Whatever form my posting took, I committed to stay with the blog for a year. I began the blog in August, 2010. It is now near the end of July 2011. Since I am both player and umpire in this game, it is up to me to make the call. I have decided this is close enough.

I have produced, I think, a fair amount of decent material for this blog over these months.  It will remain here for you to enjoy, but I am taking a break.  As of today, this blog is going into hiatus while I recuperate and focus my creative energies on other outlets.

Chief among those other outlets will be my long form podcast Your Neighborhood Almanac.  I don’t anticipate this will be a permanent break from writing here, but in the meantime if you want to hear from me, Your Neighborhood Almanac will be the place to do it.

Thanks for a great year.

These few extra moments of preparation will spare you a good deal of unpleasantness later. That is, if your family is anything like mine. On the other hand, if yours is a family that delights in splashing around in rivers of recently spilled blood, well, just forget I said anything.

I wish someone had given me this advice before my family trudged out to an Amish friend’s farm last week.  A woman came out of the house to greet us once we rolled in.  Noah, her husband, was in the back barn. We were welcome to amble back there, she said.

Before we even got close, I heard screaming. Distressed squeals broke the air. They carried a note of panic. I am no expert naturalist, but even I know an upset pig when I hear it.

Rounding the corner, I was surprised to see a pick-up parked between the barns. Its presence meant we were not the only English, or non-Amish, visiting that morning.

Two guys stood in the open barn door. They wore jeans and T-shirts ripped open from armpit to waist and baseball caps. Behind them in the barn were Noah and his oldest son. The pig was walking near their feet, still protesting.

“What are you guys doing?” I asked.

One of the English guys turned toward me. His face beamed beneath his cap, his bottom lip distended from the glob of tobacco tucked in behind it.

“About to slaughter a hog,” he said, confirming my dreadful suspicions.

“Let’s move back that way,” I said to the Mrs., pointing toward the house.

I am all for my girls experiencing the farm. They have bunnies in a pen. Ducks waddle around trailed by a long line of furry babies. A wooden wagon sits piled high with hay drying in the sun. All of these are good for the children to be around. They always come away excited, full of memories to cherish. I was unconvinced having a pig gutted before their eyes was likely to have the same effect.

Noah is a sensitive man. He seemed to pick up on my concern.

“Let’s take a break,” he said to the guys standing there with him. He instructed them to get some water and rinse the pig. This would cool her down, he said.

Then, he stepped from the barn and led us toward the house.

He stopped to retrieve a basket from the back of the buggy. I sidled up and said “So, you’re going to take care of that pig?”

“Yea,” he said. “We’re going to dress it here and then they’re going to take it for a hog roast.” I assumed the men were going to do this because nothing completes a traditional Fourth of July celebration like five hundred pounds of pork.

“How are you going to kill it?” I asked.

Noah scrunched his bushy brows. He spoke more quietly, as if we were talking about a holy thing. “Shoot it,” he said. “That way it’s quick.”

I was relieved. I was glad to know that though killing animals is a regular part of farm life, especially Amish farm life, Noah was still concerned to minimize the pain he caused.

I am not a vegetarian. I enjoy meat. When I am asked what I want to eat, bacon is always on the short list.  Enjoying meat and knowing what must be done to obtain it, doesn’t mean I have no concern for the welfare of animals, even those destined for the plate.

This incident confirmed for me something I’ve suspected.

The farmer, especially the farmer who slaughters his own stock, straddles life and death like no one else. The death he brings serves to nurture the life of others. He plows his own life into the ground. For the farmer who works his days away bringing forth sustenance from the stubborn earth, every field is a grave.

Noah seems to have accepted this. At the end of our visit, he said, “Well, I better get back to that pig” and moved off toward the barn to move the pig off toward its end. I watched him go, dressed in his dark shirt, black pants and hat, he was, I thought, perfectly dressed for a funeral.

These moments have been rare for us lately. About a year and a half ago, our four year old decided she would no longer take naps if there were something more interesting to do. She can always find something more interesting to do, like lying in  bed in the near pitch black with her legs pointed toward the ceiling just to check if she still has feet. An hour-long conversation with an inanimate object is, in her mind, riveting compared to a nap.

We, the bedraggled and bleary-eyed souls, she calls her parents feel otherwise. On any given day, sleep is something we are profoundly interested in. Rest, however is a commodity hard to come by, while living with a small human being whose unceasing movement generates enough energy to power a semi truck. For months, we’ve been wondering what it will take to get her slow down and sleep.

Last week, we had that question answered. Turns out, all it takes is an anesthesiologist and thousands of dollars of advanced medical equipment.

We drove her to the hospital early one morning for the surgery her pediatrician had recommended months before.  Sometimes, people are born with a small hole in their abdominal muscle where the umbilical cord once connected. Usually these close on their own.  In a small percentage of cases, they do not. We were not surprised to learn our daughter, the fruit of our love and care, was in this elite group. To recognize, her achievement, we gave her not a trophy, but an operation.

At the hospital they talked to us about our options. They had a medication “similar to valium” the nurse said. It wouldn’t put her to sleep, but would calm her down and “make her not care about what’s going on.” After that medicine had taken effect they planned to move her to another room to administer full anesthesia.  Of course, the nurse said, we could skip the initial dose. She asked what I wanted to do.

Nobody wants to overmedicate his child. Yet, I knew when they wheeled her away there was going to be a lot of screaming, a great conflagration of clutching and crying and shouting “No! No! No!” To avoid this kind of behavior, I suggested they give the medicine to me.

They declined and gave it to my daughter, the patient, instead.  One parent could be by her side, the doctor said, when they put her fully under. We decided I would do it.

“You’ll need a bunny suit,” one nurse said.

“Really,” I said. “That’s too bad. Normally, I carry one with me, but I forgot it this morning.”

She said she’d bring me one.  To everyone’s disappointment the suit looked nothing like a rabbit. I set about wriggling into the blue one-piece jumpsuit that went on over my street clothes. It was tight. I felt like some kind of reverse Houdini trying to get into the thing.

By the time I finished, our little girl was reclining quietly, staring into space. I stood sweating in my new get-up. A different nurse came in and surveyed me.

“Oh,” she said. “You don’t need to wear that. We’re not going into the operating room.”

I decided to leave it on. How often do I get to wear one of these, I thought. Also, I needed to rest a while, save up some energy. This was not the kind of garment you simply take off. It was the kind of garment you escape.

Together the nurse and I wheeled my daughter down the hall. Sitting on the gurney, she was quietly loopy. Halfway through our journey, she raised a hand and stared at it like she’d never seen it before.

Once in the induction room, the place where they put people to sleep, it didn’t take long. Our little girl lay there. A technician attached the mask to a hose. It hissed. He held the contraption suspended over her nose and mouth. I stroked my baby’s arm. And for what seemed like the first time in months, she was still and silent. Her blue eyes darted around the room, returning to me for reassurance every couple of seconds.

After only a minute, the doctor said “Ok, she’s asleep. You can give her a kiss if you want.”

The technician pulled back the mask. I leaned over and kissed my annoying little darling on the cheek. Before leaving I turned. She looked small against the sterile white gurney sheet. She was surrounded by strangers. She was prepared to disappear.

In the hallway, I took a moment to, you know, lose it completely. Slumped against the wall, I let go of a few big sobs. I wasn’t worried about being seen, not worried about being the object of strangers’ prying attention.  I mean, it’s hard to embarrass any further a man whose already out in public wearing a bunny suit.

That’s not strictly true. I do get a little. But, anyone in my position must accept that plenty of people make a lot more. And they didn’t have to endure graduate school to get it. Honestly, that stings a little.

The upside is that you get more time off than others. In fact, the only group whose jobs allow more time off than teachers is the unemployed. So, in the long run, things even out.

Summer is the big one, a long stretch everyone looks forward to, weeks without classes, without students, without meetings. All through spring, summer and the joys she supposedly holds are on everyone’s lips. I’ve learned not to believe the hype.

Summer, I know, has her own agenda, a secret plan to upset your dreams. You imagine an endless run of lazy days where your time is your own. Summer imagines the fun she’s going to have watching your dream die.

Almost none of her tactics is as effective as her demand that you mow the lawn. Getting the lawn under control has been a problem since we became homeowners. Plants are not known as the toughest creatures under the sun. You’d think cutting them down would be easy.

For many people this is the case. We however have had the misfortune of living on the only two plots of land on earth where the grass fights back. It shoots up mysteriously overnight, bulking up like a prisoner lifting weights in the yard; its puny chlorophyll-fueled mind spinning plans of revenge.

I have found one tool makes mowing the lawn easier. It’s called a lawnmower. I have not been privileged to own one of these machines, but I have used close facsimiles.  First, I used a push mower. I chose this because our yard at that time was so small that even without a motor, I should have been able to complete the job during a long commercial break on HGTV.

It took all day. That grass wasn’t stupid. It reached up entangling the blades, choking the carriage in weeds. Cutting a single square foot required pushing so hard the metal handle snapped. I stood there listening to the grass laughing.

When we bought our current home, the sellers left their mower in the garage. It is a machine of such quality that one would like to leave it behind. I knew from looking at it I was up against the same gangster grass I had previously encountered. The handle was broken.

The previous owners had tried to outsmart the lawn by reinforcing the handle with two eight-inch lengths of rebar and a couple of plumber’s clamps. No good. One push this summer and the thing fell apart.

If I was going to press on, I needed something stronger, something more powerful than grass or iron, I told the Mrs. I needed a substance whose bonding power bordered on the inexplicable.

“Do you want the duct tape?” she said.

“Perfect,” I said, my spirits revived by the mention of this secret weapon.

After wrapping the handle, the rebar and the clamps in a half-mile of duct tape. I went again into the fray. The machine was shaky, but held together. At the end, the lawn looked ragged and messy but, and this I decided was all that mattered, shorter.

Such grass battles are but one aspect of summer that departs from the fantasy of a lazy, sunny season.  There are others. Together they make the season a time of such toil, I look forward to the end of vacation when, finally, I might be able to get a little rest.

This childhood anxiety helps explain why, when it came time to create my own crime fighting alter ego, I would take steps to safeguard it thoroughly. My success in this endeavor is obvious given that until a few days ago, not only was that alter ego hidden from the world, it was also hidden from me.

Still, I had long suspected I bore some similarities to Bruce Wayne. See, by day he’s a dashing millionaire, and by night a fearless scourge to the forces of wickedness. I, on the other hand, have managed through a miracle of self-restraint, to avoid becoming either of these. Instead, I have, through an iron will and an unusual tolerance for danger molded myself into a diffident academic who gets winded climbing the stairs to his office. It’s a pretty convincing cover.

I first became aware of my secret identity a few days ago when, arriving home with the family, I stumbled upon my first case. My law enforcement career was launched, as I’m sure is the case with so many other lawmen, by parking. The parking spot along the street right in front of our house is highly desired. Sometimes we get it. Other times we park down the block.

When we turned onto our street this day, another car was sitting there and we drove on to find a place to stow the van. With two children in the van and a dog in the house with a penchant for charging through open doors, getting everyone into the house  and keeping inside everyone who should not be out becomes a project complex enough that were this a government operation they’d have called in the Corps of Engineers.

To resolve the problem, I leapt out and headed for the house to lock up the dog. The plan was for the Mrs. to bring in the baby. I’d return immediately for the four-year-old.  On the way to house, I noticed something odd.

Our neighbor likes sometimes to sit on his front porch. We are on friendly terms, so as I passed I looked up and greeted him. The odd thing was that the man who greeted me back was not my neighbor. Instead, it was a stranger up there, a lanky fellow with white hair and a day’s worth of stubble. I’d have guessed he was in his sixties.

In the corner of our yard, a little red pocketbook lay open; it’s contents partially strewn around in the bushes. I gathered it up and dropped it into the pocket of my jacket. When I returned from securing our jittery hound, the Mrs. was coming up the sidewalk, the baby in her arms. The stranger was sidling down the sidewalk. When he approached our van where my daughter still sat, he slowed. He leaned in a little, clearly checking it out.

In that instant, it all came together. In what I will forever remember as my “Magnum p.i. Moment” I experienced crime fighter’s gestalt.  When everyone was safely inside, I asked the Mrs. if the situation seemed weird to her. She said it did. I flourished the abandoned pocket book. “Does it seem even stranger that this pocket book was lying in our yard?” I said.

The Mrs. called the neighbor’s to ask if they had a guest. Nope, they did not. “Ok,” the Mrs. said “I’m calling the police.”

Before dialing the cops, the Mrs. suggested I look outside to see if the perp was present. “Take your phone and try to get his picture,” she said.

I opted to step it up. I grabbed the camera and headed out. He was no longer on our street. I slid into the van and rolled away. I spotted him a couple of streets down. He was tugging on car doors. I called the Mrs. She called the police. I went around the block.

I pulled to a stop at one intersection and noticed he was walking toward me. I snapped a picture or two and drove on.

Another trip around the block and he seemed to have vanished. Just as I was about to head home, I spotted him, this time hanging around a station wagon parked in an alley.  I called the Mrs. She called the police. I drove on.

Looping back once more, I spotted him. He was busy this time too. He was busy explaining himself to a couple of police officers who, I’m sure, had a few pointed questions.

I pointed the van toward home. An officer came by soon afterward to retrieve the pocket book. After examining the driver’s license it contained, he determined it belonged to the driver of the car parked in the coveted space directly in front of our home. She was in the house across the street.

The Creeper got off with a ticket for walking around with an open container of booze. Because no one had actually seen him rummaging about in a car, the cop said, they couldn’t charge him. Still, they know him now and he knows which neighborhood to stay out of.

I tell this story to send a message. From this day on, let the word go forth to the criminal underworld that though the may evade the law, though they may squeak past prosecution, though they might for while hide from the forces of justice, their days are numbered should they take to messing with a professor in a mini-van.

When supper is over, it’s time let the effects of another demanding day roll away. I am ready to relax, to sit in my chair and read, maybe watch television. I want simply to sit and do those things I have little chance to do in the rush of a regular day–like breathing, and possibly, if I’m up for it, some sighing.

The problem is that not every member of my family shares this desire. The disparity causes some tension, and we cannot seem to get on the same page about this. We just have very different ideas about what activities constitute proper means of preparing for bed.

I think the best way is to be still. The goal is to make up for the exertion of the day by moving as little as possible. I am committed to preparing for rest with some pre-rest rest.

My four-year-old disagrees. She believes the best way to prepare for sleep is by jumping off furniture. She also believes–and I have evidence for this–that the way to maximize the effect of throwing oneself off a piece of furniture whose height is at least equal to your own is by getting a running start.

Lately when I put her to bed, before she will even consider lying down, she insists on playing a game with me. The game consists of only two moves. First, she stands on the far corner of the double bed and runs hard at the opposite side, her thin legs pumping, gathering speed with every step. When she reaches the last centimeter of bed, she leaps.

The game’s second move is this: I catch her. I reach out, feel my hand curving around the little belly, and lift. Her feet soar in a semi-circle out into space and back to the bed. We do this three times. Once in a while, we pretend that instead of a thousand Polly Pocket shoes and My Little Ponies strewn over the floor, it’s New York down there and that when she leaps, she is flying unencumbered over the grand city.

This does not tire her out. Before she falls asleep she will spend at least an hour playing quietly. We will know she is not sleeping because her idea of playing quietly involves thumping something heavy against the wall. We will listen to her steady beat until she comes downstairs wanting a snack. We give her one, knowing she will be back a little while later asking me to come up and tuck her in.

Naturally, these requests conflict with my “no moving, pre-rest rest” policy. It is a contest of wills. I usually give in, hoping to enact my inaction policy when I return.

Everything I remember from childhood and everything I have learned as a parent confirms one truth: it is easier to be a kid than to have one. It requires less energy to grow up than to be a grown up, thus the disparity between our evening attitudes.

Still, I’m not sure I’d change our ritual. There are few greater opportunities for a father to prove himself trustworthy than when his daughter is hurling herself off furniture believing daddy will catch her before she comes down crashing into traffic on Fifth Avenue.

That kind of trust is a treasure, one I am eager to protect. And that is why even when she’s been quiet a long while and I am finally able to live consistently with the value of evening sloth, should I hear her cry from the dark of her room, “Daddy!”, I have a reason to come running.

Such stealth is quite remarkable given they are made of concrete.  These lumps of manufactured stone are, in spite of their obvious menace, apparently beloved by thousands. I cannot say precisely what compels people to take a lump of concrete and shape it into the form of a pesky, aggressive fowl then to take that form and dress it up as, say, one of the founding fathers, but I’m pretty sure it’s not a healthy impulse.

I mean, anyone who likes having people come to her door and say “Oh look what you’ve done with your goose!” only to respond, “That’s not a goose, silly! That’s James Madison” has got something going on that’s not altogether normal.

I have begun to suspect that concrete goose enthusiasm has a dark side. The behavior of even the casual goose-dresser confirms my thesis. The concrete goose must secretly be regarded with fear, as a sign of impending destruction. Why else would people feel the need to disguise them as butterflies?

One web site offers to sell you a devil costume for your goose. What greater sign of  ambivalence could there be than the fact that some people would rather come home late at night to find Satan standing in their yard than a concrete goose?

No one knows for sure how this fad started, so I will answer the question of its origin by employing a revered research technique used by scholars everywhere. I’m just going to make something up.

The phenomenon suggests a conspiracy. I imagine it started with an old lady, the sweet and gentle looking kind who recruited the goose for a lunch money grab. The old lady was the brains. The goose was the muscle. His icy stare no doubt intimidated countless kids into surrendering dimes and quarters. Eventually, the kids must have caught on and started avoiding the yard, taking the long way around. So, Granny upped the ante.

To keep the kids flowing by, the goose needed a disguise. Thus a trend was born. No doubt the disguise worked most of the time, though it’s easy to imagine a particularly savvy third grader seeing through it.

Here he comes, strolling up the sidewalk and the goose tries to lure him in.

“Psst,” the goose whispers, “Hey kid. Over here”

The boy is startled. “Oh no! A goose!” he shouts and turns tail in the opposite direction.

As he moves he can hear the goose shouting. “I ain’t a goose, kid. I’m a ladybug. Just look at my shiny black spots.”

All this came to me last weekend when my wife pointed to a page of goose outfits in a catalog she’d received.  I did not react well. The very presence of that page in our home, I felt, could implicate us in this concrete goose racket.

“Throw that out,” I demanded.  She dropped it in the recycling bin.

That’s why she must have been surprised to return home to find I had dug it out and was in the backyard setting it on fire.

“Are you cooking out tonight?” she asked.

“Nope,” I said. “Just getting rid of the evidence.”

My generation also had pop music that asked questions. For example, we were asked to confront the question “Are you down with O.P.P?” Ten years ago, this inquiry was in the air everywhere. I have never forgotten it.

I have also never answered it. Mostly, this is because I don’t know what it means.  Given that there are many things I am not down with, I can only assume there is a good chance I am also not down with O.P.P.

The only way I can imagine being down with O.P.P. is if it’s some kind of disorder.   It sounds painful, like it’s probably a back injury.  If this is the case, I assume I am not immune. I can easily imagine missing a day of work and having someone ask the secretary, “Hey, where’s Dean?” only to have her say “Oh, he called in sick. He’s down with O.P.P.”

Regardless of my down-ness or not down-ness with O.P.P. I have recently realized I am definitely not down with O.P.C., other people’s children.  I learned this through a journey into a dark place, a place of terror and pain, a place I call “the kettle of nightmares”, but is more commonly known as Chuck E. Cheese.

The problem isn’t the restaurant. It’s good enough for what it is, an arcade that serves low quality food while robots sing to children. The only complaint I had is that the animatronic mouse is dressed like a gangster. His attire suggests that when he is not throwing five-year-olds the most mouse-a-riffic birthdays ever, he’s running heroin operations out of Detroit.

No, the problem isn’t the restaurant. The problem is the clientele. They run. They push. They scream. They hog the skee-ball.  They walk around with armloads of tickets they have collected mostly by cheating and roughing up smaller, weaker children. And those are the adults.

With parents like this as role models, it’s no wonder other people’s children behave so badly. They, no doubt, get the message early that life is about taking home the prize even if it is nothing but a packet of silly bandz and blob of rock hard taffy.

From the parents’ point of view, it’s easy to see why they would want to spend a day at Chuck E. Cheese with their children.  They want their little ones to have warm childhood memories to remember when they grow up and move away to prison.

Unfortunately, our recent visit to the house of the pizza mouse was not my only  run in with other people’s children. My wife has gotten into gardening and this means we have begun hoarding our trash.

Just after moving in, the Mrs. installed a big plastic tube behind the garage she calls a composter and the neighbors call “the pile of rotting garbage.” A few times lately, I’ve noticed the tube has fallen over. This upsets the Mrs. since letting your garbage rot is, apparently, a very complicated procedure. It’s important to keep the garbage separated by level of decay. Knocking the container over mixes everything up.

We assumed the wind had blown it over. Yesterday, a neighbor told the Mrs. it had been done on purpose by O.P.C. Our neighbor had seen two small boys overturning the composter.

In spite of all this, I’ve started to wonder if I’m being too hard on the kids. Kids used to have certain built in limits to keep them from expressing their awfulness so openly. These were called parents. More than a few of these seem to be taking their duties less seriously these days. In the end, it’s not really other people’s children that bother me, but Other People’s Parents.  So, in that sense, it seems I am most definitely not down with O.P.P.

She nestled in among the shampoos and conditioners. I picked her up to examine her more closely. She was a new bottle of deliciously scented body wash.

I don’t know when she and her ilk became so popular. When I was a kid, no one used body wash. Granted, back then we lived in primitive conditions, but we stayed clean. We were able to maintain our level of hygiene thanks to a now all but forgotten technology.  It was called soap.

Soap was, in some ways, similar to body wash, except it was solid and came in a bar. The upside to soap was you could actually drag the bar directly over your skin. No applicator necessary.

The switch from soap to body wash has complicated showering. Unlike soap, body wash requires a delivery method. These things are now “must-haves.”  Should we examine the shower facilities of the toughest among us, we’d see these fluffy balls of mesh bouncing glibly along the tile.

I imagine the shower facilities at the super top-secret training grounds for America’s grittiest fighting men are full of these things.  You know things have gotten bad when the first question to impose itself on the mind of a Delta Force officer each morning is “Hey, who moved my loofah?”

Also, body wash comes in too many scents.  The new one in my shower smells like coconut. I assume this indicates its maker is really selling something other than a body cleanser. They are really selling the momentary illusion that instead of being caught in tiny, steamy bathroom whose fixtures haven’t been cleaned in a month, you are actually on a beach in Hawaii. Or, possibly stranded on a deserted island eking by on the fruit of a solitary palm.

If you prefer to fantasize about a vacation in Asia, there is a scent called Japanese Cherry Blossom.  If you prefer a wilderness fantasy, there is something called Twilight Woods.  Black Amethyst is a scent for those who like to start every day fantasizing about jewelry.

In the old days, soap only smelled like one thing: soap. The only morning fantasy available to us in those days was to dream of a life spent at the soap factory which, compared to another day at school, seemed like a step up.

Another advantage of soap was that you could use it without significant blood loss. The body wash that showed up in my shower a couple of weeks ago has gravel in it. Somebody said this was to help me exfoliate.

I thought I understood the concept of exfoliation. Previously, however, I was under the impression exfoliating was supposed to stop after the first layer of skin, not go all the way to the bone.  The stones contained this stuff contains are big and sharp enough to suggest the manufacturer believes most of their product is purchased by rhinoceroses looking for that youthful glow.

To remedy the problems brought on by the cultural shift toward body wash, I propose a new product be brought to market. The product I am imagining would have all the cleansing properties of a good body wash without the accompanying difficulties.

First, it would come in only one scent. It wouldn’t smell like fruit, or nuts, or roast beef for that matter. It would smell clean and not be the kind of thing that could easily be confused with any sort of foodstuff.

Second, it would not have a texture like sandpaper. You could rub it all over your delicate parts without a scratch.  In fact, it might be so smooth that once it became wet, it might get slippery.

Finally, it would be a solid. Maybe it would come wrapped in paper. You could grab it and get a little suds directly without having to fumble with a bottle, a cap and any intermediary delivery system.

I cannot be the only one out there aware of the limitations the body wash fad.  I’m convinced this product would sell. Now, I just have to decide what to call it. I’m thinking about “Body Wash in a Stick.”

Spring is on the way, and right now two things are happening. Young people are preparing to graduate high school and athletes around the world are working to qualify for the summer Olympics which kick-off in just over a year.  In my case, these two have come together tragically.

See, one of the functions of a high school education is to inflate expectations, to tell us we are capable of almost anything.  With the perspective that comes from being out of high school a couple of decades, I can see that much of what I was told there was dubious. Guidance counselors were the worst, always telling us that if we could dream it, we could achieve it.

In fact, the counselors I encountered were so devoted to selling lines like this that I’m convinced an ability to tell bald-faced lies is a job requirement. A typical want ad probably goes something like this: must have experience in education, must be sensitive and compassionate, must have teeth, must be able to lie through them.

The bitterness in my words is a result of dreams crushed. My guidance counselor never told me that the world is unfair and sometimes, no matter how earnest your desire, other factors intervene. Often, we are kept from living our dreams because of the short-sightedness, the prejudice and bigotry of others.

I know because it happened to me. When I was young, I dreamed of being an Olympic athlete. Instead, I grew up and became part of that larger, less respected group known as “people who are not Olympic athletes.”

The reason for this failure lies not with me but with the International Olympic Committee, an obviously prejudiced group. Each year they routinely and openly discriminate in favor of those gifted with extraordinary athletic ability and unshakeable mental toughness.

The result is that people who, like me, are “exercise challenged” (or to use the more sensitive term our community prefers “chubby –capable”) are excluded, cut off from our opportunity to receive the applause of the nations. This kind of unfairness cannot be allowed to stand.

To spare those chubby-capables about to leave high school the pain of finding their  Olympic dreams out of reach, I suggest an easy fix to this problem. A few events should be added to the roster of Olympic sports. These new competitions would benefit everyone. The Olympic Committee would be recognized as a more compassionate, less exclusionary group, and those of us who have long dreamed of Olympic glory could have our shot.

New sports are easy enough to find. I offer the following suggestions.

These new competitions could be classified in the traditional way. They could challenge an athlete’s endurance, skill or both.

In the category of endurance sports, I’d suggest adding marathon reclining. In this event, athletes would settle down to some aggressive, unrelenting, head-to-head sitting.   They would keep on sitting until one emerged victorious.  The last man not-standing would be declared winner.

One advantage of this event is that training can be worked into anyone’s daily life.  Preparation can easily be undertaken simultaneously with other activities. I am actually training for this event right now while typing.

Other games would be less about endurance and more about showcasing the highly developed skills of the competitors. For example, competitive pie appreciation. This would not be like one of those tacky contests to see who can eat the most. Rather, the goal here would be to get together to see who actually likes pie the most.

Some might argue that the standards by which such a competition could be judged are too subjective. Well, that’s the beauty of it.  When nobody knows how to win, everyone has an equal chance. To be sure, this would be the most democratic of the games.

Finally, I’m not sure of the parameters of such an event, but I’m pretty sure there should be a competition involving falling asleep in front of the television.  To really pick up the action, upper-level play could involve Doritos.

I offer these suggestions solely in the interest of creating a more just and loving world. I ask you to join my campaign. Perhaps you could take the initiative to contact members of the International Olympic Committee with your own ideas for more equitable events. We will have to keep the pressure on. Remember these people can’t be trusted for a second. Before joining the committee, most of them, I hear, used to be guidance counselors.

Using an expensive appliance that seems designed not to work well, and by working well, I mean, does not turn you into a human sparkler, got me thinking. We have other things around our house that don’t work so well.

My three near-combustion experiences this weekend brought to mind our former health insurance.  Our health care plan came with a unique feature in that it served us well so long as we did not require any health care. We had worked out with our company a special deal where we would pay them thousands of dollars a year and in return, they would accept it.

The upside for them was that they took our money without ever paying a doctor’s bill. The upside for us was that we had something to do with a significant portion of our income that otherwise would have gone to buying trinkets to clutter up our home like a new oven or, alternatively, matching fireproof suits.

Being their customers wasn’t all bad. The money we gave them entitled us, whenever we wanted, to call up and listen to their automated phone menus.  After listening for forty-five minutes or so, the messages would change slightly.  At the beginning of each call, a voice would urge you to hold if you were calling with a question about your benefits.  After three-quarters of an hour, the perky-voiced lady on the recording would say, “If you are calling with a question about your benefits, do us both a favor and stop pretending you have any.” We always got a kick out of that.

One of our cars recently developed its own unique attribute. It stopped running. We haven’t gotten rid of it, because in lots of ways it’s still useful. For example, it works as a sort of enormous paperweight to keep the driveway from blowing away. Also, it makes a nice decoration; spices things up back there visually. Some people have pink flamingos. We have a Honda.

All these advantages pale in comparison with the chief use we’ve found for it.  I won’t go into detail, but let’s just say, we’ve started referring to that pile of rusting metal as “the guest room.” When friends drop by, it’s so nice to have someplace to put them.

You might think the neighbors would object to watching a family of six pile into a 2000 Honda Civic as if it were a room at the Plaza. They don’t because the neighbors have certain unique attributes of their own.  Mostly, their inclination to discuss the intimate details of their marriage extensively. In the street. Very loudly. In the wee hours of the morning.

A few nights ago, I was roused from slumber by their screaming. It went on and on. If I, safely ensconced in my bed, two floors above the action, was alarmed, the folks down in the guest room must have been terrified.

The neighbors paced the street. Their shouting grew louder whenever they came close to our home. The woman was letting him have it. She insisted he was cheating on her. He denied it.  I mean, who could be any less than totally satisfied with a woman like this?

Perhaps they were well matched. He returned her every accusation with a streak of abuse composed in rhetoric so enflamed I worried it would peel the paint from our house. Given his performance, the question that remains isn’t was he cheating, but why wouldn’t she want him to?

The Mrs. went to call the police. When she returned a few minutes later, she said they’d be sending a cruiser.

“Will they be bringing an ambulance as well? Maybe some paramedics?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “Why?”

“Oh,” I said. “Since I’m up, I figured I might as well go down for a snack.”

“What does that have to do with whether they are sending an ambulance?” she asked.

“Well,” I said. “If they were sending an ambulance, I could use the oven.”

A change of season  has caused a flare up in my wife’s condition. She has shown symptoms in previous years but this time, it’s getting dire. I don’t know what has made the difference. Maybe it was moving to a different state a few months ago. Maybe it’s having a bigger yard. Whatever the cause, this thing is serious.

My wife has caught the gardening bug.  Perhaps it is appropriate then that one of the most obvious symptoms is an increased interest in, well, bugs.  The Mrs. is quickly becoming an expert on the hidden world of aphids, the dietary and reproductive habits of ladybugs.  Ladybugs, as you know, have a reputation as cute, adorable critters. If you want to continue believing that, do not marry a gardener.

The symptoms of mad gardener disease (MGD) go far beyond a simple obsession with the insect world. Other signs include a sudden swelling in the amount of reading material showing up in the mail. Much of this will be festooned with images of livestock. If you spy a loved one reading magazines whose middles unfold to reveal a glossy pictures of chickens, it’s time to be concerned.

The reading is part of a larger problem. The condition invariably involves a compulsion to learn about topics that should remain forever shrouded by ignorance. For example, animal poop. I can say with confidence that in pretty much every arena of human endeavor, a sudden passionate interest in manure is always a bad sign. Should someone close to you feel compelled to subject you to more than two conversations about animal waste, including detailed descriptions of its consistency and uses, seek help.

Talk about manure is just the tip of the iceberg. Monitoring conversational topics will go a long way toward indicating the severity of the illness. For example, should you and your spouse be sitting out back on the porch listening to the stillness of the night while surrounded by the neighbors’ homes just a few steps in any direction, and should you begin to whisper sweet words of love only to have her whisper back, “Do you think we can fit a chicken coop in behind the garage?,” it may be too late.

As with any debilitating illness, MGD also affects the family and friends of the victim.  It’s not uncommon for those in the family to have to yield living space to seedlings. The top of the dining room table, a corner of the entertainment center, a dearly needed drawer can all easily be lost to pots of sprouts yet too tender for the outdoors.

The healthy among us can see this is an example of how MGD distorts the thinking process. To those of us free of this dreadful condition, plants too weak to grow outdoors, if we consider them at all, are considered not worth having. To the mind perverted by MGD, the obvious solution is to bring the outdoors inside.  For this reason, conversations in MGD households sometimes run like this:

He: Honey, have you seen my new tie.

She: I’m pretty sure it’s hanging in the closet between the beets and the summer squash.

At the same time, it is not above the MGD sufferer to ask family members to enable his or her disease. It’s not unusual for victims to seek help with the tasks large-scale gardening requires. For example, a hypothetical wife might say to her hypothetical husband “Honey, would you mind turning over some dirt in the back yard so I can plant a few things?”

In an effort to accommodate her, he might reply “Ok, Where?”

To which the victim of MGD would say, “Oh, just everywhere. Everywhere’s good.”

Like most illnesses of this type, the severity of symptoms waxes and wanes. MGD, in particular, seems to follow a seasonal pattern. Spring tends to be the worst. At that time, MGD victims can be most distressing to those they live with, constantly demanding help with their compulsions, rattling on endlessly about the details of sowing and reaping.

Fall tends to be best time of year for MGD victims and their families. The rest of the year, MGD sufferers can seem odd, out of touch with reality. Their relationships can get strained. But in fall, when the tables are heaped with the bounty the earth, under their care, has yielded, when the provisions are piled high and bellies are satisfied, well, at those times, the MGD sufferer hardly seems ill at all.

There are some things the Amish are not good at.  I’m pretty sure, for example, that they are terrible about responding to email. If you’re looking to recover the data you negelected to back up before dumping half a can of Coke down the vents in your computer’s casing, the Amish are not who you want. And how good would a group of Amish be at running the first manned mission to Mars? Totally not good.

They are good, however, at keeping promises. Noah and his boys left the last time they visited with the work of installing the fence half done and a promise to return. A few days later, they were at our door again.

The Mrs. called to tell me. I headed for home. This was not something I wanted to miss.

As I pulled onto our street, I could see the buggy, this time pulled by a single pony, squatting in our neighbor’s driveway.

We are still new to the neighborhood. It is important we try to stay on the neighbors’ good side. I was afraid that blocking access to their garage with an animal unashamed to engage publicly in the most personal activities possible might not be the best way to do this. I could imagine the man who lives there tooling home in his finely crafted specimen of expensive 21^st century German engineering only to be stymied by the finest technology the 19^th century has to offer.

As I moved to the back of the house to talk with Noah about moving the buggy, the Mrs. called to me from the porch. Our neighbor had just telephoned, she said. The buggy could stay. He had called to inform us he wouldn’t need his garage for a while.

I stood talking with Noah in the yard. Cars along the street slowed so their drivers could gawk.  The Mrs. told me later that before I’d arrived home a car had come to a complete stop.

“What do they want?” Noah asked her.

The Mrs. walked over to find out.

They just wanted to look, to admire the pony, and the fence and to revel, no doubt, in what must have been, for them, the charming strangeness of it all.

The fence went up smoothly.  They planted it deeply enough no storm will knock it over. It was built to weather well.

When they finished it was time for coffee. Noah and his boy sat at our table and told us the story of their day.

On the way to our home, they had stopped at the bank. Noah needed a notary. Inside, the teller directed him to someone authorized to notarize. When he found her, she refused to help.

Before she would notarize anything for him, she said, she’d need to see a photo I.D. Noah does not have a photo I.D. The Amish don’t have their pictures taken because they believe doing so violates the second commandment.

At the table, Noah expressed his frustration at the ridiculousness of this woman refusal to believe he was who he is.  And so, I found myself trying to explain the bureaucratic mind to an Amish man whose life revolves around a set of values that emphasize those qualities so repugnant to the modern paper-pusher: informality, intimacy and community.

I told him she knew he was who claimed to be, but that was not the issue. The issue was that requests for notarization by the Amish were not covered in her training. As a corporate employee, she has been indoctrinated to be concerned not about the customer standing in front of her, but the supervisor standing above her.  She did not want to deviate from policy and leave herself open to criticism from the boss, should something go wrong.

All this was, I think, somewhat astonishing to Noah.  He went on to explain to us that using forms of identification issued by the government is a matter of controversy among his branch of the Amish.  Noah prefers not to use them even though doing so would make his life easier. One reason he doesn’t want to use them, he said, was that his mother and father, both of whom, I got the impression, are dead, never used them.

This statement struck me as the perfect encapsulation of what seems so strange to most of us about the Amish way of thinking. The idea that what our deceased parents  did or did not do should lead us to a less convenient life strikes most of us as ridiculous. It is not so in the world of the Amish. There, tradition triumphs.

Noah drained his cup and sighed as our talk wrapped up.

“It is a hard world we live in,” he said. “We are tested and tried in many ways.”

The tone of his voice made it clear when he said “we” he did not mean just the Amish. He meant to include us as well. It was clear that we had, in his mind at least, crossed whatever line normally separates people like him from people like us. The move to cross that barrier was, I’m convinced, mostly Noah’s doing. He is, after all, a man who knows his way around a fence.

I shy away from touchy subjects for these essays. My goal is to amuse, not to anger, to evoke, not to provoke, to comfort, not to disturb. Today, however, is an exception. What I am about to tell you, you may not want to hear. You might want to shuffle small children to another room. Tell them to cover their ears and shout “la-la-la” because I am about to tell you where babies come from.

They come from another planet.  Some of you may think otherwise. Some of you may have heard different in biology class. Some of you may think you have first hand experience with babies and their origins. Some of you may argue that babies come from mothers’ tummies.  Nevertheless, I maintain my stance, children are from another world, mamas are just their means of transport.

That babies, indeed, all children are from some world foreign to all normal earthly customs is obvious from birth.  Consider that these little aliens arrive here by sliding out of another person. Ask yourself if you know a single normal, adult earthling who thinks resting up in a friend’s torso for while only later to come popping out in a pool of questionable fluids is something he’d like to do. I’d venture you do not. Why? Because as earth people we conduct our relationships almost entirely on the outside of our friends skin, the way God intended.

Also, children do not understand the central facts of life on earth. Clearly they come from a planet that does not rotate, whose inhabitants do not divide the cycles of daily life into a part called day and a part called night.  I was reminded of this just after our second extra-terrestrial arrived.

Though she tried to fool us as to her true identity, she betrayed her secret by assuming that the hours between 9 at night and 1 in the morning were a good time for a ride around town. For weeks, she would wake up somewhere during this time with a cry that meant, “Hey, let’s go!! I’ve got a world to explore!!”

Upon finding that her earthling parents were accustomed to reclining into a state of unconsciousness during these hours, her disorientation and homesickness would set in.  She’d express these through the cute little baby habit of screaming relentlessly at volumes that could drown out a jet engine at a rock concert.

I should have understood the meaning of this reality years ago when her older sister developed some unique mid-night habits. See, the Mrs. and I think of the wee hours of the morning as time for peace, a time for quiet rejuvenation. Our first daughter quickly came to think of that time as an excellent occasion for singing through a few of the high points of the Rogers and Hammerstein catalog.  You may be skeptical about my thesis that children are from another planet. Had you ever been awoken by hearing a two-year-old scream her way through “My Favorite Things,” you would not be.

Perhaps the most obvious clue that children come from somewhere very different from us is the language barrier. Problems of translation abound. For example, the earthling phrase “Take this toy to you room and put it away” is likely to be translated as “Take this upstairs. Stand at your door. Do not actually enter your room. Chuck toy vaguely in the direction of your bed.”

Other examples of difficult to translate phrases include “be quiet” which appears to be understood as “Please lie down on the floor and scream” and “Stop kicking me” which is often translated to mean “Kick me harder.”

It’s easy to see why these creatures are invading our world.  No one would want to live on Planet Child. We can only imagine what it is like. For example, it is clear their civilization has not concept of “hurry.” This can be seen from the fact that putting on a coat for a child here is not a time to focus on getting out the door. Instead, it is a time for putting your coat on backward, pulling up the hood so that it covers the entire face, and leaping about utterly amused at your own cleverness right up until the moment you slam face first into the sharp part of the entertainment center.

Also, Planet Child cannot be a sanitary place. I deduced this from the evident delight so many of its recently arrived inhabitants take in throwing up.  Just watch any newborn if you can stand it. Their unceasing vomitous expulsions are almost always followed by an expression of such self-satisfaction you expect them to stand up and shout “Ta-Da!”

That children come from another planet is not really all that shocking. The more shocking thing, by far, is that, in spite of our differences, we earthlings come to care so much for these little aliens, to devote ourselves to making certain they are protected, provided for, and safe. It remains an even greater mystery how we come to love these creatures, so obviously imported here from another world, as if they were, well, our own flesh and blood.

All of us have images of ourselves, a view of who we are we carry deep in our hearts. Some of these are grossly inaccurate. For example, people who imagine themselves sophisticated, worldly, well-informed and yet somehow fail to read this blog. These people are like Ford Escorts who think they are Lexuses.

I, on the other hand, possess a perfectly accurate sense of who I am. The truth is I really am like a fine and delicate automobile, a Ferrari, or perhaps a Lamborghini.  I base this understanding on the fact that like these marvels of automotive engineering, I have a very hard  time getting started on winter mornings.

In fact, at times I have been tempted to think of myself as superior in design and value to one of these machines specifically because I have a hard time starting most mornings. On summer afternoons when these suave vehicles are out flashing their sleek lines at the sun, I am barely mobile. I think its pretty clear who wins in that comparison.

I blame the weather. Just like it does to expensive cars, cold weather makes me feel bad. So does hot weather. I pretty much feel bad whenever there’s weather. And one thing you can say about weather is that you’re going to have some. Everyday.

My relationship with weather seems to have gotten more contentious as I’ve gotten older. No one tells you when you are young that as you age music will get louder, the people working at the grocery store dumber and the weather increasingly hostile.

Weather sensitivity runs in my family. My mother, who, as you might deduce, is older than I am was well into her own protest against weather in my childhood. Above all, she hated summer.

In those days, I could stay outside for hours in the blistering sun making investments that might someday pay off healthily in melanoma.  Afterwards, walking into the house meant entering an entirely different weather system.

My mother loved air-conditioning as if she had invented it. Our unit ran full blast from April until October. You see, my mother had an aversion to being “hot” which, to her, meant allowing the air temperature in the house to exceed fifty degrees.  Our single air conditioning unit would labor all summer to replace the hot, muggy air seeping in from outside. As a result, in the winter we’d wake up and scrape the ice off the car. In the summer, we’d wake up and do the same to the dining room table.

To be fair, my mother’s health made it hard for her to breathe easily in a too warm house. The rest of us accepted this. Making peace with this way of living was not without its social costs.  By the time I entered high school, I was accustomed to opening the door for friends on the hottest day of the year and hearing them respond by saying, “Why are you wearing a parka?”

Our unique way of living did offer a few surprising benefits. For example, some families store bread out in the open on a shelf for easy access, we could do this with ice cream. Also, in junior high school, I was so inured to the cold that when I stood on the street corner looking for the school bus on snowy mornings, I could do it in a t-shirt.

I tell you all this to say spring is coming on or trying to. The last few weeks she’s been waging a pitiful fight.  The best she’s done is a few days in the fifties only to have winter come raging back with a couple additional inches of snow. Spring is a pretty little thing, that’s for sure, but she’s weak.

Naturally, I’m rooting for her. Spring has her own weather, of course, rain and pollen and mud. But still, I have a soft spot for her. In spite of her shortcomings, she does offer a few days a year where the weather is at its best, a few days a year where everything feels just right, a few days a year where I can wake up feeling like the awesome, finely tuned machine I was meant to be.

At least, this is what happened to us the week before last.

The Mrs. later told me the two of Noah’s sons, ages 14 and 19, showed up at the door unaccompanied to explain they had gotten a ride with an English. Their father, they said, would be along.

“Would you like something hot to drink while you wait?” The Mrs. asked.

The younger one said yes, he would. He would, he said,  like a cappuccino.

The Mrs. said she was sorry, but we were fresh out of all fine Italian coffees.

The Mrs. gave them plain old coffee and, apparently, decided it was time to call me.

I had just returned to the office from class when the phone rang.

“Our Amish friends are here,” the Mrs. said. “So, you might want to come home.”

I packed my things and headed out, leaving campus the back way. At the end of the long driveway between the quad and the road, I pulled to a stop. Down the road, to my left a black buggy hauled by a pair of horses bounced.

“That’s got to be Noah,” I thought.

I sat at the stop until he drew near.  I could see him clearly in spite of the drizzle that continued to fall. He was bundled i to his beard in black. A round black hat was tight on his head.

I shouted out the window to ask if he could find our home. He said he could, but I was beset with anxious fantasies. All I could think of was being responsible for a lost Amish father separated from his children clopping his horses in circles around town looking for us.

I turned onto the road ahead of the buggy. A couple blocks down I pulled over and waited. When I saw the buggy get close, I drove on and pulled over again. I repeated this process all the way home. A drive that normally takes three minutes, took fifteen.

Dealing with the Amish raises questions we rarely think about. The Mrs. had pulled the Honda out of the driveway to clear it for the buggy. The garage we decided would serve as a temporary stable.

“You can put your horses in here,” I said to Noah.

He stepped inside and surveyed the structure. “Vair vill ve tie zem up?” he asked.

For months, we had planned to shelter the horses from the elements and the hungry eyes of passersby by lodging them in the garage. Not once had we thought about tying them up.

We decided to tie them to the last section of fence scheduled that day for demolition.

They stood in our back yard for hours, glancing around, sometimes quietly eating the lawn.

At lunchtime, everyone filed indoors. We ate chili.  We talked some about Amish life, about how their pastors are chosen. We talked about gardening. There was much silence.  Perhaps they had not spent much time in an English home. Maybe they were nervous.

After lunch, they returned to work on the fence. I returned to work on campus. When I came home that night, half the fence was up. It looked great.  Our friends had left with half the job completed and a promise to return.  We did not know when we would see them again. They are full of surprises, those Amish.

I ended the evening in the yard, cleaning up the mess the horses had left.  An unpleasant task made slightly easier by having a new half-fence to admire.

I had exactly this feeling the other day while trying to help an Amish guy win a new car.

I’d made another trip to the farm. Months ago, we contracted to have them build for us and install a fence. Because the fence is too substantial to be transported in a buggy, I had to haul it home in a truck.

On Saturday, the first nice day after our recent illness, I borrowed a vehicle and rattled out into the country.  When I arrived, the place was quieter than I had ever seen it. No children scurrying around feeding livestock, no one putting laundry out to dry. Not even Shep, the ubiquitous mutt, made himself known.

I approached the barn hoping Noah would be inside and save me from having to knock on the door of the house and risk intruding.

“Hello!” I called through the open door. From the dim interior, I heard an animal stir, but no human voice greeted me.

When I turned from the barn, Noah was outdoors coming toward me, the usual smile spreading across his wide, bearded face. His boys were gone, he said. They were at their brother’s house helping build another fence. Apparently their experience is in demand now.

Noah and I began loading the remaining pieces of our fence into the truck bed. We talked a bit, about the weather, about planting coming up, about egg production. The wind blew his hat off twice. In the background an engine, a gigantic one from the sound of it, roared.

“I bet you don’t have that in town, do ya,” he said.

“No,” I said. “What is it?”

Noah said it was the sound of a four-wheeler, of ATV’s ridden by the neighbor boys.  Soon, they came into view. We could see them tearing across an open field not far from us.

“I’m guessing those guys aren’t Amish,” I said.  Noah confirmed they were not.

Not long after they din of the engines faded, another strange sound broke the silence.  A mini-van was pulling onto the property.

“Oh,” I said, “you have more friends coming.”

“It’s just the mailman,” Noah said, “probably bringing me something nasty.”

From the porch of the outbuilding where he stood, he smiled at the people in the van and shouted, “Are you bringing me something nasty? Are you bringing me something nasty?”

The woman in the passenger seat said she had a package for him but she didn’t know if it was nasty. She handed him a cardboard box and a few pieces of paper.

He held one of those papers out for me to see.

“Do you get these?” he said.

In his hand, was a flyer from a car dealership. On it were three silver circles and a key. Noah knew enough to scratch the silver-grey stuff away from the circles. Numbers were under there. Numbers that if they matched the number printed above the circles, the instructions said, meant he was a winner.

All the numbers matched. He was a winner. He needed, the flyer said, to call them immediately.

“Do you have access to a phone you can use,” I asked.

He said he did not. I pulled mine from my pocket to check for service. Three bars.

“When we’re done here,” I said, “I’ll call them for you.”

We went into the woodshop to make the call. No one answered. We called again, this time pressing a different number from the menu. Still no answer. Finally, I left a message telling them to call me. Noah wanted to try one more time. We did. This time the message told us that if we were calling about the lottery to press four. I pressed four. The voice told us to come in immediately.

Noah said he might take the bus down there.

“What would you do with a brand new car if you won,” I said.

“Sell it to you for half-price,” he said.

I hope he wins.

———————————————————————————————————————————–

Read the previous chapters of this story here, here, here and here.

I’d be glad to hear from anyone who knows how to keep the code underneath the player from showing in the post.

  Retrospective Podcast 1 by Dean Abbott

By the time I got home I couldn’t stop. I went to bed where I stayed for the next two days. When I go up, it was to visit the doctor’s office. The lady there told me she thought I’d had an upper respiratory infection that had become bronchitis.

I went home with medication and sat in a chair as long as possible. That’s when the Mrs. got sick.  For two days, I was barely mobile and the Mrs. was completely inert. As I’m sure you can imagine, two adults on the verge of unconsciousness makes for marginal parenting.

When your children are four and six months old, sensitivity for the ailing is not their strong suit. This lack of empathy only intensifies once they contract the bug going around. When the kids are sick, they show all the same symptoms mom and dad had, but accompanied by 18 hours a day of whining, occasionally interrupted by screaming. This, naturally, makes mom and dad feel so much better.

Suffering through our illnesses was complicated by the end of civilization. For two days, ice fell from the sky. The sound of limbs crashing beneath the weight of solid water woke us up in the night. Sirens were everywhere. In the hours before the storm, the media reminded us we were doomed. More than once, promos for the news broke in to announce “In the weather tonight? You’re all gonna die. More after CSI.”

For days afterward, the streets were caked with frozen sludge four inches thick. The world has been a silent, unmoving mess over whose surface we have been doomed to creep, coughing, wheezing, and aching.

Slowly, we’ve been pulling out of it. My head is clearer. The chud’s nose has stopped running. The baby is sleeping better. The Mrs. voice carries its normal note of cheer. Outside the sun is shining. The temperature has risen high enough to start the thaw.

From all corners, the sound of dripping comes. In a few days, they say the temperature will reach almost 60. It will be, at least temporarily, the end of a terrible season. Should you pass me on the day the mercury gets above the 50 mark, you will know me. I will be the guy standing outside, barely healthy, weeping for joy.

See, we have children, and the curse of parents of young children everywhere is perpetual tardiness. If you have children, you will immediately understand what I mean when you get around to catching up on reading this blog two years from now.

If you don’t have children you may not know what I am talking about. You childless people are all about wanting to go somewhere and, you know, going there. Travel isn’t that simple for those of us with offspring.

Parents of young children are always late because the entire point of a child’s life is to resist by all possible means leaving the house. Preparing  yourself and your children for an outing and showing up anywhere close to the designated hour resembles nothing so much as calming a prison riot.

This puts kinks in your routine. Showering is a rushed affair. If there is a parent alive who flosses, I want to meet her.  Shaving takes forty-five minutes due to the constant complaints about how evil the Man is for suggesting someone should wear her dress with the puppy dog on it.

Should you manage to get everyone strapped safely in the van, your progress will be slow, in part because you will return home at least once. The most likely reason for turning back will be that the child you told to go potty twenty minutes before leaving and who insisted she did not need to go potty and, in fact, would never need to go potty again in her whole, whole life, needs to go potty. Also, someone might have forgotten her My Little Pony.

When you arrive where you are going, people will turn to look. Their staring will make your stumbling around banging the diaper bag against every solid surface seem much louder. They might scowl, not knowing what you’ve been through. If you are lucky, however, they might nod their heads and wear a grin that says, “Ah! Parents. We’ve been there too.”

When I began, I expected something different. I was busy and believed I didn’t have time to write crafted posts that would read as coherent wholes. Instead, I intended to write daily in a kind of stream-of-consciousness journal.

Then, I got even busier. I reduced posting to twice a week. During that time, the nature of the posts changed. Without my consciously intending it, they became more like polished essays. Stories came out with all their pieces in the right places. They were more polished and more deserving of publication.

I liked them better. So, I decided to continue posting only twice a week, but to make my posts a series of full-blown essays and memoirs rather than an online journal. Writing them has been fun and the more I produced the more I could see their potential for further publication.

Readers, such as they are, seem to enjoy them. Amy Scott has linked a few posts. Others like Cara, Sarah and Carrie have been helpful in promoting my pieces. Koop Kooper mentioned me on his radio show. In December, this post was freshly pressed. I’ve seen a few links to my posts thrown up on facebook profiles.

Still, readership isn’t what I’d like it to be. The feedback on the content indicates people like what I write. But, I haven’t done a lot of the things that cause blogs to get attention. I don’t link much. If I used the blog for conversation by, say, going out and finding another blogger’s post and writing my own post in response, I’d get more hits. Also, I don’t have a niche. It wouldn’t take long, I suspect, to become the most widely read blogger on the topic of animals who can play musical instruments or recipes that use only yellow ingredients.

As this blog has evolved, I’ve started to see my purpose is larger than a single niche. My goal here is simply to write about all of life in a way others enjoy. It is hard to know how well I’m achieving that goal because the appreciative comments and the low readership send a mixed message.

One of the truisms of blogging is that, over time, you learn what kind of posts your audience likes. The posts that have generated the greatest amount of feedback are those in which I have riffed on a topic like being defriended, or how I have to carry stuff everywhere I go.

The memoir posts, those where I tell a story of some sort, get about the same number of views, but don’t get linked or commented on. Perhaps I should attempt more topic posts in the next six months.

I have, from the beginning, assumed I would stick with this blog for a year and then decide what’s next. I may stop blogging. I may continue. I may start a whole new blog with a new purpose. That decision is still down the road a ways.

As the halfway point in that year approaches, I would like to see my readership grow. I’m planning to put more time into promoting my writing and I hope this blog will be part of that.

What I want from you is feedback and ideas you have for how to attract more eyeballs here at Retrospective. I have some ideas of my own and you may see the results of those soon, but for today I am all ears.

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A boy less lonely, less desperate for adventure and affirmation might have surrendered right then.  I did not. I determined to dig my car from beneath the glacier that hid it.

I attacked that pile of ice and snow with the kind of madness only adolescent hormones and blind devotion can inspire. I worked with the ice scraper from behind the passenger seat in my parents’ car. The doors on my car were frozen shut, the ice as hard as steel. I banged the scraper against the ice again and again. Tiny shards flew, glinting, into the air.  After half an hour I had made no significant headway.

I fought the impulse to give up, to retire to the warm house and the comfort of my bedroom, the salve of one more night watching television. I imagined calling her back and explaining I had been beaten by precipitation. I imagined that lovely feminine face falling in disappointment. I imagined losing whatever of her respect I had earned.

It was too great a loss to imagine.  I could not accept defeat, certainly not defeat at the hands of an enemy as simple and as weak as winter. In that moment, something within me became a kind of soldier.

I pressed on with renewed vigor. This time, I focused on getting the doors open, thinking that, once inside, I could start the car and let the defroster do the work. I scraped at the line where the door meets the frame. Nothing budged. I needed a new strategy.

I am fortunate the frozen car window did not shatter when I dumped water from the kitchen tap on it.  In retrospect, perhaps dousing an automobile already covered in ice with more water was a less than ideal strategy. On the upside, it worked.  After another thirty minutes of delicately pouring warm water in the right spots and flailing away with the scraper, I yanked on the door handle. The door came forward half an inch. I yanked again. And again. Finally, the thing surrendered and, with an agonized groan, fell open.

I climbed inside and turned the key. The engine was big and loud and knew how to generate some heat. I left the car to warm. From inside the house I could watch the ice sliding off the hood, the roof, the windows, every falling chunk a tribute to my victory.

That evening I opened the door with ease. I slid inside and dropped the engine in gear. I turned the wheel, heard yet more ice crunching beneath the tires, and pulled away toward excitement, reward and the promise of romance in a dead season.

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In the bleakness of winter, she called. The weather was harsh. Snow had been falling most of the last few days. Before the snow, ice from the sky laid a deadly, slick coat over every surface. Her voice on the line and the invitation it carried could have melted it all.

The invitation was the first in the little more than a year I had known her. Our meeting had been dramatic. A friend of mine who, back then , nurtured dreams of an actor’s life had landed a role. His high school, smaller than mine and situated in a rural part of the county, was mounting a production and he asked me to come see.

I did. I forget now his performance. I remember her. She played an old lady with granny glasses and one of those beaded things you tie to the earpieces to keep them around your neck. She was funny and energetic and I wanted to know her.

I was sixteen, and like many an adolescent male, had buried in my brain a device whose sole purpose is to detect beautiful girls. Such a machine cannot by fooled by some Old Mother Hubbard disguise. Up there, under the lights, her auburn hair, her pale skin, made her gorgeous, like a model, like a star.

I went up after the show and was introduced. A few days later I called her up.  Then, I called her up for a year. We did not attend the same school, so the times we saw one another were rare. I would invite her to church youth group functions; sometimes she would go with my family to shop or out to eat.

All this, she did with no expression of serious interest in me. I took this as normal. Women were a topic in which I had great interest, but little expertise. My confidence was thin, my style awkward.

Still, when she called that Saturday in January, I knew it meant something. Her church group was coming into town that night for a band concert, she said, and did I want to meet her there. This kind of request tends to cause electrical overload in the brains of boys. I managed to say I’d be there moments before the circuits blew and rendered me speechless.

I would have to drive myself to the auditorium. This shouldn’t have been a problem.  Earlier that year, my parents had bequeathed to me their old car, a 1976 Dodge Charger they had spruced up by having it painted black. Before, it was the color of a banana.

It was enormous, a tremendous boat of a car.  My brother and I had ridden in it throughout our childhoods. When children today ride long distances in cramped and compact cars they play games, miniature versions of the full-sized models at home. This was never the case for my brother and me. The back seat afforded us enough space to play anything we wanted, like football, for instance.

For weeks, I had neglected the car. If I needed to go somewhere I would just borrow my parents’ car. Convincing them to allow me to abscond a little while with their vehicle was always easier than chipping away at the frozen detritus that covered my own. That night, however, they had plans. They were going out of town and taking the car with them.

This fact of modern life is nowhere more evident than in the areas of food and eating.  The ease with which we acquire the sustenance to keep going has left us disconnected from the processes, often dirty and demanding, by which our tables are filled.  Most of us are strangers to the dirt and muck and blood from which our provender springs.

I saw these truths again last night by lantern light.

The story begins, as so many good stories do, with a dog. When we moved to the town where we live, we moved into a home unable to meet our fencing needs. Our mutt is a wanderer. Without a sturdy barrier to keep her home, she would bolt off after every creature with a scent. To remedy this, the Mrs. and I contracted with the family of a local Amish man to build and install a fence for our backyard. That was in the fall. Read more about it here, here, and here.

Last night, I went to their home to retrieve pieces of the fence they are unable to transport.

I got there after dark. The air was cold. Their house in the distance glowed faintly, spots of lamplight punctuating the surrounding blackness.

They know us by now. The thrill of having us pull onto their land has gone. We are treated more like friends, weird friends no one could possibly understand, but still. The Mrs. has traveled out to speak to them about the fence and been invited in.  The kitchen, she said, was a dim affair marked by activity and wood smoke.  Once they sent her home with candy.

When I came rambling out of the van last night, the middle son came toward me out of the dark.

“Is Noah here,” I asked,

“Ja,” he said. “He are in da barn.”

In his hand he carried a flashlight. He indicated I should follow him.

A few steps away, and around a corner a feeble light came through an opening in the ancient wooden wall. The boy stepped through. I followed.

I was greeted by Noah and the back ends of seven or eight cows. I had come at milking time.

All those episodes of Little House on the Prairie had led me to believe the nineteenth century would be better lit than it actually is. You’ll see what I mean if you ever go there.

The barn was huge. Only a couple of lanterns, their wicks spluttering, threw a circle of amber around us. The boys stood around, eager to learn about the world by listening to every word the English man dropped.

“I have never actually been in the presence of a cow being milked,” I said.

“Really,” Noah asked from his milking stool, his hands finding whatever apparatus down there makes the milk come out. “ Well, you’re about to be.”

I stood there thirty minutes waiting for the chores to be done. I didn’t mind. They didn’t seem to.

Noah had a million questions. Were the pies in the cafeteria where I work baked there or brought in?  Is the campus inside the city limits? What were my students like?

One question seemed particularly significant. Something is wrong with his manure spreader. There is a piece of metal they need to remove.

“We tried to bang it off there, but we couldn’t budge it.”

He asked if I had an acetylene blowtorch.  Now, as a college professor, the occasions on which I need a flame so hot it will melt steel are rather uncommon. In fact, my needs in this area are such that I can easily manage without a blowtorch of my own.

“I’m afraid I don’t,” I said.

In spite of my lack, the question struck me. Behind it lay the recognition of friendship. By asking this question, I was being invited into their lives a little more deeply. Never had I regretted not having a tool more.

Finally, the cows had given all they could. Noah and the boys and I loaded the heavy chunks of fence into the back of the borrowed truck.  They worked quickly. Supper was waiting.

I climbed back in the cab. Snow covered the circular drive that led to the road.  I couldn’t see it in the dark. I mentioned this.

“Don’t worry,” Noah said, disappearing, lantern in hand,toward the house, “We’ll show you the way.”

—————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————–To read more about how we are distanced from the natural processes by which we feed ourselves, I recommend looking at Jenna’s blog.