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.