My Date With Donnie (Pt I)

Recently I caught parts of the movie “My Date With Drew”. If you’ve never had the opportunity, the movie is kind of a documentary – closer to a home movie, frankly – about a guy who gets semi-obsessed with Drew Barrymore and spends the whole movie trying to find someone who knows someone who knows Drew who will return his calls. My wife caught a few minutes and almost immediately said, “Why is this a movie? Why should we care about this guy stalking her?”

I’m sure the only reason the movie wound up being released was that at the end, Drew gets wind of the project, checks out his website, and the next thing you know they are in fact having a date. It’s not necessarily a blockbuster film (actually, I believe it is a BlockbusterTM film) but it’s pretty charming, and the ending does make you feel like you want to cheer.

It had a little extra resonance for me because I have a little bit of an obsessive streak in me too. For instance, I’m really not a neat freak; I would probably say I’m more comfortable with a certain low level of chaos than most. Certainly more so than most, if not all, of the people I’m married to. But sometimes out of the corner of my eye I catch sight of something that’s crooked – a magazine left open, a picture slightly askew – and it’s like something tunnels inside my head. I’ll try to do something else: read a book, have a conversation; but I can’t rest until I fix that thing. Not the mess in the rest of the house, mind you, and certainly not my infamous To-Do Pile, but I’m on edge till that one glaring anomaly is put right.

I experienced a musical version of this as well. I don’t mean one of my obsessions was produced on Broadway, although it wouldn’t seem that out of place from what I read about the Legitimate Theater these days. I mean I got stuck on a song.

I may be the all-time champion of getting a song stuck in my head, particularly at about 4 AM, but what I really mean is that this song stayed with me for years. You see, as all right-thinking Americans agree, the music of my youth is the best music there ever was. And although Billy Joel, Styx, Barry Manilow and the like are not considered cool, I’ll put them up against anyone today. In fact, they’ll put themselves there – they still tour, very successfully. You may not be as familiar with Donnie Iris.

Donnie was the ultimate One-Hit Wonder, and if you remember his smash, “Ah, Leah”, you’re probably exactly the same age as I am, so perhaps I should pause while you rinse out the Grecian Formula. In fact, you're probably a bit fatigued -- so I will take a break and resume this story next time....

Best Supporting Actor

In the hazy days of my childhood in the pre-cable era, awards shows were always a big draw. The Emmys and Oscars were annually among the most popular shows. I'm not counting the Tonys, of course; nobody watched the Tonys, then or now. When you think about it, it's kind of amazing that they even put it on TV. What percentage of the nation lives within commuting distance of Broadway, and what percentage of them care enough to go to a show? Maybe we should start televising Little League banquets and the like.

I still watch awards once in awhile (it's hard not to; in the cable era, there's a new awards show almost weekly), but it gets harder to find the entertainment. I blame the homogenization of the acceptance speech. There used to be, it seemed to me, a presumption that the winners might say something interesting or even unpredictable, but those days are gone forever. Now it's a list of thank yous: my agent, my manager, my accountant, the head of the studio... zzzzzz.... sorry, did I doze off? The writer, the director, my costars..... if you're lucky and the music doesn't start up, they might squeeze in thanks to the family (actually, there have been some high-profile instances of the family being left out and some attendant marital friction).

Kind of reminds me of Father's Day. The most important "thank you day" is clearly Mother's Day -- that's the day with the flowers, the candy, taking Mom out to brunch, gifts (I gave my wife a stepladder this year*). Then down there at the end, there's Father's Day. There are a lot of reasons for that, like the fact that some part of society has convinced themselves fathers are optional. And the fact that an enormous proportion, whether they like it or not, are doing without a father to varying degrees. And the fact -- have I mentioned this previously? :-) -- that mothers are sometimes perceived as doing the real work.

[*Editor's Note: Lest I be tarred with the 'typical male' brush, the ladder was a big hit -- perhaps my most successful present since I gave her a wheelbarrow for her birthday.]

I hasten to assert that I am not complaining with a personal motivation. I'm grateful just to be a father, and my clan has made plenty of fuss about me today. In fact, I'm getting my Father's Day Wishes: I'm not cooking dinner tonight (they don't know it yet, but I intend to extend that notion all the way to the complete avoidance of any sort of chore); and I'm actually sitting on the couch, watching an entire Mets game from start to finish. Hey, it's the 18th of June -- I'm entitled to one.

And after all, what says "Hey, I'm a great dad!" more eloquently than completely abdicating my responsibilities, and ignoring my children between 1 and 4 PM?

Little Worksite on the Prairie

I am a creature much sought-after by advertisers: the Name-Brand Buyer. Since I was a boy old enough to take a bologna sandwich to school day after day (after day after day after day), those sandwiches have been unfailingly made with Oscar Meyer bologna and Hellman’s mayo. And as much as I love my laptop, I still use a lot of pens … but I will hunt through the drawer till I find a Pilot -- although in a pinch I’ll go for a Bic Z3. Also, I’m probably a “Toyota buyer” – although it’s hard to tell since they last so long we’ve only bought two.

In the movies, one of the brands I look for is Tom Hanks. According to imdb.com, I’m stunned to realize I’ve seen about 20 of his films. I’m not saying they’re all winners; do all in your power to miss Bachelor Party, The Man With One Red Shoe, or Turner & Hooch. And I’m not sure I’ll be making it to DaVinci Code, for that matter.

One I have missed to date, and which I might be safer to avoid entirely, is the 1986 Hanks/Shelley Long classic, The Money Pit. When it came out, we were apartment dwellers; since then we’ve lived in houses owned by our churches, so it never seemed quite relevant somehow. Now, however, I’m just too terrified to watch it.

About two years ago, we decided it would be great to have our own camp – somewhere to hide out, and a way to simplify vacation-time with two small children. So we bought a double-wide located near a lovely pond, not far from where we’re living. It’s not only a camp, but also a pointed lesson about perceptions, because where I see a quiet spot to get away, my wife sees a blank canvas.

When we were camp-shopping, we agreed we shouldn’t get a fixer-upper since neither of us is particularly handy. Little did I know she would become fanatical about developing those skills. Since then, we have experienced the following … ah, improvements (* - incomplete):

• Paint: Master bath (including trim and cabinets), master bedroom, kitchen, bedroom 1* , back porch, front porch (stain)
• Also in the master bath: light fixture, sink faucets
• Living room – paneling and trim*
• 2nd bath – wallpaper*, tub faucet

The outside has also experienced weeding, mulching, planting, digging up rocks… I can’t even recount it all. Suffice it to say that I made an enormous hit for her last birthday when I bought her a wheelbarrow. I was nuts to shell out for jewelry all those years!

On top of all that, it seemed kind of extravagant to buy a lawn mower for a camp, so I’ve been making do with a reel mower I bought some time ago to trim around the house. Now a reel mower – that is, the old-fashioned push mower with no engine – may be quite effective under some circumstances, but with uneven terrain and intermittent mowing leading to very tall grass/weeds, it’s roughly equivalent to cutting the grass with a steak knife. I might be better off if I just steal Bob Lanier’s basketball shoes from the NBA Hall of Fame and stomp the grass down (that’s mostly what the bar on the front of the mower does anyway).

Unfortunately I don’t think I have enough left in the bank to purchase a place to get away from the getaway, so for the time being I guess I’m still signed up for the work crew. There is one significant consolation, however: the kitchen is always stocked with Hellman’s mayo & Oscar Meyer bologna.

Lower Education

I recently found myself wondering (you’ll understand in a moment how I came to pursue this line of internal inquiry) whether any Nobel laureate, Rhodes Scholar, Pulitzer Prize winner, or someone of that ilk, has any 2-year college experience lurking in his or her past. Do you suppose a search – I’m not sure if Google is up to the task – would turn up such a thing as an A.A in Liberal Arts & Sciences (Mathematics)?

I am not a recipient of any of the above honors, although I’m hoping the Pulitzer gang inaugurates a prize for Outstanding Achievement in Sporadic, Polysyllabic, and Often Meandering Blogging. I am, however, the proud holder of the aforementioned degree.

Its main function in my life is to enable me to say I have the same number of college degrees as my wife. We each have three; big deal if 2 of hers are Master’s and one of mine is an Associate’s! I paid good money for that degree… well, actually, in those days you could almost pay for community college with change you found between the couch cushions. And I think, to be more accurate and less entertaining, my parents paid for it. Be that as it may, I’m doubly proud to assert that my community college education was every bit as valuable as the rest of it and almost incomprehensibly cheaper. But the point I set out to make, if I recall correctly, is that my family has really done its bit for education.

Of course, we also did our time on the other side of the desk, having a combined 18 or so years of teaching experience, depending on how you choose to count. I pile all this up not to brag, but instead to achieve the utter pulverization of my original thesis: around here, we know from education.

Just when we thought, however, that it would be safe to sink into the soothingly overstuffed Easy Chair of Ignorance, along comes the next generation of learners… and naturally (whether we like it or not), while they are learning, they can’t help but show these aging canines a few things along the way as well. So in case you were consumed with curiosity about whatever happened to Robert Fulghum, the following are a few lessons I’ve picked up from our in-house tiny taskmasters (or, if you prefer, half-pint headmasters):

• A pile of dirt, a plastic cup and some water beats anything you can find at a toy store. Why is this so hard for parents to learn? It’s a well-worn cliché that kids ignore the present and play with the box, and still we persist in handing them “stuff” that interests them for even less time than it takes to break.
• If you keep looking around, you can find something interesting in every situation. For example, my daughter is almost 4. Her name starts with “K”, so she is always on the lookout for the letter “K”. When she sees it, she experiences a sense of triumph on par with any world-famous archeologist.
• Every question is worth asking, as many times as it takes to get an answer that makes sense to you. I find that when I ask for help (as a man, I am permitted to do so at work, although not in my personal life and under no circumstances when directions are involved), a lot of times I give up after one round of questions – even if the answer doesn’t make any sense to me. Not so my son; he’ll keep drilling all day till he strikes oil.
• When you feel something, let yourself feel it all the way. Like any idea, this one can be taken to extremes. I’ve had it up to here with people (some of whom are not my children, or children at all) who think that being angry is a good reason to rave like a maniac. However, it’s wonderful to watch my kids being so happy they can’t physically contain it; and I wonder whether by letting themselves be reallyreally sad, they don’t get over it faster.
• The journey is more important than the destination. Yes, I know that one’s a cliché of greeting-card proportions (and not the Shoebox greeting cards either, I’m talking Helen Steiner Rice with flowers on the front). But it does take on a whole new life when you’re out for a walk and you keep stopping to pick up sticks… search for rocks… chase a toad into the bushes…
• If you love someone, tell them over and over and over again, at random intervals and for no apparent reason. A big hug around the neck & a kiss ain’t bad either.

Go talk to a kid today; if you really listen, you'll probably come up with something to make you laugh, or make you think. If you want to make an impression, bring a plastic cup and a pile of dirt.

Theology For Dummies: Family Edition

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who read a book once, and feel they’ve squeezed all the juice out of it; and those who hang onto a book as you’d hang onto an old friend. Not that I’d suggest keeping all your friends lined up on a shelf – although, come to think of it, that would be more convenient than trying to reach someone on the phone, and synchronize schedules, and….

I have heard a rumor that there is a third kind of person: the kind who regards a book as an unwelcome reminder of an uncomfortable experience of Compulsory Education. I choose to disregard that rumor, since that’s not the kind of world I’d want to live in.

I have already noted in this space which camp I fall into; rest assured that the books I singled out in that entry are old, familiar friends. I also mentioned that my response to the cliché “books for a desert island” question would have to include both the Baseball Encyclopedia and the Bible.

If you are a person for whom baseball exceeds a pastime and approaches mental illness – quick test: will baseball be mentioned in your obituary? – you might see the appeal of the former volume. Not only is it immense, and virtually impervious to being read cover-to-cover, but all those names and numbers are like videotape to those of my ilk.

The Bible is similar in a way. When I read the stories of Scripture, I recognize a lot of people I know – selfish, cowardly, a little slow on the uptake, or any number of other common human characteristics. OK, full disclosure: a lot of those “people I know” are people I actually recognize from seeing them in the mirror.

It is, of course, quite possible to read the Bible cover-to-cover. Still, it probably supports re-reading better than most other books you can name, and that is because how you read it and understand it changes as you change.

I’ve read the whole thing through, but I still find things I would be almost sure I’ve never seen before, because I see something I wasn’t in a position to see the first time. One excellent example of this is Eph. 1:4-6 --

For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will-- to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.

I never really understood what adoption was all about until my wife & I adopted our son in 1999. I understood the part about a child coming to live with you; you take care of him and you come to love him. What came as a surprise to me was that a child who’s not “yours” can become yours, even instantaneously. We don’t have any biological children, but I can’t imagine feeling any stronger about one. Or, as I’m fond of saying, I couldn’t love him (or my daughter either) any more if I’d given birth to them myself.

It sheds a new light on my relationship with God. I don’t have any particularly strong claim on being part of His family. God knows ;-) the family resemblance is often not very strong. And yet for some reason it pleases Him to treat me as a son, and to love me as much as if He’d given birth to me. Now I understand this doesn’t mean I’m a second-class member of the family… being a child of God represents not just a legal status but a place in the center of God’s heart.

It also means I need to keep reading; who knows what else I’ll turn up?

What Happens in Vegas...

… ends up getting posted on the Internet. I always figured people who visited Las Vegas were either the smooth high-roller type, or the plaid-shorts/black-socks tourist variety. I was always certain, in any case, that people who visited Las Vegas were people who were not me.

But here I am, attending a team meeting in perhaps the least businesslike city in America – well, I guess New Orleans has a lot of the same vibe, plus half the city got washed away, so they may win the title. I still don’t think I fit either of my theoretical demographics. I do have to admit that when I got here I was wearing my favorite bright blue pants – my wife calls them golf pants. But hey, they’re cool & comfortable, and they weigh about 4 ounces, so I think they’re great for traveling.

OK, I happen to love the color too.

It’s definitely a different world out here. For one thing, it’s been 90 degrees plus, the whole time (OK, it goes down to 75 at night). For a second, smoking is apparently compulsory. Coming from an environment where smoking is only permitted on alternate sides of the street from 9 pm to midnight, it’s a little startling to have to fight your way through a blue haze in the lobby.

Now that I think of it, hotels around here don’t really have “lobbies”, just casinos with a reception desk. So I suppose the biggest adjustment is walking past row after row of slot machines, with row after row of middle-aged women feeding coins and pulling the handle. Actually, relatively few of the machines still have the traditional handle; most of them are push-button.

Quick hotel quiz -- match the following (each "letter" may be used more than once):

1.Body bar	a. Ginger orange
2. Conditioner	b. Grapefruit & pomegranate
3.Facial bar	c. Lemongrass sage
4.Shampoo
5.Body lotion

The good news is that I get my minimum daily requirement of fruits and vegetables by means of a conscientiously-applied regimen of personal grooming. The bad news is that every time I leave my room I'm attacked by monkeys. (Quiz answers: 1b, 2a, 3c, 4a, 5b)

I certainly don’t have the time (or, frankly, the inclination) to get too used to it out here; I’ll be home before I know it. Unless you count another day of meetings and six hours on a plane, that is. I am doing my best, however, to squeeze a little adventure out of my trip. That can be a bit of a challenge in a city that bases its identity on self-destructive behavior, but if worse comes to worst, I can fall back on two things dear to my heart: leaving the work to the chambermaid, and expense-account meals.

I have proven once and for all what everyone has always suspected – I would travel 2500 miles for free food.

All In a Day's Blog

I try always to have a lot of cereal boxes in the house. Naturally we like to have a number of delicious breakfast options, but perhaps more importantly it's vital to have as much reading material available as is humanly possible.

I have written in the past about some of my reading preferences, but when the chips are down I'm an omnivore. I have a number of subscriptions in an effort to ensure I have something fresh on hand at all times, but if need be, I'll read anything printed-- English-language optional.

It was in such times of extreme distress that I would often scoop up Reader’s Digest. With most magazines I’m pretty linear – I read Newsweek basically back to front, even the business columns. But with RD I usually skip around and find the little anecdotes, especially the monthly features, like “Life in these United States” or “Humor in Uniform”.

You may have read these columns in the past and thought: I could do better than that. And we shall see, because today I am finally submitting a story that I’ve always “meant to”, since the day it happened to me 15 or so years ago. Hopefully this will turn out to be yet another of the many advantages of my somewhat checkered employment history -- a chance to be immortalized in “All in a Day’s Work”, as follows:

I used to work in a large, open office with long tables where the worker bees sat, ringed by supervisors’ desks. As a result, everyone knew everyone else’s business. I listened one day as Mary, the head of the department, told Judy she was leaving for awhile. She explained to Judy that if the phone rang, she could pick it up on her own desk by pressing “pound-4”. Judy said okay, and Mary went on her way.

Before we knew it, the phone rang, and although Judy snatched up her receiver and jabbed at the buttons, it continued to ring. Finally someone called from across the room, “Judy, pound-4!” She continued to stab frantically as she called back, “I’m pounding as hard as I can!”

Hall of Fame Numbers

One of the things I love about baseball is the central role that numbers play. They tell their own story: .300 is a good hitter; 3.00 is a good pitcher. Yet .300, 30 HR, 100 RBI means something entirely different to a baseball fan than .300, 5 HR, 40 SB. One is a power hitter, probably a big star; the other one is more of a speedy guy, probably leads off and scores a lot of runs. Even uniform numbers tell a story -- in fact, you can find an entire set of those stories at www.mbtn.net, which is a website that details every player who ever played for the Mets in order of his uniform number.

One of the most famous numbers in baseball is 44, which has been worn by such legends as Hank Aaron, Willie McCovey, and Reggie Jackson. So obviously I am in good company, since I myself am also now 44. This is not, regrettably, my uniform number but instead the one which, God willing, will keep increasing every year. Next year I make the switch from slugging to pitching -- Tug McGraw and Pedro Martinez are the two most famous 45s in Mets history, at least.

I have been in many ways struggling with this new piece of my identity... not specifically being 44; birthdays are not generally a huge crisis for me. Although I can't say I'm eager to hit a half-century. It's more the mindset behind my favorite (alleged) Satchel Paige quote, "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you was?"

At one point I would've said early 30s -- not to mention that I could easily pass for that. Hey, some days I probably would've said 19.

The other night my daughter asked me, "Daddy, why is your hair getting all gray?" I told her that happens when people get older, and since I'm only half-old, I'm only half-gray. Not long after that, my son had the kindness to point out that I have "a little hole in my hair". And it probably goes without saying my waist is a little thicker and my knees are a little stiffer (although that's the beauty of BlogWorld: absolutely nothing goes without saying).

Still, I'm driving at something a little less tangible. I am at 44 very likely more than halfway through my days, and I still can't quite get it through my head that I'm a grownup. I have two small children who depend on me for support, both financial and emotional, and who I'm supposed to be helping shape into mature individuals. I, or we, own two cars and a camp and a house full of stuff. I'm supposed to be saving for retirement, for heaven's sake. That's a real eye-opener for me, considering that for all intents & purposes I didn't even have a career less than 10 years ago.

I have priorities and responsibilities and decisions to make; and sure, I share all that with my wife -- but in some ways that makes it worse. We have to work together as mature adults in tandem, when much of the time I'd rather either

• do whatever I want, unilaterally, and let everyone else shift for themselves, or
• let her make all the decisions while I shuck the responsibility.

Seems like only yesterday I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating chips, drinking iced tea, reading The Sporting News AND watching the Three Stooges (this is how I learned to multitask). The biggest thing I had to worry about was studying for my Chem test.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not Mourning My Lost Youth, not exactly anyway. We all have responsibilities that are at least sorta heavy, and I cope with mine OK, I think. I just can't help but feel like it would all go smoother if I really felt like an adult, down deep inside -- sometimes it's more like I'm playing the 'daddy' part in a never-ending game of House.

As a (very late) Baby Boomer, I also got caught in a generational/perceptional switch. In my Dad's day, grown-up men put on a suit and a skinny tie and a hat and went off to their serious adult jobs; I'm from the generation that wears jeans to work, and listens to rock 'n' roll, and spends money like they don't quite understand it comes in finite amounts. Somehow not quite so serious, not quite so adult.

I guess this probably sounds like the standard-issue Midlife Crisis, and that soon I'll be buying a red convertible and wearing my hat backwards... or maybe taking off on a cross-country journey to Find Myself. Maybe it is, or maybe it's a side-effect of all the steroids. Maybe it's just living in a culture that tends to glorify non-grownup behavior. In any case, I'm hoping I get it sorted out soon because I think it'll be hard to find an old-folks' home that has unlimited potato chips and iced tea available for afternoon snacks.

That's the Way Mr. Chips Crumbles

This is usually where I write the paragraph that makes it appear as if I’m writing about one topic, before I swerve into the real topic. But first, a confession: my jones is getting the best of me. I made it for a couple weeks drug-free, but I’m back on the ‘roids. Next thing you know I'll be skulking in dark alleys looking to score....

One of my qualifications for writing a blog is the variety of my life experiences. OK, I'll be honest, my primary qualification is that I have an Internet connection, or at least that’s the only commonality I’ve found among the other blogs I’ve read. Even the ability to write a coherent (or interesting) sentence in English, or any other language, is not a prerequisite.

Anyway, I’ve done everything from working backstage at a tiger show to cleaning toilets as a church custodian, not necessarily in increasing order of fascination. But much of my career was spent teaching math.

One of the reasons I quit was because I probably got more affirmation and positive feedback from the tigers than I did from the students (or my colleagues), but there were at least three notable episodes that still give me a slightly warm & fuzzy feeling.

The first was during my abbreviated high school teaching career. I had an honors-level Algebra II class, and for a unit on systems of equations, I asked them to write their own word problem using three equations with three variables. One young lady asked me, “Does it have to come out even?” I suggested that she change her numbers slightly to make it "come out", and she said, “But then it wouldn’t rhyme!” She had written her word problem in verse, a rare instance of my being faced with excess creativity.

The second instance was in a Calculus II course – the highest level I ever attained. There was a local high school student taking the course. There was no single tipoff, but slowly I recognized this kid was sharp… in all likelihood, smarter than me. Not to sound pompous, but in the low-level courses I usually taught, it was unusual to catch that flash of intelligence. He made me raise my game; I knew if I wasn’t absolutely on top of what I was discussing, he’d catch me.

And one pretty minor episode that nonetheless still tickles me: in a math for non-majors course, we were talking about “number tricks” -- like, take a number, add 3, double it…. So I had them pick their own number and follow along as I went through the steps on the overhead, and when I unveiled the last line – “The answer is 5” – there was an audible and almost unanimous gasp. Made me feel like David Copperfield or something.

I was reminded of that earlier this week when a friend sent me a link to a number trick on the Web. Once you've checked it out, you might be interested to know how it works:

• If the digits of a 3-digit number are a, b, and c, the value of the number is 100a+10b+c.
• Scramble the digits, for example ‘bca’, which has the value 100b+10c+a. If you subtract one from the other (assume ‘abc’ is larger, it doesn’t affect the conclusion), you get 99a-90b-9c.
• Since I can rewrite this as 9(11a-10b-c), it’s clear this number is a multiple of 9 (or divisible by 9, if you prefer).
• From number theory, here’s the deal about numbers divisible by 9: the sum of their digits is also divisible by 9. So if you tell me all but one of the digits, I can subtract that sum from the next-larger multiple of 9 to find the missing digit. Note the insistence that you don’t omit a zero; if I leave out a zero, you can’t tell whether the missing one should be a zero or a 9.
  

Example: 286, reshuffle to 628. Difference is 342. Sum of the digits is 9, so if you tell me any 2 digits I can subtract from 9 to find the missing one.

Example 2: 8594, reshuffle to 4859. Difference is 3735. Sum of the digits is 18; if you give me 335, sum is 11, 18-11=7.

So as you can see, your high school algebra teacher was right: algebra is vitally important to … let me think... no, I was right the first time -- it's the Foundation of the Universe.

Just Another Pod Person

Does it seem to you like mankind as a whole is achieving new highs in interpersonal communication? After all, there are innumerable books on the subject. Incidentally, if you’re looking for one, check out Deborah Tannen. Her book, You Just Don’t Understand, is the best one I ever read. Another good one that addresses both verbal and nonverbal communication in marriage is Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages.

Surely we’ve been brought closer together by e-mail, right? You can send your thoughts to someone halfway across the world, instantaneously. In fact, you can even send the same thoughts to dozens of people at the same time, and nothing says “personal relationship” quite like that. I find I hear from a slew of people every week… there’s a lovely fellow in Nigeria who’s made me a very generous offer if I can just help him with a little bank transfer problem he’s been having. And I do like to make new friends, but I continue to get mail from a large number of people that seem a little too interested in certain very personal aspects of my life and… well… person.

Still, I can’t quite shake the notion that there’s a whole lotta communicatin’ going on. I base that largely on the fact that virtually every one I know or see along my daily rounds has a cell phone. Actually, I left out part of that sentence: it should read, “has a cell phone surgically attached to his or her head”. Perhaps I’m not the best judge, since I have been known to put off making the most mundane phone call for multiple days. But do we really have this much to talk about?

When I leave the house, I almost never say to myself, “I wish I could make a phone call. I really need to talk to someone. I can’t wait to get to a phone!” But there certainly seem to be a number of urgent, can’t-wait conversations going on wherever you go. Note I didn’t say “top secret”; another wonderful virtue of cell phones is that they allow not only the two official parties to the call, but everyone else within a 20-foot radius, to stay in constant contact. It’s like being invited into someone’s living room, or perhaps their phone booth.

Not long ago I was driving past a downtown parking lot and saw not one but three young women in the pose we’ve become accustomed to seeing: standing about 15 feet apart, facing away from each other, motionless and slightly hunched. Not a scene from experimental theater, as it turned out.

Up until very recently, my indignation has been pure and unsullied. The problem is that we are in our second year of owning a camp, and while we spend as much time there as possible, it’s not enough to justify the expense of a phone. We’ve been depending for some time on the forbearance of our neighbor, but it seemed like a good idea to find a way to shift for ourselves; the barbed wire she put up along the property line is a bit unsightly.

So we bought the cheapest, simplest, most feature-free phone and coverage available, and the intent is to use it sparingly and for the most part to receive calls at camp. I hope we don’t turn out like the high school kids who plead for a cell “just so I can call home” (and end up talking all day to their friends sitting across the room), but I do have a vaguely uneasy feeling that we’ve joined Cell Phone Zombie Nation. So if you find me hunched over in a parking lot, you have my permission to drive a wooden stake through the heart of my phone.

Postscript I discovered through a bit of googling that I'm mixing up vampires and zombies:

• Vampire <=> stake through heart
• Zombie <=> destroy brain

So I guess I meant "destroy the brain of my cell phone" -- if it hasn't already done the same to me through a combination of deadly radiation and the general dumbification that seems to victimize many cell-users...

Paging T. S. Eliot

I was going to title this "The Cruelest Month", since that is in fact (a) what I had on my mind and (b) just pretentious and semi-literary enough to be one of my titles. I do work very hard on my titles; I like them to be a little bit mysterious but connected somehow so that when you read the piece, you eventually have that sort of "now I get it" feeling.

Ties in with one of my more annoying traits -- I have almost a compulsion to be surprising. Taken to its extreme, we get the almost weekly occurrence of some family member asking me what's for dinner, and me saying something vague and cutesy... because unquestionably, nothing enhances fish sticks quite like a dramatic, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition-style "reveal".

I see I have failed in that endeavor yet again, because quite unsurprisingly, I find myself in the third paragraph without having come within a $5 cab ride of my actual topic. However, before I sink to my hands and knees to try to gather up the skein of thought that lies unraveled around me, allow me to point out: I managed to work the pretentious and semi-literary idea into my title, but at least avoided the most obvious cliche. And in my defense, it turns out that any written material dealing with the subject of April is required under federal law to refer to T.S. Eliot in some manner.

I am actually in most respects a fan of April; as pointed out previously, anything associated with both baseball and the coming of spring can't be all bad. I can't help but wonder, on the other hand, who the genius was who decided it was a good idea to try to fit the beginning of baseball, the tax deadline, and Holy Week all within a few days. The pressure of balancing all those demands simultaneously is enough to induce a blogger to try to create an entire entry out of one barely coherent observation.

Theoretically.

My team (both teams -- the one I follow in the real world, as well as the one I created in the fake one) is doing well enough, thanks for asking. I have found as time passes that it's almost impossible to get another actual baseball fan interested in your fantasy team, let alone a random reader... so probably more than enough said there. I will note only that my guys keep getting hurt, but I can't dump them, because after all they're my guys.

Holy Week is extra services, extra music, extra rehearsals, extra demands on the pastoral spouse. This was all well & good prior to October 14, 1999... but gets a bit tricky when you start to factor in baths, snacks, bedtime, etc.

And taxes... I come from a long family tradition of licking the envelope while the postmaster is trying to padlock the front door of the post office. This is not entirely due to malingering; anyone who has ever done a clergy tax form would probably make an appointment for elective root canal just to get out of it. It's a little better with TurboTax to hold my hand, but still ranks considerably below sweeping and cleaning the garage and vacuuming the cars.

Wait, that's tomorrow.

The only saving grace there is that I haven't yet this month run into one of those misguided individuals who thinks ministers' salaries are tax-free. This has saved my blood pressure from the effects of expounding on a little thing called "self-employment tax". But there again, either you're on the team, and you know the drill -- or you're not, and you don't care.

Monday marks the end of two of those three competing events, and the beginning of our vacation. As a card-carrying pessimist (all of our "Locals" have negative numbers, naturally) I'm sure something else I haven't even foreseen will arrive on our doorstep before too much longer.

As it turns out, I guess I should've called this entry "The Waste Land".......

Acme Moving Company

It's a little unsettling for me to realize that every experience of my childhood was harmful to me in some way. After all, I would often play out in the sun all day without a biohazard suit; I really believed that chips were one of the four basic food groups (not your fault, mom, I promise); and perhaps worst of all I watched not only the Three Stooges but what used to be known as "Saturday morning cartoons". As everyone knows, the violence in the classic Warner Bros. cartoons poisons growing brains, which explains why I turned out to be the rage-filled menace to society that I am today.

I think all right-thinking Americans recognize that the king of the traditional cartoon universe is Bugs Bunny. Really, except for the vegetarian diet, I'd like to be Bugs Bunny. Always in control, always smooth, always the perfect comeback. (By the way, can someone explain to me what the deal is with Mickey Mouse? He's clearly the head honcho in the Disney world, but I just don't get the appeal; I can't even understand what he says.

Also, he's a mouse... and he has a dog.)

These days, however, I'm feeling more like Wile E. Coyote. It's not (I hope) because he has the biggest ego of all of them -- sure, Daffy's arrogant, but even he never claimed to be a Super Genius. It's not because he's always hatching schemes that never come to fruition... and I'm proud to say that my nose is smaller.

The classic Wile E. moment in probably every episode is when something goes wrong. He stands quietly pondering, and a little voice in his head prompts him to look up. A boulder, or even the side of the cliff, is bearing down on him.... It's too late to run, nowhere to hide; all he can do is put up a tiny parasol in a vain attempt to cushion the blow.

In my case, I was kinda minding my own business, not even chasing any Road Runners, when I looked up and suddenly found out that in all likelihood, we will be moving next spring. Kind of an occupational hazard for a minister's family, of course. But the size of the rock is exacerbated by the fact that this area is our home in a lot of ways. And the fact that I am not a Change Enthusiast.

But you know, it's not just an approaching rock; it's a test of whether I'm willing to live the faith I talk (and write) about. Can I put my own fears aside, and can I trust that God is truly going to provide? Can I claim for myself the promise that all things work together for good?

The parasol's not going to cut it this time -- all I can do is find a bigger Rock to hide behind.

Not For Nothing Do They Say Hope "Springs"

There are many signposts on the way to spring; I'm sure yours are different from mine. Groundhog Day is the first excuse to speculate on its arrival, and although the First Day of Spring is rarely what it's cracked up to be here in the Great Northeast, it's at least another source of hope.

I said something to my son a few days ago about what we would do when spring gets here, and he was offended. Don't tell him it's not spring yet -- his kindergarten teacher said it was. Besides, the drive-in opened this week, and it's time to go get some ice cream!

For many of us, it's when we start to see and hear the birds. As I wrote this, two ducks just flew by about eye-level. That has to be a good sign, right? ... on the other hand, I couldn't tell whether they were headed north or south...

If, unlike my son, you need your spring to feel a bit more springy, you may wait for meteorological spring. Around here, we get subtle and fleeting hints: the first day you can walk to the mailbox without a jacket (or shoes!); that rich, green, south-windy scent in the breeze; the subsequent sneezing fits.

Whoa, there go some geese. Really hoping that's north.

What really inspires this ode is not the warmer weather we've had this week (outdoor blogging!), or the fact that I've moved down two jacket-thicknesses in that time, because the Real First Day of Spring falls on April 2 this year: Opening Day. You can have your vernal equinox, my friends, and it will not be the groundhog but rather the ground ball that determines the arrival of spring for me.

The harbingers:

• Yahoo! opens their free fantasy baseball leagues for sign-up
• The players begin reporting for spring training (note: A Baltimore Oriole looks a little bit like a robin anyway, or at least the logo does)
• Season Preview publications begin to appear on the newsstands
• "In Port St. Lucie, Fla., today, a Mets split-squad defeated the Expos 7-3." Home runs were hit by several 20-year-old kids you've probably never heard of, and very possibly never will again
• The Transactions column in the sports pages really is a column, full of who was "optioned to Rochester" and "reassigned to minor-league camp" -- or perhaps just plain old released
• I conduct the draft for my fantasy league, assign players to teams & hit the switch

With each of those the anticipation builds and the icicles begin to thaw. But tomorrow night on ESPN, the honest-to-goodness first pitch is thrown out and baseball is back. Feels like I can take a deep breath again. Even if the game broadcasts for the first month feature guys huddled in the dugout in parkas gripping hot water bottles, even if shoes and jackets will continue to be required to retrieve my Sports Weekly from the mailbox, you can't take spring away from me now.

Blog of Shadows

There’s been a lot of talk lately in the sports world and even beyond about the new book, Game of Shadows, which is an expose of steroid use by athletes. If you read any of the early news articles, you would be forgiven for believing the whole book is about Barry Bonds. He’s actually only the most prominent figure to have his drug use detailed; there are a number of others from a variety of sports.

Anyway, seeing the furor over the book made me realize that it’s only a matter of time till my own secrets are revealed, so my best course of action is to confess on my own terms: I am also using steroids.

I have actually gotten two or perhaps three compliments on my blog, but I’m afraid those compliments are going to have to be voided – or at least asterisked – because I have been writing under the influence (WUI).

It started innocently enough; I complained to my doctor about a skin condition under my eye and he gave me some Hydrocortisone Valerate. If you are not chemically-minded, note that the “-one” ending is a dead giveaway that a chemical is considered a steroid. I promise I was only using it occasionally, but I’m sure that stopping that pesky itch made it easier for me to concentrate on my writing. For that matter, I can’t say for sure that the residue on my index finger didn’t increase my typing speed and accuracy.

I was almost clean from that when I suffered some inflammation in my ear and the doctor gave me Prednisone (again, note the –one). This is a no-fooling-around steroid … and I have to admit I just gulped down a handful before beginning to write.

To be honest, I read other bloggers and I wonder if maybe they’re getting a little “help”. Their jokes seem to go farther than even my best efforts, and it appears they’re able to recover quicker – some of them post every day. Hey, if everybody else is doing it, maybe it’s the only way to be competitive.

I don’t think I can go on living a lie, though. I have to stay on the stuff for 10 more days – as Barry could tell you (but will not), steroids are prescribed in a "course" and you have to taper off. But after that, I’m off the junk for good. In the future, this blog will be 100% natural -- no additives, no preservatives, no artificial colors or flavors -- chock-full of that natural bloggy goodness.

Quantum Leap

I’ve had kind of a running gag going with my wife where she asks me if I’m middle-aged yet. I’m 43, but I really don’t feel whatever middle-aged is supposed to feel like. I always answered no, till finally she asked me in exasperation, “How old do you think you’re going to get?”

As of now, I guess I’m shooting for at least 87.

She might be relieved to learn that I’ve apparently reached an advanced age in at least one respect; in fact, I might have skipped the middle & headed straight for the rocking chair.

Since I’ve been blogging, I’m always searching for topics, and one thing that’s struck me repeatedly is how much the world has changed just in my lifetime. So I think I’m well set up to be one of those geezers who starts every paragraph with, “Now, in my day….”

Oops, sorry, I had to go put my teeth in. Back now. So I make like Sam Beckett from the late, lamented Quantum Leap and time-travel within my own lifetime....

The easy signposts for this kind of thing relate to technology. When I was a kid, we got 3 TV channels. I guess public TV (it was called “educational” TV then) was around, but you had to tune that in with a whole different dial called the UHF tuner. And TVs had actual knobs, of course. Ours even had doors on the front. And I still vividly remember when we got a color TV. It also had a radio tuner and a “record player” (oh, what the heck, “hi-fi”), and it took up about the same amount of room, and weighed about the same, as your average compact car today.

By the way, when I was thinking about all of this, I really freaked out when I realized that my dad was born about the same time as commercial broadcasting… radio broadcasting. His father before him predated the Victrola.

“Compact car” was pretty much an oxymoron when I was a child, come to think of it. We had a succession of station wagons, including one with the legendary wood-like paneling, and the letters MPG were not prominently featured. Of course, with gas about 30 cents a gallon, who cared anyway? Gas stations were known as “service stations” then, because they gave you service – and sometimes a prize just for showing up. For many years, I kept the NFL team glasses we collected from our local Sunoco.

I think we all get the thing about the meteoric rise of the computer age – but I can’t help but think we’re getting a bit jaded about it. It’s worth (I hope) reminding ourselves that when I was born, “computer” was always followed by “room” because you needed the latter to contain the former. I have written elsewhere about getting my hands on a TRS-80 in the early ‘80s… with cassette data storage. And now I’m publishing this from a laptop (on my actual lap) via a wireless connection to the World Wide Web.

Actually, my favorite Stupid Technology Trick relates to the Texas Instruments SR-10 calculator, basically the original handheld calculator. Not too long after it hit the market, my parents had occasion to buy one for my sister. If you click on the link, you’ll find the SR-10 performed the basic 4 arithmetic operations, and square/square root, invert, and scientific notation. My parents bought it second-hand and paid Ninety-Five Dollars.

Oh, and by the way… when I was born, an entire race of people was still being widely oppressed not only by custom and social stigma, but by actual laws in many places. When I watch a show like "Eyes on the Prize", although I consider myself well educated and not altogether naïve, I shake my head the whole time. It’s hard to imagine that such a world existed in my lifetime. I understand fully that conditions between the races have not reached a state of perfection, but you can’t watch a group of children buffeted by a fire hose without appreciating the difference between then and now.

A&E: Shorter-Term Memories

Yes, I really can write a 2-part piece on a bunch of shows that aren't even on any more. I actually published it in one piece originally, but then when I saw it kind of took up an entire page, I decided to break it up. So continuing chronologically, I've made it all the way to the Reagan Administration so far.

I always think of Hill Street as kind of an entry with St.Elsewhere. Also groundbreaking in its own small way; also a deft synthesis of drama and comedy. The show featured talent like Denzel Washington and Helen Hunt, passing through on their way to better things, and Howie Mandel & Ed Begley Jr., just passing through. Consider the greatness of a show that made Howie look talented. One of the reasons I loved it was their use of inside jokes and little winks to the audience….

…. Which was also a characteristic of another show I miss, Moonlighting. When they were at their peak in the first couple of years, I used to watch the clock all evening long to make sure I didn’t miss it. Later in the run, they were just looking peaked and I watched the clock to see if it was almost over yet. A great combination of smart and smart-alecky; maybe the fastest-moving show ever – don’t try to watch while writing a letter or picking up around the house.

I think many of the shows you fall in love with turn out to be like old girlfriends you’re still friendly with. At least I hear that happens; I’m married, so that would NEVER NEVER be something I would do. I do think I’ve broken up with ER, even though we still see each other regularly. When it started, it was a real shot of adrenaline, administered stat; I think it’s more like a pressure bandage or an IV drip of lactated Ringer’s now. Since basically all the actors worth watching have moved on (with one exception: Maura Tierney is awesome, light-years above her NewsRadio days), it seems almost like inertia (and NBC’s abject desperation) is all that keeps it going. There’s probably a life-support metaphor in there, which will be your homework assignment.

I seem to have a weakness for fast-talking shows: consider The West Wing. Also perhaps in the ER category (upon reflection, more than “perhaps”). It was – and I hate to say “was” but I think it’s the case – the rare show that could hook you dramatically and also make you think about larger issues. Such as, can a guy really get elected by telling the truth? I’m leaning towards “not”, but Martin Sheen made it seem almost plausible.

I missed one in there chronologically, I think. Actually everyone missed it; if they hadn’t, I’d still be watching it instead of missing it. That would be Sports Night, which I think the Trio Network’s Brilliant But Canceled show was invented for. I was biased toward it to begin with, since it’s about a SportsCenter-type show. Actually, it isn’t “about” that at all, and if more people (especially female people, I suspect) had realized that, its fate might have been different. There’s a vast difference between being set in a particular environment and being about that. Was Cheers “about” a bar? Was Barney Miller “about” a police station? Well, sorta.

I’m struck by how much of their DNA these shows seem to share – I’ll leave Adam-12 out of the discussion, since the 8-year-old me perhaps wasn’t quite as discriminating. Two of them were even created by the same person (Aaron Sorkin: Sports Night and West Wing). I suspect there would be many more creative names in common if I dug a little. I think it’s worth noting that every one of these shows is smart and funny and assumes the audience is smart enough to keep up. A network executive would no doubt counter that several of them weren’t wildly successful either. There are plenty of dumb shows I enjoy, but I can only give my heart to the ones that challenge me a little.

Check back again in 20 years to see if I'm typing homages to According to Jim or Fear Factor....

A&E: Thanks for the Memories

Please excuse me if I SHOUT WHEN I TYPE tonight. One of my ears is plugged up and I can't hear myself expostulate. The doc says that till I'm better I have to lay off the antihistamine. I'm a little worried; not only is it the only thing that keeps me from coughing all the time, but I don't want anyone to start thinking I'm pro-histamine. Take it from me, kids: just say no.

I do have friends, although you wouldn't guess it from a joke like that. Life being what it is, however, let’s face it: most of us spend way more time watching TV than we do with our friends. So it shouldn’t be a complete shock that some of us, at least, form attachments to TV shows. Here are some of the shows I wish hadn’t moved away:

The first show I remember looking forward to was Adam-12. What I remember was rushing through my bath to get downstairs in time for the beginning. I don’t know if I understand the appeal, then or now (of the show, that is. I’ve gotten over the appeal of rushing through my bath). On the other hand, when you think about it, there isn’t a lot of space between Adam-12 – which is in itself a direct descendant of Dragnet, the first great TV cop show – and Law & Order. And I think there’s a decent chance that this Law & Order thing might well catch on.

In the ‘70s, the show I waited for was the Rockford Files. Of course, since it aired on Friday nights, it could’ve put a real dent in my social life. I was fortunate, however, not to have a social life, so I was free & clear to hang with Jim, Rocky and the gang. James Garner is just one of those guys you can watch doing anything. He’s able to be the “hero” while at the same time being just a little bit cowardly & self-absorbed.

I owe an enormous debt to the show Soap. Not because it was a classic, although I did enjoy it. When Soap debuted, there was an enormous amount of controversy over the subject matter. Several ABC affiliates chose not to carry it, or ran it in late night… among them our local station. In its place, our friends at WAST ran a half-hour syndicated show called Second City TV. They got better-known when they did the late-night series on NBC, but the original show was even funnier (and ironically, in a lot of ways more subversive than Soap). Rick Moranis was great in the network version, but the show lost something when Harold Ramis left from the original cast to be a successful director. And don’t even get me started with Robin Duke and Tony Rosato.

The best show ever in my opinion was Hill Street Blues. It’s kind of hard to remember at this point just how groundbreaking it was for its time. The handheld cameras, the overlapping dialogue, the mixture of comedy and drama…. I loved everything about it from day one. I even made sure to watch it when I was in college – in those days, there was a TV in the lounge on our floor; nobody had their own. I would round up my friend Rob and stake out the lounge a little before 10 every Thursday night. Going to school in Western NY, I had a few Thursday nights wrecked by pre-emptions by Buffalo Sabres hockey games (another measure of my always-tenuous social life).

It appears that my memories runneth over, so I guess I'll make this post a Very Special Two-Part Episode. Will Our Hero survive to watch TV in the 21st Century? Tune in again, same Bat-Blog....

Theology for Dummies

I read an article recently on the vast “For Dummies” publishing empire. The publishers basically asserted that they had a book out for anything you could do or even think about, and if you don’t see it on your bookstore’s shelf today, come back next week.

I just checked and it turns out that while there is a “Religion for Dummies”, there’s no “Theology for Dummies”. These books, of course, are billed as the reference for the rest of us; but that’s my point in choosing this title.

I mentioned in my first blog entry that I would be writing about God at times, and I start today with one of my core beliefs: we are all theologians. We are all of us engaged in “the study of the nature of God”.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying we’re all equally good theologians. I would be the last person to endorse the theory that all pathways to God are valid, or that truth is subjective. Quite the opposite; I figure if you disagree with me, that’s a pretty good indication that you’re wrong :-).

But everything we do, whether consciously or unconsciously, reflects what we think about God: whether He exists, whether He involves Himself in the world. Even atheists, agnostics, and all the other flavors are theologians. We hope that those who are a part of the church think more deeply and more accurately about God, of course. You have to hope that listening to Scripture read and explained weekly, singing the hymns that at their best are tiny theology texts, and being around other believers produces better-quality insights.

And that brings me to another of my core beliefs: that’s what the church is for. We all know someone who says, “I don’t need to go to church, I can worship God right where I am” – which is true as far as it goes, although I believe in most cases you’d be hard pressed to see that philosophy enacted.

One of the major reasons we have church, however, is that as humans we can only see a limited “amount” of God. If I could see it all, I’d actually be God (and for that not being the case, we are both grateful). But if we all get together, I can show you the piece I see, and maybe someone else will show me a piece I’ve never seen, and when we put all the pieces together, we get a more complete portrait.

I saw this in a new way this fall when our family went on a cruise. We did a couple of shore days and I found it frustrating that I couldn’t take a real picture of the ship. It’s just too huge to fit the whole thing in the viewfinder. I guess what I needed was a whole “congregation” of people taking pictures and sharing them with me…..

Two More Blocks, One More Board

I mentioned in Part I that I'm a sucker for books with a decade in the title. You know, like The Forties: There Was This Big War, or The '60s -- Everyone Was Stoned All the Time. I like to read about what the time was like. It's fascinating to think about how life has changed; I'll be writing about that some time soon. One of the best of the breed of book is William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream, which actually covers FOUR decades, 1932-1972.

Probably the best baseball books I’ve read are Bill James’ series of Baseball Abstracts from the 1980’s. Bill James was a pioneer in using baseball statistics to understand how baseball works, and like the vast majority of my favorites has more than a bit of ... well, smart-aleck in him. I would be hard-pressed to recommend them at this point unless you have an appreciation for Enos Cabell jokes, but at the time they were a hand grenade rolled into the center of the traditional “Joe Blow gives 110% and loves kids” school of baseball “journalism”.

This last one isn’t actually a book, but I wanted to point it out just to illustrate, perhaps once and for all, just how frustrating it can be to be me. Roger Angell wrote baseball columns for many years for the New Yorker. He has published several collections of those pieces, which are worth reading for anyone who enjoys graceful writing and has an appreciation for baseball from the ‘60s on.

He also has a book called A Day in the Life of Roger Angell, which collects a number of his non-baseball pieces, and one extreme oddity: it’s a summary of the 1961 World Series… written in the style of Greek tragedy. It’s very funny, but almost infuriating, because I’ve never found anyone to share it with. If you make a circle for all the people who follow baseball closely, a circle for all those who remember 1961, and a circle for those familiar with the structures of Greek tragedy, I have to think the intersection of those three circles is virtually microscopic (Note: I don’t “remember” 1961 in the literal sense, but I can tell you without looking it up who played in the Series – and most of the Series in history – and how it ended).

Standing in that intersection doesn’t make me a genius, or superior, but it does make me a minority verging on a mutant. I feel a little like the guy trying to tell jokes in Latin or Sanskrit or something. Say, what about that wacky Warren G. Harding, huh?

Two Cement Blocks and a Long Board

Anyone who’s ever lived in a dorm or similarly under-furnished, low-budget location will recognize these ingredients, which constitute the classic instant bookcase.

However, my intent is not to give building tips, which I think will make this nation a safer place to be. Instead, I want to think about what books I'd put on the shelves.

This isn’t exactly the proverbial “what books I would take to a desert island”. Since I am an extremely fast reader, it wouldn’t do me much good to take a stack of novels. I’d be through them in a week and end up no better off than Burgess Meredith in "Time Enough at Last”. For that situation, I think I’d need the Bible and the Baseball Encyclopedia, both of which contain enough variety and resist synopsis enough that I’d be able to get a lot of hours out of them.

Instead, I wanted to point to a few “real” books – the kind people sit down & read from cover to cover – that I really enjoyed and I felt had a special quality. I tend to read an odd combination of baseball, mysteries, and cultural history (I’m a sucker for any title with a decade in it), so I feel certain I can come up with something to bore anyone.

In the mystery field, I don’t think anything can match the novels of Raymond Chandler. He has his own distinctive style; one of my favorite lines (which he uses more than once) is, “There was nothing to say to that, so I said it.” Along with Hammett, invented the hard-boiled, and realistic, private eye.

Often imitated, never equaled, not even by Robert B. Parker, who is one of his most slavish imitators and even finished an unfinished Chandler novel AND wrote a sequel to it. To be fair, Parker not only imitates Chandler but also himself; most of his recent novels read like his early novels put through a version of the “Telephone Game”. Of course, he’s been writing Spenser so long and has written so many that he might actually have forgotten that he’s written it before. The way to tell Good Spenser from Bad Spenser: the good ones are about 150 pages in paperback, and everyone has sideburns and wide ties. The bad (i.e. recent) ones are much thicker, much bigger type, much more whitespace, and consist of about 40 3- to 5-page chapters.

I must say, I’ve never read a book quite like P.J. O’Rourke’s Parliament of Whores, which manages to be a textbook on government, a conservative manifesto, and quite possibly the funniest book I’ve read. It’s also pretty close to a thesaurus, because he tends (like my favorite blogger) to use his vocabulary as a playground. I make it a policy to check out anything new that PJ comes up with.

In the same vein, I have to recommend the funniest book ever on punctuation, Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, by Lynn Truss. Very British, and not recommended for those born without a sardonic gland. This is actually a tandem entry with her follow-up, Talk to the Hand, which is a treatise on manners in the same vein.

In Part II (coming soon), a few more thoughts.....

Metablog: Hurling the cat out of the bag

I considered several titles for this entry, like “Outing Myself” or “An Advertisement for Myself”, but in any case the sense is, I’ve gone public.

There’s an old joke about a little girl who gets perfume and a watch for Christmas and goes around showing off her gifts all the time. Finally her parents tell her to stop pestering people. Soon company comes to the house and she’s like a cat on a griddle but she can’t say anything. At last she bursts out: “I’m not supposed to say anything, but if anybody hears anything or smells anything, it’s me!”

That’s been me the past few weeks; everything someone says leads me to note, “Hey, that reminds me of something I wrote in my blog!” Some of them are even people speaking to me at the time, although I’ll squeeze into someone else’s conversation if necessary to make my “offhand observation”. The funny, or sad, thing is that almost no one bites. Nobody says, “Gee, what a keen idea! Can I read it immediately?”

So after a couple of months of writing and posting my blog and getting absolutely no feedback at all, I couldn’t take it any more. I sent out a message to basically everyone in my address book, essentially begging them to read it. I’m pleased to say I’ve already gotten a half-dozen or so responses, and while none of them were sobbing uncontrollably & saying I’d changed their lives, it was nice to know someone besides me actually read something.

I've been checking in every couple of days, watching as my hit counter climbed all the way into the mid-teens. Unfortunately, I believe most of those were me, checking to see if my hit counter had gone up yet. And I have garnered a total of one (1) comment, by some random stranger impressed that I mentioned the Waitresses in my Christmas music piece.

When I checked tonight … hit counter 42. They can’t all be me, right? Of course, it’s a double-edged sword; if someone’s looking, now I have to make sure I’m doing interesting, good-quality stuff. I'm trying to take it as encouragement to do better, not pressure to be perfect – but it’s tempting to end up in that same mindset I wrote about in “Going Cold Turkey”. Go read that, it’s pretty good :-).

I am one of the four people across the land who don’t watch American Idol, but I know how it works. The first several shows of each season feature the most self-deluded and talentless candidates, to the point that viewers end up asking, “What was THIS bozo thinking about trying to be a singer?”

Now I think in recent seasons, it’s probably driven by cynical motives as often as not: if I’m bad enough, I’ll make it on TV. But surely for many it’s not all that different from my e-mail. I’m doing something here in the privacy of my own room that I like & I think is pretty good, but I can’t be sure how good in “absolute” terms till someone outside my own head evaluates it.

If you do choose to respond, however, I'd like it if you'd err on the side of Paula and not Simon.

Just Like Looking in a Mirror

I have mentioned previously that I sometimes feel a bit… out of the mainstream. I was going to say “like an oddball”, but you know what? I’m not taking the rap for it. Maybe the mainstream are the oddballs.

In any case, it was refreshing to turn on the TV this fall and see someone that (at least in some respects) reminds me of me. I don’t know if that’s happened much since the premiere of Mad About You, which for awhile had us searching for the hidden cameras in our apartment.

My new role model/separated at birth twin is Rod Calloway, the First Gentleman played by Kyle Secor on Commander-in-Chief. I’m not going to claim “identical” twin, although if someone else wants to make the tall-dark-&-handsome comparison, I’m not going to interrupt. My identification with Rod (aside from his love of baseball) is more functional.

The First Gentleman, of course, is the husband of Mackenzie Calloway, the nation’s first female president. Rod is himself very able politically and often gives Mac advice on the big issues she faces (by the way, who watching this show or West Wing would ever want to be president? That job is just way too hard for a mortal).

I am, of course, the spouse of a pastor, and I feel that like the First Gentleman I’m often in a unique (and somewhat tightrope-like) position. I have a lifetime invested in the church, just as my wife does… with resulting ideas and opinions I’m always prepared to share.

Here’s the First Gentleman tightrope: I can have ideas, but I always have to be careful not to undercut her or make it look publicly like I’m the real power behind the throne. I can share opinions with others, but I have to make it clear that I’m not speaking for her, unless specifically authorized.

More than anything else, I think the common ground is this: I can do a lot of things behind the scenes, so to speak, to support her and make her ministry more successful. But it’s pretty astonishing how easily I can undermine her ministry. If I do something stupid, I can embarrass her and weaken her effectiveness. In fact, I can make her look bad in many more ways than I can make her look good. Maybe I’m inflating my importance, but how many professions do you know of where someone can have so much effect on how their spouse is perceived?

Apparently I'm to be denied this opportunity for video mentoring, as my local ABC affiliate has curiously stopped carrying the show. Otherwise I'd be watching Rod Calloway like a hawk, hoping to pick up some tips that will help me “do my job” better.

Locker Room: All of Our Operators Are Assisting Other Customers

I haven't been hitting my self-imposed goals for posting frequency (hey, you could call me once in awhile, you know), but my attention has been divided lately because it's my busy season. I'm not a tax preparer or a florist or even a snowplow driver (although the plow guys in our area have had a pretty restful time of it). No, I'm referring to my moonlighting gig as commissioner of a fantasy baseball league.

I admit, I'm one of Those Guys. I organized the league six years ago, I keep the Official League Records (not that anyone else even notices), and I even send out occasional e-mail newsletters. I've actually gotten a little less compulsive about that -- the first couple of years it was weekly newsletters. But I guess when you come down to it, fantasy baseball has become the 21st century equivalent to Dungeons & Dragons. It's just as well I got married before I started doing it.

Most (normal) people are not thinking too much about baseball right now; the players haven't even gone to spring training yet. But in addition to supervising the league itself, I also personally conduct the player draft. That means I have to create lists of players at each position & get them to the other "owners" so they can rank the players and pass the lists back. Then I go through the lists in a preset order & assign players to teams.

There's a lot of work involved, of course, but (as with my other ... "enthusiasms") the truly remarkable, or scary, thing is what this all does to my brain. For the next month, guaranteed, when I am in the shower I'll be thinking of how I might rank the second basemen (should Mr. X be #11 or #14?). When I'm cooking dinner, I'll be trying to think of an American League starting pitcher the other guys might have overlooked. And when I'm on the interstate, I'm sure the question of which of last year's players I should keep (we're allowed four) will induce me to miss an exit sometime. If you've ever been involved in getting something started, you won't be surprised: the actual beginning of the season will come as a relief.

I guess to be on the safe side, I'd better stay in the right hand lane for the next month or so... maybe I'd better have my flashers on for good measure.

Family Room -- Fear Factor

One of my core philosophies is that you can never really teach anyone anything – they have to learn it for themselves. This may explain why my teaching career wasn’t a total success, of course, but I’m really thinking about parenting. My children are small now, but someday when they’re teenagers I hope they prove me wrong.

One of the lessons I hope I can communicate is not to let fear and anxiety get in the way of trying new things. I’m not talking about vegetables – in the case of most veggies, I think fear & anxiety is a reasonable reaction. Looking back over my life, though, I can see so many times when I missed out on something good because I was too afraid to try. Several examples:

• When I was in junior high, the choir director asked me to join the choir. I put it off till high school.
• Then she asked me to go out for the school musical. Not only was I too scared to get up on stage, but I also was afraid it would screw up my schoolwork. I finally went out in my junior year and made the chorus; by senior year, I was one of the leads.
• One time the school’s athletic director asked me to be the public address announcer for the football team. I said yes, but as the week went on I started to think, “It’ll be so hard to see what’s going on. What if I mess up?” I sought him out and told him I couldn’t make it, I had “stuff to do at home.”
• It's probably only fair to note that I never asked a girl on a date till I was 16 1/2.
• When I went to college, I joined the radio station -- which in itself was a huge leap of faith for a guy like me. It took me a year after that, though, to get involved with sports broadcasting, which had always been a passion of mine (All right, don't torture me, I'll confess – it still is. If some minor league baseball team called tomorrow, I’d quit my job in a heartbeat).

OK, no major harm done – just some things I would have enjoyed that I didn’t get to enjoy till later. Bummer enough, but consider this one:

I was in high school and college at the start of the personal computer era. My mom was walking through a mall one day and, on impulse, purchased the fabled TRS-80. She quickly decided she couldn’t really use it, so it came to me.

Actually, there wasn’t that much you could do at that point with a TRS-80, but I did everything I could and loved every minute of it. I even took computer programming courses. Then the time came to declare a major……

Keep in mind, computer science as a discipline was pretty new, at least for the general public. I thought about computer science, but I kept coming back to, “Computer science is for geniuses, I could never hack it” (pun unintended). So I majored in math, minored in secondary ed, and went into teaching.

Fast forward a dozen years or so and the teaching gig isn’t going quite like I drew it up on the chalkboard. I’m teaching part-time at all sorts of colleges, trying from semester to semester to piece together a schedule. I decide once again to start taking computer science courses….

… and before you know it, I end up in a programming job, having the time of my life. It wasn’t exactly instantaneous, but probably quicker than I had a right to expect. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of great things about teaching, but I still kind of feel like it took me a little extra time to get it right.

My son, who is 6, told me this week that he didn't want to go to college if he had to "sleep over" -- so I can see I have my work cut out for me. There are about 800 line items in the parental job description, but this one might be in the top 10: to give your kids the chance to face the world without running away.

Is this what I've come to?

I had a scary experience, nearly an epiphany, with the TV Guide crossword. I am something of a devotee of the magazine; I’ve been a subscriber on & off for about 20 years – and by the way, I’m still recovering from the shock of the revamped version. After a lot of years when they always seemed to be looking for excuses not to write about TV, suddenly with the new format comes a renewed focus. Who would have ever guessed that the articles in TV Guide would be about TV shows?

In any case, however, the crossword page has always been my second-least favorite page, behind the hard-hitting journalism and indispensable information of the horoscope page. They’ve regained my attention lately by adding a Sudoku puzzle, which I love, but the TV Guide crossword puzzle over the years has mostly been only good for insults. As in, “You’re too stupid to finish the TV Guide crossword.”

The other night I finished the Sudoku and glanced at the crossword. With clues like “1 – First three letters”, I didn’t figure it would take too long (What, they couldn’t at least base the clue on the TV network of the same name?). And there were definitely some clues of the caliber that have made the puzzle famous… for example, “Leave ___ Beaver (two words)”.

But there were several other clues that were fairly obscure, but that I knew anyway. Kinda made me wonder if there’s such thing as a brain tumor that forces you to remember esoteric TV trivia. That has to be the most logical explanation, right?

Here are some of the clues I got right off, and for which I’m vaguely ashamed (answers below):

1. Ray of Married People
2. Rosalind of AfterMash
3. Shera of Ace Crawford, Private Eye
4. Jethro’s sister on The Beverly Hillbillies
5. Janitor on Night Court
6. Kathy of The Real McCoys
7. John of MacGruder and Loud

I’m pretty sure the most recent of these shows went off the air in 1991. The oldest was cancelled when I was 18 months old. And while I watched all these shows at least once (with the exception, I’m proud to say, of the rollicking Tim Conway vehicle Ace Crawford), I’m certainly not a fanatic for any of them. Nor is anyone else, I don’t believe.

I do have to confess that I’m very fond of a book called “The Complete Directory to Prime-Time and Cable TV Shows, 1946-present”. I own the 8th Edition, after having several others, and I really am capable of reading it like a novel, from ABC Barn Dance (1949) to Zorro and Son (1983). And I have a decent memory for trivia, which at one time made me the scourge of our peers with regard to Trivial Pursuit. But I swear, I haven’t read the book in at least months, maybe a year!

Before I continue, the answers to above, which I do hereby affirm and attest came completely out of my brain without the aid of the book:

1. Aranha
2. Chao
3. Danese
4. Jethrine
5. Art
6. Nolan
7. Getz (OK, I didn’t remember that one till I had a couple letters filled in. But seriously, whoever heard of John Getz?)

So it’s clear to me that there are only two possible courses of action (Note: I have already considered, and discarded, the option of “turning off the television and having a life”): Either I check into the local hospital for an immediate CAT scan in search of that tumor, or I go online and see if I can find the complete DVD collection of MacGruder and Loud.

The Rare Dodo

I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one of my kind. Although I suppose everyone feels that way at times, I’m thinking mostly of the way our family works.

Gender roles have certainly shifted over the past … what, 30 years? However, you don’t always see that reflected in the media or in the way people think. Since our older child was born, I have been working part-time; when our daughter was born, I cut back further to half-time. My wife works full-time, so I am the primary caregiver for the kids. In fact, as a minister she has a lot of evening commitments, so that means extra responsibility for me.

Beyond that, food-related tasks have never been her forte, so I am also responsible for cooking and grocery shopping. And since I have less time committed to my job, I also do the vast majority of the laundry and dishes. The temptation, of course, is that anything that needs doing goes in my column (“since you only work part-time”), but I definitely resist it.

Hey, we’ve basically worked it out between ourselves in a way that (usually) works for us, but I still get the feeling that I’m a mutant in the eyes of “the world”. A few relevant examples:

• It’s a disorienting experience for a dad to read a magazine like “Parents” or “Parenting”. Or maybe I’m just expecting them to live up to their names. They really should be called “Moms” and “Mothering”, because there’s seldom any acknowledgement that dads are part of the equation. The articles that relate to dads are usually advising women how to get their tentative or just lazy husbands to take a more active role in raising the children (I’m thinking that the only way I could be more involved is to carry them in a pouch like a kangaroo).
• Some time ago I was running errands with the kids – which of course is the only way anything ever gets done around here. I popped them out of the car and we headed for the door of the bank. There was a bank guy standing outside the door smoking a butt; he kind of smirked at me and said, “Babysitting today, huh?” I always try to set an example of calm and reason for my children, so I didn’t hit him. I kept right on going, but as I passed him I said, “No, just being a dad.”
• It’s not just the parenting stuff either. I still get remarks sometimes when my wife has to go out of town for a few days – “Guess you’ll have to cook for yourself!”, or, you know, “How are you going to survive on your own?”

I don’t know, I can’t see into everyone else’s house. Maybe every other dad comes home from work, plops down with a cold one, and lets “the little woman” handle the kid stuff. And I certainly didn’t get into this setup to get other people to tell me how swell I am. I have learned, however, about the power of expectations... so if we hope for parents to be equal partners, maybe we ought to at least act as if it's theoretically possible.

Locker Room -- Those Who Forget the Past...

As a longtime Mets fan, I have seen a number of approaches to the offseason task of reshaping the roster for the next year. In the early 70s, when I first became aware, it was often a case of picking up one guy who was supposedly going to be the answer – often a third baseman (Joe Foy, Bob Aspromonte, Jim Fregosi, Joe Torre). He usually wasn’t much good, and/or over-the-hill. Didn’t usually work (with the probable exception of Le Grand Orange, Rusty Staub).

In the late 70s, the team in the largest city in the US decided to go on the cheap. They rounded up whoever didn’t have a job somewhere else (Elliott Maddox, Tom Hausman, Kevin Kobel, Dock Ellis), with the hope of having enough guys to fill out a roster. Didn’t ever work (sorry, Lenny Randle: one good year doesn’t create an exception).

In the 80s, they began targeting value deals, cashing in their assets for guys with “upside” or to fill a specific role (still no free agents, by the way). I guess you could say it worked (Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, Gary Carter, Howard Johnson); see also, 1986, 108 wins, World Champions. Or better yet, ask the ’86 Red Sox.

In the 90s, there was a seismic shift. Suddenly the club started handing out free-agent dough like it was one of those AOL CDs. Really, really didn’t work – not only were the players lousy AND jerks (Bobby Bonilla, Vince Coleman, Eddie Murray, Bret Saberhagen) but the contracts made them difficult to unload and the budget was already spent.

In recent years, we’ve seen some high-profile trades and a couple of free-agent splashes (Mike Piazza, Cliff Floyd, Roberto Alomar, Carlos Beltran), with the net result of one playoff loss, one World Series loss, and a slow drift through mediocrity to less exclusive neighborhoods.

Throughout, the conventional wisdom on the guys in orange and blue has been: not enough offense. Get us at least one more big bat. So many of the trades have been in search of some real thumper. It always seemed to me, subjectively, that the new guys never quite measured up. I wasn’t sure, so I decided to measure them.

I used OPS, a popular stat that combines on-base percentage and slugging percentage for a quick but descriptive shorthand of a hitter’s production, and found the top 20 OPSs for players the year before they became Mets. Then I compared their production in their first Met season. I excluded anyone who came over in midyear, with the exception of Mike Piazza (since he arrived pretty early in the season). The players in OPS order, with their first Met year: Piazza (98), Roberto Alomar (02), Cliff Floyd (03), Carlos Beltran (05), Duke Snider (63), George Foster (82), Bobby Bonilla (92), Rusty Staub (72), Mo Vaughn (02), Kevin McReynolds (87), John Olerud (97), Gary Carter (85), Dave Kingman (81 – the 2nd time), Jeromy Burnitz (02), Bernard Gilkey (96), Todd Zeile (00), Richie Hebner (79), Frank Thomas (62), Willie Montanez (78), and Robin Ventura (99).

Any Met fan of a certain age knows where this is headed; several of these guys were the most expensive and high-profile flops in Mets history. And indeed, 16 of the 20 declined in OPS, ranging from 0.4% (Thomas) to 26% (Alomar). The two big successes were Gilkey (up 12.6%) and Ventura (up 15.7%); note that both of those guys lost considerable altitude the year after that. The weirdest case was Gary Carter, who had exactly the same OPS as the previous year.

Averaging the percent changes, which isn’t really mathematically accurate since it’s not weighted by at-bats, the group as a whole declined by 7.6%. I also figured change in home runs (-10.1%) and RBIs (-7.6%).

This info is of national-security importance because of the arrival of Carlos Delgado, the latest slugger/savior. He had healthy numbers to start with (his year-before OPS ranked 2nd to Piazza), so a decline is not necessarily catastrophic. If he follows the trend, he ought to end up with an OPS of .909, and a line of .281-30-106, which any Met fan would sign off on today. I guarantee you, if he hits 30, no one will care where he stands for (or on) “God Bless America”, even if he stands on his head.

Metablog – Breaking the Code

As I have begun to get into this blogging business a bit, I have been struggling to understand how it’s really supposed to work. It’s definitely a form of communication with its own unique challenges….

It’s kind of like a diary, but there’s at least a theoretical chance that someone else will read this – so while I intend to be honest, it may be best not to be “nakedly” self-revelatory!

On the other hand, if it actually were a two-way conversation, that conversation would be informed by the relationship between me and the other party. You change the way you communicate based on who’s listening, but if you don’t know who’s listening, how do you set the style?

Even a work of fiction has its own internal logic and conventions, and as you read through, you hopefully come to understand the characters and watch them progress. However, even if you assume there are readers, they can jump in (and out) anywhere – in fact, they don’t necessarily even read them in the order you intend. So, pretty hard to shoot for "character development".

I’m not sure that many of the blogs I’ve scanned have given this concept (or anything else, but that’s another story) a lot of thought. I have to think that if I’m going to do this at all, it ought to be worth doing right. I just hope I eventually figure out what that looks like.

When I write our family's annual Christmas letter, I always have to keep in mind that it's the family's Christmas letter, not just mine. That means I am not always free to say everything that comes to mind, in whatever style I wish. If it were all me, it would be about 50% puns and wry observations. And, of course, my vocabulary tends to be a bit... I don't know, florid? Baroque? I have to admit that I come from the school of, "if a 50-cent word is good, a two-dollar word is better." In some circles that's seen as showing off, but really I just find it amuses me. In this I am following in the footsteps of some of my favorite funny writers such as Twain, Thurber, and PJ O'Rourke.

So one thing I have determined about writing this is that I'm going to indulge my own unique word sense to the hilt. They say you should "write for yourself", and since it's probably myself I'm writing for anyway, I have nothing to lose.

A&E - A Cracking Time

Although we are not big filmgoers at our house, there is one movie we are eager to see. It looks like it’ll have to be on video, which is not all that unusual around here. So in a few months, you’ll probably find me sleeping outside the video store, waiting for the arrival of the Wallace and Gromit movie.

Certainly I can tell you all about the first time I saw my wife, and I have a similar clarity about my love affair with W & G. We were living in Ohio, about 1995, in an apartment just outside Dayton. Kelly was in seminary and I was working all sorts of part-time jobs to pay the bills. It was late one evening – it strikes me that it was a Saturday night about 11 pm. I don’t know why we didn’t just go to bed, but instead we were lying on the couch flipping through the TV channels, when we hit upon the public TV station playing an odd sort of animated show.

Within minutes, I was lying on the couch alone – because my wife, whose strongest response to the comics page or a TV sitcom (or my jokes) is usually, “That’s funny,” had begun to laugh so hard she had literally fallen on the floor… an instance of ROTFL that predates instant messaging.

Needless to say, that viewing of “The Wrong Trousers” made us instant converts. Thanks to our friends at that Cincinnati PBS station – and we really owe them a donation! – we soon had a chance to watch the first W & G, “A Grand Day Out”. And to complete the experience, the third short, “A Close Shave”, came to a theater in Dayton some months later.

For the uninitiated, Wallace is a middle-aged and eccentric inventor who is continually developing ideas to improve "our modern lifestyle". Gromit is his dog, the real brains of the operation. Their inventions are often aided by Gromit's perusal of his well-thumbed (um, well-pawed?) copy of "Electronics for Dogs".

Perhaps the most remarkable part of the whole series is that Gromit is a well-defined and consistent personality despite the fact that he doesn't speak. However, he communicates more intelligence and humor with his eyes and eyebrows than a full season of your average sitcom.

We’ve been waiting desperately for a follow-up ever since our Ohio days (what I always call "the exile" -- perhaps a topic for another day), and finally our dream has come true. If the movie got you hooked, or if you didn’t “get” what all the fuss was about, anyone who hasn’t seen the short films should check them out… in the following order:

• “A Grand Day Out” is pretty entertaining, but obviously the first in the series. It looks a little like they shot it in someone’s basement. I have to admit, I would be hard-pressed to give a plot synopsis beyond "the lads run out of cheese and decide to go to the moon to get more" -- it just didn't stick in my head. Give it the bronze medal.
• “A Close Shave” is very funny and technically quite good, but somehow doesn’t take the gold for me. It does have the advantage, and also the disadvantage, of featuring a larger variety of characters. Also, although it is animated, and very funny even for kids, it does have some pretty scary moments, so parents might exercise caution. Very enjoyable, but I have to give it the silver.
• I guess you never quite get over your first – if you have to pick one, go for “The Wrong Trousers”. It’s just packed with classic moments; if you haven't seen it, I fear I will fail to explain why a penguin giving a sidelong glance is hilarious. And I honestly believe in my heart that the train chase sequence is perhaps the funniest 3 or 5 minutes of film you will ever see. I just defy anyone to watch that without laughing.

I'm proud to say that I'm not alone in my high esteem for these guys... see Roger Ebert's review of the movie ("arguably the two most delightful characters in the history of animation"). I broke down and bought the DVD collection for my wife for Christmas, so with any luck I will survive till the big-screen version arrives on video as well.

Christmas Performance Review

So I flunked Christmas.

OK, I don’t think I flunked, but I probably get something like a ‘C’. As a dyed-in-the wool traditionalist and all-around sentimental fool, I have a certain set of expectations for how the holiday season should go. Long-standing family traditions should be gently unwrapped and held up to the light again; children’s eyes should sparkle in wonder at the magic of the Yuletide; every secular, gift-related moment should be counterbalanced with a quiet, yet profound and heart-touching spiritual lesson on Christmas as Jesus’ birthday (my 3-year-old sinks to her knees, hands clasped in reverent prayer)….

Maybe this is just a different time, or maybe my parents’ generation was just better at this stuff (and everything else related to parenting), or maybe I just always wanted the full-body holiday experience so much that I saw something that wasn’t even there. I suppose it’s also just vaguely possible that I’ve set the expectations bar a little higher than reality can support.

In any case, if I had it to do over again, I’d:

• Spend more time reflecting on Advent. I had a very nice Advent calendar with a daily Scripture reading, which I put in my “inbox” and never saw again.
• Do more special things with the family. The Advent wreath got lit once, the angel chimes got lit once (and promptly burned down to barely-visible stubs), and we visited one nearby house to look at lights – and then only as we were on our way home from somewhere else.
• Stage-manage a little better. We had cookies for Santa (which we forgot to put out) and magic reindeer food (which we forgot to put out). Fortunately, my wife woke up with an “oops” and ran downstairs to dress up the set a little, while I tried to stall the children.
• Take seriously the concept of “some assembly required”. One of this year’s gifts was an indoor basketball hoop which, due to other commitments and a missing part, didn’t get assembled till the 28th. In addition, batteries were unsurprisingly not included, and our usual backup cache was not entirely sufficient to meet the demand. But more than anything else, I should’ve recruited some sort of Ocean’s Eleven-esque team of commandos to help break into the packaging ahead of time. Between the hermetically-sealed plastic clamshell packages (which, by the way, present razor-sharp edges if you get past the first line of defense), and the yards of wire twist-ties that bind everything to the package, it takes longer to get a toy out of the package than it did to buy it, or perhaps to manufacture it – which guarantees restless, grumpy children.

Of course, I do have to do it again. With a 6-year-old and a 3-year old, I’m guaranteed at least a half-dozen more attempts at a Christmas that’s the perfect marriage of Billy Graham and Martha Stewart.

On the other hand, maybe along the way I’ll learn to take it as it comes, not sweat the small stuff. After all, we got to spend time with friends and family, as a family. I was really proud of the gifts I got for my wife this year (all wrapped before the 24th), nothing elaborate but every one attuned to who she is and what she needs. I should mention that this was a vast improvement over the year when I got 2 weeks from Christmas with no ideas at all and had to take her shopping so she could point at things she liked – my most shameful Christmas memory!

We did actually talk about the meaning of Christmas, and though the kids still love Santa, they’re excited about Jesus too. I think one of my daughter’s favorite moments was getting to put Baby Jesus into our manger scene on Christmas morning. If nothing else, the kids got heaps of presents, and seem to enjoy playing with the ones that I’ve been able to get out of the package and find batteries for.