One More Day.

The hard part about vacation is standing in the driveway at 6:00am watching the back of your son's car disappear down the street. This time, there's someone with him, which makes it easier, not quite as lonely a visual as in past years. She makes him happy. After watching them together for five days, that much is clear. They both have responsibilities on Sunday, so they had to leave a day early. Pam cried. She always does. I didn't, because I never do. But that doesn't mean it isn't difficult. It is...after 26 years, it still is.

Looks like our last day here will be the best as far as weather goes. It's glorious outside, clear and crisp, without the heavy blanket of humidity...God's judgement on the South. We will wrench every minute out of this day on the beach, around the pool and around the table. Tonight is the only night we order take-out. It will be pizza, I think. We've got to spend what's left of the yard sale proceeds on something, it might as well be pizza. We could go out for dinner somewhere, but parties of 16 are problematic at the smallish restaurants on Hatteras Island.

It's been a very relaxing week, except for last night when my wife beat me by one shot at Putt Putt. She can be a cold blooded killer when she wants to be! Last night was also a milestone of sorts for the 13th Dunnevant Beach Week Vacation. It marked the first time that my two kids were responsible for making dinner. Watching Kaitlin, Jon, Patrick and Sarah putzing around in the kitchen making, baklava, chicken cheese enchiladas, Spanish rice and tomatoe salad was something to see. It seems like only yesterday that my kids were running around on the beach at sunset with oversized t-shirts on, their little brown arms glistening in the dying light. Now they huddle together in the kitchen preparing a meal for 18, calm and confident. Amazing.

Tomorrow we will crawl out of here and make the deflating journey back home, me with an ailing neck and Lucy with what might be an urinary tract infection. But that's tomorrow. Today I'm still at the beach and intend to make the most of the day. Patrick and Sarah will never be very far from my thoughts, because I won't be able to relax until they make it back to Nashville.

Great week.

Playing Through the Pain

My neck isn't enjoying my vacation. It has gotten progressively worse each day this week. I've been trying to figure out the reason for this particular flare up, since I have been under zero stress since I got here. At first I thought maybe the posture of my beach chair might have been the culprit, but last night was by far my worse night and because of yesterday's rain I spent very little time on the beach. So much for that theory. Perhaps my neck is allergic to vast quantities of calorie-packed food? Whatever the reason, a combination of high dose anti-inflammatories, muscle relaxers and pain killers isn't doing the job. Bummer. But, I'm on vacation, so I'll just have to play through the pain.

I'm staring to think that bringing Lucy to the beach was a mistake. Even though she has enjoyed being around so many people who love her and has thoroughly enjoyed running on the beach, this great big house has proven to be a house of horrors for such a skittish puppy! Everywhere she looks there are piles of scary bags and boxes. The streets here are lined with millions of black garbage cans. Every morning before sunrise a giant and very loud truck comes to pick them up and violently shake them free of their contents, all the while with a yellow flashing light twirling above sending spooky shadows dancing across the roof of our room. Last night's violent rainstorm and rolls of thunder had the poor girl shaking like a leaf, wedging herself under our pillows to escape. It's all been too much for her. She's eaten maybe two complete meals since Sunday.

Now, on to the good news. Wednesday night was our dine around night so Pam and I took our six out to Rusty's for dinner. Fantastic meal and wonderful conversation with Miss Sarah, who is having a great time here despite being introduced to so large and potentially intimidating a gathering of personalities which the Dunnevant family can sometimes be. Tonight she will be helping Patrick, Kaitlin and Jon fix dinner, the first time that this particular generation has ever been given the task. We are all nervously optimistic!

Despite last night's horrendous storm, at 7:45 on Thursday morning, the skies are clearing, specks of blue are fighting back against the gray. Looks like another wonderful day on the beach is in my future. 

You Asked For It!!

Many of you have sent me requests for more information concerning the fart machine I mentioned in my last blog. Actually just a handful of you have requested the information. Ok, ok...one of my middle school readers is all geeked up about the thing and wants more info, so here goes:

The Wind Breaker 2000 ( deluxe model 2 ) is made by the Crude Novelty Company at their manufacturing facility at 3308 Ol Factory Drive in Whokudtasheeze, Wisconsin. It features a remote control with not one, but TWO power settings, Oops and Wow! The device comes with a computer chip with 10 unique standard examples of flatulence. However, for a mere $9.99 each, you can buy two additional chips that feature more exotic flatulence from around the world. There's the sardines and broccoli on a twelve hour train ride chip, and my personal favorite, prison dysentery revenge.

Today was our first bad weather day, but it wasn't a complete wash out. The morning was sunny and not terribly hit, so several of us went into Buxton to climb the Hatteras lighthouse. Of course, the presence of Jon on the property had our party treated like rock stars, complete with free tickets. He made some impression during his three summers here apparently. After the lighthouse, we drove by the Orange Blossum bakery where we bought three bags of Apple Ugglies, the most intense combination of sugar, fruit, butter and flower known to exist in the free world. The line was out the door. I plan on having some for dessert tonight. Of course, they'll have to wait until I polish off Paula's hot peach cobbler first. 

A Day In The Life at the Beach

Whenever I tell people about the family beach vacation we take every two years, whereby 18 of my extended family rent an enormous house on the Outer Banks of North Carolina for a week, about 30% of them say something like, "Oh, that sounds wonderful!" Everyone else looks at me hesitantly, mouths agape, waiting for the punch line. "Wait...your whole family rent a house...together? For an entire week?"

Being in close quarters with large numbers of relatives can be difficult.  Every family is some combination of the Walton's and the Manson's, I suppose. But somehow for us, it all works. This is the 13th such vacation, so we've been doing this since Patrick was a fussy three month old. That inaugural trip was in Sandbridge, in a house with a window air conditioner in two rooms of the entire house, artificial turf on the floor in the kitchen, and roaches the size of adult sandals. Despite such third world conditions, we all had a blast, and against all odds decided that it should become a new family tradition.

As the family grew, the houses would get bigger. As our financial prospects improved they would become more luxurious. Once mom and dad got too old to climb four flights of stairs all day for a week, we began to rent only houses with elevators. As a result, we narrowed the field to houses constructed relatively recently, elevators not being a common feature of houses built in the 1950's. As the rental cost began to escalate, somebody came up with the brilliant idea of having a family yard sale on trip years to finance the week's groceries. At that point, the week took on a life of its own, permanently gaining a beachhead in family lore.

Beach week has also served as a testing ground for would-be suitors. My sister Paula introduced us all to her boyfriend Ron one year. Some of us were dubious, what with his problematic backstory which involved prison time. Ever sensitive to the feelings of others, we decorated the house for a surprise birthday celebration for him by decorating everything in a jail theme, complete with prison uniform stripes! A few years later Christina brought her boyfriend Paul along. He was nice enough, but guilty of false advertising, since for the week he had a head full of hair, but as soon as they tied the knot, he shaved it all off, and hasn't had hair since. Then, a few years ago, Kaitlin's boyfriend Jon, just happened to be a park ranger working at the Hatteras lighthouse, and so just casually popped in for a visit every stinking night, where he was a blatant suck-up the entire week, ingratiating himself to the entire family...except me. This year, Patrick has brought along his girlfriend Sarah. Due to her Greek heritage, we are forcing her to make baklava for 18 people. She's been here for over 48 hours and so far hasn't fled the scene in tears, so I'd say it's going pretty well.

"But, what do you do all week with all of your family?" When people ask this, what they are trying to say is, "Don't you get on each other's nerves??" The answer is...kinda. But that's what nerves are there for...to be gotten on. So, why not have your nerves gotten on by people you love? Essentially, most days go something like this:

5:30-8:30am. People wake up gradually and when they do, breakfast is an on your own affair. Usually a group of ten or so wind up at the table together eating everything from cereal to pound cake slathered in strawberries. At the beach, meal boundaries vanish. If you decide that breakfast should consist of left over lasagna, then bless your heart.

10:30am. The beach calls. We go down and stake our claim with umbrellas and beach chairs. It is quite a sizable enclave, and I'm sure other smaller, less loud families resent us. Yesterday's session featured a fake snake placed close to the new girl...who barely flinched. She has promise!

1:00pm. We head back to the house for another a la carte lunch, after which everyone heads down to the pool for the afternoon. Everyone, that is, except the unfortunate slob who is responsible for the evening's dinner. Yesterday, that was Pam, and by extension...me. Although the final product was a raging success, the process was stressful, featuring as it did a defective crock pot ordeal. But the pulled pork barbecue, apples and cranberry cold slaw, bacon topped baked beans, tomatoe pie and homemade ice cream cake was wildly praised by all. 

Sometimes after dinner, we all head to the beach for a walk as the sun sets. Then we all gather in the big family room to eat Uncle Bill's stove top pop corn and gossip about all the idiots back home. Sometimes games break out, other times it's just a million small conversations taking place all at once. One thing that never happens? The large flat screen television that hangs on the wall, large and foreboding...never gets turned on. It just hangs there, black and useless....sorta like Al Sharpton.

So far this year, besides the fake snake, there has been a fake dog poop sighting and a remote controlled  fart machine employed during dinner, with six year old Bennett at the controls. Just your basic, everyday Tomfoolery. 

I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.

Renaming the Beach House

Ok, I realize that I should probably let it go, but I just can't get over the cognitive dissonance that surely must have been involved in the naming of this house. I mean, when you set about naming a beach house, Absolutely Fabulous,you are making a rather emphatic statement. You're saying that everything about your house is, well...fabulous. I am here to tell you that, as God is my witness, this is not so! So, to correct the record, I have come up with a list of alternative names that do less violence to the truth.

1. Insidiously Ordinary

2. Predictably Disappointing

3. Insanely Overpriced

4. Mildly Irritating 

5. Shockingly Dirty

I've been thinking about writing a follow up to my book, Finishing Well.  

If I wrote a book about this place, I could call it, Aging Poorly.

Alright, now that I've got that out of my system, I can report that everyone has arrived safe and sound. Patrick and Sarah pulled an all-nighter from Nashville, arriving at noon yesterday. Today is the day that the Dunnevants are responsible for making dinner...pork barbecue. 

The weather is here, wish you were beautiful.

Our Ghetto Beach House

We made it. Six hours in a car with Lucy, despite organizational dysfunction and a minor tick infestation, we made it to our beach house in Hatteras. The house is optimistically named Absolutely Fabulous, in much the same way as some parents might nickname an effeminate kid, Thor, in the vane hope that a mere name might somehow endow the recipient with qualities that are otherwise lacking. To name this particular house, Absolutely Fabulous is to forever strip any reasonable meaning from those two words.

It is not without its benefits. The roof seems to work. Electricity is fully functioning, as is the indoor plumbing. There are no broken windows. No roaches, rats or other pests have made an appearance, and the kitchen seems to be fully functioning. Thus ends its positive qualities.

The negative side of the ledger must begin with the smell of the place. The first floor game room has that stale, film of mustiness most often associated with Southern Baptist fellowship halls. It's as if someone years ago had an Easter egg hunt using moth balls. As you venture up the stairs on the carpeted steps, which appear not to have been vacuumed since the Eisenhower administration, the smell changes. The second floor has four bedrooms dissected  by a single hallway. The air is thick with disinfectant, the kind that motels spray after four college kids check out of their Spring Break room at Motel Six. By the time you reach the third floor living space and kitchen, the smell becomes less noticeable, not offensive, but with a 1950's, Green Mile staleness that makes you want to throw open every dirty window in the place and let in some fresh air. Speaking of dirt, there's lots of it here at Absolutely Fabulous. I am hoping and praying that none of the ladies happen to look up at the blades of the ceiling fan above me...there's enough dirt lining those babies to plant tomatoes.

But, I have no business complaining. I'm on vacation, and my son and his girlfriend are four hours away, having left from Nashville at 10:00 last night, driving through the night. I will have an entire week to be charmed by the hidden beauty of Absoluetly Fabulous. After all, when you pay $7000 for a house at the beach, there has to be hidden beauty, right? Oh wait...Christina just found an ant! 

My Nightmare Afternoon

I had big plans for my Friday. After my one morning appointment, I was going to spend the rest of the day plowing through a list of vacation preparation jobs and generally getting all geeked up for my family trip to Hatteras, North Carolina. Instead, some clerk in a skyscraper in Boston, Massachusetts set off a series of events that sent my financial life spiraling out of control. I will attempt to write about it here as a form of therapy, since there's nothing else I can do about it, and writing about it is probably a better idea than buying a gun and driving to Boston.

Eight months ago I began work on a sizable life insurance case. Finally, in late June, all of that work was rewarded when I closed the largest such case I had ever written in the 32 years of my business career. I will not name the company through which I placed this business for fear that the simple act of typing their name might very well send me into apoplectic spasms of violence. Suffice it to say that this company was named for a prominent signer of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike the vast majority of companies I deal with, this company does not pay me by way of electronic deposit. Consequently, on Monday the 13th of July, I received by Federal Express, the largest single check of my life and promptly deposited it into my checking account. Knowing how weird banks are about large checks, I waiting a couple days until I saw it appear on my online statement as "ready to access." Then I began writing checks, transferring money to other accounts belonging to my wife and my business, etc..etc..

Imagine my surprise, when yesterday at 12:45, after my appointment had left, I read four e-mails from my bank notifying me that I had bounced four checks and that the largest check of my career had been returned to my back as UNPAID! I made a bee line to my bank to get to the bottom of what was surely a bank error. My helpful bank officer was certain that it was not a bank error, that in fact, the insurance company bearing the name of a signer of the Declaration of Independence had refused to honor their own check. But, no worries, I had overdraft protection, which had kicked in to limit the damage. Only, my overdraft protection had limits and I had exceeded them due to the large nature of this particular deposit. Dazed and confused, I raced back to my office to demand an explanation from the hapless guy who handles the processing of life insurance. After an agonizing two hours, he informed me that a clerk at the home office had made a "clerical error during the processing of my case which had inadvertently caused the case to be backed off the system..." But, not to worry, they have taken full responsibility for their mistake and have agreed to reimburse me for any bank charges that might have resulted from said error and have vowed to overnight me a replacement check by Tuesday of next week at the latest.

I really am a reasonable guy. Yes, I can be volatile. I do have a famous temper that sometimes rears it's ugly head. But, I was so taken aback by the sheer stupidity of this particular screwup, I couldn't even conjure up appropriate rage. I stammered out something about how this was unacceptable, that I was going to be out of town next week on vacation and needed that replacement check to be in the form of an electronic deposit and I needed it to be executed TODAY, not next Tuesday. I was assured that this could be done and not to worry. I took a deep breath and for the first time in three hours felt that I was going to be alright. Little did I know that it was just starting!

Of the dozen or so things on my to do list for Friday, I now only had time to get a haircut. While in the chair at Sortsclips, I get a text from my frantic wife notifying me that while she was standing in line at Martins she had gotten a text from our bank notifying her that all of the money in her account had been liquidated and she now had a ZERO balance. Not only that, but since her name is still on my grown son's account, all of Patrick's money had been removed as well...something about "loss prevention." So now, our friendly clerk in Boston has left my "living paycheck to paycheck" 26 year old son who lives in Nashville with ZERO money in his checking account. Pam immediately launched into Momma Bear mode and heads over to the bank. It's one thing to drain her account, but when you start messing with one of her kids, well now you've got WWIII on your hands. 

I meet her at the bank, still waiting for confirmation from my life processing guy that the replacement money will in fact be electronically transferred today. As we sit across the desk from two of the most helpful bankers in history, the full impact of what has happened begins to dawn on me. For the first time, I become angry. I say nothing. If my guy comes through, all will be well. The call comes. I walk outside into the parking lot where he informs me that the earliest the transfer can be done will be mid-morning on.....Monday.

My Christian faith informs me that anger isn't a sin, but warns that in my anger I should "sin not." Well, I'm pretty sure that the conversation I had in the parking lot of my bank at 5:20 yesterday afternoon failed to meet the Biblical standard...by a long shot.

Back inside, the branch manager was scrambling to come up with a way to put a band aid on the situation that could get us through until Monday. The fact that it was a Friday and that I would be out of town next week made a bad situation even worse. Amazingly, she found a way. It involves an old credit card I had with my bank that had a zero balance but a $25000 line of credit. I hadn't used the card in over a year but hadn't cancelled it either. We will be able, over the next two days, to make cash advances to cover the shortfall in all of the accounts affected by this catastrophe. I will have to call my mortgage company to have them submit my house payment again, since it was one of the checks that had bounced. Luckily, I had cashed a couple of smaller checks before all of this barnyard manure had hit the fan, so at least I have enough walking around money to get me through the weekend.

When this is all over I intend to do two things. One, write a letter of accommodation to whoever is the boss of my bank's branch manager. She was a dynamo and worked feverishly and compassionately to fix this for me, way above the call of mere duty. She was professional and take charge and I will always be grateful for her efforts on our behalf. Once I do that, I'm going to get to the bottom of exactly who it was that plunged my Friday into such chaos. I want to know who it was who managed to transform the biggest case of my career into the biggest financial nightmare of my life. 

Then, I'm going to give him or her a call for a full explanation, and this time try harder on the "sin not" thing.