I have a 30 year relationship with drinking. One that covers so many memories….
I’m thrilled to be on The Good Men Project today, writing about it all….
Tag: nostalgia
I Don’t Want to Let Go
Teddy still babbles. He’ll sit with the Lego Duplo’s and play by himself and there is a stream of playful and emotive gibberish. He has started to use words and and pretend and play make believe with his creations and the figurines, but if I listen in the right way, if I’m able to listen loosely I can still hear the patter of the 2 year old he was.
Being a parent is a lot. Early on we weren’t up to the task. Seriously. We are excellent, loving parents. Any kid, and I mean any kid at all would be lucky to have us. But the truth is that as excellent as we are as parents, we just aren’t very good at it. We don’t revert naturally to routine. We don’t always provide excellent examples and we are just terrible at doing so many of the things that we are ‘supposed’ to do.
Our house is a mess and while it’s better than it was, it’s never gonna be an ordered and soothing environment. I like to think that has to do with our artistic bent, that our clutter and struggle to eliminate is an element of us that is strongly informed by our connectedness and the meaning we see all around us. Meaning that I turn into stories.
We don’t sleep train. We shouldn’t have to at this point, frankly. Our kids are well past the age when that should not be a thing that needs doing. I’m afraid that if our kids are ever to get themselves to bed, it’s gonna happen on it’s own. For now we each take one and we snuggle and struggle and ultimately find them asleep sometime within a couple hours of getting them up the stairs and into their rooms. In my case, with the three year old it is sometimes in the chair after losing the fight of getting him to calm down in his bed. Other times it is both of us on the floor looking up at the green stars on the ceiling that emanate from Winnie’s honey pot when you press the bee. Sometimes we find the moon, other times we find the one constellation, an outline of Mickey Mouse’s head. Yep, Disney even invades their sleep. Still other times it’s on the ‘big boy bed’ the five year old will be moved to once I am able to solve this endlessly flummoxing Rubik’s Cube of a task that I am told should never have been allowed to get to this point. In my moments of confidence, a wonderful if fleeting thing when it comes to my life as a dad, I like to think that whatever we’re losing by not giving them normalized sleep routines is more than made up for by the love and feeling of security we’re giving them by never leaving.
We are inconsistent practitioners of reward systems, a crime doubly indictable as I’ve been designing and implementing such programs for much of my 20+ year career. We don’t practice anything approaching appropriate self-care. The clothes are piled up, usually separated into piles that require sniff tests to determine whether they are clean or dirty. We take them into our bed and let them stay the night. Every time. We are wonderful parents to have as we never fail to give love. But we are just not very good at the component skills.
I’m not complaining. Well, not much. Now that our lives are this way I can honestly say there’s very little I would change. Perhaps I’d employ more consistent rewards or maybe I’d have a few more date nights. I’d certainly have a neater pile of clutter, that’s for sure. Okay, there’s a lot I’d change.
But I won’t, because at this point, this is who we are. We are fumbling through this thing together, imperfect as hell. I’m not saying we refuse to grow or we won’t change. We’re changing all the time, growing all the time. We’re just doing it together. At this point that means we’re messy, tired, together and happy.
I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to hear through the coherent play and listen to the babbling that is working it’s way fully out of my son’s mouth. Truth is I might already have heard the last of it. That’s the thing. Nothing we do is going to stop them from growing up. Nothing I do will keep us from watching life slip ever past. The older they get and the older we get the more clear it becomes that none of it is forever. None of it lasts like I’d like it to.
It kills me to think that I’m ever going to step out, I’m ever going to be finished. With loving and watching and helping and messing up with my kids. That I’m ever going to walk away from my wife who I’ll never see again or that she’ll have to walk away from me. I don’t want any of this to change because for the first time since I was too young to understand the implications of it, I don’t want to ever die.
I want to live forever and never say goodbye. Never grow old. Never die. I want to live this life I have for a million lifetimes. Not some version of it, not some other life, but this one. Mine. With the same pains and the same joys. Now everyday that goes by where I don’t hear my boy babble, like the ones that came before he uttered a sound and relied on us for his every aspect of existence, every tiny change that moves some aspect of their lives to the past is a process. One of letting go. That is how we think of it.
I often think that parenthood is the first time it’s highlighted for you that so much of life is the process of constantly letting go. It is, but it also isn’t. It gives me some agency, some power, some sense that this is my choice. To let go. To slowly choose to hand away life one tiny handful at a time, knowing that at the end the last thing I’ll let go of will be life itself. It’s inevitable. It’ll be all I have left to hand over.
That’s not how it is though, is it? I don’t want to let any of it pass. I want to live equally in the moments where I was three, sitting on my momma’s lap playing with her long hair that flowed out of her ’70’s style bandana, staring at the wooden cross hanging from a leather strap around her neck. I want to spend eternity smiling at the brown lunch bag my father drew pictures on just for me. I want to fall in love for the first time at 12 years old and play act what I thought it meant to lose it all. I want to feel lean and limber and strong and beautiful as I dance with a basketball unafraid of anyone who might wish to stop me. I want to be brash and cocky and altogether terrified on my first day of college and I want the world to open up to me at camp as I found what it was I’d do the rest of my life. I want to meet my wife, sit on those bar stools forever. Falling in love and diving into the unknown. I want to have my kids, meet them for the first time, and I want to watch them grow and marvel at the spectacle. I want all of this to be held. Why would I ever let go of this?
The answer is obvious. We ‘let go’ because we have no choice. Because we can’t choose to hold on. That being said, I want to get as much of this as I can. I want to watch my boy play on the floor with not a care in the world but what the little elephant on the back of his train that he built from Lego’s and imagination is going to do next. Forever.
The Lodge, Part Three: Family.
As I stood there counting names, not heads mind you as heads can be counted twice, it was mighty distracting to have so many trying to get my attention. Yelling things at me like, ‘Joe!!’, and ‘You’re still in your pants!’, and ‘What’s wrong with you…’ All to the unending guffawing of these supposedly ‘special’ people. My people. On top of it, this was a high risk area. The pool. Where we are all to be on extra high alert.
To their credit the reaction was the one I sought by coming down to do my name count in the same fashion I always did, at 6-10 activity areas 4 times a day but proceeding to walk directly into the middle of the pool, fully and normally dressed, while maintaining as stern an authoritarian countenance as I could project at all of 23 years old. All the while never breaking from my task of making sure all were accounted for and safe. Once I was done I left, not saying a word, just soaked through from the waist down, dripping all over and smiling ear to ear on the inside. I was making a memory that would last for all those who saw it. My attention seeking behavior pointed to bringing a smile to the faces of our guests. My guess is I’m the only one that really remembers that. I was pretty cool.
I really was.
Camp was home in a way I’ll never really experience again. It was a childhood home. The home I was an integral part of, but not one I was in any real way in charge of. I was an older brother maybe, or a young uncle that sometimes seemed more like a cousin. I always would be perceived as a kid there as they saw me at my finest and my, well, not so finest in my early twenties. Not so finest covered a LOT of territory back then.
Still, it was home. I discovered the world there. Discovered myself in the process. When I was done, at least when I thought I was, I launched. Out into the world armed with the confidence and skills I would never ever have found without having spent my four years there. Yep. Four years, 2 of which were year round. Unlike other camps that do year round programming this camp was not one that was really set to have tenants in the winter, other than those that come up for weekend programs and the director. But that director, she liked me and trusted me and needed the help so I had the chance to stay. To be the kid leaving dishes in his room. To be the teenager too big for these little beds, ready to push off on his own but not yet willing to pull the trigger.
Four years in I started to get self conscious about it. I should really be going I thought. So I did. I moved to New Hampshire where I went to start a new life, one that was supposed to be a lifetimes journey.
10 months later, having shown thoroughly that I was not yet ready to make that step, I was lost. Not yet 26 at this point, the summer of 1999, I loaded my belongings, said all my apologies, cried some tears that hurt because they were the first final tears I’d ever cried for myself, and I headed back to camp. I could be a driver. That was alright by me. Just what I needed. I knew they didn’t need a driver, not often enough anyway.
The journey back was terrible. I was full of failure and judging myself harshly, the way I could back then. But at the end I was home. For whatever reason it always felt like I was already there when I passed through the traffic light in Palenville, some 15 or so miles down the mountain, headed toward the winding roads that were so harrowing the first few times, but came to be second nature to me as the years passed by and this road became the primary means of egress from my mountain life.
That summer, the one I spent as part time asst. director (Not in title, but I sussed it out when I was tasked with firing people and covering for the director on days off)/Driver, was when I came crawling back with my tail between my legs. But when I got there I was welcomed happily by the few senior staff I knew and the guys. Oh, the guys. They were the reason we were there, all of us, everyone of us, but that year they were the actual reason I was there at all. I needed to be somewhere where I was loved and so many of them loved me without reservation. The camp was really a lodge, and our ‘campers’ were known as ‘guests’. Intellectually and developmentally disabled adults that had no idea how much it meant to me to hang out at the store those nights at after hours with them, playing pool and listening to music on the porch. Or sitting with them on the swinging benches that were placed around the Gazebo. Or just hanging out in the office listening to the camp live around me while I felt so securely and perfectly placed in a life I loved. How much it meant to me to be somewhere where I knew what I was doing and how to do it well. Where I was openly and obviously seen as someone worth spending time with.
I didn’t get close to any of the staff that year. It was the year the guests became more my family than the staff. They were permanent after all. Staff turned over, mostly, every year. There were returners, but by year three there’s only a handful left from year one.
That said, this past week I got a tweet from a man who was a kid there working at the camp that summer. Peter. He was an Irish lifeguard and he remembered me. Stuck out to him that one night I afforded him the privilege of breaking curfew on my porch. I was given the exec’s cabin for the summer and I took full advantage and knowing I had no one to really hold me to account for an infraction I knew to be minor I said come on up, have a drink and a smoke. And we did, and we chatted. It was nice. And he remembered.
It’s funny what you remember. I have memories that die every day now. Ones that have just lost space or priority or value for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s age and distance that are crowding out so much. But for whatever reason it didn’t crowd out that one extra beer and smoke after curfew for Peter and his bringing it up to me rescued it from the waste bin I’d yet to empty in my mind. Now it’s there, given a lifeline, safe for a few more years.
I’m certain on my death bed I’ll think of my son’s. The times I’ve spent with them in this short time we’ve already had have filled me to overflowing. I’m sure I’ll flash to the night I met my wife Karen. It’s a memory I visit often to thank my lucky stars. I’m equally sure I won’t think of that night on the porch with Peter. Won’t happen I’m afraid. But I’m glad it made another appearance, because family, the family you grow up with, well all of it is significant. The silly times you made everyone laugh as you walked away beaming from the inside, and soaked from the waist down and the times you came crawling back, embarrassed, with all your life in tow and they didn’t for a second see you as anything but welcome and they were even thankful, happy that you were there.
I’ve said this to everyone who’s ever asked about camp and it’s true today. ‘If everything falls away, if my life literally crumbles around me and I’m left with nothing, I’ll always have camp.’ After all, if it all were to go away where else would I go other than to family.
My Kodachromatic Memories
I’ve had tightness in my chest and shallow breathing for going on a month. It’s largely a result of pollen and my bodies late life decision to no longer recognize that springtime friend that greeted me with joy for so many years as I thawed out from so many winters. What was once my friend, the dawning of life in the blooming and bursting nature outside my door is now my enemy, a predator and my body has chosen, without consulting me, to fight it using all the parts of me I can’t control as it’s shield.
It’s no big deal. It’s a minor pain in the ass that I forget about sometime in May and remember in early spring annually. The older I get the less invincible I am.
I’m changing jobs and as exciting as it is I’m taking on a massive new challenge. I’m looking forward to it and I’m thinking about it and the tightness in my chest feels a natural psychosomatic reaction as well. Though I know it isn’t. It’s merely my body deciding not to work like it once did. Same way the knees did when I tried to run the Brooklyn half 10 or more years ago. I made it one mile before hobbling to a train and turning to low impact ellipticals in the gym. The way my lithe and supple and strong body turned to a big and broad and strong body before turning to a big and unresponsive mass. Thankfully I’m told the heart keeps getting stronger even if it’s harder and harder to make what I see in the mirror reflect what I still think I am in my brain.
Getting older is hard for many reasons. The physical reason’s are a lot to be sure and I’ve only just begun that journey. Being where I am now, mid-career, early family and years from financial security is a constant struggle. The same one so many travel with me. But there’s also the dawning realizations that an active mind, one at rest and given a few minutes to contemplate can’t help but notice. For me it can happen in the car or at work or watching my kids in the back yard as they bounce from one thing to the next, bound by no laws of energy I’ve come to think of as universal since being bound by them years ago. It’s all gonna end and it’s gonna happen soon.
I love my kids beyond all reason. It’s the only way I know how to do it at this point. I understand that their are some terrible situations out there where children aren’t afforded that type of love and it shatters me when I hear of bad things, scary things happening to them. Things I could watch in movies or read about in the news years ago about terrible things happening to young children are no longer things I can ignore. I feel it now viscerally. Iit kills me now in a way it never could have before. It’s empathy for strangers and it’s hard to have at times, but it’s proof to me of some sort of reason for all this. My mind intellectualizes and thinks that reason is survival, we are here and our point is to survive. Even if that’s so, for me that contains within it what others find in God.
I’m a slightly older dad, but in a life so short as this one even slightly older has ramifications. Perhaps nostalgia just overtakes you at this age, I don’t know. What I know is that for me the overwhelming rush to nostalgia and the amplifying emotional response to it is something that came around the same time I had kids. In a real way they’ve been my greatest teachers about what life is all about. I’m living in a museum at this point. Our home is awash in the memories that will be those I sprint to as the ‘time of my life.’ This is the golden passage that will live longest in my mind, this time when we are a small, highly interdependent family who’s only plans, only one’s we can even imagine, revolve around all of us. Their will come a time when that isn’t so, which is sad to think about.
All the stuff to come actually has some sadness in it. For me at least. Because what’s next after our family is our slow walk away. We aren’t going to live forever. Even those of you firmly in belief that this is not it, that there is more after, surely even you must share some of the melancholy I can have when it hits me that what comes next isn’t this. This amazing life all opened up to me, when my kids want to hug me and read with me and kiss me and tell me they love me.
For me it’s good to remember that I’m going to die. It’s a positive reminder that what we don’t take and hold and cherish will be gone. Nostalgia is my guide as I look longingly back at the life I’ve lead to here and all that life yet to happen, yet to be stored in memory. We curate this museum in our minds, Karen and I. We arrange and rearrange the memories because we simply love to hold them. In doing so I’ve come to learn the value of my young memories.
In those memories of my youth the world is colored like 70’s and 80’s quality Kodak film and there are faded edges. My mother is there in her Jean bandana and my dad in t-shirt and Lee’s and we’re eating cereal from little boxes at picnic tables at Hamlin Beach, about fifteen miles from home. They had six kids and it was how we took some vacations. We loved them. or we’re at Hersheypark and loving the rides and smelling chocolate in the air. Or we’re all crammed into any of a series of station wagons driving down the highway on our way to adventures. I’m sitting in the back facing bench seat, crouched so my back is where my butt should be, so I can dangle my bare feet out the rear window, dangling in the Kodachromatic sun as the wind sweeps over the lot of us from all the open windows, always open in the summer, a thing we barely do anymore.
I have to visit there to keep my mom mommy and to see my dad as the strapping man much younger than I am now managing what I now am able to see was a circus of nonstop work, that I lived in and couldn’t possibly conceive of then. I have to go back there to keep the edges from fading in any further than they already have. These are the glory times of my life, just like these times are now, and for the rest of time I’ll return there, here, because I don’t want to go.
Life can only be lived forward and as far as I can tell it can only be lived once which is it’s only flaw. I used to think nostalgia was something silly people did who were afraid of life but I was dead wrong. It’s what lucky people do to remember all that was so graciously and gloriously bestowed on them.
A Love Letter to My Home
From the kitchen window in the house I grew up in you could see my lawn. It stretched out flat like a sheet of green for 70 feet to Clark St. It was a front lawn made to be the play place. When my parents moved there it was decided that the front yard would be the place to play. Their last home had a beautiful, big back yard, with swings and a garden and even a great tree for climbing. But without fail the boys always ended up in the front yard. It was where you wanted to be. You didn’t want to miss out on other kids coming and going. It was the late 70’s and that was what you did. You played with all the neighbor kids.
The lawn on Clark Street was lined by woods to the left and the driveway to the right. It’s a gravel driveway in my mind. Mostly chalky dust still painful to walk on but worn so thin by the constant comings and goings of so many. It’s probably been paved close to 20 years by now, but I’ve been gone for most of that.
It was the lawn where pictures were taken. In formal clothes or shoeless and ragged and smiling from joyful exertion and childhood exploring. It was the lawn we ignored from the porch while we ate breakfasts and read newspapers and chatted. The lawn we’d look out to on beautiful summer mornings, a thing not to be missed where I’m from, where snow is likely to cover the grass for 6 months solid, if not more, and laugh embarrassedly but lovingly as our parents would lie on the grass holding hands. Who knew what crazy things they were talking about, it wasn’t the point at the time. The point was how weird our amazing and beautiful parents were. I could write those conversations now and while I’d be hard pressed for accuracy, I suspect they would read those words and hear the conversations they had, enjoying the privacy of their tiny shangrila in the middle of so much youthful burbling and angst. They’d have been telling each other the funny thing one of the kids said that the other hadn’t heard. They’d be recounting the plans for the summer and making decisions while holding hands in the grass my mother liked to keep a little long and a little wild. They’d be living love the way you do when it surrounds you and consumes you and you find yourself awash in the logistics of simply maintaining such a healthy harvest. My father would have the chance to be funny. He was always funny. The quiet and opportunistic kind of funny. Observant and smart. The best funny, the kind that leads with the ear. But he’d get the chance to be funny for his lady. Funny in a way the kids wouldn’t get and she couldn’t resist. Before long, but not too quickly, life would remind them it’s time to get back at it and they would. But they’d be back.
Across the street, a slow, unlined simple village road, was the park. It was Corbett park but to us it was just the park. The park that watched us grow while it grew and changed over time. The park that had everything we ever needed, everything I ever needed. The park where we hid in order to explore being dangerous and being bad when we got older, where we could spend hours when we were little on now ancient seeming playground apparatus that our children will recoil at if they ever have kids of their own. Hardly believing that you could be spun so fast at 4 or 5 or 6 or older, depending on how big you were and how big the spinner was, so fast that you could hold on to the bars and with full extension spin endlessly. You’d fall and get up and try to swing so high that you’d be able to fully flip it. Never saw it, but I heard about it. We’d all heard about it.
When I got older the park became the basketball court for me. The parking lot for others. But during my prime people seemed to respect that the hoop on the Main Street side of the lot was mine and you parked on the far end. Or maybe it was just that way because for a good number of years I was out there, rain or shine, morning to night. When I was old enough I’d bring the car over and shoot in the lights with the radio on. It was my home court, always will be. I shoveled it to keep shooting. I would shoot in the middle of the night. Must have driven the neighbors crazy. All day every day. It was my first deep deep love. I always had basketball. Through ups and downs and joys and pains I always had that hoop.
When we wanted to test ourselves the park once again provided all we needed. At the back of the park, the horizon of that view from the small window at the kitchen sink, past the tennis courts was the pit. The pit was a giant hole dug at the back, between the park and the steep but small hill that led up to the towpath along the canal. It’s fair to say we grew up between the Erie Canal and Lake Ontario, but we could walk to the canal, which we could see from our porch, in perhaps as much as 3 minutes while the lake was some twenty miles behind our house, through at least two other municipalities. Still, they were parameters of sorts, at least in my mind. Nothing that pinned us in, just something that gave us our bearings.
The pit would grow green like all the other open area in the flatlands that is the Great Lakes area of the country. But to us boys it was dirt. One solid line of dirt maybe a foot wide that started at the patch of trees that signified the point where the canal slope, the park and the pit convened. You’d disappear behind on your BMX bike as you’d gathered all the speed your legs and the descent from the towpath would get you. When you emerged from that tiny patch of trees you’d make another, shallow descent into the pit where you’d churn your legs as hard as you could. Maybe not that first time, but even then you’d fake it. Then you’d hit the best playground BMX jump that suburbia ever created and you’d soar, sometimes as much as 20 feet when you got good at it. I swear. It was epic.
To this day my mother says she was at the window in the kitchen when we proved it was a bad idea to do this kind of thing on a motorcycle. I say we, but it was one guy. He made it, but he also crashed through a chainlink fence surrounding the tennis courts a good fifty feet from the lip of the jump. At least that’s how I remember it. That’s how we talk about it, which we do every couple of years now when it comes up.
At the end of the day you’d make your way home, walking up that long driveway and know how lucky you were. I can still sense it in every way just by closing my eyes. I can feel the gravel under my feet and smell the trees and the more subtle smell of long uncut grass. I can hear the birds making their nightly ascent from the woods we explored for thousand of hours. It’s going to be one of the places I sense most vividly on my death bed no matter how old I am or how much I’ve lost. I love that big blue house on the middle of our block in a town I’ll always love but I know I will see so rarely now that life is upon me and I’m busy trying to make a world half as magical for my kids to remember when they are out and finding what will be there home.
It may no longer be our house. It was our house and that’s enough. Now there are other people making other memories and living the good life in the best place a kid could ever grow up. But in my heart and in my mind it will always be my house. The house I grew up in, the home I loved before all others. What a lucky kid I was.
Little Man, Big World
I complain, mostly for comic effect, but occasionally sincerely, about the extremities of emotions displayed by my boys, who are 4 and 2. It can be overwhelming and exhausting at times trying to keep up. But lately the older one’s been starting to show shading. Middling not just between feelings but mixing them with thoughts and presumptions. Calculation and calibration. He’s developing nuance and forethought. His communication can be veiled by strategy. He’s different. He’s becoming a bit more independent in thought, developing an inner life. He’s becoming a little boy and revealing the nascent aspects of his character. The character he will be judged by independent of us.
All in all I’m sure it’s not a very big deal. We are all separate people. It’s a transition we feel lucky to be able to watch. We will be afforded endless opportunities to warn against danger, to praise the many wonderful examples we will surely see of his kind heart. We will be there to fight him when he thinks he’s right and we know he’s wrong. Hell, there’s even a far horizon, one perhaps not as far as I imagine, when we will be there to fight him when he knows he’s right and we think he’s wrong. That will be another transition. For all of us.
But for a second I’m going to take a breath and be thankful. Stop to acknowledge how lucky we were before moving on to how lucky we are in a new, future present. Be thankful for the time when we were his everything. It’s going to dawn on him soon that we’re not infallible, but rather flawed. It’s been nice for us to be his sun and him to be ours, all circling one another. Providing each other with all the power and light needed for an entire universe that existed in the spaces between us. Before he grew and his light couldn’t be contained in our galaxy any longer.
There’s still time. He’s a very very big boy and often people think him much older than he is. Hell, sometimes we hold him to account like a kid twice his age. But he isn’t twice his age. He’s still a few months away from five years old. He may be the size of an eight year old but he’s still naturally inclined to climb up onto my lap and tell me he loves me. He knows what it does to me now. Knows how happy it makes me. There’s certainly something lost in the exchange now that he’s aware of how his words effect me, but there’s a ton more gained. His spontaneous proclamations of love were wonderful and pure. But the thought that he sees me and knows how happy I am made by him saying, ‘I love you, Daddy’ and he does so not only because it is true but also because he wants to exercise this newly discovered power of his to make me happy, that packs a pretty powerful punch as well.
We’re going to do our duty bound best to foster his independence and we’re going to try to teach him what we find to be most important; that he think about others and how to be a kind and thoughtful person. But for as long as we can, in the bubble that was once a universe, we’re going to try our hardest to pay attention to the times when he isn’t ready to be a small boy in a big world. When he wants to pretend like he’s still a big man in a small universe. After all for all his eagerness to venture out he still needs to know that whenever he wants to come home and pretend to be the big kid in a two kid world he’s always welcome. Besides, he’ll quickly learn that doing that will make his Mommy and Daddy very, very happy.
Museum Pieces
The exhibit is nearing completion, though there are still a few pieces left to be completed, logged, inspected and displayed.
The exhibition is of my most productive period and will be in permanent residence in the grand hall. The room, the central hub and featured showroom, has been closed to all visitors for nearly four years. That’s how long it has taken to produce and display the items that are to be featured.
There has been a great deal of buzz generated by myself, the curator and a collaborator on this project, but the room itself has been open only those crucial to the process.
The grand hall in the museum of my life will be hosting the display, ‘Our Family, the Early Years.’ It is a permanent and evolving installation.
I’m forever curating the museum of my life. There is endless detritus that is logged once, noted and recorded for historical purposes and donated or outright given to others or placed in the cold, dark, vast warehouse of forgotten details and mementos. Of those items that I choose to display they are ordered by importance and their prestige is evident in how I choose to display them.
This room, this grandest of rooms, will feed me and fuel me through the times that lie ahead. Through times that will so devastate me that they will make me wonder what all this was for. My aim is to curate an exhibit so stunning, so perfectly designed for my audience of one, for me, that I will be so enamored of it as to be unable to wander too far from it. Over time it will hard wire my memories and the feelings that drove me to embark on such an ambitious, albeit not groundbreaking, body of work.
I will wallow in it, work in it and invest energy in keeping it pristine. All of this in the hopes that even in my feeblest state I’ll always know my way back to that room. That room filled with love and meaning and work and creativity and awe and beauty. Its the room that I intend to live in for as long as I can, until the end if possible.
I will marvel at it’s treasures and inspect those pieces that so transformed and transfixed me. When I can no longer manipulate the artifacts of my specific humanity anymore, I intend to nest in them as I did the first time around in order to feel that pride and love and warmth until I die, smiling at what was and what is.
This document is a map of sorts to a memory or two. An artists description of the work in real time to be used by me as a patron of the museum in the future. It will help me access more fully the pieces that are before me. I’m compelled to do this to make up for all those pieces I didn’t log in this way due to exhaustion and the foolish belief that the memories would be so powerful as to never drift away into the ether. Perhaps I thought them permanent in some way, a way that would make documenting it formally a waste of time. Foolish indeed and I should have known better. But, ours is not to wonder why, and so forth…
It is also for you, reader, truly it is. Knowing that you read, and that you are occasionally moved to engage with me has added immensely to my experience. It is also for my wife and our kids. A log of sorts, though I hope an artful one, capturing this time. A fools errand to be sure, and likely a fruitless and hopelessly failing attempt to capture just a piece of its essence for our collective and individual future enjoyment.
Teddy sits in my lap, every night sometime between 8 and 8:30. Bathed and brushed and comfy in his pajamas. He’s my little bedtime buddy. He’ll cry when I pick him up and momma gives him his Elmo doll. A doll too small to be his lovey, but it is what he has chosen and our many attempts to provide him with a larger, more plush and easier-to-find-in-your-sleep or in the darkness of waking at 2AM doll have been shunned. ‘Mo-mo’, as he calls him, is his guy. The rest are discarded, literally thrown overboard, if he notices them. Two dolls other than mo-mo stay in the bed, a floppy brown bunny and a standard issue bear, but they are so untouched as to be unnoticed.
The routines are a dead giveaway now and he cries and lunges for mommy when it clicks for him that it is bedtime. She is a bit more pliable in terms of keeping to the schedule in general and he thinks if he could just get me to hand him over to her, he’d be able to avoid his fate. Neither momma nor I pay any attention to this complaint anymore as it ceases by the time we get to the stairs, a walk of no more than 12-15 adult steps from anywhere on the first floor of our small and perfect little suburban home, and usually not more than 5 steps from where he’s been picked up, in the living room.
Once to the stairs we make a dramatic flourish of thrusting our hands upward, toward the second floor, a show of bravado that he and I enjoy and one that always brings a smile to his face. Thusly we proceed up the stairs, following our outstretched hands and giggling when we get to the top. The theatricality of it all is just plain silly, but if you haven’t seen him do it it’s just not altogether possible to understand how adorable it is.
He is not going to have these cheeks, these bubbly, adorable cheeks, for much longer, but for the time being anything I can do to make him smile, I will.
Once on the landing we turn left to the bedrooms. Theirs one to the right, but we loaded up all our stuff in it when we moved in and now only reference it if something is in there which needs to be extracted or if we need a place to shove things when people are coming over. It is now, and I imagine will forever be referred to by Karen and I as ‘the cottage’. We christened it when it became the place we flopped down in when we’d pushed enough crap to the sides to lay out a futon mattress and it became the place where sick parents slept, or where we’d lie during that glorious long weekend when we had managed to get them napping at the same time. Our room shared a wall with theirs and we weren’t going to risk even the possibility of being the reason they might wake up.
I plop him down and he runs into his room. Once there he looks around for a second spots the glider chair that was initially used for nursing but is now the rocking chair, and makes a break for it. I pretend to be outraged and shocked, every night, that he’s going to sit in daddy’s chair, and he struggles his way up there, climbing like a pro, sits proudly and takes in my displays of shock, both facial and audible, and laughs proudly.
I don’t know if you have access to a two year old, but if you do, spend AS MUCH TIME AS POSSIBLE watching them walk around in pajamas. It’s just awesomely cute.
I pick him up, turn on various, strategically placed little lights, turn off others, turn on a bit of white noise and proceed to work my way through his stack of books until he decides he’s done, or we finish all of them. To this point, we’ve only added and not yet removed any of his books. Little Blue Truck and Goodnight Gorilla are the musts but usually it’s all of them. I’ve dozed off while reading. I always roust quickly enough, but his weight and warmth on my lap, the dim lights and the repetitive pleasantness of the books have a mildly narcotic effect on me.
Once done I sing to him. Usually starting with Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, then You Are My Sunshine… I may hum from there, I may move to the Beatles. Some Blackbird, some early parts of Hey Jude, maybe some God Only Knows by the Beach Boys. I usually put him down at this time, but yesterday he made me hold him for a bit and kept bringing my hand up to his cheek, so it rested on him, fully holding his face on the outside, while the inside was pressed against my chest while he sat in my lap. If a meaning of life can be said to be a visceral feeling rather than a thought or a defined purpose, this is one of the meanings of my life.
This is one of the routines that evolve early in life that feel like they will last forever, but tend to last a few weeks to a few months before necessity forces them to change or the child simply loses interest and the routine is no longer effective. While I haven’t done a wonderful job of logging them, as I’m doing now, I hope to do more in the near future. Hopefully this is a nostalgic dad’s lament, chapter 1.
I want to go back to the old video’s and photos and jog memories and come back here and record them in detail, as much detail as possible, before they are all gone and I look at the photo’s and see my beautiful boy and remember everything he ever said, but start saying things like, ‘I don’t remember that apartment so much anymore. Was Charlie born yet when we moved in there? Was he only in the apartment for the first year or was it closer to two?’
I don’t want that fate. But it or some more addled version of that state, or some less benevolent version of it is surely approaching. Just as new and exciting and enriching phases of my kids lives are heading this way.
So rather I log my memories, in pictures and in words in hopes that those triggers will trigger in me responses that will transport me in an instant back to that dark room, in our still disheveled, not fully occupied or appointed tiny little house where I can giggle with Charlie over the silliness of him pretending to be a dog named Sonny. Where I can pretend his carrots are puppy treats, a move I’ve stolen from his mother, in a multipurpose front room with makeshift changing stations and an unused fireplace and gates blocking every exit. To the place where my little boy won’t let me take my hand from his cheek. Where he will simply find the hand if it goes missing, and place it back on his cheek as he knows that is what’s needed. He’s right, and its one of the chief pleasures of my entire existence, and I will become a silly nostalgist adrift in gauzy memories and I will lose all currency and relevancy willingly if it will help me to remember this beautiful place of messy, sloppy, crazy love where our family began.
The Lodge Part One; Getting There
Amongst the clearest and most treasured memories of my youth are the handful of roadtrips that I took with my dad, just the two of us. One that sticks out for me as particularly enjoyable was a trip to Pennsylvania where I needed to be on campus early for basketball camp check in the next day.
The day started at the Morgan Manning house for the 4th of July town picnic and fair. Its the kind of tradition I had no idea I’d come to love about the town of Brockport, NY where I grew up.
After hot dogs (Zweigel’s, the only proper hot dog) and my little brother doing the cakewalk and the barbershop quartet of high school teachers we went home, loaded the minivan and got on the road.
On this trip we were in the right mood. We were just relaxed and comfortable and conversation flowed and we talked about life and family, everything and nothing. I don’t remember the details and they weren’t important. We were relaxed, comfortable and alone. It was nice.
It was in fact the counter to my normal level of anxiety. Once when I was 5 or so I was in the bathroom while he was shaving. There were at least 8 of us, often more. As George Bluth said, watch out for hop-ons, you’re gonna have hop-ons. Anyway, with two bathrooms overcrowding was not at all unusual so for me to be peeing while he shaved was not unusual. After a moment of observation he looked over at me, face half covered in thick white foam and half smoothly shaven and said. ‘Are you breathing.’ I wasn’t. He said, ‘it’s okay. Breathe.’ So I did. I’ve always been self-conscious, still am.
We stayed in a hotel that night near the camp. It remains the one and only night I’ve ever eaten at an Arthur Treacher’s. I imagine this was true for him as well. Then we went to a movie. The only thing that lined up with our schedule that was agreeable to both of us was ‘Soapdish’.
For a couple of hours we howled with laughter. A reserved 40-something dad and his jock 15 year old son cracking up at the antics of a cast of eccentrics populating the set of a daytime soap opera. It was downright hysterical, silly and perfect. It was one of the best days of my childhood. It shouldn’t surprise me that the most meaningful and metaphorical journey of my life was a road trip with my dad in a minivan across the state when I was 20.
Side note about my dad; He’s funny. Very funny. It’s a dry sense of humor, not needy, rarely reaching out, but often reactive and precise. I can be manic in my need to get in a funny line at every opportunity, even inventing the opportunities, or sticking a laugh line in as a non sequitur just to get the attention. It comes from a funnier place for my dad. He’s okay letting tons of good enough but not perfect pitches fly past, and then boom, HYSTERICAL. I’ve tried to learn from this, and to some degree I’ve calmed down. He’s such a good editor and knows when funny is funniest. My papa was that way as well.
Fast forward to what can either be referred to as my first Junior year at college or my second sophomore year. I prefer the former, but whatever your druthers.
I, remarkably, was in a night class. I say remarkably because my academic history is littered with classes that I never intended to attend and rarely did. But this was a 3 hour, 1 credit class and I showed up. It was part of a series of single credit, single night classes that were offered in the Human Services curriculum. I’d kind of backed and failed my way into the major, but it was in line with my personal ethics of being helpful to those less fortunate so I went with it. These single night credits were taught by community based professionals in a particular field of service. This night happened to be the Executive Director of the Chemung County ARC. He was a nice if distracted guy who gave us a good history of the movement, the state of the field and the needs going forward. It was interesting and I wanted to get involved.
In the course of the evening Jodi, a less then friendly and somewhat overconfident young woman by my estimation (which was informed by little if any evidence, but firmly believed. Ah… youth) spoke of her experience the previous summer at a camp for adults with developmental disabilities.
It was a camp run by AHRC of NYC, the chapter that was the progenitor of the entire Arc movement. I decided to approach her at the break. Turned out that being male, a decent fellow and willing made me qualified for a position there! Besides, Jodi would be there and I’d at least know one face. Might even get to see another side of her. So the dye was cast and my life turned at that moment and in many ways has never turned back.
After a week or so home from school I was off to the Catskills with my dad. It was a 6 hour drive, one that I’d make several more times over the years. The ride was long and disorienting. I’d never noticed the glorious mountains that buttress and soar over the New York State Thruway as you make your way east across the state. They existed there without my notice for the many trips I’d taken across the state over the years. But when we got off and went onto the local roads it took only a few miles until we realized we were heading to a place neither of us had known existed.
Other than some summer vacations when my dad was a kid even he had never really experienced the vast mountainous region of New York that stretched from the area city-dwellers called upstate and the northerners thought of as downstate all the way up to the top of the world up at the Canadian border. It was the spine of the state and we lived in the panhandle out west.
My dad is from the New York Metropolitan area, so this vast middle, encompassing the Catskill Mts. and the Adirondacks had managed to be avoided. The long looping curves of the valley roads gave way in an instant to roads that seemed to have majestically green, steep, natural walls. It was like the mountains and there fauna were cradling the pavement that now wove a twisting and turning road that revealed which travelers were local as they bore down on the vast amount of out-of-towners there to feed the economy and reconvene with nature.
Finally, out of the hairpin at the Kaaterskill Falls trail head the roads started to stretch back to long and looping as we arrived in the higher valley.
Tannnersville is a small, humble and charming mountain town that would become my nearest ‘civilaization’ for the years ahead. The directions took us right through and up the mountain that hovered over it, all the way to the picturesque stone church at its peak and back down the other side. We took a right at the General Store/Post Office onto a beautiful, meandering river of a small country road that ended at Colgate Lake.
Rather, it didn’t end it turned to dirt and we continued through a tunnel carved through the forest, looking at each other partly worried and partly as Doc Brown looked at Marty at the end of Back to the future… Where we’re going we don’t need roads!
I can’t honestly tell you what conversations were had on this journey save one. I remember saying it and my dad has remembered it too. I told him that I had no idea what to expect. I told him that I was a little nervous but that I was thinking of it as 90 days and I can endure anything for 90 days. I’ve heard my dad proudly retell of hearing me saying that and he always follows it up by pointing out that after he left me that day he knew a change was coming for me. He was right.
I could most certainly endure what lay ahead. I had no idea that it was the start of a journey with as much learning and growing and failing and succeeding as I could stand bottled up in 5 two week sessions of sleep deprived sleep-away camp that would change my worldview, broaden my understanding of humanity, enhance my ability, grow my confidence, open my eyes to a world that was rich and vibrant and dynamic and revolutionary and introduce me to an instant community of friends and acquaintances who would create and sustain magic on a daily basis, all with the aim of righting a societal wrong and providing people with the opportunity to have the time of their lives. It would keep my otherwise antsy and unsteady and frankly dangerous life of excess in check as I discovered that when you are fully engaged in a thing, 20 hours a day is not enough. It was enough to get the work done, at least usually, just not enough of the experience.
I was enjoying all of it, the joy and the pain, the wins and the losses, the new experiences and the vulnerability I was discovering in myself and the world and I didn’t want it to ever end.
We’d drink and sing and dance and swear and smoke and hookup and breakup. During the day we’d bring people that would never have the chance otherwise to the top of the mountain, whatever that meant for them. If we couldn’t we’d not hesitate in getting to work building them their mountain, to spec, because we were delighted to be given the opportunity. We fought and created cliques, then we broke them and cross pollinated. We created a utopian society their and we thought we were the first ones to do it. I’m still convinced we were the best who ever did.
But on that car ride, a ride that was both familiar and different it turned out that dad was dropping me off at the end of a dirt road in a beautifully landscaped world that was designed to make the world a better place. It certainly did that for me. It was the home that would take it’s place next to the big blue/gray house on Clark St. It became my spiritual and literal home. When I’d leave I’d yearn to be back. When I was there, even in the cold, dark, lonely and depressing winters, I never wanted to be anywhere else. I loved her even more then. Even when it was emptied of all the people that made it what it was. It was even more beautiful to me as it sat stoically dark waiting patiently to be enlivened once again. After the departures, after the work, after our irreversibly changed lives, after the love and the struggle and the ultimate experience, the walls were my companions for months on end and I loved them as I had learned their potential.
I loved everything about that place and I still do. The Lodge was where I was able to make mistakes and miracles and to witness transformations, including my own. Where I learned to push myself and accept who I was. It was the greatest experience of my life to that point and would inform all the other wonders that were to come.
Housewarming
Mid-westerners are a fairly docile lot intent more on steadying a boat than on rocking it. They are a quiet and polite. Their pride is in their work and the ability to get on and get along. The men edge toward stoic. The women are rarely showy.
It’s home, it’s in my bones and it lives in me to this day.
State lines defined us as New York and New York is a northeastern state. That said, we had more in common with Ohio and Indiana then we did with Manhattan. By a long shot. The land and the affect of it’s inhabitants is typically flat with mild undulations that can only be noticed at distance. We were on the far reaches of the Great Lakes/Rust Belt side of the Midwest, as opposed to the expansive Heartland/Great Plains end.
This unrattled and underwhelmed temperament is exemplified by the the fire chief who rung our doorbell at 3 in the morning on a late summer night in 1979. No one answered after a reasonable wait time, so he patiently rung it again. When my older brother Mike, all of 8 years old, was the first to get the door it was without alarm or particular urgency that he asked him if his parents were home. I assume that he refrained from asking if he were the man of the house. But it strikes me that the formality crossed his mind. We like formality.
Whatever pleasantries were exchanged were accompanied by surging, roaring, 60 foot flames that were emanating from the abandoned 100 year old barn that was burning in our yard. So Mike did his duty and woke up Mom and Dad to let them know there was a fireman at the door and that the prayer house was on fire.
The prayer house.
It’s a lovely idea and one that I’ve taken the journey from embarrassed mockery to envious admiration of in the years since. In this world of stock conformity, where eccentricity was a thing to keep secret, my mother was going to have a prayer house.
This is not a thing, a prayer house. Prayer is for the church and for the dinner table and perhaps quiet moments of appreciation or desperation. But we were not only going to have one, it was going to be in a big ass barn in our front yard. This was all of a giant embarrassing piece that was accompanied by a father who subscribed to Islands magazine from the snow belt, wore Hawaiian shirts and cowboy hats and a mom that would lie in the grass on the front yard on beautiful sunny mornings, just enjoying the weather, right where anyone could see her. My father would join her and they would lay next to each other holding hands.
In hindsight its the most beautiful thing in the world to see your parents do. But I didn’t view it that way when I was young. There was a valuable lesson in this that took me too long to fully learn.
So here we were, a family of five kids (Leo wasn’t born until 5 years later) and a couple of parents in their 30’s newly moved into a house designed by my father that had and would take up all our spare resources for many years prior and many years to come, awoken in the night to see it all being threatened by soaring flames.
There was not a great deal of shouting or anything, at least not as far as I can remember. We were all moved to the car so we could back out of the driveway and move out of harms way. In a remarkable coincidence that is so fantastic as to be unbelievable, this occurred on the night of our “housewarming” party.
To now my description of the evening is based on the few and dwindling stories that we told about this night, remembered and retold by a person that was five or six years old when it all went down. If I’ve been accurate in any details of the night, that is largely coincidental as I’m quite certain I’ve maintained the story in my head by fleshing out the bones with a certain amount of myth and whimsy.
My father did in fact design our home, which he did in a weekend prior to the builder starting when he was told that the blueprints would cost something like $20,000.
My father was and is an industrial designer and he knew what he wanted so he taught himself how to design a house and create workable blueprints in a weekend. All from home, where I was the 3rd of five. This at a time when we were decades away from a functioning internet. Al Gore was beta-testing I imagine.
My father is not merely talented, he is a wizard and a sorcerer capable of feats that are not possible to mere mortals. He’s also taller than your dad. So there.
There are 3 particular memories that are mine, which is not to say they are accurate, but rather that they emerge wholly from my memory. They are weaker memories than they were 30 years ago, but before they leave me for good allow me to share them with you in chronological order.
From the family station wagon we could feel and see the giant flaming structure directly to our left as we backed down the driveway. It was rather breathtaking, and to a boy of my age it was positively amazing. I was in the back seat of the car, not the far back that looked out the rear window when you sat down, but the middle bench seat behind my father who was driving.
We backed out of the driveway until we were aligned with the fire and we halted to let one of the many companies assembled move a vehicle from our path so we could be evacuated. We sat quietly. I really do marvel at and question my memory, because in my minds eye it was a quiet car. Maybe we were stunned, or perhaps tired, but this was a time for panic most certainly. Surely somebody would be in a state? But I truly don’t remember that being an issue.
What I do remember was getting out of the driveway and my father pulling into the parking lot/basketball court across the street from our house and turning the car around so we could watch. He like I was mesmerized by the whole thing. Behind us was the park that we would look upon from our front porch for the next 35 years. It closed at dusk so it was a vast stretch of pitch-black in night time, but in the light of the flames you could see all the way to the canal, which bordered the park to the south, our street being its northernmost edge.
I suppose we were stunned but we sat there silent for a minute watching as the flames continued to roar. The loss of the building had to be emotional as my mother had already named it the prayer house, but my father was transfixed. And after a minute or so it occurred to my mother that this was what we were doing. We were sitting here watching the darn thing burn and watching the firemen struggle to contain the flames. Watching what looked to me like very bad firemen from the surrounding towns that appeared to think the fire was at our neighbors houses and not ours. I would later learn that the crews from our town (Brockport) were fighting the fire and the other crews were soaking the roofs of all our neighbors to ensure that the fire didn’t leap to other homes.
He intended to sit here until the next logical step was made evident. To this end my mother helped make the next logical step clearer to my father. Slowly I saw her turning so that her face was in perfect profile and with just an ounce of annoyance in her voice and demeanor, and I mean with just a tiny bit of knowing bewilderment she looked at my dad, the way my wife has looked at me and the way women have looked at men for all of history, and said very clearly, ‘What are you doing?’
My mother is a religious person and was a parent of small children to boot, so the standard coda to this comment from a wife to a husband clearly unaware of the others around him, ‘you horse’s ass.’ was left to be implied. I believe my father replied forthrightly and said something to the effect of ‘Just watching.’
However it was communicated at that point, it was apparently made clear that we should shove off to seek some shelter for the duration of the night.
I don’t know whether it’s a male trait or more specifically a family trait, but like my father I imagine I would have done the same thing once we were in the car. That said, we have a difficult time getting the kids into the car for daycare without voices being raised, so I can’t imagine how they did all this without expressing or causing panic in me.
My next memory is of being at our neighbors house in the middle of the night. They were the neighbors on the corner and they were a family we were more friendly with than friends with. They were lovely, they were just at a different stage.
There youngest was in middle school, at least, possibly in high school already and my parents were swimming in little kids and babies. But this was the Midwest and neighbors were there to help in a crisis with a pot of coffee and some warm blankets for the kids to sleep in.
As you might imagine we didn’t sleep too much, if at all. By now we had a sense of what was happening and how big this was. Plus we had a whole new house to take in.
I had two older brothers that I loved and feared and they knew Anne, the youngest girl in the neighbor family so it was easy for them to talk to her. But for me I just remember standing there, in my underwear, all night. Surely this isn’t what happened, but the moment of realization was a startling one for me. I knew I was supposed to wear pants in front of people. Being in your underwear in front of people was for little kids not for me. I remember thinking this. And for what may have been the first time I felt shame and embarrassment. Like seriously.
Is that shame, really, or is it just embarrassment. This is not rhetorical, there is a definitive answer. It’s just simple embarrassment for god’s sake. What the hell. Was I preternaturally self pitying and melodramatic! Was I meant to be a fifteen year old goth girl all along! Apparently so.
My final memory is of mom and dad plopping us down in the playroom to watch early morning kids television. This was over thirty years ago so it had to be Saturday morning.
Saturday mornings were the only time that TV’s were programmed for kids. That and say, 3-5pm, M-F. We sat and watched our favorite cartoons, the smurfs and super-friends and the whole Hanna-Barbara lineup while munching on cereal that they prepared for us. It felt good. I was back in pants of a sort and we were back in front of the TV and safe and happy and the fire was not going to take our house.
All of it is a warm memory. One that contained all the resolution of a finished story. It was a memory only a child could make. I remember bringing my bowl into the kitchen, or more likely I left my bowl right where it was, on the floor waiting to be broken or at least tripped over, and was only going to scan the fridge for more food during a commercial. While I was in there I could see my parents through the window, heads trained at the ground, purposeful, searching the burnt out rubble on a grey morning. Searching for what, I have no idea.
And that’s it. That’s the memory I have of that event. One that highlights some definitely inaccurate information.
In fact allow me to list for you the parts of the story that are accurate. We had a barn. It was scheduled to be set up as a prayer house. It burned down. If it wasn’t the exact night of our housewarming, it was very close to it. We left our house. We went to our neighbors.
The rest is just what I’ve filled in. Some of it may reflect accuracy, much of it surely doesn’t. It’s almost totally subjective and about something that happened 35 years ago, to a six year old.
Another piece of potentially inaccurate information… I’m pretty sure it was arson and that the fire was set by (and this is the part that could be fabricated from whole cloth) a pyrophiliac who watched and whatever else, from the park across the street. This is precisely the type of detail that is 100% believable, but also so scandalous that it would make sense that we were left to surmise it from stolen info spread amongst the kids that would never be addressed. It has taken on a permanence that even evidence of it being false would hardly keep me from telling the story that way, even to myself.
So there it is. The story of a housewarming gone terribly awry, ruined by a pyrophiliac with a sense of irony. Genuine, definition irony. Like all stories, its one that has a perspective. Like any oral history, its one that would vary from person to person, with some facts tying it together.
Stories live and breath and evolve over time. I love that about stories. In the end this story has no terrible outcomes. The prayer house still came to be but it was in the backyard and built to order. Everyone was safe and there was nothing of too much value that was lost. But it is instructive to me that you never know the tails your tales will grow.
If I’m the one telling the story its a story that is of a small boy comforted by his parents, embarrassed by his bedtime attire and returned to a changed but same place that he would call home for the next 30 years.
Which is insane, really. Because in the midst of that tale, the much greater story is of the couple of thirty somethings who had a 100 foot, 5 alarm fire in there front yard, almost immediately after moving in, set by a person with some serious issues while they and there 5 kids were sleeping. It could have ended in tragedy but for the heroic efforts of many brave men who left their own stories and their own families sleeping to save ours.
My parents, supported by our community, protected us from everything, even fear, and provided a sense of security to us all. I hope I never have to find out if I’m able to live up to their standard. I wonder how I would do.
developing dad 