Adios 2008!

2008 has been a remarkable year and I am glad it is over.

We logged a butt load of travel miles in ’08 – Kazakhstan, Java, Bali, Turkey, Singapore and Egypt plus various locales in the US. We’ve been attacked by monkeys, crawled inside pyramids, paid bribes to various public officials, eaten horse and camel meat, sailed on the Nile, woke up to call to prayers, chased a snake through a rice paddy, met thousands of school kids and scores of teachers, taken and led and listened to workshops and keynote addresses, made new friends, had a couple books published, ran some triathlons, painted the garage, planted a garden, had a kid grow up and move out of the house, driven through blizzards and witnessed an historic presidential election.

We also lost loved ones – some needlessly too soon, others whose lifelong presences will be missed – each leaving a hole. We’ve seen stock markets swallow savings and watched violence erupt and boil in some of the places we have visited over the years, we’ve been disappointed by folks and organizations we trusted and watched family members face their own crisis wishing we could do more.

But – we’re still here, moving forward.

This has been a remarkable year – the highs have been stratospheric – the lows subterranean.

Good bye ’08 – thanks for the memories – now don’t let the door hit you in the ass.

’09 – bring it on.

PRESS PRESS - PULL

My Grandma kept everything.

Below is a combination of the pics from my first newspaper feature back in 1987 (found in one of Grandma's trunks) and another from a month or so ago.

Sara asked me if I'd give the kid sitting next to me the time of day.
I'm still thinking about it.

Extra points to anyone who can guess the allusion in the title.

Cocoon Buffoonery

We’re

getting ready to get busy around here. Sara is working on a new PowerPoint presentation for our keynote in Springfield MO this coming Thursday – were getting extra fancy embedding some video clips and all kindsa teacher pleasin’ good stuff – that’s my job figuring out the file formats and compressions and placing the clips onto the external HD for her leisurely plucking. After our stint in the show me state I head to Texas for week long residency in storm ravaged Houston then back home for a couple days – two stops in PA and then we’re off to Cairo Egypt. You can scope out my schedule over there on the right and see that October is a whirlwind month in this house.

Speaking of this house – we are playing host to a road poet who is currently catching some Zzzzs in our guest room – Eirik Ott aka Big Poppa E is our houseguest for a couple days as he crisses across the sates on another of his tours. He too is a working poet/performer singing for his supper across the US of A.

The recent passing of my grandmother prompted a flurry of stories as we sat reminiscing. Here’s a quick one.

Behind our house as we grew up was a large open field with a hill we sledded on in the winter. During the spring the field leading to the hill seemed endlessly vast and was crammed with goldenrod and milkweed, grasshoppers, katydids, garter snakes, toads as big as Cornish hens and other creepy crawlies. I attest my usually robust constitution to my early years of playing in the dirt, chewing on sassafras twigs, eating stolen peaches without washing them and digging many many holes from sunup until the bell rang at night for dinner.

Forts were very important to me my brother and our friends Tom and Jay thus we made many of them usually by digging into the sandy soil until the holes were over our heads- then we would lay branches across the opening followed by a layer of leaves then another tier of soil. We had an insatiable urge shared by most preteen boys to become subterranean. These forts were damp and smelled of the wet clay that lay below the layer of sand. Of course this obsession also meant purloined candles were required for illumination or even a coffee can three quarters full with gasoline lit and placed in a niche carved into the wall. No one had ever told us about asphyxiation and I’m certain this lack of knowledge and dumb luck is what kept us alive – like Wile E. Coyote blithely walking off a cliff and not falling until he looks down. Some other time I’ll tell you about the time we set Tom on fire and then tried to convince the nurse who lived in the neighborhood that his injuries were a rug burn.

What I was reminded of though, as we sat around telling stories after Granma’s service was the time my brother and I collected a bunch of cocoons from the field below the hill. Snapping off milkweed stems that the golf ball sized orbs were attached to. Hundreds of ‘em, we loaded our arms like we were gathering kindling and brought them all into our bedroom envisioning the day when we would wake up thousands of butterflies flittering around like some scene from Disney’s song of the south Zip a dee do dah day.

It was a couple days later that my mom showed up at St. Gabriel grade school to give us a ride home – this had never happened before we always took the bus so we were definitely entering a different dimension. It seems our cocoons had hatched – but instead of a glorious display of winged wonderfulness fluttering we had a room infested by what looked like the type of mold that grows on an old orange peel.

Except – this stuff was moving.

Seems the cocoons we had collected were of the praying mantis variety so literally millions of the little (each about the size of a grain of rice) buggers had emerged simultaneously while we were at school. I don’t remember how we got them all out of there, most likely with a shop vac but I do remember their teeny tiny little beady eyes.

what 36 years can do to a guy

Before

After

Today my son and I will be relocating some live chickens. Hopefully this will be uneventful - but there is some potential for unforeseen catastrophe.

update: The chicken moving escapade was pretty anticlimatic - while the premise was I Love Lucy rerun worthy - we put a couple chickens in dog carriers, drove them 40 miles in the back of my Honda Elelment - then set them loose in my sister's chicken pen along with a couple dozen of her own fowl. No harrowing escapes in the auto - no fighting with new chicken pen mates - no chickens attached to anyone's face as they stumbled around a pasture - nothing.

Grandma

Anna Salinger

was my grandmother and a pretty good cook. Back in the day she made everything from scratch. That’s one of my earliest memories of her. She’s wearing an apron, flour all over the kitchen counter rolling out the dough then cranking it through a machine that sliced it into the long skinny noodles homemade for her soup. I was very impressed that nobody yelled at her over the mess she was making. This let me know she was the boss. She’d drop these into her pot of homemade beef broth, onions, potatoes, carrots always sliced the long way, but more than anything it was those homemade egg noodles, they were what made grandma’s soup the best. Of course this didn’t stop my grandfather from dumping a half bottle of ketchup into his bowl, but the rest of us knew better.

I remember staying over at grandma’s house. Sleeping in the guest room with the bumpy crocheted bedspread, streetlight shining through the window level with the foot of the bed and Collinwood yard train sounds coming in the other one.

I broke all the thermometers in her house. One time when I was staying over, I was probably around ten or eleven years old, I gathered then all up. My grandparents had quite a few thermometers too, between the one hanging outside the kitchen window and the ones grandma used for cooking and the couple I got from the medicine cabinet. I took them all and put them in the freezer then I took them and set them on the grill of the hot air vent then back into the freezer and heated again until they were all rendered useless. So my parents come to pick me up and see this pile of thermometers sitting on the counter. My Grandmother tells them what happened, and then she took my side. He was just doing an experiment, she said. He’s a scientist.

Every one of us grandkids and great-grandkids could tell a half dozen stories like this. Grandma always took your side. No matter what you did, the way you cut or colored your hair, the good and bad choices we made in life or our friends – she may not have approved of some of our decisions, but she never turned her back on us. Anna Salinger was as stubborn woman and we benefited because of this. We were always welcome at her table.

I know I speak for everyone who knew her when I say, “We’re all going to miss Grandma’s cooking.”

Anna Frances Salinger
Feb 18, 1920 - Sept 14, 2008

91 years old and crawling around the house on all fours.

At least that’s what her age would be if one uses the standard seven to one ration when determining a dog’s relative age. Maggie is a miniature dachshund who we are dog sitting for my sister while she is visiting her fiancée’s family in the DC area. I’ve known her all her life (the dog that is – I’ve known my sister all her life too – but this post is about her dog) and she is a good wiener dog.

For being a nonagenarian she gets around pretty well. Granted she lists from side to side when she totters around the house her rat tail clicking back and forth with the precision of a German cuckoo clock’s pendulum and she does sleep most time – but all in all she’s hanging in there.

Mag’s hearing isn’t what it used to be – one needs to be relatively loud to get her attention. Standing ten feet away I pretty much have to yell to get her notice and even then when she cocks her head it’s more akin to her remembering what it was like to perceive some high pitched noise in the far distance rather than actually hearing it. Eventually she gets the idea that I want her go outside once she sees through her cataracted and milky eyes that the rest of the canines in the household are headed out the open door. She dodders behind our other two dogs not exactly sure where she is going or why but she doesn’t want to be any trouble and if they are all going this way, well then she probably should be too.

She reminds me of old women one sees on the street in an ethnic neighborhood. Insert whatever locality modified by the adjective "Little" – Italy, Greek Town, Poland, or India whatever – these ancient women are ubiquitous to the sidewalks in these enclaves. Babushka-ed and wrinkled, long sleeved black sweaters in 90 degree humidity - hands as if carved from apples left to dry clutching a hardwood cane.

They stand outside of church entrances or at bus stops with wire wheeled shopping baskets that for the life of you, you would never believe they could move. Seemingly frail, but sinuous and tough as worn leather these are the old women one reads about in the news of the weird section of the paper. The ones who subdue would be purse snatchers with a crack of the cane across the mouth, using the muscle memory of countless chickens beheaded.

This is who Maggie is – a tough old broad who can be forgiven peeing on the carpet every now and then.