Older and Doing Okay

I am now officially older than I was.

As a historian I know that this process happens gradually, day by day, a steady accretion of time that has no borders, but there is something about a calendar that sticks in the human mind and we as a species always know, pretty much to the day, when another year has gone by. One day doesn’t feel all that different from the next, but the differences accumulate and suddenly you realize that the world you lived in not that long ago is gone and it’s a whole new world that greets you in the morning.

You learn that as you get older. You learn a lot of things as you get older.

It was a good birthday once I got past all the grading that had to be done and moved on with the rest of the day. All four of us were together and we had dinner and played cards and talked, and that’s pretty much all I ever want for my birthday these days. I made General Tso Chicken. Oliver came out ahead in our Phase 10 game. We enjoyed each other’s company, as we always do.

I don’t know how people get good photos out of cell phone cameras, but perhaps the graininess is part of the story as well.

After our card game Lauren took me out to see her friends at a local purveyor of fine beverages now that everyone is legally allowed to do that and they all sang happy birthday to me when I got there, which was lovely. I’ve known many of them for a decade now. They’re good people to talk with and very welcoming. Aleksia even bought me a Green Tea Shot for my birthday and it was tasty!

I stayed about an hour, until the clock ticked over to midnight and we sang happy birthday to Aleksia, and then I went home where the old people go at that hour so the younger folks can do their thing on their own. It was a marvelous way to end the day.

It’s not such a bad thing getting older when you have family and friends to share it with.

I Speak for the Trees

We have become the sorts of people who have multiple Christmas trees.

I know how this happened, and to be honest it wasn’t really an excess of Christmas spirit. That sort of spirit has been hard to come by in recent years, and this year has been particularly elusive for a lot of reasons. It’s hard to be festive when the world conspires against it, and defiance will only get you so far.

Following along with the tried and true strategy of “fake it ‘til you make it,” however, we have been getting things decorated anyway. Over Thanksgiving Oliver, Maxim and I set up the long strand of blue lights that we always have across the front of the house, and Kim has continued her newfound tradition of putting more blue lights – the kind that blink in random patterns – on the broccoli stalks that still stand in the raised bed garden in the front lawn and you have to admit that is a rather sneakily cheerful thing to do.

But normally this sort of thing requires only one Christmas tree.

We even upgraded that last year and got one that is bigger and rounder than the one we’d been using for a while in order to keep that number at one, which of course speaks to the main problem. We simply have more ornaments than can comfortably be placed on a tree.

We have our own ornaments, some of which we have acquired over the years and some of which were given to us as gifts. There are the ones that the kids made when they were younger, which of course have sentimental value. I have two Gritty ornaments that Kim got for me. We finally remembered to bring the box of ornaments that I inherited from my mom a couple of years ago up from the basement, many of which are either gorgeous – my mom had a pretty good eye for these things – or sentimental or both. And we have my burgeoning collection of “travel ornaments,” which is a nice way of saying “keychains.” This is mainly my project, though Oliver and Lauren contribute to it as well. Mostly I pick these things up wherever we end up traveling because they are inexpensive, indestructible, and a nice reminder of good times. And since we’ve also become People Who Travel – an odd thought, but not one I’m complaining about – there are a lot of those.

So this year Kim bought a small tree just for the travel ornaments. It’s not short, but it’s kind of thin and it has a festive “blue and white” color scheme that isn't really obvious from the photo. It came prelit with bright white LED lights, which give all of the ornaments a kind of backlit feel to them. It’s a nice way to both highlight and quarantine all the keychains and the like.

We had to figure out where to put it, since the main tree has its own spot and the living room didn’t really have a space for a second tree, and eventually we decided that the dining room was fine. Midgie agreed.

The angel on the top is from my parents. They bought that in 1963 for their first Christmas together. It seems happy there.

The main tree is in the usual spot in the living room and we spent most of Sunday decorating it since there was a dense fog advisory here in Our Little Town and I’d already done the grocery shopping and all the grading I planned to do for the end of the semester. We weren't going anywhere. It was a good window of time to get the tree up.

Right now we’ve kind of stalled a bit, since the trees are basically done and now we need to figure out how much else to put out and how much just to pack away again for next year. We have surprisingly few open horizontal spaces to put things, it turns out.

As problems go, it’s not so bad.

To Sleep, Perchance to Entangle

Way back in October I did a sleep test, and it turns out that I’m doing it wrong.

I know. You’d think I’d know how to do this by now, having had more than half a century to practice it, but apparently even this simple task is beyond me these days. At some point I will simply be amortized out and sold for parts.

In the meantime, I have been given a Machine.

It is a little Machine, roughly the size of a loaf of bread if you include the reservoir that has to be emptied every morning and then filled up again every evening. It’s surprisingly quiet. It has bright lights that go out eventually and several buttons that make a satisfying click when you press them. It automatically connects to the nearest cellphone tower and reports on whether you have used it, for how long, and under what circumstances. It may also echolocate the cat and report on that as well. It needs to be cleaned on a rigid and unforgiving schedule. And right now it is making me very, very tired.

The good folks at my local medical purveyor started texting me about this Machine a few weeks ago, but since I don’t answer texts or phone calls from unfamiliar numbers it took a while for this fact to sink in. Eventually they were succinct enough in the texts that I could see their point in the preview screen so I wrote back and after some stilted conversation they eventually said they had one of these things for me but I needed to come in to get trained on how to use it.

So we set up an appointment which I then canceled so I could go tailgating (total regret about this fact: zero) and then rescheduled for last week.

On the appointed day I ducked out of work a bit early and headed over to what I had previously known as a bar but which now houses the medical equipment people – and no, I am not making that up – where I met an enthusiastic fellow who spent the better part of an hour telling me how much my life was about to be revolutionized by this wondrous Machine.

“You won’t understand how you lived without it!” he said. “Prepare for the best sleep of your life!”

This turned out not to be true.

I think he could tell that that vast majority of the enthusiasm for this transaction was occurring on his side of the desk which seemed to sadden him, but I did promise that I would give an honest effort to make it work and I do believe I have kept this promise as best I could since then.

Still not true, though.

I didn’t use it the first night as it requires a supply of distilled water that I did not have, but a quick trip to the local grocery on the way home from work the next day solved that problem. And then I had to get it set up.

These things are a lot simpler when you’re looking at one on a desk and a genuine Machine enthusiast is walking you through all the parts and procedures. When you’ve got one at home and you’re staring gimlet-eyed at all of the various bits and bobs trying to remember what end was up and how it all connected together, it is rather more complicated. But eventually I got it all lined up and connected and even figured out how to put the little mask on. Because you have to wear a mask.

There’s about a hundred different sorts of masks. Did you know that? I didn’t. Not until last week, anyway. There are masks that are just little tubes that you stick up your nose. There are masks that you could use to explore shipwrecks of Spanish galleons off the coast of Florida. And there are different masks for pretty much every step on the gradient between those two end points.

I hate having things on my face. Masking up for the pandemic was a genuine drag, though I did it because I am not an idiot and didn’t feel like sacrificing myself or my loved ones so some psychotic grifter could score political points for his re-election campaign. This is called enlightened self-interest, folks, because sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do in order to achieve a larger goal. I know. Life is hard, but there you go. I am capable of doing things I do not care to do if there is a purpose to it, which is how you know I am an actual Adult.

So I picked one that just rested under my nose but left my mouth uncovered. I get one free change, though.

Eventually I got the tube all snapped together and – after about fifteen minutes of topological mathematics – figured out how to get the apparatus connected to the mask to clamp onto my head. The tube back to the Machine comes off the top, in case you’re wondering, so I look like a post-apocalyptic unicorn and now that’s an image you have in your mind too.

It’s actually not that uncomfortable if I don’t move, though if I open my mouth the air that is being gently forced up my nose immediately comes down whatever the little pathway is for that and exits out my mouth, which is really, really disturbing. Once I have this thing on I have to keep my mouth shut, and there are people out there who would tell you that this is worth the price of the Machine all by itself though there has to be an easier way to get me to do that, I think.

I can fall asleep with it pretty easily most nights if I start on my back. But the problem is that a) I sleep on my side, not my back, and b) I rotate like a gas station hot dog while asleep. The Machine Guy dismissed this out of hand. “Your body is just trying to compensate for the very problems you came in here for this Machine to solve!” he enthused at me, his clothing and verbal intonations slowly morphing to look and sound like the Wizard of Oz. “Once you have this, you won’t need to do that!”

This turned out not to be true either.

For four of the last six nights I have strapped myself into the Machine, laid down on my back, and with surprisingly minimal fuss drifted off to sleep. And then two hours later I rotate onto my side, get entirely tangled up in the tube, wake up, try to get back to sleep while resting my face on the apparatus, spend some time attempting to reset the mask which by now has slipped over toward one or the other of my ears (which is surprisingly unhelpful, really), try to find a different position that might work, and then take off the mask, turn off the Machine, and – eventually – go back to sleep for whatever is left of the night.

All of which gets reported to the Machine Guy over the cell phone system.

Kim sleeps through all of this, which is how you know we’ve been married a long time.

The Machine Guy called me on Monday to see how it was going, despite already knowing this thanks to the snitching of the Machine, and he seemed unhappy when I actually told him. So on Thursday I am going back to the local medical purveyor’s office at what I still think of as a bar if I am being honest, and I’ll see if a different mask will make any improvements.

I am not sure how all of this is supposed to help, to be honest, but I am giving it a genuine try.

A Round Birthday

Kim had one of those Round Number Birthdays last month, so naturally we had to celebrate.

The problem, though, was that she originally tried to leave much of this up to me and I have no party skills whatsoever.

“What do you want to do for your birthday?”

“That’s up to you. I’m the birthday girl.”

We went around like that for a while until she realized that this was probably a losing cause for everyone involved and she started telling me what she wanted so I could just go ahead and do it. I spent thirty years backstage on the lighting crew. If you give me a plan I can get it done just fine. Just don’t ask me to do the planning.

In the end, she wanted a pizza party and you know? That sounded like a good idea. I called around to a few places without much success until finally we went to a local place and just asked them if they could host a party with two or three dozen adults, and to his eternal credit Benny the Manager didn’t even flinch. “Sure!” he said. “We’ll block off this section of the restaurant and run a tab for you and you can settle up at the end of the night.”

Reader, he even let us bring in our own cake. Three cheers for Benny.

We managed to do this on Kim’s actual birthday which was the Saturday after Thanksgiving this year – the one day that wasn’t already spoken for over break and, to be honest, the main reason we scheduled our wedding on that same Saturday nearly three decades ago since we figured people could travel for it.

It took some doing to get things set up, including a last-minute stop to pick up party plates for the cake, but in the end it worked out pretty well. Everyone got a wristband so the cashier would know they were with us, we successfully managed to shoo out a number of people who apparently can’t read large signs about things being reserved for an event, and we had a grand time. It was good pizza.

Eventually it was time for the cake.

At this point it seems relevant to note that there was a slight miscommunication regarding the cake decorations. I ordered it from a local supermarket bakery, which had the inestimable virtue of being open on the Saturday after Thanksgiving so I could pick it up, and they asked me a few questions.

“What do you want it to say?”

“Happy birthday, Kim.”

“What sort of decorations do you want?”

“Flowers would be good.”

“What’s her favorite color?”

“Green.”

And thus we ended up with:

It was tasty nonetheless.

The embroidered cloth in front of the cake was something that Kim stitched for our wedding. It’s based on a Ukrainian pattern and we had it wrapped around our hands then. It was nice to see it again.

Lauren had suggested that we go out barhopping afterward but it was a very cold night and by the time the festivities ended that turned into a nice evening at home, hanging out with the four of us plus Max and Nolan.

Happy birthday, Kim!

Tailgate Two!

I had a medical appointment scheduled for 8am on the day after Thanksgiving, which wasn’t something I knew you could do until the guy offered to book it for me. It wasn’t for anything urgent but I figured I’d have time around then and it would get me moving for the plans we had later that day, so why not.

And then I discovered – on Thanksgiving Day – that our plans were actually much earlier than I had thought so I had to move the appointment. It is not easy to reschedule an appointment on a holiday and I knew (or at least hoped) that speaking with an actual person was probably not going to happen, but eventually I found the proper phone number and left a message and hoped for the best. I told them – truthfully – that I had a family commitment that I couldn’t miss.

What I didn’t tell them was that this commitment was a tailgating party. Although in the end I think they figured it out.

Last year Lauren and her roommates decided to host a Parent Tailgating Weekend where they invited all of the various parents to join them and their friends for a festive afternoon of grilling, drinking games, and football, and I have to say that it was a lot of fun. We ate. We drank. I played my first ever drinking game (Boom Cup) and if I didn’t quite win then neither did I lose and I’ll take that. We even got tickets to see the game, which was terrible but we enjoyed it anyway. We had a very good time, and when your adult daughter invites you up for a gathering with her friends you can definitely count that as a parenting win.

So when Lauren and her roommates decided there would be a Second Annual Parent Tailgating Weekend, we were all in for it.

Except that this happened much later in the season than last year, so rather than the crisp fall day of the first one it was very much Winter In Wisconsin, with a high temperature that day somewhere in the teens Fahrenheit (which is Very Cold in Celsius). This was heightened by the fact that the game was much earlier in the day. Last year’s game started around 3pm, which meant we could slide up there around lunchtime and still have time for – hypothetically speaking – medical appointments in the morning. This year, however, game time was 11am and if you know this particular campus you know that nothing says College Game Day like alcohol consumption at 8 in the morning. It beats medical appointments, anyway.

We didn’t get there until around 9, though, because we are old and because we had to weave around the fenderbender that happened right in front of us as we neared the stadium and also because we stopped to pick up two dozen fresh bakery donuts for the festivities. For a reasonable fee we found a place to park – right behind the house were this was happening – and as parents and Old People we celebrated the fact that that the tailgate had been moved indoors.

There was plenty of food and all of it was good. The parents of the actual hosts for this event run a barbeque restaurant somewhere and brought a pile of tasty meats. And in true Wisconsin fashion, there were plenty of beverages. I brought a bottle of homemade Irish cream that disappeared pretty quickly, and at one point Lauren introduced me to something very tasty whose name escapes me now but which consisted of elderflower liqueur and champagne.

I also got to experience my first shot of Malort.

If you do not live near Chicago or its cultural basin you have probably never heard of Malort and in this you should count yourself lucky. It is a liqueur of sorts, one whose overriding flavor is “bitter” with a dash of “regret,” though it also includes an ever-changing blend of herbs and infusions such that no two bottles are ever quite the same so even within those parameters it is something of a guessing game. It’s the sort of rite-of-passage beverage that most people only consume on a dare and yet it is inexplicably popular in Chicago and I’d wanted to try it for a while now but purchasing an entire bottle of the stuff was just out of the question. And there it was!

It fully lived up to my expectations.

The living room had been cleared for action, and we joined in. It took me a while to find the range, but in the end Nolan and I very nearly won our game of Beer Pong, a game I had never played before despite being a proud graduate of three different universities, all of which had football teams at the time. Kim and Max actually did win their game.

Mostly we spent the time hanging out. Sometimes I was talking with the other parents.

I spent a fair amount of time talking with Anita’s grandmother, who has led a fascinating life.

And sometimes I was with Lauren and her friends, some of whom I have known since they were in middle school and some of whom I met at the party. They’re good people, and I enjoy talking with them.

It was quite a group.

By this point it was nearly game time so most of the college students went over to the stadium, where they watched the home team get pretty conclusively thumped by one of their main rivals. Kim and I took a quick look at the temperature (a balmy 18F by then, not including the gale force winds) and decided that our best option was to take in the game at a local bistro. Fortunately Maxim works as a bouncer at just such an establishment and he got us in. It was loud, crowded, and busy, which is why I suspect that when the medical office called me back they knew pretty much instantly where I was (or at least at what sort of establishment and event I was) but to their credit they didn’t flinch and we rescheduled my appointment without incident. Tailgating in Wisconsin is a hallowed tradition, after all.

Eventually we all ended up back at Lauren’s apartment where we warmed up for a while before Lauren, Maxim, Nolan, Kim and I headed out to an international grocery store because that’s the sort of people we are. From there we went to an actual local bistro for dinner in a much quieter and less frigid atmosphere.

Tailgate for the win!

Thanksgivings

My brother’s favorite way of dividing the world into two kinds of people is to point out that there are people who relax by doing something and there are people who relax by doing nothing. Me, personally, I’m a “doing nothing” sort of person – my idea of relaxation involves very little motion of any kind – but I am not the planning part of the family and Kim is very much a “doing something” person. I generally end up having fun at these somethings and being glad that I did them, it has to be said, though I often end up rather tired.

Such was our Thanksgiving break.

I don’t know if you noticed, but Thanksgiving was incredibly late this year. Most people down at Home Campus were ready for it to be about a week – maybe two – before it actually was, and that’s just the faculty and staff. Fortunately for me three of my five classes didn’t meet that week – I told my First Year Seminar students that they had to schedule an advising appointment to choose classes for next semester instead, and my Zoom class goes out not only to Far Northern Campus but also to anywhere up to half a dozen high schools in that area, all of whom are closed that entire week because it’s Deer Season (a capitalized event in Wisconsin) and it just wasn’t worth holding class for the two or three students who would show up. They’d probably just sit there and be unhappy because they hadn’t gotten their deer yet.

We had two Thanksgivings, because one was clearly not enough.

I’m okay with that, actually. Thanksgiving has become one of my favorite holidays over the years mostly because it is one of the very few holidays on the American calendar that does not ask for more. It simply asks us to be glad for what we already have. You don’t get gifts. You don’t get candy. There are no fireworks. You’re not expected to buy flowers. It’s just there to remind you that even with all of the problems in the world you probably still have things to be grateful for and you should acknowledge those things now and then.

This is why I have very little patience for the killjoys who insist that the holiday is somehow irrevocably tainted by its origins or the football games or whatever. I am well aware of such things. But you know. That’s not what I’m celebrating here.

Our first Thanksgiving this year was with Kim’s side of the family – our annual jaunt up to Rory and Amy’s house. We are responsible for many of the baked goods for this event – the year we had to stay home because we all had the flu was calamitous that way – so we spent that morning baking all sorts of things. Pumpkin pie. Apple cranberry pie. Buns. Biscuits. And, of course, pizzelles, which are my contribution to all of this. I’m not sure I’d be allowed in without them, and at this point I’m not going to test that theory. Plus they’re fun to make. I set up my pizzelle iron in front of the television and watch large men chase a small object for an hour or so while I make them, and then the whole house smells of anise. There are worse ways to spend an hour.

Kim, Oliver, and I piled into the car as soon as the last pie was out of the oven and headed on up to the festivities. Lauren and Max drove over separately, though there was some confusion as to when we should arrive so they got there well before we did. It is strange to know that your child can just get there on her own with her boyfriend – it feels like a whole new stage of people gathering from separate places, even if it isn’t all that different from us picking them up on the way. Not sure why.

The evening was the usual chaos of food and family, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. I usually end up sitting in the front room or the dining room and talking with whoever happens by, which this year was mostly either Grandpa or Amy’s dad, along with our subgroup. Sometimes I’d wander into the kitchen and talk with people there, which had the advantage of also allowing me to graze on the appetizers set out on the big kitchen island. It’s all good. I don’t seem to take many pictures at Thanksgiving for some reason – perhaps I’m just happy to be part of a holiday instead of trying to record it as I usually do with events – but I got a couple.

We got back fairly late, moved the leftover bits of the pies from the van to my car since there was no room in the fridge and at this point in the year the garage is essentially one big cold storage unit, and left them there until Sunday when we had Thanksgiving II: The Turkening.

We wanted to do a smaller Thanksgiving on our own to go with the big family feast, perhaps just as a way to have more leftovers, and Sunday was pretty much the only day that we had open for that. And for reasons that will be explained in a future post, it worked out well as far as getting together, as Lauren and Max had come by on Saturday. So Sunday it was.

Kim did most of the cooking for this one – turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, “dad rice,” cranberry sauce, and Aunt Linda’s Baked Pineapple Dish without which no holiday is complete, which is a lot for five people but then the leftovers were the point after all. We’ve already put Thanksgiving III: Bride of Turkey on the menu for later this week. My role was mostly hauling the turkey up from the basement to be prepped for cooking and then getting the table extended and the dishes set. We always bring out our wedding china and the silverware I inherited from my parents for this sort of thing, as well as the silver-rimmed glasses that were my dad’s pride and joy, since you might as well use the stuff.

Also, now that it is December and past the official date of Thanksgiving I will acknowledge the existence of Christmas, so Oliver, Max, and I put up the one stand of blue Christmas lights that we always have across the front of the house, a task that was both easier (more hands, plus no giant bushes in the front to work around this year) and harder (15F without the wind chill) than usual, but now the lights are up and glowing peacefully.

We had a lovely meal.

Afterward we all ended up in the living room collectively working on an online geography quiz because that’s just how we roll. You get a blank map of Africa and have to name all of the countries (we got about 95% of them) and then Europe (100%), Asia (95% or so), Oceana (100% but there aren’t that many), South America (100%) and North America (which has a lot of countries if you include all the Caribbean islands and we would have gotten 100% if the quiz had accepted the answer we kept trying to give it until it decided we were wrong and then gave us that same answer). You have fun your way, we’ll have fun our way.

Thus was our Thanksgiving break bookended. Of course, that left the two days in between, and naturally both of those were filled with events as well.

Something, not nothing, after all.

Twenty-Nine

After twenty-nine years you get to know someone.

You know most of what they like and don’t like. Not all, but most. You know the sorts of things that interest them. You know whether they want you to join them in this or that activity or just want to hare off and do it on their own.

You’ve heard the old stories. A lot of them, anyway. There are always a few surprises, and people find new things to like or become interested in after all. But if someone hasn't told you a story in nearly three decades chances are they're either not going to tell you or they've just completely forgotten about it themselves.

But all that means is that you get to make new stories together.

It’s been twenty-nine years since that crisp autumn day when Kim and I got married, here in Our Little Town. We’ve shared a lot since then, raised a family, traveled, seen, done, done again. We’ve told each other a lot of stories and gotten to know each other pretty well.

And here we are, making new stories.

Happy Anniversary to us!