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All I can hear now is Aerle Taree: ‘a game of horseshoes’

We went to a pool party, Saturday. Perfect day to spend in someone’s backyard. Just a lovely day. Very nice people. Let me count … about two dozen people. Kids in the pool, burgers on the grill, enough tables to circulate through to drop in on different conversations. Perfect weather. Someone there will have a big birthday next week, so it was one part that and one part getting all of these different people together.

Played a little cornhole, downplaying the skills, lest anyone become awed by my grasp of geometry and physics. At one point, for phone, I was just knocking other bags out of the air with my bags. And then a score was announced and, well, I can’t lose the game. So I started dropping them directly down the hole, which wasn’t as impressive as it could be, but was held in higher regard than it should be.

I resisted the urge to throw up my hands and yell, “I grew up playing HORSESHOES!”

Because I did, and that game gives you life lessons.

Also Jarts, which gives you other lessons, important lessons about parabolic arcs, escape vectors, eye protection, how to pop your hips and turn from a backpedal into a sprint if it really goes bad, and so on.

One of the kids was working on swimming lengths of the pool entirely underwater. We’ve all done that. I still do that. I might do that the next time I get in the pool. The swim was powerful, fast, ferocious. Three widths of the pool were completed by natural athleticism, fitness and youth. I explained lactic acid buildup, fluidity, efficiency, and wall propulsion. Suddenly, five widths became the standard. I think I felt more accomplished for explaining it than the swimmer did for swimming it. This is what it means to coach others: to see the success of others, to manifest an excitement of achievement that belongs solely to them because, if you did not, it’d just look weird when the thing was done to a level you knew possible.

Another, younger, kid I taught how to use a snorkel. I’m not sure if we progressed well into using it as a submerged breathing tool, but he did delight in blowing water out of the top of the thing. This is always what it means to coach others: to enjoy seeing the delights of others as your success.

Ask someone who played any sort of youth sport about something a coach and a team and their sport taught them that wasn’t about the game itself. That’s what it really means to coach others. I’ve never coached a sport, but I had those coaches. It’s invaluable. I coached college students on student media for 15 years — they won a bunch of awards and a lot of them have gone on to satisfying and important work in the media and someone of them just enjoyed their time their for their own reasons. And I think about that aspect of what a mentor or a coach can be when I think about that work. In this case, what is the confidence that grows in seeing yourself improving a skill by 67 percent based on just one conversation? What joy can you provide yourself by seeing how far you can discharge water out of a silly looking bent plastic tube?

Which is to say it was a nice pool party for me, and, also, I won at Cornhole.

We went to a rock ‘n’ roll show last night. Matt Nathanson was the opener. Still doing his breathy-graveling, coffee shop singer-songwriter thing. He was a 15-year-overnight success in 2008. He’s done now something like a dozen studio albums, two live albums, a bunch of EPs. He’s got a great stage presence. Its not every opener that you’re determined to get there on time for, or that everyone around you will shut up for, but we should, and Nathanson is one of them.

It was a night of three acts. More featuring Matt Nathanson later in the week. I’ll have another, different clip tomorrow.

Back to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. (This is not a book club, but if you pick this up and read along we can pretend. Either way, you should consider the book, it is a great, terrific, and informative read.) One of the things that I always appreciate about Atkinson’s work is how he uses these lists as a sort of a daily street-level census of things. The more texture like this you give a story, the more I’m inclined to lean into it. Atkinson always seems to do that in these descriptive ways that never seem too onerous, never lose the thread of where his story is going, and yet gives you real flashes of this moment that we can’t physically inhabit.

Obviously I’m not prepared to fact-check him on this. Possum meat? Few of us are. But he’s a well regarded popular historian and I’m sure this has all been carefully examined to the extent possible. I have no reason to think otherwise, but I often think: how long does it take him, or the people that wind up in the acknowledgments of the book, to pull enough color together so that it can go into this one paragraph? Just the assemblage of information, let alone whatever time it took to write it, re-write it, edit it, re-work it again. And it’s merely a part of his style.

And one more reason I’m enjoying the book and suggesting it to others.

adventures / baseball / family / Friday / Philadelphia / photo — Comments Off
24
Jul 26

Yankees at Phillies

We went out for pizza last night at a place that serves pizza. This was the place where we discovered honey on pizza — and you should try that before you discount it. You should try it and then think about how you can start smuggling honey into your favorite pizza place because you’re going to start doing that because honey on pizza is good. Also, they were having open mic night last night. We did not sing. But we could have. And some of us would have fit right in.

Look, I don’t sing in front of people. Because what if I’m bad? And you have to weigh that against all of the other things that a person does in public without regard to judgement. So I applaud the people that pursue open mic night, fulfilling a dream, taking a shot, singing their truth, whatever it is. Good for them. I applaud the people who do the things I can not or will not do. But … ya know … listening to some of them … maybe I should?

Anyway, we heard five people while we had our pizza and I marveled at the honey on my pizza. And then a guy took himself to the little corner where the microphone was, introduced himself, said he’d driven an hour-and-a-half to be there, and was so young he talked about how he had to learn these 80s songs. Then he played them, and that young man was good.

So I will not.

This evening we went over the river and to the ball game. We did not have peanuts and Cracker Jack, and that was an oversight on my part. Saw a nice game, though. Both pitchers, Cam Schlitter for New York and Jesus Luzardo for the Phillies were perfect through three innings.

And then, in then Paul Goldschmidt turned a 2-0 sinker into a lead-off home in the fourth inning, just as the Yankees fans began a chant, and Phillies fans started to boo thunderously.

Not so much at the player, but the other people in the stands. That was a Mad Max moment, the sort of thing that make Philadelphia sports fans legendary. It was intense, and funny, and fun.

Here was a bang-bang play at second base. They went to instant replay. They slowed it down from every angle on the big screen and nothing looked definitive. They overturned the judge’s on-field call. That eventually led to a bases loaded moment, but nothing came of it.

That one run home run was the game. It was a true pitcher’s duel. But other things were also going on.

The Fanatic found a way to work in the biggest sporting news of the day. LeBron James is going to spend a little time here, which everyone will most assuredly react to in dignified ways.

I like to think the Phillies front office Slack channel was filled this afternoon with “Who’s got a Knicks jersey?” queries.

Now consider for a second, you’re the Fanatic. You have big feet. You have big furry hands. You have a circumference. You’ve got a basketball. You’re dribbling on grass. And you’re doing it pretty well, all things being equal. And then he backed Not Patrick Ewing to the rim, and jammed it home.

The basketball hype is going to be easy for the next little bit. One of the best players of all time is going championship hunting in your venue? That’ll sell tickets.

And the fans are ready for it, already.

The LED lights across the field, over the right field foul line.

The Liberty Bell light, which stayed silent this evening. When the Phillies hit home runs the light change, hydraulics move the structure, and there’s a stock gong sound. It’s pretty cool. There’s a place in the park called Pass and Stow, named after the two men who cast the famous bell. There’s a replica outside the stadium. This is inside. It is, I am reliably informed, not the actual Liberty Bell.

The sunset.

A different moment in the same sunset.

And scoreboard signage.

My mother-in-law thought the first six innings were a little blah, but the drama caught up to her late in the game. She’s not invested in this one way or the other, but found the whole of it to be rather stressful. It was good baseball drama. I guess he was doing the math, but at some point my father-in-law said he’d been a Yankees fan for mumble-mumble years. Suffice it to say, his whole life. He was impressed by the number, too. Started telling the ushers about all of those years, all of those ups and downs, all of those pinstripes. The man wept when Thurman Munson was killed, got sentimental at the old timers’ games, and was offended on Yogi Berra’s behalf when he was left off a greatest player’s list. (Ask him about that. He’ll make the case, and he’ll be right.) I should ask him if he remembers a particular reason of how and when and why the fandom caught him.

books / family / history / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
23
Jul 26

I won’t get over it

The in-laws are here, visiting for a few days, and I have some laundry to do, so this is short.

This is short because I must zealously guard my laundry from my mother-in-law. We have had a delightfully playful feud about the status of clothes for 17 years. You see, I have been doing the laundry since I was 10 years old, which is long enough to develop habits and peculiarities about stuff, like who should touch your laundry — no one — and how it should be washed — as casually and haphazardly as possible — and how you put it away — long after the laundry is done, but in a series of particular ways when you do get around to it.

My mother-in-law had come for a different visit years ago and I was at work and she was home with her daughter. She somehow decided she was going to do the laundry. My lovely bride said that I wouldn’t want her to do that, that I didn’t want her to do that, that I wouldn’t like it at all. My mother-in-law — who is one of the sweetest people you’d meet — said, “He’ll get over it.”

Now, their house or ours, her washing machine or mine, it has evolved into a kind of production. No one knows any longer if one of us is initiating a new round of “Oh … you!” or seeking revenge.

So today, I’ve been kicking myself that I got down to the wash-by-necessity stage of things on the day after they’ve arrived. This will require some sneakiness on my part.

(Update: I’ve been successful, with the laundry completed largely undetected. I think it was that I minimalized the sorted, and turned off the chime on the washer and the buzzer on the dryer.)

Back to Rick Atkinson’s Fate of the Day, the second in his Revolutionary War trilogy. (Buy it and join my non-existent book club where we are enjoying this book a great deal. I like to read the contemporary passages over and over if, for no other reason, only to consider how Atkinson is writing to them and around them and how each is informing the other of the choices the book is making. It isn’t enough that a group moved from here to there. You’ll want to know what they’re feeling. And it isn’t enough to say that the trip was hard or the weather was bad … you have to find the right way to express it.

And while we don’t know who wrote that — which makes you think that perhaps they’re barely a spectator to the the grand and terrible thing going on around them, more often we can get little glances into the real fears and miseries and worries of prominent people.

Ambrose Serle was an English navy man, a clerk, a well done, who-you-know bureaucrat really. He was also a propagandist, running the New York Gazette for about a year. He wrote a pamphlet, “Americans Against Liberty” in 1775 which attempted to defend the British Empire on religious and political grounds. He was, for two years, the private secretary of Gen. William Howe and historians owe much to his journals.

Indeed, owing to his vantage point and training (he was a hymn writer and author, as well), he saw the American Revolution as a religious war. (That wasn’t an uncommon thought at the time, but it has receded into memory somewhat.) He was also haughty. Condescending. Indignant. One thing he was not was excited about a trip from New York in late July of 1777.

“My heart is full” must have meant something else back then, no?

He survived the Chesapeake, and the war. He went home in 1780, managed French prisoners of war. He died in his late 60s in 1812, in England.

adventures / family / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
17
Jun 26

And now all back at home

We have made it back home this evening, the cats are getting settled back in, all went according to plan. This was today’s plan.

This morning I worked on cutting back some shrub-turned-trees at my in-law’s house. Then we visited the local hardware store where a guy sold us some equipment so that we could fashion additional handholds in the basement. This we did with brisk efficiency.

We celebrated with lunch, going to one of those seafood walk up places that looks out over the water. My lovely bride grew up going to this place, and we go there whenever we are there and the weather is nice. You walk to the window, place your order, receive a tray and then walk around the back to a bunch of picnic tables and boats docked to piers. Its all sandwich-based, and all fried. I get a shrimp sandwich and dose it with fresh cut lemon.

Back at the childhood manse, we packed up our things and, finally the kitties. We said our “see you soons” and set out for home. The cats had a lot to say about that. For about 90 minutes they let us have it. They were still singing the mighty chorus when we passed by the George Washington Bridge.

That’s the world’s busiest bridge, and more than 100 million vehicles go over it in a year. It is almost a mile long, and has 14 lanes, which is some sort of record or something. It was, for a time, the longest main bridge span in the world, until the Gold Gate Bridge took the title in 1937. But, you know, I think that bridge was misnamed. I don’t think George Washington ever went over that bridge.

We saw a lot of World Cup signage. Here’s some of that.

Those two photographs were taken just 17 minutes apart, but look how different the sky is.

Soon after the asphalt of the highway smoothed out and the cats settled down. When we took our exit, they noticed the big turn and the change of speed and perked back up. They’ve done that trip maybe three or four times. No way they knew where they were until I carried them in the house, right?

adventures / family / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
16
Jun 26

Reunited with the kitties

We arrived last night, having been American again for about 55 hours. I find that the older I get the more time I need to reset. At this rate, my whole reset thing may take months. Sometimes circumstances don’t allow, though, which is probably for the best.

Anyway, we’re at my in-laws, picking up the kitties. They’ve had a great time here. Poseidon adjusted to our return pretty easily and, by today, he’s been eager for pets and to tell us about the fun he’s had.

He’s easy to win over. Give him a little attention, a good pet or two, and all is forgiven, or you’ll become famous friends.

Phoebe, on the other hand, takes a little more time. She has a lot of closets and hiding places here and she’s not ready to forgive us just yet.

She’ll come around. I’ve learned that you just have to let her do it in her own time.

And, in the meantime, I helped out a little bit. My mother-in-law has this huge holly and it needed some trimming. So I brought the shears and the pruners and a few other things and went to it this morning. There’s a bird nest in the back, but no one was home. Happily, I was able to leave it undisturbed. I cut back limbs from the house, cleared a path to the water spigot and cleaned up around the dryer vent. It was a productive morning. Here it is before the final trim.

Only after that did she come out and tell me the story of the bush. It was a special gift, and I’m glad I didn’t hear all of the details beforehand, I might not have cut a single leaf off of the thing.

My lovely bride went fishing with her father today. So after I did my part helping out around here, I petted Poe and read awhile. My mother-in-law and I went out for dinner. I drove us to one of their regular haunts and she told everyone she knew there that she’d traded in for a newer model. Had a delicious burger, lovely conversation, and now back here, waiting to hear tall tales of the big one that got away.