Our Turn To Make Dinner

The Dunnevant Beach Week contains a bizarre tradition first started by my mother, who after a particularly trying day had thrown up her hands at the prospect of preparing the evening meal with the now famous exclamation, "I'll be John Brown if I'm making dinner for this bunch of hulligans tonight. Either somebody else makes dinner or they can all starve to death!"  Thus launched the ill-fated let's all take turns making dinner for twenty people at the beach and call it a vacation gambit of 1991. The fact that it survives today is a towering monument to the power of inertia. It has become a permanent feature of this trip...not a bug, a feature! Last night was our turn.

I've got an idea, someone foolishly once said, why don't we just make hamburgers and hotdogs for our meal at the beach? That will be easy. And baked beans...everybody loves baked beans. It will be a cinch!

When financial writers know even less than they normally know about the direction of the stock market...that is to say, when their non-existent crystal ball is more opaque than usual they often trot out that rediculous formulation...the markets are currently struggling for direction. However, this worthless declaration makes--hamburgers and hotdogs will be easy to prepare at the beach--sound like a Princetonian doctoral dissertation. Here's how it all went down...

By 5:00 the situation was well in hand. Pam had everything organized to within an inch of its life. The table was set with fake Fourth of July finery. Pies had been made, secondary dishes were lined up on the huge kitchen island with ruthless assembly line efficiency. All that was left to do was slip the baked beans in the oven and fire up the grill to cook the burgers and dogs. I exited the kitchen out into the deck where the suspiciously new looking gas grill sat, arms loaded down with 16 burgers, 16 dogs, and six brats. The tank was filled with propane. I had a sweating glass of sweet tea in hand and was ready to put my 'Murika face on. I turned the dial counter clockwise, waited for the click, then listened for the whoosh. I took a confident sip of tea, then paused to admire the setting sun as I waited for the grill to heat up.

It was a long wait.

While, the tank was filled with gas, and the four elements all emitted flame, the heat that all of this produced wouldn't have been enough to melt a stick of butter. I could have jumped up on that grill naked without fear of getting burned. After twenty minutes it became clear that if anyone wanted to eat hamburgers and hotdogs this evening, an alternate plan would have to be devised.

Meanwhile, inside the kitchen, the baked beans caper was in full swing. Despite knobs that indicated that the gas oven was fully engaged, the two dishes of beans looked fresh as daisies after twenty minutes in close contact to allegedly fatal temperatures. Perhaps the particular type of gas pumped to this address was of a timid variety, propane which feels guilty for the damage it is doing to the planet and has decided to not cook stuff when asked!! To make Pam's situation worse, here I came marching onto the scene commandeering the entire surface of the stove for the purpose of frying hamburger. The popping, spitting grease storm that ensued made flipping these burgers a test of will, courage and endurance...Stand back..I'm going in!!! Godspeed, man!!

Dinner was eventually served, albeit forty minutes late. Everyone was complimentary. The burgers were actually pretty good. My blood pressure sat an all time record for the systolic reading, Pam's hands eventually stopped shaking, and we both take comfort in the knowledge that we won't have to do this again for two full years!

Off To A Rousing Start

The thirteenth iteration of the Dunnevant Beach Vacation has gotten off to a rousing start. Saturday, travel day, was a lost day of angst, frustration frayed nerves, and therefore will never be spoken of in this space again. But, yesterday, our first full day, was a blissful delight.

First, the house. This place has no pretentious name like 2015's Absolutely Fabulous. But this house actually is. The bedrooms are huge. The kitchen is sprawling, although oddly...has no pantry. The house is dominated by a freakishly large family room:

There's an entertainment center that is so ponderous, it's hard to imagine how the thing could have gotten inside the house. We have come to the conclusion that it was either built in place, or lowered by crane before the roof was built. It's the kind of entertainment center that Louis XIV might have had at Versailles if they had had big screens back in the 1600's. The only problem with the room is the furniture. Again...grotesquely huge pieces of furniture have been thrown about the place, sofas,  love seats and ottomans all designed and built for the long since extinct race known as the Pygstilt people...that strange tribe of humans known for their stubby torsos combined with seven foot long legs. If the Dunnevant clan was so built, we would all be raving about how comfortable the sofas are. Since we aren't, here we all are...awkwardly splayed out on these too low to the ground pieces, feet dangling weirdly mid-air, heads sticking high up with nothing to lean against like the stilteyes of sand crabs.

But, enough of the obligatory complaining. This place is beautiful, and we are all happy with our purchase.

Yesterday, in the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal, there appeared an irksome piece which turned its journalistic nose up at the family vacation with this condescending turn of phrase:

Family vacations often mean bad food and slothful habits...but it doesn't have to be that way.

It's written by some nerd-king dork who begins his piece complaining about how the first day of his family vacation was spent desperately searching for WiFi so he could submit his latest column to his editor. The fact that his accommodations didn't provide instant, reliable and free internet service was a source of great consternation to the writer. My response to this idiot would have been...Ok dude. First of all, why didn't you finish your column before you went on vacation. Poor planning on your part does not constitute a vacation internet crisis on anyone else's part, moron! And secondly...what are you talking about with this bad food crack??

And, slothful habits? Are you kidding me?

Do you have any idea how much work it is to haul this many chairs all the way from the house to this beach every morning?? Slothful habits..pphhssttttt! I have to climb 49 steps just to get to my bedroom. We are a thousand feet from house to beach here, so if you want to call that slothful habits, be my guest. 

So yeah, if this guy wants to take a couple weeks off every summer to train for a marathon while eating twigs and berries, then he can help himself. As for me and my house, we will lounge around on the beach all day making fun of each other while eating five meals a day plus snacks.

Can I get an amen??

Anyway, things are going swimmingly. Last night's meal was a triumph. Kaitlin, Jon and Patrick offered up spicy chicken fajitas, some sort of delicious corn salad thing and sopapilla cheesecake for dessert. Linda, inexplicably found a rubber snake in her shower, and had a fake mouse jump out at her from a small wooden box.

Everything right on schedule...

Here's How it Went Down at the Bank

I'm sitting in the parking lot of Wells Fargo at 8:50 am, desperate to be the first order of business for the Pump and Three Chopt branch brain trust. I'm quietly rehearsing my pithy takedowns when I see a post from my wife reminding me of the money verse from last Thursday's bible study...James 1:19
My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry...

Great, I thought. What a lousy time to have gotten involved in a small group bible study at Hope. Now, on top of bank problems, I've got the specter of spiritual accountability hanging over my head!

So, I take a couple of big, deep breaths, slap on the phoniest smile I own and boldly walk through the doors with great expectations. Just my luck, Clarise has the day off, so the assistant manager listens to my case and leads me over to the desk of an eager young man with a broad smile who will help me get everything cleared up. The assistant manager explains the situation of the double mortgage payment debits to my new smiling friend, who promptly picks up the phone and calls someone in the bill pay department. When he begins to speak, my spirits dropped considerably. This eager young man had the thickest Pakistani accent I have ever heard. I was sitting less than five feet from the man and could hardly understand a word he said, how was someone a couple of states away going to decipher his gibberish across a phone line?? My suspicions were confirmed when it took him three attempts to communicate my account number to the poor sap on the other end..

...No no...dhat was V as in Rickter, not B like in DOB...

Despite this setback, I remained confident. Surely, my bank would be able to correct so obvious an error as this in no time. My fake smile was positively beaming at this point.

Then, it all went wrong. Very. Very. Wrong.

Without wading deep into the weeds of bank-talk, let's just say that in modern finance, the efficiencies of electronic banking are very much a one way street. Ever since the advent of the internet it seems that my bank has been hounding me to go electronic! I have been told of the many benefits to be had from leaving old school paper banking behind. Why, Mr. Dunnevant, imagine the speed with which transactions would fly from one of your accounts to the next without having to wait on the US mail? And, think of the trees you'll be saving?! Think of the children, Mr. Dunnevant. You want our planet to be healthy for your children, don't you??

But there's always a catch, always some absurdity just around the corner anytime somebody pleads with you to do it for the children. In my case, it became apparent after poor Rashid spent thirty minutes on the phone translating my problem into fluent Urdu for not one, not two, but three separate bank functionaries, that while the bank recognizes their role in this situation, and has ever intention of making this customer whole, unfortunately, the second mortgage payment could not possibly be returned to my balance until the passage of ten working days.

Now, upon receiving this vexing news, things began to go in slow motion. A seed of righteous fury had germinated inside my brain and was morphing rapidly into what very easily could have become a raging spittle-spewing tirade. But then...just like Tom Hanks' character in A League of Their Own, when Evelyn, his right fielder who keeps missing the cutoff man, and he gets ready to unload on her but then remembers that the last time he did she had burst into tears, and he had had to remind the entire team that there, in fact, was no crying in baseball!!!!...yeah, just like that, a weird, strained calmness came over me. The entirety of my response is as follows:

Rashid, is it? Yes, Rashid...let me see if I'm understanding you correctly. You're saying that despite the fact that Wells Fargo can remove money from my account in literally a nanosecond, it will take two entire weeks for them to put the money back into my account. Is this what you are saying, Rashid?

Rashid nodded in the affirmative, as his eyes took on a deer in the headlights look.

There was a time in my life when this might have triggered what people in the banking trade call a situation, as in...Hey, Fred, we might have a situation over here with this Dunnevant guy...But, today was not that time. I lowered my head, shuffled my feet a little and replied with all of the sincerity of a politician...

"Listen, I really do appreciate all of your efforts here, and I know that this isn't your fault...but Rashid, this is exactly why people hate banks."

That was it. I didn't even raise my voice. It was almost like a miracle. The branch manager then stepped into the void left by my unanswerable factual statement with a workable plan to work around the rules blah, blah, blah, and get this fixed by no later than Tuesday of next week. They begged my forebearnace and assured me that once the dust had all settled, I would be charged absolutely nothing for the trouble caused by their mistake.

So, there you go. As it turned out, I was, in fact, slow to speak, and slow to get angry. Apparently, there's something to this bible study thing.

The Joys of Banking

This morning, 48 hours before I depart for the beach for a week, I was alarmed to learn that my checking account at Wells Fargo had a balance of only $31. By my calculations, the number should have been many multiples of this paltry sum. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the overdraft protection feature of the account had been launched, whereby the deficient sum is summoned from my equity line in order to cover the overdraft. What fresh hell is this?..I thought. A few more clicks of my iPad revealed the problem...my bank had decided to draft my account for my mortgage payment...on two consecutive days. 

The conversation that I intend on having with my banker this morning could go two ways:

Possibility number 1

Clarise: Good Morning Mr. Dunnevant. What can I do for you this fine morning?

Me: Hello, Clarise. You are certainly looking well his morning. I was wondering if you could help me with a little snafu that I have discovered in my checking account. I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for it, but somehow my mortgage payment was drafted two days in a row. Since I was not expecting the second draft, the overdraft protocol was initiated, costing me $100 along with much embarrassment. Is there some way you can have this reversed and my account credited properly?

Possibility number 2

Clarise: Good morning Mr. Dunnevant. What can I do for you this fine morning?

Me: What can you do for me? What can you do for me????!!! I'll tell you what you can do for me...your bank can stop being the most incompetent enterprise in America, that's what you can do for me. Your bank can stop taking two mortgage payments out of my account when I have only authorized one, and then you can reverse this outrageous overdraft charge, then beg for my forebearance and thank me profusely for agreeing not to make a scene!!

I'm thinking that the real conversation will probably wind up being something in between...formalized politeness and bile-churning venom. When confronted with bank shenanigans I usually start as Dr. Jekyll, but withing five minutes get transformed into an enraged Mr. Hyde. This transformation stems from the arrogant position universally assumed by the banking class in matters of their own errors. It can't possibly be our mistake, Mr. Dunnevant, we have done studies and have discovered that 99.9% of these sort of conflicts are a result of customer error, that sort of thing.

But then, I set my jaw in that certain way that my children can recall with crystalline precision, that expression that possesses my face just before I launch into a withering takedown. My children referred to it as simply...the look. It gives off a certain vibe that suggests the possibility of madness, the very real chance that I might be capable of virtually anything. Of course, I am not a violent man...but sometimes it helps if other's don't know that.

By 9:30 this morning, the charges will be reversed. Hopefully, an apology will not be needed from me an hour later, when wracked with guilt by my performance, I will drive back over to the bank, flowers in hand, begging Clarise's forgiveness.

Beach Week Prep

Preparations are at a fever pitch for Dunnevant Beach Week 13.

Meals have been planned. A grocery list has been made. All but one of the six prank gags I ordered from Amazon has been shipped. On cue, a tropical storm has begun to form out in the Atlantic Ocean somewhere and brings with it the possibility of a midweek weather event. Andrew Freiden=Satan.

Of course, a big part of pre-trip logistical planning involves the actually drive to the beach. In our family, this means six vehicles leaving from four different places, plus my son who will be flying into  the Norfolk airport for pick up by his Mom and Dad. To make this year's voyage just a bit more difficult, our rental agency has come up with a 6:00 pm check-in time. Here's the controversy:

Two schools of thought have emerged. One, championed by my brother-in-law, is that we should leave as early as possible to beat the worst of the traffic. If this means we arrive six hours before check-in, so be it. The second idea seems to be, why not chill at home for a while, eat a leisurely lunch, then hit the road later, and if we need to stop for dinner on the way down, fine. Since Pam and I have to pick up Patrick at the Norfolk airport(arrival time 12:30, assuming no delays or hijackings), we have no choice in this matter. So the debate has become...do we all plan on eating dinner on our own, or do we wait until we all arrive and order pizza at the house?

We have spent the better part of two days debating this topic on the Dunnevant VACAY 2017 Facebook page...yep...and after all the back and forth, the conclusion we have reached seems to have been:

Everybody leave Richmond at whatever time you like, and we can either eat dinner on the road or maybe order pizza if the trip goes better than expected and we all find ourselves at the house at 5:00 and the rental agency allows us to check in an hour early, which may or may not happen.

In other words, Shakespeare had the Dunnevant's pegged pretty well when he wrote, It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Our "debate" produced a thunderous maybe. But at least we didn't venture into the murky waters of trying to decide on pizza toppings...are you kidding? That would take a second Council of Trent!

Anyway, the day is fast approaching, and everyone is putting on their game faces...especially my nephew, Bennett, who offered this 24 carat gem to his mother the other day...

...I hope I find another shark tooth at the beach this year. That would be cool. I lost my other one. Or, I might find some buried treasure. I could. And then Pops could figure out how to open the box with his knowledge. Or maybe Uncle Ron. But if I find some, I'm keeping it. And everybody will be like, "can I have some of your gold?" And I'll be like, "no way--gold doubloons are expensive!" You know, cuz they are--I'm not going to be giving away my gold doubloons and diamonds and stuff....

Kid is eight years old and already understands the relationship between scarcity and price, the productive division of labor, and has come out steadfastly against wealth redistribution!!

One last thing...here's a teaser shot of the prank box...

Be afraid, people. Be very afraid...

A Meditation on America

A fair amount of space on the bookcases in my library are filled with books of history. Most of them deal with the history of my country, America. I suppose this is natural and proper, that a man would be most intrigued with the story of his native country. I have been so for the majority of my life. I love America. I feel a devotion to her and I'm grateful for the accident of birth that granted me all of the benefits that she conferred upon me when I was luckily not born in Afghanistan, Bangladesh or North Korea.

But my love for country has evolved along the way, been made more mature by the great tumults that have roiled us since the year of my birth, 1958. On many occasions my devotion has been tested. Often I have found myself disappointed by events, even embarrassed by what we have done, or failed to do as a country. But if the history of a country is like a balance sheet, I have confidence that we are still running a positive balance. It's easy to lose sight of the grand sweep of the greatness of a country if you succumb to recency bias. What we may look like today is but a dot on a ponderous timeline that stretches back 241 years.

As we celebrate America's birthday, these are the events of my lifetime which have formed my thoughts and feelings about what it means to be an American citizen. For you, these may not resonate at all. Other things may have impacted you more profoundly. Or, you may have lived through these chapters of American life and come to different conclusions. That's ok. I can only tell my story.

The first memory I have as a child that had anything to do with history, politics or government was the cold November afternoon when my older brother and sister got off of the bus early and scrambled past me into the house. I followed them and heard someone say that the President had been shot. I
was five years old. All I really remember about it was how quiet everyone was. Something bad had happened, and my Mom and Dad were very upset.

My next big memory was of John Glenn, the hero. I read about him in the Weekly Reader. I wanted to be an astronaut for a couple of years after that. So did everyone else.

I remember hearing about my Uncle John and my Uncle Harry, my Mom's brothers who were both hero's in WWII. Uncle John drove a tank for George Patton. Whenever I visited him when I was a child, I remember him being so gentle, nothing at all like the fierce combat veteran of my imaginations. He always had a certain sadness in his eyes. My Mom told me that he was a different person when he got home from the war, nothing like the brother who left.

In 1968, I was ten years old and paying closer attention. In June of that year, I found myself in my Grandma Dunnevant's trailer, watching Robert Kennedy get shot on a black and white television no bigger than a bread box. I saw Rosey Greer on the screen and I knew him as a football player for the Rams and was momentarily confused. All of the grown ups in the trailer were upset, some cried. Martin Luther King and now this...someone said. Something was wrong with my country. Young people were marching in the streets. I didn't understand it all, but I could figure out that people like my Dad were the enemy of the people marching in the streets. He was older, and couldn't be trusted, they said.


Then, less than a year later, we put a man on the moon. Another crowded room. Another black and white television, this one an RCA Victor with aluminum foil around the rabbit ears. That's one small step for man...bl>#%\ckkk...one giant leap for mankind. I was thrilled and proud to be an American. But alongside the thrill came questions...what the heck was going on? These people in the streets, burning down Watts and Newark didn't seem very thrilled to be Americans. They were burning the
flag. Thus began my lifelong quest to understand, to square the circle that was my big, brawling country. I began reading...a lot.

Our amateur boys beat the Professional Soviet hockey team at the height of the Cold War. A big night.

I cast my first ever vote in 1976 for Jimmy Carter. He was a Democrat, and he wasn't Gerald Ford.

College introduced me to a group of professors who loathed America. Well, they loved the perks of tenure and the abundance in the stores, but in their telling, America was the worst actor on the world stage, and we were  responsible for most of the world's problems. I listened, and read. Some of it made sense, most of it didn't.

Ronald Reagan came along. Owing to my youthful fondness for liberalism, I voted against him the first time, but he soon won me over. Adulthood brought me down on the side of freedom and individual liberty and the power of free enterprise as the best  system ever conceived to produce wealth and to bring goods and services to market. But, even then I sensed that capitalism wasn't enough. There was more to life than economics. For, despite the incredible accomplishments of my
young and confusing country, there were glaring weaknesses...mostly having to do with race
relations.

I watched Bill Clinton, with his southern charm and roguish manner stumble through his Presidency
and was horrified that he would be so foolish as to carry on with an intern...in the freaking Oval
 Office!! 

I watched George W. Bush grab that megaphone on that smoking pile of twisted metal after 9/11. I was with him that day, and so were most people. Then I watched him throw away all of that unity, all of that good will by settling scores in Iraq.

I marveled at the sight of Barack Obama taking the oath of office. Even though I never voted for him, something in me was stirred seeing such a dignified man become President in the shadow of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, the freer of slaves.

While all of this politics was going on, out there in the rest of the country, Americans were changing the world, rewriting its history. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs did what my countrymen have done for 240
years...innovate, create and change the world. While Washington dithers, Americans produce and pursue their dreams with unrivaled success, assuring us a dominant place at the world's table.

Now, we have elected an entertainer, a successful business tycoon with the temperament of a carnival barker. It has been a wild six months. Some are ecstatic to have a street fighter in charge. Many love his counter punching, his coarseness, his bluster. Others are horrified.

But, I'm still an American. Politicians don't define me. The ugliness in Washington, now increasingly amplified by a thousand  electronic voices doesn't wipe away the triumphs of this great land. There is
much left to do to make us a kinder people. We have work to do to become more fair, more equitable. But the heart of America is decency. Sometimes we are too slow, sometimes some catastrophe has to shake us to it, but we eventually return to decency. We eventually overcome our self centeredness and exchange it for caring for one another. Every raging tornado in the Great Plains gives us a glimpse. Every hurricane that lashes the coasts brings out the spirit of loving kindness. We all know that we have it in us, the capacity for charity, the gene of courage which was bequeathed to us by our ancestors.

We are a mightily blessed people, blessed and cursed. It's my hope that the better angels of our character will eventually win the day.

The Tweet

This will be my last blogpost for a while. We've reached the halfway point of the year and I'll be heading to the Outer Banks in a week or so. There will be lots to do to prepare for that. Besides, sometimes you just run out of things to write about. What's worse is when you live in the United States in 2017 with Donald Trump in the White House and there are literally a thousand things to write about. The reason this abundance of material is worse is because most of it is not just bad stuff, but incandescently bad stuff. It's virtually impossible to keep up with. But you can't and shouldn't comment on everything. Not every raging dumpster fire requires my particular brand of kerosene. My voice doesn't always necessarily elevate the discourse. Still, sometimes I think...what hath man wrought?

This week, our President unleashed a couple of Tweets directed at a couple of morning talk show hosts from Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski...

"I heard poorly rated Morning Joe speaks badly of me (I don't watch anymore). Then how come low IQ Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe came to Mar-a-Largo three nights in a row around New Year's Eve, and insisted on joining me? She was bleeding badly from a face lift, and I said no."

Ok, for purposes of this discussion, I will not attempt to answer the question of what the President of the United States is doing Tweeting at 7 o'clock in the morning. I will also concede that this particular couple of pundits have been rather vicious in their scathing denunciations of the President. Further, I am aware that an awful lot of people take a lot of pleasure in watching a President who fights back against the press, a guy who doesn't just sit there and take it.

But, people.....

Read the Tweet again. 

This, from the President of the United States.

I don't care of a couple of two bit commentators on a show that barely anyone watches called the President the bastard child of Barney and Cruella DeVille...why in the name of all that is holy would he lower himself and the Presidency to this level of childishness? 

But the fifth grade level immaturity isn't even the worst of it. What are we to make of the line about her bleeding badly from a face-lift? Who knows if it's even true? But if it is, his inclusion of this bit of information was intended to humiliate. There's a meanness to it, a smallness of character. What person do any of you know who would say such a thing publically?

I read this stuff and I think to myself, "Mr. President...can you, just for one day, just for one 24 hour period refrain from your particular brand of petty cruelty? Can you, for once in your life...be kind?"

It's come to this...all I want from my President is a hint of kindness. The bar has been officially lowered enough for a basset hound to leap over.

And with that, I'm checking out for a few days. Have a great 4th of July everybody!