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The Saddest Day of the Year

It's sadly ironic that the "Most Wonderfull Time of the Year" is directly followed by the saddest time of the year.  Families reuniting, mountains of presents, and bountiful feasts are replaced with goodbyes, stacks of new underwear, and new year's resolutions, like...the dreaded diet.  The good news is that I've already lost seven pounds in three days.  The bad news is that I could stand to lose much, much more.  Still, this isn't why yesterday was the saddest day of the year.  Yesterday we took down the Christmas decorations.

Yesterday afternoon, decorations that took a month to put up were neatly stacked in the attic in the space of two hours.  Christmas CDs were put back on the shelf for another eleven long months.  Some I didn't even get around to listening to, like Pavaratti and Harry Connick, Jr.  Some I wore out like Trans Siberian Orchestra, Elvis, Sinatra, and of course the Charlie Brown Christmas CD.  The same applied to DVDs.  I watched It's a Wonderful Life three times, Miracle on 34th Street four times, and The Polar Express at least ten.  All that has been put back in the cabinet.

It's always such a saddening time right after Christmas because there's such a great build up to the big day and of course the night before.  It seems like in the month prior to Christmas, my family had one Christmas activity per night, and to see it all come down like an axe to a redwood is more sobering than I care to think about.

There was the mistletoe above the office door under which I planned to ambush my wife, but never had the guts.  The stockings hung limply on the wall.  The Christmas calendar on the wall was devoid of candy in all of the days' pouches.  The Christmas village sat peacefully on top of the entertainment center, the one-horse sleigh plodding through the snow by the two Victorian hotels on its way to the skating pond and the backwoods cabin whose light had burned out.  Even the Christmas tree was depressing.  We had dubbed it "The Leaning Tree of Ponca" because it just wouldn't stand up straight anymore.  We had already bought a new and bigger one at Wal Mart when they went on sale for 75% off, so this was the last year we were to use our family's first Christmas tree. 

So down it all came.  We took time to meticulously box up all the Hallmark ornaments and carefully wrap the rest in toilet paper.  We played the "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" ornament one last time.  I carefully wrapped my Grandpa Jule's fly-fishing fly pendant, one of only two items I have by which to remember him.  The star fit awkwardly in its old packaging.  The salt dough ornaments which will probably crumble over the summer.  The string of popcorn and cranberries to the trash.  Memories of Midnight Mass becoming just that: distant memories.  Oh the sadness.

So today our living room looks bare, empty.  I recall last May when school was letting out that I would rather it be the Christmas season than summer break, and I think the opinion is still valid.  Now school is about to open its doors for the spring semester, and the next thing to look forward to is...Valentines Day? 

Red Badge of Courage- 11/17/2010

Okay students, you have read Killer Angels and part of Red Badge of Courage.
1. What are your first impressions of Red Badge?
2. Other than the length, what are the primary differences you have noticed between the two books, especially in regard to language?  Please be specific!
3. Does Red Badge's language remind you of anything else you have ever read? (I'm leaving this question vague to see in what directions you might take it.)

Confessions of an Amateur Carpenter

"Although I have never pretended to be a great fisherman, it was always important to me that I was a fisherman and looked like one, especially when fishing with my brother."
-Norman Maclean, from A River Runs Through It

I first read this line in 1997. How many times these words have rung true in my life since. I'm not necessarily referring to fishing, but to other skills men should be stereotypically good at, like fixing things around the house. Tonight I hung a door in a house that I am convinced is not square- the house, not the door. The door is on, but it doesn't fit so well.

You see, it started about two months ago when my wife, while caught up in the excitement of our friends buying a new house, decided to start looking around town for a deal. 4.5% interest and a buyer's market were clear signs that we needed to look at a bigger house, and we found one. But over the course of a month of offers and counter-offers, we finally came to a dead end. Okay, no problem, except that we had decided that if we were going to put our house on the market, we had better fix it up. The wheels were in motion. There was no going back.

So I set out to fix all the little problems our little house had, and there were penty of them. Patching sheetrock, rewiring, and painting, we prepared our house for my sister and brother-in-law, the latter of which flips houses for a living. It was decided that new floors in the office and kitchen, new counter tops in the kitchen and bathroom, new fixtures throughout the house, faucets, and such would spice up our little abode, making it much more marketable. But since we were now not selling it, we would just force ourselves to live in a house which was more pleasing to the eye.

In the course of a weekend we flipped the three rooms previously mentioned. Never having done many of these skills, I found myself asking my brother-in-law for help many times over, each time surrendering my Man Card, for this is not typical "man behavior." It's like pulling over to ask for directions while on vacation.

I felt stupid the whole weekend. We moved at a snail's pace, and when they left here Sunday night, the only major job left was to hang a door. Now we have come full circle in this story.

I won't go into all the details, but I will say that the darned door is hung, and it sticks something aweful. Sawing, planing, and sanding, I did all I could to keep from totally wrecking that poor door if only for the reason that I didn't want to buy another one if I whacked too much of it off. It opens and closes, but barely.

I wanted to look like a handy man in front of my brother-in-law, and I'm sure I failed. My wife knows the real truth about my sad skills, so there's nothing I can do to change that perception. The thing is, my father-in-law is a true do-it-yourself handyman and my wife's hero for one good reason- he's been around the construction site a few times. He can fix anything, just like my dad. Thirty years ago he was probably where I am now, a man gaining valuable skills by fixing-up stuff around the house. Learning by screwing up doors, successes coming few and far between. To my wife, her dad hung the moon, and that's how it should be. But I can't compare myself to him or others with valuable experiences, just like I can't compare my students' education levels to mine. As math teachers would say, it's apples to oranges.

So tonight I will hold my head up high because I am the man who successfully hung the office door. When it's discovered in the morning that the door sticks something bad, I'll return to my incompetent reputation and surrender my Man Card again. That or blame it on shifting tectonic plates.

A Beautiful Living Room

Leaky Tent. Soaked sleeping bag. Visible breath.

It was 3:00 A.M. I had been trying to fall asleep for maybe two hours, and at that point I was just praying for sunrise.

It's no stretch to say that the annual "Mantrip" was off to a rocky start. Let's start at the beginning of that day.

We woke Wednesday morning in my brother's new home in Amarillo in quite a melancholy mood. A torrent of rain that night had created quite a washout on his property, which, with more storms forecasted, threatened to worsen in the following days.

Undeterred, we loaded up the pickup trucks like the Beverly Hillbillies, only without Granny on the rocking chair, and headed west. The trip itself was uneventful, and by the time crossed the border into Colorado, spirits were high. We made camp at 10,000 feet on a beautiful spot overlooking the Conejos River some 300 feet below. Gazing at the river, one of us happened to look up at a mountain obscured by an omnious rainstorm that was heading our way.

The original plan was to set up camp, then run down the hill to fly fish the evening green drake hatch. Setting up included a gazebo with walls for food storage and preparation, a modefied fire ring (hourglass shaped for a bonfire and for cooking,) a big canvas tent with air mattresses, cots and such, a shower tent, and finally a latrine tent. Now it takes about two hours to set up camp by the book. We didn't have that much time.

We worked fast and nearly managed to set up the essentials before the clouds let loose. We took shelter in the trucks and waited for the lightning to abate. It soon became evident that the rain was not going to let up, so we got out and worked through it like real men, not complaining about being soaked.

About 9:00 that night, after not doing any fishing, we saw upon entering the canvas tent that the treated material was leaking, and that our bedding was getting soaked. We had planned on getting out of our wet clothes and into a dry bed, but it now became apparent that we needed a tarp. Amazingly enough, six grown men who had made numerous trips to the mountains all forgot to bring one. So my brother and I headed down the road about an hour away to see if a friend had one at his cabin. When we got back to camp without a tarp, we found out that there had been more problems.

The tent stove got a bit too hot and burned the tarp we were using for a floor. It was also giving off a poisonous odor from the lacquer finish being burned off which made one of our friends sick. It had to be dragged out of the tent with a pair of pliers. Without the heat of the stove in the tent, it got very cold that night. Now we're back to the beginning of this story.

So what is so fun about camping out in the mountains? This question has permeated my thinking since that night. The fishing was good, the weather did improve, and we managed to stay dry the rest of the trip, but that couldn't replace that fact that I had a perpetual case of altitude sickness, I smelt like a campfire, I was exhausted, and I hadn't showered since I left Amarillo. Aside from the discomfort, it was easy to become soured after that first night. Finally on the last evening, it hit me.

I had just finished taking pictures of the setting sunlight on the top of the mountains when I sat down in my camp chair. The fire was stoked and we friends all took our turns poking sticks at the burning logs on the fire as the stars, all billion of them, came out for the first time that trip. I had somehow forgotten that I go for the simplicity of it all. We sat around the fire and cracked jokes in the most beautiful living room God could have created.

Move over Griswalds!

It wasn't Wally World we were visiting, and my great aunt Edna didn't die, but my family vacation mirrored nearly every other tragedy in National Lampoon's Vacation.

Beforehand, I gave myself a budget of $1000 for the trip, inclusive of everything from lodging, food, attractions, and intangibles.

We should have known fate was telling us not to go when a few days before departure, I used a free tire rotation gift certificate and the mechanic ended up putting on a new tire, aligning the front end, and replacing the brakes and rotors. To add insult to injury, the bill came out $150 more than he had promised me on the phone. So before starting out, we were already $450 in the hole.

My wife Angela mentioned that God was trying to tell us not to go on vacation. I disagreed and got my way. I should have listened to her.

The drive up to the Black Hills of South Dakota was pleasant enough. We left my parents' house in Western Kansas at 5:00 in the morning, enjoyed a sack lunch at Chimney Rock in the panhandle of Nebraska, and took in a viewing of a sinkhole littered with mammoth skeletons in Hot Springs before rolling into Hill City, South Dakota just before evening. The temperature was a cool sixty-five degrees and my family basked in the fading light of the sun setting behind the pine-littered ridge to the west as I casted a fly at some hungry trout in the little creek behind our cabin. It was bliss. The next morning my wife's words took on a prophetic tone.

We drove to Rapid City, population 76,000, to go to Wal Mart (it was thirty-eight degrees that morning and all I had brought was shorts and tee shirts!) One sweatshirt later, I drove towards a fly shop to pick up some flies, a book on fly fishing the Black Hills, and some information from the local experts. On the way I saw the temperature gage on the car's control panel rise to nearly 200 degrees, so I made an about-face, ran back to Wal Mart, and bought some more antifreeze. When I popped open the hood I saw that the car didn't need any antifreeze. This is where I started to panic.

We drove to the nearest garage, a Jiffy Lube, and the grease monkeys there went above and beyond to try to find a mechanic who could get me in immediately. This hospitality was something that everyone from the Black Hills seems to possess. I am totally convinced that they are the nicest people on earth, but I am getting off topic.

A man from a Ford garage next door just happened in on the conversation and told me that he would look at the car for me. I handed him the key and my wife, the kids, and I spent the morning at a park. When he finally called me around lunch time, he told me that not only did my thermostat need replaced (what I was hoping for) but also that the water pump was bad. I quickly added the math in my head and guessed around $200-$250.

He quoted me $600!

We spent lunch and all afternoon at a Chevy dealership looking for a new car and being assisted by a salesman named-and I am not making this up- Jerry Maguire. It took every fiber of my body not to ask him to "Show me the money!" To make things even tougher, all the cars in the lot had been transferred to the civic center downtown. We would run downtown, look at a car, run back up to the dealership, get quoted a ridiculous price, run back to the civic center and start the whole process over again, the whole time keeping an eye on the heat gage and praying for green lights. By five o'clock that afternoon, it became apparent that we were not going to be able to purchase a new car because the financial people at the dealership had gone home for the night and we were still $3000 apart on price. I can't even describe how frustrated we were. We had wasted a whole day of vacation and we were no nearer to having the situation resolved, so we did the only logical thing we could do; we went to church. It was the best thing we did that day.

Afterwards we drove back up to Hill City, probably around a 1000 foot climb, and made a phone call to a mechanic from Rapid City named Mark that the guys at the Jiffy Lube had suggested. This is what we should have done in the first place.

Mark quoted us $200 for parts and labor and that next day back in Rapid City, while he replaced the parts, his secretary gave us an auto tour of Rapid City before dropping us off at the mall to hang out for a few hours. As I said before, the people of the Black Hills are the nicest people on earth, outside of the unethical mechanic that quoted us $600.

That afternoon, we received our fixed car plus a new air filter that Mark threw in, and in the euphoria of finally being able to start our vacation, we decided that this glorious moment was the right time to visit Mount Rushmore. For those of you who haven't been to Mount Rushmore, you travel uphill from Rapid City to Keystone, then travel drastically uphill for a few more miles, taxing your engine the whole way. We might as well have been driving up Mount Everest. When we finally parked beneath the presidents, the temperature on our car's heat gage read 220 degrees! Aaauuuugggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!

That next morning we mulled over our options. We talked about just leaving and trying to get our money back on the final few nights of the cabin. We could write down the phone number of a mechanic in every town on the way back home. I spoke with my dad for advice and he asked if we had our radiator blown out with an air hose. I told him we hadn't. Not wanting to go back to Rapid City for a third day in a row, I opted to wait until late morning to get it into the only shop in Hill City. Ten minutes with the air hose and the man blew out massive quantities of wheat chaff, bugs, and dirt. That afternoon was the first time since we had been there where we felt at-ease. We were able to salvage one and one-half days of our vacation, during which time my boys and I were able to tour Custer State Park, catch a few trout and take home a few memories.

We survived the trip, getting home in one piece with our dignity and well over our budget. I think back to family vacations when I was a kid and I recall car troubles being part of the equation. Apparently things haven't changed. It's a tradition maybe my kids will be able to break when they become fathers with starry-eyed dreams of the great American vacation. Feel free to comment on any National Lampoon Vacation incidents that you have had. I would love to hear your stories!

Men's Slow Pitch Softball- A Love Story

The weekend warrior. Reclaiming one's youth. Great in his own mind. A has been. A never was.

Anyone have a good remedy for a pulled hamstring? How 'bout two bad hammies?

My father was my hero when I was a kid. Mom would take my brother and me to watch the Shelton team. Officially we were sponsored by Pizza Hut, but most of the team was made up with my family members. Dad was a slick second baseman. Uncle Ronnie pitched. Uncle Dick played short stop. Finally Uncle Kenny manned left field. When my older brother turned sixteen he joined up to make 1/2 of the team Sheltons. I was only two years behind and day-dreamed about being the sixth, but Dad retired before I could play.

But growing up, I watched my Dad turn double plays with the fluidity that would make the toughest managers in MLB history crack a smile. He could turn on a pitch and actually hit the third base bag with the ball five times out of ten. His game was exacting. My uncles were great in their own rights. Kenny was a very capable left fielder. Ronnie threw pitches with such high angles that hitters constantly popped up. Uncle Dick was a vacuum cleaner at short and was a beautiful opposite-field hitter.

Oh yeah, they never lost.

Now that is to take liberties. Sure they lost a game or two but it seems like for ten years they went undefeated in league. It wasn't until the Shelton brothers started reaching their forties that they became vulnerable. Dad's range shortened with his bad knees so he was relegated to catcher. Kenny had a tougher time getting a strong throw in from the outfield. Dick's shoulder bothered him so much that he had to sidearm flip the ball to first, then moved to second for shorter throws. Ronnie was gun shy from getting hit on shots up the middle and couldn't move out of the way so easily. And then one year they took second in league. It was quite the depressing moment to see my childhood heros... lose. How could they lose? They were invulnerable in my eyes. Well, now I know why.

I am a mere thirty-five years old, still young in my own eyes, but then my eyes don't aren't accustomed to physical activity. The last five years I have given up on playing serious tournaments and relegated myself to church league. I have gone from a speedy outfielder making remarkable plays to a short stop for only one reason: I don't like to run out to the outfield every inning.

I'm getting old.

When I look at myself, I don't see an aging man. I still see that eighteen year-old who had very few physical limitations. I am the man who doesn't need to run and stretch before a game, doesn't need to warm up the arm. Of course this is all false. And last night it finally came to a head.

In what would be my final games of the season, my last swings at the plate this summer, I invited my wife and kids to watch. I had a romantic idea that my wife would marvel at my softball prowess, my kids would call me their hero.

So I took the field with my normal excitement, and in playing against a team that was vastly superior to our rag-taggers (myself included) we were able to keep the game close the whole way. Nursing a hamstring pull, I was not going to be able to turn a single into a double, or a double into a triple like I could in my youth, but I would put on a show all the same. And I got my chances.

I dove for and snared line drives, turned double plays (one of which I tweaked my other hamstring,) and made an assist on a cut-off from the outfield when an arrogant kid tried to go for an inside-the-park home run. The center fielder on my team even called me Derek Jeter on one play. I hit safely two times out of three and came a few feet short of a home run on one swing. I scored the winning run in extra innings on a sacrifice fly, despite being hobbled by my two ageing legs. I gave it everything I had. It was a great way to finish a year.

Caked from head-to-toe with dirt, I went into the stands to see my kids. They too were busy playing in the dirt. I asked my wife what she thought of my performance and she said, "You we're kind of slow out there. You had to dive for a lot of balls. You should have let the center fielder play short stop. He's really fast."

When she noticed my baloon deflating, she quickly added, "But I thought you played very well, honey!"

So it's morning now. I have two ace bandages wrapped around my legs, a cold pack in each. I have taken 600 mg of Ibuprofen to ease the pain in my back and I definitely don't yawn and stretch, or else every muscle in my body will cramp up at once. And I am thinking that I am not eighteen anymore. I can still play the game in a semi-competative church league, but at what cost? I remember my dad coming home from softball very sore, sore for days and I couldn't understand it. I understand it now. Dad held on until he turned forty. I don't think I will last that long. Maybe it's time to hang up the spikes.

On the other hand, I bet I will feel different next summer!