In Defense of Failure

I owe a lot to my near perpetual failure. I mean a whole lot.

I learned to fail early. I tell everyone, eventually and probably repeatedly that I failed kindergarten. Now I know that in the context of school that means a specific thing. In my case it meant something slightly different. I cried. I cried all day. I cried every day all day. I cried terribly and persistently and if it’s like anything else I’ve ever done, I did so loudly.

Sure, I was slightly young as I was born in November and started my first year of kindergarten (a phrase that is just utterly delightful to me, my first year of Kindergarten) as a 4 year old. I clearly wasn’t ready. I went to a Catholic school those early years and I remember sitting with a nun in the big office in the southwest corner of the first floor of the school with a lollipop to end my day at least one of those days. In my memory my mom picked me up there and had a few moments chat with the nun outside the door before we left to walk home. Maybe I was in school for a week, maybe a month, maybe 3 months. I suspect I was home by Christmas, but it was 1978 and I was four or five so I don’t really know. What I do know is this early failure set me forth on a career of academic failure that lasted into my 30’s.

That’s not entirely true. To be sure, I was an academic failure throughout my formal education. That said, in my 30’s, based on my work performance and a career that was well under way I was accepted into the Masters of Social Work Program at Hunter College. I attended the orientation in the auditorium and was relatively excited to start the program. Until day one. I was miserable preparing to go, resistant to leave my apartment in time and upon arrival to the school saw a sign on the door that read ‘Class cancelled today. See you next week.’ That was enough for me. I walked out, never returned and abandoned EVER seeking to further my formal education ever again.

Back to the failure at hand. That first exposure to kindergarten soured me on the whole endeavor. Those early years in Catholic school were the worst and that was a sustained reality. I faked sick as much as possible to avoid being there. I was what kids today would call ‘bullied’, though at that time I don’t know that ‘bullying’ was all that bad. I think adults pretty much concurred that dealing with bullies was a good learning experience. Like so much so that there were very special episodes of sitcoms reinforcing the belief.

I remember telling my grandfather when he asked about all the punches I kept taking in school that I was taught to turn the other cheek. Well I had him on that one. Or so I thought. He just took it in, confirmed that it was a good lesson from my mom and from Jesus, but that sometimes a man has to punch back and it wouldn’t be the worst thing if I did. Well, I did not like that idea. So for 5 years of Catholic school, six if you count my failed year of Kindergarten (technically I dropped out) I learned to really take a punch.

I failed everything going forward. In my school, and this is amazing to me to say from this angle in 2024, but you had to FAIL THREE CLASSES to be academically ineligible for sports, so I failed 2 consistently, I’d pick them out ahead of time, and made sure to really skim by a third class. I may have actually missed a semester of basketball at one point, but never when on Varsity. I was pretty good so coaches would go to bat for me.

Ah, basketball. I miss being so young and spry and able to move so fluidly. Make no mistake, on the local level, in my town, in my schools, I was legit very good. I was obsessed and remember specifically talking to a guidance counselor in 7th or 8th grade and telling them my only objective was to play in the NBA. That was my career plan. Here’s where it gets a little unbelievable. They responded by saying it was not something they’d ever said to anyone else, but in my case it seemed like a reasonable path to pursue. Again, I was really good really young.

I lived and breathed the game. I devoured the basketball digests that arrived at my door. I spent 6-8 hours a day (this is if anything an under estimation for the years I was 12-16 years old) playing, shooting, looking for runs around town to jump in on or in my wonderful case, lying about my age to get a day pass to the college open gyms where I was a bit of a legend as I ran all but the best players on the college team out of the gym on the daily out of season. I know it doesn’t sound possible, but it was a div 3 school and I was much younger and fitter back then.

My NBA dreams lasted well into high school. Beyond my own assessment and that of my middle school guidance counselor, I think a lot of people thought I really had a chance. But like almost every other dreamer of such dreams I hit a brick wall beyond which I couldn’t see myself ever getting to. I saw it before my classmates or kids I played with did, but it was clear. I got inklings when trying out for the regional AAU team. I made the team, but I saw the guys who were moderately successful college players who had what I never would. They were taller, faster, stronger and by amounts I couldn’t fully make up for with hard work and dedication.

So I lingered. I lost the love. The last great accomplishment was making the Empire State Games team as a rising senior. It was a wonderful capstone to a project I’d undertaken with an open heart and with both feet in the water for most of a decade and I’m proud of it to this day. I played with College greats and NBA players and I knew before anyone else around me that it was stopping here. And mostly it did. But before it stopped completely, before I hung ’em up, it did one very important thing for me. It got me into college. Which was good since I had no idea if I’d graduate high school until the last minute.

I was in. I made it to college. I even made the basketball team and immediately failed off after one trimester. Yep. Basketball ran on fumes after that and a couple more things happened, but I was mostly an also ran who occasionally was asked to dress for a trip and even got to travel for the first time our school ever qualified for the NCAA tourney. It was fun, but that’s all it was at that point.

College was more failure, but I was getting more efficient at it. I learned that I could take a night class to satisfy my requirements. I could attend with adults much older than me (and a few likeminded regular students) and completely a class while only having to attend once a week instead of 2-3 times during the week. That’s right, I could skip a whole weeks worth of classes in one go! Okay, that may be sarcastic, but it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen quite a bit.

I failed introduction to computers (that was a real and required course for all graduates of Elmira at that time, the early 90’s) what I have to assume is a still record 7 times. Yep. I failed Intro to Computers 7 full times. When I walked across the stage after 5 full years of college (yup, took five years to fake graduate) I received a nice, purple degree holder with a piece of paper inside that had the words ‘summer completer’ typed inside. The whole family came to see the pageantry of my fake graduation. I wouldn’t graduate for 4 more years, until I made the trek once a week from my home 2 hours away to complete intro to computers on my 8th try. And it was touch and go even that time. After a ton of failure I got my degree in human services in just under (6 months under) a decade.

In one of those night classes though, in the place where I would least suspect to find a thing I wasn’t looking for, I took the first steps on the path that leads directly to where I sit now, 30 years down the road. The Executive Director of the local ARC came in to speak about the history of the ARC movement and how he worked to make society more integrated and open opportunities for people with disabilities. A fellow student, someone I frankly had a fairly low opinion of spoke up in class and asked if the ARC were in any way related to AHRC of NYC. It was. She described how she had worked the previous summer at a sleep away camp for AHRC of NYC and what it was like to do that work. I asked her about it after class and next thing I know I’m getting a call in a dorm room to interview for a summer camp counselor position. I took the job and never looked back.

So, that 4 years between fake graduating and graduating was maybe the most fortuitous failure of them all, my failed engagement. It’s a long story and a not so interesting one. It’s filled with youthful confusion and striving as well as delusion and insecurity. In any case, thank god I failed at that one. I don’t suppose I’m the only one who failed at relationships until they found the right one so I won’t ponder on it, but suffice it to say, I suspect everyone came away from that a winner. She was a lovely person and I was a lost and potentially lovely person. Thankfully we each have found the right person and, while I can only fully speak for myself, I suspect she would agree, this failure while painful was necessary.

I am a reader. I suspect it’s a large part of what has made me successful in a lot of ways. I fell in love with books at an early age and never really let go of them. I was resistant to school or even work reading, but let me loose in a bookstore or library and I’ll find a stack of books I’ll get through no matter how long it might take me. I loved novels. My first hero in the literary world was John Irving, celebrated novelist of such wonderful stories as The World According to Garp, A Prayer for Owen Meaney, The Cider House Rules, The Hotel New Hampshire… I have to stop there. I could go on and write endlessly about each. Especially Owen Meaney.

My love of novels lead me to want to be a writer. I idolized these people. I couldn’t believe all these worlds that so enraptured me as I read about them, all these characters and situations all came from a single mind was mind blowing. Mind expanding. I wanted to try. I wanted to see if I could create a world like I had fallen into so many times. I wanted to tell a story that had my thoughts and creations at its root. I wanted so badly to be a novelist.

I wrote. A lot at times, less at others, but for 3o plus years now I have been writing. I still dream of being that next great novelist. A lot of novelists don’t strike a nerve with audiences until well into their 40’s and even 50’s. I still feed this dream and while I haven’t written much in the last 4 years or so, I still dream about it. I have started reading a lot more this last 5 years of so since getting glasses. I had no idea how much the fading images had effected my reading, but as soon as I addressed the issue I was back in the books.

But here’s the thing. Despite all the writing I’ve done and despite generally feeling great about the audiences that have read and mostly liked my writing, I have failed, utterly, to write that novel that takes me out of worrying about making a living. Failed to write that script that gets into a bidding war amongst the great Hollywood Studios that makes my next deal the one I can retire from the other world and dedicate my life to stories and capturing the praise of those critics I read every week in the NYT Review of Books. Nope. In fact I’ve spent far more money on writing and developing passable pieces then I have received. I am a writer, and that was a hill to climb and I’m proud to have done it, but I’m not the writer I set out to be.

Nor am I the student I could have been. Nor the basketball player I thought I’d be. Nor the partner I tried to be so long ago. Nope. I failed to finish where I intended in each of these. But I wouldn’t change a thing.

Because the success that my life is, and there’s almost no argument against my life being a success, is largely due to the connections I made in all my failed endeavors, the lessons I learned in never quite getting to where I aimed and in the roads I couldn’t have seen that I wandered down in pursuit of things I would never find.

Failure is fuel at times, driving us to keep looking. Failure is a guide at times, gently turning us toward where we should be looking. Failure is many things, but it is rarely alone. It brings a lot with it and we shouldn’t be afraid to follow it down paths we didn’t know existed when we started out. I followed failure where it lead and like that path less traveled in that long ago New England wood, it has made all the difference.

Christmas Break

The author reflects on the past year, emphasizing personal growth and accomplishments. They acknowledge the challenges of parenthood, career development, and maintaining sobriety. The family’s well-being and the author’s writing aspirations are also highlighted. Overall, the narrative presents a heartfelt journey of self-improvement, gratitude, and optimism for the future.

Like a lot of other folks I tend to spend some time during that final week of the year assessing. Perhaps its silly, but based on the posts of my co-conspirators, er, rather the friends I’ve grown up with or made along the way, I’m not the only one who uses this break in the schedule to contemplate the past year and by extension, where I am on this adventure.

It makes sense. I’m anything if not a meaning making machine, moving through life and attempting to make it mean something is really my life’s work in the broadest sense of that term. And what better time of year to sit and contemplate where I am, where I’ve been and what lays ahead.

That said, I wish there was some balance to this week in midsummer. A week when the world slows to a crawl, where everyone, by default, is expected to be unavailable as they congregate with their families and eat, drink and be merry. Concentrating all of our year in review thoughts to the shortest days of sunlight around the most emotionally charged time of the year, the holidays, may not be the perfect set up. That said, its probably healthy to imbue some bleakness into the assessment in order to account for the unavoidable bleakness that consciousness compels upon us beings whose sole unifying reality is death. That bleak enough?

Lets Occam’s Razor this task first. White/Black. Yes/No. Pass/Fail. The 30,000 foot assessment is easy sitting here at fifty, a bit more than half way through the ride. Pass. Don’t dismiss this victory too quickly. It wasn’t always certain that I’d land squarely on this side of the dividing line. At least it wasn’t always so clear to me. In fact there were years there, possibly decades when this outcome didn’t feel so easily attained. But as I sit here with a happy family, a wonderful partner and wife and a good deal of the adventure still left to discover, I’m relieved to say that I’m pretty good at this point. Could of course get hit by a bus (literally OR metaphorically) at anytime and I keep that front of mind, but from where I sit I’m fairly comfortable and excited for what is yet to come.

Now, let’s put some more fine points on the line and determine where I am and what I can bank.

I’ve become a better dad in time. Started out kinda rough. I always loved and cared for the kids, but those early days I didn’t really come through for my wife. I wasn’t horrendous and it wasn’t anything other than typical failings, but I’ve gotten better and I hope it’s helpful. Where I really failed was caring for myself. I still struggle to do it, but I’m determined.

I’m about 3 years back into exercising with some regularity. One thing that is for sure is that my body is not what it used to be. In fact, just on stats it’s about 30% more than it used to be. And no, I’m not saying I’m 8’1″. No, I’m afraid all my added size is concentrated in the middle as I grow horizontally. I had no idea that all those years spent playing basketball in my youth were wasted as my natural body type would be that of a wrestler or a large appliance mover.

My career is, knock on wood, moving right along. About 10 years ago we made a decision as a family for me to start making moves in my career with the conscious goal of getting to a place where we could get closer to financially secure. This would seem to be a natural goal of all workers I would assume, but I didn’t really make the effort prior to that. I mean, I was viable and as such I was secure, but like many new parents the world started to look very different when I started seeing it through a (thankfully) healthy new babies eyes. Having made decisions with that new imperative these past 10 years or so, we appear to be on track to retire somewhat close to the normal timeline. That said, there were some bumps on that road. I can tell you, it SUCKS being fired with young ones. That said, in hindsight it was the best thing for me and for our future.

I’m not drinking. I never thought I would be able to say that. I was quite committed to the task. Been a little over 2 years and I’m so happy I didn’t stay drunk the whole time. It was somehow depleting from every other aspect of my life while fueling and feeding my anger and annoyance. Drinking is stupid. If you can, you should stop. I still drink two beers a night, though non-alcoholic. I like to ensure I keep my calories up to stay warm in winter;)

I’m reading again. Not as much since I took on a new job in August. But I made my first Goodreads reading goal and thankfully reached it by midyear. It was only 25 books, but I should note, this would always have been a miss for me in every year of my life. I don’t know how people manage to live and hit some of the numbers I hear people spewing in their end of year book summaries. I am a HUGE advocate of reading, but when someone says they read 150 books this year I just worry about them. Maybe they’re fine, but maybe it’s a cry for help, no?

For the record, and in no particular order, these are my favorites of the year. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett, Shades of Glory by Lawrence Hogan, A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib, Kindred by Octavia Butler, Beartown by Fredrik Backman, Babel by R.F. Kuang, House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune and The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman.

My kids are doing great and I likely won’t be writing about them in much detail anymore. At least for the time being. Honestly, when they were little what I wrote was universal and connective. Felt that way to me at least. I was writing for my tribe of fellow parents with little ones struggling to navigate the transition they throw us into that we could never have been prepared for. It was cathartic for me and largely inobtrusive for them. While I may still write tangentially about them as I talk about me, I no longer feel their lives are so intertwined with mine that I have the right to put out their lives as my own. Perhaps I was wrong to do it as long as I did. I really don’t know. What I do know is that it would be entirely wrong to share their stories now as all I have are my access to their story. My point of view on their story. But their story’s are theirs completely now and it would be intrusive and honestly destructive for me to commandeer those stories for my tales. So be it.

What I can say about the kids is they are growing up. We are heading into the teen years and they are playing their roles exactly as they should. My wife continues to have an amazing bond and provides for the emotional support I can’t always tap inside me. They, all of them, are the best thing that has or will ever happen to me. I’m so proud to be their dad and her husband. We are sometimes stumbling and often soaring. We continue to learn how to be there for each other. I love them all with all my heart.

I published a short story since last I wrote here. I did it right this time and hired a copyeditor and am really proud of the how it turned out. It’s a lovely love story of sorts, a cozy tale of sorts, a melancholic tale with some laughs and more, but I can’t say what more it is without giving away a critical reveal toward the end. It’s called ‘It all Started Down at the Stewarts’ and it I’m really proud of it. I think it’s really good. Takes about an hour to read or listen to (my brother is a professional audiobook narrator and incredibly talented) on audible. If you read it and like it a positive review would really be appreciated. Telling friends you think might like it is also incredibly helpful.

I’d like to get back into the writing game. I miss it. This is the second post I’ve written this past two weeks, but I suspect this will be the first to be published. Perhaps it will be the only one. That said, I saw Neil Gaiman talking about his process for writing novels and he said he has taken to writing longhand in notebooks for his first draft. This lets him avoid interruptions that our tech has gotten way to efficient at providing and also lets him type out the second draft which really helps in the ‘re-writing’ part of the second draft. That resonated with me so I have the notebook and pens ready. Haven’t started yet, but I am optimistic.

What else is there to say. I guess that’s a wrap on 2023 and a good read on how it looks from 50 with a couple of kids and a family. Happy New Year. I would love to hear how your annual review went in your home.

How Awkward: A Date Night Tale

I have not felt like a teenager in some time. I’m a man of a certain age and while I may carry around my own personal supply of self-doubt and self-consciousness, they both fit in a perfectly normal sized backpack that does not in any way draw attention to me. It is the standard teen drama we all carry around, hidden safely, strapped to us to inform our sense of self.

So, as I stood there, cheeks reddening and heart racing, I was once again that same teenager who would walk to school, past the buses lined up dropping off all my peers. Dreading being seen and fearing not being noticed. Worried the eyes I could feel boring into my skin and my psyche were because a pimple or a stray booger had sprung forth unbeknownst to me. All this while not noticing I was completely naked from the waist down. Sure, this was a dream. I never in fact walked to school while naked down there. But I dreamed this a lot.

You can imagine how jarring it was to be feeling these feelings after not feeling them for so long. All because I was once again making a fool of myself, a thing done with such startling regularity when I was a teenager that it was a nightly job to process embarrassment in dreamland.

What can cause a 45 year old man, fully self aware and fairly unselfconscious to find himself once again blushing? Could it be a physical reaction? In this case that couldn’t be ruled out. That said I have a sneaking suspicion that it was much the same thing as caused me to feel so unabashedly and unavoidably awkward those many many years ago. In this case it was in fact the presence of a teenage girl.

Please know that she is, by all accounts, a perfectly kind, warm, thoughtful person whom I would have been embarrassed in front of in the same way were she a 45 year old man like me. I simply note her ‘teen girlness’ for the remarkable symmetry it provides with my earlier embarrassments.

This young woman was here to do her first of hopefully many future nights and days of babysitting for our kids. She had been here for a half hour before to meet the kids, but this was still squarely in the ‘first impression’ stage of our relationship. So, as so many parents do, we had spent the day cleaning. To put our best foot forward. For our high school babysitter. I mean, we worked for hours. Okay, maybe I’m not entirely unselfconscious.

neal-fagan-221904-unsplash
pretty much how I’m feelin’ right before I injected myself…

Anyway there we were in our date night best. We hadn’t done date night in a while, so for our standards we were looking sharp. All that was left was to show our young employee the where’s and what’s and the whatnot’s. It was exhilarating.

Then, right before we were to leave, I stood in front of her and jabbed myself with an Epi-Pen. Right there. In our kitchen.

Sure, I was blushing. Yes, my wife and the teenager were laughing pretty hard. Yes, I did think, ‘Oh, no! What have I done!’. I quickly realized I was in the clear. The needle barely touched my leg. I didn’t get injected with anything. I was safe. But the laughs became more nervous. More giddy. They even belied a fair bit of actual concern.

Why were my cheeks getting so hot? Why the heart racing? Why did I want to crawl into a ball and hide under the table?

Because I’m the knob that just played the cool guy and jabbed himself in the leg with an Epi-Pen. In front of his wife, who could only be half surprised at best at such jack-assery and our new babysitter.

‘We’ll be texting to check in and please please please don’t hesitate to text us. We would love to know how it’s going.’, my wife said as I hustled us out the door awash in shame and certain I was getting pimples, urging Karen to hurry it up in the clenched teeth, hushed tones of teen boys for millennia as I waved Karen to the door.

‘Please text, we’ll definitely be checking in to see how you’re doing.’, I added, trying to regain my composed adulthood.

‘Perhaps I will have to be checking in to see how you are doing after that.’, she added with a smirk.

It was funny. All of it. We were able to have a good laugh about it.

Then, for the first time in maybe 25 years, I dreamed I was walking to school again. I never looked down. Didn’t have to. I knew.

So Long 2018. I’ll Miss You

Charlie, Teddy, Mommy and I just cycled through all the New Year’s Eve Countdowns on Netflix. We even doubled up on the ‘All Hail King Julien’ and ‘Larva’ countdowns. We have only seen King Julien in the context of this less-than-two-minute clip, yet it’s a perennial favorite.  Larva on the other hand is just super weird. Mildly disturbing actually. I love that Teddy loves it. I’m not sure why.

img_4134You two don’t really need us to trick you anymore. You know it’s 9 o’clock or so and you are happy watching all these countdowns. You still dance. You dance without inhibition. You are whirling dervishes in our happy living room and are as excited on the tenth countdown as you were on the first.

Saying goodbye to 2018 shouldn’t be that hard. Outside of our bubble it’s been a rough one. But inside our bubble, inside our family, it’s been a year I’ll never forget. One that could have gone very differently. One that could have felt tragic even. But it didn’t. For that I have you two, my two wonderful boys and your Mommy to thank.

The lowest day of the year for me was May 11th. It started like any other, then it took an unexpected turn, then I was out of work. With all the thoughts racing through my head it was so easy to feel hopeless. I could have sunk. But you didn’t let me. You even found some joy in it. Even in my most determined and optimistic thought trains the best I could get to was finding a better place to be and earn money to maintain what we had established but you guys saw beyond that.

I haven’t written much this year. Not much to you two at least. I have to fix that. While I won’t say this blog hasn’t evolved since it’s start, I will say that I still wish to write it for you two specifically and for our family more generally. I still want it to be the place where I can select and clean up our muddled memories for future reference. I still want to make a trove of gratitude for the times we have to be mined later for the purpose of copious and gratuitous nostalgia. In that way I want to shine a light on 2018 before it passes us by.

img_2509First, I found a level of love from your mom, one that was tender and thoughtful and selfless, that I didn’t know existed. Her continual support and encouragement and love really made me able to see past the vicissitudes of the moment and grab onto the opportunity I’d been given. At times when I lost faith she never did. When I doubted myself she reminded me who I was and what I could do. She was beyond anything I deserve, even though she’d never let me think that.

img_1462-1Secondly, I had the year with you two in 2018 that I wished for and thought I’d never get. I got to spend the summer home with you two! If we could in any way make it so that you were home with one of us instead of away at various after school programs, we’d do it. We want that more than anything. But to live here, a place that gives you such great opportunities, we both need to work. But from May 11th through the rest of the year I got to spend my days with you. Do you even know how great that timing is!

img_1705We had a summer together while you guys were 5 and 7. Charlie was heading into 2nd grade in the fall and T, you were entering Kindergarten. What an amazing time to have with you! We explored and hiked, played baseball and went to the pool pretty much every day. We talked and ate and cooked and laughed. We learned Chinese checkers and met our neighbors. You two became neighborhood kids and you spent the summer in and out of friends backyards and trampolines. We sprayed hoses and shunned shirts for days. Well, you guys did. I am of a certain age and shirts are just a good policy. Still, we did SO MUCH.

The fall came too quick, I’m afraid. We fell back into the school year begrudgingly. Before long Mommy was taking Charlie in on her way to work and I was hanging with T through early lunch after which his Kindergarten day would start. We talked about everything in the mornings. Friends, feelings, Lego’s and life. I would walk you across the street and wave goodbye. We even blew kisses through the door for a little while, but you stopped and preferred to wave soon enough.

I’d come home and clean up and look for my next job. By now it was somewhat begrudgingly. You all taught me to have some high standards and I think I got it right when I chose to say yes to an offer. I’d turned a few back and  then had not heard anything for long stretches. It made me nervous. But you guys and mom were so wonderful I couldn’t just take anything.

I’m thrilled to be starting my next job at a wonderful place doing real world good works. But I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you how much I’m going to miss what we had these past 11 months. I didn’t even realize I was dropping you off for midday kindergarten for the last time when it happened. It just happened. Like it had for months before.

I can’t say 2018 was perfect. It wasn’t. But it was the very best imaginable imperfect I could ever have dreamed up. I will never be able to recapture what we had this past year, but I’ll never ever forget it.

Diary of a Wimpy (and AWESOME!) Bookstore

When your seven year old son manages to have his attention wrangled by a book you pounce. When he falls so in love with a book series that he reads 12 of them as fast as he can acquire them you do everything you can to feed his passions. In our case that meant spending hours on end reading with him. He would assign both me and his mother separate books that we would take to his room and lie in his bed with him while each reading quietly. If one or the other of us chuckled we would read what it was that made us giggle back so we could all get in on the laugh. For us, for our Charlie, that book series was the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books by Jeff Kinney.

Charlie at the hotel that night showing off his haul!

I don’t know if you’ve had any time recently with an obsessed seven year old. It’s intense. And when there is a exactly 217 pages x 12 books of details to obsess on ones curiosity extends beyond the pages of the books and into all the surrounding content they can find. It was while pursuing any and all things Greg Hefley that our Charlie discovered the existence of An Unlikely Story in Plainville, Massachusetts.

Well, our fate was sealed. A journey to the store was in the offing. So when we surprised him on the night before we were to drive the four and a half hours (spread over six or so as we were of course traveling with the seven year old and his five year old brother) he immediately started bouncing. Just ceaseless bouncing while exclaiming over and over, ‘this is going to be the best day ever!’

He wasn’t wrong.

There’s no telling if a bookstore so highly anticipated in the active imagination of a little boy can live up to his wild expectation. As soon as we pulled into the small parking lot adjacent the store on the otherwise unremarkable intersection in the aptly named (no offense) Plainville any concerns were allayed. He was all buzz and electricity.

Upon entering the bookstore we were all a bit overwhelmed. Immediately it was clear that this store was not the beautiful monstrosities we come across at our local corporate book monolith but rather a space designed by and for people who loved books. The high ceilings and burnished wood surfaces were beautiful in the lighting that instead of bathing every inch in overwhelmingly bright floods of fluorescent uniformity highlighted the spaces between the shelves and the items throughout the store.

It’s clear as well that this space was designed as a community space for book lovers, fantasy geeks, story obsessives and lovers of the type of independent bookstores that take residence more in our minds and memories than in our lives these days. Which is wonderful. For all the awesomeness we discover at the massive book behemoths there is something about getting lost in a less uniform space that I didn’t realize they were missing until they got to navigate this place of magic. It’s a modern throwback to a time when bookstores held a different role in the life of a place and a welcome balance to the modern, uniform experience. A place where a sports fan, a cookbook enthusiast, a reader of mystery and genre fiction and kids learning to fall in love with stories can share the space without feeling separated and segregated. Where each can stumble on the other and become curious about others interests.

The cafe was unobtrusive and inviting and after making all our purchases of all things Wimpy (and a novel for me and bag for mama) we were comfortable lingering and exploring our new lit stuff. In fact the cafe attendant saw how much Charlie loved the Wimpy Kid books and when we were done getting our assorted refreshments she slipped us a few cups, the sort used for a fountain soda or iced coffee, with images of Greg Hefley, the Wimpy one himself, all over them. We haven’t broken them out yet. We’ll probably save them for dinner the night his pre-ordered, signed copies of book 13 come in the mail!

An Unlikely Story Bookstore & Cafe

Summer of Joy and Pain

Underlying what has been in fact my most enjoyable summer in decades, if not ever, is the reality that a part of me is struggling. I’m listing and drifting further and further from the confidence I recently took for granted.

As I write this I’m still in the shadow of a vacation in which I spent long evenings sitting up with close and distant relatives laughing and listening. I’m sitting at my dining room table while my sons play with legos at my feet. They’ve taken to making their own creations from the thousands of assorted blocks we’ve accrued over the years. I’ve had the entire summer home with them and I haven’t wasted it. Sports, days at the pool, a little shouting now and again, but all in all an opportunity I didn’t imagine I’d have when they were this age.

An opportunity that has left me worried about whether we will be able to maintain this life. Concerned and ashamed, honestly, that it’s my failings that are putting all of this at risk. I keep stoking the flames as I search for  the answer but I am finding less and less hot coals to revive. It’s the end of August and I’d say I’m at least a couple of weeks away from the search picking up again. People who hire people in my situation (too experienced and too expensive for most openings) are out of the office at this time of year. I guess we are all on a school schedule of sorts.

Our youngest will be entering kindergarten and his older brother will be starting 2nd grade in a little over a week. I know that they look up to me, but I’m having a hard time feeling admirable. I can appreciate my value beyond how it is defined by capitalism, but I can’t deny that on the capitalism front, I’m failing.

I have perspective and my day to day isn’t devastating by any means. I’m actually quite happy. If I could design life it would look like this. Long summer days spent playing and swimming and exploring with my kids. What could better. The answer, the obvious one, is I could have that start date for my next contribution sitting in my head, validating the part of me I always try so hard to deny. That part that knows ‘provider’ is not my strongest suit.

TIme to wrap it up. We are off to the pool this afternoon and we want to get there in time to get a good spot.

A Moment to Treasure

Some moments are just magical. They arrive unannounced and if you are lucky you recognize what’s happening in time to capture it in some way. This is not one of those moments.

‘Daddy? What’s your favorite butt cheek?’

Hmm. Thinking. Resisting every inappropriate joke running through my head.

‘My left butt cheek, I guess.’

Phew, dodged all bullets.

‘No. I mean between me and Teddy.’

‘I don’t have a favorite. I love all four of your butt cheeks equally.’

…and, scene.

I Wish I’d Met You Earlier

‘If I could change anything I’d go back in time and meet you earlier so I would have more time with you.’

imageOf course for that to work I’d actually have to go further back than you might think. I’d have to go back to the relationships before I met you, to the therapies and jobs and life lessons and various family functions when I festered with free floating rage and self loathing. The feelings that led me to some of the terrible decisions I made that left me looking for you in my early 30’s via the internet, wasting one Saturday night after another with the wrong people engaged in the same search. And of course you’d have to go back and relive all you’d lived to get back to the same place at the same time. In the end even that wouldn’t give us so much as a fighters chance of creating the events necessary to ensure another 5-10 years with each other.

The truth is had we met earlier I wouldn’t have been ‘the one’ yet and you may not have been either, though I have a harder time thinking that. Truth is we had to get to where we met, separately. In hindsight it was the only way it could have happened. Had you met me earlier you’d have met an even more imperfect man.

But we didn’t meet earlier. Life knew when and where you were going to be and made sure that I was ready. Made sure I had resolved my old and musty issues and was better able to understand how little I knew. Made sure I had learned, even if only in theory, that the person you love and commit to is not meant to be the end of the challenges and the resolution of all discomforts but rather they are your help and comfort while facing them. Life made sure I knew that it was my job to be that for you, too. That the dream of finding someone to love and be loved by was not the equivalent of going on permanent vacation. That it was not your pillows fluffed and your sheets turned down and rooms cleaned magically and freshly stocked paper products everywhere you looked. It was not nonstop nights of endless passion and wine and late night bathroom window cigarettes and days full of endless entertainment.

Wedding DayLife brought us to the same place at a time when we were ready to commit. To face the challenges and monotony and joys and unknown glories of having someone to do it all with. To commit not only to someone that could make the highs pure bliss, but also someone who could endure the lows, tell you your crazy and put up with the issues you haven’t resolved. Someone who will love you if you never resolve them. Someone who can write all these things at 12:51 in the morning after we didn’t have our best goodnight ever and never ever have to worry that that means anything other than we each have to figure out what it is we have to apologize for. Because this is real. I’m forever thankful for you. You absorb my frustrations and reflect my joys. You make the bad times quick and the good times permanent. I hope I can do at least some of the same for you.

None of this could have happened any earlier than it did no matter how much later it was than either of us might have expected it.

That said, it does leave me sad in one specific way.

I’m thrilled that Charlie is who he is and that Teddy is who he is. Specifically. Had it been another time they would have been other people. They wouldn’t exist as we know them. So in that sense I’m so happy it happened when it did.  But now I’m left looking at them and thinking…

‘I wish I could have met you sooner so I could have had more time with you.’

imageIt’s impossible for me not to project out now that they are with us. It’s hard to look down the road and know that at 20 I’m whispering to 60.  The math gets more unnerving from there. I’m not going to live forever. It’s something that hit me the second our first was born. Perhaps I’m dumb. We all know it doesn’t last forever. To say that it occurred to me at the moment Charlie was born is to somehow suggest I hadn’t known it all along. I did. I mean I knew people died and I knew I was a person. So, ipso facto and ergo and whatnot. But not like now. Now I’m going to die on my kids. I mean, even in the best case scenarios I die and leave them behind. But at my age the chance is it’s going to be when I would have been too young for my parents to go.

I didn’t learn to even start appreciating my parents until my 30’s. Not in the way they deserved. Not in the way that’s a bit more reflective of the amazing job they did  And my god, I’ve needed them more these days than I can ever remember needing them. I understand how silly and sweet that sentiment must sound to them. I ‘get them’ now that I’m a parent.  It must be cute to them to think I think I ‘need them’ now more than ever. Because those early days, my prehistory, the prehistory that is the equivalent to the one my kids are living now, concurrent with the peak of vibrant life for me are days they won’t  remember. They’re our days, actually, not theirs. Theirs come later. And I was their third. Of six. And there were a few more. I have two and I’ve needed them for all of it.

It worries me to no end that I’ll die while they still need me. The early days are just like that, and I’m still in the early days. But the deeper fear is that I’ll die without them being ready, without them being of an age or established in the life that will be there’s to live, that’s the one I can’t shake. I know no one is ever ready. I know I won’t be. But I’ll have a home, a wife and a job and my boys. I fear leaving them before they have any of this. Before they have roots.

There’s also a selfish piece to it all. I want to live long enough for them to forgive all the things we’ll get wrong and to see us as people, who loved them all the way through, even through the hard times when they couldn’t see why we did what we did. Through the times when we get it wrong. When they couldn’t see the love that was at the root of it all. Because having kids and being a parent and a spouse, it’s made me understand my parents in a way nothing else could. It made me love them in a way that’s oddly equivalent to how much I loved them when I was just Charlie and Teddy’s ages now, when they were my whole world and I was theirs and it made all of us special. There’s a symmetry now and I can see all that they did. I once again think of my parents as something so much more than ‘just people’. It’s your job to realize that they are in fact just people as you depart your family of origin. You have to see them for all their humanity and in that you find shortcomings and magnify them. It’s a part of your liftoff you have to exercise. It’s the balance to those years when they were the sun and the moon. It provides you perspective. But if you’re lucky enough, like I am, you get to come around on that later and see how superhuman their lives have been. I’m back to a place where I can tell them unabashedly how much their love means to me. How much I love them. I want that with my boys. I want to make it there.

‘I wish I’d met them earlier so we would have had more time together.’

How I Became the Creepy Dude at Walmart

 With great power comes great responsibility, sure. But with middling power and autonomy there comes some amount of privilege. When that power and autonomy is exercised at great distance, and when it is accompanied by insane committment and endless hours, so many that you move to work for a few months to attack the job at hand, well, it comes with the privilege of ocassionally taking liberties. In my case my great liberty was I skipped first breakfast. I brazenly entrusted my senior staff, their staff and the staff they supervised with breakfast for the 6-12 year olds.

It was understandable and in my defense I tried hard to be there by the end of Wawa breakfast to at least check in. My skills were rarely needed here and my support was hopefully felt in other ways. You see, the hours of a summer camp professional, roughly sun up to sundown to curfew to on-call until sun up, are the hours one keeps when they are a mythical creature or a college student. Being neither, being in reality a 33 year old man with a quite specific, though veiled case of Peter Pan syndrome, I felt it was within my capacity to do this job that I’d been doing in some capacity since I was the college kid getting up at the crack and getting my guys ready to be to breakfast on time. I was normally right. I did the job well, really well and by the end I at least maintained ‘well enough.’ This was probably the sunset of my ‘really well’ years and I knew how to operate.

There is a specific thing that goes by the wayside at camp. Vanity. Actually, now that I say that I realize it’s a lie. I was awash in vanity. It just looks different at camp. Vanity is masked in disgusting personal habits, lax hygeine, scattershot bouts of shaving and an overall bedraggled appearance that screams for attention with witty asides and hats that once spoke whimsy that now speak to tradition. I did all the things. I was a fully institutionalized man you could say, a camp guy. Complete with my own unique quirks and a signature style of management. I was a guy that by all accounts was camp basic. Standard issue to all who were more than an arms length away. I was quick with a smile, easy in conflict, ready to stand up to anything and ready to help whenever asked and happy to be invisible when things were good.

My day to day at the camp was as often at a desk as it was out and about. I loved getting out though. I loved stepping always from budgets, off the phone, away from my responsibility to my bosses who were based hundreds of miles away in the city. The camp day was a race to accomplish all the proactive planning one intended to do versus the reactive responding one was compelled to do and often it left you working until all hours. Then it left you waiting until the very end of the talent show to see the routine the cabin of 14 year old guys had been working on all week and responding to the girl who couldn’t understand why the girls she liked didn’t like her, or she didn’t think they did.

Then it was the counselors, the hardest working 17-22 year old kids you’d ever want to see finding you to tell you all that transpired that day and the week leading up to that day (for context) and why it was all so unfair to them. Then walking the smartest, most talented people I’ve ever worked with through the experience they lacked in order to build them up to earn the experience they’d get from facing the challenges that come with being accountable to 30-40 kids with special needs, the parents and caregivers of all those kids, the bosses, like me and others they were working with and all their friends who now needed so much from them now that they were supervised by them. This last part was my favorite.

On the day in question I was asked at breakfast, not the one I skipped, the second one, the older kids breakfast, If I’d be making a run. This was another one of my jobs. Making the hour plus drive to Walmart to get supplies. I wasn’t planning on it, but they were kind of stuck if I didn’t. It was for the girls cabin and I asked Lexi if it was stuff they NEEDED needed or if it was stuff that could wait til next week. I was home on weekends (more of that earned liberty taking) and had a busy day of commitments. She said yeah, it would be good if I could go.  She was uncommonly talented and knew at 20 how to gently tell her boss, ‘Yes, dummy, this is important.’ Being good at being the boss I understood her. I wasn’t going home til the end of the following day, so I was sure I could make it happen, even if it was at the end of the night.

The day proceded however it proceded. As it was getting to the end of second dinner I was telling Lexi I’d be heading out and would drop the stuff off at the girls cabins when I returned, after evening program.

‘Um, can you help me with something first?’ She said.

‘Sure. What’s up. Do we need to step outside?’ I asked.

‘No, but come with me.’ She grabbed her tray and radio and stood up.

‘Go sit with the STEP guys. Hang out for a minute. Tell me if you see anything.’

So I did. STEP was our older guys, 18-24 or so, who were capable of coming back and having a work experience be a part of their time here. It wasn’t for everyone. We had at most room for 10 per session. Kind of a graduate level camper. They had need for support, but they had a great deal of independent skills as well.

‘So, did you notice anything about Taylor?’ She asked.

‘Not particularly. Seemed to be in a good mood.’ I replied.

‘Yeah. I mean, he’s always in a good mood. But it took me a bit too. He shaved his eyebrows off.’

‘WHAT?’

‘Yeah. I asked him why and he said, my mom told me to shave my whole face while I was at camp.’ She said.

‘Oh my GOD!’ I said and started cracking up.

‘I know. I asked him how he liked his new look and he said he thought it looked cool.’ She said.

Now, I can’t tell you how much this is no big deal for someone like Lexi. She was poised beyond her years, emotionally and in all other ways intelligent and intuitive. But when you are 20 and you take your job of taking care of others kids seriously, and you are a tad shellshocked from being the point of contact for parents of kids with special needs, day and night for weeks on end, who are on ocassion quite nervous to be alone without them for what is often the very first time, well the potential for disaster in calling a parent to tell them their kids will be coming home with at best a five o’clock shadow where their should be eyebrows, well, it can call for some support from your boss.

We talked and laughed and talked and laughed and finally arrived where we needed to be.

‘How’s your relationship with his mom?’ I asked.

‘Great. I mean, until now.’ She said.

‘How about we just laugh. Life is short and she seems like someone who gets it. I mean, I’d be happy to make the call if you like, but I think we should just treat it with her like we’re treating it now. No one got hurt, it’s super funny. We could present it that way. I’ve always known her to get it. What do you think?’

She was down, and she would make the call. But this was a risky approach. We had faith that she would have a good perspective, but I was going to be there. So, once whatever the activity was that was going on that night was off and running we stepped out to the office to make our call. Being a pro I took the pro’s approach…

‘Oh no, I’ve done a ton of these kind of calls, you get used to it. You want me to do it?’

‘No, I think I got it.’

Phew. She bought it. Now, lets see how this goes.

Ding ding ding… We were right! His mom coulndn’t even stay on the line long enough to say goodbye in real words. She was in stitches. Crying, laughing. It was a highlight of my life hearing the volume of that laughter that came from that phone as Lexi joined her cracking up at something that was genuinely funny.

So, dusk upon us I told her I’d be heading out.

‘What do the older girls cabin need? In the hubbub of dinner I didn’t get a list.’

‘It’s not a list. They need a few cans of FDS.’

‘What’s FDS?’

Sometimes when you are young you forget that people who are right next to you don’t posess all your knowledge. She was dumbstruck.

‘um, really?’

‘Really.’

She hemmed. She hawed. I waited, unaware why she was so uncomfortable.

‘Our girls are a little older. You know, we go up to 18?’

Nope. I’m still staring at her blank faced and innocent.

How about this…

‘What does it stand for?’

‘Feminine Deoderant Spray.’

I was inclined to say something like, Oh, like ‘Secret’, but the implication was that it was not ‘secret’, and  it was.  Nuff said.

‘Where do I find that?’ Okay, one more question.

So there I was, a list from the younger girls cabin in my cargos, unshaven and unkempt in clothes that were wearing me headed off into the late night to do my little part that took a long time. An hour plus each way to the Walmart in Kingston where I would ocassionally see several people I just knew were there doing the same thing. Making time where there was none to do things important but not important enough to be done earlier than the middle of the night.

Now, all of this is context. I was away in the woods in a committed lifelong pursuit to make the world a better place. I was a man who cared about how he spent his time, but not so much how I appeared outside of this little world where all of us, dirty, tired and worn, understood who we were and why we were there. We were the good people, dammit. Breaking down barriers in the real world and in the minds of children who would go on to build on our small but hard earned successes. We were planting seeds and tending gardens that would bare fruit for our children. But to the other people in Walmart, I was just a clearly unwell man, one who could use some help taking care of himself. Someone to be cautious of, someone to perhaps be careful with. Who smelled funky.

But there is no one who was more concerned for who I was or what I was up to then the woman at the cash register as I lay my admittedly very small pile of items onto the belt for her to ring up. If there were a silent alarm system under the till I am both thankful and concerned that she didn’t activate it. You see my list consisted of three items and three items only. The aforementioned Feminine Deoderant Spray. A few packs of multicolored underwear for little girls. Candy.

I saw the look in her eye and rushed my way through all my explainations. I’m engaged to be married, I run a camp for kids, sleepaway. I was sent with this list. I didn’t even know what this stuff was a couple hours ago. Ugh. It was only making it worse. We both survived our one and only interaction, but we were both scarred, far as I could tell.

As I dug into the candy for the ride home I did something I never did on any of the other nights I was out and about running errands throughout the Catskills. I set the cruise control. For the exact speed limit. If ever there was a night when the cops might be looking for me it was this one.

Sometimes trying to make the world a better placed can be severely misunderstood.

On Magic and Memories