This is Maria. We had dinner at her restaurant, Tutti’s, tonight. Her husband is a master chef. They have a professional soccer playing son and a daughter who is in investment management. Also, the food is delicious. Order anything there.
Got an email this morning from the site where I monitor my exercise. It said I’ve pedaled 1,722.9 miles this year. A very low number. But there’s always next year!
This morning it was cold. Very cold. It was 26 degrees at midday. Before that we went out for a run. So there is the last of the Christmas snow on the ground, ice puddles in small holes and frozen mud, the stuff that doesn’t accept your footprint.
I ran a little over four miles. After we got started it didn’t feel cold. I passed an old couple who were out with their little dog. The guy told me I was doing great and looking good. I also looked like a fool in a windbreaker and shorts. (At least my ears and hands were covered.) As I finished my last big circuit around this park and pronounced it the right time to quit. The chill was starting to get in at the very end. Why not? It was in the twenties.
I’m starting to like running, then. You’d have to, to do something as crazy as that.
So we spent most of the afternoon warming up. Dinner at Tutti’s. We made it back home for football. Johnny Manziel had a New Year’s Eve party on the field:
We’re watching the ball drop in Times Square, relatively warm and in no crowd. The phrase of the night seemed to be “a million people, a million people.” Who needs that?
Anyway, enjoy your arbitrary demarcation of a new solar circuit. As you put the old one behind you — should you find you were fond of it, or simply find that you are fond it is over — I wish you health and abundance and twice the happiness in the next trip around the sun.
adventures / Monday / photo — Comments Off on We went to a high school shoving match and a hockey game broke out 30 Dec 13
Back to New Jersey today for a hockey game. This was my first high school hockey game, which was good, because the pace moves a bit slower, so the action is easier to follow. This was also the first time I tried to take pictures of a hockey game, which was a struggle in a dimly lit arena.
A lifelong buddy of my father-in-law is the coach of a high school team, the Ridge Red Devils. They are wearing black and green:
This was a rivalry game against Bridgewater Raritan.
Bridgewater Raritan is a good team. They were state champions last year, apparently, and returned all but one player this year.
And so while Ridge was outskated, Bridgewater won 3-2, without ever really putting the good guys away.
We had pizza with the coach and his wife after the game. As I said, the coach is an old friend of my father-in-law. His wife went to nursing school with my mother-in-law. They have a lot of friends like this, people they’ve known for more than 40 years, people they’ve both known separately and together, which is a neat thing.
Tim, the coach, said that this was the coldest rink around. After Hurricane Sandy, he said, this area had no power for two weeks. When the power came on he went to the rink and skated. It was the only one around, without power, that still held ice. After two weeks.
It was about 32 degrees when we left the rink tonight. It was warmer outside than inside.
family / photo / weekend — Comments Off on New Jersey Christmas 29 Dec 13
I feel like this: the spirit of Thanksgiving isn’t brought about in a day, but rather through a season. When, really, it should be a spirit we keep throughout the year it is something that is at least always close at heart throughout this time of the year.
If you’ve ever sat around the table and played the “I’m Thankful For …” game you know there are a lot of things that folks choose. Throughout the season, based on how the holidays fall and where I’ve always lived and all of the travel and the various things that go with it, I’m thankful for one thing more than others. Truth be told, I’m probably not as thankful as much as I should be. I probably let the inner-Grinch run roughshod over my sentimental gratefulness too much, at the expensive of my gratitude.
And the thing I’m most thankful, and most grateful, for are the people who’ve come into my life when they didn’t have to, and let me take up a little piece of theirs. We pick our friends, we inherit our families, but we’re absorbed and adopted and accepted by others and that’s just a remarkable condition of humanity.
My family is full of stories like that, a family tree with swirls that shouldn’t be that, over time, make perfect sense. So is yours. People marry in and you come to see them as your own. People that need an extra sibling or a grandparent or whatever they need, and you find a place for them in your own family puzzle. This is a neat, and powerful thing.
A few years ago, for just one example, some friends of mine lost their newborn grandchild just before the holidays. Circumstances meant these two lovely people would have been alone at Thanksgiving. I invited them to my grandparents’ home and they sat with us and joked with us and cried with us like old relatives we’d known forever. It had this ease and casualness and lack of formality or awkwardness that was a marvel. It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve seen in a lifetime of memories at my grandparents’ home.
I’m sure my grandmother sent them home with leftovers, which is also what she does.
I was thinking about that sort of thing, how rich I have been in extra-family, on the drive from Connecticut to New Jersey, where I get to be on the “adopted” side of things. This last Christmas gathering is with The Yankee’s godparents. The families are intertwined in unbelievable ways. My father-in-law and The Yankee’s godfather, a retired teacher and coach who tells great stories, have known each other literally almost all of their lives. My mother-in-law and The Yankee’s godmother, a nurse fully intent on exercising her right to spoil her granddaughters, went to nursing school together.
The two families raised their three girls, only about four years apart, between them. Everyone is all grown up now, of course. The younger godsister, if you will, went to college and married the guy she dated there. The older godsister went to the same college and she and her husband have two children — ages two to five or so, who both already speak two or three languages. All of these people are lovely folks.
They’ve all taken us in, the three guys who married into this family — a biotech sales rep, a bike racer/budding film producer and little old me — with the greatest of ease. And I know this happens everywhere and is not unusual in the slightest, but it is, to me, the most amazing thing, about how families operate.
As gifts I received a beautiful ornament and a really nice shirt and sweater. I’m going to take my godmother-in-law clothes shopping with me. She knows her stuff.
Did I really this entire passage just so I could write the phrase godmother-in-law? Yes.
Even the dog gets presents:
That present that the dog opened was from my mother-in-law, who is among the world’s better present givers. (She’s mine and you can’t have her.)
Also, because my godfather-in-law’s father was there tonight, we had scratch-lasagna with four generations of a family tonight. Four generations! (The second time I’ve done that in a week, since there were four generations at one of my family dinners.) How incredible, and it is something we seldom even think about.
The only downside to this day of travel and festivity is riding on some of the bumpier roads on the eastern seaboard. Small price to pay when you have a lot of things for which to be thankful.
I’ve been battling a head cold of sinuses and various other fun for several days now. I can point to when it began, precisely at the end of dinner on Christmas Eve. This being the holidays, and that meaning traveling and a dozen people’s varying schedules and being courteous to the dietary habits of others, that would have been at around 5 p.m.
We’d had dinner with a portion of the family that was just getting over some bug or another. And I thought, for a time, that I’d been given some fast acting strain of a thing that I did not want.
Instead, before I complain about being sick and never eating, let me tell you about the best Christmas present I received on Christmas Eve.
We show up late, because there is being courteous to the dietary habits of others and then there is being alternatively busy and passive aggressive against the idea of eating dinner at 3:30 in the afternoon. So we sit down, all of the family in one big giant circle. For some this is a nice time. For others, perhaps they’d rather be elsewhere. Presents are passed around because one of the kids has to go to his father’s for another meal — the typical modern American Christmas, of course.
So it turns out that all of the gifts are aimed at the children, as it should be. This set ranges from 10 to 17 or so. Being book lovers, and considering these particular kids, The Yankee and I decided we’d simply do gift cards for all of them to a local bookstore.
The 10-year-old, after the haze of Christmas presents presents burns down to a nice, soft, amber glow in his mind, becomes upset. He has gotten me nothing. He disappears. He scours his room. He sends word that I am to join him there. He presents a miniature American flag. And a child’s giving, loving heart.
For the next three hours he proceeded to try to cheat me out of every dollar possible at Monopoly, but, still, for a moment, that was perfect.
Anyway, that was Christmas Eve, where I started coming down with something in his house. When the plane landed the day before yesterday here I couldn’t hear anything because of whatever is going on in my head. I’ve been walking around sniffling and listening to everything as if I’m three feet under water.
So we went for a run this morning. So we walked up the hill to the park where my wife played as a child, the same park where we had our engagement photos taken a few years ago. It is one of those old, large homes turned into a city showcase arrangements. There are dog runs and empty fields and disc golf and a gravel path and plenty of woods.
It was about 39 degrees and I’m going to be that guy, here, but the run helped me feel better. Cleared my head a bit. Now I’m hearing things slightly more clearly, and so on. I got in just over four miles.
We got back to the in-laws just in time to see Uncle Scott, who was up from New Jersey for Connecticut Christmas. How nice of him to wait for us, huh?
Cleaned up, and then Christmas presents, where Santa did an amazing job of bringing wonderful things to everyone. I’m still very much under the spell of that thing parents tell kids just before Christmas, and I’m always sure that I’ve never been good enough to deserve the Christmas gifts I receive. This year, this fine year, was no exception.
We had Christmas dinner, at a reasonable hour. And I calculated this: I believe it has been eight days since I’ve had both lunch and dinner at or near their regular times.
Now let me tell you about the luck of Christmas dinner. My mother-in-law, she’s a fine chef. Christmas in their home is shrimp cocktails and prime rib. Prime rib isn’t the first cut of meat I’d choose for myself, but she makes it happen and it was delicious, as always.
So I helped her clean up afterward and then went to play with my Christmas presents, which are too many and too grand for a boy like me.
Also, at this Christmas dinner, we open crackers. It seems you have this tradition or you’ve never heard of it. There is a cardboard tube with a ribbon coming out of either side. You pull the ribbons and it pops, a mini-firework! The tube opens and you get a paper crown for dinner, a cracker jack-type toy and a joke. These are the jokes we received tonight:
And Christmas still isn’t finished! One more tomorrow …
We traveled all day yesterday. Up and out of my grandmother’s house, skipping breakfast to her mortification, before 8 a.m. Our route took us across regions both populated and sparse and rural. And also down gravel roads. Not even the good stuff, where the creek rocks have been crushed to dust and spit out to the side by previous generations of tires, but loose gravel roads.
Which might be unfair. It was on a detour. A bridge was out, you see, and the local crew that were in the middle of repairing the structure had helpfully hoisted road closed signs and a detour sign, but no actual detour. So we made our own, on roads that looked very much like what we’d traveled in nearly abandoned portions of Ireland this summer.
And from the gravel roads we made it back to the empty county roads and from there through sleepy southern towns and finally into Atlanta and to the place where we parked our car … just in time to miss the airport shuttle.
No matter, there will be another along in 15 minutes, we are right on schedule and so we are really playing with house money for an hour. So we park, unload the things that are going on the next leg of our holiday travels, leaving behind the first stages of clothes and things. The shuttle comes along, we climb on, meet a new young Auburn fan — he’d just chosen sides before Christmas, apparently, and was very pleased to tell us about the shirt he got for Christmas.
These are golden times, my man, and you’ve chosen wisely.
We got into the airport. I instantly lost track of my wife while fiddling about with a zipper or something on my luggage. That took 17 seconds. At 22 seconds, with my thoughtful, staring face firmly applied, a helpful airline employee asked if I was looking for something.
Turns out she was in the check-in line. (Who knew?) I’d found her myself. We checked. We made it through security, where we probably got ourselves on a watch list by hopping lines. We’d committed to one line before realizing the people there were still trying to reach their spring break destinations. So we changed to something that looked like your typically efficient government operation, rather than a Soviet toilet paper queue.
So down to the terminal train and then we found our gate, grabbed some food, finally and got on the plane. Our flight was uneventful, save for the three year old kid doing a wicked Billie Jean cover off and on.
And I had so hoped that flight would have a talent show.
We arrived in Connecticut, where it is cold, as you would expect. Good thing I brought two jackets! On the one hand, we drove and flew almost a full day. On the other hand, we covered more than 1,000 miles. It was an easy night after that, dinner with the in-laws, hauling luggage upstairs and so on.
This morning, we ventured out into the post-Christmas wilderness, and this:
They had a white Christmas, and there is still a little bit of the stuff lying around. It doesn’t impede anything, but it is cold enough to sit in one spot for four or five days without feeling like it is in anyone’s way.
So today we shopped. A visit to the empty mall here, a quick stop to the reasonably underwhelmed Apple store there. We got in and out of a high end district and hit a big name cosmetics store. We visited a haute couture kind of place for one thing or another — I was dizzy with it all by then — and the lady who worked there spoke with us like we were long-lost nieces and nephews.
She’d heard of Auburn. And it had registered enough that, isn’t there some sort of big game? And some sort of rivalry? It was interesting. People either live it or know of it. Or they are completely oblivious to it. But she had just the most passing knowledge — which, hey, good for her, I guess, a fashion store girl in New England knowing anything about the South and its diversions — and I had to explain how this silly little thing was so much a part of our local culture.
It kind of makes you dizzy.
We hit another place or two and then got our collective acts together. We went, with the in-laws and some family friends, to New York City, tonight, here:
At the Lincoln Center there is a performance of MacBeth, staring Ethan Hawke as the cursed mad king. They play the whole thing for the poetry rather than the emotion. Hawke is a much better mad king than a reluctant and treacherous one. It was a fun show, seeing Shakespeare is always good.
They rushed through a lot of really great stuff — this is Macbeth, so of course it is great — as if they just really wanted to get to the last battle, which felt thin for different reasons. Perhaps if they’d lose the rapid fire delivery, and let the audience think about the spaces in between the lines, the show would feel stronger.
We finally had dinner sometime around midnight, at some cafe on the way back home. My body has no concept of regularly spaced meals any more. We’ll get that fixed tomorrow.
