Day Five & Six...Stereotypes and Reality

The much dreaded drive from Short Pump to Princeton lived up to it's billing. To the everlasting credit of my crew, everyone was AIS by 6 AM. Patrick drove the wheels off  his 1998 VW Jetta, keeping it glued on the tail of my Budget Battle Tank. The drive around our nation's capital was emblematic of the dysfunction so associated with that city. 5 lanes of insanely chaotic traffic careening around ill-conceived and poorly constructed beltways. It occurred to me that no metropolitan area in the entire country has been the beneficiary of more stimulus and infrastructure
spending than our capital, and yet to drive the roads built by all that largess is still the most frightening experience in all the world of travel. I almost sideswiped two cars, spent 30 minutes in a traffic jam, and was rewarded with not one hilarious road sign for my efforts. On a side note, and a large number of my extended family will LOVE this, I actually made the first and only bathroom- only stop of my driving career...not for Pam, or Caroline...but for ME. Perhaps it was the hour and a half of white knuckle clinching involved in the navigation around DC, perhaps it was the brutal pounding my kidney's took from the Grand Canyon sized potholes, or maybe it was being so close to a city where everything from money to state secrets flows so freely...after only 3 hours on the road, I truly had to go. Shameful.

Once we made it to Lawrenceville, I was pleasantly surprised at Patrick's apartment complex. In my mind's eye, I was picturing...New Jersey, apartment, near number 1 highway...let's face it, I was thinking public housing meets Jersey shore. Instead, the place was beautiful. The apartment itself was spacious and charming, and the grounds were gorgeous, complete with three pools, walking trails, tennis courts, and landscaped lawns and beautiful trees everywhere. Although the whole vibe of the place laid waste to my prejudiced, anti-yankee sensibilities, one image did serve as a reminder that one stereotype of Jersey is in fact justified. There, in the back of one of the clean parking lots was a late model Nissan Stanza propped up precariously on cinder blocks, with not a tire in sight!

The unpacking of the truck went swimmingly well compared to the Nashville version. All of his stuff was unloaded and his bedroom and music/computer center completely set up in less than two hours. We got to meet one of his roommates who was very nice. Pam finally got her chance to clean all of his "kitchen stuff". His closet is organized, bed made for the first ( and last ) time. By 5:30, Pam and I were checked in to our hotel. At 7:00 we met the kids at Palmer Square in the heart of Princeton for a lovely dinner at Winbergs, and an evening of sightseeing, a relaxing ending to a day that had begun at 4:30 AM.

Today, we finally rid ourselves of this wretched truck. Patrick is as I write this driving Matt to the Philadelphia airport. He will return by noon where we will meet him and Caroline back at the apartment for some final touches. Then we will leave him to his new life and make the drive back to Short Pump.....or....Pam will see tons of other stuff that needs to be done and we will end up staying another night in this Garden State. Who knows. Either way, it has been a long, nerve wracking week. Something like an adventure.

Day Two & Three. A Blur...

Tuesday was one of those days that you will remember forever. Like 9/11, the Rodney King riots, the Japanese Tsunami...days that you will always recall in crystal clear detail. For me, the detail I will always remember is..spaghetti.

In Patrick's defense, he had been forced by circumstances to move all of his worldly belongings twice in the last 3 months, and then once again from a bedroom to what was a dining room in his current apartment. It's a long story involving leases and whatnot that I won't bore you with except to say that there were extenuating circumstances behind the fate that awaited us at his apartment Tuesday. We arrived around 1 o'clock in the afternoon with the rental truck for what we supposed would be a rather simple job of loading all of his stuff and then going out to dinner. Wrong. What we found was the most bizarrely conceived collection of boxes you could possibly imagine. In one half empty box there would be two books, some sheet music, one sock, a necktie, and a box of flour. On the top of the box, it would be labeled.."eclectic randomness". No, we would have loved any label. There were no labels. How do you label a box with one pair of long john underwear, a screwdriver, a box of staples, and a can opener? For Pam, this was the moral equivalent of cruel and unusual punishment. Her eyes were wide with the horror of it all. She began making furious plans to organize it all, starting with cleaning everything she could get her hands on. But soon she realized the futility of her efforts. The turning point for her brings me to my spaghetti moment. Up on the top shelf of his closet was a box that he assured us contained only "kitchen stuff". He was right. Inside was a teaming mass of things associated in most people's minds with kitchens. There were two or three glasses, some plastic measuring spoons, and no less than 8 frying pans of every size imaginable. Where did he get so many frying pans? We could only recall buying him two. From the looks of it, maybe he thought that once a frying pan was used once, then a new one was needed. Digging through the box, I half expected some hostile living thing to jump out at me. Then I saw it. The one thing that served as a cold water in the face moment for Pam and I, the clarifying event of the day that screamed out, "Forget organization..that way leads to madness. Just throw it all in the truck and deal with it later." We pulled out the last frying pan in the box and found that it still had the remains of a spaghetti dinner from June encrusted to the Teflon coating.

By late afternoon, it was all packed. Then I happen to notice that the right rear tire on the truck was flat. You would think that this would have sent me over the edge, but I was strangely serene. I calmly called the "roadside assistance 800 number" given me by the strange smelling woman at the Budget Truck Rental office earlier in the day. In less than an hour, Leon showed up and replaced the valve stem. The next thing I knew, Pam and I were sitting at Puckett's Boat House across the table from Patrick and Caroline having a lovely dinner in the most charming small town in America...Franklin, Tennessee.

Yesterday was just a long hard slog of a trip. 10 hours of holding on for dear life in the loudest truck cab I've ever heard, sitting in a seat designed for transferring all of the impact of even the smallest pot hole directly to your kidneys, with the added bonus of an engine that got 8 miles to the gallon. The driving downpours and high winds we encountered along the way actually helped me by diverting my attention from the cramps in my legs brought on by restricted blood flow to my extremities, courtesy of my tortuous drivers seat.

Last but not least, I did notice two hilarious roadsigns along the way, one that caused much ponderous thought and the other, well, it just struck me as funny. The first one was a large sign advertising an ADULT SUPERSTORE and CONSIGNMENT SHOP. The mind reels at the possibilities. The second was actually plastered on the side of a building. There was a ginormous picture of an AK-47 machine gun and then the name of the gun store. Right under that was a sign in huge red letters....JESUS IS LORD.

Day One of Moving Week

Day one of our nomadic adventure went quite well, thank you. We left Short Pump at 7:40 in the morning and stopped for the first time at 11:45 at our favorite lunch spot in Abingdon, Va. Then we drove for roughly another 4 hours until a gas/bathroom break near Cookeville,Tn. After another hour we arrived at our east-end hotel near the airport in Nashville, 8 hours and 55 minutes after leaving Short Pump. Upon posting our progress on Facebook, I was met with incredulous accusations of being a relentless slave driver by not allowing more bathroom breaks for Pam. Actually, on our second stop in Cookeville, Pam didn't even get to use the bathroom because it was being monopolized by a desperate women with "kidney issues". So, in fact Pam went over 5 hours without a bathroom break, no surprise to me since, in a family of iron bladders, she is the Queen. My family has made over fifteen 13 hour road trips to Maine. Most of those trips were made through the night, straight through with two stops. So starting at an early age my children learned how to "conquer the trip" in fine fashion. Of course, I'm fully aware that most people hear these stories and recoil in honor at the prospect of having to be in a car for more than 45 minutes without going to the bathroom. When I am part of the Dunnevant family convoy of 7 cars headed to the beach every other year, it is an agonizing experience. My dear extended family have the combined bladder strength of a freshman pledge at Delta Tau Chi. We turn a 3 and a half hour ride into a 7 hour tour of the finest bathroom facilities from Richmond to Nags Head. I feel like we should be filming a public service announcement for the American Urological Association. I've come up with lots of names for these trips to help me deal with the frustrating pace with humor and not hostility....The Bladder Battle...The Wee-Wee Wars...The Trickle-Down Trip....When Will We Get There?...it DEPENDS...

Last night we attended a concert at the First Presbyterian Church of Patrick's choir, the Wedgewood Summer Chorale. This was a choir that he recruited and directed all summer for this one concert..just because he couldn't imagine going 3 months without some sort of musical project to work on. One of the songs they sang was a premiere of one of his works called..In Sorrow. Speaking as a parent with no training in the fine art of choral music, it was a stunningly beautiful piece. After the concert, one of Patrick's favorite professor's at Belmont came up to Pam and I to say of that song.."I hate your son! When I was his age, I couldn't possibly have written something as solemn and intelligent as that. Most kids his age have to work through the anger and bitterness in their lives when they write music, but what comes out of Patrick is beauty and joy." He went on to praise us for fine parenting to produce a man capable of such work. It was all quite dizzying...and uncomfortable. We pointed out to him that we had lots of help along the way. Honestly, although musical talent is evident throughout my extended family, I hesitate to credit his gifts as merely a function of genetics. What Patrick has is closer to a freakish, sixth sense of a thing, a divine gift given out at random by an unpredictable God who blesses whom he wishes to bless, and curses whom he wishes to curse. So endowed, it's up to Patrick to make something of it, to God's glory. He is well on his way.

Just about the time Patrick might be expected to get all puffed up with pride with himself, he gets pulled over on his way back to his apartment for having expired decals and a defective headlight!! Who says God doesn't have a sense of humor?

Great Campaign Commercials in History...sorta

Now that Paul Ryan is on the Republican ticket, I'm sure that the Democratic Party will revise that classic commercial they ran back during the 2010 congressional elections featuring a Paul Ryan lookalike literally pushing a wheelchair bound senior citizen over a cliff. Paul Ryan's crime? He had offered a plan to reform Medicare, an actuarially doomed social program that is on a path to destroy itself absent changes. For his efforts, he was made the center piece of the Democratic Party's effort to demonize Republicans as anti-old people...the now famous Mediscare strategy. Watch it for yourself..it's awesome!!

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Classic stuff. But, it has gotten me to thinking. How would modern campaign strategists have handled previous presidential campaigns? If there were television commercials, political consultants and Hollywood production capabilities, along with today's standards of decency back, say, 100 years ago, what kinds of commercials would they have produced? Hmmmm...


Vote for Wendell Willkie!! ...Isn't it about time we had a President who will STAND UP for America?







Seriously? Must we elect the ugliest man in America as our next President?  Vote Breckinridge '60




If he's so smart, how come he has a slave-girlfriend?  John Adams is the only man running for President in 1800 with all white children...John Adams, the pure choice for President.






William Howard Taft...an animal hating, tub of lard! The last thing America needs is another FAT CAT in the white house. Vote William Jennings Bryan in 1908!!

Time For A Little Bragging

So, this morning I was planning on vacuuming the down stairs, as is usually my lot on Saturdays. But while I was sitting at this desk catching up on the overnight news I hear the Dyson roaring. Pam then told me that I am not to do anything that might throw out my back between now and Monday morning when we depart for Nashville. Long car rides followed by moving furniture and boxes has been a toxic mixture for me in the past so, she's probably right. But I hate being told I can't do something because I might get hurt. Even when I was a kid I hated it. Mom would say.."Douglas!! Put some shoes on before you walk through the smoldering embers of the trash fire from last night!!" Of course, hearing that was like a green light challenge for me so I boldly plowed ahead, Tony Robbins-like into the smokey pile, whereupon my bare left foot immediately came down on the jagged edge of a broken coke bottle. The inch long scar is still there as a monument to my foolishness. True story.

Speaking of overnight news, Romney picked Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his VP. I don't like to brag, but to some of us, this is not really news. I now call your attention to these words written by your humble blogger on January 2, 2012 as part of my "Predictions" blog...


8. Mitt Romney will win the Republican party nomination, becoming the first Mormon to be so honored. He names Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate. In a bold move designed to prove that he does, in fact, have a sense of humor, they arrive at the Republican convention center in Tampa riding two bicycles, wearing white shirts with skinny black ties.


BAMM!!

Moving My Boy To New Jersey

Next week is going to be a beauty. My son will be moving from Nashville, Tennessee to Princeton, New Jersey to attend grad school. Here's how the itinerary looks on paper.

# Pam and I leave Richmond at 8 AM Monday morning headed for Nashville. It's 600 miles and will take 9 hours. Somewhere around Knoxville we gain an hour, crossing into the central time zone.

# Monday evening, we will attend Patrick's final choral concert in Nashville. This time it's a choir he created from scratch at the beginning of the summer. They have been rehearsing for nearly 3 months just for this one and only performance. It would seem that my son cannot go a single season without hatching some musical project, and spending a fortune on sheet music. ( BLAST you Sherri Matthews!!)

# Tuesday morning I pick up the Budget Rental truck and head over to Patrick's apartment. He is currently sleeping in the dining room of a place he has lived for only 2 months. The guy who is replacing him in this place decided to move in two weeks early, so all of Patrick's worldly possessions are stacked in what was once a dining room. He sleeps somewhere in the pile. When  he Skyped us the other night the only part of this chaos that looked even vaguely organized was the wall that contained his keyboard/computer combo. Oh..and the new guy has a puppy. So, here's hoping the mutt doesn't have flees. We will spend this day sorting through the mountains of stuff, organizing, discarding and boxing it all up. All the while we will be meeting Patrick's girlfriend of these past 4 months who we have heard about but never actually met..Caroline. Tuesday night we will all have dinner at Puckett's Boat House, Patrick's employer since graduation in December.

# Wednesday morning three vehicles will depart Nashville around 8 in the morning. I will be driving the truck, Pam will be driving our car, and Patrick will be driving his car with Caroline and his best friend Matt as passengers. We will all have walkie-talkies just in case Patrick's 14 year old VW Jetta dies on the way. On this leg of the journey, we lose that hour we gained on Monday, arriving back in Richmond hopefully around 7 o'clock in the evening.

# Thursday will be a day of Patrick showing his girlfriend the sights of his home town, while Pam frantically prepares for the last leg of the trip, and I go into the office and try to get some work done.

# Friday morning early, which for me would be 6 but will probably end up being 7:30, the same three vehicle convoy will depart Short Pump and make the most dangerous road trip in America...up 95 thru D.C., around Baltimore, across the Delaware bridge and onto the New Jersey turnpike. Mapquest says 5 and a half hours, but with the traffic, multiple accidents( hopefully not involving US) it could be 7 hours. Once we arrive in Princeton, we get to meet Patrick's new roommates who have already moved in. These are two kids he has never met, since he only knows them from Facebook.  Awesome.

# By mid afternoon Saturday, the move complete, and amidst much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth from my wife we will drop off the rental truck in Lawrenceville, and make the death-drive back to Richmond, arriving sometime before midnight. Total miles driven since Monday...2000. Total cost of truck, gas, meals and hotels..$1800.


Why do we do this as parents? Our son is 23 years old. He works, pays his own bills, he is a fully functioning adult. If left to his own devices he could move himself from Nashville to Princeton. Why spend all this money, blow and entire week of production to oversee the event? He didn't ask us to help. So, why do we do it? Part of me thinks we shouldn't insert ourselves into this thing. But another huge part of me thinks.."What, are you NUTS????" He's our little boy. Sure, maybe 15 years have passed since he has actually been our little boy, but it's hard to see him as a grownup. When we moved Kaitlin into her rental house at Wake Forest when she was starting grad school, I remember thinking to myself.." How is she going to make it here by herself, since she is only 6 years old?" We parents are weird that way. Time may march on, but not in our imaginations. These smart, engaging, ambitious adults staring back at us can't possibly be our children...can they? What happened??

"When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?"

My inbred, free born, suspicion of government comes as no shock to regular readers of this space. I'm sure it annoys those of you on the left who can't understand why I could possibly distrust something as wonderfully benevolent as our government since it is the guarantor of our freedoms. Many of you on the right I'm sure are equally annoyed that I lack sufficient enthusiasm for the Republican party's grand plans for constraining that government. Fair enough. But never before have my feelings of isolation and alienation from the political process been more powerful than they are today. A Presidential election campaign will do that to you. But it's more than that. Consider just this one example from last week.


The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, goes on the floor of the senate and proclaims to the world that he had gotten a call from an unnamed former Bain Capital investor who claimed that Mitt Romney hadn't paid taxes in ten years. Reid then called on Romney to come forward and prove that this accusation was untrue by releasing his tax returns. Well, there you have it...the new evidentiary standard of our justice system...any anonymous accusation is the truth until you prove that it isn't. This giant step forward in our criminal justice system brought to you by the highest ranking Democrat in Congress, a political party who won 30 years worth of elections demonizing Joe McCarthy.

Lest you think that this "when did you stop beating your wife" style of accusation is strictly a democratic party affair, think again. President Obama has never released his academic records from his time at Columbia University. Right wing political web sites have been ablaze with accusations that this "proves" that his grades were awful and that he probably got in to Columbia via affirmative action,or even worse, because he entered as a foreign exchange student, buttressing the foreign born accusations of past years. "Come clean, Mr. President", these sites demand,"and prove that these accusations aren't true. Release your records!"

Make a charge, with the flimsiest of evidence, then demand that the candidate disprove a negative, and if he doesn't, that's ironclad evidence of his guilt.

You lovers of government, you devotees of the grandness of the political process, answer me this...why would anyone of superior intelligence, great accomplishment, demonstrated leadership skills, knowledge of history, and a patriotic desire to serve this Republic ever subject himself and his family to such an unholy degradation? This system of ours which was founded on the notion that after a long and fruitful life of great accomplishment, our best citizens would then feel compelled to serve the country as it's political leaders, has now morphed into a grubby, cess-pool of professional politicians, effete con-men and shakedown artists, who jockey for position and power at the public trough. How else to explain the likes of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and Eric Cantor trodding the ground once occupied by James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and Henry Clay?