My Uncle Bob

Recently, a relative of mine asked me if I was named after my uncle. Well, the story goes like this. My dad had my mom call up my aunt asking to speak to my uncle. You see, my dad didn’t know how to use the telephone. When my mom got my uncle on the line she said,

“Raymond wants to ask you something,” then she handed the phone to my dad who said,

“Are you gonna use the name 'Robert'?”

Uncle Bob said, “No.”

Them my father hung up. And that’s how I was named after my uncle.

For my whole life I referred to my dad's brother as my uncle. Growing up I didn’t know it was possible to have more than one uncle because I knew only one, and he was from Massachusetts. I also thought Massachusetts was very far away from Rhode Island for the same reason.

My uncle was my godfather and as such he often was a father figure in my life. When our oldest, Aidan, was in grade school, my aunt and uncle each year attended Grandparent’s Day. Often parents came up to me afterwards and said,

“My father and your father had such a wonderful conversation. He said your father is so interesting.”

My uncle was very engaging. When he met someone for the first time, he would ask them about themselves, and he would listen. I didn’t bother to tell the other parents that he wasn’t my father.

Back in 2001, my uncle stood in for my father when I wanted to go to Long Island to visit my grandfather's grave. Maybe it was because he was a WWI veteran, or because we shared the same last name or the mysterious circumstances of his death, my grandfather always intrigued me. Not my father though. He hated his dad, and I heard it many times growing up. His father had abandoned my dad and his brothers, Robert and Ronnie. He deserted my grandmother, Nativa, in the middle of the Great Depression leaving her to raise three boys on her own. My dad always said his father was a drunk who never sent any money home, which caused the boys and their mom to move around a lot because, as my father used to say, "they had to stay one step ahead of the landlord."

So I cooked up this well intentioned, stupid idea to find out where my grandfather was buried then take my dad there so he could "experience closure." Two days before we were to leave he called to say that he wasn't going. Back in 1938 after my grandfather was pulled from the Hudson River in New York City, my dad was on his way to the service in a car driven by my cousin's father in the middle of a hurricane. There wasn't enough room for Bob so he and his little brother stayed with their maternal grandmother who spoke only French. When the power went out, Bob was sent to the corner store to buy kerosene. His grandmother gave him two mason jars to carry the flammable liquid back to their house. Bob struggled to hold the jars until one fell to the ground. My uncle told me that story a few years ago, the disappointment still in his voice for being incapable of steading the jars in his eight year old hands during a Category 3 hurricane.

My father was more excited to go on a trip to New York than upset over his father's death. His callous attitude angered his mother who exclaimed,

"That's your father!"

Now my dad was reliving that event. He told me that he initially agreed to go because he wanted to go on a trip. The wounds of abandonment were so deep that he refused to join me, his only son, on a pilgrimage to honor my grandfather. I was bitter even though I knew it was a very rare thing for my dad to choose himself over one of his children. The next day, my uncle called to say that he would like to go. He had never been to his dad's grave. The following day Uncle Bob stayed with us in a house we were renting in Groton, Connecticut. The next morning we got on the ferry to Long Island.

On the trip over my uncle was very animated. He told stories about going to parks and the beach with his dad and mother and brothers. They were happy stories. Stories I never heard before. My uncle explained that back then during the depression there were no stimulus checks. The government expected families to pull together and lift the country out of the economic crisis brought on by the Great Depression. He told me that his father joined the Works Progress Administration (WPA) which required him to leave his family to build roads and bridges in other parts of the country.

Being on a ship even as a passenger reminded my uncle of his days in the navy. He talked of his adventures in the military when he was a younger man. The ferry's engines droned on as we crossed the sound on our journey to honor a soldier in our family. My grandfather was so proud of his military service that he always kept his honorable discharge papers in his pocket. My father showed me the documents when I was a kid. As he pointed to the water stains, he told me that the police used these papers to identify his father's body after he was pulled from the river. 

When the ferry docked in Montauk, we offloaded my car then drove to a train station to pick up my uncle's oldest son, Ron. After we all ate lunch, we made our way to the cemetery. Being three men, we didn't ask for directions. Using a folded map, we eventually found the cemetery. We didn't ask anyone how to get to the section of the cemetery we sought either. After a bit of wandering we located my grandfather's grave. I read on the marker that he was a cook in the army during World War I. After some time my uncle told us to go for a walk so he could be alone. We strolled a short distance away while admiring the grounds. When I looked back at my uncle, he was standing before his father's gravestone and saying something. I couldn't hear him, but I assumed he was reciting the Lord's Prayer. As I watched, my uncle came to attention and saluted his father.

We returned to the car, got Ron back on the train then drove to Montauk to board the ferry. On the way back, gone was the man full of stories. My uncle stared stoically out the window as the ferry plowed the sound. I wondered what he was thinking about. Was he remembering his life with his father and his mother and brothers? Or perhaps he was recalling his wife, Corinne, and their four boys they raised in Massachusetts. Maybe he was reminiscing about his lifelong friend, Don Verrier, who he met in kindergarten. Still yet, he might have been musing about his navy buddy, Bob Zimmerman, who served with him on the USS Missouri during the Korean War. My uncle looked to me and said,

"You know, I have to tell you something. Of all the people in our family, you were the only one interested in finding your grandfather."

My uncle was thinking about me. He continued,

"Family is important. You know, you''ll do a lot of dumb things in your life, and all you can hope for is that your family will forgive you."

My uncle did not live a life of less hardship, struggle or disappointment than my father. The difference is he forgave his dad, and that was his lesson to me.

Editor's Note: Robert's uncle passed away on March 8, 2022. He lived a full life of 92 years.

Thanksgiving Dysfunctia

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving at my house was an opportunity for me to mess with my sister's boyfriends. Once at the holiday meal, I launched into a seemingly meaningful story explaining to the guy a family tradition in which my mother would put an almond or something in the indian pudding. He listened thoughtfully as I explained that whoever drew the special something in the pudding would win a prize, then I gave a rundown of who won over the past ten years after which I said,

"This year my mother put in the pudding a toenail."

My sister would roar with laughter. My mother was suitably disgusted. My father usually wasn't paying much attention. He had the paper folded on the table so that a crossword puzzle or the word jumble was visible.

My mother always cooked a wonderful Thanksgiving meal, except as she got older she started burning the turkey because "undercooked turkey will give you worms." My wife, Christine, loves to cook. She tried to jump in and help out, but my mother always regarded everyone as incompetent. After five years Christine hadn't made it past preparing a few minor vegetables as the main course was deemed out of her range of cooking ability. So my wife would whip out the corn and beat potatoes into a mash while my mother roasted the turkey into a tiny, dried, dense ball of chalk.

My mother had a lot of good traits. She was an accomplished artist and could be very helpful when you needed to know how to do something like remove a stain from a porcelain sink or sew a complicated stitch. I always found my mother to be a little like the female lead in a Rogers and Hammerstein musical, one part dingbat, two parts well meaning. She had friends who were just like her. They all mostly stayed at home, inside. Women from the 1950's kept their worlds well organized. They never wore jeans, preferring polyester pantsuits. They had "house coats." They talked incessantly, rarely absorbing anything anyone said. In my youth I learned not to bother to tell my mother what was going on in my life. I once confided in her about something that was troubling me when she tilted her head back to look through her bifocals. I knew she wasn't paying any attention to my lamentations, but I continued with my story anyway. When I finished, she said,

"How long have you had that blackhead on your nose?'

I just explained how I was struggling with a stressful situation, and my mother's sage advice involved when to pop a zit. What do you expect from a generation who slept in separate beds by age fifty?

For my entire life, I've hated lima beans. Some people have tried to convince me that they were just not prepared correctly, but it's not that. I hate them. Every Thanksgiving for decades my mother made lima beans, and when she noticed I didn't have any on my plate she inevitably commanded,

 "Have some lima beans."

"I don't like them," I answered.

She asked incredulously as if this was new information,

"You don't like lima beans?"

"No, I don't. Going on forty years now."

Lima beans weren't the only vegetable that was an issue. Corn caused a lot of problems too. I like corn, but only so much. On Thanksgiving we loaded up our plates, then we all pretended like we were religious by reciting some immutable, incantation of a prayer, approved by the Second Vatican Council. I learned not to eat all my corn on my plate, but instead to leave a few kernels behind. My father picked up the newspaper looking for a four letter word that began with "d" for "opposite of Jane."

"You want corn?" my mother asked.

"I had some," I answered.

My father looked up, grabbed his pencil and said, "That's easy. Dick."

Then the heat came on and the baseboard hot water radiators began to expand. My mother issued,

"We need to get the water out of those pipes."

"It's a baseboard hot water system. It's supposed to have water in it," I explained.

"There has never been water in those pipes," she insisted.

I had a four year college degree in mechanical engineering and a masters in the same that I earned all with high honors, but somehow my mother never thought I knew what I was talking about when it came to a forced hot water system. It probably didn't matter much had I explained that if air was in those diminutive copper pipes, there wouldn't be enough mass to transfer sufficient energy to heat the house. Then my mother asked,

"Aren't you gonna have some corn?"

"I had corn, and I ate it," I answered.

"The sink in the kitchen is leaking," she then announced.

Every Thanksgiving since 1994 I had to sit through the Kitchen Sink Affair which happened in the summer of that year. On a warm day in July my mother had lifted the handle to the kitchen faucet to turn on the water. It broke off in her hand. Water shot to the ceiling. I dove under the cabinet for the shutoff value. It was behind a can of Easy-Off and a slew of products to remove pet odors. My mother was in a complete disarray. She sat in a rocking chair with the faucet handle still in hand and shouted profanity at the people who built her house in 1951.

Earlier that year she had called her plumber, Tony, to fix a drip in her kitchen sink. Tony, being the master plumber from the old country, replaced the stem in her sink with one that didn't fit correctly. You had to push up on the handle unusually hard to get it to work. Eventually the mechanism broke which led to the Fountain of Trevi in my mother's kitchen.

After inspecting the faucet I said, "This can't be the right stem."

"Tony knows what he's doing!" my mother exclaimed.

Christine is also a mechanical engineer with a masters specializing in thermodynamics. She looked the faucet over as well. Being a more diplomatic problem solver, she focused less on who did what and more on the task at hand.

"Let's go to Home Depot and get a whole new faucet," Christine declared.

She's smart like that. This wasn't a court of law in which blame was to be assigned. She just wanted to fix the faucet. So off we went. When we jumped into the car, Christine said,

"Don't say it."

We purchased a chrome faucet and hoses and installed it in under an hour. It worked beautifully. Shortly afterwards my mother had the faucet inspected by Tony the Plumber, and every Thanksgiving thereafter the story surfaced over dinner. Often she started with,

"Remember that faucet you installed?"

How could I forget the outpouring of gratitude?

"Well, I had Tony look at it, and he said that you installed the wrong stem."

"I installed the whole faucet. The stem was the one that came with it."

"No, Tony had to installed the right one," she insisted.

"And it leaks now right?"

"That's because you don't know what you're doing. Just like the baseboard."

"It didn't leak after we put it in," I professed.

"If you had put the right one in the first place, it would've never leaked!"

My father stirred as I mused that he was looking for a seven letter word that begins with "a" for "unpleasant person." My mother had no need for logic. She just pushed through life espousing her baseless assertions as facts. She was a free thinker in that she didn't let not knowing what she was talking about stop her from expressing her opinions. She never let faith in good intentions lead her astray as she recalled the sordid side of any story. She looked to my plate.

"Have some corn."

"I've had some corn. I don't want anymore. If I did, I would just get some more corn," I said in an overtly condescending tone.

I got up to use the bathroom before my head boiled off like the turkey. When I returned, my mother asked,

"Did you jiggle the handle?"

"What handle?"

"The toilet!" she shouted, "You need to jiggle the handle or the toilet will keep running. I thought you were an engineer?"

"We should replace the valve," Christine chimed.

"Home Depot is closed on Thanksgiving," I gladly offered.

"Tony will to do it. He knows what he's doing," my mother said.

Sure he does. Tony installed a used stem in my mother's kitchen sink which eventually broke, then he pulled out the guts to the faucet I installed and replaced it with another old stem that he just yanked out of someone else's house. I'm sure he was waiting for another call from my mother to fix her kitchen sink yet again. The wind rattled the old single pane storm windows.

"I need to get NewPro windows for the whole house."

My mother had one window replaced in the family room with a NewPro window. She called them incessantly about every little issue including a spot on the outside. Their lifetime warrantee came to an end shortly after a year.

"They're guaranteed for life, you know," she said.

"Or a year, which ever comes first," I added.

My mother looked about the table then asked, "You want some corn?"

As I stirred, I caught a glimpse of Christine communicating the nonverbal message,

"Don't say it."

I looked to my mother then my father who I assumed just got a seven letter word that began with "f" and ended with "g" which I wanted to use to describe the corn. Christine reached over and scooped a small pile of corn onto my plate. My father mumbled as he peered at the paper in the low light,

"Five letters, ends in 's' for 'fermented mare's milk.'"

"Kumis," Christine offered.

"That fits," my father exclaimed as he eagerly scrawled the word down.

When dessert was served, I drew the almond from the indian pudding. I buried it in the remains of my corn. We left shortly afterwards. Everyone hugged like we were a close family, but the reality was we were as close as we were religious. On the drive home I asked Christine,

"Why did you put that corn on my plate?"

"Because I'm sure it tasted better than your tongue," she answered.

More recently at our house we started a tradition on Thanksgiving to go around the dinner table and say what we are thankful for. Often the answers from younger family and friends involve gratitude for the support they received from their parents. I usually say something about my wife and our two boys then fan out from there to relatives and friends. Often I'm thinking of how lucky I am to be part of such a loving family given my experiences in my youth. People exposed to terrible things like drugs, physical abuse or racism often perpetuate the worst aspects of their upbringing. On Thanksgiving I'm thankful for not what I experienced but for what I avoided.

Come to think of it, I'm thankful of that everyday.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on November 23, 2016.

A Family Tape Scandal

In 1976 the country was celebrating the bicentennial with fireworks, parades and reenactments of historic battles. The big event was the gathering of tall ships in New York City for the Fourth of July. Before they sailed to the big party in the Big Apple, the ships were to convene on Newport, Rhode Island. Although my home state, we didn't actually go see the tall ships because my parents had only one crappy car that wouldn't have made the trip even though Rhode Island is the size of a large ranch in Texas.

My father was the only breadwinner in our family which meant that even if we made it to Newport, two of us would've had to crawl under the fence to get in to the festivities. I was the youngest and my father exploited this every time he had to pay an entry fee. He tried to pass me off as twelve long after I learned to drive and grew a mustache. Lucky for us the local news outlet was covering the visit of the tall ships all day and into the evening.

Back then videocassette recorders (VCR) were state of the art in home entertainment. At the time you could record one channel while watching another. On "extended play" (EP) you were able to tape eight hours on one videocassette. The quality wasn't so good, but you could stuff a whole miniseries like the The Thorn Birds on one tape. On "long play" (LP) you could capture four hours of television with a bit more quality. The best picture quality was achieved on "standard play" (SP) which offered the shortest duration, two hours. Videocassette tapes weren't cheap, but we were so we always recorded on EP. This would work out perfectly for my mother's master plan for the tall ships bicentennial celebratory extravaganza which was coming to our television that summer. The local news station planned on covering the event twelve hours a day for four days. My mother used a piece of paper and a pencil along with her Radio Shack calculator for the heavy math involved in determining the number of tapes she needed.

On her first attempt she came up with 24. At two dozen tapes, it looked like the once in a lifetime nautical circus would pass us by like a ship in the night. I checked her numbers.

"You can fit eight hours not just two," I noted.

"But I want the best quality," my mother declared.

I convinced her that it was impractical to switch out tapes every two hours. On extended play only six tapes were required which is the way they were often bundled and sold in bulk. Prior to the event my father picked up the blank tapes from Benny's, the local department store chain. My mother told him to get the highest quality tape, Sony, but my dad returned with six tapes labelled "GoldStar." My mother looked them over disapprovingly. She frowned but said nothing. She was a bit of a spendthrift. Once when she went grocery shopping, she returned with a broom handle and a scrub brush. My father asked,

"Where's the milk?"

"I didn't know we were out of milk," she admitted.

So my father did all the household purchasing. It made sense since he earned all the money. My mother taught art lessons in a studio she set up in the basement. She charged so little that she operated at a loss for decades. My father once said that her income didn't cover the light bill. Unlike my mother my father was good with finances. Along with lying about my age to get into events for less coin, he filed some pretty creative income taxes over the years. He wrote off my mother's art business losses with a devil-may-care attitude. As a struggling head of a household working two factory jobs while treading water in the stagnant economy of the 1970's, my dad thought a lengthy stay in prison for tax fraud would be a lighter sentence. He said that he always expected a letter from the IRS informing my mother that after a careful review of her tax filings, they recommend she try something other than teaching tole painting.

My mother often complained about money which led to my father taking on a second job. It never dawned on her that she should get a job herself in lieu of toiling away in her basement for fifty cents an hour. As long as she got her tubes of cadmium yellow, prussian blue and titanium white along with enough turpentine to level the family home should the stove catch fire, she was going to refrain from expressing her overt distain for the knock off videocassette tapes my father brought home.

As the historic event neared, my mother commandeered the television then dutifully manned the VCR, taping all 48 hours of the tall ships sailing up the bay, then down the bay, then back up the bay. The parade of sail dragged on all day and into the evening as each country unfolded their glorious flag under sheets of white canvas. My mother watched the spectacle of primitive power from yesteryear live so she could pause the recording during the commercials. As she watched, she commented,

"Raymond look. Spain."

My mother never left Rhode Island but over four days in the summer of 1976, she was a world traveller.

"Oh look. Brazil."

I was outside tossing a football with my friends in the street when she stuck her head out the door and yelled,

"Bobby, France!"

She even called up her neighbor, Dolores Schmidt, to tell her that the German ship was on even though Mrs. Schmidt was Polish. It was an exhausting four days, but we got through it. I missed the Price is Right and reruns of The Andy Griffith Show while my mother painstakingly recorded the entire epic event. She filled all six tapes with what my father secretly described as "the most boring shit ever recorded." My mother hand wrote the labels on each tape in her exquisite penmanship, identifying the day and date, then arranged each tape in the bookcase adjacent to a set of World Book encyclopedias. And there they remained for the next quarter century.

Whenever someone came across the six VCR tapes neatly lined up on the shelf, my mother would say,

"Those are my tall ship tapes."

This was usually followed with polite inquiry. My mother often explained the content of the tapes in great detail then followed with the declaration,

"They're worth money, you know."

A few years later we bought a boombox for my father on his fiftieth birthday. It picked up AM and FM radio as well as played cassette tapes. My father enjoyed everything from jazz to rock and roll. His favorite band was the Beatles. He took his boombox everywhere he went. On the weekends he stretched an extension cord across the lawn so he could listen to music while he puttered around his vegetable garden. One day he asked me if his boombox could record a radio station on the cassette deck. I took a look at the many knobs and levers. As I scrutinized the controls, I noticed that his boombox was a little banged up. One of the speaker grills was cracked and a knob was missing.

"What have you been doing with this thing?" I asked.

"Oh, it fell off the seat on the way to work," he answered.

The missing knob was for the selection of the tape type with options for,

1. Fe₂ O₃
2. Cr O₂
3. Fe₃ O₄
4. Metal

I wasn't sure what to set the tape selection to. Best I could tell it was positioned on the first compound and without a knob I recommended we skip the chemistry lesson and leave it where it was. I found the source selection for the cassette and set it to "Radio," popped in a tape then pushed the record button. When I demonstrated that the cassette contained the music played on the radio, my father exclaimed,

"Great! WPRO is playing the Beatles all day on Saturday. I'm gonna tape it."

My father purchased a block of ten 90 minute cassette tapes. Being doubled sided he had at his disposal 30 hours of recording time. On Saturday morning when the Beatles marathon commenced, my father was poised with his boombox and stack of cassette tapes. He painstakingly paused the recording between songs. He wrote down each title and counter number for ease of recall. As the day wore on my father manned his station filling up cassette after cassette with the entire Beatles discography. He burned A Hards Day Night, Help!, The White Album, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, hours and hours of music.

"How did it go?" I asked.

"Go ahead. Ask me any Beatles song," my dad proffered.

"Ok, Norwegian Wood."

My father pulled out his logbook and flipped through the pages. He ran his finger down the list of hastily scrawled titles which he ripped from the radio royalty free. He tapped his finger when he found the title, tape and counter numbers. After he exchanged the cassettes and reset the counter, he proceeded to fast forwarded to the target tape position. As the numbers rolled into the desired integers on the counter, he pushed the play button. Sure enough the familiar melody burst forward from the speakers, but that's not all he recorded. He also picked up the disk jockey blathering about a summertime sale on lawn chairs at Sears before the recording gave way to the lyrics.

"Alright!" my father exclaimed triumphantly as the song wound to a close.

And when I awoke

I was alone, this bird had flown

So I lit a fire

The deejay's voice interjected to inform us that Jake Kaplan Auto Group's blowout end of summer sale was underway.

"Everything must go to make room for new inventory!" the baritone voice boomed.

Isn't it good, Norwegian Wood?

"Go ahead. Ask me another," my dad commanded.

"Are they all like that one?" I inquired.

"Yeah, the audio is great!" my father offered, "Ask another."

"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

Picture yourself in a boat on a river

"Barry's, Barry's, Barry's, the video dance club in Warwick, now with six dance floors..."

Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly

"Nickel beers on Thursday nights!"

Suddenly someone is there at the turnstile

The girl with kaleidoscope eyes

"There's still time to get your Fudgie the Whale at your participating Carvel ice cream dealer."

My father smiled broadly as he patted his boombox. He wasn’t merely happy. He was proud. He could barely contain the intense satisfaction he felt for pulling off the heist of a lifetime. Forget the time he claimed the family cat as a dependent on his taxes, or when we sat through Star Wars twice in the theaters. He had just acquired hours upon hours of Beatles music for the magical mystery price of zippo. Unlike my mother my father actually played his tapes. He played them in the house. He played them outside. He played them in the garden. He took his collection and boombox to the factory where he work as a silversmith. Having trouble toting the many cassettes and boombox, my dad repurposed a plastic bag he used to transport his apron to and from his place of work. He tossed all the cassettes into the bag and was good to go. When I saw the tapes all free floating in the bag, I noticed a brown film on the inside of the satchel.

"What's that powder in the bag?" I asked.

My father snatched the plastic sack and peered into the opening. He wiped up some of the powder on his fingers.

"Pumice," he answered.

"Pumice?"

"You don't know what pumice is?" my father said with astonishment.

Now, I was pretty sure that pumice was a type of lava rock. I just wasn't sure why my father hadn't noticed that he had an abrasive powder inside the bag he used to carry his magnetically recorded pilfered music collection.

"You might not want to keep your tapes in a bag of pumice," I advised.

Dismissing my suggestion, my dad asked,

"The thing with the missing knob, what's that for again?"

"The tape type."

"What should it be set on?"

I really didn't know all that much about magnetic tape coatings, but I didn't think that was the real issue. Forget chemistry. The bigger problem was more likely to be geology.

"Set it to pumice," I said.

My father expanded his recording activities to include scheduled tapings of television shows via the VCR. Back then you had to enter start and end days and times through a cumbersome interface on the front of the unit. Mess up one AM/PM designation and you either got nothing or eight hours of a Public Broadcasting Service telethon. The aerial on the roof was also attached to a motorized unit that rotated the antenna when a dial was turned to a new compass heading on a box atop the TV. Forget to rotate the antenna and instead of recording Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom, you got an hour of static.

My father taped a host of shows and movies on extended play. Often he wasn't exactly sure how much tape he had left so when he recorded a movie, sometimes the tape ran out prior to the ending. His note and counter method of finding a recording, successfully employed with his Beatles pumice anthology, often resulted in taping over the finale of the preceding show. I urged my father to set the VCR to SP which shortened the tape duration to two hours, affording enough space for a few shows or one movie. It was much easier to locate the media he recorded with less entries on the tape. He numbered the videocassettes, then kept a list of what was on each in a notepad.

The system worked well for years. The incidents of cropped conclusions were dramatically reduced. Although he rarely saved a recording for very long, preferring to overrun his collection of tapes weekly, he did find that the number of videocassettes he managed started to grow, especially when he replaced the antenna with cable. With a hundred channels of unfettered televised bonanza flooding through the coaxial pipe, my father had no choice but to purchase more videocassette tapes. There is only so much time in the day, and my dad recorded much more than he could ever watch.

My father was a consummate fan of The West Wing, starring Martin Sheen as President Josiah Bartlet, Phd. He referred to the series as "adult TV" which is a little like describing comic books as "literature." Written by Alan Sorkin, the series employed the "walk and talk" to make the White House appear like a buzz of activity since a show chronicling government employees sitting in meetings would be both overtly boring and intrinsically uneventful. Most public servants saunter into their 9 o'clock meeting fifteen minutes late with their third danish in hand as they dribble their fourth cup of coffee onto the office carpet. I also pointed out to my father that the West Wing of the White House is not as large as depicted on the show and is certainly not as dark. The poorly lit set used on the series helped portray an air of intrigue. I've been in the West Wing, and I can say for certain that it is well lit.

One evening, my father was in a bind. His favorite show was on that night, and he was out of tapes. I assumed he looked through his collection with the intent on recording over the tape containing the material that least interested him. I was certain that's what he had done as I saw the VCR spring to life at the proper hour to capture the gripping drama chronicling the braintrust of our society making important decisions like how big of a tax break they should give toy wooden arrow makers. The steady stream of recording bliss continued over the coming years until the day arrived when my mother rediscovered her collection of six tall ship tapes neatly arranged on the bookshelf. As she slipped the first tape into the slot on the VCR, she reminded us all,

"These are worth money, you know."

The familiar scene of the tall ships under sail slipping beneath the Newport Bridge faded into focus. My father sat in his chair with the newspaper unfurled blocking his view of the television. My mother swooned,

"Oh look Raymond. Brazil."

I could recite the order of the countries for the first five minutes of the first tall ship tape as that is the only tape and duration my mother viewed throughout the remainder of the 70's. Ignoring the tapes for two decades, my mother now oddly displayed the same enthusiasm she exhibited when the event unfolded in technicolor years earlier. Her commentary continued,

"Oh my. Look at that one..."

"Romania," I interjected.

"How did you know that?' my mother asked, certain that middle school Catholic education couldn't have imparted knowledge of the Romanian flag.

"I watch those tapes all the time."

"Oh yeah, then what is the next ship?"

"Portugal."

When the Portuguese flag appeared on the television, my mother was astonished.

"Why don't you watch one of the other tapes before you wear out the first five minutes of that one," I suggested.

My father stirred uneasily as my mother retrieved another tape from the bookcase. As she exchanged the tapes in the deck, she reminded all of us,

"These are worth money, you know."

More legendary sailing vessels appeared on the television. My mother was riveted to the screen, mouth agape as she solemnly shook her head in a combination of disbelief and anticipation. She knew that she had captured in its entirety a historic, majestic bygone era that future generations will cherish with envy. An endless parade of square rigged sailing vessels gliding up and down the bay filled the television screen. And it was all worth money.

My father rattled his newspaper. I looked to him curiously then to my mother. She was focusing on my dad who hid behind a black and white paper shield. My mother looked to the television. The steel-hulled Argentinian schooling vessel, Libertad, was unfurling its sails. Her gaze returned to my father. Later in life I would recall this scene with more mature eyes which at the time were incapable of recording my mother's sixth sense, developed after four decades of marriage to the same man. She announced,

"Let's watch another tape," then she turned to me and added, "Shall we?"

She moved towards the bookcase. My father brought his hands together to advance the page of his newspaper, a gesture which made me think of a butterfly, strangely. My mother ran her fingers over the five remaining tapes on the shelf in the bookcase. She stopped on the one which was second to the end. It was number five of the series.

"This looks like a good one," she declared.

After ejecting the tape, she inserted another. I distinctly recall seeing the label disappear behind the door to the slot of the VCR,

"Tall Ships - Thursday, July 1, 1976 #5"

The television screen was black. My mother watched intently. Gone was the glee. Instead her pursed lips and stern gazed betrayed her resolve. I first heard the orchestral strings playing a familiar tune which I just couldn't quite place. Was it God Bless America? No. Bach maybe? I couldn't tell. Then the Presidential Seal appeared. For the briefest moment I thought my mother had captured a patriotic, bicentennial speech by Gerald Ford, the only president no one ever voted for, but the seal was quickly replaced by three words that flashed momentarily through white and yellow shimmering graphics. My father folded up his paper and began to rise while Rob Lowe's concerned face appeared on the television. My mother went through the entire cast line up. When the helicopter appeared followed by Martin Sheens's upward gazing face looking a little like Thomas Jefferson on Mount Rushmore, I turned to my father and blurted,

"You taped West Wing over the tall ships?"

My father was busted. In hindsight, it was bound to happen. With his recordings piling up, stuck without a blank tape on the night of his favorite show and not wanting to overwrite any of his recent recordings, my dad did what any cornered silverback would do. I thought of the scene in the 1959 movie Journey to the Center of the Earth when Hans caught the antagonist Count Saknussemm eating his pet duck. The Count said,

"I needed food so I took it."

And that's what my dad had done. He took it. My mother was furious. My dad explained that he had inadvertently put one of his tapes on the shelf for safekeeping. He was sure her fifth tall ship tape was among his videocassettes. My mother ejected the tape cutting off Martin Sheen's rant on the sanctity of each citizen's duty to cast a vote. She read the label which was in her own handwriting. My father shifted his story from a case of mistaken identity to accidental premeditated overwriting. He erringly recorded over my mother's tape. She wasn't buying that defense either so my father did the only thing a defendant presented with overwhelming evidence of guilt could do. He blamed me. Now that might have worked back in the day, but now that I was no longer the omega of our little troupe, I wasn't going to take the rap. Left with no other options to squirm out of the predicament, he fell on his own sword and confessed. The last time I saw my mother that mad at my father she caught him cheating at Scrabble.

My dad tried to make light of the situation by appealing to my mother's logical side which if was anywhere to be found was playing solitaire somewhere in the depths of her soul. He reasoned that no one ever viewed any of the tapes over the past twenty years. He explained that cross magnetization likely rendered the recordings unviewable which I found both compelling and impressive. He noted that the shelf life of the tapes had expired years ago. My mother handed the tape to my father then turned about revealing a broad smile. She left the room with a chuckle, leaving my father and I puzzled.

Apparently, the six tapes on the bookshelf caused my mother a certain amount of anxiety. She knew she was never going to watch all 48 hours of those fucking tall ships gliding about Narragansett Bay. In all those years she had viewed only five minutes of the first tape maybe four times. Even she thought they were boring. Now that the set was incomplete, she was finally free. A few days later the tapes disappeared from the shelf in the bookcase. The only one that survived was the dubious tall ship tape #5 which my father commandeered for his recording scheme. Eventually, it wore out.

As the years passed, I was certain that my mother's tall ship tapes ended up in a landfill somewhere in Rhode Island, but the truth is she never threw anything out. Most of my mother's belongings were spirited off by a friend of hers who after my father passed convinced my mother to make her the executor of her will. When my mother died, I was allowed to retrieve a few items from my childhood home. I took my wedding picture that was tucked in the back of a closet. I also got a framed collage of my sisters and me as children. I retrieved a bowl that a local artist made which I gave my mother on her sixtieth birthday. I was required to document everything I removed from the house I grew up in. When I emailed the information to my mother's friend, she didn't waste the opportunity to tap the animosity that had hardened on the surface of my family. She emailed me with,

"I find it astonishing that you are interested in family heirlooms."

I thought of responding with,

"That's funny. I was going to say the same about you."

But I didn't. Instead I answered,

"Enjoy the tall ship tapes. They're worth money, you know."

The Birth of a Family

My wife, Christine, and I remained childless for seven years after we were married. She never spoke, even once, about children, until we nearly completed a renovation of our first home. Out of the blue, she said,

William and Aidan

"Now that we have a house with all these rooms, we should fill them up with, you know, people."

"You mean babies?" I asked.

"Of course, what did you think?" she responded.

I was relieved that she was open to the idea of children. For a moment, I thought she was talking about homeless people.
 

Now, a routine doctors visit led to a test which came back with very bad news. A condition my wife had meant that we were not likely to conceive without help. It was one of the two times in life I saw my wife cry. Even if we were not going to have children on our own, I wanted a turn at bat. Thirty days later, much to the puzzlement of the medical experts, she was pregnant.

With a baby on the way, I started reading articles about how it's normal for some men to take a few months to love their newborns. We don't carry them so their birth is a step change for us. I remember thinking,

Aidan

"Who is this stranger coming to invade my life with my wife?"

Three weeks ahead of schedule, I was painting the oil tank when Christine went into labor. We had gone through several false labors including one trip to the hospital, all resulting in a gentle pat on the head as we were sent home. Now, I was covered in a thick mess of black, tarry paint. We had a routine appointment scheduled for the next day so I said with a certain conviction,

"I'm going to clean up, and we're all going to bed. We're gonna ignore this, and we'll deal with it in the morning."

Even though I hadn't a clue what I was talking about, it worked. The labor pains vanished. All three of us went to sleep. The next morning, just before we left for her appointment her water broke. Now, for those of you in the medical profession, mid wives, and with a stitch of common sense, you all know when the flood gates open, where do you go? To the hospital, dumb ass. We had this appointment in our heads so that's where we went. When we arrived, we were early so we sat in the waiting room. I looked to Christine and said,

"I think we can go right up there because, you know, you're in labor."

Seemed logical to Christine so she did that pregnant walk up to the counter, then stated,

"I'm in labor."

The nurse receptionist person who was wearing that odd mix of goofy medical person clothes said,

"Sure, you are, honey. Go sit down. We'll call you in a minute."

She sat back down next to me.

"What did they say?" I asked.

"They told me to sit down."

Now, I'm not a doctor, but I've watched a lot of medical shows on TV so I was pretty sure we should just go right in. I went up to the counter and said,

"My wife's in labor, and her water broke."

So they reluctantly agreed to take her in right away. The nurse person in her mismatched outfit of scrubs and flower patterns escorted us into the examination room very slowly and casually, but things changed once she examined Christine.

"Oh my God! You are in labor and your water broke. You have to get out of here!" exclaimed nurse person.

Nurse person looked directly at me and scolded, "Why didn't you take her straight to the hospital dumb ass?"

I don't think she said "dumb ass," but that's what I heard. She did have a valid question and getting more valid by the minute. I wasn't going to go over the earlier, multiple labor scares that were dismissed on the phone. Sure, it made sense now that nurse person was giving me the stink eye, but I didn't have time to discuss all that. I was collecting up my wife to drive carefully to the hospital. On the way out of the office, nurse receptionist person hit me up for a copay. In the medical business nothing is ever so urgent that we all can't stop, calm down, pull out a valid credit card and pay up. Turned out Christine had another twenty hours of labor to go. We watched the finale to Survivor, Pearl Island, Season 7, and Home Alone through it all. It was a long day and a longer night.

When Aidan finally arrived, I held him as I sat in a rocker and told him about all sorts of things we would do, the color of his room, the big tractor we had, the horses in the fields surrounding our house. Christine needed minor surgery six weeks later to correct that condition and that was that.

When Aidan was an infant, daycare wasn't for us. The idea of someone else comforting our child didn't work for my wife. I never expressed my view because she was having no part of it, and that was that too. We had picked up a lot of relevant education the seven years we were childless, and it worked out for both of us. She became a top person at a Fortune 500 company, and I had a good job in the software industry. When it came time to decide who would leave their job, the choice was obvious. My paycheck looked like a banking error compared to hers. So I left my exciting career as a software engineer for a minimum wage job, that is, nothing per hour.

If this was my life now, I was going to learn how to be the best at it. I got me a subscription to Parenting magazine. There was a wealth of information in that periodical on how to get stains out of things. There was also tips on how to get your kids to say "please" and "thank you." There was an article about "Toddler Tantrum Tactics." There were other pieces about recovering from pregnancy, what to do about postpartum syndrome, and taking the all important "me time." It didn't take me long to figure out that Parenting magazine was focused on moms. Just the moms. They didn't even hide it. Many of the articles were entitled "What Moms Do About..." or "Moms Speak Openly About..." They might as well write an article entitled, "Dads, Who Gives a Shit?"

I read a piece about my post pregnancy body, how it has changed, and how my spouse should accept me the way I am. I looked in the mirror. Looked the same to me. I wasn't into warm baths with candles and chamomile tea to steady my nerves either. My "me time" usually involved some ongoing house renovation replete with multiple trips to the hardware store. Apart from getting a stain out of the carpet, I didn't find the magazine all that useful.

I discovered that most of what you need to know about keeping a child warm, fed and secure is already prewired. It was actually pretty easy and a lot of fun. Much easier and way more rewarding than nodding off in some status meeting listening to Ted explain why he's six weeks behind an eight week project that he's been "working his ass off" on. Or sitting in a cube farm near the men's room and mentally noting that half your male colleagues don't use the sink after you hear the toilet flush. When my little boy was sleeping, I spent my time thinking. Taking care of a baby is a lot like being on sabbatical. You have no deadlines, no pending presentations, no projects to complete. It was very freeing. Leaving work offered the opportunity to freely think like I did when I was a kid. I still had some demands on my time, but holding that boy, making him laugh, feeding him, pushing him on a swing, even changing his diaper, never seemed like work to me.

And so I freed my head which started me thinking about recursion, a computer science concept in algorithms. I would do my heavy thinking while mowing the lawn. This led to a paper and a presentation at a prestigious software conference. My wife flew out to meet me in California after a well received presentation. As the saying goes "absence makes the heart grow fonder." Now, at the time we were in our 40's, and it didn't look like anymore children were likely. You can plan your life, but you can't plan your family. Sometimes, it just works out the way it does. Many women lose babies, and when you're an older parent, you just don't have time to try again. I'm fond of saying that I'm glad my wife and I listened to the doctors when they said we couldn't have anymore children. No more worrying about birth control. But life breaks free. Life expands to new territories. Painfully, maybe even dangerously. Life finds a way. There it is.

On that trip to California after a successful presentation in which I published the concepts surrounding my now world famous algorithm, Christine, against all the odds, biology and the cosmos, became pregnant once more. I guess when you think about it, your body doesn't know how many times it's been around the sun. So many people were simultaneously dumbfounded and happy for us. They all figured we went to a fertility specialist due to our forty something age. One friend said,

"We know how much hard earned money you invested in this, the sacrifices. We're so happy for you."

She actually used that term, "sacrifices." Christine was patient zero at her OBGYN. She was the first patient they had seen when they opened their office twenty five years ago when they were all fresh out of medical school. When she called to tell them she was pregnant, the nurse receptionist person put her on hold, then went to find her doctor. He took over the call,

"Are you sure?" her doctor asked.

"I'm sure of it," Christine announced.

Incredulous, her doctor yelled into the office, "Hey Ted! You'll never guess who's pregnant?"

"Margret Thatcher," Ted summoned.

"No, Christine Languedoc!" he exclaimed.

No pregnancy since Jesus elicited so much joy from so many people than our small, random miracle that was on his way. I used to ask Christine what she was going to do with all that frankincense and myrrh? She warned me not to tempt fate, but I knew we were already past that. Christine became the poster mom for women trying to have babies in their 40's.

I said to a friend once that kids are great because they ensure you won't be alone when you're old.

"There's no guarantee they'll come back," he schooled.

In our case, they wouldn't have left yet.

This time around, I was very concerned that I couldn't love a second child as much as the first. It just didn't seem possible. I wondered,


William

"Who was this stranger coming to invade my life with my wife and son?"

My friend, Bill, and his wife, Julia, have two girls, Caitlin and Allison. When I discussed my concern with Bill, he told me,

"Julia and I can't imagine life without Ally. You'll find you have an infinite capacity to love."

Bill was right. The moment William was born, I was in love again. It was like William was always with us. He was just waiting for his time to come.

William and I are renovation buddies. He's always up for a trip to the hardware store, and he's quick to help with any home repair project. He's also intrinsically funny and enjoys a good belly laugh. Once, I was exiting the bathroom, William asked,

"Did you go poopies, Daddy?"

"Yes," I answered. To which, William exclaimed,

"Way to go, Daddy! Good job."

Recently, I was reading William a bedtime story when he announced,

"I have to go to the bathroom," then he asked, "Can you pause that?"

We both laughed heartily. A lot of kids William's age are very stoic. They're quiet, shy, on the other side of a shell. I often think stoicism is an inability to make someone laugh. There's none of that in my house.

I think of the circuitous route that led us to where we are now. A long courtship, a marriage, education, a first born, a job, time to think, a white paper, a conference, another child, wise friends, laughter. They seem all disconnected, but they're not. They're blazes on the trail, marking even the path least taken. I believe now, more than ever that these events are all connected. Some more obviously than others. I'm not sure of all that much, but I am of this. Life is not meant to be abided.

It's to be journeyed.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on October 18, 2016.