Catching up

If it's not abundantly clear that I completely suck at this whole "blogging" thing, then it should be.

I guess a bunch of things have happened since I last posted here, not the least of which is that my grandfather (and the subject of my last post) passed away in June. He went into the hospital to have some kidney stones zapped and never came out. We were all deeply saddened by his passing but he died peacefully at home surrounded by family. Thankfully my brother was able to be here when he passed. No one was a hurt by his death as was my Uncle Pete. Pete was not his son in a biological sense but I don't know if a father and son were ever closer than those two. Maybe someday I'llpost what I can of their relationship but it would muddy the waters to tackle it right now.

Cooper turned 2 in january. He really is an incredible kid, I know he's mine but the kid is super bright, he started talking at like 7 mnths and was using short sentences by 18mos. He's now having short conversations with us about his day and events that happened as long ago as last summer (building sandcastles with Cousin JJ). He's very active, he's in constant motion and climbs on and jumps off of EVERYTHING! he is a bit on the small side for his age, his height is about avg. but he's low on the weight percentiles though the doctors aren't worried and he certainly eats plenty.

He saw his forst movie a couple of weeks ago, the lady he goes to daycare with (Auntie Diane) took the brood to see Curious George. It was pretty good timing as I had just gotten him his first Curious George book a few weeks earlier.

Other happenings? Christina and I are talking about a second child. Coops getting older and she's getting the "baby blues". I want to wait it out and see if it passes. If it doesn't I'm willing to talk about it but I expect that we'll have some serious discussions about finances etc.

Me? Well. I went to see my doctor a month ago. My cholesteral is in check but my triglycerides are still high of course it doesn't help that I keep putting on weight. I really just need to stop putting of getting back to exercising on a regular basis.

In 2001 I started working out regularly, doing cardio and nautilus and eventually switching over to free weights. At one point I had drpped down to about 235# not great, but considering I was up at about 270# not bad, and I was feeling good and energetic. That's not the case right now. I've gone back up to 270# and feel slow and run down. I need to drop wieght by the summer I really want to be active with Coop. Yay self pity...

Professionally things are going well, the job is good, classes are good and I feel good about the design work I've been doing, now I just need to focus on my health.

Gramp/Snippets

This weekend I was talking to my mother about memories from my childhood and it made me realize that very few of my memories from a long time ago are complete, most of them are just snippets.

It started with talking about some memories of time spent with my grandfather. Now my grandfather is still alive. He turned 88 in September (our birthdays are two weeks apart and we often celebrated them together at family gatherings) and until recently he’d been doing pretty well. Last week I got a call from my Mom, she sounded scared so I knew immediately that something was wrong. Given that she’s not terribly mobile I figured it was my grandmother, but as it turns out my grandfather had been admitted to the hospital and the thinking at the time was that he may have had a heart attack. Now the man had a quintuple bypass about 16 years ago and since that time he’s had a pacemaker, but again he’s been doing well. He had gone into the hospital that morning to have some kidney stones zapped and something happened. It turns out his lungs had filled with fluid and he suffered congestive heart failure (not specifically a heart attack) and I guess that’s what has triggered a bunch of these little memories. He’s still in the hospital and when he’s discharged he’ll be going straight to rehab for 2-4 weeks.

The first one we got talking about was driving around in his truck when I would visit. We’d do any number of things like stopping at McD’s (he’d always get the coffee and filet-o-fish) or maybe going candlepin bowling where’d I’d always manage to win at least one string even though Gramp had a 100+ avg (pretty good for candlepins). Many times our trips revolved around his business, he worked on refrigeration systems mainly for hockey rinks, apple orchards and dairy farms of which there are plenty in New England. This job also allowed him to travel quite a bit, he installed rinks all over New England at colleges and prep schools, but he also traveled to the Midwest to work on dairy farms and as far away as Guatemala. Going around to the orchards and rinks was pretty cool when I was a kid. I could tell people liked my gramp (I do too, he’s a hell of a nice guy), he’s a true old time Yankee in the best sense of the word.

Anyway as I said I have a variety of memories but one thing that always seemed to happen was a pit stop at Idyllwild farms in Acton, MA. Now if you go there it’s a very upscale farm stand where you can get fresh produce of any imaginable variety. What was the attraction for me almost 30 years ago? Peanuts. Yup that’s right, peanuts. I love peanuts, you could say I’m nuts for them (sorry). Anyway, we’d stop by because my gramp knew I loved them too. They kept them in an open half-barrel and you’d scoop them up into a paper bag. I wouldn’t eat any on the way home, I’d just enjoy the last 15 minutes in Gramp’s truck as we wound through the back roads and he snuck one last Winston before we got home to Gram (he hasn’t smoked in years and even hid it then). When we got home I’d head straight to the breezeway of Gram’s house, which was the only place a kid could be a kid in her house.

Let me interrupt here and say I absolutely adore my grandmother. I have so many memories of her as well, and someday I’m sure I’ll write about them here. Most of them are very fond memories of Thanksgiving and Christmas at her house (remind me to tell you about the grandfather clock there terrorized me as a child), but she is, to this day, a very particular woman. Everything must be just so. Her home was definitely not “kid friendly” but the breezeway was our territory when we were there. It was the brightest room in the house having full glass walls on both sides, and it had the only TV that wasn’t in their bedroom. It also had a small hutch full of toys and games, some of which must have belonged to my mother and aunt when they were kids. I remember spending night’s there playing yahtzee with the two of them when I’d go spend a week there during the summer. Anyway, there’s about a dozen or so posts in my visits to my grandparents let me get back on point.
So we’d get home and I’d plop onto the floor in front of the TV and check to see if there was a baseball game or a boxing match on. Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge baseball fan and most specifically a Red Sox fan. I love the pastoral pace of the game and I have enjoyed watching it live and on TV since I was about 5. Most people associate Monday nights with football, I always looked forward to Monday Night Baseball on ABC when I was a kid. But some of you may be surprised to know that I used to love boxing as a kid. One of my earliest heroes in the sports world was Muhammed Ali. Now back then he was my hero because of his athletic prowess (and the fact that someone wrote what I thought was a great song about him). Little did I know that he was worthy of being my hero for so many other reasons. But back then one of the staples of The Wide World of Sports was boxing. Typically it was a heavyweight match, but occasionally it was a middle or welterweight bout. I really began to appreciate the amazing skills that some of these smaller fighters had, not only could they hit hard, but they moved so quick it was truly stunning. Probably the best bout I ever remember was between Marvelous Marvin Hagler and Sugar Ray Leonard. Hagler lost, but he really won. I still cannot figure out how that bout didn’t go his way. When that travesty of justice occurred boxing lost me forever. I now understand that boxing is a dirty sport and has been for decades, but back then I thought it was the purest athletic competition there was. One man versus another with nothing between them but some leather gloves. Yes, it could be brutal, but there were no victims, just two guys sizing each other up.

Almost as soon as I plopped in front of the tube my grandmother would be there with a bowl for me to put the shells and husks in and she’d sit behind me and knit. My grandfather would sit in his chair and read a magazine or a book. Sometimes he’d look up and comment on the action of what was going on. He was never a huge Red Sox fan. Growing up when he did he had two choices for pro baseball teams in Boston and he was a Braves fan. The Braves left Boston in the early 50’s I believe. They moved to Milwaukee where they would become the team of the most prominent homerun hitter of all-time, Hammerin’ Hank Aaron. They were also the team of Hall of Fame pitcher, Bob Feller, the Braves have since moved again and now reside in Atlanta. I know my parents sent me to stay with my grandparents to get me out of their hair for a week, but I always had a good time. They didn’t spoil me rotten, I always had a few chores to do, and I helped Gramp out. In many ways I think my memories of those summer weeks were better because I wasn’t spoiled, I just blended into their lives for the week.

Now I take my son to see them every so often. As much as I can, but not as often as I should. He’s only one, but he has a great time there and he always brightens their day. They aren’t as active as they once were so he’ll never get to have the same memories of them that I do. In fact I don’t know where he will get those types of memories from. His maternal grandfather died 9 years ago, Christina’s mother lives in an assisted living facility. My dad lives across the country in Seattle (though I must admit the two of them bonded quite well when they were here in January) with his wife Judy. My mother is close by and gets down to see Coop at least every other week. She’s great with him, they adore each other, maybe that’s what he’ll remember, I don’t know. I think she’s going to go into full retirement next year (when the SS kicks in), I wonder if I can talk her into moving a little closer to us? I’d love to have her nearby and have Coop spend as much time with her as he can.

Scars II

My apologies to anyone who was actually reading my blog, I've been side tracked lately.

Scars II

Left Kidney – This is the grand daddy of all my scars. When I was 8 it was discovered that I had an infection in my left kidney, normally under these circumstances the doctors would have recommended removing the entire kidney but as it turned out my right kidney was not functioning as it should have been so they decided on removing half of my kidney. So in a I went to the hospital first for 5 days for a series of test to make sure they knew what they were doing and then later for the actual surgery.

Needless to say I was a bit scared, I mean they didn’t say anything but I knew my parents were worried. Now I know, of course, that kidney surgery is a very big deal and if it was my son I’d be terrified for him. So off I went to the hospital, when the morning of my operation came they gave me a nice little drug cocktail of Demerol and Visterol that made my ride to the operating room quite pleasant.

This may be the time for a quick side story, as a child I was terrified of needles. I don’t know why but they scared the crap out of me. I particularly hated having blood drawn. I was completely irrational I know, but what can you do. Well, I knew I was going to need a bunch of shots during my 2 week stay at the hospital and that scared me worse than the surgery. My dad struck a deal with me, for every shot or blood draw that I remained calm for he’d give me a dime. Now this is 1978, a buck was a pretty big deal to me (I think my allowance was 2$) 10 shots = 1$? I knew I’d probably make that pretty quickly.

So into surgery I go…the first thing the anaesthesiologist did was give me a quick jab in the arm and he covered my face with a gas mask and asked me to count backwards from 100…99…98…97…gone. Seriously. The next thing I know I’m in the recovery room looking up at my parents. “How are you doing Josh” they asked “Dad, you owe me a buck fifty”…stunned silence. By the time I got out of the hospital I think he owed me something like 26 bucks. I think it was in part because I became a bit of a junky while I was there. I was getting pain meds like 4 times a day and I really liked whatever shot is was they were giving me because I was practically begging for that thing right before bed time.

Back to the scar. Actually for this surgery I got a total of three scars. The smallest is a small scar from the tube that was jammed into my kidney through my back. It just looks like a little dimple. The second is a scar that is about 8 inches long in my lower abdomen. They figured while they were there they’d clean up some infection they spotted in my bladder. And the big one…it stretches from about 6 inches to the left of my belly button and goes all the way around my back (while rising diagonally) to about 6 inches below my left shoulder blade. All tolled it must be nearly 16” long. They claimed it would fade with time but it’s still visible today.

Scars

I’ve been thinking about topics for my blog and I’ve come up with a couple that I’ll probably be tackling in the next few weeks. I turned 35 last fall and I’m starting to feel my age, I think this is especially true because I work with teenagers. You start to feel a bit old when the senior in your class was born the year before you graduated from high school.

As I’ve begun to think about getting older I’ve started to notice things about myself, the grey hairs in my head (it looks like it will be staying though) the crows feet around my eyes and the scars that I have collected over the years. Some have been around almost as long as I have. Some have faded somewhat, some are hidden and must be sought out to be seen and others are more obvious. How to talk about each one?? Chronologically? I know, I’ll start from my head and move down.

Forehead- On my forehead mostly hidden behind my hairline about an inch and a half in front of my temple is a small scar. This was my first injury that required stitches, I got it when I was 5 years old. I was living in Warner, NH, a small town about 20 miles west of Concord at the base of Mt. Kearsarge. There couldn’t have been more than a couple thousand people in the town when I lived there (from age 1 to 7) but it was the home of my earliest memories. It was very much the perfect small town in New England. I lived down the street from the volunteer fire dept. (mainly consisting of the Monihans who had 16 kids, mostly boys), around the corner was The Variety Store where we bought penny candy (for a penny thank you very much) before going to school. Across from the fire dept was the library where I first learned to love books, mainly because I had a crush on the young librarian. Further down Main St. was a gas station and a small local grocery store that burned down when I was 6. The town is bigger now, it’s right off the interstate so there’s a McDonalds and other various highway businesses but when I was there a good time was going to the dump with dad on Saturday. Anyway, back to my scar on my forehead. I had a good friend who lived up the street who really liked to play golf (it would take me until I was 25 to get into the game), so we’d sometimes hit balls in his back yard. Now we were 5, so the ball wasn’t going too far (we weren’t exactly Tiger Woods) but we tried. Well for some reason I made the foolish mistake of standing right behind him. He took a good healthy backswing and POW!!! Lights out…I swear, I really went out for a minute I think. When my eyes cleared Chip was standing over me with a shocked look on his face, then I felt something warm and wet on my face and there it was, blood…blood…I’d never seen so much blood before in my life. I mean I was only 5, so I hadn’t seen a whole lot of slasher flicks (and they weren’t really popular in 1975 anyway). Chip looked at me in awe and then ran inside to get his mother. Now Chip’s mother had medical training…ok, she was a dental hygenist…she pressed a cloth on my forehead, took me inside and called my mom. Mom got there in short order (now Mom had real medical training, she was an RN) and took a look and determined I needed stitches. Now these days it seems none of us is more than a few minutes from some kind of emergency care facility but in 1975 in NH the closest place to get stitches on a Saturday was Concord. Now if you’ve been paying attention you know that Concord is about 20 or so miles from Warner, so we hopped into the Dodge Dart (more stories about that car later) and off we went. This was my first trip to Concord Hospital, but certainly not my last. Three stitches later I was off.

Now going to Concord when I was a kid was a big deal. The only times we went were on birthdays (Pizza Hut on the Heights, a large thick crust mushroom pizza and pepsi please!) and when I had to go spend the day at my Mom’s work when school was out and she couldn’t find a sitter. My Mom worked at the state hospital (still does actually) so there’s a few stories in that too.

Anyway, I guess Mom was feeling a bit sorry for me, so she figured while we were there we’d hit Dunkin’ Donuts. Any good New Englander will tell you Dunkin’ Donuts rules. I didn’t drink coffee back then but the smell was and is stunning. There donuts are good too, I especially have a thing for their plain cake donuts. So off we went, “Anything you want hun” she said. Hmmm…so many choices…actually I knew precisely what I wanted. You see, this was in the era before the Happy Meal (and even before breakfast at McD’s) so new products at fast food places were a novelty and even then the marketed to kids. At about that time Dunkin’ Donuts had just come out with a new product “Munchkins”. Munchkins were simply the holes to the donuts, but they were small, I was small. I thought that was cool, yeah I know, there’s one born every minute. Back off. We got a box of Munchkins and we were back on the road back to Warner. A half hour later we pulled into Chip’s driveway. I had asked mom if we could stop by, cuz I wanted to show off my stitches and share a few Munchkins. When we pulled in Chip’s mom was in the front yard. When I asked if I could see him she said “well…Chipper is being punished”. Punished? “For what” I thought. I mean it was an accident and really I was just as guilty as he was and I wasn’t being punished. In fac just the opposite, I got Munchkins. I think she saw all this on my face and sort of buckled. “Ok, I guess he can come out so he can apologize”. Hmm, apologize…whatever makes her happy I guess. So Chip came out looking a bit down, but as soon as he saw I was ok and that I wasn’t mad things were cool. We ate Munckins and he checked out my stitches and we basically played around for the rest of the day.


Next scar.

Right hand- Now this one is a little less innocent. If you look at my right hand just above my pinky you will see a small white crescent that came to be as a result of my brother’s Swiss Army knife (BTW, if that’s all the Swiss Army has no wonder they are neutral). The cause? Another act of silliness and maybe a little passive aggressive behavior on his part (I got a B in Psych 101). My brother and I spent a lot of time at home alone after school. We were classic latchkey kids. I must have been 11, which means he was about 14. Now growing up in NH we always had pocket knives. I used to go to The Variety Store in Warner and buy them after saving my allowance for a few weeks. So my brother gets this bright idea that we should play sword fight, of course he’s armed with an open pocket knife. Me? I was armed with air. A few quick swipes and BAM!! Blood is gushing from my hand. He freaks out, starts to apologize like mad and we rush to the bathroom sink. After flushing it out for a few minutes I knew I needed stitches but he was clearly hoping against hope that I would not. “Let’s put a big band-aid on it!”, seriously, that’s what he said. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at that. Once he calmed down a bit I convinced him that we needed to call Mom and tell her what happened and get me to the hospital. Now by this time we were living in Bow which is the town right next to Concord so it only took Mom a few minutes to get home, get me into the car and off we went. Another 3 stitches later and I was good as new. My brother was not so lucky. He got a healthy grounding and lost the knife for a good long time.

Left Thumb- This is the only scar that is as a result of a scene shop accident and considering I’ve been building scenery for the better part of 15 years that’s pretty good.

I was working in the scene shop at Michigan State University where I earned my MFA. I was working on the drill press drilling 3/4in holes into plywood discs we had cut. I held the disc in place with my left hand (yes I know, stupid) and operated the drill with my right. The paddle bit started to bite into the wood, and as paddle bits are known to do, it jammed and started to spin the wood. Generally my reaction time to stuff like this is pretty good, but this time I left my hand on the piece just a little long and SLICE! I opened a 1/2in gash on my thumb. Blood was everywhere, what a mess. Looking at the cut I didn’t think I needed stiches so I just wrapped it in bathroom paper towels and threw a bunch of medical tape around it. I must have looked like an idiot on the bus ride home that day. So no stitches, but to this day if you look at my thumb you can see a nice thin white line. Looking back I probably could have used a couple stitches.

Right Thumb- Ok, I guess I’m not allowed to have an uninjured thumb or something. When I was about 20 or 21 I went to my cousin Kim’s for Thanksgiving. Everyone was there, my Mom, grandparents etc. We were all having a good time and a bit of alcohol had been consumed. Kim asked me if I would open a fresh bottle of wine and handed me a bottle opener. Now I can open a bottle of wine drunk or sober, but what she handed me was one of those bizarre openers that was popular in the early 90’s. Instead of having a corkscrew it had two thin black strips of metal that were supposed to slide between the glass and the cork, their flared shape was supposed to grab the cork on the way out. Simple right? Right. Holding the bottle in one hand and the opener in the other I pushed downward and SLICE! Right into the thumb that was holding the opener, a nice _” slice on my right thumb. Again, no stitches, just a nice bandage but still a visible scar 14 years later.

Ok, that’s it for now. I’ll finish up next week with my kidney scar.

Snow Day Part Deux

We had another snow day last Wednesday (and one Monday), that makes 3 snow days in January and 4 so far this year along with a couple of delayed starts. We haven’t had a full week of school since before Christmas break. It’s been fun for awhile but it’s starting to affect continuity in the classroom as well as dorm life. A single snowflake and the kids start behaving like they won’t have school for the next day. It’s also bound to affect the musical as they can’t rehearse.

Tomorrow I’ll be heading into Boston to pick up some materials at Backstage Hardware. I love being able to walk into a hardware store and pick up gaffers tape right off the shelf and search through gel colors and gobos. I used to do everything via catalogues and the phone, but eversince I discovered this place on the wharf I go there instead. It’s a True Value Hardware store that carries theatre stuff, too cool. Sorry I’m being a nerd. The owner is very cool too and it’s a good place to hook up with other people in the business and shoot the shit. I also get to see new little gadgets every time I go, the last time I was there he showed me this neat little battery operated candle that you can blow out…again I’m nerding…

Anything else going on? Well I’m a bit behind on the set for the musical. I am having a very hard time getting up for this show, I hate the book for it (The Pajama Game) and the director and musical director always treat me as if I’m an appendage on this show. I get zero input on show selection and design wise the challenge is always how to create as much flat open space as possible. Now if I had a fly system in the theatre I guess that would be ok, but I don’t so it sucks. I’ve decided that I will ask not to be listed as a designer on the show and simply billed as the Technical Director.

Coop is doing well, he’s running around like crazy and now stringing a couple of words together, like “Thank you” and he’s adding more complicated words like “spaghetti” and “Cheerio”. The best part about the two snow days has been having him home (though we still pay for daycare). He spent a day in the toddler room at the end of last week so he may be moving soon, I think there may be some trauma associated with that.

Current events? I had the priviledge of watching GW’s press conference today. Damn was that frustrating, I don’t think he answered a single question he dodged and weaved like an old pro. Is it just me or does that snotty prep schoolboy act wear thin?

Any advice what to write about? I always seem to run out of stuff to say. I read a lot of political blogs and a lot of personal blogs. I don’t have the time to dedicate to researching a political blog, and if I did one I’d want to do it right (Scoobie Davis is one of my favorites). Personal stuff is cool, I just don’t think I have a great ability to capture events in my life very well. Maybe next time I’ll talk about my relationship with my brother.

GO PATS!!

Dad

My Dad and his wife (number 3, but she’s cool and good for him) just left this Tuesday after a visit over the long weekend, 4 days, the perfect length of time for us and them too I think. Of course the most important reason for the trip was to see Coop, and I must say considering he’s only seen them once before (at 4mos old) he took to them pretty quickly. Especially my Dad, it was nice to see them forge a relationship, something he and I have had difficulty doing. I don’t hate my Dad, maybe at one point I did but now it’s a relationship punctuated by strained silences on the telephone. Coincidentally it’s the same type of relationship my brother and I have. There’s probably too much to tackle in one posting but I will add it’s also the same type of relationship my father has with his brother. The both of them always hoped aloud that my brother and I could manage to do it better than they had, in many ways I think we’ve done worse. My brother and I are polar opposites, he’s a diehard ex-military conservative and I’m a bleeding heart lefty teacher. Ok, sorry to go off on a tangent, I was going to talk about my dad and me.

You want the truth? I’ve always been closer to my mom. When my parents got divorced I knew precisely whom I wanted to live with. My dad had a temper, he never hit us (well ok, the occasionally spanking and he took an open handed swing at me once but I slipped it) but he yelled a lot and that yelling could be pretty scary. He and my mom yelled at each other a lot too. I knew from as long as I knew what a divorce was that my parents were bound to get one, actually I prayed for it before I knew I was an atheist. Anyway, for some reason that I still don’t understand, when my parents separated they decided that mom would move out for a year while dad continued his 1hr+ commute (meanwhile mom worked 15min away and moved to the next town over), it was a sucky year. I really think I would have been fine living with my dad, but I also had to live with my brother and to be truthful Dad would get home from work generally between 6:30pm and 9pm, so it was 12yo me and my 15yo brother home alone nightly. That, I think, is a subject for another post. Needless to say it was a very lonely year for me and probably at an age where I least needed to be alone. I know it was tough on me, but every time I saw her I could tell it was tough on Mom too. As I said, she and I were always close (still are really).

A year later Dad moved closer to work and Mom came back home. Once that happened my brother and I were supposed to see Dad every other weekend and some holidays but the reality was we ended up seeing him less than that. Dad got himself a girlfriend who lived in NYC so he spent as many weekends as he could there and some others with us. Sometimes we’d get a call and a plane ticket to fly from Manchester (back when the person who sold you your ticket also put your luggage in the plane and signaled the plane to the runway with those funky flashlights) to NYC on Bar Harbor or Precision Air, both a couple of fly by night puddle jumpers. It was kinda cool and actually a bit of an adventure really. I liked NY ok; I really didn’t think it was anything special, I guess I felt much the same way about Dad’s girlfriend. What I did like were her daughters. They were both older than my brother and I, in fact they were both in college and they were kinda hot too (at least I thought so then).

So really my mother raised my brother and me on her own. We were a handful, if you recall I mentioned that I was a poor student in high school, well that started really in junior high just after my folks split up. My brother did much the same in school, but as it turns out he had an excuse, some sort of learning disability.

Within the next year my dad moved to Cambridge, which was much cooler than the place in Boxboro he had been living, so visiting was less painful than it had been. I went down more often, but spent more time at the comic shop down the street and hanging with some punk rockers in Harvard Sq. Dad would insist we decide what to do on the weekends we went down, generally this consisted of going to the movies or the science museum and way to many trips to Quincy Market. What he didn’t realize was that I would have been just as content hanging out, talking and walking around the various neighborhoods. Going out was fine, but it wasn’t every thing. Around this time my brother had gotten his license and a job and most importantly a girlfriend so he wasn’t going down that much, so I was there a lot on my own.

Somewhere in this time my dad and his girlfriend got engaged, they made some plans to live in both NYC and Boston and Dad started to hunt for a condo. He settled on a place on Comm. Ave. in Alston between BU and BC, it was a cool place and Comm. Ave. was a fun place especially during the summer when I’d always manage to get to a few sox games. It was a longish walk from his place but it saved on the subway fare. At that time (84-85) it was pretty easy to walk up to the gate and get tickets on game day. Somewhere along the line he and his Fiancée broke up, well my dad has never been very good at being alone so the hunt was on for a new woman.

This is where it gets weird.

Dad decided that I should be in on the audition process so one weekend that I was down he managed to arrange for me to go out with him and three different women he was seeing (maybe I’m just jealous, I never dated three women in the same year, let alone at the same time). In fact, we went on two dates in one day. It was really very bizarre, after each date he asked me what I thought, like I was gonna rank them our give them a score between 1 and 10. What I really wanted to say was “they aren’t mom and that’s all that needs to be said”. I didn’t really care whom he dated but I picked one and that’s the one he stuck with. Within a year or so he married her and within a couple years of that he divorced her. And that’s all that really needs to be said about that relationship.

In the interim I had gone through (struggled really) high school, after which I attended a one-year program of internships in Worcester, MA called Dynamy. It was a cool program but it mostly consisted of spoiled rich kids who had never had a job. I really didn’t fit in. They were all prep school brats and I was a middle class kid. While they worked their internships and then partied I worked my internship and the closing shift at McD’s so I’d have spending money and a bit of savings when I finished. After that I spent, a year working at the local newspaper and getting myself into college.

So this is what I consider to be one of the defining moments in my relationship with my Dad. Sometime around April he calls me with this idea. “Let’s go on a cycling trip to Denmark”…”A what to where?” I asked? He was serious. Somewhere along the line my Dad had gotten into cycling. It may have been “Breaking Away” who knows. He always seemed to follow some fad or another, now it’s fly-fishing; at another point it was country bars (the whole Urban Cowboy routine). Fine I said, only because I knew once it was in his head it wasn’t going anywhere. Besides, the drinking age was 18 in Denmark. Oh, you may be asking yourself, “Why Denmark?” Well, Denmark is relatively flat, with a max elevation of something like 575ft so it was really a fairly easy ride.

My Dad bought a new bike for the trip (Univega or some other royally expensive thing) and gave me his old Peugeot. We bought brand new gear (4 paniers each, ugh) and maps, pumps, spare tires etc. Over the time I had worked at the paper I saved a bit of money and when I left I was fulltime so I cashed out my sick time and vacation days too, so I went to Denmark with about $400 in travelers checks for a two-week trip. We boxed our bikes and headed off to the airport, got on the plane and off we went. Actually I should mention that my dad paid for the airline tickets with his frequent flier miles and there had been no coach fares available so we ended up flying transatlantic first class. I must say I recommend it if you get the chance, heaven knows I never will again. Anyway, we get there and the stress starts. Dad called the youth hostel in Copenhagen as soon as we landed and they said we needed to get there within an hour or so in order to secure a room. So once the pressure was on he started to stress out and throw a bit of a hissy. We rushed to get the bikes together and out of the airport, of course he neglected to plan for our first leg and we had very little idea as to where the hostel was. After some huffing a puffing and bitching and moaning we found our way to our destination.

Settled into our room our first big issue, “give me your passport and travelers checks”. “What?” He was serious, I was 20 years old I was heading off to college in the fall, and I had earned the money. I was an adult. No one that we came in contact with on the entire trip treated me like a kid except my own father. He insisted that if all our important things were together (with him) that they’d be safer. Ung, too hard to fight it I gave in. Looking back that was my biggest mistake, but ask anyone who knows him, once he digs his heals in on something he’ll never give it up and if for some reason you don’t go along with him he’ll behave passive aggressively about it for the rest of his life.

The trip was actually kind of humorous looking back on it. I’ve never been any kind of physical specimen and biking an entire country (no matter how small or flat) seemed daunting. My father had told me to work on biking at home prior to the trip, but I only got on my bike a couple of times before we left. We were both pack a day smokers and there were even occasions on the trip where I smoked while actually riding the bike. All in all it was fun going from hostel to hostel, visiting a variety of cities in Denmark and scoping out all the blonde women. In Katmandu I saw my first topless beach (it was almost all my hormones could handle) and in Odense I got a great surprise. We pulled into the hostel and I started to lock up the bikes as Dad checked us into a room. As I was chaining us together I noticed a nice pair of legs go by. I looked up to see a very attractive young woman. Shortly thereafter another nice looking girl went by, then another and another…there must have been 30 or so 17-20 year old Danish girls…I began to wonder if I were dreaming. As it turns out there was an Au Pair group training at the hostel so the two days in Odense (Denmark’s 3rd largest city) were spent site seeing in the day and hanging out with some of the most beautiful girls I had ever met, kinda made the trip worth it.

On the opposite side of the spectrum were days like the one where my dad took my passport, etc. Another lovely incident occurred as we were climbing the one big hill in the entire country (on the way out of Odense). I was having a little trouble as I managed to get caught between gears and was getting a lovely ratcheting sound to come from my chain. My father start to bitch at me about being careful and not break the chain, I yelled that I had it under control. I guess my tone wasn’t perfect as he started to bark back at me…”You’re not too big for me to handle you know”…wow, nice. Nothing says great father son trip like a little smackdown in the Danish countryside. The funny part was is that I was too big for him to handle. I mean, I’m no badass but at the time I was 6’ tall and about 215#. I wasn’t rock solid but I had spent the better part of the past 3 years or so manhandling skids of newspaper inserts and 900# paper rolls while he had spent the better part of 25 years pushing papers around his desk and occasionally riding his bike. I mean the man got knocked out at a Jimmy Buffett concert. He was taller than me (6’2”) but he weighed all of a soft 180# and I easily could have taken him.

I think this might have been the crux of our problem. I was, for the most part, raised by my mother from the time I was 13 until this trip and my father had seen me sparingly in the interim. Ultimately that led to him to looking at me as the same teenager he remembered and not a grown man.

We’ve come a ways since then, but not without some rocky spots. He went to Harvard and he placed a high value on education, I did not take high school seriously and after a couple extra years of getting my head straight I ended up at Keene State, not exactly impressive by comparison. Now, though he had promised to help out, my father played no roll in paying for my education. With the money I made over the two years off I paid for my first year out of pocket and my mother and grandmother took care of year 2. Loans took care of year 3 and by year 4 I was old enough to secure independent status and get Pell grants. Of course this didn’t mean that he didn’t hassle me about my grades. I hadn’t been in a classroom fulltime in like 3 years and in some classes I struggled, in particular I failed math and ended the first semester with a 1.92 avg (.02 from academic probation). I don’t know why, but I called my dad and while on the phone he asked me about my grades ( I must have known he would), I told him and he let into me good. So much so that by the end of the phone call I was in tears. My mother saw this and I think it really set her off. I mean she was paying for the year and he was ripping me apart. Sure I failed math, but pulled nothing less than a C in anything else. She called him back and I have never heard this woman so mad before in my life. She absolutely shredded him. Looking back it was kind of funny, but needless to say I was a bit gun-shy about letting him know how I was doing academically.

The funny part was that once O found my major (theatre) I started to do pretty well, In fact I spent most of my last two years on the Dean’s List and managed to earn a 3.18 in my 4 years at KSC after starting year one with a 2.24. The result of this was I was able to get into grad school and earn this high paying prestigious prep school teaching position…note sarcasm. Actually, one spring break I was out visiting him in Seattle and I mentioned that I had earned a 3.75 the previous semester (glutton for punishment I guess) and his only response? “Why not a 4.0? Pardon me for this but FUCK! Sorry, had to get that out.

Anyway, he’s chilled and I think after nearly 9 years of marriage and a child he’s getting the picture that I’m an adult and a couple of times he’s even mentioned that he’s proud of me. It shouldn’t mean that much to me, but it does.

It’s for these reasons and more that I am working very hard to be the best father I can be. I think I’m pretty good at it. I know from the look on his face and the sparkle in his voice when I pick him up at daycare that my little guy loves me, now it’s just up to me to keep it that way.

Cooper

One year old. Amazing. It's hard to believe that 12 months ago Christina called me in the middle of the class I was teaching to let me know that she thought she had started contractions. Damn! The nice thing about living on campus is that I could say, "I'll be right there" and mean it. Home in less than 5 minutes. She was certainly feeling the waves of a contraction when I arrived, and they were sporadically coming every 12 minutes or so. We were a ways off from having to make the short drive to UMass Memorial Hospital. One of the nice things about living in Worcester is the availability of good hospitals and good doctors. Our apartment is less than 10 minutes from 3 hospitals.

So as she had her contractions I played the good husband and rubbed her back and kept her as comfortable as possible. This must have been around noon or so, I made he a small lunch to start and got out the wooden massage tool with the smiley face on it and went to work. We must have watched a variety of things on TV, but the one thing that sticks out is that we watched The Big Labowski on Comedy Central. Of course this sticks out because we both love the movie, in fact we could have watched it uncut if we had just popped in the DVD, but I don't think either of us was thinking that clearly. Another reason is the scene at the dentist's office. If you pay close attention to the music playing while his teeth are getting worked on you'll notice that the song in the background is "My Mood Swings" by Elvis Costello, rather an appropriate tune given the circumstances.

Now I must say that things progressed rather slowly from this point, in fact I don't think we left for the hospital until about 7:30pm or so. When Christina decided the pain was great enough and the time between contractions had closed to about 7 minutes or so I dutifully carted her bag down to the new used Subaru station wagon we had purchased for the occasion (I was happy to swap it for my piece of crap Jetta). I drove us to the hospital, dropped her at the front door and parked the car. I will tell you one thing that will stick in my memory for some time to come; my son was born during what might have been the coldest week in 50 yrs. No lie, it was well below freezing and every time I went out to start the car the thing took at least 5 minutes to wheeze to life and a good 20-30 to warm up. It was the kind of cold where road salt just won't work and you can feel ice crystallizing inside your nose as you breath.

When we were both in the hospital I pushed her up to the maternity unit in a wheel chair and told the woman at the desk who we were, who our doctor was and all sorts of various information. She called up a nurse and boom we were in triage. Now if you've never been through this before, triage is where they asses whether or not you are ready to be admitted to the hospital or not. We were there for a good 3 hrs. In fact, Christina didn't get any drugs until about 9:30pm or so, but once she did she was floating.

Funny, it took until the 3 hrs we spent in triage for me to really realize our situation. There was a very young girl in the next bed, she was maybe 17, and she was clearly having some serious trouble with her labor and everyone was concerned. A couple of other things became clear, first, this was not her first child, second, she had not had very good prenatal care and that may have been leading to her difficulty. From the sounds of it she hadn't seen her doctor since the first trimester and she was delivering a few weeks early.

This made it clear to me that Christina and I had really thought this out. We had talked about having a child for a couple of years. Christina wanted to finish grad school and get going a bit in her career. I had wanted to get to it sooner as I didn't really want to be the oldest dad on the block, but in hindsight I think we waited just about the right length of time. We both had completed our education, I had a decent job that put a roof over our heads and we were both pretty mature. Christina was almost 32 and I was 34, and here were these two kids next to us about half our age. We had health insurance, good prenatal care and a family happy to help out with whatever we needed.

Once admitted Christina got the good drugs and shortly after that she got the epidural, yippee!!! We sat and smiled at each other, talked about all sorts of things and waited. Plenty of students came in during the process to observe, ask questions and comfort the both of us. I must say the doctors, nurses and students were fantastic, each and every one of them. Once the epidural set in Christina faded off to sleep around midnight and I followed shortly thereafter. I woke at about 5am and she was up an hour or so later. After a check by the attending physician it was clear that she wasn't progressing nearly as well as they would have likes. She had been in some form or another of labor for the better part of 18 hours and she was only 7cm dilated so the attending gave her Petosin (sp?) a drug designed to complete dilation and facilitate the birth. Once they did this I went outside to make a quick couple of calls to our mothers who would kill me if they weren't able to be in the room the second it was ok.

Maybe this is the right time to mention something we had been worried about for a couple of months. During one of Christina's ultrasounds, the doctor was concerned because one of the kidneys looked dilated, as if it hadn't completely formed. Now this is one of the most common birth defects and most people if born with the condition do just fine and live normal lives, some others have to go on dialysis. I've been living with one kidney since I was 9 and trust me I've suffered no ill effects. But of course it did give us something to worry about, and the point of telling you now is to give an explanation as to why the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit was on alert for our delivery. In fact they were going to be in the room so they could check him out right away.

The next few hours dragged along. By 10am both Christina's mother and mine had made it to Worcester as had Christina's brother Matt. They saw the two of us briefly and then went to wait in the lobby.

Now around 1pm the delivery nurse came in and started having Christina push, this actually went on for 3 hours. I couldn't believe how strong she was. A variety of attending physicians were in to observe and direct the proceeding but luckily for us our OB's office was right across the street and he was on call that day. About 3pm he shows up and checks things out, still only 9cm but he really wanted her to get going with the delivery, she was getting wiped out and he could see that. Honestly I was getting a bit worried. It didn't seem like things were moving along that well or that quickly. She had been pushing for the better part of two hours and all she seemed to be getting for her troubles was frustrated.

Another 45 minutes or so of pushing and no luck. It was then that our doctor asked her if she wanted some help. "Yes" and almost as soon as that, out came the salad tongs. And moments later he was out and being cleaned up, and checked out by the NICU folks and by 4pm I was holding my son. That last 15 minutes was a blur, but I can tell you that no less than 12 people besides me and Christina were in that delivery room, between doctors, nurses and med students. Christina was doing ok, it was a tough delivery that actually kept her off her feet for a while and the next couple of days were a blur. I couldn't believe how scared I was to be a dad. I mean it was cool (still is in fact) and I love my son like nothing else on this earth, but is there a more daunting a responsibility than parenting?

35 years old and my son will be 1 in a few days. I'll be 52 when he graduates from high school. I'll be 56 when he graduates from college (unless he goes my route, in which case I'll be 58). If he waits as long as I did to have kids I'll be nearly 70 by the time I'm a grandfather. But the funny thing is, in many ways I feel better prepared. I was very hot tempered as a young man, and I don't think that lends itself to parenting. My dad was 27 by the time I was born, at which point my brother was already 3 _ yrs old. He and my mom struggled to make ends meet for years. Now Christina and I aren't loaded, but we are both working and Cooper has never had to go without anything to this point.

He started walking the week before Christmas, and now he's really quite good at it. He's a happy kid. He smiles a lot and loves for us to read to him as much as he loves to play with balls, stuffed animals and musical toys. I hope he is that well rounded for the rest of his life. My one regret for myself is that I may have pigeon holed myself too early in life and not given other things a chance.

He a verbal kid too. He's less than a year old and he already has a vocabulary that includes:

Momma
Da Da
Ball
Kitty
Puppy
Beaver (that's a story in and of itself)
Bubba (bottle)
No
And Baaaaaaa for his stuffed sheep.

Is he a genius? Of course. no really, he's doing quite well in most areas, the only problem so far has been ear infections, he's on number 7 as we speak and once he finishes with his current round of antibiotics, we're going to start him on a maintenance dosage for the next 5 months. Hopefully that will clear things up, if not we'll have to start looking at getting tubes put in.

Christina and I get exhausted at times, the kid is non-stop movement, he walks and crawls everywhere (mainly chasing our cat Fenway). He is having trouble switching to the sippy cup from the bottle, but getting rid of the pacifier was no problem. We'll get through but it can be hard. We're definitely first time parents, but it's clear to everyone that we love him a lot.

Over the past year we have made some decisions, the most important being that Cooper is going to be an only child. We love him, but at our age we can't see dealing with all the 1st year stuff again. In fact it's clear from our friends that in many ways he's been pretty easy. He's been sleeping through he night since he was 4 months old (though he is an early riser) and he's got a great disposition even when he's sick. It's also a financial decision. We can provide well for one child, send him to day care and maybe even a good private elementary school (middle school and upper school are free for him where I teach). A second child would push the limits of our resources. And if we spread it out 3 or 4 years I'd be nearly 40 by the time child #2 made it's appearance.

Anyway, ramble, ramble, ramble. I love my kid. He's great, he's my buddy. I love waking up at 5:15am to here him cheerfully standing up in his crib saying "Da Da! Da Da!", it can't help but bring a smile to your face right?

It's funny though, one of the women who works at the dining hall at school is my age and her daughter is having her second child. 35 and a two time grandmother and the whole family on some form of public assistance. Ok, this is where I'll get myself in trouble. I am a bleeding heart liberal, but it just makes no sense to me that a 16 yr old with one kid that she is having trouble taking care of goes out and gets herself knocked up. I know the guy is just as responsible, but it should be clear to her already that they may not stick around. It's 2004, rubbers work. So does the pill, so does depo, you name it they all work. Sure they fail sometimes, how about using more than one form of protection? What's it going to hurt? Of course I guess it doesn't help that we teach kids nothing in school about this. Abstinence only right? Right. Anyway, Happy Birthday Cooper Albino Webb.