I have been trying very hard to avoid politics of late.
For much of this past year I have been immersed in political matters, particularly those of Wisconsin. When there are people in your own government working to undermine not only the policies that have made your state and nation prosperous, safe and worthwhile but also the values, traditions and institutions that made such policies possible, you really have no choice but to get involved. I have marched. I have written, here and directly to the various political leaders who claim to represent me. I have written to the local paper. I have organized.
This is what democracy looks like.
But I am not, by nature, an optimist. I grew up in Philadelphia – pessimism is my birthright. As I watch the baseball season tick down, for example, with the Phillies guaranteed home field for the duration of the playoffs and possessing the best rotation in the sport, I remain firmly convinced that not only will they not win the World Series this year but also that they will figure out a way to lose the one they won back in 2008. And when I look at the political situation these days, it just seems to me that the thugs are winning. It always seems that way to me.
They cheer at the thought of the uninsured dying. They boo American soldiers for being gay. They insist that disaster relief be held up for partisan advantage and offset by further cuts to the very people they should be helping. They are a moral disgrace, a political outhouse, and a savvy and powerful minority hell bent on destroying the United States of America and replacing it with the sort of backward authoritarian nightmare that, with a single change in religion, would not be all that different from the goals of the jihadists in the Middle East.
That sort of thing wears on a body, and especially this semester I find I have precious few mental reserves with which to deal with it.
When I was on vacation in August I was unable to keep in touch with political developments, and you know what? I felt better for it.
With the presidential elections in full swing now and the recall campaign against Governor Teabagger (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries) about to get underway, I don’t suppose I can avoid political issues for much longer. I may not be looking for politics right now, but politics is very much looking for me – and it will find me eventually.
And when it does, look out.
But until then I will go about my days and try to focus on what is in front me. Sometimes you just need a break.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Monday, September 26, 2011
These Are the Conversations We Have On the Way Home From School
Riiiiiing! Riiiiiing!
Hello! You have reached the offices of The Avenger (tm), wholesale suppliers of retributive justice at affordable rates. “If you’ve been wronged, we’ll make them pay.”
Unfortunately we are either on the phone or away from our desk right now and cannot answer your call. Please do not despair! Your call is important to us!
If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911.
Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.
Para continuar en espanol, oprima el dos.
If this is about a family feud, press 1. Be prepared to specify degree of kinship, age of consent in your jurisdiction, value of property destroyed or stolen, and whether alcohol was involved in the original incident. Rates may vary depending upon the specific conditions described.
If this is about a business dealing, drug run or gambling debt, press 3.
If your baby done you wrong, press 4.
If you are a Supreme Agent of Evil (SAE) fulfilling an ancient prophecy and have been thwarted by a goatherder who has only recently discovered he is the Chosen Hero, press 5.
If you are an SAE betrayed by love, ambitious underlings, scandalous press or divine intervention, press 6.
For all sports-related issues, including rivalry games, press 7.
For all work-related issues, press 8. Please note that we no longer accept commissions from academics regarding the scheduling of Friday classes, as we regard such things as within the boundaries of normal duties and not within the parameters of “betrayal” as defined in The Avenger (tm) Manual. Seriously, dude. Live with it.
If you are calling about a planned paranoid drug-fueled spree of destruction right down the middle of Main Street USA that will show them all, every last one of them – whether accompanied by maniacal laughter or not – please hang up and contact a local mental health center or substance abuse program immediately.
For all other concerns, please stay on the line and one of our trained specialists will assist you in determining the level of vengeance appropriate for your case and budget.
Remember, when it’s all about you, you’re all about us.
Thank you, and have a great day!
BEEEEEEEEEEEEP
Hello! You have reached the offices of The Avenger (tm), wholesale suppliers of retributive justice at affordable rates. “If you’ve been wronged, we’ll make them pay.”
Unfortunately we are either on the phone or away from our desk right now and cannot answer your call. Please do not despair! Your call is important to us!
If this is an emergency, please hang up and dial 911.
Please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed.
Para continuar en espanol, oprima el dos.
If this is about a family feud, press 1. Be prepared to specify degree of kinship, age of consent in your jurisdiction, value of property destroyed or stolen, and whether alcohol was involved in the original incident. Rates may vary depending upon the specific conditions described.
If this is about a business dealing, drug run or gambling debt, press 3.
If your baby done you wrong, press 4.
If you are a Supreme Agent of Evil (SAE) fulfilling an ancient prophecy and have been thwarted by a goatherder who has only recently discovered he is the Chosen Hero, press 5.
If you are an SAE betrayed by love, ambitious underlings, scandalous press or divine intervention, press 6.
For all sports-related issues, including rivalry games, press 7.
For all work-related issues, press 8. Please note that we no longer accept commissions from academics regarding the scheduling of Friday classes, as we regard such things as within the boundaries of normal duties and not within the parameters of “betrayal” as defined in The Avenger (tm) Manual. Seriously, dude. Live with it.
If you are calling about a planned paranoid drug-fueled spree of destruction right down the middle of Main Street USA that will show them all, every last one of them – whether accompanied by maniacal laughter or not – please hang up and contact a local mental health center or substance abuse program immediately.
For all other concerns, please stay on the line and one of our trained specialists will assist you in determining the level of vengeance appropriate for your case and budget.
Remember, when it’s all about you, you’re all about us.
Thank you, and have a great day!
BEEEEEEEEEEEEP
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Friday Night Lights
The girls went to their first high school football game last night.
One of the things about Kim’s new job is that it is a position of high visibility in the community. This has certain implications, one of them being a pressure to attend events like community fundraisers. And as the First Mate, I get to go along.
I never liked those things even when they were benefiting an organization I was running.
Oh, they’re pleasant enough, really. Lots of community-minded people gathering together for a good cause, a silent auction full of interesting things, a decent meal and some good entertainment – in this case, a very good 12-piece Latin band – but I’m just one of those people who would rather stay home and read. My hearing has never been all that great and my voice does not carry well, so I find it hard to have conversations in such environments, and whenever I find myself in a room full of strangers my first reaction is just to sit quietly and observe until it is time to go home.
So the festivities are kind of lost on me, is what I’m saying.
But between Kim’s job and mine we don’t get much chance to see each other, so I went. And this required us to find somewhere to stash the girls for the night. Fortunately, some friends were going to the Other High School’s homecoming game and volunteered to take them along.
There are two high schools here in Our Little Town – the one the girls will go to eventually, assuming the local voters haven’t decided to defund the schools entirely (a disturbingly realistic scenario these days), and the other one across town.
Neither Tabitha nor Lauren is really much into football – Lauren at least cheers for certain teams based on her parents’ allegiances, though when I tried to explain to her what exactly a “touchdown” was yesterday she tuned me out fairly quickly. “You’re not interested in learning this, are you Lauren?” I asked. “Not really,” she replied. Tabitha cares even less.
But there were friends there, and their favorite babysitter is one of the cheerleaders, so they were excited about going.
We left the fundraiser and got to the game just as halftime ended, so we sat there through a quarter and a half before it got too cold to stay any longer, talking with our friends and watching the game unfold.
The last time I was at a high school football game was when I was still in high school, back in the depths of the 1980s. I didn’t go to many games. I had friends in the band, so a couple times I went to hang out with them, and I made it to the Big Rivalry Game most years (it’s the oldest public high school rivalry in the country, and if we won we got half a day off).
The games don’t seem to have changed.
There was a lot of offense – I saw only one punt in the time we were there, and that resulted in a penalty that gave the ball back to the punting team for a first down – and most of it was on the ground. Only two of the dozen or so pass plays actually worked. And most of the people in the stands were students who seemed more interested in hanging out with each other than following the game.
On the other hand, the field-goal kicker for the home team was a girl and nobody seemed to notice or care, which is something that would not have happened back when I was attending these games. Real progress is attained when equality becomes unremarkable.
When I was in grad school, one of my friends told me there were three stages of living in a small town. First, you’re just a visitor and you don’t really pay much attention to the local high school football team. Then you do pay attention, because you start to know people involved – friends who have kids on the team or in the stands, students who once played, that sort of thing. And finally, you start to care whether they win or lose, just because.
So when I checked the score this morning in the local paper and discovered that the home team lost on a touchdown with six seconds left I thought, well, perhaps I’ve lived here long enough to have gone through the cycle.
One of the things about Kim’s new job is that it is a position of high visibility in the community. This has certain implications, one of them being a pressure to attend events like community fundraisers. And as the First Mate, I get to go along.
I never liked those things even when they were benefiting an organization I was running.
Oh, they’re pleasant enough, really. Lots of community-minded people gathering together for a good cause, a silent auction full of interesting things, a decent meal and some good entertainment – in this case, a very good 12-piece Latin band – but I’m just one of those people who would rather stay home and read. My hearing has never been all that great and my voice does not carry well, so I find it hard to have conversations in such environments, and whenever I find myself in a room full of strangers my first reaction is just to sit quietly and observe until it is time to go home.
So the festivities are kind of lost on me, is what I’m saying.
But between Kim’s job and mine we don’t get much chance to see each other, so I went. And this required us to find somewhere to stash the girls for the night. Fortunately, some friends were going to the Other High School’s homecoming game and volunteered to take them along.
There are two high schools here in Our Little Town – the one the girls will go to eventually, assuming the local voters haven’t decided to defund the schools entirely (a disturbingly realistic scenario these days), and the other one across town.
Neither Tabitha nor Lauren is really much into football – Lauren at least cheers for certain teams based on her parents’ allegiances, though when I tried to explain to her what exactly a “touchdown” was yesterday she tuned me out fairly quickly. “You’re not interested in learning this, are you Lauren?” I asked. “Not really,” she replied. Tabitha cares even less.
But there were friends there, and their favorite babysitter is one of the cheerleaders, so they were excited about going.
We left the fundraiser and got to the game just as halftime ended, so we sat there through a quarter and a half before it got too cold to stay any longer, talking with our friends and watching the game unfold.
The last time I was at a high school football game was when I was still in high school, back in the depths of the 1980s. I didn’t go to many games. I had friends in the band, so a couple times I went to hang out with them, and I made it to the Big Rivalry Game most years (it’s the oldest public high school rivalry in the country, and if we won we got half a day off).
The games don’t seem to have changed.
There was a lot of offense – I saw only one punt in the time we were there, and that resulted in a penalty that gave the ball back to the punting team for a first down – and most of it was on the ground. Only two of the dozen or so pass plays actually worked. And most of the people in the stands were students who seemed more interested in hanging out with each other than following the game.
On the other hand, the field-goal kicker for the home team was a girl and nobody seemed to notice or care, which is something that would not have happened back when I was attending these games. Real progress is attained when equality becomes unremarkable.
When I was in grad school, one of my friends told me there were three stages of living in a small town. First, you’re just a visitor and you don’t really pay much attention to the local high school football team. Then you do pay attention, because you start to know people involved – friends who have kids on the team or in the stands, students who once played, that sort of thing. And finally, you start to care whether they win or lose, just because.
So when I checked the score this morning in the local paper and discovered that the home team lost on a touchdown with six seconds left I thought, well, perhaps I’ve lived here long enough to have gone through the cycle.
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Evenings Well Spent
The girls and I have been reading The Phantom Tollbooth at bedtime for a while now.
I used to be the bedtime story reader. When they were little we’d get the girls upstairs, get them into their jammies and make them brush their teeth, and then I’d settle in and read whatever it was they wanted to hear. It took a lot of time, but it was worth every minute – there weren’t many other ways to spend an evening that were more rewarding, and those nights fly by fast.
As, indeed, they did.
Eventually the girls discovered that Kim was a much better reader than I was. I read like the narrator, but Kim reads like the characters. And so for the last couple of years, whenever there were books to be read at bedtime it would be Kim’s task to do so. And now that they’re both older and can read their own stories, even that had seemed to be on the way out.
But I have always loved The Phantom Tollbooth and I wanted to share it with them. For those of you who have not read it, well, what is wrong with you? Go out and read it! Now! I’ll wait.
See? It’s amazing.
We’re having fun following the adventures of Milo (a boy who never before knew what to do with his time), Tock (a watchdog – literally, a dog with a watch for a body – who, in a tragic family mix-up, says “tick-tick-tick”) and the Humbug (a large insect clearly modeled on a WC Fields character) as they travel through the decaying Kingdom of Wisdom on their quest to rescue the Princesses Rhyme and Reason from their prison in the Castle in the Air, way up in the Mountains of Ignorance.
Yes, the whole book is a long series of puns and anthropomorphisms designed to appeal to anyone with a sense of humor.
Lauren’s favorite part so far has been the chapter where we meet The World’s Smallest Giant (who is also The World’s Largest Midget, among other things). Tabitha seems to prefer the long diversion through the Valley of Sound, wherein we meet Dr. Kokophonus A. Dyschord and his assistant, the Awful Dynne. I have a sneaking fondness for Officer Shrift of the Dictionopolis police, who is, of course, short.
We’re almost done now. Milo and crew have left Digitopolis, where numbers are mined, and are headed into the wilds. Eventually the story will come to an end, and once again I will be on the outside looking in come story time.
But for a while, even as big as they are now, they still want Dad to read them a story at bedtime.
So I shall.
I used to be the bedtime story reader. When they were little we’d get the girls upstairs, get them into their jammies and make them brush their teeth, and then I’d settle in and read whatever it was they wanted to hear. It took a lot of time, but it was worth every minute – there weren’t many other ways to spend an evening that were more rewarding, and those nights fly by fast.
As, indeed, they did.
Eventually the girls discovered that Kim was a much better reader than I was. I read like the narrator, but Kim reads like the characters. And so for the last couple of years, whenever there were books to be read at bedtime it would be Kim’s task to do so. And now that they’re both older and can read their own stories, even that had seemed to be on the way out.
But I have always loved The Phantom Tollbooth and I wanted to share it with them. For those of you who have not read it, well, what is wrong with you? Go out and read it! Now! I’ll wait.
See? It’s amazing.
We’re having fun following the adventures of Milo (a boy who never before knew what to do with his time), Tock (a watchdog – literally, a dog with a watch for a body – who, in a tragic family mix-up, says “tick-tick-tick”) and the Humbug (a large insect clearly modeled on a WC Fields character) as they travel through the decaying Kingdom of Wisdom on their quest to rescue the Princesses Rhyme and Reason from their prison in the Castle in the Air, way up in the Mountains of Ignorance.
Yes, the whole book is a long series of puns and anthropomorphisms designed to appeal to anyone with a sense of humor.
Lauren’s favorite part so far has been the chapter where we meet The World’s Smallest Giant (who is also The World’s Largest Midget, among other things). Tabitha seems to prefer the long diversion through the Valley of Sound, wherein we meet Dr. Kokophonus A. Dyschord and his assistant, the Awful Dynne. I have a sneaking fondness for Officer Shrift of the Dictionopolis police, who is, of course, short.
We’re almost done now. Milo and crew have left Digitopolis, where numbers are mined, and are headed into the wilds. Eventually the story will come to an end, and once again I will be on the outside looking in come story time.
But for a while, even as big as they are now, they still want Dad to read them a story at bedtime.
So I shall.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Pet News
There’s been quite a bit of turnover with our pets this month.
On the down side, we still haven’t located Tria and after two and a half weeks hopes begin to dim. The girls have been coping with this as best they can and doing a good job of it, but it is a sad thing and it is appropriate to be sad about it, so we let them. It isn’t any better for the grown-ups, and that seems to help in a “we’re in this together” kind of way. If things don't change by next month we will probably have some kind of memorial and look into getting another cat, if only to keep Mithra from losing what few marbles she retains.
And today we confirmed that The Oldest Living Hamster In Captivity has vacated her title. This, at least, was not unexpected. Hamsters have a lifespan of about 18 months, on average, and we’d gotten this one full-grown 26 months ago. For all we know she was older than we are - a Victorian lady hamster adrift in the modern world. We’re still not sure whether it was Hammy or Vee, but it seems kind of moot now.
She had a good life.
Every dinner time she’d come rocketing toward the edge of her cage, looking for a handout, and every dinner time we’d give her one. Seriously, why not – at some point you have to stop trying to watch their health for the future and just let them ride. If I make it to the magical age of 90 I will spend my last years living on Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and black tea so sweet it would cause cavities in statues. So we let the hamster eat grilled cheese and veggies and rice and chicken and whatever else we were having for dinner. And she would eat whatever we gave her, too – she’d grab it eventually (we’re pretty sure she was blind at the end) and sit there chewing and doddering. She actually doddered.
We had a simple burial service out in the rain this morning. Godspeed, little one, and may you find nibblies wherever you are.
On the plus side, though, we now have two rabbits.
There is a little black one named Milo after the main character of The Phantom Tollbooth, which the girls and I are reading together now. He’s a tiny little thing with short stubby ears and soulful brown eyes, and his great joy in life is melting into a puddle in the arms of a child. Can’t fault him for that, I suppose. The other is a larger brown one named Hazel, who is about twice the size of Milo and has a ruff around her neck but otherwise looks much the same.
They like to come inside and hop about the living room, much to Mithra’s dismay, although so far she hasn’t tried to eat either one of them.
Milo and Hazel are part of Lauren’s 4H project this year, although neither of them is likely to be a show rabbit. Hazel is too old and fat to show (which, frankly, makes me sympathize with her a bit more than I otherwise would), and Milo is not a purebred bunny with papers.
In other news, there are purebred bunnies with papers.
So they live in a big wooden hutch out by the garage, and so far they seem to be doing just fine. We’ll see how that goes come wintertime.
Lots going on around here.
On the down side, we still haven’t located Tria and after two and a half weeks hopes begin to dim. The girls have been coping with this as best they can and doing a good job of it, but it is a sad thing and it is appropriate to be sad about it, so we let them. It isn’t any better for the grown-ups, and that seems to help in a “we’re in this together” kind of way. If things don't change by next month we will probably have some kind of memorial and look into getting another cat, if only to keep Mithra from losing what few marbles she retains.
And today we confirmed that The Oldest Living Hamster In Captivity has vacated her title. This, at least, was not unexpected. Hamsters have a lifespan of about 18 months, on average, and we’d gotten this one full-grown 26 months ago. For all we know she was older than we are - a Victorian lady hamster adrift in the modern world. We’re still not sure whether it was Hammy or Vee, but it seems kind of moot now.
She had a good life.
Every dinner time she’d come rocketing toward the edge of her cage, looking for a handout, and every dinner time we’d give her one. Seriously, why not – at some point you have to stop trying to watch their health for the future and just let them ride. If I make it to the magical age of 90 I will spend my last years living on Reeses Peanut Butter Cups and black tea so sweet it would cause cavities in statues. So we let the hamster eat grilled cheese and veggies and rice and chicken and whatever else we were having for dinner. And she would eat whatever we gave her, too – she’d grab it eventually (we’re pretty sure she was blind at the end) and sit there chewing and doddering. She actually doddered.
We had a simple burial service out in the rain this morning. Godspeed, little one, and may you find nibblies wherever you are.
On the plus side, though, we now have two rabbits.
There is a little black one named Milo after the main character of The Phantom Tollbooth, which the girls and I are reading together now. He’s a tiny little thing with short stubby ears and soulful brown eyes, and his great joy in life is melting into a puddle in the arms of a child. Can’t fault him for that, I suppose. The other is a larger brown one named Hazel, who is about twice the size of Milo and has a ruff around her neck but otherwise looks much the same.
They like to come inside and hop about the living room, much to Mithra’s dismay, although so far she hasn’t tried to eat either one of them.
Milo and Hazel are part of Lauren’s 4H project this year, although neither of them is likely to be a show rabbit. Hazel is too old and fat to show (which, frankly, makes me sympathize with her a bit more than I otherwise would), and Milo is not a purebred bunny with papers.
In other news, there are purebred bunnies with papers.
So they live in a big wooden hutch out by the garage, and so far they seem to be doing just fine. We’ll see how that goes come wintertime.
Lots going on around here.
Saturday, September 17, 2011
What We Did On Our Summer Vacation
When we weren’t dodging Nature’s fury, we had a pretty good vacation.
Yes, the last bit of August was time for our mostly-annual trek out to the wilds of the Jersey shore, where sand, family and beautiful Cape May awaited us. Cape May is the kind of place where you can bring kids and know that they will not have to deal with anyone who looks like they fell off an MTV promotional tour or who will try to sell them timeshares – it’s a nice place that way. My parents started renting a house there for a week in the summers about a decade ago, and it’s become something we all look forward to immensely. We head in from Wisconsin and my brother and his family come down from New York. The cousins get to hang out with each other and do all the beach things that one does amidst sand and surf, and the adults get to talk and have margaritas.
Win.
Even before the various outside crises we knew it was going to be an abbreviated trip, though. Kim’s new post as Interim Dean is a time-crunch of a job so we would have to cut the beginning of the vacation fairly short, and since the house we like was only available in the last full week of August (darn those owners wanting to use their own house all summer…) and the girls started school in Wisconsin on September 1, that meant cutting the end fairly close as well.
Among other things, the practical upshot of that was that there was a list of friends whom we wanted to see but didn’t even bother telling we were headed out since we knew there wasn’t going to be time to see them anyway. Next time we’re out, we’ll have to correct that.
Still, it was worth it. We did get to see a couple of our friends, and of course we spent a week with various configurations of family down at the shore, and that’s a good thing no matter how you slice it.
We arrived on Saturday August 20th via the Cape May – Lewes ferry, a novelty for us, which we had never done before. Kim likes new things – she truly believes that anything done twice intentionally qualifies as a rut, which amazes me since I find that sort of repetition comforting. Between us we make a whole person. And this time she won, which turned out to be a good thing since the ferry was rather a fun experience. You drive down to central Delaware and then onto a boat that’s roughly the size of an office block, and for 90 minutes you steam across the Delaware Bay toward New Jersey. It made for a suitably dramatic entrance, we thought.
This was moored right next to the ferry in Lewes, which made it even cooler.
We were eager to get down to the beach on Sunday, since that is what we were there to do. Well, that and drink margaritas, but since you can’t bring those onto the beach we save them for after. We are responsible citizens of Cape May in this regard. Plus, if you drink all the margaritas down at the beach you will likely not be able to find your way back to the house – not the tequila-intensive way I make margaritas, anyway. You’ll stagger about for a while until you fall over in the sand and fry until you either die or look like a House Majority Leader or, possibly both (does anyone actually have conclusive proof that that man is not undead?), whereas back at the house afterward you can drink all the margaritas you want and you’re already there! And if you fall over, you’re still already there!
It’s as if there were a plan already in place...
So we gathered up the troops, packed our supplies, hoisted anchor and invaded the Philippines.
No, it just felt like we did. We do not travel light, no we do not. For one thing, you never know when you just might want that one more little item and since the number of one more little items in the world is potentially infinite, well, you can see the problem. And for another thing, even when we limit ourselves to necessities such as beach umbrellas, they’re still heavy. At least ours are. The blue one in the photo below dates back to the Truman Administration and is made from sailcloth, oak and wrought iron. This turned out to be a good thing, though, since Sunday’s sustained winds were somewhere around 30mph and were sufficient to turn the more modern, space-age umbrellas (mylar, aluminum, and soap bubbles) into pretty little kites attached to spears, at least one of which managed to stab poor Cousin Josh in the leg. He is a brave young man, though, and was back out in the waves before you knew it.
We had an excellent time, wind notwithstanding. The girls picked up right where they left off with their boogie boards and their cousins, getting the most out of every beach day, and when it wasn’t a hurricane it was actually beautiful out there.
The adults also picked up right were we left off, with our conversations and our general willingness to let the rest of the world go hang while we relaxed.
For lunches we decided to skip the pretence of being at all concerned with our health and just go get food from Hot Dog Tommy’s little hole in the wall walk-up window just off the beach. The girls had been jonesing for Tommy Dogs all summer long, and you know what? Nutrition is for normal life. For vacations, there are only Tommy Dogs. I enjoyed my Buffal Dogs (all beef dogs with bleu cheese and hot sauce, no onions – “hold the O” as Tommy says) and my tribal-sized can of Arizona Iced Tea, and I can cut back on sugar, salt and fat now that I’m back in the more mundane normality that is my life.
Well I could, you know. It’s entirely possible. It is.
We hit most of our favorite spots while we were there. We went mini-golfing one night, for example, or at least the kids did. The grown-ups mostly watched, as otherwise we’d still be there, somewhere around the 14th hole, arguing over whose turn it was and yes she DID hit my golf ball with hers and why CAN’T I use the club as a cue stick? We also went to Sunset Beach, where the old concrete ship went down in the 1920s. The light is always so nice there.
There were some strange moments on this trip.
For one thing, I spent one morning getting my hair cut, which is not something I usually do on vacations. But everyone – even me – agreed that my hair had gotten too long and was approaching “comb-over” status, which I find annoying. So my brother and I went to a barbershop, since a) Keith lives in New York now and thus has a sense of Style, something I will never have no matter where I live, and b) a barbershop is infinitely to be preferred to a salon when it comes to getting a haircut without too many fripperies. There are too many guys named Serge in this world who own salons and want to design your hair and not enough guys named Tony who work in barbershops and want to cut it. We ended up with Tony’s wife or mother or possibly great aunt, a woman whose New Jersey accent could have sliced open soda cans at thirty paces and whose voice sounded like three miles of unpaved road. But between her and Keith I came away with a much more reasonable looking, if much less covered, head. I can live with that.
The other thing that struck me as odd was that at some point there must have been an Austin Healey convention, since all of the sudden the streets were swarming with dozens of impractical little British sports cars, all of them bearing Quebec license plates for some reason. I will pause here to let you, the reader, guess the gender and approximate vintage of every one of the drivers I saw. Sometimes you just want to grab people by the shirt collar and yell at them – “Don’t! Confirm! My! Stereotypes!” But so it goes.
On what turned out to be the last day we spent down in Cape May, Kim decided that it would be fun if people went kayaking. The girls were all up for this, as were their cousins Josh and Sara and their father, Keith. And since Lori and I were to remain safely on dry land, we agreed that this was a fine plan. So we made our way over to the kayak rental place (of course there was a kayak rental place in Cape May – don’t be silly) and they got kitted out.
After a smooth launch into the water, off they went.
Apparently a very good time was had by all.
We got home for lunch, and then it was a blur until we suddenly found ourselves back in Philadelphia, waiting for the hurricane, as described a few posts ago.
Once the hurricane got sorted out it was time to head back to the nation’s tender midsection. It was just the girls and me on the drive home, and they were troopers. On the way we stopped in Pittsburgh for some O-Fries, a move which is fast becoming a tradition. That’s a medium order of fries, by the way.
We landed at a hotel somewhere in Ohio after that. It was a nice place, I suppose – the train tracks ran right behind it and there was no elevator, but it was clean and it had a pool and that is all the girls care about when it comes to hotels. They spent most of the evening splashing about, since they’d noshed their way across the time zone and weren’t hungry for dinner, but eventually we found a place that served decent food and had paper placemats that we could make into origami objects. I was actually kind of pleased that I remembered how to make those inflatable paper balls that so enlivened my junior high years. Now that Tabitha’s in middle school she’ll need to know things like that.
The next day we were home.
It’s good to be home.
Yes, the last bit of August was time for our mostly-annual trek out to the wilds of the Jersey shore, where sand, family and beautiful Cape May awaited us. Cape May is the kind of place where you can bring kids and know that they will not have to deal with anyone who looks like they fell off an MTV promotional tour or who will try to sell them timeshares – it’s a nice place that way. My parents started renting a house there for a week in the summers about a decade ago, and it’s become something we all look forward to immensely. We head in from Wisconsin and my brother and his family come down from New York. The cousins get to hang out with each other and do all the beach things that one does amidst sand and surf, and the adults get to talk and have margaritas.
Win.
Even before the various outside crises we knew it was going to be an abbreviated trip, though. Kim’s new post as Interim Dean is a time-crunch of a job so we would have to cut the beginning of the vacation fairly short, and since the house we like was only available in the last full week of August (darn those owners wanting to use their own house all summer…) and the girls started school in Wisconsin on September 1, that meant cutting the end fairly close as well.
Among other things, the practical upshot of that was that there was a list of friends whom we wanted to see but didn’t even bother telling we were headed out since we knew there wasn’t going to be time to see them anyway. Next time we’re out, we’ll have to correct that.
Still, it was worth it. We did get to see a couple of our friends, and of course we spent a week with various configurations of family down at the shore, and that’s a good thing no matter how you slice it.
We arrived on Saturday August 20th via the Cape May – Lewes ferry, a novelty for us, which we had never done before. Kim likes new things – she truly believes that anything done twice intentionally qualifies as a rut, which amazes me since I find that sort of repetition comforting. Between us we make a whole person. And this time she won, which turned out to be a good thing since the ferry was rather a fun experience. You drive down to central Delaware and then onto a boat that’s roughly the size of an office block, and for 90 minutes you steam across the Delaware Bay toward New Jersey. It made for a suitably dramatic entrance, we thought.
This was moored right next to the ferry in Lewes, which made it even cooler.
We were eager to get down to the beach on Sunday, since that is what we were there to do. Well, that and drink margaritas, but since you can’t bring those onto the beach we save them for after. We are responsible citizens of Cape May in this regard. Plus, if you drink all the margaritas down at the beach you will likely not be able to find your way back to the house – not the tequila-intensive way I make margaritas, anyway. You’ll stagger about for a while until you fall over in the sand and fry until you either die or look like a House Majority Leader or, possibly both (does anyone actually have conclusive proof that that man is not undead?), whereas back at the house afterward you can drink all the margaritas you want and you’re already there! And if you fall over, you’re still already there!
It’s as if there were a plan already in place...
So we gathered up the troops, packed our supplies, hoisted anchor and invaded the Philippines.
No, it just felt like we did. We do not travel light, no we do not. For one thing, you never know when you just might want that one more little item and since the number of one more little items in the world is potentially infinite, well, you can see the problem. And for another thing, even when we limit ourselves to necessities such as beach umbrellas, they’re still heavy. At least ours are. The blue one in the photo below dates back to the Truman Administration and is made from sailcloth, oak and wrought iron. This turned out to be a good thing, though, since Sunday’s sustained winds were somewhere around 30mph and were sufficient to turn the more modern, space-age umbrellas (mylar, aluminum, and soap bubbles) into pretty little kites attached to spears, at least one of which managed to stab poor Cousin Josh in the leg. He is a brave young man, though, and was back out in the waves before you knew it.
We had an excellent time, wind notwithstanding. The girls picked up right where they left off with their boogie boards and their cousins, getting the most out of every beach day, and when it wasn’t a hurricane it was actually beautiful out there.
The adults also picked up right were we left off, with our conversations and our general willingness to let the rest of the world go hang while we relaxed.
For lunches we decided to skip the pretence of being at all concerned with our health and just go get food from Hot Dog Tommy’s little hole in the wall walk-up window just off the beach. The girls had been jonesing for Tommy Dogs all summer long, and you know what? Nutrition is for normal life. For vacations, there are only Tommy Dogs. I enjoyed my Buffal Dogs (all beef dogs with bleu cheese and hot sauce, no onions – “hold the O” as Tommy says) and my tribal-sized can of Arizona Iced Tea, and I can cut back on sugar, salt and fat now that I’m back in the more mundane normality that is my life.
Well I could, you know. It’s entirely possible. It is.
We hit most of our favorite spots while we were there. We went mini-golfing one night, for example, or at least the kids did. The grown-ups mostly watched, as otherwise we’d still be there, somewhere around the 14th hole, arguing over whose turn it was and yes she DID hit my golf ball with hers and why CAN’T I use the club as a cue stick? We also went to Sunset Beach, where the old concrete ship went down in the 1920s. The light is always so nice there.
There were some strange moments on this trip.
For one thing, I spent one morning getting my hair cut, which is not something I usually do on vacations. But everyone – even me – agreed that my hair had gotten too long and was approaching “comb-over” status, which I find annoying. So my brother and I went to a barbershop, since a) Keith lives in New York now and thus has a sense of Style, something I will never have no matter where I live, and b) a barbershop is infinitely to be preferred to a salon when it comes to getting a haircut without too many fripperies. There are too many guys named Serge in this world who own salons and want to design your hair and not enough guys named Tony who work in barbershops and want to cut it. We ended up with Tony’s wife or mother or possibly great aunt, a woman whose New Jersey accent could have sliced open soda cans at thirty paces and whose voice sounded like three miles of unpaved road. But between her and Keith I came away with a much more reasonable looking, if much less covered, head. I can live with that.
The other thing that struck me as odd was that at some point there must have been an Austin Healey convention, since all of the sudden the streets were swarming with dozens of impractical little British sports cars, all of them bearing Quebec license plates for some reason. I will pause here to let you, the reader, guess the gender and approximate vintage of every one of the drivers I saw. Sometimes you just want to grab people by the shirt collar and yell at them – “Don’t! Confirm! My! Stereotypes!” But so it goes.
On what turned out to be the last day we spent down in Cape May, Kim decided that it would be fun if people went kayaking. The girls were all up for this, as were their cousins Josh and Sara and their father, Keith. And since Lori and I were to remain safely on dry land, we agreed that this was a fine plan. So we made our way over to the kayak rental place (of course there was a kayak rental place in Cape May – don’t be silly) and they got kitted out.
After a smooth launch into the water, off they went.
Apparently a very good time was had by all.
We got home for lunch, and then it was a blur until we suddenly found ourselves back in Philadelphia, waiting for the hurricane, as described a few posts ago.
Once the hurricane got sorted out it was time to head back to the nation’s tender midsection. It was just the girls and me on the drive home, and they were troopers. On the way we stopped in Pittsburgh for some O-Fries, a move which is fast becoming a tradition. That’s a medium order of fries, by the way.
We landed at a hotel somewhere in Ohio after that. It was a nice place, I suppose – the train tracks ran right behind it and there was no elevator, but it was clean and it had a pool and that is all the girls care about when it comes to hotels. They spent most of the evening splashing about, since they’d noshed their way across the time zone and weren’t hungry for dinner, but eventually we found a place that served decent food and had paper placemats that we could make into origami objects. I was actually kind of pleased that I remembered how to make those inflatable paper balls that so enlivened my junior high years. Now that Tabitha’s in middle school she’ll need to know things like that.
The next day we were home.
It’s good to be home.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Why I Will Not Be Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11
I remember where I was that day. Of course I do. Who over the age of 20 doesn’t? This was the most recent Pearl Harbor, the newest JFK Assassination – if you were alive and old enough to know about the world beyond your friends and neighborhood, you remember what happened. I’ve been through three of those events in my 45 years, and I’m not sure why the other two qualified for that level but they did. I remember where I was when I found out that Reagan had been shot. I remember where I was when the Challenger blew up. And I remember 9/11.
It was a tragedy of mind-numbing proportions. The slaughter of the innocent always is.
About two weeks after the events I sent out a survey to about a hundred people – basically the mailing list for the updates on my first blog, which was a more focused and less frequent affair than this one. Where were you when you found out? When did you realize it was so serious? What did you do the rest of the day? What sticks with you from that day more than anything else? Basic questions, focused on the specifics of human experience.
Comedy can be broad. Tragedy is always specific.
I got an overwhelming number of responses to that survey, and rather than send out a compilation as an email – as was my original intent – I posted them as a web page. It’s still out there, if you know where to look. I found myself reading it last week.
It is still surprisingly raw.
The final question of the survey was something along the lines of “What do you think you will say to someone thirty years from now when they ask you what it was like?” As with the other questions, the answers were thoughtful. What impressed me, though, was that they were also surprisingly hopeful – there were a great many responses that talked about how the US would be changed forever, how it brought us together, how there would be a silver lining even in a cloud that dark.
It didn’t work out that way.
The innocent dead were immediately put to work for partisan advantage. They were used to justify not one war – a war that was at least related to their deaths – but two, the second being that Freudian farce of a conflict in Iraq, where the Honorable Runner-Up in the White House sought to outdo what his daddy had tried a decade earlier. They were made the excuse to gut the Constitution and the rights that the Founding Fathers had placed in there for the protection of the citizens, ironic since the Honorable Runner-Up in the White House made such a big deal about how the innocent dead were murdered because of our freedoms and then went to such great lengths to take those freedoms away. And perhaps most shamefully, they were prostituted as political campaign fodder.
I think the final straw for me was when the Honorable Runner-Up in the White House came out with a campaign commercial for his second try at winning a majority of the votes, a commercial that prominently featured the New York City firefighters marching bravely to their duties and their deaths, as if their heroism and sacrifice somehow justified his sordid ambitions.
There are things that are sacred.
There are things that cross lines that should never be crossed. There are things that are unforgivable. There are things that cannot be undone. “Have you no decency, sir?” Robert Welch once asked another political opportunist, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
And the answer, on both occasions, was no.
The honored dead are not honored by being made into tawdry political symbols. They weren’t there to be heroes. They were just going about their lives and were murdered in the name of political fanaticism. And we responded with fanaticism of our own.
I am not convinced that sinking to that level was the proper response.
Nor am I convinced that the use of the innocent dead as political cudgels to beat dissenters and enforce a narrow, ideologically charged patriotism is worthy of commemoration.
Ten years later I remain sickened by the horror of that tragedy. And I am no less sickened by the way that tragedy has been twisted to suit our increasingly fanatic, ideologically extreme partisan politics. We have not changed forever, nor for the better, and reading the answers to my survey today, a decade after the fact, was an exercise in lost hopes and the bitter taste of opportunities squandered.
I will remember the innocent dead on this day – the specific individuals, men and women with families, with stories, with lives brutally cut short in the name of other people’s extremism. I will remember them and I will mourn.
But I will not commemorate this political monstrosity called “9/11.”
No, I will not.
It was a tragedy of mind-numbing proportions. The slaughter of the innocent always is.
About two weeks after the events I sent out a survey to about a hundred people – basically the mailing list for the updates on my first blog, which was a more focused and less frequent affair than this one. Where were you when you found out? When did you realize it was so serious? What did you do the rest of the day? What sticks with you from that day more than anything else? Basic questions, focused on the specifics of human experience.
Comedy can be broad. Tragedy is always specific.
I got an overwhelming number of responses to that survey, and rather than send out a compilation as an email – as was my original intent – I posted them as a web page. It’s still out there, if you know where to look. I found myself reading it last week.
It is still surprisingly raw.
The final question of the survey was something along the lines of “What do you think you will say to someone thirty years from now when they ask you what it was like?” As with the other questions, the answers were thoughtful. What impressed me, though, was that they were also surprisingly hopeful – there were a great many responses that talked about how the US would be changed forever, how it brought us together, how there would be a silver lining even in a cloud that dark.
It didn’t work out that way.
The innocent dead were immediately put to work for partisan advantage. They were used to justify not one war – a war that was at least related to their deaths – but two, the second being that Freudian farce of a conflict in Iraq, where the Honorable Runner-Up in the White House sought to outdo what his daddy had tried a decade earlier. They were made the excuse to gut the Constitution and the rights that the Founding Fathers had placed in there for the protection of the citizens, ironic since the Honorable Runner-Up in the White House made such a big deal about how the innocent dead were murdered because of our freedoms and then went to such great lengths to take those freedoms away. And perhaps most shamefully, they were prostituted as political campaign fodder.
I think the final straw for me was when the Honorable Runner-Up in the White House came out with a campaign commercial for his second try at winning a majority of the votes, a commercial that prominently featured the New York City firefighters marching bravely to their duties and their deaths, as if their heroism and sacrifice somehow justified his sordid ambitions.
There are things that are sacred.
There are things that cross lines that should never be crossed. There are things that are unforgivable. There are things that cannot be undone. “Have you no decency, sir?” Robert Welch once asked another political opportunist, “At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
And the answer, on both occasions, was no.
The honored dead are not honored by being made into tawdry political symbols. They weren’t there to be heroes. They were just going about their lives and were murdered in the name of political fanaticism. And we responded with fanaticism of our own.
I am not convinced that sinking to that level was the proper response.
Nor am I convinced that the use of the innocent dead as political cudgels to beat dissenters and enforce a narrow, ideologically charged patriotism is worthy of commemoration.
Ten years later I remain sickened by the horror of that tragedy. And I am no less sickened by the way that tragedy has been twisted to suit our increasingly fanatic, ideologically extreme partisan politics. We have not changed forever, nor for the better, and reading the answers to my survey today, a decade after the fact, was an exercise in lost hopes and the bitter taste of opportunities squandered.
I will remember the innocent dead on this day – the specific individuals, men and women with families, with stories, with lives brutally cut short in the name of other people’s extremism. I will remember them and I will mourn.
But I will not commemorate this political monstrosity called “9/11.”
No, I will not.
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