A Little Self Examination

I believe it was Socrates who said that the unexamined life is not worth living. As is often the case with stuff Socrates said, this one rings true. We instinctively understand that the road to discovery and personal growth starts with an honest self-appraisal. Of course, too much of this sort of thing leads to narcissistic navel-gazing, so, moderation in all things, right? I say all of this because I have recently thought a lot about one of my odd personality traits. I know what some of you are thinking.."Which one? There are so many." Fair enough. Here it is...I hate being part of organizations. More specifically, I prefer at least the ideal of being an outsider, removed from the commitments and conspiracies that come with membership in associations. This trait manifests itself in countless ways in my life.

I have always been repulsed by large things, big things. I despise big government, big business, large labor unions. I am intrinsically suspicious of political parties with their organizing committees, and caucuses. Although I love baseball, I can't stand Major League Baseball, the organization, and it's commissioner. Closer to home, I never want anything to do with the local or national branches of the outfit that lobbies Washington on behalf of my profession. Even within the Broker-Dealer that I clear through, don't even ask me to serve on some advisory board, to be part of some inside circle of influence...it gives me the creeps just thinking about it. On a spiritual level, although I am a devoted believer and admirer of Jesus Christ, I remain a reluctant church member. Although I have been a member of Grove Avenue for over 25 years and have benefited from that association, it is a shaky thing, at best. The worst church experience of my life were the two years that I served as chairman of the finance committee. Never, in all of Christendom has there been a more ill-conceived match than me and that committee. I escaped with my faith hanging by a thread.

I clearly understand the benefits that can come from being part of a group. There is power in numbers after all. Being part of an organization of like-minded people trying to accomplish something together that can not be accomplished apart is what civilization is all about. So, why do I prefer hovering above things, why do I prefer the isolation of being on the outside, looking in? Why am I so devoted to Independence? This instinct is at the heart of why I ended up in the business I'm in. I have no boss, no board of directors, and no one telling me what to do. However, along with that freedom comes the unavoidable fact that I also have no one to blame for mistakes and failures. They are always mine alone.

Maybe it's a pride issue. Maybe I like Independence because I'm too prideful to accept criticism or discipline, too prideful to acknowledge my need for others. Whatever it is, all I know is, I have always been this way. What's different now and the reason I've been thinking more about it is that as I get older, I see more clearly the need of association. I understand the benefits of belonging to things. But how do you transform yourself from an eccentric loner type to a gregarious committee man? Maybe it's a process. I'm not quite ready though. Every time I get an invitation in the mail to join AARP, I grit my teeth, let out a little "grrrrrr" and take great delight in ripping the envelope to shreds. No...not ready yet.

 

Date Night!! Restaurant and Movie Review.

Last night, my daughter hosted a last blowout of the summer sort of thing at my house for a couple dozen teenage girls. Pam and I took advantage of the chaos to have a Wednesday date night. It started at Yen Ching. We have been going there for dinner since the year we got married. It is one of the constants of our lives. We go there, without a reservation, and no matter what time of day or night, we get seated in never more than 5 minutes. Every night we order the same thing. I order orange beef and Pam gets crispy honey shrimp. We share the dishes over fried rice, with an egg role for an appetizer. It's always perfect, the most predictably reliable meal in the city of Richmond. The lighting is soft, no music blares from the ceiling, so conversation is easy. There's a cheesy little Chinese sculpture with a fountain in the middle of the dining room which provides soothing back ground noise. The waitresses all speak very broken English, but the service is efficient. Very poor selection of beer ( Heineken and Tsingtao ) is the only drawback to an otherwise wonderful and relaxing dining experience. The bill always comes out to $35 or so. We left full and content.

After dinner I suggested some truly mindless entertainment...the latest Will Ferrell movie, The Campaign. The presence of Ferrell on the marquee guarantees a level of raunchiness and crudity that I normally try to avoid. But tonight, I was in the mood for a laugh at the expense of our democratic process, and figured, who better than Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis to provide just that? I was not disappointed. It was very raunchy, very crude, and a rather even handed send up of both political parties. Imagine what a Congressional race in a rural North Carolina district between John Edwards and Jesse Helms would look like..and you've pretty much stumbled upon the plot of this picture! Throw in lots of bourbon, blonds and bad guys ( Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow play the scheming billionaire "Motch" brothers ), and you've got yourself a Ferrell vehicle extraordinaire. Silly, juvenile, and embarrassing...the same three emotions I grapple with when confronted with real campaigns. Perfect. I spent $20. I've spent more money on dumber things..so, not too bad.

When the final credits ran it was still only 9:40. Kaitlin's party was scheduled to run until 11. We drove around aimlessly for awhile before deciding to throw caution to the wind and brave the great teen aged girl invasion. We walked in the house and found that nothing was on fire, no policemen had been called by irate neighbors, and Molly ignored our entry into the house, enthralled as she was being the center of attention of the roughly 10 girls in the family room. Actually the girls were well behaved, adorable, and amazingly neat. Kaitlin clearly adores them and the feeling seemed very mutual. It brought back lots of memories of the nights where there were 30 or so kids in our house, 10 years ago. Back then we didn't care so much about the furniture, since they had already destroyed it anyway. My kids were much louder, hungrier and more destructive. Wait..that's because half of them were boys! Walking in my house last night, I realized how much I miss the chaos and tumult of teenagers. Sounds crazy, but it's true

 

An explanation of AIS

Six days, 1950 miles, and 31 hours behind the wheel later, we are home and the whole thing is finally over. Total cost came in at 8 dollars shy of $2000. Collapsed in bed around 10:30 last night...and naturally woke up at 1, wide awake. Nothing more to say about the trip. However, as a public service, I feel it necessary to address an issue that has arisen from a term I used in a previous blog...AIS. It has elicited several raised eyebrows, and even a response from my mother-in-law.."What's AIS??", she asked.

AIS is a term I first heard used on that most profound of all television shows dealing with the dynamic of family life..Everybody Loves Raymond. The patriarch of the Barone clan, Frank, used the term when describing how he organized and planned departure times for family vacations. When Frank declared that AIS time was 6 am, it was final, and nonnegotiable. AIS meant, crudely..ass in seat. Ever since then I have used it myself with great effect. The term communicates perfectly it's unambiguous meaning. What is the last thing one does before departing for a trip in a car?? Exactly.

My family has responded well to such clear and abrupt language. However, using the AIS concept with my extended family with our seven vehicle caravans to the Outer Banks would probably not go so well. Probably something like this.....


Me:  Paula, it's 6:03. What is Ron doing?

Paula:  Oh, he's adding one more of those stretchy things to the bike rack to make sure they are secure.

Me:  No, no, Paula. I clearly wrote in the last e-mail that AIS time was to be 6:00. Why is Ron BCB at 6:03?  ( bungee-cording bikes )

                                                                    later

Me:  Linda...where is Bill? It's 6:13??

Linda:  Oh, he noticed that he only had 3 quarters of a tank of gas, so he's filling up. He'll only be a minute.

Me:  Wait, Bill is TOT at 6:13?? ( topping off tank ) Does anyone in this family read e-mails??!!

                                                                   even later

Me:  Paula, what in heaven's name is Ron doing now?

Paula:  Looks like he's adding some extra waterproofing to the car top carrier. You know, there's some rain on the radar down near Williamsburg.

Me:  But, one does not FWT at 6:17 when one's A should have been IS at 6:00! ( fiddle with tarp ). And by the way, I haven't seen Ryan.

Paula:  Oh, he's still inside trying to decide which hat to wear, the Nationals or the Yankees.

Me:  Do you mean to tell me that Ryan is OOALAG at 6:18?? I give up. This family is hopeless. ( obsessing over accessories like a girl ).

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!!