Labor Day weekend is pretty much the pinnacle of the bicycling season in Michigan. Every year, 1500 or so cyclists ride the DALMAC tour, 350+ miles from Lansing to Mackinaw City, over the course of 4 or 5 days.
I didn’t ride DALMAC this year; but, in honor of the Pinnacle of Michigan Bicycling, my riding buddy and I rode 77 miles on Saturday, the pinnacle of our own riding season. And this morning, 4M and I did another 35 miles, which put me over 1000 miles for the second year in a row. Woohoo!
To put that in context. . .
I bought my first touring bike after I got out of college, before Molly and I started dating. I started going for rides out on the country roads around OurTown, maybe 20 miles or so at a time. When Molly and I got married, I bought her a bike (a mixte frame, which she still has; it’s almost kind of a cool relic these days), and we would go on rides together.
By around 1982 or so, a few other guys in our community took up cycling, and we started riding together. I rode my first DALMAC in 1983, and every year from ’84-’86, I rode over 3000 miles per year (in ’85, I maxed out at 3664 – one of my riding buddies and I thought it would be really cool to say that we averaged 10 miles per day for the entire year)
2F was a year old when I rode my last DALMAC, and Molly, uh, let me know that training for DALMAC was starting to interfere with the demands that two toddlers were placing on our lives. So, I stopped riding DALMAC, and cut my miles back. Still, from ’87-‘93, I averaged over 2300 miles per year. Changes in my job meant that I rode even less after that, but still, in ’95, I rode over 1200 miles. ’96 was the year I switched jobs and started with my long commute. I didn’t even track my miles that year, but Molly and I, in honor of turning 40, ‘bootlegged’ the last day of the DALMAC tour that year. We weren’t quite in ‘DALMAC shape’, but we had a good time.
After that, I basically stopped riding for several years. My long commute and growing family just pushed cycling to the bottom of the priority list.
About 7 or 8 years ago, I started getting back on the bike. My old community riding buddies invited me on a ride with them. I rode about 5 miles, and thought I was gonna die. I had to stop, and lie on the ground, and wait for my heart to stop pounding out of my chest. It was really pretty humiliating – I used to ride 35 miles just as a routine matter, and here, I could barely do five miles without dying.
But, I knew the only way for me to get in better shape was to keep riding. If five miles was all I could do, I was at least gonna do five miles. And then eight, and then ten, and then twelve. For the next several years, I went out as often as I could on the weekends, riding miles considerably reduced from what I’d once done. There was a 17-mile ride that I used to do as my first, shake-out-the-legs ride of the season. Now, it was my goal for the summer – if I worked hard, I could do a 17-miler by the end of the summer. Or maybe (*gasp*) a 20-miler. I didn’t track my miles for those years, but I vaguely recall that something around 200-300 was a typical season for me.
And Molly, solicitous as she has always been for my health and well-being, would ride with me, when she could. Which provided another marker for how far I’d fallen. ‘Back in the day’, I’d ride with Molly when I didn’t care how good a workout I got – if I rode hard, she couldn’t remotely keep up with me. But now, she was dusting me. It became one of my goals to get strong enough to where she didn’t have to wait for me.
In 2006, I started my weight-loss program, and, as part of the program, I took a more aggressive approach to riding. Instead of starting the season with 10-12 mile rides, I started with a 15-miler, and built up to 20 miles pretty quickly. My ‘pinnacle’ goal for that year was to do the 35-mile ride that I used to do ‘back in the day’. It was actually kind of an exciting year – I was rediscovering miles and miles of really nice rides that I hadn’t done in years. I think I finished ’06 with something on the order of 600 miles.
Last year, I was even more aggressive. We built up to 30-milers pretty early in the season, did a 50-miler over Labor Day, and ended up with over 1200 miles for the year. And this year, I’m on pace for 1300-1400, depending on how the weather falls in November. . .
This is all like the next chapter of The Great Weight Loss. It’s like a whole chunk of my life that had been lost has been restored to me. I had almost forgotten the joy I got from being out on my bike. And, when I was over 300 pounds, even though I was getting on the bike in whatever ‘reduced’ capacity I could manage, I was pretty sure those days were gone forever.
So, as I said, when I started being able to ride miles that I hadn’t been able to do in years, it was like being re-introduced to an old friend. Corners of the countryside around OurTown that I hadn’t seen in years, were becoming familiar to me once again. . .
There is this huge sense of having gotten a reprieve, a ‘do-over’ on a massive scale. I am so grateful to be able to ride again. At age 52, I’m in as good a physical shape as I’ve been in many years.
And, it’s a complete, gratuitous bonus to be able to ride with my sons. At various times, if my regular riding buddy has been unavailable, I’ve been able to ride with 4M or 5M; both of them are high-school athletes, and I’m sure, if they really put the hammer down, I couldn’t stay with them. But, I can make them work harder than they used to have to. . .
So, next year, I’m thinking of doing DALMAC again. 23 years after I did my last one, and 13 years after I even rode any part of the route.
And Molly and I are saving our pennies to buy a tandem. . .
Monday, September 1, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Bittersweet
Molly and I celebrated our 28th anniversary this past weekend. It wasn’t so high on the scale of romance as some of our recent anniversaries have been, but it was rich in an entirely different dimension. . .
-------------------------
Four years ago, my mother (technically, I suppose she’s my step-mother; but since she married my dad when I was 10, I’ve only ever called her ‘Mom’) was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. We live a couple states away, so we didn’t see many of the early signs, but Dad and my sisters, who saw her every day, started seeing enough little ‘lapses’ to take her in for an evaluation. Even so, we’ve never seen the ‘hollowed-out shell’ that people seem to always talk about when they talk about Alzheimer’s. Mom seemed bright and cheerful, maybe even more than she’d been before (although a lot of that was chemically-induced), albeit increasingly prone to occasionally bizarre lapses of memory.
Until recently. Over the last few months, my sisters (and my brother’s wife, who actually sees more of Mom and Dad than anyone else) have become more and more upset and alarmed about Mom’s condition, and its effects on Dad. Dad is 86, and he’s 13 years older than Mom. I’m sure the ‘plan’, such as it was, was always for Mom to take care of Dad as he got old. And now, those tables have been turned, in a way that almost seems cruel. Dad is still very clear-headed, but he’s old and tired, and trying to look after Mom has stressed him horribly. My whole life, my dad has always been one of those omni-competent 'Greatest Generation' guys, and it's been disconcerting to see him so completely overwhelmed
Finally, a couple weeks ago, Dad announced that he and Mom were moving into an assisted-living facility, and within a week, they moved. Apparently, he’d been laying the groundwork for the move for a year or so; it was a great situation for them – Mom would have access to the care she needs, but they could still live together, at least for now. But Dad hadn’t told anyone what he was up to, so it came straight out of left field for all us kids.
So, last week, in talking with my sister-in-law, Molly and I came to the conclusion that we needed to go down to help with the situation. First, Mom and Dad’s house needed to be prepared for sale (in the midst of the worst housing market in a generation; *sigh*). Thirty-five years’ worth of *stuff* needed to be disposed of (and Dad is a packrat of more than modest proportions). And Mom needed to be ‘looked after’ so everyone else could work on the house, and Dad could get a bit of stress-relief.
So Molly and I drove down and stayed with my brother and his wife, who live about five blocks from Mom and Dad. I helped my brothers and sisters and their spouses clean the house, which was sort of décor-frozen in the 70s. I took down maybe ten of those wall-mounted track-shelf units. And my dad had to have been the ceiling-hook king of the Universe. I must have taken down something on the order of 100 ceiling hooks. I am not kidding. Swag lamps (remember those?), hanging planters, and every other imaginable thing you ever heard of that could be hung from a ceiling, and probably a few that haven’t occurred to you, besides. My sisters/SILs went through the house, organizing things into boxes for a garage sale.
And we had the inevitable ‘Distribution of the Heirlooms’, in which my siblings and I identified the items which were too precious to put into the garage sale, and decided who would get them. I dreaded this distribution; I have seen several families nearly unravel, quarreling over who would get which precious heirloom from Mom and Dad, or Grandma, and I really didn’t want that to happen to us. And, with our ‘Yours, Mine and Ours’ family, there are a few additional landmines to be dodged in the course of distributing the *stuff*.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The tone of the discussion was much more one of, ‘such-and-such is a precious item, and we can’t let it leave the family – why don’t YOU take it?’ ‘Oh, I think YOU could make much better use of it than I could – why don’t YOU take it?’ And so on. Even some really nice items, there just wasn’t any quarreling, and in the end, everyone was genuinely happy that certain of the siblings would take certain precious heirlooms. It was really quite cool.
And Molly spent the weekend looking after Mom. Every day, I took her up to Mom and Dad’s apartment. Dad and I would have breakfast together, and Molly tended to Mom all day. I won’t go into any detail about what-all that entailed, but by the end of the day, Molly was pretty well wrung-out. But at least Dad got some respite from having to tend to Mom for one weekend. They have a caretaker five days a week, which is nice, but the weekends end up being pretty stressful, so my sisters and SILs are setting up a rotation for the weekends. And Molly and I will be taking our turn whenever we can.
So, in several ways, the weekend was bittersweet. It was sad, emptying out the house that I’d been ‘coming home to’ for 35 years, even though I’d hardly ever ‘lived’ there. It was sad, seeing my Mom in such a ‘hollowed-out’ state (and realizing that, four years in, it still has lots of time to get worse).
But, Saturday night, as we all flumped on the floor with our beer (even Molly and my sisters, who rarely drink beer) at the end of a long day, we had a wonderful time reminiscing about the life of our family, and our parents. We spoke more openly and affectionately with each other than we have in many years. Holidays are great family times, but the relating can be kind of ‘by the book’, so to speak. This was just us, talking honestly about our experience of our family; mostly recalling the good times, but some of the bad ones, too. Honestly, it was one of the best ‘family times’ we’ve had in many years, and it gave me a level of confidence that our family will survive the passing of our parents, which is something I’ve wondered about, from time to time.
-------------------------
Molly and I were pretty much whipped after all that, and too tired for any very strenuous anniversary observations. I imagine that, once we’ve had a chance to recuperate a little, we’ll manage some more suitable way to mark another year of marital bliss.
But honestly, getting together with my brothers and sisters to take care of our parents was a fitting enough way for us to spend our anniversary, don’t you think?
-------------------------
Four years ago, my mother (technically, I suppose she’s my step-mother; but since she married my dad when I was 10, I’ve only ever called her ‘Mom’) was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease. We live a couple states away, so we didn’t see many of the early signs, but Dad and my sisters, who saw her every day, started seeing enough little ‘lapses’ to take her in for an evaluation. Even so, we’ve never seen the ‘hollowed-out shell’ that people seem to always talk about when they talk about Alzheimer’s. Mom seemed bright and cheerful, maybe even more than she’d been before (although a lot of that was chemically-induced), albeit increasingly prone to occasionally bizarre lapses of memory.
Until recently. Over the last few months, my sisters (and my brother’s wife, who actually sees more of Mom and Dad than anyone else) have become more and more upset and alarmed about Mom’s condition, and its effects on Dad. Dad is 86, and he’s 13 years older than Mom. I’m sure the ‘plan’, such as it was, was always for Mom to take care of Dad as he got old. And now, those tables have been turned, in a way that almost seems cruel. Dad is still very clear-headed, but he’s old and tired, and trying to look after Mom has stressed him horribly. My whole life, my dad has always been one of those omni-competent 'Greatest Generation' guys, and it's been disconcerting to see him so completely overwhelmed
Finally, a couple weeks ago, Dad announced that he and Mom were moving into an assisted-living facility, and within a week, they moved. Apparently, he’d been laying the groundwork for the move for a year or so; it was a great situation for them – Mom would have access to the care she needs, but they could still live together, at least for now. But Dad hadn’t told anyone what he was up to, so it came straight out of left field for all us kids.
So, last week, in talking with my sister-in-law, Molly and I came to the conclusion that we needed to go down to help with the situation. First, Mom and Dad’s house needed to be prepared for sale (in the midst of the worst housing market in a generation; *sigh*). Thirty-five years’ worth of *stuff* needed to be disposed of (and Dad is a packrat of more than modest proportions). And Mom needed to be ‘looked after’ so everyone else could work on the house, and Dad could get a bit of stress-relief.
So Molly and I drove down and stayed with my brother and his wife, who live about five blocks from Mom and Dad. I helped my brothers and sisters and their spouses clean the house, which was sort of décor-frozen in the 70s. I took down maybe ten of those wall-mounted track-shelf units. And my dad had to have been the ceiling-hook king of the Universe. I must have taken down something on the order of 100 ceiling hooks. I am not kidding. Swag lamps (remember those?), hanging planters, and every other imaginable thing you ever heard of that could be hung from a ceiling, and probably a few that haven’t occurred to you, besides. My sisters/SILs went through the house, organizing things into boxes for a garage sale.
And we had the inevitable ‘Distribution of the Heirlooms’, in which my siblings and I identified the items which were too precious to put into the garage sale, and decided who would get them. I dreaded this distribution; I have seen several families nearly unravel, quarreling over who would get which precious heirloom from Mom and Dad, or Grandma, and I really didn’t want that to happen to us. And, with our ‘Yours, Mine and Ours’ family, there are a few additional landmines to be dodged in the course of distributing the *stuff*.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The tone of the discussion was much more one of, ‘such-and-such is a precious item, and we can’t let it leave the family – why don’t YOU take it?’ ‘Oh, I think YOU could make much better use of it than I could – why don’t YOU take it?’ And so on. Even some really nice items, there just wasn’t any quarreling, and in the end, everyone was genuinely happy that certain of the siblings would take certain precious heirlooms. It was really quite cool.
And Molly spent the weekend looking after Mom. Every day, I took her up to Mom and Dad’s apartment. Dad and I would have breakfast together, and Molly tended to Mom all day. I won’t go into any detail about what-all that entailed, but by the end of the day, Molly was pretty well wrung-out. But at least Dad got some respite from having to tend to Mom for one weekend. They have a caretaker five days a week, which is nice, but the weekends end up being pretty stressful, so my sisters and SILs are setting up a rotation for the weekends. And Molly and I will be taking our turn whenever we can.
So, in several ways, the weekend was bittersweet. It was sad, emptying out the house that I’d been ‘coming home to’ for 35 years, even though I’d hardly ever ‘lived’ there. It was sad, seeing my Mom in such a ‘hollowed-out’ state (and realizing that, four years in, it still has lots of time to get worse).
But, Saturday night, as we all flumped on the floor with our beer (even Molly and my sisters, who rarely drink beer) at the end of a long day, we had a wonderful time reminiscing about the life of our family, and our parents. We spoke more openly and affectionately with each other than we have in many years. Holidays are great family times, but the relating can be kind of ‘by the book’, so to speak. This was just us, talking honestly about our experience of our family; mostly recalling the good times, but some of the bad ones, too. Honestly, it was one of the best ‘family times’ we’ve had in many years, and it gave me a level of confidence that our family will survive the passing of our parents, which is something I’ve wondered about, from time to time.
-------------------------
Molly and I were pretty much whipped after all that, and too tired for any very strenuous anniversary observations. I imagine that, once we’ve had a chance to recuperate a little, we’ll manage some more suitable way to mark another year of marital bliss.
But honestly, getting together with my brothers and sisters to take care of our parents was a fitting enough way for us to spend our anniversary, don’t you think?
Monday, August 4, 2008
Zero Tolerance
Our third son, 5M, has always been a solid kid. He’s kind and good-hearted, and has often gone out of his way to befriend the ‘social-misfit-type’ kids at school. He has tended to get a little lost in the shuffle in our family, with all the drama going on among his older siblings, but just a very solid, very good kid.
When he was in 8th grade, 5M had a MySpace page. Which was news to us, since we didn’t even have an Internet connection on our home computer (I mean, we didn’t even have the connection; I had removed the modem from the box – the only sure way I could finally find to keep porn out of our house). But, you know, other families have computers with modems, and he’s not under our roof 24-7.
One time, I brought my laptop home from work. 4M and 5M were eager to borrow it so they could go online without having to run to a friend’s house, and that was my first look at 5M’s page. It featured a large photo of his august self, shirtless and sleeping. It could possibly have been construed as mildly ‘erotic’, in a 14-year-old-boy sort of way. I told him I thought a different photo would be a good idea, and he switched it.
5M played on the school’s 8th-grade basketball team and, as I recall, they had a very good season. But, at one practice in December, one of the boys on the team messed up in such a way as to cause the whole team to run extra laps at the end of practice. Which, as has been known to happen among middle-school boys, didn’t endear the boy to his teammates on that particular day. One teammate in particular, was extremely angry over it, and left a nasty, threatening comment on 5M’s MySpace page. 5M didn’t think much of it – he knew the kid who left the comment, and figured he was just venting some steam. He might have deleted the comment, but frankly, he didn’t know he could (just speaking as the boy’s father, there are all manner of bloggity things that y’all do that I have no idea how to do, so he at least comes by his ‘ignorance’ honestly).
A month or so later, on a Friday when 5M was home sick, his class had a discussion on school violence. In the course of the conversation, one of the girls said, “You should see what’s on 5M’s MySpace page!” So that day, after school, the teacher calls up 5M’s MySpace page, sees the nasty, threatening comment sitting there, having been there for over a month, and about jumped out of her clothes. The teacher showed it to the principal, who consulted the policy manual and determined that, holy shit, they had an honest-to-goodness violent situation on their hands, right here in Tiny-Catholic School! So they huddled together and consulted the policy manual for what to do. They even called the Diocesan Education Office downtown.
The following Monday, Molly and I got a call, requesting that we meet with the principal. When we got there, 5M was already sitting in his office. We sat down, and he described the situation to us. My first thought was to wonder why he needed us to come in for a meeting over that – what, exactly, had my son done wrong? It became clear that 5M’s offense was in leaving the comment up on his page. So I asked 5M why he hadn’t deleted the comment, and he said he hadn’t known that he could. And besides, his opportunities to even get at his page were fairly limited, since we didn’t have an Internet connection at home. And, he had gone in and deleted it that afternoon, when the principal showed him how. So no problem.
Well, no. NOT ‘no problem’. Not by a long shot.
The principal went on to explain that, according to the policy manual, this constituted an instance of violence against another student, which would not be tolerated. He even invoked Columbine. 5M was to be suspended for a week, removed from the basketball team, and be ineligible to participate in any extra-curricular activities for the rest of the school year. Which, since he was in 8th grade, meant for the rest of his time at the school. Including the ‘celebratory’ class trip at the end of the year.
I was dumbfounded. Was any consideration given to the kind of person they knew 5M to be? He’d been at the school for eight-and-a-half years, and had never remotely been a trouble-maker (which could not have been said of at least one of his older brothers, and even one of his sisters). This seemed kind of a nuclear response to a first offense, that, when I looked at it, didn’t look like much of an offense at all. The only response I got was that this was what the policy manual said they should do in a case of violence against another student, and that Sister Scholastica downtown agreed.
I wrote a letter to the principal, asking him to reconsider, based on 5M’s complete lack of any disciplinary history. I wrote a letter to our pastor, and the parish Education Commission, asking if there was any way for them to intervene in the situation, but they declined. I wrote a letter to Sister Scholastica, too, but I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for that; with the others, I was at least talking to people with whom I had a relationship. As far as Sister was concerned, I was just Irate Parent. The suspension was gonna stick.
I would have a hard time describing the bind we were in. Our kids have been attending this school for 20 years; it’s our parish school. So, sending our kids there is virtually a matter of supporting the parish. Plus, in all other ways, we liked and respected this principal; this ‘zero-tolerance’ thing came completely out of left field, as far as we were concerned.
Molly and I agonized over what to do. It seemed a shame (and honestly, an act of ‘violence’ in its own right) to pull 5M out of the school just a couple months before his class was due to graduate – these kids (or at least most of them) had been together since kindergarten, and they were a close-knit group. And yet, 5M was effectively being held apart from them by virtue of the discipline. If we sent 5M to the public middle school, he’d only be there for a couple months, and he knew very few of the kids he’d be there with. Besides which, with a ‘violence’ action attached to his name, we weren’t even sure they would take him, anyway.
We finally told 5M that, if he could, we wanted him to finish the year with his class. If he found that it was too hard, or too strange, to keep going back to school with his ‘Scarlet-V’ status, we would pull him out and switch him to the public school, without a second thought. But, if he could do it, we wanted him to finish the year, hold his head up, and figuratively say to his ‘adversaries’ (however he perceived them to be), ‘I won’t be beaten down’.
And that’s what he did. I’ve rarely been prouder of any of my children than I was when 5M graduated with his class from 8th grade. He held his head up and didn’t get beaten down. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut. All of his teachers (except the one who had ‘turned him in’) more-or-less rallied to his side, making clear that they regarded this as unjust, also. In fact, he even got ‘reinstated’ to go on the class trip (which he was tempted to refuse, out of principle, but he ended up going).
As I said, I’ve rarely been prouder of any of my kids. 5M’s character really showed through, and he grew a lot stronger for living through an awful situation with his dignity intact. There were no ‘good’ solutions to the problem, and I just wanted to make sure that we all, in the Jones family, handled ourselves uprightly and with dignity. We had many words of support from fellow-parishioners, including a few who offered to make some trouble on our behalf. Which we declined to have them do.
Our parish is a relatively small urban parish, and the school is its life-blood. The school itself has struggled fiscally for several years, and a major brouhaha could easily result in the school’s closing. Which, in the long run (or maybe not so long), would lead to the parish closing. Not that I thought that the fate of the parish hung on what we did, but taking care for the good of the parish was certainly part of our consideration.
And looking back, I think the whole problem was the ‘zero tolerance’ policy that the school adopted. I understand, and am supportive of, the school’s concern to protect its students from violence. But, to punish a stupid comment left on a MySpace page (out of ignorance much more than malice) as if it were the next coming of Columbine was just out of all proportion, and an affront to common sense. But then, ‘zero-tolerance’ is all about not engaging common sense. If the manual says it’s ‘violence’, then off you go; nothing to think about, you just follow the manual.
And the galling thing is that, in a Catholic school, I would expect the students to be treated as persons with human dignity, made in the image of God, but ‘zero-tolerance’ ends up treating them as line-items in the policy manual. Even the remotest consideration of the person who is my son 5M would have told them that they weren’t dealing with a putative perpetrator of violence. But thought is hard, and reading a policy manual is easy.
As I said, in every other respect, I like and respect this principal. Our working relationship is mostly intact. But trust has been damaged some, and if such a situation arises again, I don’t know with certainty that I can trust that the right things will be done, and I wish that I could. I hope such a situation never arises again, and if it doesn’t, I will be gratified. We’ve only got eight more years to run of Joneses at that school (assuming it stays afloat that long), so we’ll see, I guess. . .
When he was in 8th grade, 5M had a MySpace page. Which was news to us, since we didn’t even have an Internet connection on our home computer (I mean, we didn’t even have the connection; I had removed the modem from the box – the only sure way I could finally find to keep porn out of our house). But, you know, other families have computers with modems, and he’s not under our roof 24-7.
One time, I brought my laptop home from work. 4M and 5M were eager to borrow it so they could go online without having to run to a friend’s house, and that was my first look at 5M’s page. It featured a large photo of his august self, shirtless and sleeping. It could possibly have been construed as mildly ‘erotic’, in a 14-year-old-boy sort of way. I told him I thought a different photo would be a good idea, and he switched it.
5M played on the school’s 8th-grade basketball team and, as I recall, they had a very good season. But, at one practice in December, one of the boys on the team messed up in such a way as to cause the whole team to run extra laps at the end of practice. Which, as has been known to happen among middle-school boys, didn’t endear the boy to his teammates on that particular day. One teammate in particular, was extremely angry over it, and left a nasty, threatening comment on 5M’s MySpace page. 5M didn’t think much of it – he knew the kid who left the comment, and figured he was just venting some steam. He might have deleted the comment, but frankly, he didn’t know he could (just speaking as the boy’s father, there are all manner of bloggity things that y’all do that I have no idea how to do, so he at least comes by his ‘ignorance’ honestly).
A month or so later, on a Friday when 5M was home sick, his class had a discussion on school violence. In the course of the conversation, one of the girls said, “You should see what’s on 5M’s MySpace page!” So that day, after school, the teacher calls up 5M’s MySpace page, sees the nasty, threatening comment sitting there, having been there for over a month, and about jumped out of her clothes. The teacher showed it to the principal, who consulted the policy manual and determined that, holy shit, they had an honest-to-goodness violent situation on their hands, right here in Tiny-Catholic School! So they huddled together and consulted the policy manual for what to do. They even called the Diocesan Education Office downtown.
The following Monday, Molly and I got a call, requesting that we meet with the principal. When we got there, 5M was already sitting in his office. We sat down, and he described the situation to us. My first thought was to wonder why he needed us to come in for a meeting over that – what, exactly, had my son done wrong? It became clear that 5M’s offense was in leaving the comment up on his page. So I asked 5M why he hadn’t deleted the comment, and he said he hadn’t known that he could. And besides, his opportunities to even get at his page were fairly limited, since we didn’t have an Internet connection at home. And, he had gone in and deleted it that afternoon, when the principal showed him how. So no problem.
Well, no. NOT ‘no problem’. Not by a long shot.
The principal went on to explain that, according to the policy manual, this constituted an instance of violence against another student, which would not be tolerated. He even invoked Columbine. 5M was to be suspended for a week, removed from the basketball team, and be ineligible to participate in any extra-curricular activities for the rest of the school year. Which, since he was in 8th grade, meant for the rest of his time at the school. Including the ‘celebratory’ class trip at the end of the year.
I was dumbfounded. Was any consideration given to the kind of person they knew 5M to be? He’d been at the school for eight-and-a-half years, and had never remotely been a trouble-maker (which could not have been said of at least one of his older brothers, and even one of his sisters). This seemed kind of a nuclear response to a first offense, that, when I looked at it, didn’t look like much of an offense at all. The only response I got was that this was what the policy manual said they should do in a case of violence against another student, and that Sister Scholastica downtown agreed.
I wrote a letter to the principal, asking him to reconsider, based on 5M’s complete lack of any disciplinary history. I wrote a letter to our pastor, and the parish Education Commission, asking if there was any way for them to intervene in the situation, but they declined. I wrote a letter to Sister Scholastica, too, but I didn’t hold out a lot of hope for that; with the others, I was at least talking to people with whom I had a relationship. As far as Sister was concerned, I was just Irate Parent. The suspension was gonna stick.
I would have a hard time describing the bind we were in. Our kids have been attending this school for 20 years; it’s our parish school. So, sending our kids there is virtually a matter of supporting the parish. Plus, in all other ways, we liked and respected this principal; this ‘zero-tolerance’ thing came completely out of left field, as far as we were concerned.
Molly and I agonized over what to do. It seemed a shame (and honestly, an act of ‘violence’ in its own right) to pull 5M out of the school just a couple months before his class was due to graduate – these kids (or at least most of them) had been together since kindergarten, and they were a close-knit group. And yet, 5M was effectively being held apart from them by virtue of the discipline. If we sent 5M to the public middle school, he’d only be there for a couple months, and he knew very few of the kids he’d be there with. Besides which, with a ‘violence’ action attached to his name, we weren’t even sure they would take him, anyway.
We finally told 5M that, if he could, we wanted him to finish the year with his class. If he found that it was too hard, or too strange, to keep going back to school with his ‘Scarlet-V’ status, we would pull him out and switch him to the public school, without a second thought. But, if he could do it, we wanted him to finish the year, hold his head up, and figuratively say to his ‘adversaries’ (however he perceived them to be), ‘I won’t be beaten down’.
And that’s what he did. I’ve rarely been prouder of any of my children than I was when 5M graduated with his class from 8th grade. He held his head up and didn’t get beaten down. He worked hard and kept his mouth shut. All of his teachers (except the one who had ‘turned him in’) more-or-less rallied to his side, making clear that they regarded this as unjust, also. In fact, he even got ‘reinstated’ to go on the class trip (which he was tempted to refuse, out of principle, but he ended up going).
As I said, I’ve rarely been prouder of any of my kids. 5M’s character really showed through, and he grew a lot stronger for living through an awful situation with his dignity intact. There were no ‘good’ solutions to the problem, and I just wanted to make sure that we all, in the Jones family, handled ourselves uprightly and with dignity. We had many words of support from fellow-parishioners, including a few who offered to make some trouble on our behalf. Which we declined to have them do.
Our parish is a relatively small urban parish, and the school is its life-blood. The school itself has struggled fiscally for several years, and a major brouhaha could easily result in the school’s closing. Which, in the long run (or maybe not so long), would lead to the parish closing. Not that I thought that the fate of the parish hung on what we did, but taking care for the good of the parish was certainly part of our consideration.
And looking back, I think the whole problem was the ‘zero tolerance’ policy that the school adopted. I understand, and am supportive of, the school’s concern to protect its students from violence. But, to punish a stupid comment left on a MySpace page (out of ignorance much more than malice) as if it were the next coming of Columbine was just out of all proportion, and an affront to common sense. But then, ‘zero-tolerance’ is all about not engaging common sense. If the manual says it’s ‘violence’, then off you go; nothing to think about, you just follow the manual.
And the galling thing is that, in a Catholic school, I would expect the students to be treated as persons with human dignity, made in the image of God, but ‘zero-tolerance’ ends up treating them as line-items in the policy manual. Even the remotest consideration of the person who is my son 5M would have told them that they weren’t dealing with a putative perpetrator of violence. But thought is hard, and reading a policy manual is easy.
As I said, in every other respect, I like and respect this principal. Our working relationship is mostly intact. But trust has been damaged some, and if such a situation arises again, I don’t know with certainty that I can trust that the right things will be done, and I wish that I could. I hope such a situation never arises again, and if it doesn’t, I will be gratified. We’ve only got eight more years to run of Joneses at that school (assuming it stays afloat that long), so we’ll see, I guess. . .
Thursday, July 24, 2008
As the Ruin Falls
As the Ruin Falls (by CS Lewis)
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love – a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek –
But self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.
-------------------------
I'll be gone volunteering at a kids' summer camp, starting Saturday, and I'll be gone all next week. Try to keep things together in my absence, and I'll see you all in August. . .
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin:
I talk of love – a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek –
But self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains
You give me are more precious than all other gains.
-------------------------
I'll be gone volunteering at a kids' summer camp, starting Saturday, and I'll be gone all next week. Try to keep things together in my absence, and I'll see you all in August. . .
Friday, July 11, 2008
Heart-Breaking
My birth-mother was nearly 20 years old when I was born. Having surrendered me for adoption, she eventually got on with her life. She was professionally successful, but I was (and am) the only child of her womb. She didn’t marry until her late 40s. In fact, I have been married longer than she has, and I like to tease her husband that, without knowing it, when they were married, she was already a grandmother.
On an ‘existential’ level, though, she dearly wanted to be a mother, and they set about trying to adopt a child of their own. Sarah came into their lives when my birth-mother was 50 years old, and was immediately a tremendous joy for them.
When I first met Sarah, on my first visit to my birth-mother’s house after our reunion, she was three years old. By an odd coincidence, in the weeks/months before reunion, Sarah started telling her parents that she wanted a brother. Which left them in a bit of a quandary as to how to tell a three-year-old that, much as they’d like to give her a brother, it wasn’t going to happen. Then, suddenly, I burst onto the scene, and - voila! - Sarah had a brother. Just not a baby brother; in fact, she had a brother who had children of his own, who were older than she was. I vividly recall, from that first visit, while the three of us were in the car one day, Sarah singing a little song to herself – “I don’t like it / when Mommy likes Desmond / so much.”
As the years passed, Sarah became as much a part of our family as my birth-mother. Which isn’t terribly surprising; she came along virtually every time my mother came to visit us. She and 2F became especially close, being closest in age of any of our kids, but the two of them also shared a strong-willed temperament, and seemed to understand each other on some intrinsic level. Because of the large difference in our ages, and her closeness in age to our kids, Sarah never really ‘functioned’ in my life as a sister; more like a niece.
As our kids got older, and we became immersed in our troubles with 3M, and then 1F, my conversations with my birth-mother took on a darker tone, as Sarah started having troubles of her own. She went through a succession of schools, as her parents spared no effort (or expense) trying to find one that could get through to her, mostly without success. Her friends were of a nastier sort than her parents were comfortable with. And there were hints that she was doing more than dabbling in recreational pharmaceuticals.
Sarah was a talented musician (she played the violin) and actress, and through her teens, she landed several good roles, for which she had to compete with other talented kids drawn from a large metropolitan area. And she just loved to perform.
She did finally graduate from high school, and before long she had moved out of her parents’ house. Her behavior became increasingly wild and erratic (although she talked to her mother on the phone every day, without fail). Her boyfriend eventually broke up with her, because he simply wasn’t willing to go with her any further into the Wild Side that she seemed determined to explore.
Finally, a little over a year ago, a month shy of her 21st birthday, Sarah didn’t call home. She died of a fatal drug overdose.
My heart just breaks. It always seems like a tragic waste when anyone dies so young. I was looking forward to a mature, adult Sarah, who might someday come to seem more like a sister to me.
But even more, my heart breaks for her parents – my birth-mother and her husband. Parents should never have to bury their children, much less their not-yet-21-year-old children. I can’t help thinking, too, of the sacrifice they made in adopting Sarah in the first place. Her parents were both over 50 when they adopted Sarah; they signed on for raising a child during years when most of their peers were coping with their empty nests. When most of their peers were traveling, or volunteering, or otherwise enjoying their freedom-at-last from the rigors of parenthood, they were just getting started, signing on for a term to last into their 70s. All parents, I’m sure, see their children, at least in part, as their legacy – a part of them to live on after they’re gone. But there will be no legacy here. Without meaning to say it crassly, they’ve got nothing (except their own memories) left to show for 20+ years they invested in raising their daughter; an investment no one forced them to make – they did it freely, even generously. It just breaks my heart; I can’t think of another way to say it.
On an ‘existential’ level, though, she dearly wanted to be a mother, and they set about trying to adopt a child of their own. Sarah came into their lives when my birth-mother was 50 years old, and was immediately a tremendous joy for them.
When I first met Sarah, on my first visit to my birth-mother’s house after our reunion, she was three years old. By an odd coincidence, in the weeks/months before reunion, Sarah started telling her parents that she wanted a brother. Which left them in a bit of a quandary as to how to tell a three-year-old that, much as they’d like to give her a brother, it wasn’t going to happen. Then, suddenly, I burst onto the scene, and - voila! - Sarah had a brother. Just not a baby brother; in fact, she had a brother who had children of his own, who were older than she was. I vividly recall, from that first visit, while the three of us were in the car one day, Sarah singing a little song to herself – “I don’t like it / when Mommy likes Desmond / so much.”
As the years passed, Sarah became as much a part of our family as my birth-mother. Which isn’t terribly surprising; she came along virtually every time my mother came to visit us. She and 2F became especially close, being closest in age of any of our kids, but the two of them also shared a strong-willed temperament, and seemed to understand each other on some intrinsic level. Because of the large difference in our ages, and her closeness in age to our kids, Sarah never really ‘functioned’ in my life as a sister; more like a niece.
As our kids got older, and we became immersed in our troubles with 3M, and then 1F, my conversations with my birth-mother took on a darker tone, as Sarah started having troubles of her own. She went through a succession of schools, as her parents spared no effort (or expense) trying to find one that could get through to her, mostly without success. Her friends were of a nastier sort than her parents were comfortable with. And there were hints that she was doing more than dabbling in recreational pharmaceuticals.
Sarah was a talented musician (she played the violin) and actress, and through her teens, she landed several good roles, for which she had to compete with other talented kids drawn from a large metropolitan area. And she just loved to perform.
She did finally graduate from high school, and before long she had moved out of her parents’ house. Her behavior became increasingly wild and erratic (although she talked to her mother on the phone every day, without fail). Her boyfriend eventually broke up with her, because he simply wasn’t willing to go with her any further into the Wild Side that she seemed determined to explore.
Finally, a little over a year ago, a month shy of her 21st birthday, Sarah didn’t call home. She died of a fatal drug overdose.
My heart just breaks. It always seems like a tragic waste when anyone dies so young. I was looking forward to a mature, adult Sarah, who might someday come to seem more like a sister to me.
But even more, my heart breaks for her parents – my birth-mother and her husband. Parents should never have to bury their children, much less their not-yet-21-year-old children. I can’t help thinking, too, of the sacrifice they made in adopting Sarah in the first place. Her parents were both over 50 when they adopted Sarah; they signed on for raising a child during years when most of their peers were coping with their empty nests. When most of their peers were traveling, or volunteering, or otherwise enjoying their freedom-at-last from the rigors of parenthood, they were just getting started, signing on for a term to last into their 70s. All parents, I’m sure, see their children, at least in part, as their legacy – a part of them to live on after they’re gone. But there will be no legacy here. Without meaning to say it crassly, they’ve got nothing (except their own memories) left to show for 20+ years they invested in raising their daughter; an investment no one forced them to make – they did it freely, even generously. It just breaks my heart; I can’t think of another way to say it.
Monday, June 30, 2008
Love Hurts
“If I never loved, I never would have cried.”
Simon & Garfunkel
“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing, compared with love in dreams.”
Dostoevsky
“[Jesus], having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.”
The Gospel of John, chapter 13, verse 1
Mother Theresa was fond of saying that our main task in this life is learning what it really means to love. She was also fond of saying that there is no spiritual growth without suffering. And I’ve come to understand that the two – love and suffering – are not so very separate from each other.
I think we’re sort of conditioned by our culture to think of love in terms of mellow warm feelings toward another person – taking pleasure in their presence in our lives, wanting to do things together with them, or give our time and energy for their sake. But if warm-fuzzies is all that we mean by love, it winds up being pretty shallow and lame.
In a fallen world, it comes to seem that any love worthy of the name inevitably has a tragic aspect about it. We are all fallen, broken persons, and our fallen-ness and broken-ness redound to the pain of those who love us. And hobble our ability to love others as we ought. We inevitably hurt and disappoint those who love us, and in many ways, the measure of love is the manner in which it deals with those hurts and disappointments.
Our kids have taught some of this to Molly and me. When 1F was the ‘perfect’ adolescent, it was pretty easy to love her; to soak up the accolades we received for having raised such a wonderful girl. But, I don’t think I’ve ever been more deeply wounded than I was when she walked away from our family to live with the F-bomb. And I never, in my worst dreams, would have imagined one of my daughters having a baby out-of-wedlock. But, you know, in the ensuing years, I think we’ve come to a stronger love for each other. I found out that my heart could bear more pain than I thought it could, and that I loved my daughter even though she had hurt me like I’d never imagined I could be hurt.
Likewise for 3M – it was easy to love him when he was a cute and precocious child, when we got appreciative pats on the back for his wit and intelligence. But when he ran away from home, and defied us in every possible way, he simply broke our hearts. And such is the tragic aspect of love – real, down-and-dirty, harsh, dreadful love. He is not today what I would really want him to be, but I think we have learned to love each other for who we are, apart from any questions about ‘approval’.
All of our kids, in one way or another, have suffered from my (and, I suppose, Molly’s, although even to say so evokes thoughts of the Log and the Speck; besides which, it feels like ‘talking behind her back’) failures of love. 1F and 3M are just the glaring, nuclear examples. 2F suffers greatly to this day that we didn’t love her as she needed us to – that we were so dazzled by her sister’s ‘perfection’, and too easily put off by her more strong-willed personality. 4M can be a male version of 1F – ‘perfect’, except when he thinks we’re not looking. 5M too easily gets lost in the chaos that swirls around his older siblings, and 6F has had to endure all manner of trials that we wished we could have been more effective in helping her through. But perhaps we are learning, just a little bit better, what it means to love. Perhaps we can dig a little deeper, and give our kids the love they need, where once we’d have come up short. Perhaps. At least, I hope so. . .
It’s not just the kids, either. As much as I love Molly (and she me), there is, even still, a tragic aspect to our love. She has not avoided disappointing me (or, to be certain, I her), even though she is still the most amazing woman I’ve ever known. Some part of the measure of our love is coming to know – really know, where it hurts to know – each other’s weaknesses and character flaws, and keep moving forward. Even to cover for each other’s weaknesses (whether or not we ever thought we should have to).
So, again - the measure of our love is not the absence of our disappointments with each other. The measure of our love is what we DO with the inevitable hurts and disappointments that we inflict on each other – can we let “love cover a multitude of sins” (I Peter 4:8), or not?
And then we have the example of God Himself, who “demonstrates His own love for us in this – while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Jesus didn’t wait for us to get our shit together in order to make a gift of Himself for our sake. He loved us, “to the end,” even in all our fallen, broken, garbage.
In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said that, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” And I think it’s likewise when it comes to ‘learning what it really means to love’. To love greatly is to risk being hurt greatly. To ‘pour ourselves out’ for the sake of the beloved, with little or no regard for what we have left when we’re done.
“And greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
Jesus, with all trepidation, I ask of you. . . teach me how to love. . .
Simon & Garfunkel
“Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing, compared with love in dreams.”
Dostoevsky
“[Jesus], having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.”
The Gospel of John, chapter 13, verse 1
Mother Theresa was fond of saying that our main task in this life is learning what it really means to love. She was also fond of saying that there is no spiritual growth without suffering. And I’ve come to understand that the two – love and suffering – are not so very separate from each other.
I think we’re sort of conditioned by our culture to think of love in terms of mellow warm feelings toward another person – taking pleasure in their presence in our lives, wanting to do things together with them, or give our time and energy for their sake. But if warm-fuzzies is all that we mean by love, it winds up being pretty shallow and lame.
In a fallen world, it comes to seem that any love worthy of the name inevitably has a tragic aspect about it. We are all fallen, broken persons, and our fallen-ness and broken-ness redound to the pain of those who love us. And hobble our ability to love others as we ought. We inevitably hurt and disappoint those who love us, and in many ways, the measure of love is the manner in which it deals with those hurts and disappointments.
Our kids have taught some of this to Molly and me. When 1F was the ‘perfect’ adolescent, it was pretty easy to love her; to soak up the accolades we received for having raised such a wonderful girl. But, I don’t think I’ve ever been more deeply wounded than I was when she walked away from our family to live with the F-bomb. And I never, in my worst dreams, would have imagined one of my daughters having a baby out-of-wedlock. But, you know, in the ensuing years, I think we’ve come to a stronger love for each other. I found out that my heart could bear more pain than I thought it could, and that I loved my daughter even though she had hurt me like I’d never imagined I could be hurt.
Likewise for 3M – it was easy to love him when he was a cute and precocious child, when we got appreciative pats on the back for his wit and intelligence. But when he ran away from home, and defied us in every possible way, he simply broke our hearts. And such is the tragic aspect of love – real, down-and-dirty, harsh, dreadful love. He is not today what I would really want him to be, but I think we have learned to love each other for who we are, apart from any questions about ‘approval’.
All of our kids, in one way or another, have suffered from my (and, I suppose, Molly’s, although even to say so evokes thoughts of the Log and the Speck; besides which, it feels like ‘talking behind her back’) failures of love. 1F and 3M are just the glaring, nuclear examples. 2F suffers greatly to this day that we didn’t love her as she needed us to – that we were so dazzled by her sister’s ‘perfection’, and too easily put off by her more strong-willed personality. 4M can be a male version of 1F – ‘perfect’, except when he thinks we’re not looking. 5M too easily gets lost in the chaos that swirls around his older siblings, and 6F has had to endure all manner of trials that we wished we could have been more effective in helping her through. But perhaps we are learning, just a little bit better, what it means to love. Perhaps we can dig a little deeper, and give our kids the love they need, where once we’d have come up short. Perhaps. At least, I hope so. . .
It’s not just the kids, either. As much as I love Molly (and she me), there is, even still, a tragic aspect to our love. She has not avoided disappointing me (or, to be certain, I her), even though she is still the most amazing woman I’ve ever known. Some part of the measure of our love is coming to know – really know, where it hurts to know – each other’s weaknesses and character flaws, and keep moving forward. Even to cover for each other’s weaknesses (whether or not we ever thought we should have to).
So, again - the measure of our love is not the absence of our disappointments with each other. The measure of our love is what we DO with the inevitable hurts and disappointments that we inflict on each other – can we let “love cover a multitude of sins” (I Peter 4:8), or not?
And then we have the example of God Himself, who “demonstrates His own love for us in this – while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Jesus didn’t wait for us to get our shit together in order to make a gift of Himself for our sake. He loved us, “to the end,” even in all our fallen, broken, garbage.
In his book, The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said that, “When Christ calls a man, He bids him come and die.” And I think it’s likewise when it comes to ‘learning what it really means to love’. To love greatly is to risk being hurt greatly. To ‘pour ourselves out’ for the sake of the beloved, with little or no regard for what we have left when we’re done.
“And greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13)
Jesus, with all trepidation, I ask of you. . . teach me how to love. . .
Monday, June 23, 2008
Stepping Out?
Probably my closest friend for my entire adult life has been a guy who, for blogging purposes, I’ll call H. We were college roommates for two years, and when I was in graduate school, he and I lived in a house together with a group of other guys. We got married just a few months apart, and we were each other’s Best Man. H and his wife (call her F) bought a house a block away from Molly and me, and we both had daughters, again within a few months of each other. 1F and H/F’s oldest daughter have been best friends since they were both in diapers, which is really unusual these days, and really cool.
H/F’s second daughter married the son of GF2 (remember her?) and her husband, and they now have a baby daughter of their own. It has been really cool to see the relationship between the four ‘co-grandparents’, who were good friends before their children married each other, but having a grandchild in common has made for an even closer bond between them.
A while back, Molly and I were at a party at GF2’s house; one of her younger children was graduating from high school. Her kids and mine are all aware that, back in the day, we dated each other, and from time to time, it becomes the focal point of some humor among them. And this was one of those times. So, when the young parents (the son of GF2 and the daughter of H/F) arrived at the party with their little girl (the ‘common’ grandchild), I held the little girl briefly and said, “You know, I used to date your grandma.”
F was standing nearby, and heard me. Whereupon she said, “Hey, you dated BOTH of us!” Well, F is a very good friend, but she was never my girlfriend, so I had no idea what she was talking about. At first. But then I remembered. . .
-------------------------
Several years ago, a buddy of mine, knowing my serious musical jones (nyuk!) for any and all things Beatle, scored tickets to see Paul McCartney (even before he was Sir Paul), and picked up a pair for me (for which you can be sure I was grateful). I told Molly about the tickets, and she was ambivalent about going. “Why don’t you go with H?”
So, I offered my second ticket to H, figuring that we could have some guy-time together at the concert, but he wasn’t particularly interested, either. “But, I bet F would love to go with you – heck, she even went to see the Beatles way back when. . .” Well, I didn’t know about that – my buddy’s wife, and all.
But Molly was all for it. “Go ahead and go to the concert with F. She’ll appreciate it, and you’ll both have a great time.” So we did.
I admit, driving the hour-and-a-half to the concert venue was a little odd, but not so bad as all that – Molly and I had been doing things together with H and F since before we were married, and I had a good friendship with F even apart from her being married to my best friend.
We got to the arena, and we had a great time. F told me stories about when she went to see the Beatles when she was 12, and it was cool. Paul came out with the band, and played a great show, and F and I had tremendous fun singing along with the songs, remembering our youth, and just generally having a lot of fun.
When the concert was over, we hung around the arena for awhile, waiting for the traffic to thin out before we got back in the car. While we were standing by our seats, we saw a couple we both knew – former members of our community, who we hadn’t seen for probably ten years or so. They came over to talk with us, and the whole time, they were both looking at us oddly, like, “I thought you were married to. . .” After a few pleasantries, they moved on.
F turned and hit me on the shoulder. “You didn’t say anything!” she squealed.
“Neither did you,” I responded. “Besides, it’ll be interesting to see if any rumors come back around from it, don’t you think?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t say anything!” To which I only smirked.
-------------------------
As far as I know, there were never any rumors spread about us. And I haven’t ever run into that couple again, to ask what they thought when they saw F and me together.
But, I have to admit, in all candor, that I can’t say anymore that I stopped dating other women after I married Molly. Heck, Molly even said it was okay (and so did F’s husband, for that matter), so long as I tell her about it when I got home. . .
H/F’s second daughter married the son of GF2 (remember her?) and her husband, and they now have a baby daughter of their own. It has been really cool to see the relationship between the four ‘co-grandparents’, who were good friends before their children married each other, but having a grandchild in common has made for an even closer bond between them.
A while back, Molly and I were at a party at GF2’s house; one of her younger children was graduating from high school. Her kids and mine are all aware that, back in the day, we dated each other, and from time to time, it becomes the focal point of some humor among them. And this was one of those times. So, when the young parents (the son of GF2 and the daughter of H/F) arrived at the party with their little girl (the ‘common’ grandchild), I held the little girl briefly and said, “You know, I used to date your grandma.”
F was standing nearby, and heard me. Whereupon she said, “Hey, you dated BOTH of us!” Well, F is a very good friend, but she was never my girlfriend, so I had no idea what she was talking about. At first. But then I remembered. . .
-------------------------
Several years ago, a buddy of mine, knowing my serious musical jones (nyuk!) for any and all things Beatle, scored tickets to see Paul McCartney (even before he was Sir Paul), and picked up a pair for me (for which you can be sure I was grateful). I told Molly about the tickets, and she was ambivalent about going. “Why don’t you go with H?”
So, I offered my second ticket to H, figuring that we could have some guy-time together at the concert, but he wasn’t particularly interested, either. “But, I bet F would love to go with you – heck, she even went to see the Beatles way back when. . .” Well, I didn’t know about that – my buddy’s wife, and all.
But Molly was all for it. “Go ahead and go to the concert with F. She’ll appreciate it, and you’ll both have a great time.” So we did.
I admit, driving the hour-and-a-half to the concert venue was a little odd, but not so bad as all that – Molly and I had been doing things together with H and F since before we were married, and I had a good friendship with F even apart from her being married to my best friend.
We got to the arena, and we had a great time. F told me stories about when she went to see the Beatles when she was 12, and it was cool. Paul came out with the band, and played a great show, and F and I had tremendous fun singing along with the songs, remembering our youth, and just generally having a lot of fun.
When the concert was over, we hung around the arena for awhile, waiting for the traffic to thin out before we got back in the car. While we were standing by our seats, we saw a couple we both knew – former members of our community, who we hadn’t seen for probably ten years or so. They came over to talk with us, and the whole time, they were both looking at us oddly, like, “I thought you were married to. . .” After a few pleasantries, they moved on.
F turned and hit me on the shoulder. “You didn’t say anything!” she squealed.
“Neither did you,” I responded. “Besides, it’ll be interesting to see if any rumors come back around from it, don’t you think?”
“I can’t believe you didn’t say anything!” To which I only smirked.
-------------------------
As far as I know, there were never any rumors spread about us. And I haven’t ever run into that couple again, to ask what they thought when they saw F and me together.
But, I have to admit, in all candor, that I can’t say anymore that I stopped dating other women after I married Molly. Heck, Molly even said it was okay (and so did F’s husband, for that matter), so long as I tell her about it when I got home. . .
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)