Soooo… it has been a long time since I have written anything.  There are a number of reasons…

1. Travelling a lot:

A. Solano Beach California

B. Whitefish Montana

C. Minneapolis MN

D. Mountain View Arkansas

E. Arcadia Michigan

F. North Padre Island/Corpus Christi

2. Working a lot.  A good economy is bad for those of us in the countercyclical world and this damn 9 year recovery that Donald Trump brought us (yes, he was working on it long before elected) has made making a living a little more challenging.

3. Still hoping to perhaps be a judge and writing about politics is career limiting in that regard.

4. I have been reading a lot, “Turtles All The Way Down” by Jonathan Green, “Mrs. Fletcher” bt Tom Perotta and several others I am not recalling on this Saturday afternoon.

That means that I have a lot bottled up inside me that I would like to vomit out regarding national politics, sexual harassment/abuse, national politics, international politics, the NFL, race in America and lot of other things and the good news is that you don't have to hear about it.  Instead this little bit of emptying myself out will be devoted to becoming a grandpa at 56.

This is seriously just such a nice thing.  My son and his lovely wife Lydia presented the world with a little girl named Julia this fall...during the eclipse.  I immediately bragged tomy friends that even the sun had to hide because Julia was so beautiful.  It was an awesome day and other than a little scare sending her to the hospital with a fever, it has been better and better everyday.  We are really lucky because she is living here and Sandy now gets to watch her 3 days a week since Lydia is back to work and it is just so awesome it is embarrassing.  

This is the first thing in my life that I was expecting to be awesome and it is so much better than I expected it to be.  I mean I am the perpetual glass is ½ empty guy.  I expect things to be bad and than I am pleasantly surprised, over and over again when they are better than expected.  I know I am lucky but I prepare for the worst and expect it and then sometimes it does not disappoint.

But this… I was really thinking that this was going to be great.  I have always thought that being a grandparent would be the low hanging fruit of happiness.  I really loved being an uncle because that seemed like a good job but being a grandparent, I expected so much because this was going to be MY grandchild.  Now it is embarrassing because I do not remember being so excited about my own kids.  That was too stressful. They were my responsibility and it seemed like there were so many ways to screw them up.  SO MUCH RESPONSIBILITY!  Who needed that?  It was hard enough just to pay attention and jump through the hoops, much less actually enjoy them.  But this…

This is coming at such a nice time in life.  I feel so lucky that we started having children so relatively young that I can just kind of soak this up.  There are problems...one of them is that I (and to a lesser extent Sandy) are basically acting like this is our achievement, our accomplishment… and of course, we have nothing to do with it… and that is a fact.  The second one might be that we are forcing ourselves on Jon and Lyd a lot because we love to see her.  I think sometimes it might be too much and...I would prefer not to miss this up if possible.

In any case it slams home the blessings of family.  I am so lucky, we are so lucky so when I am looking at this year, right now it seems pretty certain to be the best one of my life.  All because of this little girl who is just learning to roll over and likely does not even recognize me. And the nice thing about it is even though I know she will have ups and downs and all the problems that the world has to offer that it is still likely to get better and better.  And who knows, maybe there are even better things to come. Not a bad attitude for a glass half full guy and a great way to look forward to 2018.  For all my friends I wish you the same experience

College Visitation

OK....sooooooo....if life is good to you and you are blessed with a child or two... and they live to be a certain age... and they have not (yet) flunked completely out of school, been incarcerated (in too serious of a manner) and are still living in your home as they approach college graduation, you will be blessed with the opportunity to "help" them choose an institution of higher learning for them to matriculate (mature with alcohol). If you are blessed with intelligence, in addition to all these other blessing you will say NO and just stay out of it.

I mean, of course for your C+ student it might not make sense to build up their hopes regarding Harvard or to let them do the same. In the same manner you probably need to give them a heads up about scholarships and you and your child probably need to let go of that sure thing, the full ride athletic scholarship for your baseball playing son (news flash, hitting high school pitching for a 300 average is not going to do it). But past that you need to be very careful. This is really hard.

You want them to learn from your (30 year old and totally irrelevant) mistakes. You want what is best for them but you also have some selfish wants. Maybe you want them to go somewhere you will enjoy visiting. Maybe you want them not too far from home. Maybe you want to show up once a month and totally embarrass them by living out the college fun which you might (or might not have) actually enjoyed in college.So if your not going to stay out of it altogether, pick your spots. For us there were only two rules. You have to leave town coupled with you cannot be too far away. 500 miles or so seemed the arbitrary definition of too far.

I recall going through the college search process with some gusto with my eldest who is soon to be graduating (another story entirely). I looked at catalogues, went on line and watched as my wife thoroughly reviewed and evaluated exhaustively about 376 institutions. We went to college fairs and read literature mailed to us and bought books and went on college visits. Jon ended up going to Valparaiso which has been an amazing place for him, having a great time and evolving into a fine young man. All of that had NOTHING to do with anything my wife and I said or did. He went there because it made sense to him. He chose well for him and all of the other stuff was just window dressing. I think we visited 5 colleges for him to sniff out but there was rarely any doubt where he was going. He knew people there and knew of a lot of graduates from there and it played out along with his goals of being on staff at a camp we frequented and... it was done.

My second one chose Truman strictly on the basis of the fact that "he had friends there" and despite (or perhaps because) of my promise that "I will never visit you there"... away he went to Kirksville Missouri, armpit of the world to a very competitive academic environment in which he seems to be thriving. Who knew? I guess the point is that we had already given up by the second one. Now i am on the third one and it seems pretty clear to me and the wife that we are mailing it in and out daughter will go wherever she damn well pleases. The whole idea that you can have any real, meaningful insight into what College you child should be attending is an illusion propagated by the University INDUSTRY to feed the illusion that you as a buyer of a very expensive commodity can make an informed choice.

It is a lie. it all has to do with luck, who your kid falls in with when they get to school and how mature the child in question is. The rest...luck and conjecture. At best.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

One of the things about having college age children home is that you want to do things with them. Other then being polite, hungry, broke and bored, they likely do not have a reciprocating interest. A desperate and conniving parent can work these qualities to their benefit occasionally and spend some time with their child or children who are home for the holidays. Notice I do not call it quality time. Quality time is of course a myth developed by over scheduled parents to justify the limited time they (we) spend as parents but even in it’s most defensible form quality time is focused on the parent being “in the moment” and the child is really just reactive or entertained. When your kids are in college quality time would require that they be “engaged” in the idea of interacting with you and generally my children do not. But they will do things with us because they are polite (guilt), hungry, broke or bored. Perhaps some time I will write a little primer for parents as to how to take advantage of these various states.

Yesterday was a full family day. I worked all morning because it is asinine to expect that your college age student would interact with you in any way prior to noon. I came home at 1 after meeting the entire male Kowert/Winstorer clan for a cocktail at Biggies before they ate lunch. These men are big, heavy drinking, huge headed mammals and when congregated it is always prudent to wade in early and wade out quickly. You want to get out before the political discussion… or the fantasy football discussion… or the will Notre Dame win the National Championship discussion starts…. or before the check arrives. So I got home at 1:00 at took the family to O’Connells. Always a winner and we gorged on meat. Jon, who is 21 then went with me to meet some Lutherans at the Village Bar where we cheered briefly for Auburnwho choked away a lead and lost to Alabamaand then we went home to pick up the rest of the family and see “The Fabulous Mr. Fox”.

I was hesitant, reluctant and well… passive aggressive and bitchy as 13 year old girl about having to go to this animated movie I knew nothing about. The fact that it was a Wes Anderson directed effort (Royal Tannenbaums, Rushmore etc…) ameliorated this slightly but not much. Still this was what a “good father” would do in attending a silly movie with his wife and children and not insisting on action or drama or at least a pretty girl. But I went because it was the dreaded “right thing to do” and as we all know I always try to be very competitive in the FATHER OF THE YEAR awards. OK, so it was a tepid effort, it was not taking my kids kayaking in sea caves but it was effort so GET OFF MY ASS!

We attended the movie at the theatre at “Crestwood Court(f/k/a CrestwoodPlaza). Crestwood Courtis a near vacant, sprawling development in mid south countySt. Louisand just south of our home in Lower Webster (Upper Crestwood). The entire family admonished me not to enter the cavernous parking lot which is evidently crumbing in on itself and has several areas no longer safe to drive under or park in but I braved it along with 7 or 8 other cars. Evidently the more intelligent (safer) people park on top of the decaying structure? Crestwood was a vast strip mall which they then enclosed in the 70s and spread it out back when you could still have a mall that was not adjacent to a major highway (the dark ages). It used to have about 75-100 stores. It now has about a dozen, and the movie theatre and has a vague post apocalyptic feel which is unsettling, creepy and kind of cool.

For whatever reason we got all the animated and children’s movies trailers. Should I care? I guess “Alice In Wonderland” with Johnny Depp could be cool but other then that I snoozed and prepared myself for boredom. Happily I was dead wrong, wrongy mc wrongerson. This proved to be an excellent little bit of entertainment. This Ronald Dahl guy was also the author of “James and the Giant Peach” and the seminal children’s story “Charlie And the Chocolate Factory”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_DahlHe died in 1990 but I think he would have been pleased with what Mr. Anderson did with his story which centers around Mr. Fox. The movie opens with the redoubtable Mr. Fox (George Clooney) and his young wife (Meryl Streep) unsuccessfully engaged in stealing some “squabs”. Out of love for his wife he foregoes a life of thievery and pursues a career as a journalist but alas…

After the birth of a new child he moves to a dangerous neighborhood against the advice of his badger lawyer (Bill Murray) and enters into a plan to rob three awful farmers (successfully) with his possum sidekick only to enter into a death struggle with the three farmers around which the central story develops. The story is a great one in my opinion . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantastic_Mr_Fox It is a classic morality play and asks all the big questions about parenting, marriage, our essential nature and… well it is just funny. Selfishly my favorite line is when he is lying in bed and life in his new house is falling down around him and he mutters to the ceiling with his wife turned away from him in bed, “I should have listened to my lawyer”.

Also well done is Jason Schwartzmen’s portrayal of their son “Ash’. Ash is an undersized, uncoordinated, bitchy, petulant unlikable fox who has to deal with his visiting, athletic, yoga practicing cousin. Much character growth and development here. The entire movie is well done. I laughed out loud and in this one case, this holiday weekend the chips fell into place and I enjoyed a few hours where my whole family was enjoying themselves together and unexpectedly. Life generally is not much sweeter then this.

Again…Happy Thanksgiving weekend and GO TCU Horn Frogs!