Susan, Patti, Diane, Flo.

Matthew, Charlie (aka PG), and Charlie’s mom, Mary.

Diane and her cousin, Billy, at Patti’s wedding to Paul.

Mark, Ginger (pregnant) and Michael (not pregnant).

Dear Diane,

You know how Matt cracks the door every night when he comes home, sticks his head into our bedroom and says, “Goodnight.” And some mushy stuff better left off the blog. And how you always engage him in conversation no matter how tired you are or how late it is?

I know, I’m usually asleep but I often hear you, and I figured some of your protective mothering instincts left on our sheets would leech my way. Guess what? They haven’t.

Saturday morning:

“Dad, I said goodnight last night and all I heard was snoring.”

“I don’t know that I heard you come in.”

“I said it three times; the last time I yelled.”

“What can I say? They call it sleep for a reason. If it makes you feel better, when I got up at three to feed the fire I noticed your sneakers next to the door.”

Sunday morning:

“Did you come home last night?”

“Dad, I yelled louder than last night.”

“And?”

Matt slips into full snoring mode.

“I confess, I didn’t hear a thing, and this time I didn’t even check to see if your shoes were by the door. When does mom come home?”

Btw, Matt got into Radford.

love

michael

I know I’ve posted one like this before, but I can’t help it. Let’s see, that’s pesky godson, Matt and … Diane or PG will have to fill in the rest.

From the same series.

Ruth Lewis, Dan and Linda

Last Tuesday, Dominic sent an email to me asking if I was up for racquetball Wed or Thurs night. I almost responded with a “Yes” when I recalled that Patrick had asked to play on Thurs. And it wouldn’t be a 3-way game, because KT was busy with a Dutch class that afternoon. So with the gauntlet of a father-son game facing me, I turned the Dom down, and suggested Saturday as a possibility.

The Dominator game postponed, I girded my loins for Thursday’s game. Patrick showed up right on time, and after about 10 minutes of chatting, we got down to work. P. scored first, and then the adrenaline started churning, and I pulled ahead. There were many opportunities for kills, but instead of smashing the ball into a strip 6 inches above the bottom of the front wall, I systematically made my returns to the rear corners. I do so love to watch P. make those impossible leaps and back-handed smashes at the corner balls. He is almost always successful in returning them, but he can’t kill from the corners, so when his ball comes down from the front wall, I just lob another return into the opposite corner, from which he makes another incredible return.

So that’s why our games go on so long. After half an hour of one corner lob after another, I won, and we went into the 2nd game. (With Dominic, it’d be the 3rd or 4th game. The Dom doesn’t mess around. It’s one kill or miss-kill after another.) We were panting heavily in the 2nd game, and I was up 11-5, when Katie appeared. After an excess of unpronounceable Dutch words, the teacher quit early. Aha! It’s a reprieve for all of us.

P and I both switched to left hands. The 3 of us played for 20 minutes, and had a great, relaxing game, which KT won. At 6 pm sharp, the 2nd game went into sudden death at 10-10-10. My serve, and it happened to hit a floor-wall corner and die. So I pulled that one out, just by accident.

It’s Friday now, and I’m wondering if the Dominator has had some practice with his other partner. I can’t rely on him going into our once-a-week games without an intermediate game anymore. He gets a chance to polish his serves and kills without me watching. But then, I get a similar chance, too. So our games may be interesting. Stay tuned.

–rakkity

You just never know what might appear on the blog after you leave home.

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Aunt Rose, Susan, Diane and Uncle Sam at Patti’s first wedding.

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Diane in Belize.

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Peter in rakkity’s cabin in NH. Circa a long time ago.

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pesky godson, Matt, Ginger and her daughter, Molly.

Diane setting up camp on Moose River trip in Maine.

I found these photos while sorting through some old papers. A short mix of camping and baby pics. Look closely and you’ll see pesky godson as a nearly newborn.

Diane’s tarmacked plane in St Cloud

Dear Diane,

I forgot to tell you about my hot pocket. I guess you could think of it as a gift back to Joe – unintentional, but so are the laughs he provides us. You remember when he and Matt were worried about my listless fish and Joe thought it wise to compare his early drawing of Winston to check for changes?

Well, I was sitting in my office typing away when I felt warmth on my thigh. I paid it no mind (easy for me), because it made no sense (as if things in my world live in such linear fashion). Soon my thigh decamped (doing my best to stay away from those to-be verbs) from warm to on fire. I looked to see if Matt were lurking, then jumped up, still not able to make sense of this heat. I reached into and started tossing stuff from my pocket onto the floor. Fiery feeling things like coins and metal screw driver tips. Nearby, Joe, drawn by the racket, entered the room By then I was into a full St. Vitus dance and Joe nearly bent over. I guess I’d a laughed too.

The source of the heat? Two nickle-metal hydride batteries which had aligned themselves perfectly with the metal in my pocket. Like crossing the terminals of a six volt battery with a copper wire, or haven’t you ever done that? You couldn’t pick those screw driver tips off the floor.

Yesterday evening I cranked up the tunes and cleaned the kitchen and our office. I knew Matt was upstairs, and I assumed asleep. Still, for my music to be effective, it has to be loud and after an hour of no hollers raining down from above, I began to think not asleep but dead. I finished cleaning, the music stopped, and then Matt descended the steps. “Now that I’m leaving you turn off your horrible music?” Not asleep or dead but reading. “Horrible?” If my melodic mix of Tom Waits and The Velvet Underground doesn’t appeal to today’s yoot, what of mine does?

Brother Peter called this morning at 7 AM. Our time. He’d just left a party where he’d made another seventeen connections to his now very distant past, and he was looking for talk to get him home. He aided me across the eastern half of the country, the least I could do was get him the two miles across the Mauna loa Valley.

And Bill Maurer called last night to tell me he’d bought an iBook, had forsworn TV and was determined to pursue his ribbon business. And Joan called to talk about Helen’s last office visit. You know, I’m beginning to see what you and Matt were accusing me of. Talking on the phone all the time.

Now, if you’ll send me your remote email address again, I won’t be forced to write you publicly.

Love,

Homefront Hard Working Husband

Jeffrey eased me out of his house at 5 AM with orange slices, a scrambled egg sandwich wrapped in tin foil and his traveling mug full of hot black coffee. I stopped five times for gas, twice to nap, and once in Worthington, Ohio, for more dry ice to keep my stash of ice cream cool.

The hours whizzed by, helped immensely by calls from Diane, Adam, Dan and my brother, Peter. Peter’s calls, every three or four hours, helped gauge the distance. He’d call, then have breakfast, call then go for a swim, call, then work on his paper. Each successive inquiry had that, “Are you still on the road?” tone. Peter asked me how much coffee I drank, but I told him the only thing that makes these long drives possible are my naps. And the first one arrived less than two hours from Jeff’s house, just outside of Louisville. When my eyes begin to close, I pull over.

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It’s difficult to balance my camera on the dashboard, and stay within the lanes, and take a steady one second exposure (which this is not). Snow near Rochester, NY.

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In a recent comment, Diane noted that Halo was the last friend Patti made. That, and the Olympics, got me thinking about the first friend Patti made.

His name was Billy Conway. He and Patti were best friends from age three until fourth or fifth grade, when it became uncool to have a best friend of the opposite sex – about the same time Patti began to prefer horses to humans.

Like Patti, Billy was a cute, bright, full-of-energy, youngest child. “A bit spoiled, those two,” some said. And were they a pair to deal with! There were always plans to hatch, places to go, things to explore, trouble to get into, scams to perpetrate.

One summer – the one between kindergarten and first grade, if memory serves – they saw an ad on TV for PF-Flyer sneakers. Said ad suggested that PFs made you faster than any other sneaker in the world. They looked at their own feet. One wore PFs; the other Keds. A contest was born.

They picked out the best stretch of Scott Drive. They marked the course with chalk. They sold tickets to everyone in the neighborhood. They enlisted their fathers to be the judges, one on either side of the finish line. Billy’s older brother Robert shot a cap pistol to start the race.

While it was close, Keds won. Once across the line, Patti took off her PFs, left them in the street, and marched over to her father, hands on hips. “I’ll need Keds,” she announced and strutted home in her stocking feet.

She got Keds. And she and Billy moved on to their next adventure. But everyone remembered the PF Challenge, and no kid in the neighborhood would wear anything but Keds for as long as the memory lasted. Some may be wearing them still!

FierceBaby

It was July 1975, and the three of us, Joe, Chuck, and Ed (your 6-lived reporter), were bound for Scott Lake, a high alpine tarn just west of Gannett Peak, the highest mountain in Wyoming. We had no intent of attempting Gannett–this was just an exploratory trip to see the high glaciated basins and alpine meadows of the Wind River Mountains. We’d been in the Winds twice before, and hiking here was becoming an annual ritual.

The approach to Scott Lake is via Twin Lakes, two long blue gems bordered by thick forests of pine, aspen and fir. The slope of the trail was gradual and pleasant, and we had wonderful views of spectacular Squaretop, with its castle-like buttresses that descended perpendicularly thousands of feet almost to lake level.

After about 9 miles of hiking the well-traveled trail, we turned off onto a poorly maintained path that headed up Scott Creek. We camped at timberline, and looked at the prospects for tomorrow. Scott Creek descends through a rock-strewn chasm in the cliffs bordering the canyon we had hiked up. Scott Lake above lies 2000′ up in a classic “hanging valley” cut over eons by creek runoffs since the geological epochs during which the glaciers carved the lower valley.

We were tired from the long hike in with 50-60 pound backpacks, and after dinner, we slept the sleep of the weary and the clueless. The next morning, after an energizing breakfast of oatmeal and bacon, we headed up into Scott Creek chasm. The path that had been faint was now non-existent, and we had to find our way through a chaos of boulders that ranged in size from suitcase to VW Beetle. Those boulders were the remnants of an ongoing battle between relative stability and winter/spring floods. What we were hiking on was a temporary respite in the yearly rock avalanche that pours down from Scott basin during the snow avalanches and the great melt-off every May and June.

As we ascended, the slope became steeper, and burdened as we were with full packs, we had to zig-zag up the slope, finding routes on and among the boulders. We first ascended to the left and then to the right, and back again, moving generally upwards. After a couple of hours of this, as the chasm steepened, we found ourselves actually climbing. We had moved from the “3rd-class” (hands-free) zone to “4th class”, meaning we had to use our hands for balance. In other circumstances we would have roped up, because a fall would have caused some injury, but probably nothing fatal. The greater danger was knocking a rock down on a partner’s head, and with a rope, that would have been more likely than not. So we stayed close together as we climbed. If one of us dislodged a small boulder, it wouldn’t gain great momentum before endangering the climber below, and he could dodge out of the way. What we didn’t expect was that rocks could dislodge themselves without human intervention.

We were at the crux of the climb now. The route seemed to get shallower up above but it was at its steepest now. Chuck and I were together, moving crosswise along a ledge. Joe was off to the right somewhere. Suddenly there was a rumble from above. I saw a coffin-sized boulder falling towards me. I jumped sideways quite instinctively. There was no possibility of planning foot and hand moves on the ledge. The boulder brushed by me, exactly where I had been. (Chuck reached out and pushed at the boulder as it fell. This is from his description of the event later. I have no recollection of it myself.) The boulder continued to fall freely below me as I moved and it made a great whoosh, followed by a booming crash as it hit the boulders below us. The sound echoed in the canyon for a few seconds. There were the usual small rock avalanches afterwards, but nothing more fell from above.

Chuck and I shook our heads as we looked at each other wordlessly. Joe called over, “Are you guys all right?” We affirmed that we were, and without any discussion, we continued on upwards. We agreed implicitly that it would have been more dangerous to descend, and the way up seemed to be getting easier. Trying not to think about the precarious stability of the boulder chasm around us, we continued up to the relative shelter of the cliffs above without incident.

When we reached the top of the rock field, we entered a wide cleft in the cliffs. The creek now ran nearly horizontally, and we followed it through the cleft to where it flowed out of Scott Lake. The basin opened up to us. We had reached our objective. The color of the lake water was a milky green pastel, caused by glacier “flour” in the water. The grey faces of Gannett Peak and the pristine white slopes of Gannett Glacier shimmered and refracted in it, making a dreamy inverted image of the basin. We settled on a patch of lovely alpine
meadow, threw down our packs, and breathed deeply of the thin mountain air. We had brushed against death to get here, and we would savor the beauty of the cirque for two more days. The route out (thank you, Odin). would be on a safer route than we had struggled up. Time to enjoy life and recuperate in one of Nature’s grandest places.

–rakkity

If your name happens to be Diane or Susan, or if you already believe I’m an idiot and are simply waiting for another opportunity to call me one, please do not read this. If, however, you like everyday occurrences enlivened by this undertaker, read on. My guess is that that leaves rakkity.

From early afternoon on Thursday, TV peppered our local programing with storm warnings. I thought, “How cool is this? The middle of February and I’ll be treated to a southern Indiana thunderstorm.” I might add there were also tornado warnings, but those, I poo-pooed. It looked to be a classic warm front (seventy degrees)/cold front battle.

After dinner (catfish, rice pilaf with lentils, cornbread, and salad, prepared by Karen), I hop into my truck and head for the river. The high banks over the Ohio provide the best long range view. I can see for miles in three directions. However, rain chases me off those banks and back into my truck, so I head for the road that swoops down by the river to the boat launch. Except: Road Closed Due to High Water. Undeterred, I drive a bit further east, just past the floating gambling boat, Casino Aztar, and find an access path winding down to the river behind the boat.

As the wind and waves kick up and darkness descends, I notice three or four rather large figures standing on the top of the floating casino, looking at moi. Then comes a car. A non-intimidating sub compact with Casino Security emblazoned on the side stops in front of my truck. Apparently, as part of the Homeland Security Act, all floating vessels are protected from my curiosity. I walk directly to the uniform behind the wheel and engage him in friendly conversation. He’s doing his duty, I’m doing my thing, they are incompatible, I walk back to my truck and back out of the area. The weather intensifies, but I figure “So what; I love thunderstorms.”

Almost as soon as I cross back into the city, the wind and rain change from disappointing to let’s-see-what-we-can-throw-at-this-simpleton. As if blinding horizontal water droplets are not impressive enough, here come various store front signs, roof parts, garbage cans, branches and even trees. I zig and I zag.

“I guess this wasn’t such a good idea after all,” I think, which morphs into, “Diane is going to kill me.” Earlier I’d written, “Tornado warnings here…boy am I glad I brought my camera.” To which Diane responded, “Tornado/camera comment was so uncute, unfunny, I didn’t even comment.” See, I’m not void of perspective. What I never fully appreciated was how a city storm is a breed apart from one in the country.

Night View

Following Day

On my circuitous way back, I pass this house (the homeowner’s crying outside). After commiserating with her neighbors, I jump back into my truck, turn a corner, and snag a downed power line. I feel it grab, sense the wire leading out like fishing line, and whip-like, I hear the crack and feel the flash as the live wire contacts the metal frame of my truck. Just behind my left ear.

From raindrops to war zone.

I hunch down in my truck and think to myself, “Now, why is it that I’m safe in my truck? It’s not the tires… .

But by then I’ve left the dangling, arcing wire far behind.