Father's Day 2013

I'm a very fortunate guy.

Not only did I  receive some clever and thoughtful gifts, but, most importantly, we got to spend time together as family. We ate well, laughed loudly, and heard good stories of hope and adventure.

Better than OK

According to people who know such things, the phrase "We are OK." was the most common phrase in Facebook posts during and shortly after Post-Tropical Cyclone mega-Frankenstorm Sandy. We are and then some.
As we mentioned on Facebook, the storm blew over a 50-foot, 100-year-old spruce tree onto our house, slicing off the chimney top which tumbled down to the roof of our family room. The sound caused my wife, Sandra, to jump up just as pieces of the ceiling came crashing down. It took a few minutes to figure out what has happened, by which time power went out town-wide.

Son Mike, a building contractor, lives a couple miles away and showed up quickly. His quick assessment, with the storm still strong, was we couldn't be sure that the house was safe. Water was coming in around the stub of the chimney and the family roof was sagging. We' couldn't be sure if any electrical wires were damaged.  After an hour of muddled thinking, we decided to spend the night with Mike's family.

There we were greeted and comforted. We listened Miss Cassie read her report on E. B. White's Stuart Little. Her report was a retelling of the story from the perspective of Snowbell, the family cat. Power came back to the town earlier than expected. Mike and Lynn gave up their bed to us. We were up early and returned home at first light.
The day passed quickly. The tree company that Mike called was on the scene with three trucks by 8 and the tree was gone by 10. A mason inspected the chimney. Mike and a framer friend cleared away the old chimney and patched the hole. The insurance inspectors were on the scene by 4. At 6, we were back at Mike and Lynn's for a birthday party for Cassie and me.

Back home, we have heat from the wood stove. (The furnace will be off until the chimney is repaired.) We are moving onto the new normal that, for a time, has a torn ceiling and a silent furnace. The house, for the first time in more than a century, is open to the east.

More importantly, we are energized with the fresh expressions of love and friendship and competence. We settled in long enough to watch the TV news of the fires and flooding in New York and the concomitant need for  heroics and compassion and money.

A while ago, after a rough personal episode, I remarked to one of my doctors that I was eager to get back to normal.

"There is no normal," he said. "There just is."

Eight years of RoasterBoy

Today we'll see Suessical at the Hanover Theater. Lily is with us for a few days. Cassie and Tess will join us. After the show and meeting the cast backstage, we get a bite to eat and come back to our house.
It's a day and a time that's less serious and more important, about letting go and listening, about having a seven-year-old read The Lorax to me after breakfast.



This blog started because of change, losing a job and moving to something unexpected. I never expected how unexpected it could be. Here's to more of it. Thanks for joining e safari.

I wonder why Huck didn't have one of these

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="640" caption="Car Stove, via bookofjoe"][/caption]

Seeing ourselves in another's mirror

The occasion was the passing of my mother's cousin at age 94. He was my mother's father's sister's son. For most of the gathered, including Bill's four daughters, I'd not seen these folks for five to as much as 50 years.
I might not be thinking of myself as old. If, however, I haven't seen someone for 50 years, well, if it ain't old, it'll do until some other explanation comes along.
"We went straight from being children to being old," remarked one of my second cousins. "We skipped right over that growing-up part and becoming adults."
You have to let your vision relax a bit before you start to notice the family threads run through each of the faces. Listening, you hear the slight chop of a Finnish accent, even among the American-born. We swap memories of visits to this family's house, that family's farm, to the camp and sauna.
I have a scanned copy of a newspaper clipping of one girl who'd shot a deer. It was from the front page of the Gardner News. She called it her 15 minutes of fame. That was back in the 1950s. She lived a full and a good life, but that's what got her name and picture in the paper.


We jump past the old stuff and earnestly talk for a couple of hours about what's going on in our lives now. We learn of each other's talents, hopes, troubles, and fears and theirs sound like our own.
One has recently been sort of diagnosed as having MS, although it's not certain. "I think MS means 'Maybe Something.',"  There are stories of Alzheimer's, ALS, and  other afflictions. There are celebrations of good things in our lives, children and grandchildren, work and retirement, travel, and other fun stuff. The darker, awkward stories of divorce, depression, abortion, drug use, chronic unemployment, even those quickly get into the conversation because, well, frankly, because we don't have time to do otherwise. This is who we are, who we've become, and we need to know these things.
And then, just like that, the room was emptying. We promise that we'll stay in touch by email, Facebook, a phone call, a visit. (Several of the folks live right nearby.) We might even follow through on those promises. You know, though, how life gets full. A day becomes a week becomes a month becomes, well, you know.
We squeeze a half century of news into a couple of hours. Who are these people? How can I know them so well when, just a short while ago, we were introducing ourselves as though we were strangers?