Place to place

I'm sitting at my cousin JoAnn's house in Grass Valley, watching the sun come up. Well, not actually watching because that's bad for your eyes, but watching the light change and shift and gradually take over from the bluish glow that greeted me when I woke up.

I've thus far pretty successfully stayed on some semblance of east coast time, getting up around 6 and going to bed around 10. Hopefully I can adjust back pretty quickly when we return. I have a few days.

Yesterday we drove up into the hills to visit another one of my cousins, who lives up here in the Sierra foothills. It's really beautiful, and we spent part of the day just hanging out, then headed into two local towns.

For some reason, I had purposely not looked into these places at all. One can either say that I was allowing myself to experience them completely on my own terms, unfettered by others' opinions. Or you could say I was too lazy to do the research. Either way, even though I suspected that they might be old mining towns, since this is gold and silver mining countries, I was struck by how well preserved Nevada City was and what a wide variety of places you could buy really nice things that you don't need.

You've probably all been in these stores- accessories and home furnishings. The number of unusual cookbooks and bits of kitchenware and barware and decorative items, purportedly functional or not, available is pretty remarkable, as you can guess from my choosing to remark on it here. A lot of it was hippyish and new agey, but with nice clothes and lots of places to eat. All with what appears to be original buildings from back in the gold rush days.

We spent most of the afternoon there, then went to Grass Valley, which is not nearly as cute but is also stuffed with shops and restaurants. I was no chain places, including no chain hotels. Ronnie and I were wondering where all the visitors come from, because they are clearly tourist-oriented.

I can take a certain amount of the clothing/home furnishing shopping, but at this point I (and Celia) opted to check out the kitchen store across the street from the boutique. This was an unexpected and kind of mind boggling experience. Tess' Kitchen Shop is simply the best kitchen shop I've ever seen. Nothing else even comes close.

We stayed in there until it was closed, had dinner, came home and watched Guardians of the Galaxy and then had a nice long sleep.

Since then, I've been back to Sacramento and now on to San Francisco, where I now sit. A long, fun, disorienting day. Time for some good seafood and then home in the morning.

The Important thing

One of my favorite kid's books just popped into my head. It's The Important Book, by Margaret Wise Brown. The book is written from the perspective of a child, full of descriptions that begin and end with the statement "the most important thing about ______ is ______."  The narrator says that the most important thing about a daisy is that it is white. Other characteristics are mentioned, but the ultimate statement is repeated and definite. It's a brilliant way of starting an open-ended discussion with a child about the world.

Well for me, the most important thing about travel is that you are somewhere else. On Sunday morning at this time I am usually sitting in my den with my puppy, watching soccer. Today I'm not doing that at all. I am in a place called Rancho Cordova. And the most important thing about Rancho Cordova is that it is not a ranch. Unless of course the most important thing about a ranch is that it be filled with nothing but strip malls and chain hotels.

Okay, I'll drop that conceit for the moment, because it's not what I meant to write about. I'm here for the purpose of being here. That's different from the rest of my life, where I am where I am either because I own this house or have this job or something along those lines. Today I'm here intentionally, with intent, by choice.

This trip is a visit, rather than a vacation. A vacation is obviously about vacating something, about leaving, getting away and not being somewhere. A visit is about being somewhere, and in this case, being with someone. It's much more positive, don't you think? I'm here to visit my cousins and my 100 year-old uncle. Unlike other trips, where I fret about itinerary and time management, all I cared about here was getting here. Once in this place, where I've visited many times before, everything would work out.

My cousin and uncle live in the same house in suburban Sacramento that they've had since before I knew of their existence. She's a couple of years younger than me and we've been close since we were kids. We've spent time at their house (they have chickens),

gone out to walk around a cute little town, and talked and talked. I got to spend time with her kids and get a feel for what her life is. I did this with and without my wife and daughter who came along. It was a visit.

This turned out to be just the thing. I have been in a rut, as literally as one can be without finding a rut and getting in it. Since mid-November it's been head down and straight ahead in everything- midterms, new class, school administration, puppy care, Thanksgiving, one kid done with semester, one kid done with college and getting an apartment, school. Nonstop. Without even a moment to look up and see where it might end. It's an awful way to be and not at all what I try to do and to be. And I was feeling it would never end.

But it did end, and just the little break of getting here, hard as it was to arrange and execute, and visiting rather than vacating is restorative in a way I was not confident it would be. Part of that is just seeing my family and part of it is just the whack-upside-the-headness of doing something different.

And lame as it sounds, the most important thing about today is that I am someplace else.

Routine car rental, except for the car part. And everything else.

The whole scene was unlike anything I’ve ever encountered, though it’s completely plausible, so that makes it kind of unnerving.

We’d arrived in San Francisco on a nonstop flight from Philadelphia at around 1:30. This was all according to plan. San Francisco, like a number of airports, has a little train system that takes you from terminal to terminal and to parking and rental cars. It also meets up with BART, the mass transit system, so it’s all very handy. Unlike Miami’s execrable system, which requires you to walk the entire length of the airport in order to access the train, this one is just up a couple of escalators.

Its a pretty long ride to the rental car center, which in turn is almost shockingly poorly designed. Or maybe it was perfectly designed and somebody just misread the scale. “Oh, that was 1:100? I thought it was 1:10!” The train dumps you by this room that is about the length of the train and about the depth of it as well. This would work perfectly if there were nobody there when the train arrived, but that doesn’t seem likely, does it?

In this case, it drops us in a room 200- something feet wide, with about 20 feet between the entrance wall and the counters. When we arrived, it was completely filled with people. All of the companies had those awful but inevitable back and forth lines set up but with another line twice that length waiting outside the velvet ropes. Every car company had this.

I had Ronnie and Celia stand in line because although I thought I might have signed up as a so-called Fastbreak customer, which is Budget’s version of preferred service where everything is all ready for you when you arrive, I wasn’t 100% sure. That counter was on another floor. Another marvelous design element. There were not many people there, either on line or at the counter. I stood in line for a while. even though there was nobody in front of me, and by the time I got to the counter, I was starting to suspect that something was amiss. 

First, the the agent asked if I wanted a Mercedes. I said fine, as long as I didn’t have to pay extra. He responded, “How about a Mini Cooper?’ Much as I love the idea of a 150 mile freeway ride in a toy car, I said no. Finally, I asked what was going on and he replied that they pretty much had no cars. None of the people who were supposed to return cars had done so, so those people upstairs were all waiting for nothing. 

Finally, after quite a bit of scurrying around, they found something for us and pointed us out to the lot. We went outside and saw, well, a empty parking lot the size of an entire city block. There were literally no cars on the entire floor of the lot, except of course for a Mercedes and a Mini Cooper. They really had no cars. This is Budget and Avis combined, since they’re the same company. We walked to where the car was supposed to be parked, but nothing was there. Finally, someone drove up with our car, and off we went. The car was wet and had pretty clearly just been returned, washed, fueled, and sent back out.

We spent most of our drive to Sacramento wondering what was going to happen to all those people upstairs. There were at least 200 people on a line that wasn’t moving (I guess lines get long when none of the people at the counter can be served). I was still wondering this morning.

Disjointed afterthoughts (Written early on the morning of November 11).

It was a blur. It's still a blur and it's the next morning. I don't know that I've ever talked to that many people that I wanted to talk to or who wanted to talk to me. My brain is still spinning from all of the thoughts, my own and those of others, all the words, all the faces all of the pictures of my mother projected up on the big screen.

We all kept saying my mom would've love this. I'm not sure if she would've liked all the focus on her, but it wasn't like she hated having any focus on her. She just didn't think it was all about her. Which this wasn't either, it was about all of us getting together to talk about and celebrate the life of someone who affected many people.

People who came to this thing knew my mom for different lengths of time and with different levels of closeness. Those who have known her the longest were not surprised by much of anything anyone said. Those who knew her less well must've been shaking their heads in amazement.

A lot of people really really really loved my mom. On the surface of all it was a simple as that. But with her openness and her positive outlook, she affected everyone in different ways. She affected them in whatever way made sense for them. She knew it wan't about her, She was just a facilitator.

It seemed to start earlier faster than I had anticipated. Ronnie and I got to the city around 1:30 and walked over to the theater. It's a beautiful little theater, with a lovely lobby with a bar in the middle that made for a great receiving area.

I went inside the theater to get used to the space and run through what I was going to say, and by the time I came out to the lobby, it seems as if people were already coming.

Although I knew off the bat that my remarks would be inspired by all of the pictures that I scanned, it took me a very long time to actually come up what I want to say. It's complicated, you know, it was my mother. And like most parent child relationships it had its ups and downs, some lefts, some rights, some spins around that seemed random and needless and dumb but end up adding up to a life of some sort.

It was people I'd seen last week, people I'd seen last month, people I've seen last year, and people I've seen in the last century. Literally seeing people who I had not seen in probably 20-30 years. They all recognize me, want to talk to me and for the most part, I recognized them. I knew their connection with my mom and with my family and with me. There were just a ton of them.

The thing is, we never had a funeral or wanted to have a funeral. My mom’s end of life came in such a way that it didn't seem proper or I don't know, it didn't seem right to have a funeral. Plus my dad would have none of it, because we decided at the time the last thing mom would want to be a bunch of people sitting around morning her. That would have been completely antithetical to everything she stood for and everything she was. So we decided to plan a celebration, my brother, my sister, my father and I. We all decided how we are going to contribute to make it happen. As I mentioned, my main part was to scan all the old photos.

My brother focused mostly on picking the venue and deciding what the program would be. We would have a few key people speak- family and close friends, a half-dozen of them. And then we would open up the mic for anybody who wanted to speak as well. And the tone was not to be mournful at all. It was to be light, fun, uplifting if possible, but the kind of thing my mom would've enjoyed.

We started planning in the summer, and decided to do it in early November, before the holidays really got going and weather might interfere with people getting here, because people were going to come from all over. My sister had the task of whittling down the guest list, and cajoling my father into not inviting every single person my mom ever knew, because the theater only held 300 people.

So we settled the time, place, and guest list. wWe invited people; they RSVPed. it was happening some time in the future. Then suddenly it was time. The programs were printed, with people arranged to speak in a particular order, attendees made their travel plans, all that stuff.

Strip it down to the bare minimum and this is what it was. I stood in the lobby of the theater, greeted over 200 people. Then it was into the auditorium, where I sat down and waited my turn, got up onstage said some stuff. It was very bight on the stage- I couldn’t see anyone. 

Then I came down off the stage and watched the rest of the people speak. Some were serious and heartfelt. Some were funny, some were both. And mine, I think, was kind of raw and unhinged, but people seemed to like it. Then we showed a video with a montage of the photos I’d scanned. And the program was over. Right on time. About an hour and a half all told. We took some photos and then out to the lobby again, where I got to talk to all of the people I'd spoken to on the way in and many many more. For another hour and a half.

At this point, around 7:00, a select few, 70 of us all told, gathered for dinner upstairs. I sat with my wife and cousin and made no effort to circulate because everyone was coming to me.

Dinner was good, I think, though I don't really remember the food or eating. Talking, talking, talking and then about an hour after it was supposed to end, it finally ended at 10:00. And we came back to the hotel, I went out and bought a beer but didn't drink it and fell asleep on the end of the bed while Ronnie and Celia sat in bed and watched TV.

Looking back, that was one of the most intense experiences of my life. Not everything that everyone said was an emotional outpouring or deeply meaningful, but the cumulative effect was as if it had been. I feel completely wrung out. And now I'm left waiting for the blur to clear somehow.  All those people and all the stuff they said. It's simply overwhelming and pretty damned wonderful.

I'm one of those now.

I bought a car a few weeks ago. It’s not a new car, but it’s much newer than the car I traded in for it. And it’s much nicer too. I bought a 2011 BMW 328, which is classified as an “entry-level luxury” vehicle, whatever the hell that means. I guess it means that I’ve entered something somehow. I’m in the world of luxury vehicles and I can never leave.

But that’s okay I guess. Part of me feels a little sheepish- I’m not and have never been a car person. I mean I am in that I own cars and drive them, but they’ve never been anything I really cared about beyond their ability to take me from place to place. I’d been driving a 2007 Toyota Camry for nearly 8 years and had loved it. But one of my kids cracked it up and a few years later the windshield seal failed causing a leak that left the car with a permanent musty smell. It was old and beat and I was tired of it.

But a BMW? I only know one thing about people who drive BMWs and that is that they’re assholes. They zip around in their sportily little luxury car and make veryone else crazy. I hate them. And now I’m one of them.

And why wouldn’t I stick with the kind of car I’ve always bought? I guess I decided that at this point I deserved something a little nicer. I focused on finding a low-mileage used car at a reputable dealer. I had a list of several cars that I was going to try and looked at the BMW first because the dealer is 3 blocks from my house. And as soon as I started driving the car I knew that was it. There was no need to look any further. It’s 3 years old and has 16,000 miles on it, so it fit that part of the checklist. But what made it easy was the driving part.

I’ve mostly driven mid-level Japanese cars- Hondas and Toyotas. Very reliable and not unpleasant. They felt like they were designed from the point of view of creating a reliable, safe machine for transportation. The BMW feels like it was designed from a driver’s perspective, where the driving experience leads to the engineering, rather than the other way around. But really I’m not sure. What I do know is that the car feels completely intuitive to drive. I feel connected to it instead of just sitting in it.

That probably sounds weird. It feels weird to write. But it’s very much like how it felt when I got my bicycle last summer. As soon as I sat down and started pedaling I knew it was right, and I knew this was right too.

That said, it still feels weird to think it’s my car. It feels too grown up for me, though I’m nearly 60. And now I’m one of those people who drives a BMW. But as my daughter told me, my wife got a puppy and I got a BMW, so we must be officially empty nesters now. So I guess I’m one of those too.

Nothing about Derek Jeter

I've been in hibernation. Well, not exactly. I've not been passing the winter in a torpid or resting state. And how annoying is it to look up a definition and find that you then need to look of the definition of one of the words in the definition? I can kind of guess what torpid means, but has anyone ever actually used that word?

Oh good, I start writing again and already I'm ranting about something. So I wasn't hibernating; it only feels that way. I could blame it on the puppy. One of the best reasons to have a dog is that you can blame stuff on them. Or that I haven't done anything. But I have. I just haven't gotten myself sat down to write.

This takes me back to my college days. By the time I'd gotten to junior year and had figured out how college worked, I specifically took classes that had final exams instead of papers. Because exams happen no matter what you do. Papers only happen if you write them. Same with any other writing, apparently. No matter how brilliant my thoughts may have been, unless I write them down and publish them, nobody will ever read them.

So I'll eventually circle back to the other stuff I've done (buy a car, go to the next-to-last Allman Bros. concert, that kind of thing), but first I want to write about nothing about Derek Jeter.

My mom, as many of you know, passed away this summer after suffering with ALS for nearly 15 years. My parents have been major supporters of the ALS Association since finding out the nature of my mom's illness, and the New York chapter's main fundraiser is a sports dinner banquet thing that they do every year a week or so after the World Series. The MC is Bob Costas and they always have great guests. Sometimes I get autographs, sometimes I chat with the athletes (I went up to the tennis player Pam Shriver to tell her how much I enjoyed watching her play doubles and all she did was whine to me about her kids) and sometimes I just eat and drink and hang out with my dad.

Last year was a huge deal, because the guest of honor was Mariano Rivera, whom I got to meet and have my picture taken with. Because my dad is a big sponsor, we have a table right up front, and Mariano (we're tight now so I can call him by his first name) was at the next table. They always have security for the special guests. They keep you from asking for autographs while the speaking program is going on or when they're eating. Mariano had a guy stationed behind him and if you asked at the wrong time, they'd politely say that you should wait until after dinner or whatever.

So this year, Derek Jeter was an unannounced guest. I'm honestly not sure why he was there. He helped present something to someone, and he donated some items for auction (to quote the auctioneer, "Who wants to bid on some shit Derek Jeter doesn't want anymore?"), which I bid on in rather spirited fashion. He didn't utter a word that was audible to anyone. And he sat at the table right next to us with his post-adolescent girlfriend.

For this occasion, Mr. Derek Jeter was assigned not one, but three security guards. One stood behind, one to the left and one to the right. And you were not allowed to even walk past that side of the table. Now mind you, I think the lowest price of admission was $250 per ticket and the sponsors' tables were $25,000 for 10 tickets. That may actually be understating it. So it wasn't exactly a bunch of rabble there. It was a crowd of rich white guys in suits. The president of the Bank of New York, for instance, was the one who outbid me for the Jeter items. Business people and some sports people as well. This was not the tailgate crowd in Silver Linings Playbook.

So I was there for 2 1/2 hours and Mr. Jeter was kept apart from the other attendees for the entire time, though if you were persistent enough you might have been able to get the security guard to pass him something to autograph. I guess eventually they loosened up a bit because my daughter got her picture taken with him. But I never saw it.

So why was this guy even there? I'd call him a jerk, but this post is nothing about Derek Jeter.

Not quite as long as the actual ride

I've ridden the MS City to Shore ride a few times before. It's a supposedly 75 mile ride from Cherry Hill to Ocean City, NJ. It's actually 79 miles, but who's counting? The last two years I've signed up and prepared to ride their "century" route. This means adding some distance to make it a 100 mile ride. Centuries are a thing for cyclists. And it really is pretty miraculous that a person can do that, travel 100 miles under their own power in a matter of hours. 

Two years ago I got shingles two weeks before the ride and last year we decided to go away for a long weekend, so I never did it. This year, I had been preparing all summer to do the Century this year. I was trained really well as August ended, and then came Hurricane Ruby. The arrival of our puppy threw our schedules into a tizzy and my training into a wagging tailspin. 

So in the past couple of weeks I'd been wavering as to whether I was up for it. But ultimately I decided that, especially given that the previous two years hadn't worked, I should go for it. Because I could. 

On the plus side, since last time I rode this thing I've lost about 15 points and bought a lighter, faster, more comfortable bike. On the minus side, I'm older. But in the end, the fact that I'm almost 59 was additional incentive to get it done.

These things start crazy early in the morning, because it takes a long time to ride even 79 miles, much less 100. For me, anything above 15 miles an hour is great for that distance. I can do 20-30 miles averaging closer to 17, but then I'm wiped out. So do the math; 79 miles at 15 miles per hour is a shade under 5 hours and 20 minutes, not including stopping to rest, eat, drink and take, as they say, a nature break. So it's six hours or so. You need to start a 6 hour ride early. And 100 miles is a 7 hour ride. So Century folks start first. At 6:30 AM. 

Who doesn't want to go for a nice bike ride at 6:30? There were at least 1000 people leaving in that early group, and another 6000 or so to follow, though I guess some of them start further along if they just want to ride 25 or 50 miles.

These big group rides take a little while to develop. You start off in a big mass and everybody's going very slowly except for a few people racing around madly. The first dozen miles are through suburban neighborhoods and then you get out into the less populated area.

First rest area. One hour 17 minutes 19.9 miles. The rest areas consist of 5 main area. Portapotties, snacks, drinks, first aid and bike repair. I've yet to need the last two, for which I am thankful. At this point I'm feeling pretty good. The riding is easy- one of the reasons I picked this for my first Century is that it's flat. There are a few places where you're sort of climbing, but nothing that would qualify as a real hill. 

One thing I notice as I ride along is that there's never just one pothole. They definitely come in groups. On a ride like this, if you encounter a pothole you are supposed to call it out, kind of like a game of telephone. You're also supposed to call out gravel, water and road kill. Always fun to hear a sequence of "road kill!" callouts.  going to come up from time to time, mostly rest areas and sometimes at red lights.

Second rest area, 31 1/2 miles two hours flat. 9:07 AM. The times I'm reporting are times riding. They don't include when I'm at the rest areas. Just beginning to feel this a bit. I rode 30 miles or so several times over the summer, but my usual is more in the 20-25 mile range and 30 is never that easy.

Once you're past the second rest area, the race (I'm sorry it's a ride not a race) begins to stratify. The fastest riders are all ahead and the slower ones are lagging. This is when I'm happiest because it means there's not people whizzing around like at the beginning, when the fast riders who started late feel the need to get by everybody else in a hurry. You can start to feel the miles accumulating and the toll it's taking, but you're not in any tremendous discomfort.

Third rest area 46 miles 2 hours 55 minutes. After this rest area I have to commit to the Century. I'm ready!

56 miles three hours 34 minutes. This is a rest area only for the Century cyclists. It's smaller, in the parking lot of a volunteer fire department rather than a school or park.

67 miles 4:15. The Century loop ends back at the previous rest area. The essential pointlessness of this is not uncommon for bikers. We usually start and end at the same point. But to throw a 20 mile loop into the middle of what is already a very very long ride seems senseless to my legs and butt, if not my head.

78 miles four hours 58 minutes. At this point, by body is asking me a simple question. Why is this not over? 

89 miles five hours 42 minutes. Ok, I'll admit it. At this point, I'm questioning my sanity, though I haven't considering abandoning the ride. You can. At each of the rest area, something called the SAG Wagon makes regular stops. SAG supposedly stands for Supplies And Gear, but we all know that it mean for people who are sagging. They will load you and your bike in the back and drive you to the finish. From about mile 70 until now, it's been a matter of deciding which hurts most, legs, feet (all the pressure is on the balls of your feet if you're wearing shoes with cleats) back, hands or butt. 

Everyone says to keep changing positions to avoid pain. This probably helps, but certainly doesn't prevent anything. The one thing that is really encouraging is that even though I have continual discomfort, my legs keep recovering and seem able to muster whatever power is necessary to keep going at a decent pace. There were a few times where it required constant conscious effort, but I never it a point where I felt like I couldn't.

At this rest area they're giving out Biofreeze, which is a cooling gel for muscle pain relief. I'd use it, but there's not enough to cover my entire body. But amazingly, and not for any particular reason that I could imagine, I completely rallied after this last rest area. Stuff still kind of hurt, but my energy level improved overall and I no longer felt like I was dragging myself across the miles. Maybe it was just that I knew it was only 10 more miles and I hadn't been sure if there even was a rest area at that stage. And this was a good thing, because the bridges beckoned.

The trap of this ride is that the first 75 (or 95, depending) miles are pretty much completely flat. Then there are 2 arch bridges that span the sound on the way from the mainland to Ocean City. They are high and windy. on one hand, you like to see them, because it means you're almost done. On the other hand, not if you don't go over them.

Fortunately, one thing I've always had confidence in is my ability to climb a hill when need be, and I've been over those bridges a few times before. So I gathered myself and flew up one and then the other. I'm not exaggerating when I say I probably passed 400 people who were struggling or walking up. I have no patience for that stuff. Go up them fast and they don't take so long is what I live by.

Finish 102 miles 6 hours 42 minutes. Done! The finish is a little anticlimactic (not anticlimatic, which mean being agains weather). I guess if you have your family waiting for you and cheering it's different, but I do this by myself, which is a whole 'nother story. So I had some food and headed for the buses back to Cherry Hill. I was home around 6.

Long day. happy ending

Things change

There's been a lot in the media recently about how people are never alone anymore. The ubiquity of cell phones and other connected devices means people are never in a position of quiet solitude. And of course how this means the end of the world.  The reasons, about which they really can go on and on and on, is that the lack of any time for quiet solitude has been removed, and that therefore people will never get all the benefits that accrue from that. And most of that is mostly true.

The question really is does it matter? The answer to that is clearly, we have no idea. None, zip. Drawing conclusions when lacking perspective is a fool's business. One of the "scolds" who's article I read makes that point accidentally.

The historical comparison is usually the invention of the printing press, which changed access to written materials from the few to the many. He notes that compared to now, when smart phones and connected devices have become ubiquitous almost immediately, when Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century, it took for centuries for much of the world to be literate. Okay, so one of the major consequences of the mission of the printing press was not really obvious for 400 years. And we presume to know what's going on with connected devices now? That's just plain silly.

There will clearly be negative consequences of all of this. It's rare that things happen where there are no negative consequences whatsoever. The important question really is how do we make sure that we minimize the negative consequences and maximize the positive consequences. That's the money shot.

My wife notes, as does one of the writers whose rankings I read, that we are the last of our generation to even be aware that this is a thing. Nobody born from the 1990's on will know that there was ever a time that not everybody was connected all the time. The kids in my classes can't even conceive of the world without plastic, which is most of history.

The point is that this is likely to not be the end of the world. Things will change, people will change, and yeah, the rapidity of the change makes the consequences less predictable. But so what? All we know is that this is happening. Quit whining and make the best of it.

A is for Anything

Before I get started with this I just want to ask an important question. If I'm out of deodorant is it okay to just use Febreze?

I've never quite understood why back-to-school night is called what it is. The only people who actually go back to school are the teachers. The students aren't there and the parents weren't there before so how is it back to school? That being said, I enjoy back to school night. Not really the leaving home and going back to work at 6 o'clock at night and getting home at 10 part, but the opportunity to at least briefly meet parents and give them a sense for the experience the students are having.

I've always gotten along well with the parents at the school. I guess it's because I am, or at least was, them. I'm a middle-aged Jewish guy who sent his kids to private school, so at least on some level I understand the mindset. This is important, because understanding who you're talking to is just as important as understanding what it is you're saying. Sometimes more so. And there are definitely times when I understand the mindset of the person that I'm talking to better than my own. I don't know if that's generally true but that's just the way my brain operates sometimes.

I think the biggest problem I have with parents at our school at this point is their insistence that their child get A's. This is very Lake Wobegonish- where all the children are above average.I can't really speak for how other departments great, but in math at least, everybody wants their kids to get A's. Of course, everyone wants A's. A's are nice. They stand for some level of achievement. Or do they? If everybody gets them, they don't stand for anything. Or maybe "anything" is all they stand for.

I can't completely blame the parents for everything. It's really just a matter of understanding motivation. Let's go through this: pretty much any parent wants their children to be successful. There's a variety of reasons why parents feel this way, ranging from the biological to the pathological. Part of it is just nurturing your children, and part of it is perhaps living through them. And everything in between.

Okay, so if you're an American parent with a kid in high school, what does successful mean? Of course it means to get into the best possible college. And what do we hear from all the colleges? That the high school transcript is the most important thing. Not that standardized tests aren't important, and parents certainly do plenty to get their kids prepared for those, but the transcript is the big deal. And what makes a transcript look really pretty? Lots of A's. It's like Ricky Bobby. If you're not first, you're last.

But there's a big difference between striving for an A and insisting on one. And high schools sometimes encourage this, primarily by tracking kids. Our school doesn't do that in all topics, but it does it in some.The more appropriately you're tracked, the better your shot at an A. On top of that, the parents press the kids the teachers and the school administration to get their kids' grades as high as possible. It's fine that they want that, but that doesn't mean we have to do.

The net effect of this has been called grade inflation. There's a problem with that terminology, although it's accurate on a certain level. When you talk about monetary inflation, it means it costs more money to buy the same things. But with money, there's no top end. Okay so it costs $1.00 for something a cost $.95 two years ago but it's still the same thing. And there is no "correct price" for something. It's just a matter of what does it cost to produce and distribute and sell and make profit on. It doesn't really matter in any abstract sense whether something costs a dollar or 95 cents. But grades don't have that option. There's a top; there is no grade above A. So if you're inflating grades, all you're doing is pushing up the bottom.The net effect of this of course, is that the grades become meaningless.

And as a teacher, you can't be the only one standing against grade inflation. That will get you in trouble very quickly. So my challenge as a teacher, since in math at least, the grades are just a straight average of points achieved over possible points, is to make the assessments such that some people can get A's, but not everyone does. Because the purpose of the assessment is to assess, it doesn't make any sense to design a test where everybody gets an A. That doesn't tell me anything.

So that's a lot of rambling about this. I can't fix it. Unless people are willing to give up the crazy supposition that it really makes a big difference where you go to college, this is never going to end. And the fact that it's never going to end is the only reason I can't say it's not going to end well, because it's not going to end it all. I don't know if we'll get to a point where everybody gets A's. And I mean absolutely everybody. And then what should we do? Have AA's? It's too bad we started with the first letter. If the top grade was H, we could have added a G. But unless we reimagine, as they say, the alphabet, we're stuck.

Sign me up for a loan!

Just as a matter of convenience, I do a fair amount of riding on the Cynwyd Heritage Trail. I'm not sure why a former commuter train route now has heritage, but it's not a matter of any urgency to me. I ride it because it's close to my house, a round trip adds 4 miles to any subsequent ride, and the 2 mile steady 2-3% climb is good training. But it isn't exactly fun or visually arresting.

My favorite sight along the trail is a billboard ad for a bank that is meant not for the trail, but for the Expressway down below. It shows someone in a suit getting fired out of a cannon with a headline that reads There must be a better way to get a business loan. Now it's possible that this kind of thing has changed since I was in the business world, but in my time at Wharton and 20 years in business, I don't remember anything about cannons. Do people really do this?

On one hand, I find myself thinking, how did someone (1) come up with this idea and (2) convince someone else that it was a good enough idea to spend money for producing and displaying a billboard? I can sort of see where it would start. The client would say, we want people to know that they won't have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get a business loan from our bank. And the add guy might think, "Hmm, jump through hoops, like a trained animal at a circus. What else happens at a circus?"

So it's not completely off message, if the idea is to say, you don't have to do something borderline insane to get a loan from us. On the other hand, wouldn't it be more fun if you did? I mean, it would bring in a different kind of clientele. But getting shot out of a cannon sounds like way more fun that analyzing financial statements and determining credit-worthiness.

5...4...3...2...1...Puppy!

This post is different that the others because it's being written with a puppy next to me. We got a new puppy on Tuesday. This was all timed perfectly, of course. We had just spent Saturday, Sunday and Monday moving our kids into their college dorms and I started the school year on Tuesday. So sure, add an infant dog into the mix, that won't get in the way of anything.

Timing aside, I'm happy to have a dog again. We'd had one for 15 years that died in December, and it seemed like the right time to get another one, now in our second year as empty nesters. Meanwhile, of course, our kids are wanting to come home a lot to visit her. Not us really, just the dog.

This kind of topped off a headlong rush into the year. The crammed in craziness of it punctuated by an overscheduled in-service that kept us in meetings for three quarters of the first day and more than half of the second day. That prevented us, or me at least, from preparing for the first day of school to the extent I wanted to, and unfortunately, where once I could get a lot done in the mornings, now mornings are puppy PUPPY PUPPY! I think of all the dislocations, that's the hardest for me to deal with. Even when we had little kids, early morning was a quiet time for me. It was alone time. Not any more. I can get some alone time, but only after a couple of hours of puppy morning energy burst.

And then there's back to school. I wouldn't say that the in-service stuff was worthless, but it wasn't of tremendous value to me personally. The first day, we did a very nice, if 50% too long, exercise in listening. This is admirable, and I'm hopeful that it was useful for some people. Less so for me, for two resons. First, I'm always right, so what's the point?

But more seriously, this is a lesson already well-learned for me. I learned how to do active listening almost 20 years ago, and it's fully integrated into every part of my life, especially teaching. My whole classroom style is predicated on my listening to and understanding what the students are saying. But it's what I do all the time now anyway, regardless of the situation.

The next day was about how to deal with stressed out kids. That's fine, though I think it's far more important for the kids to learn how to deal with their own stress than to have us do it for them. I'm kind of tired of hearing about how the students are all stressed out, especially by their homework. Life is stress and school is a great place to learn how to deal with it.

More on this and the puppy later

Let them eat cheesecake

Okay, I admit it. I ate at the Cheesecake Factory. This required me getting over quite a bit of internal resistance. Aside from the fact that I never had any particular interest in eating at Cheesecake Factory, there was a recent article where to add the top 10 most unhealthy foods served at restaurants seem to be served at that chain. 

So suffice to say it wasn't my choice. However, I felt confident that I could somehow navigate their menu and find something that I would be able to eat without feeling disgusting. We got to our table and we're handed two menus, one with a spiral binder.

The other menu, which was just on folded laminated card stock, was called, and I can't even write it without gritting my teeth and scowling, the "Skinnylicious" menu. The regular menu items seemed completely innocuous. And the others in my party both ordered from there, one had an appetizer and entrée and one had two appetizers.

For myself, I ordered a Skinnylicious turkey burger. And opted to spend the rest of my calories on beer. The first appetizer for the other two seemed normal enough. Regular type portion size for appetizers. Entrée and the second appetizer however both came on plates that, and I'm not exaggerating here, were about 10" x 18" big. I've had chicken lettuce wraps before. They have them at Pod in Philadelphia and they're delicious. And make a nice light appetizer. At Cheesecake Factory, they come on a platter with approximately an entire head of lettuce, two full grilled chicken breasts, and other things to put in the lettuce including other vegetables, sauces, and, inexplicably, noodles. The entrée, the innocent-sounding chicken piccata, also came on what resembled a serving platter. Three sautéed chicken breasts covered with sauce, and an appetizer sized portion of pasta. My turkey burger looked like a three or 4 ounce patty ground turkey on a brioche roll with lettuce tomato and grilled onions and a salad. It was quite tasty and just the right size.

Nobody had any problem with the quality of the food. Everything tasted really good. I tasted things and will be having chicken lettuce wraps for lunch today. But now I know why everybody else in the restaurant looked overweight. If you ate like that even twice a week, there's no way that you could maintain a healthy weight. 

And it's completely needless. There's no reason anyone needs that much food. I suppose if you were one of those people who likes to go out and eat and then bring leftovers home for the next day, that would make sense. But this was in a touristy area and there was no reason to believe that anybody could do anything like that. I took the lettuce wraps because they're cold and can just be pulled together and eaten easily and quickly.

And then of course there's the cheese cake itself. Again, delicious. We did take those to go and have them several hours later. I, of course, did not order any for myself, because I could tell by the sheer weight of the shopping bag I was holding that there would be plenty for me. And in fact it would be plenty for me the next day also and perhaps the day after that, but we didn't keep it.

The point is, well I don't really have a point. I'm not one of those "how can you eat so much when children are starving elsewhere in the world" people. I just don't think the casual throwing about of extra food sends anyone a useful message. And it's genuinely wasteful. I don't understand it. I mean I don't understand the impulse. Who at corporate headquarters decides to bury people in food? In any event, I had my turkey burger, my beer, and two different kinds of cheesecake, so I ate very happily yesterday.

Where am I?

To paraphrase Alec Bings in the Phantom Tollbooth, I know precisely where I am. I'm right here, on this very spot. Aside from that though, I'm in Pittsburgh. Yes, Pittsburgh. Not exactly where I would expect find myself on any day, much less this one.

It's not a long or particularly interesting story as to why am here. Last week, my daughter asked if I wanted to go see ballgames in a place where we hadn't been before, and looking at the schedule Pittsburgh had the best option. We're seeing the game tonight and another one tomorrow afternoon and then coming home. And in a way, being here now is just another part of one of the weirder summers I've ever spent.

I was going to title my next post "what I didn't do on my summer vacation." I suppose I still could, but it seems less interesting now. And anyway, the point was not that I didn't do anything, but that I didn't really have a summer vacation. I mean, I did do this and that, I relaxed more than I relax during the school year. I didn't teach any teenagers anything, at least as far as I can tell, but it wasn't like up a restful break.

Some of that was external circumstance, some of it was my own doing. I suppose in a way it's all my doing. Not that I caused the external events, but that I reacted the way I did to them.

But all of that is in the past. The present is Pittsburgh. I have not been here in probably 25 years and never really spent much time here in any event. I once visited a school friend and enjoyed it, but that was my last experience being here and not just at the airport. I did for a few years fly in and out of here a lot to go to other places, but that didn't give me any sense for the city itself.

So after an easy trip, we took a taxi down town, notable because the taxi driver forgot to put the meter on. We're staying in a nice hotel in the central business district. This area has a very interesting mix of early 20th century and modern architecture. They definitely have a sense of style here, though it would be hard for me to put my finger on exactly what it is. The newer stuff looks like newer stuff, though in pretty interesting ways. Some of the older stuff is fun to look at. The train station in particular is remarkable.

The second photo is the original drop off for the train station, but it's completely blocked off now from traffic. Most of the building is now an apartment house. I didn't go inside. There really aren't a lot of trains to here anymore.

Pittsburgh, as many people know sits on the confluence of three rivers. I'm not going to tell you what they are. If you start typing about it into a Google search line there are literally hundreds of online questions about what are the three Rivers that converge in Pittsburgh the answers are pretty much all the same.

The place that I was interested in is the river that separates the central business district from where the baseball park is. It's the part you always see if you look at pictures of the ballpark and part of what makes it such an attractive place. I'll go into more detail on the ball game later but here's a picture of what it looks like from the side of the river.

There are three identical bridges crossing the river parallel to one another at two block intervals. The one in front of the ballpark, called the Clemente bridge, is the one you really see from the field. There's another one to the right of the photo. You can see the stairs up to it in the foreground. And then there's another one to blocks to the right. They are yellow and they're quite pretty.

More to come.

Rhymes with

So I've been through 17 photo albums and scanned nearly 300 photos out of them. Funny, of all the things that keep popping up is my first car, a green 1974 Dodge Dart.

For those who don't know about cars, 1974 was probably the worst model year of its era because it was the first year pollution controls became mandatory. To suggest that simply adding pollution controls to a car that was not designed for them was a bad idea would be giving far too much credit to the team at Dodge. It wasn't a bad solution. It wasn't any kind of solution at all. This was, by any measure, an awful car.

Why, you may ask. And why then does it keep showing up in Frank's old pictures? Well, the greatest failure of that particular car was its inability to deliver an appropriate mix of fuel and air to the engine. Again, if you haven't seen the Magic School Bus episode about how an engine works, this is perhaps the core function of an engine. The result of this inability was typically silence. As in the engine would just shut off. Fortunately, this only happened at times when you really needed to accelerate quickly, like if you were making a left turn when a car was coming in the other direction. Nothing dangerous here.

I should interject here that nothing I'm saying here is exaggerated even in the slightest. I shudder to think of the number of times that car stalled out when I was trying to make a left turn onto our road. It's amazing it never led to an accident. It also made it a challenge to negotiate hills, like that on our driveway, when the pavement was slippery. It was so bad that we called it, though not without some affection, the Fart.

It also had sticky vinyl bench seats and was in no way a comfortable place to sit. But it did feature the famed Dodge Slant 6 engine, which was renowned for its durability. Hence its ubiquity. It served the family for a good dozen years. I drove that car across the country twice. On the second time across, I had a head-on collision in Washington near Mount Rainier (not in any way my or the car's fault and nobody was injured) that bashed in the front end and bent the steering column. After some on-the-spot metal bending by the tow truck driver, I was still able to drive it south to California and then back to New York. Of course, if I turned the steering wheel all the way to the left it would just stay there and drive in circles, but that was the kind of thing you could adjust to when you were 20.

After I'd had it for a few years, it got passed along to my (younger) brother, who drove it out to Colorado, where he eventually wrecked it, twice I believe, and had it towed to the parking lot of his apartment building. A few weeks of heavy snow and a busy parking lot led his landlord to have the snowplow deposit all the snow where the car was parked, completely covering it as far as we knew.

A couple of months later, I was sitting in my Dad's office when he got a phone call. It was the Authorities. The policeman informed my dad that the Dart had been involved in an armed robbery in Brooklyn. My father said, no, the Dart is buried under 8 feet of snow in a suburb of Denver. But when it thawed out, sure enough, the plates had been stolen.

Sadly, that was the last I heard of the Fart. But it still conjures up fond memories for me to see it in these pictures.

What makes a Hottentot so hot? What puts the Ape in Apricot?

One of the projects I've taken on is scanning photos of my mom from my parents' old photo albums. Because Ronnie is pretty expert at photo storage and preservation, we have a lot of the oldest of these here to be reset into archival storage. In the meantime, I am scanning these images. After I do this I will go back and scan the images that my mom is not in (i.e., mostly pictures of me- see below).

Among the ones I'm currently working on is an album from our trip to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). My father went there for a year or so to do research for his doctoral thesis, which was about economics of the developing world. Once he was settled there, my mom brought me (I was about 20 months old) to join him.

I've seen a lot of these pictures before, more than I'd seen some of the other oldies (including those from soon after my birth), but what struck me now is how impossibly brave my parents, and especially my mom, were. Yeah, they'd run away to Reno on a Greyhound bus and eloped, so they definitely had some gumption as a couple. But thinking about my mom taking a toddler halfway around the world by herself is pretty astounding to think about.

I have to ask my dad how we got to Europe. We must have flown- he did. But there weren't any flights to southern Africa. The distances were too great for the planes of that era. So we took a ship, from London I think, to Cape Town, South Africa. Crossed the equator, all that. Then, we took a train to Rhodesia, where my dad met up with us. Just my mom and me. Like I said, pretty courageous.

Granted, I was the kind of kid with whom you could get away with this sort of crazy scheme. I was a happy, independent kid, and (especially) cute too. I'm sure I had my moments, but I wasn't a whiner or cryer as it were. Twenty months is a pretty agreeable age too. But still. Who would do that kind of thing now?

But I never remember my mom being fearful. She was resolute and positive, not stoic. She enjoyed rising to a challenge. She wan't always successful, of course. I saw her defeated a few times. But she was undeterred by any kind of setback.

One thing I can tell you about doing this project. It's a good thing I don't mind looking at pictures of myself. My dad always liked taking pictures and I was their first kid, but my god. Another thing I noticed is that my parents were pretty easy on the eyes back in the day. I mean, they're not like 'hot' or model gorgeous, but they were nice looking.

You can also see from the get go how close my parents were to each other. It's pretty amazing how well they did when they were separated. Once they no longer had to be away from each other, they seldom were.

The last group I did today was a bunch of pictures from my first photo album. I took pictures with a Kodak Brownie camera, got them printed, and my mom had me dictate captions. There's a few of my friends, some nice ones of my parents, and a few of my paternal grandparents in front of their store. Quite something to see. It was a whole different world.

This project, which I was afraid might be depressing, has felt more soulful, or soulfilling, perhaps. If nothing else, it reminds you of how important it is to really live your life, not to take things for granted and to go after whatever it is you want to reach for.

Time for the ruminations on death

I have a couple of friends who hate it when people ask them "so what do you do?" because either they don't like what they do or don't care or don't think what they do is worthwhile or just don't want to talk about it or whatever. I'm one of the lucky few who don't feel that way, and I don't cast aspersions. I just don't ask them about it.

For me, this summer has me reacting the same way to the question "How are you?" Since my mom died, what I get is more along the lines of "How are you?" The italics may be more or less subtle, but they're always there. This raises the stakes on my answer beyond what I would prefer from a casual sort of question, which in turn leads me to answer "okay."

From what I can gather, "okay" is about a step above "fine" on the adolescent rating scale, "fine" being one step above "miserable" in that context. For me right now, it's just shorthand for a lot of complicated thought.

What's the significance of the death of a mother with whom I was never super close and who has been a practical nonentity in my life for nearly 10 years now, when I'm nearly 60 years old? And yes, I know that sounds kind of heartless. It's not meant that way. I loved my mom and she loved me. We just weren't close and she'd been really sick for a really long time.

And so I have to deal with the possibility that it really doesn't have any deep meaning for me, at least on the most straightforward level. This seems sort of strange. Aren't we supposed to find meaning in life's big moments? Maybe, but it runs counter to the way I try to live. Not that the big moments don't have meaning, but that every other moment does as well.

What life lessons am I supposed to glean from all of this? I'll tell you one thing, the big events might punch you in the gut, but even if they don't, they spin off in ways that can kick your butt repeatedly as you continue along your chosen path. It's now that I'm beginning to understand that even though my mom's passing was neither sudden nor unexpected and was in many ways a blessing, it has made me think more about other people in my life who have either died or are simply far away.

Man, I hate what I'm about to write, and those of you who think I'm cynical at heart won't get it, but here it is.

Ruminating on death has made me feel more alive.

AAAAGH! How cliché is that? Ugh, ugh, ugh. But it's true. I hate being so obvious. But it's true. I don't think I've ever felt more open, both in terms of sharing and in terms of letting things in than I've been for the last month.

So if you were looking for something dark and gloomy, this ain't the place. I'm neither feeling dark nor gloomy. A bit challenged at times, but I can live with that.

Biking update

There's so much crap raining down at the moment (and rain raining down, for that matter) that it seems weird to write about anything other than what's in the news. But honestly, I have nothing to add. Like most people, I was in awe of what Robin Williams could do, but I have no special insight or connection. I liked his stuff. He was a really funny guy and obviously a deeply disturbed genius. Like many of us, I've dealt with depression at times, but not in any way that can bring any light to what happened.

So on I go to other topics, like bike riding. I enjoy bike riding, a lot in fact. It's the most fun real exercise I've ever done since I stopped playing basketball regularly. During the summer I ride around 100 miles a week, sometimes more. You can go far on a bike if you're not in a huge hurry. I could ride to New York if I was willing to spend the day on it.

Today, I had several interactions with cars that highlighted to me the uneasy relationship between cars and bikes sharing the road. Cyclists are rightfully terrified of what cars can do to them (though many of us own and even drive cars as well as ride bikes) and drivers often seem clueless about how to deal bikes, probably because they're never taught how.

So here are a few hints.

1.  You are not allowed to hit someone who is riding a bicycle with your car. I might note, you're not really allowed to hit someone even if they're not riding a bike, but let's try to stay focused. This is clearly a basic, seemingly obvious kind of rule. Yet cars often seem unaware of this, based on the way they drive. For example,

2. If a bike is going straight through an intersection, don't pass them on the left and then make a right turn at that intersection. This actually happened to me today. Then the person gave me a wave. I'm not sure it that mean 'sorry' or 'thanks,' but better perhaps to wait for the 0.75 seconds it would have taken me to cross the lane and then just turn. Which leads to...

3. Think of a bicycle as just a very small, incredibly underpowered car. Kind of like a SmartCar but more so. A bike has 2 legpower, which is less than 100+ horsepower.

One really difference though is that if you're driving on local roads behind someone driving slowly, you tend to wait it out. I drove for a couple of miles yesterday behind someone stubbornly driving exactly 2 miles per hour below the speed limit. At first I was frustrated, but then I got curious about the driver and was eventually rewarded with affirmation of my hypothesis that it was a teenager, probably on a permit, driving with their mom next to them.

With a bike, though it's different. Cyclists really don't like having cars following closely behind at the same speed. It makes me jumpy because cars are not as maneuverable as bikes and can't stop very quickly. I'd really rather that you go roaring around me.

4. It's okay to yell at a cyclist who runs through a stop sign, but only if you yourself actually stop. Honestly, 4-way stops are confusing in general. On a bike, I only stop at them if there's another vehicle approaching, because momentum is important. But I've screwed up and gotten honked or cursed out, and I probably deserved it. On the other hand, when I make an effort to slow to a near stop, drivers almost always wave me though, even if I shouldn't have right of way. I guess the show of courtesy and respect gets a positive response. I should try that in the rest of my life some time.

Three is most likely not a charm, but this is part 3

Where did that saying about 3 ever come from? You fail twice and then succeed the third time and that's some sort of charm? How about persistence and learning from experience? We send such inconsistent messages in this society. Sigh.

So somehow I found myself in Aspen on July 10. I had been in Aspen once before as a young teenager, late 1960's and remembered nothing about it. I don't think it was quite as chi-chi as it is now. It was a charming ski resort and I'm not sure what else. It certainly isn't near anything else.

I mentioned that this thing I was attending was called a retreat. I was viewing it as some sort of cross between an conference and a group therapy workshop. I actually can't write much about specifics here, because we took a confidentiality pledge. But I can tell you that by the time the first thing on the schedule came around, that I was not of a mind to retreat at all. I  had no intention of holding anything back.

This is not something I naturally do. I tend to be reticent in situations of any seriousness, preferring to stay on the periphery and listen. But I came into this situation emotionally raw and ambivalent about being there in the first place, so I just said what was on my mind. I'm used to people who know me paying attention to what I say because I'm a teacher and the students' families are paying good money to have them listen to me. And of course my friends listen to me because they're my friends, and I don't really care that much about anybody else.

But I was surprised to find that whatever I said resonated with a bunch of people. I think that has to do with the generational differences on wealth and philanthropy. The older generation, like my dad, never told their kids anything of any importance about inheritance and the like. I think what I said was along those lines and people responded.

The first night was a dinner and a warmup, but it set the tone for what happened the next day, when we explored our own particulars and commonalities in large groups, small groups and pairs. Maybe it was all interesting, or maybe I was just so deep into my emotional state that I couldn't help myself. But I found the whole thing pretty engrossing.

The schedule was a dinner and warmup, then a whole day of sessions, then another dinner, then a half-day of sessions. The warmup, where I first spoke, was deceptively simple- a bunch of yes-no questions where we had to stand on one side of the room for yes and the other for no. You could stand in the middle too, if you were willing to explain yourself.

It was a strange and interesting group of people, peers of sorts who never would have met under normal circumstances, which was the whole point. As displaced as I felt, it seemed okay.

The full day of sessions was pretty draining, and all of us (meaning my family) took a break at some point just to gather ourselves. We did not tell anyone about my mom at that point, though the organizers knew. It was very structured and kept moving, with very little in presentation form. Most was directed either self-evaluation or group discussion or a combination of the two.

I didn't really get in and around Aspen much, though I went for a couple of early morning walks. It's a pretty place for the most part, with a lot of varied and in some cases stunning architecture. Downtown was a mix of bars, restaurants and high-end stores. If you want to do a few tequila shooters and then buy some Burberry, Aspen's the place for you.

You know how sometimes things seem like a blur when you look back on them? This seemed like a blur even when it was happening, so now it's like a blurred blur. But I'll say one thing, it felt healing somehow. Maybe just to get out of the immersion with my mom's death, and to get away from it with some family members made it feel okay. It's hard to describe it.

So by the middle of July I was spent, pure and simple. Just turned inside out would probably be the best way to describe how it felt. The rest of the summer has been recovering from that, I guess. As I write this I can still feel the rawness of it all. That's not all bad; a little rawness is good for personal growth, if that's something you care about. All I can do at this point is to try to make the most of it.

The second part, which has a working title of Part 2.

I'll be honest. I have trouble processing selfish feelings. I'm very good at prioritizing things on the whole, but I'm never sure where to place my own reactions and needs versus those of others. Part of me (I know Freud named the parts, but I'm too lazy to look it up) wants to put the Me Me Me stuff right on top. The more measured part of me wants my needs prioritized on roughly the same basis as everyone else's.

So in this context, I don't know how much of my ranting here sounds like whining about my own discomfort when others are suffering different sorts of pain. But I will not be deterred. Throughout the whole run-up to my mom's final days, I was a mess. I was stressed beyond recognition.

I was fortunate to have close friends visiting and distracting me to some extent, and Ronnie was wonderful. But the reality of my own part in this kept barging in. In short, setting aside things directly related to my mom, I was facing 4 nights spent at my parents' house, where the absolute best I've ever felt was profoundly uncomfortable. In whatever way one might be uncomfortable- physically, socially, emotionally, I was all of it. And from there, I was leaving directly to go to a 2-day "retreat," as they say, in Aspen for what's referred to as the next generation of the Giving Pledge.

For those not up on their philanthropy news, the Giving Pledge was started by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, I believe. The pledge is for really rich people to give away a large chunk of their wealth during their lifetime. Since my parents belong to this group and we have a family foundation, it sounded interesting to attend back when my sister suggested it to me (she was going as well) a couple of months ago. It would have felt strange under any circumstances, but at this particular time it felt especially odd.

So in the midst of this huge upheaval in my family's life, I was going to be away from home for a week, doing a lot of something (enforced socializing) that I despise. So there it was, in all its glory. The only thing I could say good about it was that somewhere in the back of my mind I know that the things I dread are never quite as bad as what I'm dreading.

And that's the way it was. The stuff at my father's house was long and felt even longer than that. But the time gradually passed and it wasn't a nightmare. And I've had times in my life when I haven't slept well. This was just another one of those. And then it was time to leave.

As I may have noted, I was doing the Giving Pledge thing with my daughter and my sister and her daughter. But because we made arrangements when I thought I'd be leaving from Philadelphia, they were all flying out of LaGuardia Airport and I was leaving out of Newark. That worked fine logistically, since it was on the way and Ronnie was then able to just drive home, and I would be on the same connecting flight to Aspen as the others. But the result was me dumped at Newark Airport at 9:30 in the morning by myself after all of that.

I'm not sure I've ever felt less within myself. I had a lot of time before my flights, so I just walked around and finally decided that, even though I'd already had breakfast, that the best thing I could do was go to the faux diner in the terminal, sit at the counter, and have breakfast, like I was starting a new day. So I sat there, drinking coffee, eating bacon and eggs and rye toast, and watching Sportscenter. And then I started my day again by getting on an airplane.

I guess there's a part 3 after all.

So how did you spend your summer vacation? Part 1

So I guess it's time to get back to this. Like anything else, blogging has this feeling where if you wait too long, it's awkward to get started again. I'm sure you've all experienced up with friends and relatives. How long can you wait between times calling people before it gets too awkward to call them again? Restarting is just hard, in my opinion at least, harder than starting in the first place.

So the answer to the question is pretty much, what vacation? This summer has been a blur, and I simply have not felt like writing about it. I think that two things conspired to make me feel like this. First, the trip to Italy, coming right before the end of school, scrambled my brain and then the rush to get finals done and graded and all just made everything very stressful. I didn't sleep well for over a month, adding to the difficulty in feeling centered.

In the midst and aftermath of the trip and end of school, my mother, who had survived ALS for nearly 15 years, was doing very poorly and finally passed away in early July. I can't bring my self to say that this was a horrible, or even bad thing. In many ways, it was the most humane and peaceful thing that could have happened. ALS is a disease without good outcomes, and this had dragged on well beyond her being debilitated to the point of her being all but inert. It was no way to live for anyone, especially my mom, who was a life force to be reckoned with.

The week that my mother died (people seem to have trouble using that word- I'm not sure when "passed" became a synonym but it's never felt quite right to me), was without a doubt one of the strangest weeks of my life. We knew the end was coming and had a chance to plan to some extent. Ronnie and I left Philly on Sunday and spent the night at my parents' house. The next morning, my father, brother, sister and I went to the hospital to be with my mother and each other. We all said our goodbyes and she was gone within hours.

To say this was an emotional moment does it no justice whatsoever, and I'll leave it at that. I lack the skill to put it in words, but it felt right for all of us to be there together, close as we're not. Maybe closer now, which would please my mom tremendously. Nonetheless, however many times we said with all sincerity that we were glad she was at peace, I don't think any of us were at peace. I certainly wasn't. I was not super close to my mom ever, really, but it was still a tremendous upheaval.

The afternoon was spent, well, telling people. Lots of phone calls and emails. It was a sad thing. We had a nice family dinner that evening with my dad and all but one of the kids and grandkids. And finally that was the end of the first day.

After a mostly sleepless night, we spent the morning preparing for the people. We had announced that we'd be receiving people at the house from 2-8 that day and the next. It was impossible to even guess how many would come. The house is big and has a deck and patio, so it can accommodate over 100 comfortably, but you need food and drinks and the like. And 6 hours is a long time.

And just walking around the house was odd. What had originally been the master bedroom had been turned into a hospital room where my mom stayed with 2 nurses behind closed doors for much of the day. I had not been in there since my mom had lost the ability to communicate, which had been several years. I waited for the nurses to dress her and bring her out in the wheelchair. But now there was nobody and nothing behind the door. The nurses and equipment were all and mostly gone, respectively. I thought about going in, but never did.

As it turned out, there were never more than around 40 people there at any given time; it was a flow in and out. Old friends and connections from business and philanthropy. Everyone wanted to pay respects and talk to each of us, whether we each knew them or not. It was interesting and warm and a bit surreal. After everyone left, a few of us had dinner and talked until my dad decided he needed sleep.

The next day was more of the same. I rode my bike for an hour or so in the morning, which wasn't easy on unfamiliar roads and little sleep. It may have cleared my head a bit, but it was kind of hard to tell for sure. Nothing seemed especially focused. A different bunch of people flowed through the house. At least there were a couple of friends of ours in the mix, which made it more comfortable.

The evening was much like the prior one, except there was much more food sitting around. People had sent all sorts of food gifts, which piled up in the kitchen and the office over the course of the day, while Ronnie and I tried to get the perishable stuff, like fresh fruit and smoked sturgeon, into the refrigerator while getting the nuts and dried fruits and crackers and such put away.

So to bed we went. It was only going to get stranger, or differently strange but definitely another thing that felt overwhelming in anticipation. But that's part 2.

So that happened

There are a lot of great lines in State and Main, David Mamet's movie about Hollywood movie people invading a small New England town. One of our favorites is the simplest- Alec Baldwin, playing a big star with, let's just say hobbies, drunkenly rolls his car at the corner of State and Main streets, crawls out, bleeding a bit, smiles and says to Phillip Seymour Hoffman, whose character happened to witness this, "So that happened!"

I felt ever so slightly like that after the past few weeks. There were moments of relaxation in Italy, but more of the trip was go go go. We got home early Sunday evening the week before final exams and since then schoolwork has been go go go. Reviews and getting exams ready dominated, all in a fog of jet lag (and given the weather, a fog of fog as well) that nabbed me a total of 20 hours sleep the first 5 nights we were home. By Thursday I was starting to feel a bit more human, but it was still go go go until I finished photocopying exams on Friday, then headed out to get to Chester County to pick up produce for our CSA. I finally got home at 4 and promptly fell asleep until 8:15.

After a day-long meeting in Connecticut and a Father's Day (or Dads and Grads day, as they say) trip to the ballpark, it was time for my final exam. I know that a teacher's perspective on final exams is probably different than the students', but it's more than a little stressful for teachers as well. For one thing, you've got to make up the exam properly. The students get so upset if you give them a multiple choice question with all incorrect answers. I seem to be prone to those kinds of mistakes, and I really need to fix it. One of my goals for next year, I think.

Also, those students have so many questions. A small pack of them descended on one of my colleagues an hour before the final and simply would not leave. I ended up kicking them out a few minutes before the test was supposed to start. I mean, you don't want to discourage their wanting to learn, but couldn't you have asked these questions during review or in, say, May? Or January? Or whenever it was taught?

The next stress point is getting all the tests situated at the tables. The way we work it is that every teacher has a different color cover page for their exam, and we put the exams on the table such that no table has more than one person taking the same exam. Considering that I had 27 students taking the test, this was not exactly routine for me. I also messed up, and made the two exams too similar looking, which caused all kinds of confusion, by the students and in one instance, myself.

Once the exam starts, it's a competition among the teachers for who has the lowest QPTT (questions per test-taker). I've been told that large sums of money used to be wagered on this, until it was learned that one of the teachers was paying off another teacher's students to ask questions whether they needed to or no. Okay, I just made that entire thing up. Never mind.

But one of my goals is always to minimize the number of questions you need to answer, because when you have 20 or 30 or even 40 students spread around a large room, you can put some serious mileage. I did 2 1/2 miles in my 3 hours there. Not too bad. Most of my questions were "should I write the answer on the answer sheet or in the test booklet?" although there were a curiously large number from some pretty advanced students about how to measure distance between things. Hmmm, straight line? Perpendicular? Anything else?

The next stress point comes as the time gets close to the end. Did I make the exam too long? If people are leaving after 20 minutes of a 2 hour exam you can be pretty certain you made it too short, but you tend to know who works quickly in a class and if they're not done 10 minutes before a 2-hour exam is supposed to end, you could be in trouble. Fortunately, I did a pretty good job timing things out this year, and nobody lagged more than 5 minutes beyond their allotted time.

And then comes the grading. English teachers are understandably jealous of the brief period of time it takes to grade math tests compared to, say, 10-page papers. But I'd say the onus is on them to make theirs easier to grade rather than for us to make ours harder. I can live with it. The fear is that either everyone will get 100, in which case you've learned nothing by giving the exam, or that everyone will get 50, in which case you can be pretty sure that you either did a bad job teaching them or made the exam too hard. Neither is a great option. But again, nothing wrong on that front.

After that it's report cards, but I enjoy those, even though they're time-consuming. Then it's a couple of days of in-service and we're done.