If you are up well before the sun at 4:50am to get to Modesto for your 13 year-old’s 8:00am travel soccer game, you might be a helicopter parent.

If you passed an all-too-familiar travel baseball complex 30 minutes ago in Manteca, you might be a helicopter parent.

(If you have heard of neither Modesto nor Manteca, breathe a sigh of relief, because you are likely not a helicopter parent, at least not of the Northern California variety.)

Am I a helicopter parent? I just might be.

I don’t complain, not a peep. I’m perfectly happy to set the alarm for 4:50am. I actually open my eyes at 4:40am, momentarily panicked by the lighter-than-expected backyard mostly obscured by the window shade a couple feet from my side of the bed. I navigate the dog toy-strewn carpet to the bathroom in the pitch black. Widening my eyes like a crazy person, thinking somehow this will help me see better. Help me avoid placing my bare foot down on Wailea’s marrow bone.

I have a well-oiled routine, because I’ve done this dozens of times now over the course of the last few years. A tight schedule is committed to memory, and silently running in the background.

Max rousted shortly before 5am. His bag already packed and waiting to be lifted into the Prius with minimal effort. The pajama-clad teenager slides into the backseat, his night’s slumber only interrupted for a couple minutes. Go back to sleep.

The chopper lifts off at 5am, Modesto-bound.

I know where I need to gas up. Right across the street from a Starbucks I know to be open at 5am. A handful of homeless and jet-lagged tourists wait in line with me, briefly, staring blankly at the refrigerated juices. Coffee and breakfast sandwiches — key elements of the early am road trip routine — in-hand, I pop back into the car within 2 minutes.

By 5:06am, I’m gassed up, caffeine-ready, and en route. And ahead of schedule. Waze rewards my military-like precision with a projected 10-minute arrival time cushion before the obligatory 7am show up.

The boy sleeps, snoring loudly enough that I glance back at him, thinking he’s joking. Not joking, just in deep sleep. Sweet dreams.

We pull in to the soccer “complex” — vaguely reminiscent of the maximum security prisons and military grade trucking depots nearby — with plenty of time to spare. And of course that time is already accounted for. Ten minutes is about what it takes for me to jumpstart my teenager, prodding him to finish his cold breakfast sandwich and $4 orange juice (best enjoyed by October 1, 2014). And even allotting him 30 seconds for an anxious search for his missing shinguard, his panic ultimately proving unfounded (as always).

His cleat bottoms touch down on the parking lot pavement at 6:55am. Four-dollar orange juice dangling from his fingers, shuffling towards the complex’s front gate, decked out in his team’s red uniform kit.

Mission Accomplished.

If any of this sounds familiar, you just might be a helicopter parent too.

Thanks for reading.

Everett’s first-ever travel baseball tournament game starts in 30 minutes. He’s been to this particular complex in Sunnyvale a couple dozen times. All as a spectator. Watching his big brother, who lives to be watched.

Everett does not live to be watched. He’s happiest when the spotlight is on someone else.

On the car ride down here this morning, he offered up an out-of-the blue observation about the merits of low expectations. If this were my older son, Max, I may have launched into a tirade, possibly laced with expletives, and likely including ample references to data points like the 5:50am wakeup call, the $50 “baseball bag” with neoprene bat sleeves purchased just yesterday, and the fact that I got along just fine with cut-off long underwear when I played and didn’t need high end “sliding shorts.”

But Ev isn’t Max, as I’m learning still, so I had to follow a different approach altogether. And it’s not one that comes naturally. Not to me, at least.

I paused for a beat or two, checked again the distance until our exit off 101 according to Waze, and rolled the dice, keenly aware that if I blew this, Ev would refuse to get out of the car when we pulled into the parking lot.

“Well, if we all settled for low expectations, think of all the things that would never have been accomplished. No one would have invented cars. There would be no Internet. No Olympic Games. No man on the moon. So it’s actually good to have high expectations, to challenge yourself, because that’s how you grow, how you learn what you’re made of, how you find the best in yourself, and maybe you’ll find that you can do things you didn’t think you could do.”

Pretty good, right? And I think this is basically verbatim. As if I pulled the “Low Expectations Talk” index card out of the Fatherly Advice packet and read from it after clearing my throat (and of course without lowering the quality of my freeway driving).

And from the backseat? Crickets. Nothing. I half-expected a gasp, maybe a gasp plus applause and a “Bravo!” shouted by my red-faced and profoundly inspired 8 year-old.

Um, yeah. No.

I soldiered on, kept my legs moving, shucked and jived. Instead of high-minded inspiration about the evolution of mankind, I went for something more visceral.

I suspected (correctly) that Ev was perseverating about getting plunked on the back at last night’s practice by an errant throw from catcher to first base while Ev was running to 1st base himself. No doubt the bruise on his right shoulder blade still smarted, pressed as he was into the backseat. I needed a strong visual to capture Everett’s attention, snap him out of this pre-game funk, pull him back from dangling over the precipice by his fingertips.

Enter Tony C.

I pulled up the famously grotesque Tony Conigliaro Sports Illustrated cover. Then I handed my iPhone and Tony’s bulging, purple eye socket over my shoulder to Everett.

“Woah, look at that black eye! Wow!”

Mission Accomplished.

Everett was now recalibrated and ready to go. His memory banks wiped clean. Not a care in the world. All it took was a little blood and gore. Whatever works.

Thanks for reading.

From the backseat the other afternoon whilst shooting towards the Golden Gate Bridge on the 101 South:

Ev:  “Dad, I wish there was such a thing as a ‘Gravity Bill.'”

Me:  [Pausing to digest this tidbit, searching my distracted brain, half-panicked trying not to reveal how much more intelligent my 8 year-old is than I.] “Oh?  Why?”

Ev:  “Because I wouldn’t pay the bill.” 

Me: [Realizing immediately that the jig is up, once again.  I haven’t the slightest idea where he is going with this, and our intellectual chain of command is so fragile.  Creaking loudly and about to snap altogether.]  “Oh? Why not?”

Ev:  “Because I want to float around, not be stuck with gravity.”

Me: [At once both proud of my 3rd grader’s flexible mind and disappointed in the fact that this line of thinking has never occurred to me.  I whisper, hopefully not audibly, “Damnit!!”] “Yeah, that would be cool, huh?” [Then I try to regain my footing, to catch up with him, to show that I am a worthy brainiac companion.] “Although, whom would we pay?  The city?  The County of San Francisco?  Planet Earth?”

And then the moment was gone.  Everett has paused long enough to give me a glimpse of his mind’s inner workings.  Just to let me know that his being quiet back there does not mean he’s contemplating the right moment to pick his nose undetected.  Some deep thoughts going on back there.  Far deeper than the thoughts going on in the driver’s seat.  At least when I’m the one doing the driving.

These exchanges — infrequent and brief, but powerful — remind me how woefully unequipped I am to provide my children with a fertile environment in which to exercise their minds.  By the way, as if to underscore this point, I first typed “inequipped” in that previous sentence, before being scolded by the dotted red underline for my grammatical ineptitude.  (At least I got “ineptitude” right all by myself.) 

We are all four together pretty much only at dinnertime.  By then, I’m tired.  Beat from juggling consulting work with a number of interesting clients.  Truly interesting work, stimulating, and with neat companies.  But it sometimes feels like I’m jamming a week’s worth of work into a few hours of intense hammering away.  Somewhere in there I will have managed to walk the dog a few times.  Maybe even a longer walk in the Presidio, say, where it feels like she might actually be getting the run she needs.  And usually I will have managed to break a sweat of my own, hopping on the lightly-rusted spin bike, slipping into the Bay, or going for a short run on rickety legs.  Some element of carpooling, to-practice driving, or bus stop pickup will come into play.  And then I have learned to really enjoy prepping dinner.  I have a very limited array of dinner options I know how to make, but it’s my array, and I’ve become fairly dependable within my own, narrow culinary parameters.  And I’ve also somehow gotten very interested in the table setting stuff — table runners, chargers, cool little napkin rings, the whole sh-bang.  Dunno how I fell into that, but fall I have. 

Net net, by the time I lower my 46 year-old carcass into my dining table chair, I’m pretty much spent.  Done. Functioning on only the barest of brain functions.  Relying on my autonomic nervous system to keep taking air into my lungs.  Not exactly prime time, then, for being the fantastic, engaging Dad I fancy myself.  Particularly in this age of omnipresent digital screens, dinner time time is supposed to be the time.  The best time.  For engaging in true face-to-face conversation.  The tribe reconnecting over the fire at the end of the day to share stories and continue an ancient oral tradition. 

If we were a tribe, and if I were sitting near the fire, I would smell something burning, realizing 30 seconds too late that my heel is scorched and blistered.  And probably grossed out that I had been thinking “hmm, something smells good, did I cook that?” only moments earlier. 

So like I said, tired.  And once again, probably guilty of setting unrealistic expectations, too.  Guilty of that, for sure.

Fortunately, I’m wide awake and reasonably alert at 8am, which is when I write.  Blog, I mean.  And sitting here now, clear-headed (sort of), it occurs to me that the opportunities to noodle over the pluses and minuses of gravity are all around us.  Happening all the time.  They can’t be curated or conjured up on demand.  They just happen.  And that’s the fun of it.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to find that damned Gravity Bill.  I have a nagging suspicion it hasn’t been paid this month, and all hell will break loose.

Thanks for reading.

Today my grandmother would have celebrated her 91st birthday.  But she did make it to 90.  And aside from the rather sudden end, it didn’t seem to anyone that she was struggling, not living life, or not enjoying herself.  Ninety.  I’d happily sign up for that. I just turned 46 the other day.  A little more than half-way to the full life my grandmother lived.  So now I’m officially in the Second Half.  At least I’d like to think so.

I have learned a lot in the First Half.  Some of the bigger lessons —

1. Get comfortable in your own skin as soon as possible.  I wish I hadn’t worried about how others perceived me when I was younger.  Everyone is different.  Everyone is an individual.  This should be a cause for celebration.  Do not spend years trying to rub down your rough edges.  The rough edges are what make us, well, us.
2. Some people will appreciate and even embrace your own skin, your edges, your individuality.  Some will not. Life is not a popularity contest.  And if you live your life as if it were a popularity contest, you won’t win.  It’s impossible. Instead, hold on to the people that hold on to you.  They’re the only ones you’ll need.
3. And you will need.  For some reason, I’ve always been extremely reluctant to rely upon anyone for anything.  I’ve even viewed this as some sort of badge of honor.  It’s not a badge.  It’s fear.  Fear of relying on someone else for something, and having that person fail or not come through.  Or worse yet, proving me a fool for relying upon them in the first place. Relying on someone, making yourself vulnerable, depending upon them, is part of being human. In candor, I think I’m still working on this Number 3.  I’ll try to fix it in the Second Half.
4. Find something to be passionate about.  That thing will most likely change over the course of time.  That’s OK.  But it’s important to find something for which your belly burns.  Something that stretches you.  Something that will bring out things in yourself that you didn’t know existed or thought impossible.  The corollary here is that you’re capable of much more than you think you are.  More suffering.  More happiness.  More empathy.  Whatever.  You have more in you than you think.
5. Stay positive.  Look for opportunities in every problem.  They are there.  It is easy to be negative, to criticize, to see a glass half-full wherever you look.  Anyone can do that.  The hard part is the opposite.  Take that approach.
6. Never give up.  This one I have preached for years to the Little League teams I’ve coached.  The odds are very low that the kids have a clue as to what I’m trying to say.  This is a big one, and worth the repetition.  I honestly believe that if you don’t quit, if you don’t actually give up, if you refuse to lay prone and silent on the canvas, you never truly “lose.”  I’m not sure that winning and losing is as binary as people think.  A light switch turned on or turned off.  We have been trained to believe there is always a victor and always the vanquished. I’m not so sure that’s the case, in real life.  Nothing is more frightening to an overwhelming favorite than the little guy who simply keeps getting back up.  And nothing is more inspiring to the rest of us than witnessing the little guy who refuses to quit.  Never quit. Never allow yourself to quit.

It’s a bit ridiculous to attempt to sum up lessons learned over the course of 45 years.  But I think these ones above are reasonably important.  I wish it didn’t take me so long to learn some of them.  I wish that I had perfected all of them.  But I suspect that part of the deal is exactly that — figuring it out as you go.  No one really has a plan, it only appears that way. A mystery.

Like the wave breaking in the distance then rolling towards the boys in the photo at the top of this post, what the Second Half holds for me remains a bit of a mystery.  I’m going to try to settle in and enjoy the ride.

Thanks for reading.

I have maintained a love affair for more than 20 years now, and my wife of 17 years is totally cool with it.

In fact, my wife facilitated this relationship. Introduced it into my life long ago. Perhaps more accurately, if I am being honest, the object of my desire is not mine alone. My entire family is in love. We all swoon smitten at this time of year, every year.

We’ve just begun our 22nd or 23rd summer stint in Chatham, Massachusetts. Albeit this one abbreviated. Cut in-half due to a Cooperstown baseball tournament last week. So we’ll be jamming 2 weeks-worth of our traditional must-see and and must-do activities into a single week.

The jamming has already begun, though we’ve been in Chatham for only about 15 hours.

Within one hour of pulling into the driveway, we shot off to Schoolhouse Pond. A quick dip before dinner. The pond is typically empty at 6pm. The charmingly inattentive lifeguards have abandoned their high chair. Multi-generational families that gathered earlier around beach umbrellas with their feet dug into the sand have, by now, departed for dinner.

So we had the place essentially to ourselves. The turtle. The sunken row boat. The small small-mouthed bass. The epic snake versus frog battles. The world’s best skimboard runway. The most perfect SUP spot. All of it.

But most of that checklist will have to wait. Simply not do-able in a five-minute visit.

My sons both fairly sprinted into the slightly chilly water, their older cousin a little more reluctant because, well, she is older. Their manic dip is brief.

The humongous snapping turtle refused to make an appearance. Presumably he was fatigued from a typical, full day of harassment at the hands of reasonably well-meaning pre-teens. Some day he’ll take a finger or big toe, I’m sure of it. But it won’t be one of ours, at least not on this day.

I take a short swim myself, just beyond the buoys that mark the area of the town’s legal liability. I glance off towards the opposite shore. I know the rowboat is out there. Submerged maybe 15 feet under. Waiting for me and one particular nephew to zero in on its always elusive location, then dive down through the blackness, tapping its bow before scrambling back to the surface and gasping for air. But I won’t renew that particular tradition today, either.

Time to get back.

And so, before it really even gets started, I reeled them back in. I’m the responsible adult, after all, and it’s time to get back for dinner.

But not before one last photo capturing my youngest. Trailing behind his brother and cousin. Not wanting to leave Schoolhouse Pond, but knowing we’ll be back. And back. And back.

After all, we’ve got two weeks to jam into one.

Thanks for reading.

This is the daytime view from the dock at our rental house on Lake Otsego. It’s beautiful and all, for sure. Fish jumping off in the distance. Mallard ducks paddling around in groups of 6 or 8. An occasional speedboat passing by pulling a child giggling wildly on an inner tube.

Don’t get me wrong. I love all this stuff. Really. I do.

But the better time is when the sun has gone back down. The ducks have gone in for the night. The powerboats have long since docked for the day. The fish are no longer on the prowl for gangly flies suspended by the water’s surface tension.

But it’s not about the gorgeous, nearly-full moon.

It’s about my brothers and I channeling our inner Seal Team Sixes in calculated, patient attempts to scare the bejesus out of one another. And these are no ordinary jump-scares. No. Creativity is applauded. Encouraged. A game in which the running score is kept over the course of years. Decades, even.

Example: One night this past week, I scrambled under our steep set of deck stairs, disappearing into the pitch black. I sat in wet moss and mud. Spitting cobwebs out of my mouth. Breathing quietly, to the point of light-headedness. Confident that my spot could not be revealed by the approaching beam of a flashlight, on account of the angle of the steps above my head. When my brother stepped cautiously down the stairs back to the dock, no amount of scanning about with his flashlight would help him. In fact, hearing nothing and seeing nothing in the the throw of his light might even inspire a false sense of security. A dangerous state of mind in this game. I happily endured the moss-soaked seat and spider bites on my arm, savoring the imminent shock I would soon deliver. Brilliant. Best scare in a long time.

Only it never came to fruition. I had sat motionless for 30 minutes in my little spider hole, maybe longer, when my self-satisfaction began to dissolve. It suddenly dawned on me that too much time had elapsed. Something did not feel right. I came to grips with the fact that I was not going to grab out of the darkness an unsuspecting ankle scampering giddily down the stairs.

With a dry mouth, I recognized that the predator had just become the prey.

I made the mistake of assuming my brother’s only route back down to the lake was the staircase. My staircase. The one I now shared with the moss and spiders.

Wrong.

Instead, as I sat soaked but euphoric with visions of my best scare in a long time, my brother “went dark.”

I later learned that he had tip-toed down the street above, snuck down a different set of long deck stairs, stripped down to his skivvies, and slithered into the shallows. He slowly made his way to my twenty from a click down-lake, wading neck-deep and completely assassin-silent. The near-hypothermia that came later was, I’m sure, totally worth it.

He popped up out of the black water Chuck Norrisian, and grabbed my nephew’s ankle, thereby delivering the bejesus moment.

(Yes, it was my nephew’s ankle. Not mine. I was still under the stairs with the spiders.) My nephew screamed and I jumped where I sat, startled, banging my spider-webbed head on the underside of one of the steps. Half-concussed.

And defeated.

Out Seal Team-Sixed by my brother. My youngest brother, no less. It’s true. My depression was made worse by an indepent scare later from my other brother, launching goofy-faced out of the bushes at me.

It took a few hours for the adrenaline to wear off.

Thankfully, there will be other dark nights. More dark ops. And I’ve already begun to plan….

Thanks for reading.

“I want to sleep in the car. If I can’t sleep in the car, I want to go home. Right now. Home!”

These were Everett’s plaintive words within 10 minutes of arriving at our Cooperstown house rental. Hilary and I kept catching eachother’s eyes after making a loop through one or another maze of ornately-decorated rooms. Making sure we were both still “in.” We had come a long way–physically, emotionally and financially–to cross this particular threshold. Short of turning a squeaky doorknob and discovering a recently-murdered person, there would be no turning back.

Every room revealed something intricate, in a lovely but faintly frightening way. The dining room chandelier looked like something out of a Vincent Price classic from my youth. The “House of Wax,” maybe.

The main staircase is straight out of the Munsters’ mansion; I am still surprised the stairs haven’t raised up for a caretaker to toss Eddie’s pet dragon, “Spot” a whole Thanksgiving turkey for dinner; the animal spewing fire.

I’m 35% certain that my family and are are meant to be fattened up and eaten by our unseen host à la the husband pig and wife duck in the children’s book, “Mystery of Eatum Hall.”

But all these terrors are minor compared to Mr. Monkey. I opened a door off the bathroom. It looked like a door that was kept closed for a reason. I fumbled for a light switch, clicked it up, and saw him: Mr. Monkey. His eyes seemed to trail me across the room. Quietly asserting his position in this particular movie. He is clearly in charge, clearly pulling all the strings and deciding what will transpire. I backed away slowly, maintaining eye contact with Mr. Monkey. And I’ve spent the last 2 days trying to forget the encounter. Unsuccessfully. Wish us luck.

Thanks for reading.