus, I don’t have to put up with nosey fellow riders asking about the book I’m reading. (I don’t know why that bothers me, since I usually welcome talking with anyone about books – I guess on a bus one likes to invoke the cone of silence.)

I suppose e-books are the undeniable wave of the future, and even of my present. But I can’t help feeling that an e-book is somehow cheating, less real than – well – a real book.

I’m a book snob. But my snobbery is not about the classics. It’s the wood pulp I have trouble letting go of.  Go figure.

My blog

 I don’t keep a diary. Neither do I make entries in a journal. But I’ve been writing as long as I can remember. It’s part of me.

I don’t consider myself a gifted writer by any means. What I am is a guy who has a lot of friends who are sensitive and generous enough to ignore the occasional tortured analogy in favor of letting the idea come through.

I don’t understand how anyone could fail to enjoy writing. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea and there are people I love and respect who consider writing a 500-word essay nothing short of torture. I understand that they feel this way but I just can’t fathom why.

I write letters to my daughters that they will read when the time comes. I’ve written a full-length novel that went precisely nowhere, bad poetry and some really good essays. I’ve had regular columns in two tiny-market newspapers. But so far, this blog is my favorite outlet.

I’ve gone on at length about family and I can’t help that I’ll likely continue to use my loved ones as blog fodder. But I also feel like turning a corner, stretching the wings a bit. There’s a book I’m reading about Henrietta Lacks that’s started the wheels turning. I’ve been thinking about a few “colorful characters” of my acquaintance that might make for a good missive or two.

I’d like to go back through some of the notes we wrote during the Ball Of Twine Tour. And I have innumerable scraps of paper – physical and virtual – bearing lists of writing ideas. I can’t wait to take some of them on.

What it comes down to is this: I know there are lots of demands on your time. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you trusting me with a little corner of it now and again. Perhaps you could even recommend my musings to some of your friends.

There’s no question that I need you more than you need me. I hope to earn your generosity.