Dad's birthday

My dad’s 85th birthday is today. When he was a boy, having a birthday so close to Christmas could be problematic. One year his parents completely forgot his special day. When I heard that, I told myself that I would remember each year no matter what.

So I’ll be sure to call him today. The card has already been sent. If I was feeling better I might try to make a run to see him. It’s a 500 mile run, though, and as far as I know, there aren’t any festivities planned. My one sister was down from Boston for the weekend before Christmas to see him, but she had to turn right around and go home when she realized she’d suffered another tear in her retina. Our youngest and his girlfriend were there on Christmas Eve. What I’m driving at, is that this year is not a year when everyone can be there.

My sister said something very perceptive about our father on the phone the other day. Speaking of his children, she said, “He’s just not very interested in us.”

That’s probably so. He figures he did his bit, we are all in our fifties now, we have our own families, our own lives; he’s content to be an outside observer, like an old family friend invited to holiday gatherings out of habit and respect.

In our families, Kathy’s and mine, it was Mom who held things together. After each of our mothers died, the bonds of family loosened, then unraveled. There seemed to be less reason to come together. Distances that meant nothing years ago were now formidable barriers. Irksome personalities that we tolerated are now revealed as racist, profane, bullying people that are no longer welcome in our homes. We certainly will not travel miles and miles to suffer their presence. We used to do it for Mom, but Mom’s gone. So is our capacity to endure those full frontal swarms.

Mom’s gone and Dad’s not interested. For many people, that was their experience from an early age, but not for us. Two parent family, parents stayed married, lost one child to cancer, kept going, were touching role models for all four of us survivors who also got married, stayed married all these years.

I remember when I realized I was no longer the center of my father’s universe, worthy of all mindfulness. I was teaching in the town where we all grew up and where he still lived. After a late night at school, probably working at a wrestling match or something that would pay an extra ten dollars, I swung by his house and saw him in a neighbor’s garage. I bounded over like a puppy expecting to capture his full attention just by my appearance. He kept talking to the other guy, probably said hi to me, but turned back to the engine of the old car the guy had been working on. I slunk away to go say hi to Mom. I got the point.

He left for work everyday around six and got home again about six. He always made sure he was home for dinner with us, no matter what. He was a civil engineer selling steel for Republic Steel in New York City. He worked out estimates, visited work sites, talked to contractors—he was very good at his job. So good, the company kept offering him a promotion to sales manager and he kept turning them down. When I asked him why, he said, “Officers get shot first”—a lesson he learned on the battlefields of World War II in France.

He never talked about his experience in the war. What we knew about that, we learned from Mom. She related one story about how dad had been knocked out by a mortar shell explosion. When he woke up in the hospital, they wanted to make him a lieutenant. He said no thanks.

It was true: sales managers were routinely fired, while salesmen stayed on, plugging away. Somehow he and my mother put all five of us kids through college and launched us all into adulthood.

So, while he didn’t say that much, I learned a lot by his example. I too am leery of promotions that might make me vulnerable. I try to let my kids live their lives as the adults they are without interference. Thanks to him, I know how to set up and take down a campsite (though there’s not much call for that knowledge these days).

So I’ll call him today and wish him a happy birthday whether he wants me to or not.

Irish news

A couple of weeks ago, our daughter left some Irish newspapers for me to read, because she remembered I have a fondness for their writing style. For instance, I love their weather forecasts: “It will be cloudy today with spells of rain.” Who ever says “spells of rain”? In the US they say “scattered showers”. How boring. The Irish style is more vague, more ephemeral. While the US forecasters pride themselves on their scientific accuracy, the Irish are content with a more human outlook. Spells of rain are much more acceptable than scattered showers. You don’t know how long a spell can last, but knowing it was just a spell of rain makes it more bearable somehow.

“Fog early on, then the best of sunshine and largely dry.” Almost sounds like something you’d wish for someone, or a blessing you might bestow.

Here is another story, rather un-Irish if you ask me from the Evening Herald of 20 November 2007: Santas in the town of Sydney have reportedly been told not to say the immortal phrase, ‘Ho, ho, ho’ in case it offends women and they think they are being called a slang American word for prostitute—they’re being asked or replace it with ‘Ha, ha, ha!”

The story points out that thanks to the Santa recruitment agency, children in that Irish town now know that ‘ho’ is also slang for prostitute. The author goes on to decry this latest incident of Political Correctness, and how people get all excited about such miniscule things while the major issues of war and poverty and famine will prevent so many children from enjoying this Christmas season.

Someone sent me one of those emails that make the rounds periodically at this time of year, but it was one I hadn’t seen before. It talked about Christmas from Jesus’ point of view, saying don’t fret about nativity scenes being banned from city hall lawns—put one in your own yard and soon we won’t need a crèche at city hall. It was kind of neat and gave me some ideas, like when to say, “Merry Christmas” to people.

I have decided to wage my own private war on political correctness, so every time I say “Merry Christmas” I strike another blow for freedom. Let’s take back Christmas! Have a merry one!

Near blizzard conditions

This was a tiring week. First, I actually had to work a full five days! Then I had a meeting of our Social Justice group on Monday night, then I packed food boxes on Wednesday night, and then I attended a dinner sponsored by the Fenn Foundation on Thursday night. Every year I go to the dinner, which honors our Co-op students, but it just came at a busy time. Consequently, I was looking forward to resting up this weekend. I suppose I will be able to at some point, but today, Sunday, is our packing and delivery day for Christmas angel presents and food. Of course they are predicting near blizzard condition for the afternoon, just to make it more interesting.

Fortunately, I got caught up on everything at work: database updates, web page updates, read and dealt with all the office email, set up appointments next week for candidates’ interviews and did miscellaneous stuff around the office.

Also fortunately, I got some great antibiotics which finally kicked whatever I’ve had since Thanksgiving right out of my head. I feel better now than I have for weeks, Justin time for the big day.

My children will be shocked to learn that I have declared this to be the last year for a real tree. After Christmas, Kathy and I will shop for an artificial one. Of course, we will argue over what size it should be. I want one taller than me, and Kathy wants one shorter than her. I told her I don’t want a Christmas “shrub”. We’ll see what happens.

We have not seen Max for a while. He developed pneumonia, but seems to be coming along. The last time he was here he was having a little problem with diarrhea. He said to his father, “I seem to have dropped something in my pants. Can you help me?”

Back in October we had an event that ran on a Friday and a Saturday. Our director decided the easiest way to handle everyone’s comp time was to give us all the same day off. Consequently, we have closed the office for Monday, December 17. I plan to do some Christmas shopping and malling, as long as the weather cooperates. If not, I might do my shopping on line, though that’s not nearly as much fun.

Support the troops?

It had been probably ten years or more since I had been in Washington DC before this week. I was there on business, visiting federal agencies with my boss, and we had some time between appointments on Thursday. He wanted to go see a couple memorials, so we grabbed a taxi and went on down near the Mall.

We walked along the sidewalk toward the Korean War Veterans Memorial, which I had never seen. All of a sudden I saw these life size figures of soldiers walking across a frozen landscape, themselves frozen in sculptured metal. That day it was about thirty degrees and there was snow on the ponchos worn by the figures, and an inch of snow on the ground. It was very striking to me, since the histories that I have read say a lot about how cold it was that first winter of the war and how ill equipped the soldiers were for the weather. You could almost feel what they felt, walking along next to them.

I have just started reading David Halberstam’s history of the Korean War, “The Coldest Winter”. I am only about a hundred pages into it (six hundred more to go), but already his considerable research allows him to tell stories moment to moment of battles on the level of the individual soldier. For instance, the first Americans to contact Chinese soldiers are overwhelmed by their sheer numbers. A chaplain bravely rescues a wounded soldier by defying a befuddled Chinese fighter who is not sure what to do with these strange people he’s just encountered. Meanwhile, back in Tokyo headquarters, MacArthur refuses to believe that it’s really the Chinese—in fact, the people receiving the information about these early fire fights are afraid to tell MacArthur that their opponents are now the Communist Chinese and not just North Koreans, so they bury the reports. Consequently, a lot more people die before the truth is finally accepted.

Moving in reverse chronological order, we then walked over to the World War II Memorial, which is a big oval shallow concrete pool surrounded by columns with the name of each state on them. It’s kind of like an oval Parthenon without a roof. There are stone wreathes hanging on each column, as woven wreathes worn by the victors in Greek contests. My boss remarked, “This is really big!” and I responded, “Just as the war itself was big.” The columns were in not in any particular order, alphabetical or any other, and he also remarked on that. My thought was, “Just as they were in war, when men from different states were all mixed together in different units”.

There was a low waterfall that was still running, despite the freezing temperatures. It was designed so that it produces a low insistent thunder, almost like the sound of artillery, it seemed to me.

Sometimes advocates of war mock people who say, “Support the troops—bring them home” since their idea of supporting the troops means supporting the goals of the particular war all the way. I don’t have any trouble supporting individuals who are sent somewhere to fight if support means praying and working for their safe return and a cessation of hostilities. I certainly do not support Bush and his war in Iraq or his plans to attack Iran.

There is a birthday card I just bought for my friend that shows a graph depicting an indirect relationship between “the number of ribbon magnets on car” with “grasp of issues”. It’s perfect. To me, “Support the troops” cannot mean blindly following an ill conceived plan and the president that wrote it, but it can mean “bring them home”.

Kathy has been sick for about two weeks now with an ear infection and a cold. I have my first cold of the season, but I can’t blame it on her. I just spent too much time walking around in the cold wind on Friday. I know—that’s not how people get sick, but it’s how I get sick. Kathy never calls in sick, though she was tempted this past week. Turns out someone else called off on Friday, so she wound up doing a lot more work and feeling crummy the whole time.

Daughter Ann flew back to her little piece of heaven (Peter or Ballingeary—I’m not sure) on Thursday after what she characterized as her best visit home ever. She and I went to the outlet mall on Wednesday where she bought armloads of jeans and shirts. I spent a little at the Bass shoe store and the Jockey store, though I hadn’t planned on spending anything. Shopping eased the pain of failing her driver’s test. She lost points on the dreaded maneuverability test trying to move our clunky Camry through its paces. Her learner’s permit is good for a year, so if she wants to take it again, we’ll rent the smallest Ford Festiva or something that we can find, in order to improve her chances.

A few days ago Max got upset in school and threw his glasses to the ground, breaking them. When he got home, he said to his mom, “There was an accident at school…” Jessica told him that the teacher had already called her to tell her what had happened. Max parried, saying, “Maybe it wasn’t an accident after all. I just get confused sometimes.” I’m not sure the “confusion defense” will take him very far.

This week I will be in Washington DC with my boss Paul. I was waiting for him to set up appointments or something for us, but then I just decided to do it myself. So, we have a couple of places where they expect us, and there are others where we will probably just show up and see what happens. On Friday, Yolanda, the other assistant director in the office, is appearing in a panel discussion with the governor of Virginia and some other VIP’s in Washington, so we will go to see that as well. The boss wants to come back on Saturday, (yuk!) but maybe I can convince him to steam out of there on Friday afternoon.

This is a busy time for me at church, with Social Justice projects like the Angel Tree and Christmas food and present packing, and working up the readers schedule for the Christmas Masses. Fortunately, I have lots of good people in both groups who are willing to help out with whatever I ask of them. Did I tell you? A few weeks ago I told Kathy I was going to join the “Education Commission” at church. Her eyebrows shot up but she didn’t say anything. Sure enough, after one meeting, I realized I was overcommitted, and so I immediately resigned. She was very smart not to remark on the whole thing, since I probably would have bulled ahead, trying to show I could do it all. I’m learning!