Newsiness

So here's some random thoughts, which are about all I have the concentration for, as I sit and watch the Packers on a Monday night:

T has been struggling not to speak English at home. It's causing a lot of squabbling these days - lots of scolding, reminding, frustration. It's harder for her than it was for Q, because Q had no one to talk to but us. T can talk to Q, and we gave up a while ago on insisting on Spanish between them. It just seems like too much to expect. All the more reason for us to get out of the country for a while - something we're looking into doing in a year and a half or so.

Uruguay is the country we're the most interested in. Economically advanced and stable, veeeery little crime (for Latin America - they have more than Holland, but not more than Italy), and very close to Argentina, which we would like to visit. The kids are less and less horrified by the notion these days - we point to the Puerto Rico experience, which, while fading into memory, still has a lot of positive cachet. It's hard to think of leaving here for a while, but the experience would be too huge to say no to, we think.

Q has a basketball game Friday, but we're not both going to be able to go. And I'm only going to see the first half. We have a tri-family movie night scheduled for that night, and Q is going to be brought home by the mother of one of his friends, and I'm going to take him and the friend there. I'll probably get to see one half. I'm much more healthy in my basketball-viewing than I typically have been in soccer - somehow, deep down, I know that this isn't going to be Q's game. Maybe I'm wrong, but the odds of him getting to six feet tall are pretty slim, and he doesn't seem to take to basketball with the same liquid instinct that he has on the soccer pitch. He himself was just a little bit iffy about even playing this season. The three-on-three tournament was great, but he was hardly a key player...Anyway, I think the odds of my being reasonably quiet while watching are pretty good. But we'll see.

Still no luck on the deer front, and my energy is petering. Saturday night, I just couldn't bring myself to set the alarm for 4:30. There was snow Saturday afternoon, meaning that Sunday would have been the first day with any tracks, but honestly, I don't see myself tracking deer for miles this year. It's getting harder and harder to justify being away all, day, long. I like to get out there and stand during the morning and the evening hours, since that's when they move, but mid-day, it's really hard to stay motivated. I've seen deer, but they were all does / fawns, and I had no doe tag when I saw them. Now I have one, since it's the black powder season, but you watch: I'll never see another one. This is me, after all. I don't kill deer. It's just not meant to happen.

Although I did see a porcupine a couple of times. He leaves the tree I stand next to every morning around 6:30 and walks in front of me, right-to-left. I tried to take a picture - hey, I still haven't uploaded that one. Let's see if it came out:




Nope.

Q's hair is really getting long, and frankly, it looks phenomenal. A couple of different people said at the 3-on-3 tournament, "If there were a trophy for best hair, Q would definitely win."

Definitely.

Skittles has been piddling on the floor again. Not sure what that's about - and she does it on the kitchen floor, sometimes right next to the litterbox. She does it in streaks, doing it for a week at a time and then nothing for six weeks. It's annoying. Nothing beats stepping your bare foot into a cold puddle of piss.

Except, perhaps, stepping into a warm puddle of piss.

Well, hell, I guess I should hit the hay. Packers are up 17-0 at the half...I can probably sleep soundly in the knowledge that we'll be 8-4 in the morning. Who'd have thunk it when we were 4-4?

I say "we" because, as many of you know, I played safety there for three years back in the late '80s.

Also: I am tall.

Big Weekend Fun

Of the exhausting sort. Here's the rundown:

I hunted, watched Q play basketball, ate meals and did dishes. Very, very little else.

Janneke's been very generous about taking charge of the kids while I walk around in the woods, pretending that there is such a thing as an adult male deer. I've seen deer - Friday afternoon, I went out to stand through the sunset (when they are most active), and two does bounced across my path. I'd have had a fine shot at either, had I thought to acquire a doe permit back in June. But no, I had to hold my fire.

I'm hunting in the Mount Anthony preserve up in Bennington. I have seen one other hunter in the woods so far, so already it's an improvement over Ragged Mountain, where I had been hunting the past few years. And the two does I saw there, plus the two I saw several weeks ago, together quadruple the number of deer I ever saw while hunting in Massachusetts. Plus, you can use an actual 20th-century weapon in VT. Not that I've had much chance to use it.

Actually, opening day I did take a crack at a buck, but I missed, and it's just as well, because I turned out to be on land that did not actually belong to the people I (and they) thought it belonged to. I was somewhat grumpily told to leave. And I did.

Saturday morning I hunted 'til 9:00, then came home to take Q up to the high school for a 3-on-3 tournament. His friend Sean is an unbelievable basketball player, and his other friend Colton is very nearly as good. And they have Q and another kid named Eli, who are find athletes but aren't born to hoop it up like those other two. Their team was "The Baconators", and their first game was at 10:15.

They won two games, against people they knew from Williamstown (I think - they blur together). 20-minute games with a continuous clock; coaches (Colton's Dad in Q's case) get one time-out per game. The Baconators looked to be cruising - Q scored a few in each of their first two games, and on the strength of the Colton-Sean Big Two, looked to be headed for the championship.

Then they ran into a team from another town, wearing Celtics uniforms.

These kids had been coached, you see. They were all four quite good players - none as good as Sean, but two (or even three) were about as good as Colton. They had outside shots, ball-handling skills, and some tactics that were very effective.

Like constant fouling. If the person driving to the basket isn't actually shooting, the only consequence of a foul in this format is that the team fouled gets the ball out at the top of the key (half-court games), so it's to one's advantage to just foul and stop anyone who starts moving netward. The fouling was too consistent, in my mind, not to have been on purpose. Their coach called out "Don't reach in" whenever they did it and were called, but the tone of it, and the kids' reaction, seemed to me to have been arranged ahead of time. As in, "I'll tell you not to foul, but keep doing it." Who knows, I can't read minds. But they were a-foulin' like mad.

And since you have to check the ball in to start a possession, another thing they were all doing was returning the ball to the Baconator player with a low bounce pass, followed immediately by a charge, putting them right in the face of the player trying to in-bound the ball. Again, too consistent not to have been coached. And a little bush-league, in my opinion.

All that was one thing. But these kids were trash-talking, too. Staring our boys in the face, making hip-hop-style "You want some of this?" gestures...They had a very bad attitude, I thought. But the last straw came as the endgame approached: Up by two, their coach called a time-out.

With one minute to go.

Clock kept running.

And they won.

Bush-league.

Q walked out of the gym with me, dejected, past the trophy table. He jerked a thumb toward them. "We're not going to win one of those," he said. He was pretty upset, as were the rest of his team. Tough moment. But they had to bounce back - More basketball yet to be played.

Double-elimination tournament, you see, so the Baconators went to the losers' bracket, where they won out handily, putting them back into a rematch with the undefeated "Celtics" team. they'd cruised through the rest of their schedule and were feeling their oats. (As I have on very good information from the mother of one of Q's friends, who stood near them as they watched the Baconators clear out the last opposition in the losers' bracket and overheard them dirisively mocking everything they could about them.) So they had a rematch - If the "Celtics" team wins, it's over; if the Baconators win, they get to play that team again, in a final game, for all the marbles.

Q didn't score a point in that game, but he became a defensive monster, sealing off his man constantly and making a number of big steals, causing a number of turnovers. It see-sawed until the end, when Colton just took over, having discovered that they just had no answer for him coming in along the baseline and laying it in. As they reached the minute mark, the Baconators suddenly had a three-point lead.

And called timeout. Game over.

Turnabout, and all that.

Setting up the final matchup, where, and frankly, I'm just too tired to make it dramatic, so I'll let you know early: The exact same thing happened. The "Celtics" looked defeated - they weren't fouling anymore like they had been, and weren't doing their bush-league inbounding anymore - their coach may have seen me somewhat exhuberantly miming their antics to anyone who would listen, and may have decided to knock it off. Who knows, though - a lot of the games leading up to this one had started getting very physical, and the ref did talk to both teams before the final game. He may have said "Clean it up, I'm going to be whistle-happy". So it came down to skill again (and height - Sean is a big boy), and the Baconators were just too much. They won, 12-8, and shouted their victory to the rafters.

It was intensely karmically satisfying.

OK, that's all I have the steam for. T's fine, Janneke's fine, Skittles is fine, I'm fine...Still deerless, but fine. I'll write more when I become a better person.

So don't hold your breath.

Overcompensation

Holy cow! I feel like I do in that dream I have where I've suddenly realized that I'm taking a math class in college, and I haven't been to it for weeks, and the final exam is being handed out RIGHT NOW! Man - I have a blog?! I have readers that number in the double digits, and I have neglected them for HOW long...? I should be horsewhipped. "Fifty lashes with a wet noodle", as someone used to say. I think it was my fifth grade teacher. He used to say a lot of things. He was known for it. "Remember him?", we reminisce, as we stand at the rail in the saloon and smooth our mustaches after every swig. "Remember how he used to say things? Oh!, by Nelson! The things he would say!" And we laugh and throw back another round and turn to send a stream of tobacky juice to the spitoon.

What to bring you up to date on...! Well, first of all, we have not been taking many pictures. The upload program just told me there are a total of 59 in the camera, and that the first one dates all the way back from when Janneke and T went to Switzerland. Which was - well, what's today, Monday? So it was a coon's age ago. So there isn't going to be a whole lot of photographic evidence to be had in this post. It's going to be narrative-heavy. Which fits with the title I have chosen for this particular episode.

And most of the narrative is going to be of the "summation" type, because most things that have recently been going on have come to an end. T's Saturday-morning soccer just had its last meeting of the year. It was run by a very nice man. T loves him, and loves the practices, though she's definitely still on the "observe and report" plan for soccer playing. She remarked to me one day after a practice, "I try to run as fast as I can, but I just can't." And I think that means either that (A) she's not emotionally involved enough to sprint, even though she feels like she ought to be, just to go along; or (B) she's not anatomically cooked up enough yet to break into a true sprint. Q was that way for the first few years, I remember - he was among the later kids in his age group to full-on, fist-pumpin' sprint. It takes a while for that to develop. But she jogs along and cheers and follows the action. The boys are very dominant in kiddie-soccer - so much so that it's a little less than completely safe sometimes. There can be some collisions between super-motivated, churning boys and kids who don't pay much attention.

Another danger is the odd sociopath who's made it all the way to kindergarten undetected. There was some kid there I didn't know whom I observed walking up to another boy and unloading a kick into his shin guard. There were three adults on the field at the time, keeping order, so I didn't feel right about charging out and setting things straight, but I did see it. He wasn't an especially big kid, and the other kid seemed amused. No real harm done. Of course, what should happen but that five minutes later, I'm chatting with someone and I hear the breathless, high-pitched wail that can only be T. And I look up to find her looking at me in complete shock, wide-eyed, mouth agape, being escorted off the field - and in her other hand, the adult in question has clasped the jersey of the same little boy I'd observed doing the kicking. "He just kicked her," the woman explained. (I know her, she's one of the doctors our kids have seen in the past and also the mother of a teammate of Q's.) "Just plain-ol' kicked her, right in the knee." I asked if they'd seen him doing it to anyone else; she said no, and I told her that that made at least twice. So he was asked where his mother was, and was marched off to her. She took him aside and spoke to him for a couple of minutes, and eventually she made him come up and apologize. Although, to my mind, this woman seemed like a "hug-them-all-the-harder-the-more-they-misbehave" type. And I don't have the most patience with that, frankly.

So T isn't completely developmentally ready for competitive sports, but she enjoys being around them, so we'll keep this up. Q's soccer season, meanwhile, was very memorable. He had another year where he's either completely on, or completely off, and there's nothing anyone can do to alter it. That's just where he is, and while he's getting to be a (very, very slightly) more consistently "on" player, he's also going into periods of prolonged deafness where things shouted to him from the sidelines (by the coaches, I'll have you know) simply do not sink in. He roams very widely out of position, which really hurts his team, particularly when he's meant to be a defender. But when he's on, and when he's a forward, look out.

Another parent - whose son is, as the parent admits freely and happily, not one of the top-tier soccer players on the squad - remarked to me during a game, "To my mind, Sammy D and Q are just on another level from the rest of these guys." I was tickled, and spooked, to hear that. Tickled for the obvious reasons, and spooked, because maybe I'm not crazy. Maybe I'm not totally biased in assessing Q's skill level - Maybe he really is as graceful and savvy as he seems to me to be. He can think two, three steps past where things are and has been sending some passes - through-balls, no-looks, chips over defenders - that make one's jaw drop. And scoring a lot, too.

Some of the thrill of the goal has gone out of it for him. Not for any reasons to do with boredom or listlessness, but because he recognizes that sometimes the quality of the opponent cheapens the goal, and he'd rather spend his energy trying to set up someone else who doesn't score as often. Their last game was yesterday, and they played Adams, a team that a Willaimstown all-star team had absolutely massacred a few weeks before. Q's regular team isn't that team, but it has Q, and Colton, and Alex B...Some very solid players. And Q knew this was going to be, as they say in Spanish, "un genocidio". So he played the whole time with a smile on his face, and could be seen a couple of times doing what I'd seen him do in one other game, and fallen all the more in love with him for it:

A player on the other team (which was very young, and not at all skilled, and was slowly getting pulverized), a long-haired boy named Harry, had been looking ill and frightened and withdrawn the whole game. He had very little skill and, apparently, very little confidence. But at one point, Harry got the ball on the opposite side of the field, deep in his own end, and started a run up the line. Q ran with him, but couldn't quite get ahead of him, and Harry went on and on, keeping control of the ball, going deeper and deeper into Williamstown territory. At the end of his run he managed to stop the ball, turned back, and fired a centering pass to the middle. No one picked it up, but the crowd went wild - a lot of us Willaimstowners, who had figured out his name, joined in and cheered him like mad. "What a run, Harry! Super job!"

And in the car, Q, doing his usual post-game breakdown, said this: "Yeah... I felt bad for him. I could have taken the ball away, or gotten in front of him, but I didn't want to. And I didn't want to just stop and let him go, because then he would feel like I wasn't trying, and it didn't matter."

It was a great game to end on, this one from yesterday, because they showcased their talented kids - every one of them scored a couple - but then started manufacturing goals for the kids who don't score a lot. And Q wore a smile the entire time, fairly effortlessly working around defenders and then looking up to see which of his teammates he could pass to. "No, Theo - You're offsides! Come back!", he said, laughing, as the defender circled him helplessly. And when Theo was back onsides, Q pushed a roller into space ahead of him. Theo watched it go, and threw up his arms at Q. "No, Theo," Q said, laughing again and approaching him: "You're supposed to run to where I'm passing. It's OK, I'll do it again."

And he did.

There is other news, of course. Much of it aquatic. T has been taking swimming lessons at the college, but it's Janneke who takes her there, and so I have little to report, other than what we knew going in, which is this: She is daring, coachable, game for anything, and absolutely in love with water. She does the crawl now, and the backstroke, and the dead man's float. Janneke feels so confident that she just gave away the arm floaties T has been using up to now. And that's saying something. I'm protective, but Janneke's clothes are continually filthy from having thrown herself in front of one child or another to protect them from something. Breezes, mostly. And moths.

And I have joined the YMCA in Pittsfield, which lies on my route home, almost exactly halfway. I stop there after a workday and check in and hit the pool for between 20 and 30 laps, depending on the manhood count for the day. And I can rarely resist a stop afterward in the weight room, where I bench a bit before heading home. It's a wonderful facility, costs $41 a month, and provides me all the exercise I need without injury. The place is rarely even close to filled - today was the busiest I've seen the weight room, and there were six guys in it. (I've never seen a woman in the weight room.) Downtown Pittsfield is in recovery mode, so you see a lot of art galleries and other hipster start-ups, but the main clientelle is still the neighborhood, so a lot of urban-neighborhood-types. Lots of neck tattoos and oversized basketball shorts. There's a trio I see in there a lot, who apparently work out and then go to the pool afterward to relax. All big, all fairly muscular. Two are white, and one is black. I see them together or I don't see any of them. And one of the white guys has "WHITE PRIDE" tattooed down his spine. They fascinate me - their interaction seems genuinely intimate, as if they're all good friends. And I just can't make sense of it. Does the tattooed fellow now regret it? Has he learned and grown, with the tattoo just a scar from the growth? Or does he somehow see and feel no antagonism against other races in being proud of his own? And does his friend accept that somehow? I don't know.

The three of them were in the pool the other day. Two were near my end as I readied myself to get in. One of them looked up at the other, who was treading water nearby.

"How far can you go underwater?"

"All the way."

"For real?"

"Yeah. Here, watch." And he took a breath and swam to the bottom.

The floating one chuckled as he disappeared. "No, no - Not..." He waited for him to come up. "Not 'how far down.' I meant 'How far across.'"

They both laughed, and I did too. They heard me and looked up, and we all laughed together.

I like Pittsfield.

Recent daguerrotypes:



T in the mouse ears I made her for "Words are Wonderful", a week-long festival of reading. She went as Chrysanthemum the Mouse.



T and Q in their official "Words are Wonderful" get-ups. T as Chrysanthemum, of course, and Q as Ordinary Boy from "The Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy". A book so good that when it's not my turn to read with him at night, I grab it off his bedstand and read what he and Janneke have read, so I'll be up to speed in the morning. They have a character called "The Red Menace", a super-villain, who is a very effectively painted cartoon metaphor for the evils of socialism. (Don't worry - much of the rest of the series is a critique of capitalism.) So effective is this representation of the basic tenets of the ideology that I re-told much of it to my Spanish 5 class, where the year-long theme is "Left versus Right in Latin America". Ordinary Boy is the only person in Superopolis who doesn't have a superpower. His friends all wear superhero outfits, but he just wears a T-shirt and jeans. With no letter on it - but Q had to do SOMETHING to make his outfit not just be a T-shirt and jeans. Though honestly, I think that was much of the appeal of it for him.



T as "Frankenstein Princess". She loved the costume, as did we. Her idea all the way.



T and Q in their costumes. Q did the same one as last year, since he hadn't wanted to put too much effort into it and had been very willing to go along with my idea: Mummy, wrapped in toilet paper. Which was a terrible idea. Didn't work at all, so he scrounged up last year's mask and set out for what was by far his longest jaunt yet. He was out with everyone else (our two, plus Q's friend Owen) for just about the entire legally allowed period - an hour and a half.

Birthday Video

Hey - Here's a video of T's skating birthday party from this past April. I'm not sure why it's so herky-jerky on my computer - maybe those of you out there with better computers and better connections can actually watch it and have it not look like a slide show. Who knows. But here it is:

Wednesday night silliness.

Herewith:

Audio-Visual

This time, WITH audio!

Audio-visual

Well, visual, anyway. Some things to look at for those of you who are into eye-candy:



T, wearing a dress that originally belonged to her cousin Natasha, now a glamorous law student in Geneva. T stands a good chance of being just as glamorous. But probably not quite as tall.



Hand-picked by yours truly, the better half, and the pups. Absolutely bursting with deliciousness. Some of them, I whisper to you slowly, are Macouns.

And here, T shows her range as an actress - Here, her motivation is that she's just been reminded of her new puppy.





Which is dead.



Because of you.

Me, personally? I want this one to be her passport photo.

Division of Labor

Holy cannoli, T can sure wail when she feels like it.

Trying to draw a tee-shirt was she this afternoon, frustrated by her inability at first to draw its outline without crossing over inside those lines - that is to say, making a single perimeter with no transections anywhere. She threw her marker and opened her mouth wide and waaaaaaailed, eyes wide. It was such volume, such from-the-diaphragm power - Janneke and I basically just left the room. There was no reasoning with her, no talking to her - we tried. She wailed louder. Not wanting to reward her for such behavior, but knowing, as we do, that trying to impose consequences on her for continuing to act out-of-control once she's already lost control is a zero-sum game, we simply retreated, Janneke to the treadmill downstairs, I outside to put a rain gutter back on the house. (A small section had fallen away from the roof.)

I was up on the roof ten minutes later, finishing up, when I heard T's wailing sudenly get louder. I walked to the front of the house, on the roof, wondering why I could hear her now, and sure enough she had come outside from the front and was making her way to the back. I walked along the edge of the roof, silently, watching this bird's-eye-view of the top of her little head as she made her way around toward the back, where surely she would find me. She could see the end of the ladder, after all - I had to be close! So she got louder and louder.

Then she had to stop and open the gate, which was a little tricky, because it had a stone leaning against it. you have to kind of push the gate forward in order to let the latch swing, but not so much that you push the stone (which keeps Skittles in the back yard) and make it fall. Then you have to open the gate toward you (again, so as not to make the stone fall), and re-close it behind you. This whole process takes a good thirty seconds if you're five and not very big for your age. And during that whole time, the wailing ceased completely.

Only to resume once she was on the other side. Her head looked left and right, and left and right, but never up - ladders, it seems, don't quite compute totally yet. And now it became words: "Daaaaaaddy!"

I called out to her and asked what was wrong, and she explained. I told her I would be down in a moment, and I came down the ladder to total silence. Saving it up, it seems.

I turned to face her, and was hit full-force again. But I managed to fend it off this time - "T, no me podés hablar así. No es hablar, es gritarme. Cuando me puedas hablar, te ayudo. Hasta entonces, no."

Amazingly, she calmed down, allowed me to put the ladder away, and accompanied me inside for some lessons on how to draw a T-shirt outline with long sleeves and one arm bent jauntily back toward the waist. She practiced, got good at it, and then happily churned out twenty of them while I snoozed on the couch. For maybe five minutes, before we all headed out to Q's soccer game.

Q had a day-long 3 on 3 tournament yesterday. Janneke and T stayed home, and I sat and waited and watched from 8:15 to 5:15 in Great Barrington, an hour away. Q had a blast, goofing around with his friends between games and playing during them. And in the end they did very well - there were three groups of U-10 teams, and they came through group play unscathed, 3-0. Putting them into the semifinals against eventual champions Lenox, where they lost, 4-2. Q scored both goals; he had also had a game where he scored 4 of the team's 7, and another where they stopped trying to score at halftime and still wound up invoking the mercy rule at 10-0. A very respectable showing.

But Q is back to his zombie ways much of the time, and I absolutely do not understand it. In the semis, he sleepwalked through the entire first half, and most of the second. Intimidated by Lenox because he knew they had tied the other Williamstown team 5-5 in group play. And of course the other Williamstown team is better than Q's team, or so he believed. So naturally they would lose to Lenox.

Partway through the second half, Q woke up and started playing aggressively, weaving through for two lovely goals. To hear him tell it, it was because his coach told him during a break, "Stop trying to pass. Just dribble past people and score." He was charging toward his third when he was tripped from behind, resulting in a PK, which he missed (off the post!). Time expired, and their day ended.

I was guilty of some loudly-delivered encouragement on the day, and feel terrible about it. BUT! Today I redeemed myself a bit. They had another game against that same Williamstown team, made up of his friends, which Q is convinced is better in every way. And so for the first half he stood and watched everything happen, made token efforts at resistance, saw who he was up again and basically gave up on trying to dribble past them, etc. It was excruciating to watch. The other team went up 2-0 almost immediately, and I am here to tell you, both goals went right past the somnolent Q. He was always behind the play, always lagging, always half-speed and late. By halftime it was out of hand, 5-0.

And then, curiously, in the second half, when the pressure was off and the other team was basically not trying to score anymore, Q woke up. Many long, beautiful runs, several shots, one goal (on another PK after his shot was stopped in the box with a handball) - again, about 25% of the game, we saw what Q can do.

Tragic, then, when the final whistle blew, to see Q's hands go to his head, and cover his eyes, then his face, and see him wracked by sobs. And to see him wordless when greeting our hugs and questions, to see him walk dejectedly ahead to sit on a lonely park bench halfway to the car and stare, slump-shouldered, at the light rain / heavy mist, beaten. To finally coax out of him, an hour later, with a chin wiggle, "I'm sad that we lost."

Because I tell you truly, this did not have to be. That other team has a stronger overall roster, but not a man-jack of them is better than Q, and none is faster. When he's relaxed and wants to play, there is not a kid around to stop him. The best 3-on-3 team in Berkshire County had no one to stop him - he pounded through two, nearly three unanswered, in about four minutes, once he woke up. The team that came in second in his division could do nothing but fall over and flail as he fired through goal after goal - with the left, with the right, from near, from far. When Q is The One, with the fire in the belly, he is as good as absolutely any 9- or 10-year-old in this league. But he often isn't that.

And it is not my job to make him that. It is my job to hug and squeeze him, take him home and comb his hair, tickle him after supper in one of his favorite games (I give him something ALMOST impossible to guess ("I'm thinking of a mammal"), and every time he guesses wrong or needs a clue, I tickle him), smile at him over his dessert and talk about anything at all. Except his own personal performance in the game. That, now, is off limits.

I did all those things tonight. I have a wonderfully beautiful little boy asleep upstairs after a hard athletic day, where he suffered through his bouts of doubts much more painfully than any of us did, wondering why he does this more fervently and more frustratedly than anyone. But now he's dry and warm and loved, and the last three hours of his night, he spent laughing and safe. That's my job.

Anybody can coach him. Only I can be Papi.

Fighting the Good Fight

So, yeah. T in the car on the way home said, in English, "Today was the worst day of my life."

Which usually turns out to be nothing. She's said this before, on numerous occasions. But I'm not about to dismiss it - I ask, "Por qué, mi amor? Qué pasó?"

And it turns out that, in addition to another event later in the day of less consequence, this is what happened:

Sitting around their table at Kindergarten today, one little girl said, "Raise your hand if you believe in God!"

T was the only one who didn't.

And all the other girls yelled at her.

"What?! You HAVE to believe in God!" "God does so many great things for us!" "The whole world is because of God!" Etc., etc., etc.

And T said that she answered, "Well, everybody gets to make their own choices." Which sounds exactly like the sort of adult-toned speech-parroting that she's so incredibly good at.

And when they still didn't leave her alone, T went and talked to her teacher, who told her that, sometimes, when people are being mean, you just have to ignore them.

After T went to bed, Janneke and I talked, and Janneke, who's been much more on the warpath with this particular issue lately than I have, said that she wanted to talk to the teacher about it. And I think that's probably the best move. Doing nothing is not something we want to do - and talking to the parents of the other kids isn't exactly what we want to do either. But we do want to make sure that there's no anti-anti-religious pile-ons happening, either. I would love to have the teacher explain, in no uncertain terms to these kids, and if need be, to their parents, that belief in God does not make a person good, or nice, and non-belief in God does not make a person bad or mean. I find myself quite insistent on that point, suddenly: We must insist in all classes that atheists are equally valid, nice, and moral. Make that known. And if parents have a problem with it, they will have to lump it. Because this is a public school, and all beliefs, and non-belief, deserve - and will get, by thunder - equal protection.

T absolutely does not like being the odd duck. She asked, as we sat in the driveway, doors to the car open, I not quite arisen out of the driver's seat, she still buckled in in back, whether it was OK for her to believe "in the good God". I said she could believe absolutely anything she wanted. That no matter what she ever decided to believe, we would always love her, and she would always be our little Grugrita.

It concerns me - somehow, Q never got any flak. Or the flak he got was something he could bat aside. T, though, was hurt by the whole interaction. I wonder if I was sufficiently Ward Cleaver for her...Hard to say. She went to bed pretty happy, so maybe I did OK.

But, of course, what should happen tonight before shower time but T comes up to me, smiling shyly, to show how well she's memorized the Pledge of Allegiance.

With "under God" right there in the middle of it.

I smiled and congratulated her effusively, even as Janneke and I locked eyes and grumbled.

There's fights out there, if you want to fight them. And maybe we do...but maybe T doesn't. And maybe she shouldn't have to.

So, Anyway...

Like I was sayin'...I think between the new school year, Facebook (which makes me feel like I'm in touch with people, though this is illusory, I think), and Skype, I feel much more connected than I used to, and the blog business has fallen by the wayside. Making this a difficult task: Where to pick up? What details have been leapt over that would otherwise have made it into some post or other here? Tough call. Tough call.

T got off to a beautiful start in Kindergarten. (Part of her first day is in a video below.) She loves her teacher, and was a very giddy and bubbly host when she took us on a tour of her classroom at the WES Open House. She was the absolute last student there - we didn't get to her room until 7:40 or so, and the event ended at 8:00. We had been so busy, you see, being given a tour of the classroom over in Ms. Shannon's 4th-grade room, by a tour guide who had a clipboard, on which was a series of items he was required to show us. This list was thirty-five items long. So, yeah, it did take something of a while.

Q's back on the soccer pitch, and is loving it. He scored two against Berkshire Hills Black the other day, and although the team lost, 4-6, it seemed obvious to me that overall, Williamstown were the more advanced side. There are a few players on the team that are young or unskilled or both, and they tended to let some very easy shots by during their tours on defense; meanwhile, W-town had a lot of very near misses, including one that should have been a penalty shot, as you'll see in the soccer video, should you care to watch. Good game, though. There are a lot of 4th-graders who are very good, and there had been talk of having one powerhouse team and another developmental one, but there were a ton of kids out this year and they decided in the end to have three teams and divide the top-flight players up among two of them. So Q's on the field with some great players and some close friends. We've been seeing the Backiels again at games, which is great - they're a hoot, and we hadn't seen much of them since last fall, what with Q not playing baseball anymore.

I don't talk about school much here, but I have to say, I have the best AP class ever. I've decided to focus on short fiction, and have divided up the class into groups of 2 to 3. Every Thursday, one of these groups has to tell to the rest of the group a short story that they have read, and do so with all the important symbolism and such intact, so exactly that the rest of the group is capable of telling the whole story back to them by the end of the hour. Friday, all the other students get a copy of the story, and the presenters use it to anchor a discussion about the meaning and symbolism of the story, the author's intent, etc., and to teach to the rest of the group any interesting grammatical elements, turns of phrase, or expressions they picked up in the text. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, we all read stories together that are not the same ones as the ones the student groups present. We've gone through the cycle once, and man, it was awesome. I felt like I was in grad school again. SUCH a special group of students - I get misty when I think they're leaving this year.

But not before we go to Ecuador! That's right, this year in February we're all heading south again. I've got 90% of the trip planned and reserved. It's going to be great - 22 kids signed up so far, 6 chaperones. Can't wait.

T has also started Irish step dancing. I've not been to a lesson yet, but T came dashing into the bathroom to open the shower curtain and show me her steps when she arrived home after her first one, so it seems to have been a big hit. Believe me, I know this is going to get filmed, and soon.

Man...There's just too much to tell. Best if I start up again with the random everyday stuff, rather than give a ton of past events short shrift. It's starting to feel dull and newsy, and nobody likes that. So I'll sign off - but not before leaving you with the promised school video. You'll laugh, you'll cry. And then you'll feel really stupid.

Chao!

T'S FIRST BUS RIDE on her FIRST DAY of KINDERGARTEN

Long Time, No Screed

Hey, man - How the hell are you! Sorry I ain't rapped at you for a while, but the Man here's been busy. Kids are well, as you'll soon see; wifey's fine, my own health's good. Summer ended, school started, and T became a kindergartener! It's all been very exciting, and I swear, I'll be telling you most of what's worth telling in the coming hours. But first, let's just pop the latest in video memories at you here. Now, this isn't much - a long video about T's first soccer practice and Q's first game of the fall season. No big deal. But they're the only one I can put up right now - my time video-wise has been taken up principally with a movie about last April's trip to Gays Mills. It's about an hour long, and is absolutely epic. Train travel! 4-wheelin'! Train travel...! And not that much else, really. But there's a lot of each of those things.

All right, with no further ado, here's Part 1 and Part 2 of the soccer video. Batten down the hatches.

Epistles

Hey, folks...Much to report, little energy with which to do it. But I'll try anyway.

T had a play date with a friend who's a year younger today, and guided her around the house and the yard with one hand in the small of her back, offering her something to drink ("Would you like hot water or cold water?"), laughing in a disturbingly adult way - that is to say, a laugh that was phony - when she didn't understand a joke, but didn't want the teller to feel bad...Spooky to watch, and cool. She might honestly be more mature than I am right now.

She also received a letter from her future teacher today, and wrote a reply. She told me what she wanted to say, I told her how to spell the words, and she wrote it out. Reads like this:

"Dear Miss Johnson,

"I really liked the letter.

"I'm really excited that I'm going to Kindergarden.

"Love,

"T"

A cuter thing was never done.

(Baby donkeys notwithstanding.)

I have a writing assignment for tomorrow: Q's fourth-grade teacher has solicited input. "I invite each of you to take a moment to write to me about your child. What are the things you are aware of that would be important for me to know? What are your child's interests? What do you see as your child's strengths and weaknesses, both academic and social?"

(Just pausing to say that the fact that she said "academic and social" instead of "academically and socially" right there made her stock shoot up through the roof, and I still haven't even met her. (Though Janneke informs me that she's the lady we often see in our neighborhood walking an utterly adorable little black collie mix.))

"What are your goals for your child this year?"

She obviously didn't know what she was asking for, or whom she was asking. Because I'll guarantee, I'm going to spend an hour on this.

One of the things to touch on is going to be his nascent personality shift, and the fact that while it may entail some things that of course we can never condone, we want her to tamp them down, if need be, very gently, without extinguishing the fire completely. Because there is some fire there, and we are liking it.

Up at Windsor Lake the other day, Janneke said she saw Q out in the water near another kid, about his size. The other kid splashed Q, in a way that, Janneke said, seemed friendly. Or maybe not. Q cringed momentarily, then told him to quit it. The kid splashed him again; Q repeated his earlier invective, louder. And then Q started two-hand machine-gun splashing the kid until he turned and waded away. And then Q went back to whatever he was doing. No running to us, no backing down, no crying. And no informing of us afterward, either - he walked back to our blanket some time later and said not one word, unaware that Janneke had been watching.

Nice.

Q had his second real day of soccer practice for the fall - there's a tournament Labor Day weekend, and they've "invited" ten of the stronger U-10 players from town to play on it. Q is among them. He got new cleats - White! His choice! - the other day, and has been rarin' to go. Practice was from 5:00 to 6:15, and I drove over about 5:30 to watch the tail end of it before the end.

There were only six kids at this particular practice, and when I got there they were doing 3-on-3. I only saw the very end, where Q was coming up the right side, feet moving very fast, poking the ball out ahead but keeping his options open, daring the defender to come closer. And when he finally committed totally to Q, he fired a cross to the other side of the goal, where another (much weaker) player put it effortlessly over the line. Much jubilation from Q, and his teammates.

And then a game where the goals are close together, and a one kid stands in each, taking turns firing shots on the other. If you're scored on, you're out, and another kid from your side takes over; if you shoot and miss the goal, you're out. First side to 10 goals wins.

Q's side in this, as in the scrimmage, was him and two weak players, against 3 strong ones. They lost, 10-9, and the last goal was given up by Q - who was bouncing on his toes, in a half-squat, hands spread wide, focused like a laser beam, just before the shot was taken. He dove to the right and got a hand on it, but not enough of one, and it bounced off the post and in. He stood up and kicked the ball into the back of the net again, then turned, looking fierce, and walked to the water bottles. A few seconds later, he was fine, joking with the guy who'd scored.

After the practice, as I helped the volunteer coach, a former Williams soccer player, pull the goals off the field so it could be mown, I asked, "So how are the troops looking?"

He chuckled and searched for words for a moment, then said this: "Q, boy, I tell you - He just looks like a little soccer player out there. He's obviously been watching the pros. He knows what the game is supposed to look like, and he does everything he can to make it look like that. It's really something. He looks older than his years."

Nice.

Q and I were arguing, because he'd done something I thought was wrong, and he wasn't agreeing that it was wrong. And I interrupted him. "Papi!" he said, very firmly. I kept talking. "PAPI! No me interrumpas! Vos me interrumpiste, asi que yo voy a hablar hasta que vos no hables mas, porque no es justo que vos me digas que YO no te interrrumpa a VOS, pero entonces VOS me interrumpis a MI! Asi que no voy a dejar de hablar...Bueno. Ahora, me vas a escuchar?"

Nice.

Q and I were shooting baskets, and he wanted to play 1-on-1. I said it wouldn't be fair, and he said "That's OK. How about, you can't do lay-ups?" Seemed good. Off we went. Every time he left the ball where I could poke it away, I did - and after maybe three times, he never left it there again. When he got me turned around and could get around me, he would sometimes hesitate - wanting to draw he game out, it seemed - and I told him not to. "If you see an opening, you take it, before it goes away. It's just like soccer." So he started going around me the nanosecond he could.

His lay-ups have become 100%, or close to it. He knows just how to do it now, can do it without thinking. He beat me, 8-4.

I told him how impressed I was with his lay-up prowess - something he did not have during basketball camp. "Q, imagine if you had known how to do a lay-up in basketball camp. You would have scored in every game, I'll bet." (Scoring for Q was a pretty rare thing - I think he made one basket in a game.) "You could always drive to the hole, but it rarely went in."

He shrugged, and smiled, half to himself. "Next year," he said, and pulled up to shoot a jumper.

Swish.

Nice.

I like this swagger - it's something he historically has not had. And he is a nice kid, so it's not like he's going to start making fun of anyone or bullying anyone. And it's not like I'll ask his teacher to let him get away with unkindness. But if there's a squabble between peers, and Q holds his own and doesn't back down, and insists on getting his way, even if it means a conflict, all the way to raised voices and pushing, I want her to know that this is new, that this is something that, if anything, he has not done enough of up to now. He's been easy to bully, easy to take advantage of. Those days appear to be ending, and Q seems to be thinking, "I have as much right to that ball / pencil / place in line / spot in the lake / conversational politeness as anyone, and I'm going to fight for it." It's OK to fight for what's right; that fight isn't something to be feared. He's just learning that.

So, if you have to curb it at all...Please be gentle about it. He's a nice kid - don't fear that it's going to turn into over-aggressiveness or bullying. It won't. Quite the opposite - He's going to use his powers for good. You'll see.

Dang. I may already have written this thing.

Revs vs Galaxy: Aftermath

The game ended, and Q and I stood there a long time, waiting for the aisles to empty out, not bothering to try to muscle our way up through the crowd. Besides which, we're yokels from the Berkshires - there's still plenty for us to gawk at even when the game is over. And after ten minutes or so, a couple of the Revs players came over to the sidelines to talk to and shake hands with the fans. We were all of fifty feet away, so Q started working his way down, Sharpie in hand, to see if he could get the players to sign his France national team jersey. The players were Steve Ralston:



and Taylor Twellman -



- the latter in street clothes, apparently injured. But both evaporated before Q could work his way down, and we headed to the exits to make our way toward Autograph Alley.

This was where three or four Revs would be made available after the game for autographs. We had been there just as we got to the stadium, but now they had moved the barriers to make a long corridor for the players to walk in, allowing the fans all along the barriers to reach across and have them sign their soccer balls or pennants or what have you. Q wriggled his way in and held out his shirt to Amaechi Igwe:



- who looked perplexed, but signed it in the middle of the back, up between the shoulders. And then Q found his way to Sainey Nyassi -



- and held out his sleeve (he'd since put his jersey back on), which the Gambian midfielder quietly signed.

Q was thrilled, and I said I thought we should try to work our way around the stadium to where the visiting team would board its bus, and see if we could get any of them to sign an autograph. I thought the odds were low, but what the heck - they were a lot better then than they would ever be again, probably. So Q, somewhat reluctantly, came along. He really wanted to go back to the hotel and swim - but he really wanted autographs, too, so I had to guide him through the logical process that showed that, no, swimming could happen regardless whether we did this now or not. So it was best to do this.

We walked past an open barricade that said "No Public Access", since the area was thinly populated by people in Revs jerseys, kids, pickup soccer games. Seemed no one was being excluded. And soon we were in front of a glassed-in lobby area, and looking in, I saw Twellman again. I pointed it out to Q - and soon we spotted a number of other players. We probably could have simply walked in there - no one was guarding the door, and it wasn't locked. But that seemed like a bit much to me, and soon they started to filter out anyway. Mostly, they seemed happy to have their pictures taken with people (though Twellman insisted on no flash), and the long and the short of it is that Q also got autographs from Twellman, Jeff Larentowicz:



and Jay Heaps:



After that, Q had had enough, and I wasn't about to make him stand around, or walk another half mile all told to see if we could get close to the Galaxy. His French national jersey is now signed by five New England Revolution players. Fitting, in a way, since the jersey was a gift from his grandmother for his birthday, and the ticket was a gift from his aunt.

Back to the hotel, swimming and hot tub, bed, sleep, home. Man, this has been a lot of writing - a very memorable trip, all in all. For both of us. And we're damn likely to do it again.

David Beckham: Man Crush

Everybody's back! T and Janneke returned from gay Paris, where T took the world by storm. She now claims she wants to live there, and open a restaurant with Q. It's something they play at a lot - Q is constantly asking me about five-star restaurants (something of a mythic beast, really, given our family's finances, but one that he'll some day get a gander of), wondering how well owners of McDonald's franchises do, wondering whether you make more money as the owner of one five-star restaurant, or five one-star restaurants, etc. And then the other day, at the McDonald's in a rest area as we drove home from the airport, T had a brilliant idea: Restaurant bathrooms - one for women, one for men, one for boys, and one for girls. It's fresh, it's new, it's exciting, it's never been done. Expect big things from this budding tycoon.

Honestly, the ladies weren't home long before another adventure beckoned. Auntie Jayne's birthday gift to Q of a ticket to a New England Revolution soccer match was cashed in just yesterday. Q and I departed for Foxboro, home of the Patriots, at noon on Saturday, checked into our hotel not four miles from the stadium, and then headed for the game.

I don't get to many professional games of any sort, and I really enjoy myself when I do go. The excitement, the crowds, the gorgeous weather (luckily) - it was a very electric atmosphere. And not least because this was to be the Revolution vs the Los Angeles Galaxy - and their erstwhile captain, David Beckham.

You may have heard of David Beckham. Just to keep you interested if you haven't, this is him:



I mean, goodness. If that's not eye candy, you don't have eyes. And he's also very good - former captain of the English national team, played for Manchester United at the age of 17, on and on. Excellent player, who's made a big splash by coming to play in the US.

Now, granted, he's done so at the age of 34, when his skills are in decline. And a lot of the money he makes here, he makes because of who he is, not what he does on the field - he's an automatic draw for fans, not just to the stadium in LA, but all round the country. I mean, I chose this game specifically because of him. It's very unusual for a top European player to decide to play here - so unusual, in fact, that it's unheard of. There's so little prestige here compared to Europe - almost anywhere in Europe. Less exposure, less money, less respect, etc. If they can play in Europe, they do. And frankly, every one of the players in the MLS teams stateside would drop MLS like a bad habit if they could go to Europe. No question.

And yet he's here. It might have been hubris - the US is the only market in the world he hasn't conquered, and perhaps he saw dollar signs in the possibility of capping his legacy by becoming a top draw in this gigantic money machine of a country. TV, movies, his own team, etc.

'Course, last year, he had second thoughts, and tried to break out of his contract to go and play in Europe again, for AC Milan. In addition, according to a recent article and book quoting / written by Landon Donovan, the US' best player and Beckham's teammate, Beckham wasn't really putting his all into his new team in LA. Seemed to be sleepwalking through it, wasn't quite as devoted to his teammates, the schedule, training, as he should have been. Donovan, who had been the captain, was strongarmed into giving the armband over to Beckham, and Beckham didn't do a damn thing with it. No leadership, etc. Then Beckham tried to jump ship, making every accusation of being half-hearted about the US ring all the truer. The Italian league is top-notch, and they wanted Beckham at AC Milan. But the Galaxy said no, and now he's playing out his contract here. Reluctantly, perhaps. Donovan is the captain again, and Beckham either plays stateside, or he doesn't play. So there's plenty of drama.

The Revolution, on the other hand, apparently are another team, and have a lot of players, and appear to have won the championship last year.

So the stage was set.

Q and I had watched the Galaxy play a friendly against Barcelona on TV recently, so we knew something about them. Barcelona was last year's European championship team and is widely held to be the best team on Earth, with the planet's best player, Lionel Messi, an Argentine. Q is crazy about Messi, and we had really enjoyed watching that game. Which Barcelona won, 2-1 - the one goal for LA coming on a set piece, a free kick that Beckham took. He is world-renowned for his free kick prowess - the movie, you may recall, "Bend It Like Beckham", deals tangentially with this particular gift of his. And he lived up to the hype - he bent the shot right, around the wall of defenders, and all the way back left to the left side of the net and in. Holy cow. Q and I were very excited indeed to get to go see him play.

Q talked for days before we drove to Foxboro about the possibility of getting Beckham's autograph. I didn't throw any cold water on the notion, although I knew full well that our chances of getting close to Beckham were close to nil. But even so, I was very glad that we'd decided to book a hotel room there and thus not have to worry about driving back after the game. We'd have time, if he wanted to try, for autograph-hunting.

Q had also seen US vs Brasil, where Landon Donovan had scored two goals and the Americans had taken an early lead; and he had also seen the US beat Spain, 2-0, so he was very familiar with Donovan as well. Fast, fast player, is Donovan, with supreme skills, and not necessarily that big, to be generous. (Putting him close to Q's heart, along with Messi - and making Donovan's autograph and Beckham's pretty much equally valuable.)

Thus setting the stage even further.

Q wore his France national jersey - it's red, white, and blue, so he blended into the crowd. We decided we would be cheering for the Galaxy, since we like Donovan and Beckham, and entered the stadium.

We caught sight of the teams warming up and stood there, watching; I had this strange, morbid fear that for some reason Beckham wouldn't play, and so easily convinced myself that the blonde man stretching there at the corner of the field wasn't him. But the binoculars, trained on his back, confirmed it: There was the signature tattoo on the back of his neck, wings spreading out toward his ears. And then he turned my way and smiled:



Ka-bam. I mean, jeepers. I'm very firmly and comfortably in the "Hetero" aisle at the "Preferences" market, but it just plain leaves you speechless. Like when I see a buck step out of the brush in the woods unexpectedly. I am awed at the beauty of the thing, its majesty - I feel like I'm in the presence of something pure and perfect. Do I want to kiss the buck? No. No, I do not. In fact, I want to shoot it, and when I'm lucky, I do. But I get weak-kneed nonetheless because I'm in the presence of something so gloriously perfect. Similar with Mr. Beckham - Ka, bam.

(And, for the record: I did not have the slightest urge to shoot him.)

The warm-ups were cool, because they looked like any old team warming up - drills, jogging, goofing around, pinnies, etc. Same as anyone. Despite being David Beckham and Landon Donovan. They're just people, we found. Something we who don't deal with fame or with famous people sometimes forget. We found our way to our seats (which were excellent - Row 14 of the main section, near midfield, right on the aisle), got us some beverages (one adult, one less so), listened to the National Anthem, and settled in to take in some damn soccer.

Watching Q play his games over the years, and taking him to soccer events because of his interest, I have come to have a VERY rudimentary understanding of what works and what doesn't in soccer. I watch the high school games my students play in, the occasional Williams game, men's or women's, and then, more lately, I watch more and more of it on TV, thanks to Q's interest and our newfound cable access to the Fox Soccer Channel. And here's what I've noticed, in general, about the top levels of soccer: There is an innate feel, a higher-level command of the field, that certain teams have that transcends individual brilliance. It's a fluidity and a sense of common purpose among the whole team, all 11 on the pitch, that's unsaid, or seems to be - a bone-level soccer tune-in. Many teams at the high levels don't have it - the US national team, for example. We watched them beat Spain, largely due to a couple of very lucky pounces on dangerous situations, and due to the individual skills of the right player, at the right time. But then later in the game, as Spain was trying desperately to come back, there was no doubt as to which team was better. Spain was a hive mind - each individual did what the whole needed done, knowing he could count on the other parts of the whole to do the same. And they had the US pinned back on their end the entire time, because the US could so rarely break up, completely, what the Spanish were trying to do. They couldn't get close enough to the ball to interfere - Spain would effortlessly, wordlessly, bounce away as one, passing and passing and never losing the ball, moving and probing for an opening. And then when the US was at the other end of the field, their own attacks would evaporate almost as soon as they'd begun. They just didn't appear to have a sense of purpose. Donovan was brilliant a time or two, individual defenders were valiant and very skilled, and the US won. But they are not better.

Same against Brazil. The US went ahead 2-0 on the sheer power and speed of Donovan - but thereafter, they were helpless against Brazil's hive-mind. The US was playing checkers, and the Brazilians were playing chess, and Brazil put three (four, really, but one was called a non-goal) over in the second half and won, deservedly. It made me sad, but you had to admit: Brazil was just better.

It was a similar thing to watch the LA Galaxy and the Revolution play. Donovan should be playing in Europe - he's just super-skilled, aggressive, knowledgeable, and ridiculously fast. And Beckham, playing midfield, was the glue that held everything together. Between the two of them, they so elevated LA's game that the Revolution looked like children - or like the US did against Brazil. Outclassed.

Donovan and Beckham communicated wordlessly all game long, weaving past each other and laying passes to where the other ought to soon be, confident that the other would not fail to be there when the pass arrived. And 90% of the time, that's exactly what happened. When other players on the Galaxy were called upon, they looked herky-jerky, clunky, compared to those two - they were George W Bush reading a prepared text, and Beckham and Donovan were Barack Obama. Just no comparison at all.

The Galaxy were up 1-0 at halftime on a brilliant, lightning-strike of a goal by Donovan, who took a cross out of the air with his left foot and bent it some 30 yards around the outstretched hands of the goal keeper and into the left side. Wow. I actually felt on a couple of occasions that he was a titch selfish - he would approach from the right side and Beckham, at the precise moment, when the man marking Donovan would trend inside to prevent Donovan from charging straight to the goal, would blaze around behind Donovan and head for the right corner - all but unmarked, as everyone on defense was still afraid of Donovan toward the center. And it seemed that the universe wanted Donovan to send it toward the space where Beckham would soon be. He did do so a few times, but on what was certainly the best opportunity, Donovan instead shot, and it ricocheted off a Revs player and harmlessly into another, who cleared it. I looked to Beckham to see if he would throw up his hands in frustration.

He absolutely did not. I have to say, watching Beckham play, and that's all I got to see him do, I feel like I got a certain amount of information about him as a person. I'll tell you a few reasons why - One was this refusal to complain about his teammates' play. Even when the obviously junior-varsity Galaxy players would blow something, his only reaction was perhaps a slow-motion, hands-pressing-earthward, "Calm down", reassurance-type of gesture, even as he bounced and trotted to the right spot to make up for the mistake his teammate had committed. He seemed like a very mature player, unselfish and generous.

With the opposition, there was a certain amount of jawing going on - Beckham has set himself up for it with his actions last year, and the Revolution players were letting him have it. Their midfielder, a big, braided-hair guy named Shalrie Joseph (here he is:)



- was continually talking to Beckham. At first it seemed very friendly - Beckham would approach and listen and give a handshake, smiling, and once turned away, laughing, tossing they guy's hand away in either a "You-big-palooka" kind of way or a "F--k you" kind of way - hard to tell, what with the joy in his smile.

(For reference:)



But in the second half, as the frustration and desperation on the part of the Revs grew (it was 2-0 by now), the tackles on Beckham got harder and harder, and he would come up jawing with the players. "That's just stupid," I lip-read once; he would approach in a confrontational way, as if to fight, but would turn it into an "I'm-just-trying-to-help-the-guy" stance at the last second. He's very good at playing the "I'm-not-the-bad-guy" game, the subtle art of provoking without getting a card yourself, that's so maddening to watch in European and South American players. He's brilliant at it.

But eventually the over-aggressiveness and the personal nature of the tackling got to be too much for him. The paper reported that the biggest incident came about because Beckham got an elbow to the head, but from what I could see, he appeared to be upset about an elbow that was thrown against one of his teammates going up for a header. It was on the opposite sideline, but Beckham got right in the Revs player's face, no subtlety anymore, and eventually they were separated. Donovan came over and pulled Beckham away, and Joseph came in and talked to Beckham - playing Beckham's game, approaching in a peacemaker stance, and then saying something nasty, which got Beckham riled again. That ended with Joseph jabbing Beckham in the chest with a finger, and Beckham realizing that he'd get carded soon if he didn't pull out, so he turned and dismissively walked off. In the end, Beckham and the player who threw the elbow got yellow cards, and play resumed. By the way, Beckham was booed thunderously throughout - although, from my vantage point, he looked perfectly justified, and much more the gentleman than the Revs.

Not five minutes later, the player who'd thrown the elbow (I assume) was up against the sideline around midfield, in a bit of a pickle, and Beckham absolutely pounced. It was a very rough challenge and scramble for the ball - nothing overtly intended to harm, no punches or elbows, but a distinct ratcheting-up of the urgency, of the level of violence, which left a few players on the ground. A primadonna, Beckham, unequivocally, is not.

The Galaxy were going left-to-right in the first half, and Beckham tended to stray right, so we got our best looks at him in the first half, when I saw him do a couple of throw-ins. Both times, the ball had bounced just off the field and into the privileged seats that are right there behind the barriers - themselves only three to three and a half feet high - such that someone in the seats there would be able to hand the ball to whichever player came to do the throw. Both times that I saw (or remember), the ball was given to him by a child. The first time, it was a kid I remember as being almost a baby - maybe two or three, given the ball by an adult and then held out toward Beckham to hand it to him. And Beckham's face went fully into Dad mode - a big, exaggerated "Hi!" grin, wide-eyed, with that surprised "Goodness!" look that I've felt myself give to tiny kids, which disarms, delights and reassures them at the same time. In fact, at the pool the other day, I gave it to a one-year-old as he looked at me over his mother's shoulder, and she turned to see me and smiled, saying, "They can always find the dads in the crowd." I laughed and said, "Well, we help them by giving the 'Dad' look." And that's exactly what Beckham gave this kid. It was just perfect - and I suddenly remembered that he is a Dad, of quite young kids. Just that little moment, and I was pretty well sure: Not just a Dad, but a devoted one.

Observe:



The second time, the kid in question was probably nine or ten, and Beckham was in a hurry, so he took the ball from the kid poliltely, with a "Thanks" that I could plainly see, definitely said, but said quickly. Then, though, as he was about to throw, it became clear that his teammates weren't ready - he'd have to wait a few seconds. So he quickly turned back to the kid, stuck out his hand, and gave him a low-five. Fully aware, of course, that he's just made that kid's day - hell, year. Childhood, maybe. Also aware that he was in the middle of a game, and had to keep concentrating - but that this kid's world was also big and important, and that he had the ability to quickly make that world much more fun and memorable, the opportunity, and of course took it, despite the fact that it won him absolutely nothing, other than that kid's happiness. I don't mean to go on about such a small thing, and perhaps I'm not conveying what I found great about the moment - I mean, I saw so many other players that day take the ball from a fan, turn back to the field, and say nothing to the fan. Not one word. "Thanks" would have cost them absolutely nothing, not even time, but it was too much to ask. And that's of course somewhat natural - they're concentrating, after all. But Beckham, despite being far and away the best overall player there, the most focused, the most famous, didn't turn up his nose at the chance to quickly make a fan (of the opposing team) very, very happy. That's important, he believes, so he does it.

I got the feeling that he appreciates all the game has done for him, and earnestly, honestly wants to give back. In just a quick glimpse, sure - but I've seen so many star athletes act like spoiled children, and to see the one active athlete who, world-wide, inspires probably the most fan shrieking and adulation, who's more photographed than any other athlete alive - to see him go those extra three feet, despite there being no obligation, was a very pleasantly surprising thing to see. He has time, even when he doesn't have time. He has the emotional space to keep it up. He's had more demands on him from fans than anybody, anybody - and he's still got more to give, in a hostile stadium, for fans who've been booing him all day and hold signs that malign his heart and his skills.

Yep. I have a man crush.

Eeyore

Hey.

Y'know, I just watched a commercial for sticky denture goo. It's the one where people with dentures mug for the camera about their distaste for certain qualities of the brands they won't be patronizing anymore. There's a shot of three women singing along to "Bye Bye Love". Except they've changed the words, and now it's "Bye bye, paste".

Then there's another shot of a guy making an "ick" face as he sings along to "goodbye stickiness". Or some such.

And, y'know, I get that they're trying to appeal to denture wearers. And that denture wearers tend not to be the youngest people. But...Certain standard advertising tactics, like making idealized versions of your potential customers appear jubilant because of their decision to use your product? Making them giggle and pose half-self-consciously in spontaneous-looking photo-shoot-type hug-fests in summer settings in bright clothes...That...doesn't really work with old people. First off, the idealized versions of people in general aren't old. In Fake TV Land, they're all young and thin and have perfectly symmetrical smiles, because that way consumers get to pretend for a moment to be those people. And I don't want for the shortest of moments to be any of the people in these ads. And older people don't dress that way, in that primary-color-jumper-and-vest combos, and if they do, it can look kind of weird. Like a ninety-year-old guy in a sideways baseball cap and a Chicago Bulls jersey. It's just not dignified. Not that I really want to buy any denture paste from anybody at all, but if I ever do, I'm going to be less likely to buy it from someone who almost mocks my age by depicting my idealized self as a somewhat addled simpleton wearing age-inappropriate clothing.

Y'know what else? Kelly Ripa needs to go eat a cream puff or six, and then not throw up. Or jazzercize. She's so damn skinny she looks like a leather Bionicle.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, I'm kind of moping lately. Janneke and T are in France, and Q is spending all day at robotics camp. Leaving me with a lot of time on my hands.

Which I manage to use, I guess. I've been swimming for exercise again, which causes nothing at all on my body to hurt. And I can't say that about any other kind of exercise, I don't think.

Not even yoga, turns out. My right wrist is killing me. Been doing an hour of yoga Mondays and Wednesdays with Ronadh, and I love it. I come out of there feeling absolutely great - all the soreness from running goes away, and I feel two inches taller. (Not cumulatively, though. Otherwise I'd be 6'2" by now.) But all the leaning on my palms has caused my old achy right wrist to rear its head again. That stinks. I love yoga. Maybe I have to go get the wrist injected again.

And I've been editing videos. Got a lot of footage from the last several months, and so far I've done Q's soccer video, a video about Christmas last year, and now one about our Team Trivia squad, "Milk of Amnesia". (Which looks a lot better now than when you saw it, Brad, Betsy, Ronadh, and Mark.) And I manage to keep Q fed and clothed and off to camp on time, and to dress and clean myself. I keep Skittles brushed, the floors vacuumed (mostly), and the grass cut.

But largely, these are spasms of activity that interrupt my moping. The house is just so damn big and empty without Janneke and T. I don't get it - Janneke claims to have a grand old time when I take the kids away. Getting tons of stuff done, going out with friends, bla bla bla. I watch Keith Olbermann and wonder why the heck I don't feel like playing guitar, which I swore I was going to do so much of this summer and now have time to do. It's weird.

In the evenings it seems stilted and uncomfortable to just sit across from each other in silence and chew, so Q and I have been watching Fox Soccer Channel while we eat. And there's an on-demand kids' channel on the local cable package, and Q will ask to watch an episode of "Destroy Build Destroy". And I'll usually cave. Sometimes we'll go outside and play basketball, and last night was "Wipeout" night. And tonight, we discovered a telenovela on Univision. It's called "Un gancho de amor" ("A hook (as in boxing) of love"), and he was laughing out loud at some of it. Mostly at the slightly overweight, greasy former boyfriend character who farts and wears loud shirts and blurts out "Bueno, sabes, mi amor, es que...No me importa" in a half-sympathetic, half-impatient whine when someone starts confiding in him. It was really fun - they talk full-on fast, and he had no problem following anything. It was actually a revelation, and I'm going to have to see if this is a once-a-week thing. (Though they tend to be every day, in my experience.) And then, after his TV stints (which, Janneke, he does not always have (oh, who am I kidding - she never reads this)), he tends to go to bed happily after some very pleasant story-reading. So we're good. But...I'm just not a good solo act. Can't find my marks, can't keep time on my own, I go flat all the time...I droop and sag like a pasta sawhorse.

Oh, well. Keith Olbermann is on - I'll just grab the remote...punch in "49"...sit back...

Guest host.

Jeepers...It just gets worse and worse.

Kicks Just Keep Gettin' Harder to Find

Except here. Because here are some damn fine kicks:

Addendum

Wow - The steel trap that is my mind just gets rustier and rustier. And so I've had to come back and finish off the relating of the Great Trip South and Back Again, because I had neglected to tell you about the final chapter: The Return Voyage.

We loved Waynesboro, Virgina so much (and I'm not being sarcastic - it's a delightful place, with a clean, affordable Best Western with an indoor pool, exactly halfway between Birmingham and Williamstown) that for the return trip, we decided to have it be our rest stop again. Even though we weren't going straight home: we were planning to spend a day with my brother Jess, his wife, Stephanie, and our kids' eldest Johnson cousin, their son, Jack.

They don't live in Waynesboro. They live in Waldorf, MD, a suburb of DC - which, Mapquest informed us, is twelve hours from Birmingham. Too dang long a drive, we said. Mapquest then informed us that it was three hours from Waynesboro - and that Waynesboro, as we had previously known, was nine hours from Birnimgham. Ergo, we would lose absolutely nothing, time-wise, if we went to Waynesboro on Day One, stayed the night, and headed out bright and early the next day to arrive in Waldorf.

And so it came to pass: another night in Waynesboro, where we ate at a lovely local Italian restaurant (owned by an Argentine, whose niece was the hostess, and who confirmed for us that Argentina is not the place to go if we plan to spend a year abroad - too many kidnappings), and then hit the hay. (But not before picking up dessert at Arby's, a restaurant I had had a hankerin' for for a while, but which circumstances on the highway had prevented us from patronizing up to then. The kids had shakes for dessert. I had a roast beef sandwich. And, by the way, of the 10 or so patrons and staff we saw there that day, 9 were on the verge of morbid obesity. Just saying.) Up and at 'em the next day, and the drive went through at least three Civil War battlefields. Can't name 'em off the top of my head, but I recognized all of them. Weird - sooo long ago, the landscape totally transformed since then, but that's the place. Saw several roadside shacks that hawk battlefield gear, probably dug up with a metal detector. And so on towards Waldorf, though we got stuck in some traffic because of a big-rig wreck. Chemical spill, so we gathered; news helicopters circling overhead, the whole bit. Got some great advice on how to skirt the blockage from the patrons and staff at a stripmall hairdresser's, and then cruised on to Waldorf.

Auntie Stephanie received us, and Uncle Jess and Jack came home in the afternoon, and the kids got on great. T charged around the yard in Jack's battery-powered car - not, by the way, fantasizing about being a race car driver, or a getaway car driver, or, even, as I would have hoped, a postapocalyptic gasoline pirate. (Still thinking about Georgia, I guess.) Nope: T was going shopping. Frankly, I expected better.

Jack is a ball of fire, running pretty much everywhere he goes. And not slowly, either. He also seems to be built on a par with his cousin Liam, whom the Packers should draft, like now. Those boys are going to be tanks - add Jack's stoutness with his need for speed, and soon Jess and Steph's lovely house is going to be sporting some Jack-shaped holes in a number of its walls. Quite the talker at 3 years old - answers every question with a complete sentence: "Yes, I do." "No, they aren't." "Yes, she is." "No." (Ooh- Wait! Maybe he's not going to - ) "...it's not." He wasn't shy with us or the kids, but he was a little reserved - I managed to extract a hug out of him when it came time to go. But it took some work. Not surprising - last time I saw him, or he saw me, he was a baby. And, to be honest, I was just out of rehab at the time, weighing only about 120, and still hadn't had my facial tattoos removed. Didn't have my prosthetic nose yet, either. So if he has any memories of me, they probably aren't pleasant. Time flies, boy...Man! How does that happen...!

Anyhoo, we spent the afternoon playing football in their green and happy back yard, ordered in pizza, chatted until bedtime, and then off to dreamland. But not before Q chimed in that he liked both their house and the Pajaros' in Birmingham more than ours, because the Pajaros had had a pool, and these guys had a pool table. Nice. Good to see those guys, even if only for a bit - it had been a while. We always seem to miss each other back at the ranch in Wisconsin.

Out like a rocket the next morning for seven and a half more hours of drivin'. Up!, Up! we went, and as we moved northward certain things started to disappear. Cracker Barrel, Waffle House...Civil War battlegrounds (which sparked a fascinating conversation with Q, still continuing in fits and starts to this day: "Why are there no Civil War battlegrounds where we live?" Think about it - that's a complicated answer), armadillo roadkill. And African-American men on motorcycles. Strange - Saw a lot of that in the South, Maryland and Virgina in particular. Up here? Honestly, just about never.

New Jersey. New York! VEMONT!

MASSACHUSETTS!

Ahhh. Richer and wiser for the experience, but happy to be back.

Here endeth the reading.

Jiggety-Jog

As in, "Home again, home again".

What a long, strange trip it was. You know about the first leg - down to Virginny, and then onward. The "onward" portion is what I shall herewith relate.

Our second nine-hour driving day was a long one. I mean, it was exactly as long as the other one, but it felt longer. We were pretty darn punchy by the time we actually rolled into Alabama. The geography was very interesting to observe, by the way - there is a clear geologic distinction between "middle-south", Virginia, and "deep south", or Georgia-Alabama. I can't totally put my finger on it, but things felt very different as we rolled out of the Virginia mountains and into the Georgia mountains.

The cities took on a very different, more-industrial tinge. And the highway that cuts across the far north-west corner of Georgia, basically serving only people who want to get from Virginia to Alabama, is downright post-apocalyptic. Grass that's been allowed to get two and three feet high in all the medians and on the shoulders, oddly purplish-grayish pavement, which, while not terribly bad to drive on, just plain seems unfriendly. And blown tire parts everywhere. That's another line you cross going south: The "nobody-picks-up-the-blowouts" line. Could be that they don't pick them up, could be that they have a hundred times more of them and the boys from the highway department just can't keep up. Either way. You expect every 18-wheeler to be sporting barbed wire and turrets manned by men in shoulderpads, firing crossbows.

Had me some goobers in Georgia. Boiled, salted peanuts in the shell, sold out of a crock pot in a gas station where I damn near bought me a twelve-dollar cowboy hat. I thought the goobers were kind of good, though Janneke thought they looked like cigarette butts floating in a piss-soaked toilet. It is a testament to my manhood that I kept right on eating after that observation.

Before I get to the family business that took place (there was much, and it was grand), I'll give you some general observations about my first trip to the Deep South. Alabama: It is hotter, and humider, but very strangely, it suffers from far fewer mosquitoes. The geography of northern Alabama is very mountainous - I say "very" because I expected it to be flat. Which shows my level of ignorance. Birmingham: Every building there, except the plain on which the city center sits, and in the flattish "village" centers that surround the heart of the city, is very, very hilly. So hilly that almost no one seemed to have a proper yard. They've kept their houses from washing away by leaving practically all the trees standing - it seemed we never saw a house that wasn't deeply shaded and protected by gorgeous stands of lush, full trees. It feels like a jungle sometimes, except that the roads are gorgeously maintained - honestly, I don't think I saw a pothole in all of Birmingham (not that I saw all of it) - my sister-and-brother-in-law do quite well, so it was a better part of Birmingham that I mostly got to see, but even so, no matter where we went, things seemed to be well-taken-care-of.

"Why did this surprise you?", my deep-south friends might well ask me with indignation. That is, they might, if I had any deep-south friends. Well, I'll tell you why: It's by far the poorest region of the US. It regularly outdoes the rest of the country in obesity, ignorance, racism, and hyper-religiosity. (I hereby declare. Though I'm sure I could back those assertions up with some numbers, if I had the inclination.) I expected that to color the whole place to some extent, and in Birmingham, it absolutely did not. You couldn't tell you were anywhere other than a prosperous, tastefully-laid-out upper-class neighborhood or suburban center. Where people talked in ridiculous accents.

(OK, I said that for comic effect. I absolutely do not consider their accents to be ridiculous. They are just as valid and historically justified as any accent, be it the flatness of the midwest, the broadness of the upper east coast, or the drabness and reservation of an English toff.)

(But they do sound funny.)

I also noticed some things with regard to race. We went at one point to a baseball game (the Birmingham Barons, the same minor-league team where Michael Jordan stank it up), and I had a good amount of crowd-watching. There were pee-lenty of African-Americans around - probably close to half the attendees. And I never saw one interracial couple. Not once. In Berkshire County, I truly think it would not be possible to walk through the mall, or go to a high school sporting event, or go to one of the miserable county fairs they have here for random reasons in the summer, without seeing one. None there at all.

Not that they don't interact - my nieces and nephews there appear to have a host of black friends from school. But it was peculiar, this race thing, at least in the eyes of a Northerner, in a lot of other ways - for example, in the Piggly Wiggly, I noticed that apart from the manager, absolutely all the checkers and bag boys and shelf-stockers were black. On my first trip - and, you know, it wasn't even true then. There was one white woman working there on my first trip. So, probably 13 out of 14 employees were black. On subsequent trips, I noticed a few more white employees. But easily 85% were black. Interesting - go to a situation where there will be big groups of people earning little money in Alabama, and the vast majority of them will be black. Go to places where you'll see big groups of wealthier people, and most of them will be white.

"Why should this surprise you? That's true in a larger sense in the rest of the US as well." I don't know - Maybe it shouldn't surprise me. Maybe. But it was different there, I think. Could be that it wasn't really - maybe I'm projecting. But I don't think so. In Berkshire County, for example, you get waited on in the fast-food restaurants by people of any color. Granted, there are far fewer blacks in Berkshire County, but that almost makes the observation more interesting. The argument would go that we have fewer blacks in our low-paying jobs in western Massachusetts, not because blacks are more prosperous here, but because there are fewer blacks. Thus implying, I suppose, that wherever you find lots of black people, they will be doing low-paying jobs, and ergo, it's logical that the checkout staff in Piggly-Wiggly in Alabama should be black? That doesn't square with me either. I mean, it may mathematically be true, but I still find it objectionable that it be so. And so maybe the truth is objectionable...? Perhaps it's just the numbers that struck me. No more prosperous in the South than here, but far more of them. Which made it that much more evident to me that the economic state of African-Americans in this country is by and large very bad.

Surprising? No. But what it points to is the way in which it is possible for me, given where I live, to sail through my day without being consciously aware of that. It isn't something I'm reminded of at every turn. Maybe I'd be better off, in terms of my awareness of the state of my nation, if I were more aware of it. And maybe as a nation we'd be better off if everybody had the sort of tiny, daily "Katrina" moments that would bring this into sharper focus. By that I mean the shock - Shock! - that so many of us, including me, felt when we saw the images of the Katrina destruction and saw that 97% of the victims were black. And we said to ourselves, "What the hey?" Unlike most Republicans, I don't feel that seeing this fact is racism. To paraphrase Dennis Miller, "Pointing out that the victims were almost all black is not being racist. It's being minimally observant." And there's a lot of useful information we can glean from that. "Hey," we should say. "How come, when we evacuate, we leave all the black people behind?" Shouldn't that merit some conversation, at least? I mean, if they had all been wearing cowboy hats, I would have expected someone to say, "Hey, let's try to sort out this cowboy-hat-equals-left-behind phenomenon."

If, every day, dopes like me were forced to observe, "Goodness, look at that. Just about all the lowest-paying jobs are taken up by black people. What's the deal there?", maybe we'd be voting differently.

Anyway...Lots to think about.

So much for Alabama. The family: Octavio and Dominique were as generous as hosts can possibly be. We had the downstairs...um...south...west...?...corner of the house to ourselves. We could close off two doors and have a hallway with our bedrooms and the kids' room, as well as our bathroom, in isolation from the rest of the bunch, or could open it up and let the sunshine in. We had our own door to the back yard, where the swimming pool beckoned.

And Q and T answered the call. Daily. Several times, for hours at a time. T, by the way, learned to swim on this trip! She had been using a life vest for a while now, but at one point, she asked if we could try without it, and then she was managing to stay afloat for a few seconds, then she was lunging from the side of the pool out toward us, and then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she was dogpaddling her way across the whole pool. It happened really, really fast, and the fact that every time she did it she got thunderous ovations from her gorgeous, beaming, cool-as-can-be teenage cousins can't have hurt in the motivation department.

Gorgeous and cool they all were, too. Flavia in particular, as far as T was concerned - the two of them just click. Flavia wasn't just resigning herself to be the babysitter, either - she genuinely enjoys T's company, and the two of them were impossible to separate. Not bad, considering the nine-year age gap. We kept on trying to rescue Flavia from having to spend too much time with her, but every time we did she'd look at us like we were crazy.

Q, meanwhile, played a lot of video games with the Alabama boys, Stefan and Adrian, and did a lot of pool time with them as well. But I think the biggest revelation of the trip was Oscar and Oliver, the Belgian cousins. (though they will insist that they're Dutch, as that's what their passports say. But they're from Brussels.) We'd only met them once before, also at Octavio and Dominique's, but it was in Florida that time, and it was in 2004. Now Oscar is 21 and Oliver is 19, and they've matured into some fantastically sound, bright young men - with a lot of "chispa", as they say in Spanish. Spark -- Creativity, a knack for finding the fun in any given situation. I've never seen people who can think of so many things to do with pool toys. There was this basketball hoop that floats on the water - basically an inner tube about 20 inches in diameter, and another one about 14 inches in diameter, separated and held together by three inflated rods, making for an overall shape between a cone and a pyramid. It floats in the water and you throw things into it. But Oscar and Oliver put it on as if it were a vest, their heads poking out the little inner tube, the larger one around their waists, and dove off the diving board with it on. Hilarity ensues - they don't quite get their feet completely into the water before the buoyancy of the thing shoots them back up and they land, sputtering, on their stomachs. And then Oliver decides to see if he can swim to the bottom while wearing it, starting from a standstill on the surface. He drives and pulls and pushes himself downward, but his legs, trying desperately to get some purchase, kicking in perfect swimming motions, simply wave and flail in the air above the surface. I have not laughed that hard in years.

Oscar and I took a couple of jogs on a lovely walking path in Birmingham while we were there. It's a mile or two from the house, and we would drive there in the morning. Just about every single foot of it is shaded (due to Birmingham's aforementioned love of trees), and it's probably two miles long. So we would go the length of it and back. He's 21, remember, and quite the field hockey sensation back home, as his his brother. So even out of shape, as he claimed to be, he kept me going a little faster than I probably would have otherwise. Besides which, we talked the whole time every day we went, about careers and family and the legal system in both countries. So I didn't get quite the distance I usually would, but it was easily as much of a workout.

Their Mum, Megs, was there as well, and it was great to get to know her better. We went to Six Flags at one point, near Atlanta, and I drove Dominique's suburban back from there with Megs in the front seat, and we had a great two-hour conversation. About her boys, about child rearing, about everything. (By the way, the exploded-tires-littering-the-highway phenomenon is much more pronounced in Georgia than in Alabama. At one point Megs asked if we had crossed into Alabama yet. I pointed to three or four tire husks and said "Not yet." Tongue-in-cheek, of course - but I turned out to be right.) It was the best chance I've gotten to know her since we met, and I feel much more connected now. It's hard when your extended family is spread across a couple of continents. Of all the sisters, she's the one I've known the least well, and it was a lot of fun to catch glimpses of each of the other three in her mannerisms, turns of phrase, sense of humor. Amazing how well you get to know the in-law side of your family after eleven years of marriage.

I also got to know Octavio a lot better. Driving around Birmingham with him to pick up Stefan from a drum lesson (Stefan has added the drums to his list of instruments he plays - it's now guitar, piano, drums; Adrian, meanwhile, played saxophone with Stefan's band at a party while we were there), Octavio showed me "the view", which refers to a short stretch of street atop Birmingham's probably-highest ridgeline, a gated-at-night-time community that has an unbelievable view of the city center and the hills beyond. There's a lot to be learned about Birmingham - its civil rights history, its industrial history (it still has active coal mines), all kinds of things. They really have found a great niche for themselves there. Octavio gave me some of the inside scoop on what it's like to essentially have two jobs - one teaching and researching at the university, and the other performing surgeries at the hospital. He was called out two or three nights in a row for emergency surgeries while we were there - transplants and such. When we got home Janneke and I started wondering if you could put a number on the lives he's saved over his career. It's got to be in the thousands.

I, meanwhile, had my status as the family "animal guy" cemented more fully. A while ago, a bird crashed into their window and lay there, stunned; they Skyped us to show us the bird and ask what I thought, having just gone through the incident with the falcon that crashed into our window. I turn out to have the reputation of being the guy who knows the most about animals in the family. (The bird eventually just recovered and flew away.) So when someone called out in dismay, "There's a dead animal in the pool filter!", someone else responded, quick as a flash: "Get Uncle Joe!" So I would come running and examine the creature.

Every time it happened (three times - once, with two bobbing there at the same time), the animal in question was a shrew. (I misidentified it as a vole at first. I had the labels mixed up in my head. I knew what it was - insectivorous, voracious, tiny ears and eyes, related to moles - but said the wrong name at first. Voles are to mice what hares are to rabbits.) The pool filter slurps out floating, dead insects and spins them lazily in a basket just outside the edge of the pool; the chamber this occurs in is covered over by a piece of stone with a hole drilled in the center to facilitate the lifting-out of the stone, followed by the basket, which can then be emptied. What appears to happen is that at night, the shrews stray near, and the scent of many accumulated, large, fleshy insects wafts out of the finger-hole. They love holes, particularly holes filled with insects, so they crawl in - and plop!, into the water and the basket, where they eventually drown.

So Octavio gets called out in the middle of the night to harvest and transplant hearts. I get called from my seat at the patio table to walk into the woods and shake dead shrews out of a plastic basket.

We both do what we can to make the world a better place.

Here's some evidence:



WIndow of the information center at the entrance to the Blue Ridge Parkway. Which appears to have fallen on hard times - 80% of the complex is unoccupied.



Inside, though, lots of fun to be had.



By kids of all ages.



Kids at the first rest stop we found on the Blue Ridge Parkway. You absolutely must go see this place.



Coppa...cubbuh...cummumma....



Friendlier denizens of the Virginia woods, also on the way up Humpback Mountain.



Q at the summit of Humpback Mountain.



Kids in the rocks. They love rocks.



There are a lot of them up there.



Birmingham: Guess who thought of lifting Q up to do this? ...Oscar and Oliver.



Here's T and Oscar. Not sure why, but we weren't so into picture-taking on this trip. "Enjoying" more than "documenting" the moments, I guess. Though I understand we got some great pics from Dominique.



Who at one point was attacked by a koala.



T and Megs, talking South African politics.



Dominique and the kids at Six Flags, about to ride the log flume.



T about to eat the log from the log flume at Six Flags.



Uncaptionable.