Read the Whole Story

The basic design of a newspaper is really quite simple, and it has not changed much over the years.  The headline is there to grab your attention, and most of the important information is contained right up front in the first paragraph.  Pictures are there to bring life to the cold print.  Like many readers, I glance through the paper quickly at first, and then go back a second time to read more about the stories that I found interesting.  But there are times when this habit may make me miss a little gem.  That almost happened this morning.

Here is a story from this mornings edition of the Chicago Sun-Times.  Please take my advise and read the whole story.  In this case, the most important information is not in the first paragraph.

Man hides in trunk of ex-girlfriend’s car, threatens to kill her

By Erin Guerra For Sun-Times Media February 4, 2013 2:47PM

Ryan Burns | Provided photo~Sun-Times Media

Updated: February 5, 2013 2:12AM

A man crawled from the trunk and through the backseat, then held a knife to the throat of his ex-girlfriend as she was driving to meet a friend Friday evening.

The woman, 28, later told Valparaiso police that she had been talking on her phone to a friend about a man she had just met shortly before the attack.

Ryan Burns, 25, climbed into the passenger seat next to her and started quizzing her about the “new guy,” punching her in the face when she said she liked him, according to the police report.

Burns allegedly ordered her to drive where he directed, threatening to kill her and himself if she didn’t. The woman instead pulled into the parking lot of Broadway Cafe on U.S. 30.

As they fought over the steering wheel, she grabbed his genitals and squeezed as hard as she could, she told police. His reaction gave her time to throw the car keys out the window and scream for help. Burns ran off on foot.

The couple’s 3½-year relationship ended in February 2012, the woman told police. They had been living together and he had been helping her raise her twins, whom she had with Burns’ father, so the children are also his siblings.

Police learned the woman has a restraining order against Burns, and she had filed a police report earlier in the day when he allegedly made contact with her at a gas station in Valparaiso. Asked how Burns could have gotten into her car, she showed officers how one of the rear windows can easily be pushed down from outside the vehicle.

The woman said Burns lives with various friends, so police worked with Burns’ cellphone provider to locate him at a home in South Haven. Porter County Sheriff’s Police made the arrest around 1:05 a.m. Saturday.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/18010118-418/man-hides-in-trunk-of-ex-girlfriends-car-threatens-to-kill-her.html

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Sometimes it is just good to read about people who’s lives are way more messed up then your own.

My day doesn’t look so bad now.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Renewal

I have a very simple picture for this weeks challenge.  I took the picture with my youngest daughter back in the spring.  While checking on the growth of the Daisies on the side of our house, I was startled by a duck, that suddenly took to flight, making a horrible noise as it shot straight up in the air.  When I then looked into the plants, this is what we spotted.

Duck Eggs from Spring 2012

Molly wanted to bring the eggs inside, but I convinced her that we needed to give the mama duck a chance to return to take care of the eggs, and that we had to let nature take its course.  I will save you the horror of what we found the next morning when we checked up on the eggs.  After a quick explanation about nature and survival of the fittest, I promised my daughter that if the duck returns this year, we will rescue any eggs she might leave in our bushes again.

Is it wrong that I am hoping the duck is a little smarter next year, and finds that pond on the other side of our neighborhood.

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For more Renewal Pictures, check out the Weekly Photo Challenge.

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2012/11/08/weekly-photo-challenge-renewal/comment-page-4/#comment-109066

Finding A Way

In some recent debates with my 15-year-old son, I have found myself quoting, of all people, Jeff Goldblum.  Well, I guess not him directly, but the character he played in Jurassic Park, Dr. Ian Malcolm.  In the movie, when it is discovered that the all male dinosaurs have somehow managed to lay eggs and reproduce, Goldblum’s character speaks the line, “Life finds a way.”

I spoke the line myself in a conversation that seemed to stun my son.  I am a bit of a realist, and I am not one to believe in wild theories or conspiracies.  I don’t think the CIA assassinated JFK, or that September 11th was an inside job.  I am not heavily religious, but I am also not an atheist.  I mostly believe in the things I can see and touch.  So with all this in mind, I told my son I believed there was life other than ours, somewhere out in space.  Now, I also backed that up with the statement that I did not believe that space aliens had visited earth to kidnap people or build the pyramids.

My son, somewhat of a realist himself, but young and more open to persuasion by anyone other than his father, told me that the odds of there being life on another planet was one in a million.  I agreed, but then pointed out that here we were.  And I agreed it was a one in a million chance that everything pulled together in just the right way to produce our planet, but with billions and billions of stars, and an unknown amount of planets orbiting some of those stars, the chances are good that somewhere out there, life must have found a way.

Before this past winter started, I did not clear off the deck as I usually do.  Nice weather and a busy schedule, and I will admit a little bit of lazy, resulted in me keeping our plant boxes right were they sat all summer, propped up on the rail of our back deck.  The worst winter in decades that the weather people had promised back in September never came to be, and now here in the middle of March we are having summer-like weather.  This past Thursday night, I pulled the chairs out of the garage, and Maureen and I officially opened up Deck Season with a couple of beverages outside under the stars.  Our next door neighbor even joined us for a couple, and we could hear other people outside somewhere talking in the warm night.

It wasn’t until this morning that I finally stepped back out onto the deck in daylight with the intention of yanking all of the dead plants out of those boxes that I got a good look at what was happening.  Although all of the flowers in the boxes were listed as annuals, somehow in the mild winter and early spring, life has once again found a way.  Under the dead growth, green leaves and even some fresh buds had started to grow.  So I changed my plans and did what I could to clear out as much of the dried brown stuff that I could.  It wasn’t easy to pull just the old stuff without disturbing the new, as much of the new green was intertwined with the dead growth.  But I am anxious to see what becomes of the new plants that made it through the winter.

After a mild winter, life has found a way back into our flower boxes.

So there we have it.  Life has once again found a way.  This time it is just to the little universe of my flower boxes, but soon it will expand to our entire yard, and then the neighborhood, and yes, maybe even the universe.

Giving Thanks

Ok, I am going to try to make this one short, but since we all know how I can tend to babble, I can make no promises.  You see, on this day, I find I really do have a lot to be thankful for.  Looking back at the last six years, I could be in a completely different state of mind right now, so first and foremost I have to be thankful for where I am today.  A divorce and then a long battle with my finances could have put me on a path that was not very productive.  But luckily I had many people in my life who cared for me and helped me through some very hard times.

Unfortunately, when my life got bad, I did what way too many others have done, and I turned the whole mess inside.  Not just emotionally, but physically.  I started to drink.  And drink a lot.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not an alcoholic or a problem drinker, but as I look back I can see the potential was there.  In those moments, I could drink a bottle of vodka, or a couple of bottles of Merlot in just a couple of hours.  If I was meeting people out or just staying away from home, I would mostly drink beer, but then a whiskey side car was almost always present.  And the worst of it all, was that I would then get in my car and drive.

One of the lowest points come when I woke up in a parking lot not too far from where my apartment was with no idea how I got there or where I was.  My answer to this problem was to go home and drink the remnants of a bottle of orange vodka that was in the freezer.  When I woke up, it was light out and I was late for work.  I took a quick shower, but I’m sure I still smelled of a brewery and jumped in my little black pick-up and found another bottle od vodka with just a couple of swigs left, finished that, tossed the bottle in a dumpster and headed to work. 

As I came through the door of the office, I was instantly called into my bosses office.  Bob looked at me and shook his head.  “What the hell is wrong with you?”  he said.  “You can’t be coming in here like this, half in the bag.”  And me with all the smarts of some asshole who had been drinking all night answered back, “I don’t do anything halfway.  I’m all the way in that bag.”

It was shortly after that, when I found myself sitting in the office of our in-house hired shrink that I realized what a mess I had made of myself.  I would like to say that I instantly turned things around, but we all know that is not how these things work.  I had a bunch of people taking an interest in getting my life back together, and I guess that is what I am most thankful about.  There are way too many people in this world who find themselves in a similar situation, and don’t have the support of a strong network of friends and family like mine.  People who were not going to stand by and watch me ruin my life.

And then came along the final piece.  Maureen.  From the darkest of times, she came along to brighten back up my life.  Sure, it hasn’t been easy, but what relationship is.  If you are one of those who believe in faith, then you believe that all things happen for a reason.  And if the reason I went through those bad days was so that I could meet Maureen, then they were well worth the struggle.  So on this Thanksgiving Day, I just want to say I am so thankful that Maureen has come into my life, and that tomorrow I will be making her my wife.

Life really is good, and I have a lot to be thankful for.  And that includes our honeymoon in Ireland.

The Cost of an Education

Just over a week ago, we held a little graduation party for my son Alex and his cousin Lucy.  Not wanting to be left out, we also included Molly, but it still did not feel right to me.  Sure, she was technically moving up from her current school to the next level, but making it out of the fifth grade and into the sixth just doesn’t seem like much of an accomplishment to me.  Don’t get me wrong, Molly is smart.  Very smart.  She has been in the advanced program since second grade, and I expect her to continue getting good grades in the Honors Program at her new middle school.  But there is the whole problem.  In my brain, sixth grade is still grammar school. 

Back in the day, I attended Lincoln School for my grade school education.  I started there in the third grade when my family moved to Wheaton.  Prior to that I attended Washington School in Villa Park which used to reside in the shadow of the old Ovaltine factory.  Both the factory and the school are long gone, but the memories of my first grade teacher Mrs. Eaton are forever branded on my young psyche.  Even way back in 1971, Mrs. Eaton was a throwback to a long gone era.  She was in fact the meanest teacher to ever set foot in any teaching institution.  And she was crazy too.  Years after we had moved, Mrs. Eaton had to be removed from her classroom.  The story as I heard it was that she just snapped and started finger painting all the children in her classroom.  Oh, the good old days.

But back in those days, an elementary school was in fact grades one to six, with either a morning or afternoon kindergarten program to help the very young student adjust to the next twelve years by getting their feet wet on just half a day of structured learning.  Back then, full day kindergarten was unheard of, and the idea of pre-school was still in its infancy as most moms stayed home to take care of the young children.  So when I was suddenly presented with the idea that Molly was “graduating” the whole idea just seemed, well, strange.

Even her school didn’t call it a graduation.  They had an advancement breakfast that was basically donuts, juice, and coffee in the cafeteria where every fifth grader got multiple awards.  And the principal allowed parents to stop and take pictures of each kid receiving their awards.  Amazingly, 119 of the almost 150 fifth graders received an award for getting better than a 3.5 grade point average over their years at the school.  Really amazing given that half of them couldn’t figure out how to get up to the podium once their names were called.   The whole thing took almost three hours, much longer than the actual graduation ceremony at Alex’s school.   That is his Middle School.  See, we don’t call then Jr. High Schools anymore.  

I attended Edison Jr. High, and although the building is still in the same spot, it is indeed now Edison Middle School and serves sixth through eighth grades as opposed to just seventh and eighth grades as it did back in the late seventies.  I am not really sure when this whole Middle school thing began, but it seems to be a by-product of overcrowding at the elementary school level.  Although I do find it strange that most private schools still consider elementary school to consist of grades one to eight.  And I have been told that many private schools have created kindergarten and pre-school programs that keep kids in the same school for up to 10 years.  Certainly these schools don’t celebrate a graduation at any level except for 8th, so why should we who have to deal with the public school overcrowding have to celebrate more often just because our system in unable to keep the kids confined to one building for the entire eight years. 

All that being said, we had a little graduation party just over a week ago.  And the kids made out much better than I would have expected.  Being a good dad, I instantly told both Alex and Molly that we were going to open bank accounts with all this new-found money.  Insert groans here.  I allowed each of them keep a set amount, and last night we opened new bank accounts with the rest.  This was most difficult for Alex, because his friend Chris was buying a guitar and amp with the money he got from his graduation party.  I asked if Chris knew how to play the guitar and the answer was of course no.  I don’t want this to come out wrong, but I have my doubts that Chris will ever learn how to play the guitar, and I would really like Alex to learn how to save money before he gets in too much trouble as an adult.  I explained to him the importance of looking to the future and not spending all your money now, just the same way my father tried to instill the same ideas in me.  And this led us down a road I wasn’t ready for.

After explaining to Alex all about savings accounts and CDs (Certificates of Deposits not Compact Discs) and how when he has more money saved we may want to talk to his Uncle Dave and set up a money market account to get a better return on his money, he suddenly turned to me and said quite innocently, “If you know so much about saving money, why are you so poor?”  I didn’t know what to say at first, so I explained that I had actually done quite well with investments in the past, but that the economy had effected me quite poorly, and that it would still take a few years for me to get back to where I was.  But that just like him, I was working on paying down my debt and hoped to be able start saving more very soon.

The truth is a little bit more difficult to explain, and it is not what he needed to hear in that moment.  Because the truth is that no matter how hard we try to plan for the future, things happen.  Getting a divorce puts a strain on the finances, especially when both parties cannot come to an agreement.  I was actually quite good at setting money aside for the future, and I kept debt to a minimum.  It seems like such a long time ago, but I do remember a time when my dad didn’t have to call me to tell me that this collector or that bill had somehow reached him because we happen to have the same name.  He helped bail me out of some very tight spots, and he has always managed to not be judgmental about it.  I don’t know how I will ever be able to pay him back for that.  And I am not just talking about the money.  I have been working for almost a year and a half on fixing the mistakes made to my mortgage after the divorce, and I am just now starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  My credit is basically ruined and I sometimes fear that I may be pulling Maureen down with me. 

I want my kids to learn the value of money, and what it can and can’t do.  Our economy took a dump because too many people lived in the here and now, and didn’t think about what all that spending was going to do to their future.  It is a difficult lesson to teach when our society has become all about the newest cell phone or video games or I-pod technology, but the price of this lesson is too expensive not to teach.  I know there are no guaranties, but I don’t want my kids to learn this lesson the hard way.  I can only hope they can avoid the mistakes I made.

I didn’t tell Alex and Molly this, but each payday I plan to put $5 in Molly’s account and $10 in Alex’s.  I know it’s not much, but it is a start.  Then in four years when Alex has his next graduation party, we can look back and see what he has saved and make real plans for how to use the money for his future.  And if he still has his doubts about the whole “A penny saved is a penny earned” thing, I will have just one question for him.

What is that guitar Chris bought worth now?

The Meijer Brand

Maureen, being the wonderful woman that she is, did a real nice thing for me the other day.  She picked me up a bag of Cheetos.  It may not seem like a huge thing, but the fact is, she knows I like Cheetos and she was at the store picking up drinks for everyone to have while watching one of Alex’s baseball games, and knowing I had probably not eaten because I tend to do that from time to time, she was thoughtful enough to pick me up a little snack while we watched the game.  Being a family on a budget like so many others these days, I usually don’t buy the “real” Cheetos.  We have a store near us called Meijer and they carry all sorts of those store brand items that we have all become used to seeing.  Remember the old days when Jewel first introduced the generic brand?  It was a white label with this green stripe across it and it just said “Green Beans” or “Diet Soda” or “Beer”.  Yes, they actually made generic beer.  The white and green label become so recognisable that the band Public Image, LTD put out a record with the same white cover entitled simply Record.  I actually had the cassette tape which of course then had the title changed to Cassette.

Meijer uses the same concept, only the packaging is a little better these days, but the prices are still much better than the brand names.  Unlike other stores that try to hide their store brand behind a fancy name like President’s Choice, which I belive is now the Jewel store brand, they just call them Meijer.  In the case of the Cheetos, they are called Meijer Cheese Puffs.  We take advantage of a lot of the Meijer brand items, especially pop and snack items.  With the brand name pop sometime costing more than $4.00 for a twelve pack, it is nice to know that the kids will drink the Meijer pop for just $2.50 or sometimes on sale for just $2.00 a twelve pack.  And they do a cool thing where they have Meijer Soda Red and Meijer Soda Blue to imitate the different taste between Coke and Pepsi.  Although as a Dr. Pepper drinker, I really do not care for either.  Luckily the 7-Up people who own Dr. Pepper seem to put their pop on sale quite often, and when the 4 for $10 sale is on at Meijer I make sure to stock up.

But back to those Cheetos for a minute.  As I said, on this day Maureen had picked me up one of those individual serving bags of Cheetos, and although I did not eat them that day, I did take them to work with me the next day and ate them as snack.  Ok, that’s not quite the truth, I ate them as a snack in the car while stuck in traffic that morning on the way to work.  But that is besides the point.  The point of this whole thing was that when I opened that bag of Cheetos and popped the first orange crunchy puff into my mouth, a strange thing happened.  I quickly realized that I liked the Meijer Cheese Puffs better.  First off, the Meijer puff is a much brighter shade of orange, which to me only says more artificial cheese flavor per puff.  The Meijer puff also had a saltier taste, which then says to me, gosh I wish I had a beer to go with this.  Overall, I just thought the “real” Cheetos were lacking in flavor.  This of course did nothing to detour me from eating the whole bag.

When it comes to the snack foods, my kids are not too picky, and I guess neither am I.  Maureen would also agree that the Meijer brand potato chips are really good.  They have a Black Pepper and Salt chip that is down right good.  I guess the point being that in today’s market, it just doesn’t make sense to stick with the more expensive brands.  I buy Meijer peanut butter, although Maureen would disagree with me on that one, and frozen chicken breast, and even toilet paper.  Yes, if Charmin is on sale, I am grabbing that and hoarding it in the master bathroom, but the Meijer brand is good enough for most of the asses that pass through my house on a regular occasion.  It is not the sand paper they tried to pass off at work one year.  But that was somewhat short-lived.  Seems that someone higher up on the food chain found a way to increase the TP budget in a hurry.

I have tried to make my kids understand that money is not flowing through our house the way it seems to in some other household, and to that end they have come to accept the store brand items as part of their life.  The “stigma” that was attached to the old Jewel generics is gone.  And the quality of what the store brands produce is much better.  It is not worth the savings if nobody will eat the cheaper brands, and on occasion we do find somethings that doesn’t meet up with expectation.  I have from time to time tried to slip a little bit of the Meijer coffee in with the Folgers, but Maureen is a bit of a coffee snob and likes the upscale flavored coffee that Folgers makes, and to her credit she does a great job of finding it on sale.  But when it come to saving a little money and still feeding your family these days, you can’t go wrong with many of the store brand items. 

Meijer Cheese Puffs are great.  I am eating some right now.

I just hope all this orange crap doesn’t stain the keyboard.

The End of the World

Late last year, Hollywood released the epic disaster film 2012 staring John Cusack and directed by Roland Emmerich.  I have not seen the film, but I know enough about the film to tell you it was a festival of special effects.  According to the director, it was inspired by the book Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock and the theory of the Mayan Calendar that the world will come to an end in the year 2012.  Surprisingly, this theory has caught on, and there are any number of sites on the internet dedicated to surviving the impending disasters.  Much like the Y2K theory, remember all the talk about planes falling out of the sky the second the clock clicked over to midnight in the year 2000, I have given this round of end of the world jargon very little thought.  That is until I realized the world is coming apart at the seams.  Literally.

In general, human beings do not like change.  We get used to our lives and our daily habits and we do not like it when things get disrupted.  The end of the world would certainly count as one of these disruptions, and I for one do not think I would adjust well.  So if there is indeed going to be an end to the world as we know it, and not just in an REM song, I would like a little advance notice, please.  Since the beginning of the year, there have been five major earthquakes that I can remember.  Haiti on January 12th measuring 7.0, Chile on February 27th measuring 8.8, and three earthquakes in April in Mexico, Indonesia, and China all measuring over 7.0.  I also recall that there were news reports of earthquakes in Japan and Spain, but that they did not seem to be as devastating as the others.  We even had an earthquake right here in Illinois in the early morning hours of April 18th.  It was a measly 5.4 quake, and I felt absolutely nothing, but what the heck.  All this shifting of the earths crust can’t really be that good, can it?  And now there is a volcano erupting in Iceland that has been dormant for almost 200 years, and the ash cloud has disrupted air traffic all over Europe and the world. 

Hey. Mother Nature.  Is this your little hint?  Are you getting ready to take the whole bunch of us out?

This may seem like a funny thing for me to say at this time, but I don’t like the fact that I am divorced.  It was a major disruption in my life, and the lives of my children.  Looking back, I can honestly say it was one of the worst moments in my life, and the shock waves from that time will be felt by many people for years to come.  I am still attempting to put my financial life back together, having spent more than $20,000 over the two years it took to get divorced, and the timing of the current downfall in the economy certainly didn’t help matters.  It upsets me to know that I failed at something, and that my failure had such a devastating effect on the people I love most.  My relationship with my oldest daughter was crushed in the process, and we are only just beginning to work our way through things.  But given all of that, I can’t now sit here and say that I regret what happened.  I really do like my life now.  Sure, as with anyone, I wish there were things I could change or fix, but I also know that I have built a new life with Maureen and the kids that in many ways is much better than the one that was destroyed.

A little bit of research and a quick visit to the United States Geological Survey web site  showed me that the current trend in earth moving phenomena is not very unusual.  Every day, somewhere around the world, the earths crust moves in some way.  Many shifts are small, and others are quite large.  Of all of the earthquake that have been in the news recently, the one that struck  Haiti was actually one of the smallest, yet it seems that the devastation in Haiti was much greater than all of the others.  The simple answer is of course the infrastructure.  Haiti is a very poor country, and they were just not prepared for the events of that day.  The recent earthquake in Chile ranks as one of the top ten earthquakes in recorded history, but it is not the most devastating one to ever hit that country.  On May 22, 1960 the biggest earthquake ever recorded struck in Chile with a magnitude of 9.5.  This along with a long history of very large earthquakes, gave Chile an infrastructure that was more prepared for the movement in the earth than Haiti was.  Chile had learned from the past, and had raised it’s building standards to accommodate for this and future earthquakes.

The current divorce rate in the United States stands at 43%.  It raises to 60% for those who get married for a second time.  Obviously there are too many people who have not learned from their own mistakes, and have not rebuilt there lives to accommodate the tough times.  When I got married the first time, I was only 23 years old, and the woman I was getting married to was only 19.  I remember a number of people telling me that we should wait.  That we were not ready for the lifetime commitment of marriage, and it pains me to say so now, but they were right.  When problems occurred, I ignored them.  They sat under the surface and heated up, until our world finally cracked open and all the problems of the past came to the forefront.  Our infrastructure was one that was ill-prepared for the major events that were shaking our world.  The marriage crumbled. 

Maureen and I have been dating for almost four years now, and we have had our share of problems.  There was one point when I really felt like we were not going to make it, but we managed to work our way through it.  We are not a couple of kids, although she is much younger looking than I am.  We have built a strong foundation to our relationship, and I am confident that we can survive any of the tremors that will attempt to break us down.  Earthquakes happen everyday in all of our lives.  Some are small, some are large.  The most vicious of them will try to collapse the world in on us, and unless we are prepared to deal with them they will succeed.  I would like to think that we can beat the odds, and that we have learned from our past mistakes.  I am pretty confident that we can survive even the very worst of the quakes.

Go a head, Mother Nature.  Give it your best try.  See if you can rock this world!

I’m betting we will beat you to it.

World’s Worst Dad

As any parent will tell you, from time to time. we all do things that make us feel like the worst parent that ever walked the face of the earth.  For me, it usually involves a sick or hurt child.  Having taken way too many trips to the emergency room where the outcome was basically that nothing was wrong, on occasion I have put off seeking medical attention for what I thought was a minor ailment that later turned out to be more serious.  But that was not the case this weekend.  My most recent run-in with the title World’s Worst Dad did not come at the expence of one of my kids health, but it did leave me a little broken-hearted.  Especially since it came at Molly’s expense. 

Of my three kids, Molly is by far, the most loving and sensitive.  Stephanie and Alex, although different as night and day, are both very independent.  But Molly is the eternal clinger.  When Molly gets in trouble, the tears begin to flow.  As the youngest child, she has always had to battle a little more for attention, and as the smallest she is very often over powered by her two older siblings.  She is not shy, but can be intimidated by others, especially older kids.  She is very often too eager to please, and this has gotten her in a bit of hot water from time to time.  I also have a special soft spot for her because of how young she was at the time of my divorce.  It was a tough time for all of us, and Molly was really looking for that reassurance that despite what was going on, her mom and dad both still loved her.  I think she still holds in some of these fears even today.

During that time, I moved out of the house for the first time just after the New Year in 2006.  By then it was painfully obvious that the divorce was going to happen, although no formal paper work had been started yet.  I will admit that I was not in the best of shape at that time, and as a father I was inept.  On a trip to a small game arcade called Wilderness Falls, Molly won this neon green friendship bracelet, and she gave it to me and asked me to wear it forever.  That way she would always know we were friends.  How could I say no?  And I took my promise seriously.  A very worn and much faded green string still loops around my right wrist today.

Before I continue, it is time for a quick confession.  The original neon green friendship bracelet broke about a month after Molly gave it to me.  It was only made of a somewhat elastic string, and it constantly had to be re-adjusted or it would fall off.  During one of the adjustments, it just snapped in two.  Not wanting to tell Molly that it broke, I headed back over to the arcade and picked up a couple of extras.  The one I am wearing now is actually the third, but it is the one that has been in place the longest.  The second one slipped off my wrist at some time and just disappeared.  I believe there might actually be one more stuffed away in the top drawer of my dresser under some underwear, next to all the teeth the Tooth Fairy has collected over the years.

For the past few years, Molly and I have taken part in a park district event called The Daddy Daughter Dance.  It is not really a big fancy event, but most of the dads treat it as one.  We all wear shirts and ties, and the girls put on their best dresses.  Flowers and a cheesy photo and a bad dinner are all part of the fun.  For a cheep park district event, it is very well done, and the girls all seem to enjoy the night out with dad.  The event is always held the weekend before Valentines Day, but you have to sign up in advance.  And that is where I blew it.  Last Saturday after Molly’s ice skating lessons, I was supposed to run over to the park district and sign us up.  Well, it was a very full day and Maureen and I had three different places we had to be that day, and I forgot to sign us up.  Even later in the week, when Maureen asked me if we had plans for Saturday night, the event completely slipped my mind.  It wasn’t until Friday night, on my way home that it suddenly popped into this thick skull of mine.

I frantically called as many of the park district offices as I could find numbers for.  A very nice lady at one place took pity on me and gave me the office number for the woman who puts the night together.  I called and left a message, but the reality was sinking in fast.  It was time to give Molly a call and break the bad news.   I told her what I had done, and I could hear the disappointment in her voice.  It really is a silly little dance, but it means so much to Molly just to have that special night just the two of us.  I promised her that if I could not get us into the dance, we would still have a date night, and that I would take her out to dinner.  Once again, Maureen stepped in to save the day, and reminded me that the ice show was still in town, and maybe that would be a fun alternative.

On Saturday morning, I placed more phone calls and left more messages and stopped by the park district office in person to check and see if there was anything that could be done.  While I was there, another dad was also looking to try and get tickets for the dance, but the lady behind the desk told us it was sold out.  She also said we were not the only dads who had dropped the ball on this one, and that there had been a number of fathers stopping by.  If her intent was to make me feel better it didn’t work.  I had already ordered Molly a small wrist corsage just in case, so I headed over there to pick it up.  When the much too jovial lady told me to have fun at the dance, it was like rubbing salt in the wound.  Of course I didn’t correct her.

On my way to pick Molly up from her ice skating class, I called a friend and got two tickets to Disney on Ice.  I then made a reservation at a nice restaurant near where the ice show was performing.  When I picked up Molly, she ran right up to me and gave me a big hug.  She asked if I had gotten the tickets and I had to admit I did not.  I then filled her in on our alternate plans, and I could see the smile start to build.  I showed her the flowers and told her we would still have a nice date night.  We spent the rest of the afternoon just the two of us, running errands and getting ready for our night.  I asked Molly to pick out a tie for me.  In honor of the ice show, she picked out an old Mickey Mouse tie I had from my days running movie theaters.  While I was still getting ready, I heard Molly and Maureen talking, and Maureen was explaining that this was going to be even better than the dance, because it was going to be just the two of us.  This really seemed to make Molly happy.

And it really was a great date.  We talked and laughed and ate too much and had a nice time.  I was feeling much better about my mistake and that disappointed look never returned to Molly’s face.  I know it may sound like a bit of a cliché, but kids really just want to know that they are special and that they are loved.  What we did that night was not nearly as important as spending the time together.  It was our special night.  At the end of the night, Molly even suggested that we do this again next year instead of the dance.  What else could I say?  I told her next year we would do both.  That way we would have two date nights.  I better not mess it up again.

Short Attention Span Theatre

Sometimes I am easily distracted.  That is what happened with my last post.  I am very aware that I have a somewhat strange writing style, but I can usually reel it in on most cases. I lost it on that one.  You see, I don’t really plan out or outline my writing here, I just sort of start with an idea and see where it takes me.  The idea for the last post was to show how television has evolved over the last thirty to forty years, but I got myself side tracked with the whole kids programing thing, and before I knew it, I had a very lengthy description of a few shows I remembered as a kid, and I hadn’t even mentioned most of the things that actually sparked the idea.  Knowing my own short attention span when reading, I try to keep the posts relatively short.  Just today as I was walking around the house, I realized I had to have at least five books in various states of read, each with some sort of scrap of paper holding my spot, patiently waiting for me to pick it back up.  On my dresser there is a book called Don’t Scream by Wendy Corsi Staub, and of them all, this is the one I just wont get back to.  I completely lost interest at page 162 where my ticket from that dismal Van Halen concert probably has found a permanent home.   In the bathroom I have Playing the Moldovans at Tennis by Tony Hawks.  Not the skateboarding video games guy, the English comedian and TV personality.  His first book, Round Ireland With a Fridge, is a must read for anyone planning to take a trip to the Emerald Isle.  This book I am still reading, but only a few pages at a sitting when I am not trying to finish the Monster Sokuko from the Sunday Sun-Times.  Alex has been trying to get me to read a book called Everlost by Neal Shusterman, and I have started it twice now.  I got a little further the second time than I did the first, but considering that it is sitting in the front room next to the Halloween decorations I have still not walked back down to the basement, odds are I am going to have to start it again.  Maybe the third time will be the charm.  The last two books I really do want to finish, but I seem to get distracted every time I pick them up.  The first is a non-fiction book called Barbarians to Angels by Peter S. Wells and the first two chapters have promised to re-examine the notion that the Dark Ages were really not that dark, and that our perception has been jaded by the known writings from the new Roman era beginning around 800 AD.  And the final book is one of those serial killer thrillers called Immoral by Brian Freeman.  I actually got to read a chapter today at Molly’s ice skating lessons despite the fact that Alex felt the need to explain to me how bored he was each time I looked down at the page.

The basic idea for my last post was sparked a couple of weeks ago when I stayed home from work for a day.  I had caught that virus thing that had been passed around, and I decided that I needed a trip to the red couch for the day rather than a trip to the office.  As I settled in with the remote that only a 13-year-old can truly understand, I realized I had a whole bunch of choices for viewing.  As a kid, when you stayed home sick from school, you were basically stuck watching the soap operas with your mom.  My mom liked the ABC soaps which included All My Children, One Life to Live, and General Hospital.  But the first one each afternoon was Ryan’s Hope.  As the title may indicate, Ryan’s Hope was about a group of Irish Americans living in New York.  This may come as a shock, but this particular group of people were involved in law enforcement, and the parents, Johnny and Maeve Ryan ran a bar.  One year while in Junior High, I was sick enough to stay home for a week, and lucky for me, this was also the week that a white blond character named Delia was kidnaped by a gorilla.  I kid you not, not only was she taken by a gorilla, but somehow they ended up on the top of an office building somewhere in New York.  Rest assured, this was a regular sized gorilla, not a King Kong wanna be.  On that Monday’s show, the gorilla dropped Delia from the roof of the building, and that blond lady fell, for and entire week.  The rest of the show just continued on as if nothing was happening, and every once in a while they would cut back to a slow motion shot of Delia falling.  I never did find out what happened to her because I went back to school the next week, but she must have been ok, because come the summer she was still on the show.

Back in the present, or at least the more recent past of a couple of weeks ago, I had a much broader range of choices for my sick day couch potato viewing.  Once I figured out the whole remote thing, I settled on a marathon of Cold Case Files with Bill Curtis.  And it actually turned out to be just what I needed.  Bill Curtis has that voice that is just so darn soothing, and before I knew what was happening, he had lulled me right to sleep.  Every once in a while I would open one eye, and there would be a whole new story of a missing wife or mysterious death, but the one constant was that voice.  Like a child with a favorite blanket, it reassured me and made me feel safe, and then right back to slumberland.  It finally came to an end when Alex came home and switched the channel. My safe place was gone. 

You see, this was the whole point I wanted to make during the last post.  Kids have it too easy these days.  All of my children have completely lost the ability to wait through a commercial break, and they all flip through the stations as soon as one comes on.  They have no patience.  We have bred a whole new generation with DVR and On Demand, video games and the internet, and anything they want right at their fingertips.  The closest thing my dad had to a remote control was to tell one of the kids to get up and change the channel.  And we would have to walk all the way across the room and manually turn a knob to get to the next station.  My kids are wimps.  Alex could not sit still or keep his mouth shut for just the 40 minutes that we were waiting for Molly to finish up her skating lessons.  And when I told them we could stop somewhere to get something to eat after the lesson was over, the two of them instantly started to argue over where we would go, as if I had nothing to say in the matter.  How the hell did they think they were getting there?  And who did they think was going to be paying?  And on the way to the car it was a shoving match over who got to sit in the front seat.  I grabbed Molly by the wrist to pull her away from her brother, and I was instantly greeted by “Stop, You’re hurting me.”  Then something deep inside me snapped for just a second and the ghost of fatherhood past took over.  I looked her straight in the face and said, “You think that hurt?” I then pinched that little bit of skin on the back of her arm just below pit.  We all know the spot, because each of our mothers has used it to get our attention when we were a child.  Molly jumped away very quickly and let out a little shriek.  “Now that hurts,” I proudly announced.

Sure, later I felt a little guilty about the pinch, but as long as I had their attention I got the back yard cleared of the deck furniture, the hammock and a whole lot of garbage that had blown around from the last windy garbage day.  They of course grumbled the whole time, and Alex complained that the metal of the table was too cold.  Like I said, my kids are wimps.  They have very short attention spans and they are easily distracted.

Just like their father.

Live Like You Were Living

As I was still in bed this morning trying to figure out if my body was actually going to allow me to get going for the day, I caught a glimps at the news and was suddenly awestruck by the story of Eleanor Cunningham.  At first glance, Eleanor looks just like any other grandmother, a slight woman with grey hair and glasses, a face full of wrinkles, but also a great big smile.  Eleanor turned 95 this past week, and to celebrate, this weekend she jumped out of an airplane.  This was in fact the second time she undertook this feat, the first time was five years ago when she was a young spring chicken of just 90.  In the story, her family laughed and called her daffy for doing this, but in the world I live in, Eleanor just became my biggest hero. 

I wouldn’t say that I am an adventurous type, but I have always wanted to skydive.  There are in fact, certain members of my own family that think I am a little daffy myself just for thinking about it, but that does not stop the desire to give it a try some time.  My only fear is that it would become an addictive habit.  Once I try it I would want to do it again and again.  I have a little bit of history to back me up on this one, you see I waited until I was over 40 before I finally got a tattoo, it was something I had thought about since college, and since that first time I have now been inked almost a dozen times.  And I have a feeling there will be a number more before too long.  I did come very close to taking the big leap a few years ago, a few friends from work were all making the trip together and I was rearing to go.  Unfortunately that was also the summer I twisted my knee up playing a catch in the lake with my kids, and I had surgery just a few days before the jump date.  Something tells me my doctor would not have been too happy with me if I came back the next week with it all messed up again.  So I missed that chance, but I will indeed one day jump out of a perfectly good airplane.  Hopefully before I am 95.

Eleanor’s story is an inspiration to me, and a reminder that you are never too old to live your dreams.  Sure, not all dreams are as high-flying as hers or mine, but we all have those things we have always wanted to try, but for some reason or another we have not gotten around to them.  But I never want fear to be that factor for me.  Sure, the idea of free-falling face first towards the ground does make me nervous, but so does that wait in the line for a rollercoaster.  But I love rollercoasters.  And once I get on and start that climb to the top the nervousness becomes excitement, and as I plummet from that first drop, the smile on my face can not be stopped.  I have to imagine that I would experience the same type of up and down emotions when getting ready to skydive, but I would hate to think that I would let my fears prevent me from doing something I really want to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that everyone should jump out of a plane to face their fears, this particular situation works for me, but if you have no desire to jump out of a plane, then doing it would just be asinine.  A friend of mine just ran the Sears Tower race this weekend.  It is 103 flights up the tower from the lobby to the observation deck.  This seems like pure stupidity to me, but that is because I don’t want to climb the stairs in my own house most of the time, why would I want to run UP the Sears Tower.  And before I get any complaints, yes, I know it is now called the Willis Tower, but until the day that Gary Coleman grows more than six-foot tall, I will continue to call it the Sears Tower.  That’s what I’m talking about Willis.

The point is, that too many people don’t do things because they are afraid.  I see this sometimes in my own kids, and it makes me nuts.  If you want to run a marathon, then just do it.  If you want to travel around Europe, then save the money and plot the time and do it.  Life is too short to spend all this time wishing you would have done something.  Of course, also take into account your other responsibilities in life.  Part of the reason I started writing this blog is because I had always wanted to try my hand at writing, but I did not quit my job to persue the writing of the all American novel.  I still have a mortgage to pay, and kids to feed.  Sure, it may lead me to writing other things, perhaps a short story or script, I may even one day try to get something published.  And even if I should get turned down, at least I would have tried.  And I would have no regrets.

Back in 2004, Tim McGraw had a hit with a song entitled Live Like You Were Dying.  The song was dedicated to his father, the late “Tug” McGraw, who was a major league pitcher for the Mets and Phillies for almost 20 years, and had passed away earlier that year.  The song was to honor his father’s free spirit mentality and to express the idea that if you lived each day like it was your last, you would then experience your life to the fullest.  Although I commend the idea behind the song, I have always had just one little problem with this idea.  Rather than living my life like it was coming towards the end, I would rather celebrate each day as a new beginning.  I would rather live like I was living, each day full of possibilities and adventure.  Sure, not every adventure is as thrilling as jumping out of an airplane, but there is also a lot of joy and excitement to be had knowing that when you get home tonight, someone has taken the time to make Sloppy Joes and Tater Tots for you just because it is one of your favorite meals.  Living your life to the fullest doesn’t mean that you give up on the everyday parts of life, but enhance them with those extra adventures from time to time.  Ride a rollercoaster.  Sing out loud, even when others are listening.  Take a trip somewhere you always wanted to go.  Kiss your kids and hug your friends.  Live like you were living.

After she had safely landed back on solid ground, Eleanor Cunningham told all of the press gathered that she hoped when she turned 100 she would be able to celebrate that birthday by taking a trip to the moon.  So maybe the old broad is a little daffy, but she is still my hero.  And who knows, with a spirit and a heart as big as hers, she might just make it there.  She doesn’t strike me as one who tends to give up easily.  Maybe we should all take a cue from Eleanor.  Do the things we want to do, be happy and spread that happiness to others.  Be a little daffy every now and then, and most importantly, live.  Just live each day as if it is a great adventure, and then let that adventure be your life.