Of Big Boys, Bad Boys, Little Boys, and Life

"Men have forgotten this truth," said the fox. "But you must not forget it. You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed."

My stepson, bless his heart, has had a hard time of it of late. He is, as we used to say in the Air Force, "all thrust and no vector" (used in its single-dimensional if non-lexicographic sense of direction only without magnitude). He cannot control himself. He is not angry or malicious, mind you.  That phase passed long ago, the inevitable result of a world turned upside down by divorce.  No, this version of non-existent self-control is more driven by curiosity, over-abundant energy, above-average intelligence, and a disposition to disregard all boundaries of space and property.  I awoke Saturday morning to find his bed empty and the tiny man downstairs, in the study, where he knows he's not to be, playing on not one, but two computers, both verboten. His repeated random keystrokes and who knows what else had vexed mine right into the blue screen of death. Not an auspicious beginning to the day, and it went downhill, in the Tiny Man's case, from there right through Sunday evening when, after dealing out consequence as dispassionately as I was capable of for nearly 36 straight hours without much detectable effect on behavior, I was granted parole to go see a movie in the interest of my sanity.

The movie is not important.  Important is that, as I was putting on my coat to go, having had mostly only attention in the form of one consequence after another for the better part of two days, around the corner came a tiny man with a surprisingly flattering request: "Can I come with you?"  "No son.  Good night."

A brief exchange, it's true, but weighty.  I needed a break.  He needed . . . me.  Never mind that other than a brief six-hour respite at work I had been on his case like white on rice for two days. I had thought he'd be as glad for the break in constant surveillance as I, but no.  Nor did it change this morning.  Out of bed nearly an hour before he should be, he was sent back to it, but chose instead, to avail himself of the pre-dawn darkness to rummage his sister's room while she slumbered.  Busted yet again, his last sight of me this morning was exasperatedly tucking him in, kissing his brow, and closing the door to his room.

Fast forward through a long day at work where sometimes even the grown ups, when they don't get their way, are a trial more akin to rearing a four-year-old.  Fast forward to bed time, and a calm conversation about consequence, about why again tonight there will be no Wii for the young hacker.  And once there, freeze frame.  Freeze on a bundle of four-year-old boy sitting in a half-century of lap, cradled, protected, nurtured, and loved, and listening calmly, and answering correctly when asked, "Why is there no Wii for you tonight son?"
"Because I went in the study and I played on the pooters."
"And why did you lose blanky this morning?"
"Cause I was in sissy's room playing wif her stuff."
"And who has control of how these things go son?"
"I do."
"That's right."
"I got blanky back."
"So I see.  For putting away all your clean clothes in their right drawers I hear.  Very good, son.  I'm proud of you."
"Will you carwy me downstairs?"
"Carry you?"
"Please."
"Okay.  Let's go."

Zoom in to angelic face of featherweight boy bundle snuggled into broad, man shoulders with blanky for pillow, arms around neck, tiny head tucked against bearded chin.  I thought I might melt.  The import, really, of "Will you carwy me?" is simply this: "I'd prefer my feet never hit the floor again tonight.  I like here."  Velcro.  Even the squirms mostly worn out of him by a rambunctious day.

So down we go to rocking chair in living room.  Man, boy, blanket, BlackBerry.  Why BlackBerry?  Simple: music.  For the next thirty minutes, we snuggled and surfed.  We worked our way through a series of music videos on YouTube, tiny hands holding the boy-sized screen as we worked our way through songs, me singing with most of them, each ending in the same refrain: "Can we do anover one?"  Half an hour like this until, eyelids droopy, we headed up to brush teeth, don jammies, and be tucked in for the night.

Who needs whom most at the end of such a day is never really clear, not really even relevant, perhaps not even answerable.  We empty our boy and man pockets on a common table: security, vulnerability, strength, fragility, age, youth, wisdom, innocence, calculation, impetuousness, anticipation, trust, and love.  It works, this sharing.  He's tall already, but in these moments he fits still in the crook of an arm.  Safe.  Calm.  At home.

What I offer below is a list of those videos, that music.  Soundtrack of a life.  Witness to the wisdom of a license plate: love wins.

Life with a "Foodie"

Being married to a self-proclaimed "foodie" is a beautiful thing.  I hardly know where to begin.

Eating Out
It's a given that we overfeed ourselves in America.  If I were up to full blogging speed, I'd attach one or two links to that statement as proof.  But I flash-blog these days, so you're on your own.  You know it's true though.  As did the authors of The 9-Inch Diet, (which I pretty much read cover-to-cover standing in Barnes & Noble one evening).

Anyway, the beauty of life married to a carnivorous foodie, is that we can split almost anything when we're eating out.  I can't think of anything that one of us loves that the other doesn't as well--with the possible exception of blue cheese, for which I've yet to develop any sort of real enthusiasm.  So, knowing that most restaurants tend to overdo portions, we split a lot of main courses.  Result: we enjoy more food in the long run.  We start with two appetizers instead of one, and almost always have room for dessert.

But eating out isn't what inspired tonight's post.

Eating In
We both love to cook.  And on occasion, we even collaborate.  Take tonight for instance.  Take the turnips.  Yes, turnips.  At least two months ago, my better half introduced me to a vegetable that I'd never actually seen on the table.  Sure, I used to pluck one fresh from the field now and then, out quail hunting with Dad and my Uncle Floyd or Cousin Roy, and bite into it raw like an apple, but I don't recall turnips ever making an appearance on the dining room table when I was growing up--growing up smack dab in the middle of fields of turnips, I might add.

I would reach the half-century mark before first seeing them at the dinner table.  Oddly enough, the turnips in question would come from my father's garden.

Whole Foods
I should take a moment here to note how lucky we are to live close enough to my Mom and Dad to see them once a month or so, and to carry back to Richmond, on a regular basis, the fruits of their labor.  In the summer it was tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, potatoes, and some of the sweetest watermelon I've ever eaten.  With the advent of fall, it became pecans and turnips.  Back in late December or early January, I brought home a larger bag of turnips than I thought we could possibly eat, in part because not having grown up eating them, I couldn't imagine exactly how we would eat them.  But Laura does a better job of using everything in the pantry or fridge than anyone I've ever known, myself included--and that's saying something.

She had no more idea what to do with turnips than I, but that didn't stop her from preparing an absolutely delicious dish of them the first week we had them.  I think she baked them.  I say, I think, because by the time tonight rolled around, she could no longer remember.  We just both remembered that we really liked them.

So tonight, two months later, after a really great day of getting things done around the house and in the study--a day that began with an almost three-mile walk with Sydni and finished with a hour at the park with the kids--we tackled dinner.  I say we, but really, I was just the sous-chef.  She'd been thawing chicken most of the day and was busy prepping it for the oven when, digging through the vegetable drawer for a lime I needed for the margaritas I was about to concoct, I came upon the second half of that bag of turnips.  Sure they were two months old, but turnips are one of those foods you can store in the ground itself through the winter months if need be.  These had been in our fridge since their arrival from Mom and Dad's garden, and the elapsed time from ground to veggie drawer, as if it mattered, was probably less than six hours.

From Red Clay to Tawny Port and Cream
"Shall I slice up the turnips for dinner?" I asked.  "Sure."  So I sliced while she tried to remember how she'd made that dish we loved so much, now more than two months into the past.  Drawing a blank, she'd settled on sauteing them.  One Google search later, I confirmed that she was on the right track, and so she started them with a little butter, a little olive oil, some salt and a lid, and set them to simmer.

Now I'm more than a little bit sensitive about anything I'm cooking, and figuring that she is too, I didn't want to mess with what she had going, but as everything neared readiness (there was a pan of green beans simmering in just a little water and a lot of vinegar to round out the colors of the meal) I couldn't resist a little experimentation with a small portion of the turnips.  So I spooned a few of the now tender slices into a smaller omelet pan and added a splash of Tawny Port and another of half-and-half and a little more salt and waited to see what would result.  (I'd have used Madeira if I'd had it, but this was the first time I'd missed it since our arrival here, and the Port seemed a near enough substitute.)  After it had simmered enough to reduce the cream and port to a mere hint of something clinging to the turnip slices, I took the chef de cuisine a bite to sample.  From that bite came blissful blessing to dress the rest of the turnips in the same fashion.

The result will be a staple around here, and the next time we're offered a whole armload of turnips from the overflow of Mom and Dad's garden, instead of taking just half because of not wanting to waste food we're not sure how to prepare, you can bet we'll find room for all the turnips they can spare.

Life with a foodie
The baked chicken was mouth-watering and the green beans, well, let's just say that thanks to me, they had enough vinegar in them to keep the mosquitoes at bay well into July, but I liked them.  All in all, that mirror over the dining room table makes more sense every day. ;-)

So much for flash blogging. ;-)

25 Random Things About My Father

I mentioned once before, just in passing, John Eldredge's claim, in Wild at Heart, that every man is wounded somehow by his father. I implied in that earlier post that such wasn't the case with me. Today, Father's Day, I want to state it outright.

I do not believe I suffered any psychic wounding at the hands of my father, ever.

Honestly, that's no small claim. I've watched other men and their dads. I've watched women and their father's too. I had acquaintances long ago that couldn't return home when they left the Air Force Academy they hated because their fathers told them not to come home if they quit. I had a so much more than friend, who will likely read this, who went there for a year, because her father told her if she would try it for that long, he would foot the bill for college elsewhere--she did; he did not. I've heard fathers say things to children in public that made my heart ache.

I had and have the best father I know. I know a couple more who are right up there with him (my new father-in-law among them), and I have friends who think or thought the same of their fathers. We are lucky people, those of us in this club, and today is a day we celebrate that luck.

Not all that long ago, I posted 25 Random Things About Me. Today, I'm going to take a shot at publishing another 25 about him. Wish me luck.

25 Random Things About My Father

1. He has taken up the drums. At least, he bought a drum set months ago, and for a while at least, he was playing them. This is especially interesting to me because a little less than four years ago, I took drum lessons for a short while. Neither I nor my father knew this about one another, which is a good segue to the next point:
   
2. My father's life has mirrored mine in so many ways that it's genuinely eerie, especially romantically. I could elaborate, but I'm going to leave it at that for now.
3. I suspect my father of being a closet adrenaline junkie. He owned a motorcycle from the time my parents split up until well into his second marriage. And he was, after all, a volunteer fire chief for over a decade.
4. When I left for the Air Force Academy, over three decades ago, the last thing I remember him saying to me as I walked out of Charlotte's Douglas Airport to climb the stairs to a waiting jet, other than, "I love you," is, "If you get there and you don't like it, son, you know you can always come home." It put staying there all on my shoulders. No expectation, no threats, no rebellion value in leaving (not that I ever felt any need to rebel). It made it possible to stay even during the months that I hated it most and seriously thought of leaving. Having options makes almost any task less onerous.
5. In all the years of my youth, he gave me only one spanking I hadn't genuinely earned. That one time, he was acting on misinformation from my Sunday school teacher. I didn't forget, but I didn't really hold it against him either. I just never liked that teacher much after that.
6. I've seen him pitch nearly perfect games of horseshoes. At Five Forks ball park in China Grove, NC, I watched him and Lee Smith, on their way to winning first place in a church league, throw ringer after ringer from one end to the other. It was awe inspiring.
7. He taught me gun safety at an early age, and how to shoot birds on the wing, to drain a rabbit's bladder before putting it in your hunting coat, how to build a rabbit trap, and how to enjoy the beauty of good bird dogs working a field.
8. He also taught me, by example, to think of all men as equals, at least equal in worth and rights, vehemently disdaining all the petty prejudices that so many fathers so sadly wean their children on. The stories in this regard are almost legend and fodder for longer posts at a later date. I'll simply say here that had Harper Lee known him, and if you knew him and her novel, you would think him her model for Atticus Finch.
9. He blames a long tour in Alaska, at Gambell Air Base, on St Lawrence Island, for the early loss of his hair. His seven brothers each kept theirs most of their lives.
10. His children have always come first in his life. Whatever other ambitions he may have had, I truly believe that being a good father was the ruling goal of his existence. God knows, he put up with more, and sacrificed more, for our sake than any other man I know would have.
11. Right behind Atticus Finch, the character from fiction that he is most like would be Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry. He was, for all practical purposes, the unspoken mayor of the small town in which I grew up. Smaller than Mayberry.
12. He can teach anyone to waterski and he was always good at it himself. For the most part, when anyone learned to waterski with us, they learned to slalom, right out of the gate.
13. He plays a wicked game of hopscotch. He always played with us on the shore during our annual vacations at Windy Hill Beach, SC, and I have since played more than a few times with my own daughters.
14. He loves tractors. He may think we haven't caught on to that, but he does. I'm not entirely certain there isn't a frustrated farmer trapped in him somewhere.
    
15. His two greatest shots in golf may have been his hole-in-one and his blind eagle. The hole-in-one was so dead on that it bent the base of the pin going into the hole. In basketball lingo, he "stripped the net." His blind eagle I was there for--a par-four on which he'd hooked the ball into the adjacent fairway, hiding the green from him behind a set of pines dividing the two holes. He hit the ball over the pines on his second shot and into the hole. I found it there. He was still looking everywhere else.
    
16. His dedication to golf during my youth was such that my youngest sister once recited the days of the week as, "Sunday, Monday, Golfday, Wednesday, Thursday . . . " He worked all day on Saturdays until he retired, but only half a day on Tuesdays. He is as good a golf coach as he is a ski coach. I should have tried out for the golf team at the Academy instead of wasting my time with track.
17. He would still like to learn to fly. He says he's let that ambition go, but I think I know better.
18. He can fix or build just about anything.
19. So far as I know, he has never cultivated any of the vices that other men, including myself are prey to. He doesn't swear, drink, or smoke, and yet he doesn't begrudge other men those "pleasures." I think he is simply cautious of the genes he carries, having had a father, grandfather, and more than one brother for whom these things were problems.
20. He is fiercely and poignantly patriotic. I remember him once calling me to the window over our kitchen sink, pointing to the flag flying at the fire station he helped found about a quarter mile away, and saying, "Isn't that beautiful?"
21. In our family business, he was all about Total Quality Management and focusing on the customer long before TQM became a watchword for the rest of the world. I remember trying to figure out what the fuss was about when the Air Force tried to institute TQM because I had always thought those principals were common knowledge. I've learned better since.
22. He is a true gentleman--gentle and yet fiercely strong. He is always polite. He opens my stepmother's car door, holds her chair, helps her with her coat.
    
23. He's more or less ambidextrous. He plays sports left-handed, yet he writes right-handed. It makes him very handy to have around when your ball is up against a tree and you really need a left-handed club to swing.
24. What he lacks in distance these days, he more than makes up in accuracy. I've been able to outdrive him since college, but I've never outscored him on the links.
25. I love him. I admire him. And I still want to be like him when I grow up.

Happy Father's Day, Dad.

Freedom March 2009

Over at Bearing False Witness, Joel Newmiller has some poignant thoughts about what it means to go through the days while a loved one is wrongly incarcerated. Joel's father, William, maintains the blog. Joel's brother, William's son, Todd, is in his third year of incarceration for a crime I don't think even the prosecutors believe he really committed.

The Freedom March taking place in a number of states on 27 June 2009 is intended to raise awareness of wrongful convictions in our justice system. You'll find more information at the web site for the march.

Funny, and Not So Much

Two videos arrived today. One I laughed pretty hard at:

Joe Cocker

Translation of Joe Cocker Woodstock Performance

Finally, after 40 years, someone has opened the vault and revealed the answer to a question that has clawed at our brains since the 1969 Woodstock album was released:

What the hell were the lyrics to Joe Cocker's version of 'A Little Help From My Friends'?

He was so wigged-out and loopy on a multitude of drugs, no one has been able to understand his garbled, mush-mouth version......until now!

Click here for the lyrics...

Hat tip: Con

FaceBook

The other, I came to more circuitously. It would be funny, but only if it cheers someone who seems to think I was unclear about a pending change in my own status. (And no, technically, by the video below, I did not break any rules.) Still, one more tip regarding FaceBook:

Adventures in Toilet Training

I had girls the first time around. They had a stay-at-home mom. If there were challenges like this, I didn't know about it.

• Challenges like a young lad marking his territory . . . in the house . . . sister and friends giggling to watch.
• Or stopping in someone else's lush green lawn, midway through a walk around the block with the dog and announcing, "I pee pee!" So we see. Even for a tiny man, the whole world is a urinal.
• Or setting him on the toilet after an announcement that he needs to be there and turning my attention back to something in the kitchen, and minutes later, hearing the rattle of an empty toilet paper roll that I distinctly remembered being a new roll only minutes before. I arrived to find him reaching between his legs to press down the fluffy white mass now swelling in the toilet. As I set him gently on the floor, sort of chuckling to myself, the ever task-focused and thorough young gentleman immediately ran to the back of the toilet and already had both hands on the flush handle as I said, "Noooooooooo!" and reached out to prevent disaster. Jet Li's lighting grab and disassembly of an opponent's 9mm pistol have nothing on the speed with which my thumb flew under the handle to counter the full weight of an almost-three-year-old.
• Or stepping away to give him a moment of privacy the next day, then hearing the flush, and flush, and flush, and flush, and stepping back to find the left hand on the flusher and the right playing in the swirling water. Inquisitive minds want to know: where does all that water go? We buy hand sanitizer like Jay buys milk.

Days, mere days. I have blog fodder coming out my ears; I just don't have time to write.

Temporal Black Holes

Wonder why I haven't blogged much since I moved to Georgia? I have crossed the event horizon of a particularly massive Temporal Black Hole.

Temporal Black Hole

Origin: From Temporal (of or pertaining to time) and Black Hole (an area of space-time with a gravitational field so intense that its escape velocity is equal to or exceeds the speed of light; thus, not even light can escape from it).
First known use: circa 1989 (by someone now known as "Doc," to describe a frequently observed phenomenon in his own life).

-noun
1. An area of space-time with a temporal field so dense that not even a nano-second can be saved from it. (Traditional clocks passing within the event horizon of such a field have been known to spin so fast the hands cannot be seen, or else, fly off, or simply vaporize. Digital clocks continue to count in proper sequence, but so fast that the numbers appear as solid or mildly flickering 8's. An entire day can pass in what seems only seconds.)

2. Any child under the age of five (possibly seven, eight, maybe even nine), regardless of gender.

Sure, he looks harmless enough, but that blur around the edges of the photo is wholly the effect of a warping of space-time. I swear I was holding the camera still.

Another Look at Social Networks

Getting the word out.

From yesterday's Inside Higher Ed:

Not long ago, a woman I know got a phone call from a sibling who reported that one of their sisters had died a few hours earlier. It was painful news, if not unexpected given the sister’s long illness; the call was part of a narrative of grief that had been taking shape for a while. But in telling me about it, she also noted an odd and slightly awkward detail. She’d actually learned the news a bit earlier, on Facebook and via Blackberry, where it had been announced in a “status report” from her sister’s daughter. . . .

An individual’s death is a rip in the social fabric. And communication among those closest to the deceased involves more than transmission of the news. It is process of patching up what remains of that fabric, a reinforcement of bonds. By some implicit rule, we take it as a given that family will get the news before it is available to a world of strangers. Not that things always happen that way, of course, but the exceptions are felt as such.

The full article is here, and it's an interesting consideration of the ways in which our modern communication tools are affecting the rules of social interaction.

Nor is it coincidence that I would open and read that yesterday morning. Despite my recent musings about matching the right information to the right venue, I find that I've failed to do so. A family member was upset at me only yesterday because a major event in my own life that I thought I'd kept her informed on, I apparently hadn't. No death involved, but a milestone of similar magnitude nonetheless. Mea culpa. I learn. I'll do better.

Parents and Facebook

On a related note, I pointed out two months ago that the face of Facebook was aging. A consequence of that has been the issue of how much of a young person's life should be open to the view of his or her parents. Happily, that's never been an issue in our family. From the outset, I've been a part of the social network of my daughters. It was one of the prices of being allowed on the internet from our home.

But for some kids, especially those whose online personas are anything but laudable, the presence of their parents on Facebook has thrown a kink into the normal stretching of the wings that takes place for almost all college students in their first year. I can't imagine conducting myself in such a way that I would have been ashamed for my parents to know what I was up to, nor do I think my daughters have that problem. (Of course, academe being my world, my threshold of shock, my expectations, and my tolerance are all fairly accommodating. The disaster that resulted from my oldest daughter's accepting one of her older relatives as a "friend" wasn't all that funny to anyone but me.) I certainly had plenty of friends in college for whose parents ignorance was bliss. And I know all too well from the use to which I've put Facebook as a college administrator, those online alter egos can be all too telling.

The conflict which often ensues is the topic of the following interesting piece from last night's CBS Evening News. Enjoy.

Update [5/21/09]: I've removed the embedded player because it automatically started the video every time the blog was loaded. If you'd like to view the video, you'll find it here.

Find Me, Friend Me, Follow Me, Connect

It's overly easy these days to lead a more public life than most of us ever dreamed we could, or would, or could or would want to.

Long ago, I copied a saying from Markings, by Dag Hammarskjöld, to the effect that one should live every day so as never to be embarrassed if what you do is published in the newspaper. (If I had the book to hand, I'd quote it, but alas, most all my books are, once again, in boxes.) [Update: if I'd had the book to hand, I'd have realized the quote I was thinking of was from Illusions, by Richard Bach. I knew it was one of the two. Guessed wrong.] Today, much of what we do each minute is published on the internet. Today, we publish it ourselves, through MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter, and so on. And what some people tell of their own lives, and proudly, our parents would have blushed to whisper. We can, if we choose, broadcast our location through GPS-enabled phones, for a few close friends to follow, or for all the world. Don't look for me to do that any time soon.

There's nothing in my life so scandalous or interesting that I would be embarrassed to have it published. (I've tried, for most of my life--not always successfully, I'll admit--to live by Hammarskjöld's advice, and more of it than the snippet above.) But I believe there are occasionally blurred, but mostly distinct lines between the things that would interest the readers of this blog and most of my "Friends" on, say, FaceBook. (Yes. I have a FaceBook account. I have daughters in high school and college. I was the Deputy Inspector General at a four-year college. But, if you're a long-time reader, you know all this.) For my friends and family, it may be enough simply to know that I saw Star Trek last weekend. For many readers of this blog, that event only has significance if I have something to say about the experience. (I will. Be patient.)

My life feeds this blog. Whatever contemplations you find here, whatever insights to human nature, whatever advice on relationships, whatever reviews of food, entertainment, or consumer goods--all those thoughts have their genesis in my life. Yet, my life per se, is not what this blog is about. This blog is about Life in more general terms--Life with a capital L.

All of this, really, is in response to readers whose curiosity was piqued by recent comments about my current travels or upcoming relocation. While this blog is not exactly anonymous--most of its readers know the author in some form, or at least feel that they know enough about the author to properly weigh his words--it has a thin facade of anonymity, or of pseudonymity, that has not fully exhausted its value. If only for myself, I'd like to preserve the illusion that the things I say here, at least sometimes, have a weight of their own, independent of any of the people the author is.

The "Doc" who authors TheyRodeOn, the "Doc" who will not let you escape his reach in freefall, the "Doctor" who lectures from podium and windowsill and makes sleep-deprived cadets stand in their chairs for nodding off in his literature or composition classes, and the friend, father, and brother whose blog some don't know exists are all one and the same and yet not. So, if you want to know what's going on with any one of me, you'll need to pick a level to drill down to, a window to peek in through. The deepest insights will always be here, and sometimes, the root causes as well. The mundane is out there to be had, just not here. Find me, friend me, follow me, connect. The view changes depending on which window you choose. The same heart drives them all.

A Tribute to Moms

Recently, I had the fun of being cc'ed on an exchange between a young mother and her aunt. Today's the perfect day to share that exchange, only slightly altered to protect the innocent. ;-)

First, the aunt sent the following:

Just in case you are having a rough day, here is a stress management technique, recommended in all the latest psychological journals. The funny thing is that it really does work and will make you smile.

Picture yourself lying on your belly on a warm rock that hangs out over a crystal clear stream, and you're naked.

Picture yourself with both your hands dangling in the cool running water.

Birds are sweetly singing in the cool mountain air.

No one knows your secret place.

You are in total seclusion from that hectic place called the world.

The soothing sound of a gentle waterfall fills the air with a cascade of serenity.

The water is so crystal clear that you can easily make out the face of the person you are holding underwater.

There! See? It really does work. You're smiling already.

Funnier still was the response:

I could use this little meditation you sent below, Aunt Libby. Here was my day:

I was angry because I lost a potential client today and it would have been a very nice check. Then I came home, pilled the dog, took the dog with me to get Jack from school because she gets lonely and had been in her kennel all day. She might pee in the house otherwise. I then took Jack and Emma for coffee and flower-buying, got home to find that the dog barfed all over the back of the car (choose your battles) because I gave her the pills on an empty stomach, Jack cried because I was outside cleaning it up, so I brought him out so I could finish without having to deal with his crying. We came inside to cook dinner and do homework. Jack was dancing in circles loudly and I was trying to read a webpage aloud to Emma over all his yelling, then he wet his pants and had to change clothes. He wanted my help only and refused to cooperate with his sister. More yelling, this time, not playful yelling. Naked Jack. Finally Dressed Jack. Dog distressed because Jack was too loud for her to eat in peace and his toys were in the way of her dish. Finally dinner, then outside again. We tied the dog to the porch. Planted flowers with Emma, Emma was dancing around in a panic over ant piles, I was coordinating kids, digging, and spoons (we have no shovels). Meanwhile, the dog knocked over flower pot on front porch and it turns out to be ant-infested. Ants everywhere. Soil everywhere. Plants knocked out of the pot. Bad Husky! In the middle of all of this, Jack peed in his pants AGAIN. He was standing on the porch naked from the waist down and flagging his underwear over his head yelling, "All DRYYYYYYYYYYY!" while neighbors walked by-- one of them was pregnant. I told her, This will be you. We finished planting. Emma went to water the new flowers we planted and got the dog's leash tangled in the hose. In the middle of all of this, I start using "Damn!" and you can imagine why. Untangled the dog, convinced Jack to get his own clean underpants on, took the hose from Emma who wanted to turn this into a Wet and Wild Water Event as opposed to Help Mom Before She Shoots Us Event. Finished watering the plants, cleaned the porch, and restored the pot to an upright position, scolded the dog who took a major clue and found a place to lie down and watch the action, rounded up the kids, walked the dog for her nightly poop. Jack walked holding his penis the entire time and when we ran into a neighbor, moved the grasp from his penis to inside his underwear (he just had on that and a shirt by that point) and proceeded to pull out a massive wad of Husky hair from between his cheeks, I don't know how. I just don't. We made it back to the house, ran the bathwater, children's father called four times in a row because he is a pain in my @#$ and refuses to believe that ONE phone message might actually be enough, Emma had left the shampoo bottle on its side and it congealed in a big sticky mess in the tub, Emma left god-knows-how-many messages for Chris while I am bathing Jack-- (apparently she learns this trait from her father??) kids in bed, Mom tired, dog sacked out in the hallway like she did all the work.

The scary part? This is pretty much EVERY day. Some kind of chaos, every day.

Thank God for Moms! It's a wonder they allowed us to live or didn't just sell us to the highest bidder.

Why My Father is Still My Hero

Almost every young boy's father is his hero. For some, it sadly wears off when they learn to think for themselves. Not for me. And it probably won't for Demitri's son either. I'll offer two videos on this theme today.

House on Fire

The older I get, the more amazed I am by my Dad. The first video comes from an unfortunate structure fire that happened in my home town back in February. The video is long and probably not something you want to sit all the way through, but if you do, notice this: the house is only burning at one end--the fire, if I remember correctly, began in the garage. Wouldn't it have been nice if the firefighters had gone in the house from the end that wasn't on fire and pushed the fire back toward its source? That's what they used to do back in the 1960s and 70s, back when my father was chief of the department he helped create and make one of the very best in the state, probably the country.

But no, in this case, they don't do that. They do two things I used to hear my dad lament so many other departments did back then. First, they start by setting up a stream of water onto the roof. Precious water. Dad learned to fight fire back when hydrants were rare. The water you brought was the water you had, and you certainly didn't waste that water by soaking down the one feature of every house dedicated to keeping water out--the roof. Secondly, they attack the fire from the burning end. That's intuitive. See fire, spray water on it! So the instinct goes. But wait. Imagine if they'd gone in from the other end, protecting what hadn't burned yet, and forcing the fire back whence it had come. Novel idea? Not during Dad's day. That's how they did it. That's how they saved more homes than some nearby paid departments. You'll find the video and article here. And you can watch and cringe as they herd the fire from the buring end right out the other side.

Lord of the Dance

The second video comes from Britain's Got Talent. It'll start your day with a smile. And the embedding was disabled for it, but you'll find it here. It's worth a watch. Enjoy.

Viewer Discretion Advised

The following subject matter is not appropriate for all audiences. If you are tender of heart, go elsewhere today. I mean that.

How soulless and perfunctory and heartbreaking and final is the language that ends a union, even read aloud by a gentle and compassionate female magistrate (thus complying, at least in some more limited interpretation of the language than ever was meant, with the pastor's proscription that "no man put asunder" those whom God has joined):

This matter was reviewed by the court on 4-17-09.
Petitioner appeared in person. Co-Petitioner appeared in person.
The Court has considered the testimony and evidence presented.
The Court has considered any Financial Statements filed and makes the following findings and orders:
1. The Court has jurisdiction over the parties because: The parties filed jointly on ____.
2. At least one party was domiciled in Colorado for more than 90 days before the Petition was filed.
3. At least 90 days have passed since the Court acquired jurisdiction over the Respondent or Co-Petitioner.
4. The marriage between the parties is irretrievably broken.
5. The Separation Agreement between the parties is found to be not unconscionable as to support, maintenance, and division of property, and is incorporated herein.
6. All provisions in the parenting plan regarding the children are in the best interests of the children, including residence, allocation of parental responsibility (including decision-making responsibilities and parenting time), and any other orders necessary to effectuate the best interests of the children.
The Court therefore orders:
The marriage is dissolved and a Decree of Dissolution of Marriage is entered.
Each party shall perform all of the applicable provisions of the separation agreement or permanent orders.
The Separation Agreement filed on ____ is incorporated into this Decree.
The Parenting Plan filed on ____ is incorporated into the Decree.
Any Support Order entered will become part of this Decree.

It is signed and dated and recorded and it is done.

Beginnings are all hope and promise; endings, all sadness and loose ends. And no matter how inevitable it was or at what point it became so, still, Brian Turner's poem, "Sadiq," is all I can think of today.

It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more. -Sa'di

It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in a desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.

Spend Some Quality Time with Random Thoughts

Busy weekend unplugged. At the DZ yesterday and this morning--spent the night in the bunkhouse. I'm gettin' too old for that.

Jumped three times yesterday and made what was probably the only load this morning before the winds picked up. Last night's excitement was the ladder truck coming out to get a jumper out of a tree. The jump before that, she was with me. She landed in the middle of the student pit and I have the video to prove it. Her jump on the sunset load was her final checkout jump. I don't remember there being a "tree landing" block on the A-license card, but if there were, she could check it off now. :-D She was bruised but still smiling!

When the winds canxed us today, I left early to swing by and say hello to my mother on the way back to Charleston. Watched a little of the race and heard the best line of the day. Originally, it was going to be the sole content of this post as the Quote of the Day, but then I was afraid of what it might imply without some backstory. At any rate, here it is, as heard during a commercial break:

"Spend some quality time with Viagra dot com."

Right. I didn't know you could have that meaningful a relationship with a web site. I'll just leave that there and head to bed. I'm still jet lagged from springing forward. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Snow Day, Inside and Out

Life is about choices, about balancing what we want with what we need, what and whom we will be near with what and whom we will miss.

Missing my daughter in Colorado is a constant ache, a dull throb like that of a tooth that you walk around with your tongue over to protect. It might be different if she had reached the age to fly the nest and left for college, but instead, the nest disintegrated around her, and with all the other changes in the world last year, her father retired from one job and came to South Carolina to take another. Being apart was a given. Where I would be was the choice--somewhere in this country, or in another land, half a globe away.

But there is balance. That throb of missing one daughter is constant, but on the other side of the scale, I am in the same time zone with almost everyone else that I so dearly love. I see her older sister every few weeks, one way or another. I even see the younger every six weeks or so, sometimes more often, sometimes a little less. There is Facebook and MySpace and text and e-mail and video messaging, but bear hugs and butterfly kisses don't quite translate through those things.

What brought all this on today was seeing photos in The Salisbury Post of the snow in the neighborhood of my childhood home. Those photos reminded me how glad I am to be here, in the South, on this side of the world where most of my heart resides. Originally, that had been the topic I intended to post. Funny how the truth outs itself. The joy is pure and transporting, and instantly balanced by the throb of an absence that will never completely fade, for either of us I expect. I look at the scenes of snow, think of the gray skies covering a world that seems to light itself from the bottom up, and think, "She'd like this . . . but her head would be awfully cold today." (That would be because she took part in a benefit for cancer at her school, and is now sporting the hairstyle of Natalie Portman in V for Vendetta.)

I drove back from Georgia through that snow on Sunday night and into Monday morning. It's the first time the Jeep has been in 4WD since Colorado, but it was in that mode for well over an hour during that trip. I chose to come the southern route, through Athens and Augusta on US-78 rather than through Greenville on I-85 and I-26. It was, so far as I could tell from the news yesterday, a good decision. Though the major shutdown of the interstate appears to have occurred slightly north of my route, it could just as easily have been me out there stuck for seven hours. Surface roads don't have that problem. You can always go around. But stuck on an interstate is stuck. And by driving late that night, I avoided the only real obstacle a 4WD Jeep Grand Cherokee outfitted with fresh, new tires would face: other drivers. In all, the alternate route and snow together added less than an hour to the trip, and was, actually, rather beautiful.

As for what inspired this post, you can see a gallery of photos from readers of The Charlotte Observer here. (The Salisbury Post is closer to home and has better photos, but is too worried about their copyright to post images of sufficient quality to even be enjoyable on the gallery. "Buy this photo" teases one button on their site. Well, if I could see it, I might be tempted, but . . .)

Here are a couple of the better ones from the Observer. Enjoy.

Hopping Around

Blogging will be light for a few days. I'm on the road. In Colorado to hear my daughter sing tonight with her high school's jazz band. Should be fun.

I'll be busy for at least 24 hours trying to keep my foot out of my mouth, or get it back out. So it goes.

25 Random Things

I was tagged for this exercise by Barry and by Becky, and blog-bud Buck's are up as well. So here goes. Here are the instructions (this will have a life both on the blog and on FaceBook, where both tags and the exercise originated):

Rules: Once you've been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it's because I want to know more about you.

(To do this, go to “NOTES” under tabs on your "PROFILE" page (you may have to add the tab by clicking on the + sign), click on "Compose New Message" and paste these instructions in the body of the note, type your 25 random things, tag 25 people (in the right hand corner of the app) then click publish.)

25 Random Things About Me. Here goes:

1. Like most military aviators, I have a call sign. It's "Doc." Most of my skydiving friends don't even know my first name. Most of my non-skydiving friends have never heard of Doc. It's still funny to me to watch either group say, "Who?" when someone refers to me by the name they're unfamiliar with.
2. When I sneeze, I'm pretty sure the neighbors' (upstairs and through the side wall) china rattles. I know that you can hear me from at least one car back--my family makes a point of reminding me.
3. I shave with a mug and a brush. Back in the late 70's, hot lather dispensers were the newest gadgets. I've had hot lather virtually every shave since the first time I ever pretended with a plastic razor and Dad handed me down his brush. Some things technology can't improve.
   
4. But whipped cream out of a can is just fine. That I've been known to mainline.
5. The last time I wore my uniform was the day I gave my last final, last semester at the Citadel. If it stays the last time except for some future official ceremony, I will not be sorry. Thirty-one years is long enough.
6. I make kick-a** guacamole. It's the one real debt I owe my former mother-in-law. "People mess it up by complicating it." I complicated it tonight with cilantro, jalapeno, and powdered red savina peppers--but those are merely tonight's enhancements to the basic recipe Peggy taught me and that I've treasured for 25 years.
7. I haven't read anyone else's 25 things because I wanted mine to be pure. I'm looking forward to that later tonight.
8. I've performed onstage as "Curly" for two production runs of Oklahoma: Goldsboro, NC, in 1985, and Merced, CA, in 1987.
9. The funniest opening to an essay I think I've ever read was, "The subject of my S. A. is . . ." I don't remember anything from it after that. I was sitting in the auditorium watching others audition for Oklahoma when I graded it, and watching my future wife lose her role as Laurie by merely reading Ado Annie's part. She was freakin' awesome. The producer looked back at me from one row ahead, and I just said, "I know, I know. Now I'll have to kiss some other girl onstage." :-D
   
10. And in 1985, after moving to Merced and taking a role as a member of the chorus in a three-weekend run of Camelot (because I'd had the musical memorized since age seven and by the time I arrived in town, auditions were over and the principal roles filled), I filled in the second weekend as Lancelot because the principal had laryngitis. I had six hours to rehearse. I never missed a line.
11. I am not gay. Mom liked musicals.
12. I serenaded Tammy Bost with "If Ever I Would Leave You" at the ripe old age of seven, while her older brother and sister held her captive. I was a sucker for a pretty face from a very young age. Someone should have warned me.
13. I was 27 years old before I learned that my grandmother took her own life and older still before I really understood why Mom liked Camelot in particular.
14. My father is the closest thing to King Arthur I will ever know, and a better man than I expect to ever be.
15. The best grade I ever earned on an academic assignment was for my final paper in a technical writing class at the Academy. It was on hunting with a bird dog. The instructor put an A in the middle of the last page and plusses out to the margin. I think he liked it.
16. I believe in destiny,
    
17. because I've rolled a Spitfire with the top down,
18. thirteen days after cartwheeling an aircraft through the treetops.
19. And I've been struck by a water mocassin (leaving only two perfect holes, a slight scar and bragging rights, but no venom),
20. while I was trudging through a swamp to find the main canopy I'd cut away below a thousand feet less than an hour earlier. But I'm still here.
    
21. I had the highest IQ among those tested in my high school class. I was tested for admission to the Cullowhee Experience in 1974 because Ms. Strawser said, "I knew you had to be a genius because you have no common sense at all." At the time, that was accurate.
22. I met most of my best male friends in high school because we were pursuing the same girls.
23. I'm afraid of heights. But only when I'm below about 500 feet and not wearing a parachute.
24. I don't often drink alone, but tonight, I had a Vesper and a bowl of guac and chips to keep me company during this post. A textbook Vesper, right down to the champagne goblet. Vesper and guac alike are gone, and I'm done, save one final not-so-random thing:
    
25. I've felt like just about the luckiest guy in the world for almost a year now. She knows why I think that. I wish the same for all my friends.
    

And I'm not tagging anyone with this. My inbox is the equivalent of the dead letter office for chain mails and memes, but if you feel like sharing, you know I'd love to hear it.

Peace y'all.

Father-Daughter Night: Hooters, Taken, and Flat Aidan

Hooters

One of the advantages of living in Charleston is being able to meet my oldest daughter, a student at UNC-Wilmington, for dinner every few weeks. Last night we met up in Myrtle Beach at the Hooters that hooked the rest of my family on Hooters's wings. (I can almost hear the audible gasps: "You take your daughters to Hooters!?" Take them? We've had birthday parties there, graduation parties, informal gatherings. After the first time they tried the wings there, during a visit following a day of outlet shopping at the beach, a visit to the very place we ate last night, I had to be sure we got there in time for the afternoon specials to avoid breaking the bank. Trust me. No other wings like them.)

Taken

Following dinner, we headed to the mall next door to see Taken. If you need a Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, lone wolf sort of action thriller, this will fill the bill. Just be sure to pull the circuit breaker on your reality filter. It's not that any of the action sequences are over the top. No, they're well enough done. It's not that the whole kidnapping for sex slavery thing is overdone. No, that happens often enough to require an annual briefing on it to everyone in the Air Force. It's the other things that films like this consider unimportant that make such films utterly forgettable.

It opens with the obligatory "let's show who he is" scenes. He's a guy with close friends from his past life as a "preventer." These are guys who visit for a cookout and invite him along on a contract job, to remind them and us he "still has the edge." These are the guys he can call on to analyze the tapes once his daughter has been taken. The guys that will tell him he only has 96 hours to find his daughter and then wish him luck doing it all on his own. What?! Speaking purely figuratively, I have gay friends with bigger balls. In fact, my female friends have bigger balls. If anyone in that line of work called a "friend" and said, "They've taken my daughter. I'm going to get her back," the reaction from the other end would be, "Party! Rock and roll baby! Where should we meet you?" Not this movie. So long as that fairly significant break from reality doesn't bother you, you'll be fine.

And if that one gets by without causing any problems, you should be fine when he gets his daughter home. That would be the seventeen-year-old who's been kidnapped, drugged up, tramped out for auction, kept as a virgin for a particular type of clientele, but no doubt "schooled" in a few things, and then (spoiler alert) rescued at the last second by daddy, unlike the now dead girlfriend she went to Paris with. If you're okay with him having to run the whole op on his own, then you'll be fine with her arriving back in the states after her less-than-96-hour adventure all cheerful and bubbly like she's been away at cheerleading camp. I'm sure that won't bother you anymore than it did me. Even the man who gave us Rob Roy has to eat, and all that well-choreographed stuff in the middle that stretches incredulity so much less does somewhat satisfy every father of daughters' secret longing to run rampant through the entire high school or college male population of would be defilers of his princesses. Catharsis. Get some.

Flat Aidan

Lastly, remember Flat Jackson? Well, now it's time for Flat Aidan. I pulled him from yesterday's mail just in time to make the trip to Myrtle to see his cousin and get a money shot with the Hooters Girls. :-D


And my sister, Aidan's mother, thinks I mind this why? Looking back, I see a trend. I have a Chief Female Associate (CFA) beyond compare, so this new awareness does me no good whatsoever, but listen up guys: If you can't borrow a baby or a puppy from your friends who have one, get out the black construction paper and the white marker, and work on your back story. Trust me on this. And ladies, don't even think about giving me a hard time. We have to work with what God gave us. All you have to do is toss your hair.

Snapshot: Home

Two people sit in a room that could not possibly be more warmly lit. The walls are a deep red tending toward iron oxide in the light of lamps on the mantle, on the black, baby grand Steinway, and on the marble-topped end table. Plentiful windows trimmed in glossy white enamel let in the subdued light of a gray day. Rain washes the world outside and taps a syncopated rhythm in the downspout on the near corner of the two-story house. Through the paned glass rear door, deck boards glisten and reflect the gray sky broken by the branches of a winter forest. Below the deck and across a back yard of mostly moss and through the bare winter trunks beyond, the creek isn't so much angry with the surplus it hurries along as merely enthusiastic, energetic, awake and purposeful now, unlike its usual sleepy self.

Inside again, a wood fire crackles warmly in a stone fireplace and the man looks up from the corner of the couch where he's grading student essays on a notebook computer the desktop of which shows two rocking chairs and hanging baskets on the front porch of this house and the background color of which matches the walls so that when he leaves he takes this place with him (but never so much as of himself he leaves behind). He looks up at the fire, across the gray-white-and-black Husky sleeping contentedly in the middle of the thick carpet, almost but not quite snoring, centered on the fireplace and positioned halfway between the man and woman. The woman sits nearer the fire, sideways to it in a rocking chair she refinished years ago and in which she has cradled to sleep countless times her young daughter and younger son. And for all that the idea of a rocking chair calls forth visions of age, this is a young and beautiful mother whose oldest child came into this world years after the dog stretched lazily at her feet. Yet in her rocking image, as she sits editing a book on yet another notebook computer perched on the fuzzy soft blanket that warms her knees, the man sees in her the mother she is, the mother who gave her life, the grandmothers he never knew, and years hence, the grandmother she will become. And in that vision is the wellspring of the contentment we only think comes from the smell of chocolate chip cookies fresh from the oven or the dulcet tones of a lullaby trickling down the stairs from the nursery like the gentle fall of water over the stones of a brook. Feeling his gaze, she looks up at him, tilts her head and smiles.

Nothing is spoken. Two separate lifetimes lead to this moment, and for now, this is but a passing like two participants at a Maypole who meet one another twice in each full round of the pole. For now, the dance is necessary. Patient they are. Because of all they've seen and what they know, they content themselves with those passing smiles. What they've each seen is what enables them to understand one another as no one else could. What they know is that the nature of the Maypole is such that each passing, each circuit of the pole, each cycle of reunion and separation brings them closer to the base, closer to a union from which parting will no longer be necessary.

For now, the rain keeps a broken rhythm, the fire crackles in counterpoint, the Husky chases Arctic hares that lope misplaced through the powdery new snow of Siberian dreams, and the man and the woman know what they know.

For now, that's enough.

Quote for the Day: Gibran

From The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
And how else can it be?
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

I miss my daughters. --Doc

Tommy Hyde, 1936-2008

The older we get, the shorter the time between notices of the passing of people who have touched our lives. And when we or they have traveled far and wide and settled in places far removed from the homes of our youth, such notices always bring a tinge of regret that we didn't get to visit one more time, to sit and chat under a cottonwood, or to make one last circle around the pattern in one of only two tail-draggers I've ever had the pleasure of piloting. Of course, Tommy Hyde's health in recent years wouldn't have allowed for that anyway, but I've no doubt that simply talking about it would have brought a twinkle to his eye.

I would have been a very young lad the first time I ever met Tommy during one of his visits "back home." He was a classmate of my mother, born only five days behind her in 1936, but if you read his obituary or biography, you'll see that while he was born in the same town as my parents and I, he moved away long ago, trading life as a Tar Heel for life as a Texan. And if you ever asked him about that, he had a fairly simple explanation: "I met Ruth. Those Texas women rope fast and tie hard." I've never forgotten that phrase.

I remember (or at least believe that I do, which is the same thing) several things from that initial meeting. He is, I'm pretty sure, the first man I remember clearly in a cowboy hat and pointy-toed cowboy boots ("Great for killing roaches in the corner," he'd said). I remember him explaining the word "gringo." And though he may only have been a decade-long resident of Texas at that point, he had already acquired the peculiar squint that I've since learned to associate with men who live and work under the bright, unrelenting sun of the Texas plain.

The next time I remember seeing Tommy (which seemed a long time later to me, young as I still was) would have been in the summer of 1978. I was a rising sophomore at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, sent for three weeks to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, for a program we called "Operation Non-Com." The idea was to find out how the non-commissioned officers lived and what sorts of work they did in the big Air Force. My first weekend down there, Tommy drove over 200 miles from his and Ruth's home near San Angelo and picked me up. From there, we drove over to the border, Del Rio I expect, and I made what may still remain, thirty years later, my only cross-border foray into Mexico. I honestly don't recall whether we made the drive north to his and Ruth's home that time or not (it would have meant an awful lot of driving for Tommy), but I did stop in there one other time, back when I was crossing the country one direction or another in my Triumph Spitfire. I spent the night, we went flying in Tommy's Cessna 140, and I went to dinner with them at the Lowake Steak House (as I remember it, circa 1980, this place in the middle of nowhere where cars congregated from all points like people flocking to Devil's Tower in the movie Close Encounters). Great food, but the company was the main thing.

I last saw Tommy on another visit back to NC. He and Ruth were making the rounds and I seem to recall this time it was not my front yard where I saw him, but the airfield of another local flying enthusiast. How long ago that was I couldn't even say. Time passes far too quickly these days. I've often thought that sometime down the road I'd have another chance to pay Tommy and Ruth a second visit in their Texas home. I'm sad that can't come to pass now. But I'm glad to have known him and to know his family still. I did at least get the happy chance, sometime between 1999 and 2002, during my second assignment as a professor in Colorado Springs, to return a little of that Texas hospitality when their oldest daughter and son-in-law came through town with their own little ones. And that is how life goes on.

One last story. Tommy was fond of aviation jokes, and though I'm sure he told me more than a few over the years, the only one I remember is the most telling. I suspect I remember it partly because it never seemed all that funny. But I suspect it never seemed all that funny because it contained more than a little bit of truth about how Tommy had always felt about the world of airplanes. It had to do with some fellow whose job it was to clean out the toilet reservoir from big commercial airliners. Somehow, a connection comes loose and he ends up soiled from head to foot, which inspires a friend or co-worker to ask in disgust why the heck he didn't look for a better job. I can still remember the squint of Tommy's eyes when he said, "So the guy looks at his friend and says, 'You've got to be kidding! And get out of aviation? No way, Jose!'"

I always suspected that particular story was a whole lot more metaphor than joke.

Godspeed, amigo. You'll be missed.