How Green Was My Mountain

I suppose that if the only knowledge someone had of me came from reading this blog, it’s possible they would think I’m forever gazing into the rearview mirror. Now it’s true that while driving, I make it a practice always to be aware of my surroundings, fore and aft – you never know when an unanticipated lane change might be necessary. But in the larger, more metaphorical sense, I’d like to think I don’t spend any more time looking back over my shoulder than most people.

I won’t deny that it can be very enjoyable, if only in the same way that stretching a sore muscle or wiggling a loose tooth is… faintly painful, but simultaneously satisfying somehow. And since I have a real love for understanding the way things fit together, I puzzle over the meaning of what’s gone before. And since I’m insufferably annoying, I write about it. Which taken altogether leads to a high proportion of backwards-facing blog posts.

I really wasn’t looking for yet another one; they can be the trickiest kind to write, because understanding the past and making it both comprehensible and even potentially interesting to someone who wasn’t there is a tall order (I stumbled across a post recently in which a guy gave a complete review of all his fantasy sports teams, which was perhaps mildly gratifying to the guys who were ahead of him in the league, but not, I thought, a winning strategy for drawing in long-term readership). But as seems to be so often the case, circumstances pushed me where I wasn’t planning to go.

By the way, here’s MS Word’s take on that previous sentence: “If the marked words are an incomplete thought, consider developing this thought into a complete sentence by adding a subject or a verb or combining this text with another sentence.”

The first event, a couple of weeks ago, was the 13^th anniversary of starting my current job. Granted, I’ve shifted jobs within the company, and the company itself was absorbed by a Gigantically Extensive multinational corporation, but still it’s considered my corporate anniversary (as it turns out, the 13^th anniversary is “congratulatory email from your manager”).

I suppose in some ways it’s kind of a lukewarm achievement, but it’s pretty astonishing when you consider the 13 years previous to my start date, when I was teaching part-time and filling in with other part-time odd jobs (and I’m not choosing the word “odd” casually) and never went a whole year with exactly the same “mix” of workplaces. Then when my wife graduated from seminary and we moved to Vermont, I decided it was also time to graduate from perpetually semi-employed Adjunct Instructor to a Real Job.

As I was reflecting on that milestone, I was also reading a book by Chris Bohjalian that was set in Vermont – having discovered his writing because he was writing for the newspaper when we moved there. So I found myself in sort of a Green Mountain State of Mind, which I suppose is kind of like a New York State of Mind, except with cows and trees and plaid flannel instead of Billy Joel.

While I had a perfectly satisfying time living in Vermont, I was not seized by any agonies when we were asked to move back to Upstate New York, so I was a tiny bit surprised when I reflected on my New England sojourn and realized how pivotal – and I mean that fairly literally, in the turning point/change of direction sense – that time had been for me. Consider the following developments in the space of just less than 6 years there:

• ~ Most obviously, both my job and my career. For the first time, I had a regular 9-to-5 type full-time permanent job. In other words, it was the first time my job didn’t come with an expiration date. And once you’ve lived the semester-to-semester lifestyle, the “normal” kind represents an enormous weight off your shoulders. As a nice bonus, I discovered that I enjoyed my new career and I was also pretty good at it, not to mention that the word “salary” has a lovely ring to it.
• ~ It was also my transition back to Parsonage World, being the spouse of a minister with all that entails. Let me be quick to say that being married to the pastor doesn’t make me special in any way – it certainly doesn’t mean that anything I say or do should be treated as having come down from the mountaintop on stone tablets – but it does make me a lot more visible. I live in the knowledge that if I do something wrong or offend anyone or generally screw up, it can have a negative effect on her ability to do her job in a way that could never be true the other way around. As such, it was kind of a rocky transition for me because I became very self-conscious about the image I was projecting to others, and despite my experience growing up in a parsonage, it was a couple of years before I stopped taking myself quite so seriously and was able to really be myself (not that me trying extra-hard to be on my best behavior is entirely a bad idea).
• ~ It was the time period when my children were born, meaning not only the blessing of their addition to the family, but also the adjustment from being a couple to being… well, a family. I suppose that sounds condescending to couples with no children, but my point is really that it sounds and smells and tastes and feels so different. I’m only speaking for me: I knew in my heart that while I loved being the two of us, there would always be a hole in my heart until there were more. I may not know much about the will of God, but I have always been convinced that I was meant to be a dad – not making any judgments about my skill for same – and in Vermont I finally got to do it.
• ~ It was my return from The Exile. You see, if you don’t count college, for the first 32 years of my life, I lived in 5 different homes, and if you drew a line to connect them, it would be about 50 miles from end to end. The Capital District of New York State is in a lot of ways as much a part of me as my hair color (ok, what my hair color used to be; I don’t know what all’s going on up there right now) or my extremely long & narrow feet. Even my college was still in New York -- Western New York, but close enough that I could feel in my bones that I was just visiting and I could go home any time I needed to.
• So when my wife chose a seminary in Ohio, it must have been sheer naiveté for me to think the adjustment would be simple. “A fish out of water” may be a cliché, but like almost all clichés, it got that way by being so true: from the moment I arrived in Dayton, I felt out of my element – no, I was out of my element -- and was quickly emotionally (and nearly physically) gasping for air. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Dayton, but it never for a moment felt like home.
• Vermont isn’t upstate New York, and native Vermonters would often half-jokingly remind us that you’re not a real Vermonter till you’ve got six generations in the ground, but it’s geographically and topographically and culturally close enough that when we moved there I felt like I’d been thrown back into the water and could breathe again.
• I understood much, much later that it was just as much a case of having been uprooted from my church home in New York, not really finding one for over a year in Ohio, and then getting a new start in Vermont, that accounted for my V-shaped trajectory… but in either case, whether Vermont was the cause of my recovery/rebirth or just the innocent bystander, it was certainly where and when it happened.

The churches of Vermont have now been officially separated from the churches of New York, so the likelihood that I’ll ever live there again is pretty close to zero. Somehow I kinda feel like I’ve already lived there for a lifetime anyway.

Practically My AARP Application

Someone who knows me very well once said that I was middle-aged when I was 9 years old. That's probably not the most flattering thing anyone ever said about me... but nonetheless pretty hard to argue against. I mean, it's not like I was born wearing a 3-piece suit or anything -- but if you look hard at the sonogram you might see the outline of a tiny bow tie.

Given that, you can see what I'm fighting against as the years advance and the hair retreats, or at least redistributes itself to some unpredictable locations. I don't want to be the proverbial get-off-my-lawn guy, but I can't much help myself; even when I was a teen I was trying to keep the neighbor out of my yard, and she was gorgeous, so I clearly can't help myself.

Adding another layer to the issue, I have to confess that Halloween has never held much appeal for me. The costume takes something of a creativity factor (and/or a thick wallet), not exactly up my alley; the whole atmosphere of the holiday is built around a certain enjoyment of the macabre and creepy, which is completely incomprehensible to me; and what's up with walking up to a stranger's door and asking them for candy? I've been known to visit friends and be unable to ask where the bathroom is, so again this holiday is not designed for me. And, to complete the woebegone picture of the little kid as sort of accountant-in-waiting, as a kid I (somehow) didn't have that much interest in candy (now? Yes, please).

This doesn't really fit anywhere, but let's pause a moment to consider the genius of wearing one of those thin nylon bodysuit costumes in an area where the average low temperature on Oct. 31 is 35 degrees. Nothing says 'superpowers' like a parka and mittens.

Why do I go through this elaborate setup? Because I'm incapable of doing otherwise. Well, that, but also I know how this is going to sound. Complaining about Halloween Nowadays is going to come off like the usual Why in my day everything was fun and innocent and these kids today just don't know how good they've got it and whatever happened to simpler values and and and....

My real point, however, if I haven't already run out the clock on having one, is that while I've never really 'gotten' or especially enjoyed Halloween, it's way worse now than it was. It wasn't much fun then, and it's considerably less fun now.

I know I'm hopelessly square and old -- I got an excellent head start on coming to terms with that, as a child -- but what I see around me is mostly just disgusting. I get that the white sheet with the eyeholes is Charlie Brown-passe, but so many of the costumes I see now have to look like the wearer is actually bleeding, or decaying, or at least getting ready to kill a bunch of people. Several of the kids at the Cub Scout Halloween party -- Cub Scouts, now, say ages 6-12 -- had some sort of zombie-looking garb AND semi-automatic weapons. I suppose with as slowly as the traditional zombie moves, it pays to have something to even up the odds a little.

In that case, I guess I should congratulate the costumes that don't require a parental advisory sticker, except a lot of those aren't costumes at all. I saw a couple of young-teen girls just wearing what appeared to be kitty ears. Get your mind out of the gutter; I don't mean just kitty ears in the sense of 'kitty ears and nothing else at all', I mean it in the sense of, "Let's put on our coats and go out to scam some candy -- hey, look, put these on your head so we can say it's a costume."

But they make up for it with their charm and personality. A big clump of them comes up & rings the doorbell; when you open the door, they shove a pillowcase in your face and stand there till you come across. I have to say it does not exactly bring out the gracious host in me.

Sigh. I know. I KNOW. They're just kids, and scary can be fun, and they're just trying on roles as kids have done forever, and I shouldn't expect everyone to have perfect please and thank you manners, and I'm probably the last person in the world who should be criticizing others for leveraging opportunities for free food. And I should stop being such a study hall monitor already. I guess I was just hoping that we could get all excited, and drop money on costumes and giveaway treats, and tromp around in the cold and rain, for something a little more... life-affirming?

OK, I have to admit, it wasn't a total loss. We were still making the rounds when my daughter dug around in her pumpkin-shaped bucket and pulled out and handed to me... a tiny, tiny (TINY! I believe it was the 1.74 oz. size, or maybe 6 pieces) bag of Peanut M&Ms.

Atmosphere Is for Meteorologists

Shortly after my wife and I were married, we mutually discovered that one of us had the interest, plus a little bit of experience, to do the grocery shopping. So began the process -- which continues to this day -- of dividing the domestic duties according to something other than standard, traditional gender roles.

Early in my tenure as the Potentate of Provender, I discovered something that put a light in my eye and a spring in my step: Edwards Food Warehouse. As it turned out, I needed all the light my eye could supply, for Edwards was a large, square, dimly-lit barn without a hint of ambiance; their purpose was to charge about 18 cents less than the other guys for each item -- passing the savings on light bulbs and shiny floor tile on to the consumer.

There are few more potent combos for me than food and saving money (see also the Entertainment Book), so it was almost a physical blow to me when Edwards went out of business. And as we moved about ourselves, virtually my first task in each new location was to scout out the grocery with the best value (in Ohio, Meijer was cheaper than Kroger; in Vermont, Price Chopper was usually better than Shaw's; back in Upstate New York, Price Chopper beats Hannaford).

I'm always diligent in tracking PC sales, especially their Buy One Get One (BOGO) and even on occasion Buy One Get Two, along with clipping coupons and using the Advantedge savings card. Of course, shopping like this means that occasionally... supply outstrips demand. So in recent years I've had a large shelf in the basement, and a small freezer in the garage to store the items that -- well, it's not that they're not needed; it's more that their time hasn't come yet. I don't think of them as "extra" or "surplus", but rather Bench Strength. Any good coach needs a deep and flexible bench. It should also be noted that in our house, we go through cereal, and peanut butter, and toilet paper like... well, like they're being used extensively every day.

One of the hidden hazards of moving was that I had to drain down the surplus a bit (plus pack a bunch of, ah, less-immediately-needed items, which itself resulted in a Spousal Advisory). So when the dust cleared in the new home -- oh, if only that were a metaphor -- I found myself feeling somewhat under-supplied to face up to the needs of the household.

The upside of the move, however (in my never-ending quest to find the silver lining for every cloud), was that I found myself a mile from BJ's Wholesale Club, which not only sells all sorts of things at a discount but was even having a sale on the membership fee! Why, it's as if they created the place specifically for me....

I am, as surely everyone who might possibly care knows, virtually unerring in my church attendance, but I find I attend BJ's scarcely less regularly. The atmosphere, if you could call it that, is reminiscent of Edwards (not to mention redolent of tires) but it looks like Shangri-La to me.

Here are some of the treasures I've unearthed on my voyages of discovery:

• % 2 one-gallon apple juice jugs linked at the handle
• % a package containing a dozen toothbrushes
• % 3 jars of peanut butter shrink-wrapped together
• % 3 one-pound bags of Goldfish, in a single box
• % a huge cello-bag of juice pops that I can "pop" in the freezer a few at a time
• % a two-pound block of mozzarella
• % a jug of Windex big enough to keep all our windows clean until we move again
• % a wall adapter for my iPod
• % 3 cans of shave gel -- say it with me -- shrink-wrapped together

So my shelves are once again robust, which in turn has contributed to a feeling of being a little more settled and "at home". Plus, if there's ever a nationwide shortage of peanut butter or shave gel, or tortellini or AA batteries, I'm going to be sitting pretty.

Trees, Swaying in the Summer Breeze

OK, I guess it's more or less over -- although they are saying we have some 80-degree days coming this week. Still, I've been wearing a lot of long pants lately, and even a jacket for the cool early-morning trip to the bus stop. Of course, that could be just because my temperature control hasn't had a chance to reboot.

But the calendar tells us that the end of summer is just days away. And it's already been a couple of weeks since I celebrated Labor Day in my traditional fashion: I sat at home and mourned the fact that summer had ended basically before it even felt like it started.

So it's perhaps emotional self-preservation that prompts me to look back more intentionally on my summer. Granted a lot of the carefree spirit was leached out of it by the move and all the attendant stress, work, and expenditure... but somehow we still managed to shoehorn our share of summery fun:

• # We didn't spend an inordinate amount of time at camp, but we managed a handful of days.
• # Thanks to one of our new neighbors, the kids were able to swim almost at will.
• # There were a number of picnics, including one that served as a reunion for us with some friends from a previous congregation.
• # I attended (and brought my daughter to) my first minor-league baseball game in a lot of years.
• # We got to have a date at a fine local theater production of "On Golden Pond"...
• # ... and also brought the whole family to a delightful, and absolutely free, outdoor production of "Annie Get Your Gun".
• # You might already have heard about this, but it's worth re-emphasizing that the family vacation consumed about 15% of the summer all by itself.

While I am well-known from sea to shining sea for my generally sunny outlook on life, even a dyed-in-the-wool optimist such as myself can benefit from an effort to remember more of what goes on in my life than working and laundry and running the kids back & forth to childcare. Hope you also have some summer events that you can recall with satisfaction.

Classical Gas, I Know

I still remember the first research paper I ever wrote -- I think it was in fourth grade*. We had to choose a state to report on, and since I had recently visited friends in Delaware with my family, that's what I chose. They helped out by sending me some brochures, and since I didn't know anything about research (and nobody taught me anything about it, either) I mostly cut out the pictures and pasted them on construction paper, then wrote a few sentences loaded with really basic facts -- you know, chief products, population, etc. Of course, I did have one really cool feature: since it was Delaware, the map I included was actual size.

*OK, I don't have to work too hard to "remember" -- I still have it.

I did a lot more papers over the years and it took awhile for me to get any better at it. I got pretty much called out for it in 7th grade when I wrote a paper about baseball. One of the problems was that the topic was baseball, and since I never narrowed it down from there, I never did get a handle on what to wrote. But again: I didn't feel like anyone ever taught me anything about writing papers, and it took me several tries to get the hang of it.

In college, I wrote a paper about lobbyists... which turned out not to be an awesome paper, due in part to my stupidity in being born too soon to use the Internet in college (and my college was so isolated that literally the only source available was the college library). But it was notable for the fact that it might have been the first paper I ever did where I picked the topic because it was something I wanted to know more about.

I didn't write too many more papers after that, and when I was out of school for good, I was actually disappointed, because I felt like I'd lost that chance to find out about more interesting topics. Nothing stopping me from learning, of course, but if there's no way to "present" it, it's like it's unfinished.

Now fast-forward 20+ years and I'm pondering creating a blog. I remember thinking at the time, hey, here's a place to write some research papers (although somehow I forgot to mention it)! That was until I discovered that merely writing the thing was plenty time-consuming enough, so more often than not I just make stuff up.

However, I still get curious about stuff, but this time I'm going to turn the research on its head: I'm going to ask the readers to supply the answers to a question that somehow got stuck in my brain this week.

I was reading about Aroldis Chapman, rookie pitcher for the Reds, who was clocked throwing a pitch 105 mph, fastest of the year and one of the fastest ever. There's been a lot of discussion about the theoretical limits of the human arm -- this on the heels, of course, of Usain Bolt and the parallel discussion of how fast a human can run.

From there, my mind made the leap to music, and I wondered how far you can push a particular musical genre -- like the Beatles did for pop and Miles Davis for jazz.

What about classical music? When I think of classical -- and I freely admit I'm totally naive here; it's not music that I actively seek out or think about much -- the names that come to mind are the guys like Bach and Mozart. While I could probably throw in Aaron Copland, I'm curious: if I were a classical music fan and were listening to the radio all the time or seeking out the hottest CDs/MP3s... would I be hearing primarily music that's 200 years old? Or are there current "classical" composers who are really considered in the same breath as the traditional masters? Contemporary classical seems kind of like a contradiction in terms.

As a rule, I don't get a lot of comments on my blog posts... but then again, when I read blogs, I probably comment 5% of the time or less, so that enables me to convince myself that I have a vast readership just waiting to be tapped. So this time there's no punchline -- I'm counting on you all for that.

Vacationpalooza Tour 2010

The Family Summer Vacation is our annual phenomenon, and every year I attempt to make some sense of it in this space. But an experience so sprawling always proves elusive to summarize -- especially for someone like me who likes to be concise and brief and a man of few words and generally is not given to going on and on about something almost indefinitely until you finally are about to forget what the beginning of the sentence was.

Wait, what was I saying?

Oh yes... I was making the point that two weeks packed with adventures can even pose a writing challenge for someone such as myself, who is, you know, gifted with, like, words and stuff.

The basic structure of the trip does not change: the meat of the sandwich is several days at a beach house in North Carolina with "my side of the family" -- enjoyable despite the minor tensions inherent in putting 9 (related) people under the same roof. Every day we go to the beach, we read a lot, we eat, we talk and play cards, and at almost any given time someone is asleep. It's almost as close as any of us usually gets to turning off the main engines and simply idling for a prolonged period of time.

So it's doubtful that that portion holds any interest for anyone not related to me, or at least someone without an inordinate interest in sand castles (not that that's stopped me from the attempt in the past). But I thought it might be worthwhile to mention a few highlights from the "bread" of the trip sandwich -- the seemingly endless miles of interstate highway travel which we attempt to punctuate with Fun and/or Educational Experiences (and suite hotels with pools). The driving part of the trip was extremely grim, more than 1800 miles of travel split into not nearly bite-size chunks... but the Experiences seemed to be home runs across the board.

The first of these was the National Aquarium in Baltimore. As far as I can tell, they became the "National" aquarium essentially because they decided they would call themselves that... but they filled the bill and more. There were of course all manner of tanks full of beautiful or odd or scary marine life -- my wife was particularly mesmerized by the jellyfish -- but also a delightful and exciting dolphin show, and a couple of odd things: a rainforest habitat and a live show with native Australian animals. Come to think of it, I'm not sure they have any better grip on the concept of "aquarium" than they do of "national"... still, it was certifiably both Fun and Educational, and you don't see that every day. Frankly I have a hard time envisioning any visitor that wouldn't be captivated by a visit, and that's a pretty strong endorsement coming from me.

Since we were in such a rush to get to the beach, the second Big Adventure didn't arrive till the trip back: a visit to Sight and Sound Theater in Lancaster, PA. This was the trip my wife in particular had been yearning to make for several years. You might describe Sight & Sound as an attempt to bring the feel of the Broadway musical, mixed with a little bit of circus, to Biblical storytelling. The show we saw was Joseph, depicting his life from his conflicts with his brothers to slavery in Egypt to a respected position to prison back to a respected position to reconciliation with his family. It's a gripping story on the page... but presented on stage (multiple stages, actually) with scenery and costumes and music, and live animals, helps you understand and feel the story in a so much more visceral way. The show was thrilling and touching, one I think every Christian would certainly enjoy... and something I would urge on anyone who wasn't actively hostile to a story that revolves around faith.

The very next day saw Adventure #3, our third trip to Hersheypark (I should mention that we always start our Hershey day with a fun, and free, trip here). Hersheypark will remind you of basically every other amusement park: you've got rides, souvenir shops, shows, food... and you have to really keep busy all day long, not only to do everything but to keep yourself from thinking about the hurting they put on your wallet at the front gate (exacerbated this year by our 10-year-old being full-fare for the first time). Oddly, it was the one day of the trip that was not hot & humid, so some of the charm of the Intercoastal Waterway was diminished, but we still had a relaxing drift and also still hit the bumper cars and the Reese's Xtreme Cup Challenge and a bunch of entertaining shows. Our thrill-seeking 8-year-old daughter even ditched us long enough to get 2 roller-coaster rides and a trip on the Scrambler. It was a lot of fun even though we would have had to stay for another 3 weeks or so to get our money's worth out of it.

On the next & final day of the trip, dear old dad begged for a bit of Driver's Privilege. I've tried for the last couple of years to bend the trip to include the Martin Guitar factory tour but could never quite shoehorn it in with all the space Hersheypark takes up... but we were so close, and on our way home anyway.... I am a guitar player, and while Martin's a bit out of my price range, I appreciate them as wonderful instruments and works of art in their own right. The tour was an hour of walking through the factory with a guide who was once the plant manager (and should have invested a bit more of the salary in a better toupee). One of the neat features of the tour was that each person had their own headphones and the tour guide "broadcast" to us, which made it so much easier to know what was going on over the noise. Guitar-making these days is of course highly automated, but on the high end there is also a lot of hands-on craftsmanship -- to the point where it takes easily 3 months for one of their non-customized guitars to make it from pile of wood to finished instrument -- and we got to see both.

I now know much more about the guitar as an instrument than I did before, which was principally this: it makes no sense for me to buy an expensive one, because in my hands it sounds just the same as my (presumably non-craftsman-created) Yamaha that was $200 25 years ago. In fact, I think they disowned it because I can't find it on their website, although I did find it here and here.

We had other, smaller adventures along the way -- including coming home & then leaving the next morning for a camp weekend (including s'mores!) -- but these are the ones we'll remember when we look back...

... in a few weeks when the credit card bill arrives.

Breaking Up Is Hard to Do

When I was in college, I had been dating a certain young woman for a matter of some weeks when she suddenly -- at least from my perspective -- broke up with me. Since I hadn't seen it coming, I asked to get together with her to discuss it; that began a series of meetings and intra-campus mails (and if you think you wait for an answer in these days of cellphones/texts/email, you ain't seen nothing. I think intra-campus mail was delivered by actual snails).

After the 2nd or perhaps 3rd face-to-face, my roommate -- he of the quiet demeanor and dry wit -- said to me, "So, are you guys done breaking up yet?"

As it turned out, that particular breakup didn't take, and we stayed together about 6 months more before the final exit ramp arrived...

That whole scenario came to mind once more about 10 days ago as our breakup (this time not a case of "it's not you, it's me" but rather Circumstances Beyond Our Control) with our previous home & church seemed to reach its own final exit ramp.

See, this has really been going on since March, when we got the call and first realized we would be moving on... then she had her interview with the new church and it began to be real; then we announced it at The Old Place. Then the process of saying goodbye begins in earnest, and everyone wants to know what the new place is like but on some level what they really want to know is, you're not leaving us for someone younger and prettier, are you?

Before you know it, everything you do is The Last Time I'll Ever Do This, and the process of packing hammers it home every day almost like the sound of a door being slammed. Then comes the goodbye party and a struggle to put into words what we mean to each other; the last service, with the last sermon; and suddenly, very much before you can come to grips with what's happening, you find yourself standing in an empty house as two big trucks pull out with all your belongings and you close that front door for The Last Time Ever. And you cry.

At that point you'd forgive us for feeling, "OK, that was horribly painful but at least that part is over now and we can at last get on with the rest of our lives"... right? Not so fast. Because The Master Scheduler had us first to move, she actually had to go back one more time for the annual service/picnic in the park -- which of course prompts a fresh round of goodbyes. And in actuality, even after the service is over, there are still 10 days left in the month, and she's still officially pastor there, even though they've promised not to call except for emergencies.

So the breakup -- or maybe legal separation -- drags on. We're not living together any more, but the divorce (annulment?) hasn't come through yet. The following Sunday we're back in town for a graduation picnic, which is more goodbyes but also, in a more healthy way, a chance for us to describe and make real for them and us Our New Life. Is it possible that the break is finally complete...

... except we have to go back to the church One Last Time, at least as "our church", to drop off all the keys -- anything we still have that marks us as connected to this place. That unspoken meaning hangs around us like heavy fog as we bring stuff in & write explanatory notes to people & put this here & pile that there: this is the end of the end. After this, the breakup is complete.

And as we get to the front door -- now locked, and after it swings shut we will no longer have any way in... in several senses -- my son has stood it as long as he can, and he bursts into tears. Now my wife is holding him and sobbing out her own sorrow and grief. And I........ I seem to have forgotten how to cry, I so rarely do so anymore, ever -- but I wish I could. It would be such a welcome release to expel this huge pulsating mass of wistfulness and loss and pain and yes, even fear. Instead it sits in my throat and chest and expands till I can't swallow or breathe or even think.

Neil Sedaka actually had two hits with "Breaking Up Is Hard to Do". The first was in the early 60s, and if you listen to that version, it's a really bouncy uptempo pop song. The mood of the song has about as much to do with the subject of the song as tiger lilies do with tigers.

He cut it again in the mid-70s, this time as a slower, more reflective and altogether melancholy ballad. That's the one that has always grabbed me; it's a very affecting song. I think it captures in a visceral way how a prolonged breakup can also prolong and intensify the pain.

Catching the Bug

I'm living proof of the limits of heredity. My dad was in his day pretty good with cars. That was in an era when an actual person could look at an engine with just eyeballs and fix it -- and I don't think that's in any way diminished by the fact that in those days, "winterizing" meant "closing the rumble seat". As a teen, he worked in a garage; even when I was a kid, he could always ID anything on the road at a glance (often by year).

It may be just more pointless nostalgia but it seems to me that cars were more distinctive awhile back, and none moreso than the Volkswagen. The VW Beetle was responsible for the "punchbug" game (spot a Beetle and smack a companion). I hadn't even heard the term in years... but now despite the fact that most VWs are no longer in the insect kingdom, the company is trying to revive the tradition. Of course, since Bugs are now few and far between, they call it "punch-dub".

They can say what they want, but they can't control the people... so my son came home from school last week telling me about the Punchbug Game, and ever since then we've been playing each time we leave the house (One significant problem there is that, as I referred to earlier, all cars look alike these days unless you can zero in quickly on the hood/trunk ornament. Am I wrong about that? If so, feel free to correct me in the comments....).

It was only a matter of time until my daughter the competitor caught on to what was going on. Now she wants to play every second of car time. I'm finding that I'm up against a certain array of disadvantages:

• > My sunglasses, which I have to use for driving, are at least 3 prescriptions behind my new glasses
• > As the driver, I have a few other things to do
• > My reflexes, shockingly, are not quite as fast-twitch as once they were

Maybe the biggest disadvantage in playing against my daughter is that she has always been from the school of "shoot first, ask questions later." Basically if it has wheels and it has a roundish insignia, whap. That doesn't take away from the fact that she seems to be able to spot one from the next block... so taken all around I'm flying with one flap down these days. But I'm determined to get back in the game.

In a completely unrelated development, I rear-ended the car in front of me four times on the way home....

Feeling a Little Lost

I was reminded this week of something I wrote about a year ago, referring to the TV shows we make a habit of watching. Of the six I listed, ER ran its course last spring; Heroes, although valiantly protesting it wasn't dead yet, was apparently carted off a couple months ago; and we said a reluctant goodbye to our friends on a certain island (or maybe not) just days ago. So it appears that, on top of all the other landmarks I'm going to have to reprogram in a few weeks, I will also need to re-navigate the television dial (note to our younger friends: once upon a time, televisions had an actual dial! Leaving us with this charming anachronism).

As a longtime student of TV history -- not in an unattractive way, of course; as I have often pointed out, it's The Other Guy who gets obsessive... I'm an aficionado -- this has also caused me to reflect a bit on the nature of the series finale. As far as I'm aware, this kind of thing didn't happen in the early days of television. I Love Lucy was a beloved show, certainly, but I can't find any evidence that it had a finale in the modern sense. Same with Burns & Allen, Maverick, Perry Mason -- all popular programs I more or less pulled out of a hat and checked.

It's not like I'm going to really research it or anything ... but I believe the modern Finale Event dates to 1967 when The Fugitive concluded with a 2-part, cliffhanger finale. Part 2 was at that point in time the most-watched episode (by percentage of households watching) in television history... and it's still third among all series episodes behind the Cheers finale and "Who Shot J.R.?". Among other things, this points out the difference between the old-fashioned world of "You can watch anything you like, as long as it's on one of these 3 channels" world of true broadcasting, and today's environment where each viewer gets his own individual cable network.

Update: I just found these guys and they more or less agree with me on The Fugitive.

Of course, it's only an "important" show that merits a 'final episode'; others are just canceled. When I was a kid, the first big finale event I remember was The Mary Tyler Moore Show; I remember how highly anticipated it was, and of course it became the gold standard for final episodes. After that I tended to watch a series finale regardless of whether I ever watched the show much during its lifespan.... not really possible now with so many shows.

I guess part of what I'm getting at is that over the years, the concept evolved to where the final show was supposed to be a climactic event that summarized but also transcended the entire series; if you want to know how high the stakes have risen, recall the reception for the finales of Seinfeld and The Sopranos.

Into this environment comes the Last Lost -- a show that has specialized in raising its audience's expectations, an entire series based on an ever-growing pile of questions. I think you can probably take the expectation for Seinfeld and multiply it by the hopes for The Sopranos.

As it turned out, the show didn't exactly resolve every open question (of course, if they had really attempted to do so, the show would still be going on. Whenever you're reading this, still going on. Trust me on that one). It also didn't cure cancer, bring about world peace, or come close to satisfying every one of the people who have been blogging, and reading blogs, about it for the past several years. Yeah, I'm in that last group.

I'm also puzzled by all the speculation about what it really "meant"; was it not clear that everything on the island actually happened, and it was the "Sideways reality" that didn't really happen? Think about all the things that happened in the Sideways where we all said, "OK, wait a minute, that's really pushing the limits of plausible"... and it turns out that's because it didn't happen in the "real world".

And sure, I would've liked more "closure" -- although on the other hand, everyone dead is about as closed as you can get. While it was not everything I dreamed of, it did have some truly magical moments and afforded us a chance to say farewell to some beloved, and not all that beloved, characters, and watch them say goodbye to each other as well. I can't say that I felt like they owed me any specific outcome, so I'm not really "disappointed".

It's also worth pointing out that the Newhart final episode, which is widely considered to be one of the classics in the genre, was (at least in my opinion) interminable and boring, and is only remembered today for the brilliant final joke -- which may very well be the funniest moment in TV history; if not for that final sequence, I doubt the program would be remembered at all.

So what do you think the odds are that I can fill the the vacancies in my watching-list with even one new show that'll even have a series finale... much less one worth discussing?

Rolle with the Changes

All around us are some of the traditional features of spring: the lilacs are blooming, we've had the windows open, both my favorite (real) team and my fantasy baseball team are floating gently to the bottom of the standings (note: this last has only been "traditional" for the past couple of years). Another common May sight is the new college and grad school graduates sallying forth on the job search, armed only with their most-recently-written work of fiction -- their resumes.

We have a young friend just getting her Master's who's in the throes of the struggle as we speak. I suspect that she, like others of us, is pondering how close she has to get to her degree-field so that the degree won't feel like a total waste!

Not that I'm in any respect qualified to give career advice. I've been out of college for 27 years (give me a sec to recover from having typed, and realized, that) and in that span of time I've worked full-time for a total of less than four years. The most recent period of part-time work has been totally by my choice; but still, from a resume standpoint that's a little scary.

As a hopefully ex-jobseeker myself (I realized today that my job, which started in 1997, has been around longer than my home or my kids or my cars... or anything outside my marriage. This is a good thing because, as challenged as I am with change in general, nothing highlights my shortcomings quite like looking for work), I've taken a keen interest in the trials of others -- but my attention was piqued by the story of Myron Rolle.

Myron played football at Florida State University and was a star defensive back, and was thought to be a top pro prospect, likely a first-round choice in the NFL draft. Like many college football players, he actually graduated before his playing eligibility expired, and like many players he enrolled in graduate school.

The difference in this case was that instead of taking grad courses in physical education, Myron went to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar... and he didn't do it to extend his football career but instead gave up his last year of football to do it.

Rolle perhaps doesn't fit neatly into the football player pigeonhole. It goes without saying that he's very bright -- his ultimate goal is to become a doctor -- and that doesn't necessarily work smoothly with football culture, where the credo tends to be "tackle now, ask questions after you blow out your ACL". And in addition to his academic pursuits, he's also had some philanthropic achievements through the Myron L. Rolle Foundation.

So when he returned from Oxford after his time abroad and submitted his name for the NFL draft, there was a lot of discussion. Some questioned whether taking a year off from football indicated he wasn't sufficiently committed to the sport, and there were also fairly audible whispers that maybe someone that intelligent was not all that safe a bet in a coach-driven, follow-the leader world (where it must be said, there's virtue in taking orders, acting as one, not thinking for yourself).

And so it went that on draft day -- although because of the growing interest in the draft, and consequent TV-ification, there are now THREE DAYS of draft day -- Myron was actually chosen on the third day. In the 6th round, the 207th player chosen. In a spot where (and I'm asserting this entirely without proof, but also without much fear of contradiction), there were chosen ahead of him some guys with "records" of a less academic nature, and other guys who wouldn't have gotten into college at all without football, but very likely few with charitable foundations. Zero Rhodes Scholars, that much is indisputable.

For a lot of reasons I'm predisposed to feel like the guy got the short end of the stick; I flatter myself that I know what it's like to be looked down upon because of intelligence (although truthfully I suspect that my classmates might have seen me as odd for, ah, multiple reasons). And he clearly is a sort of Renaissance man (in a literal sense you don't see too often). I wonder, though, whether it isn't actually a wise move not to choose him higher. A high NFL draft choice is an investment of money, sure; but just as much it's an allocation of resources that can lead to disaster if it doesn't pay off in a long-term asset.

And of course, what you have here is the living embodiment of the cliche, "He can do anything in the world he wants to do." I can see why you might not want to bet the farm on someone who might decide in 2 years to quit and go to med school, or do charity work in the Third World, or... who knows? In fact, you could make the argument that the greatest good for the greatest number would be achieved if all the teams passed on him and let him get to work making contributions to more than just the Cover-Two defense.

The Now and the Not Yet

I am on record in this space that I have long since decided that I'm not doing the Funny Kid Blog here. Sure, it would be easy enough to do when surrounded by kids (OK, not exactly surrounded by 2 of them... and anyone with more than two would certainly scoff at me... but a lot of the time it feels like it). I could tell the tale of my daughter -- who's been talking since she was about 4 hours old, and who carries around a pad and pen for amusement -- taking an hour to write 3 sentences for a school assignment. Or here's a son story: we've been inflicting Little House on the Prairie and The Waltons on the kids lately as part of the ongoing quest to instill Old-Fashioned Values. In one such episode, John-Boy had a crush on a girl and sneaked in for a kiss... whereupon Our-Boy remarked in a low tone, "Well, that was a good one."

And so it goes. I don't know that there's a big market appeal for that kind of blog, and in some ways it's way too obvious anyway. In the same way, since we got the news to which I alluded in my previous post, it would be easy to write the "We're Moving" blog; after all, we think of little else. We've got piles of boxes around (with the result that the van is now permanently out in the driveway to make room) and it's certainly a recurring topic of conversation. Of course, everyone in the church kind of wants to work through it with their pastor, so by the time I get to her she's often kind of "moved out"... so sometimes I'm left to stew in it. And so I do.

Consider the children of Israel, when Moses led them out of their Egyptian captivity (all right, stay with me here a bit)... they got out into the desert, and before long they realized they weren't really getting anywhere. Even though they were told they were going to the (original!) Promised Land -- which by definition ought to be pretty cool -- they weren't there yet, and all they could think about was what they used to have.

In case it's not immediately obvious, what they used to have was slavery. Beatings if they didn't work fast enough. The Old Testament even points out that they were making bricks for the pyramids, and the overseers not only raised the brick quota but also made them find their own raw materials. Think of it as No Brick Left Behind.

Still, I'm keenly aware that if you stretch a simile even a little too far, it can snap back and put your eye out... so let me be clear that I'm not escaping from slavery here (nor is it entirely clear that the Promised Land is the destination). But that's also kind of the point: if it can be a challenge to get from torture to paradise, I can perhaps be forgiven for being a little hung up on the in-between when I'm starting from a very comfortable spot.

It may also be quite clear already that I most certainly don't seek out new frontiers just for the sheer exhilaration anyway. I probably established that for good and all about 30 years ago, when I worked at the same place for 6 consecutive summers. Or perhaps when I spent 11 years in my first career despite having a full-time position for exactly one out of the 11. Could it have been when I bought my fourth Toyota?

For all that, however, what we do know is that it's coming up (and closer every day) no matter what we do about it. I wrote about this very sensation four years ago when I compared myself to Wile E. Coyote. My timeline was off by just a bit, but my conclusion was basically sound. So here's what we're doing:

(1) Last Sunday, we went to visit the new church -- just to say hello and let them start to think of us as something besides an announcement in the bulletin. We met a lot of people (though it is to be hoped that they don't expect us to remember all the names!) and everyone was very welcoming. That was in some ways a very important step in transitioning to a new reality.

(2) Then we took the kids to tour their future home. They got to see where their bedrooms would probably be, and check out the back yard, and generally begin to put a face on this thing we've been telling them is coming.

(3) Then I went around the place like a complete maniac with a tape measure in my hand, and for the last week have been translating the measurements into floor plans, complete with tiny scale-model paper furniture. There's so much about this that seems to undetermined & undeterminable that it seems to both of us like having a real concrete sense (pun not intended) of our new home will begin to smooth the way.

The tricky part, of course, is that we're not dead yet...

We've still got about 7 weeks to go; we can't just pack all the boxes today and wait for this part to be over, we still have life to live and ministry to do and a lot of people here we're connected to -- while at the same time recognizing that an important part of that connection is going to be amputated before too much longer. We are definitely trapped with one foot in the now and one foot in the not yet.

I've talked before about the fact that time-traveling to the past can be surprisingly painful... nevertheless, it may still be easier than traveling to the future and back, no matter how much it costs these days to fuel up your DeLorean.

Hired to Be Fired

As is the case each year about this time (and mentioned in this space yearly as well), I have used an awful lot of time in recent weeks getting things prepared for the Fantasy Baseball league I administer. Really, though, once they begin tossing a ball down in Florida (and Arizona), everything in my world becomes kind of baseball-inflected. The fantasy season draws near; soon I'll be able to watch actual games; and even spring itself seems surely just about to round third base and head for home.

Maybe that explains why I'm identifying with baseball managers these days. It's early yet, but if some team gets off to a poor start, we may see our first managerial firing before too long. And if the victim is a particularly philosophical sort, we may even hear a popular line from the mythical Manager's Creed: "Managers are hired to be fired." That is, no manager lasts forever (well, Connie Mack ran the Athletics for 50 years -- spending most of the last several years napping on the bench -- but then, he also owned a chunk of the team); he knows on the day he's hired that the exit interview is already in sight.

Or maybe it's our more recent visit to the Mark Twain House & Museum that has me feeling like Tom Sawyer. As I recall -- it's been awhile, and I'm too lazy to research it -- Tom let the folks in his town think he was dead, and was gleeful at the prospect of attending his own funeral.

I suppose that all of that sets rather more of a foreboding tone than I really intended, so I should probably pause here to assure the reader that no one was fired and nobody's dead.

We have, however, been contemplating endings and transitions around here lately, because as was officially announced last Sunday, we will be moving this summer. We know that no pastor -- at least in our system -- stays forever in one place. It's not exactly "hired to be fired", but still the expectation is set from day one: someday you'll be moving on.

I told my wife that the announcement was a little like attending your own funeral, in that people are somewhat expected to say nice things about you... but I don't think she really wanted to contemplate her own funeral. I, on the other hand, would be burningly curious to know what's being said about me! As it turned out, several people were quite kind and gracious in ways that let us know that they weren't just "saying the right thing".

While the move is not unexpected, it bears some resemblance to the old joke about mixed emotions... we're moving with open hearts and open eyes, but at the same time it's wrenching to leave this place that has so much good about it. Had the call not come, we would've been happy to stay here in this place and minister among these people; in fact, I in particular have been pretty vocal about the concept that I wouldn't mind being "forgotten" and left here for the rest of my life.

Of course, that is only partly because I love it here and clearly some portion due to my general change-averseness (about which I have been equally vocal). And besides, the church here kind of brought it on themselves: they have become such a vibrantly healthy (emotionally as well as spiritually) bunch that it really made it possible for us to leave. If they'd been troubled, it would've been a lot tougher sell.

We're still in the process of selling to the kids, who've really never experienced this kind of move. Our daughter was 9 months when we came, and while the boy was 3 1/2, he doesn't remember it too well. I think he does remember viscerally how it pained him to lose his first home -- I know I do.

So we get the girl excited about the basketball court in the new church and the possibility of biking to school, and we tell the son that we'll be less than a mile from the mall AND ToysRUs. There will be a park nearby and some good friends living not far away. And I've stopped saying in Sunday night prayers, "Thank you God that we went to church and saw all our friends,".... because I don't want to remind them that (relatively) soon, we'll be going to church and seeing strangers. New friends, yes, but not that first week for sure.

We believe in our hearts that this new place is where God wants us to be at this time, although there's clearly a corner of my heart, at least, that has retreated behind a locked door. Can a "corner of your heart" put its fingers in its ears and go, "La la la I can't hear you!"? I guess I should have said above that we're going with mostly open hearts and eyes.

I have one little theological theory that I fall back on a lot, although no one else seems to much get why it's important to me. But I find it of great comfort: since God is beyond time and space, the concept of "today" is meaningless to Him. I am tied, at least physically, to today, no matter how tempting it may be to try to live in the past or obsess over the uncertainty of the future. God, however, is already there in that future. In God's world, it's "today" and "1983" and "this July"... so I don't have to be afraid even when uncertainty looms (although it seems that quite often I am anyway). I know there's already someone there who knows me and who's going to make all the pieces fit together somehow.

Giving, and Taking

Even I would have to admit that I don't always project the sunniest of dispositions. I'm not necessarily 100% John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band, but I do tend towards the theory that not only is the glass half-empty, but the milk is probably spoiled anyway.

Regardless, I don't think I'm being unjustifiably negative when I say that one of the parts of the year that really puts me through the wringer is vacation. I'm not talking about the physical toll of travel, or the financial drain, or the difficulties of enforced togetherness/small spaces; it's probably more self-inflicted than that. And this has been very much on my mind -- pressing down hard on my mind -- since we just did our 3-day Winter Vacation Trip last week.

I don't know whether it's genetic (a Guy Thing?) or learned, emotional or strictly mental, or even pathological, but I take a huge burden on myself whenever we travel. I spend loads of time before the fact, planning and researching, scheduling Fun Activities for the Whole Family, looking for that hotel room that's 10% nicer for $5 less -- then, of course, getting everything mapped out to the last possible turn (this time, I had 3 pages of printed directions... which I basically ignored in favor of the more, you know, electronic guidance of the GPS).

The day arrives and I am, ah... not bubbly... as I'm trying to get the last details nailed down and get us out the door On Schedule. I do virtually all the driving -- not because my wife won't, or because I don't trust her to, but because it just feels right to me to carry the load. I am in general a pretty confident, and I believe competent, driver; but always in the back of my mind is that we could get lost or break down or have an accident.

If one of the stops doesn't come off, if the targeted Children's Museum turns out to be a ball pit and a card table with a box of broken crayons on it, if somebody gets a lousy meal... all of that feels like a personal failure to me.

I'm sure a lot of that sounds like egomania -- making it all about me -- or some kind of messiah and/or martyr complex. Rationally I do know that plenty of stuff can go wrong that I have absolutely no control over, and I recognize that nobody's waiting to point the finger at me just because the thermostat doesn't work in the hotel room.

But in the midst of all that burden I felt myself carrying the past couple of weeks, I also realized that there's a healthy lesson to be learned as well, and it's this: there are times that it's more blessed to take than to give. That is, I realized that what I was doing, at least in part, was living out the role of Head of the Household (now there's a term you don't hear much these days, at least in a non-census sense) in the way it's really intended: not giving orders, but taking responsibility.

The New Testament talks about the man being the head of the woman, which is a concept that got twisted so far in a particular (and particularly uncomfortable) direction that I think it eventually went SPROINNGGG! and flew off behind the couch or something. Or at least we'd like to hide it there. But I think the real point of being the "head" is that I can serve my family by being the buffer zone, getting out front, taking the blow if necessary.

As it turned out, the vacation came off fine -- a couple complaints from the GPS, but nothing that couldn't be resolved by circling the block. So I can look at it as a lot of worrying for nothing, or I can see careful planning and concern for my family's well-being paying off.

And isn't it interesting that God can take "character flaws" and use them for positive purposes?

Bloglet: As the Swallows to Capistrano

I suppose I shouldn't feel so bad about it. After all, Robert B. Parker wrote 39 novels about the same character (is there a record in that category?), so obviously he wasn't afraid to revisit the same territory more than once. In fact, there were times in the later years where it wasn't immediately obvious that it wasn't just the same novel, with some of the words rearranged... but I may be undermining my own point. But even with all of that, he's probably my favorite up-until-recently-living author.

When I planned our honeymoon umpty-ump years ago (all right, it was 1987), I went to all the hotel chains nearby and collected their thick little books that listed every one of their locations. Then I paged through and found the most likely prospects and made a bunch of phone calls. After that, I sat down with my Rand McNally road atlas and plotted the route.

The final destination was Boston, and when we got there we found one of those tourist guides with a street map in it. At one point, my lovely bride said she thought it would be neat to put her feet in the ocean... so I looked at the little map and said, "OK, we'll go this way for a couple miles and then turn and we should be there."

And in 10 or 15 minutes, she had her feet in the ocean.

We're going on vacation in a couple days. I've spent hours on the Internet, Googling hotels, checking hotels.com, looking for reviews, and then actually making the reservation. Now I have to go to one of the map sites and print out detailed directions... of course, I'll still have my GPS running the whole time as backup.

So as you can see, I'm back around to one of my pet topics, as surely as the swallows (and clearly, the swallows have a better press agent -- not to mention better taste in vacation destinations -- than the buzzards): even as much as I've lived it and read about it and written about it, it still blows my mind how much the world has changed within my lifetime, or even half my lifetime.

I suppose in the case of the trip, it might be a change for the worse; I'm pretty proud that I put together a honeymoon trip basically just by my wits, rather than making The Computer do it for me. After all, somehow the swallows still don't need GPS.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Although I probably qualify in most respects as a geek (I suppose I could conceivably be a dweeb or even a dork, but I strive for my full potential), I never reached the heights of 70s geekdom, total absorption in Dungeons and Dragons. In fact, I've never played at all and truthfully don't even know much about it, except that about 20 minutes after its invention it became an easy shorthand for all things geek. Ironically I think my fatal flaw from a DnD perspective is probably that I don't have enough imagination to live in a fantasy world... I have a hard enough time imagining my present world. I am quite good at recalling and obsessing over the past, but there isn't a 20-sided die in the world that's going to bring that back to life, except in the loop playing in my own head.

My own personal gaming obsession started in about 1971, when I got a copy of Sports Illustrated Baseball. This was a board game that allowed you to play baseball games between any two actual 1970 team rosters. I loved it immediately and forced several friends to play it (regardless of their level of familiarity/interest in baseball). I became so taken with it that I created my own version, based on the 1974 rosters -- written on lined paper (notebook paper, with all the little lacy edgy things hanging off it), drawing in my own (occasionally-)vertical dividing lines for the columns...

It just occurred to me, why didn't I just use graph paper? Certainly as a junior high student I was aware of its existence....?

In any case, I wore out several green & red colored pencils coloring in little boxes on batting/pitching charts (green for hit, red for out, blue for strikeout). And naturally, by the time I finished all that painstaking work -- and I did finish it, I'm proud to say -- the whole thing was obsolete anyway. I'm not sure what year it actually was, but it sure wasn't 1974.

Then a couple years later, I switched to APBA baseball. I probably would've stuck with SI forever... but since we didn't have internet access in 1977, I had to take what I could find, and I'm pretty sure I stumbled on an ad for APBA in the old Baseball Bulletin. And as with SI, I played with friends every chance I got -- and if I didn't have that chance, I played it "solitaire" and managed both teams.

The best part for me, maybe, was that while I was playing, I was also doing a constant play-by-play -- which as I have previously written, has always been a passion of mine. "That will bring up Dave Kingman, who homered in the fourth for the Mets' only run. He's also struck out in the first and sixth... Here's the pitch from Carlton and it's a HIGH pop fly in the air to short left field... Bowa drifts back onto the outfield grass and squeezes it for the third out. For the Mets, no runs, no hits, no errors and none left on..." Maybe you think you can't see all that just from rolling a big red die and a small white one, then checking the result from a 2"x3" card against a big cardboard chart -- but I could.

I've sort of convinced myself that that was when I got in the habit of talking to myself, although I'm sure my mom could relate tales of muffled paragraphs coming from in utero. One way or the other, I am a confirmed self-talker; almost anyone who's spent any time with me could share an instance of coming upon me engaged in an animated monologue.

It's not as if I can really help it at this point. I'm working 100% from home now, and I don't really have much personal contact with others -- at least till the kids come home, and that puts a whole new spin on "talking to myself".

I do have periodic conference calls and virtual meetings, but most of the time I'm on mute, listening, anyway. But of course I am seldom mute myself; it's certainly far from unusual for me to be commenting on the proceedings to myself -- and as you can imagine, always & only in the strongest possible positive terms O:-).

All of that ranked merely as something between a charming character quirk and a sign of low-grade mental illness... until a call not long ago. I was on with maybe a half-dozen others, sitting on mute, waiting for someone else to "arrive". Then the "real" (home) phone rang, and since I was just waiting anyway, I answered it and handled the call -- on and off in less than a minute.

Then one of my callmates said, "Uh, Mark... we could hear all that. Did you think you were on mute?" Well, I was on mute -- at least according to the switch on my headset cord -- but they could hear me anyway. Apparently my frequent use of the mute switch, along with my constant fidgeting with it when not in a call, had worn down a connection or something so that I was no longer mutable. Immutable, if you will.

Which was fine; the call was routine and I hadn't said anything controversial or rude or... but then I started to think. OK, "think" is an overstatement; "panic" would be more accurate. How long had this been going on? Had I been sitting around making, ah, less-than-affirming remarks about people that they could actually hear?

And:

Why am I a person who would say things on mute that he wouldn't say if he knew he were immutable?

Fortunately the PC phone software I use has its own mute button, so I can override the headset's mute or lack of same. Still trying to find a mute button that will shut off the sound of that last question, however...

Into the eVortex

If there's one thing on which I pride myself, it's self-awareness. Granted, I've been vividly reminded just this week that knowing your shortcomings does not constitute a free pass for them... but that's a whole different issue. I've always seen myself as profoundly aware of my limitations (although, if I weren't aware of my limitations... would I realize it?) -- which shouldn't be news to anyone who reads this space "regularly". I haven't been too reluctant to share my foibles here.

For example, a few years back I wrote a prediction of what would happen if I ever got an iPod:

Perhaps more to the point, I just don't need something else that needs to be "managed". I'm sure it's supposed to be a selling point when they say how many zillion songs an iPod will hold, but all I can think is, "When will I have time to find the sites and find the songs and download them all?" And oh by the way, continue paying and paying. It used to be that if I wanted a collection of cool tunes, I'd go to Caldor or Ames and slap down $4.98 for the latest K-Tel album. A zillion songs times 99 cents is a daunting prospect.

Well, of course I did end up with an iPod, and I was able to distract myself for a year or more with all the music I already owned -- actually, I've hit 2 years of recording and I stillhaven't gotten everything I own digitized (although I've gotten all the good stuff, I think). But I've also been very intentional about not getting sucked into downloads; I've been afraid that I'd end up that alcoholic who just takes one little drink... and wakes up in the gutter 3 days later. I went for months not even spending iTunes cards, except to make CDs for the family. And frankly, right now I have $17.82 in my iTunes account and I've been a bit overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing 18 songs out of Every Song in the Universe.

So I guess I can't really explain what happened to me a few weeks back when I saw an ad in Entertainment Weekly for a free 7-day trial for emusic.com: 25 free downloads. Although I knew I would still grapple with the needle/haystack conundrum, there was something about the message that spoke to me -- it could have been the word "free". In fact, when I finally gave in and went to check it out, I even found that they had upped the offer to 35 free.

This would take planning on the order of the lead-up to D-Day. I painstakingly went through the database building a list of 35 target songs. I wanted to have the whole list plotted before beginning the 7-day term, so I could get in & get out with no danger of spilling into non-free time.

I started my quest with the songs I featured in that original pre-iPod post, and was delighted to see several of them listed; also a bit frustrated to see that some of the artists I sought were missing, or didn't include the albums/songs I needed, or the songs were there but listed as album-only. Nevertheless, with a little adjusting and scraping and resetting of sights, I was able to build a very enticing list of tracks.

So I found a 7-day window that I thought would afford me a chance to do the job before the clock ran out on me, and joined. Of course, I had to provide a Major Credit Card -- for identification purposes only. After the reg process was over, I started my shopping spree.

As I went back to the songs I had already scouted, I discovered that on top of all the other restrictions I had made my way around, some of my target songs were labeled, "We're sorry, but this item can only be downloaded using paid credits." I grabbed what I could and decided I'd better regroup... only to find that some of the songs I had already downloaded that claimed to be by original artists really weren't, and others were "rerecorded" versions that didn't sound much like the version I heard in my head that was the experience I was seeking to duplicate.

Brief pause -- make your own "voices in his head" joke.

So I went back through the database yet again, even more painstakingly. I reviewed my current collection to see if I was "missing" anything from my favorite artists, and I used the Genius feature in iTunes to suggest connections I might have forgotten (keep in mind, a lot of the music I was after is from what you might call Another Era -- although like most people my age, I prefer the term "classic" to "oldies").

Finally, I had a decent list of 35 assembled, but I also had a Shadow List of songs I really wanted that were closed off behind the "paid credits" door. So I concluded: what's the harm in one month of subscription music? The basic account provides 24 songs for $11.99 (i.e. 50 cents each, half of iTunes pricing). I knew I could make a very worthwhile list of 24 more, for a total of 59 for $12: basically 20 cents each.

So I finished off the free downloads, automatically triggering my first paid month. I had enough good stuff waitlisted that, even though I was still disappointed by some songs that were missing altogether, I was able to quickly knock off what I felt to be good value.

All that remained was the formality of canceling my account so I could be free of further charges, which I was planning to so "sometime this week"... until not long after, when checking my email revealed a message from emusic: "We've just added 10,000 new albums to our database! Click here to view..." etc.

In the immortal words of Carrie Bradshaw, "I couldn't help but wonder..."

So back I went into the database and, page by page, clicked through the entire list of recently-added, something like 900 pages, not counting my frequent detours into artist listings that looked promising (some of which were the very omissions that put me behind the 8-ball to begin with).

To make a long story almost exactly the same length, but maybe a little narrower, when the meter clicks over for 24 more songs (and 12 more bucks) in February, I'll be standing there with list in hand saying, "Please sir, I want some more."

No doubt there's some fresh sleight-of-hand awaiting me -- now you hear it, now you don't. Never fear, I'm planning to bring to bear on this problem the same resolve, determination, and strength of character that enabled me to join the Columbia House Record Club in 1978, and only stay in it until... last year, when the now-BMG club folded.

OK, technically, they really just transferred me to yourmusic.com, but I hardly ever go search the entire database. Three times a year, tops.