A Graduation Story

My nephew graduated from college yesterday. I come from a tribe of people where this sort of thing is celebrated. It's a milestone, a seminal event. Whenever possible, we show up at these things. In my time on this planet, I have been a part of countless graduation ceremonies.

They are all horrible.

Our day began at 5 o'clock in the morning. That's how early I had to roll out of the rack in order to get to Lynchburg in time for the 8:45 processional. The day was glorious, bright sunshine and perfect temperature, but the day came with a unanimous disclaimer from every weatherman in the State of Virginia...strong chance of afternoon thunderstorms. But surely we would be out of harms way by the afternoon, right? I mean, geez...how long can a graduation that begins at 8:45 last??

Answer? All. Freaking. Day.

Here's the deal with college graduations. Every speaker seems to think that the 35,000 people in the stadium all came to hear them speak. So, all of them prattle on forever, convinced that we are hanging on their every word. College Presidents are the worst. Oh how they love hearing the sound of their voice! First, there's the boilerplate "limitless future" claptrap, followed by the deadly dull regurgitation of the gold-plated legacy of the school, and finally the obligatory shout-outs to the big donors. Meanwhile, we're sitting in the sun-splashed stands, scanning the sea of 8,000 graduates trying to spot our boy, wondering why the heck we never thought to bring some dang sun screen. An hour later the guest speaker strides to the podium. His speech has been loaded into a TelePrompTer. This means that somebody, somewhere is aware that we are facing a thirty minute stem winder. A full 90 minutes after taking our seats, we hear the magic words..."and now it's time to confer degrees on our graduates." This consists of an old guy saying, "Will all candidates for the bachelor of science degree stand and be recognized." Below, from the thirty yard line to the fifty yard line, a wave of black mortar boards rise rhythmically while exhausted parents, uncles, cousins and spouses clap politely. 

I'm sitting there thinking...what the heck just happened? No, no...my sister explains. This is just the graduation service. Ryan will walk to get his diploma at the next service...after a convenient lunch break which we will miss because the President took two hours recognizing the Dingledorph family for the having now six generations of Dingledorphs as Liberty graduates. Oh, and did you know that there are 16 sets of twins, all cancer survivors, graduating today?

After standing in line at the concession stand to buy a five dollar cheeseburger assembled last week and brought back to life twenty minutes ago by a heating lamp, I made my way down the field for the main event. I noticed off in the distance at the edge of the Blue Ridge mountains to the west a dark black line. I consulted the weather app on my cellphone and saw the giant green blob of rain that every weatherman in Virginia had been warning us about. It was rapidly making its way towards us. I took a bite of my cheeseburger. Surely the people in charge of this event are aware that God has placed us on a time clock, I thought. Then the dopey speaker spends fifteen minutes trying to coax 10,000 people to get "the wave" going. Apparently not.

By the time my nephew got his name called, the stadium was being rocked by 30 mile an hour gusts and sideways rain. It was 2:15. I had just spent five hours in a football stadium so I could get to hear my nephew's name called while huddled under an overhang in the cheap seats. 

But, all was well. We were reunited with our graduate afterwards and made plans to meet at his favorite Mexican restaurant. I had parked on the fourth level of the only parking deck on campus a mere half mile from the stadium. It was determined that I would catch the shuttle and go get the car,
then pick everyone up. Only the shuttles didn't take you to the parking deck so I had to walk. But since rain was coming down at a rate of six inches per hour, I had to run. By the time I made it to my car, I was soaked to the bone. Everything I had was wet. I grabbed a golf towel from the trunk and tried to dry off, only to realize that my golf towel was covered in dirt. So now I was not only wet, but muddy. Luckily, I had a fleece jacket in the trunk and was able to clean up with that. I back my car out of my space and get in the long line of cars trying to exit the deck. I looked at my watch. It was 2:30.

Forty minutes later, I was in the exact same spot. Apparently, nobody on this campus of higher learning thought that the spot where a line of cars pouring out of a parking deck trying to merge onto a packed road might need a traffic cop. At least I had plenty of time to dry off. 

By 4:15 our party was happily reunited at the Mexican restaurant. All the misery of the previous seven hours of incompetence was over as we enjoyed a fine meal and watched Ryan open some gifts. We will tell hilarious stories about this day for years to come...if any of us survive the skin cancer we will get from our third degree sunburns.

The Maniac is Back.

My tomato plants are growing like weeds, every morning the little green balls get bigger and multiply like rabbits. I live in the suburbs. You know what that means...yes, it's open season on that most diabolical of backyard rodents, that furry ball of menace, God's big mistake...the ground squirrel.

They sit up on their haunches up in the trees at the edge of my back yard casting their beady eyes on my tomatoes, plotting their evil schemes. The older ones stay away. They know the fate of their kind who dare to enter my yard. Many of them are still nursing wounds from past years from glancing flesh wounds administered by my Daisy Powerline 35. Squirrels know it only as the Swift Sword of Death. The older ones sit around in their little squirrel legislative assembly and try to warn the kids about the maniac who lives on Aprilbud Drive. But, kids being kids, they don't listen. Instead, they try their luck. They send probing parties around the perimeter of my deck. One such scouting party wandered in this afternoon, and were met with the merciless strafing fire of the DP35. It was over in seconds.

Word will soon spread in the squirrel community that the Maniac Is Back. But it won't matter. Every year there is some up and coming hot shot in the group who thinks he's the one born to take me out. He will rally a group of equally delusional idiots bent on fame and glory...and my tomatoes. But my aim is true. I will unleash old Daisy on this year's sacrificial lambs and my back yard will be transformed into the great killing fields of squirrel myth. Only it's no myth...the destruction will be pitiless. 

But, alas, every year one gets through, usually under the cover of darkness. I wake up to find little teeth marks surrounding a quarter-sized plug that's been taken out of my most ripe Better Boy who was just days short of the harvest. I will be apoplectic with rage. Prior to this outrage, my attacks have been purely defensive. But now, I start a revengeful hunt. My neighbors start to give me fitful glances when they see me back there, and clutch their young children close. But, at the end of the day, my garden will be protected from these freeloaders at all cost.

Semper Fi.

July is Coming

For the entire month of July, this will be my home.

This will be my view. It's called Duck Cove Cottage and it sits on Hobbs Pond in Hope, Maine, about an 8 minute drive from Camden and the Atlantic Ocean. If Hobbs Pond were in Virginia it would be called a magnificent lake. But in Maine it is dwarfed by hundreds of lakes much bigger and more grand, so pond it is. We will take rental possession of this beauty on July 2nd and leave on the 30th.

We have never done anything like this before. Sure, we have taken our share of vacations, many more than most people, I will admit. But, we have never gone away for an entire month before. It has taken a lot of planning and advance work. My profession doesn't really allow a complete hiatus, so my laptop and cell phone will be with me in case of some geo-political/financial market meltdown. 

Barring Armageddon though, professional concerns will rank approximately 16th on my priorities list.

It won't be easy, pulling this off. Ok, the hardest part is over since I've already paid the rent. But, we have never packed for a month before, have you? And, transporting Miss Lucy to Maine is going to be something like Dante's nine circles of hell. It will involve one pet friendly hotel stay in Conneticut, in case you're wondering. The drive takes 13 hours, which is like six months in dog years. Actually Lucy is very much the wild card of this adventure. Will her famous neurosis go to death-com five in 

a new, strange house, or will she, like everyone else, have herself transformed by Maine? Will living here chill her out?

I can already tell what many of you are thinking...What the heck would you do in Maine for an entire month?? The answer is a combination of anything we want, and whatever seems right. The best part of being in Maine is simply...being. The lake has a magnet in it. You swim in it, fish from it, kayak on it. But you also gaze at it, and listen to it. And if fresh water ever starts to annoy you, you get in the car and drive into Camden and eat a lobster and take in a lungful of salty sea air.

Or, you can climb to the top of Mount Battie, overlooking Canden harbor with a packed lunch and pick blueberries.

Mostly, you stay outside all day. Being outside so much changes you, recalibrates your mind and gives you a ravenous appetite which gets rewarded with amazing food cooked up on grills...again outside. Then, after dinner, you walk down to the edge of the lake, light a fire and sit around it, hypnotized.

We will have guests. At some point Kaitlin and Jon will be with us, and Patrick and Sarah, hopefully on the same week. Other family will come on other weeks. Maybe we will have a week by ourselves, maybe not. This is the sort of place that you want to share.

So, we will grind through all of the packing drama, and the hellish journey up I-95. We will arrange for house sitters and assure the timely cutting of grass here in Short Pump. But we will leave the 95 degree days and the suffocating humidity behind and enjoy four weeks of Maine..." the way life ought to be."

I Know There's a City...

One of the songs performed on Nashville Public Radio's Studio C program yesterday was a modern day spiritual written by a local song writer named Dan Hart. I have been obsessed with the thing ever since I heard the Portara Ensemble rehearse it over the weekend. For one thing, the guy absolutely slaying the piano is a white-haired old man who you would never guess could play anything with such soulful beauty. But what really gets me about this song is the lyrics.

There must be a well that's fed by an eternal stream of tears.

 And I have filled my cup there once too many times in my life.

  Where is your God? I have heard them say

   When they hear me cry every night and day.

But I know there's a city where sorrow is gone,

 and every tear wiped away.

Sadness in the streets I walk down, trouble everywhere I turn.

 And mourning in the hearts of those broken and bruised in this life.

  All through the night on this bed I lay.

   Longing for the light of a brand new day.

I know there's a city where the sun never sets,

 and every tear's wiped away.

I don't know about you, but there are times over the past year where I have felt these lyrics. Bearing witness to the degradations of modern life, with its cruelty and suffering, the nastiness and violent edge of our politics, makes these words come alive for me. No, our response to a screwed up world isn't simply to "lay on this bed longing for the light of a brand new day." If we see cruelty and suffering, it's our job to work to end it. Still, history teaches me that some of the evil in this world cannot be overcome. Some of our most intractable problems have no solution on this side of eternity.

But, I know there's a city....

Facebook is Liberal?? WHAT???

News broke yesterday that everyone's favorite social media hub, Facebook, has been cooking it's news feed. Several former employees spilled the beans that the algorithm that was supposed to be driving its "whats trending" section was actually a room full of newly minted Ivy League millenials who were picking the news items which they thought should be trending. To the surprise of absolutely no one with half a brain, the stories favored by Ivy League millenials tended to be very complimentary of progressive politics to the near banishment of "conservative news" with the exception of anything that might cast that philosophy in a bad light. This morning comes news that the United States Senate is opening an "investigation" of Facebook. A few observations...

I suppose it's disappointing to learn just how many people get their news from Facebook, but this is the world we live in. It is also a little disappointing that Facebook would try to pitch a room full of news curators in the scientific language of algorithms. But, there is no news here. I have held to a conservative/libertarian political philosophy for nearly 35 years now, and in all that time, most newspapers, and almost the entirety of television news has been dominated by people who disagree with me. With the advent of social media, nothing has changed. Mark Zuckerburg is a reliable progressive, and he has a huge platform. So what? It's his company. He can do what he wants with it. That a Republican senator would want to launch an investigation into a private enterprise nosing around in its free speech rights is a ridiculous overreach. You know who else has a huge platform? Rush Limbaugh. I remain fiercely opposed to the Fairness Doctrine precisely because it is not a function of government to cast about looking for inappropriate speech to suppress. If Rush can attract 20 million listeners to a program that espouses conservative politics, good for him. If Facebook wants to push liberal news stories, that's their business. Nobody is holding a gun to my head forcing me to listen to Rush or read the news feed on Facebook. There are plenty of other places where I as a free man living in the United States can go to get my news. I don't need my government to be mucking around with those options.

When I first read this Facebook story I thought...why?? Why would Facebook try to make it look like its news feed was produced by an impartial algorithm, when in fact it was a news-driving project? Why not just drop the "what's trending" tag and be done with it? Perhaps they thought that if they could convince their users that one way of thinking politically was what everyone was thinking it would advance the progressive agenda via the social pressure of group-think. Or maybe it wasn't nearly as diabolical as all that. Maybe it was the fact that the kinds of stories favored by young Ivy Leaguers reflect the near unanimous opinions espoused by those institutions. Either way, none of this comes as a surprise to me. Anyone who is surprised just hasn't been paying attention for the past fifty years.

My opinion? Leave Facebook alone. It's Mark Zuckerburg's job as CEO of Facebook to bring value to his shareholders. By all accounts, he has succeeded. If you don't like his liberal politics, ignore the what's trending newsfeed and go back to bragging about your awesome workouts and the off the charts accomplishments of your children...cough...

...maybe it was that.

First, the good news. I've got a couple of great kids. Getting to see them both over the last five days was tremendous fun. Seeing what kind of lives they are building for themselves made me quite proud. Although I still harbor a tinge of bitterness that they both settled so far from home, I have no right to complain. They are both accomplished, happy adults. What parent wouldn't want that?

Now, for the bad news. From the time I pried my stiff carcass out of the car upon arrival in Nashville, until that same stiff carcass rattled up the steps of my house a few hours ago, I have been in a death match with a three-day allergy attack. There were many contributing factors to my miserable condition. I will let the reader decide which was the actual culprit.

1. The weather in Nashville on Saturday and Sunday was probably the nicest two days that city has enjoyed in years; delightful breezes, crisp air, stunning blue skies. We arrived at Patrick's retiring house to see the van he had rented already in place and half loaded. There were only some large furniture pieces and neatly packed boxes left to load. We would be completely done with the loading and unloading by 12:30. However,....and life is always about the howevers, there was one problem. See, Patrick had shared this rental house for the past couple of years with two other bachelors, and a dog. A white dog. It was rumored that the house had a working vacuum cleaner, but no evidence of any kind that it had ever been deployed. Consequently, fluffy dog hair balls the size of large rodents drifted out from under every piece of furniture like roaches scattering in the kitchen when someone turns on the lights in the middle of the night. Maybe it was that.

2. Once we unloaded everything at his new place, I took a load of trash to the dumpster which was at the bottom of a small hill in a cul de sac just down the street from the apartment. When I turned around to walk back up the hill, I looked up and saw the bright sunshine illuminating a wall of pollen streaming down from the trees like an invading army of ants. A thick sludge of tree junk had been raining down all around me and I had only just now seen the evidence, thanks to the angle of the sun. This stuff made Short Pump pollen look positively polite by comparison. Maybe it was that.

3. Saturday night, high on Benydril, I attended a Nashville Sounds baseball game in the glorious dying sunset of a Chamber of Commerce day. We sat outside for the better part of two hours, all the while the invisible sludge was painting the inside of my respiratory system a lovely shade of lemon. Maybe it was that.

4. On Sunday morning, we went to Patrick's church, a glorious old stone building, with grand cathedral archways and stained glass windows a hundred feet above your head. The second I stepped into this beautiful building, I remarked to Pam how strange it is that all old churches, no matter their denomination, smell exactly the same...like polished wooden pews, candle wax and moldy curtains. Maybe it was that.

Somehow, despite this perfect storm of allergens, I was able by sheer force of will to stave off a full fledged meltdown. I took Allegra, and popped Benydril, which kept me in a slow motion stupor for much of the time, but I was somehow able to fight off the big one, that embarrassing, fifty sneeze extravaganza that leaves your eyes swollen shut and two boxes of spent Kleenex at your feet. I was just not going to allow anything to ruin my time with my kids. Now that I'm at home, I feel like I just ran a marathon carrying a fifty pound backpack.

Finally, a word about my son. This month he will turn 27. I watched him very carefully all weekend. The kid is...happy. He likes his job. He still pours himself into his music and is continuing to grow as a composer. We watched him during a rehearsal for a choir he is in and nobody on the stage seemed to be having as much fun as Patrick. He's also happy with Sarah. They fit each other so well. And now, he has his own place. The sky is the limit.

Now, if he can only learn how to run that brand new vacuum cleaner I bought him.

...She's one of THEM!

Yesterday we hit the road for Nashville a little after 9 in the morning. We were flying along making great time( a euphemism for 80 mph and no traffic ). Then, just west of Knoxville, interstate 40 became a parking lot. There were repairs on a bridge somewhere ahead. It took us an hour and ten minutes to go 4 miles. As you can imagine, I took this developement with measured grace and tranquility, never once losing my temper or my good humor...........

After we got unpacked in our hotel, we made the two minute drive to Sarah's apartment, where we were to meet up with Patrick. When she pulled a plate of cheese, fruit and home made cucumber sandwiches out of the fridge, I rolled my eyes and thought, Good Lord, she's one of them! That move was right out of the Dunnevant Women's Hospitality Handbook, Volume III. Lemonade was soon to follow. Pam was thrilled. In our tribe, hospitality is the coin of the realm. The women in this family are known far and wide for their outrageous feats of daring-do in the kitchen where guests are involved. It started with my Mom, who would disappear into the kitchen after unexpected guests arrived, and ten minutes later miraculously appear holding a twenty pound turkey with all the fixins! My sisters, Linda and Paula are just as bad. They can throw parties like nobody's business. And my wife might just be the worst of all of them, having been trained during my ten years in the Grove Avenue Baptist youth ministry. Thirty teenagers suddenly show up at the house at 9:00 on a Friday night? Before you could say, "Holy Crap, look at that gaggle of...", two platters of nachos would come flying out of the oven. And now, my son is dating a girl who goes to the trouble of making cucumber sandwiches? Mercy.

We had dinner last night with Sarah's folks out in Smyrna, Tn. The meal was wonderful, and they were delightful company. They made us feel welcomed and relaxed. We all kinda fell for their 13 year old beagle, Libby. Adorable! Gotta love dog people.

Today, we move the boy into his new digs. Pam will insist on a trip to several stores to buy him, ALL THE THINGS! Then we will take in a minor league baseball game in upper seventies weather, the Nashville Sounds, possibly the best named baseball franchise in history. There will be hot dogs, Cotten candy and beer. Can't wait!