Only hours to go, and then I'm outta here. I've got a minimum of 50,000 words worth of middle grade / young adult novel to write and only 30 days in which to do it, so I am swearing off the free-time black hole that is Facebook. Or Bookface, if you work at Dunder-Mifflin.
My first status update upon completion will be that I've knocked off another manuscript, or something to that effect. Hopefully it will reflect the immense relief I'll be feeling. For me, this National Novel Writing Month deal isn't so much a matter of if I finish the 50,000 words in time, but whether I'll be done early or not and how far past 50,000 I wind up going. I have to let the story tell the story, and I don't know what kind of word count that will require. I'll probably be doing some blog posts along the way just to clear my head a redirect a little, but you'll have to find them the hard way without any Facebook links if you care enough to look.
So with that, I have a few more hours to try and up my Blitz score, and then I'm stepping off the grid until December. Now, about that Blitz score....
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
I'm Not Depressed Enough, or Back to the Music Part 2
I was in too good of a mood today, and it worries me a little. Not the being in a good mood part - that actually made the day easier, especially when you consider how frustrated I was with so many things the day before and the sheer volume of f-bombs that went off inside my head during the 20 or so minutes after school before I finally was able to get out of there. No, after all that the good mood was welcome. It's just that it was a really bad time for one.
National Novel Writing Month begins as soon as Saturday Night Live ends this weekend, and I plan on starting in on my book right on that inaugural minute of November. Thing is, the book I have planned and mapped out (all in my head at this point because taking any notes would be cheating) isn't particularly happy. I don't think I'd call it depressing or dark so much, but its certainly thoughtful and introspective, and, I won't lie, a little sad. And for me to be able to write at my best, I need to kind of construct a mood that will match the voice and tone of the book. Which, you know - not happy. So somehow I have to cut this good mood loose.
And why is this a problem? Why would it be so difficult to do? Because of the music. I wrote about a big new release day in September when I bought a whole bunch of new albums that all came out at the same time and how I was so buzzed about having all of that new music. Well, it happened again this past Tuesday. Here's the rundown:
Train: Save Me, San Francisco
I really like Train, even if they now kind of seem like one of those bands struggling to hang on to a relevance that just may have passed them by. But this new album, the first one in something like four or five years? I'm really, really liking it. A lot of wordplay in the lyrics, some interesting electronic touches to what was always a sound rooted in classic rock, and an album full of songs that are just happy, rockin' songs. This album does not help with shaking off the good mood, but it's hard to put it aside.
Creed: Full Circle
I thought Creed was okay back when they were popular some ten years ago, even if many of the songs were a little too muddy-sounding for my taste. But then after they broke up and reformed with a new emotionally-stable singer and called themselves Alter Bridge, I liked them a lot. Now they're back to the Name Brand to cash in on past glories and nostalgia, but at least the band sounds a little less muddy and a little more like Alter Bridge, while still being it's own thing. Not a landmark but I like it, and there are a good number of songs on there that will get some serious play in the coming months and years.
Winger: Karma
I have a cousin who told me once that music should never be called a "guilty pleasure," because if you're lucky enough to have music that you enjoy there's nothing to feel guilty about. And this is coming from a guy who has everything from Alice Cooper to Donny & Marie on his iPod. One of the bands I enjoy that OTHER people would call a guilty pleasure is Winger, the 80s band of "She's only seventeen..." fame, which is a song that was a lot less creepy to like when I was in my late teens / early 20s instead of my early 40s. But luckily there are other Winger albums out there for me to secretly enjoy, including this new one. This isn't an example of an 80s band trying to prove they've matured as time has gone by, but a band that shows they still got it. And for anyone who might write them off as the Aqua-Net joke they were known as back in the day? I disagree. There is some significant talent in this band.
Trans-Siberian Orchestra: Night Castle
The newest TSO album, and the second one that isn't all about Christmas songs. I have yet to decipher what awkwardly-contrived storyline has been created to link these songs together, but at least I can still enjoy most of them at face value for the music. Though it irks me a bit that once again they blatantly ripped themselves off for a couple of tracks on the album. By this I mean that Trans-Siberian Orchestra began as a pretty darn good metal band called Savatage, which is probably one of the worst band names ever. But they were a good band, very melodic, and morphed into TSO about ten years ago when they realized they could cash in on playing holiday music and touring behind it if they hired a few more musicians. Two songs on this new album are note for note remakes of older Savatage songs.
Transatlantic: The Whirlwind
Here's an album that was never supposed to happen. TA is a progressive supergroup featuring four incredibly talented musicians that hardly anyone has ever heard of; frankly, if you know Transatlantic at all you don't need me to tell you who they are, and if you don't know them then no explanation is going to be worth your time. This is a 2 CD edition of the album - the first CD is made up of one song broken into several different parts, but still linked together as one piece of music -- more than 77 minutes long. For one rock song. This I think is pretty cool. The other CD has some shorter songs on it, in addition to some obscure covers. And since this album really was never supposed to happen in the first place, I'm very happy that I even have been able to play and listen to it one time.
And in a couple days I'll have to more or less shelve all of them to lock my head into the playlist of emotion and melancholy I've put together to listen to while writing my 2009 November Novel. Gotta do what you gotta do, and for me to write productively at all, I need the music that's going to push me in the direction I need to go.
I'll keep you posted....
National Novel Writing Month begins as soon as Saturday Night Live ends this weekend, and I plan on starting in on my book right on that inaugural minute of November. Thing is, the book I have planned and mapped out (all in my head at this point because taking any notes would be cheating) isn't particularly happy. I don't think I'd call it depressing or dark so much, but its certainly thoughtful and introspective, and, I won't lie, a little sad. And for me to be able to write at my best, I need to kind of construct a mood that will match the voice and tone of the book. Which, you know - not happy. So somehow I have to cut this good mood loose.
And why is this a problem? Why would it be so difficult to do? Because of the music. I wrote about a big new release day in September when I bought a whole bunch of new albums that all came out at the same time and how I was so buzzed about having all of that new music. Well, it happened again this past Tuesday. Here's the rundown:
Train: Save Me, San Francisco
I really like Train, even if they now kind of seem like one of those bands struggling to hang on to a relevance that just may have passed them by. But this new album, the first one in something like four or five years? I'm really, really liking it. A lot of wordplay in the lyrics, some interesting electronic touches to what was always a sound rooted in classic rock, and an album full of songs that are just happy, rockin' songs. This album does not help with shaking off the good mood, but it's hard to put it aside.
Creed: Full Circle
I thought Creed was okay back when they were popular some ten years ago, even if many of the songs were a little too muddy-sounding for my taste. But then after they broke up and reformed with a new emotionally-stable singer and called themselves Alter Bridge, I liked them a lot. Now they're back to the Name Brand to cash in on past glories and nostalgia, but at least the band sounds a little less muddy and a little more like Alter Bridge, while still being it's own thing. Not a landmark but I like it, and there are a good number of songs on there that will get some serious play in the coming months and years.
Winger: Karma
I have a cousin who told me once that music should never be called a "guilty pleasure," because if you're lucky enough to have music that you enjoy there's nothing to feel guilty about. And this is coming from a guy who has everything from Alice Cooper to Donny & Marie on his iPod. One of the bands I enjoy that OTHER people would call a guilty pleasure is Winger, the 80s band of "She's only seventeen..." fame, which is a song that was a lot less creepy to like when I was in my late teens / early 20s instead of my early 40s. But luckily there are other Winger albums out there for me to secretly enjoy, including this new one. This isn't an example of an 80s band trying to prove they've matured as time has gone by, but a band that shows they still got it. And for anyone who might write them off as the Aqua-Net joke they were known as back in the day? I disagree. There is some significant talent in this band.
Trans-Siberian Orchestra: Night Castle
The newest TSO album, and the second one that isn't all about Christmas songs. I have yet to decipher what awkwardly-contrived storyline has been created to link these songs together, but at least I can still enjoy most of them at face value for the music. Though it irks me a bit that once again they blatantly ripped themselves off for a couple of tracks on the album. By this I mean that Trans-Siberian Orchestra began as a pretty darn good metal band called Savatage, which is probably one of the worst band names ever. But they were a good band, very melodic, and morphed into TSO about ten years ago when they realized they could cash in on playing holiday music and touring behind it if they hired a few more musicians. Two songs on this new album are note for note remakes of older Savatage songs.
Transatlantic: The Whirlwind
Here's an album that was never supposed to happen. TA is a progressive supergroup featuring four incredibly talented musicians that hardly anyone has ever heard of; frankly, if you know Transatlantic at all you don't need me to tell you who they are, and if you don't know them then no explanation is going to be worth your time. This is a 2 CD edition of the album - the first CD is made up of one song broken into several different parts, but still linked together as one piece of music -- more than 77 minutes long. For one rock song. This I think is pretty cool. The other CD has some shorter songs on it, in addition to some obscure covers. And since this album really was never supposed to happen in the first place, I'm very happy that I even have been able to play and listen to it one time.
And in a couple days I'll have to more or less shelve all of them to lock my head into the playlist of emotion and melancholy I've put together to listen to while writing my 2009 November Novel. Gotta do what you gotta do, and for me to write productively at all, I need the music that's going to push me in the direction I need to go.
I'll keep you posted....
Friday, October 23, 2009
Conferences = Purgatory
Hey, all you parents out there. You think YOU hate going to parent-teacher conferences? I sit here tonight fairly confident that I have every single one of you beat on that point. Beat down hard.
Time was I was young, and idealistic, and blindly naive about the world and saw conferences as a great opportunity. "I'll have a broader picture of each student after meeting their families!" "What a great opportunity to help build a sense of community!" And several other similar empty platitudes that probably should have earned me a good hard slap in the head for being such a moon-faced idiot.
Conferences are not these things. Conferences are just long. And tiring. And then longer. I won't go into any detail about the types of parents that show up for conferences and the personality categories I shove them into since I've done that before, but I will say that on principle I will hate any parent who brings a preschooler to conferences when that preschooler doesn't know how to behave in public. I refuse to sit there and share in an exchange of sympathetic simpering grins as little three year old Travis or Chloe or Caitlyn or Caitlynn or Katelyn or Kaitlinn or Kayte-Lynn runs around screaming and crying and laughing hysterically and destroying my classroom as her / his parents sit and do nothing about it. Few things bother me more.
Worst thing about the conferences this year? Between the two nights we had scheduled this week, I chose the night off to go home and DREAM THAT I WAS HAVING CONFERENCES. I was in the media center instead of my room. My grade level partners weren't there so I didn't have their help to keep things rolling along as smoothly as they did for us in real life this year. I sat down with a parent who in the dream I knew had a horrible reputation for Conference Evil, and she sat and drew bizarre diagrams of every point I tried to raise before abruptly leaving. And all the while, people kept coming in and interrupting me by checking out books from the media center.
And several of those media visitors were noisy little pre-schoolers.
Time was I was young, and idealistic, and blindly naive about the world and saw conferences as a great opportunity. "I'll have a broader picture of each student after meeting their families!" "What a great opportunity to help build a sense of community!" And several other similar empty platitudes that probably should have earned me a good hard slap in the head for being such a moon-faced idiot.
Conferences are not these things. Conferences are just long. And tiring. And then longer. I won't go into any detail about the types of parents that show up for conferences and the personality categories I shove them into since I've done that before, but I will say that on principle I will hate any parent who brings a preschooler to conferences when that preschooler doesn't know how to behave in public. I refuse to sit there and share in an exchange of sympathetic simpering grins as little three year old Travis or Chloe or Caitlyn or Caitlynn or Katelyn or Kaitlinn or Kayte-Lynn runs around screaming and crying and laughing hysterically and destroying my classroom as her / his parents sit and do nothing about it. Few things bother me more.
Worst thing about the conferences this year? Between the two nights we had scheduled this week, I chose the night off to go home and DREAM THAT I WAS HAVING CONFERENCES. I was in the media center instead of my room. My grade level partners weren't there so I didn't have their help to keep things rolling along as smoothly as they did for us in real life this year. I sat down with a parent who in the dream I knew had a horrible reputation for Conference Evil, and she sat and drew bizarre diagrams of every point I tried to raise before abruptly leaving. And all the while, people kept coming in and interrupting me by checking out books from the media center.
And several of those media visitors were noisy little pre-schoolers.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
NaNoWriMo
Yep. That's me. A winner.To start with, I HATE the little abbreviation "NaNoWriMo." To me, something about it just stinks of the same nauseating pseudo-intellectualism that played a large part in driving me out of the English department in college and made it easier to change my major to something where everyone else didn't think they were God's gift to thought and the written word, and tried to prove this by wearing dark overcoats and divining sexual imagery out of the most innocuous pieces of writing outside of childrens' literature.
That might be my longest blog sentence to date. Maybe the grammar is a little caffeinated there. But anyway.
NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month. I've been aware of this for years and thought it was kind of a cool idea: "Can you write an entire 50,000 word novel, from start to finish, all during the month of November?" Well, last year, my Life Coach got all fired up about trying to pull it off and talked me into giving it a try as well. So I pulled an idea out of the vault and hacked away at it, figuring that at the end of the month I'd at least have a workable first draft of another project already completed. And that's about all I did get out of it, but I did, in fact, pull it off. In 24 days instead of the available 30, I might add. And to give credit where it's due, Life Coach also finished hers. Quite a feat considering she'd never tried to write a book before.
So I bring this all up now because just in the past couple days, I've come across what this year's novel idea is going to be. But it's not November yet, and I am unfortunately inflexible when it comes to following rules, so I need to wait until we've crossed over from Halloween to Midnight, Nov. 1 to begin. And honestly it's really a struggle to do that because this story is coming alive right now. I mean, RIGHT. NOW. As we speak. I'm typing this while another part of my brain is processing the ideas I have so far and deciding what else I can do.
So, since I can't start yet I am preparing a little. Thinking it over, which I've always considered a bit part of writing anyway, that I can do. That's not cheating. I'll have the thing mapped out pretty thoroughly by the time I can start, but that's all the better. I'm also auditioning songs for the iTunes playlist that will serve as my writing soundtrack. This involves putting songs on the list I think will work, then listening to them in the context of the book's tone and voice, and then deciding to keep or delete them. Might seem like a time-waster to most, but pretty necessary for me.
So. If you don't see my on Facebook much in November, or, you know, out of my house beyond the hours of the school day, you'll know why.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding
Today I went to a funeral for a nine-year-old boy.
I'm not going to round up to ten for him; his birthday was less than a week away, but I'm not going to give him credit for those last few days because I just want to highlight the injustice and tragedy and incredulity of anyone ever having to attend a funeral for a nine-year-old boy.
Kyle is now definitely on his way to Heaven. My experiences with death have led me to develop my own belief that one does not arrive there inside the half-moment following death, but that an individual journey needs to be made, depending on what that person learned in their time on Earth and how much time they had to learn it. Being that Kyle was all of nine and possessed an inordinate amount of wisdom and understanding for his age, I'm sure his journey will be relatively quick.
He was a funny little guy. I met him as a first grader when I had his older sister in my class. I'd see him at the end of the day waiting in line for his bus, and if I was quick enough I could catch him unaware and pull his stocking cap down over his eyes. While most kids would quickly yank it back up off of their face and point an accusing finger at me, Kyle just accepted that I got him and stood there with the cap over his eyes, letting out a defeated little cry that was engineered to make every other kid in the bus line laugh. After awhile he figured out my pattern and started watching for me. Or set friends on guard to watch for me. Or just stood in the bus line as long as it took with both hands clenched to the top of his head, just in case I came by that day, ready to announce with triumph, "Can't get me!"
As the months and years went by and the cancer he had fought back earlier in his young life returned, I felt a pull. He wasn't just another little brother or sister of a student anymore, not just someone I would joke around with but someone I started watching. I'd give him bits of encouragement when he looked like he needed it, joke with him when he needed cheering up. I watched his sister. I knew what it was like to have a little sister suffering with that disease, and what it was like to watch her die. I watched his sister to see how she was going to handle the return.
When the school year ended and his sister moved on to the middle school, she still came back to visit, more frequently than a lot of kids would because her brother was still at my school and she had a reason to occasionally come by. Kyle went in for some massive treatment to chase off the disease again and missed a lot of school. We felt his absence while he was being tutored at night by someone set up through the district. And eventually, he came back.
But the remission didn't last. And in only a matter of months the disease had fought back, and another intense round of treatment was ordered up, one that would keep him out of school for at least a good month, not to mention several sporadic days and weeks after that while his body regained strength. And I felt the pull again. As soon as I'd heard he would need homebound tutoring again, I told his homeroom teacher to let the family know I would do it. Another teacher in our building was also willing to help him, but, to be blunt, I staked a claim and more or less elbowed her aside. I had the relationship with the family she didn't. I had known Kyle longer than she had and I knew him better. I knew his sister Kiana and wanted to hover somewhat close to keep an eye on how she would be dealing with everything. And I knew that if something like this came up, my sister would want me to be involved. I wasn't feeling a pull anymore. I was feeling compelled.
My colleague graciously stepped aside and I was on board. I went to his house in the evenings, usually for an hour or two depending on what his schedule was like. There were good days and bad ones. There were nights we would focus hard on the math that came so easily for him and butt heads a little about the reading he didn't really want to do. There were times he was feeling playful and goofy, and I had to find ways to persuade him to stay busy. There were times his pain took over everything and we were lucky to get anything done before the stress wore him out and put him to sleep on the living room sofa. One night I sat on the floor with him, his sister, and the babysitter, while Kyle rolled back and forth in Kiana's lap, not having much luck trying to find a position he could rest in that wouldn't hurt, unable to focus on much else or to even communicate with any of us. Kiana just held him and told him he'd be okay. His sitter, their neighbor, gently tried over and over and over to get him to lie on the sofa. I sat and pet the dog, Shelby, so she wouldn't get excited by all of Kyle's moving and crying and think he was trying to play with her.
And that night wasn't even the worst one.
But there were great times, too. He'd try and get me to sneak downstairs and play Wii, as if his mother wouldn't hear from the next room that we weren't working anymore. More than once he tried to talk me into helping him prank Kiana, and we finally did once on her birthday; their mother and her friends captured the moment on cell phone cameras, and his smile was as wide as it could have been. We played some Nintendo DS. We set up Star Wars action figures around the work space on the dining room table. We found that the only way we could get Shelby the dog to stop barking at us for attention was to take the battery-powered massage ball that he used to relieve muscle tension and hold it right on her butt.
He died October 9th, which, oddly enough, was the same date my sister had been buried five years earlier. Our school had parent-teacher conferences the night of his visitation so I skipped my dinner break and sped (literally) to the funeral home, getting there with just enough time to cut my way past at least 150 people to see him in his casket surrounded by his favorite toys and to talk briefly with his mom before I had to speed back for my next conference. Which I made.
His funeral, today, was something that about ten people from our school attended; our principal had put out a call to available licensed staff in the district to volunteer and fill in for those of us attending; she said later she'd had so many volunteers she could have had the entire school staff covered. It was a difficult funeral to attend. I didn't feel much sadness for him because I knew the worst of it was over for him now and he was on his way to meet up with my sister and hundreds of other souls waiting to celebrate his arrival. I did feel great sadness for his family, particularly his mom and his sister. They seemed so lost, and having been in that spot myself I knew where they were and what they still have ahead of them.
I cried a little when his best friend walked up to eulogize him with a poem she had written; knowing what it's like to deliver a eulogy, I can tell you that she did an admirable job of getting through it and keeping her emotion in check as much as she could. For me the defining moment, the perfect moment of the service was the very end, when the pallbearers came forward to bring his body outside. The picked up the casket, turned around to face down the aisle, and the closing music, which I found out later Kyle had chosen himself, started playing through the church's sound system:
The main title theme from "Star Wars."
I'm not going to round up to ten for him; his birthday was less than a week away, but I'm not going to give him credit for those last few days because I just want to highlight the injustice and tragedy and incredulity of anyone ever having to attend a funeral for a nine-year-old boy.
Kyle is now definitely on his way to Heaven. My experiences with death have led me to develop my own belief that one does not arrive there inside the half-moment following death, but that an individual journey needs to be made, depending on what that person learned in their time on Earth and how much time they had to learn it. Being that Kyle was all of nine and possessed an inordinate amount of wisdom and understanding for his age, I'm sure his journey will be relatively quick.
He was a funny little guy. I met him as a first grader when I had his older sister in my class. I'd see him at the end of the day waiting in line for his bus, and if I was quick enough I could catch him unaware and pull his stocking cap down over his eyes. While most kids would quickly yank it back up off of their face and point an accusing finger at me, Kyle just accepted that I got him and stood there with the cap over his eyes, letting out a defeated little cry that was engineered to make every other kid in the bus line laugh. After awhile he figured out my pattern and started watching for me. Or set friends on guard to watch for me. Or just stood in the bus line as long as it took with both hands clenched to the top of his head, just in case I came by that day, ready to announce with triumph, "Can't get me!"
As the months and years went by and the cancer he had fought back earlier in his young life returned, I felt a pull. He wasn't just another little brother or sister of a student anymore, not just someone I would joke around with but someone I started watching. I'd give him bits of encouragement when he looked like he needed it, joke with him when he needed cheering up. I watched his sister. I knew what it was like to have a little sister suffering with that disease, and what it was like to watch her die. I watched his sister to see how she was going to handle the return.
When the school year ended and his sister moved on to the middle school, she still came back to visit, more frequently than a lot of kids would because her brother was still at my school and she had a reason to occasionally come by. Kyle went in for some massive treatment to chase off the disease again and missed a lot of school. We felt his absence while he was being tutored at night by someone set up through the district. And eventually, he came back.
But the remission didn't last. And in only a matter of months the disease had fought back, and another intense round of treatment was ordered up, one that would keep him out of school for at least a good month, not to mention several sporadic days and weeks after that while his body regained strength. And I felt the pull again. As soon as I'd heard he would need homebound tutoring again, I told his homeroom teacher to let the family know I would do it. Another teacher in our building was also willing to help him, but, to be blunt, I staked a claim and more or less elbowed her aside. I had the relationship with the family she didn't. I had known Kyle longer than she had and I knew him better. I knew his sister Kiana and wanted to hover somewhat close to keep an eye on how she would be dealing with everything. And I knew that if something like this came up, my sister would want me to be involved. I wasn't feeling a pull anymore. I was feeling compelled.
My colleague graciously stepped aside and I was on board. I went to his house in the evenings, usually for an hour or two depending on what his schedule was like. There were good days and bad ones. There were nights we would focus hard on the math that came so easily for him and butt heads a little about the reading he didn't really want to do. There were times he was feeling playful and goofy, and I had to find ways to persuade him to stay busy. There were times his pain took over everything and we were lucky to get anything done before the stress wore him out and put him to sleep on the living room sofa. One night I sat on the floor with him, his sister, and the babysitter, while Kyle rolled back and forth in Kiana's lap, not having much luck trying to find a position he could rest in that wouldn't hurt, unable to focus on much else or to even communicate with any of us. Kiana just held him and told him he'd be okay. His sitter, their neighbor, gently tried over and over and over to get him to lie on the sofa. I sat and pet the dog, Shelby, so she wouldn't get excited by all of Kyle's moving and crying and think he was trying to play with her.
And that night wasn't even the worst one.
But there were great times, too. He'd try and get me to sneak downstairs and play Wii, as if his mother wouldn't hear from the next room that we weren't working anymore. More than once he tried to talk me into helping him prank Kiana, and we finally did once on her birthday; their mother and her friends captured the moment on cell phone cameras, and his smile was as wide as it could have been. We played some Nintendo DS. We set up Star Wars action figures around the work space on the dining room table. We found that the only way we could get Shelby the dog to stop barking at us for attention was to take the battery-powered massage ball that he used to relieve muscle tension and hold it right on her butt.
He died October 9th, which, oddly enough, was the same date my sister had been buried five years earlier. Our school had parent-teacher conferences the night of his visitation so I skipped my dinner break and sped (literally) to the funeral home, getting there with just enough time to cut my way past at least 150 people to see him in his casket surrounded by his favorite toys and to talk briefly with his mom before I had to speed back for my next conference. Which I made.
His funeral, today, was something that about ten people from our school attended; our principal had put out a call to available licensed staff in the district to volunteer and fill in for those of us attending; she said later she'd had so many volunteers she could have had the entire school staff covered. It was a difficult funeral to attend. I didn't feel much sadness for him because I knew the worst of it was over for him now and he was on his way to meet up with my sister and hundreds of other souls waiting to celebrate his arrival. I did feel great sadness for his family, particularly his mom and his sister. They seemed so lost, and having been in that spot myself I knew where they were and what they still have ahead of them.
I cried a little when his best friend walked up to eulogize him with a poem she had written; knowing what it's like to deliver a eulogy, I can tell you that she did an admirable job of getting through it and keeping her emotion in check as much as she could. For me the defining moment, the perfect moment of the service was the very end, when the pallbearers came forward to bring his body outside. The picked up the casket, turned around to face down the aisle, and the closing music, which I found out later Kyle had chosen himself, started playing through the church's sound system:
The main title theme from "Star Wars."
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Go 73.
The day is done. The suffering is over. The next journey is underway. My little pal Kyle has shaken off the dust and is on his way to... well, Heaven, even though I don't know exactly what that means and I don't think any of us will really know until we're there ourselves. But I know he's on his way now, and I suspect he maybe had a hand in pulling one last prank on me on his way out of town early this morning. And I know my sister is there waiting for him, and I KNOW she's waiting for him because she told me she would be last summer, and just reminded me again this afternoon.
I wish I could see that time they first get together. October 9th won't be a favorite date for either of them, since that's the day he died and the day she was buried. But once they get past that awkwardness, they'll have some good times. Better times than any of us could understand. Trust me -- those two are going to hit it off big time.
And as for the Go 73? Maybe you saw it on Facebook, maybe you saw it on his CaringBridge page, numerous times. Wish I could explain it, but it was something the two of us came up with intending for it to be our private joke, something we'd laugh at because we got it, and then laugh at more because nobody else would. It wouldn't be right for me to break that confidence even if he's not here anymore. Okay, his mom knew, too. But I don't think she's going to spill it either.
The last time I saw him was at his birthday party. I went back to the room where he was resting to say goodbye, reached out for our customary fist-bump and, as had become part of our routine, did not say goodbye. But instead the last words we exchanged?
Go 73.
I wish I could see that time they first get together. October 9th won't be a favorite date for either of them, since that's the day he died and the day she was buried. But once they get past that awkwardness, they'll have some good times. Better times than any of us could understand. Trust me -- those two are going to hit it off big time.
And as for the Go 73? Maybe you saw it on Facebook, maybe you saw it on his CaringBridge page, numerous times. Wish I could explain it, but it was something the two of us came up with intending for it to be our private joke, something we'd laugh at because we got it, and then laugh at more because nobody else would. It wouldn't be right for me to break that confidence even if he's not here anymore. Okay, his mom knew, too. But I don't think she's going to spill it either.
The last time I saw him was at his birthday party. I went back to the room where he was resting to say goodbye, reached out for our customary fist-bump and, as had become part of our routine, did not say goodbye. But instead the last words we exchanged?
Go 73.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Wedding Weekend
There was another wedding in my family this weekend. Usually I hate weddings. A lot. Seriously. Not always for the same reasons that so many other people hate weddings; my list has more to do with that whole "in the 40s and still unmarried" deal and the feelings of general inadequacy that stem from seeing someone who was born after you had earned your driver's license get married. Talk about being LAPPED, people. Oh, the delicious self-pity....
And then there's the dance. I have nothing against dances on the whole, but I usually sit them out on principle. It's not that my collection of dance moves is so... distinct... that its been given its own name and has people studying it to try and learn how to replicate me. After all, let's face it: Nobody at a wedding can dance except for maybe one or two people, and most of the other guests watch them and are impressed for a song or two, then wish they'd just get off the floor and quit making the night their own personal showcase. Most people just want to hear the music and have fun and celebrate. I'd rather be the person enjoying about 60% of the music and working the room, catching up with the people I don't see very often, and I do what I can to avoid being the guy during the group dance who has to slink off quietly when a slow song comes on and all the couples fall together while I find a table with the 12-year-olds, who are staying up too late and traveling through the ballroom like a cloud of sugar-fueled locusts, systematically eating all of the remaining dinner mints still in the little decorative arrangements.
Oh, the delicious, delicious self-pity of it all....
(Incidentally, I'm thinking about authoring a petition to be passed around to all independent DJs in the land, asking them to have some kind of summit that would establish a new list of songs that have to be played at every wedding dance. I don't need to list these tired, overplayed wedding-dance songs; you know which ones they are. It's time for some retirements, and time for some new blood. I'm willing to provide several suggestions to get this new paradigm underway.)
Anyway. Yesterday my cousin and his long-time girlfriend got married. And for a nice change of pace, I enjoyed myself! (I know! Pick up your jaw!) Decent meal. Nephews #2 and #3 had fun with very little time spent fighting. Lot of good conversations. A very welcome surprise guest showing up late in the evening. A DJ instead of my cousins' band... not that I have issues with my cousins' band, but I think I can only be reasonably expected to hear "Black Velvet" so many times in one life, and I'm rapidly closing in on my quota.
One of the best things about the night though was that the ballroom was actually in the hotel where so many of us were staying. Which was awesome. How would you rather make your way back to bed: Drive 45 minutes through unfamiliar city streets in the dark, or hop on the elevator and whip out your key card? No contest for me.
One of my favorite moments of the night had to do with our being at the hotel. Now, the thing you need to know here is that I have a huge extended family, and we are unusually close; even in the cross-generation aspect this holds true. And we have all grown up together. I am closer to several of my cousins than many people I know are to their own siblings. And as the night was wrapping up, a group of us volunteered to bring the wedding gifts up to the hospitality room where the gift-opening would take place the next morning. It took about nine of us to get them all up there, and when we got to the door, we had to wait for another cousin, the sister of the mother of the groom, who had to track down the key card to let us in. While we were waiting, someone decided it would be funny if we made it look like we had just left this huge pile of gifts in the hall, out in the open for anyone walking by to grab, and so she would think she was the one person who would have to move them all in the room. So to pull this off, this group of people from my family? This collection of parents, teachers, accounting partners, professors, aunts & uncles, volunteers, high school students, grandparents, and so on? What did we do?
We left the gifts on the floor. Then all ran around several different corners to hide.
We stayed quiet and hidden for at least three or four minutes by my estimate. Silent. Peeking out to check, listening for voices, trying to keep each other from laughing.... at least that was the story at my end of the hallway.
Which was exactly the kind of thing we all would have done thirty years ago. Some things don't change.... much. I'm happy my family is on that list.
And I'm also happy that Sandy is finally, officially, one of us.
And then there's the dance. I have nothing against dances on the whole, but I usually sit them out on principle. It's not that my collection of dance moves is so... distinct... that its been given its own name and has people studying it to try and learn how to replicate me. After all, let's face it: Nobody at a wedding can dance except for maybe one or two people, and most of the other guests watch them and are impressed for a song or two, then wish they'd just get off the floor and quit making the night their own personal showcase. Most people just want to hear the music and have fun and celebrate. I'd rather be the person enjoying about 60% of the music and working the room, catching up with the people I don't see very often, and I do what I can to avoid being the guy during the group dance who has to slink off quietly when a slow song comes on and all the couples fall together while I find a table with the 12-year-olds, who are staying up too late and traveling through the ballroom like a cloud of sugar-fueled locusts, systematically eating all of the remaining dinner mints still in the little decorative arrangements.
Oh, the delicious, delicious self-pity of it all....
(Incidentally, I'm thinking about authoring a petition to be passed around to all independent DJs in the land, asking them to have some kind of summit that would establish a new list of songs that have to be played at every wedding dance. I don't need to list these tired, overplayed wedding-dance songs; you know which ones they are. It's time for some retirements, and time for some new blood. I'm willing to provide several suggestions to get this new paradigm underway.)
Anyway. Yesterday my cousin and his long-time girlfriend got married. And for a nice change of pace, I enjoyed myself! (I know! Pick up your jaw!) Decent meal. Nephews #2 and #3 had fun with very little time spent fighting. Lot of good conversations. A very welcome surprise guest showing up late in the evening. A DJ instead of my cousins' band... not that I have issues with my cousins' band, but I think I can only be reasonably expected to hear "Black Velvet" so many times in one life, and I'm rapidly closing in on my quota.
One of the best things about the night though was that the ballroom was actually in the hotel where so many of us were staying. Which was awesome. How would you rather make your way back to bed: Drive 45 minutes through unfamiliar city streets in the dark, or hop on the elevator and whip out your key card? No contest for me.
One of my favorite moments of the night had to do with our being at the hotel. Now, the thing you need to know here is that I have a huge extended family, and we are unusually close; even in the cross-generation aspect this holds true. And we have all grown up together. I am closer to several of my cousins than many people I know are to their own siblings. And as the night was wrapping up, a group of us volunteered to bring the wedding gifts up to the hospitality room where the gift-opening would take place the next morning. It took about nine of us to get them all up there, and when we got to the door, we had to wait for another cousin, the sister of the mother of the groom, who had to track down the key card to let us in. While we were waiting, someone decided it would be funny if we made it look like we had just left this huge pile of gifts in the hall, out in the open for anyone walking by to grab, and so she would think she was the one person who would have to move them all in the room. So to pull this off, this group of people from my family? This collection of parents, teachers, accounting partners, professors, aunts & uncles, volunteers, high school students, grandparents, and so on? What did we do?
We left the gifts on the floor. Then all ran around several different corners to hide.
We stayed quiet and hidden for at least three or four minutes by my estimate. Silent. Peeking out to check, listening for voices, trying to keep each other from laughing.... at least that was the story at my end of the hallway.
Which was exactly the kind of thing we all would have done thirty years ago. Some things don't change.... much. I'm happy my family is on that list.
And I'm also happy that Sandy is finally, officially, one of us.
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