A Vacation For The Mind

For all of you who have been quietly annoyed at me for posting Maine pictures, you will be happy to know that yesterday Camden experienced rainfall that can only be described as Noah-esk.  By 8 o’clock last night the radio was screeching out one of those horrible emergency broadcast warnings, the ones that sound like a cross between a fax machine signal and a dial-up internet connection. There were flash flood warnings for half of the state. There were reports of cats drowning in the raging torrents of water! We were reduced to eating take out clam chowder and fresh, warm biscuits from Cappy’s. I’m telling you…it was horrible!

But here I am at 5:45 in the morning looking out over the still as glass water of the lake watching the powder blue skies creeping in from the ocean, replacing the last of the low clouds from the night. I’m in long sleeves and my coffee is helping to keep me warm. I’m told that today is to be mostly sunny and 72.

Random observations about this place:

1.     The reason I’m up so early is because the sun rises earlier here, I suppose because we are so much further north. I generally wake with the first streams of light, so at home that usually means 6:30 or so. Here it’s 5:30.

2.     Maine should be called The Flower State instead of Vacationland. Everywhere you look there are lush flower beds, flower boxes in windows, flower pots outside of businesses. In the town of Camden, they even have flowers boxes on the top of the public trash cans. And even though it’s almost August, they all look May fresh, like the arrangements you buy at Strange’s for Mother’s Day to put on your deck at home. Only, in Virgina, by August first those flowers are an eyesore, looking as if they have just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan where they contracted the AIDS virus. I suppose flowers thrive here because they never have to endure stifling heat and humidity. Whatever the reason, the results are beautiful.

3.     Almost none of the public buildings here have air conditioning. The ones that do make a big deal of it, posting little signs in their shop windows, “We’re air-conditioned!!” It makes me wonder why these environmental non-profits like the Sierra Club and the Environmental Defense Fund have air conditioning in their office buildings. Seems to me that all these save the planet tree hugger outfits should be setting a better example for the rest of us by housing their headquarters in giant mud huts along the banks of the Potomac river instead of glistening towers on K street.

4.     You should see my wife in a kayak. The woman is amazing, she becomes a completely different person, transported to another place. The sound of the water lapping against the sleek hull, the speed of the thing cutting through still water, the majestic views all around do something to her. She’s been out twice so far and would have gone out in the rain yesterday if it hadn’t been for the wind.

There is a television at this cabin, but it hasn’t been turned on yet. I haven’t read a newspaper. For all I know peace could have broken out in the Middle East and I wouldn’t find out about it until they were fighting again. But I am reading a great biography of Ted Williams, so I haven’t abandoned all intellectual stimulation, just the kind that ages me.

Getting My Maine On

This is probably my 25^th trip to Maine, somewhere around there, and each time it’s the same. It takes a while. There’s a 24 hour period where your body and mind are still in Virginia. But the way you think and feel in Virginia won’t do.

After a day up here you began to feel the change. The muscles in your back begin to loosen, your blood pressure begins to fall. Before long you find yourself sitting in a chair on a dock listening to the water lap against the shoreline and it occurs to you that you aren’t thinking about anything. You’re simply looking and listening. That’s when you know that you’re beginning to get your Maine on.

Then you suddenly realize that you are starving. Even though you’ve done nothing but sit in a dock chair and stare out at the mountains across the lake for an hour, you feel like you could eat a horse. Then, when you are served a simple ham sandwich with chips and a beer, it taste like a five star gourmet meal. Such is the power of the Maine air…or something.

Yesterday the first part of the day was sunny and delicious. We spent much of the morning kayaking all over this meandering lake that stretches itself for miles in all directions, full of islands and inlets, nooks and crannies, dotted by one postcard camp after another. To paddle by these sanctuaries is to do battle with envy, to commit the sin of covetousness more times in an hour than you have previously in the entire 56 years of your existence.

By afternoon, it started getting cloudy, then the rain came. Today will be a washout. The rest of the week looks glorious, with high temperatures in the low 70’s with bright sunshine. We will spend the day in Camden shopping and eating. It’s only Monday morning and I already never want to leave.

When we first arrived, Pam and I sat on the back porch in silence for a moment, taking in the beauty. Then she said to no one in particular, “I miss my kids.” It was as if she was saying it to the lake, a simple statement of fact, an acknowledgment of the realty of our new life. Of course, she’s right. We do miss our kids. For most of our lives together, Maine has been associated with family vacations. Maine was fluffer-nutters on the beach at Dummers. So to be here without them feels incomplete. The fact that both of them have better things to do than to be here with us seems like a small betrayal.

But then I remind myself that the kids weren’t invited. Besides, with each passing hour, we are both missing them less and enjoying this place more.  We are getting our Maine on, which includes adjusting to the primitive conditions of a cabin built 75 years ago. The bathroom sinks have one cold faucet and one hot faucet and gasp, no stopper! How are we to wash our faces under such barbaric conditions? Absent a “proper stopper” we are reduced to fetching a bowl from the kitchen and mixing cold water with hot ourselves! Oh, the humanity!!

The Next Ten Days

For the next ten days, I will be on vacation. This means that I will not be analyzing summary statements of client holdings. I will not be scanning the Wall Street Journal at 6:30 in the morning trying to decipher the short and long term implications of the latest Federal Reserve utterances. I will not be desperately trying to talk clients out of raiding their IRAs to buy jet skis, and I will not be pleading with clients to stop reading the latest installment of somebody’s newsletter called, “Jesus Is Coming Back Soon So Stop Saving For Your Retirement Since There’s No Money In Heaven.”

Here’s what I will be doing:

1.     Enjoying a place where the average high temperature is twenty degrees cooler than it is in Short Pump.

2.     Jumping into lake water so clean and cold that you are unable to speak for five full minutes afterwards.

3.     Eating lobster that was pulled out of the North Atlantic like ten minutes ago and cost about as much as I pay for appetizers at Maggianos.

4.     Living in a cabin so authentically cool, it has a birch tree coming up through the middle of the dining room table.

5.     Kayaking on lake water so smooth and clear, you can see rocks twenty feet below the water line.

6.     Watching the sun rise over a mountain ridge only a quarter of a mile from the back door of our cabin, then watching the sun set over the beautiful Maine coast line which is only three miles away.

7.     Eating the best clam chowder you’ve ever tasted from tin cups at Cappy’s.

8.     Dining at a place called Peter Ott’s and enjoying the most deliciously warm gingerbread with hot caramel sauce you’ve ever put in your mouth.

9.     Strolling through the delightful streets of Camden poking around in all of the quaint shops and boutiques for as long as Pam wants me to because…

The next ten days will be devoted to whatever my wife wants. I have watched her pour her heart and soul into the care and feeding of our daughter’s wedding for over 18 months. I have marveled at her stamina. I have worried about her mental and physical health. I have never seen anyone work so hard for so long with such painstaking attention to detail. This vacation is about me trying to begin paying her back.

So, for ten days, whatever Pam wants, Pam gets.

Within reason, of course.

I mean, I just paid for a wedding.

Plus, it has to be legal.

So, I guess technically, not everything she wants.

Everything that Pam wants…that I can afford is probably more accurate.

I should stop typing now.

Nightmare in Nashville

Earlier this week, my wife, along with my sister, my nephew and my son left my house in three fully loaded vehicles headed for Nashville, Tennessee. Patrick, having completed his graduate studies had rented a house with two other guys and was excited to start his new life in his favorite city. My wife refused to let him make this trip alone. If he’s going to live 9 hours away, at least his new home should get off on a good start by being settled and organized. So, off they went!

What follows are actual events that took place between roughly 6 PM Monday the 21st of July and 12:15 AM Tuesday the 22^nd. Details have been provided to me via an e-mail written by my wife along with several hysterical texts and one more measured and dispassionate cell phone conversation. I present this information to you without embellishment, and I will refrain from employing dramatic license, since as you will soon see…none is required.

From: Pam Dunnevant

To: Doug Dunnevant

 This day has spiraled into a blog-worthy nightmare. What follows are just the worst of the multiple bad things that have happened:

1.     Patrick’s house is filthy and reeks of pet urine. The previous tenants trashed the place and were kicked out---for good reason!!

2.     Patrick’s house has no hot water. That’s right…no hot water. Oh, and when you turn on the bathtub faucet, the sink faucet stops working.

3.     Went to the mattress store to buy him a bed and the place was so sketchy, it freaked me out. No mattress purchased. Add that to the 100 other things I will need to do tomorrow before I will be able to leave my sweet son alone in an essentially empty house that he will probably become allergic to.

At this point, I couldn’t imagine her day getting any worse. I was mistaken. They hadn’t checked into their hotel room yet.

4.     Our hotel room, which we checked into around midnight…reeks of skunk, billows of skunk smell roaring out of the AC vents, which we can’t control. The manager had to move us to another end of the hotel since apparently, a skunk had made its way into the basement near the elevator shaft and caused a “problem” in that end of the building. The new room, the only one available only has one bed, not two.

 I would cry, but I’m not able to since I’m in shock. Hope you’re having fun too.

 

I read this e-mail first thing Tuesday morning. Needless to say, I was very concerned about the situation as well as my wife’s sanity. However, with the dawn of a new day and after a decent night’s sleep, things began to improve.

Pam: Patrick doesn’t seem as worried about the house as I am. We’re working on a fix for the water and I am putting on my happy face.

                                                         ….later….

Me: How are things going now?

Pam: Great! Just bought a mattress and a desk. The cat pee smell is almost non-existent today. Paula and I must be superior cleaners! Plumber is on the way to fix the water situation.

Me: Unless you think they might send me into cardiac arrest, could you send me some pictures of the place?

 She sends me a picture of her and Patrick assembling his TV cabinet. Hmmm…

Pam: The Plumber thinks he has found the problem with the water and he can fix it. Unfortunately the power just went out in the neighborhood.

Me: What…is there a thunderstorm??

Pam: Not a cloud in the sky. The saga continues…

 

Fortunately, the power came back on, and the place is organized and sanitized enough that Pam felt she could safely leave this morning heading back home. She will cry when she leaves her boy. She will cry again when she gets home after so long and trying an adventure. But then I will whisk us both away for 7 days in Maine, hands down the most superbly timed vacation of our entire married life.

Diversity

Diversity. A fine word. We all want lots of diversity in our lives. When we go to the grocery store to buy, say…beer, we like the stores that stock 50 different brands of brew. When we purchase a cable television package we want a diversity of channels, not just NBC, CBS, and ABC. Since we are not North Korean, we desire diversity in our clothing, lots of different styles and colors in our closets. But somewhere down the line in the field of higher education, the word “diversity” has become associated with another fine word…moron.

Consider, if you will, the latest advance in the diversity project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where they are striving mightily to “place the mission of diversity at the center of institutional life so that it becomes a core organizing principle.” One would have thought that the “center of institutional life” at a “university” would have been reserved for, you know…education, but what do I know? I’m not an educational expert like the luminaries at UW.

The interesting part of this new project at Wisconsin comes in the fine print of the plan as follows:

…it calls for “proportional participation of historically underrepresented ethnic-racial groups at all levels of an institution, including high status special programs and high demand majors, and in the distribution of grades.”

Hmmm…What measures does a professor have to use, besides a student’s mastery of the material, in order to properly distribute the correct grades, you might be wondering? Well, there’s lots of stuff…

“individual differences in personality, learning styles and life experiences, group and social differences that may manifest itself through personality, learning styles, along with differences of race, gender, sex, and gender identification or expression, sexual orientation, age, country of origin, physical or intellectual ability, emotional health, social-economic status, and affiliations that are based upon cultural, religious, political, or other identities”

Goodness. Using this menu of excuses, I could have graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Richmond, instead of “Thank the Laude.” I mean, I clearly struggled in the hard sciences because of my “learning style” which was heavy on baffling them with bull**** on the essay questions and using my patented guessing system on the multiple choice. My “life experiences” didn’t help out either, since I was working in a pallet manufacturing factory 30 hours a week while I was in school. As for “emotional health”, are you kidding me? I was a basket case every time I opened a blue book in Dr. Rilling’s British history class. And, don’t even get me started on my “intellectual ability” or “personality.” You try sitting for an hour and a half listening to Dr. Bogel pontificate on the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict with ADHD!

Clearly, under this new regime of performance analysis being employed at the University of Wisconsin, I could have turned out totally different. Perhaps I could have graduated with an advanced degree in Bio-Physics, and won a Nobel Prize by now.

Seriously though, when one thinks through the long term consequences of this type of Balkanized learning curve, the results will not be good. Suppose you are in a heart surgeon’s office and notice that he earned his undergraduate degree from UW-Madison? How confident will you be in allowing someone to cut your chest open who was given diversity A’s in biology because of his low self-esteem issues? You might not give a hoot about his sexual orientation, but when you consider that it might have helped him pass Surgery101, you might care…a lot!

So, while the good people in Madison work hard fine tuning their “representational equity,” I’ll look for a Johns Hopkins diploma next time I need an operation.

Vacant Lots

This morning the clouds hung low in the sky, gray and listless, humidity thick as molasses. Clear skies and sunshine would have helped. I had been dreading this day for months now, but there I was helping Patrick pack all of his worldly possessions in three cars for his latest trip back to Nashville, his new city. Pam and Paula were heading down with him along with Ryan, who would be driving the cavernous Buick.

Meanwhile, Kaitlin and Jon were busy packing up all of their wedding gifts, all of Kaitlin’s clothes and the remainder of her stuff from the attic in preparation for the trip to Columbia. They will begin their married life together in South Carolina, while Patrick will be trying to make his mark in Tennessee, both of them many miles from home.

Pam and I have been through this before, but in the past it was always temporary. This is the real thing. They are both grown and on their own, and my house feels empty, their old rooms like vacant lots, full of furniture but oddly still and lifeless. Pam won’t be back until Wednesday, so I’ll have a couple of days in this place by myself to get acclimated to the new reality.

I spent much of my day at the office working through my Dad’s financial affairs, paying the stray bills that keep trickling in through the mail. I spent nearly an hour talking with someone at Bank of America, trying to officially cancel a credit card that had a zero balance. It would require a copy of his death certificate to get it done, a certificate that I had to pay $12 for. Even after death Dad can’t escape the tyranny of our paper-pusher society. Dying isn’t cheap.

So now, I will pretend to watch a baseball game on TV while I think about how it could possibly be true that I have two grown people for children.

But first, I think I’ll close the doors to their rooms. There’s no point in standing in the doorways looking in anyway. Who wants to look at vacant lots? Besides, I hear that a redecorating project is in the works.

A Dark Day at PETA

I normally don’t spend a lot of time in this space talking about the latest shenanigans in the Middle East, mostly because it is so unbearably boring and predictable. The Israelis vs The Palestinians are to the geopolitical world what the “terrible twos” are to child rearing, both inevitable and infuriating. The only difference is that with kids, they eventually grow up. Not so in the Middle East. So the rest of the world has to put up with their interminable adolescence.

However, something happened while we slept that is worthy of note, as it may help turn the tide of public opinion.

Generally speaking, the world press treats an Israeli/Palestinian conflict like this:

-         Peaceful yet fed up Palestinian people “rise up” against their Jewish oppressors by lobbing a few harmless rockets into some random hillside and the war mongering Jewish state completely overreacts by launching a full scale military invasion of the Gaza Strip, resulting in the deaths of thousands of children. Every reporter on the ground in Gaza shows up at hospitals and begins interviewing the injured toddlers. Great pains are taken by these intrepid film crews not to show the rocket launchers in the corner of these hospitals rooms, which might make for inconsistent optics and confusion among the viewers. At the end of each piece, footage is shown of riots taking place in the streets of New York, Paris and London in support of the suffering children and against the Fascist Israeli state.

All of the beautiful people of the world are always in agreement. The Jews are killers and the Palestinians are innocent victims. In another world and in another time, this used to be called “anti-Semitism.” Now, it’s called liberal consensus.

But, I have a feeling that the tide may be turning. Cracks may begin to be seen in the united front of progressive, enlightened thought. For, overnight came word that Hamas, the governing power in Gaza, has resorted to using “suicide donkeys.” That’s right, perfectly innocent animals have been enlisted as weapons of mass destruction...no wait, should it be "ass" destruction? The traditional “beast of burden” has now been employed to carry the ultimate burden, one hundred pounds of bombs. This follows reports of dogs similarly engaged, but never documented, in the second intifada. As of 6:25AM, no official statement has been forthcoming from PETA, but a press conference has been scheduled for later in the day, and one source inside the animal rights organization has described the denunciation of Hamas that is to come as “blistering.”

“You know, it’s one thing to strike out blindly at your Zionist oppressors and all, I mean, I get it,” said the highly placed source. “But you start strapping bombs around donkeys, well…that’s just beyond the pale.”

If PETA can be turned, one has to wonder what traditionally leftist organization may follow? Might powerful Teachers Unions in America object to Hamas using the roofs of schools for their anti-aircraft batteries? Might Humanists organizations tire of Hamas soldiers constantly yelling “God is great” every five minutes? Right now the situation is quite fluid, but from where I sit, the Palestinian cause may finally have gone a bridge too far.

Time will tell.

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 [Ma1]ass

 [Ma2]