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.

High-Altitude Fabulousness

Holy cow, what a fulfilling day of familial fun. Crazy, crazy good day. Where to begin, I wonder.

Up at the crack of 6:45 to don my running clothes and hit the streets. We're in a strip mall-type area on the edge of Waynesboro, which we'll never truly enter, and there are absolutely no sidewalks anywhere. Pedestrians do not exist in the mind's eye of the Waynesboro city fathers. I mean, nothing. There was about 100 yards of sidewalk on the street in front of an elementary school (which is basically sandwiched between a Home Depot and a Ruby Tuesday's), probably the result of some obscure by-law dating from the same era as the laws that made 'em let the coloreds into the dang schools in the first place. That was it. All day in Waynesboro, we saw a hundred yards of sidewalk.

I ran 25 minutes in one direction and 25 back, and after jogging in the ditch for a while I took a right at a stoplight and hit a residential neighborhood. Quite nice, ranch homes, seemed a lot like he gated community where my sister in law and her family lived in Florida, but it wasn't gated. It had a golf course snaking through it, which also made it feel tony and private, but it truly appeared to be public. After fifteen minutes or so I can to a public park, which held a swimming pool, softball fields, several open-air performance spaces...it was truly lovely. A gorgeous municipal park. Say what you will about these sidewalk-hatin' Southrons, they build and maintain a mean park.

Back to the hotel, breakfast (I had two bananas - feeling kind of portly lately), and then we hit the road. The lady at the front desk had said "Ain't but one way to git to the poark. Git on 64 and git off at exit 9. You're raht thurr." So we got onto Highway 64, headed east, and promptly saw a sign for exit 95. Turns out, in Virginia, the words "nine" and "ninety-nine" are indistinguishable. Kind of like "there" and "their". Must be hell at auctions.

So we got off at exit "nahahaha", and sure enough, we wound up right at the entrance to the park. Stopped at the visitor center and were informed that there were a number of accessible areas for the kids, including a place 6 miles south on the Blue Ridge Parkway that included a museum of mountain life and a mountain ridgetop called "Humpback Rock" that they'd be able to hike to. Off we went.

This dang Blue Ridge Parkway thing is the eighth wonder of the frickin' world. It snakes along the mountaintops, with a top speed limit of 45, peppered liberally with ab-so-lute-ly spectacular overlooks and hiking trails all along its length, and keeps going south through Virginia and North Carolina for FOUR HUNDRED SOME MILES! How in God's name did I have no idea this thing existed? It is fabulously maintained, incredibly picturesque, and FOUR HUNDRED MILES LONG! It must be paradise for cyclists. I know the motorcyclists love it, as we saw a lot of them, but not nearly as many cyclists as you might think.

(By the way, for you motorcyclists out there: If your engine is loud, you suck. You. Personally. You are an inconsiderate and obnoxious jackass. There is no reason for your damn muffler to be so loud - it's not keeping you safe. If it were, those BMW bikes and Honda Goldwings would be deathtraps, because they make so little noise I think it actually gets quieter in the vicinity when they pass. All you're doing is slowly poisoning the day of every single person you pass on your merry Piss-Off Tour every summer, ruining the scenery with your horrid machine noises, mile after mile after mile. You are a prick, Loud Bike Owner, and I hate you.)

Anyhoo, we went and saw the museum, which is an actual 1800's cabin thats got three people working in it, and they are the loveliest, most open and warm people you can imagine, engaging kids with Jedi mind tricks that make them grin as they sit and play a dulcimer, weave at a loom, play graces, and prowl about a cabin wondering where they'd have slept had they been raised there. We were at the cabin nearly an hour, and the kids left a little reluctantly. Just fabulous people.

On across the parkway to the trail leading up to Humpback Rock. Q was a little whiny (only a little), and T is an absolute mountain goat. Both scampered happily most of the way - Q, at one point, got everyone's attention because he'd seen a snake in a stump. We took pictures, watched for probably a minute and a half - it never once moved. Gorgeous. And later on I spotted a doe, thirty feet away off the trail; we all watched it eat a while and thrilled as it walked within ten feet of us before sauntering off to look for more to eat. Beautiful.

And the view from the top of the mountain, perched as we were atop crags that were the most majestic things our two kids had yet seen in their lives, was perfect. We ate a light lunch, and walked back down.

Where the guys working on the fence near the parking lot looked at our photo of the snake and told us it was a copperhead. Totally deadly.

I came to a few minutes later, let the rangers and workmen help me to my feet, and then we all walked wobbly-kneed back to the car for another hour and a half of the Parkway. We trooped south to look at a waterfall, which turned out not to be worth the trip at all, in and of itself - but every single fifty-yard stretch of this parkway is so gorgeous you just can't feel like time there is time wasted. We got out of the park and back to Waynesboro around 3:30.

Picked up some popcorn chicken and drinks at KFC and hit he park I'd found this morning for some jungle-jim climbin', football tossin', soccer ball kickin', and all-around fun in the sun-havin'. (It had been about 70 degrees up on the Parkway, but it was 82 down in Waynesboro.) Whereupon we retired to the hotel and hit the pool.

Q swam more fiercely and aggressively today than I had ever seen him. He went the whole length of the pool without taking a breath! Which, if you know Q, is a real feat. He's never been that into swimming, let alone anything that requires physical danger or discomfort, but he was all over it today. Working on his crawl, working on underwater strokes...Great. And T! She is so much braver than Q was at her age. Jumping into the pool on her own (with a life vest), standing tippy-toe without a life vest in the three-foot end of the pool so she could practice her strokes (she can't swim as it stands), holding her breath under the water for as long as she could...Great fun. So glad we picked this hotel.

Applebee's for supper, which was clean, predictable, and inexpensive. And then back to the hotel, where we are all on the verge of collapse. A very good, full, unhurried day. Vacation is good.

Hitting the road tomorrow - this time Tuesday I should be writing this from Birmingham, Alabama (or, as T puts it, "Burping Hampster, Alabama"). Wish us luck.

I'll post the pictures as soon as I can turn my camera on without going into anaphylactic shock at the thought of the two or three photos of a co...a cop...copper...cuppamuh...cubbuh...cup....

Excuse me. I have to go lie own.