Happy Belated Birthday

Yes, I missed my Big Bruddah’s birthday again, for the umpteenth year in a row. So Happy Birthday Bro’, and many more.

Wanted

Let’s test that old memory and see if you can remember where this photo was taken…

151 reasons to say I’m sorry

Memories are like birds. You can be sitting in the kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee, and when you look out the window a flock of them are gathering around the feeder. And just as quickly, the dog can run down the back steps and they will scatter, leaving you wondering just what it was you were thinking about a moment ago.

Maybe it’s the season, but lately the memories have been flitting about my head like chickadees. I blame facebook. Ever since I put my name out there and accepted my first friend request, I have been running into names and faces that I hadn’t thought about in years. If nothing else, social media is a good crutch for a fading middle age memory.

The past few weeks have been a lot of fun, putting these old memories into words. And like I have said before, I learned long ago not to trust the objectivity, or truthfulness of memory. The mind has a curious way of distorting them with each remembrance until they become memories of memories. But I enjoy them nonetheless.

Looking back at the last 6 months of postings, it occurs to me, that if all you knew of my life was what I wrote you would think I grew up doing nothing but drinking beer, and chasing girls. I am fairly certain there was more to my life than that, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it might have been. Oddly enough, despite the preponderance of stories involving alcohol and girls, I led what could be considered a pretty typical existence for a working class kid from Batavia, circa 1985. I pulled down good grades, was involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, and made it to church every Sunday. And yet, when I filled my coffee cup this morning, and sat in front of the window, watching the snow drift down over the blank landscape, I was not reminded of charitable works, or academic triumphs, but of nights spent sitting in the dark of my bedroom, listening to Simon & Garfunkel’s greatest hits, and pining away over some unrequited crush. I guess that’s normal if you consider that of all the relationships you have in the course of a lifetime, only one of them will not end badly. In reality, if you can claim even one of them was ended happily ever after you are doing better than 50% of the general population.

Cripes that’s a depressing thought. No wonder I turned to booze.

Kidding. There is no doubt, alcohol was our primary form of entertainment from age 16 through 25. It wasn’t so much that we abused alcohol, as alcohol abused us. Nearly every weekend centered around getting our hands on some form of it, and finding a place to consume it. There was the aforementioned woods behind the Blind School, and a whole assortment of dead end dirt roads in the countryside of Genesee County, my personal favorite being the one out by the City Dump. But for all of our law breaking, and living dangerously, we were a pretty responsible bunch. I am not lying when I say that even at 17 we took turns being designated drivers. That thankless task usually fell upon my good friend Dan’l, who by 19 had acquired his own set of wheels, a fabulous 1978 Chrysler Cordoba the size of the U.S.S. Enterprise. And like the good crew of that ship, our weekly mission was to go where no man had gone before. Usually, we failed in our efforts, but not from a lack of trying.

These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise

But despite Dan’l’s heroic sacrifices, he was not always consigned to be our D.D. I took my turns as well. I can remember one particular night, during spring break of my freshman year of college, where I volunteered for the duty, only to live to regret it.

It was sometime in March, or early April, when the Western New York weather could not make up its mind if it was winter or spring. There was a house party out on the East side of town, in a development off of East Main, past the old Twin Fair. It was around Easter time, and the spring breaks of our assorted colleges and universities happened to fall over the same weekend. The weather not being suitable for outdoor drinking, someone’s whose parents were out of town had volunteered to host a party.

I was in a steady relationship at the time, with a girl I had been dating since the beginning of my Junior year of High School. A relationship of that length bordered on common law marriage for a kid of 19. Not that I had ever let that stop me from pining for, and pursuing other girls. Yes, I had hormonal issues rivaling those of Tiger Woods, but back in those innocent days it was not recognized as a treatable addiction. Instead we referred to it as being a “teenager”.

In some ways I think that my status as being in a steady relationship, just served to make me desirable to girls at the time, for when we did eventually break up later that spring, girls suddenly treated me like I suffered from leprosy. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The only way I had managed to lead such a double life from age 17 to 19, was the fact that my girlfriend was a very sweet, and hard working girl from a working class family, who spent her weekends cleaning house in the daytime for an elderly woman, and her evenings babysitting for a family down the street. This meant that for the most part I attended every party alone, hormonal, and prone to temptation. But since we had begun college in the Fall she had cut back on her babysitting jobs and taken on more prosaic work for a college student. So on the eventful night of the party in question she was coming along with me.
Being the designated driver for the evening, I had managed to borrow my parents Plymouth Voyageur minivan, an ideal vehicle for shuttling drunks. Picking my steady-eddie up from her house, I made a few more stops in town before heading out East Main to the party. When we got there the place was hopping. Just about every kid from the BHS class of 1986 seemed to be in attendance, as well as kids from Notre Dame, and some of the rural schools in the county. It was a veritable class re-union. Kids were playing drinking games in the kitchen, or hanging out in the shag carpeted, faux-paneled family room as 80’s music blared. Being Freshmen home on break, we were pretty damn full of ourselves. Everyone seemed to be sporting their school colors in some form, and blathering at length about how great their life at the University of Blah-blah-blah truly was. It was curious how much less interesting we became when I was sober.

We hadn’t been there for more than 30 minutes, when a call came in that someone needed a ride to the party. Having a somewhat less than titillating time with my sobriety, I volunteered to go pick them up. I kissed my girlfriend goodbye as she was sitting down at the kitchen table to get in on a game of quarters. For those who grew up in a missionary family in the depths of the African jungle, or as members of a religious cult in a compound in Idaho, let me explain. The game of quarters consisted of every one taking turns trying to bounce a quarter into a glass of beer. A successful turn allowed the bouncer to pick one person around the table to “consume” the drink. The word “drink” was outlawed, as was using your finger to point to a person. So a successful bounce was followed by pointing your elbow at whatever coed you hoped to get drunk enough to lower their inhibitions enough to meet their standards, and saying “consume”. Failure to remember the rules about pointing, or saying drink, meant you had to down it yourself. Even by the age of 19, the novelty of this game had worn thin, which means I was probably not the only one suffering from boredom at the party.

Now my girlfriend, being busy with work every weekend, had never had much opportunity to develop a tolerance for alcohol. Even at the few parties she had attended, it took little more than the scent of a wine cooler to begin to swoon. In fact, at the first party I had ever hosted at 20 Prospect she had managed to become so drunk off of 2 beers that her friends had to take her upstairs and put her in the shower to sober her up before taking her home. Based on history alone, I should have known better than to leave her alone at the party.

Now Batavia is not a big city, and the trip into town and back couldn’t have taken me more than 30 minutes. When I walked in the door, I found my girlfriend in the living room, unable to stand up, her eyes rolling about her head like pinwheels. Unbeknownst to me, after I left the game of quarters had switched from cheap beer to Bacardi 151 Rum. Knowing that she was a lightweight, my best friend and her boyfriend had proceeded to feed her with 5 shots, out of boredom. Within 15 minutes she was in the bathroom, her head over the toilet, “selling Buicks.” It wasn’t even 9 o’clock in the evening.

Do not try this at home

In retrospect, I could have kept her at the party, and waited for her to come around. But she was so out of it that I had little choice but to take her home. One of the other guys at the party, to whom I will forever be indebted, helped me carry her to the car and came along on my via dolorosa. There are few things in life that I dreaded as much as taking her home to her parents. Like Simon the Cyrene, this stand-up guy helped me bear my cross up the front steps to her door, where he left me to face my crucifixion. It was an ugly scene. Her Mom answered the door, and as I carried her into the entryway and explained what had happened, she very quickly deduced the situation and called for one of the older sisters to come quick and help us out. She tried to keep the commotion quiet, but her husband had heard, and came storming down the hallway screaming that he was going to kill me. Her Mom turned to me, and said “Quick, go!” and taking her sage advice I turned for the door. It slammed behind me, and as I hurried across the porch and bounded down the steps I could hear them screaming in the entry way, as she tried to restrain him from coming after me.

Needless to say, I did not return to the party that night. Instead I drove home, where I sat in the living room pretending to watch TV, half expecting the State Police to show up and take me away. The irony of the situation was not lost on me. For all the nights I had conspired, broke laws, and been unfaithful to her, in the end it was the night that I was sober and responsible that I got into trouble. Perhaps in some karmic way it was expiation for my infidelities. The rest of the evening passed uneventfully, and I eventually turned into bed where I lay in the dark, looking up at the ceiling, marveling at the randomness of fate.

It was a few days before my girlfriend called me on the phone to apologize. Things hadn’t been great between us for a long time, and this was pretty much the event it took to get me to force the issue. It would be a few months for the breakup to finally occur, after going through the whole “let’s be friends” melodrama. Little did I know that God was not done punishing me, and it would be 3 long, lonely years before I had a relationship that lasted more than a couple of weeks. I would like to say that I suffered an injustice, but in my heart I knew I got what I deserved. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

The Ballad of Yellowstone Sue

It was ‘round about the winter of 1991, and I was a confused and conflicted young man still trying to re-build from disaster of my last semester at Clarkson and find my place in the working world. I had already been a resounding failure in the first district office I had worked in, Birmingham, Alabama, and I was taking another shot at a fresh start with our office in Chicago. As I mentioned before, I had been placed on a long term assignment at a new construction site in Northern Wisconsin, where I was the youngest and the greenest of our 5 person crew at the site. We were working long hours during the day, and spending the long winter nights in the neon lit bars of Wisconsin’s “paper valley”.

Main Street Nekoosa WI

Like I said, I had still not found my groove after losing most if not all of my self confidence during my final days in college. Like most new grads I hated my job, and was very disillusioned about my choice of career. Lucky for me, the other four engineers on the project were all younger than 25, so my life outside of work wasn’t as miserably lonely as it had been during my stint in the South.

It was after work one afternoon, when my friends Cathy and Joe and I stopped into the supermarket across the street from our hotel to lay in some supplies. She was working one of the registers, and when she looked at me and smiled, her piercing blue eyes made me suddenly speechless. There was no doubt, I was smitten. I told Cathy and Joe about it at dinner that night and they both goaded me in to returning. So on my second trip back to the grocery store that evening I made sure to stake out the registers until her line was empty. Then I picked up a pack of M&M’s, walked up to her, and struck up a conversation.

She was just out of college as well, with a degree in Elementary Education, that old stand-by for women who are lacking in imagination. She was living at home and substitute teaching for the winter, working at the store to save some cash until Spring. Then she would hike the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, before finally entering the working world. I was intrigued. She was fun to talk to, and not at all shy about sharing intimate details of her life, hopes and dreams with a total stranger. Still, I was a chicken, so when someone else got in line at her register I said goodbye and left. Back in my room at the Chalet Motel I was tortured. Why hadn’t I asked her out? How could I let that opportunity pass? So I swallowed my pride and with a pounding heart, and sweaty hands I went back to the supermarket.

On the third trip through her line that evening I confessed to her that I wasn’t really addicted to M&M’s, but that I wanted to know if she’d like to maybe, possibly, like, um… go out sometime, maybe. The date was on.

We met at a local restaurant one evening that weekend and our conversation picked up where it had left off. She told me of the wonderful and amazing subculture that “through” hiking the Appalachian Trail was. How each Spring people from all parts of the country and world, in all different stages of their life, began the journey from Springer Mountain Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Northern Maine. On the way they developed friendships, and “trail families” that looked out for each other, and pitched in to help each other reach that common goal. It was a life changing experience for all of them, and when they finally reached the summit of Katahdin in October they would never be the same.

I was enthralled. Now I had done some hiking in Alabama and Georgia the previous summer. With no friends, and no place but a hotel room to call home it was one of the few pursuits I had found where being alone wasn’t such a socially unacceptable thing. But I had never conceived of such an adventure as that. I wanted to join her, and as we continued to date, I began to read books about “the Trail” and dreamed of quitting my job and going from living out of a car, to living out of a backpack. It was so romantic, and seemed to be just what I needed. A six month sabbatical in the woods to find myself, and my calling.

But there was more. I was smitten with her. She was a tall, apple cheeked, all natural girl, with eyes as blue as a glacial lake and seemingly as deep. She had a mystique that reminded me of Ingrid Bergman in the movie “Casablanca”. I remember one night after shooting pool with my friends, we stayed up half the night talking and telling each other stories about the places we had been and the adventures we dreamed of having. So it came as no great surprise when under a dishwater gray March sky I made up my mind. I was going with her.

I bought a backpack. I bought a tent. I made a list of all the gear I would need. I bought maps, and started planning my trip. Then I told her. She was thrilled, but made me promise her that I was going because deep in my heart I was doing it for me. She said that if I was doing it for her I wasn’t welcome. I lied of course, what could I do?

Then I told my family. Well if the trouble I had gotten into before graduation didn’t kill my parents, this would surely finish the job. They cried, they screamed, they pleaded. How could I be so stupid? How could I throw away a good paying job, and ruin my career. Nobody would ever hire me again after a boneheaded decision like that. They even convinced my big bruddah to call me up and tell me not to make the same mistake he did when he dropped out of college to hitchhike around the country.

I was torn. I wanted so bad to chuck it all, tell my family to get bent, and for once in my life think only of myself. But I knew I couldn’t do such a thing. Then fate intervened. I got a call from my district manager that they needed a body on a job in Alabama. So there it was. I could say yes, pack my bags that night and go to Alabama, or I could say no and…

I packed my bags that night, and said goodbye to Sue. She was cool with it. Nothing ever upset her. After she left I cried like a pathetic little baby.

The funny thing is she never did hike the Appalachian Trail. Her friends backed out, and when Spring came she didn’t have the cash. So instead she found a job in Sequoia National Park working at a snack bar. You see she had spent the previous three summers working summer jobs in Yellowstone National Park, and had become something of a seasonal employment groupie to the National Park System. I never knew there even was such a thing.

So I went South again to Alabama for a week, and when the job ended I was back to sucking flyash, and crawling boilers in Waukegan, Illinois. We wrote letters to each other. The dormitory in Sequoia only had one pay phone. The difference between her letter’s filled with awesome vistas of the Sierra, and mine filled with descriptions of the purple chemical sunsets of Waukegan, Illinois couldn’t be more striking. I was miserable in Chicago. My district manager thought I was a malcontent. I thought he was a jerk. I had to get out of there. It was my second district office in 12 months, and I was running out of country. So during the national meeting that summer I lobbied hard with the Denver district manager and the following week I was headed West. Sure I was still 800 miles from Sue, but I was getting closer.

I had a week’s vacation coming so I decided to fly to San Francisco with my friend Joe, and help him drive an Alfa Romeo Spider he had just bought, back to Chicago. I called Sue and told her, I’d be on her doorstep a week from Saturday. So exactly one week from Saturday, as the sun sank into the California sky, and the stars blinked on above the Sierra Nevada, we drove the Spider up the mountain into the park and showed up on her doorstep. She wasn’t there. She’d left for the weekend, and told no one where she’d be.

In the Sierra Nevada

I was crushed, and humiliated. The gods mocked me all the way back across the country. I was angry, but I couldn’t let it rest. So I wrote her. She apologized. Her parents had come to town unexpectedly, so she’d left with them for the weekend, and had no way to tell me. Fair enough I assumed, I couldn’t hold that against her could I? It’s amazing the depths to which a person will delude themselves over a pretty girl.

In the mean time I had finally hit my stride at work. I clicked with Charlie, my new boss, and suddenly big time responsibility, and projects were mine. The chances I never got in Birmingham, or Chicago were mine at last. Amazingly, I didn’t screw them up, and soon I was a rising star in the district. I decided work wasn’t so bad after all. I bought a Jeep, and started putting that backpack and tent to use on the weekends. Gradually I began to forget about Sue.

Then while working in Salt Lake City, Utah that September I got a letter from her.

She had found a position for the fall in Yellowstone National Park. She was only 6 hours away! When the job in Salt Lake ended, with no phone number and no idea where to find her in a national park the size of Connecticut, I headed north. It was the week after Labor Day, and the hordes of summer tourists had disappeared. The elk had come down from the higher elevations to mate. The temperature had dropped, and steam rose from the paint pots and fumaroles in the cold morning air as I entered the park that Saturday. After a day of searching, she was nowhere to be found. I was bummed. I thought that intuition, and luck couldn’t possibly fail me now. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d never find her, then I stopped at Old Faithful Lodge to get some lunch before heading home. I looked up, and there she was, my waitress.

Yellowstone

She got off work at four, so I stuck around. We spent two hours walking around the trails by the lodge talking. It was funny. There was nothing there. No spark, no interest. Just the same stories I had heard the previous spring, only this time in the midst of all the glory of Yellowstone they seemed as flat and dull as the Midwest. We promised to keep in touch and I left.

Over the years we did keep in touch. Each winter and summer I’d find a letter in my mail box telling me what park she happened to be working at. She never did get a job teaching school. She just cooked fries, and served food to a mobile nation of old guys in Bermuda shorts, and women with bouffant hairdos. A few years later we started corresponding via e-mail. She was working in Colorado for Outward Bound. Still seasonal, but no longer beholden to the whims of Government budgets. Her e-mails were full of the plans she was making, and the things she was going to do. She still hadn’t hiked the Appalachian Trial.

The funny part is I did eventually climb Springer Mountain in Georgia. When I reached the summit it was surrounded in fog. I sat down to take a rest, and the clouds began to part. Sitting there watching the fog roll back from the southern foot of the Appalachians I realized I had done it for myself after all. I may not have walked all the way to Maine, but the path I had chosen I had cleared myself, and it belonged to me alone.

The Trail up Springer Mountain

The Edge of Seventeen

They say that the most potent of all of the human senses is our sense of smell. While sight, sound, taste and touch can all evoke memories of our past, there is something unique about the sense of smell that makes its connection to our memory stronger, and more vivid. I have experienced this many times. Put me within 20 yards of mothballs, and I am immediately transported to my Grandmother’s house. Put me near fresh cut grass during the dusty days of late August, and I can almost feel the pain of football 3 a days. So I find it highly distracting when a co-worker of mine douses himself with Polo by Ralph Lauren, and proceeds to fumigate the office with memories of 1985. Like a red shirted character on Star Trek I am suddenly beamed down to a hostile planet where I know I am doomed.

The year 1985 could have been the high water mark of my life. In fact, it had all the makings of it. When it began I was in the 2nd semester of my Junior year at ND, and had suddenly found myself in the midst of a flowering social life which seemed unattainable a mere 6 months earlier. I had a steady girlfriend, more close friends than any man deserves, and access to alcohol that only increased with each passing month. By spring of that year every week seemed to promise a new experience, and a new coed with whom to become acquainted. By all rights I should have spent the rest of my days in Batavia living in the long shadows of my life at 17. How I managed to escape that fate, and wind up happy, and somewhat well adjusted, on the frozen prairies of Minnesota is still a mystery to me. In fact, attempting to solve that mystery by retracing my steps backward to the very beginning is half the point of writing this blawg.

So these periodic blasts of a dated cologne result in a flood of memories that send me off in a reverie trying to grasp the essence of what I felt at the time. The spring of 1985 was an early one that seemed to linger deep into June. With each passing week the temperature inched upward, the world became greener, and began to vibrate with life. My braces had come off after 6 years of suffering and pain, and my self esteem soared. Never before had anyone ever considered me to be “good looking”, but suddenly it seemed as if there was a different, maybe even handsome, face staring back at me from the mirror. The same could be said for all of us that year. We had turned the corner from gangly teens, to young adults, and we were thrilled to get out and try out our new equipment.

I am a born pessimist. For as long as I can remember, I have viewed every good event in my life with the suspicion that it was fleeting, and would soon be followed by Faulkner-ian loss. If ever there was such a thing as Western New York Gothic, I embodied it. But that spring of 1985, for the first, and maybe the last time in my life, the future seemed boundless. My heart still aches remembering it.

Photo copyright atsjbosma @http://www.flickr.com/photos/87185102@N00/2436554995/

It was a spring evening, with the first breath of summer sighing through the trees. It was a Friday, and after school we had borrowed one of our parent’s cars, and driven a classmate who could pass for 21, out to a convenience store on East Main to buy beer. With thrilling success we had managed to acquire 2 cases of beer. Well, if you can classify Old Milwaukee, and Old Milwaukee Light as beer, but at the time we weren’t exactly selective drinkers. Being 16 and 17 year olds, we were limited in our range and mobility. Getting a car after dark, was pretty much out of the realm of possibility, so we had to do some quick planning to figure out where to store this beer, and where to drink it after nightfall. After some discussion, we decided on the woods behind the Blind School. It was a central location, accessible by a short walk from most of our houses. So we drove the dirt driveway back behind the school that afternoon, and stashed our illicit treasure under some upturned concrete blocks, in a pile of dirt and construction waste from a recent construction project. Then we returned to our homes for supper hoping that no one had spotted us.

That evening, shortly after supper, we began to gather in small groups at various houses. The guys started showing up at 20 Prospect on their 10 speeds before, ahem, “going to the movies”. The girls began to gather on State Street for the same ostensible purpose. Then as the shadows began to lengthen, we started making our way to the woods to rendezvous. The spot we had chosen was a wooded hillside that sloped down towards the north, and an undeveloped area of scrubby growth that extended to the Thruway. The nearest homes were on Burke Drive, over a hundred yards to the west, through a wooded area thick with undergrowth. It was unlit and very secluded, well off the beaten path for any passing kids, or adults.

Looking back it all seems so innocent, but at the time we felt like hardened criminals committing a felony. Retrieving our warm Old Milwaukee, we began passing cans around the circle, and talking in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Being kids it didn’t take more than half a can for us to begin feeling the magical effects of alcohol beginning to tickle our consciousness. I had never felt more mature in my life than I did sitting around that circle, talking and laughing with 8 other guys and girls. It was the first real clandestine “party” we had ever thrown, and it would not be the last.

Sitting there in the gathering dusk, the city began to disappear around us, until it was just the nine of us there in the dark, our senses alive like never before. Goosebumps appeared on my arms, as much from the excitement of the moment as it was from the coolness of late May. The girls huddled close to the guys, and we began to look at each other in a new light. Up until that point the friendships between us had been reserved and platonic. But as the night went on, and the cans piled up, we became aware of each others presence in a visceral way that we hadn’t ever noticed before. Like blind kids, the dimness and the alcohol had suddenly magnified our other senses. We could feel each others presence, even in the indigo darkness. It was an awakening for us all.

As summer came on, we would repeat this scene many times, in many places, but our relationships had begun to change. With each progressive step, our familiarity increased, and romantic intrigues developed. Over the course of the next 5 years the couplings, and breakups would become too numerous, and intertwined, to keep straight. But sitting there on the edge of 17, the future stretched out like a field of unbroken snow. We had no idea what lay before us, and we tingled with anticipation, poised and ready to step forward into the virgin wilderness and begin blazing our trails.

That was 25 years ago. We had no idea of the twists, turns and the dead ends that we would wander into. One by one our paths would diverge into a forest of our own choosing, and slowly the path behind would be overgrown with weeds and burdocks. But the memories are still there, somewhere far in the back of our minds, until something, say a colleagues bottle of ancient cologne, flips a switch and it all comes flooding back. When it does, there’s not much that can be done except to pause, smile, and marvel at the journey.

Pensive on the porch

Photo by Gordon Parks, Feb 1943 - Library of Congress - FSA/OWI collection

Like the boy in this amazing photo, I’m in a pensive mood on my front porch this morning. Don’t have much to say. Just kind of staring off in the middle distance, thinking. Thinking…

Monday night at the rink

17 degrees. Snow falling. Lights on at the rink. Enough to sooth the savage beast.

Last night I took 20 Prospect Jr. over to the rink to play some hockey with his friends. 2 hours of non-stop hockey for a gaggle of K-3rd graders, while me and the other Dad’s shoveled the ice. Add Human Zamboni to my list of mad parenting skillz.

I do love it here. No, really, I do.

Mid-Winter Bleak

These are the times that try men’s souls… – Thomas Paine

A little known fact, Thomas Paine spent the Winter of 1776 in Minnesota. I can remember being a kid, sitting at the kitchen table, eating my instant oatmeal, listening to WBTA report that Puxatawney Phil had seen his shadow and feeling my heart sink. Even at that age of sledding hills, snow forts, and snowball fights I longed for spring. This morning, standing in my boxers at the back door, calling the Indomitable Moxie to get the hell in the house and quit her yapping, I felt that way again. My God, I am not sure I can make it till April.

It was another mid-winter weekend of youth sports. We rolled out of bed at 5:20 am on Saturday to take Lil’ Miss 20 Prospect to a swim meet in the far reaches of Wright County. Yesterday it was 20 Prospect Jr.’s hockey game at the Parade Ice Garden in Downtown Minneapolis. And so goes the life of a parent in modern day America. At what point in our collective history did parents become the sports agents for their children?

It’s funny, but I don’t ever recall my parents having to take me anywhere to play youth sports. For baseball I rode my Huffy Thunderoad to Austin Park for practice, or MacCarthur Park for games. For soccer, it was a trip out to GCC on my Schwinn Traveler. OK, I admit, they did drive me over to Williams Park for football practice. I have to give them credit for that. I used to see other kids riding their bikes in full football equipment, and I was thankful for the ride in the car. But the point is the same. Youth sports was something of, by and for the kids. It did not involve long car rides, or day long events on the weekends. When did it suddenly take on all this perceived importance? When did it get so organized?

Maybe the youth sports bureaucracy of USA Swimming, and USA Hockey, and all the other youth sport machines designed to feed children into the pipeline of amateur athletics, will prepare our kids better for a life time spent in the Corporate Salt mines. Maybe that’s what is wrong with me. The carefree, lackadaisical, daydreaming I did while picking dandelions in right field in the 70’s never prepared me for the absurdity of life in the employ of my Dark Corporate Overlords. Maybe that is my problem.

Or maybe it’s just the weather. Either way, it’s time to pick up my pick axe, and head down into the mines for another shift. Peace.

Aurora Borealis

The Great Sine Wave of Life

Everything goes in cycles. This is one of the great truisms of life. Whether we are in the pits of despair, or the heights of joy, we know that change is inevitable. Life tends to follow a Sine Wave, oscillating up and down from +1 to -1. Like a sine wave, the zenith and the nadir are the moments of stasis, where time seems to sit still, and our mood hangs in the air, before it slowly begins its swing to the other extreme, accelerating through zero, before slowing as it reaches the other extreme. Rinse and repeat.

The sun also follows this cycle. Every 11 years the solar activity on the Sun peaks, and begins to decline. We are at the bottom of a cycle right now, preparing to begin the climb again. You can look it up. Years of peak sun spot activity play havoc with radio communications, as the Earth is bombarded with waves of solar wind, resulting in the creation of the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights. For those that have ever been lucky enough to see the aurora, the unearthly display of dancing curtains of light in the night sky is something you will never forget.

Aurora Borealis

As I’ve said before, my senior year at Clarkson saw me rooming with 3 friends in an old farmhouse about 5 miles East of Potsdam on route 11B. It was 1989, during one of the peaks on the great sine wave of solar activity when the earth is awash in the great solar wind. In my own life, it was a time of great uncertainty and change. College was ending, and my world hung poised at a moment of lethargy, waiting for gravity to begin pulling me back towards zero. As I arrived in Potsdam in September, and moved into our apartment in the North Country, I had little idea of the great changes that lay ahead. All I knew was that the life I was living was inert, and stagnant, like the August heat. It was the year of the Nynex phone company strike, which only seemed to amplify the solitude of living outside of town.

My North Country Home

The farmhouse was old, and our upstairs apartment was drafty in the winter, and a sweatbox in the summer. With no fans in our possession, we stewed in the late summer heat. Sleeping on the old mattress on the floor, beneath the window in my bedroom, I would awake to the sounds of houseflies buzzing against the window screen, and the snorting of horses below. Rosie and King, the sway backed old workhorses our landlords summered on the property, would stand in the early morning shade beneath my window, swatting flies with their tails.

The first few days were given over to trips into town to buy books, and register for classes, followed by evenings sitting outside on the deck, watching the darkness creep out of the foothills of the Adirondacks. One night after a dinner of fried sausage, and Utica Club, we decided to pile into my roommate’s car and head into the bars in town . Potsdam being a village of 9,000 people, a good half of whom are college students, was well appointed with bars along the length of Market Street.

My roommates and I were contrarians for the most part. As misfits, and avowed anti-Fraternity types, we tended to avoid the dance clubs, and stick to a more sedate place called Maxfield’s, that even back then in Pre-Micro brew America, stocked Bass and Guinness on tap. But it was the first night back in town for all of us, and we deviated from our norm, to bar hop down the street to try to catch up with as many classmates as we might run into. With no phone service, chance encounters were about our only way of catching up with friends.

Despite being vehemently opposed to the Frat boy culture that permeated Potsdam, I still had a fair share of friends that belonged to different fraternities. And it wasn’t long before we ran into some of them at a dive noted for selling the cheapest pitchers of cheap beer in all of the North Country. I hung out in the back of the bar where they were playing pool, before wandering back to the place where my roommates had been standing. It was then that I noticed they were gone. Mildly annoyed that they had left without telling me, I walked outside to the next bar down the street in the hopes of catching up with them. But they were nowhere to be found. I began checking out each and every bar along Market street getting angrier by the minute. Finally, after a half hour of searching I walked back to where we had parked the car only to discover that it was gone.

Now I was pissed. How the hell could they ditch me like that? We didn’t live in walking distance of the bars anymore, and I had no idea how the heck I was going to get home. Rather than go back into one of the bars and hang out with some of my fraternity friends, and spend the night at their place, I decided that I was going to go straight home and confront them. I began walking out Elm Street, planning to hitchhike back to our apartment, despite the fact I had never hitchhiked anywhere in my life.

Now keep in mind it was the tail end of the 1980’s, and the “peace love and understanding” of the 60’s had long since faded. Potsdam isn’t a big town, but it is the biggest town in all of St. Lawrence County, and the nearest village of any size to the East of us was over 30 miles away. A hand full of cars drove right on past me as I made my way out of town. That should have been my first hint that the likelihood of any local stopping to pick up an obviously drunk college student was pretty slim. In my drunken and agitated state it never occurred to me that the only people that probably would stop to pick up a drunk hitchhiker at 2 am in the morning were either cops or serial killers.

I walked, and walked. Out past the airport, past the salvage yard, and into the pitch black countryside. As I walked in my stupor, my anger began to fade, and I began to be aware of the world around me. It was a moonless night, and the darkness was unnerving. Looking to the North I could see the faint glow of lights over the horizon. At first I thought it was the lights of Massena, 20 miles away. But as I walked I slowly became aware that the lights were moving. Now I was really confused. It took me quite a while before I realized that I was seeing the Northern Lights.

My walk home took two hours. It was past 3 am when I climbed the stairs to the apartment, and walked through the door swearing. To my surprise, my roommates, and their girlfriends were still awake. As I let into them for ditching me in the bar, they looked at me like I was crazy. Only when I had completed my profanity laced tirade, did they tell me the real reason that they had left.

While at the bar, a couple of thick necked frat boy bouncers had started giving a hard time to a scrawny little underclassman, that was undoubtedly trying to sneak in with a fake I.D., (along with about half of the kids in the place). My roommate Chris, seeing this, walked up to them and said “Why don’t you pick on someone your own bleeping size”. At that point he was jumped from behind by a couple of frat boys, and pushed out into the street. Falling onto the sidewalk, they started kicking him in the head, as his girlfriend screamed, and my roommates rushed out to his aid. By the time they broke things up, he had been roughed up pretty bad, and they decided to take him home. All of this had happened while I was in the back of the place talking with friends, oblivious to the events.

By now I felt like a first class jerk, and my anger subsided into guilt and embarrassment. They all assumed I would do the rational thing and just crash at a friend’s place. No one expected me to walk home five miles through the dark countryside. That was my first experience with the Northern Lights, but it would not be the last.

Later in the month, I awoke around 2 am to a buzzing sound coming from outside. At first I thought it was a fly against the window screen, until I realized that it was night and not the time for houseflies. Slowly coming to my senses I looked out the window and saw a green glow in the sky. I pulled on a shirt, and walked out onto the deck. There, in the sky above was the most ethereal display of light I had ever seen. It took me a minute to realize that what I was seeing was the Northern Lights, blazing so brightly that they seemed to cast a glow over the earth.

the night sky aflame

I sat down on the deck, and watched the light show for hours. At times the Aurora filled the whole sky, changing from green, to red, and surrounding me like the walls of a giant tee-pee, flapping in the breeze. I didn’t know it then, but my life was to begin picking up speed again on it’s downward trajectory along the sine wave. By spring it would be approaching zero, and unraveling at a speed that I could never have dreamed possible. Sitting there in the dark, as the invisible solar wind blew in from millions of miles away, and lit up the sky in green and red filaments, it seemed as if the whole, dry, world around me was about to burst into flame.

I see the boys of summer in their ruin…

I am in love with my bed lately, in a way that I haven’t been since adolescence. When the alarm went off at 5:45 am, waking me from the oceanic depths of a half remembered dream, I let out a long sigh. Buried beneath the billowing waves of comforter and blanket, it took all the discipline I could muster to get out of bed and face the cold dark January morning. Adulthood sucks.

Driving to work through the  5 degree darkness, the steam rising from the manholes, and sewer grates, my thoughts returned to the last summer of my boyhood, 1983. I was fourteen years old, transitioning from freshman to sophomore years of high school, and caught somewhere between childhood and young adulthood. That summer was to be the last of the worry free, unencumbered, summers of my youth. It stretched out before me in bright sunshine, and dappled shade, three months of freedom from the tyranny of alarm clocks. Late nights spent watching late night TV long after Dad headed off to bed. Mornings spent sleeping until 10 or 11 o’clock, only to be awoken by the scuffling sounds of sneakers in the gravel driveway, followed by footsteps and voices on the back porch, and the tinny knocking of kid fists on the screen door.

My bedroom window at 20 Prospect was right above the back porch steps, and I could hear the neighborhood kids gathering below on the porch steps. Ranging from 9 to 14, the boys of Prospect Avenue would gather for sports every day from spring to fall. Summer was the height of our baseball season, as the street hockey sticks were put away in the basements and garages, and the ball gloves and bats came out.

Eventually the knocking would cease, and the kids would start calling up to my window for me to get out of bed so we could play some softball. As the kids in the neighborhood had grown, and the number of them multiplied, our ball games had moved from wiffle ball played in the backyard, to softball played in the park around the block. Being the oldest, I was expected to be the team organizer, equipment provider, and chief umpire for the games. In addition to the collection of bats and balls that had accumulated over the years from my big bruddahs beer league softball, I also had a collection of old Frisbees that served as the bases. At times there seemed to be no end to the treasures and effluvia that collected in the cellar of 20 Prospect, in large piles, and cardboard boxes, crammed in every corner.

That was also the summer I had received a glove for my 14^th birthday. It was the first new glove I had gotten since 2^nd grade, and I spent much time looking through the Brand Names catalog picking it out. In the end I selected a softball glove as big as a peach basket. It hung off of my spindly arm like a suitcase, but I loved it, and spent hours rubbing it with neatsfoot oil, and storing it with a ball stuffed deep in the pocket, and rubber bands around it to give it the necessary shape.

Rolling out of bed, and getting dressed, I would collect the equipment, and we would set off around the block on our bikes. I suppose we could have walked over to the park, but our bikes served a dual purpose. The park we played in was a large grassy, tree speckled square in front of the Blind School, known as Centennial Park, although I never quite understood what centennial it was commemorating. The park had once been the front grounds of the Blind School, and in the 1800’s had been lined with walking paths, lily ponds, and a large gazebo. At some point it had become a city park, but had always been kept undeveloped. Perhaps that had to do with the fact that the park was on the side of a a large hill. In the winter it served as the premier sledding hill in town. In the summer, it was just a shady, grassy place to walk the dog or play a game of catch.

The NYS School for the Blind in 1868. The pond at the lower left would become our ball field 114 years later

The maple trees that had been planted along the walking paths in the 1800’s had grown into a woods, and the walking paths had long since been overgrown with grass. There were no baseball diamonds in the park, or any other playing fields. But in the clearing where the old lily pond had been filled in, neighborhood kids had worn out a baseball field. The maple trees served as a towering, leafy roof above the field, and made pop flies a challenge. We’d park our bikes in a semicircle behind the home plate dirt spot, to form a backstop, and set out the Frisbees for our bases. After choosing up sides the games would begin. With only 9 or 10 kids, it took a bit of range to cover the field. Line drives would bounce off the trunks of the maples that served as foul poles, and determine if the ball was fair or foul. Balls hit deep to center would bounce and roll into the trees and make throws to home a real challenge.

Cenntenial Park in 1910

We could have chosen to ride a few blocks farther and play on one of the real ball fields at McArthur, Austin, or Woodward field, but Centennial was our park, and it seemed only natural that we would have our games there.  The field had just as many quirks as the Polo Grounds, and Ebbets Field, and the list of ground rules was long, but there was no beating the cool shade of those maple trees on a hot summer day.

The park today

At the time it never occurred to me that this would be the last year I would spend playing ball with the neighborhood kids. I had played it all my life, from the time that I was the little mop haired kid that was relegated to right field, right up until I was the defacto league commissioner. But I was fourteen now, and my interests were about to change. I had discovered girls a few years before, but it would be at least a year before the girls discovered me. That last summer of my boyhood would be spent on the ball fields during the daytime. My evenings would be devoted to soccer practice, or long rides on my ten speed out past the Community College, and the Airport north of town, and into the mucklands of Elba. When night came I would be hanging out with friends on someone’s front porch, talking for hours about sports, and girls.

By mid-August it was over. Football practice had begun again, and I was sentenced to three-a-days in the buzzing, swampy, heat. The next summer would be spent in Drivers Ed class at the Community College, mowing lawns, playing soccer, lifting weights with the football team, and pursuing girls at the Trojans game. If only I could have found a way to bottle it up, and store it away. What I wouldn’t give to take one of those bottles down, and pour myself one of those lazy summer days right now. But it is not to be. I am a Father now, and I watch my children take their turn drinking in those lazy days.

Dylan Thomas was right. We are the sons of flint and pitch. O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

The Russian Empire in Living Color

Continuing on the theme of obscure, internet, ephemera, I present to you a collection of color photographs from the Library of Congress. These photographs have an un-earthly, ethereal quality to them that I cannot describe. The subjects seem to glow, or radiate light. The appearance of a world caught between the medieval and the industrial revolution, is amazing enough. To see that world in such vivid color is astounding. The pictures possess a dreamlike quality that makes them seem at once familiar, and entirely foreign to our eyes.

These photographs were taken between 1909 and 1915 in pre-Soviet Russia. They are the work of Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, a Russian photographer who developed a unique process for creating color photographs. The Prokudin-Gorskii process was an ingenious photographic technique that captured images in black and white on glass plate negatives, using red, green and blue filters. A single, narrow glass plate about 3 inches wide by 9 inches long was placed vertically into the camera by Prokudin-Gorskii. He then photographed the same scene three times in a fairly rapid sequence using a red filter, a green filter and a blue filter. The images were then presented in color in slide lectures using a light-projection system involving the same three filters.

In the early 1900s Prokudin-Gorskii presented an ambitious plan for a photographic survey of the Russian Empire to Tsar Nicholas II. His plan was to use the emerging technological advancements that had been made in color photography to systematically document the Russian Empire. Through such an ambitious project, his ultimate goal was to educate the schoolchildren of Russia with his “optical color projections” of the vast and diverse history, culture, and modernization of the empire. Winning the support of the Tsar, he was provided with a specially equipped railroad car darkroom, and two permits that granted him access to restricted areas and cooperation from the empire’s bureaucracy. Between 1909-1912, and again in 1915, he traveled through eleven different regions of the Russian Empire, recording daily life among the Empire’s diverse ethnic groups, Medieval Orthodox Monasteries, and the railroads and factories of an emerging Industrial society.

Prokudin-Gorski would leave Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution and eventually settled in Paris. His work remained with his family until the U.S. Government purchased his slides from his heirs in 1948. The Library of Congress recently undertook a program to digitize these slides and present them in an online exhibition. All of the following photographs are copyright the Library of Congress, and Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii. I hope you find them as fascinating as I do. For more info visit the Library of Congress exhibit here: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/empire/gorskii.html

This photographic collection preserves a past that no person alive today can recall witnessing with their own eyes. They are snapshots of a colonial Empire stretching from the wild edges of Eastern Europe all the way to the Pacific and the borderlands of China and Mongolia. They are a reminder of the astounding size, and diversity of the Russian, and Soviet Empires, and how pre-modern they truly were at the beginning of the 20th Century.

This amazing monastery looks like an Alien Spacecraft landed in the countryside

Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?

The Emir of Bukhara (present day Kyrgyzstan)

This one gives me goosebumps, and I'm not sure why

If these factories look jarring and out of place to our eyes, imagine how they appeared to the Russian peasants that saw them for the first time

How I would love to know the life stories of these three girls

The shining city on the hill from Revelations

Another haunting photo from the Brothers Grimm

The ferryman at the River Styx

This could have been taken in my backyard, and may be the the most achingly beautiful portrait ever taken of the untamed, wild beauty of lilacs