leap day

bedtime reading.

i should have videoed the boy before bed. as i tucked him in, he told me this was leap year, which i think he learned in school today. i asked him if his class did a leap year leap. he said no.

i got a wild hair and told him to get up and stand next of his bed. on my knees, i scooted back about two feet and told him to jump into my arms.

after i caught him, i said he had just taken a leap day leap and that he would be 10 years old the next time he took one. fourth grade, i said. he'd be getting ready for middle school.

big snow, little suit.

he took that in and let it wash over him. "i'm getting old every year," he said before we began our bedtime rituals. ain't that the truth, son.

funny thing about this guy is that when he's in bed, lying still as we say our prayers, he still looks like a little boy. the length and angularity of his face disappears somewhat and his cheeks regain a bit of the fullness that they had when he was a toddler.

his sister had exhausted herself over a long day and, possibly sick, she went to bed early. so by the time i got home, he was playing a sesame street video game by himself and seemed much less spastic. (not having to vie for attention does wonders for a kindergartner's demeanor.)

he was being very sweet to his ailing mom and not at all obnoxious for a change. in the dimmed light of the living room, he, his mama and i were able to exchange recollections of him as a toddler as asked questions during  his bedtime story. (darth vader and son, set just after revenge of the sith, but before a new hope, when luke is 4 years old. it's pretty funny.)

again, remembering his travails as a terrible 3 in preschool, kris and i were remorseful at what could have been sweeter years in toddlerhood. the things we learn. we should be mindful to not waste the present, though.

cultural revolution

monster period, october 2015.

i vaguely recall efforts to making my room my own as a child. while i think i pretty much just left alone what decoration my mom stuck to our walls, i don't think i actually added to it with my own posters, at least not for a long time.

she hung two "peanuts" banners in our bedroom at our first home in west virginia. "curse you, red baron!" had snoopy in his world war i pilot regalia atop his doghouse; the other had linus sagely remarking, "i love mankind ... it's people i can't stand!"

i remember reading them as a first-grader and being stuck on "curse," which i tried to read as "cuss" to make it sound like a word i'd heard before, neither of which i knew definitions for, anyway. i was equally flummoxed by "mankind," as i pronounced it with a short "i" sound, and, again, even if i were pronouncing it correctly, i would have no idea what it meant. (ergo, its nuances as a funny sentiment went over my 6-year-old head.)

they traveled with us to our present home, to the bedroom i shared with my brother. each was positioned at the head of a bed; i believe i had snoopy.

other than that, i don't recollect either of us affixing anything to the walls, aside from a kiss bicentennial poster a la "the spirit of '76" and at least one velvet black light poster as we hit puberty. (i once had the temerity to hide a playboy centerfold behind sweet charles schulz' creation. fear and shame got the better of me within the day, though, and it was stealthily returned to my dad's magazine that afternoon.)

i remember an effort at a wall of celebrities on the back of our door, featuring cast-off pics from my girl friends' teen mags, so there were a few images of farrah fawcett (not the famous one), the cast of "charlie's angels" and possibly kristy mcnichol, who i had a crush on. i think i realized i was just going through the motions when i taped a picture of arnold horshack from "welcome back, kotter." i don't think the "wall" lasted past ninth grade.

once i left for college, pj made a big deal of turning the room into his bachelor pad with led zeppelin posters and whatever swag i brought him back from school. he tore up some nice creem magazine covers along with color photos from it and rolling stone of whatever rock bands he deemed hard enough, as well as beer ads with beer and/or scantily clad women.

this sad bit of history is a long way of saying that after a mere six years on the planet, the boy has decided he is making over his own room. no more with the monsters or dinosaurs or the creations of his preschool self.

the force awakens, december 2014.

today, he followed through on his plan hatched earlier this month to make his room exclusively star wars, complete with "trophies" (a 9-inch tall darth vader and storm trooper) and a poster he made with images he clipped from the newspaper. he even completed a bedtime putsch, banishing his seussian characters and bears in favor of a plush darth vader bear and an assortment of plush star wars "itty bittys" (i had to look that up).

i'm not sure how long this will last, but given the juggernaut that disney is just now ramping up, this could last him close to middle school and possibly beyond.

(update 29 february: noticed last night that he has reinstated his lorax among the bedtime coterie, which was sweetly reassuring. he hasn't totally let go of his toddlerhood. but whither orangie?)

no tools required

easy-to-assemble furniture.*

so i put together a lovely, inexpensive, saddle-type barstool from target for the boy to help him stretch his adductors, which his doctor said could help with some of his pigeon-toedness if he straddles it for about 30 minutes a day.

(i say this remembering a theory my buddy jody had re pigeon-toedness and good athletes. two he pointed out as examples: michael jordan and andre agassi.)

anyway, i took a few minutes after the kids were in bed to put the thing together. i assembled a collection of screwdrivers and pliers only to find on opening the box that a hex wrench was included — and all i needed, apparently. all told, there were about 18 bolts in three sizes, plus four washers. took all of maybe half an hour to finish.

Mixed Material 29" Barstool -Threshold™

(plus two i just now put in after inventorying the bolts. i'd put them in my pocket thinking they were extras but i remembered seeing two more holes in the frame that aligned with a pair in the seat. good on you, blog.)

using that allen wrench, though, put me in mind of the idea of cake mixes. my advertising professor told the class the story behind them was that modern processing allowed everything in a cake to be broken down into powder; all that needed to be done was add water, bake, and, voila, cake.

but research showed an aversion to the process. users didn't really feel like they were "baking" and that what they were making was somehow artificial. so the developers dialed the recipe back a bit so the cook had to crack an egg and add oil, too; this felt more "genuine" and that there was more care put into its creation.

from my standpoint, i see no shame in "building" furniture with a tool so cheap it is included with all the other neatly bagged accouterments in the box. the result is less a work of craftsmanship as industrial engineering, but it gets the job done — we hope. i'm pretty sure we'll get at least a few good years out of this utilitarian piece of furniture imported from the middle kingdom.

* easy-to-assemble furniture allows for the consumption of inexpensive beer.

multi-culti kiddies

something i started hammering out before work so mama could show the kids after school. after reading the lovely "mama provi and the pot of rice" and admiring the multi-cultural buffet it served up in a trip up eight flights of stairs, i remarked to my wife that we're a "multi-culti" family. (at which point she recalled that the baby asked her that day if/when her skin would become brown, like her daddy's. i honestly didn't think she or the boy noticed such thing.)

so anyway, here's the post.

thank you

for the big little favor, Lord. 

dadness

gramps and the boy have an exchange.

this guy holding his grandson. i think i've kissed this guy more in the past five years or so than i had in the previous 40.

as i became college-aged and was in school, there were manly handshakes or a simple grasping of hands. once i moved out of the house for good, there were fatherly hugs.

it wasn't until after i returned from living in south carolina that it began to dawn on me that he might miss hearing from me. i was 40-something then, and at some point, after i hadn't called them for weeks on end, he commented that he saw me more when i lived a day's drive away than when i was less than an hour from home.

because i'm dumb, it never occurred to me that he might have an interest in my well-being and my person. all those years i thought he and mom were nagging me, he was working to spare me the painful lessons he had to learn on his own and teach me how to be successful.

(at first, he figured that doing it exactly his way was the path of least resistance. good Lord, it must have driven him crazy when he witnessed me aimlessly wandering, wasting my talent and intelligence. later, it became lessons on how to have a successful life in general. and it wasn't all about money, either. turns out we both had a lot to learn in that regard.)

"it's about that time ..."

it may not have been until i announced my engagement that a) i realized that he was paying attention to my life and 2) that i started hugging him like a little boy hugs his dad — because i loved him.

he confessed to me after i broke the news to the family as we prepared to leave the beach that as he and mom drove to my sister's condo he'd wondered aloud to mom, given this was kris' and my second trip to the beach as a couple, what my intentions were.

finally, i was becoming a person; finally, something with which we could relate to each other.

as the kids have come along, i appreciate even more what he had to be going through. and he had to do it moving four times in six years, each successive move bringing with it another baby, and all the while having to continue learning and studying to become the doctor he is today.

(and it's only now that he's even coming close to slowing down. this, oddly, the real start of his autumn years, has led to my regarding him as i do my own children, in need of my care and, yeah, the acknowledgement that i do love him dearly. so i kiss his gray head a lot more these days just so he knows. expressing tenderness to my own children just made it easier.)

trap.

weekends like the one i've just enjoyed, while my children are still very much children, i'm not sure dad was really able to experience. i mean, when any two of us were 6 and 4, he was knee-deep in rotations or training or being on call for days at a time. i just got to spend the better part of a day and a half watching, working and playing with my babies.

(he's getting to do that now, though, after 10 grandchildren, i believe his time has passed to ever learn how to change a diaper.)

i got to watch their imaginations at work and the unfathomable logic, or lack thereof, of how they think. (which suddenly explains my father's exasperated urgings to me and my brother to do that very thing after some unexplainable foolishness we'd gotten ourselves into.)

these are moments, a handful out of countless others that have gone or will go undocumented, to be pulled out at random after getting chucked into the footlocker of our memories, but will form the basis of the type of relationship that i'll have with my children.

good Lord willing — and i'm saying that an awful lot these days — we'll all have the chance to see what kind of fruit, and hugs and kisses, it bears.

so young

Someone To Call My Lover - Janet Jackson from Lauren on Vimeo.

i'd forgotten about this song, but it might explain why i've been gravitating to the gymnopedies piano trio by erik satie.

i'd finally returned to listening to top 40 radio after the sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. i needed an escape from the real world, where the earnest reporting of public radio was immersing me for days on end.

i'd become a regular gym rat and the cable music channel playing over the speakers at the y was just the right mix of alt/pop to engage me and keep me company as i emerged from about two years of therapy. i was enjoying music again. this song was in regular rotation; at the time, i only appreciated the loop of america's "ventura highway" woven throughout.

since i'd been listening to his work so frequently of late, i wanted to read up on satie as a composer and found this piece had been incorporated into pop music. so i sleuthed a bit as to the bit that was echoing in my head and found this video.

my mind suddenly went back about 15 years and i was remembering being a lean, fit middle-ager, blooming late into the comfort of my own skin.

and it was about this time that i met the young woman who would become my wife and the mother of my children. she was probably just starting work at the paper when this song was making its way into my consciousness and onto an early mix cd. we were still just work friends then. she couldn't have been more than 23. (i wonder now if she liked this song.)

seems like a million carefree years ago. a bittersweet reminder of how far we've come, and how blessed and lucky were to find each other, on this overcast, wintry valentine's day.

mother church

lector, 2009.

this is me about a year before our first child was born. i got called up to read at the noon ash wednesday mass.

i usually enter lent with some dread of sacrifice and privation, but come to recognize that, compared with Christ's days of prayer, fasting and suffering, these are really only inconveniences that ought to put me into the frame of mind for introspection and growth.

maybe it's a return to the traditional prayer the ministers offer as they administer the ashes or maybe it's my age and watching its vagaries creep up on those i love, but i was especially cognizant of hearing "you are dust and to dust you shall return."

(it seems like it had been "repent and believe in the gospel" for years. i'm not sure if there had been a change and i just hadn't noticed over the past few years or the diocese or the parish or the priest made the choice on this particular wednesday.)

as fr. o'donnell mentioned before the closing prayer this evening, he said it's one of the few times someone will look at you and say, "you are going to die."

having attended my share of funerals and hearing ministers speak of returning to dust, i was aware in an abstract way of mortality. but it was always something off in the distance, something that happened when you got old, something as ordered, regular and expected as the changing of seasons. you die and then you go to heaven! isn't that great?

now, looking at our tiny planet from orbiting cameras in space, then looking at planets just hanging in the vast darkness, then seeing unending clouds comprised of billions of stars (thanks, carl sagan), each a sun surrounded by their own system of planets, you get to thinking that, yeah, we are just specks of dust on a rock spinning around a flaming fusion reaction.

then, when one of those specks stops pumping blood or its nerve bundle blows out and it stops being a warm, moving thing, it becomes cold. from the survivor's standpoint, bereft of word, breath or emotion, it is the end of this person's existence. the body now houses nothing — this is final.

this is depressing. and scary. but, today, hearing the antecedent "you are dust," was oddly comforting. this housing for your person was dust before you inhabited it; when you leave, it will be dust again. "you" will go someplace else; "you" are eternal.

all this, after an hour in church.

pieta

i can feel my relationship with her, in the physical manifestation of architecture and statuary and people, beginning to change somewhat. where she used to be a shelter in which i could practice the communal aspects of my faith apart from my personal prayer life, i'm becoming more aware, in the church's material presence, the effort to reflect and convey her teaching.

as a father, i look at the plaster copy of michelangelo's "pieta" in the nave of the church with new eyes. it isn't just Christ taken down from the cross; it's a mother holding her dead son. what this means from so many perspectives of sacrifice and love and loss and what it means to our faith is profound.

(what was strange was this new insight vis a vis a parent's relationship with a child came just days before i went to watch the new "star wars" movie, where in a climactic scene a father's love for his son transcended everything. my church experience somehow made this even more powerful.)

a lot going on this first day of lent.

ugh

sam's southwest burger.

i believe messrs. jagger and richards put it succinctly when they wrote, "what a drag it is getting old."

as today is shrove tuesday — the day before ash wednesday — i asked kris if it would be ok if i had a last cheeseburger before i give them up for the next six weeks.

"i guess," she replied. "Lord." i exasperate her.

my friends at sam's were totally on their game today. their southwest burger with the pepperjack cheese and the pepper-rubbed bacon was pretty close to perfect. so well-seasoned and condimented that i didn't need to ketchup my fries until i was about halfway done. (see how i verbed those nouns?)

well, between the burger and the king cake we had in the newsroom, i'm on, oh, about my sixth antacid tablet.

a drag. i'm not going to stop, but yeah, it's a drag.

new year

so today begins chinese new year, the year of the monkey. (which is nice for kris and me.)

up until work got really busy, i was still in a fog about dad (yeah, maybe kind of mournful) but i felt a little better after giving mom a call.

he knows to scale back, deciding this morning to take himself off cardiology call, so he'll just keep office hours and hospital visits. what's next follows a couple more doctor visits. maybe this will help take some of the unknown out of the equation.

picked up a handful of children's books on chinese new year for the kids. the boy was tickled to find his birth year in one of the books — he's a tiger — and the girl was disappointed to not find herself in it. but the last book featured a character named "mei-mei," which was close enough to keep her contentedly staring at the page for a while. (we found she is a rabbit, btw.)

nice shot by erik meldrum. chinese new year 2011, san francisco, calif.

up until a year or two ago, i was pleased with the knowledge imparted from a chinese restaurant placemat that i was born in the year of the dragon. but then i learned, according to the chinese calendar, i am a rabbit. while also a fairly lucky sign, in my mind, it's not as cool as a dragon. (it is more compatible, though, with my wife, the goat.)

so while the lunar calendar has me a rabbit, i think i'll just stick to the solar calendar where i'm a dragon. yeah, i'm appropriating me some culture.

friday

after a few tests, and a normal bp, discharged.

the baby and i went to meet dad at the doctor friday. we ran into him just as he and mom were leaving.

he said he was being sent to the emergency room to be admitted to the hospital for some tests.  his blood pressure was super high.

waiting for mom in the car, he looked at the girl and said, "i thought i was going to see you graduate high school."

and that just broke my heart.

it's not going to take more than the miracle that modern medicine offers to fix what ails him.

but the miracle still has to happen. and we still have to have faith.

and, for now, courage.

coot

We are always listening. Are you? #WhyListen #wvpblove via Instagram: https://t.co/76lIZUgWkF pic.twitter.com/HT4QL9EYa8

— Mountain Stage (@MountainStage) February 5, 2016

now i know i am old. i see posts like this on social media and all i want to do is smack every one of them.

speaking as a music snob, few things cheese me off more than music snobs. more to the point, it's pretentious music snobs who have to let you know how their taste is so much better than everyone else's.

kinda like this gathering here. a bunch of hipsters playing "rate a record" at a local brew pub and sipping their ipa's and porters and bocks and generally making the scene.

these millennials, so much like their baby boomer grandparents. where the latter is so full of self-congratulation, the former is just full of self — full stop.

just when it seemed like the grating din from the "me generation" was finally dying down, its obnoxious, amplified echo is being heard from the "i-generation" (i think i just made that up) with the two combining like some horrifying set of doppler stereo headphones permanently clamped to the collective head of generation x.

i'm going to be a great, bitter old man.

Beer-battered mac-and-cheese bites

Beer, mac & cheese bites and bacon – all in bite-size form. From @latimesfood: https://t.co/BPYJJVyng7 #SuperBowl pic.twitter.com/mFCld6SQDz

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) February 5, 2016

Ingredients

• 1/2 lb Bacon
• 1/2 cup Chives
• 1 lb Elbow macaroni, small 
• 1 1/2 tsp Baking powder
• 3 cups Cornstarch
• 3 1/2 cups Flour
• 1 Salt and pepper
• 3 tbsp Vegetable oil
• 1 Vegetable oil
• 2 tbsp Butter
• 3/4 lb Cheddar, sharp grated
• 3/4 lb Gouda, smoked grated
• 1 1/2 cups Half and half
• 1 1/2 cups Parmesan cheese, grated
• 4 1/2 cups Ipa beer

1. Heat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Bring a large pot of water to the boil and add the vegetable oil, then the macaroni. Cook the macaroni according to the manufacturer's instructions to al dente, then drain. Spread the macaroni out on a rimmed baking sheet to cool slightly while you make the sauce.
3. In a medium, heavy pot, render the bacon until crisp, stirring frequently, 8 to 10 minutes. Using a slotted spoon, remove the bacon, leaving the fat in the pot. Drain the bacon on paper towels.
4. Measure the bacon fat in the pot. You will need 1/2 cup. If short, add butter as needed to have a total of 1/2 cup fat.
5. Heat the fat in the pot over medium heat and slowly whisk in 1/2 cup flour to create a roux. Cook the roux for 2 to 3 minutes until it is lightly colored, then begin to whisk in the half and half and 1 1/2 cups beer. Continue cooking, stirring frequently until the sauce begins to bubble and is thickened.
6. Stir or whisk in the grated cheeses until melted and incorporated, then stir in the bacon. Stir in the macaroni.
7. Spoon the macaroni and cheese into a greased 13-inch by 9-inch baking dish. Place the dish in the oven and bake until the sauce begins to bubble on the sides and the top is faintly golden, about 15 minutes. Remove and cool on a rack to room temperature, then cover and place the baking dish in the refrigerator until the macaroni and cheese chilled and completely firm, preferably overnight.
8. Fill a 4-quart pot with frying oil to a depth of 3 to 4 inches. Heat the oil to maintain a temperature of 350 degrees.
9. Make the beer batter: In a large bowl, whisk together the remaining 3 cups beer with the 3 cups flour, 1 1/4 teaspoons salt, and the baking powder. Whisk in the chives and Parmesan cheese and set aside.
10. Remove the macaroni and cheese from the refrigerator. Cut the macaroni and cheese into 1-inch squares.
11. Working with a few squares at a time, toss the bites into cornstarch to coat, then gently roll them in the beer batter to coat completely. Shake off the excess batter and carefully dip the bites into the hot oil. Fry the macaroni and cheese bites until the batter is puffed and lightly golden and the batter is crisp, about 2 minutes. Drain the bites on a rack, and continue frying. Serve the bites hot.

synchronicity

The #WordOfTheDay is abject: low in spirit, hope, or state https://t.co/FSQo0L1WBN

— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) February 1, 2016

apt. maybe not even just today. maybe for this part of my work life.