Category Archives: Family

$42 for Chucks?

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My daughter just got home from a short shopping excursion she talked Celeste (my lovely wife) into taking with her.  She’s been hell-bent on getting a pair of Chuck Taylors and so she took her hard earned babysitting money and plopped over $40 on a pair of black Chucks.  My reaction was, "Huh?"

When I was a kid we wore Chucks only because that was the only option we had.  Buying shoes was kind of like buying a car back in the 1920s.  You know, "Would you like your car in black or very black?"  In our case it was "Would you prefer the black or white canvas Chucks?"  That changed in the mid to late 70’s and I can distinctly remember wearing a pair of red suede Puma’s my Mom let me get and I also vividly remember all my socks turning pink when it rained. (This is the same woman, by the way, who dressed me in a peach denim leisure suit and my brother in a lime green leisure suit).  Chucks became what you wore when your parents were intent on torturing you or simply refused to pony up the cash for some Nikes or Adidas.

I have to take my hat off to the marketing geniuses at Converse who somehow made the Chucks cool again.  It probably began when they introduced various colors all those years ago.  For me personally those colors will always seem un-cool because I had a kid in my class my senior year of high school who wore a different color of Chucks every day of the week. They matched the color of his corduroy pants and long sleeve button down shirt.  If I remember correctly on Mondays he wore blue, on Tuesday green, on Wednesday red, on Thursday purple and Friday was black.  I used to think of Thursday as "Grape Day" and Friday as "Johnny Cash Day."  Miraculously he made it through the entire year without getting hassled once.  Quite frankly we all thought he was nuttier than a fruit cake and we figured he was just the type who would hunt us down and kill us slowly with a pair of tweezers and Super Glue so we didn’t mess with him.  That’s also why I’m not naming him.  I really don’t feel like being hunted down and slaughtered by a middle-aged monochromatic-Chuck’s-wearing wacko.

All of this is just to explain why I’m absolutely befuddled that my daughter just dropped so much coin on a pair of shoes that in my mind are the ultimate in dork-fare.  Of course this also explains why the large gap that used to separate me from cool has now grown into a bottomless chasm of un-cool. Hell I’m starting to ask the kids to interpret things I hear on TV!  Next thing you know I’ll be saying "Boffo!"

The Guys in White Shirts and Riding Bikes Found Me Again

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Last night I was visited by two Mormon missionaries and a volunteer from their local Ward.  This is part of the church’s ongoing campaign to try and win me back, a campaign they’ve been waging since 1976 when my parents got divorced and left the church. 

Back when I was a kid some people from the church would call and offer me and my brother a ride to church.  My mom told me I could go if I wanted but I don’t know many 10 year olds that would a. go to church without their mom, or b. go to church without being physically carried.  So I always respectfully declined the ride.

The Mormons lost track of me in college but once I got married I somehow re-appeared in their database and they started calling on me again.  Usually it’s just a couple of missionaries coming by the house, and because I respect who they are and what they’re doing I invite them in, sit them down, give them a cold drink, tell them my life story and that there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of me coming back to the church, and then end up talking hoops for a while (it’s amazing how many Mormon missionaries played high school basketball).  I also give them an open invitation to stop by if they’re tired or thirsty and we’ll have a cold glass of water or lemonade waiting for them.

Sometimes, like last night, they’ll have another church official call or visit.  I’m also nice to them, but since they’re driving I don’t feel the need to offer an open invitation for a cold drink.  Other than that I have the exact same conversation with them that I have with the missionaries, and it’s amazing how each takes it.  Without exception they don’t try to "sell" me, they just give me their name and welcome me to call if anything ever changes.  I have to respect that.

Now that they know my story I won’t be getting another visit until the next batch of "recruits" comes to town, so I guess we’ll have those cold drinks ready in about 6 months.

Side note: If you need to find someone forget hiring a PI, just go straight to the Mormons because their people tracking skills are amazing.  No wonder so many work for the FBI.

Ode to Mike

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Img_0510That handsome devil to the left is my oldest son Mike.  Until very recently he was my oldest son Michael, but he’s requested that we start calling him Mike so I’m giving it my best shot.  (News flash to Mike: your Mother will never stop calling you Michael so get used to it). 

Last Saturday Mike turned 14 and I’ve been struggling with that reality for almost an entire week.  It seems like just yesterday he was a precocious four year old giving his sister a hair cut that left her with a kind of bangs-mohawk.  You’d have to see it to understand.

Now he’s in 8th grade and is a good student, a great friend, a kind person, a gentle soul, and an absolute class clown.  He also manages to be a relatively benevolent older brother to his sister Erin and brother Justin. I couldn’t be prouder of the young man he’s become, and I’m looking forward to seeing him blossom in high school.

MichaelbandwStill I can’t believe he’s not the little guy in the sleeper you see on the left.  Part of me misses little Michael, but the rest of me loves meeting the new big Mike that seems to blossom more every day.

Happy 14th son.

Money Pit or “I’ve Never Seen Anything Like This Before”

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The sentence that will forever define our experience in our first house in North Carolina is “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”  That’s the sentence used by every service technician that enters our home.  Today it is being used by the good folks at Duct Doctor who are here cleaning out our air ducts.

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The reason the good people at Duct Doctor used “the sentence” is that they’ve discovered radiant water heating coils in the ductwork of our basement.  As I may (or may not) have documented in the past the previous owner of this house had a large chimenia built in the back of our house (picture above), had water pipes run through it and then attached those pipes to some radiant heating coils throughout the basement.  Until now we had no idea that they also put radiant coils inside the ductwork.

Apparently the theory was that the coils would aid in heating the house by allowing the air handler to blow air around the warm coils, but unfortunately the coils are just resting on the bottom part of the ductwork so the air can’t really circulate around it.  Furthermore, it makes no damn sense when you consider that you have to worry about heat around here maybe 3 months out of the year.  And the fact that this was all hooked up to an outdoor, wood burning operation kind of totally defeats the purpose too by causing you to spend your entire day out in the cold stoking a fire.

Unfortunately for us the result of all this is that we have a higher propensity for mold in our HVAC system.  We already had the water source detached from the coil system when we had the plumber (John’s Plumbing, Heating & AC, whom I highly recommend) in to fix our water pressure after our new water heater started leaking, so that part of the equation is taken care of. But, we still need to get those metal coils out of there since condensation can build up on them when we run the AC. Oh, and by-the-by, we run our AC a LOT more than we run the heat.  Guess what I’ll be doing over the next few weeks?

So now we’ve had a general contractor, a plumber, an HVAC tech and a duct cleaner all walk in our house and say “I’ve never seen anything like that before.”  I suspect we’re becoming infamous among the service people in Winston-Salem.

Section 67, Grave 2711

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Img_04801986 was the first time that intimate death entered my life.  Until that point I had never had anyone close to me die and then in the span of a couple of months my Grandpa died and one of my closest friends from high school was killed.  I was reminded of this two weeks ago when I visited Arlington National Cemetery and found the headstone (Section 67, Grave 2711) of my friend Louis Robinson, Jr. (L CPL, US Marines), who was killed August 31, 1986, a week after his birthday and the same day his child was born.

We, my friends and I,  never really knew the circumstances of Louis’s death, but we were told that while stationed out west he was waiting for a transport flight to go to Tennessee to be with his wife for the birth of their child.  He went to a park with some buddies and was having some beers.  Another Marine was at the park with his family, and after being told by his wife that Louis had offered their young son a beer (according to the story his buddies said he was joking around) he went back to his car, got a gun out of the glove box and shot Louis in the chest.  Louis’s buddies threw him in a car and took off for the hospital, lost control of their car and ran over a sidewalk and into a storefront.  He never made it to the hospital alive.

I’m not sure how much of this story is true, but I can tell you that it wouldn’t surprise me too much if it was.  It has all the earmarks of the silly or stupid crap we did in high school.  We always seemed to get ourselves in little jams by acting like stupid kids while cruising the streets of DC and the suburbs.  Heck we’d even been caught in the vicinity of gunfire twice before.

We laughed off all our misadventures.  After all we were invincible, as yet untouched by the truly horrible punishment that life can mete out.  Sure we all had a little something we could point to as painful: divorced or alcoholic parents, bad break-ups with girlfriends, a car crash or two, but few of us really believed that true tragedy could, or would, touch us.

Louis’s death changed that.  I can’t speak for my other friends, but it rocked me to the core.  The invincibility that I’d felt disappeared and was replaced by hesistance for the first time that I can remember.  Not that I had never felt fear or uncertainty before, but I felt a truly visceral fear for the first time ever.  Events that I had previously looked at as a crazy kind of fun — can you believe we just did that? — I now viewed as events that I had miraculously survived — how the hell did I not die?

One of my closest friends died doing the kind of thing we’d done for years.  Silly, juvenile, stupid and totally within the norm for your average 19 or 20 year old American idiot.  It saddens me to no end that he died before he outgrew that stage of life, that he never had the opportunity to become a real man, to watch his kids grow up, to experience the pain and joy that it is to be a parent and an adult member of society.

And it shocks me that it has already been 20 years since he died.  To be honest I didn’t realize it had been that long until I saw Louis’s headstone, and it really knocked me for a loop.  I have no idea what became of his child or his wife; she was from Tennessee and none of us met her before the funeral or saw her after that day.  The fact that Louis was a black city kid from DC and she was a white country girl from Tennessee made the situation a little awkward, and I’m not sure if she stayed in touch with Louis’s family.  Unfortunately I know for a fact that I didn’t and that is something I regret to this day.

Now I’m thinking of my own kids.  They’re just now entering their teenage years and I’m wondering what kind of trouble they’ll get into.  What stupid, short-sighted, totally inane mischief will they perpetrate?  Should I share my own misadventures in hopes of making myself an object lesson, or do I risk giving them the wrong idea?  I have no idea and I guess Celeste and I will just have to do what parents have always done: play it by ear and do our best to minimize the damage. And hope to God that good luck is hereditary.

I really wish Louis had lived to face these hopes, fears and questions himself.  We could have talked and  laughed about it over a beer with all our other friends.

Family Week

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I got to spend most of last week with my family.  Celeste had to be in DC for work on Wednesday and Thursday so we all accompanied her and stayed with my in-laws. We spent the day on Sunday at Celeste’s brother’s house for a party with all of her family, and then on Monday I visited one of my clients in Alexandria while Celeste took the kids to Orange, VA to visit her friend Lee.

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On Tuesday I drove Celeste, Erin, and my mother-in-law Patti Rogers to a tea and then took Justin for ribs at King Street Blues. After that we drove over to Arlington National Cemetery and saw the changing of the guards at the Tomb of the Unknown and then we found the grave of my high school buddy Louis Robinson (Lance Corporal, US Marines), who was killed exactly 20 years ago this month.

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On Wednesday I drove Celeste to her client’s office at McPherson Square, and then went back to get Erin and Justin.  We headed over to Occoquan and had lunch with my buddy Ted before going downtown to pick up Celeste. Having the kids along allowed us to utilize the HOV lanes and get back to the in-laws’ house in about 1/2 hour.

Jonmikeatwhitehouse_1 Yesterday my oldest son Mike (formerly Michael) and I took Celeste into the city (again utilizing HOV) for her meetings and then did the tourist thing. The photo of us was taken in front of the White House on the Lafayette Park side and was shot with ye old camera phone, thus the purple hue and enormous belly on moi.  For the record I’m actually an incredibly fit tri-athlete often mistaken for Pierce Brosnan…damn crappy phone.

Anyway we started out having breakfast at the Old Ebbitt Grill, then walked over to the White House and followed that with a walk to the Bureau of Engraving & Printing where we couldn’t get a tour pass, so we went next door to the Holocaust Museum. There I found out how little Mike’s been taught about the Holocaust so despite the fact that he found it kind of boring (he described it as "lots of words and pictures") I’m definitely glad we did it.  It’s incredibly powerful and I think he’ll appreciate it all the more in coming years.

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After lunch (excellent chicken salad sandwiches provided by my mother-in-law) we walked over to the World War II Memorial and then the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Memorial. After that we took a break and drove over to Union Station and walked around it and then visited the Postal Museum next door.  Once we were done there we drove over to McPherson Square and picked up Celeste.

After that we drove back to the in-laws via the HOV lanes, had a quick dinner with them and packed up the kids and headed home.  We were in our garage at the stroke of midnight.

It was a blur, but I had a blast.

Wake Up Erin!

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We’re slowly but surely converting our old home videos from VHS to DVD and in the process I’m playing around with converting the DVDs to MPEG files.  Below is a video of our daughter falling asleep while eating pizza when she was a toddler.  Man does time fly.

Friday Night in Floyd, VA

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Took the family up to my mom’s place in Radford, VA to spend a long weekend with her, her beau Bert and my brother and his family.  On Friday night we went to Floyd, VA to see the bluegrass and gospel groups that play every Friday night at the General Store, along with some impromptu playing on the streets by various groups.  It’s a completely different world and culture and it was a definite eye opener for the kids (of all ages).  Here’s a little video I shot with my camera phone (date: 7/28/06):

Family Member and Winston-Salem Native Makes the Front Page of the Washington Post

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My cousin Adam Good was the subject of a story that was on the front page of the Saturday (July 22, 2006) Washington Post in an article titled "Secure in His Mannyhood: Evolved or an Anomaly, a Male Nanny Enjoys His Job in VA".  There’s even a video with an interview in the online version. (Photo to the left is from the Washington Post article, by Kevin Clark of the Washington Post).

Adam’s a great guy (I’m still tempted to call him a kid) who grew up here in Winston-Salem.  To say he’s smart would be the world’s greatest understatement.  Before we moved here we stayed at my Aunt Debbie’s (Adam’s mom) house during one visit and we had Adam’s old room.  His bookshelves were crammed with books on philosophy, politics, and literature that scared the crap out of me in college and he was reading them in middle school and high school.  He graduated with honors from American University and will be pursuing his masters degree in the near future.

It’s wild to think that a family member is being profiled in one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers and is considered representative of a new "trend" called "mannyhood."  It cracks me up to no end that he’s being compared to Britney Spears’ "manny."  Adam being mentioned along with Britney Spears is extremely funny. Suffice it to say that I seriously doubt that Adam’s music collection contains anything from artists with names like Britney, Avril or Jessica.

And of course it’s entertaining that Adam has to answer the requisite "are you gay?" question (he’s not) as if men aren’t capable of being good child care providers, and I’m sure he gets his fair share of grief from his male friends, but as Adam points out in the article it is no small deal that he’s getting paid good money and he’s living rent free, which is a big deal in DC.  Like I said Adam’s one smart dude.

A side note to a prominent blogger here in North Carolina, Billy the Blogging Poet: Adam is also an accomplished poet and a very good musician.

Just Me and Justin

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Tubing_with_eddie_nevins_and_justin_julyCeleste and our two oldest kids are at Laurel Ridge this week for summer camp which means that our youngest has had to endure a week alone with me.  I had business in DC late last week and early this week so on Thursday we drove up and I dropped Justin with our good friends the Nevins.  He spent the night with them on Thursday and then after I was done working on Friday he and I spent the weekend with the Nevins.  We went boating on Saturday with Ted (Nevins patriarch), his two boys Eddie and Daniel and Ted’s parents.  The picture is of Eddie, me and Justin (hand up) tubing on the Potomac River.  We also went to see Pirates of the Caribbean on Friday and just kind of hung out on Sunday, which allowed us to spend some time with Jane (matriarch of the Nevins family) and the Nevins’ girls, Delia and Tess.

On Monday and Tuesday I was working all day in Bethesda, MD so we moved to a hotel in Chevy Chase on Sunday night and my Mom and Bert (her significant other) came up and stayed in the same hotel as me and Justin.  They took him to the International Spy Museum and the newly reopened Smithsonian American Art Museum on Monday and shopping on Tuesday.  Since Mom loaded him up with books I don’t think he minded the shopping at all.  Sunday evening Justin and I ordered room service and then watched a pay-per-view movie and on Monday we had dinner at Clydes with Mom and Bert and then ordered another movie in our room.  Justin is now under the impression that business trips are all about figuring out where to eat and then watching movies in your room.

Last night, after having dinner with Mom, Bert, my brother and his family we drove home and listened to the CD of spy movie theme music that Mom bought him at the Spy Museum which was a hoot.  We have two days at home before Celeste and the other kids get home so I’ll be bouncing between working and doing some more fun stuff with Justin. This is the first significant amount of time that Justin and I have ever had just the two of us.  We’ve always done lots of stuff with his siblings and I’ve coached one of his soccer teams when he was little, but this has been a unique experience and it’s been an absolute blessing for me.  He’s a great kid, I’ve always known that, but the one-on-one time has allowed us to do more uninterrupted talking in one week than we probably get in the normal course of one or two months.  My new goal is to do something like this with each of the kids as much as possible and I’m hoping that Celeste will get the chance to do it too. 

What a great week.