Day 6: The Kids' Book of Questions

 One of my usual May posts is the Q & A post, during which I answer whatever questions people ask me. It’s still coming, in two weeks actually, and I’m really hoping I’ll get a long, challenging, and varied list this year. 

Answering questions can be a solid writing prompt. One of the things I’ve been doing in class to help my students get used to the idea of constructing paragraphs with main ideas and supporting details is assigning them prompts from something called “The Kids’ Book of Questions.” It contains 268 questions, some silly and light, some heavy and dark, that would be good conversation starters and are mostly age appropriate for elementary students. Some might be a little intense to use as for daily writing warm ups, but there are many, many others to choose from. 

Today, with the help of another teacher, I settled on five questions from the book to answer in tonight’s post. We selected them through different methods of mostly random selection. It wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be since it is a book for kids and many of the questions, or aspects of them, aren’t very adaptable to adults. But we settled on five. Here they are, along with my responses. 

Question #12: “When you find yourself sitting in front of awful-tasting food that you’re supposed to eat, what’s your best trick for getting rid of it without getting caught?”

I don’t really have this problem, to be honest. I’m kind of picky about food, but for me it’s more about texture being off-putting rather than taste. However, I had several reliable strategies for doing this exact thing when I was a child. I won’t get into details because I don’t think the world needs a full appreciation of how disgusting I was (and Jenny, I promise I will delete any comments you make that clarify this), but I can share what was my best answer for this question. After trying many different things with varying degrees of success with the whole “not getting caught” part, I realized if I filled my mouth at the dinner table with the food I didn’t want right as I finished the meal, I could make a quick dash to the bathroom, spit it all out into the toilet, and BOOM. No evidence.

Question #151: “If you knew that by cheating you could win an important competition for your school and be a hero, would you? Pretend you were sure you wouldn’t get caught.”

It's kind of a funny twist that it's a question for kids and yet I still have a school I can claim as my own. I also just realized this book might have a preoccupation with kids trying not to get caught doing things they shouldn’t. Anyway, no, I wouldn’t. I might be tempted to look for some kind of an advantage or a way to improve my chances, but if I knew I’d won because I’d cheated, I would carry too much guilt and regret for knowing what I had done. 

Question #202: “If a friend gave you a gift you didn’t like, would you pretend you liked it?”

As I understand things, I’m particularly difficult to buy gifts for, so I apologize to anyone who ever has to do that. I have gotten some gifts in the past that I wasn’t exactly thrilled with, but I always at least try to act like I liked them. Unfortunately, I don’t know how convincing I ever am.

Question #244: “What do you parents do the most that embarrasses you?” 

At this point, I don’t think anything. Back when I was a kid though, one thing that comes to mind was when my dad sat with the family in church, which he didn’t always do because he was a member of the choir for most of my childhood, and sometimes he would still sing the songs with a choral-appropriate amount of projection in his voice. As one of my sisters and I would say, “You can take Dad out of the choir, but you can’t take the choir out of Dad.” I also remember my mother had this t-shirt that said “Candy Cruisin’” on it. It was some promotional swag Dad got at the drugstore he managed from a candy company like Sweet Tarts or Skittles or whatever. The thing was, Mom chose ignore the self-awareness it would take to not wear this shirt in public! Like, at stores! Where people could see it and see she was wearing it! Luckily it quickly rotated its way into her gardening attire.

Question #126: “If you could do one thing you’re not allowed to do yet because you’re supposedly too young, what would it be?”

Retire.

Pandemic Narrative Part 15/Big Block of Cheese Day

If you don’t know the Big Block of Cheese Day reference, then you haven’t watched enough episodes of “The West Wing.” Quick description: There are some posts here on the blog when I have different things on my mind at once, so instead of deciding on one as a topic, I put together some shorter posts inside one longer one. I’m also tagging this as part of the overall pandemic narrative as well, since each topic is somehow related to Covid-19 and its aftermath. Because what isn’t these days?

THE ACTUAL PANDEMIC NARRATIVE PART

There are more than 9 million Covid-19 cases in the United States. By the time you read this, there will probably be 230,000 deaths. Our President is a liar, and anyone who believes him when he says we’re turning the corner and the military will be able to delivery 70 bajillion doses of the vaccine in time for Thanksgiving leftovers is too naive for words.

Since the last time I updated the narrative, Covid caught up with my family and knocked back one of my blood relatives pretty damned hard. He’s doing a lot better now, thank God, and hopefully will be done with all of it much sooner than later. It was maddening when he was in the thick of struggling with it, and all my family could do was wait and see what happened. The last I heard was he was hoping to return to work in a couple days. Fingers crossed he does, and that’s the end of it for him.

Minnesota is on fire. We’re currently experiencing thousands of new cases daily, which of course means more hospital beds are occupied, and tragically more people are dying. None of this seems to have any impact on the people who have succumbed to their Pandemic Fatigue or their Covid Anger, or the cultists who still feel this is a hoax and “refuse to live in fear.” Anyone out there walking around feeling emboldened by the armor of their ignorance who wants to blather on about how Covid is a hoax? Acting with caution and living in fear are very different. I hope things aren’t going to catch up with you and show you how seriously you should have taken this. Sadly, I think that will inevitably be the case with some. I just hope getting to watch your kid take a few hikes during his senior year of high school football will have been worth it.

SHIFTING LEARNING MODELS DURING THE PANDEMIC AGE

The state and the school districts have said since back in the summer that it was likely the learning models being implemented would change throughout the school year, depending on the spread or containment of the virus. Four weeks ago, our district was considering returning the hybrid students to a full-time model. Two weeks ago, they saw that couldn’t happen. Two weeks after that, or now, they’re arranging for the secondary students to begin a full distance learning model while the elementary students remain in a hybrid. Elementary could potentially change to distance learning as well, provided the Covid data being monitored locally ever necessitates such a change. 

Predictably, there are many people and families who agree with more careful learning models, as well as many who feel the amount of implemented caution is too extreme. Somehow (45) this has been bastardized into being a political issue. This is leading to a lot of raging comment threads on social media, many of which assign teachers as the most identifiable face of the school system and freely bash away at them (us) as if they’re (we’re) the ones making these decisions, instead of the elected officials and district administrators following the science. It’s really unfortunate that our community is struggling so much to come together at a time like this to and support each other through the unprecedented challenges we’re all experiencing. I would like to suggest to anyone who may someday invent a time machine that your best move would be to travel back to Harvard around the turn of the century, and convince Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend not to dump him. Then maybe social media will never have a pathway of coming into being, and everyone in the world will be happier and get along better for it. 

NANOWRIMO 2020, OR RAGING AGAINST THE EMPTY

I’m just going to say it: I’m coming off a bad week. Why was it bad? I wish I knew. There was no starting point when things went from their standard neutral to bad, but it sure happened. There wasn’t a lot of smiling or laughing going on, at least outside of the time I was with my students. Sleep was more of an interruption in the darkness than an escape, when it even came. Emotions ebb and flow, however. Yesterday was net positive, and today feels nice and normal. Bad days come, sometimes stretches of them, but they also balance out. Plus there are things people can do to fight back the negative. Those things are probably different for each of us, and I feel like I have a basic understanding of what a few of my things are. One of them is definitely reading a good book. Here’s the one I picked: 

It took one book for Justin Cronin to become one of my favorite authors. I met him at a book signing in 2012 for his novel THE TWELVE, which is the second novel in the trilogy that started with THE PASSAGE, a horror novel that, coincidentally, began as a story about a pandemic that started with a bat and decimated the population. As he signed my book, I mentioned I was a teacher hoping to be an author someday. He said he’d started out the same way, which of course I already knew.

Four years later when CITY OF MIRRORS came out, I was back for another book signing, but this time with a different story to share. Instead of buying my copy of the book at the signing, I brought my own, which my agent had given me as a birthday present a few weeks earlier after she somehow managed to score a copy of it before it had even been released. You might think that shouldn’t be any great trick for someone in the publishing industry, but for a high profile book like this was at the time, it was no small feat. I was absolutely blown away. When it was my turn in the book signing line, I told Cronin how things had changed for me since his last signing. He shook my hand, congratulated me, and asked what I was working on. Then he wrote this with his signature.

I know that reading a good book does something to my brain, like flipping a switch that primes it to narrate. I recently decided to participate in National Novel Writing Month again this year, so it seemed like a good opportunity to start reading a good long book and tap into that priming action. I picked CITY OF MIRRORS because he’s a really good writer, I’ve only read it one time, it contains a section that I would argue is one of the best love stories ever committed to paper, and above all it’s a horror story, which is what I’m going to be trying to write next month. I’m putting aside the middle grade work for a shot at adult fiction, and specifically horror. I’ve been looking for a good horror story to tell for a while now. When I started writing for real in college I wrote horror almost exclusively, but I still haven’t done it as a full-length novel, at least in adult fiction. I’ve had a number of conversations with my agent over the past year about taking on a project like this, and decided I had to go forward with it after she gave the concept her blessing.

I can’t say I’m really excited about it, though. I’m very excited about the story, but not so much diving into another round of writing a whole damn book in a month. First of all, it won’t be a whole book: Nanowrimo only requires 50,000 words in 30 days, and my draft should be aiming for something closer to 80,000-90,000 before editing, which would be really taxing to do in 30 days. I still win if I hit the 50k mark, and I will win at this because I won’t allow myself not to, but I’m okay with finishing the rest of the story in December.

See, I realized earlier this month that I feel better when I’m creating something. I finished revising a middle grade novel a few weeks ago, and noticed that the darkest part of October started soon after I was done with that, and continued to get more pronounced the longer I sat on the sidelines. Writing lesson plans helped, believe it or not, because there’s a certain amount of creativity that goes into that. Everyone has their own ways of proactively fighting whatever depression or anxiety they might be experiencing during these crazy pandemic days. I think my fight has to do with reading and writing, between keeping my head occupied, filling me with whatever collection of hormones are dumped into my system when the reading ignites that narrative response, and the feeling that follows the achievement that comes from writing something that brings me a sense of accomplishment. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing that I seem to need that so much, but it’s probably good that I recognize it. 

Okay. That’s enough for now. Since I can’t start working on the new book until tomorrow, I’m going to go do some reading instead.

May 10: Mother's Day

Pandemic celebrations have been subdued for my family, to say the least. We didn’t get together for Easter. We’ve already missed three birthdays, with another one this month set to either be postponed or bypassed altogether. As of today, we’ve missed Mother’s Day. 

I almost started this paragraph by writing “Everyone’s mother is special to them,” but after so many years of teaching and witnessing so many either fractured or completely broken mother/child relationships, I know that isn’t necessarily true. I have known of mothers who wanted to try their best, but weren't even able to take care of themselves. I’ve known mothers who have given up on being any kind of a parent, because they either didn't understand or have any love for their children. I know of mothers who have essentially abandoned their families to move several states away in search of a second try. I’ve had students who were only alive to be in my classroom by the grace of God. I’ll spare you the details, because frankly, I know too many things from my years as a teacher that would leave most people sickened or walking around with waking nightmares. The world is not always a good place, and many of the people who live in it have considerable problems.

My sisters and I had all the luck in the world to be born to our parents. I’m giving my father half the credit here because he certainly deserves it, but since today is Mother’s Day, we’re going to focus on my mom instead. Her patience got me through being a very sick and injured child; I think it’s only because of the law of averages that I haven’t been in a hospital for so long, because I probably used up most of my allotted turns before turning eight. She was the one who could read me well enough to occasionally let me stay home from school when I faked being sick; I didn’t do it often, so she figured I probably had reasons why I didn’t want to go on those few particular days. She drove me where I needed to go, even if I didn’t want to be there. She told me what I needed to hear, even when I was positive she was completely wrong. She was the one who subtly changed the direction of my life when I expressed a small bit of reluctance about teaching high school English, by suggesting I spend the day in her classroom with her and her second graders to see what elementary was like. The highest compliment I can think to give my mother would be to say how much she reminds me of hers.

I didn’t buy her any presents this year. If we’d had the chance to get the family together for a celebration, of course I would have had a gift and a card. This year though, things felt different. Sure, I could have had candles or flowers or new socks or a book she’d like or something similar delivered for the day (and I’m not saying I won’t; there is an important date still coming up later this week), but gifts like those things dropped off at her front door by someone else felt like impersonal tokens. Instead, I drove out to my parents’ house and stood in their front yard, with my mask on, while they stood on their front patio, wearing their masks and winter jackets because even though it’s May it’s still 2020 and few things about the world makes sense right now. 

I did get to spend part of Mother’s Day with my mom though, and I got to spend time talking with my parents face to face for the first time in about three months. At least that made sense.

May 9: The Post-Pandemic Perfect Day

I think that at one time or another, most people have indulged the daydream of imagining what a perfect day would be like. I don’t necessarily mean a day filled with lottery wins or wildest dreams coming true, or magically being able to correct mistakes and erase regrets. I think of a day when everything would go as well as it possibly could. 

A few months ago, I would have had a dramatically different idea of what a perfect day would be like. The day of the week wouldn’t have mattered, but it would have started with me getting a text from my agent soon after waking, asking when we could talk later that day since an offer had come through on the manuscript we have on submission. I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it, but carrying that secret all day would color everything else that happened in the best possible way. The day would be full of good meals, with me probably seeing a movie I’d been looking forward to for a long time, lots of laughter, and good songs on every station on the radio when I was driving. I’m sure there would be details beyond that if I was able to specifically plan out a perfect day, but that’s the basic outline. 

Not anymore, though. 

The pandemic has become a driving force of everyday life here in my state, and consequently a lot of our priorities have changed. Because I understand and respect the risks involved with Covid-19, I have been taking the idea of shelter-in-place very seriously. This means that, since the last day of school before this seemingly eternal spring break began two months ago, I have probably spent 98% of this time, literally, inside my house with no one but my dog. In all this time, I have not had a live, in-person face to face conversation with anyone that lasted more than three minutes, and mostly with people living in my neighborhood I only kind of know, if they happen to be outside while my dog and are out for a walk. The only way I can keep in touch with the people important to me is through some virtual electronic medium. The same students I couldn’t pay to stay quiet in the classroom stare blankly into their cameras during our video conferences, without questions to ask or anything to say. If I have to leave the house to pick up something essential, or if I have something delivered, I don’t feel completely secure about even that superficial level of interaction with the outside world until I’ve wiped down any exposed surfaces, washed my hands to a level that would make them acceptable for performing surgery, and, if necessary, even changed clothes. Am I taking all of this a little far? Probably. But I’m also not infected. So far. That I know of. 

Because of all this, my vision of a perfect day has changed. Now, I feel a perfect day would be 24 hours spent basking in the former normalcy that we all had probably taken for granted in some way, and may not see again in the same way for years. I think my perfect day would go a little something like this: 

5:45 AM - It’s a Friday. I’d wake up just a little before my alarm, feeling fully rested. I’d turn on the morning news. My dog would hop up in the bed and say good morning by straddling my chest and throat, snorting in my face, and wagging his tail so enthusiastically it actually creates a small breeze. (This describes the first 10 minutes of practically every day anyway.) After a walk, breakfast, finishing the Sudoku in the paper, and a shower, I’d be ready to go to school. Because yes, going to school would now be a part of my perfect day. 

8:00 - I’d arrive at school early enough to get a decent parking space. There wouldn't be any meetings in the morning. All of my materials for the day are ready to go because I had enough time the night before to prepare them. As people arrive and enter the building through the door near my classroom, they’d all say a quick good morning to me as they walked past my door, and the ones I’m closer with would stop to talk for a few minutes before they went to start their days. 

9:15 - The first bell would ring, signaling what will be a successful day at school. The kids will be engaged and productive. We’ll all be in good moods, contributing to a happy and comfortably classroom environment. Everyone will be getting along so well that no one will drag any toxic drama back to the classroom after recess or lunch, and the day ends successfully. I’m happy about having another good day with a class I really enjoy. (This is true about this year, at least as far as I how I enjoyed them back when we were spending our days together.)

4:00 - The day ends well and the kids go home. I don’t have much school work to do over the weekend, and the little that I have is already pretty much packed and ready. I’m not feeling any rush to leave, so I allow myself to get pulled into three or four of the conversation pockets that always pop up in the hallway after school. This ends up taking close to an hour, if not longer. It’s wonderful to see these people right in front of me, and hear their voices in person instead of over the internet, and to just be present in the moment with so many of them. I had a good day with my students, and I get to end it with some quality time with my friends and colleagues.

4:45 - I finally leave. I stop at Target on the way home, and enjoy walking through the aisles in no particular rush, unconcerned with the number of people in the store, whether or not they’re six feet away from me, or if they’re wearing masks. None of that is necessary anymore. I pick up the things I need and even a few I don’t. I run into a person or two from school while there, and get into more end-of-the-day depressurizing conversations. I’m feeling happy and relaxed.

5:15 - I’m home, a little later than my dog would prefer, but he’s very happy to see me and to take a walk through the neighborhood during a comfortable and sunny evening before he has his supper.

6:00 - I’m at my sister’s for dinner. For whatever reason, her whole family is there, along with our parents and even a few local cousins. My brother-in-law is outside grilling. Dinner is good, and we have a good time talking and eating and joking around. After dinner people spread around, some in the living room, some on the porch, some outside on the deck, because it’s still a comfortably warm evening. We spend the rest of the evening just being with each other until the sky begins darkening and it’s time for everyone to return home. 

9:00 - After getting home and taking the dog out for one last walk, the two of us spend a little time sitting in our patio chairs to enjoy the cooling evening until the bugs come out. After that, it’s back inside for a little TV or reading until I grow peacefully tired and know it’s time for bed. 

It strikes me that my idea of a perfect day now isn’t so different from what a fairly normal day would have been like before. I hope the time comes when I can have another day like that.

May 3: 15 Dramatic Scenes of my Nephews During the Pandemic

As I sit here during this worldwide health crisis trying to enjoy the fact that it’s relatively easy for me to just fall off the face of the earth, it makes me wonder what it would be like for people who are sheltering in place with their families. I have a pretty good idea what it’s like for my parents since I check in with them every few days. When I think about my sister and brother-in-law’s house though, it’s a little different. 

First of all, my sister works in a hospital which makes her one of the front-line workers constantly referred to in the media, so anyone on Facebook reading this should probably leave a comment thanking her for enduring the added stress and responsibility that she and her co-workers are managing during these times.

Anyway. I used to be much more involved with my sister’s family when my nephews were younger. These days, not quite as much. I text with my sister all the time. I get along with my brother-in-law very well, and I always enjoy when I get to spend time with him. But my nephews aren’t little boys anymore, and all have lives of their own. For perspective, the youngest one has spent this spring finishing his freshman year at the University of Minnesota — remotely, or course. 

I don’t know how often my nephews are able to all get together. Normally when we have family birthdays or similar events, we try to schedule the celebrations for days when everyone will be available. I get to see them together on these days, and it always makes me feel good to see how easily, as a group, they slip back into a very solid friendship.

Even though I’m not there, and I know the three of them are not all sheltering in place together, I feel like I have a pretty good idea of what it would be like to eavesdrop on their conversations / arguments / joking around if they were. With that in mind, I have put together fifteen very brief dramatic scenes I believe would capture this hypothetical. For the record, I’ve exaggerated much of what they say here, as well as their responses, for comedic effect. Having said that, I think anyone who has had the chance to see the three of them in action, and how much fun they have bantering back and forth, could back me up with how close to the mark many of these scenes are.

**********
Nephew #3: The Twins aren’t playing baseball this year. It’s your fault because you were so bad at baseball that they all gave up.
Nephew #2: (Deadpan stare) There’s a pandemic going on, idiot. They can't let people into a stadium to watch any games. 
Nephew #3: You’re just using that as an excuse. It’s still your fault.
Nephew #2: You’re the worst.
Nephew #3: Not at baseball. That'd be you.

**********
#2: Do you know why Mom still goes to work?

#3: Because it’s her job.
#2: No. It’s not for money. It’s because she hates you and wants to get out of the house.
#3: Wrong. I am the reason she comes back home.

**********
#1: Remember that time when we were kids, and you guys put on all of your clothes for padding, and then me and one of my friends shot at you with air rifles from the patio?
#2: (rolls eyes) Yes.
#3: We were stupid.
#1: We should do something like that again today, but with you running from cars.
#2: Cars? What the hell! Why cars?!
#1: Social distancing.

**********
#2: My eyes are blurring over from all the Netflix. Mom, we need a big TV for my room.
MOM: You believed Tom when he told you TV paint was a real thing. Maybe you should get a can of that and paint up a TV the size of your wall.
#2: TV paint isn’t real. But it should be. It would've been so cool.

**********
#3: You know I’m a writer for a comedy magazine.
#2: Oh, they had an issue written by people they felt sorry for because they suck?

**********
#3: I have homework to do.
#2: Watching Game of Thrones again doesn’t count.

**********
#2: You should go see a movie tonight. 
#3: The theater is closed.
#1: It’s not that late. You could probably still get in.
#3: There’s a virus out there. It’s closed, like, closed so they aren’t showing movies. Idiot.
#2: You could still probably get in and then just sit in a dark room by yourself.
#3: Even if I could, why would I ever want to do that? 
#1: Who cares? At least you wouldn’t be here anymore.

**********
#3: Where are my Starbursts?
#2: (thoughtful pause) Maybe I ate them. I can’t say for sure. Or, I could say, but I won’t.
#3: Fine. Remember that answer when you ask me why we’re out of chicken.

**********
#3: (quietly): Why is Dave just staring at the TV when it’s not even on? 
#2: I have no idea, but it’s weird. 
(They both walk to the kitchen.) 
#2 Mom, why is Dave starting at the blank TV?
MOM: He’s pretending sports still exist.

**********
(#3 tries to sit down in the living room to watch TV)
#2: You can’t sit there.
#3: Why not? The couch holds three people. You’re only a person.
#2: Social distancing. I don’t make the rules.
#3: (leans over and fake-coughs several times on #2)

**********
#1: I read that some dogs have been infected with the coronavirus.
#3: Yeah, I read that too.
#1: I think you should probably have Willow and Toby and Riley sleep in your room tonight. 
#3: Really. Why?
#1: I think they miss you.
#3: They don’t miss me. I never go anywhere. 
#1: I think they would appreciate having some quality time with you. 

**********
(MOM stamps hard on the kitchen floor several times. The basement door creaks open.)
#2: What?
MOM: Tell your brother it’s time for dinner. 
#2: He’s been quiet in his room for hours. I think he has coronavirus.
MOM: No he doesn’t. He isn't showing any symptoms. 
#2: But he’s the worst. 

**********
#1: Let the dogs out. 
#2: I’m not going outside. There’s coronavirus everywhere.
#1: Current findings say that virus particles aren’t freely floating through the air. 
#2: You don’t know that, Dr. Science! 
#3: Take the dogs out before the poop on the floor!
#2: (Stares) You know they’re going to do that anyway.

**********
#1: I saw online there’s a new update for Pokémon Go. You should download it. 
#3: Why? 
#2: There’s a whole bunch of really rare Pokémon all in the same place. 
#3: Where?
#1: Some place where there’s a lot of coronavirus. You should go check it out.

**********
#3: Where’s your mask? You should go put your mask on.
#2: Why? I’m not going anywhere.
#3: But Mom is coming home soon.
#2: What does that have to do with my mask?
#3: She’s probably had a hard day and doesn’t want to be reminded you live here.

An Open Letter to Nephew #3

Dear Nephew #3:

I’ve written one of these for each of your brothers. As I looked back at what I shared with them, I found a lot of general going-to-college advice that would apply to you as well, so I’m recycling the ideas that seem the most useful. However, we all know that as similar as you are to your brothers, there are also things that make you very much an individual. Your experience will not be theirs. So here is my abundant wisdom, tailor-made for you, from which I am certain you’ll benefit if you take it to heart. You’re very welcome.

*The first 48 hours I spent on campus were some of the most intimidating of my entire life. Things will likely feel very foreign at first. I promise it won’t last. If I was given the chance to revisit any period in my life, I’d go back to any random month I spent in college. The learning, the newfound independence, the constant discovery, the emerging self-definition, the failures and successes, the hundreds of casual friendships, the evolving relationships — both long-term and temporary; it’s an exhilarating time. I’m a tiny bit jealous that you’re about to be immersed in all of that. 

*The blank slate is a beautiful thing. You'll settle in, meet new people, and spend the first few weeks being whoever you want to be. No history, no baggage, no labels; everything completely neutral and waiting for definition. You'll live in glorious, intoxicating anonymity for awhile, and even after you establish your new circles of friends and acquaintances, that's how things will be most of the time. Enjoy it.

* Many people go to college because it seems like the next step they’re supposed to take in life. The truth is college isn’t for everyone, and by no means does it guarantee happiness and success. Happiness comes from getting to do what you want with your life, and hopefully with enough security to avoid any severe and constant worries. Having a degree will result in more choices and opportunities being available to you. It wouldn’t be the worst idea to occasionally reflect on why you’re in school and what you hope to get out of it. Having said all that, I have no doubt that you belong there. You will love the experience of it and will greatly benefit from everything it has to offer.

*Some of the best memories I have from college were the results of the chances I took, while all of my biggest regrets were from the ones I didn’t. Try to imagine how different high school would have been if you weren’t involved in your list of arts and activities. I’m not saying join every club or try out for every activity you hear about, but be open to possibilities. Don’t let hesitation ever choose your path.

*When you throw yourself into doing your best and things don't work out, let that be okay. You'll make mistakes, or things will take a wrong turn of their own accord, or even a combination of the two might happen. Just pick up the pieces and move on. Don’t make it bigger than it needs to be, and learn what you can from the experience. In the end, remember your GPA will only wind up being one line on your resumé. It's important, but it shouldn’t define you. Today’s trials are tomorrow’s footnotes. 

*The time might come when you’re tempted to blow off some of the classes that seem easier. Don’t give in. The grades you get in that first year carry a lot of weight when it comes to establishing a baseline GPA. Trust me, you don’t want to find yourself hundredths of a point away from graduating one level of honor higher than you will, especially if it means knowing it would have made all the difference if you’d just gotten a B instead of a C in that one freshman class where you spent half your time playing with the light reflecting from your watch onto the ceiling instead of paying attention. That kind of thing can stick with you.

*Set goals to work toward. Plan for ways to work around any patterns that become obstacles, and take advantage of the ones that work. Find a routine to get your class work done, and seriously, get your class work done. It won’t be just completing assignments; your goal isn’t the grade anymore, but the knowledge. You have a SWEET work study gig; use that as an opportunity to learn how to prioritize and manage your time.

*Give everyone you meet a chance to show you the best version of themselves.

*College is a great time to get the stupid out of your system before you have to officially join the real world as a full-fledged adult, but you will still be held accountable for your decisions and actions. You’ll hear people frequently using excuses like “Dude, I was so wasted,” or “Oh crap, I totally forgot” as reasons for not getting things done or making complete asses of themselves. But: Teachers won’t care. Employers won’t care. Police won’t care. (Not that I expect you to have any run-ins with the police, but still.) People will see your actions as a result of the decisions you make, and they will take that as a representation of who you are. 

*NEVER walk into a dorm bathroom with bare feet. Never, ever. There’s more awful going on in there than even the CDC could categorize.

*You’re 18 so you could probably nutritionally absorb cardboard without experiencing so much as a stomachache, but there’s going to be an extraordinary amount of pizza in your future. Walking all over a huge campus will help you maintain a respectable step count, and having a bike on campus won’t hurt either. College is a good time to begin establishing good habits. Maintaining even minimal exercise routines will make a big difference in how you feel, both physically and mentally.

*When you feel insecure about things, remember that everyone around you will be insecure as well. Everyone is just trying to get by. Everyone is looking to define themselves and figure things out, even the people who either seem like or act like they’ve already figured it all out. They really haven’t.

*The teacher in me has to get this out: In high school it was the job of your teachers to teach you. In college it will be your job to learn. If you don’t find a way to do the learning, you can’t blame anyone else for it, and it’s not always going to be a ride around the lake. Professors won’t care about which clubs people were or were not in, who took advanced placement or had IEPs, who had a letter jacket and who didn’t. To some of them you’ll be nothing more than a face in the crowd, a name on an assignment, or most likely a number on a list. Some will recognize and appreciate what you have to offer, but be ready for that to be the exception. It’s just the way the machine works, especially in the early years.

*You’re going to be surrounded by a lot of people who have awful taste in music, and yet they’ll feel as passionate about their music as you do about yours. Resist the urge to point out how misguided they are. You’ll only come off like a fifth grade boy dramatically covering his ears and complaining about how much BTS sucks. 

*It’s always good to try and get along with your roommate as much as you can. Not all pairings turn out great, but most are at least workable. Agreeing on some ground rules can help. My roommate in the dorms was different from me in a lot of ways, but we lived together well because understood each other. 

*If you have a professor tell you there are multiple forms of a test and you’re using a bubble sheet to mark your answers, pay very close attention to which form you have and where you should hand in your answer sheet. That way you can avoid studying really hard the night before and scoring an 11 out of 50 because you put your answer sheet in the wrong *&%@! pile, and then you won’t have to miss attending Game 7 of the 1987 World Series because you can’t afford to have another failing grade on one of the only three tests given during the term.

*Respect the people, and especially the women, around you. Luckily you and your brothers all have strong relationships with your mother, so that’s going to give you a head start. Demonstrate that respect in ways that will help you earn it from others. At the same time, remember that you can’t control how other people think and feel and act, and that no one has the right or the power to marginalize you.

*The people you'll know and the friends you'll make will come from three groups: The ones you live with, the ones you learn with, and everyone else. How big Everyone Else is completely depends on how involved you decide to be in campus life beyond your dorm room. I cannot emphasize this next part enough: These coming years will be the very last time in your whole life when you will be almost exclusively surrounded by people your age. Take advantage of that. One of my clearest college memories was a day I was cutting through the student union and I saw a girl I knew from a class sitting with a cup of coffee and studying. I stopped to say hi and we talked for a few minutes. The reason I still remember this is because it was a such a perfectly representative moment of what so many days of campus life were like. Soak up and enjoy all the minuscule details that make up college, whatever that ends up meaning for you. I’m not saying to forcibly embed yourself into every aspect of the campus community, but dip your toes into something new once in awhile.

*Text your mom sometimes, just because she’ll miss you.

*Take advantage of this time to discover who you are and to prepare for the life you want to have. Learn to recognize the importance of small events as well as the big ones. Pause and occasionally allow yourself half a thought to appreciate what’s happening to you in the moment, because, believe it or not, these next few years will absolutely fly by.

*Remember there are all kinds of us who want to see you succeed and are cheering you on. Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you ever feel it’s becoming too much. We’ve always had your back, and we always will.

Day 18: Through the Hands of Time

Last night was Nephew #3’s final choir performance, which brought his high school performance career to an end. There’s a lot of construction going on at his school this year so the auditorium wasn’t available. Instead, the concert was in the great hall of a nearby university.

It was an interesting pairing. Being the last concert of the year, it was the last concert period for all of the seniors, and there were many moments and songs meant to acknowledge the emotional send-off with only days of high school left before they all move on to whatever comes next for them. Many of them, according to the senior slide show, have college plans in their futures. I’m sure it wasn’t lost on many of them that they were performing at a college, and surrounded by a very different environment than a high school auditorium would have been. As difficult as an evening as it was for so many of them, which was evident from all of the tears that were shed, it’s a beautiful stage of life they’re at, each about to move on to a new horizon that is all their own.

Earlier in the week, my teaching partner was meeting with a finance guy during our lunch. He’d set up in the lounge during the day to be available to set up retirement programs for anyone interested. She’d been meaning to get to it this year, so it was a great time to check important box on the to-do list. It was the catalyst for a few discussions about retirement this week, especially since we had another colleague celebrating with a retirement party Friday after school.

It got me thinking for the first time, at least in a tangible manner, that my retirement is now about ten years away, give or take a year or two. Putting the money aside, that’s a pretty big thing to consider — to face that this thing I’ve been doing now for nearly 30 years will be coming to an end, and probably sooner than I’ll expect.

Has my life or my career gone the way I thought it would, either back in my nascent days of college or when I was setting up my own retirement program, which happened so long ago I can barely remember not having one?

This time of the school year is usually reflective for me, even more so this year with my nephew finishing high school and so many of my friends moving on to different schools and experiences next year. I think about all the things that went well, specific happy memories I’ll keep, but also the frustrations and failures I encountered. (Whether it’s fair or not, I probably focus more on the those.)

All I can do at this point is hope I made a difference. With any luck, the students I worked with will remember me well instead of spending their adulthood cursing out what a bastard I was. More importantly, and what would honestly be the most important to me, would be that they’ll remember things I helped them learn. In a perfect world, they wouldn’t even remember where that knowledge came from, because it will become a second nature part of who they are.

We had a talk with our classes on Friday about the importance of ending the year with positivity. Isn’t it so much better to end on high notes instead of go through the last days with people bothering each other and having to live with the consequences of negative decisions on their ways to middle school? I hope they see it that way. I’d want them to have that ending.

After that ending happens, my mind will shift over to slowly getting ready for the next class to start in the fall.

At least for a few more years.

Day 12: Mother

If I ever do finish writing the memoir about my music fandom, I will have to acknowledge the influence of my mother in my origin story. 

Our parents had a modest but fascinating record collection when we were kids, largely dominated by folk music from the 60s and 70s and Broadway musical cast recordings. But mixed in with all of that dated material were a few albums that seemed out of place. As we got older, that became more frequent. The Saturday Night Fever soundtrack brought disco into our house, which inspired either me or one of my sisters to buy a Bee Gees album. The Urban Cowboy soundtrack is probably the closest I’ve ever come to willingly listening to country music, even though I was more drawn to the songs by the likes of Joe Walsh and Bob Seger, before I had any idea who they were. 

Mom probably kickstarted my record collecting the day she came home with a vinyl copy of “Paradise Theater” by Styx, and album she’d bought because it had that pretty song from the radio, “The Best of Times.” Sure, pretty song, whatever, but there was a good supply of early 80s rock on it as well, which was enough to elevate Styx to being the first band I was calling my favorite.

Not long after she did the same thing, buying Journey’s “Escape” album because of the pretty songs “Who’s Cryin’ Now” and “Open Arms.” I personally think “Who’s Cryin’ Now” is one of Journey’s weakest, laziest songs, but the rest of Escape is undeniably a great album. I couldn’t stop listening to it. I stared at the album cover long enough that I could draw a fair approximation of it on the inside cover of most of my notebooks at school. 

Mom liked Survivor’s song “Eye of the Tiger,” so that album made it into my parents’ collection (even though I’m certain my dad never played it even once himself). Survivor was just this side of being a one hit wonder, but it was a noisy guitar album and had some great songs. Once the dam had broken from Styx and Journey, I started paying more attention to the music my junior high friends were talking about, which at the time was basically AC/DC and REO Speedwagon. When I started buying music on my own, I’d go for the whole album instead of just buying a single. I’d already seen how deeper album cuts could turn out to be some of the best songs on a record. I figured if I liked the band enough from one song, they’d probably have a few other good ones as well. 

If it wasn’t enough that she’d already modeled for me a lifetime of buying albums for one or two songs, she also ushered in my 15th year by bringing me to my first two concerts. She brought me, my older sister, and our cousin to see Styx on my 15th birthday, and Journey with Bryan Adams as the opening act about a month later. The Styx show was magical for me since it was my first concert, even though the Kilroy Was Here tour is well-documented as a cocaine-fueled disaster full of backstage in-fighting. The Journey show was transcendent. Bryan Adams was just breaking out and had a few foot-stomping radio hits so he had a fun set, but when Journey came blasting onstage and Neal Schon eventually broke into a self-indulgent 10-minute guitar solo, my brain didn’t know what to do with itself. I was hooked. 

So on this Mother’s Day 2019, I want to thank my mom specifically for her role in my being the music fan I am now. It wasn’t driving me to piano lessons, or signing off on the drumming practice minutes you probably knew I wasn’t really doing. It wasn’t just letting us pick the stations on the radio, or the lectures about being careful when I signed up for different rounds of the Columbia House Record and Tape club. 

You were one of the first to teach me to buy the whole album and see the concert when the band came to town, Mom. For that, I will always be grateful. 

Day 6: Digital Discord

These days my teaching partner is reading THE WESTING GAME to our classes at the end of the school day. The important thing to know here is that this book was originally published in the late 1970s.

A couple days ago there was a moment in the story when one of the characters was listening to a transistor radio. I’m very confident I was the only person in the room then who had actually done that in real life. After my cousins introduced me to American Top 40, I adopted my dad’s transistor radio and would listen to it with the 70s precursor of an earbud, which was an uncomfortable parabola of plastic you had to jam deep into your ear canal to hear. It also kept you tethered to the radio by a cord that couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches long. I didn't care. There was more than one night, especially if Casey Kasem’s weekly countdown was on, when I fell asleep with that thing stuck in my ear, or, if I couldn’t stand it anymore, with the radio volume turned way down so I could lie in bed on my side and balance the radio on my ear until I fell asleep.

It wasn’t long after that I was buying records, both albums and singles. Truthfully, it was usually albums. Having the hit song was good, but if it was a favorite band there was a good chance there would be deeper album tracks I’d like as well. When my parents bought a cassette deck, I started adding some tapes to the collection, which eventually led to an infinite parade of obsessively planned mix tapes. If you didn't know me back then and you think I ever would have made a mix tape for you for whatever reason -- you missed out. I had it down to an art form.

Compact discs came in college. My roommate Steve had a CD player and didn’t mind if I bought a few discs of my own for us to play. It wasn’t many years later until I had my own stereo in my first apartment, at which point my CD collection began to slowly take over my life. At least until the iTunes store went live and I bought the first in a series of several iPods, and downloaded more songs and albums than I will ever admit.

Somehow though, my evolution stopped there.

I still have two iPods, and I keep music on my phone. I’ll still buy and download most of the albums I listen to. I have maybe three CDs stashed in my car for emergencies, but I’ll usually listen to one of my six preset stations from the Twin Cities radio market. No streaming services, no satellite radio, no Alexa.

Television is basically the same way. I still haven’t cut the cable, and I rarely order up anything from On Demand. I have Netflix, but I hardly ever use it. With that in mind, what about all of these other streaming services, more than any of us could ever name? I’m sure they all have good shows, but am I really missing out if I don’t know anything about them?

If I subscribed to a music streaming service, how much of it would I use to really explore the potential of what’s out there I don’t already know? If I did unload cable this summer, how would I know which streaming services were really, truly essential for what I would want to watch?

And really, how much would any of that enhance my life more than being able to listen to the radio while reading a book on a summer afternoon as my dog naps beside me?

I'm kind of serious, though. Why would I ever consider getting a streaming service, either for music or television? For people that use them -- what am I missing?

Day 4: Childhood's End

I saw my nephew’s final high school play last night, “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.” It was a great production, and he did a fantastic job. Since he's been involved in drama for a few years now, I recognized a lot of the other kids in the cast from different productions. Seeing them come together one more time for a production that was so entertaining, and one they clearly enjoyed, was a lot like watching them take a victory lap. As a teacher and an artist and an uncle, I was proud of them all, for so many reasons.

But it was also a sad night.

In less than a month, my nephew will go through his high school graduation. The commencement ceremony will be held on the campus of the college he’ll be attending in the fall. Because he’s the youngest of my sister’s three sons, his moving on to college signals the end of any familial attachments I’ll have with anything related to childhood.

Because of whatever twisted path of decisions and indecisions I ended up making throughout life, I’ve gotten this far into the game without having been married or having any children. I know there are people in the periphery of my world who look at that fact and wonder about it; my only response is I often wonder how things happened that way myself, so you’re more than kindly invited to mind your own @#$%&^! business on the subject. However, this meant my nephews were the children in our family. My sister Erin and I always tried to be an active aunt and uncle team for the boys, and, at least in their younger years immediately following Erin’s passing, I tried to step in and make up for her absence. My reasons were both because I felt the responsibility — especially for the oldest one, since I was the only godparent he had left — but also because part of me craved even a sampling of this whole category of life experiences I was all too aware I was going to miss. As a teacher, I’ve been to more dance recitals and basketball games and church concerts than I could ever remember, but those were all for students. Going to those activities for students can be its own kind of special experience, but it’s not the same when you have that blood connection to the kids you came to watch.

I had years when my Wednesday nights meant picking up Nephew #1, driving him a couple suburbs over for Tae Kwon Do class, then taking him to the Subway at the other end of the strip mall for dinner, where he ordered the same sandwich, without fail, every single time. Nephew #2 was the one who was game to try just about anything once, as long as it had something to do with a ball, running around, and teams full of kids he could play with. Football, basketball, soccer, baseball — it’s entirely possible I’m forgetting a sport or two. There were enough games spread out over the years I seriously considered buying my own collapsing canvas chair to use on the sidelines, so I wouldn’t have to borrow one from my sister or sit in the grass.

Nephew #3 gave sports a try early on, but they didn’t stick. For the longest time he was that kid content to play video games, eat cheese tortillas, and, as was his birthright and responsibility as the youngest child, irritate his older siblings. Then in middle school he found music. One instrument wasn’t enough, so he tried others. He got older and there was speech. He got to high school and saw a lot of his friends trying out for plays, which led to some parts in drama and voice lessons so he could be in musicals.

All of that’s done now. Any melancholy I feel isn’t about giving up the activities — which were not always a thrill — but knowing those three boys and the world of their childhood is over. I cringe a little at the phrase “young men,” but when my youngest nephew is probably able to grow a heavier beard than mine and he’ll be in college in a few months, I can’t really call him a boy anymore. They are all three young men, each seeking their own direction, trying to navigate the worlds they live in, and figuring out what will come next.

They’ll still be a part of my life, but not to the same degree or in the same way anymore. Even though I’m happy to have had so much time with them when they were younger and I’m happy to know who they are now, there’s a distancing that seems inherent with growing up. I’m glad I was able to have that with them, and I hope the Buffalo Wild Wings lunches we had and the Lego Halloween fairs we built and the movies we saw made some kind of positive difference for them. They certainly did for me. Whatever comes next for them, I’m going to miss what isn't there anymore.

One Month Later

It’s now been a month since Freddie moved in. His online adoption profile said “he’ll be shy at first, but with enough time he’ll become your best friend!” This was why I waited until summer break to adopt, knowing that concentrated amount of bonding time would help a new dog become comfortable with me and his new surroundings before I had to start back to school. 

The first time we met, he growled at me when I reached to pet him, and he would only grudgingly accept any treats I offered. Otherwise he sat cautious and unmoving in the grass, leaning hard into his foster mom’s hip to put every millimeter of distance between him and me that he could. Now, if I sit down to watch TV or read, he’ll jump up beside me and either snuggle in or start tapping me with his paw if I don’t begin to pet him quickly enough. 

The first times I took him outside meant gently slipping the harness over his head while he sat on the love seat. Our first walks were explorations of our small yard; one lap around the house would take at least ten minutes. He’d cautiously watch me and I’d carefully make sure I wasn’t stepping too fast, since he’d jump in surprise if my foot ever did anything he didn’t expect. When he felt safe he’d sniff the grass to gradually learn about his new home. Now he’ll race to the front door when it’s time for our morning walk. He’ll sit on a floor mat and wag his tail while I put him in his harness and then we’re off, heading down to the stretch of sidewalk where all the neighborhood dogs seem to stop and visit. He’ll happily trot for the half-mile or so of the walk, only occasionally stopping to when he picks up a scent, which he’ll sniff and follow with the tenaciousness of a cartoon dog detective. At first he leads me with all six feet of his leash but will settle in to walking at my side, matching my pace closely enough for the leash to hang loose and drag on the sidewalk between us.

When he first moved in, he spent nearly every waking moment curled up on the one section of the love seat close enough to his crate for him to decide was a safe place. Now when we return from our walks, he’ll wait patiently for me to take off the harness then he’ll zoom into the living room and hop up on that same love seat, standing on his hind legs and wagging his tail so he can have his good morning scratches. Then he’ll race into the kitchen for his breakfast. He’ll scarf it down so quickly I barely have time to put the food bag away, turn on the news, and sit down before he bounces back into the living room and demands more petting. 

He brought two favorite toys from foster care — a half-chewed rawhide bone and a heart-shaped squeak toy pillow. He ignored them both for at least two weeks, even when I put the pillow in his crate at night, thinking it probably had familiar smells. Eventually he started playing with the rawhide, enough that big pieces started falling off and I eventually had to throw it away before he swallowed one. I offered him one of the bone toys that my parents’ dogs, Shamus and Butch, will play with when I’m dog sitting. He wasn’t interested at first, but soon started gnawing away at one, and then another, and then began carrying his pillow around. I also bought him a Kong, which I fill with treats when I leave the house. When he sees me filling it he climbs into his crate, then starts working out the treats out as soon as I set it in and close the door. He’s recently realized the Kong also works as a toy, and will sometimes toss it up in the air to see where it will land. Sooner or later all of his toys end up in the sun room, where he likes to keep them clustered together all within a foot of each other.

After he eats his supper and takes his evening walk, right around sunset, he settles down to relax in one of his favorite napping spots. He’ll usually take a big drink after walking; in his first days he would barely eat or drink, and I would almost choke up with relief at the sound of his tags bouncing against the water dish while he slurped away. Now it’s normal enough I’m only aware of it. I turn off the lights and bring his crate back to the bedroom at bedtime. He’ll follow in not a minute behind me, stepping in and nesting down in his crate blanket, usually with his squeak pillow close by. It’s not a bad life.

A lot of this description might be surprising for some who have met him, since he still reverts back to nervous and cautious when unfamiliar people are around. He’s making progress, though; people who were here to see him in his first days and have visited more recently have commented on how much more relaxed he seems. I don’t know for sure since there are big gaps in his pre-foster history, but it seems pretty clear from so many of his cautious and nervous behaviors that he probably endured some form of abuse before going into foster care. His foster mom suspected the same thing, as did the other people who saw the fear he carried in his first days here. I feel happy knowing he’s overcoming whatever dog nightmares there are in his past, both from his time in Texas Animal Control and whatever led him there in the first place.

After so much time spent in so many shelters, he now has his pick of comfortable and sunny places to nap. He has an entire shelf of my kitchen cabinet devoted to dog food and treats. He gets all the petting and scratching he can stand, and still gets time to himself when that’s what he wants. He feels safe and happy. Knowing how difficult of a transition it was for him when he first arrived, I feel both proud of myself and relieved for helping him settle in as quickly as he has.

Day 18: Is This Not What You Expected to See?

In 1980 and in the handful of years that followed it, the ultimate form of school rebellion was to sing the chorus of Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” at the top of your lungs as an entire class choir during a field trip bus ride. At that age we still had no idea what dark sarcasm was, but we mumbled through that part of the lyric to make sure we could yell “HEY! TEACHER! LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE!”

I was only familiar with Pink Floyd as a radio act for the several years following. In the anemic Twin Cities radio market, this meant some of the classic songs from Dark Side of the Moon, which I thought were unnecessarily weird at the time, and a handful of singles from The Wall: Comfortably Numb, Run Like Hell, and occasionally Hey You, along with the aforementioned Another Brick in the Wall — usually only part 2 was played, but if you were lucky, you could occasionally catch the version that included Part 1. I was never that impressed with Roger Waters’ voice — he always sounded like he was trying too hard to emote. Pink Floyd purists originating back in the seventies would consider it heresy for me to say I didn’t really become a fan of the band until 1987’s David Gilmour led “A Momentary Lapse of Reason” since Roger Waters was out of the band by then, but I’ll still stand by that as a strong album of the time. And ultimately, it made me curious enough about the band to go back and revisit The Wall in its entirety. 

The student union at St. Cloud State University, known to the populace as Atwood Commons or Atwood Center or, most commonly just plain Atwood, had a smallish movie theater tucked in the back of it, large enough to hold maybe one or two hundred people. It wasn’t big enough to show first or even second run movies — we had a theater a few blocks away from campus that did that for only a buck fifty (earning the moniker “the buck fifty place”) but campus did dig out some older hits or lesser-known cult films to show on the weekends. One Friday night in the winter of 1988, the posters went up declaring The Little Theater would be showing “Pink Floyd’s The Wall,” on…wait for it…Laser Disc. It was the eighties, and this was still a big deal.

Undoubtably this was coming on wave of popularity following the recent success of A Momentary Lapse of Reason, but my roommate Steve and I didn’t care. Neither of us had seen the movie but had heard all the stories: The dude who shaved off his nipples, the Nazi symbolism, and, of course, the urban legend of how the movie had been purposefully made so the only way you could truly understand what was going on was to watch it while you were high. I think that came legend came more from the frequency of Pink Floyd’s music being used as the soundtrack for so many of the laser light shows held in planetariums around the nation back then. Steve and I didn’t bother testing the theory, and walked across the snowy campus only under the influence of a shared Domino’s pizza.

I made the mistake of buying into the rumors and hype before seeing it and spent the movie thinking way too hard, convinced that each scene contained multiple layers of symbolism meant for me to unravel. Ultimately the story was little more than a non-narrative telling of a little boy who never got over losing his father in World War II, grew up to be a rock star, then reached a popularity that led him into a brief flirtation with military fascism before he went completely crazy. This is the kind of story that seems pretty deep when you’re twenty years old. That winter it became a favorite pastime of ours to turn off the dorm room lights, plug in the Christmas lights we had hung up around our lofts, put my A Momentary Lapse of Reason CD on Steve’s massive stereo, turn it up loud enough for the entire floor to hear or feel, and then just sink into our dorm room furniture and tune out. It was almost like accidental mediation. 

I started keeping an eye out for The Wall during my music store visits, but hesitated to buy it each time I found a copy. After all, I was a college kid. These were the days when I could carry a $50 dollar balance in my checking account and feel totally secure with it. And The Wall was a double album, which meant twice the price. I only finally cracked when I found it in a version I had no idea even existed, and probably didn’t exist that far beyond a band like Pink Floyd offering a special cash grab mini-boxed set release: A CD set with gold-leaf plating on the discs. According to the box, which of course would have been completely truthful, the gold on the discs was only going to increase the sound fidelity, revealing unheard nuances of the music. 

Total nonsense, but it looked cool. The case secured the discs with some hard plastic lever in the center and would only release the disc if the tray was raised a certain number of degrees (such was the importance of protecting the precious metals). It was soon after this that Floyd put out a double live album, “The Delicate Sound of Thunder” featuring several songs from their Momentary Lapse of Reason tour and classics from The Wall, as well as older standards. Because of the louder recording, that started getting more airplay from me than the original “Wall” discs did.

I felt proud of myself in a way, for connecting with an album that was so widely viewed as a classic instead of the usual hair metal of the day; it made me feel like I had an extra layer of depth. I could appreciate the music and began to understand the story better, but I didn’t really take ownership of the album until January of 1991.

A month earlier, while visiting my grandmother’s house at Christmas, I heard bits of a conversation regarding how my cousin Kelly was being deployed to Iraq. Kelly was in the army, and eligible for activation if the need ever arose. The closing days of 1990 and the opening days of 1991 saw the onset of Operation Desert Shield. Soon after that came Desert Storm.

The world had been waiting on the brink of war for months, so even though it felt like an inevitability when it happened, it was still something of a shock. This was war, after all. Real, honest to God war. America hadn’t been engaged in a full-on war of this scale since the Vietnam era. Sure, there had been military incursions around the world, but this was bigger than any of those. And in the dawning days of the twenty-four hour news cycle, this was going to be the first war of our time that would be televised. 

I had been at work in my afternoon job at a Boys and Girls club. Our site closed down at 6:00 PM, but we usually only had to stay as long as the last kid needed to be picked up. I drove home, parked my crap-colored 1983 Dodge Colt in my rented parking space, walked up three flights of stairs, opened the apartment door and was greeted by the sound of explosions and the sight of green tracer fire lighting up our living room from CNN’s live broadcast out of Iraq. My roommate Greg caught himself before throwing the Nerf basketball at the hoop we had mounted on the door and looked over his shoulder at our other roommate Chris, who looked back and me and said with a stone-cold sober face: “It started.”

Back then, we had no idea that the active combat part of the war, in earnest, would be over in a matter of months, with only the years of messy clean-up to follow and the Shock and Awe sequel to follow in the wake of 9/11. That night there was nothing to latch on to, no guidance to be provided as to predicting what could happen what impact it would have on our country or the world in general, or how long it would last. All we knew was that things were different now. The three of us stayed there in the living room, quietly watching for the most part with exclamations of surprise or bits of commentary at some of the facts being revealed. After a half hour or so, I realized I only had a quarter tank of gas in the car, and quickly got up to drive down to the convenience store a few blocks away to fill up, just in case something was going to happen with the worldwide oil reserves and gas would cost ten dollars a gallon the following morning, money that I didn’t have because I was a college kid and just as broke as you would imagine. I got home in time to discover that the knock-off Hamburger helper Greg had made for dinner hadn’t turned out to the level of quality he expected — even now I can’t help myself but to laugh when I think of the number of times he said “Hamburger Italiano” that night while mocking it — and our fourth roommate Dan had gotten home from his job. The four of us nervously spent the evening watching TV together, mostly CNN since that was the only serious 24-hour news channel in the game back then, occasionally flipping over to network broadcasts to see what the anchors and reporters we were more familiar with had to say on the matter. Real life intruded, and one by one we peeled away and back to our respective bedrooms to take care of whatever homework assignments we had to deal with, periodically taking breaks throughout the evening to check in on the TV on that evening, even when nobody was in front of it. 

And even though I never said anything, I kept thinking, “She’s over there somewhere, in the middle of all that.”

Kelly was, and still is — spoiler alert, she survived the war — two years younger than me, and was also in college at the same time. Her degree was pharmacology, which led to the joke of how it wasn’t enough that she was in college to get drunk but to understand what was happening to her body when she did. She spent most of her deployment a fair distance from the fighting in a M*A*S*H unit, but not always so far that she completely avoided ever hearing sirens warn her to put on her gas mask on the off chance a SCUD missile might find its way to her hospital.  

I don’t know if there’s something wrong, or possibly right, with my brain, but I have a deep archive of songs in stored memory that I can have the most random thing trigger an ear worm that will be stuck in my head for days. This predilection is one of the reasons why I’ve built an inescapable and lifelong relationship between Desert Storm and “The Wall.” Even when I wasn’t parked in front of the television on that first night and was back in my bedroom trying to focus on whatever remnants of homework I had to deal with before starting my student teaching experience two months later, it was impossible for me to stop hearing the barely minute-long interlude of the half song from the second disc, “Bring the Boys Back Home.” I hadn’t picked that song to play through my head on purpose, but there was no doubt about where it had come from. 

I felt guilty and helpless in the first weeks of the war, knowing Kelly’s whole world was what was going on there. I tracked down her address through the aunt, uncle, and grandparent grapevine (this was all before Facebook and email and cellphones, remember) and started writing her letters regularly, thinking if the one thing I could do was send her occasional bits of distraction from home, I was going to do it up right. I’d tell her about whatever mundane things were going on in college life, what it was like to live through the last stupid weeks of winter in comparison to the desert, what music I was listening to, which sketches were the best ones of Saturday Night Live that week, and any stories that came up of funny things that happened with the kids at the boys and girls club. She replied when she could, telling me about the people she had met, the experiences of desert life in the military, and relieved me quite a bit as I came to understand that being in Saudi Arabia didn’t necessarily mean that chemical weapons and bullets were constantly flying at her head. 

Combat ended and she made it home safely, after staying longer than it seemed necessary. She wasn’t the last of my cousins to experience war, but since she was the first she was the template for me. 

To this day, whenever I hear something on the news about military engagements or human atrocities taking place around the world, and if I sit in front of the television for more than ten minutes watching the coverage, my mind begins shuffling through the songs on that album. 

Day 15: Some Things About My Older Sister

Last month I’d put out a call for topics to write about this May. My older sister, as she has most years I’ve done this, suggested I take one day to write about why she is so cool. I suppose since I’ve written so much here about our younger sister, I can give her a nod toward equal time. 

Between the two of us, she’s the adult. If we encounter problems in life, I’m the one who tends to retreat and think about what everything means from nine different directions before cautiously moving forward. She just does. Here are two stories to illustrate this.

First:

It’s no secret she’s on her second marriage. As is always the case, there wouldn’t be a second marriage if the first one had worked. When that first marriage comes to an end, there is always a final tipping point when decisions are made and bridges are crossed. The tipping point in that first marriage came to pass in the early days of one summer when her husband moved out and we all knew life was entering a new stage. 

Some family event had been going on that weekend, and some of our cousins were staying with Jenny and the boys at her house. She wasn’t really in the mood to play hostess to anyone but honored the prior commitment. One time during that visit, everyone staying at the house was leaving for a quick shopping trip. One of the visiting cousins, a kid, locked the door from the garage into the house upon leaving. Maybe it’s what his family always did, maybe he thought it was what Jenny’s family did. Well, they didn’t, and it had been so long since anyone had locked that door they weren't sure where the key would have been except that they didn't have it. This was discovered before leaving and it led to a bit of chaos, because everyone was now locked out of the house. Nobody knew how to get back in, people were upset and growing agitated, blame was being tossed around. 

In that same situation, I would have felt myself slowly beginning to melt and retreat, especially coming off of a run of difficult days like Jenny had just experienced. I would have tried to calm everyone done, logic my way through the available options and figured out what was the best thing to try. Instead, she walked across the garage, retrieved and plugged in a power saw and cut off the doorknob, then said something like, “Now we better stop and get a new doorknob, too.”

Second: 

Jenny came too close to dying in a car wreck a few years ago. It’s only due to some miraculous confluence of events that she came back from that accident as well as she has. Two things happened in the first forty-eight hours of that crisis that spoke to who she is. 

When the paramedics were carefully removing her from the remarkably destroyed car, she asked them that when they called her husband to let him know what had happened if they could remind him to turn off the Crock Pot before going to the hospital, because she knew he’d forget otherwise and dinner would be ruined. This might have been a real concern, or possibly a joke. (Joking like this wasn’t so different from what Erin had done after the surgery when her cancerous lung had been removed; while lying in her hospital bed in extreme pain, she confessed to our father she had knocked over his motorcycle once when she was twelve, figuring that was the one opportunity she had to tell him about it and and not get in trouble. This might help people understand more about where my sense of humor comes from.)

After settling into her hospital room and taking in her visitors during her second night, she was complaining about lying in bed so much after everyone, other than Dave and me, had left. I hadn’t been there all day and didn’t know what any doctors or nurses had said to her about activity, but since I had been feeding her soy milk one drop at a time the night before, it seemed like her recovery was going to be something unwise to rush. 

Dave and I were both surprised, and taken aback, when she wanted her bed angled up enough so she could carefully stand and walk over to look at the white board showing the nursing schedule on the wall, saying something like “Might as well get started with this,” as she took her first few tentative steps. Meanwhile I’m thinking of how easy it’s going to be for her to tip over and shift one of the dozens of internal injuries that had left her millimeters away from paralysis. Dave’s expression looked exactly like what I was thinking. But she took her steps, turned around, walked back and got back in bed.

She went out to dinner on Christmas Eve a couple weeks later even though it left her exhausted, and was back to her job in four months. I wouldn’t have moved from the bed until I’d had second and third opinions telling me I was going to mess my body up any more than it already was. She just decided that day she was going to start walking again. 

Between us, she’s the adult. She’s probably a little sick of that since there are still occasional times when I rely on her to talk me down or straighten me out, especially when she already has her boys, and her husband, and her dogs, and her whole world to manage. I’m just lucky she’s still here to do it when I need her to.

(One more thing: I didn’t mention that once I finally said I was probably getting a dog, she started to send me text images of dogs at the Coon Rapids Humane Society that met my criteria, usually with the message, “You should get this one.” This is how I can say with some certainty I’ll be getting a dog this year. If I sit on the fence too long, she’ll probably make the decision for me. And she’ll probably be right.)

Day 14: The Nexus

My sister Erin was a huge “Star Trek: The Next Generation” fan. I was too, but not anywhere close to the same degree. She read the novelizations. She kept a framed photo of Commander Riker on a shelf in her bedroom. She attended a convention, and found her way to the right building by following someone dressed as a Klingon through downtown Minneapolis.

When the show ended its run on TV and the movies began, it was a big deal for us. The first one, “Star Trek: Generations,” wasn’t the epic we had hoped for, but it was a good fan movie and we still enjoyed it. I watched it again recently. With the perspective of a different filter, I noticed it’s actually a layered story about growth, loss, coping with regret, and the stalking passage of time.

The story is centered around a villain trying to find his way to something called The Nexus, a place that exists outside of space and time where someone could live out eternity in their own ideal. One character who had been there described it: “It was like being inside joy, as if joy was something tangible. Never in my entire life have I been that content.” When Captain Picard ends up there later in the movie, he sees a reflection of the life he never had, getting the chance to live out all had sacrificed in the name of his career: a wife, a loving family, a home, and the return of the young nephew he had recently lost. 

With Erin’s birthday approaching, it made me wonder what The Nexus would have been like for her. For all I know, wherever or whatever she is now has her existing inside something that maybe wouldn’t be so different. What would her ideal have been? 

It didn’t take a lot of thinking to put that together.

She’d be at our cousin’s cabin in Western Wisconsin on a warm summer Saturday night. There wouldn’t be any humidity or bugs to bother anyone. The windows would be wide open, letting in just enough breeze to keep the air intoxicatingly comfortable. The clock would say somewhere around 2 AM. She’d be standing in a kitchen filled with our cousins, all laughing to they point they could barely breathe. The entire house would be filled with the smells of classic 2 AM food: garlic cream cheese dip, chips, frozen pizzas, special k bars. Little ones would be asleep in nearby bedrooms, but in the Nexus they’d be sleeping soundly through the raucous laughter in the kitchen and the pounding music coming from the guitars and drums and keyboards and singing in the basement.

Our nephews would be there, and she’d be able to enjoy them both as the small boys she knew and the young adults she never had the chance to see, because time wouldn’t matter there. Every dog our family ever knew, ranging from Lady, the corgi we had as kids, to whoever might be coming home with me next month, would be in and out of the house, playing, chasing resting, all getting along perfectly. 

Even though close to one hundred people would be filling the house there would be plenty of room, both inside and in the yard under the stars, for everyone to sit. There wouldn’t be any awkward moments, no stress or anxiety waiting for our return to the real world, no pain to endure; just everyone together, our own generations, surrounding and enjoying each other in a night that would never have to end.

As the movie comes to an end, Captain Picard convinces Captain Kirk (yep, they’re both in this) to leave The Nexus with him so they can save the population of an endangered planet. Picard appeals to Kirk’s sense of duty; the need to know he’s doing something that makes a difference ultimately tips the scales for Kirk and sends him back to a reality that matters.

That need to make a difference, as selectively as I choose to see it, is something I probably allow to drive my decisions more than it should, so I felt a small twinge watching that scene. It brought back something of a thought experiment that had been going around when the movie was out: What would The Nexus be like for you?

I won’t get into great detail about my version, but I’d imagine that reality would be made of different intersecting points from a number of unexplored timelines or parallel universes, collecting the elements of a life to fill in the blanks of what I don’t think I have here or believe I’ve missed out on. I have ideas about what that might look like, but, much like it had been for Picard, I don’t think I’d know for sure until I was actually there. 

All I know for sure is that Erin would be there. And I could see her again. And we’d both be happy.