Tag Family

Timing Is Everything

Michael 4 Comments

Time’s Up

Yesterday for Easter, the family went out for dinner. It was a very good and we had just as much fun visiting and chatting at a table among other tables of families doing the same as we would have had at a table within one of our own set of walls. The only downside was that after the meal, after the dessert and coffee, after sitting back into a good stretch for a moment or two, as we waited patiently for our check, our patience ran thin as that patient wait ran to 20 minutes before we even spotted the person with our check to be in her apron pocket. Not for the first time did an efficient wait person who was always ready with a suggestion, always available with a drink refill, always timely with the next course, was nowhere to be found when the time to say goodbye came around.

 

AprilSnowThe Little Scamp

Yesterday was a hockey night and on the way into town as the late afternoon sun shone through the car windows warming the interior close to July levels I almost thought about switching on the air conditioning to have a good preseason run through knowing it wouldn’t be long before warm days become hot days. This morning, the day of the local baseball team’s home opener, we woke up to four (yes, 4 (!)) inches of snow. I know Punxsutawney Phil promised us six more weeks of winter but he usually orders them up consecutively.

 

Best of Two

Today is Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. Yes, it is. Really. To celebrate I was going to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch, something I do maybe once a year, usually on Peanut Butter and Jelly Day. Plans were going well. I got out the peanut butter. I got out the jelly. I got out the bre… hey! there’s no bread. Then I remembered that late night post hockey game ham sandwich assembled on the last of the bread and saying to myself it was ok, I’d run out in the morning and get some. For those of you following along, that was the same morning that found 4 inches of snow on the ground and me saying boy I’m glad I don’t have to out for anything this morning.

 

Sometimes the time’s timing is running a little bit late.

 

An Eggcellent Family Tradition

Michael 2 Comments

Holidays are great for traditions. All the big holidays have great traditions with lots of family time and activities people are willing to wait all year for. Thanksgiving, Christmas, Groundhog Day.

egg1But as is so often the case, the biggest seem to have the least. And Easter is the biggest for the Christian community for if not for Easter there would be no Christian community. But still the fewest and the least. There just aren’t those big events we associate with the holiday outside of the church.

It might be because spring is a horrible time for a holiday. The secular season has its own traditions more universal than celebrating a religious commemoration. Spring break, baseball opening day, and high school musicals all compete for the limited attention span of people who have just gone through too many weeks of snow, ice, and freezing temperatures.

eggsMy own little family is no exception. Although there are our every year church activities and things we do most of the time, we have but one family tradition we’ve done every year since my daughter was old enough to sit at the table and spill colored water about the kitchen. Dying Easter eggs on Holy Saturday. This year since my dialysis schedule has me sitting in a chair not at the kitchen table most of this Saturday, we rescheduled our egg dying for today, Holy Thursday.

Easter eggs have been a tradition in Italian households for centuries, long before there was an Italy. Early Romans used eggs in their spring festivals to symbolize new life as did early Persians and early Mesopotamians and early Africans and druids and pagans and probably cavemen. Christians just borrowed them because the symbolism works for Christianity too. And for the two of us it works because we get to spend a few hours in each other’s company and catching up with each other and with the season.

egg2Traditions are good for that. Connecting seasons with the people. Take the opportunity this season to start or continue your own tradition. Whatever season you want to celebrate, Easter, Spring or Baseball, can be a chance to make new or stronger connections with the people most important to you.

Happy Easter. (I pick that one.)

 

Pleased to Meet Me

Michael 10 Comments

In an effort to avoid the all day onslaught of football on television yesterday I stumbled upon on old episode of The Golden Girls where Blanche was researching her family tree. I recall my daughter having a similar assignment for some class in some year of some school. We got back a few generations on my mother’s side, but my father’s branch and both sides of her mother’s family stalled after two generations, just about the time the families arrived on American shores.

Tracing a family tree can be fun but back then genealogy was a lot of work. It involved going through family bibles and loose documents and asking questions of surviving friends and relatives of parents and grandparents when you could find them. For us it was further complicated by documents that were written in Italian, German, and Czech. Ancestry.com would have come in handy if it had existed then.

While I’m firmly behind the notion of finding your roots, I’m confused over the recent explosion of DNA testing to determine your ancestry. To me, a person’s heritage is what was learned from one’s parents. I’m American of Italian heritage not because some DNA inside me matches the DNA of some others who sent saliva samples to a particular lab, but because my mother and father raised me as American of Italian heritage. Although DNA testing is fine and dandy for determining lineage, there are many reasons why that DNA may not take a straight line to get to you.

For example, let’s look at a couple of the TV commercials’ reasons for why they think you should have your DNA tested and, to put it politely, blow them out of the water.

DNAFirst there is the one with the earnest sounding man wearing lederhosen and dancing in a German dance troupe. He had his DNA tested and there was no German DNA there. In fact he was Scottish and had to go out and buy a kilt. How could such a thing happen? Oh, I don’t know. Maybe adoption.

Then there is that equally earnest looking couple who were certain that the hubby half is Italian. Where would he have gotten such a foolish idea when his DNA clearly shows he is really “Eastern European.” The idea that nobody is certain of the actual separation of Southern Europe, Eastern Europe and the Balkans aside, there has been so much commercial trade between northern and eastern Italy and the Austrian empire over the centuries that the trading of DNA was inevitable.

Although you can’t deny that DNA is what makes us, it’s not our DNA that makes us. Oh, it gives us our hair and eyes, our build and bones, and our blood and sex types. But it’s our parents that give us our substance, our values, our reason for being the beings we are. Maybe that’s just as high as our trees need to reach.

 

Happy Early Father’s Day

Michael Leave a comment

Earlier this week someone told me how much she thought I look like my father. People always say family folk look like each other and most of the time the resemblance stops at having the same number of eyes and ears. I don’t often look at myself so I’m not a good gage if I even have eyes and ears but I do look at my father every day. On my refrigerator is a picture of my parents at a dinner some 20+ years ago. I don’t know if it’s the last picture they had taken but it is the last picture of them that I have.

Yesterday I looked at the picture then I actually looked at myself in the mirror and darned if I don’t look like him. It helps that we’re not too terribly far apart in ages, his in the picture and mine in the mirror. And it doesn’t hurt that he was always looked a bit younger than his age and I a bit older. But there he was, in my mirror, looking back at me.

When our resemblance was mentioned I remarked that I wish I could be like him rather than look like him. He was a remarkable person, in that he really deserved to be remarked about. Born the year that World War I came to an end he grew to be tall-ish, strong-ish, and with a year round tan courtesy of the fire and heat of the steel mill where he worked for 45 years. Until I came along he was the sole male in a house filled with women. He worked, he prayed, he played, he hobbied, he hubbied, he befriended anyone he met. He served country and community, but always it was God and family before all else. I have very few specific memories of things we did because it seemed he was always there. Rather than a specific memory I have one long memory from childhood to manhood.

He retired the day I got married. You hear so often that poor old Mr. So-and-So just retired and then died within a year yet he managed to get another 26 years out of life after becoming a gentleman of leisure. I don’t think he figured he would have lived as long as he did. He developed diabetes in the early 1960s when people died of the disease and had a few other bumps along the way after that. But it wasn’t illness that makes me think he lived longer than he expected. I think he figured that anybody who was born in a year that ends in something-teen probably won’t be around when the year’s first two numbers change. But stick around he did. Long enough to travel, long enough to see, play with and make a grandfather’s impression on my daughter, long enough to endure my mother’s various redecorating ventures, long enough to see her beat her own demon cancer. And long enough to make it just past his 88th birthday and almost to his 56th wedding anniversary. If you do the math you see that he was a little on the late side for marriage in mid-century America. I think he waited to make sure he would get it right.

Over the years he taught me how to be me. But exactly when or how I couldn’t say. When he died I can honestly say I didn’t lose my father. I lost my dad.

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?

 

Looking Back

Michael Leave a comment

Sometime toward the end of last year I mentioned the Real Reality Show Blog turned five years old. That happened on November 7 but I didn’t get around to mentioning it until much later that month. Shortly after that it became December and life got turned upside down for me. Again. I ended 2016 two days shy of actually being home from three separate hospital stays during the last month of last year. Hanging around for so many days in a hospital bed leaves one with only so many things to do. Read. Watch TV. Work a crossword puzzle or two. Roll over on top of the nurse call button. Think about life.

I hate thinking about life. Here’s why. Why is because thinking about life interferes with life. While I was lying about wondering “what had I done to deserve this” I got to thinking of life and the life I specifically had last year.

It started celebrating the end of the holiday season in a strange place. For the first time in 29 years I wasn’t in my old, wonderful house with a Christmas tree in every room highlighted by the 12 foot job under the cathedral ceiling of the natural wood finished sun room. And worst of all, I didn’t have all 37 of my nativities displayed. That’s because for the first Christmas after 29 years I was celebrating it in a miniscule one bedroom apartment so I could move about and function better in my new “challenged,” – screw that, make it disabled! – state. But then but the end of the year I got used to those not that miniscule quarters, I got used to working around the complex, I got used to hanging out at the pool, I got used to my new neighbors, and I missed those, that, and them when I wasn’t there in December.

In April I turned 60. I didn’t think anything of it. But for some reason my sisters thought I should have a party to celebrate that milestone. I look at milestones for birthdays years like 16, 21, 30, maybe 50, definitely 75, and by all means every year from 80 on. But I figured, why not. At least I knew I’d get a more extravagant meal than I was planning for myself and maybe even cake. Now, it happened that the last party I had thrown for me to celebrate a birthday was indeed at 30. (Hold that thought.) The selected venue for last year’s event had a guest limit of 25.I got to thinking how I was going to limit a guest list to 25. I pulled out my address book and mentally started drafting explanations to those who wouldn’t make the cut. After much serious review, and even more serious reflection, I handed my sister a list of 22 names. Thirty years previous there were three times that many people on hand to commemorate my becoming a thirtysomething. Had I or anyone got around to hosting a 50 year party I could imagine at least one guest for each lived year. Now, I couldn’t scrape up two dozen friends to watch me move another year closer to Medicare. And then the day came and those few all showed up and I realized these were mostly the same people who were around to see me turn 16 and a few years later, 21, and would have been among the crowd at 50. Friends. Old friends, close friends, real friends. Friends who saw me move not only from year to year but from trials to successes to failures to challenges to successes to every high, low, dull, and exciting phase of life. My life. And I hope they’ll all be there for 75, 80, and every one from then on.

Sometime in August I was at a routine doctor appointment. One of those that you get ready for a week before by going from lab to x-ray to CT to have as much of your insides available for the doctor to review as your outsides when you get there. She looked at the numbers and then at me and then back at the numbers and declared that I had a year, maybe, before my kidneys would go the way of so much else in my insides and I’d need the use of a dialysis machine to do what comes naturally to most others after a couple of cups of coffee. She was off by just a little. About 8 months. It was, in fact, while I was thinking all this in the hospital sometime in early December after I had been transported back to my hospital room from the dialysis unit after the second or maybe third of what would become a new thrice weekly event for me. But it wasn’t that much later that I reminded myself that the reason any doctors were even looking at lab and x-ray and CT scan results for the state my kidneys was that 15 years ago I was diagnosed with a pretty rare, chronic condition that feeds of internal organs like kidneys and if they found just the right treatment for me I had a 37% chance of living longer than three years. Somehow they hit it right and I was one of the lucky ones who got at least 12 more years so I could have a birthday party in a non-milestone year and all I had to do now was give up a dozen hours a week that I wasn’t doing anything with anyway and maybe make it to 75, 80, and a few more after that.

See, those are just a few reasons why I hate all this “looking back.” It just ends up finding the silver lining instead of dwelling on the uncontrollable like human beings are supposed to do. And it means I spent the entire 500th post of the RRSB talking about me. Instead of talking about the me you got to see in the past 500 posts. I guess I’ll do that next time.

Hmm. Five hundred. Not as compelling as 75, or 80, or all the numbers that come after that. But I bet somewhere there’s a word for that.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

It Just Happened

Michael Leave a comment

You wouldn’t think Dr. Seuss would come up when a 60 year old is looking back on the year almost gone by. Being just out of the hospital for but a few days I actually haven’t gotten all the way home yet. Since I live alone and am still a little while away from taking care of myself with a greater chance that I end a day in the emergency room rather than the bedroom, my sisters have opened their house to me so I can be pampered in the style an only son should be pampered…even at 60. But I digress. I think.

I was sitting alone in a corner pondering how I got to this place in space and time while the younger of the two siblings, the one still working the poor dear, was modeling the many holiday themed hats she was planning on bringing to work with her on the next day. You know the kind you see this time of year. The baseball hat with antlers that reads “Oh Deer,” or the one decked out in gingerbread cookies saying “Oh Snap!” As she dug deeper into her bag of headwear I got a greater memory sense of a story about a boy with a never-ending collection of hats.

It didn’t take too much more reflection that I recalled the hats indeed did end. The young man was Bartholomew Cubbins and the tale was Dr. Seuss’s “The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.” If you don’t remember it, it is the story of a young boy who cannot bare his head to the king. Every time he removes a hat another appears in its place. Finally at the 500th reveal he doffs the yet finest example and presents the highly decorated hat to the king and is rewarded with a bag of gold.

So, how do we get from a child’s story from the 1930s to my consideration of all that happened to me this year? The last line of the story tells the tale. Though they could never explain how it happened, “They could only say is just ‘happened to happen’ and was not very likely to happen again.”

And isn’t that really the tale we are all told?

That’s what I think. Really. How ’bout you?

All Dogs Go To Heaven

Michael 1 Comment

Dog gone it if it isn’t the most useful day of the year. Today, the third Monday of July, in the midst of the dog days of summer, is … hold that thought for a minute.

I have spent no telling how many electrons celebrating useful, special days that only a special interest group could dream up. There are days that deserve to be recognized and often get left in the shadows, like Groundhog Day (Feb. 2). There are days to honor those who truly should be but the governments of the world collectively have dismissed them, like First Responders (there are First Responders Appreciation Days and they vary by state and whether it’s an election year but Sept. 27 seems to be a popular choice). There are days to honor people you’d think could do with just their salaries as honor enough like Talk Show Host Day (Oct. 23). There are so many special days that 365 calendar days aren’t nearly enough so just about every day has multiple recognitions although sometimes you wonder if whoever assembled them had really wanted a special day to commemorate irony (like April 7 which combines National Beer Day with National Alcohol Screening Day (technically the first Thursday in the first full week of April, and isn’t that a designation that only the collective governments could come up with, which this year happened also to be April 7).

All of them worthy of being called special – if for nothing else than their dog and pony show aspects – but certainly not all commendable for their usefulness. So what about today would make one jump up and shout “Hot Diggity Dog!” It is in the recognition that even though you may not be able to teach an old dog new tricks, you can make sure that every dog has its day. And today that lucky dog is the one that is up to his neck in doggie doo.

The one in your dog house is today’s luckiest dog because today is Get Out of the Doghouse Day. For today to work the one who done the wrong has to do the heavy lifting. You know who you are. Put down the bone and apologize. While you’re at it, put down your cell phone unless you are going to use it to actually make a call. You don’t want to trust a chance to get back in somebody’s good graces to an e-mail, a text, or (Heavens, don’t even think about it) a tweet. You need a personal touch.

It’s a dog eat dog world out there. Let sleeping dogs lie and get back in the fight. You might have to work like a dog today but if you end up being man’s – or woman’s best friend again, it’s all worth it!

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Stops Along Holiday Road

Michael Leave a comment

It’s not quite here but if you haven’t already, you’re probably at least in the planning stages for your summer vacation. Have you noticed how we change our vacations through the span of our life? You may be still on your great journey so let me use my life as an example of one who has already journeyed the various stages of vacationing.

I was a kid during the time that station wagons ruled the roads and roads ruled vacation travel. Our vacations typically were to places where branches from our own family tree reached. Which worked out since we became their destination on their vacations. Most summers we loaded up the family sedan and set out on a day’s drive east or west. (There were no relatives south and a day’s drive north would have taken us out of the country.) Major attractions were riding lawn mowers and shopping at department stores different from the ones at home.

The teen year vacations were pretty campy. You know- boy scout camp, baseball camp, band camp, football camp. The camp years. The locations changed but the group didn’t. Later in life these were the memories that would make you appreciate the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt.”

During the college years there were no vacations. With kids in college for a dozen years running, my parents claimed the school year to be their vacation while we would work through the summer so we could all do it again the next fall.

Adulthood finally brought the real vacations. We travelled to exotic places like Los Angeles and Boston. For us that was exotic. One was actually sunny for five days in a row and the other had people who spoke in some language that wasn’t what we were used to hearing at home. Upon the arrival of my daughter vacation spots once again resembled family gatherings. Fortunately staycations were becoming the in thing (even if we didn’t have that catchy name for them) right up until her camp years began.

There was a brief period after my daughter graduated and set out on her own that vacations became exotic again. Since I was actually working and had some discretionary income, exotic actually included locations that required air or sea travel to reach.

And that brings me to the cusp of my “golden years.” Retirement, no commitments, no worries, no work, no time clock, no shirt, no shoes, no income. Every day is a vacation. And as long as I don’t travel too far out of the city I should get to spend quite a few of them on Holiday Road.

So, plan wisely, enjoy your summer vacation, and remember… oh heck, I forgot.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

Fishing For Memories

Michael Leave a comment

Trout season begins this week. Saturday specifically. In my state. I’ve never fished for trout. I’ve fished for walleye, I’ve fished for bass, I’ve fished for compliments. But I’ve never fished for trout. And that’s unusual for around here because there is a lot of trout around here. Of course, to catch trout around here you have to fish around here and I’ve never done that either.

Around here is huge on fishing. The county I live in issues more fishing licenses than anywhere else in the state, odd for an urban area but the numbers don’t lie. Even though the county sports only 10 percent of the state’s population it has ranked number 1 in fish licenses since 1919. Probably before that but that’s as far back as I could find records. For most of those years there were more fishing licenses issued in this one county than in the rest of the state combined.

I’m not a real fisherman – or fisherperson as the TV reporter reminded the viewing public of the start of trout season put it. I fish, or fished, once or twice a year and at what could at best be called sporadically over 40 years or so.

My first fishing memory was of my father taking me up into the mountains for an overnight trip with two friends of his and their sons. I didn’t catch anything. I’m not sure that anybody caught anything. I remember cooking something outside for dinner but it was probably hamburgers. After dark we piled into someone’s station wagon and went deer spotting and that night slept in someone else’s hunting cabin. That was the first fishing memory I have. It is also the first memory I have of doing something special with my father.

My second fishing memory came 20 years later and 20 states away. Floating in the middle of some lake in the middle of Texas were me and an Army friend in a rented bass boat. It had all that was required for fishing for bass. We had the trolling motor attached to the bow, the big Merc mounted on the stern, the electronic fish finder, the funny chairs that looked like bar stools. We got just far enough out to finish our to-go coffees and were when his pager went off. Return to base. His unit was being mobilized. In less time to write about it we were back at the dock, secured the boat, gotten to the car, and were two-thirds of the 15 minute drive to base. That’s when my pager went off.  Later that day we found ourselves as parts of one of the largest training exercises our base had mounted in years. We ate in the field that night but it wasn’t fish.

Another 20 years and in the middle of another lake, this one called Erie, I was one of a group of five pulling in our 30th, and last, walleye. After years of doing so, my friend had the planning down pat for this trip. We left the day before for the drive north, now mostly highway making it a relatively quick trip. Quick enough that we got there hours before anyone else. We picked up our licenses, checked into the hotel, and asked for wake up calls for 4 the next morning. That gave us twelve hours to meet the rest of the gang, have a few beers, have dinner, retell our lies from previous years’ trips, make our ways back to the hotel, and turn in for the night. What was much more than but felt much less than a couple of hours later we were back in the lobby with our coffees and headed for the dock. Our hired captain and his boat were waiting in the dark and we clambered in for the ride to where the fish waited in the dark. The lines weren’t all in yet when the first walleye struck. As he was being brought in another line was hit. The first fish was landed, pictured, and chucked into the well when number three hooked on. And so it went. Nobody remembered a year when the fish came so willingly to us. We had reached our limit and turned back to the docks before some other boats had begun their day. The picture of us with our racks straining under the morning take was on the captain’s charter company’s website the following day. A copy of it is still on one of my walls. A week later we reassembled in my friend’s back yard to fry fish and tell lies. That was the last fishing memory I’ve had. Three weeks later I was in the hospital where a surgeon took longer than we did to fish for his limit.

Trout season starts this Saturday. I’ve never fished for trout.

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?

 

Training for Turkey

Michael Leave a comment

The onslaught is coming and it is past time to prepare for it – it is Thanksgiving dinner! You don’t train for a marathon by sitting on the couch. You don’t prepare yourself for a presentation at work by going dancing. And you can’t call yourself ready for Thanksgiving unless you get those eating muscles in shape!

Yes, it is time to work on your feasting strength and stamina. You have to work that jaw, sharpen those taste buds, and most importantly, stretch those stomach muscles or you’ll be like the punt returner who failed to stretch his hamstrings before the big game – and that is, on the sidelines nursing unnecessary cramps while reduced to watching the action from the bench, or sofa.

I started my warm up routine a week ago by going to Sunday brunch. (Ok, it was my daughter’s birthday and brunch was her idea. But, hey, it got things headed in the right direction, culinarily speaking.) If you are just getting started you missed out on the opportunity to break in with a brunch buffet. Not to worry. Any all you can eat buffet will do. Breakfast buffets at your local casual restaurant are perfect to get things rolling. Just remember when you’re loading up your plates to concentrate on the three main Thanksgiving tummy stretchers. Those are turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie. These are easily simulated at breakfast by eggs, potatoes, and pancakes. Be sure to increase your return trips to the buffet so that by Wednesday’s session you are testing the limits of “all you can eat” pricing.

Breakfast is a good start but don’t ease up on lunch and supper training. No small salad with dressing on the side for lunch this week. Indeed you should be lunching on double-decker sandwiches with meats, cheese, and gooey dressings. I recommend keeping to the holiday spirit with turkey pastrami and swiss with cranberry/jalapeno dressing on marble rye.  For dinner, increase your eating power each day progressing through stuffed salmon to stuffed chicken breast to stuffed double cut pork chops. With gravy.

Follow these tips and those turkeys, stuffing, potatoes, veggies, salads, relishes, cakes, and pies, will have met their match this Thursday. When you push back from the table ad retire to the sofa or head out to the sales you’ll do so with the knowledge that once again, you have proven your power over poultry!

That’s what I think. Really. How ‘bout you?