I need a nap. 

It’s only 9:10am and I’m totally exhausted.  Not because I didn’t get some quality sleep last night.  No problem there.  Not because I got up at the crack of dawn.  I didn’t. 

I’m totally tapped out because I just spent the past hour or so putting together a Paperless Post invite for my 8 year-old’s birthday party this weekend.  Typically, my wife Hilary has always handled outbound invites like this one.  It appeared so facile, Norman Rockwellian, sweet, when all I had to do was open my copy of the polished emailed invite. 

But now I’ve seen the guts of it, and it ain’t pretty.

First there’s the what the “card” should look like.  I write “card,” because this is all digital now.  No need to kill any trees.  Or more accurately, no need to use any trees that someone else killed.  No need to shuffle down to the Post Office to scrounge up a roll of stamps, even though those auto-stick stamps are WAY better than the older versions with the stale Doublemint “flavor.” 

And of course, we had already decided on a theme. 

What, you say you don’t choose a proper theme for your child’s birthday party?? You say you don’t think your parents even threw you a “party” for all of your own childhood birthdays?? 

Welp, times have changed, and there must be a birthday party.  Every year.  And it damn well better be meaningful.  And impressive. Consider renting a clown or bounce house.  And not some shitty clown and shitty bounce house — the painted, arched eyebrows better be crisp, and the house better not have any duct tape over bloated seams.  What kind of parent are you?? 

This year’s theme (sound of crisp manilla envelope holding major award on stiff card inside, ripping via pointer finger, me wearing black tie standing at the dais) is baseball.  Fortunately for us, a school family friend has just recently opened up a new batting cage facility in the Presidio.  It’s called Batter’s Box SF.  And I believe young Master Everett’s birthday party at said facility with be the first birthday party at said facility.  How ’bout me?  You can keep your clown and bounce house.  We don’t need no stinking clown and bounce house!  At least not this year. 

So we have ourselves a theme.

Fortunately, the theme limits the Paperless Post digital card options.  Otherwise, given that I am given to distraction, I would have been pouring over a few hundred cards in search of the perfect font.  I choose a baseball-looking card, seems reasonable. 

Then comes the grammar and syntax part.  Exhausting.  I went with the default “Fenway” font for the card.  Looked good, but was so frilly.  I’d say 50% chance that I spelled Everett’s first name wrong or our last name wrong.  I’m not sure; I just can’t tell whether that is an “L” or an “i.”  Hopefully our guests will suffer from vision worse than mine, or maybe they won’t suffer from font-obsession if their vision is good. 

Then comes the invite list.  Stressful.  I have to navigate some written rules and some unwritten rules to make sure that I don’t offend (a) Everett’s school, (b) Everett’s friends, (c) Everett’s friends’ parents, (d) my wife, (e) Everett’s basketball team, (f) said batting cages facility, and (g) my own very tenuous sensibilities.  Because I am the world’s best dad, I made sure to have Everett feel involved and engaged in the invite process.  So this morning I had him hand write a list of his invitees.  The list is awesome.  I would love to post a photo of it, but I would be offending at least three of the potentially offended groups above.  His little list is so cute, quaint, Norman Rockwellian (again).

And totally incomplete.  An absolute land mine had I latched onto only that list.  I can’t even imagine the full parade of horribles that would have transpired had I not scrutinized the hell out of his list. 

Instead, I cross-checked, spell-checked, classroom-checked, YMCA hoops team roster-checked, school website-checked, school family directory-checked.  I don’t think I crammed so much research into writing term papers in undergrad. I am not kidding.  Like I said, totally exhausting.  But I managed to come up with a seemingly bulletproof, offensive-proof list.  I think.  I hope. 

My anxiety reached a crescendo when it came to actually having to click on the “SEND NOW TO ALL GUESTS” button.  The button is bright red.  The font actually seems a little more prominent than any other copy on the Paperless Post website.  I felt like I was faced with hitting the proverbial BIG RED BUTTON launching a nuclear attack.  Felt like JFK mulling over a short list of options during the heat of the Cuban Missile Crisis.  At least he had Bobby.  I wish I could show my birthday party invite “preview” and my draft list of invitees to Bobby.  No Bobby for me. 

So here I am.  My right hand is shaking as I try to guide its forefinger to make the “click” on the touchpad.  My vision blurs, heart pounding and pushing blood now with a new squirt or 3 of adrenaline.  I use my left hand, grabbing the wrist of my right, trying desperately to steady my button-pushing finger.  And out of the corner of my eye, you better believe I am very aware of the “delete” button.  Don’t look at it directly.  Ah, shit I just looked at it.  Don’t look at it!  Don’t…Look…At…It!  Must…push…red…BUTTON!

You get the picture.

The (right) button was pushed, I pulled myself back together, and now I sit in fear of an imminent RSVP with a comment about how I misspelled my son’s name or otherwise truly screwed up royally.  The odds of this whole thing not descending into an exercise in complete, catastrophic failure?  Mmmm, 9%.  But I am in too deep at this point. 

Besides, Everett’s actual birthday was in December, so we’ve already messed it up.  Nowhere to go but up!

Thanks for reading.

Among a slew of others, one of my favorite bad habits is something that has come to be known around here as “faxing your passport.”  I’m one of the least “handy” people you’ll meet, which is odd because my dad and my step-dad are both ridiculously handy. 

Examples. 

When I was maybe 12, my father one day decided he wanted to build a deck with a sliding glass door off off of our then-deck-less and sliding glass door-less summer camp.  He decided this with seeming spontaneity, while standing in front of a blank wall.  Within a minute or two, he’d jacked the chainsaw to life and carved a man-sized, square hole in the wall.  I can still recall the sweet smell of the saw’s fifty-to-one oil and gas fuel mix.  Over the next few weeks he built the deck.  More or less on his own, as I recall. 

I could never do that.

My step-father, for his part, has crafted room-sized gazebos, legit pieces of furniture.  He’s like the Edward Scissorhands of woodworking.  Amazing.

I could never do that, either.

My creativity in this area, if I have any, lies in conjuring up and executing Homo Habilis solutions to urgent situations.  By that I mean caveman-like solutions.  MacGyver with his IQ cut in half.  In modern times, it turns out that this particular kind of Savant Syndrome is prettied up with the name, “Life Hacking.”  That sounds and looks better than my caveman, but the caveman is mine, so I’ll keep it. 

Examples.

The memory of the first one is hazy, but I’ll give it a shot:  About 20 years ago, my wife and I sat in the rear of a musty taxi, en route to one airport or another.  Maybe Boston.  Maybe Syracuse.  And she might not have been my wife yet.  Regardless, one of us had forgotten to bring our driver’s license along for the ride.  Rather than turn the taxi around to retrieve the ID, I convinced myself that the gate agent would gladly accept a substitute:  A faxed copy of the license.  We didn’t need to waste valuable time careening through the streets back from whence we had come; we needed to find a friend to break into the apartment, grab the license, and fax a copy of it to me at a number to be determined, at the airport.  The number would be need-to-know for said friend, just get the license, get thee to a neighborhood fax machine place, and stand by for further instruction.  Brilliant, right? 

Um, no.  But this was the genesis of the “fax your passport” phenomenon, at least as best as I can recall.

More recently, my business partner and I were producing an America’s Cup event on board a World War II Liberty Ship here in San Francisco. (I know this sounds completely out of the blue and odd, but it’s true.  More on work-stuff in later blog posts.  So for now, just go with it.)  We had a skeleton crew of our own staff and ship volunteers, and we were expecting a few hundred ticket-holding guests within a matter of minutes. We were stretched thin, chief cook and bottle washer-style.  The ship sits about thirty feet higher than the pier, or “apron,” that runs alongside.  Many many trips up and down the rickety gangway were made. 

Those trips could be time-consuming, particularly if the one-way gangway was trying to accommodate two-way traffic.  My partner was up top, I was down on the apron.  Far enough away that shouting was required to communicate.  He needed a half-dozen plastic zip ties ASAP, in order to secure a decorative red, white and blue bunting to the side of the ship.  No time to waste, and the gangway was packed with harried folks in a rush.  I looked down at the zip ties in my hand, then thought of the Granny Smith I had just sunk my teeth into.  I plucked the apple from my mouth, stuck the zip ties into it like a pin cushion (or voodoo doll, if you want to get a little weird), then hurled my little caveman solution up to my partner.  Good throw, good catch, problem solved.  Caveman-style.  Fax your passport-style. 

This blog format prevents me from regaling you with dozens of other examples.  Plus, I actually can’t remember many more of them.  Oh, there was one where I hoisted a bed frame up three floors to the rooftop deck of my North End apartment in Boston.  With a rope just like the one you climbed in grade school gym class 35 years ago.  Pulling the frame up from the street maybe 40 feet below.  In the middle of winter.  I would get the frame almost all the way up, and my forearms would completely fatigue, fat with blood like a rock climber’s. I wrapped the fibrous brown rope a couple loops around the rickety deck posts, then paced around the snow-covered deck, opening and closing my fingers in rapid succession to regain feeling.  At one point, the poorly-tied loops gave way while I was pacing in circles like Bluto in full-tantrom. I heard a “FZZZZZZZZZZZ” as the heavy frame went weightless and the rope rubbed wood, then a “CRAAAAACK” when the frame found ground. 

I was afraid to peer over the ledge.  Someone would surely be pinned underneath, squashed like a cricket, arms and legs akimbo, poking out from underneath.  Or at minimum, the bed frame would be wedged in the front seat of someone’s DeVille, windshield smashed to bits.  And most likely, said DeVille was the prize possession of one or another of the mobsters or quasi-mobsters who still populated the North End. 

Miraculously, no one was killed and no DeVille’s were devalued.

I resumed, from the beginning.  But the frame kept getting stuck on the “lip” or overhang of the roof, and I just could not maneuver past that.  Enter the passport-faxing.  I re-tied the rope (better, this time), found a broom handle, then positioned the broom handle with my foot so that the rope would drape over the end of the broom handle, giving me a better angle to get the bed frame past the overhang.  Ridiculous, right?  Well it worked.  Caveman-style.  Fax your passport-style.

There was another time, involving the same apartment and an over-sized couch.  Again it was winter time with the requisite, non-cooperative snowbanks.  I had to get the big couch into the tiny apartment, and the only viable point of entry was an alleyway window on the 3rd floor, far smaller than the one my father had chainsawed.  Didn’t have a tape measure handy, so I used my scarf.  Measuring the couch’s width with wool pulled taught between my fists on the street, then running up 3 flights of stairs, fists still clenched, then fists and scarf pushed up to the postage-stamp sized window.  A perfect match!  I’ll spare you the gory details, but that gym class rope was involved, as was a rusty pulley the size of a steering wheel, and a couple barely-willing buddies to help me with the faxing.  One of the buddies nearly lost his head, literally, as I pulled on the rope from the alley below with too much force, dislodging the pulley from the roof, falling in the direction of his head poked out of the window.  I yelled “get back!” just in time to avoid my buddy’s head being plunked from the steel pulley now loose and free-falling towards the alley.  It bounced about ten feet in the air, by the way, which was weird.

Which reminds me:  To the best of my knowledge, no one has been hurt by any of this passport-faxing.  At least not physically.  At least not yet.  But tomorrow is another day.

Thanks for reading.

And thus begins another season of San Francisco Little League baseball….

I’ve just returned from 90 minutes with my new group of fresh-faced, mostly 8 year-olds. Best 90 minutes I’ve spent in recent memory. Felt more like 15 minutes. Maybe fewer than that. Not nearly long enough.

I’ve been coaching Little League now for something on the order of 14 or 15 seasons. I can’t believe I get to do this year after year. It has become a big part of who I am. By now, I have a decent handle on the car trunk full of the requisite gear: polyester jerseys, rationed-out bats, helmets and first aid kits. All of which will fill my trunk and hurt my gas mileage for the next few months.

But I have learned that there are, in particular, a couple of very key ingredients that are the most important:

– One white plastic bucket that used to hold paint or maybe plaster or stucco. Now it holds approximately 55 baseballs accumulated over the course of the aforementioned seasons coached. These 55 balls are the backbone of our season. They will suffer through rain, cold, mud, fog, regular beatings from metal bats and from my wooden fungo, and hopefully some baking sunshine on occasion. They will generally be stuffed into the plaster bucket, musty canvas bags, and dark car trunks, unceremoniously. With nary a complaint. But they will never be left behind, forgotten about in the high grass after a long practice or chaotic late-inning frenzy. I have a strict “No dun sphere left behind” policy.

Some of the 55 in my bucket have been in the mix since my 12 year-old was a 5 year-old. Some have been scarred by permanent black-markered letters. A “B” to distinguish our balls from others’, for sure.

A couple tattooed with “Nice Catch!” or “My Man!” As Max grew older, I’d hit high and l-o-n-g fly balls to him in the outfield at a park near our flat. Just the two of us. I’d scribble one phrase or another on the ball, toss it up with my left hand and crush it with a wooden bat gripped by my 2 hands. Max would manage to corral it (or not), and read my message scrawled between the seams. Big smile, visible even from deep in the outfield. This is good stuff, and pulling these particular old balls up from the bottom of my bucket, unexpectedly during a practice years later, feels pretty damn good.

– One 45 year-old right-shouldered rotator cuff. Has served me well over the years, and seems to be holding up surprisingly OK. Thankfully I wasn’t much of a pitcher as a kid, so I unwittingly managed to save my arm for my own kids some 30 years later.

Over the course of a season (and I am coaching both sons’ teams), I reckon I will throw perhaps 40,000 “pitches” to kids weighing between 60 and 160 pounds. In about a month from today, this will start to catch up with me. My shoulder will ache. I’ll be in the habit of stuffing my back pocket with a dozen or so Advils at all times, and swimming in the Bay–about which I am truly passionate–will be painful. Each reach and pull with my right arm feels a tiny bit nauseating.

I will gladly sacrifice the various parts of my right shoulder as the season wears on. What are those parts for, if not to bond with these boys, maybe teach them a few technical pieces here and there, but most importantly to teach them to love that bucket of balls as I do. And to appreciate what that bucket of balls will teach them (and me) over the course of the long season.

So the Little League season is here. My bucket of red-stitched balls is ready. My shoulder is fresh. Bring it on, boys. Release the Hounds!

Thanks for reading.

“Freshly Pressed!” I’m clearly fixed, no longer struggling with balancing all that needs to be balanced! I have everything totally figured out! My prayers, if I prayed, have been answered!

The out-of-the blue email from an earnest, affable WordPress editor is welcome news. I’m practically giddy. More than “a major award” shipped in a crate marked “fragile” to the “Christmas Story” dad. Less than, say, a 2am call from the Norwegian Nobel Committee. In between those two somewhere. Yeah.

I’ll take it.

Yesterday, the morning after the WordPress editor’s email, I am reminded how far I am from being “freshly pressed,” as I think of that phrase. Precise in a military boot camp sort of way. Spinning on heels to carve a tight corner. Bed sheets taut. Everything neat and clean. Yeah, like that. I’m just like that.

Well, not exactly.

My sons, 12 and 8, are home from school. This is “Ski Week,” after all. Only we aren’t skiing this week. We all went a few weeks back, and more recently, I’m still in the throes of Coccygodynia. The snow up there still leaves something to be desired, too, but had the timing worked out better, we would maybe be at 6,000 feet for the week instead of at 12 feet for the week.

I’m not complaining, I relish every opportunity I have to breath the same air as my boys. But as any honest parent will admit, that air can get a bit stale at times. “Stale” as in, not “Freshly Pressed.”

Which brings us back to yesterday morning.

Sitting–gingerly still, thanks to my overzealous Tahoe Boys Weekend–at our dining room table. Captain Kirk at the comm, surveying his orderly domain. In total control. Surveying it so competently, in fact, that he’s comfortable going where no man has gone before. That image inspires confidence.

But my chain of command at home is far more tenuous. My competence is fleeting.

I had planned on attending a pretty important all-day meeting in Oakland, the conclusion of an 8-week capital-raising “bootcamp.” Really cool, cutting edge (you might say) stuff, about which I will hopefully blog on a later date. The meeting is supposed to take place, in the real world, in the properly appointed conference room of a law firm. Dark wood. Long rectangular table. Videotaped for posterity. Perhaps 20 attendees paying rapt attention, the future of their nascent companies at stake. Meaningful. Important. Important enough that I pretty much have to go. Hop in the car and go. That’s my plan.

I look into Max’s eyes while assessing his readiness to take the comm for the next several hours. I have been prepping him for about 48 hours now. Innoculating him with “be a good big brother,” “I need you to step up here,” and so forth. I believe he is up to the challenge, though his little brother studies me warily. That could be fear or sizing me up to see how much screen time little brother can squeeze in while I’m away, and I’d never be the wiser.

I assess my troops and come up with a solid plan–I am “Freshly Pressed,” remember.

Condensing 12 years of parenting, 2 years of in-the-trenches co-parenting of my baby sister along with my mom (another blog for another day), a couple developmental psych courses hazily recalled from undergrad, a stack of potentially relevant albeit half-read parenting books, and my God-given wits (if there is a God), I experience a stroke of brilliance.

Brilliance, I said.

A schedule for the boys while I am gone. In half-hour increments. Ensuring they stay on task. 30-minutes of cleaning up our dorm room living room, putting away long-folded clean clothes, walking our animal, hitting a few buckets of baseballs into our loyal backyard Bow Net. Punctuated by equal, alternating increments of “free time.” Watch the Olympics. Play on your iDevices. It’s “free,” baby! Go crazy!

I walk my soldiers through the schedule, written neatly on a small whiteboard the size of a breadbox (really). If I had a red-tipped wooden pointer and Canadian Mountie pants, I would have gladly used both to enhance my authority in this moment.

As if I needed to. This was the perfect plan, rigid yet flexible, playful yet disciplined, the very model of parenting. No wonder I’ve been annointed “Freshly Pressed.” Wouldn’t be surprised if I do get that middle of the night Nobel nod. Wooh! Super parent!

As I’m smiling self-satisfiedly, basking in the glow of my brilliant schedule presentation, packing my bag for the meeting, my youngest comes shuffling into the kitchen behind me. Crying and fighting back crying, with a message for me. Max was apparently not ready for the comm. Instead, he has just delivered a charlie horse-inducing punch to his younger brother’s thigh. And it’s not even 8am yet.

I sigh, probably not taking another breath into my deflated lungs for a solid minute. Defeated, I bail on the meeting and make plans to join by calling in.

From my dining room table. Wearing sweats. And a flat brim cap from Max’s new baseball club. Unshaven. With twice-microwaved coffee in a stained mug. And a half-eaten Clif Bar. With the dog licking my (apparently salty) ankles. My hand-written schedule, propped only minutes ago on the fireplace mantle. It mocks me.

“Freshly Pressed”?

I beg to differ.

Thanks for reading.

I still am not physically able to sit on this chair.  I mean, I suppose I could lower my body to the plateau, achieving a close facsimile of the international sign for “sit.”  But I definitely couldn’t put anything close to my full weight down on that.  Not without yelping in pain, and drawing unwanted stares from my fellow coffeehouse patrons.  Fellow coffeehouse patrons who, fortunate bastards, don’t suffer from my current malady. 

I’m fairly certain I broke my arse.  

It has been 11 days since “the incident.”  I’ve managed to get back on the horse as far as walking, running, cycling, and swimming.  Reaching for an errant toss of the baseball from my 8 year-old during a game of catch?  Feels like someone sniped me with a well-aimed flick of the crossbow string.  Stretching for a low backhand a foot off the grass, searing pain, and I instinctively whip my head around my shoulder, searching for the ill-intentioned archer.  No archer.

Just a broken arse.  I think.

As I mentioned a few blog posts ago, I tripped the light fantastic at a recent Tahoe Boys Weekend.  Although I have used the phrase, “trip the light fantastic” often–I just love the way it feels coming out of my mouth–I suppose I never truly had a handle on what said phrase actually means.  Now I can speak from experience with the phrase.  From a position of authority.  I haven’t looked it up yet, but I’m reasonably confident that the (perhaps the secondary or tertiary) meaning is, “to fall down slick hardwood stairs, landing on one’s coccyx with a full-bodied thud, often accompanied by the tripeee seeing stars.”  Check, check, and check. 

I took a quick inventory while catching my breath on all fours.  Elated not to have a split-open skull, wrist bent the wrong way, or chicken-on-the-bone lower leg.  My arse was numb.  I cut my teeth on so many Bugs Bunny, Roadrunner, et al cartoons featuring near space falls onto cartoon character buttocks, with our hero or villain dusting himself (always himself) off and moving on to the next frame.  So I do not, as a rule, assign a ton of concern to broken butts.  Plenty of meat down there, anyhow, to protect me.  Evolution at work, you might even say.  Net net, I got to my feet, feeling pretty good about myself. 

But it’s now been eleven days.  That’s practically two weeks.  As with everything else, I run a quick Google Search.  Regular readers will appreciate why I am very careful about exactly what I type into the search box:  “My broken ass,” instead of “a broken ass.”  The latter would surely trigger some silent alarms at my next pass through security at SFO.  I appreciate Google ignoring my profanity-crippled search as a kindly uncle or school nurse would, accommodating the fact that I’m in a pained state.  So I search.

It appears based upon my extensive 30-second research that I may have, indeed, broken my tailbone.  My coccyx.  And the dull ache punctuated by occasional crossbow target practice is known as “tailbone pain,” or “Coccygodynia.”  That is not a good-sounding word.  It definitely does not feel good coming out of my mouth.  If someone told me health officials had identified a strain of “Coccygodynia” in the Bay, I would not swim in those waters.  I am surprised that “Trip the Light Fantastic” and “Coccygodynia” are not listed as antonyms.  They should be.  

Google assures me that my Coccygodynia will go away away on its own within a few weeks.  Or months.  Months?!? In the meantime, I am encouraged to do the following:  First, sit completely upright with proper posture — keeping my back firmly against the chair, knees level with my hips, feet flat on the floor and shoulders relaxed.  If I was the kind of person who habitually sat in chairs this way, very proper and impressive, I probably would’t have tripped the light fantastic in the first place.  

Second, Google tells me to lean forward while sitting down.  I can do this, though I’m not sure I understand given the vague instruction.  And I’m certain my fellow coffeehouse patrons will by this point be keeping a very close peripheral eye on me.  Thirty-five percent chance, too, that my following these first two steps will lead directly to a frightened barrista activating the silent alarm on the counter’s underside.  But I press on.  

Step Three says sit on a doughnut-shaped pillow or wedge (V-shaped) cushion.  That sounds kinda nice, like meditation maybe.  Final Step?  Apply heat or ice to the affected area.  Nope.  No sir.  This would be the final straw, and the odds of my being frogwalked by the local police out of the new Peet’s on Chestnut Street go way up.   Probably 75%, maybe more.

There is one last resort if the other steps don’t bring relief.  Surgically remove the tailbone.  A Coccygectomy.  Say what?!?  Just remove that bad boy–the coccyx–surgically.  Seems a bit extreme to me.  And while I don’t have any particular attachment to my coccyx, I just think I’d like to keep as much of my spine in place, intact, as-is for as long as I can.  

So I guess I will pick up a v-shaped cushion and ice pack and head out for a cup of joe.  At least this dull ache is a reminder of a truly memorable weekend that doesn’t come around that often.  And I’m OK with that.  

Thanks for reading.  

A few weeks back I was tooling through the Richmond neighborhood in San Francisco.  Rushing a bit to drop my eldest, Max, onto the Polo Fields in time for a weekday soccer practice.  Feels like I spend a lot of time rushing in this way, now that I think about it.  Must work on that, try to slow down a bit.  But I digress.

I was headed south, in the general direction of the ideal northerly Golden Gate Park insertion point.  I frequently overshoot or undershoot these points, so I was decidedly focused on ensuring I picked the precise, proper avenue.  One number off and I’m stuck in a Pac-Man game, going right-right-right-right or left-left-left to get back on track.  Performing a time-compressed cost-benefit analysis regarding one “do not do this” sign or the other.  And there’s no time for that.  Focused.

In the right-hand side of my windshield, I see something.  It doesn’t register at first, since we’re crossing a street teeming with pedestrians, shoppers, families, bike-riders.  A moment later I realize something is off, so I set my big toe on the brake a bit and slow down, giving my consciousness a chance to catch up with my subconsciousness.  Then I see what triggered my reptilian brain:  An African American gentlemen bee-bopping down the street, joyfully bouncing to whatever music flowed from his Walkman (yes, Walkman) through his in-flight earphones, and into his ears.  He seemed really happy.  A little too happy, even.

Maybe his overly pleasant affect and extra giddyup in his step was due to the axe in his hand.

A big, bright blue-handled axe.  In his hand.

He worked the prop like Willy Wonka tooling around the Chocolate Factory.  Like the lead marcher in the marching band with the ramrod-straight back, Nutcracker caps and batons held like a champagne flute.  Because he wasn’t ranting and raving and otherwise behaving consistent with what one would expect of an axe murderer, those around him were seemingly oblivious.  I don’t often do this–in fact I can’t remember the last time I did this (on purpose)–but I dialed 911.  The call with police dispatch was almost as odd as the axeman.

Police:  “911, What is your emergency?”

Me:  “So there’s a gentlemen walking down the street, at the corner of X and Y, a bunch of other people are around, and he has a big blue-handled axe in his hand.”

Police: “OK.  Can you please describe him?”

Me:  “Uh, sure.  He’s the guy with a big blue-handled axe in his hand.”

Police:  “Can you be more specific?”

Me:  “Um, well, other than the big axe in his hand? Sure, well, he’s African American, wearing a Walkman with headphones, and really really happy.  He’s like dancing down the street. I don’t mean to make light of this, but he looks like he’s in the Soul Train line dance.  He’s pretty distinctive, will be very hard to miss.”

Police:  “OK, thanks, we’ll send a unit out to take a look.”

And so I drive on, still tracking for an on-time arrival at the Polo Fields.  Shaking my head a bit at how weird this was.  How thoroughly unsatisfying.  Not sure what I was expecting.  A Key to the City from Mayor Lee, probably not.  But something other than the dull, disinterested monotone of the 911 operator?  That would have been nice.

Maybe she’s just numb to all the tragedy and chaos out there.  The tragedy and chaos that yuppie folks like me are typically spared thanks to the mind-numbing behind-the-scenes work of people like the woman on the other end of that call.  Is it possible that my axeman–so seemingly urgent to me, about to go on a killing spree at any moment–was only number ten on the threat list on a whiteboard in a precinct conference room?

I have no idea.  I’m still processing this stolen glimpse into the sausage factory that I don’t often see.  (And this is in spite of the fact that I worked for the District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan one hot summer.  A slight risk of contracting tuberculosis from a visit to the lockup, though, apparently pales in comparison to thrill of seeing my jive-walking axeman.)

And what, you may ask, does this all have to do with Grandma’s Lemonade?  I suppose just that I’m hoping the 911 operator and her colleagues make up a shit ton of it, constantly.  If anybody needs one of those molten chocolate machines but customized to dole out infinite volumes of lemonade, it’s these guys.  My chance, once-in-a-lifetime sighting of a crazy gent with a long blue axe makes for a great blog post on my little blog.  But the people who deal with this kind of thing on a regular basis aren’t blogging about it, I don’t think.  They’re trying to process it and partition it and to douse it with lemonade in a courageous attempt to live otherwise normal lives.  I wish them luck.  And all the lemonade they can drink.

Thanks for reading.

This is one blog post that I will not edit by reading the draft aloud. Not even whispering it. Technically, not even shape my lips to the vowels and consonants of it.

I have taken a vow. The vow is something on the order of 20 years old by this point. So that makes it a “solemn” vow. It is a vow of silence, of a sort. That makes the vow sound even more solemn, doesn’t it?

Roughly 20 years ago, I made a wager. The wager centered around the proper pronunciation of a proper noun. I have been known to fancy myself as something of a connoisseur when it comes to words. A sommelier of words. If words possessed umami, I would profess a preternatural ability to taste and perceive that umami. “Gun metal finish?” I’m not sure I can pick that up in a wine, no matter how pricey. But the proper way to pronounce “ennui?” I am your man.

At least I believed I was your man 20 years ago. When I manufactured the aforementioned wager, recklessly slapping my long-barreled revolver and fancy gunbelt on the sticky-Whiskey table with a thud and puff of sawdust. Walrus-mustached gunslinger. Or wordslinger, rather. You get the picture. That’s how I pictured myself.

Unprompted and ill-advisedly, I announced to our table that there is only one proper pronunciation for “Reese’s.” Only one. It rhymes with “pieces,” not “feces.” (This last sentence I did not say at the time. I wish I had, it may have ended the debate before the debate even got off the ground. But alas,….).

So confident was I in this pronouncement, unsnapping the top of my custom-leather holster, not breaking eye contact with my table mates, that I elected to throw down the gauntlet. “If the waitress pronounces it my way–the only proper way–I win. If she pronounces it your way–the improper way–I vow that I will never again say that word aloud for the remainder of my living days.”

Things did not break my way that day.

My fellow wagerers (as I recall, my future wife and future in-laws) walked away with my Colt Peace Maker, hand tooled leather holster, and cartridge belt. Had I slapped my chaps on the tabletop, they’d have confiscated those too. (Had I worn chaps, this would be a blog post of a different sort.). I twisted the ends of my walrus mustache, fingers tipping the brim of my ten-gallon, and then backed my way slowly out of that particular saloon. One backwards shuffle step at a time, not taking my unblinking eyes off of them. Not even for even a moment.

Well I’ve clearly beaten this particular metaphor to a pulp. I admit that.

However. I have also kept up my end of the hard-struck bargain. Faithfully.

Those bars made of chocolate-coated peanut butter? The candy bar name that has not been spoken, and will not be spoken. Count on it.

Thanks for reading.

I am in love with a 35 million dollar steel harp. She weighs nearly one million tons. That’s roughly the same as a half million Mini Coopers. She’s held together by 600,000 rivets. You can paint your den her color by mixing the following CMYK colors: Cyan: 0%, Magenta: 69%, Yellow: 100%, and Black: 6%. Nearly two billion cars, trucks and motorcycles have crossed her (not the angry kind of “crossed”) since she was born nearly 80 years ago.

When I am fit and rested, my fist-sized heart will collect my blood and then squeeze that blood back out 14 times between two of her fog horn blasts. That squeezey number can slide to 16 or 18 if I’m under the weather or haven’t been breaking a sweat on a faithful basis.

I see her almost every day. I always make a point of giving her a full-on drooly stare. I take her in with my eyes in a way that would likely violate stalking ordinances in most jurisdictions. Within the last year, I’ve shuffled my regular swim venue so that I can be closer to her, pulling my fingers through the same brackish water that rubbed along her buttress a few minutes ago or that will cruise underneath her a few minutes hence.

The sight of her sends an involuntary wave of relaxation through me. A deep, fulfilling sigh. And I stare.

When I am away from her for too long, I get itchy. When I return home, I am not really “home” until I lay eyes on her, or ears on her fog horns.

I got it bad.

I once was ordered to sit cross-legged on the cold, wet pavement winding towards the base of her South Tower. I had impulsively hurdled the “road closed” sign–oblivious to the high tide waves crashing on the roadway–to extend an early morning run within reach of her. To hell with the rules, I had to get closer. The Park Police were not amused, finding nothing charming in my creepy obsession. They mistook the lovesick pierce of my eyes for malevolence, figuring I had designs on targeting the bridge. This was not long after 9-11. I endured the humiliation–my name was now on their “list,” he scolded–as a small price to pay.

So what’s the point? What does this have to do with Grandma’s Lemonade?

I think it’s this: It’s important to find a way, any way, to preserve a sense of pure, unabashed wonder. Something that presses our “reset” button. That serves to recalibrate our perspective; to remind us to keep it simple.

I’m damn lucky to have this orange beauty in my backyard. I hope you’ve found your own bridge. It’s an obsession worth keeping.

Thanks for reading.

If there’s one thing I’ve managed to figure out by this point; one thing that has enabled me to enjoy (or at least try to enjoy) every person I’ve encountered in my life, it’s this: People are imperfect. Incredibly imperfect. Predictably imperfect. Perfectly imperfect. Count on it.

Ignore this essential truth, and you will consign yourself to a life of disappointment and disillusionment. Acknowledge it, and you can find something redeeming in just about anyone. After 45 years, my shit list is about 2 people deep. And even then, I’m prepared to move them off that list under the right circumstances. I aspire to have a shit list that is completely empty.

A corollary to this, for me, is that even people that show tremendous courage, that behave in objectively heroic ways–they are beautifully imperfect too. The gifted pop star who can’t mother her children. The home run hitter who is blinded by his narcissism. The ground-breaking politician with a reckless addiction.

So I am loathe to embrace anyone wholeheartedly, because we are all those MacPaint color wheels. A kaleidoscopic hodgepodge of so many traits. “Good” and “bad” but mostly everything in the circumference and in between.

Still, on occasion, someone says or writes or does something remarkable. Something that is so profoundly meaningful, so incredibly courageous, so contrary to their own self-interest. Something that makes my neck hairs bristle and cheeks flush. Something so inspiring that it’s just not good enough to “Like” or “Share” it on Facebook.

For me, the actress Ellen Page’s “coming out” speech yesterday is one such occasion.

To me, this is what it means to show true courage, to demonstrate what genuine humanity looks like. Sure, she’s not destitute and never will be. However, she undoubtedly eviscerated what Hollywood refers to as her “marketability.” Even if there are enlightened, right-thinking studio heads, there are enough movie-goers who will from this point forward refuse to see her movies. Studio heads know this. And studio heads don’t stay studio heads if they don’t churn out highly profitable movies. Ellen Page now represents a very real risk to that model. It takes real courage to act against your own self-interest, particularly acting against your own financial self-interest. Ellen Page just cost herself tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars over the remaining life of her acting career. Who among us would be willing to step forward into the hot spotlight, knowing to do so would mean giving up the prospect of hundreds of millions of dollars?

Her speech is way bigger than money, of course, and it feels wrong even to try to quantify it this way. But it’s interesting to apply dollar figures to courageous decisions. World history is full of courageous acts that are aligned with the actor’s own self-interest. Misaligned or even pulling in the opposite direction? Not so much.

While fueling up to head to a testosterone-infused baseball tourney this morning, I placed my iPhone with Ellen’s speech queued up into my 12 year-old’s hands. “I want you to watch this. This is what real courage looks like.” I hope that her speech counterbalances whatever misogynistic, materialistic (but popular) lyrics will be pumping through his headphones this weekend.

I may be a right-thinking, grown man now. But I absolutely called my childhood buddies “fags” so as to tease and demean them. So I am as guilty as anyone else in creating an environment that made and continues to make people like Ellen Page (or, more accurately, anyone with traits or beliefs that are considered “non-traditional”) feel unwelcome. Feel that they are somehow not right. That they are wrong. I can’t apologize enough for my failures there in not being a better young man, a better human. And certainly no amount of blogging at this late date is going to undo the fact that I gave currency to that hateful crap.

But you can be damn sure that I will not allow my own boys free reign to say whatever they wish to “fit in” with the crowd. I’m grateful for opportunities like Ellen Page’s speech to hold up as examples of what it means to be a “good man,” to be a “good human.” I will continue to work my ass off on this. I don’t want bigots squeezing my hands on my death bed. I want solid human beings squeezing my hands; my young men who (hopefully) have learned to look at people by the quality of their character, and to be comfortable in their own character, comfortable in their own skin. I think this is important, about as important as it gets.

Thanks for reading.