The Bargain

Walking into your office after a week away is one of the most deflating experiences this life has to offer. Yesterday, I decided to do so to prepare for my first day back. My desk was piled with 8 days worth of mail and correspondence, a prodigious mound of worry covering almost its entire working surface. Then I glanced at my phone, saw the blinking red light and the number “22” in the message window. “Welcome back Mr. Dunnevant”

Two hours later, I had plowed through all of it, sorting it all into workable piles on the floor, this pile containing the stuff that must be filed, that pile the stuff that needs some sort of action, and a third pile that I get to throw away. Then I catalogued all of the phone messages. Thankfully, there were no emergencies, no angry clients wondering why on earth I would be taking a vacation on the very day they needed to speak to me. I then set about prioritizing the order in which these 22 calls must be returned. I transferred this information onto my very old school “to do list” on the yellow pad that always sits just to the right of the laptop on my credenza. When I was done, twenty five items required my attention for the week of July 29^th.

This is the bargain we make with ourselves every summer. We plan a vacation with the family someplace far, far away from work and the reality of our lives. We go, and temporarily turn our backs on our responsibilities. It’s glorious, and we love every minute of it, but in the dimly lit recesses of our brain, (right beside old high school memories and to the left of memorized poetry), there lies a poorly suppressed thought, the first day back at work is going to be horrible. But we accept it as a necessary part of being a functioning adult. We can’t have the vacation without the job, unless we are members of Congress where one is indistinguishable from the other.

So, back to work, where I will do my duty and begin plotting the details of my next vacation, which lies somewhere out there at the end of a rainbow.

What's a Vacation Without a 911 Call?

I hate it when you wake up and you’re still in your beach house, but vacation is over. All of a sudden, the place isn’t a fabulous retreat with glorious views of the ocean; it’s a three story house with stuff strewn everywhere that needs to be picked up, vacuumed, and left clean and pure for the next family. The end of vacation stinks.

This has been a great week with nearly perfect weather. There has been amazing food, lots of laughter, and what vacation would be complete without at least one 911 call? Unfortunately, I missed it all since I was down on the beach, but I have it from fairly reliable sources that it involved Christina, Ezra and Bennett taking an ill-advised joy ride in the elevator. Naturally, the thing got stuck, something about a circuit breaker. So, now you had two little boys trapped in an un-air conditioned closet. Ron, our go-to family know it all, was out walking and unavailable, and me, the family blogger wasn’t there to offer any snappy one-liners, so someone made the decision to call the authorities. Soon, Buxton’s finest pull up the driveway, and suddenly the house looks like a set from CSI: Criminal Minds. Two firemen in full regalia, wielding axes and attitude burst through the door ready for anything, then a couple of plain clothes detectives walk in flashing badges and assuring all that there was no need to panic. Too late. Paul freaks out when he sees the firemen, certain that once Ezra is greeted by these uniformed giants, all hell will indeed break loose. Thinking fast, he recalls a passage from one of Ezra’s favorite books and yells up the elevator shaft, “Hey Buddy, guess what? Your two favorite firemen from, “Let’s Put Out The Fire” are here!!”

Thankfully, the circuit breaker problem was solved, and all ended well. When Bennett emerged from the ordeal he took full advantage of the crisis to demand, “I’m gonna have a pop-sicle right now!”, thus cementing his title of “Most Valuable Vacationer” of 2013.

So, this morning we will stuff everything into the back of the car and cheat the hangman by spending the day in Manteo while waiting for the traffic to die down, wrenching every drop of fun we can out of this week before surrendering to Richmond, Virginia.

Can’t wait for 2015.

A Magical Night

It was a little after 7:30 in the evening when we all gathered down on the beach. Jon and Ron were busy digging a hole in the sand near where the waves were washing gently up the steep inclines so common on the Outer Banks. Three other families, several football fields up the beach had the same idea. Soon, the flames were making crackling sounds as they wrapped around the bone dry wood I had bought earlier in the day from the one armed man at the Shell station who let me name my own price since he couldn’t help me load it in the back of my car. I gave him a five dollar bill. “If you’re happy, I’m happy”, he said.

Soon the little ones came down to see the fire, their eyes wide with expectation. By the time we started roasting marshmallows for the s’mores the fire was a blaze, sending strange shadows across the sand. It was getting dark and now the fire was lighting up faces all around. There was a Kryptonite sighting and all the attendant squealing fun as Bennett screamed out his warning.

I sat quiet and still taking in the moment, the chocolate and marshmallow smeared faces of the children, the tanned face of my daughter as she stared at her fiancé, my son sitting next to his mother deep in some conversation. I watched my two sisters and their husbands, my nieces smiling at their children with Matt hovering with his camera taking thoughtful pictures that we will point to years later as we ask, “Do you remember that night?”

On this most perfect of nights, I miss my Mom. This was the sort of thing that she lived for, family all together having fun. She would have loved it. I also thought of my Dad who couldn’t make this trip with us. He would have loved it too.

As the fire died down, we walked down to the water’s edge and stomped around in the wet sand, and like magic, tiny specks of light appeared around our feet. Noctiluca, it’s called, a terrible name for something so romantic. It was nice to feel something like wonder at age 55. It was at this moment, watching my family dancing on the beach, pawing at the sand and pointing at what looked like a miracle that it occurred to me that I will be doing this for the rest of my life. I will be making a trip to the beach with my wildly boisterous family every two years until the day that I, like Dad can’t make the trip…because this is what families do. I will watch the little ones grow to become teenagers, replaced by little ones of my own someday. Someday, my grandchildren will be old enough to carry my chair and cooler down to the beach for me. The family will grow and get younger, louder and more difficult to cram into one house, but we will always do it, because to miss out on the magic of a fire on the beach isn’t worth the risk.

Entrepreneurs For Christ !!

Times are tough all over. Even churches are feeling the heat, as high unemployment and uncertain prospects have resulted in budgets being cut. Just the other day, I was talking with a friend of mine who is an administrator at the First Baptist Church of Freloadia, Tennessee.

Me: So, Steve, how are things at the church?

Steve: Not good, in fact, things are pretty awful. Attendance is up, but giving is way down, so we have had to make some tough decisions.

Me: Like what? You didn’t get let go did you??

Steve: No, no, nothing like that. But as the Administrative Pastor, they all expect me to come up with new and improved procedures to increase efficiency. And, I’ve done just that, but so far, we’ve gotten some rather angry feedback.

ME: Oh dear. What did you do?

Steve: Well, it’s mostly little things, the same sort of things that any business would do in lean years. You know, stuff like charging for weddings, and funerals.

Me: Wait…you charge for funerals? Isn’t that sorta insensitive, you know, adding insult to injury?

Steve: Not at all, it’s a service we provide. Money doesn’t grow on trees around here, Doug.

Me: Ok, what else?

Steve: Ok, we have started to charge people for taking communion. Those little crackers have gone through the roof lately, and I don’t need to tell you how expensive grape juice has gotten. We charge one dollar for the blood of Christ and 50 cents for his body. But you can get a special family rate that brings the cost down significantly for a family of four. We call it the “4-Pack”.

Me: Wow…that’s certainly innovative.

Steve: And of course, we’re charging a dollar to park in the church parking lot, which is a twofer since it encourages our people to park off site so there’s more room for visitors, plus, it’s become quite a cash cow, you might even call it a “sacred cow”! Haha!

Me: Steve, I don’t know about this, it just doesn’t sound right.

Steve: Look Doug. This is Twenty First Century thinking. The days of free church membership are over. Besides, people who truly love Jesus won’t mind pay toilets and coin operated water fountains.

Me: Are you freaking kidding me? You guys installed pay toilets?

Steve: Sure! Of course we only charge 25 cents if you’re handicapped. But, the one that everybody has pitched the biggest fit about is our plan to sell tickets for the children’s choir concert. Even though we created a roped off “platinum member” section for the parents of the kids, you would have thought we had killed somebody the way the grandparents yelled and screamed over that one. But Doug, we are serious about these new austerity plans. Matter of fact, from now on, if you want the best seats for any church service, you have to be a tither.

Me: But, how do you know if someone tithes?

Steve: oh, we know. There are ways, we have, er..methods. The chairman of our finance committee used to work for the NSA. We even came up with a new slogan, “At First Baptist, You have to Pay to Pray.”

Me: And the people aren’t happy with these changes, I take it?

Steve: You know how people are Doug. Everybody hates change. But eventually, they’ll get used to it. It’s actually making people think twice before demanding services from the church. I’ll tell you one thing, that prayer list that the Pastor always reads on Wednesday night sure has gotten shorter since we started charging a prayer request prioritizing fee. All of a sudden old Mrs. Fitzgerald’s bunions have miraculously been healed since she had to fork over 5 bucks to get on the list.

Me: I don’t know what to say Steve. What you’re describing doesn’t sound much like a church. It sounds more like a…”

Steve:…a Silicon Valley start up? Exactly! I’m not a Pastor anymore Doug, I’m an entrepreneur for Christ.  

Vacation Life

 For the past two days, I’ve been laying around on the beach, eating too much food, and engaging in spirited conversations about everything from the financial woes of Detroit to the killing power of Kryptonite. So, today, on Day Three of #Dunnevant Beach13, I will be driving my car onto a ferry, making the trip to Ocracoke Island so I can…lay around on the beach eating too much food, variety being the spice of life, or so I’m told.

It must be reported at this point that seven of us went to play putt-putt last night. The winning score of 44 was posted by your humble blogger, naturally, while the high score of 68 was tallied by my wife who simply could not master the contours of the dimly lit greens while simultaneously looking fabulous. Ryan’s front nine score of 38 set some sort of course record for futility that caused buzzers to go off, sirens to wail and several paramedics to appear to make sure he was ok.

All was not lighthearted fun however; as I discovered that my future son in law is not above cooking the books to embellish the standing of his girlfriend. After one particularly problematic hole in which Kaitlin managed to hit her ball onto the back of a nearby pickup truck, then into a water hazard, I saw Jon write down her score on the scorecard, smile adoringly at her with the words, “Nice 3 honey!”

We got back to the house just in time to hear Linda tell the story of the day when the hurricane came through Richmond and knocked out power to the hospital. The generator was deployed to maintain critical life saving equipment, so each patient room was reduced to one light. This was unacceptable to one expectant grandmother who marched down the hall wanting to know what in the $#@&? was the matter with the television?! The head nurse explained that the hurricane had knocked out the power. “I don’t give a flying rat’s #$@!? about no %$#@&* hurricane. Rick is about to come out of he coma and stop that lying Camille from stealing he inheritance from that thievin’ Brooke who claim she had the amnesia but everybody know that’s a $#%@* lie. Now you people need to power up this here TV are I’m gonna have to open up a can of whup-ass up in here.”

More popcorn, Bill.

Detroit: The Audacity of Math

The city of Detroit has filed for bankruptcy. Like Stockton and San Bernardino California before her, Detroit has woken up from a thirty year bender and surrendered to the brutal nonpartisan reality of mathematics.

The voluntary relocation of a million people out of a formerly great, innovative and iconic city in a mere twenty years is quite a complicated story that cannot easily be reduced to a bumper sticker like “Democrats Suck”. However, since one of the goals of this blog is to make complicated things understandable while displaying as few actual credentials as possible,…here goes.

First, let’s destroy a few straw men.

“Detroit is bankrupt because it’s been run by blacks for forty years.”

Ok, aside from the fact that this is a blatantly racist notion, it is my belief that if the policies of Detroit over the past forty years had been administered by Opie Taylor and his band of blond Swedes, the results would have been the same.

“It’s all the fault of free markets.”

Yes, by all means, if it weren’t for those pesky Japanese and their annoyingly dependable cars, General Motors would still be making Chevettes, and auto mechanics would be the richest men in America.

“It’s all because of the greedy unions.”

It’s not the job of the municipal unions in Detroit to look out for the interest of the city of Detroit. Their job is to get the most lucrative contracts for its members. By all accounts, they performed splendidly.

 

So, Dunnevant, why is Detroit bankrupt? It’s all the fault of long division. A divided by B = C, where A = Detroit’s pension obligations, B= the number of taxable citizens and C= Solvency. So, what we have here is the City of Detroit piling up more and more A, while at the same time the number of B’s are dropping faster than Congress’ approval rating, all of which flows from two basic problems, one party rule, and the unionization of public employees.

 

 

Detroit’s politicians are 99% democrats, and as such it is the most monolithic government in America. Unfortunately for the citizens of Detroit, the most dependable voting block is the public sector unions, ie, city workers. So, here’s how this works. When it’s time to negotiate union contracts, there are democratic politicians on one side of the table, and on the other side are union bosses, the same ones responsible for their reelection. As a consequence of this incestuous relationship, there is no one in the room representing the tax payer. In this room, the unions do what they do which is wrench every possible nickel they can, and the politicians do what they do which is take care of their biggest and most dependable constituency. So, even during times of tight budgets, in lieu of pay raises, offer hugely rich retirement packages, kicking the fiscal train wreck down the road. The results of such an unhappy negotiation are contracts that pay the “horseshoer” who works for the Detroit Water and Sewer Department $56,000 a year, even though he has no horses left to shoe.

So, a city with only 700,000 citizens left looks at its future obligations and says, “no mas”. By filing for bankruptcy protection they are hoping that its Congressional delegation will have the clout to pressure Washington to step up for one more bail-out. My hunch is that they are correct. How can Obama rationalize bailing out the auto workers four years ago, and now turn his back on their corrupt city? The term “moral hazard” practically leaps off the page here, but to bring that up would probably shower me with charges of insensitivity.

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service.”

What knuckle-dragging, union-hating, big-business loving conservative Republican said this, you might ask?

FDR.                   

The Trip To Hatteras

Yesterday, three groups of Dunnevants left three different locations headed for Hatteras, North Carolina. Kaitlin left from Winston-Salem, the law firm of Schwartz, Hawkins, Garland and Roop from Richmond, and Pam, Patrick and yours truly from Princeton, New Jersey. Kaitlin left at 11:00, the Richmond contingent at 9:30, and the New Jersey group at 7:30. What follows is mostly true.

We got our first text from Paula around 11, “As God is my witness, I will NEVER make this trip again!!” She was in her first back up on 64 and was handling it with her characteristic calm and understated detachment. Meanwhile, Kaitlin was sending YouTube videos to us featuring profane black women raging about the heat wave. “I’m not tropical, I ain’t no toucan!”

Soon, I hit my first toll booth, one of the many plagues afflicting our northern states. There was the $2.90 one for the privilege of travelling 28 miles on the New Jersey Turnpike, a road dedicated to some long dead New Jersey Governor. Then I was separated from another $8.00 for going over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, and here I was, so ignorant I wasn’t even aware that Delaware had died! Each time, and I mean each and every time I sat in the long line to pay my toll, my son would remind me that if we had an EZ Pass, we would already be on our way. Each time, I would say something like, “Yes Patrick, and if I only had a son who looked like Trayvon Martin, I would be President.” But just about the time I thought the tolling was over, we reached the Chesapeake Bay Bridge tunnel, a 21 mile feat of engineering which featured not one but two tunnels. When described this way, it makes the $12.00 price tag seem almost like a bargain. Almost. When the total toll expense exceeded the $25 dollar mark, it occurred to me that in 2013 America, it even takes money to be a drifter.

Meanwhile, down south, Paula had reached Def Com 5 on the freak-out meter. “It’s useless. We will never get there. We will die in this car.” Kaitlin sailed through North Carolina listening to country music, blissfully unaware. The New Jersey group was getting very cocky, since our all-knowing GPS women kept rerouting us around traffic backups with steely precision, notifying us in her slightly creepy accent that she was busy, “seeking alternate routes”, but then all of a sudden, around 10 miles west of the bridge leading to the Outer Banks she dejectedly announced, “Mother of all backups detected ahead. You are screwed.”

10 and a half hours after leaving our Hampton Inn, we finally pulled up into the driveway of our beautiful beach house, the last to arrive, whereupon Patrick reminded me that if we had an EZ Pass, we probably would have beaten everyone.