Moving

Hello to both of you! The blog has been mostly dark for a while, and this will be the final post at this address. But not the Last Post.

As part of a restart, I’m shifting things to WordPress and renaming the new version Catswamp, after Cat Swamp Road, where I was brought up. Not surprisingly, you can find it at catswamp.com.

Hope to see you there.

Geezer redux

I haven’t posted for over a year. Stuff happens.

One more bit of stuff that’s going to happen in the next few weeks is that I’ll be posting again, but on a new platform at a new address. I’m not sure if I’ll be changing the blog’s title. “The Geriatric Review” has been suggested. Either way, I hope and think it will look nicer and be more stable and easy to use. I honestly don’t know what direction the whole enterprise will take, but both of you can expect the standard jibbering cogitation. I’ll post appropriate info when I have it.

Anyway, I’m still here, and I’m still working on my office. Most of the books (160 baseball titles alone to the Wesleyan University Library book sale), and lots of the files and papers are gone, along with most of the random detritus. But here’s a partial list of items I just pulled out of corners and drawers, or off the back of bookcases.

• Five baseballs, all decades old. Two used, two autographed, one pristine. 
• A rubber gizmo used to keep cross-country skis together. (You need two for the system to work.)
• A yarmulke. I used to carry one in a pocket of each of my sport and suit jackets. You never know….
• A tiny fielder’s mitt my grandfather tossed into my crib in 1948.
• A single bronzed bookend from the late 1920s, made from one of my mother’s baby shoes. The other one’s around here somewhere….
• My dad’s Wilson 1940-vintage Ellsworth Vines tennis racket, in its press. Your ad!
• A Speedy Stitcher sewing awl, “… a handy tool to have around the house, farm or any place where heavy material has to be sewn.” I think I may actually have used it. Once.
• A 1928 YMCA Checker Championship trophy won by my mother’s father.
• A small wooden music box that plays “Stardust,” a wedding gift to my parents in 1945.
• Three inflating needles, used in decades past mostly for basketballs, but occasionally for the random soccer ball or baby gizmo.
• An Ace bandage wrapped in a length of well-greyed adhesive tape. I’m pretty sure this came home from college with me in the summer of 1966.
• And, best of all in a way, a small, tattered, fake stuffed bird that was given to me, for reasons I no longer remember, by friends on my 21st birthday, and has been hanging off of a series of study and office lamps ever since.

What do I do with all this? You can have the needles, the ski thingy, the yarmulke, the Ace, and maybe the awl, but what can I do with the rest? It’s family history. Maybe I’ll start a museum.

Leery of relativity

When I was a boy (oh, God, here he goes again), the local paper had a little Sunday magazine that carried a feature listing local events that had occurred 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years before. I remember thinking the 10-year-old stuff wasn’t really all that long ago, but the 20-year-old stuff was pretty antique, and the 30-year-old stuff was nearly obscured by the mists of time.

The same paper has apparently been doing something similar these days on its sports page. A friend asked me during the fall if I’d seen it a few weeks previous. Nope. “Well, there was a little piece in there about a cross-country race you won 50 years ago.” We naturally had the requisite laugh about how superb we were then and how old and creaky we are now, and moved on to local politics.

Of course, to me now, the fall of 1964 can seem like last week. I can still smell some of those crisp afternoons, tempered pungently with Essence of Cramergesic. On the other hand, 50 years before that was 1914, which only existed in books and the obviously addled memories of the utterly ancient.

Blue binder

Well, lurking quietly in the corner, at the bottom of a pile, hoping to be ignored in the clean-out, here’s an ancient blue 3-ring binder holding a career’s worth of addresses and phone numbers. On the back of some of the pages, the occasional doodle, list, or bits of terrible protest doggerel, scribbled almost certainly during an excruciating phone call with a magazine editor. A representative example:

Cut, he cried,
It’s way too long.
Make it like a Beatles song—
Short and snappy hits the gong.
Incomplete? Who gives a bleat?
Our dopey readers think it’s meat.

Other than my perfectly-scanning Wordsworth imitations, it’s page after alphabetized page filled mostly with numbers attached to names I haven’t thought of for years or have utterly forgotten, cunning little codes that no longer snap my synapses, scribbled notes with additions or changes or bits of info about secretaries, spouses I must have met along the way, and children now long grown. Once in a while a face pops into my mind, triggering flashes of memory that make me smile, or grimace, or wince. Colleagues, people I used to do work for, people who used to do work for me. Writers, editors, publishers, graphic designers, artists, distributors, packagers, photographers, publicists. Politicians, mostly local or state. Baseball types. Old running partners, teammates, opposing coaches. Professors, teachers and school administrators, tradespeople, priests and ministers (we have five churches within half a mile). Stables, horsey types, equine supplies. Outdoor gear. Membership organizations. Once good friends lost in the mists of time (sad, sad). The payphone at the house I lived in during my last year of college (!!). The occasional famous or near-famous or once-famous name. (Sometime in the early ’90s, I picked up my phone to hear the then universally-known voice of the broadcaster Joe Garagiola shouting, “Mark, Mark, why am I calling you?”) Doctors, dentists, physical therapists, athletic trainers (some of whom I still see, some of whom I haven’t seen in 40 years). Relatives and pals now departed. So more doggerel:

Old notebook

Workhorse compendium
Reminder of annoyance
and affection
Ennui perfected
and late solitude
grinding out lines immediately forgotten
And that great party in Chicago
with the wrestler and the white limousine
at Harry Caray’s
And the broken tooth in Boulder
with the pretty assistant
and the fern-bar dentist
And Anchor Steam in Frisco
or maybe it was Berkeley
     or both
Too bad, old notebook, old memories
It’s still the bin for you

A quandary

I’ve been working away at my disaster of an office in concentric circles, expanding outward. I’m being ruthless and brutal and am making surprisingly great progress (“Look, the floor!”), but now I’ve come to the logjam of a bookcase in the northeast corner. Maybe 200 books, collections, journals, guides, studies, and bound manuscripts, mostly about baseball, but with some unimportant stuff tucked in here and there, too.

The top shelf holds mostly things I wrote, edited, or contributed to, and I suppose I’ll keep most of that. But then I run into trouble. I feel disloyal tossing stuff by friends, and I know how agonizingly hard some of the writers I gave moral support to worked on their projects. There are also a few books signed by authors I admire. (One has a charming inscription to H—and it’s a terrific read, too.) Then there are things I’ve had since boyhood, and which I’m sentimentally attached to. But most of this stuff has really got to go. I have a horror of having to pack up a mass of personal debris in quick time if we move, and a much greater horror of leaving the horrible job to a loved one. And really, not many people would think this material is worth anything.

So I’m gradually working my way around to just getting rid of it all. Or maybe allowing myself half a shelf. Or maybe I’ll just weed the obvious outz now, go skiing, and come back to it next summer. Or maybe the book fairy….

Now that’s the ticket!

I’ve been digging deep into the detritus of my life (you could say “the mess in my office” if you wanted to be mundane about it). 

Today I surfaced a collection of autographs: Ted Williams, Nellie Fox, Bob Feller, Jimmy Piersall, the golfer Doug Ford, and, best of all, a non-autograph: a ticket stub from the 1964 US Olympic pre-Trials at Randall’s Island. 

Tom O’Hara! (Scrawny as I was—“ah, your arms are just for balance.”)

Dyrol Burleson! (Whose first name I never knew how to pronounce.)

Jim Grelle! (Whose last name I never knew how to pronounce.) 

Cary Weisiger!  Archie San Romani Jr.! The idols of my youth. 

I remember going to a side field to watch these guys warm up for the 1,500. I was shocked that they looked remarkably human.

How odd ... How lovely

I hopped in the shower this morning and began a weirdly excellent experience.

I have a very small Bluetooth speaker in there, and I thought my iPhone was set to continue an audio book I’d been listening to. But no. Some illicit digital shenanigans had been going on, and up came “Boplicity” from Birth of the Cool. Which naturally made me feel like one smooth operator. And when it was over I was set up for more ultra-sophisticated post-bopness from Miles and the guys.

But no again. Little Richard asking Lucille to satisfy his heart.

It’s hard to go so fast from supercool to down and dirty, and I didn’t quite make it before here was Fats Waller and his famous variations on Tea for Two, which made me remember for the first time in years asking my mother, who loved Waller (“great left hand”), if this was a joke that was played on him or a joke he was playing on us. She told me she thought he was just taking an insipid tune and demonstrating how it could be played in various jazz styles. I wasn’t convinced then and I’m not convinced today.

By this time, I was in the car headed north to a great farm market. We went classical for a stretch, and the sounds took me deeper and deeper into the memory tunnel.

A movement of a Vivaldi Cello Concerto made me remember that we used to listen to a lot of Baroque when H was a little girl. She always recognized this composer, and called him “Mr. Vivaldi.”

Next, a movement of the Mozart Bassoon Concerto (Michael Chapman!) reminded me that while I used to know most of the Köchel numbers, now I can barely tell Mozart from Cab Calloway.







































Onward to Coleman Hawkins sedate but ground-breaking “Body and Soul”.  My dad, the first time I played it for him decades ago: “Where’s the melody? I can’t hear the tune! Why would anyone do that? You don’t like this stuff, do you?”

But dad loved the next one (which is why it’s on my iPhone): Bing Crosby crooning his massive early hit, “Please”. (“Your eyes reveal that you have the soul of / An angel white as snow / How long must I play the role of / A gloomy Romeo?”) My mother used to roll her eyes at stuff like this and make the “square” sign.

Back to a movement of one of Big Mo’s string quartets. Until I lost the hearing in one ear in the mid-’80s, chamber music was my thing, and the Mozart Quartets were pretty much my idea of perfection in music. But they became vastly less enjoyable to me in personal mono. Which is a shame. On the other hand: jazz. Louis and Wolfgang exist somewhere together. They both treat Billie Holiday with great respect.

By this time, I was cruising along back roads that were beautiful, green, and cool. It’s an awfully nice part of the country here. And up came Patti LuPone singing “Rabbit Tango” from a Sandra Boynton collection we bought for B. We love everything Boynton, but especially Moo, Baa, La La La, which in our family is always pronounced Moo, Baa, Ya Ya Ya, because that’s the way H said it when she was very small.

This was unfortunately followed by Simon & Garfunkel singing “Save the Life of My Child,” which I actually don’t remember ever hearing before, and which brought my spirits low even on this beautiful day in the beautiful place.

But then, just before I pulled into the farm, The Beatles offered “Let It Be”, which made me realize that the older I get, the more I love John Lennon.

“...striding down Main Street with a determined look.”

It’s lovely to read or hear nice things about people you love. Not so great when they come as condolences, of course, but some of those notes and phone calls can be profoundly moving. And some really good ones, like the one I’ve excerpted as the title of this post, raise memories that can make you laugh and cry at the same time.

My dad passed away on Easter morning. I was in church, a relative rarity, when the phone in my breast pocket buzzed, and I got up to take the call outside, knowing what it was likely to be. I returned to pass the news to our pew, then H and I made the half-hour drive to Maplewood.

As spring came on this year, Dad’s body, so faithful for so long, began to give up the ghost. Visits became short wheelchair rides down the hall, where I’d find a seat and strike up one-sided conversations that involved the weather, H and B, and famous family stories that I got to tell him as if he hadn’t been there. His eyes still lit up when I arrived, and I could usually get a smile out of him, sometimes even a chuckle, but by mid-April, his systems were clearly shutting down, and it was time for me to speak to the medical staff about Hospice care. The two of us had one more moment of real connection, when I worked with him on one of the pathetic little exercises we’d been given: to see if he could touch his nose with his right hand. I think we both realized how ridiculous this was in so many ways, and when I cheered as his thumb, with  some gentle help, made contact, we both laughed. A few visits later, H and I planted what we understood were likely to be our last kisses on his shiny bald head. The next morning, he was gone.

One woman of my generation, daughter of great old friends of my parents, told me that Dad had been the most “sophisticated” man she ever knew. This made me laugh, because my father was none of the things you think of when you hear that word. He was not worldly, or urbane, or debonaire, or suave, or wealthy, or well-educated, or any of the other adjectives that usually factor into the description of a sophisticated man. Quite the opposite, in many cases. But I knew what she meant, and it was a set of attributes that many of the notes and conversations of condolence mentioned. One called him, “fun, funny, gracious, kind, and utterly charming....” Not a bad epitaph.

A few weeks later, we had a slightly eccentric gathering of friends and family, where I said a few words and we buried his remains in a quite lovely spot next to my mom’s, with everyone tossing in a bit of good Woodbury dirt, and a few of us hanging around to fill the little hole and tamp the turf back down. Then we adjourned to the house for catching up (much-loved but seldom-seen cousins and childhood friends) lots of stories and laughter, good food, and what I vaguely remember as reasonable amounts of drink. Dad loved a good party, and we did our best to see him off the right way.

Of course, he wasn’t perfect. He was mean to me about a baseball bat, had little respect for my intelligence, and sometimes failed to show up for important family events.

Boy, do I miss him.

The shah and the chimp

Alan Sloman recently put up a blog post that included this wonderful sentence, “... Mum made it quite clear to me, repeatedly, that the Shah of Persia would not be coming if I didn’t eat my greens.”

(And now, of course, you have to go read the post or live your life believing that Alan was indulging in the merely surreal.)

Alan’s mum’s brilliant strategy inevitably reminded me of something. When I was a little boy, I lobbied hard for a pet chimpanzee. They were all over TV in those days, and as an only child I thought one would make a terrific playmate. Not surprisingly, my parents were having none of it. But no was not an answer up with which I was willing to put. I persisted, I nagged, I pestered. I hounded and badgered even though I wanted neither hound nor badger.

Finally, my father had had it. “You can’t have a chimpanzee,” he told me, “because they grow up to be gorillas.”

Well, there was no answer to that, really. Even I realized we had no room for a gorilla. The matter was dropped.

But here’s the thing. I don't know what lessons I didn’t pay attention to, what nature programs I zoned out on, what books I didn’t read, what simple logic I didn’t apply, in what ways I simply ignored the obvious, but I didn’t know the truth of the matter until my wife-to-be and I had a short sharp argument on the topic in our early 20s. She won, unfairly deploying provable facts.

To be fair, Dad’s answer was probably more humor than deception (though under the circumstances I imagine he was perfectly OK with deception). We are a facetious family. We often say what we don’t mean, and mean what we don’t say. We expect others—certainly family and close friends—to recognize this and go along with the joke, the point of which isn’t always jokey. I was perhaps a little young, but I was supposed to reason like this: “That’s untrue but funny. That’s also Dad saying pleasantly what he does not want to say angrily, which is, ‘That’s it. I’m answering your nonsense with some of my own, and if I hear any more from you something unimaginably horrible will happen to your baseball glove.’”

On the other hand....the fib abides.

Joyous amalgamation

How many weddings has a guy my age attended? Lots and lots and lots. Family, friends, colleagues, and their children and other connections over three generations and more. I remember being forced into dressy clothes and trotted off to be bored at lots of formal, straight-laced affairs in the ’50s and early ’60s. I retain at least vague memories of somewhat more colorful gatherings of the late ’60s and early ’70s, including several where the bride and groom actually wore shoes. (One I livened up with a bloody nose at the reception that required me to be removed from the premises. Who knew a G&T or two would have that effect?) And over the last few decades there have been lots of overproduced extravaganzas I chalked up to the weirdly unmodern diktats of the wedding industrial complex. Lately, it’s been some relatively simple but elegant events involving remarkably self-possessed young couples settled and mature enough to know what they wanted and to do it in style.

We just got back from a weekend in St. Augustine, Florida, where R, our much-loved eldest niece, tied the knot with the excellent Other R. They knew what they wanted and they did it in style. First, they gave sweet B a featured role as a flower girl, thereby pretty well assuring perfection throughout.

Second, they arranged for perfect weather at a beautiful venue. Third, groom R’s mom makes easily the best key lime pies anywhere. Fourth, the families from both sides bonded, and really enjoyed each other.

Then the main event: excellent music, a cool minister, a few special words—brief special words—by said minster, members of the bridal party, and the nuptial pair themselves, that hit the nail on the head. On to good wine, carefully chosen food, jolly conversation around the tables, more good wine, and, along with further good wine, lots of enthusiastic dancing. (Why don’t people do the Jerk anymore? Why do they laugh at people who do? It’s a mystery.)

Great weekend. Great wedding. And it’ll be a great marriage, too.

∞

When we got married, one of us was simultaneously in a frenzy trying to finish a thesis at the end of a distinguished college career. The bride’s mother couldn’t understand how her daughter could be so relatively uninterested in wedding details.

Mom, annoyed and frantic: “This is the most important day of your life.”

Daughter, frantic and incredulous: “I certainly hope not.”

I just went out for a run.

Still an all-star

Dad had a rough transition, both physically and emotionally, to his new home. Lots of consultations with social workers and physical therapists and nurses and docs. A few days with a full-time minder, to whom he was polite, but whose presence he could not tolerate. Most memorable to me was his kicking across the room of what he wanted to make clear was not his walker. The old football player’s final punt went high and deep before crashing satisfyingly into furniture, wall, and floor.

But he gradually got squared away. Issues noted. Meds adjusted. A few key familiar items brought from home. Lots of visitors. And after a month or so, he was a new man. He still wouldn’t use the !@#$% walker everyone cleverly kept putting in front of him, he still had the occasional malfunction requiring light medical attention, and he can’t speak without great effort, and even then is often unclear. But he began to feel at home, and despite his verbal limitations he made friends. The ladies—both fellow residents and staff—love him (big surprise!). He took what the aides told me everyone seemed to agree was his appropriate place at the head of the long dining table. (He’s eating so well he told me two weeks ago that the waists of his trousers were shrinking. I patted his tummy and said, “You know, dad, I think there might be another explanation.” He got it, and laughed. ) He pulled people out of their chairs to walk the halls with him. He danced with staff.

And when I walked into his room a few weeks ago, he proudly handed me this. (We spell it “Dickie”, but that’s all right.)

Plumbing the depths

The two of you may recall a post from a few years back in which I discussed a Thanksgiving notable primarily for the eccentric flow of household waste water and the delicious effect it had on our version of America’s great feast day. You will be amused to hear that fortune smiled upon us and hilarity reigned again this year.

Since our first adventure, we’ve remodeled the ancient bathroom on the second floor, which serves what we call, for obsolete but perfectly good reasons, “Weezie’s room” and “Tilly’s room,” both of which are now primarily for guests. A little rearrangement for efficiency’s sake, new fixtures, a big stand-alone shower which serves our new generation of athletes better than a tub, bright paint. It’s nice but not fancy.

During the summer, H and A competed in a big triathlon nearby. (Which produced this wonderful, slightly staged, picture.)

They brought along with them a number of New Hampshire teammates, some of whom parked campers in the back-back, and some of whom used random beds, couches and whatever they could find in the way of cozy floor space, and all of whom had been told they’d have access to a nice new shower. Fantastic! But after a few flushes and half a shower, test guest No.1 looked down to find himself ankle deep in fecal matter. This is fairly disgusting even for a triathlete, and we were soon informed we had a problem. To make a long story short, we shunted the sweaty off to our own bathroom on the third floor, the one in what was then my father's apartment over our garage, and I think perhaps Paul’s across the backyard. Others just hosed off by their RVs and used their own facilities. Virtually everyone had competed well, they were all fit and cheerful and sociable (a state I vaguely recall myself), and we had a memorable weekend party regardless of the effing effluent.

I called the Rooter man, of course, who pulled the toilet, theoretically cleared the lines, told me the plumbing seemed to have very little pitch (1/4-in. per foot is standard), and that the twists and turns required by the ancient carpentry beneath the floor were choke points. He recommended supplying less luxurious toilet paper to guests. (“Welcome! So glad you’ve come! Please use this tissue paper. And I know you won”t mind limiting yourself to two squares. See you at dinner!”)

Obviously not really satisfactory, but maybe the best I could do. Occasional guests seemed to have no problems—even with real toilet paper. But we were having a fair crew for Thanksgiving, and I wanted to be certain not to add another plumbing disaster to the menu. So I called K, former schoolmate and owner of the plumbing company we use. We hemmed, we hawed, we agreed we’d rather not pull up the floor unless we really had to, and we finally decided to try “pressure assisted technology”—a toilet that uses pressurized air to shoot the water down the pipes. The guy who installed it laughed and nodded when I asked him if it would do the trick. “Just tell whoever’s using it to stand up before they flush or they’ll go down too,” he said. So good.

But no. We clearly had Old Faithful on our hands. A group of friends ready for a good party for a few days? Predictive perfection: Merde

We managed. (We’ve had a lot of experience, after all.) And we actually had a great time.  But Monday morning, up came the floor, and in went the plumber. Bumpings of pulling out the toilet. Whine of electric screwdriver. Thumpings up and down the stairs. Growl of reciprocating saw. Holler from Wayne: “Mark, you’ve got to come up and see this.”

He points at an opening he’s had to make in the plastic piping installed during the remodel. I peer. “What is that,” I say. “A snake,” says Wayne. For a micro-second, I’m wondering how one of the local serpents could have crawled through our pipes. Then I realize Wayne means a plumbing snake, that coiled steel auger you feed through the plumbing to—theoretically—clear it of blockages. “Holy shit,” I say, displaying my grasp of this highly technical plumbing situation. “How could that be?” Wayne shrugs, clearly not yet ready to rat out the Rooter guy. “How much of that is in there?” I ask. “We’ll find out,” says Wayne direly. And he spends much of the day doing just that. Here’s how much.

The shower stall is about three feet by four. By actual measurement, the separate sections of snake come to just shy of eight feet. (One of them was spotted using a mirror and a flashlight and was pulled out by the longest pair of needle-nose pliers I’ve ever seen, a tool so scary-looking a dentist would be proud to own it.) You’ll notice that the one on the left and the one on the right had been doubled back on themselves inside the plumbing, just to make sure nothing much could squeeze by.

Wayne tested things, put everything back together, used a few little tricks to get us better pitch, screwed the floor back down, reinstalled our X-15 of a toilet, and we discussed the obvious: how had this happened? Rooter guy turns out to be the only possibility. But how can you lose that much of even a powered, super-long pro snake and not know it? And if you did know it...? So I’ll be having one of those discussions I really hate with the Roots.

But I think the bathroom might finally be all set. Come by and help us test it sometime. Bring lots of friends.

Can’t we have a statute of limitations?

Because he’s such a dead-pull hitter, opposing teams have been throwing a shift at David Ortiz, in which the shortstop (sometimes the third baseman) moves into short right field. The other night Big Papi hit a looper that would normally have dropped into short right for a base hit, but it was fielded on one short hop by the shifted fielder and he was thrown out at first. This jolted me with a horrible memory flash of paleozoic teen baseball, slapping an outside pitch into roughly the same place, an easy and obvious base hit without a shifted fielder. But I loafed up the line, the right fielder charged hard...and I was thrown out at first. Oh the mortification. Thinking about it even now makes my skin crawl.

So David, just hit ’em over everybody from now on and save me further memorembarrassment.

Go Sox!

The magic of the mile

Sitting on a shelf downstairs is an audio book—already read but borrowed from the library for car trips—called, The Perfect Mile. It’s about Roger Bannister, John Landy, Wes Santee, and their quest to be the first to run four minutes. (It’s actually a bit of a stretch to include Santee, because he was busy running multiple events for his college track team. But he was American, and the U.S. is a big market....) I’ve always deeply admired Bannister, and loved Landy for his profound decency. And just try this on:



What a great, great race. At the time, they were the only two men in the world who had run four minutes, and they didn’t fool around: they both broke the barrier. Each ran to his strength and put everything he had into it. Landy actually succeeded in a way. He took the sting out of Bannister’s kick, which resulted in a mere 60-second final lap and a pretty thorough collapse at the finish. But Landy himself couldn’t quite keep up the pace. I’ve always thought the famous “Landy turned the wrong way” moment was interesting but unrelated to the result. Tremendous courage and determination from both men.

Seeing the audio book and watching this YouTube got me thinking once again about the wonderfulness—the perfection—of the mile as a competitive distance. The U.S. went fully metric on the track some years ago, but high schools (at least the high schools around here) run 1,600 meters rather than the world-standard 1,500, and although it’s about 10 yards short, it reasonably approximates the real deal, which I assume is the point. With that impulse in mind, I think it would have been much better to have raised a middle finger to the metric zealots on this particular issue and simply carried on with the classic.
 
The mile is special partly because its constituent parts are themselves memorable goals. Four laps on a quarter-mile track, with a minute for each being a natural and elegant (if, on laps three and four, seldom-achieved) goal. For reasonably strong runners growing into their sport, it was: 1. “A minute for a lap? Okay.” 2. “Two minutes for two laps? Well, all right.” 3. “Three minutes for three laps? Erk.” 4. Four minutes for four laps? Are you kidding me?”

Then, of course, you get old, and search for entirely different sorts of miling magic. 

October 1, 1945

Today would have been my parent’s 68th anniversary. When I was little I used to insist that I was at their wedding (it was really my Uncle Bob’s, I think). They’d laugh and say maybe I had been, but they didn’t remember seeing me there. My mom, especially, laughed all the time. You know you’ve got great parents when your house is the place your friends want to be.

Sooo happy

I was in Concord for a few days, mostly trying to finish up the painting in the attic conversion. (Which is looking pretty good, finally.) On Sunday, I was enticed to the hills. H chose Belknap, which has an old fire tower (B loves fire towers), and is a mountain we've wandered up before. Here I am there with B in October, 2009...

...and here we are, low on the mountain, yesterday.

She and I have a little ritual, in which I say, “I love you about...seven.” She says, “No, M.” I say, “Well, maybe 12.” She says, feigning petulance, “No, M. “You love me soooo much!” I say, “Sooo much? How much is that?” To which she has been answering something like, “It’s a lot, lot, lot.” But yesterday she had a new answer: “It’s beyond any number. It’s infinity!”

Which shows you what a couple of weeks of school can do. Anyway, I love her a lot, lot, lot.

B also took a picture of me with the first little girl I loved soooo much. (I love Jasper the Wonderdog, too, but somewhere short of the end of numbers.)

And here I am almost passing out with infinite delight.

Family weekend away

We’re in Freeport, Maine, to support H and A, who are racing in the Lobsterman Tri tomorrow morning. Earlier, we were all crossing the street in slightly wet and wooly conditions when our umbrella got blown into premature decrepitude. B: “That certainly was a strong gust of wind.” Later she counted to six for us in Spanish (I think this is a Montessori thing and I know my grandfather would have been very proud indeed, though for him “cinco” was pronounced “thinco”). Of course, she also flipped out at bedtime, threw a minor fit,  pulled her jammies off and stomped around uttering maledictions. So Miss Crankypants is still in there, along with that funny smart person. By and large, though I admit to a certain empathy with Miss Crankypants, I prefer the funny smart person.

I’m pretty sure that’s who this is, doing something incisive and nuanced with numbers.

Our schoolgirl

Sweet B starts kindergarten Monday. Last weekend, we went to Massachusetts to celebrate our niece’s engagement, and B displayed the engineering gene she’s inherited from her dad. She and a grown-up helper or two constructed this elaborate set of chutes, and performed highly technical experiments to align all the elements properly. Mom was called into play solely to keep the marbles that landed in the tray from popping back out.

A brief consultation...

The marbles (three, I think) dropped into the hopper...

 Around and around they go...

 Success!

And a graceful acceptance of applause from the dress circle.

So come Monday, she’s ready to roll.

Deus ex machina

Years and years ago, I often ran workouts that I called “Rockers,” pushing hard for a half-mile or so to the top of the road we then lived on, which was a well-pitched hill, recovering by jogging slowly down the other side, then turning and pushing up again, back and forth. Hill-running for me was always a sort of magic potion, and this was a way to efficiently get a good bit of it in toward the end of a shortened training run. One day, I’d just gotten to the top and had down-shifted to a little jog, when a dog—an Afghan Hound of all things, a beast I’d never seen before—appeared from behind a neighbor’s house and headed toward me. I knew immediately that he meant business. Runners learn to tell. This guy wasn’t loping toward me to bark and get scratched. He was  hunting me down. I didn’t have time to feel scared. I’d read somewhere that the thing to do when you’re attacked by a dog is to jam your arm down its throat and choke it. So I’m standing there, in my chop top and short shorts, ready to make my stand and thinking to myself, “Oh, shit, this is going to be bad.”

When, all of a sudden (isn’t that a great phrase?), the door pops open on a pickup truck parked by the side of the road, a man with a tire iron jumps out, he bashes the dog, and I’m saved. This whole event takes less than 10 seconds. The adrenaline surge hits me, I realize how terrified I’d been, and I can barely stand up long enough to say thank you and stagger away home. Bless you, Lee King.

Panache

At bedtime when she’s here or I’m at her house, I often lie down for a snuggle with B at bedtime. She invariably asks me for a Little Peach story, an impromptu feat of imagination I no longer carry off as well as I did for her mom, so I’ve started to ask her if she’d rather hear a story about when her mother was a little girl.

One of her favorites is a story about H at a horseshow. Like a lot of little girls, H was passionate about horses. She had lessons, eventually a pony of her own, and when she was bigger, a wonderful jumper and event horse named Panache, who, early in the relationship, frankly scared the sweet bejeezus out of her mother and me. But H had an excellent teacher, learned how to control all that power, and the two of them had great fun together. One Saturday, the two of them went off to a show jumping competition in which one of H’s earlier teachers, who had done a great job teaching her the basics and a good bit more, would be riding a favorite. Panache was in his prime, H was riding joyfully, and they rode absolutely clear rounds to win. B, who has visited Panache in his Vermont retirement, loves my (much-embellished) version of this story.

Sadly Panache, died last night. He’d been a sweet, easy-going boy—except in competition, when all he wanted was to go fast and jump high, and when he demonstrated he was a terrific athlete. He’d had a very comfortable retirement. And he was a very, very old man. He was also, of course, much loved by us all.

∞

I’ve just discovered that all our pictures of P and H flying over things are those antique paper things. But here are a few shots digitized:

A little snuggle, I think the fall H went off to college.

Early retirement in Vermont, spring 2003.

And the B has a go in 2011.