I’ve had two ouch moments recently that jolted me out of my relatively comfortable middle aged existence.
Last Sunday, moments after the 6th grade CYO basketball team I help coach won its quarterfinal playoff game, we huddled together outside the gymnasium for a postgame wrap-up. Coach Connor, who just turned 17 and plays JV ball at a local high school, also reminded the team how important our final two practices would be this week.
“We’re going to work on our inbounding and beating the press,” Connor said. “But I won’t be there Thursday.”
“Coach Martin and I can handle that practice,” I said. Coach Martin is the father of Connor. His other son, Patrick, plays on our St. Isabella’s squad.
From out of nowhere, my son, Miguel, swooped in with a major dose of reality. “If you two are going to run practice you have to pay attention this time. No talking to each other on the other end of the court.”
Ouch. Double ouch.
I looked at the team and saw grins on their faces. Miguel’s smile was wide and slightly sheepish.
“I think I was just dissed by my son,” I said.
“Well, it’s true,” he said.
And he was right.
Martin and I understand the game of basketball, but we couldn’t diagram or design a play to save our lives. That is Connor’s territory. He lives and breathes basketball. Before our first round playoff game he said to me, “I was up playing basketball last night until midnight.”
Not video game basketball. Not on the computer. But real live bouncing the ball on the hardwood inside some school gym basketball for serious aficionados basketball.
So Martin and I gladly step aside at the practices when Connor is there, and what else can the two of do but converse about life, love, and avoiding serious prostrate issues for two men at or near 50?
But Miguel’s semi-serious admonition was a wake-up call for me. Then Martin called me Monday morning as I was driving Miguel and a neighbor to school.
“Maybe we could move practice to another day,” he said. “Then Jacob and Kendal (our two big men) can be there.” Both of them have never been able to practice on Wednesdays because of a previous extracurricular activity.
So Martin and I agreed to switch the practice to Tuesday and keep our usual Thursday schedule. Then the proverbial shoe dropped.
“But Connor and I won’t be there Thursday. We’re going to see the Warriors. Connor’s a big Brandon Roy fan. The Warriors are playing his team, the Trailblazers.”
Then the other shoe dropped and I nearly careened off the side of the road.
“And Connor won’t be at the game on Saturday,” Martin continued. “He’s got the SATs.”
When I shared the conversation with Miguel before we turned into his school, all he said was, “You better take notes at practice on Tuesday.”
Ouch.
Martin and I are on our own this Saturday bright and early for the first semifinal matchup at 9 am. If we win, we play in the championship game on Sunday afternoon. If we lose, we busy ourselves with Little League baseball, which began in late January, with regular season games beginning this weekend.
My next ouch moment occurred last night at work. Verna went into San Francisco for a special talk sponsored by her breast cancer support group. So I had the kids with me because I needed to work later, until 6:30. Normally I work until five or so, but one of my co-workers is off this week due to a death in his family. So I have to cover his hours, as I am his supervisor and those hours are at the front desk of a retirement facility, which must always be manned, as it were.
I brought Miguel with me after his baseball practice, which lasted fifteen minutes (batting practice). Verna dropped Maya off en route to her event. At one point, Maya came up to the front desk while I was talking to a private duty aide. The aide, a nursing student at a nearby university, said, “Oh, is this your granddaughter?”
I nearly choked.
“Granddaughter?” I asked. “I’m going to have to bar you from the building.”
I know I am Senior Dad, father of a 4-year old and four weeks from turning 51, but grandfather? OK, I know it’s quite possible. Verna and I met a 43-year old woman two years ago in Cabo who has eight grandchildren. I have cousins younger than I am with grandchildren. And my brother-in-law, who isn’t yet 50, has a one-year-old granddaughter.
After I recovered from the shock of her remark, which was quite innocent, she said something about her age, 33. I quickly did the math and figured out that when I was 33 my mother was 55. So being a grandfather at 50 is entirely plausible. Too plausible for comfort. But, as Miguel is only 12, he will meet a swift and untimely demise should he bless us with his off-spring in the next few years.
The hard part about being mistaken for Maya’s grandfather is that I still think of myself as somewhat youthful. Besides being in decent shape, I run around with the kids as much as possible. I play tag in the park, chase Maya up and down the slides, play several sports with Miguel, and race Maya upstairs in order to get her to bed.
Shortly after my grandfather ouch moment, one of my colleagues said to Maya, “You love your daddy?”
Maya said, “Yes.”
“What do you like about your daddy?”
“He’s silly,” Maya said. “He makes me laugh.”
Nothing like a sweet four-year old to nearly remove the sting of the grandfather comment. Then a little while later, as I shared the grandfather incident with another colleague, a young woman who is twenty and works as a housekeeper and server in the dining hall, she said, “But you’re not that old.”
“How old do you think I am, Veronica?”
“In your 30s.”
Give that girl a major raise. Promote her to CEO.
“I’m 50,” I said. “I’ll be 51 next month.”
She looked at me and said, “No way.”
The second ouch was now completely gone, having been pummeled into submission (for the most part) by someone whose mother is only 46. Hey, I had to ask. So I was essentially saved from an evening of sulking by two females not old enough to legally drink alcohol, one of whom is in preschool and recites the ABCs to help her fall asleep at night.
As for basketball, I paid serious attention on Tuesday and am completely ready to guide the boys tonight and Saturday.
Father doesn’t always know best.
Ouch.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Wednesday, March 3, 2010
Meet The Grandparents
My mother-in-law, Maria Graciela “Chela” Wefald, should have turned 86 today, but she died a week before Halloween in 2008. Verna went to Mass this morning, where the priest mentioned Chela, and planned a quiet celebration of her mother’s birthday after dinner. The four of us shared a fruit tart, topped with blueberries, kiwis, and strawberries, and filled with white and chocolate custard-pudding. Then we watched the 12-minute DVD Verna and her brothers commissioned for Chela’s memorial service, which was on Election Day 2008.
Maya was excited this morning as she readied herself for preschool about eating cake after dinner, but she was also focused on her grandmother. “Grandma died,” she said to Verna as Miguel and I rushed to get ready. “I want to get another grandma.”
Verna reminded her that she already had two grandmothers, my mom, who is Grandma Bev, and my stepmother, who is Bubbie (Yiddish for grandmother) Joyce. Maya was relieved and happy.
As Miguel and I dashed out the door, I started thinking about my grandparents. I was fortunate, very fortunate to have grown up with four grandparents within 10 miles of where we lived in Bloomfield, CT. And by the time I was in my late teens or early twenties, three of them resided in my hometown, so I saw them pretty regularly when I was home from college and beyond.
Unlike Verna, who saw her paternal (she never met her maternal grandparents) grandparents maybe 6-10 times in her entire life, I saw four grandparents at least 1-2 times a month, including all major American and Jewish holidays and assorted birthdays.
Sadly, Miguel and Maya only live near one grandparent, Verna’s father, Martin, who continues to play a major role in their lives, so they won’t have the same, expansive relationship with multiple grandparents as I did. And Maya especially did not have enough years with Chela, who absolutely adored her last grandchild. I won’t even mention that Chela did not live to see her first great-granddaughter, Lola Chela, enter this world on the final day of 2008.
But back to my grandparents: My mother’s father, Sam Bernstein, came to this country from Russia some time after the Bolshevik Revolution. His father, Benny, raised him because his mother wasn’t well physically or mentally. She died when Sam was young. Benny was often harsh and distant.
Sam died when I was 12 so I really didn’t know him well. I remember him giving me a Tonka truck when I 10 for my birthday (that was when Tonka trucks were really sturdy and metal). Another time my mom gave him a lunchbox for either Father’s Day or his birthday and he cried. He was not overly educated, but he loved to create and solve math problems, and then beam with pride when my mother or I checked his work.
My paternal grandmother, Fannie Friedman, was cold and demanding at times. She made great matzah ball soup and pickled tomatoes, which she left in jars on her porch. She died in 1988 when I was 29.
She was, er, frugal. She would send us to the store for a dozen eggs with two dollars and expect the change back. One time she treated me to bingo night at the synagogue and I won the coverall and $50. She said I had to split it with her because she’d paid for my bingo cards. Then one of my cousins asked me what I planned to do with the money. It was late August.
“I’m going to use it to buy school clothes,” I answered.
Fannie then gave me the other $25. “Since I was going to give you money for school anyway,” she said, “I might as well give it to you now.”
I loved sleeping over her house in East Hartford, CT, which she shared with my grandfather, Myer, Myer’s sister-in-law, Lillian, and another boarder, Simon Rutt, the father-in-law of Myer and Fannie’s daughter, my Aunt Sari. We always got to eat candy, play cards, watch TV, and one year, on New Year’s Eve I think they let me and a neighbor sleep in their bed.
Myer died in 1992 of congestive heart failure. He was 86. He was one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met. After he retired he continued to work part-time as an aide to physically disabled adults. He regularly chauffeured people to synagogue for morning and evening prayers, no matter the weather. He religiously cut coupons out of the newspaper and either shared them with family, used them himself, or left them on the items in the stores.
He never stopped talking about how great Roosevelt’s New Deal had been for working people. He drove a delivery truck for 35 years for Drake’s Cakes, which meant we always had ample supplies of Hostess-like coffee cakes, devil’s food cakes filled with crème, and fruit pies. He always straightened out the Drake’s displays in whatever store we were in, whether it was his day off or past his retirement.
For a year after he died, I wanted to ask my father, as had been my tradition during our long-distance phone calls, how Zadie (Yiddish for grandfather) was doing. As I type this, a framed photograph of Myer Friedman, his face grinning down at me, hangs to my right.
My maternal grandmother, Ida Bernstein, was the other most compassionate person I’ve ever known. She migrated to this country from Poland in 1921. She spoke no English and didn’t understand anything about American customs or cuisine. When someone gave her a banana for the first time, she didn’t know what it was so she threw it under the table.
She, too, loved to cook. She made great spaghetti and meatballs, matzah ball soup, kasha and varnishkes (buckwheat groats and bowtie pasta), pudding, and jello. She kept kosher, but was never dogmatic about her religious beliefs and practices. She was one of the few people in my family who was truly excited when I married a wonderful Catholic girl because she knew how happy I was with Verna.
When she sent us to the store for a couple of groceries, she gave us $10 and always insisted we keep the change. One year, when I was 15 or so, I spent the night with her on New Year’s Eve and we made cookies at midnight and proclaimed that we were the first to bake cookies in the New Year.
She inspired me with her devotion to Judaism and her acceptance and respect for all people. She never went beyond high school, but she listened religiously to informative radio talk shows, read the newspaper daily, and watched the news at night.
We brought Miguel cross country when he was six months old in 1998 to meet his great-grandmother, who lived then in the Hebrew Home in West Hartford, CT. After cleaning him up following a massive poop on the sidewalk of the Home, we surprised Ida in her room. She immediately exclaimed, “The baby, the baby, you brought the baby.” We were there with my mother, stepfather, brother, and sister-in-law, and everyone was crying joyfully as Ida gazed at Miguel. We quickly posed for a photograph of the four generations together.
Ida died in early March 1999, just two weeks before her 90th birthday.
I miss all four of my grandparents, one whom I didn’t know well, one who was flawed but loved us deeply, and two who were amazing and deserved to be sainted in a Jewish-secular kind of way.
Missing them was certainly on mind as the DVD of Chela ended and I said to Maya, “You miss your grandma?”
“Yes,” she said. “I want to share my cake with her.”
Maya was excited this morning as she readied herself for preschool about eating cake after dinner, but she was also focused on her grandmother. “Grandma died,” she said to Verna as Miguel and I rushed to get ready. “I want to get another grandma.”
Verna reminded her that she already had two grandmothers, my mom, who is Grandma Bev, and my stepmother, who is Bubbie (Yiddish for grandmother) Joyce. Maya was relieved and happy.
As Miguel and I dashed out the door, I started thinking about my grandparents. I was fortunate, very fortunate to have grown up with four grandparents within 10 miles of where we lived in Bloomfield, CT. And by the time I was in my late teens or early twenties, three of them resided in my hometown, so I saw them pretty regularly when I was home from college and beyond.
Unlike Verna, who saw her paternal (she never met her maternal grandparents) grandparents maybe 6-10 times in her entire life, I saw four grandparents at least 1-2 times a month, including all major American and Jewish holidays and assorted birthdays.
Sadly, Miguel and Maya only live near one grandparent, Verna’s father, Martin, who continues to play a major role in their lives, so they won’t have the same, expansive relationship with multiple grandparents as I did. And Maya especially did not have enough years with Chela, who absolutely adored her last grandchild. I won’t even mention that Chela did not live to see her first great-granddaughter, Lola Chela, enter this world on the final day of 2008.
But back to my grandparents: My mother’s father, Sam Bernstein, came to this country from Russia some time after the Bolshevik Revolution. His father, Benny, raised him because his mother wasn’t well physically or mentally. She died when Sam was young. Benny was often harsh and distant.
Sam died when I was 12 so I really didn’t know him well. I remember him giving me a Tonka truck when I 10 for my birthday (that was when Tonka trucks were really sturdy and metal). Another time my mom gave him a lunchbox for either Father’s Day or his birthday and he cried. He was not overly educated, but he loved to create and solve math problems, and then beam with pride when my mother or I checked his work.
My paternal grandmother, Fannie Friedman, was cold and demanding at times. She made great matzah ball soup and pickled tomatoes, which she left in jars on her porch. She died in 1988 when I was 29.
She was, er, frugal. She would send us to the store for a dozen eggs with two dollars and expect the change back. One time she treated me to bingo night at the synagogue and I won the coverall and $50. She said I had to split it with her because she’d paid for my bingo cards. Then one of my cousins asked me what I planned to do with the money. It was late August.
“I’m going to use it to buy school clothes,” I answered.
Fannie then gave me the other $25. “Since I was going to give you money for school anyway,” she said, “I might as well give it to you now.”
I loved sleeping over her house in East Hartford, CT, which she shared with my grandfather, Myer, Myer’s sister-in-law, Lillian, and another boarder, Simon Rutt, the father-in-law of Myer and Fannie’s daughter, my Aunt Sari. We always got to eat candy, play cards, watch TV, and one year, on New Year’s Eve I think they let me and a neighbor sleep in their bed.
Myer died in 1992 of congestive heart failure. He was 86. He was one of the most compassionate people I’ve ever met. After he retired he continued to work part-time as an aide to physically disabled adults. He regularly chauffeured people to synagogue for morning and evening prayers, no matter the weather. He religiously cut coupons out of the newspaper and either shared them with family, used them himself, or left them on the items in the stores.
He never stopped talking about how great Roosevelt’s New Deal had been for working people. He drove a delivery truck for 35 years for Drake’s Cakes, which meant we always had ample supplies of Hostess-like coffee cakes, devil’s food cakes filled with crème, and fruit pies. He always straightened out the Drake’s displays in whatever store we were in, whether it was his day off or past his retirement.
For a year after he died, I wanted to ask my father, as had been my tradition during our long-distance phone calls, how Zadie (Yiddish for grandfather) was doing. As I type this, a framed photograph of Myer Friedman, his face grinning down at me, hangs to my right.
My maternal grandmother, Ida Bernstein, was the other most compassionate person I’ve ever known. She migrated to this country from Poland in 1921. She spoke no English and didn’t understand anything about American customs or cuisine. When someone gave her a banana for the first time, she didn’t know what it was so she threw it under the table.
She, too, loved to cook. She made great spaghetti and meatballs, matzah ball soup, kasha and varnishkes (buckwheat groats and bowtie pasta), pudding, and jello. She kept kosher, but was never dogmatic about her religious beliefs and practices. She was one of the few people in my family who was truly excited when I married a wonderful Catholic girl because she knew how happy I was with Verna.
When she sent us to the store for a couple of groceries, she gave us $10 and always insisted we keep the change. One year, when I was 15 or so, I spent the night with her on New Year’s Eve and we made cookies at midnight and proclaimed that we were the first to bake cookies in the New Year.
She inspired me with her devotion to Judaism and her acceptance and respect for all people. She never went beyond high school, but she listened religiously to informative radio talk shows, read the newspaper daily, and watched the news at night.
We brought Miguel cross country when he was six months old in 1998 to meet his great-grandmother, who lived then in the Hebrew Home in West Hartford, CT. After cleaning him up following a massive poop on the sidewalk of the Home, we surprised Ida in her room. She immediately exclaimed, “The baby, the baby, you brought the baby.” We were there with my mother, stepfather, brother, and sister-in-law, and everyone was crying joyfully as Ida gazed at Miguel. We quickly posed for a photograph of the four generations together.
Ida died in early March 1999, just two weeks before her 90th birthday.
I miss all four of my grandparents, one whom I didn’t know well, one who was flawed but loved us deeply, and two who were amazing and deserved to be sainted in a Jewish-secular kind of way.
Missing them was certainly on mind as the DVD of Chela ended and I said to Maya, “You miss your grandma?”
“Yes,” she said. “I want to share my cake with her.”
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Growing Up
While Miguel and I were watching the Olympics last night, I asked him, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
I don’t know what prompted me to ask, but maybe I was curious because I am reading a book about parenting (Becoming a Jewish Parent by Daniel Gordis). Of course, for some strange reason, I picked the most inopportune moment to query him: we were watching the four-man bobsled competition, in which the US earned its first gold medal in 62 years.
“An athlete,” he answered. “Baseball or basketball.”
I couldn’t help being a parent at that moment. “Do you have a fallback position in case you get injured?”
“A doctor,” he said.
“What kind?” I asked.
“One who works with kids.”
Yes, I beamed inside. My son the doctor, crowed the Jewish parent that I am. But I was a little sad, too. I wondered if Verna would live long enough to see Miguel realize his dreams and become a professional athlete or pediatrician (or any other choices he makes). Time will tell, I know.
When Miguel was six he announced that he and his schoolmate, Oscar, wanted to room together and become janitors at the zoo when they were older.
“We’re not going to get married,” he stated firmly.
“That’s OK,” I said, trying to be the supportive parent.
Later he said he and Oscar could always adopt children. I quickly went to Verna and said, “Miguel’s gay. And a chorus from Seinfeld erupted, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
And there isn’t. But I am a product of the larger society and radical-liberal-vegetarian-commie-pinko-Jewboy that I am, I am also imprisoned within very traditional notions of how life ought to be. So while I intellectually support equal rights for everyone, on a visceral level I was disappointed that Miguel wasn’t opting for the wife, two kids, dog, and picket fence scenario that has clogged my mind for so many years.
Verna probably said something about me overreacting, which was true, but, hey, I’ve refined anxiety and neuroses to award winning dimensions. And the reality is I will love and support whatever decisions Miguel makes, whether he is gay, straight, Democrat, or…oh, never mind, or becomes a Trappist monk.
I phoned Oscar’s mom, a friend of ours, and she just laughed. She hadn’t heard about his career goals, but she found it touching that Oscar and Miguel were close enough to ponder a future together.
Miguel’s revelation yesterday got me thinking about my dreams so very long ago. The first career I envisioned for myself was as a mechanical engineer. I have absolutely no reason why I chose mechanical engineering, because as an eight or nine year-old I had nary a clue what a mechanical engineer was or did. In fact, today I still couldn’t satisfactorily explain the details of a mechanical engineer’s job description.
The first vocation I recall choosing was that of consumer advocate. I wanted to be a lawyer just like Ralph Nader, one of my earliest public heroes. I loved that he fought against corporations that betrayed the public’s trust and cared more about profits than people. I even spoke about the legal profession to a friend of my parents who was a Legal Aid attorney.
The next time I confronted grown-up career goals was in high school. We had to take one of those seemingly useless personality achievement tests that determined, based on the answers we gave, what profession best suited us. My results came back as teacher-social worker-guidance counselor.
At the time, having just turned 18, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I “grew up”. I was fairly smart, but lazy and had elevated procrastination to an art form of the highest capacity.
However, that prognostication was pretty close to where my heart truly lies. I taught school for 12 years, have continued to tutor for another 11, and spent a year as a funeral counselor. Now I work with elders in an independent living retirement facility.
I guess I am really impressed that Miguel knows what he wants to do. Or at least he has an idea that may change, evolve, mutate, or dissolve several times over before he reaches adulthood.
We will nurture his dreams even if I was taken aback by his declaration. Medical school is so hard and the profession so demanding, that I wonder how he will deal with the challenge. Not that I doubt Miguel’s resolve, but so far he is happiest with a baseball, basketball or football in his hands or watching any televised sporting event. I can’t yet picture him hunched in a college library study carrel, sucking down massive quantities of caffeine and pulling another all-nighter as he struggles through biochemistry.
Last night, though, I was reminded that the present often bears little relation to the future. I ran into an old friend, whose son I taught 15 years ago. The son was a spirited kid, rock solid build, who, despite being super bright, couldn’t hold his behavior or focus together in class. After running a successful landscaping operation in the Caribbean for a few years, this “kid”, now in his mid-twenties, his proud father informed me, is currently getting his master’s degree at Berkeley in project management. The student I knew so long ago probably couldn’t have spelled the words project management (OK, I am exaggerating).
So, to borrow an Olympic motif, Miguel should reach for the gold (or silver or bronze or forego medals) and settle into a career and life path that satisfies his deep desires as a human being.
Yes, I am being corny yet again. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
I don’t know what prompted me to ask, but maybe I was curious because I am reading a book about parenting (Becoming a Jewish Parent by Daniel Gordis). Of course, for some strange reason, I picked the most inopportune moment to query him: we were watching the four-man bobsled competition, in which the US earned its first gold medal in 62 years.
“An athlete,” he answered. “Baseball or basketball.”
I couldn’t help being a parent at that moment. “Do you have a fallback position in case you get injured?”
“A doctor,” he said.
“What kind?” I asked.
“One who works with kids.”
Yes, I beamed inside. My son the doctor, crowed the Jewish parent that I am. But I was a little sad, too. I wondered if Verna would live long enough to see Miguel realize his dreams and become a professional athlete or pediatrician (or any other choices he makes). Time will tell, I know.
When Miguel was six he announced that he and his schoolmate, Oscar, wanted to room together and become janitors at the zoo when they were older.
“We’re not going to get married,” he stated firmly.
“That’s OK,” I said, trying to be the supportive parent.
Later he said he and Oscar could always adopt children. I quickly went to Verna and said, “Miguel’s gay. And a chorus from Seinfeld erupted, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”
And there isn’t. But I am a product of the larger society and radical-liberal-vegetarian-commie-pinko-Jewboy that I am, I am also imprisoned within very traditional notions of how life ought to be. So while I intellectually support equal rights for everyone, on a visceral level I was disappointed that Miguel wasn’t opting for the wife, two kids, dog, and picket fence scenario that has clogged my mind for so many years.
Verna probably said something about me overreacting, which was true, but, hey, I’ve refined anxiety and neuroses to award winning dimensions. And the reality is I will love and support whatever decisions Miguel makes, whether he is gay, straight, Democrat, or…oh, never mind, or becomes a Trappist monk.
I phoned Oscar’s mom, a friend of ours, and she just laughed. She hadn’t heard about his career goals, but she found it touching that Oscar and Miguel were close enough to ponder a future together.
Miguel’s revelation yesterday got me thinking about my dreams so very long ago. The first career I envisioned for myself was as a mechanical engineer. I have absolutely no reason why I chose mechanical engineering, because as an eight or nine year-old I had nary a clue what a mechanical engineer was or did. In fact, today I still couldn’t satisfactorily explain the details of a mechanical engineer’s job description.
The first vocation I recall choosing was that of consumer advocate. I wanted to be a lawyer just like Ralph Nader, one of my earliest public heroes. I loved that he fought against corporations that betrayed the public’s trust and cared more about profits than people. I even spoke about the legal profession to a friend of my parents who was a Legal Aid attorney.
The next time I confronted grown-up career goals was in high school. We had to take one of those seemingly useless personality achievement tests that determined, based on the answers we gave, what profession best suited us. My results came back as teacher-social worker-guidance counselor.
At the time, having just turned 18, I had no idea what I wanted to be when I “grew up”. I was fairly smart, but lazy and had elevated procrastination to an art form of the highest capacity.
However, that prognostication was pretty close to where my heart truly lies. I taught school for 12 years, have continued to tutor for another 11, and spent a year as a funeral counselor. Now I work with elders in an independent living retirement facility.
I guess I am really impressed that Miguel knows what he wants to do. Or at least he has an idea that may change, evolve, mutate, or dissolve several times over before he reaches adulthood.
We will nurture his dreams even if I was taken aback by his declaration. Medical school is so hard and the profession so demanding, that I wonder how he will deal with the challenge. Not that I doubt Miguel’s resolve, but so far he is happiest with a baseball, basketball or football in his hands or watching any televised sporting event. I can’t yet picture him hunched in a college library study carrel, sucking down massive quantities of caffeine and pulling another all-nighter as he struggles through biochemistry.
Last night, though, I was reminded that the present often bears little relation to the future. I ran into an old friend, whose son I taught 15 years ago. The son was a spirited kid, rock solid build, who, despite being super bright, couldn’t hold his behavior or focus together in class. After running a successful landscaping operation in the Caribbean for a few years, this “kid”, now in his mid-twenties, his proud father informed me, is currently getting his master’s degree at Berkeley in project management. The student I knew so long ago probably couldn’t have spelled the words project management (OK, I am exaggerating).
So, to borrow an Olympic motif, Miguel should reach for the gold (or silver or bronze or forego medals) and settle into a career and life path that satisfies his deep desires as a human being.
Yes, I am being corny yet again. Not that there is anything wrong with that.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
A Commercial
If you or someone you know is aware of anyone (at any time) who is interested in senior living at a wonderful retirement facility, please contact Drake Terrace (where I work), just 15 miles north of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, to arrange a tour. Please tell them I referred you: http://www.kiscoseniorliving.com/communities_draketerrace.asp
Monday, February 1, 2010
The Long (and Not So Long) Run, R.I.P.
I wasn’t exactly Jekyll and Hyde as a kid, but in an area of life I didn’t really like—school—I was a classic underachiever by choice. In an area I loved, loved, loved—sports—I just wasn’t that good. I was Yin and Yang and two seemingly disparate entities all wrapped up as one.
I spent most of my school years, through early college, leafing through the Cliff Notes rather than read The Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick in high school, or memorizing 75 Spanish words moments before the quiz, or taking yet another incomplete because I just didn’t do the work or study for the final. I was content to skate by on my photographic memory and general intelligence. And by the time I hit college, that wasn’t nearly good enough.
As for athletics, sure, I dominated the three neighborhood kids with whom I was closest in basketball, towering over them and swatting away their shots like a mini-Manute Bol. But put me into the larger pool of neighborhood or school kids who had some talent and I was, maybe, mediocre at best.
I was passionate about sports (and still am), but I froze up during basketball tryouts in 9th grade, struck out more often than not in Little League, and chickened out of playing soccer in high school after the coach asked me to try. He truly was desperate: the team hadn’t won a game in nearly three years.
I was also the guy who once scored so many points in a pick up game of basketball outside my cousins’ house in Massachusetts that the other team refused to play a second game. But I was also the guy who scored a total of ten points in the Jewish Community Center league in four years, and eight of those points came in one game, after which my coach blurted, “What’s gotten into you? Why can’t you play like this more often?”
My academic career was beset by intentionally missed opportunities, and my athletic endeavors were marked by, ahem, er, failure.
Until running.
I started running in 1978, several weeks after a conversation I’d had with the security guard in my college dorm. He was a retired firefighter, and he told me about a fireman with a bad back who had just won a race up the Empire State Building. I told him about a mayor in New Mexico who trained a year for a marathon.
Then I had an epiphany. I raced upstairs and told my best friend, Dan, “I am going to train for a year and run the Boston Marathon.”
He said, “So will I.”
So we wrote out pacts to each other and promised to train and run the marathon together. Dan had been a high school runner, so he could draw on his past. I was the underachiever who was usually picked near last for any organized sport. But I took to running like a junky craves his fix.
I didn’t have to be good or fast or graceful. The satisfaction and sense of accomplishment and victory came from just finishing a one, two, or ten mile run. I remember sprinting one night up the dead end street we lived on in Bloomfield, CT, and screaming the last 150 yards with blissful abandon, clearly in the throes of the fabled runner’s high. I slogged miles in the rain, or in the 95-degree heat with matching humidity. I once ran in a blizzard and someone called me crazy and I felt so proud to be doing something that few people did. And I was physically and mentally fit.
I loved running. I used to hold up my first pair of running shoes—New Balance 320s—in those first few weeks of newness and inhale their rubbery smell. Running was my friend, someone who accompanied me daily and often made me feel better. I met famous people while I ran—Frank Shorter, once, in a 10K race in Hartford, CT. I used to wave at the actors William Hurt (The Big Chill, Body Heat, Altered States, Children of a Lesser God) and Clarence Williams III (from the Mod Squad) as I passed them in New York City’s Riverside Park when I jogged during college.
More important than scrapes with fame, were the times I ran with friends and strangers. While I preferred to run alone, I’ve had running partners who have helped me as a runner and person. I learned how to stretch in college even if I ignored Marcia Markowitz’s advice then. She and I often went out for an hour or so after I picked her up at her dorm outside Barnard College. And my most recent running buddy, Kei, mother of four and ICU nurse, gave me an opportunity to talk about anything, mostly parenting and growing older. We teased and harassed each other and joked and cried together. She was a neo-natal nurse who couldn’t help but take some of her work home.
Running wasn’t always fun, but the benefits far outweighed the effort I sometimes needed to prod myself out the door. When I broke up with a girlfriend in the mid-80s and my heart was shattered, running daily in preparation for a marathon was a constant that aided my recovery. My life may have been falling apart in many ways, but running was there for me, telling me everything would be OK and I could still be a success.
If this sounds like a long-winded epitaph for my running life, it is. I found out a few weeks ago that I probably shouldn’t run again. I started having terrible back spasms in December and so I went to see a chiropractor. She took x-rays and showed me what I’d already been told by a Kaiser doctor: I had degenerative arthritis in my lower back. The chiropractor also said I had bone spurs, which she showed me, in my lower back and neck. We talked about how much pounding a body absorbs during running and the effect it has on one’s joints and muscles and tendons and ligaments.
“Will I have to quit running?” I asked her at that first meeting.
“No,” she said, “but you need to take a break.”
A few weeks later, though, her sub told me that running was bad, very bad. “I’m in a cycling club,” he said, “and half the members are former runners with bad knees.”
He said unequivocally that I should stop running so I can walk and exercise when I am 80. When my regular chiropractor returned from her brief business vacation, she didn’t dispute the other doctor’s assessment.
So I came home and told Verna, who is battling horrendous bone pain from her cancer and can barely move from the couch, and all she said was, “Consider yourself lucky. I’ve had to give up everything.” She said it without any rancor or ill will, just a nod toward the reality of her situation.
I drove to work and was struck by my utter stupidity. How could’ve I had said that to her? I called her up, for what was a quick conversation since we live so close to work.
“That was insensitive of me, venting about my running while you can’t even workout.”
“Yes, it was,” she said.
So I retreated back into myself and felt sad and wistful as I recalled so many wonderful memories of running and sweating and pushing my body beyond any limits I’d thought possible. I have completed four marathons, pushed my son in a baby jogger for nearly six years—rain or shine, jogged in Italy, Israel, England, Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica, and bleak Caliente, CA, a steamy backwater with two restaurants, a bookstore, a few motels, and a gaping sense that the town’s glory days died decades ago. I ran the day after the 1989 earthquake in the Bay area left Golden Gate Park littered with huge strips of Eucalyptus tree bark as an eerie calm hung over everything.
And now, for the good of my body, I probably have to say goodbye to a friend who helped me become a better person, someone who became an achiever and finished college and grad school.
Yes, I can still cycle and workout, but I will miss running, for helping me to believe in myself and returning that faith unconditionally.
I spent most of my school years, through early college, leafing through the Cliff Notes rather than read The Scarlet Letter or Moby Dick in high school, or memorizing 75 Spanish words moments before the quiz, or taking yet another incomplete because I just didn’t do the work or study for the final. I was content to skate by on my photographic memory and general intelligence. And by the time I hit college, that wasn’t nearly good enough.
As for athletics, sure, I dominated the three neighborhood kids with whom I was closest in basketball, towering over them and swatting away their shots like a mini-Manute Bol. But put me into the larger pool of neighborhood or school kids who had some talent and I was, maybe, mediocre at best.
I was passionate about sports (and still am), but I froze up during basketball tryouts in 9th grade, struck out more often than not in Little League, and chickened out of playing soccer in high school after the coach asked me to try. He truly was desperate: the team hadn’t won a game in nearly three years.
I was also the guy who once scored so many points in a pick up game of basketball outside my cousins’ house in Massachusetts that the other team refused to play a second game. But I was also the guy who scored a total of ten points in the Jewish Community Center league in four years, and eight of those points came in one game, after which my coach blurted, “What’s gotten into you? Why can’t you play like this more often?”
My academic career was beset by intentionally missed opportunities, and my athletic endeavors were marked by, ahem, er, failure.
Until running.
I started running in 1978, several weeks after a conversation I’d had with the security guard in my college dorm. He was a retired firefighter, and he told me about a fireman with a bad back who had just won a race up the Empire State Building. I told him about a mayor in New Mexico who trained a year for a marathon.
Then I had an epiphany. I raced upstairs and told my best friend, Dan, “I am going to train for a year and run the Boston Marathon.”
He said, “So will I.”
So we wrote out pacts to each other and promised to train and run the marathon together. Dan had been a high school runner, so he could draw on his past. I was the underachiever who was usually picked near last for any organized sport. But I took to running like a junky craves his fix.
I didn’t have to be good or fast or graceful. The satisfaction and sense of accomplishment and victory came from just finishing a one, two, or ten mile run. I remember sprinting one night up the dead end street we lived on in Bloomfield, CT, and screaming the last 150 yards with blissful abandon, clearly in the throes of the fabled runner’s high. I slogged miles in the rain, or in the 95-degree heat with matching humidity. I once ran in a blizzard and someone called me crazy and I felt so proud to be doing something that few people did. And I was physically and mentally fit.
I loved running. I used to hold up my first pair of running shoes—New Balance 320s—in those first few weeks of newness and inhale their rubbery smell. Running was my friend, someone who accompanied me daily and often made me feel better. I met famous people while I ran—Frank Shorter, once, in a 10K race in Hartford, CT. I used to wave at the actors William Hurt (The Big Chill, Body Heat, Altered States, Children of a Lesser God) and Clarence Williams III (from the Mod Squad) as I passed them in New York City’s Riverside Park when I jogged during college.
More important than scrapes with fame, were the times I ran with friends and strangers. While I preferred to run alone, I’ve had running partners who have helped me as a runner and person. I learned how to stretch in college even if I ignored Marcia Markowitz’s advice then. She and I often went out for an hour or so after I picked her up at her dorm outside Barnard College. And my most recent running buddy, Kei, mother of four and ICU nurse, gave me an opportunity to talk about anything, mostly parenting and growing older. We teased and harassed each other and joked and cried together. She was a neo-natal nurse who couldn’t help but take some of her work home.
Running wasn’t always fun, but the benefits far outweighed the effort I sometimes needed to prod myself out the door. When I broke up with a girlfriend in the mid-80s and my heart was shattered, running daily in preparation for a marathon was a constant that aided my recovery. My life may have been falling apart in many ways, but running was there for me, telling me everything would be OK and I could still be a success.
If this sounds like a long-winded epitaph for my running life, it is. I found out a few weeks ago that I probably shouldn’t run again. I started having terrible back spasms in December and so I went to see a chiropractor. She took x-rays and showed me what I’d already been told by a Kaiser doctor: I had degenerative arthritis in my lower back. The chiropractor also said I had bone spurs, which she showed me, in my lower back and neck. We talked about how much pounding a body absorbs during running and the effect it has on one’s joints and muscles and tendons and ligaments.
“Will I have to quit running?” I asked her at that first meeting.
“No,” she said, “but you need to take a break.”
A few weeks later, though, her sub told me that running was bad, very bad. “I’m in a cycling club,” he said, “and half the members are former runners with bad knees.”
He said unequivocally that I should stop running so I can walk and exercise when I am 80. When my regular chiropractor returned from her brief business vacation, she didn’t dispute the other doctor’s assessment.
So I came home and told Verna, who is battling horrendous bone pain from her cancer and can barely move from the couch, and all she said was, “Consider yourself lucky. I’ve had to give up everything.” She said it without any rancor or ill will, just a nod toward the reality of her situation.
I drove to work and was struck by my utter stupidity. How could’ve I had said that to her? I called her up, for what was a quick conversation since we live so close to work.
“That was insensitive of me, venting about my running while you can’t even workout.”
“Yes, it was,” she said.
So I retreated back into myself and felt sad and wistful as I recalled so many wonderful memories of running and sweating and pushing my body beyond any limits I’d thought possible. I have completed four marathons, pushed my son in a baby jogger for nearly six years—rain or shine, jogged in Italy, Israel, England, Hawaii, Mexico, Costa Rica, and bleak Caliente, CA, a steamy backwater with two restaurants, a bookstore, a few motels, and a gaping sense that the town’s glory days died decades ago. I ran the day after the 1989 earthquake in the Bay area left Golden Gate Park littered with huge strips of Eucalyptus tree bark as an eerie calm hung over everything.
And now, for the good of my body, I probably have to say goodbye to a friend who helped me become a better person, someone who became an achiever and finished college and grad school.
Yes, I can still cycle and workout, but I will miss running, for helping me to believe in myself and returning that faith unconditionally.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Pupusa Diplomacy
I don’t want to get too warm and fuzzy, but I do think we could ease tensions in the world if we increased our intercultural understanding and truly heard people from different countries, their stories, and their perspectives.
I had an opportunity to do exactly that last Wednesday morning with several women from Latin America in the kitchen of the retirement facility where we all work. Earlier in the day, one of the women, Gilma, who is from El Salvador, told me she was making pupusas for the staff appreciation lunch (my homemade blackberry pie was cooling in the prep corner).
“We’re making them at 11:30,” Gilma said. “Come and help.”
So I joined Gilma and five other women, who are servers in the dining hall and housecleaners. Although my mother-in-law was from El Salvador and my children are one-quarter Salvadoran, I had never made pupusas before.
I watched Gilma first so I could learn to do it right. She said grab some pupusa dough, roll it in your hand, then flatten it, stuff it with some zucchini and cheese, and then flatten it again. My first pupusa did not look round like Gilma’s. Mine were oblong, which is a polite way of saying sadly misshapen.
Gilma showed me again, and the key was rolling the dough again after stuffing it with zucchini and cheese. It worked and my pupusas looked similar to everyone else’s.
We made pupusas as the cooks and servers prepared lunch for the 108 residents of Drake Terrace, located 15 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
What was great about the experience was that even though I am a department head, the women were my teachers that morning as I deferred to their culinary wisdom. Cooking together helped break down barriers and erase any divisions that might have existed between management and staff. The women got to see me, wearing my casual dress pants and shirt, as one of them or at least just another person willing to help.
I was acutely aware that making pupusas or any traditional meal carries so much meaning for everyone involved. The preparers get to beam proudly as they replicate a dish from their native countries, something they learned long ago from grandmothers or mothers in villages and towns far, far away. The helpers, of which I was one, get to acquire new skills and, specifically, feel we were contributing to our multicultural potluck, which featured pupusas, pie, carnitas, tortillas, lasagna, brownies, and cake with white frosting.
My first serious intercultural foray was about five years ago after I joined a local Arab-Jewish dialogue group. Although I am very liberal, my views on Israel were chauvinistic and defensive. I held all countries, including my own, to a rigorous standard of human rights except the Jewish State, which I excused and defended with all the fervor of a militant.
But at one meeting, I actually listened to a woman born in a Palestinian village on the West Bank talk of the time Israeli soldiers forced her 70-year old father to remove some graffiti from a building near his home. Even though her father had had nothing to do with the incident, the soldiers threatened him with bodily harm if he didn’t scrub the walls. It was at that point I realized there were different narratives about the situation in the Middle East, personal stories and perspectives that I needed to hear and understand.
The Arab-Jewish dialogue group really changed me. I still support Israel, but I was able to see other views and my perspective broadened. Some of family and friends, of course, have accused me of abandoning Israel and colluding with her enemies, but all that fodder is for another blog entry in the distant future.
I guess I’ve finally learned something about being sensitive to cultural differences and perspectives in my sixth decade. My initial intercultural experience unintentionally didn’t go well. One of the classes I was taking at Columbia University in the early 1980s was Black Radicalism in the 20th Century, a 2 ½ hour seminar every Tuesday afternoon from 4-6:30. I was the only white male in the class. I was very interested in the topic.
But I was also in the middle of training for my first marathon (26.2 miles), so I often came to class with my energy ebbing after a 10, 12, or 14 mile mid-morning run. I would rest my head on the long wooden desk as class proceeded. Each session usually consisted of some contextual remark s from Professor Hollis Lynch, his deep Trinidadian voice exciting and comforting, before one student delivered a report on the book we’d all read, after which Professor Lynch helped guide the discussion.
On the last class of the semester, enroute to Professor Lynch’s spacious Upper Morningside Heights apartment for a Caribbean feast and fiesta, I struck up a conversation with another student, Henry, a nurse. We talked about the class and how much we enjoyed reading about Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Civil Rights luminaries.
Henry was just a bit surprised at how highly I thought of the course and my experiences each week. “One of the women in the class really hated you,” he said.
“Really? You’re kidding,” I responded. “How come?”
“She was really upset that you rested your head on the table. She said you never took the class seriously.”
“You’re kidding?” I repeated, and then I went on to explain about running long distances and my energy waning by the end of the day and resting comfortably before dinner. He understood and had told the woman she was mistaken. But then reality hit me with a stark slap, and I understood how easily cultural misunderstandings begin, fester, and can explode.
I would’ve rested no matter what course I was in, Black studies, Jewish studies, ship navigator’s trigonometry. Maybe that it isn’t how one should ‘behave’, but being disrespectful was never, ever on my mind. However, my female classmate saw it differently. I was not only studying her history, but we were learning about the specific and tragic experiences of African Americans, many of which she was familiar with on a personal level.
Henry and I agreed that we should have held a class within the class three or four times during the semester so people could air grievances and express feelings.
Fortunately, my pupusa making experience went smoothly. Probably the only ‘issue’ was when I looked at the steaming pile of pupusas before we began to eat. There were three kinds, zucchini and cheese, leroco (a Salvadoran cheese), and pork and beans, and they were all mixed together. Should I ask anyone to help me find a vegetarian pupusa and, possibly, risk offending anyone who labored over their preparation? I decided to grab the lighter colored ones, which were clearly not filled with the pork and beans, and plopped two onto my plate. They were delicious, and because I was unable to tell which one of us had actually made the pupusas I ate, they tasted even better.
I had an opportunity to do exactly that last Wednesday morning with several women from Latin America in the kitchen of the retirement facility where we all work. Earlier in the day, one of the women, Gilma, who is from El Salvador, told me she was making pupusas for the staff appreciation lunch (my homemade blackberry pie was cooling in the prep corner).
“We’re making them at 11:30,” Gilma said. “Come and help.”
So I joined Gilma and five other women, who are servers in the dining hall and housecleaners. Although my mother-in-law was from El Salvador and my children are one-quarter Salvadoran, I had never made pupusas before.
I watched Gilma first so I could learn to do it right. She said grab some pupusa dough, roll it in your hand, then flatten it, stuff it with some zucchini and cheese, and then flatten it again. My first pupusa did not look round like Gilma’s. Mine were oblong, which is a polite way of saying sadly misshapen.
Gilma showed me again, and the key was rolling the dough again after stuffing it with zucchini and cheese. It worked and my pupusas looked similar to everyone else’s.
We made pupusas as the cooks and servers prepared lunch for the 108 residents of Drake Terrace, located 15 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge.
What was great about the experience was that even though I am a department head, the women were my teachers that morning as I deferred to their culinary wisdom. Cooking together helped break down barriers and erase any divisions that might have existed between management and staff. The women got to see me, wearing my casual dress pants and shirt, as one of them or at least just another person willing to help.
I was acutely aware that making pupusas or any traditional meal carries so much meaning for everyone involved. The preparers get to beam proudly as they replicate a dish from their native countries, something they learned long ago from grandmothers or mothers in villages and towns far, far away. The helpers, of which I was one, get to acquire new skills and, specifically, feel we were contributing to our multicultural potluck, which featured pupusas, pie, carnitas, tortillas, lasagna, brownies, and cake with white frosting.
My first serious intercultural foray was about five years ago after I joined a local Arab-Jewish dialogue group. Although I am very liberal, my views on Israel were chauvinistic and defensive. I held all countries, including my own, to a rigorous standard of human rights except the Jewish State, which I excused and defended with all the fervor of a militant.
But at one meeting, I actually listened to a woman born in a Palestinian village on the West Bank talk of the time Israeli soldiers forced her 70-year old father to remove some graffiti from a building near his home. Even though her father had had nothing to do with the incident, the soldiers threatened him with bodily harm if he didn’t scrub the walls. It was at that point I realized there were different narratives about the situation in the Middle East, personal stories and perspectives that I needed to hear and understand.
The Arab-Jewish dialogue group really changed me. I still support Israel, but I was able to see other views and my perspective broadened. Some of family and friends, of course, have accused me of abandoning Israel and colluding with her enemies, but all that fodder is for another blog entry in the distant future.
I guess I’ve finally learned something about being sensitive to cultural differences and perspectives in my sixth decade. My initial intercultural experience unintentionally didn’t go well. One of the classes I was taking at Columbia University in the early 1980s was Black Radicalism in the 20th Century, a 2 ½ hour seminar every Tuesday afternoon from 4-6:30. I was the only white male in the class. I was very interested in the topic.
But I was also in the middle of training for my first marathon (26.2 miles), so I often came to class with my energy ebbing after a 10, 12, or 14 mile mid-morning run. I would rest my head on the long wooden desk as class proceeded. Each session usually consisted of some contextual remark s from Professor Hollis Lynch, his deep Trinidadian voice exciting and comforting, before one student delivered a report on the book we’d all read, after which Professor Lynch helped guide the discussion.
On the last class of the semester, enroute to Professor Lynch’s spacious Upper Morningside Heights apartment for a Caribbean feast and fiesta, I struck up a conversation with another student, Henry, a nurse. We talked about the class and how much we enjoyed reading about Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other Civil Rights luminaries.
Henry was just a bit surprised at how highly I thought of the course and my experiences each week. “One of the women in the class really hated you,” he said.
“Really? You’re kidding,” I responded. “How come?”
“She was really upset that you rested your head on the table. She said you never took the class seriously.”
“You’re kidding?” I repeated, and then I went on to explain about running long distances and my energy waning by the end of the day and resting comfortably before dinner. He understood and had told the woman she was mistaken. But then reality hit me with a stark slap, and I understood how easily cultural misunderstandings begin, fester, and can explode.
I would’ve rested no matter what course I was in, Black studies, Jewish studies, ship navigator’s trigonometry. Maybe that it isn’t how one should ‘behave’, but being disrespectful was never, ever on my mind. However, my female classmate saw it differently. I was not only studying her history, but we were learning about the specific and tragic experiences of African Americans, many of which she was familiar with on a personal level.
Henry and I agreed that we should have held a class within the class three or four times during the semester so people could air grievances and express feelings.
Fortunately, my pupusa making experience went smoothly. Probably the only ‘issue’ was when I looked at the steaming pile of pupusas before we began to eat. There were three kinds, zucchini and cheese, leroco (a Salvadoran cheese), and pork and beans, and they were all mixed together. Should I ask anyone to help me find a vegetarian pupusa and, possibly, risk offending anyone who labored over their preparation? I decided to grab the lighter colored ones, which were clearly not filled with the pork and beans, and plopped two onto my plate. They were delicious, and because I was unable to tell which one of us had actually made the pupusas I ate, they tasted even better.
Friday, January 8, 2010
The Warm and Fuzzies
One child regulates her body temperature backwards, the other sleeps with a fan on in his bedroom at night even in the dead of winter (where temperatures rarely dip below 30). Our kids may have things a bit wacky, but I love them with an ache so profound that it fills me with an awesome sense of joy and gratitude.
Maya became attached to a gray doggie sweater Verna and her father found after Verna's mother, Chela, died in late 2008. Apparently, Chela had purchased the sweater, with red rings around the sleeves, for Miguel in 1999 and forgotten about it. It turned out to be the right size for Maya, who wore it every day, to the park, to the store, to bed, which we interpreted as some kind of sign that Chela and Maya would always be bonded.
When the weather turned warm in November 2008, Maya insisted on wearing the sweater. As 2008 morphed into 2009, Maya wore the sweater. As the weather warmed up in the spring, Maya wore the sweater, which was now frayed around the sleeves and collar and dotted with holes. When we experienced one, two, three heat waves, with temperatures soaring near 100 degrees, Maya wore the sweater. Verna and I calculated the parental cost of imposing our will on a defiant child over a sentimental and blessed sweater. We let her wear it just about anytime, anywhere.
When we did have to yank it from her body, we gave her notice. “Maya,” one of us would announce in the evening, usually, “you won't be able to wear the sweater to bed tonight. We need to wash it.”
She relented, but not before she picked out a substitute: either her red one with white polka-dots or the fleece sky blue model that buttons up the front.
When we visited Connecticut and Massachusetts last summer, during the typical muggy East coast summer, Maya donned the sweater everyday. By then she was clad in a white one with tiny doggies around the collar, a suitable replacement for the gray one that was no longer wearable. Verna and our friend Amanda have plans to enshrine the original in a keepsake frame.
Now that it's winter, Maya still wears the sweater, but she often wants to take it off because she is too hot. "I'm sweaty," she will say at the park, or "I'm hot," even though most of us are wrapped in multiple layers and I never go without a hat.
The sweater does come in quite handy at times. Last summer, while everyone was viciously attacked by mosquitoes at Bass Lake at the edge of Yosemite, Maya was the only one not bitten. The sweater saved her, while even my brother-in-law's then six month old granddaughter could not escape the mosquitoes' wrath and hunger.
Maya's newest sweater of choice is another sky blue one, hooded and more like a sweatshirt, with a front pocket near the waist. Flowers dot the “sweater” that was sent to us by Aunt Sandy, a warm and generous relative by marriage who currently resides in the ICU of Hartford Hospital with heart and lung problems.
Maya's favorite sweater is another precious keepsake from someone who blesses our lives and whom Verna considers a guardian angel.
Miguel's gentle insistence on sleeping with the fan on could be a February kind of thing. My brother, who was born on February 4, 1963, always slept with the fan on. Miguel, who arrived 35 years later on Feb. 9, seems to be the same way. When it's broiling outside in the late spring or summer, we understand his need for the fan. But tonight, with temperatures hovering near 40, the fan is on. All Miguel says on cold nights is, “Don't forget, dad, to turn my fan off before you go to bed.”
I almost always remember. But sometimes Miguel wakes up in the middle of the night and turns the fan on. Then in the morning he will say, “How come you didn't turn my fan off?”
“But I did. You must have turned it back on.”
“Really?” he'll ask.
I mention these two body temperature examples because they are part of our children's quirky natures, the silly or fascinating or unique characteristics that usually make us love them more. Most of us love our kids deeply, and what I've realized over and over is how much I adore them and how much they add to our lives.
Last week, as I was showering before work and Miguel was brushing his teeth before school (Verna and I shower in Miguel's room), I said to him, “Miguel, you forgot to hang up your washcloth again.”
He often leaves his soggy washcloth in the shower overnight. I went on about mold and having to clean up after him.
“But I have you to do it,” he said with a straight face. “It's a win-win situation.”
I couldn't help but laugh, at his interesting logic and the cool smirk stretched across his lips.
Chalk another one up for the teenager-to-be.
Tonight when I got home from work, still wearing my winter coat, backpack and Red Sox ski hat, Miguel cranked up his iPod, attached to the docking station in the living room, and out blared one of my favorite hip-hop songs, Cascada's Evacuate the Dance Floor. Miguel pulled his shirt up and started whirling and twirling like a maniac. Maya became his mini-me, jumping up and down and kicking her legs out as she reached for me. I did the only sensible thing: I grabbed her hands and started rocking and rolling to the music. Miguel's faced was etched in concentration, Maya was giggling, and I was supremely happy, the recipient of another sublime moment of unconditional love for our two kids and a nearly overwhelming sense of pure happiness.
How did I get so lucky? I know that's a question most parents ask. The answer lies in nine year old sweaters and whirring fans and dancing with reckless abandon and appreciating the gifts offered by the universe.
Maya became attached to a gray doggie sweater Verna and her father found after Verna's mother, Chela, died in late 2008. Apparently, Chela had purchased the sweater, with red rings around the sleeves, for Miguel in 1999 and forgotten about it. It turned out to be the right size for Maya, who wore it every day, to the park, to the store, to bed, which we interpreted as some kind of sign that Chela and Maya would always be bonded.
When the weather turned warm in November 2008, Maya insisted on wearing the sweater. As 2008 morphed into 2009, Maya wore the sweater. As the weather warmed up in the spring, Maya wore the sweater, which was now frayed around the sleeves and collar and dotted with holes. When we experienced one, two, three heat waves, with temperatures soaring near 100 degrees, Maya wore the sweater. Verna and I calculated the parental cost of imposing our will on a defiant child over a sentimental and blessed sweater. We let her wear it just about anytime, anywhere.
When we did have to yank it from her body, we gave her notice. “Maya,” one of us would announce in the evening, usually, “you won't be able to wear the sweater to bed tonight. We need to wash it.”
She relented, but not before she picked out a substitute: either her red one with white polka-dots or the fleece sky blue model that buttons up the front.
When we visited Connecticut and Massachusetts last summer, during the typical muggy East coast summer, Maya donned the sweater everyday. By then she was clad in a white one with tiny doggies around the collar, a suitable replacement for the gray one that was no longer wearable. Verna and our friend Amanda have plans to enshrine the original in a keepsake frame.
Now that it's winter, Maya still wears the sweater, but she often wants to take it off because she is too hot. "I'm sweaty," she will say at the park, or "I'm hot," even though most of us are wrapped in multiple layers and I never go without a hat.
The sweater does come in quite handy at times. Last summer, while everyone was viciously attacked by mosquitoes at Bass Lake at the edge of Yosemite, Maya was the only one not bitten. The sweater saved her, while even my brother-in-law's then six month old granddaughter could not escape the mosquitoes' wrath and hunger.
Maya's newest sweater of choice is another sky blue one, hooded and more like a sweatshirt, with a front pocket near the waist. Flowers dot the “sweater” that was sent to us by Aunt Sandy, a warm and generous relative by marriage who currently resides in the ICU of Hartford Hospital with heart and lung problems.
Maya's favorite sweater is another precious keepsake from someone who blesses our lives and whom Verna considers a guardian angel.
Miguel's gentle insistence on sleeping with the fan on could be a February kind of thing. My brother, who was born on February 4, 1963, always slept with the fan on. Miguel, who arrived 35 years later on Feb. 9, seems to be the same way. When it's broiling outside in the late spring or summer, we understand his need for the fan. But tonight, with temperatures hovering near 40, the fan is on. All Miguel says on cold nights is, “Don't forget, dad, to turn my fan off before you go to bed.”
I almost always remember. But sometimes Miguel wakes up in the middle of the night and turns the fan on. Then in the morning he will say, “How come you didn't turn my fan off?”
“But I did. You must have turned it back on.”
“Really?” he'll ask.
I mention these two body temperature examples because they are part of our children's quirky natures, the silly or fascinating or unique characteristics that usually make us love them more. Most of us love our kids deeply, and what I've realized over and over is how much I adore them and how much they add to our lives.
Last week, as I was showering before work and Miguel was brushing his teeth before school (Verna and I shower in Miguel's room), I said to him, “Miguel, you forgot to hang up your washcloth again.”
He often leaves his soggy washcloth in the shower overnight. I went on about mold and having to clean up after him.
“But I have you to do it,” he said with a straight face. “It's a win-win situation.”
I couldn't help but laugh, at his interesting logic and the cool smirk stretched across his lips.
Chalk another one up for the teenager-to-be.
Tonight when I got home from work, still wearing my winter coat, backpack and Red Sox ski hat, Miguel cranked up his iPod, attached to the docking station in the living room, and out blared one of my favorite hip-hop songs, Cascada's Evacuate the Dance Floor. Miguel pulled his shirt up and started whirling and twirling like a maniac. Maya became his mini-me, jumping up and down and kicking her legs out as she reached for me. I did the only sensible thing: I grabbed her hands and started rocking and rolling to the music. Miguel's faced was etched in concentration, Maya was giggling, and I was supremely happy, the recipient of another sublime moment of unconditional love for our two kids and a nearly overwhelming sense of pure happiness.
How did I get so lucky? I know that's a question most parents ask. The answer lies in nine year old sweaters and whirring fans and dancing with reckless abandon and appreciating the gifts offered by the universe.
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