June 2004 Archives

All over town, the soft summer nights are filled with teenagers enjoying their only perfect summer, that glorious space between high school and life, that time when anything is possible and they’re too young to be afraid of those possibilities. Freedom in car keys and bottles and loose curfews. I don’t envy the young much beyond the careless ease of slender, pain-free bodies. If they knew what was coming -- if any of us did -- they’d be frozen in place, unable to move forward into the pain and the joy. It’s all too much, conceived at one moment. It takes time to live through it all. But I do envy them the warm summer nights spent lazing around the porches of lovely girls, drinking new drinks and wondering what will come next. There may be kisses, there may be more, there may not. Trying to name the stars, debating the profundity of a song, quoting poetry, trying on sophistication like a new suit.

Or maybe it’s completely different now. Who would know? But I know what it was like then, a score and twice-three years ago, and it was sweet. It was nectar.

Though that’s not the perfect night I’d most like to capture. I’ve long thought that I could do no better as a writer than to capture a summer night from when I was one of a bunch of 15- or 16-year-old boys, riding our bikes, hanging out under streetlights and on a series of front porches, bullshitting about sports and girls and especially girls, still something of an alien species to a group of kids that was centered on several families made up of many boys. I can taste the Bazooka bubble gum and the Hires root beer, I can see the fireflies in the high grass of the elementary school ballfield (with its much battered “No Hard Ball Playing” sign on the backstop now reduced by focused pitching to an admonition of “No Hard,” exactly what we thought it should say). I can remember the boasts and the promises, the banter of boys who’ve known each other forever. One of us was going to die, and we knew that, which set an odd tension over these perfect nights, made liars out of all of us when we talked about the future. We couldn’t know then that we’re all liars when we promise the future, so there was guilt about those lies, about what we’d do when we could drive, when we were out of high school, when we went off to college. The friendship of boys -- a much simpler thing than with girls, less subject to daily upset. Just because you don’t like another guy doesn’t mean he’s not one of your friends, necessarily.

But when I try to put it down, I can’t quite get it all -- the supreme teenage zen of a tank top and cutoffs, perched perfectly on a bike, one sneakered foot against the curb for balance, the other foot idly backspinning the cogs on the bike, occasionally wheeling out into the street, turning the tightest circles possible, back to balance against the curb. I can’t quite describe the tinny, staticky sound of the AM transistor radio, brought out onto Paul’s grandmother’s porch, turned to the Top 40 station but turned way down so as not to wake her, because we could pretty much stay outside until some parent somewhere noticed us, or noticed we were missing, at which point they might send a little brother to fetch us home, or a father would get out in the station wagon, cruise up and lean out the window to check out what we were up to, give a thoughtful puff on his pipe and then announce it was time for his boys to get on home. If we were at one of the places they expected us to be -- someone’s front step, the schoolyard, under a corner streetlight -- it went nice and easy. If he’d had to drive half the village to find us, harsher direction would be given. Either way, our night would be over and we’d pedal off home to sleep and dream and ready ourselves for another day of baseball and bicycles and bullshitting.

But if you weren’t there, if you haven’t had those sweet nights in your life, I haven’t described enough of the hundred details that went into making such a night: The baseball game -- right field an automatic out under our rules, as we’d have to interrupt the game if the ball went over the fence into the street -- played until it was too dark to see the ball in the seldom-mowed grass. Wiffleball in the street, using storm sewers for bases. Frisbee, card games at wobbly picnic tables, bike rides to the corner store or to Jumpin’ Jack’s drive-in.

Will the memories of the kids wandering these streets on these soft summer nights be as sweet as ours are?

Not a bad weekend, though, as always, way too little of it. Only one long bike ride, and a modest one, but that's okay. Saturday was a day of supreme laziness, just couldn't get going on much of anything in the morning, and the afternoon was spent disassembling the old swing set, cleaning the garage some more and trimming back lower branches from the massive maple. (Maples are so beautiful, and they make such a mess -- dropping blossoms, seeds, and leaves all through the year.) Got the hammock out and immediately lost it to my daughters. Yesterday, mostly more of the same. Cooked a whole chicken on the grill for the first time, and it came out great.

Made it a bit of a baseball movie weekend, too. Watched "Eight Men Out," truly one of the greatest baseball movies ever, just a masterpiece by John Sayles telling the story of the Black Sox. Last night, we watched "The Pride of the Yankees," the Lou Gehrig story starring Gary Cooper, and if you don't think an old '40s black and white melodrama can still bring you to tears, well . . . there wasn't a dry eye in the house when he said, "I am the luckiest man in the world." (In between, we snuck in The Marx Brothers' "A Night at the Opera," just so it wasn't all gloom and doom around here.)

Plans for the Fourth? Why, going to Lake Placid and watching ski jumping, of course!

Today, however, I am the only person in my house who has to get out of bed.

It's Thursday, so I must be sleeping in New York City tonight. Another overnight, this time to give a talk to people I don't care for about a program I'm barely current on. They may have to forgive me if I stick to my notes. And I only accepted because it thought it was taking place at the Crowne Plaza in Albany, short steps from my office. Turns out it's the Crowne Plaza in Times Square, many more short steps from my office. (And, it occurred to me last night that they use money in New York, just like anyplace else, and I don't happen to have any, so I've gotta run to the bank this morning, too -- haven't had an ATM card in many years. I'll soon be in the Smithsonian as the last human to cash a check.)

Sneezing with Grape-Nuts in your mouth is actually dangerous.

What am I reading, out on my porch on a fine summer's evening until it's too dark to see anymore? Baseball's Best Short Stories, a rare case of truth in advertising that I picked up at the Hall of Fame a couple of years ago and am just now getting around to loving, and McSweeney's Issue 13, the all comics issue -- a Father's Day bonus. Strangely enough, the cutting edge comics artists are the same as they were 20 years ago, or so it seems. Hernandez brothers, Daniel Clowes, Kaz, Charles Burns, etc. Great stuff.

So, speaking of grocery stores and iPods, I was listening to a playlist last night that I had named "Party Mix 1." Couldn't remember having put it together, then it dawned on me -- iTunes now has a function it calls "Party Mix," which is just a slightly fancier version of shuffle mode that actually lets you see the upcoming songs. At some point the listing must have pleased me especially, because I took a list of 20 songs and put them into this playlist. But I listened to it last night and just had to wonder, what the f kind of party would this be, exactly? It starts out with surf classic "Comanche," okay -- then goes into "Gorilla You're a Desperado," a lesser Zevon work, followed by a song that should never follow anything (or lead into anything, either), "Couldn't You Keep That to Yourself" by Ute Lemper. You just have to take Ute on her own terms; doesn't playlist well with others. Then "Can You Be True" by Elvis Costello, in the same vein (not surprising, he wrote both). Then it goes into "Sliver" by Nirvana, Cracker's lugubrious "Rainy Days and Mondays," and Nick Lowe's "I'm A Mess," and it's really just time to leave this party and find some anisette to take the mood down to the basement, curl up on a bed of nails with some Ibsen, put on some Tom Waits and wait for death to come. Thinking I may need to retitle it, something subtle like "Never Play In the Grocery Store!"

Slacker dude working the register at the supermarket. I'm in my total dork dad costume -- race t-shirt, baggie shorts, clogs and my iPod. (Like most people, I completely don't care what I look like when grocery shopping.) Dude smirks at me and asks an unusual (and therefore, I think, snarky) question: "Find everything okay?" I answer with a "yep," and then he asks, "Listening to anything good?" Happens that I'm listening to "Let's Go Crazy" from Sandinista, so I say, "At the moment, The Clash." Not what he expected. Shut down! (Either that, or he had no idea what I was talking about.)

That's all. It just was. Saturday, a little bit of Troy's Riverfest and the rock 'n' roll stylings of The Fleshtones, who know what to do with wireless guitars and a flatbed trailer converted to a stage. They completely rocked. Then, went to the drive-in with friends to see the best Harry Potter movie yet (that's three drive-in shows this summer, and Spider-Man 2 is yet to come). They stuck to the core of the story and really made it great.

Yesterday morning, I was awakened by much shuffling and pitter-patting and whispering, and then officially awakened by two beautiful girls in shiny dance costumes carrying a tray of presents. It was incredibly sweet. They gave me a bike repair stand and a new set of tools, which was very nice and much needed. I spent the day finishing the tree fort and cleaning the garage, and tried to get in a bike ride but my headset started coming apart again, which proved the need for the repair stand, so I put it to immediate use.

Also? Dozens more strawberries, and the first of the black raspberries. Love those girls . . . .

Sometimes it strikes me how very odd it is that I can just get on a train and suddenly be in New York, and a few hours later I get off another train and I'm back in Rensselaer, which is so very Not New York. Had to spend a couple of days in the city, and I can't tell you how hot it was. Had to wear a suit, and I was just dripping. No wonder there are so many dry cleaners. I stayed across from Madison Square Garden, very convenient to the train station but a pain in the neck when there's an event at the Garden -- it gets very noisy. Plus, there's a fire station on one side of the hotel and a police station on the other. Madonna, who apparently didn't understand that people were busting on Prince over that whole name change thing, was playing at the Garden, and it was odd to see a whole bunch of people decked out as if it were 1984 -- not in Madonna chic of the time, but punk clothes: studded belts, lots of chains, torn shirts, spiked hair. Right costume, wrong party. The leftover punks of the early '80s would not have been going to Madonna shows, kids. Struck me as very odd.

This afternoon's family event? The Fleshtones, live and absolutely free, up in Troy. In all this time, I've never gotten to see them live, so I'm totally jonesing for this....

The absolute best time of the year for living in my house is about to arrive. The little wild strawberries that we let overrun the back corner are turning up perfect, tasty, tiny little berries, and the black raspberries that surround the house are about to deliver us quarts and quarts of delicious black caps. I know that someday we will be gone from this house and someone else will come here and mow down the strawberries and tear out all the raspberries, and I just want to be on record saying that I will be forced to haunt the bastids, even if I'm not quite dead yet, because anybody who doesn't appreciate having their own raspberries doesn't deserve this house.

I can now report with a 98 percent confidence interval that taking a week off to ride a bike is better than going to work. In addition, I have scientifically established, once and for all, that my headaches are work-related. However, despite fairly comparable amounts of sitting involved in both activities, work-related sitting has never required me to patch my butt with second-skin bandages, so, oddly enough, it is the leisure activity that proved to be more of a pain in the ass. (Feel free to peer-review.)

If I may just add to Chris Rock's admonition that your main job, when you are the father of girls, is to "keep them off the pole" -- I think it is probably nearly as important to keep them off the local arena football dance squad.

The great thing about summer? Blueberries for breakfast, local strawberries for lunch.

Know what I feel like doing after riding 52 miles for the American Diabetes Association at a killer pace (for me, and most people) of 18 mph? Not a damned thing. Luckily for me, my DVDs of the first network season of SCTV arrived yesterday, so I have something to do while not doing a damned thing.

It was a great ride this morning, though. I don't usually (okay, ever) ride with groups, so it's a very different experience. Pulled out early at a pace up over 20 mph to get past the knot of cyclists (I heard it was over 800, overall. Don't know how many did the 50 mile route), and started sharing the work with another rider for a while, a different and nice experience. (Being on the front of a line can take four times as much energy as being in the line.) Got dropped eventually when I had to sit up to eat, soloed for a long while, and eventually picked up some other groups now and then. Tried not to suck wheel. Anyway, it was a glorious day, though the wind really kicked up about halfway through and created some wicked crosswind coming up over the river. Sunny, high 70s, hardly any cars, very little roadkill, and I even saw a mature bald eagle right near the end of the ride. Only took two rest stops and came in just under three hours of riding time, and it was timed perfectly, too, because Lee and the girls drove up and passed me (I didn't even see them) and were waiting for me on the lawn when I got to the finish. Perfect day. And thanks to those who gave in support of the American Diabetes Association. If you still want to, you can still connect to the link at right for another few days.

But now, I've got some serious lying around to do. Altogether, since a week ago Saturday, I've ridden just under 200 miles, and yes, I do need to apply butt cream.

Afraid so. Ray Charles, who brought gospel into rock 'n' roll, held some of the slowest tempos in history, and fought a lifelong battle with microphones that wouldn't stay in place, has died. It would have been impossible to have grown up in the '60s without hearing some Ray Charles, but I didn't really appreciate him until I saw him perform at the Landmark Theatre in Syracuse in 1979. A friend at the summer paper and I got some press tickets -- he was going to do the review, I was going to take the pictures. The show was sponsored by the local country station, and I thought the whole thing was going to be some kind of goof. (This was the same summer I first saw the Ramones.) The curtain came up, and there was an enormous band on stage. But no Ray Charles. The band start to play. No Ray Charles. Three, four jazzy numbers go by, complete with featured soloists. No Ray Charles. Finally, an announcement, and Ray is led onto the stage. The band is warmed up and ready to go, and with a nod, he launches them into it. A few rockin' numbers, and Ray announces that he needs a little . . . inspiration. Out come the Raelettes. They swing with him through a few more numbers, a duet, a couple of slow ones. He wraps the show -- it may have been "What'd I Say" -- and is led off the stage. The crowd goes wild, but Mr. Charles does not do encores. I was stunned -- I had never seen such perfect musicianship (like James Brown, he insisted on it from his band) and such excellent showmanship. And he left you wanting more.

I saw Ray Charles just about every chance I got after that, including two nights in a row up at Saratoga way back when -- the first night, a show with the Philadelphia Orchestra; the second night, his regular band. Two completely different shows, both amazing, and when he did his version of Jacques Brel's "If You Go Away," in the slowest tempo known to man, I was nigh onto tears.

But I can bike it. Just barely. Yesterday's bike ride down to Chatham turned into four and a half hours in the saddle, with breaks for carbs in Kinderhook and Chatham. (To a cyclist or a runner, this whole Atkins thing is bemusing at best and dangerous at worst. Carbs are my fuel.) Took a longer route to get there than last year, and so was faced with about 10 miles more than I had wanted to do. Happily, I found a sort of a short cut to the Albany Post Road (Route 9, as we know it now), and was happy to choke on dust and get run over by a'holes if it only meant a flatter ride home and about five fewer miles. Here's how messed up I am, and why living with me is no ant-free picnic: My goal for the day was 50 miles. In Chatham I realized that I was headed for more like 60 -- and I didn't have 60 in me. So I cut over and suffered along the "flat" route, and when I got home, the computer said 55.00 exactly. And I was disappointed that I hadn't done 60. Even though my goal was 50, and I beat it by 10 percent. I'm not a well man.

But I am a beardless man. After about 8 years of foreswearing the blade -- be it single, double or the devil's own triple -- I have rejoined the non-faceless masses. Been thinking about it for a while, and realized that I had to do it before my face got any more tan. My little Queer Eye makeover didn't quite bring on tears, but no one but me is used to it yet. I'm beautiful underneath, by the way, my dimple is back in full evidence, and my greatest fear -- that I had no chin -- was based on a me that was about 25 pounds heavier. A little odd to get used to the feeling of wind on my face, and now I've gotta use lots more sunscreen.

So, today, a comparatively easy 29 miles, city streets with minimal hills, no roadkill to speak of and a very civilized rest stop at the Latham Starbucks for iced coffee and lemon-flavored carbs. Amazingly, not sore at all, though my body wasn't begging to do hills. Well, in truth, the butt is just a tad sore, so I may have to do some icing tonight. (Doesn't it seem like "ice my ass!" would be a good new epithet?)

Pictures from the dance recital are starting to pop up over at my Fotolog site. More to come!

Wondering what all the fuss is about? Here's an excellent version of the story of James Cook's voyage to observe the transit of Venus, by which Edmund Halley had determined one could derive the distance from the Earth to the Sun. This was so important that several nations sent out crews all over the world to try to measure the 1761 transit, but none of them produced any good measurements. (My suggestion would have involved a very long folding rule, which is why I wouldn't have fared well in the Enlightenment.) We're getting up early tomorrow! (Gotta get working on a pinhole viewer.)

This comes right on the heels of our visit to the replica of Columbus's Niña down in Hudson yesterday. It's like living inside The History Channel. But with fewer Nazis . . . .

How many summer things can you squeeze into one day? It's easy to forget what a beautiful, diverse area we live in, how much is going on, all the things people are up to, but yesterday morning I took an easy bike ride from here up to Watervliet and back, and I saw (in absolutely no order whatsoever):

• A cab driver from Africa who wanted to know how my wheels held up to the potholes
• Happy families taking the train to NYC for a day trip
• Recreational runners, bikers, bladers on the Corning Preserve bike path
• Beautiful view of the Hudson River from the Dunn Memorial Bridge (more on the Dunn later).
• High school rowing squads in 4's and 8's out on the river
• Hundreds of people heading up to the Freihofer's Run for Women -- didn't go this year, Hannah wasn't running and we had too much to do
• Hundreds more people who had never been to Albany before, heading for either the PromiseKeepers rally or the NOW rally protesting the PromiseKeepers rally (NOW hasn't yet figured out that if they didn't protest this thing, no one would even know it was going on).
• A seaplane on the Hudson River (they used to be common on the Mohawk, but I don't remember seeing one on the Hudson)
• The beautiful replica of Henry Hudson's Half Moon, still docked at Albany
• Art for sale all along Lark Street
• And, in the new Schuyler Flatts park in Watervliet, I saw people playing cricket.

Yes, I said I saw people playing cricket. I looked hard and I'm pretty sure it wasn't just a flashback, and I don't think I ever hallucinated cricket players in my youth. I'd have stopped and watched, but there wasn't time.

I also got a chance to read the plaque honoring Parker Dunn, for whom the Dunn Memorial Bridge is named. The Dunn is the second Dunn bridge connecting Albany and Rensselaer, and is the southernmost of the Albany bridges. (It's also the southermost toll-free bridge, so plan your travels accordingly!) The original was, I think, a lift bridge, but I can't find a picture of it just now. The "new" bridge is very high and quite unlovely, and was originally meant to be part of some grand expressway idea that would have busted Rensselaer into pieces. It never came about. We hear about the Dunn just about every single day -- around these parts, it's currently most famous for hosting the FalconCam -- but I don't think anyone knows about the Medal of Honor winner it's named for. Parker Dunn was a private first class from Albany, and was killed in The Great War near Grand-Pre, France. Here's the citation on the plaque:

"When his battalion commander found it necessary to send a message to a company in the attacking line and hesitated to order a runner to make the trip because of the extreme danger involved, Pfc. Dunn, a member of the intelligence section, volunteered for the mission. After advancing but a short distance across a field swept by artillery and machinegun fire, he was wounded, but continued on and fell wounded a second time. Still undaunted, he persistently attempted to carry out his mission until he was killed by a machinegun bullet before reaching the advance line." (Thanks to this Medal of Honor page.)

So, a little late for Memorial Day, a note of remembrance to Parker Dunn.

At the top of my blog this morning? An ad for "New York Injury Lawyers" and another for "Bone fracture treatment patches". I expect my daughter to start getting spam from 1-800-LAWYERS any minute now.

Speaking of the wonders of the information age, when we lived in Syracuse we got a lot more Canadian news than we do here, but it sure seems that I should have heard earlier about a massive software glitch that completely bogged down the largest bank in Canada, no?

And while we're on the subject of Canada, don't miss Allée des Célébrités Canadiennes. (Don't worry, it's in English. And it's considerably more interesting/amusing than Brooklyn's Walk of Fame. Sorry, Brooklyn -- middle of the food chain!)

Ich bin auf Ferien Estoy el vacaciones Sono sulla vacanza Eu estou em férias

Vacation, vacation, vacation. Officially, training for next Sunday's 50-miler (which was no big deal last year, and this year I've been doing even greater distances). But really, lazing around the house. Not shaving nor putting on a tie. Shorts and sandals all week. Wearing minimal underwear (oops, crossed the line!). Hooray for me!

Once again, the Wonder Parents have let one of their children walk around with a broken bone for several days before doing anything about it. Oh, sure, the docs say that it's perfectly normal, that this kind of fracture (on the growth plate, of all places, on her elbow) often gets worse several days later -- but that's just to give them time to get to the phone and start setting the man on your ass. I keep telling these kids, they've gotta soften up so that we might notice when they break something. Oh, there was some mild complaining, but nothing like one would expect. And what makes it worst of all? She was, for the first time in her life, not running in the house. She was walking normally and just slipped and fell. We can't even lay a little guilt on her. Jeez.

Well, the good news is it's 26 days in a cast, it's not her dominant arm, and they say she can dance in the ballet recital this weekend. Hopefully, this dance didn't call for a lot of graceful arm movements.

In the City today, on the subway, and there was an odd, unexpected, loud popping sound -- and if you saw yesterday's headlines about that woman who appears to have been shot for no reason right on a car, you can understand why it was a bit of an anxious moment. But there was no blood, and it was our stop. . . .

Well, this happens sometimes when you're on a long ride . . . there's a need to steal a mirror, as Vonnegut might have put it. And so there I was, off on one of the remotest roads, off in a pulloff, hadn't seen a car for miles, and of course just as I step off into the weeds and, well, you know -- the road turns into tourist central. I half expected a Gray Line bus to pull up. At least I wasn't as bad as Bob Roll during a particular Tour de France -- in fact, if I ever write a book of my outdoor experiences, I intend to title it in reference to something he has done and I have not: "I've Never Taken a Dump on a Frenchman's Lawn."

Oh, yeah, that'd sell. I'll grant you, it's a distant second to "My Lead Dog Was a Lesbian."

The inevitable question at work after a three-day weekend. Always hard to balance giving a sincere answer and giving way too much detail. What did we do? Well, what didn't we do? We had tree fort construction (wait'll you see the rock climbing ramp to get up there!), massive bicycle repair, a sleepover, double-feature at the drive-in, friends over for a barbecue, viewing the last stage of the Giro d'Italia, chalk drawings in the driveway, and stomp rockets on the garage roof. (God, now that I think of it, no wonder I was exhausted today.) Plus, I got in a nice 34-mile ride down to Valatie (pronounced vuh-lay-shee-ah) yesterday, even though I didn't feel great. So, yeah, it was a good weekend, despite mostly iffy weather. Windy and cool, though there was sun.

The drive-in was not a repeat of our last experience, which was as close to American nirvana as one can come. This time, we arrived at about the same time, but then spent literally 40 minutes on the highway outside, waiting to get in. We were one of the last cars they let in . . . so when they say "arrive early" in their ads, they mean it! That meant we had a horrible location for seeing the first movie, "Shrek 2," but most of the place cleared out after that and we got to move up considerably for "Mean Girls." I liked "Mean Girls" quite a bit, by the way, but I've got that whole Tina Fey crush going on, so that may color my judgment. Hadn't realized just how harsh the language would be, or rather, the frequency of its harshness, so had to have a little discussion with the girls (and invited friend) on how those words were really terrible things to say about anyone, that they were vicious and hurtful, etc., and that the point of the movie is that girls shouldn't tear each other down. ("Bitch" they knew; "slut" and "whore" may have been newer to them. Oh, well, better they learn it at home, right?)

Great ride yesterday afternoon, extended my ride past the buffalo farm, further down into Schodack and on to Valatie. Lots of road kill, mostly only identifiable as "some kind of mammal," though there was a perfectly flat box turtle. Lots of hawks, and what I couldn't be sure weren't eagles (I wasn't that far in from the river, really, a few miles). Also happened to time it perfectly to sit on a lonely railroad overpass and watch a freight train speed by beneath me, which was a pleasing little moment in time.