Freeing up a Sunday night

The last football game I attended with my father was a little over 20 years ago on the day after Thanksgiving. The home state Hogs were playing the Tigers of my alma mater in my home town. Dad had two extra tickets, and my brother and I jumped at the chance to see a game with the old man, even though both teams were terrible that year, and the game was essentially meaningless.

The temperature was in the mid-30s with a cold drizzle at game time, and it was raining hard by the end of the first quarter. The game was not going well for the home team, and the situation was plainly not going to improve in the second half. Soaked, freezing, and miserable, my brother and I decided that a hot shower and a cold drink were called for, so at half time we told Dad we were leaving. "All right, then," he growled from under his poncho, showing no inclination to join us. He didn't call us pussies out loud, but it was clearly implied. He stayed until the bitter (30-7) end, and never mentioned the game to us again.

This is a long way of saying that football is important in my family. We all played growing up. My parents had season tickets most years. When other girls were hanging David Cassidy posters, my sister kept an autographed picture of Joe Ferguson on her bedroom wall. I think Archie Manning was on my mother's list. She still watches football every Fall weekend between naps, and both of my brothers are active on the sports blogs.

The trouble started when they moved the game indoors. Image from here.

So it's not a trivial thing for me to skip the Super Bowl. I have watched them all* since Super Bowl -1 (the 1965 NFL Championship game). I saw a few epic games, and more than a few I could have done without. I watched the Packers, Colts, Cowboys, Dolphins, Cowboys again, Steelers, 49ers, da Bears, Broncos, and the rest put it all together and grab the big prize. I suffered with the Bills through four straight Super Bowl losses. I even lived long enough to see my Saints make it to the big dance and win.

I have been falling out of love with big time football for a while now, but I seem to have passed my personal tipping point. It's not just the concussions and other health problems. A lot of people work jobs that are every bit as dangerous for way less than $10 million a year, though when Ditka says the game is not worth the risk, that gets my attention. It's not even the animal abuse, domestic violence, and murders. They select these people for aggressiveness and violent tendencies, then pump them full of drugs and give them more money at one time than most of us would earn in three lifetimes. Am I the only one who is not surprised when some of them don't act like model citizens?

No, the camelback straw for me was watching the Patriots clearly think it was funny that someone caught them cheating. Worse, I found myself laughing along with them.** It seems to have finally dawned on me that the NFL owners not only don't care about the players or the fans, they don't have any respect for the game. Through scandal after embarrassment, the league shoots a big finger at the fans, lights another cigar with a billion dollar bill, and watch the money-machine keep cranking.

I am not trying to start a movement or anything. I expect everyone I know to watch the game, and I wouldn't expect them to choose differently. I know that neither the sponsors nor the league will notice me gone. My personal choices are the only way I have to shape my world, so I am making this one. Who knows, maybe I'll be back next year.

My father loved football for what it taught young men about leadership, teamwork, sportsmanship, and perseverance through pain and heartbreak. He liked how the game brought families together, and gave manly men some way to express emotions. He loved the game itself. I don't think he would like how professional football is being run. He would probably still watch, and while everyone else was standing around eating snacks and discussing commercials, he would be glued to the biggest television in the house, watching every play to the bitter end. But he would definitely grumble about the erosion of respect for his favorite sport.

All right, then.

---

* I may have missed one or two being on the road or working, but if I did I don't remember, so they must not have been important. I am also a little fuzzy on the particulars of the 1965 NFL Championship game, other than that it was in color.

** I'm not picking on the Patriots especially. I wasn't particularly enamored of Marshawn Lynch's eloquent defense of his personal right to privacy, either. There is not a team in the league with clean hands. New England are just the latest, and their "what's the big deal" attitude is particular galling to me.

Up for air

Didja miss me? I did.* I should probably make up some story about traumatic amnesia, or accidentally hiking across the border into Crimea and being taken into custody, but who has that kind of time?

In fact, I have spent most of this past year doing things. Not particular things. The focus has been more on the doing. I tend to write when I'm feeling reflective, and -- oddly enough -- not so much during creative periods. My medium of creation is source code, grant applications, project collaborations, and business lunches. My inner child is sent to his room, and the storming part of my brain is kept on a short leash. I think very little about myself during these times, and go days at a time without so much as glancing in a mirror.

Eventually I start to feel ways about things again, and the urge to put something down on paper, or whatever this is, returns.  I have felt it coming for a while now. The culmination was probably the trip home for my uncle's funeral last week. He was a bit of a self-important blowhard and alienated a lot of people, including his kids, but somehow his passing seems to have washed much of that away. We had a wonderful time catching up with relatives who haven't spoken in years, and my uncle's shortcomings barely came up. Except for his toupee. We talked quite a bit about that.

There is a lot changing in my professional life right now -- turning of the academic year, new management, shifting roles all around -- and I will be shifting my priorities as well. Hopefully, I can use the uncertainty to break some bad habits, and maybe even become less habitual over all. I like being productive, but it's very hard to live in the moment going full speed.

---

* I never really planned to stop posting here, any more than I planned to write this post since before about five minutes ago. I may not write another one for a year, for all I know. What I do know is that I like having this outlet when I feel like writing, and for now I plan to keep it.

The melting pot

It's been a pretty good New Year's holiday, considering I'm still intermittently clocking a hundred point something fever, and if I cough one more time I'm afraid the top of my head will come off. But at least I don't feel like my skin is icy-hot anymore, or that I'm going to need a double hip replacement before the day is out.  And my sense of taste is coming back, though that can be a mixed blessing with the stuff that's being manufactured in my head and chest. Hopefully, I'm also making a little more sense. The weekend is a bit of a blur, but I would be willing to bet that little of what I said was worth writing down.

Once again faced with the biennial 1500 mile Christmas tour, Biscuit and I decided that longer stays weren't going to make the drive any shorter, so we scheduled two nights at each homestead for a total of five days away. It ended up being only four.

All went pretty much as expected at Biscuit's parents' house. Many treats and goodies were eaten, relatives' health issues discussed, Christmas Eve candlelight service was attended, and the latest project presented for consideration. Biscuit's father is a tinkerer on a scale which typically only mad scientists approach, and a visit to the shop out back is a high point of every visit. It was sometime Monday afternoon when the weather entered my consciousness.

I had checked the forecast around 700 times before we left, because I'm a middle-aged man and that's what we do. Apart from some possible light showers on our Christmas Day drive from Biscuit's homestead to my mother's house, it seemed like clear sailing, and even a little milder than usual. But by Christmas Eve, a monster storm had appeared from nowhere and was predicted to cross our path the next day*. Luckily, it looked like we would be driving well ahead of the storm, and safely at my mother's before we saw more than cold drizzle, whatever was going to happen.

Well, "whatever" turned out to be the largest snowfall since I was in elementary school**, over a foundation of a daylong rain and an inch or so of ice. We arrived at my mother's in plenty of time for Christmas dinner, since they were predictably two hours late (and losing ground) on preparations when we arrived at mealtime. We had a lovely meal, my mother gave her annual tearful speech on how special it was to have the whole family together, and everyone got home (just barely) before the roads became impassable.

Many people in my hometown are rethinking the whole "dreaming of a white Christmas" idea. The trees on the right are normally taller than the house, but are bent almost flat by the snow load.  Everyone in my family got power back on the fourth day, which is quite good by hurricane standards. Of course, after a hurricane we typically don't have to worry about freezing to death.

Little Rock is a city of steep hills and many trees. On Boxing Day morning it was also a city largely without electricity, nine inches of snow and ice on the streets, and exactly four snow plows. Since only one of my siblings had electricity (and heat), and since his house has four fewer than the six bedrooms required to put up the family, we decided that home was the better part of valor, arranged for my brother to fetch my mother, and we set off for our own blessedly electrified house. We had to shovel our way out of my mother's cul de sac, but after that we had no real problems getting home.

We observed another tradition of this trip, which is that one of us bring home a cold or the flu. This year was my turn. Probably because I dared to enter a church. I started to feel that nagging rawness at the back of my throat on the drive home on Wednesday, and by Thursday night I was feverish and unable to sleep. I've spent most of the last week tossing and turning on various horizontal surfaces around the house, coughing, and browsing for things on the Internet that I immediately forget having seen. But one or two things have managed to stick in my frying brain.

The diversity of New Year's traditions listed by my FB friends over the last couple of days reminded me that the American Culture many of us were raised to believe in is a myth, or at least a subculture made up of a dwindling -- if influential -- minority. Television would have us believe that we all party hearty on the Eve, and then watch football and make resolutions all the next day. I know millions of people do that -- I have been one on occasion -- but it may not be as common as some people at Disney or NewsCorp would have us think. I know a lot of people with different ideas on how to commemorate the turning of the year. Many African Americans pile into churches on New Year's Eve to hear the Emancipation Proclamation read aloud -- a tradition considerably older than college bowl games. Most Southerners that I know share the tradition of eating black-eyed peas for luck on New Year's Day, but the details of the meal vary widely from region to region, and even family to family. (We had black-eyed pea hummus (my first attempt), coleslaw with Greek salad dressing, and Mediterranean pork tenderloin.***)

I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say here, except that when I was a kid we heard a lot about America as the melting pot of different cultures and traditions. We celebrated the diversity of our origins, but assumed that all of the pieces would merge into some homogeneous American fondue. A great many people still believe in this vision, and more than a few of them think we have enough different flavors already. In truth, I think the United States is more of a stew pot. The flavors blend, but individual chunks remain. It's the partial blending that gives the dish its richness. Damn, now I want stew.

In any case, Happy New Year Internet Friends, however you celebrate. And whatever your hopes and dreams may be for this year, I hope enough of them come true to make this your best year yet.

---

* I'm not sure when was the last time I saw local television weather-casters so confused by a storm. They had essentially predicted somewhere between zero and ten inches of snow for Biscuit's parents, with the promise that they would have a better idea "tomorrow", which was of course the day the storm arrived.

** When we still didn't know what the Moon was made of.

*** In Southern Louisiana the tradition tends to go black-eyed peas for luck, cabbage for money, and pork for good health.

Happy Anniversary, Biscuit!

Biscuit and I met in the early mid-90's, when bangs were tall, boots were short, and all the cool girls drove Miatas.  I made pizza for a group of people on one of the first nights we met. This apparently made a positive impact on her opinion of me.* The pizza, and a good base of friendship, helped us get through some up and down times when we started dating a couple of years later.

After five years together, we decided that we were probably not going to be able to be rid of each other, so we got married like it was 1999. Since neither of us was interested in a big production, we snuck off to Barbados on a cruise to make an honest man of me. We lied right in the face of friends and family who said we were running off to get married. We're still denying it to a few people.

James the limo driver. Quite possibly the coolest person I have ever met.

The day itself could not have been nicer. A limo ride to the government building to fill out the paperwork, a quick stop at the florist for a bouquet, and we were off to the church on the beach.

No matter what anyone tells you, this is all it takes to get married.

The wedding coordinator served as Biscuit's maid of honor, and the limo driver was my best man. He even shot a roll of film with our camera, since we had opted to skip the photographer. Also because it was 1999, and cameras had film.

You are so jealous right now.

Some vows, a little smooching, champagne toast, a quick walk on the beach, and we were back napping in our cabin by noon.

What were you doing five minutes after your wedding?

We woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of the drunkards returning from the pirate party ship. We knew that they had been pirating it up, because we heard several people "haaaarrrrghhh" into the water below. And they definitely looked like they had been at sea for some time.

Never have so many been so drunk so early in the day. 

Except for every other day this thing sails, I suspect.

That was 11 years ago. Tonight, to commemorate the event, I will make a pizza, she will open a nice chianti, we will eat and drink entirely too much, dessert on a fistful of Tums, and fall asleep before getting around to the stuff you young people do on your anniversaries. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? Thought so.

Hungry?

I can't believe it's been 11 years. While on the one hand it seems like Biscuit and I have been together as long as I can remember, it feels way shorter than my first marriage, which seemed to go on for-ever. I wouldn't trade it for the world. Happy Anniversary, Biscuit!

---

* Biscuit is all about good food. That's why I'm always trying to learn to cook new things. When I met her, all I could make were pizza, chili, and cheese toast.

Life in the middle

I was born in a no-win situation. My older brothers were born 13 months apart. I came along 4 years later, and in a last ditch effort to have a daughter, my mother and father produced my sister two years after me. Being the baby and the only girl, she ruled the family.

My parents took a fairly laissez faire attitude when it came to sibling disputes. As a young boy, I was at a distinct size disadvantage to my brothers, and by this point in my parents' child-rearing careers, yelling and screaming wasn't going to bring anyone to my rescue. If I couldn't make it into their presence, I was on my own. I suffered many brotherly beatings at the bottom of our basement stairs, caught when I paused to open the door. As I grew older, the lessons became more practical. I made a deal with my middle brother to trade mowing for pool cleaning duty. When he told me I was going to have to do both, my parents left it to us to work it out. I did both.

This policy had one important exception. Sister was "too important to fail" and was accorded all manner of protections, immunities, incentives, bailouts, kickbacks and favors. Sort of like AIG. I was not allowed to hit her or yell at her or through inaction cause any harm to come to her. It was sort of like the 3 Laws of Robotics, except replace "human being" with "baby sister" and "robot" with "what's his name." She figured this out early, and made a habit of torturing me until I lost patience and broke one of the laws, resulting in big problems for me.

It's not that my mother and father were uncaring. I know they loved me more than I will ever comprehend. But they were definitely not from the "everyone is a winner" school of child-rearing. Fair play and the golden rule were important, but competition and natural selection were definitely in play. If you wanted self-esteem, you had better find someone who had some and figure out a way to get it from them. And if you did cross the line, there was a good chance you would be told to "wait until your father gets home." When the dreaded moment arrived we were often "worn out" or "given something to cry about." If my mother took matters into her own hands, we usually would "go round and round."

I used to be pissed about all of this, like most of us resent whatever part of our past we believe is keeping us from being happy. This was before I figured out that (1) happiness is a choice, and (2) happiness is often not all it's cracked up to be. That Tom Jefferson knew what he was talking about when he focused on the "pursuit" part, because that's really where the action is. But I digress.

I eventually realized two other things. First, all of my siblings have had a profound impact on who I am, through actions large and small. When I was about twelve, my oldest brother walked into my room while I was listening to Venus, by Shocking Blue. He berated me for listening to bubble gum music and walked out. I didn't think anything of it until a week or so later when he presented me with a Moody Blues album and said, "Listen to this. It's better." That one act changed my relationship to music, probably to this day.

The second thing I realized was that I acquired valuable skills and some of my favorite personality traits* because of my position in the family. Without any real power, I learned to work through logic and negotiation. I learned how systems worked, and how to find the pressure points.  I learned to watch people, and to listen, and to try understand what they needed.

Oh, I guess I realized one more thing. Eventually, we all have to grow up, grow a pair** and get over ourselves. I was lucky enough to grow up in a beautiful home, with a family who mostly love each other, and no one is in jail, or molested, or on the pipe or living in a cardboard box. Life is good, and sometimes the middle is a very comfortable place to be.

---

*And some of my least favorite behaviors and traits, but what are you gonna do?

---

** Of course, pairs come in two flavors.

Christmas Blessings

It wasn't the best Christmas week on record. It included 1400 miles of driving, most of it in weather ranging from bad to "oh my god we're all going to die." Most of the clan (myself included) had trouble finding inspiration for gifts this year,* leaving those who really worked at it feeling somewhat taken advantage of. And the schedule was tight enough that there was only one day in seven that didn't include planned activities, and I was tagged to cook most of that day.

There was also the Christmas Eve Wine-and-Philosophy Slam, which led directly to The Hangover That Ruined Christmas. This was not my hangover, which was impressive in its own right. This particular prize goes to one of my relatives, who was already Christmas cheerful on the 24th when we arrived after an eight hour drive through Noah's flood. After getting me a glass of wine to calm my nerves, he continued to open giant bottles long after anyone with an iota of sense had gone to bed. My brother and I, not wanting to be rude, kept him company. I was the only one in the group that was up both before and after noon.

We spent the day after Christmas at an impromptu family reunion, which was both welcomed and ill-timed. I saw relatives I had not seen in years, and some I had yet to meet. I'm sure it will be the last time I see some of them in person. But it was clear that virtually everyone in the room was exhausted, and we struggled to do much more than smile at each other.

The second half of the week was spent at a combined Christmas and 50th wedding anniversary celebration with the in-law clan. The Wife found a great big house on a lake to rent in hopes that we could all spread out enough that we might not try to kill each other. Her plan was largely successful.

Throughout the week there were the inevitable slights, snubs, snide comments and bruised feelings that are part and parcel of family gatherings. Someone said a couple of weeks ago that our families are hard-wired to get on our nerves,** and this year was more evidence in support of this theory. Each holiday together features incidents or comments that are so bizarre or surreal that I wonder if they really happened at all, and immediately begin convincing myself that I must have misremembered or misinterpreted. These people are so like me in so many ways that normal social conventions and defenses don't work. But they are so different and "other" that sometimes it feels like they (or I) might be from another planet.

We drove home yesterday through light snow and then heavy rain, and The Wife is already showing signs of coming down with something. I won't even talk about the thing with the cat-sitter.*** It is easy at such times to swear never again and try to put the whole thing behind us. But someone way smarter than I am said once that life is too short to live in a way that makes us wish it were shorter, so I try to find some value and enjoyment in every experience.

My late father's best friend, and practically a second father to me, never saw this Christmas, and his wife and children spent the holiday mourning the loss of their patriarch. Another dear and lifelong friend spent most of the week in the hospital after her husband's surprise emergency surgery. They face tremendous challenges this coming year. We took group pictures at the family reunion, and the first shot was of my parents' generation. When my mother looked at the picture she said, "Surely there are more of us left than that."

The end of the year is a time for looking forward, but for me it is also a time to savor the fullness -- and yes, the bitterness -- of life. Every holiday season is an opportunity that will not be repeated, and I will try not to waste a single one. Time I spend with my relatives helps me understand them -- and myself -- better, and somehow makes me feel less alone. I learned things. I played in snow. I beat my brother-in-law at pool. I got an electric wine opener. It's all good.

Happy New Year, everyone. Say goodbye to the twenty-oh's. I predict this next year is going to be interesting.

_________________________________

* Think brightly colored carabiners and LED flashlights.

** I think it was Dr. Drew on GMA. I am very discriminating about where I obtain my medical information.
*** The cats are fine.

Free Spirit!

I've been fascinated by the Mars rovers ever since the Number Five-looking things made it through Martian Civil Defense and landed on the red planet. I know the word "hero" gets tossed around a lot these days, but if these little robots aren't heroes then neither is the person who calls 911 when they see someone in danger.

The nerds at JPL couldn't be any happier than I am that the rovers have lasted this long, or more worried about little Spirit getting stuck. So I've been following the effort to free the little guy for the last couple of months, keeping up with the rovers on Twitter, and generally irritating the crap out of my wife by telling her how much the right front wheel rotated on the last test, or making her look at pictures of what look like random areas of New Mexico or Utah.

So, does she ignore me, or tell me to grow up or get aggravated because I spend so much of my attention focused literally millions of miles away? Well, maybe a little. Can you blame her? But mostly she listens patiently, and looks at the stupid pictures, and then buys me this for Christmas.

So boys and girls, my Christmas wish for you is that you have (or find) someone who will give you things that make you happy, even when they know that they will have to look at (if not step on) the little pieces all over the house for months afterward. That's a real hero. Did I mention that she bought me a telescope as an engagement present to reciprocate for her ring? To be fair, I think my ex-wife gave me potholders or something the last Christmas we were together, and I gave her an emerald ring. I guess things average out.

Merry Christmas to me! Oh, and to the rest of you too, I guess.

Passing Away

There has been a fair amount of upheaval in my adult life, but my childhood was bedrock stable. I lived in the same house, went to the same church and lived next door to the same neighbors from the time I was born. And my parents kept one circle of friends the whole time.

The closest people in that social circle were E.B. and his family. He was my father's best friend. His wife was -- and is still -- a member of my mother's tight, inner circle of ladies who speak most every day, travel and shop together, and support each other in endeavors large and small. They had kids around my age. We went to the same church. Our families took several vacations together, and we spent countless weekends camping together, or at their cabin on the lake, or hanging by the pool. I was well past grown before I realized that it is not typical for two families of unrelated people to be this close.

E.B. was more like an uncle than a family friend. He and my father had an ever-escalating competition over who would pick up the check at dinner. He taught me how to pitch a tent, build a campfire, and how to tell a good ghost story.* With almost infinite patience, he taught me to waterski, refusing to surrender to my almost total lack of balance and grace. He pulled me around Lake Hamilton countless times, two skis or one, boogie board or barefoot, always bringing me in at just the right angle and speed to glide in to knee-deep water and step to the shore. He grilled a million hamburgers, and as many hot dogs for countless kids.

In recent years, his wife had not been well, and he spent increasing amounts of time and attention caring for her. He started a business with his son, and I think it took more of his time than he probably anticipated. He was working harder than an eighty-something year old man should, but he never complained. In fact, E.B. was the anti-complainer. It seemed the more lemons life tried to give him, the more cheerful he was determined to be. At a certain age we start to recognize this artifice in this approach, but it was as natural to him as breathing, and it worked for him. As Kurt Vonnegut said, we become who we pretend to be, and E.B. was quite simply the nicest and most beneficent man I have ever known. He was notoriously generous with his money, his time and his love.

Yesterday E.B. suffered a major stroke, and he is right now lying in the hospital on life support, waiting for the last of his children to arrive and say goodbye. Not surprisingly, he never let anyone know if he was feeling unwell, and this all happened without warning.

There is no way to describe how I feel right now. Hell, I don't even know how I feel right now. All I know is that the world is a poorer place tonight. My wife said, "I only met him a couple of times, and I love him." I am trying not to think of how hard this is, and is going to be, for his widow, and his children, and my mother and all of the other people who maybe never really knew how much he enriched their lives.

So long, old friend. I miss you already.

______________________________________________
* His signature story was, "I want my tail." I heard him tell about a dozen versions of the stupid thing, probably fifty times or more, and he still managed to scare the piss out of me every single time.

Now I really can't go home again

I got an e-mail from my mother a few weeks ago informing me that my childhood home had been demolished. This wasn't completely unexpected, but still came as somewhat of a surprise. My parents sold the house in the mid-1980's to an attorney who had plans for it that apparently fell through, and it has sat empty most of the time since, slowly decaying. It had become both an eyesore and a hazard, and reminded me a bit of Miss Haversham's place in Great Expectations. While I was considering writing this post I realized that I don't have a single picture of the house or property. I'm sure I lost a few just being a young man who moved a lot, and the rest left with my ex-wife.

Unlike most Americans of my generation, I lived in the same house from the time I was born until I left home. And it was no ordinary tract home in a subdivision, though it was certainly not a McMansion, or any other sort of mansion. The house was a modern* split-level on a wooded two and a half acre lot that was essentially given to my parents by the man for whom the street is named. He owned a very large tract of land and "just wanted good neighbors." We had only two other houses within a half mile of us. It was practically wilderness when I was a child, surrounded on three sides by woods, with a small creek running across the property. By the time I graduated from high school, the street was four lanes, there were subdivisions on all sides and I could see McDonald's from the driveway.

The house was very unassuming from the front, but from the back it was two thousand square feet of glass overlooking a large brick patio and a small hillside. My father designed and built the house in three stages, using a combination of subcontractors and child labor. By the time he was finished we had five bedrooms, three baths, two fireplaces, a living room and dining room, den and game room with a pool table, poker table, seating area and a wet bar. He had also put in a large swimming pool with an outdoor kitchen, gazebo and dressing rooms. A friend told me one time that it was the sort of place that should have a name.

Our house was not only the center of our lives, but a frequent stop for a number of overlapping social circles. Between casual gatherings, band rehearsals, poker parties, pool parties, church socials and a ridiculously large all day Independence Day party every year, our house was known by people I didn't even know I knew. To this day, when I meet people from my hometown -- many of whom I may be meeting for the first time -- they are much more likely to ask about that house than about members of my family. In fact, just last week a friend I haven't really seen since high school mentioned the house in the first e-mail message we exchanged after being out of touch for almost twenty years.

It broke my mother's heart to sell the place and move, and I know she suffered watching it erode and finally fall. She raised all of her children there, and poured her own hopes and aspirations and pride into making it a showplace. For my father, I think the loss was balanced by the opportunity to build a better house and avoid some of the mistakes he made with the first. I feel it more than I thought I would, but it's a tragedy of much less than human proportions. After all, it's been twenty-five years since I've seen the inside of the house, and the memories are still with me, even if the building is no longer there.

There is a sort of diffuse, low grade sadness in knowing the place is really gone, sort of like hearing that an old classmate or neighbor has passed away, even if they were never that close and you haven't spoken since childhood. I guess it's just another reminder that time and entropy make fools of us all. Still, when I'm home for the holidays I think I'm going to have to drive by and see the hole. Maybe I will find that G.I. Joe I lost behind the wall.

_____________________________

* Modern in the 1950's architectural sense, with a flat roof, clean lines, natural materials and lots of glass. My father was a huge fan of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Don't you wish your boyfriend was hot could cook like me?

So, yesterday was the wife's birthday. Normally I don't pay a lot of attention to my family, friends, pets, loved ones, other people, or my surroundings in general. In fact, my life often feels like time-lapse photography, where I look up and notice a whole different set of people in the room than were there what seemed like just a second ago. But, if you are willing to have sex with me and admit to it, and birthdays are important to you, then I'm going to try to bring my 'A' game to that one day a year. And the wife likes her birthdays.

Luckily for me she has exquisitely simple tastes. She has said that she fell in love with me the first time she tasted my pizza, which I know to be an exaggeration, if not an outright fabrication. But it means I manage to avoid finding just the right place to take her for dinner every year in exchange for a couple of hours in the kitchen. (This is also how we avoid any undue Valentines Day foolishness, except the pizza is heart-shaped and only red and white toppings are allowed above the cheese.) This is yesterday's effort:



Green onions, bell pepper, zuchini, fresh tomato slices, mushrooms and pepperoni with mozzarella and provolone cheese, homemade sauce and a hand-tossed, 100% whole wheat crust. I'm still working to get the crust just right, but if you've ever wanted to make whole grain breads that don't rise like cardboard and taste like wood, you might want to buy Peter Reinhart's book.



You have to start the dough the day before, but it's totally worth it. Then you should e-mail the author and tell him he should send me money because I'm pimping his book on the Internet. His pizza dough is the only thing I have tried that I didn't really love (don't tell him that), and that's only because I like my crust pretty thin and crispy, and his dough is more tender and bready like they tend to make on both coasts. I haven't tried a deep dish with this crust. One of you in the Midwest will have to let me know how that goes.

The most significant change I have made lately is slicing cheese instead of grating it. I've always tried to avoid pre-grated cheese because it's dry and tends to burn before it melts right, but using little slices of ball mozzarella and provolone instead of grating blocks myself has definitely stepped up the flavor a notch. (Bam!)

Oh, and you're going to need one of these:



Actually, you don't really need one, but you will want one, because it effing rocks like a hurricane. Sometimes I make bread just so I can play with the mixer. Seriously. The wife is not the only one who has good birthdays.

Speaking of presents, she got a Wii, because she is cool, but also because she is a girl. The allure of multi-core power and graphics acceleration is mostly lost on her, and she hasn't ever liked a shooter game that I know of, with the exception of Fallout (1 & 2). If Emily is to be believed, this may be the last time you hear from me, as the Wii will have consumed all of our waking hours from now on.

Oh, last thing on the cooking. My most important kitchen accessory is this apron:



Oh, plus there was a cake, but it was eaten before any pictures could be taken.

Update: I almost set the kitchen on fire this morning, probably because of the headspace thing. I may have to lay off the cooking for a while.

Eight(y) is Enough

The last things I thought I would be talking about when I started this blog were death and old age and other depressing shit like that. But that's what's been happening in my life, so there you go and there you have it and there you are. Anyway, if you're not depressed enough by the post-holiday-economic-meltdown-seasonal-affective blues, let's see what we can do about that.

I sent my father's widow (I've never been able to call her my stepmother, since I was in my 30's when they married) a Christmas card, and got this message in reply:

I hope this is still your correct email address. Merry Christmas to you and (wifey)! I appreciate your remembering me this year. My life is very quiet now and I don't drive very much anymore, so I stay home a lot. Some of my friends cannot even do that. Enjoy each other and do all the things that you wish to do while you and young and able.
Love,

I mean, Holy Shit! What am I supposed to do with that, besides everything in my power to make sure I don't live that long? After sitting alone in the dark for a couple of weeks with a bottle of Jack and a loaded handgun, I decided that the only thing any of us can do is to take her advice. My father went through several careers and started a number of companies, the last when he was 79. He used to say that when a door closed on our lives (NO! Not the window thing!) it was time to pick up whatever we had left and head on down the road. (Whew! Close one.) My father was full of crap about a lot of stuff, but I think he had this one right.

Life is too short, people. And to paraphrase someone smarter than I, it's definitely too short to live it in a way that makes us wish it were shorter. It's also too precious to spend it beating ourselves up because we're too fat or we don't make enough money or our job sucks or we already broke our resolution or our loser <pick one> left us for some <pick again>. I can go on...no?... you get the idea?... good, because we were about to go blue.

So be happy today. Do something you've always wanted to do. Or watch reruns and eat a whole box of Cheeze-its. And if you end up never visiting the Parthenon, don't beat yourself up about it. The thing we can never do later is live our life the way we wanted to live it at the time.

If I weren't so lazy/busy, I would go find one of those Bon Jovi smiley face things to put here. You will have to use your imagination.