State of the... well, just me, actually...

 Back in the day, I used to write a yearly family Christmas letter – a virus I caught from my mom, who probably wrote one annually for more than 40 years. I have a copy of the one where she describes me as a cheerful 5 ½ year old, which… well, fill in your own punch line there.

As our kids got older, I found that it increasingly felt like I was telling stories that weren’t mine to tell. And I found myself stuck between a desire to paint a complete, “warts and all” portrait and the need to protect everyone’s privacy including my own.

So this year I decided I would only write about myself, and only include the things that brought me joy this year – not “accomplishments” as much as experiences.

I think observing my 28^th anniversary with my company sounds like an accomplishment, but I’m noting it mostly to say: There was a time in my life when I was caroming from one part-time job (or in some cases, “adjunct instructor position”, if that sounds more impressive) to another and I wondered whether I’d ever find something permanent. I can’t swear, from the vantage point of somewhere from 2-4 years till retirement, that this will truly turn out “permanent”, but I’m really gratified that I’ve been able to create a career.

I enjoyed being active at our church: in addition to serving as delegate to the Northeast Global Methodist Annual Conference, I led a few hymn-sings; formed a contemporary music group that led worship a couple of times; and conducted a full service once at this church and once at another.

We took some interesting trips this year: Philadelphia in April; Cortland in May for Annual Conference; HersheyPark in July, with one “kid”; New Bedford in August, for our 38^th anniversary; and Watkins Glen in August, with the other “kid”. Besides the tour of Watkins Glen State Park, my other new waterfalls for the year included Valatie Falls, Stuyvesant Falls, High Falls (Philmont), and Cowshed Falls in Fillmore Glen State Park.

Closer to home, many of my greatest joys of the year involved music. I continued to sing with Adirondack Voices and Adirondack A Cappella, tackling some interesting musical challenges. I also did four 90-minute performances, singing and playing guitar, at a small coffeehouse nearby – the first time I had ever tried anything on that scale. It was an exhilarating experience and I left each performance counting the days till the next one.

Much closer to home (my couch, that is), I spent a decent amount of time continuing to research my family’s genealogy. Thanks to the way math works, there are a lot of family lines to track down; I’ve gotten many of them back to the 1700s or farther, originating from Ukraine, Germany, Sweden, Scotland, and England among others. As a “collector” by nature, I enjoy finding the names and dates, but every so often I get a tiny glimpse into what their lives were like, and that’s the real treasure.

All in all, I come to the end of the year reasonably happy, reasonably healthy, and grateful to God for the blessings of 2025.

Gimme Shelter-in-place

If ever there were a crisis I was made for, this seems like the one. Stay inside the house and avoid contact with others? I’ve been preparing for this all my life.

There are probably a lot of other introverts out there who would agree with me, although I wouldn’t expect them to flock to my side even if they were allowed to. Social distancing is built into our DNA.

I almost feel guilty when I see how hard the current situation is hitting so many people. There are a lot of folks who can’t work and don’t know when they’ll be allowed to, or even if there will be a job (or a company) waiting for them when all this is over. And I just read a statistic claiming that as many as 80% of American workers live paycheck-to-paycheck, which is surely not good news if you don’t know when the next one is arriving.

Workers who are able to do their jobs from home have been asked to do so; as a computer programmer, it’s no effort at all for me to do that. In fact, it’s not even an “adjustment” for me – I’ve been working full-time from home for 17 years now (even with 6 different actual physical homes in that time).

Side note – now that everyone is posting “tips & tricks” on how to work from home, I can testify to the truth of what seems to be everyone’s rule #1: get up, shower, and get dressed like you mean it. I never go to work in PJs or sweats or even jeans. I have found that the more informally I dress, the dumber I am, so I always face the day looking like I’m ready to “leave for work”… except my feet. I rarely wear socks and I literally have almost no use for shoes.

Because my work situation is exactly identical to what it was last month, I also don’t feel the same economic pressure that many are suffering. And as far as “staying in my home” – I would be hard-pressed to even find a way to leave the house less than I already was. If I didn’t run out of salty snacks from time to time, I’d probably never experience fresh air.

Notwithstanding all that, there is one way that our current predicament has hit me hard, maybe harder than I expected it would.

I am a preacher’s kid. The story in my house, or at least what I’ve always believed, is that I was brought to church on the way home from the hospital. From that day to this, across the months and years, through an ever-changing selection of “home" churches, the one thing I knew about my life was that my week always began with church.

Obviously there have been times when illness or travel or circumstances prevented me from attending, though if I were able to count them up I think I’d be pretty amazed by how few of those there were. I can tell you with a straight face that there has never in my life been a Sunday when I woke up and just said, “Nah, not today.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not offering this as any kind of evidence for what an awesome Christian I am. I believe that clichés and memes often hold great truth, and one of my favorites is “Sitting in church doesn’t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car.”

I definitely am, however, a creature of routine, and while I make every effort not to go to church solely as a matter of routine, the fact is that it’s been part of my weekly routine since before I could spell  church, or anything else.

More than that, when my wife & I moved from New York to Ohio, we had to sort of reboot our entire lives. We still “went to church”, but we weren’t really part of a church and I soon found myself becoming seriously depressed. Church is a big part of my spiritual life, but (especially as an introvert) it seems to be a significant part of my social life too, and of my overall sense of “belonging” in this world.

Fast-forward almost twenty-seven years and here I am again, essentially legally prohibited from attending church. My weeks still take the same basic shape, since I’m still working, but it’s a little like the yeast or the salt or some other pivotal ingredient is being left out of the recipe.

Easter approaches, and from this vantage point it seems all but inevitable that we will not be gathering to celebrate the Resurrection. My wife recently told my daughter that she didn’t think I’d handle that very well… and I’m afraid I won’t.

I hope that everyone who might read this is getting what they need most in a time where we all need something to make our lives feel a little less out of control. 

End of an Era

When I went to college, I got the chance to meet people from all over, especially all different parts of New York State. And that reopened the discussion of what constitutes Upstate New York.

You've probably seen the Facebook memes but it really is a thing, especially among people who are not from New York State. There was a sizable Jersey contingent on my dorm floor and one day one of those guys asked me where I was from. When I told him I was from upstate, he said, oh I know a guy from upstate. When I asked him where, he said "White Plains".

White Plains is 30 miles north of New York City, and 184 miles south of my hometown at the edge of the Adirondack Mountains (it's worth noting that that town is in turn more than 130 miles south of the Canadian border, just for complete geographical perspective).

I've lived Upstate my entire life -- sure, there was a 6-year stay in Vermont, but that was just across the lake and I came back to "this side" frequently. Certainly the Vermont folks always treated me like a New Yorker. And there were The Years of Which We Do Not Speak, my 3-year exile to Ohio, but I am resolute in pretending that never happened. But for the most part, you could draw a rectangle on the map that's about 10 or 15 miles wide and about 50 miles long, and it would contain almost 50 years of my life. So I know about as much about Upstate NY as I know about anything.

For 50 years, there has been an infallible indicator of someone's Upstate knowledge: Exit 3 of the Northway. When I was a kid, we had this:

Before very long, however, the original project planned for exit 3, a crosstown interstate connector, was scrapped and even the sign came down... so that if you traveled north, you went directly from exit 2 to exit 4 with no indication of what happened to exit 3. Since then, it's been a secret code among upstaters: "Exit 3?" "There is no exit 3." Sure, it was a little embarrassing being seen by outsiders as the area that couldn't count, but I think we enjoyed sharing that little secret.

Until today. As I headed south from exit 12, I hit a big traffic snarl around exit 6. I soon found that the source was a lane closure at exit 4... which in turn was related to the fact that Exit 3 Southbound opened for business today.

For several weeks now, construction has been underway on a brand-new exit, meant to make access to the airport easier. Apparently the on-ramp was opened recently, but the change became real to Northway travelers today when the off-ramp opened.

The governor was there to make a fuss about how revolutionary this will be, how it will open our area to more travel (also spelled "$$$$$"). And of course there are obvious benefits, including the benefit of wrapping up the ongoing construction effort sometime soon. But our world is a little less unique...

Be Like the Turtle

When our kids were younger, they spent a lot of time in churches, courtesy of parents who were so often there themselves (sometimes because one of us was being paid to be there, but frankly we would've been there all the time anyway). Just like fish don't really "notice" water, they got to the point where, as I was forever reminding people, they saw the church as "just another room of the house."

Of course, I was really trying to insulate all of us against the kind of disapproval that results when kids behave like they do at home but they're someplace else. But even when I was trying to excuse them, or at least protect them, I felt like I had stumbled on a semi-profound truth.

Maybe I wasn't really talking about them at all. You see, my children and I have something very important in common: we have a parent who's a pastor. In my case, it was my dad, and though the leading occupational hazard of being part of a "parsonage family" is frequent moves, he had relatively long tenures, so I was spared repeated upheaval.

The first move was when I was 11; the biggest issue with a summer move is that the kids aren't in school, so it can be tough to locate a new peer group. As it turned out, I hadn't had much of a peer group to begin with, and I was spending a lot of time listening to baseball on the radio as the Mets accidentally won a pennant, so in some sense I didn't notice much difference. And there was the new church, and new friends there, so I adjusted pretty quickly.

When I went away to college, my Christian school held Sunday services in the chapel/auditorium, but while I attended, I didn't have a real connection; it was almost like watching "somebody else's service" on TV. In fact, in general my time at school was marked by a vague sense of disconnectedness.

As a graduate student, I ended up at the church where I was born (not literally, but pretty close). I didn't really know anybody there, since I had left on my 3rd birthday, but somehow it felt familiar. Then after getting married, the first thing we did was find "a church for both of us," and were blessed to find a place close by that was not only a great spiritual home but also gave us a peer group that we're still happy to call our friends 30 years later.

At that point I felt really grounded, really comfortable in who I was, so when my wife announced that God was calling her to go to seminary, I almost didn't even give a second thought to what it would be like to pick up and move 678 miles to a new home 3 states away. Just another new adventure...

... until we actually got there. It was a new world in every possible way; among other things, we had a very hard time finding a church where we felt at home. And I also ended up in a depression that necessitated counseling before I began to pull out of my tailspin a little.

For several years I understood those two facts as "two things that happened in Ohio," but eventually I grasped that they were 2 sides of the same coin. I have been formed in such a way that -- although we lived in a quite comfortable apartment -- without a church I could really call my own, I was for all intents and purposes homeless.

Being married to a pastor means that, since that trying time, I always have a church readily available to me, one that has at least some level of commitment to me because I come as an accessory to the one they're really invested in. Or I thought it would be an "always" thing, until she had to take a year off from ministry because of a health issue.

We knew we would move back to a familiar area, and also knew we would need a church; it was there that I put my foot down. With so much disruption and upheaval, I believed that I would only survive if I had a church where I was instantly at home.

We went back to that same church from my teen years, and it was the best decision I ever made. Many there remembered me, and still fondly remembered my parents; at the same time they (mostly) didn't make me stay a teenager but allowed me to be an adult. Perhaps it helped that even as a teenager I was pretty much a middle-aged man.

So I'm writing this not only because of my unwavering gaze in the rear-view mirror, but also to thank those folks for being home to me at a time when I needed one almost like I needed oxygen. And also to thank them for most recently graciously sending me out, since we are beginning a new adventure in a new church.

This time I know I'm going to be fine... since I know I have a church to call home, it feels as if, like the turtle, I'm carrying my own home with me on my back.

Sculpted from Cheese

Not long ago, a Facebook friend posted a video of the number 11 song from the year after I was born. Now keep in mind (additional clue) that it was the last year before Beatlemania, when JPG&R would have nine top-100 songs, so "number 11 song" doesn't make it all that hip.

My comment on the post was "I don't 100% understand why, but this is a long-term favorite of mine..." which, looking back, I believe to be untrue. In fact, I'm pretty sure I do know exactly why but I just didn't want to admit it.

The household I grew up, while very musical, was not very attuned musically to Beatlemania or any of the downstream effects of that; I wrote about that here:

When I was a kid, my parents were "easy listening" devotees. If you're not familiar, easy listening is basically elevator music, (occasionally) with words. While this has come in handy recently, since the "easy listening" music of the 60s & 70s makes up most of the "easy piano" books of the present day, it didn't necessarily help me develop a sophisticated musical palate.

In fact, I was surrounded; since I lived outside the school district I attended, I was transported not by a standard bus -- nor even by the now-legendary Short Bus -- but in fact in a regular station wagon with the rest of the literal outcasts (how sad is that, that I didn't even merit the Short Bus?). Every afternoon, all the other kids were called by bus number; then the voice intoned, "Station wagon, please... station wagon." Not that I'm bitter.... anyway, Mrs. Dickenson, the driver, was an aficionado of that same easy listening station. Narrow range of musical exposure -- that, and hymns! -- is what I'm getting at here. I was in high school before I figured out you could do a song with an electric guitar and drums.

Not only that, but I can remember watching quite a bit of Andy Williams' show in the days of 3 channels/1 TV set. So I probably heard this song a million times between home and The Station Wagon (or wagons, counting the one at home).

I'd like to think it was pure immersion that made it a fave, and maybe it was, but the environment I was in is impossible to separate from the man it created, and the man it created ended up with the kind of tastes in entertainment that I am still learning not to apologize for. I captured that more than 8 years ago (wait, WHAT??) in a post I called "Behold, the Power of Cheese".

And of course, I've also been very open about my fondness for looking back. If you doubt that, click on the Rewind tag in the right margin for all the times I have written using reflective verbiage...

When you put it all together, it would probably be weird if I didn't love the song.

Time Jump

Even though I haven't posted here in who knows how long, this blog never quite totally disappears from my thoughts... I can't tell you how many entries I've written during my morning shower. Only in my head, of course; I probably use up enough hot water without trying to rip out 800 words or so at the same time.

Despite the aged-in-the-cask nature of the 200+ posts here, it's not uncommon for me to send a link to one of them to some unsuspecting passerby -- I can find a periodic excuse to pass on this one and this one in particular -- but that always reminds me that I kinda miss doing this thing.

It takes intentionality to create a blog entry, however, and since my blog has never been big on the 'feedback' end of things, it's difficult to muster the concentration, effort, and time it takes to post. Next thing I know it's seemingly a whole lifetime later -- it would probably take a lifetime to recap all the water that's gone under the bridge in the meantime.

I decided to resurrect it at least temporarily (who knows, maybe I can get a little something going here at least sporadically) for the purpose of posting our family's holiday letter here. This way I can easily link to it in Facebook or an email and anyone who would venture a click can read it (while at the same time, it's fairly unlikely that anyone who doesn't care would wander in).

Anyway, I find that I haven't lost the knack for writing half a page without even remembering my original objective... but the following is what I ended up writing about the year 2017:

Merry Christmas to you and a Happy 2018! Writing this is literally the first thing I’m doing in the New Year. We’re off to a strong start already; my son’s first words to me on Jan.1 were not “Happy New Year” or even good morning, but rather “Where are the donuts?”

Having located them, he’s (munching, &) watching YouTube videos on his laptop; his mom is curled up with a cup of coffee and a podcast on her new iPad; the young woman among us is still sleeping; and I am determined to capture an entire year, or at least the State of the Family as the calendar changes, in a few paragraphs.

We’ve been a little lax in our longstanding holiday letter discipline, but this year’s was inspired by a few pieces of news we wanted to make sure our whole circle of connections were aware of.

Kelly has the biggest news this year. As she observed her third anniversary as pastor of Hartford UMC, and the fifth anniversary of her traumatic brain injury, she began to feel a readiness for a fuller ministry.   After much prayer, she told the Bishop she was ready for ¾ time status as a pastor.   That seems like the ideal “balance” right now; allowing her to pastor and still spend meaningful time with our two teens and her husband.   As of today Kelly is appointed to serve the Ballston Spa UMC on a ¾-time basis.

Because that church has been without a pastor for 2 months, she had been getting started with some things there, but yesterday marked her final worship service with the gracious folks at Hartford.   How well they thanked her and honored her ministry among them.  They also did a great job blessing our family with support and kindnesses.   The parting is sorrowful, but the small country church sends Kelly onward with their blessing.

Mark, Katie, and Jonathan have been involved at Hudson Falls UMC since we left Colonie, but Mark & Katie have made the decision to join Kelly at BSUMC, even as we all remain in our Moreau home.  Jonathan will continue at HFUMC, both because he has such a “home” there and as part of his continuing transition toward independence. At this point we anticipate a likely move to the Ballston Spa parsonage in the summer of 2019.

Meanwhile, Mark reached the 20^th anniversary of beginning at IDX Systems Corporation, which eventually became part of GE Healthcare. He’s blessed to have maintained this position through a change of role, corporation, and five physical moves, having worked 100% from home for more than 14 of those years. He’s saddened to transition away from being Staff-Parish Relations chair and praise team leader at his hometown church, but excited for the opportunity to share in ministry with Kelly once again. We’ve missed each other.

After spending a year in the high school program at the Wildwood School, Jonathan transitioned this summer to the school’s Young Adult Program, just before his 18^th birthday. YAP seeks to give young adults on the autism spectrum the living and working skills they need to achieve maximum independence. His teachers consistently remark on how he’s become a leader and the example they often use with the other students. Visitors to his bedroom consistently remark on the many Lego creations he has assembled and is displaying on every horizontal surface.

Katie celebrated her 15^th birthday at midyear and is now a sophomore at South Glens Falls HS. One of the highlights of her freshman year was her first participation in the school’s legendary Marathon Dance, which really has to be seen to be believed. This year she and the rest of the student body raised over $800,000 to help people in our local community, most of whom are facing a life-threatening health crisis.

This fall Katie took up tennis and had a winning season as part of the varsity team’s first doubles pairing. As the year came to a close, she suffered what was somehow her first broken bone in a gym class mishap, a right pinky-finger fracture that required the insertion of 2 pins. At this writing she is anxiously awaiting the removal in a few days of the cast and the pins, so she can resume writing and drawing (and full household chores, of course).

This summer we also celebrated our 30^th wedding anniversary with a trip to Rhode Island, including some fascinating time in Newport, and had a couple of quick getaways to Lake Placid which resulted in Mark becoming obsessed with waterfalls.  And as with all of you, this year did hold its share of heartaches, but we won’t chronicle these.  What we do want to convey is this:  we’re here on the other side - by the grace of God.  We cannot help but remind you whom we care about that God is our source of strength and peace; He heals us and restores our hope.  It is well with our souls.

As we close out this year and anticipate a fresh new one, we pray that each of you is well.   We’d love to hear your latest news, for you are important to us.  One of our New Year’s resolutions is to see as many people as we can in person.  So reach out soon so we can plan a simple meal or host you for an afternoon or evening.    We’ll set out some “sweet treats” and savor them and your good company.   Do let us show and share our love, and God’s love with you in 2018! 

My Father's Hands

I wanted to post a song today to honor my Dad on Father's Day; I am lucky to have him for the 54th Father's Day of my life.

But since I am old, the song I wanted does not live in any online form -- no youtube video, no online streaming, not even a sample in iTunes. Totally out of print.

In fact, the lyrics aren't even online anywhere. So I am presenting the lyrics in this form, actually transcribing as I listen to the song. I believe this is the perfect Father's Day tribute.

The song is called "My Father's Hands"; the album is Floodgates and the artist is Glad.

At the age of five I was taking on the world,
Every day was a reckless adventure unfurled
Never gave much thought to any consequence
When I was testing my boundaries and peeking through the fence

When the time would come, as it always did,
That I'd outstep the stride of a five-year-old kid,
And it would crumble like a castle of sand,
I'd go running to my father's hands

My father's hands could fix anything in my world
If it all lay in pieces, without a hope or a prayer
It was never beyond the loving repair of my father's hands

Looking back, I can only admire
The things he could do with patience and pliers,
As trivial as broken playthings could be,
He could sense it was the end of the world for me

From broomstick horses and bent handlebars
To the mechanical nightmare of my first car,
If it crumbled like a castle of sand,
By the magic of my father's hands...

My father's hands could fix anything in my world
If it all lay in pieces, without a hope or a prayer
It was never beyond the loving repair of my father's hands

Now here I am and I'm feeling scared
'Cause for the very first time I am aware
Of these ruined hopes, and these shattered dreams,
But my father's hands cannot fix everything

A broken heart is not a broken toy,
And though I'm a man, I am still much a boy,
And my daddy's done all he can do.
So Lord Jesus, I'm asking you,
Could your father be my father too?

Now my father's hands can fix everything in my world
If it all lay in pieces, without a hope or a prayer
It's never beyond the loving repair of my father's hands
Oh, my father's hands
My father's hands...

Blessings on Father's Day to all the dads, and God's comfort to those who have lost their dads.

Facing Backwards

I don’t believe the American Motors station wagons of the early 70s were considered classics at the time, or even in hindsight – although like with every other topic, particularly 70s-related, if you look online you can find a small community of obsessives. Like them, I remember ours pretty fondly, though.

It was dark green with the mandatory faux-woodgrain paneling, and if your family had anything similar, you know what was the most cool about it: it had 3 seats, and the third one was rear-facing.

While the Council on Bubble-Wrapping Our Kids has decided that’s a no-no (like everything else we enjoyed as kids), in those days parents & kids both welcomed the opportunity for a little space between us. So the third seat (at least in memory) was my sanctuary.

In a sense it was kind of wasted on me, because on a trip of any length I was absorbed in one of two things, and didn’t notice which direction I was facing – either I had “my nose in a book”, as Mom would say, or I was rummaging through/examining/obsessively re-sorting a thick stack of baseball cards.

Baseball cards weren't yet considered a ‘collectible’ – the day when they would be considered a legitimate hobby and then an investment and then worth zero again was still far in the future – but kids of a certain age always collected them. I don’t know why they fascinated me instantly; the cards of the early 70s are considered more or less the ugliest in card history. But anytime I could lay my hands on a dime, I’d walk the block to the drugstore for a pack.

Baseball cards were in some ways the Microsoft Excel of my childhood, because a pile of cards could be sorted and resorted – alphabetically, by team, by position, by card number… this did cause one huge problem for me, however, because in order to keep the ‘team’ category current, I would cross out the team on the card and write in the new team every time a guy got traded. So a large number of my cards are in the opposite of mint condition (and yeah, I mean they are; you bet I kept ‘em all to this day).

As a guy who is (probably genetically, certainly temperamentally) predisposed to Collecting and Sorting Things, I have been very much in a state of heightened alert since I got an iPod. The iTunes library allows for easy slice-and-dicing, and it’s even easier to carry my songs with me than it was to carry my baseball cards.

Not only do I like to make lists, though, but I also like to look at other people’s lists. When I came across the Rolling Stone list of the top 500 songs of all time, I immediately copied the list and checked it against my library. As of today, I have 187 of the 500 – which is funny, because it seems like I always have about a third of any list I find.

The more I looked, though, the more I realized that the reason I didn't have more of the songs was because I didn't want them. When it comes down to it, and I've mentioned this before, I’m just not oriented toward critically-acclaimed music. I’m not really seeking out Nirvana or the Sex Pistols or Eminem.

Still, I like to collect, and I’m always on the lookout for reminders of songs that I enjoyed and would like to add, so I decided to crowdsource: using Wikipedia’s pages for the Billboard year-end top 100 charts, I was able to compile essentially the top 1000 most popular songs of the (guess which decade?) 1970s. And as of today, I have 474 of them, which I believe is a testament to (a) how much I love 70s music and (b) how exactly straight down the middle my taste is. I’m not claiming that’s good or bad, it’s just the Undisputed Truth.

Of course, the problem is that this plays into my obsessive nature and I spend much of my time trying to figure out how I can get more and more and more of these. Since our library subscribes to Freegal, I can get a few tracks free each week so I am scouring the database to see how many of them are on the list, as I had previously done for the Rolling Stone list. Also, I have a lot of secondhand vinyl & cassettes I’ve picked up along the way but not ripped yet, so I’m mentally scanning to see if there’s anything there.

So I guess I haven’t really come very far since baseball cards in the backseat; when it comes to entertaining myself, it seems I’m still facing backwards.

The Unkindest Cut, Part 2

The kidney stone episodes I alluded to in Part I were plenty painful, but I can tell you that the day they took off my splint and fitted me for a cast was for me a Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day  The nurse jostled my arm a little taking off the splint, and it was as if she'd clubbed me with a baseball bat.  In fact I almost threw up and I had to lie down for a few minutes to recover.  Then they X-rayed it, forcing me to twist this way & that and I suddenly discovered: my arm didn't do that any more.  By the time I got the cast on, I was grateful for the respite.

When I finally got the cast off, I had 'only' a long brace, and I got to start PT.  Here's where I started: if a 'handshake' position is 0 degrees, and palm-up is 90, I was at -5.  I could only bend it backward & forward about 15-20 degrees.  For 3 weeks I was stretched hot-packed, ultrasounded, and electrically stimulated; I did all manner of exercises both in PT and at home.  Then I went back to the doctor.

He was Not Happy, and he muttered darkly about "never getting it back" if I couldn't step up my game. He wanted me to hurt myself.  I protested that I had always heard pain was a signal to back off, but he said it was time to push through the pain.  When I asked him how far to push, he replied, "I want you to push until you want to punch me."

Cue the Rocky training montage (hold the raw eggs).  I worked as hard as I could, and I did push myself, although I'm sure I didn't do "enough" home exercise.  There's only so many times a day that you can block off a 20-30 minute chunk of time; since I had to work the weaker hand with the stronger one, both were occupied and it sure is hard to get much else accomplished. You can't keep up with a blog, I proved that.

Finally at the end of March I was released from PT -- but he warned me that if I didn't keep working, I'd start going backwards.

On the one-year anniversary of the surgery, I see that it's probably never going to be "normal" again.  I still walk around a lot of the time, holding my wrist with the other hand, rubbing it, stretching it... hoping to make it feel less tight, less stiff, less sore, stronger.  If I bend it hard, just the right way, it makes exactly the same sound a bowling ball makes when it comes out of the chute and smacks into the other balls on the rack.

So you can see what good it did me to be positive for once.

The Unkindest Cut, Part I

In some ways I suppose I resemble Linus; while I never carried a blanket or sucked my thumb, he's kind of a nerd who wears glasses, seems pretty introspective and is comfortable with his spiritual side.  I'd also have to guess that, though I don't recall seeing this in a strip , like me he ended up with a TRS-80

That may even be a little flattering to me, but I also must confess that I identify as much or more with Charlie Brown.  Like the round-headed kid, I was not necessarily popular with my peer group; I always loved baseball even though I was not always noticeably successful at it; and I was more than a little crazy about a red-haired girl.

I wouldn't be surprised if Charlie Brown had the same dream I did as a kid, over and over.  I'm playing the outfield as the red-haired girl watches, there's a deep fly ball and I race back back back... at the last possible instant I leap to snag the ball as I crash into the fence.

A hush falls over the crowd as I am carted off the field and the red-haired girl rushes to my side with, you know, like shining in her eyes.  I think she smiles at me, maybe touches my hand, as they wheel me off to... I don't know, rebuild me, make me better than I was.  As long as I impressed the girl, I didn't much care what came next.

In real life, I never made that kind of catch and I didn't get very far with the red-haired girl, and I also never spent much time at the hospital.  Never broke a bone, never had my tonsils out, never even had a cavity.  I've racked up a couple of ER visits for kidney stones -- which, ouch, but pain meds for a few days and a lot of water, and the pain more or less, um, passes.

Then a couple summers ago, I noticed a sharp pain in my right wrist when I lifted or pulled something; one night I pulled hard on a heavy object and got a blinding flash of pain.  The orthopedist said I had injured the TFCC in the wrist, basically a repetitive-stress injury caused by the outer bone of the forearm (ulna) being longer than the inner bone (radius); the imbalance basically causes the head of the ulna to pulverize the cartilage.  This is called being "ulnar positive", which refutes all the people who have said I don't have a positive bone in my body.

I had a couple cortisone shots to stave off the pain, though the doctor made it clear that I was only postponing the inevitable -- since they weren't making my ulna any shorter.  Finally -- last Halloween -- I experienced the first medical procedure of my life.

When people hear "wrist surgery", they usually think (1) carpal tunnel, which this wasn't, and (2) arthroscopic.  My wrist actually was scoped to clean up the cartilage tear, but since the real problem was the length of my ulna...

The other part of my procedure was called an ulnar osteotomy, which like most uses of medical terminology is meant to camouflage the fact that they open up your arm, cut a small wafer of bone out of the ulna, and put it back together with a plate and screws.

Maybe your favorite ballplayer came back in a week or 10 days after a scope, but I ended up in a huge & cumbersome splint for 2 weeks, followed by 2 weeks in a cast running from my knuckles past my elbow.

I couldn't drive, or type, (that is, work) for the entire month of November, but I was OK with that because I figured I'd get the cast off at the end of November, do a couple weeks' PT, and be good as new by Christmas!

I figured wrong.

As I Was Saying...

One of Newton's Laws of Motion states that a body at rest tends to stay at rest (if I were a real writer, I'd look up which Law, but since this is a blog, I'm obligated only to link to it).  This Law is perhaps most clearly illustrated at nap time, but it also describes what's been going on with the blog of late.

I won't deny that my production had been winding down really for a period of multiple years, for several reasons, but the pothole that seemed to drop the transmission out was my surgery in October.  The irony, of course, was that I had nothing but time, suddenly... but typing was laborious (and handwriting all but impossible).

Looking back over the past 9 months it seems full of momentous events, both exciting and catastrophic.  I'm struggling a bit dealing with all of that in blog terms, first of all because the sheer volume of events really resists being summed up in 800 or so words -- but also because some of the individual events feel too big, too deep, too... personal.

One of the joys of this endeavor over the years has been creating little vignettes, glimpses into my life and the way I think, and trying to make it interesting or funny to someone besides just myself.  I appreciate also the cyberconnection I have with so many people who've been part of my life at different stages.  It makes for a kind of community that's frankly missing from my largely isolated work-from-home life.  I take particular pleasure in the fact that several of my Facebook friends that I interact with the most are people with whom I wasn't all that close IRL

I'm also aware, however, of a fundamental shortcoming -- whether in me or just built into Social Media World: when I'm going through Real Stuff, such as I have been lately, it's better worked through with Real People, and not where "just anyone" can see..And while I've been pretty successful in building a Friends list, I've been way less successful in building actual Friend-ships.

Even in the midst of such reflection, I still find it a bit ironic; I just wrote a blog about the limitations of blogging, in which the big revelation is that I'm fundamentally unable to reveal myself.

Call Me Cautious

I realize that a high percentage of my posts end up to be about music. I guess that's kind of like the way Eskimos are supposed to have so many words for snow, or fish tweet all the time about how the water is today. Not that I claim that level of expertise, but I seem to be surrounded by music so it seems to be on my mind more often than not.

It's not the same as it once was, I have to say. Actually in a way it is, because I seem to be immersed in the same music now that I was then... but what I meant was, in my younger days when there was something cool and hip and happening, I was aware of it (even though I was constitutionally unable to be hip) more or less right away.

Now when I am... less conclusively young... I am reminded of that fact over and over, because the new hot song comes to me through my children. Ouch, by the way. Quite often they say, "We heard this song and it's really cool and can we have it on our iPods?"

It is my intent as a parent, of course, to exercise a certain amount of quality control over what's going into their heads, so my answer is always "Let me look at it." I then head directly to Google (pretty often right that very moment, with some encouragement).

I know I have no grounds to be all that superior -- "She loves you yeah yeah yeah" is not precisely Shakespeare, and no one will proudly hail the ascension of "My Ding-a-Ling" to #1 in October 1972 as a cultural touchstone. But I also can't say that I've been overwhelmed with the literary quality coming out of top-40 radio these days either...

Maybe "literary" is the wrong angle. Now that I'm coming at it from the parental standpoint, I'm actually more interested in the message than the turns of phrase. Sometimes I can sort of get around "adult language" by making them get the Kidz Bop version, since it's sanitized for your protection (shades of Pat Boone), but other times it's more of a conceptual struggle, particularly in the way current music deals with male-female relationships.

With that in mind, I'd like to submit the following proposed lyric:

Hey, I just met you,

But I'm not crazy,

Can't have my number,

So let's meet for coffee sometime in a neutral and non-threatening public place where I can be completely sober AND see you in the light of day AND be able to hear what you're saying so I can figure out whether you're a normal guy or some kind of stalker,

Maybe

One for the Money, Two for the Show

There were over a thousand students at my high school, so my verification was surely not exhaustive, but to the best of my knowledge I was the only one around who ever wore blue suede shoes to school.

I'm also relatively certain that this removes the last vestige of doubt about whether I was ever "cool" or 'hip", as if that ship hadn't sailed well over 100 posts (not to mention well over 40 years) ago.

Here are the two things you really need to understand about that: first, I was probably 13 or 14 when I got them and surely can't be held accountable; and second, given the opportunity, I'd do it again tomorrow. Maybe tonight, even.

They were Hush Puppies and you know I just checked the website but they don't seem to have them these days. Those shoes were comfortable and I really loved them... and yeah, I also felt like I was really styling as well. It may be just as well that I can't get my hands on them any more, since there have been two major changes since those days -- Hush Puppies are now crazy expensive, and I am also now a married person.

I haven't thought about those shoes much in the past 30+ years -- although I must admit that they do tend to get mentioned at my high school reunions! -- but recently I actually found myself in a situation when a pair of blue suede shoes was exactly what I needed.

During our 25th anniversary cruise this summer, I fell victim once again (as, let's be honest, we all knew I would) to a more serious cruise-related virus than even Legionnaire's Disease (or the compulsion to impress your girlfriend by sailing too close to the coast). It must have been lying dormant in my system ever since October of 2005.

As I reported in one of my first blog posts ever -- in which I believe I established a precedent for being transparent about myself -- I was rather mesmerized that first time around by the opportunity to perform karaoke. I went in this time hoping that a bit of foreknowledge, and self-knowledge, would help me keep things in perspective.

Then I discovered that not only could I take a whirl at conventional karaoke, but they were also offering Superstar Live -- karaoke with a live band including backup vocals. I definitely relished the opportunity to perform, for the first time ever, with an actual rock band.

Despite all of that, I felt like I kept my infection pretty well quarantined; I sang a bunch of songs, in both formats, but I didn't feel like it dominated my life. That might have been the Great Trivia Contest Quest, but that's another story. I had another brief bout of worrying about which song would make me look good... but then I realized that if this was only going to happen once every 7 years, I'd better focus on singing songs I enjoy singing. And after that it was awesome.

Hanging around karaoke off-and-on for the week, I kept hearing about the "Carnival Legends" show featuring passengers performing on the main stage... as the week went on, however, I concluded that I must have no shot. After all, no one said anything to me -- until suddenly, the day before the show, I passed the karaoke host in a doorway and he said, "Oh, Mark, I was meaning to talk to you..."

And seemingly before I knew it (yet at the same time, after hours of stewing, re-listening to the audio, more stewing...) I was standing on stage in front of an audience, and a full band... dressed in full Elvis drag. At that point things are moving thisfast, and it can get away from you in a hurry.

The Elvis Legends number is a medley of "Jailhouse Rock" and "Hound Dog", and what I found immediately after starting to listen to the practice track they gave me is that despite the fact that "Jailhouse Rock" is older than I am and a certifiable 'rock classic'... I sure didn't know the words. And I worried about that non-stop till I got on the stage.

Sure enough, I got to the fourth line and "went up". All I could do is keep my mouth moving till the words came back, which they did (only to depart again briefly a few lines later) -- but I actually believe, or perhaps delude myself, that some of the crowd didn't even realize I had lost it. Hey, you can't always understand Elvis either...

And you know what? I got to sing on stage with a full band in front of hundreds of people... happily the house lights were off AND the spotlights were in my eyes AND I didn't have my glasses on, so I couldn't see past the band anyway. And I screwed up in front of all of them, and I will never never not remember that. But I had a great time, and the rest of my performance was pretty awesome :-), and given the opportunity I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

My other big regret was that, since I didn't pack for a stage show, all I had to wear on my feet was my old sneakers, which didn't totally fit the Elvis image, of course. Turns out that Mars Blackmon was right; I'll bet if I'd had those blue suede babies, everything would've come off without a hitch.

These Are the People in Your (Floating) Neighborhood

Quiet. Solitude. Contemplation.

These are just three of the words that will never be used to describe the cruise ship experience. Yes, my wife and I recently returned from an 8-day eastern Caribbean cruise -- the longest by far we had ever been away from our children. As I recall, we have two of those, and while I'm a little hazy on the names, I'm sure they will come back to me while I'm writing this.

This was a (slightly early) celebration of our upcoming 25th wedding anniversary, a romantic getaway for two marred only by the presence of over 2500 strangers... many of whom seem bent on affirming the worst stereotypes of residents of the Greater New York/New Jersey Metropolitan Area. I really had thought going in that the trip would include long stretches of quiet conversation, but to be in virtually any public area is akin to sticking your head in a jet engine.

From a sociological standpoint, there's fun to be had in observing your fellow cruisers and discerning their primary motivation for booking. There is a major cohort, for example, that spends every waking (at least) hour in the casino. These are easily identified on the rare occasions they emerge by -- in addition to their eyeballs rolling vertically before coming to a stop -- keeping their room cards on a lanyard around their necks. This affords convenience for sticking the card into a slot machine for hours/days at a time, which in turn supplies a neat visual metaphor for the hold the machine has on them.

A second group of cruisers is never more than a few yards from the pools. Mind you, they’re not often found in the pools, which are pretty small. This group spends their days sprawled on a lounge -- you can't get up if you want to keep your place -- catching some rays and, I suspect in many cases, angling to be seen and admired.

A similar group doesn't care about the rays, particularly, but can also be found in a lounge (often in what shade avails) stretched out with a book and/or snoozing. These people have clearly concluded, and I guess I can't argue strenuously with them, that vacation consists largely of doing, and moving, as little as possible. While this philosophy appeals to me somewhat, it only works for me in short bursts before something sounding very much like one of those old-fashioned alarm clocks with the double bell on top goes off in my head. Then I have to go find an Activity, lest I while away the precious hours of my vacation without Accomplishing Something Vacationy. OK, you got me, I'm struggling with all of that.

Incidentally, when it comes to reading material, even in tropical climes accustomed to bold colors, there were a lot of Shades of Grey to be seen.

Perhaps the largest cruiser group, certainly by mass, is the Buffet Enthusiasts. I suppose if you say "cruise" to someone who'd never been, the instant reaction might be "unending food"... and they wouldn't be off by much. The first problem with pizza and ice cream available at 3 a.m. is that the vestigial reptilian/teenage brain says, "Aha! If I can eat it, then I must eat it"... but that way lies madness, not to mention raging indigestion and ill-fitting clothing.

The dirty secret, of course, is that when cooking for a couple thousand people of varying backgrounds and palates (I don't think I'm being unfair to say, skewing toward unsophisticated), between sheer volume and least common denominator, it's almost impossible to put out excellent food. It's a Denny's that floats, is what it is.

OK, that's (marginally) harsh, but while they clearly aspire a bit higher for dinner service in the formal dining room, most of what you get wouldn't be out of place at your local neighborhood Golden Corral -- which operated on a similar charter for giving large numbers of customers acceptable food that really doesn't put anyone off.

I'm completely OK with that; I've made no secret that I'm no gourmet, so as long as I go in with the expectation that it's going to be hot and plentiful and pretty good, it's filling the bill. Note -- when discussing cruises, it is never advisable to use the phrase "get what you pay for".

Apple: Not Falling Far Enough

I guess everybody wants to see a little of themselves in their kids. I don't have the biological thing going for me, of course, so I do tend to study them closely to find those small reflections.

I've written before about my son and how I started out looking in all the wrong places for connections with him. It turned out he was not much for elaborate wordplay, and didn't care much about baseball -- but when we're riding in the car he always wants the oldies station playing, and pretty often he says, "Dad, do you have that one?" So we have a fair amount of overlap in our iPods. And I was happy to get him hooked on the finest in visual entertainment as well.

My daughter and I are pretty close in general, but the thing that we talk about the most (well, the thing I talk about with her; she talks about anything and everything with anyone and everyone) is baseball. Now that I'm helping coach her team, I like to try to teach her about the game... yeah, she's not really any more inclined to listen to dad when I'm wearing a maroon baseball cap than any other time. But even though it's somewhat frustrating, we can always connect on some level around the game.

Naturally I can't really expect them to share my preoccupation with the past... or least that's what I was counting on recently when I was able to recapture 8.5 oz. of my childhood.

I've seen a lot of those photos that look like posters on Facebook recently talking about how our lives were simpler when we were kids -- we didn't have seat belts or sunscreen and we stayed outdoors from dawn to dusk without posting armed guards -- but I can certainly testify that one thing was in fact way simpler, and that was breakfast. In my day it seemed as if nutrition was optional; the proper response to "Sugar content?" was "Yes, please!"

So it came to pass that in the fullness of time, and bowl, I started nearly every day with a heaping bowl of Quisp cereal. Like his cousin, Captain Crunch, Quisp was a jolt of sugary, sticky, corny goodness and I loved it. And I believe it was no coincidence that as I got a bit older and was slowly induced to eat a higher proportion of breakfast foods found in nature, Quisp was actually taken off the market.

In the 90s Quaker brought it back as an Internet-only product, and from there it gradually crept into scattered stores. You won't find it in your average Price Chopper or Hannaford, but it is perhaps ironic that I found it when browsing the more upscale Fresh Market (perhaps the only time "fresh" and "Quisp" have shared a thought).

Since it's such a "boutique" cereal now, and since the Fresh Market is so... well, I kinda want to say "snooty", but I'll try "esoteric"... an 8.5 oz. box of Quisp actually set me back more than a normal-size box of a normal cereal (for a real eye-opener, check this out). I was OK with that, though, because I figured one box would get it out of my system.

I bought it on a Friday night and basically wedged it into the back of the pantry shelf, then I went to bed. Saturday dawned bright and sunny and, as basically the only prerogative of the parent, I slept in a tiny bit. As I came down the stairs yawning and stretching, my daughter greeted me cheerfully, "Dad, this new cereal is really good!"

I had already planned bagels for the weekend and the Breakfast Blast from the Past for Monday; I decided to stick with that despite my feelings of foreboding...

... and so it was that on Monday morning I poured the last of the Quisp into my morning bowl. It was pretty good, but not as good as an entire box of Quisp.

Lost in the Pages

I'm sure that from the standpoint of most retailers, I'm probably not the ideal consumer. I'm pretty good with the coupons, I'll drive across town to save 20 cents on a gallon of milk, and it's not uncommon for me to "visit" a product multiple times before I buy it (if I ever do). When stores use "loss leaders" to get me in the door, I love to go in and grab just those sale items and not get sucked in to any of the surrounding regularly-priced merchandise. I'm a trifle on the frugal side, is what I'm getting at.

There is one commodity for which I am the target audience, however: books. I know that when I'm writing one of these, all I really want is for "all of you" to read it and enjoy it -- whether that's engaging with my premise, nodding in recognition, or just getting a laugh. The one thing I can promise from the other side of the reading experience is that I will throw my whole self into it. Sure, I have the tendency -- exacerbated by years of blogging -- to reserve a corner of my mind for the metacritical, "am I really enjoying this? why or why not?" sort of evaluation, but on some level I'm still able to disappear into a book.

I'm also extremely brand-conscious; once I've enjoyed your book, I'm camping on your doorstep waiting for the next one. So last week I got my hands on Faye Kellerman's 20th Decker/Lazarus mystery (OK, I should probably admit that as usual I got it at the library, so in that sense I'm probably not entirely what an author is hoping for) and, having read probably the previous 19, I was ready to dive in.

I was interested by the mystery but it was the 2nd plot, the love story, that really absorbed me. I found myself rooting, trying to anticipate where it was headed next, worried that something was going to go wrong; even when I was finished I found myself wondering what would happen to these characters after the book was over (am I the only one who does that with fictional characters?).

Now it's possible I was influenced by the fact that the romantic couple were... a 15-year-old boy and a 14-year-old girl. When you combine my ability to pull a book up around my ears with my ceaseless fascination with my youth, I might have over-identified just a little.

Because when I started to come out of my tunnel, I started to think, wow, this is really sticking with me; I wonder what the rest of the world thought about it...

...and discovered that the world as a whole thought that the book wasn't that great. That the mystery wasn't that mysterious, and in any case got kind of short shrift. That the mystery story and the love story intersected in all too convenient ways. And all the more that maybe it wasn't too awesome to have a love story between a 15-year-old and a 14-year-old that... ah... perhaps took on more adult aspects than were strictly necessary. Not that I depend on the opinions of others to know what to think, but it was useful to get a little more rounded perspective (and maybe get my head out of my... book, a little).

We all bring our personal Stuff to whatever we read or hear or watch, even relationships with others -- or so I've heard from people who have relationships with others. But in retrospect I probably should have stayed sort of outside the book a little more. And by the way, if you happen to read the book: kids, don't try this at home.

Housework

I’m fascinated by the jobs people do. I mean, I know I have friends who are secretaries and teachers – and ministers, of course – but an awful lot of people kind of just “work in an office”. I wonder what their days are like; do they spend their time sending emails or typing documents or just thinking? Do they have a lot of control over what they do, or are they given a list of tasks to carry out today? And on top of all that: are they really good at their jobs, and how could you tell?

I guess I think about this in part because I don’t believe anyone really knows what I do. My title is “software engineer”, which is a euphemism for “programmer”, and I think most people who see that would probably think that I write computer programs all day. Put aside for the moment that I firmly believe that a lot of people (I won’t say “most”) really don’t even have a clue what a program is.

My own family is completely mystified by what I do. My mom used a 3-word title to "label" me in a Christmas letter one year; she got all 3 words wrong. My wife looks over my shoulder once in a while, and is convinced that I basically type random gibberish all day long. Not to mention the periods I spend staring at the screen, not moving at all... I don’t guess that looks much like work either. My daughter has said she wants to grow up and take my place when I retire, but I suspect she mostly wants to sit in a recliner all day in front of a screen while wearing slippers.

I tried to calculate it today, but I think it's quite possible that I spend fewer than 20 hours per week wearing shoes.

The truth is that while I write code now and then, my job description – or at least my job practice – is kind of all over the place. One of my major responsibilities is learning about some of the new software my company produces; at times that means I end up handling questions from colleagues and problems from customers. So quite often my day is spent poking through program code to try to figure out why things are behaving the way they are.

I work from home, also, and in some ways that doesn't work well with my personality. I can be easily distractable -- I like to think of it as multitasking -- and with easy access to a kitchen full of food and an Internet full of... everything but food, let's just say sometimes my concentration level is not a horizontal line. If all else fails, I can always take time out to pet the cat.

(Partially) as a consequence, my workdays lately have felt like episodes of "House"... I seem to stumble around for the first 49 minutes of the program, or even 53, but then right before the last commercial (or in my case, at the Outlook reminder that I have to do the Bus Stop Trip), I finally pinpoint the disease. Sometimes I even have time to start treatment before I go off the air, but a fair amount of the time I end up with a special 2-part episode, continued next time.

However, with "House" about to go off the air, I have to choose a new role model. I'm trying to decide between Martha Stewart, the Amazing Racers and the dudes on Project Runway.

Family Resemblance

Both of my parents are the youngest of their siblings, by a notable margin, and I’m the youngest of my generation as well. As a result, even my cousins have 10 years or more on me; we basically were strangers until well into my adulthood.

However, the arithmetic is bringing us together in recent years – we cousins seem to encounter each other at funerals. The rest of my immediate family has fled south, so I am the uncontested Northeast Regional Funeral Representative for the family.

Despite the fact that we were virtually unknown to each other, all the cousins knew who I was pretty much instantly, because they knew my parents – and I am a walking testament to the power of heredity. I look pretty much like what you’d get if you added my mom & dad together and divided by 2.

My hands and feet are definitely my dad’s, and they said that even as a toddler I walked like his father, even though he died before I was born. My face is mostly from my mother’s side, although I think a little of the paternal side sneaks in there, and my sense of humor and much of how I think is strongly reminiscent of mom as well. I’m sure there’ll be a future guest blog entry where she refutes that in the strongest possible terms.

I’m dwelling so much on Mendelian matters because it occurred to me recently that I also inherited something from my sister – a large swath of my iPod playlist. I’m not sure that there have been any scientific studies establishing music preference (or obsession, if you prefer) as hereditary, but the evidence is pretty strong in my case.

My sister was four years ahead of me in school, so she left for college as I reached high school… and started getting interested in music. And when she left for college, she left a tiny slice of herself behind: a really cheesy, beat-up record player – maybe not even worthy of being called a “hi-fi”; more like a lo-fi – and a small stack of albums (insert obligatory self-deprecating yet somehow simultaneously condescending crack about how some of my readers won’t remember large vinyl platters).

Fast-forward mmmmppph years – OK, 35, give or take – and here I am building a music library. Anyone who’s read any of my stuff, let alone my past music-related posts, will be unsurprised to learn that a lot of my collection comes from a long time ago. The backbone of the list is all the LPs and cassettes I bought all those years back, but thanks to a number of contributing streams (yard sale LPs & cassettes, cheap CDs, my somewhat winding emusic.com odyssey, and some gift iTunes cards), I’m slowly filling in the blanks.

Let me see if I can remember what was on that record player spindle: the Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today”. Gordon Lightfoot, Glen Campbell, and Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Ten Years Together”. John Denver – “Poems, Prayers, and Promises”. Was the Carpenters’ “The Singles: 1969-1973” in there too? I think so, but I’m not 100% sure. I know there was an extremely warped copy of James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James” that made me seasick to watch when I tried to play it. She also gave me an 8-track, for you archaeologists in the crowd, of some of the earliest of what would come to be called Christian Contemporary music; I kept it, later copied it to cassette (we didn’t “rip” in those days), and still listen to it in 0/1 format even now.

Further, in my never-ending quest to haul Yesterday into Today, I’ve bought the PP&M and Carpenters albums second-hand. I grabbed a nice Gordon Lightfoot selection at emusic, and I developed an unhealthy obsession with finding the actual Glen Campbell tracks I remember in their “original” state. It looks like the album she had might have been this one, but the cuts I got from emusic are live cuts recorded much later (*cough* ripoff cough). I finally grabbed the most recent Greatest Hits, when Amazon was basically giving it away for $5; this has allowed me a kind of “ahhhh… finally” moment, although at least one of the songs has been remixed almost till you can’t recognize it any more.

I started buying James Taylor in my first batch from Columbia House, way back in the day, so although I don’t have the SBJ album, I do have 40 JT tracks in my collection. And somehow, I ended up with the original John Denver LP, so that became part of Project Digitize.

I bought the Beatles’ Revolver some time back as a second-hand cassette, thinking that was the album I’d heard so many years before. But Beatles albums are an odd commodity; the same track often shows up on multiple LPs. Eventually I did a bit of research (can you claim it as “research” if it’s really just Wikipedia?) that I discovered that the actual record was “Yesterday and Today” and that it basically contained half of “Revolver” and half of “Rubber Soul”…

… but fortunately, the arrival of the Beatles at iTunes coincided roughly with the arrival of iTunes cards in my Christmas stocking, so I was able to snatch up “Rubber Soul” digitally to finish off that dream. Although I have to admit that I’m now trying to figure out where the most significant holes are in my Beatles collection, currently numbering 66 tracks.

I can’t in good conscience blame the whole thing on her, although I may still send her an invoice – a large percentage (I’m waffling between “impressive” and “disturbing”) of my acquisitions in recent times have been focused on the time period when I didn’t have to cook my own meals or do my own laundry. At least 1200 of my songs, or over 20% of my collection, are dated before 1980.

I find that for many of the really old tracks I have a memory, or at least a “memory”, of when I heard them first – and actually many of those have sisterly associations as well, like hearing “Hey Jude” for the first time at The Tower Restaurant in Lake Pleasant, NY (where the older kids hung out), or being instantly hooked on “It’s Too Late” by Carole King when I heard it in a car one late night in downtown Troy. And don’t get me started on “Indiana Wants Me”, which to be honest I haven’t bought yet because it’s hard to find the authentic one, plus I’m still a little bit conflicted about it.

Meanwhile I continue to get Facebook friend requests from high school classmates, and I made a few purchases several months ago to get my collection of 1973 Topps baseball cards within 9 of completion. My Today often looks a lot like my Yesterday, except with more TV networks.