And The Winner Is…..

And The Winner Is….

“Men are like pumpkins. It seems like all the good ones are either taken or they’ve had everything scraped out of their heads with a spoon.” Anonymous

According to the Chinese calendar, 2009 was the Year of the Ox.  Yet, 2009 was also a year dominated by H1N1 and men behaving badly. For all intents and purposes, it was the Year of The Swine.  It is appropriate on Valentine’s Day that we should always pay homage to those committed souls who understand that a lasting relationship is a lifetime achievement.  To remain faithful in an age that condones common law relations in lieu of marriage, transient “hook ups” and “don’t ask, don’t tell” liaisons is no easy feat.  It is like trying to whistle one’s way through a candy store while on a diet.

Men and women navigate these straits of fidelity differently. Men struggle at times with the concept of monogamy.  For all their bravado, men possess fragile egos that can enlarge or be damaged by seemingly prosaic events leading them to become more vulnerable to the siren’s call of life’s lost souls and home wreckers. Iconoclast Oscar Wilde saw men clearly as raw physical forces of nature.  In their pursuit of ego and power, men roam the world root out validation the way a swine might forage for truffles in the forest. “A man can be happy with any woman” mused the indulgent Victorian, “as long as he does not love her”

And so it has been since our meager beginnings as creatures creeping out of mud and dark waters, men continue to screw up a good thing.  Hubris, self-pity and the invention of hair coloring products have ruined more marriages and relationships than eating crackers in bed. Each year, a new class of “pigs” is admitted to the pantheon of philanderers, cheats and “is he out of his freaking mind” losers.  These offenders are indeed in dubious company.  The Hall of Shame is a who’s who of  “my will be done” piglets whose serial indiscretions visit shame and pain on anyone within a 200 miles radius.  They are politicians, CEOs, talk show hosts, average Joes and yes, even religious leaders.The more pious the offender, the porkier the pretender appears to us when they are finally outed for their reckless indiscretions.

2009 was quite a year for the sultans of swine.  This year we have chosen a Whitman’s Sampler of Valentine offenders who are all in contention for Swine of the Year.  It was a close race and our judges – John Gray (Men Are from Mars), Maureen Dowd (Men Should be Killed), Hillary Clinton (I Am Secretly A Man) and Regis Philbin (I am Secretly a Woman) were challenged to produce a single winner who validated the old saying that, “men marry women assuming they will never change.  Women marry men assuming they will change.”

After much deliberation, we offer for your approval a troika of tomcats who have managed to monopolize the media, ruin their careers and cause every man to feel guilty even when he has done nothing wrong. No words can truly describe just how far back these heels have set back male/female relations.  However, we have tried to memorialize their Win, Place and Show actions as a reminder to others that slime does not pay – -but the celebrity gossip group TMZ does. In winning the coveted Divine Swine award, these pigs have in their own way, helped families across America and have begun to establish fact patterns for women who are worried that partner is cavorting with a home wrecking strumpet.  Yes,  these 2009 “boys will be boys” curly-tailed infidels stooped lower than a well digger’s shoes. Let’s meet them, shall we?

(Applause)

Third Place Swiney – Governor Mark Sanford. This pig hails from the state that has a history of being the first to behave badly.  South Carolina was first to fire on the US in the civil war, and first to secede from the union – - as was its governor who seceded from his marriage after using tax payer money to carry on with an Argentine mistress.

Sanford caused a media sensation when he dropped off the radar for several days while the state legislature was in session. The father of four claimed that he was doing “foreign policy” research during his frequent trips to South America. We now know he was not camping in the Andes to clear his mind. He left his pup-tent at home along with his dignity.

What really distinguished this particular wild boar from the other straying swine was his public admission that he was indeed in love with his younger mistress who he considered his “soul mate.” He went on to say that he was going to return to his wife, Jenny, of 20 years to “try to fall back in love”.  The only thing he did not say was that he and his wife had one thing in common – they both love the same person. Yet, the Love Guv has met his match. Ms Sanford is no slouch.  She is a former VP of M&A at Lazard, tough campaign manager and the heiress to the Skil Power Tool fortune. She has now realized that she married the biggest tool of them all.

Second Place Swiney – Tiger Woods.  What can one say about this wax winged God of the dimpled ball who fell faster than the’ 08 Dow? Turns out Tiger was leading a double life and Scandinavian wife, Elin, did not clue in that the text messages signed “LOL” meant “lot’s of lap-dancing”.  The inch wide and a mile deep, uber athlete had an awkward, underdeveloped adolescence where he had not been allowed to play spin the bottle until he was 24.  According to Tiger’s high school sweetheart, Dina Parr, Father Earl, was also a serial slicer, known to occasionally drive out of bounds with female “friends”.

Tiger was not just leading a double life – he was playing an extra eighteen after the course had been closed.  Apparently his night vision goggles were not quite as keen as his light of day Tiger’s eye. As the legions of augmented, collagen lipped trollops crawled out from underneath bar stools and slid down stripper poles to greet us, we were expected to believe that these wholesome girls next door were really victims and that Tiger was just having, well – a putting problem.

You have to hand it to Woods and his spin doctor caddies.  They tore a page out of the Book of Really Lame Excuses and announced that the PGA pro was suffering from “sex addiction”.  He joins a long bread line of wayward souls who have finally found a clinical term to justify acting on the belief that the grass is greener on the other course. Have some empathy! This is a sickness. Just watch Dr Drew and Celebrity Rehab – Sex Addiction. Imagine if the stomach flu involved that much fun.  The clincher that cemented Eldrick Woods as our runner –up 2009 number two piglet was his rumored assertion to Elin that “none of the women meant anything. “

We have saved the best for last.  This human manatee has taken slime ball to a new level leaving his super libido pals behind to play handball against the curb. What is it about the Carolinas that spawns these swamp things with antlers the size of continents and brains the size of electrons?

Let’s give a southern “Deliverance”, Ned Beatty, pig squeal for our winning divine swine of the year – - VP, Presidential and STD candidate, ex-North Carolina Senator John Edwards.  This lying, pathetic sack of self deception fell into a deep coma of denial as he philandered with a bizarre earth mother who followed him 24/7 as his personal campaign videographer.  A recent kiss and tell book by ex-aide, Andrew Young called “The Politician” has unmasked this hypocritical scumbag (who made millions as an ambulance chasing, medical malpractice attorney) as a pathological liar and ego maniac.  Old “Love Lips” denied and then, when confronted with DNA evidence, admitted to being the father of Reille Hunter’s child – - carrying on while wife Elizabeth was being treated for terminal cancer.  Spouse Elizabeth is not entirely a poster child for “victim” according to Young, who claims she possesses a rather flinty and ambitious personality.  However, no amount of character defects can justify the senator’s frequent indiscretions and his duplicitous contempt for everyone that he was charged with serving or supporting.  Young portrays Edwards “as preening and arrogant, an Atkins dieter who hated making campaign stops at state fairs where ‘fat rednecks try to shove food down my face.’ Edwards was overheard to hiss,” I may have to represent them but I do not have to eat with them.”

Sen. Edwards is perhaps our most compelling choice in quite some time. He has carved a grand canyon of disappointment as a human being and a politician ( you notice that I distinguish between the two )  Edwards was portrayed to America as a pious, church going family man who was desperate to champion the cause of the little man.  Instead he chose to sire a little lady out of wed-lock with a Haight-Ashbury throwback who believes that their love child is “a golden messiah… the reincarnated spirit of a Buddhist monk who is going to help save the world.” One thing this miracle baby cannot save is Mr. Pig’s career, reputation and future as a reality TV star.  Possible contestants with Citizen Edwards on Celebrity Rehab – Lower Than Lowe (That’s Rob Lowe) will include 2001 Swiney winner, OJ Simpson, Son of Sam and Richard Simmons.

And there you have it – our 2010 Swine.  For 2011, we plan on expanding our ” Swiney” awards to include subcategories of cheating wives, star-crossed lovers and those caught en flagrante dilecto.  There is so much material and so little time.

However, do not let this dark Valentine drive you into the provinces of the cynical.  Love remains eternal, sacred and the essence of our human journey.  It is only through giving it away, that we can possibly hope to find it. The goal, as one poet shared, is to fall in love and keep falling in love with the same person – again and again.

Just make sure it’s the same person.

Fight Night At The Octagon

I’m a charming coward; I fight with words.  Carl Reiner

In the 1952 John Ford classic, “The Quiet Man”, John Wayne and Victor McLaglen square off in what some film critics have touted as the greatest fistfight in the history of American cinema.  The confrontation follows the two combatants across a half mile of County Mayo countryside as they exchange blows for a full twenty minutes.  After seeing John Wayne in action, it seemed to me that a boy wasn’t really a man until he had administered or been given a fat lip in a fistfight.

When you grow up among boys, you get beaten more times than your grandma’s throw rug. It is a rite of passage to be punched in the arm every morning and pinned to the ground by your older sib’s friends who proceed to administer medieval tortures like ” pink belly’, ” cauliflower ear”, “super melvins” and the dreaded “monkey bump”. You learn quickly that to cry outside the family is to invite further ridicule. You choke back tears; rise up out of the dirt, florid and humiliated – - intent on plotting the slow, painful death of each tormentor. In later years, you just hope that one of them comes to you looking for a job.

Being regularly beaten up for a decade left me two choices – man up or move to Canada. In the 1970’s all conscientious objectors moved to the great white north.  However, when it was pointed out to me that Canada had no McDonalds, I realized I must adapt to my hostile environment. Like an anthropologist I studied other families.  I noticed that the best adjusted and least bruised kids were those who were quickest to cry wolf at the slightest fraternal infraction.  I discovered that if I pretended to be more hurt than I really was, I could inflict greater pain than if I fought back.

It was a clever ruse to fake serious injury. At some level, my father knew that I was faking but he just could not stand the crying. He was angrier at my ear splitting screams and the disruption than the actual infraction.  He would ruthlessly administer swift corporal punishment to the offending brother and then yell at me to calm down.  Like a method actor, my ability to feign injury was the equivalent to the Star Wars Missile Defense System. It became a valuable prophylactic against the tyranny of older brothers.

While the internecine wars of boys were measured in scratches and welts, most of the scrapes I witnessed later in life, were one-punch affairs. Seasoned street fighters understood that landing the first punch improved their chances of survival. Cowards and thugs sometimes overcame opponents out of their weight class simply by deploying an underhanded technique called the “sucker punch”. The sucker punch was a risky and devious instrument of foreign policy where one considers the mere threat of violence as sufficient cause for a preemptive strike. This unanticipated offensive usually took the form of a head butt, nose punch or knee to the groin. It bought you time – precious time to press your advantage or in my case, run away if the attack failed.

Being the descendant of French Huguenots who fled from virtually everything, I was a pacifist and believed avoiding a fight was a good as winning one.  Having spent a childhood getting pounded, I could sense when social tensions were creating a low-pressure system that only a fight could fill. When the potential for confrontation began to escalate, I would ease towards an exit. If a fight did break out, I would be out of harm’s way. Once the outcome was determined, I could stumble upon the scene and pretend that I was furious at having missed the combat. Yet fights were like flash fires and sometimes one could not be avoided. When the bullets started to fly, it was important to pick your fox hole mates very carefully.

I always stuck close to my buddies who wrestled. There was a great mythology around the physical prowess of football players.  In my experience, a 260lb lineman moved like a Brontosaurus and possessed a similarly proportioned brain that gathered and processed data very slowly. Linemen were like the French forts of the Maginot line – big, imposing, and useless. Large guys just invited a sneak attack.

My fellow baseball players were generally useless in a scrape. They did not know what to do if they could find a mound to rush. Swimmers? Forget it.  They were usually preening their green chlorinated hair in the bathroom and waiting for any opportunity to remove their shirt so they could show us their 42 abdominal muscles. A swimmer might attempt one swift, girly kick before rushing off like a seal to find water where they would dare you to come and get them.

It was always the scrappy 158lb middleweight wrestler that was the force to be reckoned. This was a guy that you ignored at your own risk. He was the high school equivalent of a Navy Seal. He was frozen in a permanent state of self-imposed suffering. He would spit, starve and sweat while wrapped in a plastic suit for three days trying to make weight for his next match. He had less body fat than a POW and a surly disposition from all of his personal sacrifices that went unnoticed by a student body that was mesmerized by more mainstream power sports. He labored anonymously on a dusty mat for hours, risking staph infections and dislocated limbs – often contorted against his will into positions worthy of a cirque d’ soleil acrobat.

On many occasions, a fight would threaten to break out, only to have the 175lb team captain slip underneath an errant blow and wrap the drunken offender up faster than you can say ” Little Annie’s Pretzels” At this point, the wrestler would look up like an annoyed animal trainer and say, “could you guys get me a beer?” Below him, the larger, more sloth like offender was straining to get out of a hold that Houdini could not have escaped.  His captor would merely tighten his neck lock and whisper, “Had enough?” This was the inglorious bastard that you wanted as a wingman when things got hot.

Fighting was a part of growing up.  Before society became wildly litigious, it was a foregone conclusion that where there were boys gathering, fists would fly. Some parents came up with creative ways of resolving disputes including forcing the adversaries to put on the boxing gloves and resolve differences in the ring.

My dad grew up boxing. In those days, kids would go to the YMCA or hang around gyms and learn the proper art of pugilism. ” Keep up your left” he would coach.

“Jab-jab-jab!   Now, hit with the right cross!”

This was an era when professional boxing still held America captive with flamboyant light, middle and heavy weight fighters like, Alexis Arguello, Roberto Duran, and the greatest, Muhammad Ali.  Hollywood glorified the grit, violence, discipline and rags to riches nature of boxing through movies like “Somebody Up There Likes Me”, “Rocky” and “Raging Bull”.

Where there is sanctioned violence, corruption is not far behind.  Professional boxing ultimately turned on itself – fighting and splintering into divided federations and associations all claiming to be the lineal descendant of the National Boxing Association championship.  A grittier and less heroic generation of thug fighters emerged and with them, America’s thirst for a heroic fist-fighter descended to a new low –- Ultimate Fighting.

In this graphic spectacle of modern day gladiators, combatants wrestle, kick, punch, choke and assault one another until a bloodied fighter taps out (yields), passes out, is knocked out or is TKO’d by the referee.  They fight in a cage. When introduced many ultimate fighters reference years spent fighting in “The Octagon”. I have no idea where the Octagon is or if it is a real place.  It sounds like it should be next to a cock-fighting ring in Bangkok. I know where the Pentagon is but this citadel of pain actually has three more sides than the epicenter of all American military operations.

Ultimate fighting is brutality and the new breeds of fighters that engage in this sport are not muscle bound pugilists but ex-college wrestlers and kick boxers.  They are often former special-forces personnel who understand the art of hand-to-hand combat.  They have names like Kevin “Kimbo” Slice and Quinton “ Rampage “ Jackson. I am drawn to it like a spectator watching a barroom brawl.

It seems as if fighting has “devolved” It has become more primitive.  There is irony in this shift.  Perhaps it is a reflection on our society. We discourage our children from fighting.  We have become more gentrified and more accountable for our actions.  We seek to tame the “Id” within us. In our efforts to evolve into a more gentile, lotus eating society, our reservoir of anxiety and hostility cannot find an outlet.  Ergo, our need for brutal full contact fighting found inside an Ultimate Fighting cage.  Are we more or less violent than 40 years ago?  Are we unfulfilled and at our nature violent creatures?  Is boxing dying because it’s not aggressive enough?  Perhaps, we may find the answers to these and other questions inside the Octagon.

But just where the hell is it?

Learning To Play The Game

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away vertically challenged, slow moving kids from the suburbs were actually able to compete in basketball at the collegiate level. And so it happened that my father was able to play Division I freshman basketball for the Golden Bears at the University of California.

He is quick to admonish anyone who presumes his alma mater has any relationship to his political orientation. He went to school on an ROTC scholarship – which was the equivalent at Cal of being a carnivore at a vegan retreat. He firmly asserts that he is but one of five conservatives to ever actually graduate from that collectivist pocket of neo-liberalism that agitates restlessly within the nuclear free city limits of Berkeley, California.

My dad does not attempt to gild the lily of his on-court experiences. Unlike a graying collegiate whose hyperbole ages to a point of becoming fallacious fact, he would talk openly about rising to the level of his incompetence his freshman year at Cal.  I can recall walking into his study and seeing a black and white photograph of a young man with tight dolphin shorts and a body shirt jersey numbered 14 crouched in a defensive position.  Later in life, I would run into his high school and college fraternity brothers who would refer to him as “Hoops”.  They would fondly share stories about his competitiveness.  “ Your old man played with such intensity that it felt like there was more than one of him on the court. “

One of his old teammates reflected nostalgically on my Dad’s feverish energy level on the Cal freshman team. “The coach kept him on the team because he was so damn aggressive. He might foul out playing a guy tight but he could provoke the other team into making mistakes and inspire guys to push harder.  He was one of those players who made as many contributions away from the ball as he did when he was handling it.  He made other people better.

When asked about his hoop playing days, my father was always appropriately self-deprecating. He would joke and pointed to his opportunity to start as the end of an epoch when slow guys who could shoot with either hand had a chance to make a college team. Dunking was still something only policemen did with donuts.

My father was drilled relentlessly in the fundamentals of passing and dribbling. He was a thinking man’s point guard.  He was ambidextrous, feisty and possessed that innate invisible eye in the back of his head that allowed him to sense a pick, double team or someone cutting through the lane open for a pass. He was a team player always telling us that a “good assist is better than a good basket”. His coach was an irascible Southerner whose thick Mississippian drawl rendered him virtually unintelligible to his players with the exception of an intense chant that he would make as he watched his players, ” hum-baby, hum-baby, hum-Turpin”!

His hero was number 14, Bob Cousy of the Boston Celtics who at 6’ 1” and 175 lbs was a 13-time all-star, and remains the all-time leader in assists for the Celtics with 6,945.  The Houdini of the Hardwood drove the Green and White to six of their NBA ten championships. To my father, Cousy was the epitome of the unselfish player and reinforced the notion that a team wins or loses championships – not individual players. Cousy exemplified the notion that sports did not build character, but revealed it.

My father also idolized John Wooden, the wizard of Westwood, who coached UCLA to 10 national championships and 4 undefeated 30-0 seasons.  Wooden’s “ Pyramid of Success” was preparing his players not just for games but also for life. Dad would repeat Wooden, as we would discuss sports. “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”  “Never mistake activity for achievement.” “Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.

Growing up, we would gather under a rotting wooden backboard unevenly mounted on a trellised ivy fence and shoot baskets for hours. Ever the advocate of Wooden, my father colorfully referred to practice as “relentless repetition leading to rehearsed exhibitions of excellence” He installed a light so we could spend our warm Southern California nights working on free throws, lay ups and jump shots.

While family genetics denied us height and speed, he was determined that we would have heart. We were reassured that it was literally possible to out work any one if you wanted it bad enough. Basketball was my first glimpse into my father as a person.  I saw his passion and his child-like love of the game.  The hardworking taskmaster would transform before our eyes when he touched that 29” ball.  This orange orb would spin on his finger and then loop between his legs  revealing to us the child that grew up hustling on the West side of Chicago.

My father explained that basketball was a physical game about using your God –given assets. As my quicker, more nimble brothers would head fake me and dribble past me like a road sign, I would simmer with competitive anger.  As he studied my abilities and weaknesses, he taught me to camp in the lanes and block shots.  He told me to use my body and to make guys “pay for coming into my neighborhood”

I was a big, solid kid with cement pipe legs and a turtle shell stomach.  My asset, in this case, was my rear end which I would deploy to box people out of rebounds, and hip check a driving guard into thinking twice about coming my way again.

“Don’t let him come into your area like that! If he dribbles past you and no one picks him up, foul him. Make him shoot a free throw. Always remember, you have five fouls to give.”

As with all youth sports, high school changes everything.  I was determined to try out for the basketball team but knew that my passion for the game would not show up on any depth chart.  I was slow, had the vertical leap of a houseplant and was confused by the fast break offense that was a staple of our coach’s playbook.

I worked my tail off that fall – running, diving, practicing and participating in tournaments as the coach slowly whittled the thirty some odd candidates down to a dozen players.  On the last day, there were fifteen of us and we knew three would not make it.  We held a scrimmage that day and I held my own, sinking a jump shot to help cushion our squad’s win.  I made sure that I did not finish last in the sprints and suicide line drills even though this left me to the point of puking.

I will always remember that call the next day as the coach called me to his office to tell me I had been cut.  In an era before cell phones and real time updates, I stayed after school at the local pizza parlor – waiting to go home to coincide with the end of practice.  I ate a large pizza. I did not want to tell my father I had been cut from the basketball team.

I recall walking into the house and seeing him reading his paper – wearing the same apron that my mother made him wear to prevent him from staining his shirt and tie.  He lowered his paper and smiled. “ So buddy, how was practice? Did they announce the team? “ I vaguely flirted with lying to him but the thought of spending the next several weeks hiding out at Tony’s Pizza waiting for practice to end would turn me into an overweight, pimple ridden loser.  I had let him down.  I could not outwork the guys who made the team.  I had failed him and myself.

I burst into angry tears and swore – sharing the news that I had been cut.  He put the paper down and sighed.  I saw again in his face that same youthful enthusiasm I would see on that driveway basketball court each weekend.  He smiled.  “Pal, John Wooden used to say, ‘if you’re not making mistakes, then you’re not doing anything.’

I am proud of you. And I know you gave it everything you had.  Failure isn’t fatal, it’s the thing that ultimate makes you better.”  He returned to his paper.

He looked up at me. “ And besides – - that coach is an asshole!  He obviously doesn’t know talent when he sees it!”

In the kitchen I heard my mom drop a dish and I could tell she had been listening – preparing to rush in upon my exit to tell her husband what a wonderful father he was.   I laughed and hugged my dad.  He winked at me and I went off to bed.  As I climbed the stairs I could hear him fighting off my mother’s stern reproaches.  “ Oh Ruth, I was just trying to….”

How Do You Like Them Apples?

“I am in shape. Round is a shape.”  – Anonymous

Across America, January has become 31 days dedicated to self-improvement. More money is spent on memberships and advertising for gyms, weight loss programs, and physical fitness equipment such as abdominizers and glute masters than any other time of year. Personal trainers are once again in high demand as disgusted, over indulged adults have moments of clarity with buttons popping, pants ripping, beds breaking, partners criticizing and television validating that something literally must change.  Time is running out as the arc of a cold winter sun climbs in the southern sky and with each degree comes the certainty that soon one must don a bathing suit or remove their shirt in public.

Perhaps more than any other program in popular culture, The Biggest Loser television show typifies the state of America parading a two ton assembly line of grossly overweight Yanks through fitness regimens directed by trainers Alison Sweeney, Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels.  With her super-hero abs, bleached teeth and prison guard chin, Ms. Michaels encourages, cajoles and berates her Team Red contestants through a physical and emotional wilderness as they seek to heal their lives and find that “inner thinner” person that is struggling to be free.  In some cases, contestants may find that they have several people living inside of  them.   Depending on your perspective, the Biggest Loser is a moving spectacle of human determination or a frightening flashback to the time you and your children were almost stampeded at a Cinnabon counter at Disney’s Epcot Center

This holiday season was a rough one for this old calorie counter.  I am not sure exactly what triggered my sudden lack of self-control – teenagers, Mary W’s famous lemon bundt cake, health reform, The Giants collapse or a pending knee operation.  I approached each dinner party and cookie tray as if I were a Hemmingway protagonist living moment to moment during the Spanish Civil war.  “Ask not for whom the dinner bell tolls, it tolls for me.” “Eat up my friend, for tomorrow, we all die – or at least have to put out the trash.”

By January 2^nd, I felt like a walking “Yo Mama” joke.  “He’s so fat, when he turns around, his friends throw him a welcome back party.”  “ He’s so big, he could be married to three women and they would never meet.” “ He’s so large, his cereal bowl comes with a life guard.”. In the past, my Christmas binge would lead to weeks of self loathing and inaction.  Then something would usually happen in late January or early February.  Perhaps, it was the realization of an upcoming trip to a warm climate or the development of New Year’s photos where I could swear that I had a small moon orbiting around me.

Fortunately, over the years I learned that overindulgence could be domesticated simply by getting back on the horse – or in this case, the elliptical machine. After years of running and scoffing at people who chose treadmills and machines over asphalt and open road running, I have become a gym rat. Every January, I now watch as new inmates, pregnant with remorse and resolve wander into the gym to tackle treadmills, activate latent muscle groups and begin a path toward self-improvement.  For some, it is court ordered – - a spouse or physician has laid down the law that the consequences of an indolent and carbohydrate filled life has accelerated their advance toward chronic or catastrophic illness.  For others, it is a closet epiphany as they discover that some malicious necromancer has shrunken their entire wardrobe.

I cannot help empathize with these ardent amateurs as they attempt a bicep curl, a bench press of 135lbs, a pull-up or pull-down.  I watch in amusement as they awkwardly approach the aquamarine squishy ball with its five odd utters poking out as if to say, “ here I am fatty. Care to do a few crunches?”  Men and women approach it differently.  Women join classes and seek the companionship of others. They want encouragement and community. Men are in denial.  Most waltz into the gym and pick up where they left off in college – trying to bench 225lbs – and promptly injure themselves.  Others cautiously lurk in the shadows waiting until odd hours to avoid the jury of their better-conditioned peers who seem to be silently watching in distain. Within weeks, most are tragically gone – too discouraged, too sore or too apathetic to sustain the routine necessary to restore their bodies.

Some turn to professionals for help combining a professional trainer with portion control masters Jenny Craig or Weight Watchers.  A few nostalgic coeds revert back to college days and begin starving themselves – - drinking Tab cola, eating lettuce leaves and then secretly binging on M&Ms when everyone goes to bed.  The most well adjusted among us dismiss all of the superficial pressures imposed by our “makeover” society and declare themselves “zaftig” and proud of it.  These well proportioned kings and queens of cushion reason that they are wonderful monuments to the golden age of Peter Paul Rubens. In that gilded time of art and consumption, abs meant absence of prosperity. Thin was not in.

We can now point to Queen Latifah, the late Barry White or Kirstie Alley as successful full figured celebrities who achieved utter acceptance from a highly self conscious society.   I am actually relieved to see that our societal stigma with weight is waning and that we actually have created a new class of celebrity – the Big Handsome Man ( BHM ).  According to Wikipedia, “Big Handsome Man or sometimes Big Beautiful Man (BBM), refers to a physically or sexually attractive fat man. These men are large to extremely large. There are many subcategories of BHMs. Some are men who just happen to be large, while others attempt to become fatter. Some of these men are insecure about their size, while others embrace their larger bodies and feel confident. Women who are attracted to BHMs are called Female Fat Admirers (FFA). In the gay community, BHMs are called chubs, and men who are attracted to BHMs are known as chubby chasers.”  Damn, and all these years I have been passing on those Krispy Kremes.

Body image is a tricky thing and we all understand that the true beauty of an individual is reflected most in their actions. Yet, we all crave love and attention.  When we falter, we overreact and declare martial law on our lives through diet and excessive remedies. As I have gotten older and wiser, I have come to learn the pitfalls of pendulum swings and fads. Perhaps my favorite story concerns my very close friend, Robert whose 24 hour fit of self improvement left an indelible mark on his family, his pocketbook and his living room carpet.

It was a New Year and Bob was surrounded with the usual thousand good intentions that fell silently around his head like ticker tape confetti.   Yet, his main emotion this January 1 was utter disgust as he considered his physical condition.  Long nights and weekends spent as an analyst at a New York investment bank had rendered him pale, overweight and unable to even climb the stairs at Grand Central without heaving like a climber on his final approach up K2.  The lithe college athlete and gym rat who had spent countless hours playing pick up basketball was now an indentured, gold collared pig.

On this particular January morning, Bob was coming off a weekend spent with friends watching football – eating pizza, chicken wings, chips and sodas.  He avoided the mirror as he slipped into the shower – careful not to wake his wife, Ann, who would sleep in an additional two hours and then head to yoga class. In a troubling turn of events, Ann had recently stopped reassuring him when he would rhetorically ask her if he was getting fat.

Bob quickly dressed and slipped into suit pants that had been gratefully adjusted to 39” in the last month.  The baggy pant legs and spacious shirt made him feel like a rap performer in a woolen, pinstriped costume.  His normal commute would take him downtown where he would exit, cross to local food emporium for a breakfast burrito and a four-shot vanilla latte.  Today, everything would change.  Today he was going on a diet.

At the food emporium, he nervously passed the scones, donuts and empty carbohydrates and ventured into a new neighborhood of colorful health foods. Directly ahead of him stood a cornucopia of fruit – bananas, sliced kiwi, Red Delicious apples and plump tangerines.  He grabbed two apples the size of soft balls and poured himself a 20 ounce black cup of coffee.  By 8:20 AM, banker Bob was at his desk – having consumed his high fiber breakfast and 20 ounces of muddy Green Mountain French Roast.  He was energized.  He was prepping for a huge meeting with a corporate client who was looking to refinance almost $2B in debt.  He was getting a chance to lead the presentation.  Perhaps, his new diet and exercise regimen would give him the extra confidence he needed to finally get promoted to the capital markets team.

At 10 AM, the first intestinal rumblings began.  He shifted uncomfortably in is chair but was on the phone and unable to get up to use the restroom.  Sensing that he may be suffering from trapped gas, Robert moved again hoping that no one would notice if he engaged in a sudden but silent release of methane gas.  As the pressure was building, he could stand it no longer and eased to his left.  To his horror, a floodgate opened resulting in a very embarrassing accident.  This was not a small accident but a very substantial one that would be impossible to disguise.

His suit pants, were already bleeding dark in the seat and he was forced to shuffle to the restroom.  Once inside the lavatory, he realized his situation was dire, very dire.  So dire in fact, that he must escape the office, take a cab uptown to his co-op, and race to the office before the client arrived at 11:30AM.

Arriving at his matchbook apartment, he leapt from his clothes, showered, changed and sprinted back to complete his presentation. He arrived on the same elevator as his client and miraculously was able to complete his presentation.  He labored until 11PM that evening following up on a variety of projects that had been subordinated for this one opportunity.  He had visited the restroom seven times that day and now wondered if perhaps, he had a mild form of flu from eating unclean fruit.

At noon that same day, a leotard-clad Ann entered the co-op returning to shower so she could meet a friend for a late lunch.  Rob was working late and she was looking forward to her day in Soho. As she walked in the smell hit her – - that same aroma that grasped and assaulted her as she backpacked across Southeast Asia in the early 1990s. One problem – this was her America and her living room.  She turned and saw the pants and the first days result of her young husband’s self -improvement plan.  She gagged and retreated from the apartment. Love may be blind but it could still inhale. He is now forever known as “Regular Robert”.

Like Robert, my experience with self-improvement has hardly been a study in moderation.  However, I do keep coming back to the gym – even when every ounce of my being wants to sit in my leather chair, eat cookies and watch Cops. It’s never too late to start.  We fight a losing battle every day with time and nature but there is no reason why we cannot maintain a high quality of life well into our later years. My advice is find a trainer, get into a routine and count your calories.  Whatever you do – don’t do it too quickly.  Be patient. And remember, an apple a day, keeps the doctor away.  Two apples?  You’re on your own….

Trains, Planes and New Year Resolutions

Trains, Planes and New Year Resolutions

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath.  Today, we are a pious and exemplary community.  Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.  ~Mark Twain

I am standing, no, sleep walking in Penn station at an ungodly morning hour staring at the rattling tote board of arrivals, departures and assigned track numbers.  A heroin addict has just scampered out in front of me like a giant subway rat clutching a handful of C&H sugar packets – presumably to temporarily mollify the beast of addiction stirring within her.  The dank corridors, low light and my bleak midwinter Vitamin D deficiency make me feel as if I am transforming into a vampire.  Perhaps sun deprivation is causing Seasonal Affective Disorder.  I consider the year that awaits me as I carry on to Newark airport and a business trip to Ohio – - another 365 days of yo-yoing stock markets, political uncertainty and twice-as-hard-to-be-half-as-good work environments. I know I am not in a good place when an elderly woman walking by with cup of coffee makes me despondent.  Am I losing my mind in this neon and halogen habitrail underworld of planes, trains and cheap hotels?

During thirty years of laboring in the vineyards of America Inc and Europe SSA, I do occasionally experience episodes of self-pity. I refer to them as my “Talking Heads Moments.”  Somewhere off in the distance, David Byrne is jerking his shoulders and crooning:

“And You May Find Yourself Living In A Shotgun Shack

And You May Find Yourself In Another Part Of The World

And You May Find Yourself Behind The Wheel Of A Large Automobile

And You May Find Yourself In A Beautiful House, With A Beautiful Wife

And You May Ask Yourself-Well…How Did I Get Here? “

My descent into the limbo of self-assessment is predictable.  It appears like a noon-day demon every first few weeks of a new year – brought on by post holiday blues, back to work doldrums and the frenetic pace of travel that always precedes budgets and a fresh year of earnings expectations.

The dark thoughts scratch at my mind’s door on a snowy January morning in an economy hotel outside of Toledo where I am giving a speech. The Toledo Comfort Inn is the depressing vortex of my self-reflection.  My room resembles that old couch that you purchased from a second hand store for your college dorm room or first apartment. If one were to use a black light in this den of drab, it would most likely resemble a Manson Family crime scene. My wake up call through paper thin walls is the muffled hacking and unearthly sounds of a heaving travelling salesman as he takes his first cell call of the morning.  Against a backdrop of his bellicose cursing, I step under a showerhead the size of a thimble.  The hot water is a stinging stream of pins that push me against the tiled wall like a bystander in some riot. I am not amused. In these nadir moments of life, it is best not to write a memo to your boss, make major decisions or operate heavy machinery. On these days, life just seems to be one endlessly existential, nihilistic rut.

At breakfast, I remember why I hate staying in commuter hotels as I make eye contact with an elderly man from a tour group.  He has been staring at me for over 15 minutes.  His is not one of those, ” don’t I know you? Or ” didn’t we meet at…” kinds of stares.  This is an ” I wonder what your head would look like in my sweater drawer” stare. I move to a new seat in the waiting area.  The temperature in this overheated corral is around 100 degrees.  It’s like an Indian Sweat Lodge and I am about to see my spirit animal in a dehydrated state of blue-collar delirium. I remember that someone once told me when feeling low that I should “ move a muscle and change a thought”.  I decide to write down my goals for the year.

Ah yes, the New Year resolutions. Perhaps this simple act of planning will prove cognitively therapeutic – breaking me out of my mental doldrums and distracting me from the octogenarian serial killer who is day-dreaming about holding me hostage in his basement. I gaze across this lumpy ocean of Middle America grazing on glazed donuts and coca puffs in the breakfast lounge,  and wonder what happened to my grand goals and resolutions?  Where did the upstart populist Senator go ? What became of the college literature and history professor? Was it me or my goals ?

“How did I get here?

Goals and planning were compulsory in my family. Each January, we were asked to record our goals for the year.  My father insisted at age ten that we charted our “stars to steer by”.  We were expected to focus on personal, academic, financial and community goals. We thought it was a bit odd that we were the only kids in our class with a balanced scorecard and performance appraisals.  It was bad enough that we would receive a day planner every Christmas as a stocking stuffer.  What I was going to do with a calendar when I did not even have a secretary?  I do recall attempting entries for the first few days of January only to eventually orphan the calendar and finally condemn it to the garbage. Dad’s theory was that boys were like cars with no GPS device. Goals were important touchstones and fundamental DNA for any worthwhile life journey. “For God’s sake.  You would not drive to New York from Los Angeles, without a roadmap. Would you, son?”  This query was usually followed by my best stupid face as I incredulously pondered,” Why would I ever drive to New York?”

Our family patriarch promulgated goals.  Acceptable submissions included: Get good grades, don’t hit your brother, do not be rude, pick up your clothes, set aside $ 100 to your college fund and do not steal my (father’s) underwear. My dad would smile and clap me on the back, as I tendered and posted my public objectives. He would faithfully staple my manifesto to the breakfast room bulletin board along with my brothers’ best intentions.  These lists would remain like public health inspector assessments for the entire year. They were constant reminders of our commitment to self improvement.

As we moved into high school, we created two sets of goals.  Like any worthwhile double agent, we had public goals and private agendas. Under threat of death, we would share our goals and attempt to outdo one another with wild boasts about our prowess as men. Life was not about the future but about the venal here and now. Forget next year.   Quality of life was measured in three-month increments.   Carnal knowledge, sporting accomplishments, plausible hyperbole and bouts with acne impacted your social standing greater than any grade point average, religious denomination or economic trend. My 17th year was a critical transition year and I was determined to exploit my new driver’s license and fourteen hairs flourishing like palm trees on my upper lip.  My confidential aim for the stars aspirations included:

Goal 1 – Ask the majestic Kerry K on a date (I had adored this girl since the fifth grade but would experience a mild form of verbal constipation when I so much as laid eyes on her. For several years she believed I was mildly retarded)

Goal 2 – Attend 4 Dead concerts (I was not sure how I would get the money or transportation but becoming a frequent flyer at Grateful Dead concerts was the social equivalent of being a Platinum card holder)

Goal 3 – Do not drink and drive (we all saw the film “Red Asphalt” in driver’s ed), do not drink beer on weeknights or the night before any baseball games  (In the socially liberal 70’s, boys did indeed buy pony kegs and parents were not hauled off to jail for being ignorant of this fact. Moms sometimes returned the kegs to the liquor store to get the deposit back)

My resolutions would fluctuate from ambitious to aimless with each New Year but I never failed to put pen to paper. I was always focused, like Catholics at Lent, on striving to cure my defects of character and mastering suboptimal parts of my life. As I got older, resolutions became like spiritual deductibles that instantly reset each January 1.  My goals became mountaintops that I sought to conquer to test and define my character. I did not complete many resolutions.  Like any good baseball player, I considered a .300 average as worthy of being an all-star. In some cases, I did not complete a resolution for years.

I think of my goals and resolutions.  I still have not tracked a snow leopard up the slopes of Mt Kilimanjaro, published a book, battled with a massive sailfish in the Gulf Stream or studied the great religions of the world.  I have not left footprints on every continent.  However, there is still time. As I sit in the warmth of the Comfort Inn, I realize there is time. There are mountains to be climbed, books to be read, children to be educated and a world to be changed.  William Thomas said it best when he remarked, “it would not be New Years, if I did not have something to regret.”  To which FM Knowles would glibly reply, “ He who breaks a resolution is a weakling.  He who makes one is a fool.” Personally, I think Benjamin Franklin said it best, “Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each New Year find you a better person. “

As for the resolutions of 1978, I finally asked Kerry K out but not until I was 22.  By then, the bloom was off the rose for both of us.  I did make those Grateful Dead concerts but all I can remember is some twirling girl named Golden Blossom.   I did not exactly master self-imposed prohibition but years later, I discovered my own boundaries and learned to appreciate a Saturday morning sunrise.

The snow has stopped and the Comfort Inn breakfast lounge has emptied.  It is time to get moving – into a new day and a new year.  I have miles to go before I sleep.

Who knows, perhaps this will be the best year ever.

Operation Kiva

Operation Kiva

On December 26, 2009 – a day where most Americans were clearing away their Boxing Day holiday debris, Army Spc. Jason M. Johnston, 24, Albion, N.Y died in Arghandab, Afghanistan, when insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.  Jason had been assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.

To quote his local Albion, NY newspaper, “Johnston lived a heroic life.  He (had) a devilish grin and how he loved to sing, dance and be goofy. ‘To most people, he’s frozen in time as a 6 year old, climbing trees, doing crazy and wacky stuff to make people laugh,’ Brett Irwin said, eulogizing his friend. The congregation laughed, but as Irwin continued, his words became choked by tears.

‘I wish I could stand here and tell you people it was all good, it was all happy, but that wouldn’t be true … he had troubles, and pain.’ The Army was a way for Jason to change his life.  Irwin joked that, when he meets Johnston again in heaven, his lifelong friend will ‘be leaning against the wall, with a Coors in one hand and a Marlboro in the other … and he will say to me, ‘There you are, brother. Why are you so damn late for everything?’

Jason had joined the military to complete his education and to find a purpose that had been missing from his life. On the day of his fatal convoy, he reassured his senior officer that he was ready to meet the challenges of the day’s mission.

As I turned from my computer and allowed myself to drift across a winter landscape of frozen snow, I considered the young men and women being mustered across our nation to follow the courageous steps of Army Spc, Jason Johnston.   I sat restless and irritated, my middle aged suburban life insulated by this gauntlet of youthful brave souls, impotent to keep them out of harm’s way.

On a frozen December morning, 6000 miles away in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, Said Pacha Mohammed Ali awoke to a knotted, sore back.  He had been working longer days — stocking the shelves of his retail store where he has recently expanded his business. Said Pacha has operated his retail shop for over ten years. His city, Jalalabad, is the largest urban area in eastern Afghanistan. It spirals from its center, swirling into a spider’s web of suburban countryside fields linked by fragile dirt roads and primitive housing.

Said is an older man who provides for an extended family and like so many, he longs for political reforms, security, peace and stability that might allow him to prosper. Pacha is a rational voice and respected elder in his neighborhood because he has known hard labor and hardship his entire life – - enduring the Russians, Taliban and the unstable Karzai regime.  He is like the rough gypsum rocks that litter the open fields and ancient geology of the jagged mountains. He endures but longs for a broader peace so his business might flourish. Pacha has suffered from the warfare, corruption and danger that has suffocated his country.  Until recently, he had been unsuccessful in expanding his business.  He desired to create jobs for relatives and dreamed of meeting the demands of a growing community. Investment, like peace, had been non-existent. Although he lacks formal education, Pascha clearly understands that a stable economy is the only sovereign capable of taming this harsh tribal land.

On the day, that Army Specialist Justin Johnston was killed, I joined a family from New Zealand, Santa Barbara, Germany and Massachusetts to loan Said Pacha 50000 Afghanis to enlarge his shop and purchase merchandise.

I found Said Pascha Mohammed Ali through KIVA – a non-profit global microfinance organization. Labeled “Barefoot Banking” by some analysts, microfinance is becoming big business for the world’s smallest businesses.  Kiva was founded in October 2005 by Matt and Jessica Flannery.  The couple’s interest in microfinance was influenced by a 2003 lecture given by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi banker and economist who founded Grameen Bank. Yunus previously was a professor of economics where he developed the concept of microcredit loans given to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. In 2006, Yunus won the Nobel Peace prize for his efforts to spread micro-financing as an essential thread binding together a wealthy but removed Western society with a frayed network of disenfranchised individuals who subsist on less than $ 1 a day.

I had joined a Kiva loan consortia hoping to create enclaves of small consumer investment.  I labeled my end of year altruistic efforts “Operation Kiva” hoping that I could invest ahead of the next soldiers that would land in Afghanistan.  Perhaps a more stable economy and hope in a brighter future could defuse the dark arguments of those who might try to convince Said Pacha Mohammed Ali to put down his broom and pick up an IED.  Could a $100 loan save a life?

Per a recent web article on micro finance, Kiva had distributed $110,671,610 in loans from 631,345 lenders as of December 25, 2009. Kiva coordinates with established micro finance institutions around the world, called “Field Partners”, to post profiles of qualified local entrepreneurs on its website, www.kiva.org. Lenders can search the globe for an entrepreneur that they wish to fund. Kiva aggregates loan capital from individual lenders and transfers it to the appropriate Field Partners to disburse to the entrepreneur chosen by the lender. As the entrepreneurs repay their loans, the Field Partners remit funds back to Kiva. As the loan is repaid, the Kiva lenders can withdraw their principal or re-loan it to another entrepreneur. The average loan size is $401.66 and the repayment rate is 98.13%.  The best part of Kiva is the opportunity to be repaid so one might reinvest those dollars in another underserved community.

Kiva and other institutions like it, have the ability to touch over 3 billion of the world’s poorest individuals, especially women, who are often marginalized in their home societies as a result of life events that prevent them from working or providing for their families.  Kiva empowers, stabilizes and restores self-esteem and most importantly, helps create a consumer economy that can do more to stabilize and sustain a nation than any amount of foreign aid or military intervention.

Consider the case of Maria Guadalupe Licona, of Tulancingo, Mexico who needed to expand her herd. She borrowed $100 for six months from a microlender and purchased additional sheep and pigs. Or perhaps you would like to meet Wafeek,  a 53-year-old Lebanese man who lives in the Bekaa with his wife and their five children. Wafeek has been working as carpenter for over 30 years. Wafeek requested a $ 300 loan from a Kiva partner, Al Majmoua to purchase wood for his work. You could be his fourth loan and he has always repaid on time.

Someone once said, “ give a man a fish, feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish, you feed him for life.” Kiva allows anyone willing to make a small loan the ability to reach into pockets of despair and begin to sew seeds of change and economic growth.  In regions of the world where 50% of the population is under 25, unemployed and disaffected, an investment in economic development can diffuse dangerous breeding grounds for fundamentalists or despots who prey on those who feel they have been forsaken.

Microfinance is not a panacea for poverty but it is a message of hope.  It is manna from a temporal heaven -sustaining those who desperately want the same things we want.  Economic vitality is an antidote to the poison of religious ideologues and political charlatanism.  It is a lifeline that may prove more powerful than any sentinel, drone or security force.  One might never know whether their investment saves a life by stabilizing a neighborhood in Yemen, Lebanon , Palestine, or Afghanistan.  However, we do know that a micro-loan could save a family and create a future.  Perhaps, with each future we rekindle, we breathe oxygen into a fire that burns brighter and more powerfully than any military ordinance.  Our generosity can fuel embers of democracy that push back the twilight of bitter ideology – - long shadows that one day crept across a lone road in Afghanistan and took Army Specialist Justin Johnston from us well before he had the opportunity to find his own future.

And Along Came Twitter

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting. – Dave Barry

My compulsive personality is a double-edged hatchet that is impossible to conceal.  My ever-present caprice always seems to catch the bright glare of fads and new crazes. Fortunately, middle age, lack of stamina and a shrinking attention span have hobbled my propensity to chase popular culture like a dog behind a mail truck. I have left the pressure of keeping pace with social phenomena to the young and un-medicated.

Every now and then, a highly viral fad infects my judgment and I become a slave to a new master. In the last few years, the corrupting siren has been technology with her buxom applications and seductive promises of increased productivity, diversion and global access.  I am hardly a techie but I am a fast follower with a highly addictive brain that becomes almost bi-polar with a new toy.  To my spouse’s chagrin, I will disappear like an addict, staying up until all hours gorging on my fascination du jour until I literally become physically ill with its consumption.

It is bad enough when she is forced to physically disconnect the computer from our children who lack the maturity to know their boundaries.  It is quite another thing to lose your partner to the same malady. In her mind, technology has turned our home into a veritable den of iniquity with video games serving as gateway drugs to more potent preoccupations such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, instant messaging and blogging.  The computer, she has decided, is one massive crack pipe.

I started with Web surfing and moved quickly to Amazon and EBay.  These Internet applications are the cigarettes and malt liquor of cyber-life.  They are not very good for you but it would take years of daily abuse before these portals could bring you to your knees. At my most abusive point of EBay use I was a two purchase a day user.  It began with innocent acquisitions like baseball cards and nostalgic talismans from my childhood but moved on to useless flotsam like maritime clocks, antique jars filled with air from the 1870s and a Halloween mask of Bart Simpson.  I hit bottom when I mistakenly bid on an item that I had posted for sale two months earlier.

My passion for military history took me off the Internet and on to PC gaming.  I became a WWII armored division tank commander in Panzer General and a combat avatar in Battlefield 1942 and Call of Duty (COD).  I graduated from the PC battles to Xbox 360 sports games and literally spent one winter disabled in my leather chair playing Madden Football until my fingers would cramp from the incessant tapping of the X, Y and Z keys.

Along came Halo and COD 4.  They were higher end, designer narcotics combining historical gaming and the Internet.  They are the opiates of video games.  COD Modern Warfare has actually infiltrated our town at every level. I have it on good authority that a certain local celebrity routinely roams the fractured buildings and broken roads of Mogadishu searching for insurgents, doing his best to help make the world a better place.  I am pleased he is out there, helping my son and others get out of tough firefights with all our virtual limbs in tact. Yet, on the anniversary of my being killed for the 1,000^th time on a virtual battlefield, I drifted back to the Internet – aimlessly following blogs, EBay auctions and The Onion. My fascination shifted to social networking.

As I approached my 30-year high school reunion last summer, I was urged to join Facebook (FB). I joined, posting the best, non-air brushed photo I had of myself in an attempt to torment any girl that ever said “no” to me to go on a date.  I dove headlong into serial posting and irreverent commentary.  Each day I would dredge up some old shoe from the muddied gray waters of the Class of ‘79.

FB gave me a chance to reconnoiter ahead of the reunion and to reconnect faces and names, safely determining who had completely lost their marbles and who had stayed reasonably normal. Life had thrown a few high hard ones to some folks and FB became their confessional and catharsis.  I avoided anyone who made entries to FB between 1am and 6am.  Social networking is like automobile driving.  The police allege that as many as 70% of the drivers on the road after 1am are under the influence of a mind altering substance. My reconnaissance proved invaluable at the California reunion as I successfully dodged someone on parole, two ex-girlfriends in the middle of strained marriages and one shady character interested in raising money for a hedge fund (hold that thought, Jim, I am just going to get a diet coke – - back in Connecticut)

My spouse sees the Facebook messages flying across our screen and is bemused. More private than me, she views FB as the equivalent of running my underwear up some narcissistic flagpole every day and waiting to see who notices. The web is like the atom – a scary unharnessed power that could easily become a WMD if placed in the wrong hands.  It is a neighborhood prowled by out-of-control teens, pedophiles and lonely hearts. Social networking is something one might find in hell — a veritable 24/7 virtual den of paparazzi where exhibitionists, garrulous wall flowers and curious voyeurs can safely post and be posted.  I pooh-poohed her conservative concerns and regularly checked my postings and blog site for comments from old friends and faceless strangers.

I was surprised one day to get a FB invite from the actress Elizabeth Shue.  There was a part of my brain that wanted to embrace Ms. Shue’s invitation to be ” friends” as validation for my rapid virtual social climbing. I had my own blog. I was a regular on FB. I had affiliated with other groups such as Linked In, Propeller and EBlog. It was apropos that a celebrity would want to network with me.  Yet social networking, like nostalgia, is a deceptive liar and you soon feel with so many friends, contacts and followers that you are ready to start your own religious denomination. You start looking for cheap land in Texas. Perhaps Elizabeth Shue would be my spokesperson.

I then got another invitation from a 28-year-old girl in Richmond whom I had never met. Her photograph was, how shall I say, a tad risqué. My immediate reaction was that she must be the daughter of a friend, and as a parent, I wanted to ask him why his daughter was sending invitations to come visit her on Tart Island. I surveyed her “friends” looking for a familiar face and it became very clear that she was only interested in meeting men – men between 40 and 80. The pathetic roster of friends was a dubious yearbook of every delusional, mid-life crisis male between Santa Barbara to Stamford. I was expecting to see Tiger Woods.  There was not a single woman.  The invitation cooed, “Hi handsome. I wanted to connect with you and be friends.”

As I scrolled the men who had consented to befriend this flattering FB figurine, I saw a friend of mine from California.  I immediately pinged him and asked him what he was doing consorting with what was most likely a Russian prostitute born when we were in our junior year in high school. He pinged me back almost immediately and sheepishly confessed, “She seemed vaguely familiar.” Yes, men are pigs.

And along came Twitter. Twitter allows you to post in 140 letters or less a daily message to those who choose to follow your “ tweets”. I cannot even use the restroom in less than 140 letters.  Twitter is all about brevity and sound bites.  Perhaps Twitter will cure my verbal incontinence. However, most tweets are inane mental droppings from celebrities and narcissists.  Rapper Ray J wants to know: ”what’s love got to do with it?” Um, ok. What does intellect got to do with it either? Miley Cyrus: “Party in the USA -I need expresso.” Good for you, Miley.  You almost spelled espresso correctly.

Social networking has created a new fifth dimension to interact and merchandise anything – a product, an idea or one’s self.  However, it is a slate gray 24-hour landscape where interaction is mistaken for intimacy.  As this sterile, achromatic vegetation spreads across our lives, perhaps it is time to turn off the computer, take a walk, say hello to Charlie and Karen next door, write a letter on my stationary and actually mail it.  Perhaps I will go meet a real friend in town for a hot cup of Zumbach’s exotic coffee.

Perhaps my next twitter should read, “ Gone to Z’s for a cup of Joe. Must recapture my mo-jo.  Say goodbye, cruel cyberspace, I’m off to join the human race. “

18 letters to spare.  Not bad.

Los Patinadores en Invierno ( Skaters in Winter)

“Style is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward” Robert Frost

I have an antique engraving of late 19^th century Spanish skaters fastening their blades as they prepare to glide across a great sheet of frozen opaque lake.  The etching is small and the figures are muted and impressionistic – the way one might dream about a past life – as if you are looking through a great frosted telescope through to some simpler time.

I recall as a child watching ice-skating in the Olympics – rooting for the hopelessly outclassed Americans as East Germans, Russians and Scandinavian pixies gracefully floated, skimmed and sailed across the blurred rink accumulating near perfect scores.

When our US skaters were not getting smoked in some far-off rink in Boogerglob, Yugoslavia, our hockey teams were getting worked over like Poland during the Blitz.  My father had told me of the “ miracle “ in 1960 when the unheralded Americans won the Gold beating Canada, the Russians and the Czechs at Squaw Valley California.  However, I grew up during the cold war and a period of total Soviet domination.  The US was no match for these bladed automatons jacked up on steroids and vodka. The eastern bloc teams had lots of time on their hands to practice. After all, home was a sterile one bedroom apartment shared with five people, two government run TV channels and bread lines.

In California, winter happened to other people in other places and ice rinks were as uncommon as wool sweaters and US gold medalist winter Olympians.  My first glimpse of an indoor ice rink was the Great Western Forum in Inglewood where the Los Angeles Kings played hockey.  I liked hockey instantly.  Hockey was exotic.  It was played on an ice rink that rested under the glossed wooden floors of the Lakers basketball court.  Hockey players were as fast and big as football players.  They were missing teeth, had scars all over their faces and were angry all the time.  They were like pirates or life without parole prison inmates.

It looked dangerous and exciting to try to score.  Once you got around six potential felons, you had to try to slap the puck past a faceless demon called the goalie.  Perhaps, he was so ugly that he was not allowed to show his face. Maybe goalies wore masks so fans would not recognize and assault them in the parking lot for allowing a goal.  I was mesmerized.  I forced my Dad to drive us great distances through very dangerous neighborhoods in South Central LA to watch the Kings slashing center Marcel Dionne, speedy forward Butch Goring and the courageous goalie – Rogie Vachon.

Alas, like most expansion teams, the Kings were hardly royalty.  They stank.  And it seemed whenever the Canadiens, Flyers, Bruins or Black Hawks came into town, my team got crushed.  To add insult to injury, the victors would usually leave one of their past-their-prime players behind with the Kings in some horrendous trade that would prolong our long painful climb our of expansion adolescence.

What I really liked best – was the fighting.  They called the players who fought “ goons” which I thought was hysterical.  The only goon I had ever seen was Alice, The Goon on Popeye.  With names like Dave “ Tiger” Williams and Dave “ Cement-head” Semenko, these insane asylum candidates wracked up more penalty minutes than maximum-security prisoners.  They had nicknames like “ The Grim Reaper”, “The Hammer” and “Bloody O’Reilly”. They high- sticked, slashed, cross checked, punched, gouged and broke more orbital bones than a medical examiner.  The goon’s job was simple: retaliate and protect their star player from the other team’s goons.

When a fight would break out, the gloves would fly off and the adults (refs) would not even try to break up the brawl.  For a kid who sought to be freed from the yoke of parental oversight and the suffocating civility of rules based games, hockey was sanctioned violence.  The referees just stared at the scrum of wild punches and ripped jerseys while everyone in the stands went absolutely berserk.  Eventually the refs jumped in once the players had punched themselves silly.

I decided I wanted to learn to play hockey and skate.  My father had grown up in a time of hockey leagues and early morning ice rinks and did not want to spend his weekends indoors in what smelled like a three week-old duffel bag.  He was a Californian now.  There was football, tennis, baseball, paddle and soccer – all to be played outdoors.

I dreamed of snow and ice-skating but did not understand that for ice to form, a person must endure consecutive days of bitter cold.  On New England lakes and ponds, there was no Zamboni machine to smooth the natural irregularities of a frozen body of water.  The ice accumulated and moved indiscriminately like a crack across a windshield.  But I had to try. Ice-skating and hockey looked so easy and I wanted to meet my Peggy Fleming on a frozen pond where we might waltz or tango and then spin around waiting until one of you fell to the ground and looked at the other and said, ” kiss me, you fool.”  I lacked the imagination to speculate what would happen much beyond this point.  I was ten.

My father bobbed and weaved with me like an outmatched prizefighter. Growing up in suburban Chicago and then discovering Eden at the University of California at Berkeley, my father vowed he would never return to the raw, sideways sleet and arctic winds that knifed across Lake Michigan. He had learned to skate, sled and survive in the snow but traded his Currier & Ives childhood for an aquamarine Christmas morning of 60 degrees and the rhythmic sway of palm trees.

I kept chipping away at his paternal guilt and finally convinced him that my inability to skate would one day keep me from getting into a good college.  He was about to say “ no” for the thirtieth time, when he got a wry smile across his face and said, “ Sure”. I will never forget his mischievous smile. He confessed that his aversion to snow had perhaps unfairly denied his sons the ability to attempt a triple axle.  In what we thought was a rare fit of nostalgia, he drove us to a suburban ice rink on Christmas Eve to “learn” to ice skate

The excitement was palpable as I laced my razor–edged rockets and ran my finger along the dull but intimidating blade that ran from the toe to heel. I was mentally already on the ice – a goon in search of mayhem and perhaps a six –year-old that I could check into the boards.   I got up to try to walk in the skates and my ankles buckled.  I fell to one knee and hit the ground hard. My eyes watered but I did not cry.

We walked on to the ice and I fell backwards, hitting my large head like a pumpkin dropping on the kitchen floor.  I had no helmet and saw stars as my head cracked on the hard ice.  A strange ensemble of people gingerly moved with arms under weak fluorescent lights flailing and awkwardly lunging like drunken sailors.  Suddenly, a pink flash shot past me.  A magnificent teenaged girl came to a knife edged stop and spun in place.  She was like a music box ballerina suspended by celestial gossamer strings.  I was in love. I tried to get up and my leg shot out from under me as if it had been fired from a rocket.

My father lifted and guided me to the railing where I moved myself along a great rectangular rink for one hour.  Each time the rose colored girl skated by, I let go and fell injuring some hidden body part with a flash of white-hot pain.  It was on my eleventh consecutive fall that I conceded that I did not have the patience or pain threshold to learn to skate or keep up with the pink projectile.  It was my secret shame – being so hooked on hockey and knowing that I could not even stand on skates.

The following morning, I awoke to sensations not dissimilar to the black plague.  Severe aching limbs consistent with internal bleeding, bruising and feverish.  My father looked on with amusement as I struggled downstairs and declared that I must have the flu.  My skating career officially died anno domini one thousand nine hundred seventy two.

Years later, I look on at skating with a twinge of envy and great respect.  I never returned to the ice.  I often slow my car to  watch as a small group gathers by the edge of  black frozen ponds.  Skaters ease on to the ice and breeze across dark, crosshatched arteries of rock hard water.  I now understand why the best skaters have quadriceps larger than many Christmas turkeys.  It is magic to stand in a cold biting wind, teetering on the razor thin edges of a single blade, pushing out with one leg while bracing the other leg to move ahead.  Slash-glide-slash-glide.  You move like winter wind across the ebony water trapped below.

It is part of the cinnamon scented of the holidays – these simple pleasures.  It is a new pair of skates under a tree.  It is a pond iced over to its proper depth.  It is frozen twilight and a single, solitary person floating like a downy feather across a frosted sheet of glass.  It’s Christmas Eve and the skaters cannot wait for the next day. I watch from a raised embankment along a serpentine road. I am thinking once again of that elegant ancient etching of “Los Patinadores En Invierno”– wispy shadows soon from another time. The skaters disappear, an evergreen pine suddenly obscuring my view.

The pond, it seems, goes on forever.

Christmas In Kamchatka

Christmas In Kamchatka

I think it’s wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly – Steven Wright

Competitiveness is like a morning cowlick that never seems to settle. It pops up in the most prosaic circumstances – at the family room table across a game of Hearts as a son-in-law drops the queen of spades on his mother-in law for the third straight hand. It is in the sharp elbows that suddenly fly in your annual family “touch” football game and it is constant skirmishes along the borders of Kamchatka during the Christmas Day game of Risk.

We like playing games in my family.  I pretend not to be competitive but it is a thin veneer.  The art of enjoying any contest as a type A cutthroat adult is to always win but never let others catch you trying to win.  Let them speculate on your motives but do not get caught blatantly attempting to succeed.  It is important to fake humility and to reinforce this with periodic excursions away from the board game – - requiring people to call you back.  Forcing them to shout, “it is your turn” can make you a master of misdirection. You must appear to not care.  When crushing a nine-year-old niece in Sorry, you must seem sympathetic. ” I rolled a six? Oh I guess that means you are bumped back to home. …What do you know? I win! (Tears) Ohhh, don’t worry sweetheart (feigned sympathy), your uncle Michael was just REALLY lucky this time. Honey, don’t cry, (more fake commiseration) it’s only a silly game.”

Each year, the same board games reappear – relics of the age of Parker Brothers, imagination, 11 television channels and computers the size of city blocks. It was the era of Monopoly, Risk, Scrabble, Parcheesi and Yahtzee.  Later, we expanded our repertoire to include Pictionary and Trivial Pursuit. In fits of adult nostalgia, we re-purchased these games on EBay, at yard sales and on rainy days while on summer vacation assuming that we could vicariously recapture those magic nights through our children. Instead our children balked – bored by the games simplicity and alarmed by our hypocrisy as we espoused sportsmanship while nonchalantly trying to force them into Chapter 11 with hotels on Illinois, Kentucky and Indiana Avenues.

Once a year, the board games are excavated from an all purpose storage cabinet in our family room.  I am immediately on the defensive as my unimaginative teens complain about the games as too long, too boring or too simple. They possess that latent American gene that screams for instant resolution and constant action.

I am difficult to beat in Risk.  I am like the Chinese. While teenagers think in terms of minutes, I think in terms of hours. I fight a guerrilla war of attrition – first seizing the seemingly insignificant continent of Oceania comprised of Australia/Indonesia. I use the continent’s two bonus armies each turn to annoyingly pick away at anyone who tries to control Asia, Africa or the Americas. By the time my hordes of freedom fighters have rid the last continent of my blue, green and yellow opponents’ armies, no one is paying attention. They are watching television, texting or have left the room – indifferent Westerners bored with this protracted analog war of dice, luck and strategy. Perhaps the next American version of Risk should include a “surge” scenario that reduces the game duration to 18 minutes.  This seems to be the maximum amount of time this generation prefers to wage war.

Monopoly holds broader appeal although I always end up being forced to be the boot – which really bothers me. Others get to be the battleship, cannon or even a Yorkshire terrier. I am convinced the boot is jinxed, as I can never seem to land on Boardwalk when it is free to be purchased.  The boot usually lands on the luxury tax space until someone has built a hotel on Park Place and then it seems happy to pay $1500 for a shoeshine.

There are two types of Monopoly players – Main Street and Wall Street.  Wall Streeters buy everything, make deals and forge alliances.  They mortgage their own properties to raise more money to buy more properties and build more hotels. They are always one dice roll from bankruptcy. These risk-addicted individuals take on maximum leverage and seek to create a bubble that will pop in the face of their Main Street opponent.  Main Street is cautious but naive.  They buy properties like Mediterranean and Vermont Avenues because it is cheap to build hotels.  Main Street buys utilities and railroads.  Against the advice of armchair observers, Main Street trustingly trades Park Place to Wall Street for $1000 cash, Connecticut Ave and three free “lands”. An hour later, Main Street has mortgaged his last property and is begging for one last turn so he might pass Go and avoid losing his racecar.   The Wall Street ruthlessly crushes him like a cigarette butt.

In our house, my opponents are subject to constant third party coaching from in-laws and do-gooders who do not want to risk actually competing but loiter like homeless people and shamelessly kibitz. “Watch out for your Dad.” shouts my mother-in-law.  “Don’t do that deal, sweetie,” my wife says to my son. “Don’t you see in one hour, you will land on Park Place and owe him everything?” I look up with a frozen perfunctory grin – “who are you people, regulators? Don’t you have homes? Or perhaps some Christmas cards to write?”

My bloodthirsty competitiveness was borne out of a third child Darwinian struggle for attention in a four-child ecosystem. Competition was everywhere and my father did not necessarily attempt to diffuse it.  He correctly assumed that the youngest would struggle more fiercely and in doing so, perhaps be that much more braced for what lay ahead in the great oceans of life.

There was no mercy when playing games in our male dominated household. Games taught you valuable life skills such as “ the game face”, “ blackmail, extortion and intimidation. Each Christmas competition was a page torn from Sun Tzu’s Art of War.  “Be extremely subtle, even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious, even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent’s fate. “ My brother was the master of blackmail and misinformation.  He understood when Sun Tzu mused, “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. “He could make me choke faster than a large piece of filet mignon. I can remember that fateful Christmas when I finally prevailed over him at Risk. As I harassed his pitiful armies across North America to a last stand in Greenland, I understood the sense of power of Alexander, Genghis Kahn and Caesar.   On this night, I was master of the universe.

Later Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary tested our left and right brains.  Trivial pursuit is more daunting and clearly creates social and generational barriers.  As a sports, history, literature and movie buff, I can adequately vie for 2/3’s of the pie wedges.   However, I am lost in geography and without Bunsen burner in science.  Trivial Pursuit has produced a variety of themed versions that hold more attention from younger family members.  However, the popular culture version has about as much appeal to me as a regular culture – a Petri dish of wriggling micro-celebrity parasites that will only infect and weaken society. If you ever catch me playing a game where the “Octo-Mom” is an answer to anything, please kill me.

Pictionary is very frustrating. As an artist, I am outraged when my wife’s Pictionary partner correctly interprets her Neanderthal hieroglyphic representing “global warming” while my impatient teammate is screaming out names of countries as I am trying to correctly draw the horn of Africa on my brilliant rendition of the earth.  Pictionary was invented by the legions of the artistically challenged that wanted to get back at their more talented right-brained siblings.  Pictionary is hell.

There are card games – hearts, poker, gin and bridge.  All of these games afford opportunities for reprisals, heckling and old-fashioned spirited competition and as the last card falls, the final property flips into foreclosure or the final pie piece is won, there is a great sigh.  Arms stretch and a slow migration occurs – usually to the refrigerator as the vanquished look to food for solace and comfort.  The game accoutrements are collected and carefully returned to their boxes.  It will be another year before we do battle.  However, there are really no losers.  We have huddled together once again like all families since the beginning of time.  A tiny human tribe – loving, fragile and imperfect – drawn together by competition and the chance, perhaps, to proclaim themselves ruler of the holiday.

A Saxon Christmas

A Saxon Christmas

“If Christmas Day be bright and clear, there’ll be two winters in the year”, Saxon Farmers Parable

The city along the Thames unfolds for the Christmas season like a flower opening to the sun. From Bond to Regent Streets on to Sloan Street and Kings Road, the twinkling white lights and the festive green of pine boughs are thoughtfully decorated along London’s main shopping arteries.  In small villages, the traditional high streets adorn lights and tasteful holiday cheer.  The West end of London transforms each year into a garrulous, friendly face like old Fezziwig grabbing you and twirling you around the open floor of his counting house.

Global warming has conspired to deny London its most famous winter accessory – a dusting of snow that accents ancient stone churches and sweeps through its narrow mews and lanes.  The pubs, now smokeless, become even more inviting – - deep cavernous hubs of good cheer and raucous debate.  Down to Trafalgar Square, a massive Norwegian pine is erected each year – - an annual gift of friendship from Oslo to commemorate the friendship and sacrifice the Brits extended to their Scandinavian brethren during World War II.  Skaters glide across opaque rinks near Marble Arch and Oxford Street.

Still, as with all things British, the holiday season is understated relative to America. Father Christmas is less inclined to appear on every street corner and instead runs a more discreet operation, much like MI5 does for domestic security.  Christmas carols are much more traditional and echo with reverence and deep religious conviction. Although less than 8% of Brits regularly attend church, great Norman and medieval churches are constant reminders of this country’s history of religious fervor.  The Protestants and  Catholics, now at peace, compete with many other religions, for hearts and minds at this special time of year.  Each vicar or priest is particularly attentive to their midnight mass or service.  The chill of a clear, December 24^th night blended with a brisk walk across an ancient graveyard to Westminster Abbey, Southwark or St Paul’s cathedrals is enough to stimulate the most latent religious gene in anyone in attendance on Christmas Eve.

We know that the Christian holiday of celebrating Christ’s birth has its roots in the  ancient white chalk across the Plain of Salisbury, home to the mysterious Druids whose most enigmatic contribution to the history stands ominously as Stonehenge.  The winter solstice, known as “yule”, was a time of celebration as the dark days of winter were slowly giving way to longer days and shorter nights.  Homes were adorned with evergreens as a gesture of hope that warmer days and better harvests lay ahead. The celebration around the 22^nd of December was an agrarian ritual.  Somewhere along the way, the Christian celebration of the birth of their messiah coincided with this festival set in the bleak midwinter.

The British celebration of Boxing Day which is on December 26^th is one of many tradition differences that arise between Mother England and the USA. Other irregularities range from the harmonies of certain carols different and a much more subdued commercialism.  As I studied my English holiday tradition, I read in the London Times of some ancient yuletide rituals that had some how managed to survive centuries of transition and change.  In Devon, there is the tradition of the Ashen Faggot.  The faggot which can be a yule log or a traditional bundle of sticks is bound with bands of green ash branches and tossed into a blazing fire.  Each unmarried woman chooses a band and whichever band bursts open first indicates which maid is likely to be the next to be wed. The chaos carries on to Yorkshire in the most obscure seasonal cavorting called “Mumping”. Mumping involves going house to house with a Christmas tree followed by a resounding carol and then begging for a treat.

On to Herefordshire and wassailing ! Wassail comes from a mid fifteenth century English greeting, “waes hael”, which means either “Be well” or could be have been started by a very drunken, toothless Welshman who  forgot his toast and raised his glass of ale anyway and shouted ” what the hell!”  Irrespective of its roots, Wassail is a powerful ale based drink that was customarily mixed in a large bowl or tureen – - mixed with sugar, spiced apples, cream, spices and even small rodents (just kidding).  Saxon farmers drunk with holiday cheer (and copious amounts of wassail) would move from farm to farm greeting one another, occasionally attacking the odd Norman bystander.  At the end of December, the feudal Lord would herald the New Year and wish all good luck who belonged to the feudal family.  The serfs, in turn, “waes-haeled” back at him, and in doing so, confirmed fealty for another twelve months or at least until bonuses were paid.  The drunken spree took an even stranger turn in rural areas where the wassailants would begin to pound on trees in the orchards, bringing good luck and making it difficult for dormant pests to get a good night’s rest.  This often led to improved crops and several arrests. When reviewing this practice, the London Times went on to muse,“ and we wonder why they had such a problem recognizing that their cows were mad”.

We next travel across to Ireland, where we walk along the narrow streets and canals of James Joyce.  Tradition runs deep in this wonderful part of the world and the vigilant pursuit of good luck was always a priority.  The ancient tradition of The Hunting of the Wren is a strange Boxing Day activity.  A group of men would kill a wren, hang the dead bird on a pole and sell its feathers as lucky charms.   So, if you see drunken Irish men running around on December 25^th trying to catch small birds, you have some cultural context.

The holiday season is inevitably about family.  Perhaps the Irish, more than most, seem to understand that anything can be overcome by preserving family, faith and good fortune.  As this Irish prayer conveys, a holiday is a time to give thanks and to ask one’s Maker for blessings and perhaps, the slightest edge:

May those who love us, keep loving us

For those who do not love us, may God turn their ankles

So we will know them by their limp.

Sundays With Gary

Sundays With Gary

“A life defined by love will not seek to protect itself or justify itself.  It will be content to be itself and to give itself away with abandon…. love never judges.  Love simply announces that the person you are, nor the deeds you have done, have erected a barrier which the power of this invincible presence cannot overcome.”. Bishop John Spong.

In 1997, journalist Mitch Albom wrote a heart-warming chronicle of the final months he spent with his college professor and mentor, Morrie Schwartz, who was dying of ALS. Many of us, like Albom -a reporter whose world view had been hardened by a career exposed to life’s harsh inequities, were moved by the valuable life lessons tutored from a 78 year old sociology professor who had dedicated a lifetime of service to shaping young minds.  In the process of imparting his final vita dictata to Mitch, he touched the world.

Morrie’s favorite saying from WH Auden was emphatic: we must “love each other or perish.” In the book, Albom is slowly resuscitated to see the world for its possibilities instead of its limitations, and in his personal resurrection, we find hope. We are blessed if we are fortunate enough to find a Morrie Schwartz – a selfless mentor whose life exemplifies the simple truths that “love conquers all” and that “fear and faith cannot not possibly coexist in the same space.”

New Canaan possessed for a brief and magical time our own Morrie Schwartz in the physical and spiritual being of Pastor Gary Wilburn. Diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) – a form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, Gary stepped down from a dozen year tenure as pastor of New Canaan’s Presbyterian church in 2008.

While his body was beginning to succumb to the debilitating symptoms of his disease, he and his wife Bev, sharpened their resolve and focused on the gift of life – moving to a remote town in Baja Mexico to be closer to family, praise every day and to race time to craft a handbook of living in the form of a trilogy of books. His first two books, The God I Don’t Believe In : Charting A New Course for Christianity and Lot’s of Hope pushed us to reclaim the essential message of Jesus and to embrace the power of hope to change a broken world. Gary’s third and final book – Lots Of Love – is an urgent and loving testimonial to the simple but fundamental building blocks of our human and spiritual DNA – that “love is the beginning and the end of our journey.”

Gary and Bev Wilburn’s triumphs and setbacks are faithfully chronicled by Bev on a website called Caring Bridge that reaches across time zones and distance to bond friends and family of those living with chronic illness.  With Bev as the family air traffic controller, Gary redirects every ounce of his physical being as an author – a celestial cartographer and guide — tracking our human journey as spiritual beings and interpreting along the way the simple divinity that swirls around us.

In a time of great fear and uncertainty, we need these clerics, shamans, priests, and holy persons in our lives to help interpret the deeper meaning of our existence. “Lots of Love” achieves spiritual interpretation the way Stephen Hawking fashioned a less complicated lens to the cosmos in his brilliant book, A Brief History of The Universe.   How ironic that these extraordinary insights should come from two men whose bodies conspire each day to rob them of their ability to teach us.

Pastor Wilburn understands that society is, by nature, cynical with self-interest but also believes unquestionably in the divine flickering in us like a candle hidden under a bushel basket.  Our life’s mission is to discover our potential as change agents in a world through the simple act of loving.  Gary guides us the way a naturalist might walk us along a gentle mountain path, pointing out the beauty and genius of simple acts of kindness and beckons us to be certain we inhale the rich pine scented humanity that comes from our compassion, humor and values that bind us all as families and communities.

Gary chronicles and celebrates the undeniable goodness of people and relates vignette after vignette of countless acts of love, gratitude and faith – whether it is in the simple act of passengers giving up their seats at Christmas so an overbooked flight can make room for soldiers trying to get home on leave from Iraq, to the half century romantic story of Nate and Theo, a New Canaan couple whose lives and deaths proved as remarkable a testament to inexorable love as any parable.

Each day physical life may conspire to ebb out of Gary’s body but his spirit flows through his pen and his glorious fight to bring us all a message of hope at the holiday season. Lots of Love is an ornament to be hung on every tree, a candle to be lit on the last night of Hanukkah, an Eid prayer at Ramadan and a strand of lights at the new moon of Diwali.

Gary’s message at these holidays is captured in the haunted words of the great social reformer, Charles Dickens and the miraculous self-revelation of George Bailey in “Its A Wonderful Life”. Lots of Love walks us across a shattered mosque in Iraq and points out the angels that flit around us each day – our eyes not completely adjusted to see these selfless spirits in the bright light of their kindness.

I can see Gary Wilburn every night in my minds eye.  He is resting in his motorized chair, silhouetted against a tangerine and blood red sunset praising every minute of a warm, Baja afternoon.  Bev is nearby, a soft constant breeze and beloved companion.   He smiles and rests – a spiritual being on a human journey.  He considers the gifts and challenges that he has been presented in a life advising and leading affluent and underserved communities. He is at peace.

I call him my Captain and miss him every day that he has been away.  He taught his congregation to listen, to seek to understand, to probe for the truth and yes, occasionally cry with outrage when a serially flawed society fails to make unconditional love its ultimate priority.  He urges us with labored breath that it is through this door of love that we can discover joy, spiritual connection with a power greater than ourselves and rise to heights as humans never thought possible – buoyed by the sheer weightlessness of seeking truth and justice.

Gary has discovered his one thing and shared it with us.  He offers up in Lots Of Love an antidote to anyone whose life is ruled more by fear than faith and who has yet to extricate themselves from the cat’s cradle snares of life’s material traps.

As he would often share with his loving but recidivist and reluctant congregation, “these three things remain: Faith, Hope and Love. But the greatest of these is Love.” (1 Corinthians 13)

Screwtape 2009

 ”Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that is ‘finding his place in it,’ while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of really being at home on Earth, which is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.” The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis

 In 1942, CS Lewis penned the Screwtape Letters – a fictional correspondence between a senior demon, Screwtape and his nephew, an apprentice tempter named Wormwood. The letters chronicle the advice and counsel that the elder demon provides to his willing associate to help him corrupt a mortal Englishman known only as ” the Patient”.  In the correspondence between the two demons, God is simply referred to as “The Enemy” and Satan as “Our Father Below.” Character is a sin and sin is character. Wormwood’s task is straightforward:  Lead the Patient, by whatever means necessary, away from The Enemy and to eternal damnation. Lewis’ creative narrative is timeless and gives clever context to the temptations that erode our morality and the strong temporal winds that conspire to blow us off the straight and narrow path.  While Lewis was a Christian, his allegory transcends any denomination in focusing humorously on our common fragility as human souls.  His demons have spent centuries examining man – attempting to exploit our weaknesses, especially our propensity to not learn from the past.

 While Wormwood seeks to trick and trap the Patient into great sins and spectacular moral missteps, Screwtape is constantly counseling endurance and vigilence. A demon’s job, not unlike a lion resting near a herd of gazelles, is to be patient, hanging back in the shade, waiting for an opportunity to confuse, distract or separate his prey from the rest of the herd. Damnation, it seems, is best achieved through separating one’s prey from The Enemy and from others within his community who might seek to protect him.  Hell, after all, at its’ most fundamental level, is separation from The Enemy. Spiritual decline starts imperceptibly through self pity and self indulgence.  We are, in Screwtape’s view, toads that can be cooked to death by merely bringing the water of self interest to a gradual boil.  If you make things too hot, too quickly, he cautions Wormwood, the patient will leap from the cauldron and escape.

 In 1942, Anglican England was  less concerned about politically correctness around issues such as the separation of church and state.  Britain was infinitely more preoccupied with physical survival against the Nazi war machine. Mid-twentieth century  society still enforced tighter guardrails around morality, religion and social conformity. As war raged in deserts, mountains and at sea, there was a battle for the soul of man that flashed every moment of a person’s life.  Lewis’ Great Deceiver sought to exploit the fear that permeated the corners of every community. He dispatched his minions to cultivate new values – a morality of selfish pleasure, self seeking and self interest. As one reviewer opined, “Wormwood and Screwtape live in a peculiarly morally reversed world, where individual benefit and greed are seen as good and neither demon is capable of acknowledging true human virtue when he sees it.”

 What advice might Screwtape proffer to a more seasoned Wormwood in 2009? Would he be pleased with the state of our society? What kind of exchange might we intercept between the experienced corrupter of men send via his blackberry to his brash novitiate tempter?  

 Screwtape12@Diablo.org: Greetings from Venezuela, dear Wormwood.  I regret not bearing witness to your coming of age across the great green Atlantic. While I am nostalgic for the mist and slow moral decay of England, I do enjoy the turbulence of Central and South America. With such poverty, despotism and half the population under 20 years old, this is fertile ground for multinational corporations to exploit the poor, political fundamentalism and a great cup of inexpensive coffee. The closer you get to the Equator, it seems the hotter it gets – literally and figuratively. This is where all the action is. How goes your new assignment, nephew?

USWorm@Diablo.org: Uncle, I was delighted to get your card and photographs.  How did you get Hugo Chavez to pose in women’s clothing? I am off to a very good start since being reassigned to America from England last September.  The October financial meltdown was perfect brimstone from Our Father Below. Everyone is afraid and as you have so often lectured, fear and faith cannot occupy the same space.  As people get more paranoid over their material circumstances, they become myopic to the needs of others.  Self centered fear is tinder dry hope and I spend most of my day as a spiritual arsonist setting little fires – destroying peace of mind - releasing carcinogenic defects of character to sicken and weaken Patients.  People become selfish, irritable and discontent.  They blame others. They fight, hoard, hate and best of all, worry only about themselves.  It’s a beautiful thing, really. Yours, Worm

Screwtape12@Diablo.org: What a plum assignment! You even have cable TV and an economic crisis. Is it true what they say that 90% of Americans believe in the Enemy but they gratefully think it is politically incorrect to mention him or talk of him? I have trouble in some of these more religious Latin American countries as the churches are constantly sending mixed messages to my target audience. I try to convince those less fortunate that The Enemy has abandoned them and that religion is an opiate designed to medicate them in their dire circumstances – but the power of hope and faith is strong. I suggest working through reality television, the internet, violent video games, fashion magazines and the music industry.  Keep casting shadows, Screwtape.

USWorm@Diablo.org: Uncle, I am doing my best to create unrest playing politics. I learned from you the art of hedging and playing both sides. I have started a non profit group called America First which I use as a shell to promote scandalous anti-liberal propaganda.  I also fund another group called Government for The People where I try to discredit conservatives and moderates who might interfere with the massive expansion of social programs.  Fortunately, most Americans have short attention spans and can only handle 144 words at a time.  Thus, the creation of Twitter and decline of print media. It’s much easier to undermine a nation with an entrenched two party system.  I particularly like to discredit Blue Dogs and non-profit groups who preach being of service.  

Everyone thinks the freshman President is an agent of Our Father Below but the fact is, he won’t even take our suggestions.  Even we are uncertain where he stands. It’s amusing and exciting  to not be able to find anyone who will admit voting for him.  I am constantly whispering in potential Patients’ ears about how the President is going to ruin the country. I haven’t seen this kind of angst and animosity since Neville Chamberlain gave his “Peace in our time” speech. Warmly, Worm

Screwtape12@Diablo.org:  My brave and noble acolyte, remember the key to social decomposition is a multiplicity of factions and fundamentalism. You must create suspicion, self centered fear and doubt.  Focus your Patients on what they do not have and what may be denied to them. If someone looks they might do the right thing, cast doubts about their own circumstances.  Use the media to promote the notion that the world is a hopelessly screwed up cat’s cradle of self interest and we have to get whatever we can out of it.  Make everyone think they are on their own. It’s a cold world out there – well, except down here in Sweatville.  Have you read Sarah Palin’s new book? Our Father Below was clearly the first angel to “go rogue”. Perhaps we should recruit her? Would she recognize you if you joined her husband’s snowmobiling team?  Respectfully, Screwtape

 USWorm@Diablo.org: Uncle, I have not read her musings.  I have already signed her ex-son-in-law to a kiss and tell book deal. It will actually be written in comic book format as he has a low IQ and nothing to say – a perfect recruit! I may leave a few copies of her book on Barney Frank’s doorsteps for giggles – although I think Barney would rather read Levi’s book.  I listen to rap, hip-hop and have force my posse to watch MSNBC and Fox each night to grasp the polar extremes.  I preprogrammed one patient’s TV to an infomercial channel that promises him $ 10,000 a week from buying and selling houses using sub-prime loans and government money.  I have corrupted Patients through infomercials – urging them to clean their colons, quit their jobs,  become day traders and on-line poker players.  (I usually let them win a few hands at PokerStars.com and suddenly they have mortgaged the house thinking they are Phil Ivey). I am a huge fan of transfats, high fructose corn syrup and sugar. What better way to displease The Enemy than helping hawk junk food to kids and obese adults.  Have you ever seen a morbidly obese person try to tie their shoes? – G2G, Worm

 Screwtape12@Diablo.org: LOL. I am off to tour the Amazon this weekend and drop in on President Lula in Brazillia. He is hosting Ahmadinejad from Iran. We have done such a good job in Sao Paolo, it is too dangerous even for a demon.  I had two pitchforks stolen from the valet’s closet last trip.  The Enemy still lurks in the shadows of the slums and in despicable do-gooder groups. However, they can only do so much   Antipathy toward and from the US is creating new enemies and shutting down critical channels of communication and financing. Your admiring uncle, Screwtape

   USWorm@Diablo.org:  Uncle, I do worry about the Christmas season.  There’s a lot of regression in America this time of year.  People become aware of one another’s circumstances.  There’s less self pity.  The Enemy seems to go on the offensive every December.  It seems like every January First, we regress back to square one. Worried, Worm

 Screwtape12@Diablo.org: Don’t forget the tried and true New Year’s recipe for creating distance between the Enemy and his Patients.  For women, the “3 Ms”: men, muffins and Mastercard.  If you can get them into bad relationships, eating to medicate feelings and mindlessly shopping, it will surely lead to a negative loop of behavior that will drive greater self loathing.  Our Father Below loves self loathing.  For men, the “3 Ws”:  women, wealth and worth.  Once men start to feel sorry for themselves or believe that they are their masters of their own destinies, they self destruct. It is beautiful to watch.  They have affairs, indulge, posture, and wallow in self pity.  They have less time to parent, lead in their communities or carry the Enemy’s message to others. 

 Christmas is a tricky time but like rich fudge, its sugar high eventually wears off. G2G. Hugo is about to nationalize the food industry and then we are off to Kabul for a two week vacation in the Pashtun.  Can’t wait. Your loving uncle, Screwtape.

Meet The Parents

Meet The Parents

Home is where you can say anything you like cause nobody listens to you anyway.  ~Author Unknown

Thanksgiving is the front end of a month long holiday banquet of expectations. When children are young, we work to create traditions that will serve as important family touchstones.  As children get older, Thanksgiving is a time of transition with sentimental hope yielding to the inevitable realities of change.  Often a mother’s only desire is for one more year as a family unit.  That dreaded Thanksgiving finally arrives on a cold wind where someone is absent – lost to new in-laws or competing priorities.

For the mother of four boys, the holidays were a losing battle fought with an unseen enemy – - the mother of the new “serious” girlfriend. My mom had always accepted us as wayward Tomcats yet we always seemed to find our way back home slipping in through the backdoor with massive appetites, dirty laundry and an unspoken need to be wrapped in holiday affection.

The girls that seemed to come and go like purple jacaranda blossoms, suddenly made repeat appearances. Her boys were transforming under the relentless company of these “serious “ girlfriends – dressing well, arriving on time and bathing regularly. She was actual excited to be rescued from this male planet so completely devoid of estrogen.  Yet, the changes left her melancholy.  Somewhere along the way, the holidays had changed.  She was now slowly opening her family to new people, new traditions and at times, coming up second as the place to be.

It had been this way for a while with her teens. Those that were still living at home could not wait to move out.  They disappeared like spooks into the night but they always appeared the next morning.  One morning a bed was empty – then, another.  With three empty chairs this Thanksgiving, there would be too much food and too many memories.

She grudgingly accepted that she must now share her sons with the “competition”.  Love and the approval of potential future in-laws were too powerful a force to overcome.  She loathed the emasculated October phone call that tiptoed toward the inevitable excuse – - a stuttering son dropping that he would not be coming home this year but instead be spending it with Carole in Princeton or Brooke in Colorado.

My father was delighted with the absence of competition for food,  the family room TV or shower hot water.  Like a prisoner marking hard time, he had been awaiting liberation for years.  There were no more missing shirts, fugitive pairs of underwear or car left with a mere 1/12 of a tank of gas. The idea of a full turkey dinner with only three mouths to feed (my younger brother was still at home but he had perfected the art of total invisibility) was as appetizing as pecan pie.  On the other hand, the idea of his castle being filled with young women – - suppressing his ability to swear, forcing him to go last through the food line and dress up for dinner, was annoying to him.  He worked hard and finally the holidays meant hardly working. As he hugged my mother and reassured her that it would be a “ just like old times ”, she rolled her eyes longing for the chaos of a full house.

While the family matriarch was navigating the martyred stages of an empty nester, my brothers and I were being blown to the four corners of the state to “meet the parents.”  I had heard from my brothers of strange customs and odd in-laws.  These stories were usually pried from them over threat of death as they were now walking on the slippery slope toward permanent domestication.  My future spouse was born in Britain to a highly intelligent, engaged Scot/Brit mother and a kind, cerebral English father.  Being a provincial West Coast American, I assumed a trip to their home would be the equivalent of visiting one’s grandmother – a more mature but familiar culture where colorful people spoke like Charles Dickens characters and the holidays were one grand protracted celebration of life. Being a Brit, my future spouse gave me no advance cultural training other than her penchant to drink copious cups of tea and to spread butter on top of butter.

The introductions were difficult as I realized that she had not informed them that her new “friend” was indeed a serious replacement for an old boyfriend with whom her parents had been quite fond.  This disappointment was poorly disguised by my future mother-in-law but completely lost on her dad.  The small talk was painful with minutes like dog years. The matriarch was not happy with this changeling boyfriend.  Meanwhile, her father was still trying to understand why someone my size had never played rugby.

A phone call from her sister thankfully broke the social stalemate.

As we walked to the garden, I conceded that her parents despised me.  “I might as well be French.” I shared with desperation.  She looked surprised. “ Oh, no. They really like you.”

I tried to help in the kitchen but was ushered out to the foyer where an ancient television sat silent and neglected.  “What games are on?” I yelled across an open family room.  “Oh, we don’t watch much television except PBS – you know “Upstairs, Downstairs”, “The Avengers” and “Rumpole of the Bailey” – - we do like the Dallas Cowboys !”. At the mention of the Cowboys I perked up.  There was hope.

An ancient animal resembling a flea market mink suddenly leapt up onto the sofa and proceeded to wrap her tail around my head.  The rhythmic purring could not perfume the smell.  It was the odor of recently deceased road-kill.  Yet, this escapee from the “Pet Sematary” was quite alive.  Within moments, I descended into a wheezing fit of sneezes as the zombie cat followed me and would jump into my lap whenever I would sit. I loathed cats but I did not want to reveal this ugly parochial side of my personality.  “ Oh, looook. Molly likes you.” my girlfriend smiled as she happily set the dinner table and winked.

An appetizer of cheese and crackers appeared with what looked like a dark dollop of animal feces and cloudy tangerine orange jam with paprika adorning the middle of the tray.  I was starving – but the dark, chunky mass had already started to spread and had touched several of the cheese wedges and crackers.  My expression betrayed my ignorance. “It’s Branston Pickle and Major Grey’s chutney’” she said urging me to the inedible offering.  “ We put it on everything.  It’s great.  Here taste this.” She shoved the wheat biscuit with dark chunky jelly and cheddar cheese into my mouth before I could create an excuse.  I gagged.

It was like this all afternoon. Since Thanksgiving is hardly a British tradition  - the holiday gave them the opportunity to combine the best parts of old and new culinary traditions. I was confronted with my lifetime nemesis – brussel sprouts – as well as a bizarre concoction of white onions, milk, flour and garlic known as “white sauce.”  In this sea of alien side dishes, the traditional entrees appeared – all originally accentuated with the spices of a foreign cook’s cultured hand. All eyes were on me as I devoured everything put in front of me.

The salad  presented innocently enough with onions, tomato and sliced cucumber.  However, I soon bit into a massive clove of garlic.  I hesitated, smiling with my mouth closed.  No one noticed my discomfort as I slowly chewed.  I assumed this “Eating Of The Giant Raw Garlic Clove” was a Dunn family tradition.  I was honored and ill. My eyes were beginning to water and my throat began to burn.  I tried to speak for a moment but was unable to utter a sound.  Chasing the clove with tons of water, I was relieved temporarily– only to turn a salad leaf and find another even more monstrous clove lurking below.

I closed my eyes and bit into it.  Tears flowing down my face.

“ Oh, my,” my future mother in law blurted.  “ I am so embarrassed. I usually rub the bowl with cloves of garlic before putting in the salad but I thought I had removed them. You poor boy, don’t have to eat those…”

Gratefully, I put the massive white herb down and became the object of modest admiration for taking on the monster garlic.  Even my future brother in law, the tough outdoorsman, was impressed.  Later that evening, as I was helping clean the dishes, my future mother in law was more relaxed and it was clear that we had crossed the Rubicon together.

As I related the story later that evening to my parents – wishing them Happy Thanksgiving, my mom laughed a deep chuckle and there was a small pause on the phone.

“You’re still coming for Christmas Eve right? “

“Yes, mom and I am bringing Caroline if that is ok.”

“Oh, yes. We’d love it!  Won’t we Miles?”

I could not hear my father’s response but I could just see him wincing and thinking.  “Damn, there go my leftovers.”

In the Shade of Valor

In the Shade of Valor

Valor is a gift. Those having it never know for sure whether they have it until the test comes. And those having it in one test never know for sure if they will have it when the next test comes. – Carl Sandburg

London’s Imperial War Museum is at once a memorial, a museum and a monument to the tragedies and triumphs of war. Prior to WWII, the sun never set on the British Empire and imperial England sacrificed generations of young men to protect its colonial interests around the globe.  Once the makers of history, the British are now expert as curators of the past. Yet, it is through preserving history and traditions that nations might avoid the snares and quagmires that ultimately bring them to their knees.

The museum covers several floors and features unique exhibits that offer a covert peek into the history of espionage, the terrifying experience of enduring the Blitz in a civilian bomb shelter in 1940 London and a 30 foot trench line along the Somme in the First World War – a four year apocalypse that claimed 21 million lives and ushered in a period of modern conflict that Winston Churchill called, “the woe and ruin of the terrible twentieth century. The jagged scars from centuries of warfare are everywhere as you bear witness to the arrogance of governments, the folly of generals and the uncommon valor of men, women and children who shouldered the savagery of warfare as it ripped from their lives any semblance of civility, humanity or hope.

I always return to the exhibit on those who won the Victoria Cross – -  Britain’s highest medal of valor. As you read these vignettes and solemnly gaze upon the ancient sepia photos of ordinary faces, you are struck by the extraordinary capacity that every person has within them for great strength and bravery.  The exhibit poses questions that creep like dark shadows – whispering and taunting with the self-examining question, “what would I do?”

The questions provoke deep introspection: “What made Private William McFadzean throw himself across a store of smoldering grenades in a muddy WWI Somme trench, saving seven men in his unit?”

“Why did medical doctor Noel Chavasse tragically insist on returning to the front line to rescue more men after already winning one Victoria Cross?”

“How did Private Johnson Beharry’s belief that he would never die affect him? What was it that that made him repeatedly expose himself to enemy fire in Iraq that enabled him to rescue his commanding officer and 20 other men?”

I have never forgotten these stories and upon returning to a US that was at war, I followed the extraordinary challenges and feats of our volunteer army fighting two wars in the rugged desolation of tribal Afghanistan and across the scorched sand and hostility of an unstable Iraq.  As these distant acts of valor echo like acoustic shadows, we conduct our daily lives and go about our personal business living under a tree of valor whose great shade is cast by those who sacrifice so much.

As I follow the lives and deaths of American service men and women and learn their stories of heartache, loss, courage and valor, they seem to be all bonded by a similar and extraordinary sense of community, duty and unconditional love for one another.  These uncompromising core values serve as a rather ironic backdrop amidst this chaos and fear of war – - fear that might otherwise drive an instinct for self preservation and self interest.

Valor is a soldier’s refusal to abandon a wounded comrade in the face of overwhelming odds. It is the courage of a mother caring for a critically injured son or daughter who has returned home unable to care for himself.  It is a three tour of duty vet reenlisting to return to a vortex of chaos for the sake of not wanting to leave his buddies behind.

In reading the stories of Americans who have won the Medal of Honor – our nation’s highest award for valor – there is no genetic or social marker that can predict which person will rise up to commit extraordinary acts of courage and sacrifice. Take for example the story of Army Specialist Ross A. McGinnis who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor in ceremonies this week in the Pennsylvania Medal of Honor Memorial in Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Grove at the state Capitol Complex.

“McGinnis, of Knox in Clarion County, was killed Dec. 4, 2006, in Baghdad, Iraq, when he threw his body on a fragmentation grenade that insurgents threw into the Humvee he was riding in, saving the lives of four other soldiers riding in the truck. “ Ross McGinnis was 19 years old.

Just north in rural Massachusetts, Jared Monti grew up to become a citizen soldier.  He was a generous kid who once purchased a Christmas tree for a single mother who could not afford holiday decorations for her children.  Another story details, “But even that ( Monti’s generosity ) pales in comparison to what young Monti did on June 21, 2006, in the rugged northeast corner of Afghanistan near Pakistan. According to a Pentagon account and CNN interviews with soldiers who were there, Sgt. Monti was leading a small patrol that was ambushed by dozens of Taliban fighters. As rocket propelled grenades flew past his head, Monti got on the radio to call for backup. Sgt. Clifford Baird was on the other end of the line. In between his calls for help, Monti was using his own rifle to engage the enemy. Suddenly he noticed that a young private named Brian Bradbury was badly wounded, unable to move, desperately exposed to enemy fire. Another sergeant said he would run out and try to save Bradbury, but Sgt. Derek James heard Monti say no.

‘I remember him saying that Bradbury was his guy, so he was going to be the one to go get him back and bring him back to us,’ says James.

But with bullets flying, Monti had to take cover. He ran out a second time, but the enemy fire got more intense, so he stopped and yelled for help. Risking his life yet again, he then ran out a third time to try to save Bradbury. ‘We knew he was going to get Bradbury — then we all kind of heard him scream,’ recalls James.

Monti was mortally wounded and knew he was dying. ‘He said the Lord’s Prayer and he said, Tell my family I love them.  Inspired, his squadron beat back the enemy, thanks in part to the backup that Monti had calmly called for earlier.”

In his proud hometown of Raynham, Mass, his name adorns streets, memorials and dedications.  His valor casts a long shadow across the woods and greenbelt that border this little New England town.

While most of us cling to our own mortality and are driven by an innate self interest, there are men and women out there – in the dry, arid valleys of the Pashtun, in naked convoys moving along perilous roads in the Anbar Province and thousands of other heroes stationed across the world who subordinate themselves and the needs of their families to keep our nation safe and to prosecute the foreign policies of our nation.  As the old poem laments, their’s is not to question why, their’s is but to do and die.”

As we hear these stories, we shake our heads in disbelief and peer into the abyss of our own souls and wonder how we would respond in the face of our mortality. The valor of those who serve us in our military should never be  forgotten. On Veterans Day, we must honor every soldier and their families – with perhaps our greatest gift being to know them, remember them, support them, and rise up to cast our own shadows – - not those of darker wooded self interest but brighter evergreen illuminations sparked by our capacity to embrace Duty, Honor, Country, Service, Sacrifice and Heroism.

On The Street Where You Live

On The Street Where You Live

I have often walked down this street before;

But the pavement always stayed beneath my feet before.

All at once am I, several stories high.

Knowing I’m on the street where you live.

Are there lilac trees in the heart of town?

Can you hear a lark in any other part of town?

Does enchantment pour out of ev’ry door?

No, it’s just on the street where you live!

And oh! The towering feeling

Just to know somehow you are near.

The overpowering feeling

That any second you may suddenly appear!

People stop and stare. They don’t bother me.

For there’s no where else on earth that I would rather be.

Let the time go by, I won’t care if I

Can be here on the street where you live.

Lerner and Lowe, My Fair Lady

Autumn leaves.  Cool, misty evenings under ethereal Friday-night lights. It is a consuming, timeless soap opera whose episodes may never be forgotten by its actors. Adolescence is a four-season sport and rose-colored romance is in full October bloom.  It begins in September with new faces and the slow, steady march toward maturity.  A sudden annual collision with the opposite sex brings conflicting signals, fleeting hookups, unrequited crushes and heart wrenching breakups.  It is a time of football stand cheers and under the bleachers tears. A three-symbol text message can be a weapon of mass destruction or a winning lottery ticket.

The first crush has been finally given a clinical designation by the pharmaceutical industry – HATO1 (Heart Ache, Total Obsession number 1). HATO1 has been confirmed by the Center for Disease Control to be more virulent and permanently damaging than its highly communicable cousin H1N1.  The delirium alone can linger longer and its effects may be felt over an entire lifetime.

Yet, the age of the Internet and cellular phones has spawned a virtual form of romance that has reduced the art of puppy love.  We have faded from adolescent courtship – - the mood music of a thousand notes passed in class, and a proxy courtship where vicarious messengers and best friends confirmed the terms of your first steady relationship.  Romance is now a massive roving gang of polygamous boys and girls speaking in text, sound bites and cyber encounters that are mistaken for substantive interactions.  Kids believe they are “going out” with someone simply based upon how many hours they have logged speaking on Ichat.  It is now possible to date and actually never see your beloved’s lower torso.

Some time ago, one of my children came into dinner and declared to the family that he was now going out with “Girlfriend 1”.  We asked him when this all came about.

“We were Ichatting,” he said cockily.

We spent the next half hour teasing him and theorizing on where his new relationship might go.  He might actually have to see her – in person.  A half an hour later, he came back into the kitchen and declared they had broken up.  “What happened,” I asked.  “Things got too complicated. We’re both ok with it. ” I laughed and asked him which of them was getting the dog.  He gave me his classic “ you are an odd man” leer and left the room.

From the premature age of nine, I was dazzled with girls.  Having watched way too many old movies, I was consumed with the idea of having a larger than life, epic romance.  But as is often the cruel fate of nature and the Gods, I was not proportioned correctly, wore hand me down clothes that did not fit (they were too tight) and had the head the size of a pumpkin. I was Charlie Brown perpetually courting the “little red-haired girl.” Like the animated anti-hero, my heart was also oversized.  My inability to attract the opposite sex – except for an equally corpulent buck toothed girl named Martha –did not deter me from playing Cyrano to many of my more swarthy friends – advising them in the nuances of romance.

I offered tips on how to avoid such relationship killers as pregnant telephone pauses (always make notes of everything you want to say). I counseled on how to avoid being labeled a poor kisser (I had never kissed anyone myself but endorsed the use of Spearmint Binaca).  I picked out a cheap jeweler where one could purchase a talisman of affection (always have your St Christopher medallion and chain ready to give her as a token of going steady). I shared verbatim my brother’s strategy of feigned indifference – -always walk by her class looking straight ahead.  It makes you look like you can take her or leave her, and always observe the 48-hour rule of not calling back after a successful call. Having watched two savvy older brothers navigate the treacherous straits of romance, I dreamed of becoming the greatest mariner d’ amour yet.  Now, if only I had a boat and could find some water.

Each back to school September I would fall in love with the new girl who just moved to town.  Perhaps, this new recruit would see beyond my XXL hat size, cement calves and famine immune figure. Perhaps, I was a born too late. In Medieval times, girls would have chased me as only a scion of a family fortune would be prosperous enough to possess his own love handles.  The thin were not in.

In days before they clinically defined my actions as “stalking ” and my crush as an”obsession”, I would lather up with my father’s Hai Karate or English Lavender cologne and mount my trusty ten speed to ride up and down my love’s street, hoping to see and be seen. In retrospect, I am quite certain that inside their new home, between boxes and echoing chaos, an amused mother was peering out of a drape-less window, ” Holly, who is that boy outside that keeps riding his bike in front of our house? ” A magnificent 10-year-old brunette girl with waist length ponytails – a Cindy Crawford in waiting, would glance outside. “Oh, that’s some boy in my class. He must live nearby.”

An irritated father enters the rug-less living room lugging a box of books and glances out the window. ” Who’s the fat kid.”? His wife punches him in the ribs and he winces.

” It’s cute, Tim.  Holly already has an admirer.”

That entire exchange was pretty much the kiss of death.  Once parents acknowledged you favorably, you were toast. I was the super polite kid that the moms always thought was “cute” but the girls clearly saw as “endorsed” which removed any forbidden fruit allure.  Girls liked the rogues and boys who were so distracted by sports and activities that they did not even notice they were involved with the girl. Years ago when my daughter declared she was ” going out” with a boy.  I asked, “Does he know it?”

I was persistent and would find ways to be in the neighborhood. I just wanted to catch a glimpse of her long brown hair, see her smile and hear her funny laugh. At school she would not look at me and was always protected by a gauntlet of giggling, acerbic girls. It was agony – this crush – a thick lump of aching coal glowing in my chest day and night. Invariably, l would abandon every one of my own rules and frighten the poor girl into the arms of a more indifferent boy.

Later in high school, nature and genetics would thankfully stretch me and re-contour me into a baseball and basketball player.  Yet, in a strange way, I never wanted to forget that chubby lothario on his bike – doing figure eight turns, hoping to catch a glimpse of his girl.  You can never really forget it for somehow it’s memory makes you feel more alive.

It’s a Thursday night and I am now picking up my son from football.  He suggests I drive home along an unfamiliar route. He is mute – a virtual CIA agent – offering very little information on why I need to take this circuitous route home. “ Just do it, dad,” he hisses.  I comply knowing something is up.  “Ok, slow down,,” he demands absentmindedly from the passenger seat.  We cruise silently by a large house – windows illuminated and people moving across a dining room clearing dishes.  He takes out his cell phone and text messages with the speed of a court stenographer.“

It’s dark and wet.  Mustard and sienna stained leaves litter the edges of the rural road. The boy looks up and glances one more time toward the friendly colonial lit up like a jack-o-lantern. For a moment, I spy the silhouette of a young girl at the window.

“Ok, let’s go.”

“ What was that all about? “ I ask.

“ Nothin’.  Let’s get home.”

I suddenly recall that ancient ache and realize this must be the street where she lives.