As parents there are a number of firsts in your child’s life – the first time they walk, the first time they ride a bike, the first time they say mama.  But few of these moments can compare, in some ways, with that first time that you drop your child off at school.

There is no question that the day your child walks into a classroom, you are essentially closing a chapter in your life and starting a new one.

Sometimes this transition is done easily and with confidence.  Our oldest, Audra, wasn’t even three yet, but there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that she was ready for preschool.  She was confident and mature and eager to leave her parents behind at the classroom door.  I’m not even sure she looked back when we said goodbye.

Then there was Asher.  By the time he was three, he was pretty ready to go to preschool, but he wasn’t potty trained and at the time I was playing taxi service to the local community college and there was no way I could squeeze preschool into my schedule, so Asher waited a year, but when he joined preschool as a four year old, he loved it, never once hesitating.

And then, yesterday, came Micah.

Micah turned three back in July, but has been a little behind developmentally.  His speech was delayed and he walked later than most.  He shows no signs of being potty trained and he struggles a little in the maturity department.  But he had done well in a county run summer preschool program and had graduated from his speech therapy.  I was confident that being in preschool would be really good for him.  He would learn from the behavior of the other kids and from being in a structured classroom setting.

We had been talking about preschool for months and by the time the big day rolled around, Micah was definitely excited.  He had picked out his own backpack and was ready to go.  This was the same preschool that his older brother Asher had gone to, so he was familiar with the class and the teacher. Yesterday he marched right in, and headed over to his favorite play area.

I had been nervous about this day.  There was a part of me that thought that Micah would blossom in this arena – that he would do just fine sitting in a circle, working at the art station and playing with others, and to a great extent I was right.  But there was also a part of me that worried that many of the behaviors that were so difficult at home, such as the bouts of uncontrollable crying or the occasional insistence that, say, his brother is not allowed to use a spoon with his dinner because… well, who, the heck knows why… would become problems.

I was the helping parent the first day of school, which meant that I would be able to at least see for myself how things went.  Initially, everything was fine.  Micah was doing well and the other few kids that had showed up seemed fine.

But they kept coming.

Our preschool hadn’t had a full three-year-old’s class in a long time and I think all of us involved had kind of forgotten what that looks like.  A group of four year olds who have been in school for a year may be occasionally rambunctious and may need to be reminded to sit still, but in general they know the structure of being in a classroom.  They know how to stand in a line (even if they don’t always do it).  They know how to sit in circle time (even if they get antsy).

The problem with a class of three year olds is that in general none of them have ever been in any kind of a class before.  They don’t know what a line is, they don’t know what a circle is and if they want to get up and walk across the room to play with a truck in the middle of a lesson, they do just that.

It feels less like a preschool class and more like releasing fifteen kids into your home for three hours.

Within minutes of all the kids arriving, all of the tubs of toys were turned upside down on the carpet, a child was attacking another child, Norman Bates style, with a pretend thermometer, and approximately 5 kids were trying to paint at the easel simultaneously like Jackson Pollock.

About 30 minutes after they arrived and about an hour before our normal snack time, a child walked up to the teacher and asked for a snack.  Within moments there were a dozen three-year-olds surrounding the teacher jumping up and down screaming “snack! Snack!  Snack!”  It was like a scene from a preschool production of Norma Rae.

It was in this environment of generally good natured chaos that my little boy began to unravel.

Looking back, he wasn’t acting differently than he normally does.  It’s just that normally he’s not in the middle of a classroom.  He’s at home with me, his unusually patient father.

At one point, someone bumped into him and he started crying.  At another point, someone tried to change seats at circle time and he began screaming and crying for him to move back.  At another point someone hit him and he cried.  Then he pooped in his pants, asked to go home, got his blanket, sucked his thumb and put his head down on the table.

It was, pretty much, an unqualified disaster. 

I spent half the class holding him, or trying to console him, or trying to control his anger.  It was exhausting, and embarrassing, especially in the midst of 14 other children with less significant, but very real needs.

He was not necessarily a “bad” child.  But he was overly sensitive, unreasonable, selfish, whiny and other qualities that exist in every pres-schooler, but seem to be dialed to 10 in my little boy.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with sweet little Micah, but I fear that in the same way that he had some delays with speech and motor skills which he has completely overcome, he is somewhat emotionally delayed as well.  It’s nothing that time won’t cure, but like all of our other steps up to this point, it’s virtually impossible to tell how much time it will take. 

The reality is that preschool will be very good for my little boy.  It will help him to mature and develop the skills he needs to succeed in the world, and in many ways I believe that it is good for him to be there, but….he is going to be “that child.”

He is going to be the child that other kids tell their parents about.  “Micah cried again today.”

He is going to be the child that the other helping parents go home and tell their spouse about.  “Oh, it was rough at the co-op today.  Suzy hit Deborah and Jack couldn’t sit still, and Micah cried for 15 minutes because one little boy took some of his play-doh.”

It’s hard being a parent of “that kid.”  My older two kids have been relatively easy.  They are easy going, flexible, and adapt well to new situations.  Micah is none of those things.  Micah isn’t a bad kid, but he takes work.  A lot of work.  And the thing is, when it’s you, the parent, doing the work it’s not a big deal, because he’s your child and you love him and you already know all the tricks. 

But it’s something else entirely to ask a teacher and a parent who don’t know your child to deal with his somewhat illogical breakdowns…. “Micah, you need to stop crying… Tommy doesn’t have to wear his hat if he doesn’t want to.”

In the past, the first day of preschool was always easy.  My kids did well, they were good little students and they always enjoyed it.

It will be a little harder with Micah.  And in another few weeks we many even reach the conclusion that Micah isn’t quite ready and that we need to hold off a year, but the thing about Micah is that while he takes longer to accomplish new skills, he will often surprise you.

Micah does things on his own time table.  He is stubborn and determined – qualities that will serve him well as an adult, but that are a pain in the patootie as a 3 year old.  As likely as it is that we may need to remove Micah from preschool, it is just as likely that one day he will surprise us by leaving the crying and unreasonableness behind when nobody is looking.

No, when it comes to Micah, things rarely come easily.

But if having children has taught me nothing else, I’ve learned that the best things in life rarely do. 

Good luck Micah. 

--------------------Update------------------

I wrote this blog right after Micah’s first day at school.   I was the parent helper that day and as I laid out…. It didn’t go all that well.

But I just picked Micah up from his second day of class and, by all accounts it went much better.  Now, why is that exactly? 

Well, it could be because the first day of school is always difficult.  It could be because kids, in general, tend to act better for strangers than their parents.  It could be because he is adjusting and will continue to do better as time passes.  Or it could have just been a fluke.

My suspicion is that it is a combination of all of these things.  Again, progress with Micah doesn’t always come easily, but it does always come.

When I was living in Mississippi, I taught third grade in the small town of Moorhead.  Moorhead was smack dab in the middle of the Delta region.  The population is mainly poor and black, but with a substantial middle class white population.  The schools in Moorhead, like the schools most places in the Delta, are 100% black.

When the Brown Vs. Board of Education decision finally ended legal segregation in the fifties, it took another 20 years before that decision trickled down to rural Mississippi.  During these last gasps of segregation, the white community tried anything they could think of to continue on.  In a number of cases individual black children were selected and sent to the white schools, hoping that if the schools now had one, or two black children, that they would be considered “integrated.”  The teacher who taught next to me was one of those selected and spent several uncomfortable years as a pawn in the larger communities attempt to subvert the law.

In the early to mid seventies, when it finally became clear that segregation could not be avoided, the white population gathered together and, literally, overnight abandoned the public schools, setting up new “academies” in churches till the private buildings which continue to educate the Delta’s white population could be built.

In the region, there were many stories of how the white school boards did things like sell all of the public school’s textbooks to the academies for a dollar, leaving the public schools with little to nothing.  I don’t personally know if these activities happened in Moorhead, but I do know that when my mother came to visit, she cried because the school as it existed in the late nineties, reminded her so much of the underfunded segregated schools she had seen as a child.

When black history month rolled around, the whole school took some time to focus on some of the leaders of the civil rights movement.  One day, I was talking about Thurgood Marshall and the Brown Vs. the Board of Education decision.  I remember, very clearly, asking the class if anyone knew what segregation meant.  When no hands went up, I started out to explain this concept, trying gamely to break down this complicated piece of our nation’s history into something a group of third graders could understand:

“Well, a long time ago, back when your grandparents were your age, there was a rule called ‘segregation’ that stated that black children and white children couldn’t go to school together.  Well, some people, including Thurgood Marshall decided that this rule was wrong and that they were going to do something about it.  So they went to court and explained to the judge how wrong it was for black and white children to be segregated.  And because of Thurgood Marshall and the people helping him, the court decided that he was right and made segregation illegal and now, of course,  black and white children can all go to school togeth….”

As, I made that last statement, I looked out across the room at the small faces staring back up at me and realized that my whole lesson was absolute crap.  There was not a child in my class who had ever been in a classroom with a white child, and they probably never would.

There were plenty of white families in the area.  You saw them in Wal-mart or when they drove by in their cars, but for the most part, this pocket of Mississippi was as segregated as it had been in 1954 when the Brown decision became the law of the land.  There was no integration in schools, or churches, and there were even certain restaurants and stores that, while not technically segregated, were still known to be primarily “for whites” or “for blacks.”

I’ll never forget the utter feeling of stupidity I felt standing there trying to explain the glories of the civil rights movement to a classroom of children who had never really experienced any of its repercussions.

Last month on our cross country drive, we were driving through Kansas when I saw a National Park Service sign for the Brown V. Board of Education National Historic Site.  At first this seemed very odd.  Over the years, I had gotten so used to referring to the landmark decision as “Brown V. Board,” I had sort of forgotten that its entire name is “Oliver Brown, et al. Vs. the Board of Education of Topeka.”

To be fair, there were 12 other plaintiffs in the Topeka suit, and by the time the case reached the Supreme Court, it had been combined with similar lawsuits from 4 other jurisdictions into one massive case, but the name of the case has always been foremost linked with Oliver Brown of Topeka, Kansas.

The National Historic Site is housed at Monroe Elementary, the segregated black school that Oliver Brown’s daughter, Linda, was required to attend.  Linda actually had to (ironically) be bussed to the segregated school even though there was a white school within walking distance.  Oliver Brown attempted to enroll his daughter in the closer white school and when he was denied, the Brown V. Board case was born.

Monroe Elementary is a handsome old brick and stone school of the kind that you only see in older cities any more.  It hasn’t been a school for over 35 years and in the meantime had fallen into disrepair.  In 1992, the National Park Service obtained the building and has renovated the school to its 1954 appearance.

Walking into the building, in a way, is like stepping back in time.  Although everything looks new and in good shape, the aesthetic and feel of the building resonates with a time from decades earlier.  It is not hard to imagine small children in pigtails and crisp dresses walking up and down the hallways.

It reminded me of the school I taught at in Detroit, a similarly old historic building with tall ceilings and gaping windows.  However, the first thought that I had when walking into the recently renovated Monroe Elementary was, “Wow.  This place is nicer than anywhere I ever taught.”

We didn’t have much time in the building.  We were driving through Kansas that day and still had a good 10 hours of driving ahead of us.  But I wanted to see the site and at least give my children a cursory overview of what this place represented.  

I decided to tell the story through the lens of Thurgood Marshall since he is a native Marylander and the kids have seen his statue in Annapolis near where we live.  As we walked through the museum and saw the different exhibits, I began an explanation of segregation and the civil rights movement and the Brown case that was very similar to the one I had laid out years before in Mississippi.  When I got to the end of my little mini-lesson and began to explain how:

“and now, because of Thurgood Marshall, black children and white children are able to go to school togeth…..”

I once again choked on my words.  I thought about my daughter’s almost all white school and the single black child and single Hispanic child in her classroom.  My mind raced instantly back to that parallel moment 15 years earlier when I had tried to explain the wonders of desegregation to a completely segregated classroom in Mississippi.

It is easy for us to stand here several years past the 50^th anniversary of the Brown decision, and pat ourselves on the back for all that we as a nation have accomplished.  Most people alive in this country were born after the Brown decision and view it as little more than a history lesson – a series of black and white photographs and choppy news footage of an era ruled by people more ignorant and more racist than we are today.

And yet, the true promise of an integrated society is about as far away now as it was in 1950.  Very few of us attend schools that have a true presence of the blacks and whites and Hispanics and Asians that inhabit our regions.  We have self segregated ourselves far more effectively than a series of laws ever could have.

And I, with my white daughter in a public school that is over 97% white is as guilty of this as anyone.  We attend a diverse church, and with an impending adoption from Ethiopia are about to make our own family more diverse than my daughter’s school.  But the reality is that because of where we live and the choices we make in life, most of our friends are white and most of our children’s friends are white.

As a nation we celebrate, with pride, the achievements of the Brown decision as an official end to our formalized system of racism and segregation, and, yet, if the people who fought that fight were to go into many of the schools around this nation the children sitting in those classrooms might not look much different.

It is hard to teach a child about how much we have overcome, when the world around them shows little evidence of that.  It is a challenge for a teacher or a parent to try to convince their child that the world is now a much better place, when the world they see seems shockingly similar to the one described so effectively in their history books.

We HAVE come a long, long way, but it is times like these that I am reminded that the path ahead is a lot steeper than we sometimes want to believe it is.

That mountaintop is still a long, difficult journey away.

There’s nothing quite like a 5 year old’s birthday.

They’re old enough to be endlessly excited about the event and the presents and the cake and everything else, but haven’t quite developed a sense of time that is exacting enough to understand the difference between “next Saturday” and “tomorrow.”  Which would probably explain why I was asked “Is my birthday tomorrow?” for approximately two months straight.

Age 5 may be the quintessential birthday year.  The child is old enough to be excited and to have strong opinions about the theme of the party.  Also, they’ve been in preschool a couple of years and have some friends.  And, the kids are old enough to play some games without anyone breaking down into tears….. well, for the most part.

Yes, age 5 is when the birthdays really take off.  I would say that these birthday golden years probably last until somewhere around age 9 or 10 when all of a sudden kids start to become too cool for games that involve tying balloons around their ankles and are at an age where they just want to…. Heck, I don’t know…. sit around and text their friends while eating fun-dip, or whatever it is that 10 year olds like to do.

So, all this is to say, that this was Asher’s first real, big birthday party.  And I was determined to do it up right. 

Asher had decided early on that he wanted to have a Superman party. 

For Christmas, I had bought Asher a set of old Superfriends DVDs… you know, the ones with the Wonder Twins and Gleek the space monkey and the probably now  racist Apache Chief?  Well, not surprisingly, he loved the videos and particularly superman and, therefore, decided long ago that he wanted a superman birthday party. 

The problem is that aside from Asher, apparently, no other little kids like Superman any more.  You just can not find any Superman stuff in the stores.  There are no Superman toys.  No Superman cake pans.  No Superman napkins or piñatas.

Sure, there’s lots of Batman stuff thanks to stupid pensive Christian Bale and those new Batman movies that are so dark and violent that your kids have to be 16 to go see them, but just try and find anything related to the man of steel.

Sure, there was some stuff a few years ago, when that horrible superman remake came out where, the superman costume was changed from red and blue to burgundy and navy and Superman was turned into a goofy Christ figure in some director’s attempt to impress his 11^th grade English teacher.

Anyway….. I digress.

My point is that it’s really hard to find anything on old Supes.  I had to order the cake pan off of Ebay and get plates and napkins from an online store that apparently had a crate of leftovers in the supply closet next to the lysol.  (Pinatas are sold out!)

But that’s ok.  There’s nothing wrong with being a little behind the times. I, for one, just finished watching The Wire (Did you know Baltimore has a drug problem?!?)

So, the next step, having special ordered from the ends of the earth the last remaining superman merchandise, was to figure out what kind of games and activities we might have at the party.  I mean, what’s a party without games and activities, right?  So I turned to google and began to see what ideas were out there.  The problem is that most birthday parties are planned by Moms.  And moms are almost always women.  And it is a certifiable fact that women don’t know anything about superheroes.  The games were all things like “Superheroes are Superhelpful!”  So let’s all reorganize my spice drawer!

No, no, no, that simply would not do.

So, I did some digging and was able to pull together some excellent ideas for this shindig (or so I thought).

We sent out about a dozen invitations and had nineteen kids show up for the birthday party.  (This is why you should only befriend single children.)

To prepare for the party, we cleaned and decorated and then presented Asher with a present from his grandparents, a brand new super suit!  It was shiny and layered with fake muscles and was every child’s dream.  It was also coated with an inch or two of foam and was warm enough to keep a spy toasty warm while sneaking across Siberia to rescue a kidnapped heiress.  Asher started sweating the second he put it on, but refused to take it off until we went swimming two hours later.

Once all the kids arrived, we started off with some Super Strength contests which mainly involved kids trying to pop balloons and release the tattoos I had hidden inside.  Half the kids loved this and the other half spent the time covering their ears and cowering.  And then there was Micah, my three year old,  who spent the entire time trying to pop a balloon while simultaneously covering his ears. 

You gotta love that kind of moxie.

After that we had a wildly unsuccessful game where the children were supposed to run through an obstacle course I had set up.  This seemed like a good idea, but I had, apparently, forgotten that the party was for 5 year olds (and their younger siblings).  As I walked the children through the obstacle course showing them each portion of it and what to do, I unknowingly lost a small contingent of them at each stage, so that by the time I got to the end of the obstacle course, there was only one child still following and listening to me, and she appeared lost.

I attempted to gather the children up so that I could send them through the obstacle course as intended, but in the end it was just easier to let the kids do whatever in the world they wanted to,  than it was to try to bend them to my will.  So the kids just ran around randomly for a while and then we began the big event of the day.

I pulled out a message from a bad guy, that said he had hidden all of the kids’ superpowers.  So with that we were on a treasure hunt to find, various items, including batman pencils (lame, I know) and t-shirts that said “Super insert kids name here” on them.  (My favorite was SuperCooper, although Cooper didn’t actually show up).

Then we went on a mission to find their missing capes, which I foolishly made out of flannel because the lady at the Jo-Ann’s fabric store told me I should make them out of flannel instead of a light shiny materials, because flannel wouldn’t unravel, but the flannel ended up being so hot and heavy and didn’t stay velcroed and what was I thinking, and why didn’t I just go ahead and get some rayon like I had intended, I’m just a total idiot and should know better than to listen to people who work at Jo-Ann’s fabric.

Anyway, after we had outfitted the kids with t-shirts, capes and pencils, they finally stumbled across an entire case of silly string.

Two tangential stories here:

1)  On the day before the birthday party, I was having a couple of people over to go swimming and one of the mom’s called and said, “Hey I’m at Target do you need me to get anything?”  at which point I shouted into the phone: “Yes!  Three things!  A cake mix, a 2 lb bag of powdered sugar and 21 cans of silly string!”

Which is precisely what she brought me

2)  In my research online, someone recounted how at their party, they had armed the children with silly string and then gotten a neighbor to drop by wearing a mask proclaiming to be a bad guy for the children to chase and attack with silly string.  I thought this was a great idea, but didn’t have any ideas on who to ask to be the bad guy. 

Then I remembered my friend Payter. 

Payter is the kind of guy who probably enjoys playing with the kids more than hanging out with the adults. He’s the kind of guy who, when the kids are swimming, you have to make sure you give him the five minute warning as well as the children.  He’s the kind of guy who will let children crawl all over him and pull his hair without any protest.  He’s basically like a giant human golden retriever, except smart.  He’s also the father of Asher’s best friend.

Payter was born to play this role.  So I called up the house and his wife told me that he probably couldn’t, because he was supposed to go somewhere with his brother later, but that she would ask.  A few hours later, she called back and said that when she had mentioned the idea to him, Payter had instantly forgotten about his brother and began planning his evil bad guy costume.  He said, that he would do it on one condition:  He had to be Bomb Voyage – the French Super Villain from the Incredibles.

But, of course.

So, anyway, just as the kids were opening this case of silly string, you hear this ridiculous French accent shout “BOMB VOYAGE!” as a black water balloon sails through the air and explodes at the children’s feet. 

And then, it was on.

For the next 15 minutes, the air was a blur of multicolored stringy goo and bursting cascades of water as silly string and water balloons flew back and forth through the air creating the most unbelievable mess in the driveway.

Which leads me to a segment I like to call:

“5 Things I Learned About Silly String”

1)  There is a lot more of that silly string stuff in a can than you might expect.

2)  All the silly string in the world will not alleviate the tears of a two year old that inadvertently gets drenched by a water balloon.

3)  Aiming silly string requires the fine motor skills of at least a 6 year old

4) Introducing silly string at a party will cause at least half a dozen parents to begin recounting horror stories about how silly string stripped the paint off their cars, or ruined the wallpaper in a hotel room (don’t ask) or accidentally poisoned their cat.

5)  However difficult you may think it is to remove 21 cans worth of silly string from your driveway….it’s actually much much harder.

That all being said, there is no question that the great Super Hero Vs. Bomb Voyage silly string / water balloon battle of 2010 was by far the highlight of the party.

Well maybe.  Because we still had one more game.

I announced to the kids “Ok, we have tested your super strength, and your super speed, and your super combat skills, but there is one more thing that a super hero does, what is it?

All the children looked at me rather blankly, as if they had just inhaled the fumes from 21 cans of silly string, and then one little girl raised her hand and said, “fly?”

“Precisely!”  I shouted, “Follow me!”

I led the children into the backyard where I had strung a zip line between two large trees 50 feet apart. And one by one, these kids, wearing their blue super shirts and these crappy flannel capes that just would not stay on, began gliding down that wire - testing their flying skills.

I have to say, I kind of rocked that.

The rest of the day contained cake and ice cream and presents and swimming. There were some ups and downs, but overall, it’s just the kind of party you would want to have for a beaming five year old.

And I’m happy to report that no one got hurt.  No one was permanently damaged from the Kryptonite and that with enough time and enough elbow grease, even the most stubborn patches of silly string can be removed from asphalt.

And that my friends, is what we call a successful party.

Happy Birthday Asher T 5.

As part of my 6,000 mile journey driving across this grand country of ours, I also went into a bit of a news blackout.  This was partly because I wanted to spend time with my beloved children and family without the distractions of the outside world.  And, partly, because wide swaths of this country don’t seem to get an NPR radio signal.  And I only watch TV news if I feel like my IQ has gotten dangerously high and I need to quickly lower it.

However, as we traveled back through Wyoming and Nebraska and other exciting places, I did stumble across a TV in the hotel’s free breakfast bar.  It was tuned to Fox news and I was surprised to learn that the big political firestorm of the week centered around plans to build a mosque at ground zero.

Well, that seemed pretty odd.  Last I had heard, everyone was still arguing about what kind of mega skyscraper to put at ground zero, I hadn’t heard anyone talk about a mosque.  I mean, you’ve got to admit, that’s kind of weird.

But then, I was in some other free breakfast bar in some other hotel and the story made a little more sense.  Of course, nobody was building a mosque at ground zero.  That was just Fox news being intentionally obtuse in order to rile people up. 

There’s a word for that, but it’s not very nice.

So, I felt better.  And as I learned more about the issue, it turns out that just about every aspect of the story was sort of misleading. 

This mosque is not going to be built at ground zero.  In fact, it’s two blocks north of the site at a building that used to be a Burlington Coat Factory.

Here’s a google map of the site, for the curious:  

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=51%20Park%20Place,%20New%20York,%20New%20York&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&hl=en&tab=wl

In fact, it’s not even a mosque.  Apparently, it’s going to be a Community Center, kind of like the JCC or the Y.  Yes, apparently it is going to have a place of worship inside it that will be technically be a mosque, but if you’re trying to imagine what the building is going to look like, you should think office building more than minarets.

So, we have a Muslim group building a community center with a basketball court, swimming pool, child care center, library, auditorium, culinary school and a September 11^th memorial to remember the thousands of Americans who died that day, including the several hundred muslims who were in the twin towers.

I know, it all sounds pretty evil…. Especially the swimming pool.

(Here’s the unbelievably boring and poorly done website for the building:  http://www.park51.org/vision.htm)

Ok, so I chalked this whole brouhaha up to right wing nut cases riling each other up and going prematurely bonkers over something that they didn’t actually know anything about.

Happens every day. 

So I didn’t give it much more thought.

And THEN, I was at an oil change place in Michigan trying to ensure that my car with 167,000 miles on it would make it the last 600 miles home when I was watching the TV in the waiting room (CNN this time) and saw a replay of Obama giving a speech where he said something totally insane like “private groups can purchase private property” or some other totally crazy thing.

Ok.  How was this story still going on?  I mean, I understand that Muslims freak people out.  If you don’t live in a big city you’ve probably never met a Muslim in your entire life and we’re all terrified of that which we don’t know.  (For instance, I am terrified of people from North Dakota.  I have never met a North Dakotan, and I can only assume that they are secret aliens)

But I really thought that our country had done a very good job drawing a distinction between Al Qaeda (a terrorist group that has attacked America as well as a ton of other countries) and Muslims (a peaceful religion that, with 1.5 billion followers, is the second largest religion in the world and whose followers make up almost a quarter of the world’s population).

I remember that after 9/11, I was extremely proud of President Bush.  He repeatedly reminded America that this horrible act was not a result of all Muslims, but of a tiny group of militant whack jobs that happened to also be Muslim.  A week after 9/11 he visited the largest Mosque in Washington, DC and simultaneously reached out to Muslim Americans and criticized anyone who would dare to ignorantly try to attack a Muslim out of anger over 9/11.

"Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don"t represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.”

Of course, Bush was always kind of a hippie.

So, anyway, while I knew that ignorance and hatred still seethed out there in pockets of America, I really, truly believed that most of us had learned the difference between terrorists and Muslims. 

I hate it when I’m wrong.

So, I’m sitting there in my oil change and after the rebroadcast of Obama’s completely bland remarks, CNN cuts to this poll saying that 70% of Americans’ “disagree with Obama” and think that a mosque should not be built near ground zero.

HOLY CRAP IN A BUCKET!

70%?!?!

I’m used to polls showing that 30% or even up to 50% of people in our country believe something really stupid, but when the vast majority of people have bought into something so clearly ignorant it begins to scare me.

You see, here’s the difficulty.  The only way you can think that it is wrong for a group to build something near ground zero, is if you think that that group is somehow responsible for 9/11.  So, I am TERRIFIED by the idea that 70% of people in this country on some level still hold Muslims, as a whole, responsible for 9/11

(all 1.5 billion of them?)

People keep throwing around the word “disrespectful,” but I don’t think they really mean that, because there’s lots of stuff closer to ground zero than this proposed community center that isn’t exactly respectful.  I mean I haven’t heard anyone complain that the “New York Dolls Gentleman’s Club” or the “Pussycat Lounge” is somehow disrespectful.  Strip bars don’t exactly scream respectability…

But, damn, if those Muslims try to put in a basketball court….

What scares me the most is not the crazy people.  I’m used to the crazy people.  In my effort to find a good map of where the site was going to be I came across all kind of crazy ranting with horrifying quotes such as:

“The bstrds can build this, but they better have a HUGE REBUILDING fund in reserve.”

“Seriously. I’m all for blowing up that mosque, and will contribute to any TNT fund.”

No, the crazies don’t bother me.  There are always crazy people.  No, it’s the sane people that have me worried.

I was listening to Diane Rehm on NPR (finally back in an area with radio signals) and they were discussing this issue.  A couple of wackos called in, but the ones that worried me the most were the people who called in and said something like:

“I want to support our Muslim brothers and sisters, but they have to understand how disrespectful this is.”

Maybe I need to understand how disprespectful this is.

Yes, the people who attacked us were Muslim.  But does that mean that followers of the Muslim religion should be held responsible for all 1.5 billion followers?

Boy, I hope that’s not the precedent we are setting, because, as a Christian, I am in serious trouble! 

I really don’t want to be held responsible for the actions of every Christian out there.  I mean, Christians do a lot of crazy stuff.  Right now 80% of the prison population self identifies as Christian.

That’s a lot of sin folks.

Perhaps an analogy would help. 

Newt Gingrich, helpful as always, has offered up an analogy.  He said that putting the cultural center near ground zero would be like the Nazis putting a sign up near the Holocaust Museum.

Wow.  That would be bad, wouldn’t it?

Although it’s not quite a correct analogy.  You see, the Nazis were not some terrorist fringe group, they were the Al Qaeda of their day, just larger and more powerful.

As we’ve already talked about, not all Muslims are terrorists in the same way that not all Europeans were Nazis.

No, a better analogy to this would be to ask:

Would we have a problem with a Catholic church being built near the Holocaust Museum?  (Hitler was a Catholic you see). 

And the answer is:  Of course not. 

Even though Hitler was Catholic (as were many Nazis) we don’t assume that all Catholics are Nazis.  To assume that would mean that you were a moron.

So, am I calling Newt Gingrich a moron?

Yes.

Another example might be to say, would it be ok to build a church in Wichita Kansas near where abortion doctor, Dr. George Tiller, was assassinated by a Christian extremist? 

I mean, his assassin clearly killed the man because of his Christian religious beliefs.  So, presumably, it would be pretty damn offensive to put up a Christian church near the assassination site, right?

Well, no.  That, too, would be asinine.  If for no other reason, than the fact that George Tiller was assassinated while acting as an usher in his own Christian church.

You see, I think we are all smarter than we seem.  We can easily identify a lunatic who has completely twisted his religious beliefs into something evil and unrecognizable to other followers of his religion. 

We have no difficulty drawing a distinction between the evil crazy people and all the other millions of followers who may follow the same religion but have found peace and love instead of hate and murder within the pages of their holy book.

Or at least we can do that when we are talking about Christianity.

Muslims on the other hand…. they’re a little, well,…. different.

Perhaps I’m oversimplifying this in my head, but it just seems so ludicrously straightforward to me. 

Muslims are peace loving people who worship the same God as Christians and Jews and they make up about ¼ of the people on the planet.  They are in NO WAY responsible for the attacks of 9/11 (that was done by a bunch of crazy people who claim to operate out of a perversion of the Muslim faith).

So why is it even an issue that a religious group with over 600,000 peaceful followers in New York City should not be allowed to buy some real estate and build a gym?

Because it is “too close?”

Just for a moment, why don’t we remove part of our frontal lobe and pretend that there is some iota of logic to this argument.

So, exactly, how close is to close? 

Two blocks is clearly too damn close.  How about 5?  Or 10?  Or should we just ban Muslims from New York City altogether.  I, mean, don’t you think the fact that they are even walking around is pretty damn offensive?

There are over 100 mosques in New York City as we speak (not to mention, who even knows how many Allah fearing swimming pools!)  They practically have us surrounded! (or is it the other way around?)

Whatever we do, I hope we don’t say that 4 blocks is too close, because there’s already a mosque 4 blocks away from Ground Zero and  that’s been there for years!  

Those tricky Muslims were being preemptively offensive!

(That’s it.  Frontal lobes back in, please.)

I really don’t know what to say.  If you believe that having a Muslim funded YMCA two blocks from ground zero is horribly offensive, there really is only one explanation.

Bigotry.

People who believe that it is “inappropriate” to put a community center / mosque in that location only believe that because somehow they believe that 9/11 is not the responsibility of a small group of crazed individuals, but rather the responsibility of the massive billion and a half member religion of which they come from.

When you take the actions of a few and presume that they represent the whole, that is the very definition of bigotry.

And, again, I can not even begin to tell you how scared I am that I live in a country where 70% of the people here are self proclaimed bigots.

I can only hope that people are just misinformed on this issue, or perhaps that the poll that was taken was inaccurate.

Otherwise, my friends, the United States of America has a much bigger problem than terrorism.

What comes to mind when someone mentions Kansas?

Possibly the Wizard of Oz.

Or if you’re into politics, possibly Eisenhower and Bob Dole.

Or if you’re a literary nerd, perhaps you think of Langston Hughes

Or if you’re stuck in 1977 perhaps you think of Dust in the Wind.

But, if you’ve ever considered driving to Colorado from Missouri, you probably think of I-70.  Which means you think of  a state so unbelievably flat and boring it’s hard to come up with any redeeming value. 

When I was planning my grand journey out  West, I was trying to come up with fun and interesting stops along the way to break the trip up and to provide some edjumacation for my children.  For instance, we stopped at the St. Louis Arch and the historically significant “Zumwalt State Park.”  We visited the Egyptian exhibit in Kansas City and had some Kansas City Barbeque.

So I was looking for some equally significant things to do while driving across the 10 hour expanse of Kansas.  However, I was able to come up with very little in my own research.  The top Kansas attractions across the plains appear to be:

 The Barbed wire museum   http://www.rushcounty.org/BarbedWireMuseum/ (not even the largest barbed wire museum – that’s in Texas)

The Barbed Wire Post Museum  http://www.rushcounty.org/postrockmuseum/  (which is nearby and inexplicably separate)

The World’s largest Hand Dug Well   http://www.bigwell.org/bigwell.html

The Underground Salt Museum  http://www.undergroundmuseum.org/index.php

And… well, that’s about it.

I talked to person after person about what to do in Kansas.  I asked friends, relatives and complete strangers (I’m talking about you Target check out lady) and nobody could offer up a single thing to do in Kansas.

Seriously.  I probably asked a dozen different people who had all driven through Kansas multiple times and not one of them could offer up a single redeeming quality for this state that has scientifically been proven to be flatter than a pancake.   http://www.cbc.ca/news/story/2003/07/25/kansas030725.html

So, I have to say, I wasn’t real excited about my extended journey across this topographically defunct wasteland.  In fact, I was going to break it up into a two day journey so that it wouldn’t be such a  long miserable day, but there were so few places to spend the night, that I eventually decided that it would be better to just push on through the state and confine the misery to a single 24 hour period.

I mean it clearly isn’t that great of a place to be.  If you think of all of the famous people from Kansas.  (Come on, aside from the ones I’ve mentioned, go ahead and think of them all….  Ok, I’ll just list some) Walter Chrysler, Amelia Earhart, John Brown, Kirstie Alley, Melissa Etheridge, Paul Rudd and Clark Kent. 

They all left Kansas.  I mean can you think of a single famous person from Kansas who still lives there?

So, how could I argue with everyone from Kristie Alley to the Target  check out lady? 

Kansas must just be a horrible, miserable, wretched place.

I mean, they can’t all be wrong?   Can they?

Well….. yes and no.

I think that it is a pretty certifiable fact that I-70 takes you through a pretty horrible, miserable, wretched section of our country.

But despite the fact that it seems like you can see hundreds of miles in every direction, this is not all of Kansas.

I decided, perhaps brilliantly, perhaps foolishly, to avoid this much maligned piece of interstate.  I stayed on the highway just long enough to be ticked off that the Interstate highway (a highway my federal tax dollars built) was a toll road.

Ok, I have a thing about toll roads.  I grew up in the south and we don’t really have toll roads.  We just have roads.  We build them using the tax money we would have spent on education.  You can drive through most of the southeast for your entire life and never have someone bring your car to a stop and ask you for $4.60.

I don’t  have an across the board problem with tolls.  For instance, tolls on bridges and tunnels don’t bother me.  When I look at the massive bay bridge spanning the Chesapeake bay, I think to myself, “damn, I bet that was hard to build.  I guess it’s worth a few bucks for me to drive on it.”

But a toll just  on a flat straight road?  That’s ridiculous.  This especially bugs me when the toll happens to be on a federally funded highway.  Didn’t my taxes already pay for this road?  Why, exactly, is this state continuing to charge me to drive on it 50 years after it was built?

Ok, me griping about tolls could be a blog unto itself.  So back to Kansas.

So, anyway, I’m driving on this toll road in Kansas, feeling bitter.  And I basically decided that even though this was going to be a long day of driving, that I might be happier getting off the universally despised interstate and taking some back roads.

And I have news for all of you Kansas Hatas (that’s how us urban folk spell haters, which means people who malign Kansas)

Kansas is actually quite beautiful.

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s not sunset over the Hawaiian mountains beautiful, but there is definitely a quiet, lonesome beauty to the rolling hills of Northern Kansas.  And yes, I did say rolling and I did say hills.

There’s a reason they laid I-70 where they did:  It’s flat.

If you travel even 20 miles north of I-70, those insanely flat corn fields break into a series of gently rolling hills and playfully curving roads.

I drove across 90% of the state before I saw flat land or a single stalk of corn.  The northern half of the state is all fields of sunflowers and rippling pastures for cows and sheep.  Sure, it was sparsely populated, but that leant to its quiet beauty.  You could travel for miles without passing cars or humans as you fell up and down the hills, your car cresting quietly along through the countryside.

The main impetus for getting off the highway in the first place had been to see the worlds largest ball of twine.

It’s sort of a stupid thing, admittedly.

In some ways, the world’s largest ball of twine is the quintessential American road side object.  We Americans will stop to see anything that is the “biggest” whether it’s the biggest building or the biggest strawberry (passed it today in Iowa)

 What makes this giant ball of twine thing even more remarkable, is that there is a long time debate about whether this is REALLY the largest ball of string.  Apparently, the giant ball from Kansas was in a long time battle with the giant ball from Minnesota, and so for a long time the Kansas ball had to suffice with the status of 2^nd largest ball of twine, or on a more positive note, the “Largest ball of Sisal Twine” to distinguish it from it’s larger non-sisal twine competition.

Today, however, this Kansas ball of twine is in fact the largest because the community has embraced it and holds  a “Twine Day” festival (third weekend of August) where they gather to add more twine to this burgeoning ball.  So the Minnesota ball is now officially known simply as the “Largest ball of Twine created by a Single Individual.”  (How’s that’s for some qualifications)

I know this is a silly little story, but it actually really struck me as more than that.  You see, the town of Cawker City, KS where the twine ball resides, has fallen on hard times.

Even in its heyday, I’m sure this city never looked like much, but it had fallen from sad to pathetic by the time I visited.  Every single one of the handful  of stores in the downtown was closed up, save for the one that sold souvenirs for giant twine ball tourists .  It was a town without much to live for – save for that one crazy giant ball of twine.

I can only speculate that there was a time when Frank Stoeber, who created this giant ball, was once thought to be the town nutjob.

This is a tiny town in the middle of nowheresville Kansas.  There is nothing else around except other inconsequential towns.  It’s a place where not much happens aside from the continuous farm work.  It must have seemed downright insane when one individual began to take leftover bits of twine and wind them around each other day after day. 

Surely, Frank went around asking fellow residents for any extra twine they might have.  And by the time the ball of twine was as big as a beach ball, I’m sure his neighbors were beginning to say that Frank seemed a bit off.  When it reached the size of a small table, the neighborhood kids probably had fun with his idiocy.  And by the time he died in 1974 when the ball was 11 feet across, surely everyone thought old Frank was about the craziest person they’d ever known.

But the funny thing is that now, that giant ball of twine is the only thing holding this community together.  It has literally put their city on the map and causes a steady stream of tourists to drive a hundred or so miles out of their way in order to come check out one man’s bizarre obsession.

And once a year the entire town gathers for Twine Fest,  its only festival, to add to this giant ball and continue on where Frank left off.  They have built a shelter to protect the ball, and in a somewhat odd, yet optimistic touch, they have placed four benches around the ball so that you can sit down and admire it at your leisure. 

I’m not entirely sure what conclusions to draw from all of this, but in a state with very little to offer in the way of tourist attractions, I found this leftover remnant of somebody’s dream to be a fascinating detour.  I set off to see something kind of hokey and ended up oddly touched by this giant ball.  It sits there, shockingly out of place on a deserted main street, with the sweet aroma of twine that reminds you of childhood potato sack races , wafting up from its massive presence.

Furthermore, this ball of twine forced me off the highway.  I love traveling the backroads, but it can be so hard to justify the extra time it takes.  But because of this twine ball, I saw some beautiful scenic byways and came away with a sentimental impression of Kansas that few others ever seem to have. 

And because I was already there, I went just a little farther out of my way to see the marker that denotes the geographic center of the lower 48 states (sort of) and the world’s largest Van Gogh painting (equally random).

All too often we accept the proposition that what we see from the highway is a true representation of what a state is.  We think that New Jersey is all Roy Rogers restaurants and chemical plants.  We think that Pennsylvania is little more than massage parlors and cracker barrels.

It’s hard to get off the main road.  It means that we delay our journey and in a time when it is always about the destination and never about the journey itself, it is so hard to take that extra hour to drive slowly through the country side. 

On our way home, I drove the highway all the way through Wyoming and hated it.  I took backroads through Iowa and fell in love.

Is that a coincidence?  Well, yes and no.  But I do know that an area is almost always more than it’s highways and rest stops and I am very glad that every once in a while there is something so bizarre and tempting as a giant ball of twine that it cajoles you into getting off our nation’s freeways.

Unlike everyone I have ever met, I loved driving through Kansas.  I found it beautiful and charming and completely unexpected.  And for that I can only thank Frank Stoeber and his crazy giant ball of Sisal Twine.

Scenic Kansas

On Sunday, I loaded up my three kids (ages 7, 4, and 3) our hyperactive , neurotic dog, a dozen  suitcases, three bikes, and all of my sanity and began driving West toward Utah.

I know…. Crazy.

You see, my father’s family is having a reunion out in Southwest Utah and we had been planning to go for over a year.  I had assumed that we would fly.  But we kept looking for cheap flights, only to find that they didn’t seem to exist.  The flights we were able to find were slightly more expensive than what it would cost to fly to Ireland, and I just couldn’t seem to justify spending that kind of money to go somewhere that we could theoretically drive.

(You see, this is how my mind works.  Unfortunately, the fact that Utah is connected to Maryland by land makes it “theoretically” drivable.  This mindset does not bode well for any future trips to Alaska or Chile.)

So, I began planning out the trip.  I decided early on that if I was going to drive that I wasn’t going to rush it.  I think you could probably get to Utah in four days of 10 hour driving apiece, but I know myself and my children well enough to realize that  a plan like that would only end in a recreation of that scene from “The Shining.” (It’s me!  I have lunchables!)

So I began to plan out a more leisurely “fun filled” drive across the country – A drive that would take us past some of our nations greatest artifacts.  A roundtrip drive that would take approximately (gulp) 5000 miles.

I planned to stay with friends as we traveled and to explore little bits of Americana on the way, providing myself and the children with that once in a lifetime experience guaranteed to create memories for the rest of their life…. Not neccesarily good memories, mind you, but memories none the less.

So, I began planning out our trip.  I figured it would take us a week to get out there, a week in Utah and a week to get back.  So, a three week total... 22 days to be exact.

Wow, that’s a really long time.

My wife, recognized early that this was a “really long time” and knew that she wouldn’t be able to take that kind of time off work (or so she said) so she is flying out and meeting us in Denver a week after we depart.  (She’s not just cure folks… she’s also really smart!)

As I am writing this, I am sitting in a friend’s basement in Kansas City.  I’ve got a belly full of Kansas City barbeque (Did you know that they serve it on slices of wonder bread?  Somebody needs to introduce these people to the “bun”) and so far my sanity is relatively intact.

We have visited the Cincinatti Zoo, the St. Louis Arch, a children’s museum, a restaurant where model trains bring you your food (http://www.fritzskc.com/)  and have even stopped at Zumwalt State Park.

Zumwalt State Park is a small park honoring Jacob Zumwalt (my ancestor) who was one of the first people to settle West of the Mississippi and reputedly one of the first to celebrate a Methodist sacrament West of the great river. It was people like my ancestor that basically allowed western expansion to happen and who paved the way for inter-continental transportation, the development of the nation’s breadbasket, and eventually the creation of the town that would bring us such cultural icons as “Singing in the Rain” and “Rush Hour 3.”

So, on behalf of my great great great (however many) grandfather:

You’re welcome.

So far, the trip has gone very well.  We’re only on day 5 (Seventeen more to go!) but with only a few minor squabbles, the kids have managed to survive and enjoy themselves.

We have seen some great sights (the St. Louis Arch really is amazing.  You sit inside this 4 foot high aspirin tablet and ride it to the top) and some weird sights (Let’s just say that after a fairly horrifying display by a Zebra at the zoo, we have finally answered the “black with white stripes” or “white with black stripes” controversy ).

We have also spent some great time with friends and learned a lot along the way.  For instance, I have learned a ton about Missouri solely from their billboards.  Here’s what I know:

1)      Missourians love Quiznos

2)      A billboard is a great place to advertise (at least that’s what about half the billboards said)

3)      Missourians really really hate abortion and enjoy telling you this in condemning and graphic terms.

So, really, what else could you ask for in a trip?

Today, however, we are about to ask for an awful lot.

In about an hour I am supposed to begin the 500 mile journey across Kansas.

When I first began planning this trip months ago, I started looking for interesting places to stop and fun things to do to help break the trip up and make it more fun.  Even in places like Nebraska this wasn’t terribly hard to do (did you know kool-aid originated in Nebraska?

But no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find a single damn thing worth doing in Kansas.  Sure, there’s the barbed wire museum and the separate (but equally exciting) barbed wire post museum, but somehow those didn’t appeal to me all that much.  So I began asking people what there was to do in the great state that brought us Bob Dole and Melissa Etheridge.  And according to everyone I asked (including Bob Dole and Melissa Etheridge) the only thing to do in Kansas is to get the hell out.

It is apparently 500 miles of corn fields and emptiness – an insanity inducing drive that has finished off better men than me.

Initially I was going to split the trip up over two days, but as I thought about it more, I decided it might be better to just press onward and get it over in one 10 hour day of madness.

So, that’s where I am, poised to enter the land that only Dorothy Gale has ever wanted to return to (and you just know she ended up marrying a lawyer and moving to St. Louis).

I am fearful, but optimistic.  I have planned a trip that will take us to the greatest treasures that Kansas has to offer, including a small monument marking the “geodetic center of the lower 48 contiguous states” and the world’s 2^nd largest ball of twine (damn you Minnesota and your slightly larger ball of twine!)

If I don’t survive, tell my wife I love her and that yes, she was the smart one to choose to fly out.

You can follow our adventures on twitter at @marcuszumwalt

So far we have recorded the discovery of all kinds of treasures ranging from major historic landmarks to a billboard advertising a personal injury lawyer who was wearing an eye patch:

http://brownlawoffice.com/

I mean come on, I don’t know what you’re affliction is, but surely to pete there is a better remedy that being America’s first pirate lawyer (you may commence jokes about pirate lawyers…….. now.)

So, please, won’t you virtually join us on our little journey?  I’ve been posting status updates that include location, odometer readings and sanity levels (currently at 93%. Surely to be much lower by this evening).

I hope to post more blogs, but seeing as how I have to manage three kids, our dog, a dozen suitcases, three bikes, and all of my sanity it’s not looking good.  I’ve been trying to write this (not particularly interesting or funny) entry since last Friday and finally just had to get up at 6:30 to try to knock it out before the kids woke up (thus explaining why it’s not particularly interesting or funny).  So I would love to promise daily blog updates, but I don’t seem capable of it.  But I will try to keep you (Joe and Joanne Public) informed of all of our goings on and  I will try hard to pinpoint that exact moment when I completely lose my mind (dibs on Wyoming anyone?)

So join me on this venture, and feel glad and smug knowing that you are, in fact, sitting safely and sanely at home.

Or at least that’s what they keep telling me.

I’ve come across two articles in the last week that have gone to great pains to tell me how miserable I am.

The first article talked about how Marriage is Under Attack!

No, no, not from the gays.  But I can see how you would think that!  Usually, I’m always reading stuff about how my marriage is under attack from the gays.  I get so sick of it!  Some days I just with the stupid gays would just go get married themselves and leave my marriage alone!  But does that happen?  No!

Anyway, this is not a homosexual attack, it is an attack by time.

That’s right, time is attacking my marriage.  As you may recall, there is something called “the seven year itch.”  This is a rash caused by the fact that a lot of marriages fall apart after seven years, because the woman gets a wandering eye, and the man gets a wandering body.

Well, I’ve got to tell ya.  I was pretty darn happy when Sarah and I got over the seven year mark.  I kept waiting to feel like I had rolled around in poison ivy, but (luckily!) the itch never came.

(whew)

But then I read this article:

http://lifestyle.msn.com/relationships/article.aspx?cp-documentid=24897268&gt1=32023

It turns out the whole seven year itch thing was an old wives tale (presumably told by old wives who had been married for, a far superior, 8 years.) 

Well, it turns out that it is actually a 12 year itch!  Can you believe that?  You get over the seven year hump only to be told that your marriage will almost certainly dissolve in another couple of years.

Now luckily, Sarah and I just celebrated 13 years of marriage (and by “celebrated” I mean we sat on the couch, ate sushi together and kept saying things like “I am so tired.”)

So we should be in the clear, but I’m just not sure.  I mean, if they’re going to change the itch from seven to twelve, what’s to stop them from changing it to fifteen or twenty?

I recently read an article saying that very few couples make it to their 75^th anniversary….because they die! 

How sobering is that?

So, anyway, that was the first horrible article telling me how depressed I am.

The second one came from New York Magazine.

Now, normally I expect nothing but joy and bubbly optimism from those heel-clicking perma-smilers in New York, so it came as quite a surprise to read such a depressing gritty article from the town of merriment.

The article is called “All Joy and No Fun – Why Parents Hate Parenting.” 

http://nymag.com/news/features/67024/

In it, some lady who has a bratty kid talks about how much parenting sucks.  And then, in an irony laced, depressed writing style, begins to pull out statistic after statistic showing how people who have kids are horribly depressed and suicidal and people who didn’t have kids are happy as clams, jet-setting around the world and drinking mimosas at every meal.

The author also got interviewed on the today show, which is fun to watch. 

Because it’s the today show, you learn virtually nothing of value, but the video is a hoot because poor Meredith Viera starts off the interview saying something about how the author is a single mother, then the author interrupts and says, “I’m not single,” and then Meredith blushes and apologizes and asks about her husband and then the author says she doesn’t have a husband, and then Meredith makes a mental note to have someone fired.

Good quality television.

 http://www.hulu.com/watch/164180/nbc-today-show-parenting-got-you-down-you’re-not-alone

Anyhoo….so this article talks all about how sad and depressed I am and how much happier I’d be if only I had never made the HORRIBLE choice to have kids and then more kids and then more kids and then even more kids and…. What the hell is wrong with me?!?

You think I would have learned how miserable and unhappy I was after the first kid made me so miserable and unhappy.  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

Of course, the funny part is that I don’t necessarily feel unhappy.

I feel tired…but I’m not entirely sure that’s the same thing.  I felt tired when I was teaching in Detroit, but then I really was tired and depressed (ooh!  I wonder if the study of all of the parents was done in Detroit and the study of all of the non-parents was done in Hawaii?  That would explain everything!)

I do think the article is fascinating.  It brings up a lot of interesting issues to think about, especially if you are a parent who is wondering why the little rugrats haven’t brought you bliss that that stupid Pampers commercial seemed to have promised

I thought it was particularly resonant in discussing how parenting differs today from 50 years ago and how modern parenting has morphed into this relentless and virtually impossible pursuit of perfection.  Particularly in places like New York, where this article was penned, there is a sense that children must be sent to the best schools and the best after care and the most prominent summer programs and be near the most developmentally appropriate playground and the most sensory rich environment to better engage the emerging neuron connections, or whatever and that if you don’t do all of these things, exactly right, you kid might end up spoiled, and self-centered (or is that what happens when you Do do all of those things?  I can never remember).

Yes, I think this article has a lot to say in a morose, “well, crap” kind of way.

But I think a lot of it boils down to this:

1) Some people are meant to be parents, and some probably aren’t.

2) Some people have the skills and personality that make parenting successful and easy and others have to work extremely hard to handle the complexities of raising children.

3) Some kids are relatively easy and some kids take an awful lot of work.

Such is the complexity and randomness of life.

Being a parent requires a pretty specific set of skills and it is a set that we are never taught.  If you get a job at McDonalds they will spend a week or so training you.  If you give birth to a baby, you’re pretty much on your own aside from the hospital’s mini-class on bathing your child, caring for the belly button stump and OH MY GOSH DON”T EVER PUT THEM TO SLEEP ON THEIR STOMACH!

Furthermore, most people spend a lot of time preparing for an infant.  They read tons and tons of books from Dr. Brazelton and Jenny McCarthy about how to care for a baby.  But then do almost no reading about how to raise a toddler and child.  And the reality is, it can be a lot easier to raise an infant than a two year old.  And unfortunately toddler problems tend to compound themselves until all of a sudden you have this difficult family situation with needy, whiny kids, an exasperated spouse, too few hours in the day, and a serious inclination to drift toward the liquor cabinet. 

So, I guess parents are more unhappy than non-parents, right?

No.

Sure, some are.  Abso-frickin-lutely some are.  They love their kids and wouldn’t trade them for the world…. but they’d trade them for the weekend.  And yes, for many people, parenting has become so difficult because of a variety of circumstances that they might conceivably have been happier in another parallel dimension where they never had kids.

But that’s the wrong way to look at an article like this.  This is the point where the true results of a social science report like this get twisted into a simplistic headline grabbing non-truth.

The issue is not “are childless people happier than parents?”  The issue is more about did people find what brings them happiness.

I don’t believe that you need to have children to be happy, but I do believe that I needed to have children to be happy.  It’s part of who I am.  I love being a Dad and I think I’m pretty darn good at it.  And had I not had children, I think there would have been a lingering emptiness in my life that I’m not sure I would have ever gotten over.

However, that is just me.  I have several friends who have chosen not to have kids and are leading full, happy productive lives. 

Both of these scenarios are perfectly acceptable and my guess is that there is a huge percentage of parents who are very happy.  I think the real revelation of this story is not that some parents are unhappy (it doesn’t take more than a trip to Wal-mart to figure that out), but rather that most childless couples ARE happy.

Our country has this stereotype of the miserable childless couple who always wanted to have kids but couldn’t and now they cry into their cups of “General Foods International Coffee” whenever an ad for diaper rash cream comes on the telly.

In generations past, an infertile couple was often condemned to childlessness, but now, most couples who have difficulty conceiving have a variety of options - these options are often expensive, invasive and complicated, but they do exist.  And most couples who want a child are able to have one through some means.

Which means that this sample of “happy childless couples” is precisely that: People who have chosen not to have children and are pretty happy with their decision. 

It probably doesn’t hurt that not raising kids is a hell of a lot cheaper and easier than raising kids.

I suspect that there are just as many happy parents as happy non-parents.  In fact, I suspect that (based on numbers alone) there are many many more happy parents than happy non-parents, based solely on the fact that there are many many more people with kids than without.

The problem comes with the numbers of (comparatively) unhappy parents.  Remember, this study doesn’t say that people with kids are unhappy, it simply says that childless couples are happi-ER. 

I think this is because there is such pressure to have children in this society that the people who actively choose not to are pretty sure of themselves and of their decision.  Whereas, I do suspect that lots of people have a child out of societal pressure, obligation or a lingering fear that they will “regret it” if they don’t.

Furthermore, and most importantly -  parenting is hard. 

Really, really hard. 

And as I said, earlier, the skills necessary to be not just a successful parent (whatever that means) but also to make parenting easy, are not readily available and are not usually taught.

And this is where the article is a little more successful.  It does a good job of discussing some of the things that make modern parenting so difficult, time consuming and stressful without ever achieving the image of the perfect well-adjusted family that we have all had imprinted in our minds by episodes of the Cosby Show.

In short, no matter what the New York Magazine says, childless people are not happier than those with children.  They are just (on average) happier than some people with children.

I love being a parent.  At times, it feels like the only thing I’ve ever been good at. 

That doesn’t mean that it isn’t, occasionally, difficult and frustrating and incredibly annoying, but, for me, it is and will always be a hell of a lot easier than teaching in Detroit.

That’s the true secret to life.  The people who always say, “parenting is the hardest job I’ve ever had” just had jobs that were too easy.  As long as you’ve had a really difficult, thankless job that you essentially fail at no matter how hard you try, BEFORE you have kids, then child-rearing feels like a wildly successful venture.

When I announced to my colleagues at my school in Detroit, that I was going to stay home with our infant daughter, someone asked, “aren’t you worried about how hard it’s going to be to raise a baby?”  I remember I looked in my classroom at the 34 children shouting and squabbling and carrying on and I said, “As long as my wife gives birth to less than 33 children, I think I’ll be fine.”

It’s all about perspective.

We currently have three kids and are about to adopt a fourth.  Sure it’s been challenging and difficult at times, but as I said, I’m good at it.  And compared to my last job, this is a breeze. 

I love being home with my kids.  I love being a parent and I don’t care what the New York Magazine says….

I’m pretty darned happy.

My youngest, Micah, turned three on Monday.  We had a party and a cake and presents and all the things that come with turning a year older, but is there anything a child looks forward to more than the birthday blog that their father writes completely unbeknownst to them? 

I think not.

So, without furthering anymore of that ado, here is a list of 10 things I love about my Micah J.

1.  He Can Talk!

Last year, when Micah turned two, he only said a few words.  In fact, my wife recently came across an email from last year where I had written to tell her that Micah had just pointed to a picture of her and said, “mama.” 

This counted for big news at the time.

Micah had been diagnosed with some speech and developmental delays and at the time it was impossible to know what had caused them and how easily they might be corrected.  When he turned two, he had been in speech therapy for about six months, and the results had been minimal at best.  I was still telling myself that he would make up this deficit, but it was very unclear when that might happen.

But then Micah, in his own inimitable way, decided several months ago to start talking up a storm. 

Parents pass around a number of apocryphal stories to reassure one another of perceived weaknesses in their children.  The one I heard over and over again was about the child who said almost nothing for years and years and his parents were terribly worried and then one day he started talking in complete sentences.

Well, it wasn’t quite like that, but it wasn’t too different either.

So, anyway, my point is that as Micah is about to begin his life as a three year old, he is finally able to tell you all about it. 

2.  His Smile

Micah has a smile that can light up a room. 

This is a pretty universally agreed upon fact, but I think it might strike me a little more significantly than others, because for a long while, Micah didn’t smile a lot.  Partly because of his speech delays, Micah was kind of an unhappy kid.  He wanted to communicate, but couldn’t and so there were many tantrums and breakdowns as a result of the fact that he wanted something in his desperate two year old way, but couldn’t figure out how to tell us. 

He would just scream and gesture frantically, while I stood bewildered in the middle of the Target parking lot, until I realized that he was furious that his sister had gotten out on “his side” of the van.

And not that we don’t occasionally still have some tantrums, but for the most part Micah is a happy, joyous child nowadays and I get to see that bright glorious smile of his more and more often.

3.  His Lance Armstrong Abilities

I’m speaking, of course, about his propensity for using and then discarding women.

No, no, wait. That’s not right.

I’m talking about his madcap bike riding skills.  (excuse me, I mean… “skillz”)  The boy is a holy terror on his 12 inch Diego bike. 

About 2 or three months ago, he cast his tricycle aside and decided to try out the two wheeler for the first time.  He climbed on and, after a little practice and getting used to the wobble of the training wheels, he realized that he could pedal himself forward.  He then realized he could pedal himself forward really, really fast.

This was fantastic.  He loved the speed and the daring.  There was just one problem, he had not quite mastered the use of the brake.  So he developed the habit of hurtling himself down the driveway at a couple hundred miles an hour and then using a curb or the side of a car as a means to stop.

My wife went out and showed him how to push back to brake and within 15 minutes he was hurtling himself down the driveway flying head first toward the garage door, only to squeal to a halt inches before slamming into the wall, all the while giggling with glee.

Drives his mother crazy.

4.  The Way He Plays With His Siblings

Now, I am not suggesting that he is a boy that never ever, say, takes a plastic guitar and cold cocks his brother with it…..

But in GENERAL….he plays very sweetly with his brother and sister.  Last week, his sister was out of town staying with her grandparents and Micah and Asher were hauling around a dozen or so stuffed animals in a box playing “daddy.”  They would take them into the playroom and let them take turns rolling down the plastic slide and then they loaded them back into the box and brought them into the living room where they put them to bed on the couch and covered them with a blanket before climbing in next to them.

It was about the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.

5.  He’s the Knock Knock Joke King

I bought my kids a joke book recently.  It was, maybe, the dumbest thing I’ve done since I bought them that box of cymbals, whistles and agitated parrots.

My older children, rather sweetly at first, began reading the jokes to one another and then repeating them to people they met.

Everyone they met.

Several times in a row.

As you might imagine, it doesn’t take too long before this kind of thing gets a little old. 

Anyway, a favorite joke emerged.  It goes like this:

Asher:  “Knock Knock”

Unsuspecting stranger:  “Who’s there?”

Asher:  “Impatient Cow.”

Unsuspecting stranger:  “Impati…..”

Asher:  “MOOOOOOOOO!”

Ok, it’s a fairly cute joke the first couple of thousand times you hear it, but after that the shine starts to wear off.  Well, as it turns out, the kids have repeated this joke so often that now even Micah knows it.

Of course, what is old and slightly annoying coming out of a 7 year olds mouth for the hundredth time becomes adorable and charming when it’s being garbled by a three year old with speech delays.  So, no matter how many times I’ve heard it, the impatient cow joke still cracks me up every time I hear Micah mumble his way through it.

6.  His Tiny Booty

Ok, my children are not exactly heavy weights.  They are all kind of small and kind of skinny, but Micah has taken this to a new art form.  The boy is scraw-nee.  We keep joking about what will happen when he starts to lose his baby fat, but it’s sort of one of those, “ha ha, uh…. ha…. um ….*sigh*”  kind of jokes.

It goes beyond just being able to count the boys ribs, he is just a wiry little bundle of crazed energy.

That being said, he has the cutest little derriere this side of the Pecos (reports have it that the world’s “cutest” derriere belongs to 2 year old Agnes Whipplemire who lives just West of the Pecos.  I don’t actually believe it’s cuter, but there are liability issues to asserting otherwise)

Anyway, the boys itty bitty booty is just too cute for words.

When he’s wearing a bathing suit, it looks like he’s smuggling a pair of nectarines into the pool. 

It is just too, too adorable.

7. He Has a Best Friend - Meena

Micah has a best friend.  She happens to be the younger sister of big brother Asher’s best friend, so the two of them see each other a lot.

Serena is a few months younger than Micah, but they love each other dearly.  They love to play together and squeal with delight when they see each other.  They just have the absolute best time together… when they’re not busy trying to gouge each other’s eyes out.

You see, for the last year, these two two-year-olds have behaved like, well,  two year olds.  They have been self centered and possessive and believed that the world should, by all accounts, revolve around them.

A common scenario would be that we would be over at Serena’s house and Micah would pick up one of her toys.  Serena would yell at him, Micah would yell back.  Serena would try to take the toy.  Micah would push her away.  And then Serena would lunge on top of him while pulling out her shiv.

This scenario would play out in the precise opposite manner if they were at Micah’s house.

Micah started calling Serena “Meena.” This was primarily as a result of his speech issues, but there may have been some underlying psychological resonance as well.

Serena, for her part, would regularly report at the dinner table that Micah had pushed her that day, even if they hadn’t actually seen each other.

It was a match made in thunderdome.

But as these two lovebirds have grown older, the instances of blood being drawn and fingernails needing to be surgically removed from foreheads has decreased considerably.  Now, when they run into each other’s arms screaming, “Micah!”  “Meena!” we can be relatively reassured that this playdate will still end with smiles and hugs as compared to tears and accusations.

It’s good to have a best friend.

8.  His singing

I am not a phenomenal singer, but I do well enough to get by.   I have sung in church or in college a capella groups, or community theater productions with relatively low standards and it is something I have always enjoyed.  And I have always hoped that my modest talent and love for singing might have been passed on to one of my children.

Well, my love for singing has definitely been passed on to my daughter, Audra, but unfortunately the talent part seems to have skipped by.  And Asher doesn’t seem to show much interest.

So my hopes are now riding on Micah.  It’s a little too early to tell about talent, but he does seem to have a love for singing.  He is particularly fond of the holiday classic “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” and the “Ooo, Eee, Ooo, Ah, Ah” chorus to the witch doctor song – both of which he will randomly break out and start singing in bed, or in the car or in the checkout at the grocery.

Enthusiasm like that is just plain contagious. 

9.  His Climbing Ability

His brother Asher is still probably the climbing champ of the family, but for his age, Micah probably has him beat.  Before he could walk, he was climbing up the sides of our playset and he hasn’t stopped.

He’s got the bug.

Which he may come by honestly considering that his older brother is an expert climber and that his uncle regularly spends his weekends climbing the rockfaces of mountains for fun, even though you could usually just drive right to the top in an air conditioned Ford Fiesta.

On a regular basis, we will have visiting friends or grandparents cringe in horror as he climbs on to the top of something that he probably shouldn’t be on top of.  But for us, it’s just part of who Micah is.  He’s a, now, three year old who loves to climb, loves to ride his bike and can pump for himself on a swingset.

He may have a speech delay, but he’s more than made up for it in his gross motor skills.  I’m confident he’s going to get at least a 4 in A.P. Outdoorsiness.

College credit here we come!

10.  He’s a Snuggler

Micah is our youngest child (so far!) and he’s also been our most difficult.  And being the youngest he tries desperately to keep up with his older siblings and do the things that they are doing, whether it’s age appropriate or not.

But he’s still my baby.  Maybe because of some of the extra work we had to put in because of his delays, or maybe because it’s just who he is, Micah is a snuggler.

When he gets tired or cranky, he NEEDS to be held, to be snuggled.  Sometimes I’ll be cooking dinner and I’ll feel something on my leg and see him standing there, Linus-like, holding his blanket, sucking his thumb and just being close.

It’s great to see your children grow up and do new things, but sometimes it’s nice just, even for a moment, to have a hint of that baby they used to be as they cuddle on your lap, snuggling in close, shutting out all the troubles of the world.

My little boy, what used to be my baby, is three now.  He starts preschool in a few weeks and grows more independent every day.  But in some ways he will always be the little boy tugging at my pants leg and, for at least a little while longer, I know he will be the somewhat larger, nectarine smuggling boy sitting in my lap.

Two was a hard year, but it was also a year of extraordinary change.  Micah is growing and changing before my very eyes with new achievements and new talents.  He’s my beautiful little baby boy.  And on this mid July day, I wish him the happiest of Birthdays.

I just finished reading a book called “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro.

It was a brilliant book, although so elegantly understated there were times I wished he would state things a little more overly.  I know that’s vague, but It’s a beautifully written story and I don’t want to give it away in case you’d like to read it (and for my illiterate readers, it’s going to be a movie this fall!)

So, I recommend you read it.  And then call me up, because I want to talk to somebody about the ending.  I mean, what’s up with that?

Anyway, without giving too much away about the secret evil twin serial killer twist at the end of the book (whoops!  I’ve said too much!) this novel is about a group of boarding school students who are growing up in a world just slightly different from the one we currently occupy.  They struggle with love and friendship.  They fall into petty jealousies and deep friendships.  There are moments of cruelty and moments of compassion.  For the most part, they grow up like most of us, trying to find their place in the world. 

The only main difference (and I don’t think this gives away too much) is that while they have to find their own place in a community of friends, their place in society is already prescribed.  They do not have to struggle to figure out what they will do when they grow up or what their purpose in life is. That is already set for them.

But they are still left to struggle with the other complexities of life – of finding love, of holding on to it, of creating happiness out of the life that you have.

I just finished the book last night, and my thoughts are still muddled, but I’ve thought a lot about these themes.  As people, and as Americans in particular, we believe that we have a great deal of control over our lives – over what we do and how things turn out.

Our protestant work ethic society basically suggests that you can be anything you want to be (Doctor! Basketball Star! President!) if only you work hard enough.  And once you achieve your goal, then everything will be right with the world and you will find happiness, contentment and joy in life.

And while there is a nugget of truth in this, the reality is much more complicated.  Yes, with hard work, there are many opportunities before you, but not all.  We are limited by genetics, and family history and where and when we were born.  I will never be a basketball player, or the president, and (I hate to break it to you) but neither will you.

There has got to be at least as much luck involved in achieving your dreams as there is hard work and ambition.  And of course, most of us discover sooner or later, that while the right job, the right house, the right income can guarantee some pleasantness in life, it is not a guarantee of happiness or contentment.

No, happiness is much more esoteric and seems wildly resistant to one’s planning and working hard to achieve it.

In the book, although the characters’ purpose and station in life is set, they are still responsible for finding contentment and happiness and love.  And in that way, they really aren’t any different than the rest of us, except that they learned early on, that those things would not come hand in hand with a degree, or a certain job.

I don’t know how much sense I’m making at the moment, but the point I am obtusely trying to make is that a contented life does not usually come in the ways that we expect it to.  This is something I struggle with, because I am a planner and it has become apparent to me that you can not “plan your way” to happiness.  I may think that repainting the foyer will make me happier and, indeed, removing the incredibly bland, life-sucking wall paper and replacing it with a color of some sort, will probably keep me from becoming depressed every time I walk down the hallway, it is not likely to actually make me happy.

I say all this to get to a point that is not particularly insightful or particularly brilliant but is, for me at least, comforting.

On Monday, Sarah and I celebrated our 13^th wedding anniversary.

It’s a pretty lame anniversary.  According to some website, the 13^th is the “textiles” anniversary.

yippee.  Jo-Ann Fabrics here I come.

We’ve been married long enough that it’s hard to get too excited about a low double digits anniversary and it’s not enough of a milestone to feel like you’ve actually accomplished something.

“Hey!  We just celebrated our 13^th anniversary!”

“Oh… hey, that’s great….uh….super….”

And we ended up celebrating it with about as much enthusiasm as a 13^th anniversary seems to warrant.  We spent the day driving back from visiting family and had a celebratory anniversary milkshake at McDonalds.   We thought about mustering up the energy to go out that evening, but couldn’t find a babysitter.  So we got home, put the kids to bed, ordered some Sushi takeout and sat on the couch watching some absolutely forgettable television.  I know that it’s forgettable, because our anniversary was 4 days ago and I have no idea what we watched.

In short, it wasn’t too radically different than any other night of our life.

It was not our dream anniversary.  It was not a magical night.  It was not what we hoped or planned for.

But it was nice.  And I was pretty content.

I am married to an absolutely wonderful woman.  She is cute, sexy, funny, smart and in ways that I can’t even quite put my finger on, manages to be a seemingly perfect fit for our life as a couple, life as parents, and life as individuals.

I could not have planned how I would meet someone as wonderful as she is (although I did have to plan how I would break up with my current girlfriend so I could start dating her) and yet, somehow, it happened anyway.

Lots of people spend their lives working toward big moments, but life isn’t really played out in the big moments.  The big moments are what get printed in your obituary, but life is lived out in the simple, forgettable moments – in reading books with the kids, or talking with friends, or while eating sushi out of a plastic container on a 13^th anniversary. 

My future is not necessarily set for me as it is for the characters in “Never Let Me Go.”

Lots of things can still happen.  There can be ups and downs still in my future.  I may have great public successes or a lifetime of quiet progression.  But the reality is (and I do try to remind myself of this) that the joy in my life will never be measured by the things that happen to me, as much as it may feel that way sometimes.

The joy and success of my life, will almost certainly be measured, not by accomplishments, careers, and achievements, but rather….

by how many nights I have the privilege of sitting next to my wife on the couch and doing nothing.

Contentedly.

My daughter is one of the more thoughtful 7 year olds you are ever likely to meet, which is nice, considering she is also one of the more self-involved 7 years olds you are ever likely to meet.  If she can not convince some poor adult to be her audience as she dances, sings, emotes and channels the love child of Laurence Olivier and Miley Cyrus, she will literally just perform for herself in front of the mirror.

But today we’re talking about how thoughtful she is.

Last week, the night before the last day of school she announced that she wanted to write a note to every child in her class.

I looked at my daughter, and I looked at my watch and then I looked back at my seven year old daughter.  “Uh….. ok.”

With most children, I would have laughed at them and told them that there was no way in the world they were going to get twenty-something handmade notecards written in the couple of hours before bed time, considering that they only even learned how to write about a year ago.

But not Audra.

She has tenacity.   If she says she is going to do something, you can pretty much count on it getting done.

Well….. if she says something like “I’m going to make a couple dozen cards in the next hour,” or “I think I’ll build a scale model of the Eiffel tower out of chex mix,” she’ll get it done. 

If she says, “yes, I’ll keep my room this clean,” she doesn’t really mean it.

So, while I began fixing dinner, Audra got her supplies together and started cutting paper and drawing.

I was worried about the time she had available to her.  There were only a couple of hours left until bedtime and a good chunk of that was going to be taken up by eating dinner and telling her brothers to leave her alone.  But I figured that she would just write “C YA L8R” on each card and call it a day.

Not my daughter.

She got done with the first two cards and this is what she had done.

Holy crap.  These were like illustrated epistles individually designed for each child!  Comments on gymnastics and future class placement?  This was some serious letter writing, and look at those drawings!  Do you know how hard it is to draw a triangle person upside down?  Or how about Audra’s illustration of her “elephantitis of the hand” condition.  It’s got to take a lot of self confidence to put that on paper!

My first thought was that I was just so proud of her.  It would have been easy to do nothing and equally easy to just do a slap dash job throwing something quick and easy together.  It takes a lot of work and a pretty special girl to sit down and write and illustrate different cards for every single child in class.

My second thought was “YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO FINISH!”

I mean come on, these one of a kind creations were going to take forever.  So I did the only thing a parent can do in a situation like this:

I nagged.

Every time I saw her get distracted, or take a cold wash cloth to press against her sweating forehead, I would snap at her.  “NO RESTING!  You’ve got 23 more cards to go!”

Every once in a while she would update me with her progress.

“I’ve only got 14 more to go, daddy, plus one for my teacher and one for the assistant and one for the bus driver and…”

THE BUS DRIVER!?!  Are you crazy?  You don’t have time for that!

But she soldiered on.  And as the evening passed she had written almost twenty different cards, such as:

Dear Peter,

I found this poem expecily for you this how it gose!  Peter Peter pizza eater, how I wish that you wear neater, hafe the pizzas on your shirt, clean the mess or no disert.  I hope you like it.

Your friend, Audra

Dear Ty,

I hope you have a great summer and be prepard for second grade I hear its hard work!

Your Friend,

Audra

With these words of encouragement and possible insult, my daughter was sending a message to the kids in her class. 

“I value your presence in my life.  You have changed me in ways you may never know.  I hope we can see each other in the future and, please, please, learn to use a napkin.”

Sometime after 9:00 we sent Audra off to bed with 4 more to go, plus the bus driver.  I was a little nervous about her getting it all done, but at 6:30 a.m. she was up and back downstairs hard at work finishing off the last of her cards.

By the time she got on the bus that morning, she had written one for every kid in her class, her teachers, the assistants, and, yes, the bus driver.

I’m sure most of the kids in her class took the cards, glanced at them and tossed them in their backpacks.  But that’s ok.  Because I think Audra has figured out that the joy in giving is not dependent on how that gift is received.   

It is a pleasure knowing that we are raising such a thoughtful, hardworking, and creative little girl.  And, yes, I do completely claim the credit for that.

I’ll leave you with two of my favorite cards that she wrote.  I like the sincerity.  I like the honesty and I like the fact that she accurately drew herself as a tiny dwarf next to her normal sized friends.

Have a great summer!

I have a problem.

A condition, really.  Or, at least, so I’m told. 

I have, what people repeatedly tell me, is a “Costanza Wallet.”

Apparently back in the 90s on a little show called “Seinfeld.”  The character of George Costanza carried a large, overstuffed wallet so full of receipts, bonus cards, photos and the occasional snippet of cash, that it literally caused him to sit on an angle when he put it in his back pocket.  Here is a three minute primer on the issue:

So, I have been accused of this very same thing.  And, I have to admit, my wallet probably bears more similarities than differences to the “costanza wallet.”  I’ll get into the details later, but for the sake of being honest and forthright, here is a photo of my wallet.

Ok, now let’s begin with the excuses.

First of all, this is a great wallet.  My father in law gave me this leather wallet almost a decade ago.  He picked it up in some South American country he was visiting (Bolivia?  Honduras?  Istanbul?)  And it is a very high quality wallet.  I abuse it every day, stuffing it full and bending it shut and forcing it into pockets and it never quits on me.  I have replaced the chintzy plastic accordion card holder three times, but the wallet keeps on ticking…. er…..not becoming unstitched.

So, I am very fond of it.  And, yes, I do have to admit that it is a bit large and, yes, it is uncomfortable to put in my back pocket because it is so large, but I have solved this problem. 

I put it in my front pocket!

Sure, it makes me look like have a large rectangular tumor growing out of my thigh, but it fits just fine, is easy to access, and I always know if it is there or not, because it slightly inhibits my leg movement.

No one is stealing from me!

But, I recognize that the main criticism my, apparently quite rude, friends have is that I have “too much” in my wallet and there is an implication, therefore,  that some of the things in my wallet are “unnecessary.”

Now, before I start defending the contents of my wallet, let me just say.  It is one thing for a man to criticize me as he condescendingly holds up his slim wallet with a driver’s license, credit card and single twenty dollar bill inside.  It is, however, something else entirely for a woman to mock me while simultaneously hoisting a 30 lb purse over her shoulder that is essentially the size of a small collie and contains everything from an umbrella to stapler to a large case of Luna bars. 

I may have a large, somewhat unwieldy, wallet, but it does fit nicely in my pocket.

These women, LITERALLY, need a shoulder strap to carry the contents of their personal belongings with them, so LAY OFF!

If I attached a shoulder strap to my wallet, it would look like the daintiest little clutch ever, and everyone would say, “oh my, how do you carry everything you need in such a tiny purse?”   And then they’d beat me up.

Anyway.

As I’ve stated previously, my wallet has lots of important stuff in it.  Let’s examine it shall we?

On the interior of my wallet I have 4 dollars, 11 receipts and a 1983 penny.

On the right side I have very important cards.  I have my debit card which I use all the time, my Barnes and Noble book card and my Borders book card and a credit card and… wait a minute.  There’s supposed to be a second credit card here.  It appears to be missing.  Hmmmm.  Give me a minute.

Ok, so we checked it out.  I don’t know where the card is, but we looked up the account info and no one has stolen it and purchased beer or guns or Liza Minnelli tickets or anything.  (although this does seem like a good opportunity to purchase beer, guns and Liza Minnelli tickets and blame it on someone else.  Hmmmm.)

Ok, The other side of my wallet is where I keep all of the cards I need to access on a daily, weekly or semi annual basis.  Here is a list of what I have there.

Regal Cinemas Club Card

A free Movie ticket coupon

Bow Tie cinemas club card  (I do love the movies!)

My Starbucks gold card (that’s right… I’m a gold level member)

Some “family perks” card for a store I can’t identify, but I already have 3 punches on it!

A $10 off coupon at Target

A buy 6 get 1 free card for Maggie Moos Ice Cream (only 1 to go!)

My Safeway club card that doesn’t work anymore because the back is all messed up

A $5 off Target coupon that expired in April

An Office Depot club card that may or may not do anything

Pigtails and Crewcuts 50% off your 10^th haircut card (4 more to go!)

Coldstone Creamery buy 10 get 1 free card (ALL 10 STARS PUNCHED!!!)

Gymboree rewards card

A 2^nd Maggie Moos buy 6 get 1 free card (only 3 to go!)

Borders kids book club card circa 2004 with three punches

A never used Great Cookie Company Cookie Club card

An American Craftworks buy $250 get $25 off card (only $237 more to go!)

California Tortilla Burrito Elito Card

Metro SmartTrip Card

And My HSA Insurance Card for paying Doctor’s bills.

Now, some people might suggest that I don’t actually need every single one of the 20 cards I have listed here.  But I think if you look back over the list, it is pretty clear that I need every single one of those items and that I am “this close” to saving a whole lot of money.

Ok, so did I mention that this was a tri-fold wallet?  Because, so far we’ve just been over the left side and right side of the wallet.  As you might imagine, these are the areas where I keep my most used cards, because I need to have quick and easy access to them.

I keep the less important cards in the middle area where the accordion plastic thingy is.  These are the cards that I either rarely need to take out, or that I only need to flash to people occasionally.

Let’s do a quick inventory so that you can see how important they all are.

My Driver’s License (Turns out I’m an organ donor!)

My health insurance card
Audra’s health insurance card

Asher’s health insurance card

Micah’s health insurance card

Aloysius’s health insurance card (who hasn’t lived here since January)

AAA card (possibly expired.  Probably should check)

A 2^nd AAA card (definitely expired)

A now illegible handwritten card from my wife that probably says I Love you or something

A Bank of America credit Card that expired in August of 2004

A tiny Southwest airlines rewards card that I printed off

A car insurance card that expired in October 2007 from a company we no longer have

My voter registration card (never know when you might need it!)

An ATT pre paid phone card from when I had to use pay phones in college

My Library card

A library card from a county I lived in 3 years ago

My Drew University Alumni card (good for 10% off in the bookstore!)
A dental insurance card that I’m pretty sure is from 3 jobs ago

A picture of my children from 2 years ago

My Kennedy Center Membership (I get free coffee in the lounge!)

A Smithsonian Membership that expires in 9 days (gets me nothing!)

Wolf Trap Membership (I love to support the arts!)

A photo of when I only had 2 kids (good times)

A second Voter registration card (You can never be to safe with your freedoms!)

A debit card for the checking account we never use

My Sams’ Club membership

My BJ”s Club Membership

An expired Smithsonian membership (gets me less than nothing!)

A Borders frequent drink card, probably from when we lived in Michigan circa 2000

And a buy 20 get 20% off card for a consignment shop (Only 17 punches to go!)

I also have a picture of Sarah on our wedding day.  A picture of Audra at 6 months old And a four year old picture of Audra and Asher.

So, to summarize:

My wallet contains 54 cards, 5 photos, 11 receipts and 4 dollars.

Ok, that seems bad.  But bear in mind, I carry cards verifying that I am a “member” of 24 different organizations that offer me discounts and special perks.  That’s pretty impressive isn’t it?  I bet you don’t know too many people who are “members” of as many special clubs as I am.  (If you want, I can even use my memberships to get you into some of these elite clubs.  If you ever need 40 rolls of toilet paper, I can HOOK YOU UP!)

So, gentleman and especially ladies, why don’t we just lay off my wallet, shall we?  I think it is pretty clear now that I have very carefully selected everything I carry with me and that everything in there has been useful to me at some point in the last 10 years, or is likely to be useful to me sometime in the next 10.

I was a boy scout and our motto was “Be Prepared.”  I fully expect that every other former boy scout in the world has a wallet very similar to mine.

Think of my wallet as a swiss army knife and all my membership cards as the tiny saw: completely useless and ineffectual, but good to have.

So, if everyone can just get off my back about my wallet, that would really help, especially since its weight is already causing me some spinal problems.

And besides, inventorying my wallet like this has helped me to learn a lot about myself.  I’ve learned about my compulsions, my neurosis, the relative infrequence with which I open the trifold area of my wallet but most importantly, I’ve learned this:

Coldstone Creamery owes me a free ice cream cone.  And in my mind, that validates every card I have.

So, there!

I have delightfully terrible news for you today:  Jesus was electrocuted.

Ok, let me explain.

Two of my best friends in the whole world live in Cincinnati.  It’s a lovely place.  A fact I am repeatedly told by my friend Sean who grew up there, went away to college, married one of my best friends and dragged her back there to raise children and enjoy the Cincinnati way of life (which, best I can tell, involves eating chili on top of spaghetti and drinking a lot).

Anyway, despite the fact that they live in Ohio, we make an effort to go visit them every year - usually in the middle of a snowstorm. 

One year, when I was visiting them in the middle of a snowstorm we needed to drive up to the Dayton airport to pick up my wife who had wisely decided to fly separately rather than drive with me through a foot of snow as we traveled across West Virginian in a van with our children.

So, Sean and I were driving from the Natti up to Dayton to pick up Sarah because it’s too durned expensive to fly directly into Cincinnati.  Sean, being the natti-o-phile that he is was eagerly pointing out to me all kinds of random things as we drove at about 20 miles an hour along the highway in blizzard conditions.

As we were driving along, discussing why in the hell the city of Dayton even existed, Sean excitedly said, “Hey!  We’re about to pass the Butter Jesus!”

“What?’

“The butter Jesus!”

“What?’

“The butter Jesus!”

“Wha…..”

This went on for a while.  Eventually, soon after passing “Trader’s World” and the Hustler store, off on the right, emerging from the torrent of snowflakes was the largest statue of Jesus I have ever seen in my life…. and I’m from Tennessee where we love us some big ol’ Jesuses.

There, along the side of the highway was a 60 foot high statue of the torso of Jesus in the middle of a large pond.  Jesus holds his hands outstretched to heaven as if saying “Thank you father.”  Or possibly, “Hey!  A little help down here?  I’m stuck in this man made lake in the middle of Ohio!”

The statue is painted this fairly unappealing yellowish color which has led most of the locals to refer to it as “Butter Jesus” as if it were the second place finisher at the ag. fair.  It is also commonly referred to as “Touchdown Jesus” since Jesus appears to be signaling to God that the extra point was “good”

Any google search for butter Jesus or touchdown Jesus will take you directly to a photo of this monstrosity, but I’m a nice guy, so I’ll just give you a picture here.

Ah, butter Jesus.

Well, I was duly impressed by this massive testament to a love of Jesus and general poor judgment.  But I was also confused.  Why in the world did they have just half of Jesus?  Why not the whole guy?

Now, iIt could be because they wanted to depict Jesus as he returned from being baptized.

Maybe.

My guess, however, is that while a 60 foot Jesus is really expensive to build… a 120 foot Jesus is just stupid amounts of money.   That would make it as tall as the “Christ the Redeemer” statue in Brazil.  Of course, that is a beloved symbol of not just Rio, but God’s compassion for all of the people who reside below.  And Butter Jesus is just a big tacky paper-mache statue on the side of the interstate in Ohio…. not that it really detracts from the beautiful scenery that is suburban Ohio, but… still.

Anyway. 

I was definitely impressed / amused / appalled by this statue which seemed to embody both the best and worst of American Christianity.

As the years passed, I would keep an eye out for butter Jesus whenever I happened to be driving to Dayton.  We also got in the habit of passing along information about this highway landmark whenever it, inevitably, appeared in the news. 

Then, one Christmas as I was trying to figure out what to get Sean for Christmas, one of my favorite singers released a new album and the very first cut was titled “Monroe, OH.”  I didn’t think much of it at the time, until I popped it into the CD player and the first line of lyrics were

“A sixty foot Jesus, rising out of the water.  On the side of the interstate, waist deep in rapture…”

Holy crap!  It was a song about butter Jesus!

If there had ever been a better Christmas present for someone lived in Cincinnati, and loved Butter Jesus, well, let me tell you, it was hard to imagine what it would be. 

Here for your listening pleasure is Robbie Schaefer’s “Monroe, OH.”

Delightful.

Equally delightful, but perhaps a bit more disturbing is the fact that this is not the only song written about the absolute best thing between Cincinnati and Dayton.

The singer Heywood Banks also wrote a song, aptly called “Big Butter Jesus.”

So, as you can tell, Butter Jesus is definitely an inspiration to people.  Whether it’s a good or bad inspiration is debatable.

Whether spending several hundred thousand dollars to build a giant tacky statue of Jesus along the side of the interstate is a good idea is, as far as I’m concerned, legitimately up for debate.  But who am I to question these devoted followers.

Now, God, on the other hand, is totally in a position to offer an opinion on such a matter.  But how would God go about expressing his position on such a thing?  How would God express his opinion as to whether a giant expensive tacky statue was either a beautiful tribute to his love for us and a visible example of his grace, or an absolutely appalling waste of money on a giant, tacky, idolatrous, highway horror.

So how would we know?  How could we tell whether God thought this was a bit of Divine Dairy or a Butte Abomination?

Well, how about this.  What if God were to send a giant lightning bolt out of the sky to strike Butter Jesus and

BURN IT TO THE GROUND!

Seriously.  Would that be a sign?

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20100615/NEWS01/306150004/Jesus-destroyed-by-act-of-God

Burned to the ground.

I am not one to take this kind of thing as a sign…. But, honestly, if you’re not going to take this as a sign, what will it take?

This story has been all over the news.  It was in the Washington Post and on MSNBC and CNN with headlines such as

“Touchdown Jesus meets Fiery End”

And

“Big Butter Jesus Zapped by God!”

Wow. 

I am really hoping the reporting continues.  The church is already pledging to “rebuild” which is…. I don’t know….. fine?  But here’s my big question.  Here is the question that I want our investigative reporters to investigate and to answer.

According to the church’s insurance policy, IS lightning striking big butter Jesus, engulfing it in flames, and burning it into a smoking pulp considered…..

….an act of God?

Because if so…. Maybe we should reconsider the whole “rebuilding” thing.

I have to tell you, if I built a 60 foot high statue of Tina Turner dancing to Proud Mary in the front yard and then, one night, it burned to the ground, and the insurance company declared that it was as a result of….

….an act of Tina Turner.

I gotta tell you.  I would just sweep up the ashes and spend the estimated half million dollars it would take to rebuild it on something else, like say… feeding the hungry, or healing the sick or something else Jesus was always prattling on about.

Or, honestly… anything else at all.

Anything.

But, if that is not to be, if Touchdown Jesus is to rise from the non-metaphorical ashes once more, then might I at least suggest…

Maybe a different color?

RIP Butter Jesus  

2004 - 2010

As I’ve mentioned, our family is in the process of adopting a child from Ethiopia.  Part of the process involves doing a lot of reading about adoption in general, but also about the country in particular.

Ethiopia is a country with somewhere between 4 to 6 million orphans, most as a result of the ongoing AIDS epidemic.  A little over 2,000 children are adopted each year.  And in between those numbers is a great deal of pain, misery and death.

One of the books we read told the story of a woman, Haregewoin Teferra, who started an orphanage for children whose parents died of AIDS. 

http://www.thereisnomewithoutyou.com/

This was when very little was known about AIDS and most people feared the disease to the point of shunning anyone with an association with it.  This woman became the only person in the area who would take in AIDS orphans and one of the only people who would even talk to or associate with individuals infected with the disease.  Because of this, Haregewoin becomes a magnet for some of the most desperate people in the city.  She had infected men knocking at her door begging for scraps of food.  She had dying mothers showing up in the middle of the night imploring her to take their children.

It is heartbreaking.

Despite that this all happens on the other side of the planet, when you are reading the book, it is not difficult to put yourself in the position of this one good woman. 

You want to help.  You feel the pain of both the mothers abandoning their children and of Haregewoin who must now figure out how to feed one more child in her burgeoning home.  You feel her desolation as she offers up a few crumbs of food to strangers, even though she barely has enough food to feed the children in her care.

The thought that runs through your mind is this:  If someone showed up at my door begging for food, begging for help to save their child, then I would do the exact same thing that Haregewoin did.  I would help them.

It is a natural instinct, the desire to help others.  And certainly if someone were to show up on your doorstep you would do what you could.  We all would.

Would any of us turn away a dying woman who rang our doorbell, begging only for some food to feed her child?

No.

But of course, we don’t really have to worry about that, do we?

I don’t know about you.  But I never have people showing up on my doorstep begging me to give them some food or asking me to take their baby from them because they are about to die.

It never happens.

Many people would say that this is blessing.

Aren’t we blessed to live in an area where that doesn’t happen?

Well, yes and no.  You see, the thing is, that it is not “a blessing.”  A blessing implies that somehow we have been given something.  And we have not been “given” the fact that we do not have people coming to our doors.  The fact that our doorbells remain silent is a choice.

Perhaps one could argue that we have been “blessed” with enough money to allow us to live somewhere that doesn’t have such poverty, but, still, the choice of WHERE we choose to live is solely our own.

We choose the location of our home.  We hire people to help us find a home in a “good neighborhood.”  We spend lots of money to ensure that our home is “safe” and “comfortable.”  And although we shroud these decisions in the desire to “protect our property value” or to attend “good schools,” there really is no way to escape the fact that at the very core of what we are doing is actively choosing a home largely based on the fact that it keeps us physically distant from people in need.

Obviously, this is not a catch all statement.  There are certainly people who make different decisions.  But for the most part, people all around the world spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to be as far away as possible from people with less money than themselves.

There is no blessing or serendipity in the fact that people do not knock on our door begging for food.  We paid lots of money to ensure that fact.

I am certainly no exception to this.  We live in a very nice home on 2 acres in the country.  You really can’t even get out here without a car.  And, of course, I would tell you that I didn’t choose this home because it was far away from the poor, the hungry and the destitute.  I chose it because there were lots of trees, and because it was quiet, and because the neighborhood was “nice,” but the truth is that the results are the same.

And when we use the words “nice” or “good neighborhood” or “good schools,” whether we admit it to ourselves or not, we are specifically describing places that – by their definition – are devoid of the poor and all of the societal ills that accompany poverty.

This self segregation that we all participate in is not unique to America.  Indeed it exists throughout the world.  For the most part, we all buy as “nice” a house as we can afford and this inherently places us in a neighborhood with other people just like us.  There aren’t too many people much poorer than us and not too many people much richer.  We all end up being pretty similar – the same income level, the same kind of family structure and often even the same kind of race and religion.  And this feels pretty good.

We are not overly annoyed by a next door neighbor who has just bought a 44 million dollar yacht, nor are we embarrassed to mention to the guy down the street that we are going to spend a week at the beach because he’s living in a tin shack.

No, we all set our lives up in such a way that the choices we make (yachts, trips to the beach, begging for food) seem normal.  There is no need to question these choices because all of the people around us are making the exact same decisions we are. 

Or, let’s be honest, the choices our neighbors are making are actually a lot worse, aren’t they?  I mean, the Smiths go to Disney World every year!  That is just decadent.  And the Joneses didn’t contribute anything to the community bake sale, and I don’t think the Jacksons even go to church!

When we are merely judging ourselves based on the actions of those directly to the left or the right of us, it’s pretty easy to feel good about yourself.  To feel like you are doing good in the world because of that one time a month you volunteer at the food bank, or the fact that you give at the “Sponsor” level to the American Cancer Foundation.  That alone raises you to the top 90% of all your neighbors.  And how can it be bad if you’re being better than everyone else?

And of course, as we sit in worship hearing about the good Samaritan, we reassure ourselves that were we to come across a man who had been beaten on the side of the road, that we would go out of our way to help that person regardless of their race or religion or income - while simultaneously ensuring that we would never come across such a person. 

We create lives that allow us to live in deceitful ignorance that any of this pain and hardship exists in the world, while a few miles down the street in an area of town that we actively avoid driving through there are thousands of people suffering in precisely the way we claim we would help if they were to show up at our doorstep.

So, we lead a life of self delusion.  We are smart, intelligent people, who on a daily basis fool ourselves into believing that the world, or at least OUR world, is a good and happy place with little pain or suffering.

I indict myself here.

I spend my days in relative comfort and yet still find the wherewithal to complain about the minor annoyances of my life – the rude guy on the highway, the careless waiter, the limited produce selection at the grocery store.

I don’t know if living this way is evil.  I’m not entirely convinced that living a “good” life in a “safe” neighborhood is wrong.  It is, in fact, what we aspire to for our children and what we sincerely hope that the poor and destitute of the world will someday be able to achieve.

I don’t know that it is wrong to live this way, but I do know that it leads to a complacency – a sense that we are doing enough, and that the world is ok, because that is what we see when we look out the window.

Meanwhile, a few miles away, the view outside the window is very different.  And 7,000 miles away in Ethiopia, the view is even more different still.

It is probably not wrong to live a “good” life, but it is almost certainly wrong to live a life of self imposed ignorance. 

If we profess that we would be willing to help if only the need presented itself, then we must take responsibility for the fact that we have actively chosen a life where the need is hidden. 

Every day, people knock on the doors of Haregewoin’s orphanage. 

Every day, my door remains silent.

There is no mystery to this.  There is no blessing.  There is no fate.

It is merely a matter of choice on our part.  I don’t know whether it is wrong to make the choice that we have made.  But I do know that it is wrong to deny that it was an overt and conscious decision. 

As any real estate agent will tell you.  The value of any house is not in the structure itself, but in its location, location, location.

The question we need to ask ourselves is not just what is in the location we have chosen to live at, but also, what is not there.

Who is not there?  And what responsibility or obligation do we have to help people once we have removed ourselves from their presence.

Few of us could abandon a dying child on our doorstep.  We would see it as a moral obligation to help them, because “fate” had pressed our lives together.

And yet every day we make the choice to own a doorstep free of such horrors.

We choose to free ourselves of this “moral obligation” because our lives are designed to never come in contact with such need.

I would suggest that it is a sin to turn your back on a child in need – that it would be evil to dismiss a starving mother from your front door. 

But is it also a sin to place your door in such a location that the poor and starving could never find it?

I’ll admit that I do not know the answer to this question.

But I am troubled.

I was running a little late, but I was still on time. 

I had all three kids loaded into the van and we were driving Audra up to the bus stop.   I just needed to get her on the bus by 8:40, and then drive Asher 15 minutes to the preschool in Bowie by 9:00, and then take Micah with me for a morning of errands so we could be back to the preschool by 12:00 and blah blah blah.

Well, it was 8:42 as we pulled out of the driveway, but I was still feeling confident.  I knew we had missed the bus at Audra’s bus stop, but I have a secret weapon.  Right after us, the bus turns down a side street to make a few stops, so, if I can buzz past that side street, before it completes it’s little circle, I can usually head to the end of the road and wait for the bus there.

I zoomed (carefully) to the top of the hill.  As predicted, we had missed the bus, but I was sure we weren’t far behind.  I hung a hard left and hurried along.  I passed the side street and…. YES!  We had done it, the bus was down there.  All I needed to do was hop down a mile or so and wait.

As I was driving I was listening to this story on NPR about people who donated money to pay down the national debt.   Apparently back in the 80s when the US debt was just a measly couple trillion dollars, some nurse in Wisconsin decided to try to encourage people to send in donations to the federal government to pay down the debt.

And shockingly…. People did.  It was a fascinating story about a generation of people who had survived World War II,  saved their whole life and didn’t believe it was healthy for the country to carry such a large debt.  And since the government seemed unwilling to do something about it, they decided to start sending in checks.

This was fascinating to me. The issues around our national debt have always concerned me and I loved this odd, but practical solution to it.  This one nurse managed to rally thousands of people to send in millions of dollars.  Of course, (spoiler alert) it didn’t work.  Apparently, in the early 90s when the government was running a surplus and the debt began to decrease in the Clinton years, people thought maybe this debt thing would get taken care of and stopped sending in donations.

The whole thing was completely bonkers, but there was something endearingly simple and straightforward about a group of…..

“Dad!”

Audra was calling out to me from the back seat.

“Dad!  Why does that sign say ‘Bowie’?”

I looked up and there was the “welcome to Bowie” sign that we’ve probably driven past a thousand times.

Jiminy Christmas!  Can’t these blasted kids give me a couple of frickin minutes to myself so I can just listen to the stupid radio and… sheesh!

“Well, Audra,” I said, with perhaps a hint of sarcasm.  “The sign says Bowie, because we’re driving into Bowie, and….  Wait a minute!  What are you still doing in the car!?!”

Holy crap.  I had gotten so involved in that stupid radio story that I had driven right past the bus stop and put-putted merrily along my way, without even thinking, straight toward Asher’s preschool.

DAMN YOU NPR!!!

So I made a quick u-turn and began driving as fast as seemed reasonable back toward Audra’s school which was 15 minutes in the opposite direction.  If we hurried, she could still make it to school on time.  I can’t believe I did that.  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid!

“Daddy,” piped up Asher, “Where are we going?  My school’s the other way.”

Shut up shut up shut up!

“I know honey, we forgot to take Audra to school, so we’ve just got to run over there really quick.”

And that’s the story about how I was running a little late, but was still going to be on time, but then ended up being totally late and how, really, it’s all NPR’s fault.

The End.

So, Al and Tipper are separating.

After 40 years of politics, uncomfortably long kisses and standing around telling everyone how great their marriage is, the Tennessee golden couple are going on a break.

Oh, did they learn nothing from Ross and Rachel?

I don’t know, somehow this has really bothered me.  I went to middle school and high school in Tennessee and I have fond memories of my mom dragging me to the stuffy upstairs attic room of our library to sit around with half a dozen senior citizens and listen to Senator Gore talk in his funny accent about exciting things like social security reform  (this was years before anyone had even thought about using lock boxes as a governmental financial tool).

The funny thing is that Al was always funny and charming and engaging in these little sessions and so it was always such a surprise to me when I saw him looking so awkward and “stick-in-the-muddish” during the 2000 election.  The Al Gore I saw fielding questions from overly medicated seniors would have totally won the election….. I mean won it even more. 

So, anyway, I’ve always had a fondness for Al.  And likewise I’ve always had a fondness for Tipper, even though I’ve never quite gotten over the fact that people call her “Tipper” which seems either silly, or rude, or like the kind of nickname you get for being a little too wild in college, but certainly not something you would call your wife… but what do I know.

Yes, I was charmed by Al and Tipper.  They always seemed cute and a little goofy and sincerely happy to be with one another.  It was always nice to see models of happy marriages, especially in the world of politics – an arena which seems to either cause men to have affairs with unattractive women (or men) or to have long term loveless marriages of convenience with their cold, angry wives who seem to always be wearing a forced smile.

I mean think about it.  How many sincerely happy politician couples can you think of?

No, Al and Tipper were like America’s nerdy sweethearts.  Sort of like Sandra Bullock and…. Er, Justin Timbelake and Britney Sp….. uh, I mean, Elizabeth Taylor and….. no, wait how about Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy?  Of course, they were married to other people and all, but…. Oh never mind.

Anyway…. Al and Tipper.  40 years.  Now, kaput.

It really bothered me.

I think what bothered me most was that there didn’t seem to be any reason for it.  It’s been 48 hours since the announcement and there is still not even a whisper of an affair, or another woman, or another man, or even a sexy polar bear who’s just a little lonely and needy after losing her habitat.

And believe me, while I may question the efficacy of capitalism or the inherent goodness of people, I will never question the ability of the tabloids to dig up some *** once they’ve been given a lead.  If the Enquirer hasn’t found anything yet, there’s nothing out there to be found.

I think I could understand it better if Fox News was reporting  that Al was having a torrid affair with Jane Goodall or that Tipper had fallen for the pool boy (or girl..… “couldn’t you see it?” my wife asked me last night.  Hmmmm)

Actually, I’m pretty sure that Al Gore might be gay, based solely on this clip of Ed Helms doing his “Gay Al Gore” impression.

Yes, if there was another man, or woman, it would seem a little easier to digest.  Because, as horrible as that might be, it would explain it.  “Oh,” we would say, “Just like a man, Al has gotten all twitterpated over Madeline Albright.”  Or, “Well it’s sad, but I can’t say that I’m surprised that Tipper left Al for Ron Reagan.  (Tipper and the Lil’ Gipper).

But when, there’s nothing that has happened – no affairs, no horrible life event, no mid life crisis -  it leaves you worried that what finished off this relationship was… well, nothing.

I mean Al and Tipper have already been through the worst of what their life has to offer.  They have endured a tumultuous political career with multiple presidential runs, a horrible car accident that almost killed their son and perhaps the most traumatic political defeat in American history.  Through all of that they clung together and, if anything, their marriage seemed to grow stronger. 

And now, just as life seems to have returned to normal, and their days are filled with interesting people, loving grandchildren and various accolades, they have decided, at age 62, to “separate.”  Whatever the hell that means.

The thing is that this story makes you worry not just about Al and Tipper, but a little bit about marriage in general.  They had a storybookish marriage, with ups and downs like all marriages and they came through it, good and bad, only to decide after 40 years…. “eh, whatever.”

I have not had a lot of experience with divorce in my life.  No one in my wife’s or my family has ever been divorced and most of our friend’s marriages are still going strong.

I read an article recently that said that most divorces either happen in the first couple of years of marriage after the couple says, “what the heck were we thinking?”  Or after about 8 years when the stress of kids takes hold (it apparently takes a year for the divorce to finalize, once the “itch” starts).  Or after the kids leave home and you realize that you don’t have anything in common anymore and your mid life crisis sets in and you go get a Porsche and a 28 year old girlfriend.

But after 40 years?  That almost never happens.

We like to think that marriages are for all eternity – that the love that bloomed at age 19 is enough to carry us forward for another 60 years until that lifetime of french fries catches up with us. 

Standing here, about to celebrate 13 years of marriage, I don’t want to contemplate the idea that things can be good at 5 years of marriage, good at 10 years of marriage and even good at 20, 25 and 30 years of marriage, but then, somewhere after you have spent two-thirds of your life married, it can just not seem worth it anymore.

That’s scary.

To think that no matter how great things are at the moment, that pain, misery, or just a lingering blah can still destroy a marriage thirty years from now.

For that reason I have been praying that Al is getting all hot and heavy with Sonia Sotomayor or that Tipper is having a raging lesbian affair with Elizabeth Edwards (wouldn’t that be nice?).

I just don’t want to think that my wonderful 13 years of marriage could still be vulnerable to nothing more insidious than, simply, time.

I know it’s not that clear cut.  Sarah and I have a remarkable relationship.  We have had an easy, wonderful, first 13 years of marriage and I have no reason to think that the next 20, 30, 40 or 70 years won’t be exactly the same (yes, I plan to live to 107).

It’s just that it makes me a little sad to think about the Gores and this quiet, bland,  dissolution to their 40 years of marriage.

And mainly it worries me, because I’m just not sure I want to live in a world where the best political marriage I can think of is….

Bill and Hillary Clinton