Recently in family Category

This was, unfortunately, not The Summer of Fun. It started with such promise - my wife was through her cancer treatments, we were getting out on the bikes together, the weather was dry and warm. But then began the home improvement project, the crazy idea to replace a 72-year-old porch, which started simply and grew and grew, and started taking up every free moment. I'm currently working on sanding and staining the 76 pieces of tongue and groove that made up the ceiling. It's that kind of project. Biking got reduced to what I do to commute every day, which ain't much. The longer days in the saddle just had to take a back seat to getting this project done.

There was also the matter of coordinating an office move at work, dealing with vendors, getting quotes and approvals and so on, in addition to the normal travel schedule. We didn't get to the ballet, or a single concert; there was no Park Playhouse or fireworks.

On the theory that if I wasn't having a summer of fun, no one would, younger daughter was packed off to a series of "camps" - if you can call intensive educational experiences full of kids way brighter than I am "camps" - which took up travel days and left us with an empty nest for a chunk of the summer. Older daughter lived away for the summer, having a job and being all responsible and grown up, and probably doing things that I don't even want to know about while living in squalor.  And then there was a family tragedy that just hurts too much to think about and has definitely cast a pall over the remaining days of August.

On the other hand, we did have a wonderful family vacation all together in Burlington. We found a favorite new place for ice cream, Mac's in Watervliet. The canoes and kayak were fairly well used. There was Frisbee. There was lots of ukulele. Wife and I snuck off to DC together and had dinner with old friends, and later hosted other old friends who were traveling through Albany. I had lunch in the park with my insanely grown-up daughter. I have repeatedly caught the other one practicing piano without provocation.  I bought a wicked sexy new circular saw.  And I think I even started to get used to the heat.

So while it wasn't The Summer of Fun, it wasn't The Summer of No Fun.

For the first time in the just shy of 16 years that there have been four of us, tonight all four of us will be sleeping under different roofs, in different cities. It's a very strange feeling. Elder daughter is having what I hope is that magical summer after freshman year. It seems to involve plastic flamingos and complaining about housemates who don't clean, so it sounds perfect. She's not far away, but she's not at home. Younger daughter is off at smartycamp, though it turns out to be supersmartycamp, where young men and women who are super-serious about becoming doctors are doing things like watching knee replacement surgeries, touring hospitals, and discussing medical ethics. This may put ideas in her head. I'll be laying my idea-free head down in the rough vicinity of Valley Forge, which suddenly is becoming another of my haunts, though the actual name of the town I'm staying in is never abundantly clear. And lovely wife will be holding down the fort, which these days means reattaching the plastic wrap to the porch reconstruction project after every windstorm. So this is how we end up scattered to the winds.

Remember that first summer away? I had a summer job on the college paper that paid $75 a week for 10 or 12 weeks, and that was plenty to live on. A small crew of us put it out every week, doing absolutely everything: writing, photographing, editing, laying out, pasting up, and delivering. It took about 3-1/2 days out of the week. The other 3-1/2 days were spent in a lazy summer haze. I rode my bike and wore out a pair of flip-flops. I discovered the city pools and parks. After an awful week rooming in the basement of a frat house, I found a beautiful sublet well away from campus with a lovely porch, one roommate who was indifferent to me, and one who couldn't stand me. I scoured garage sales for old vinyl, spent hours and hours writing letters and ridiculous short stories, picked away at a guitar. We "borrowed" the paper's van and went out every weekend to see Next of Kin, playing, most often, at the local Ground Round. I hid from the summer heat in cool darkrooms and pretended I was a photographer. I discovered Jefferson Airplane and the Animals. I drank too much sometimes but it wasn't yet the problem it would become, and that summer everything seemed to be in perfect balance. On top of it all was the easy atmosphere of a college campus in summer, where no one's in too much of a hurry, things are relaxed, and you feel that by being there you own the place more than the kids who come and go with every semester. So I'm hoping the elder one is having that kind of summer.

For that matter, remember that first time going away without your parents? I had several opportunities like that, but the biggest one was essentially a journalism camp held at what would become my college, the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. Two weeks away with other kids from all over the state and the country, all in some way into the same interests. It was so exciting . . . in the same day I heard my first authentic Long Island and Texas accents. We worked like dogs putting together a newspaper and a yearbook for the program. We learned writing, composing, and photography. We pulled all-nighters. We listened to "Hotel California" a lot. The thrill of finding others who were in some way like me, of opening up, discovering. It's all so new and wonderful at that age, and I'm so glad the younger one gets to experience it this summer.

Other than that, for the parents, it's a routine week. I try to understand electricity, and Lee comes home from work to put the saran wrap back up on the porch project I left behind.

 

I don't seem to be able to think of my father at the socially prescribed times, like his birthday or the anniversary of his death, but Father's Day is coming up and that has me thinking about my own legacy as a father, and that makes me think of his as well. As the kids say, it's complicated.

He was a good man, and not a terribly good one. He was generous to a fault, and wasted much of his life in bars. He knew how to build things but lacked patience. He was inarticulate, uneducated, and embarrassed about it, and he was massively proud that I turned out differently. He's been gone longer than I knew him, but even at the time he died I felt like I had an incomplete picture of him, and not nearly enough memories.

What was expected of fathers started to change in the '60s and '70s, when I was growing up, and so it's fair to say that the transition was confusing for many men. For a long time I just accepted that that was how it was, and he definitely did come from a different time. He was one of ten kids in a family where the father, 50 years old when my dad was born, was often working in a distant city. There wasn't a lot of father-son bonding. Or any, as far as I know. So to my father, the amount of time we spent together probably felt extravagant. But for the most part, it wasn't time together; it was time when he needed to go somewhere, and I'd come along. Mostly where he needed to go was bars, the old dank neighborhood bars that barely exist anymore. Sometimes there were other places: auto repair shops, the lumber yard, the barber shop. We fished together a couple of times, and two or three times he drove us on my scout troop's annual trip to Lake Placid, but otherwise he wasn't there. It was up to someone else's father to perfect my Frisbee throw or to give me my first good fishing reel.

It seemed perfectly normal to me then, something any kid might do, to accompany my father into bars and wait while he drank. These were all places that knew him, where he knew everyone, and he was welcomed and greeted. I learned later that a barfly's welcome isn't worth much: when he died, people I thought were his friends couldn't rouse themselves to come to the funeral, but instead waved at the procession as we drove past the tavern. But to him, these were his favorite places, and he probably felt sharing it with me was a good thing. I'd get dimes or quarters to play the jukebox and the bowling machine, I'd get the tiny glass of soda mixed with grenadine embarrassingly and unfailingly called a Shirley Temple, and a bag of Wise potato chips or Slim Jims. And then I'd just sit and wait and watch him leaning against the bar, chatting with the other drunk men about nothing whatsoever. And somehow I believed it was perfectly normal, despite the fact that I rarely, if ever, saw another boy in those places.

My strongest memories of him are the smells: the powerful mix of diesel and cigarettes that clung to his work clothes, the whiskey and beer on his breath at the end of absolutely every single day, the pungent cool smell of stale beer soaked into the floorboards of ancient taverns. Images of him are harder to find (and actual photographs, in a family that viewed film as an exotic and unjustifiable expense, harder still), but to this day if I smell rotting lettuce, which he often reeked of after a day of hauling produce for Central Markets, I instantly think of my father.

He was sweet in many ways. He tried to be interested in the things that interested me, and was always polite and kind to my friends. He adored my wife and insisted she would have a wedding ring even though we were too progressive to believe in such things. He was supremely willing to help when help was needed.

He was stupidly young when he died, 48, and he died because he drank and smoked, especially smoked, despite very bad asthma and a lot of signs from his body that maybe it was time to straighten up. He didn't. A few years ago I found myself at his grave in rageful tears, so angry that he wasn't here to see his grand-daughters, and it was entirely his doing.

And so I think about the legacy, the memories my girls will have of me. I lived nearly 18 years with my father, he died when I was almost 25, and as I said, even then my memories were scant. I have tried, not always with success, to be present, to be there when I'm there, and not to be distracted by the electronics and things that make it easy to divert our attention. We have done a tremendous amount of things together, close to home, around the state and even a bit beyond, and each one seems to elicit a very specific memory for them, and I just hope those memories remain. I was blessed with a period of time when I was home nearly every day, and we learned to cook and bake together, to dance around the kitchen, and to just enjoy each other. I'm touched beyond belief when my older daughter texts me with a question she could easily have Googled, and when she thanks me for teaching her to solder and how to wash dishes. I'm touched beyond belief when my younger daughter squees with excitement that we'll be returning to a campground we visited many times when she was young and fell out of using, because I know her experience of that place, and our being there together will always be with her.

There are many, many more old family photos (my wife's family, not mine) now posted over at my Old Photos Flickr account. It was a different time, facial-hair-wise.

For some reason I have tripped upon a lot of wedding-related writing in the past few days, and it just amazes me how insane people let it make them. I've long said that if people put anywhere near the amount of effort into the marriage that they put into the wedding, there'd be far fewer divorces.

I was looking for something else and ran across this photo from our wedding. It was 1983. We were married in our apartment on a cold November afternoon by a judge we didn't know. A few friends and family came. She made that dress. We're so young, and she's so beautiful, that it breaks my heart. Of course, we had no idea what we were getting into. No one does. It's been as easy as breathing, except for the parts that were awful and hard and painful. But I liked the hard parts, too, because we shared them, came through them, and now there's just nothing we can't get through.

A short ceremony in our apartment followed by a nice dinner in a restaurant we liked, a delightful evening out with friends and family. Was it a dream wedding? It's the marriage that counts.

Some days I find myself seriously wondering how this:


Turned into this:

The Nutcracker is rarely seen in broad daylight. Apparently he looks much larger on stage.

A long time ago, I dreamed of three little girls, dressed like Madeline, swarming out of the house.  There would have been three but there were two, and that was good, too. It seems like the promise of little girls is a promise that is forever but in reality the colorful plastic toys and endless readings of "Frog and Toad" pass quickly, so very quickly, and the next thing you know they're getting scholarships and going off to learn more than you could ever have imagined knowing.  And so there are things that won't happen again, like little girls making snow forts, though I suspect the older one will always eat snow off her mittens, and there will always be hot chocolate to spill. There will be regrets within my control, and without my control. I could have taken them tobogganing more often, but I couldn't bring them up in the world of freedom of my childhood. They learned to swim and dance and play music, to question everything (everything!) and to be bold and strong. This is good.

But there are some things I miss. I miss helping them get the second mitten on and tucking hair inside their balaclava. I miss the dark winter nights of the last couple of years, when it was just me and one of the girls, having a punk meal of leftovers or freezer meat at the island in the kitchen just in time to leave for dance. I miss having time to bake cookies in the afternoon, and surprising Hannah with her favorite macaroni and cheese. (So when she came home a couple of weeks ago it was a joy to make waffles again.)

On the other hand, I come home to amazing hugs and piano playing. I get to watch Rebekah's mind expand with high school the way her sister's did, to watch her fill with passion and commitment.  And she gets to teach me about Doctor Who. So it's not all over yet.