I remember him

He liked whiskey sours and Miller High Life.

He liked a cigarette with his second cup of coffee.

He liked tennis.

He liked golf ... and it frustrated him.

He loved ice hockey.

He missed Ted Williams and Milt Schmidt.

He liked Frank Howard and Sonny Jurgensen.

He fell asleep in his rocker-recliner.

I never saw him in jeans. I never saw him in a T-shirt. He wore boxers.

He liked his Jaguar and his Fiat Spider.

He liked to grill.

He liked maple walnut and butter pecan ice creams.

He had freckles across his shoulders.

He was a Marine.

He liked to whip potatoes. And pancake batter.

He didn't like the beach.

I never remember him raising his voice.

He tossed footballs and teed up golf balls.

He met us at the bus and took us to see the Senators.

He drove us home after we'd fallen asleep in the car.

He was outspoken at work, or so I have perceived, and it may have cost him.

He would have loved laptops and iPads.

He climbed to the roof to rotate the TV antenna so we could watch locally blacked-out games on a more distant station.

Neighbor kids bugged him.

He loved Christmas.

He didn't call his Mom often enough, but loved reuniting with his sisters and brothers.

He laughed at Cheers.

He played along with Jeopardy and the $10,000 Pyramid.

He squirmed during Jaws.

He whistled Strangers In The Night.

He took me to a lacrosse game and a hockey game in the same day.

He still gives me confidence to be in the spotlight.

He told this joke once: A driver picks up a hitch-hiking hippie. They come to an intersection. "See anything," said the driver. "Just a dog, man" said the hippie. The driver pulls out and ... CRASH. They come to in the hospital. The driver says, "I thought you said it was just a dog." Says the hippie, "Yeah, man, it was. A Greyhound, man."

He laughed with his mother-in-law for many years.

He loved my mom.

He would have been 80 today.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

Hey. Web person. Build this.

I get mad that I am not smart enough to write code or mash API's or do whatever it is programmers or designers or developers or whatever the job title is for the people who create smart websites and mobile apps ... yeah, what they do.

Because this is what I would do.

I would have a place to type in keywords. As many as I want.

Homes 3+ bed 2.5+ bath, open houses, lunch, spaghetti, sports bars, sports, dry cleaners shirts $1.95, traffic, history, live theatre, news, what are they building there, cherry ice cream.

I would have a place to type in a route. As long as I want.

SE 4th to Park to SE 14th to Grand to 9th to Locust.

I would have a button that you could click that says "Map."

And then, coded so that it made sense, I would see my map.

And it would show, within 3 blocks of my route:

All homes for sale with 3 or more bedrooms and 2.5 or more baths. Free to the Realtor. FSBO's pay.
All open houses. Free to the Realtor, FSBO's pay.
All restaurants with lunch specials (yes, paid advertising) today.
All restaurants with spaghetti specials today (yes, paid). OK, maybe through the coming weekend.
All sports bars with what they are showing on their live TVs tonight. Free.
All sports events through the weekend. Free. And the results from last night.
All dry cleaners who do shirts for $1.95 or less (light starch). Paid.
All potential traffic delays, including wrecks, construction, detours, school zones.
All sites of historical events.
All live theatre venues and what is coming through the next weekend. Free.
All sites of news stories from the daily newspaper in the past 72 hours.
All sites where there is commercial development with what's is coming or going.
All places where I can get cherry ice cream or a cherry sundae or maybe even a maraschino cherry on top of an ice cream cone.

And if you don't like cherry ice cream and history, then you can type your own keywords. Except I wouldn't call them keywords. Maybe "My stuff." Or maybe just "Me."

And if you aren't living here with my mother-in-law, you can type any route you want. Yes, you are right. I wouldn't call it route. Maybe "My way."

And you'd push "Map" and it would do the same thing for you.

No pull down menus. I want to choose what I want to choose, not what someone tells me to choose.

No boing, static AroundMe, Yellow Page-esque listings. I want it on a map. With one of those little blue dots that flashes to tell me where I am. And I want it to change when there's a new wreck,  a new listing, a new commercial lease, a new bulldozer, a new headline, a new ad sale. Right then, not a day late. Not when the ad assist gets around to scheduling it. Not when the reporter decides it is time to send in a graf or two.

Now.

And a link to more information.

Web and mobile. And maybe there's some Bluetooth kind of thing so if I need it to talk to me while I'm driving I can do that without getting in a wreck. And showing up on the map myself.

So, if you are one of those developers or programmers or designers or whatever the hell you are, you can have the damn idea. Just tell your boss where you got it.

Don't tell me, "yeah, but, yeah, but, yeah but." If I have to put quote marks around some of those longer "Me" words, fine.

Just let me know when it is done.

I'll bookmark you.

And I'll pay $2.99 for the app.

It's a lot more than 25 cents

I hoard state quarters. I've stashed away about 70 of them since I moved to Des Moines six-and-a-half weeks ago. Yes, that's 10 a week I've tucked away.

Who know how many I have back in Reno, sorted alphabetically if I don't need them in one of those folders.

One more Maine and each child will have a set. Two more Maines after that one, well, let me know if you've got a real neat, geeky kid like me.

If I get Philadelphia-minted quarters of Montana, Hawaii and some other western state, then I'll have a P & a D for every state, too. And then there are the uncirculated sets still wrapped up and untouched.

Sometimes I spend one in a pinch. To feed a parking meter. Maybe if I'm really thirsty and the machine says, "Exact change required." Frequently I just go thirsty.

I know which quarter has a sailboat on it. Which one has George Washington on both sides. Which one commemorates a landmark which sadly has crumbled since the coin was minted.

It's because of Grandma and Grandpa, who drove us across the country every summer to visit my uncle in Seattle.

In little apothecary bottles, we'd collect a sample of dirt from each state through which we drove and, when we got home and school resumed, Grandma would take the bottles to show her first-grade class in a geography lesson.

We'd make lists of the rivers we crossed and baseball stadiums we passed. Any wonder I'm following Chris Apel's cross-country sports trek.

When I drove to Sioux Falls a week ago, I saw the signs for Wall Drug and the Corn Palace, regular stops each summer. They stick in my mind even more than the most famous South Dakota landmark and the one which graces the back of its quarter. Grandma once sent us a set of post cards from Rock City and you know, it always will mean Tennessee to me more than Graceland or the Opry.

I miss my Grandma. The quarters help me keep her close.

I'm house-hunting for the fifth time in my life, slipping into other people's homes, peering into their closets and kitchen drawers and showers and garages.

One can't help bit feel a bit voyeuristic glimpsing at the bulletins board notes, window-box frames, and bedside tables.

In one master bedroom hung a framed now-yellowed sheet of paper upon which a frat boy typed 32 years ago a dozen or so rhyming lines about a diamond and the hopes of a lifetime and the request to spend it with a true love.

It was when I had finished reading those lines I realized this may well be the last time I go house-hunting.

After all, in the next four years, one will start high school and another will be a year away. A mother-in-law will turn 90.

So this may well be the house where:

the tooth fairy makes her last call;

prom corsages are pinned on dresses;

letters arrive from college admission offices;

two empty-nesters reminisce;

a young suitor asks for a daughter's hand;

grandchildren cultivate memories which they will pass down to a generation I may never know.

I guess I better find the right house.

How is it supposed to feel?

My mother-in-law and I watched tonight. As the crowd gathered in front of the White House, waving flags, chanting and singing, I asked her what happened when word came that Hitler was dead.

She was almost 20 at the time. She didn't recall.

"We all went downtown when the war ended," she said. "But I don't know about when Hitler died."

I suspect there has never been a night like tonight, when the people of a networked world learned of the death of a monster and then had to figure out how to react.

A night of accomplishment. A night of justice. A night of satisfaction.

A night of joy?

Some questions may best be answered with contemplative silence.

Forgive me, Zoe ... and Schneider ... et al

OK, OK. Yes, it is a little disconcerting to have editors -- and notably copy editors -- reading your blog when you've just posted an item which contains things such as:

• "... grand old weathered building which architecture buffs marvel at."
• "The globe, 19-feet around, with marks countries like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia ..."

So, to Zoe, Heather, Jody, Alice, Carol, Linda, Kelly, Cindy, Beryl, Tom, Schneider (yes, I did that on purpose), Carolyn, Karen, Maria, Bob, Maribel, Kate, Mike, Rich, Shawn, Terry, Tony, Valerie, Linda, Billy, Vicky and whomever I've missed ... please be tolerant.

Character and perspective

The first memory I have of Des Moines is the weather beacon whose lights flash the forecast from a television transmission tower in downtown. I first saw it more than 40 years ago as my grandparents drove us across the country.

"Weather Beacon red, warmer weather ahead.

Weather Beacon white, colder weather in sight.

Weather Beacon green, no change in weather foreseen.

Weather Beacon flashing night or day, precipitation is on the way."

In the 15 years or so that I've come to know Des Moines a little more, it is only fitting that the beacon still flashes here. It is a reminder of simpler times, before we could get the weather on a smartphone, when transmission towers were more symbolic of TV than a cable or dish, when downtowns boasted department stores and hotels with coffee shops and mezzanines.

The department stores are gone from downtown Des Moines, but there are decades-old hotels with coffee shops and mezzanines and up and down Locust and Walnut, grand old weathered building which architecture buffs marvel at. I work in one of those old buildings now.

From the moment you enter the marble-ladened lobby of the Des Moines Register, you feel it. The tradition. The character.

• The pictures of 15 journalists who've combined to win 17 Pulitzers. 
• The globe, 19-feet around, with marks countries like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and which sadly no longer rotates but still occasionally draws a curious visitor. 
• The old mail chute which runs from way up on the 13th or 14th floor all the way to the lobby, right by the elevators, just like the one at the old Hotel Fort Des Moines around the corner or down the street at the Savery or Kirkwood.
• The staircase, whose steps from the first floor to about the third are worn from decades of shoes. By the fourth floor, not so much. The steps are smooth. The elevators are busy.

I've never been fortunate to work in a building like this and I was waxing on about it to one of the building/maintenance staffers the other day.

"Character. It's got character. It's really neat," I said.

"Character? That's what you call it," was the harrumph-saturated reply.

"I'll tell you what I call it. I call it a place with a million-year-old HVAC system which is always too hot or too cold for someone. I better not say what else I'd call it."

We both laughed.

Nothing like a little perspective. For both of us.

Dodger blues

I never intended to write about anything other than "local" news here. "Local" thoughts. So why do I feel compelled to write a few lines about the Dodgers?

I've never been a particular fan of theirs. I was disappointed when they beat the Twins, in 1965 not so far removed from Washington, in the World Series. I was disappointed when the lost to the Orioles a year later. LaSorda was loveable. Valenzuela was fun. Gibson dramatic. Scully is still melodious. But they weren't the Senators or the Red Sox or the Cubs.

Yet I mourn the Dodgers plight of today. This is a franchise of more than wins and losses. This is the franchise of Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey, the franchise with neighborhood roots, the franchise which paved the way west and toward expansion.

This is the franchise which has always taught us the cultural and societal impact of baseball. When such an institution is shaken, it rattles security.

Who's your grandpappy?!

So it finally happened. Mark it down. 53 years, 6 months, 11 days.

"Do you want to carry any of your candy?" asked the cashier as she rang up the M&M's, Skittles and Hershey Bars.

"No, it's all for the Easter Bunny."

The mac and cheese and spaghetti and fruit roll-ups came next. Then the 12-pack of Corona.

"Is this for the Easter Bunny, too?" she asked with a smile.

"Yep. And the Easter Bunny might get into it before Sunday."

I laughed. She laughed.

And then ...

"So," she said ...

Wait for it ...

"How many grandkids do you have?"

A garden of little flowers

Jack is student of the week this week in his kindergarten class at Little Flower School. Parents know the routine:

Create a poster with pictures of your family, of when you were a baby, of your favorite things, of what you want to be when you grow up.

Be the line leader. Be the teacher's helper. Pick the stories for the reading circle. Pass out the snacks.

Yesterday, Jack also got to pick three classmates with whom to have lunch outdoors.

He picked Lauren Bautista, Gianna Gonzalez and Dylan Wong.

Now I went to a private school in Virginia which integrated ahead of the county's public schools. There were maybe three African-Americans in a school of about 125 kids. I've worked more than 30 years for a company that has prided itself on the diversity in its workplace.

But nothing has compared to the experience my children have been fortunate to have at Little Flower, where the Asian, Hispanic and Anglo populations are all about equal.

My kids have had sleep-overs in homes where Spanish is the first language.  They've hosted birthday parties where they've been the only caucasians. And Jack had lunch yesterday with Ms. Bautista, Ms. Gonzalez and Mr. Wong.

I imagine, if they should stumble upon this decades from now when our world, its peoples and cultures are even more intertwined, they'll wonder, "So what was the big deal about that, Dad?"

Yes, we will miss Little Flower, a garden of many varieties.

Good morning

Mom doesn't like bad news. Oh, she will stew and worry about her boys, but we learned long ago the practical realities of being away from home.

We went to boarding school about 300 miles from home. One Sunday afternoon during his senior year, my brother Tom was driving from home back to school.

He'd made it about 280 miles when the car broke down. Stranded, he found a pay phone and called home.

"You're 20 miles from school and 280 miles from me," Mom said. "Who do you think can help you the quickest?"

Tom called school.

But with her sobering practicality regarding bad news also comes a relentless wish for optimism and cheerfulness.

She was cheery every morning when she came in to wake us before our prep school days. It makes me smile to this day.

And it is why, I'm certain, that I always hope the first thing I hear every morning is a bright and chipper, "Good morning." A personalized touch makes it even more precious.

I can't reach out to all of you every morning, I guess. So I will wish you a lifetime of "Good mornings" and hope all your days start with glee.

A song in her heart

My mother-in-law is upstairs watching Lawrence Welk. She does so every Saturday night.

I have an idea it reminds her of her dear Bob. He died 12 years ago this summer. He never knew little Kirby or Allie or Jack.

One of the first few times I met him he was in the hospital in Kansas City over Thanksgiving. I'd known him only a few months, but in the hospital room, he waved me to the side of the bed, shook my hand I think, and said a volume or so above a whisper, "You're on the A team."

I only shared a handful of years with him and most of that time was hundreds of miles away.

Marie shared a lifetime with him. Play on, Lawrence, play on.

Perspective

OK, OK, so I said I was tired and here I am too many hours later. And get this:

I watch the last chapter of Ken Burns' Civil War tonight. For the umpteenth time. If it came on tomorrow, I'd watch it for the umpteenth time plus one. It's storytelling. I like it.

And as I listen to Lorena and Jacob's Ladder and so many other haunting melodies, I can't help but think how did they live through it. Not just the soldiers, but everyone, every American. How did they do it?

And just how did my grandparents live through two World Wars on either side of the 1930's?

We think we're stressed because a house won't sell or work's not right or a spouse is away or the kids' teacher won't return a call or the cable guy didn't show up.

How about there's no food in town because the siege is in its second month and the cannon balls keep dropping around the neighborhood so you go out back and shoot the mule and have him for dinner?

How about the spouse is on some European battlefield or Pacific island and there's no Internet or IM or cell phones or Fox News or CNN and maybe tomorrow will be the day the guy in the uniform knocks on the door and hands you a telegram?

How about there's no soccer game because the kids have to sell a few eggs or clean up the parlor-turned-guest room before the new lessee moves in?

It helped. It put things in perspective.

And then I opened one more email. And I got frustrated and stressed on this front and that front, typed and erased and typed and erased ranting emails which wisely I never sent, and stewed about ancient history, about stuff that doesn't matter, that's completely illogical.

So here I am typing.

And now ... calming down ... and thinking again ... about Shiloh ... The Wilderness ... Andersonville ... and thousands ... and thousands ... of worried ... loved ones ... in Boothbay Harbor ... Muscle Shoals ... Oelwein ... Opelousas ... Culpepper ... Clarksville ... Grand Rapids ... Grosse Tete.

I think I'll go to sleep now.

Cleaning out the notebook

I'm tired. This is all I got:

Too much information: "Be good," I say when bidding adieu. Never thought a thing about it. Until the last couple weeks. "I don't have to be good any more," said one newly-single friend.  "I'm trying, but it is really hard," said another.

Like, I mean, peace be with you: 11-year-old Kirby recently on the pastor's long, long, long blessing over a couple celebrating an anniversary: "At the end, he was just sort of random."

Soy ve: OK, top this combo: Sushi at work while Skype-ing brother-in-law in Tel Aviv.

Suddenly, Cousin Mary

Tis odd how an image from decades ago suddenly comes to mind.

Cousin Mary lived in our house when I was little. She was my grandfather's first cousin, a true Virginian, a regular attendee at St. James Episcopal Church, appalled when us young 'uns came home one day in 1968 with the bumper stickers and campaign pins heralding "Nixon's The One" we'd gathered from the local campaign office.

For the longest time she had a big old car with running boards and a button you'd push for an ignition.

And she made fudge.

She was always old as far as I could tell, though I imagine she was just in her 60's when I was headed to first grade.

She rented three rooms, including a kitchen, and a bath from my parents. They were all upstairs in our big stucco home on Lee Street.

Lee Street. Lee.

Yes, on the wall of Cousin Mary's living room hung a framed portrait of the great hero of any Virginian of her generation: Robert E. Lee.

For some reason that portrait of Lee jumped into my head tonight. Why? Why?

It's not that it was out of place. Of course, Cousin Mary would still honor the memory of Gen. Lee.

It's not that I think often of Cousin Mary or Robert E. Lee or our house on Lee Street.

But I find a peace in these sudden images of my youth. Like when I think of my grandfather reading Hansel and Gretel to me. Or the sloppy kisses my Uncle Tom planted on us. Or the postcards with art work of the great masters which Mrs. Rust handed out in third or fourth grade.

They've been gone from us for years now. But may they and so many others keep popping back to mind as unexpectedly as Cousin Mary and Gen. Lee.

Um, uh, um, uh ... th, th, thank you

Some things shouldn't be hard.

Reading "Madeline" to little Jack. Trying new foods. Turning down one last drink. Saying thank you.

Jack's far away tonight. I made a little salad for dinner. Iceberg lettuce. And I think I will have that beer in a little bit.

But, you know what I did today? I said thank you.

"Are you Tom?" I asked a little meekly as I slipped up on the desk of the veteran reporter.

He looked up, his head rising patiently as newsroom stalwarts do. Weathered, but distinguished. Seasoned, but not grizzled. Busy in thought, but tolerant of a stranger even at 8:30 in the morning.

"Yes."

"I'm Ted, Ted Power. I'm here to run this design studio."

"Oh, yes, good to meet you."

"I, uh, well sometimes I need to just say what's on my mind."

I realized as my words spilled over that Dilbert-gray partition and across his note-littered desk, the kind with a coffee cup here and a stack of notebooks there and probably an old city directory and phone book under it all, how odd they must have sounded. 

I suspect Tom Witosky braced for some criticism of his co-bylined story this morning on the shooting death of a rural deputy sheriff. Tom looked up and nodded, welcoming, curiously, perhaps cautiously, whatever was on my mind.

"I began in Nashville and covered Tracy Caulkins and all of those great swimmers there."

"Sure, sure, yes."

"And I guess you were covering Gable and wrestling and the Olympic committee and such in those days."

"Yes I was over in sports for 25 years and I enjoyed it," he said, relaxing, turning almost conversational. Not chit-chat, but explanatory as if he was in front of a another bunch of high school juniors on career day. "But then came the opportunity to do something else, so I'm over here now."

"Well, I just wanted to tell you how much I admired what you did in those days, what you wrote about, what you cared about."

"Oh! Well, thank you."

"Well, I just wanted to tell you, you were an inspiration."

I slipped away. I didn't turn back. I hope I made him feel good.

I made myself feel good. 

Maybe it won't be so hard next time.

Promises, promises

My cousin Maureen rode in the passenger seat as I drove 1,600 miles from Reno to Des Moines.

We never turned the radio on. We never listed to an iPod. We never sought a Wi-Fi connection.

Instead we talked. And talked. And talked.

We talked as we drove past silver mines and casinos of norhern Nevada. We talked as we passed the Mormon Tabernacle and the Olympic ski jumps of Utah. We talked as we passed Little America, Wyo., and its hotel-restaurant-gift shop-truck stop, a home of 50-cent ice cream cones and "17 marble showers." We talked as we negotiated the near white-out conditions just west of Laramie. We talked as we passed the towering wind turbines across three states. We talked as we passed the state capitol buildings in Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Lincoln and finally Des Moines.

We talked of life, of tragedy, of dreams; of children, of dads, of uncles, of siblings, of grandparents; of reaching out, of holding back; of staying connected, of staying disconnected.

Maureen and I listened and learned. Maureen and I laughed and smiled. Maureen and I cried and ached.

We spoke to each other more in 53 hours than we had in my 53 years. There couldn't have been more than 30 minutes of silence, except for the hours of sleep. And when we reached Des Moines, though we both had early, early flights the next morning, we stayed up too late because there was still more to share.

As we said good-bye at the airport, both of us bleary-eyed, facing multiple flight connections and a few hours of work upon arrival at our homes, we promised it won't be 15 years until the next visit. We promised it won't take another tragedy to bring us together. We promised to stay connected. We proposed visiting our uncle in Chicago or Maureen's daughter in Missouri or putting together a family reunion in Massachusetts.

In the air, as planes jetted us a continent apart again, I thought of all the duties of daily life which we so often use to not only sabotage plans to reunite, but to skip simple weekly phone calls.

 

I thought of 140-character posts and every-two-hour place check-ins, valuable in their own right, but not the grounds for deeper friendships that buoy us in times of grief, stress or celebration.

I thought of past promises to other friends to stay connected, promises not kept for one reason or another ... or for no reason at all.

 

I hope Maureen and I keep our promise.

 

One-track minds

Oliver Burkeman's wrap-up of SXSW was filled with not just salient insight, but also haunting observations.

"We drive ourselves to cope with ever-increasing workloads by working longer hours, sucking down coffee and spurning recuperation," he wrote, warning all of us we are human, not computers.

But nothing leapt off the page and grabbed me quite like this line: "The vaguely intimidating twentysomethings who prowl the corridors of the Austin Convention Centre, juggling coffee cups, iPad 2s and the festival's 330-page schedule of events ..."

(An aside: There's a post just waiting to be written about a 330-page schedule of events at a tech event packed full of green-leaning folks toting iPads. "Do we really have to sell a print ad?" "Oh, just bundle it with the banner and the sponsorship for the meet-up afterward and you'll be fine.")

What really struck me was the "Vaguely intimidating twentysomethings." They know how the Internet works, they know of rails and scripts, of embedding and tagging, of a bunch of other stuff I'm trying to catch up on.

I was wondering where they found the time to get ahead of the rest of us, how they did it, how they do it. And then I read this and didn't feel quite so envious.

Thinking it through

New Years! Fifty-something makes life-changing career decision, heightening anxiety and need for encouragement.

Ash Wednesday! The well-intentioned, but support-craving fifty-something does what? Gives up Facebook for Lent, effectively withdrawing from 280 supportive friends.

Furlough! The fifty-something, newly cemented in an ink-on-the-fingers job, does what? Sets up a TweetDeck account, follows a slew of new media, API-mashing, GUI-oozing pundits, and winds up all-a-twitter wondering if he'll ever catch up to the twenty- and thirty-somethings changing how we commune, communicate and communify.

OK, maybe I didn't think things through.

So, what to do? Start writing.

Hence I now have a blog. I think it is as much for me as you. A chance for my thoughts to slip out, to make a little space in this ol' noggin for new thoughts.

What else did I do during my Lenten exile from Facebook? (Details to come in ensuing posts.)

I drove 1,603 miles from Reno to Des Moines with a special passenger grieving from a recent tragedy, and, amid laughter and tears, rekindled a dormant friendship.

I realized I really can work on airplanes and in airports.

I met my fourth Catholic bishop and served communion for the last time at Little Flower Parish.

I cheered the Tar Heels, marveled at the Predators and braced myself for another April of Capitals playoff hockey.

I said good-bye to a staff, seethed as a dear friend avoided saying good-bye, and hugged and kissed my three little ones good-bye for three agonizing weeks.

I was buoyed by J. Patrick Dobel's thoughts on changing life's path from his blog, "Point of the Game" and by a gray-haired, grandmotherly-sort who, while waiting for her plane at LAX, read "What Color is Your Parachute."

I passionately explained to a brother-in-law, sister-in-law and nephew why they are so fortunate to have a great newspaper like the Des Moines Register in their town.

I felt great support from caring journalists as eager to venture down a new path as I.

I moved in with my mother-in-law.

And you know what. I think I really had thought things through after all. And I think writing this blog is going to help me realize that over and over and over.