Be It Ever So Humble

One of the topics I have mined pretty frequently for bloggish fodder is travel, both family and business trips. And in the case of the latter, I don't believe I've been very successful in keeping the secret that I look forward to business trips (and perhaps more so than vacations).

There's not too much to hate about it, really, starting with the fact that someone else is paying the entire tab, as well as hosting you at better hotels and restaurants than you would typically seek out on your own. Well, the restaurant thing not so much necessarily; when on the road and given a chance to choose the stereotypical Relatively Fancy Local Restaurant over the usual middle-of-the-road chain place, I go for predictable over chance for greatness basically every time.

I work harder, and longer, on the road than I ever do at home, but it's energizing to put your ability on the line in front of colleagues and clients. Or just to see colleagues and clients, since I spend 99% of my time isolated at home.

And I also have to admit that being away from home, and free from the domestic responsibilities that usually wrap themselves around work's demands, holds a good measure of appeal. Love my kids, love my wife, don't mind taking a break from it all once or twice a year.

This week I am on my first business trip in more than a year... and I am also clearly being punished for looking forward to it just a tiny bit.

If you are reading this more or less in real time, you're aware that travel throughout most of the country is in upheaval right now due to a severe winter storm covering almost all of the US that actually has a winter. Here are a few... ah... highlights of my trip so far.

* It's a 2-day trip from NY to MO, so I have to travel on Sunday to get there in time. It's hard to fly directly to Columbia, MO, so I have to fly into St. Louis, then drive more than an hour. I pick the latest possible flight so I can spend the most time with family... but I miscalculate the total length of the trip and there's no way I can get there before 11. Local time -- midnight body time.

* Southwest allows you to check in online 24 hours before takeoff, and I actually check in 23:59 before, putting me in the "A" boarding group. This allows me to get a really choice seat, but does not in any way prevent the mom with the crying baby from sitting across the aisle, one row back.

* Baltimore/Washington International is not known for even the level of cuisine I favor on trips. The best possible choice for fine dining turns out to be... Quizno's.

* I get to St. Louis and head for the baggage carousel; as I walk up, about 8 bags come tumbling out, none of them mine. I sit down to wait for the rest of them. I watch the carousel for probably 20 minutes until it dawns on me, with nearly lightning speed, that there ain't nothin' else coming. I go to the baggage office; they have no clue where it went but they take my contact info. They think they can get it to me sometime on Monday.

* Since I am delayed picking up my car by my absorption with luggage, by the time I drive halfway across the state to Columbia, I arrive mere moments before midnight. A good preparation for my 7:30 meeting the next morning. On the bright side, it won't take long to choose my wardrobe.

* We get to our meeting Monday morning, and practically the first thing our host says is, "There's an enormous storm coming tomorrow; if you don't get out today, you might not get to leave till Thursday." We stumble through the meeting till the first break, but instead of using the restroom, we all get busy trying to change our flights. I get a 4:15 out of St. Louis (and let Southwest know I'm coming to get my bag, so don't send it!).

* The meeting breaks up and our team takes off. I stop for lunch at the hotel, then I start out for St. Louis. As I get on the highway, my cell rings... it's an automated message from Southwest to tell me my flight's canceled. I circle back to the hotel but I can't reach the airline to reschedule; I can't even get through.

* It's pretty icy on the windows (the roads are surprisingly drivable), but the luxurious rental Toyota Yaris I'm driving has no scraper on board. I use a plastic bottletop. Oh, and here's a quote from right before I left the house on Sunday: "I'm not going to need a hat or gloves."

So here I am in St. Louis; I hope to be going out tomorrow afternoon (through Orlando, since at least there's no ice or snow there). In the meantime, here's a tiny measure of good news that struck me just a little while ago: I have no meetings tomorrow. I have no children to get me up tomorrow. I'm at least planning to travel virtually all day tomorrow, so while I intend to get some work done in the morning, there's really no schedule-based urgency.

In short, I need neither a mechanical nor human alarm, and I can basically get up whenever I want to. And I have absolutely no clue when that happened last.

The Best Kind of Sticker Shock

I was a genius when I was a kid.

I was reading before most kids my age even knew their letters. School came easy to me; I was always ahead of everyone else, always got the best grades. Gradually my pervasive awesomeness overcame most of my native humility and I got a little arrogant about how brilliant I was – rarely (although I can't honestly say never) as an excuse to act superior to others, but sometimes as license to goof off.

Then came the day I had to go home & tell my mother I was failing reading. “How can you be failing reading?” she retorted. “All you ever DO is read.” That was a Scared Straight moment for me and after that I resumed my previous trajectory, continuing at the top of my class all the way through.

It was really when I got to graduate school that I grasped the essential truth: that I wasn’t that special intelligence-wise after all. I was blessed with the ability to pick up new ideas pretty quickly; I was always very successful in testing situations; and I was motivated to succeed and/or scared to fail. Bright “enough”, quick-witted maybe, definitely faster with a punchline than was probably healthy (in multiple senses)… but no genius. I met people in grad school who had the sheer brainpower, as well as the will, to tackle complex problems and just chip away at them until they got to the other end. That was not me; I made it through my Master’s just fine, but no one was throwing incentives at me to get me to shoot for a doctorate.

Still, as kind of a geeky kid, and then adult, who loves to use big words, has a fairly (um…) complex sense of humor, and knows a fair amount of trivia about a variety of subjects, I’m probably most comfortable around bright, educated people – not because I’m a snob, but because they tend to “get” me better. Literally, they speak my language. And I always hoped that when my kids got old enough, I could introduce them to Twain and Thurber and O’Rourke, we could discuss the intricacies of baseball analysis, then sit around exchanging all sorts of obscure wordplay.

Then our son was born, and we gradually learned that he had some intellectual and emotional challenges. Not the kind that get you a telethon or label you “handicapped”… just the kind that ensure you’re always going to start the race from the back of the pack. And while nothing we learned diminished my love for him even an iota, it did kind of make my heart sink.

Not because I was disappointed in him. Not because I couldn’t point to what an awesome success my kid was. Because I thought it meant we’d never “get” each other. The things that make me who I am, in a sense, are things that will never be a part of him at all; the things I love are largely out of reach for him.

Or so I feared. He’s 11 now, and as a semi-part-time stay-at-home dad, I spend more time with him than anyone else and I know him better than anyone else. What I’ve learned is that he loves music, just like I do. He loves a good joke – granted he doesn’t always know why it’s funny, but he often seems to be able to feel the funny even when he can’t quite spot it. He has a particular facility for a very odd trivia subspecialty: if he hears a voice on a cartoon, he’ll often point out that it’s the same actor who did a different voiceover. In fact he’s almost infallible at that and at, “Hey dad, we heard this song last year when we were going…”

I wrote before about some of his school struggles and the way he was overcoming them or at least persevering. At this point he’s classified as Special Ed, so while he spends part of his day in the general classroom, he also gets extra accommodations and small-group instruction with individual help.

I was standing at the bus stop waiting for him one day several weeks back when a car went by with one of those “my kid is an honor student” bumper stickers and I thought, you know, if my boy ever came home with one of those, I think my head would explode. A few minutes after that, he got off the bus and we walked up the street to the house, where he pulled out his backpack and said, “Hey dad, look what I got at school today…”

Turns out it wasn’t that essential after all – but it’s sure cool having one more thing in common.

Yet Another Christmas Review

I guess I need to figure out (once again) whether it’s my life that’s out of whack, or my expectations.

Every year I have this vision in my head about how Christmas is going to look, and every year my actual mileage varies. By quite a bit, really. I’ve written about this before, enough times in fact that it’s probably time to wake up and smell the eggnog. I seem to be perpetually in danger of missing Christmas because our Christmas doesn’t look like the one I see in my mind’s eye.

After all, our Christmas is pretty entertaining in its own somewhat skewed way. But with three services on Christmas Eve, for example, and creating PowerPoints for 2 of them and providing all the music for the third, I may not ever get a profoundly spiritual experience out of it – at least not from sitting in church. Maybe, however, from incessantly cycling through over 300 Christmas songs on my iPod, or from sitting quietly in front of the tree, or from trying to help my own kids keep the meaning of the season front & center, or even from a paragraph in a Christmas letter – even if it’s my own.

Even though we may have fallen short, once again, in observing the rituals I’d like to see become our family-traditional Christmas, there are always events of the season that guarantee we won’t forget it. Such as:

· My son playing a Wise Man in a contemporary retelling of the Christmas story – in this case a Wise Man who was too busy at a conference to discuss “Celestial Signs of the Coming Messiah” to actually notice the birth when it happened.

· The kids deciding that the best way to give Santa a list is to wait till the last possible moment, and in fact revising the list as their last act before going to bed Christmas Eve.
· Dad hauling out presents to put under the tree, eating the cookies left for Santa (and a few more, just for the sake of realism), pouring the milk back into the jug, and then settling down – AFTER midnight – to compose the traditional Santa Reply Letter. Don’t ask me where Jolly Old St. Nick keeps the laptop and printer on the sleigh.
· In response to each child’s inquiries, the letter addressing subjects including (a) how the reindeer are doing, (b) what Santa’s favorite baseball team is, and (c) how exactly he can tell from all the way up there who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. Also, why you’re not getting any of the presents no one even knew you wanted because you just added them to your list on Christmas Eve.
· Watching on Christmas morning as the boy disappears in a blizzard of wrapping paper scraps, surfacing only to ask repeatedly, “Are there any more presents for me?”
· My daughter walking around the house all Christmas day in a ninja costume, playing a trumpet which someone with apparently a rather evil sense of humor has given her, while…
· Her brother spends most of his day trying to sneak up on people with a remote-controlled Rude Bodily Noisemaking Device that someone else with a rather evil sense of humor has sent us.
· The girl pausing in the midst of a soliloquy about all the cool stuff Santa brought her to look sharply at dad and say, “Wait a minute, did you…?” before stopping herself. “What were you going to ask me?” “Never mind…”

And of course there’s one other tradition that never misses – the hurried sprint out of town for vacation, since as long as she’s in the same town where the church is located, she can hear it calling her (this is the spot where I really wanted to include a sound clip of the slot machine in this Twilight Zone episode, but I couldn't find it as a standalone).

I have to say, this time it kind of worked for me too... once we got out of town, I forgot all about what was "supposed" to happen, and I just enjoyed my vacation. Maybe next year I can start that frame of mind before Christmas!