My Old, Old, Old, Old Dog (Written March 2009)

We got the old dog back in 1992 from the Humane Association, the same year my son made the 10-Year-Old Little League All-Star Team.

It wasn't my idea. I was against the idea. Not that I disliked dogs, but we had some cats and my wife was often annoyed by the barking of a neighbor's canines. I had lived with dogs all my years growing up and knew their ways and needs. She had never had a pet as a child and only our Iguana, hamsters, gerbils and cats up to the point she said we should get a dog. She had already announced this decision to the kids and I was voted down along with the standard agreement that she and they would feed, care and walk the animal. You know how long that agreement lasted - about as long as peace treaties in the Middle East or a politicians campaign promise. The dog may have been my wife's, but I was the dog's. Oh, it didn't just happen overnight. It was an insidious, but unstoppable process. It began with the request I walk him, because he was too rambunctious and strong for anyone else to control, she feared he might get loose and run into traffic. Thus it began and soon he was mine and I was his.

I walked him twice everyday (sometimes three times) for eleven years and he was a good dog. He never went to the bathroom on his walks so didn't force me to carry plastic bags of his leavings. This was good, but had an occasional downside. If he felt the urge for either bodily function, he would turn and hightail it for our home and yard. This was hard on me, keeping up and hanging on and expecting a heart seizure at any moment.

Labs are old at eight and after eleven years he slowed down and walks were hard on him and grew shorter and shorter, and when he sighed at the mere thought I gave him rides twice a day in the car. I'd take him around the countryside and he would watch the scenery and nod to the other pooches we passed with a "look at me" wink.

He is too old for even that now. He can't climb up into the car anymore with his bad hips and poor feet. He hobbles across our floors and we must aid him out to do his business. We live in a home with no ground level entries. There are always steps to get up and down and sometimes he manages, but most times he doesn't. We help him do that, sometimes with a towel beneath his belly to support him, sometimes just holding his sides because he has loss enough weight we can lift him now.

I don't know how much longer he will be with us. He was always the good dog and he obviously wants to stay. He sleeps a lot. He doesn't complain. He dreams a lot about running, I think, for his feet go during naps. He is happy for our attention. He trusts us.

I'm getting old myself. Sometimes my legs ache when I go up and down those same stairs as he. And just as he trusts us and depends on us to hold him up and guide him in his weakness, I trust in God and depend on Him to hold me up and guide me in my weakness. I thank God that he brought such a wonderful animal into our lives. The Wolfer may be old and decrepit, but is a puppy at heart.

(The music on the slide show is "Old Dogs", written and performed by Bill Stains, copyright 2007 by Red House Records.)

Click on the title of this post to see where we got this old dog.

We Interrupt this Series for a Sudden Interruption... (Written April 7, 2009)

Let me say, this has been a trying couple of weeks around a couple of days of relaxation. My wife and I spent last Wednesday through Friday at the Inn on Canal Square in Lewes, Delaware, the fine inn where Retired on Delaware works.  We

 certainly needed the time away just to unwind and have some peace.

The day before we left was not a good one, nor was the morning before we left.

On Tuesday we had our dog, Tucker, put to sleep.

He was a yellow lab who reached the grand old age of 18, although it wasn't so grand for him. He no longer could stand up, let alone walk. We had to carry him outside several times a day and he needed someone to stay with him through the night.  My son and I took turns with these tasks, but a couple of weeks ago, while taking him in and out, I torn something in my upper leg and could no longer lift him.  I am still having a great deal of pain and can't really bend down and lift anything.  My oldest daughter, who works for the SPCA, talked to the vet there and he felt it was best for the dog to bring him in and put him down.  besides his inability to stand, he had some tumors and I could see he had cataracts in his eyes.

It was difficult to do.  All five us had our moments of crying.  My two daughters and my wife took him to the SPCA, where he was attended to. The Delaware Pet Crematorium director met them there and took the body.  

We got him back this past Monday in a nice little casket with his ashes and a tuft of his fur. He is gone, but we still keep looking for him in the room or listen for his bark.

On Wednesday a week ago, the morning we left for Lewes, I went to edit a post and when I clicked view, a strange site came up, a kind of product search engine.  Someone had taken my domain name. Now, I had registered the name a year ago and my subscription did run out on March 29, the very day I found this other party grabbed the name. I had no notification that my subscription was ending or renewal notice. Not much I can do, I guess.

I thought I had no choice but to rebuild my site, which I did. Then I discovered I could retain my old site as is by just changing it to nitewrit.blogspot.com.  By that time I had sent an email to my followers asking them to change to the new site called nightwritinglem.blogspot.net.

I now think I will use nightwritinglem as my 2008 postings and do my 2009 postings on nitewrit.blogspot.com.  I have a link between the two.  I hope you will bear with me on this and continue to read my posts.  My regret is directories, both on line and in print, will now be directing people to this other site and not mine, but it is what it is.

This has been a bad year for me on the Web. Last year someone breached security and took over my email to send out spam and I lost my original email address. Then my PC crashed and I had to transfer everything to a new Mac. Now this.  Perhaps Satan is trying to shut me up.

But like an old Timex, pain or stolen web sites will not stop me from keeping on ticking. I'm just sorry I must put you thought this trauma with me.

Tribute to Tucker (Written April 10, 2009)

Thank you who have expressed your sympathy to us on the loss of Tucker.  Tucker did not not start life off under good circumstance.  I don't know the reason, but as a puppy he ended up in the Delaware Humane Association shelter.  Perhaps he had been born with show dog hopes and because he had some red in this nose instead of all black, he wasn't considered good enough and was discarded. I really don't know. But we saw him there and adopted him.

He was a very smart dog, very friendly and loyal, and tolerant of our cats. It was sad to see him deteriorate in old age and hard to make that final decision, very hard. But I think we gave him a very great life. he lived very long for a lab, that must say something. 

Comics 52 Pages in Color For a Dime

When The Kid began third grade his family lived in a swamp. During the Christmas break, they moved back to town and with the New Year of 1950 The Kid went to a new school, which had been his old school. Although the hallways of learning here were familiar and the faces around him were familiar, the friendships of first grade had somehow dissolved during the time he was elsewhere. He found making new friends difficult.

One friend from the early days stuck with him, but she was a girl. All her other friends were girls so they automatically kind of became The Kid's friends too. Perhaps if The Kid were 16 he would have found this a situation to glory in, but he was 8 and hanging around girls seemed more a detriment to making male friends than helping. Besides he was taking grief for his lack of skill in team sports and becoming skilled at the less-than-manly arts of hopscotch, jacks and skip rope didn’t seem the best image to develop. Maybe it was better to downplay his friendship with the girl next door while at school.

Of course The Kid was very naïve in thinking this, if not out-and-out shallow. After all, the girl had been loyal to him when none of his other former friends had. Avoiding her companionship at school wasn’t going to change anything anymore than his switch in baseball caps did. He had been branded as the Swamp Thing, the Hick from the Sticks, The West Whiteland Wimp, the Doofus from Glenloch and any new friends probably weren’t going to come from the jock cabal.

It didn’t help that he quickly became a teacher’s pet. It wasn’t by choice. He didn’t campaign for the position nor did he seek it. His shyness, his quietude, his deportment just always seemed to lead to it. It didn’t help he had a couple skills that brought him to notice. One of those skills combined with what had been in a spare room of the house back in the swamp, was going to lead him to the longest lasting, most bestest friendship of his life.

 So what was it lurking in that upstairs room at the house in the swamp. Was it Aladdin’s Lamp or some exotic magic amulet?

Not at all, it was something marvelously mundane. It was stacks of comic books that stood as high as The Kid. These were comics The Kid’s father had bought and saved and stored over the years.

There were new comics, because by this time The Kid was spending his own meager allowance on such mind-rotting literature, at least in the opinion of the academia and other anal retentive types. After all, these do-gooders of doom did eventually drive The Crypt Keeper, The Old Witch and The Vault Keeper into Mad magazine and turn them into Alfred E. Newman.

These self-declared guardians of good taste and youthful morals even got Congress involved, trying to out from the closet Batman and Robin and Green Arrow and Speedy, and any other super hero who dragged a young boy along on his adventures.  They saw in this a great homosexual conspiracy to capture the youth of America, instead of the more obvious idea that the comic book reader of those days was a kid and these boy wonders would give them a figure to identify with. Of course, the comic book publishers were as wrong as the Congressmen and their so-called brain trusts. The Kid never imagined himself in the green shorts of Robin, but in the dark cowl and cloak of the Caped Crusader.  I mean, come on, who wanted to be some kid in the shadows of a great man?  The Kid was already too often in the shadow of others.

There were all kinds of comics stacked in that room some new and some very old. There were ones in those stacks that dated from the very beginning of the form in the early 1930s such as “Funnies on Parade” and “Famous Funnies”. These comic books began as reprints of the Sunday comics in the newspapers, although some of these issues used daily strips and weren’t in color.

But how was this treasure trove of comic books going to lead to an important friendship for The Kid? That will have to wait for the moment, but all secrets will be explained soon.

Toilet Seats and Searching for Dinner: the Ironies of Everyday Life

Sometimes little kindnesses take convoluted routes. Take Tuesday evening when I offered my wife dinner out. Tuesday is not our usual night for restaurants, but I knew she was upset about the toilet seat and although I was weary, I felt she might be more so.

Perhaps I should explain about the toilet seat first. We had a toilet seat, one which had been around for a number of years, that had gotten loose on one side. My wife found this annoying and about two weeks ago she purchased a new toilet seat. It cost $24. Nothing overly fancy, I mean it's just a toilet seat and we weren't putting on airs about it. It was plastic, solid white with some scalloped edges to fancy it up.

I installed the new and unceremoniously deposited the old faithful, but slightly cockeyed, seat in the trash. Life seemed just fine with our shiny new plastic toilet seat brightening up the bath.

But then it went loose on the left side (as you face it). On lifting the seat I could see the two screws in the flap that held the seat to the lid had come loose. I got a screwdriver and placed the screws back against the holes and tightened them. This repair held for perhaps 15 seconds. Well, we lived with a wobble before so we would survive.

A day or so later I discovered both the left and right latches were hanging down with all the screws out of the holes. I retrieved my screwdriver once more and tighten all four screws. The two on the left refused to take hold even temporarily. The two on the right screwed back in, but a few hours later gave up any pretense of being fasteners and became derelict in their duty. We now had a free floating toilet seat.

My wife was very upset about this. I can't blame her. There are some functions of life which should not include a thrill ride.

Now Tuesday afternoon when I got home from work my wife's little apple car was gone. She was out grocery shopping and didn't get back until after four-thirty. Being out and about in the current atmosphere of the Christmas shopping season had her looking a bit strained and thus my little dinner out offer of kindness. (I suppose there is some irony in going out to dinner because of shopping for groceries.)

As I was feeling weary myself, I thought where is it easy to go? My choice was Dead Presidents. This restaurant is along a street in the Italian sector of Wilmington. It has friendly servers and large booths that provide nice privacy for dinner conversation. In line with its name, the portraits of all previous Presidents of the United States who are deceased line its walls. When a President dies, they have a little ceremony and add his picture. Reagan was the last honoree to join their decor.

However, I always like to give preference to my wife and so I asked; "Do you have any preference?' She said, "Barnabys".  Barnabys is on our regular circuit of eateries. It isn't very far, but once you cross over into Pennsylvania and turn off the back road we use onto the main route to Barnabys you hit traffic.
Not just traffic, but a long slow snake of it in both directions. It is a stop and go affair for the few miles, which thus seem like far more, you must travel.

I then said, "How about Dead Presidents?"

She acquiesced, but I though there was a hesitation. We went down our hill in the direction of Dead Presidents, but at the next cross street I turned back toward Barnabys. My wife then insisted Dead Presidents was fine, in fact, preferable, so we began our search for dinner with a ride around the block.

I went down I-95, turned into Wilmington and with not too much rush hour traffic quickly got to the street where the restaurant was. We turned into their parking lot, which was extremely empty. There were two cars, one near the front and one near the back. I parked and we walked around to the entry on the front. It was dark and a sign on the door read: "Temporarily closed due to major plumbing problem."

So it is back on the road, and my wife says, "How about Kid Shelleens?" I had been thinking the same thing since it wasn't far from the first restaurant. So I managed the left turn at a non-traffic-light intersection to get on the narrow back streets that wend to this restaurant. Unfortunately, one look at the crowd and the full parking lot told us to keep going.

I am now headed back toward downtown Wilmington and suggest, if we can find a parking place, the Washington Street Ale House.  We turn up Washington Street and into the parking lot just past the restaurant and straight on through to the street behind because this lot is really full, cars are practically parked on top of cars.

It is proceeding later into the evening and the later it gets the more crowded eateries around here also get. I then suggest Stanleys, which is actually the nearest restaurant of all to our house. We sometimes eat there, but it doesn't have the intimate seating arrangement we prefer. Too often you feel you are sharing a table with perfect strangers because some tables and booths are so close to each other. But it has good food and is close to home and I am getting hungry.

We arrive at Stanleys and although the lot is fairly crowded, there are a number of parking spaces. As we are walking across the macadam to the doors a number of people exit the restaurant. These are followed by a few more and my wife says, "Good, come on, some more leave."

Well, some more do. We think nothing of it. We get to the door and there is a sign. "Due to our Employee Christmas Party, we are closing early tonight. The kitchen closes at 6:30."

There is no sense going in. We go back to the car and drive away, this time in the direction of Barnabys. As we are poking along in Pennsylvania traffic I say, "The irony is, I really didn't want to do much driving tonight."

Before we come to Barnabys, we pass Henneseys, another of our regular places and it looks as if we can get in there. In fact, I got a space right by the front door. We went in and there were empty tables and booths. "I hope this doesn't mean they're closing up for a Christmas Party, too,"I whisper to my wife.
They aren't. We get a cozy booth and have a nice meal, although it costs more than I originally planned to spend. But man, by now I was really hungry.

Oh, the toilet seat -- the next morning I found some larger screws and drilled them into the holes. So far it seems to be holding. It's only a day so maybe a brief victory, but brief is better than total capitulation I suppose.

Curse of Barnaby's.

Last week we decided to go out to dinner at the last moment. We told our son we would bring him back a sandwich from Duffer's. When we returned home, we handed him a shrimp dinner and said, we told you we would get you something from Duffer's, but your mother decided we would go to Barnaby's, which is why you have a meal from Hennesey's.

Let me explain. We started out to go to Duffer's Pub, but not far up the road my wife asked, "how 'bout Barnaby's?" Okay, so I turned up the road toward that restaurant. This road takes you through the countryside out of Delaware into Pennsylvania. It twists and turns some, crosses railroad tracks twice, where we have often been stopped by long freights, and exits out onto Rt. 452 where you pick up bumper to bumper traffic for the remaining miles.

Things seemed fine. We just squeezed out onto Rt. 452 when the light changed and poked our way through Aston, PA. At one point we had to get over as a siren and red lights came from behind. A pickup zoomed past and I asked, "what kind of emergency vehicle is that? Emergency pothole patrol?" My wife said perhaps it was "cone rescue" (an inside joke I don't want to explain here)**. We passed Hennessy's Irish Pub, which was on the way and where we also often ate. Now the road got into the woods and went down a long hill of curvy road until you came to Barnaby's, except just at the last curve a police car blocked the road and a man in a yellow slicker directed everyone off on a narrow side road. 

We saw a couple trucks down the road next to a home supply store right on the curve. We figured a truck had skidded on the wet road (it had been raining) and jackknifed. 

But our immediate concern was we were now on an unfamiliar road going who knew where. It was up a steep hill and half way up we came to a stop at an intersection, we and a long line of cars fore and aft. Here was another guy in a yellow slicker. His pickup truck sat on the shoulder. It was the one that had passed us earlier. There was a sign on the side saying "Fire Police". Well, Mister Fire Police hadn't a clue to what he was doing. He was trying to direct traffic through this intersection, but had it mostly as confused as he obviously was. At one point he was turning in circles just flinging his arms up in a hopeless gesture. As a result, I just missed being broadsided as I passed the cross road.

The hill went on. We passed a college campus. I tried simply following the line of traffic sent this way with me, but they began to go different ways at crossroads. My wife said keep going straight. She thought we would come out on Route 1, the Baltimore Pike, a main highway we knew well and the one on which Duffer's pub is located. Looked like Duffer's after all.

But instead we ended up back in Aston at what is called five points, because five roads all converge at one intersection. I was completely turned around in my head. I had no idea what direction was what. My wife recognized just where we were and got me back on Rt. 452 heading back toward home. We would head for Duffer's after all.

But Duffer's was a long way off in this direction, so I decided to turn around and go to Hennessey's.   I was really hungry.

We had a very pleasant meal and we heard the manager explain to people in the booth behind what had happened down the road. A tree had fallen over and landed on a car, pinning the people inside. I haven't heard anything more about this, so I hope the people were okay. We did think, however, if we had arrived a couple minutes earlier maybe it would have been us.

This Monday we decided to go to Barnaby's for dinner. (We don't know when to quit.) We got there without a problem, beyond the heavy traffic and a few near misses. You could see the remains of the fallen tree and a couple smashed road signs just before we arrived at the restaurant. 

Then Tuesday morning as I started out to work I noticed something absent from my wallet. I had left my credit card at Barnaby's. That afternoon, after work, I had to drive back to the restaurant in a raging thunderstorm to retrieve the card. I have decided Barnaby's is cursed.

** My daughters have longed claimed to be members of "Cone Rescue", whose duty is rescuing lonely and abused highway cones. They mourn the poor cones who didn't make it, but were instead smashed by careless drivers.  I know, my whole family is crazy.

That is Barnaby's in the photo.

A Daddy's Memories on Father's Day

Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him. Psalm 127:3

At thirty-three I thought a dad I'd never be. At thirty-four I became one. I've told the story of all that along the way in this Blog.

My three children are adults now; none married and none have children - phew! They don't know what they are missing.

It's nice they're grown now, nice all the worry and work of raising decent people is behind us. What is also nice is they still come by every week, we laugh together, we sometimes go out to eat together and everyone likes each other. And it is nice that children leave you with so many memories to brighten gloomy days.

What kind of memories? Good and bad, of course, but it's odd, over time even the bad memories often turn good, things you can laugh about together now. Let me meander through some images stored in my aging brain for you. Indulge me, it is Father's Day and next week is my birthday. It is a season for reminiscence.

All my kids were premature births, thus tiny. Laurel wasn't the smallest, that was Noelle, but Laurel was the first and teeny enough. Before they would let us take her home, we had to dress her. We were prepared with the smallest size bunting one could buy, but even this outsized her and she seemed insistent no one was going to slip such a clown suit on her. She seemed to sprout extra feet and hands and a supersonic wiggle that resisted two giant oafs, who had sprouted nothing but thumbs, attempts to control and dress. To the side the hospital nursery staff stood and laughed. Welcome to parenthood.

When the day came I had to rush my wife to the hospital believing she was miscarrying (it proved to be Noelle anxious to enter this world), I had to call the church for emergency help to watch over Laurel, who was just over two and a half and at the attempting to talk stage. This did not involve human speech so much as babbling odd and strange sounds, which could be the start of words. You'd get icks and ahhs and erks, often quite loud. This was the practice she was engaged in when the Pastor's wife came and as the woman entered through the doorway, Laurel uttered a new discovery in her pre-speech vocabulary, one beginning with F and ending in K. This would have been bad enough if the Pastor's wife hadn't sweetly asked, "What did you say, my dear?"

I could picture us the subject of next week's sermon.

Laurel was full of surprises. About age four she would imitate her mother's care of baby Noelle on her dolls. It was cute. One day I came home from work and Laurel came running to the top of the staircase calling, "Daddy". I started up the steps and before me stood a little ghost, somewhat resembling a girl, but white from topknot to toe. "Come see," she said and led me to our bedroom which appeared to be a snow scene from a Hallmark Christmas Card. She had gotten her mother's powder and was talcing her dollies' bottoms - with plenitude.

If Laurel was the little mother, Noelle was the fearless adventurer. Let me illustrate. When Laurel was at the crawler stage she crawled one day to the bottom of the staircase. She sat back and studied this mountain. After a bit of contemplation, she pulled herself upon the first step. Here she paused, then gingerly lowered one leg backward until her foot touched the floor and climbed back down. She thought a moment more, then carefully negotiated two steps, paused and repeated the cautious retreat to the floor. This was repeated for two more steps before she finally clambered to the stairway top. Having pretested the conquest, she now carefully backed her way down again.

When Noelle was at the crawling stage and came to the stairs, she looked up once and scampered to the top. However, having not given it any thought meant getting back had not crossed her mind either and Daddy had to go rescue her.

Perhaps this charge ahead adventurous style of Noelle's came from nearly not making it through birth. Just as doctors had once given up on my wife ever having children, they had given up on Noelle living past her first day. It probably led to the Night of the Rhino Foot.

There was a period when I worked days and my wife worked nights. Once during that time I was preparing the kids for bed. Noelle was in taking a bath, having reached an age where she could be left alone in the tub without danger of drowning. But not without danger of experimentation. My mom had given the kids these bath toys, little sponge animals that when wet grow in size. I had tucked Darryl in bed and went to hustle Noelle from the water to the blankets, but when I opened the bathroom door I was greeting with the shower scene from "Psycho" or more precisely, the aftermath just before Anthony Perkins cleaned it up. Blood, blood was everywhere. It dripped down the edge of the tub and sprinkled the walls and puddled on the floor. It also was streaming down my daughter, who sat unperturbed staring at her nonplussed dad with one finger up her nostril.

"Can't get out," she calmly said.

"What?"

"Rhin'russ," she said.

She had stuffed the Rhinoceros sponge up her nose where it swelled and left behind its foot. She had ripped the body away and spent who knew how long trying to dig the remainder of the beast out of her nose thus creating this massive bleedfest.

I cleaned her off and (pretty much in a panic mode to tell the truth) called our Pediatrician, hoping his office was not yet closed as the evening was late. A nurse answered and I blurted out, "My daughter has a Rhinoceros foot stuck in her nose!" By the Grace of God, she did not hang up on me. In may be that zoo animal parts up noses is a natural occurrence in pediatric offices.

I then called my wife at work and told her I was taking the kids to their doctor. She of course asked why and I said...

"Noelle has a Rhinoceros foot stuck in her nose," and at this point the absurdity of it hit me and I barely stifled a chuckle.

"I've had a rough day," my wife snapped, "I'm tired and in no mood for your jokes."

Obviously explanations followed and all worked out and my daughter is not now encumbered by any kind of feet up her nasal passage.

Now my son was not above sticking items in his nose, but he never got any stuck that drew my attention to such practices on his part. It got my attention the day he was accused of plotting with a classmate to blow up his school, but that is a story for another Blog (a teaser to keep you coming back - one of those then bad things we laugh about today).

My kids were in a number of activities. Sometimes activities led to odd affiliations; for example, I can tell you my son was in the Girls' Club, My oldest daughter in the Boy Scouts, Noelle wore combat boots, I was a Cookie Mother and my wife was a Road Runner.

Laurel, at age 8, asked to ride horses. We took her to a stable just over the Pennsylvania line to enroll her in riding lessons. She being the unadventurous and cautious daughter, I expected once she stood next to a horse towering above her, she would ask to go home. Instead she took riding lessons every week for the next 11 years and won quite a number of horse show ribbons. She also was in an award winning school chorus, an adult church choir at age 10 and some plays, not to forget her stint in the Explorer Scouts to participate in a paralegal program.

Noelle had dance and acrobatics, but shown in art, having work displayed in two Young Brandywine Artist Festivals and also a private showing locally. She was also in Brownies for which I became Cookie Mother. (She was also recruited by the engineering school at the U. of Delaware, but choose not to go, taking paramedical classes instead.)

My son was in scouts, too, but probably some of the best memories he gave me were in baseball. He was a good ball player. In his first Little League season if he couldn't quite hit the ball consistently, he was good at the ball hitting him. In one crucial situation with his team needing runs and the bases loaded, he looked at me and said, "Don't worry, dad, he's going to hit me." And sure enough, the pitcher plunked him. Darryl never flinched upon being hit, just trotted to first. I remember one time he got clipped good by a hard throwing kid and the umpire took off his mask and said, "that's one tough kid".

Next to the season when he was team captain and the team went on to win both division and league championships, the sparkling moment was a year earlier when his team was out of playoff contention. We were playing the Tigers, a team on the bubble for making the championships. We had a man on base in the last inning and the scored tied with two out. Our third in the batting order was coming to bat, a pretty good hitting catcher. The Tigers season was on the line. The Tigers' manager did something I never saw before or after in the nine years I coached in Little League. He ordered an intentional walk. He walked this kid to get to my son. And yes, just like the movies, with two strikes on him, my son hit a game winning home run and knocked the Tigers out of the playoffs.

My thought was, "what was that manager thinking? Why did he think we had Darryl batting clean up." Darryl led the team in home runs that year.

It is the little successes of their children that mean more to daddies than all their own accomplishments. My children, all three,have awarded me with many such joys.

I could go on, but enough of this puffed-up proud papa palaver. I will just leave you with the cliche, but truth, emblazoned on the T-shirt below:

All Through the Night

This is what we do as a family together on Christmas day. We laugh a lot. Actually, we laugh a lot whenever we get together.

It is expected there be this affection within a family, storge love as the Greeks put it. It is a real blessing when you love being together because not only do we have familia love, but we truly like each other.

Christmas is precious for bringing families together, I hope most appreciate that fact. It is one of the rare days throughout the year when the pictures above could be taken, the five of us together.  When I began in life as a young adult you talked about jobs as 9-to-5 affairs, things you went to for 8 hours a day Monday through Friday.  That wasn't an absolute. Some people worked longer or on different days. My own boyhood family was an exception, my dad being a long-haul trucker who was seldom home. But it was close enough to be called the norm for those times. You could count on hearing men leaving home between 7 and 9 in the morning and see them arriving home between 3 and 5 in the afternoon. Most of the women worked as home keepers, so didn't go off. My mother was a clerk in the Five 'n' Dime for awhile, but retail was different then as well. Stores were open from 9 to 5 on Monday through Thursday, stayed open until 9 PM on Fridays, some opened 9 to 5 on Saturday and never on Sunday.

It is different now, and not for the better. Nothing seems to close anymore. Some stores and even some banks remain open 24/7 all year long. Most stores are open seven days and keep evening hours. Holidays don't mean parades or picnics, just sales. Work schedules are unpredictable and it is difficult to get families in one room at the same time.

So it is with us. My wife is retired, so she controls her own hours. I am close to a norm, working part time Monday through Friday generally from 10 - 2 (since my hours have been cut and I think will be cut again). My son (in retail) and my girls (both in animal shelters) have different schedules weekly and never seem to line up together. Even on Christmas the girls worked some hours. Animals need care everyday.

So bless Christmas it is a day that can bring families together; although, a warning for the future, some stores have begun to open even on Christmas Day. Not all of Scroogedom has repented from the pursuit of one more gold coin.

We had hoped this year my parents could make it to our home for the day. My dad was banned from driving earlier this year because of health problems (his heart) and my mother would not be at ease driving the distance, so I had planned to pick them up and take them home. Weather conspired against us for neither my mother wanted to travel if it were bad nor did my wife want me making the trip in such conditions.

The weekend before Christmas we were visited by Jack Frost who left behind 18 inches of snow. This is not common for Delaware so people deal with it less well than some in other states. Temperatures remained low, so the snow wasn't going anywhere fast, yet the days that week were sunny and bright and the roads in good shape. I held hope until the last moment we would get my parents here, but rains came heavy on Christmas and it didn't happen for us. My dad is 91, my mother 89, so your don't know if a missed opportunity will be the last opportunity.

(Photo is my parents a couple Christmases ago.)


Perhaps our Christmas day was little different than most Americans. Once everyone arrived, we took turns playing Santa and handing out the gifts, then took turns opening them. There was hardly any duplication this year. The first gift my wife opened was a back massager from me. The first gift I opened turned out to be a back massager from her. Ah, that is where the mind goes when you get older -- mutual back massagers.

We watched a funny DVD my son got and laughed our heads off. That is what is going on in the photos at the top. Then we had dinner.

Now the Ghost of Christmas Past will recall we always had a stuffed turkey with all the usual trimmings, but this year my wife asked everyone what they would like for Christmas dinner. We had hot dogs and beans (my choice), potato and macaroni salads, mac & cheese, the pink stuff (some kind of fluffy jello thing my oldest daughter loves), pickles and olives and I've lost track.

After Grace and before digging in we opened out crackers. You know, we are big BritCom fans and Mr. Bean and the "Are You being Served" gang over at Grace Brothers always pull crackers on Christmas. So this year we did too. I wish I had taken a picture of us sitting there reading our fortune in our funny paper hats that had popped out .

A gift my wife had given our son was a set of eight hot BBQ sauces. She ordered from a catalogue online and thought they would be large bottles. This small box came with eight tiny bottles within. Each sauce had a ever hotter sounding title and the last came with a warning label. That evening the kids decided to try the sauces on crackers (the kind you eat this time) and so they did. Ah, you would have had to see the jumps, pacing, screeches, runs for bread or milk, and the guffaws of laugher in between cries of "my tongue is on fire".

I would have joined in this self-inflicted torture, except the only damper for me was I was sick all weekend. I felt the virus start late Christmas Eve eve and it continued right through until Monday. Actually it is still lingering a bit, but you know how it is. You get sick on a holiday and it always clears up enough for you to return to work. I don't get sick often, but it always seems to be when I least wish to be ill (as if there was a time I wished to be), like this Christmas. the last time I got sick was in September 2007 when we were on vacation in Charlottsburg, Virginia.

But I survived and I enjoyed the day with the family.

As it turned out it was probably fortunate the rain kept my parents from coming. They went to dinner with friends, so they weren't alone or missing out on celebrating. But that evening my dad went into the bathroom and after a bit called for my mother to come. She said she went in and there was blood everywhere. My dad had had a biopsy two weeks previously (he had found a lump in his breast) and something had lesioned. My mother called her friend to come take them to the hospital, but the friend did the right thing, told my mom to call 911. The 911 operator instructed my mom to press a towel against my dad's chest until the paramedics arrived and took him to the emergency ward. Who knows what might have happened if this had happened on the road?

Now the Holiday has gone for this year and we sit back and reflect. We reflect on our family and how blessed we are. We do not know what next Christmas will bring, only that we have Christmas because all is in God's hands. In all the joys and mishaps of any Christmas day or any other day, through all the years of life we turn toward the first birth of Christmas and the second birth of Easter with gladness. It is in the aftermath of the celebration that we sit in the glimmer of only the tree lights and think of the last lyric on an old song: "Christmas should be softly spoken, all though the night."

"God bless us, everyone!"

Larry

Sea Change -- Andrew Wyeth

Events have conspired to bring my little corner of

this world into a larger frame this weekend. The poster that opens this Blog hangs over the

entertainment center of our living room. It is of Little Caldwell's Island off the coast of Maine. Although the original painting hangs in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, my wife purchased this reproduction at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine.

My wife walks between buildings of the Farnsworth in 2006 prior to making her

 purchase of the poster.

This painting called "Ides of March" hangs above our fireplace. The artist must have owned a Yellow Lab, as do we, for one appears in several of his paintings. 

Like most of his paintings, there is something

both comforting and disturbing present in the image. The dog lies near the fireplace as a seeker of warmth would, but there is no fire. There are some smoldering embers in the logs. The dog stares directly at you with questioning eyes. Is it wondering if the artist will put down his brush and stoke the fire? The day is March 15, nearly

the end of winter, almost the beginning of Spring in the most uncertain of months. Will there be a final burst of snow and chill or will the air begin to fill with teasingly warm ribbons of air promising renewal in a new season?

This painting above was purchased at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Chadds Ford isn't far from me. I have visited it

many times, both the area and the River Museum. This photo on the right I took of the

 Brandywine River Museum in  2004. I chose to use it here because my photo has some similarities to the paintings of this artist. It has a feeling of isolation, of being outside something, yet the open doors seems to invite me inside the courtyard.

Indeed, I have been inside that courtyard and

 inside that museum and inside the world this artist expressed many times. Like the painting on the left called "Big Room", which hangs above our entryway stairs, his paintings have been of the big room in which I grew and live. The images the man created were scenes I knew, places I passed and the inner-moods of my existence.  

"The Academy" hangs in a corner of our living room. Despite the horses, I doubt it is a riding academy. Where are the riders? Presumably inside the house learning.

I've seen this house or ones like it. They dot the countryside between my birth and old age, an area as much of an academy of my own creativity, a line weaving my tales and poems together. 

I have inhabited its banks for sixty years.

Photographed its waters while balanced upon its rocks.

Waded through its shallows and swum its deep still pools

Where those same rocks dammed the flow and calmed the rapids.

Seen its torrents in torment from terrible rains, furious at the thunder.

Seen its floods, fat and full, tolerantly awaiting the tempest to be through.

Seen it dried by summer deficiency to a ditch, stripped of its drift and undressed to it sediment.

A furrow burbling throughout my environs,

Who are you?

I have heard its entitlement for sixty years.

Heard its intoxicating reiterations echoed through the Valley,

Memorialized at a Battle, displayed in a riverside art museum,

Flattered by a hundred parks and roads, housing developments

And disparate other places.

An identifying location of my living,

Who are you?

I have spoken the Brandywine for sixty years.

Are you namesake of Andrew Braindwine, settled on your banks before Francis Chadley’s son John famously contravened your width?

Are you the unexplained corruption of Brandwyn, who dwelled alongside your stream?

Are you of Dutch descent, christened by the wreckage of the good ship Brandewijn that dumped its Brandy cargo in your mouth three hundred odd years ago?

A lifeline across the palm of my land,

Who are you?

I’ve crossed your winding path from Modena to Whitford, from Fallowfield to Uwchlan, from Bucktown to Glenlock,

To the stones of a hundred graves bearing names:

The Talbots and the Downings and the Bruners and Townsleys and the Wilsons and Browns.

Families floating like flotsam through my veins.

Sometimes a creek and sometimes a river,

Who are we? ***

And as if uncertain whether the Brandywine is a river or a creek, critics have struggled with this artist in the 70 years he graced canvases with his art over his 91 years. Let me clarify it for them. The man was a river. His work is not illustration, it is not sentimentality. It is a true examination of America, done in a realistic style that belies the depth of emotion, thought and story beneath the sombre colors of tempura. This was certainly one of the greatest of American artists, perhaps the greatest. He is certainly among the greats of the world and history.

He died the other day asleep in his "Master Bedroom". Now he rests with the immortals and his dog sleeps alone against his pillow, still feeling his last embers against its skin, holding onto that last flicker of warmth, while we who loved his work can gaze upon his genius forever in those paintings hanging about our walls. 

"Master bedroom" was the first I bought, a gift I purchased for my wife at the Boothwyn Farmers Market.

What tied our visits to the Farnsworth in Maine and the Brandywine River Museum in Pennsylvania? Just what it said this morning in his obituary:

Services will be private. A celebration of his life and work will be held at the Brandywine River Museum at a date to be announced later. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa., and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. 

I never met Andrew Wyeth, at least not knowingly. We traveled the same roads all our lives. Last night my wife and I ate at the Chadds Ford Tavern, where paintings by his father hang. We have eaten in restaurants he ate at, and next to where I work is a coffee shop he sometimes bought his morning brew.  That coffee shop connects to the other event that brings my little world to national attention this weekend. Joe Biden would also often stop in that shop for coffee early on his way to the train station from his Greenville home.

Today a train will slow by my small town station and then stop down the way a piece in Wilmington, where Joe Biden will be waiting. On the train will be the President-elect, Barack Obama. They will make some speeches and then travel on to Baltimore and Washington.

Like the dog by the fireplace in "Ides of March", I feel between the changing of a season. I watch, perhaps, the end of winter for the America I knew and face ahead an uncertain Spring. I will miss the passing of Andrew Wyeth in the final winter of his life.  He was in many ways a modest man, known as Andy, who ate breakfast at Hank's Place and asked that people not stare. He leaves the scene as a train brings someone who doesn't appear modest at all. It is certainly a milestone of history, but I fear the heightened expectation. Can anyone live up to such hopes? But we can only wait and ponder until this man sets his brush to painting our future, will it be a masterpiece or something less.

Andrew Wyeth is beyond our prayers now. Barack Obama is in need of them. 

And I sit here in my little corner of the world a-sudden caught in the spotlight of attention. I am sure many speeches today will end with God Bless America.  But to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, it is not is God on our side, but are we on God's?   

***"RiverCreek Mystery" by Nitewrit, published in Mobius: The Poetry Magazine, Fall-Winter 2004.  Copyright by the author, 2004

written 1/17/09