Keeping Records

EXHIBIT A.

Whenever I get to the end of a month I find myself sorting through the multiple written summaries of my accomplishments and failures. They are all written down in my own handwriting in tidy journals and several very old school three ring binders complete with those reinforced plastic hole protectors. Pam thinks it quaint and slightly unsettling that I still refuse to use her much more efficient Google Doc system, especially when it comes to keeping my calendar—which I’m sure you’ve already guessed is of the sturdy black Week-at-a-Glance variety. This guy…

There’s no better feeling that first week of January than when you realize that you won’t have to worry about ink bleed for the rest of the year. But, I have gotten side tracked from the point I was trying to make—that I have a decades long habit of keeping score. My fitness journal above is just one of many examples of this genre. I have one for investing, budgeting, reading, and personal goals for everything you can think of, even my squirrel-kill count. (Partially kidding about the squirrel thing). Why do I do this? I have no rational answer to this question. The more difficult question would be, Why do I keep these records from twenty-five years ago?

Take EXHIBIT A. For example. I have a routine of physical fitness that goes back at least a decade or two. For years most all of this routine was accomplished at American Family Fitness, but then COVID came and they closed down and I dropped my membership. Since then it all gets done at home. I get up in the morning every other day and do a series of exercises which include things like push-ups, sit-ups, and curls with 15 pound dumbbells. In addition, I mix in a variety of road work which include walking and running and on bad weather days, a stationary bike. Many years ago I started jotting down a record of it all, Over the years I have perfected the record keeping to the place where I can fit an entire month of such exercises on one freaking page of a journal!! How’s that for efficiency, Google?

So, as you can see, I have so far in 2024 performed 2005 reps of each of these exercises, along with 171 miles of roadwork. But what does it all mean? None of it has kept me from several health setbacks in recent years. Despite all of this sweating and grinding I am still 15 pounds heavier than I was from the day I got married until the day I turned 55. Once I hit my late 50’s and early 60’s, all the exercising in the world has not been able to compensate for the discombobulating metabolism of late middle age. Yet, here I am still keeping painstaking records of my feeble attempts to turn back the clock.

Now that I think about it, what is this blog if not yet another record keeping scheme? Isn’t The Tempest merely an eleven year record of my thoughts and feelings about stuff? Maybe it will come in handy one day long after I’m dead and gone. Maybe one of my grandchildren will ask their parents a question like, I wonder what Pops thought about COVID? Wonder what his view of the pitch clock rule in baseball? What did he think of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or Donald Trump? Then my kids will answer, “Are you kidding? You don’t ever have to wonder what Pops thought about anything, cause he wrote down every spare scrap of an idea that ever came into his head back in the day in this crazy blog.” Of course, then the grandchildren will ask, “What the heck is a blog?”

Turning the Page

At the onset of a new month, May of 2024 seems daunting…

May 6th—Book Launch party.

May 7th—Publication Date, A Life of Dreams.

May 11th—Kaitlin’s birthday.

May 12th—Mother’s Day

May 16-20—40th wedding anniversary, (19th), celebration in the Cayman Islands.

May 25th—Patrick’s birthday

May 28th—Fly to Atlanta to attend Braves v. Nationals game with Patrick.

Of course, there are many others things that should be sprinkled into this mix. Four Friday morning Cafe shifts. A Saturday at Hope Thrift. Pam’s last day of work on the 10th. Many client meetings at work. Lots of yard work. Several robust walks with Lucy. Sunday’s at Hope. What is sure to be a daily obsession with the sales numbers of A Life of Dreams. 

But it will all be over in a vaporous instant, and June will come into sharper focus. June will bring with it Maine and all of her delights. Then, May will be a memory, and I’ll wonder why on earth I thought it was so daunting.

We have a calendar in our kitchen. Of course, it features photographs from Maine. When we are a couple days away from a new month I always flip the page early to get a peak at the new picture. In real life, we don’t enjoy this privilege, we must take each day as it comes…

The Queen of Hearts

For those of you who are planning on attending the launch party for my book, you are in for a treat. I say this not out of vanity or an overinflated opinion of my writing skills, but rather because of what my wife’s imagination has conjured up for the event. Honestly, when the idea of a launch party was first presented to me by my publisher my first instinct was a hard pass. But when I mentioned it to Pam it was like waving a red towel at a charging bull. She immediately took over the project.

May 6th is probably the absolute worst possible time for this to happen. In our family, May has always been a sort of hell month. An astonishing number of our family members happened to be born from late April through the end of May including, both of our children and my father in law. Then there’s the small matter of our 40th wedding anniversary on May 19th. So planning something which neither of us have any experience with in the middle of all of this is challenging. It will be the largest party that Pam has planned outside of the weddings of our children and for those there was a wedding coordinator. For this thing…there’s my relentless, creative, and indomitable wife, along with a cadre of family and friends she has recruited to help her pull it all off.

At this point I should probably contrast for you our two visions. First mine. I thought we would set out some chairs, throw some snacks on a table with maybe some bottled water or coffee. Then after some mingling I would give a brief talk about the book, read a section, then sit down at a table with boxes of my book stacked up on it and start selling and signing them.

Now…Pam’s

I will not go into any specific details here since the plan is still in the formation stage but suffice it to say that Pam’s vision compared to mine is like a royal wedding at Buckingham Palace vs. running off to the Justice of the Peace. Its like the difference between Taylor Swift’s Eras tour and Darrell and the Drifter’s two night gig at The Pour House. At Pam’s launch party there will delicious snacks, punch, wine and book-themed cake. There will be cool banners, an actual set with chairs, a lamp, ferns and an actual semi-famous emcee. There will be decorations all over the place based on my protagonist’s gambling skills, including but certainly not limited to a roulette wheel. There will be a poster-sized edition of the book. There will be a deck of playing cards with the book on the cover, along with a super cool coffee mug for me to hold in my hand to identify the author and to keep him from fidgeting…

That’s about all I am at liberty to share at this point. You’ll just have to come to see it all for yourself. I married the Queen of Hearts.

https://dougdunnevant.com/rsvp/

The Three Most Beautiful Paragraphs You Will Read Today

The writing of letters has become a lost art. The arrival of the email sealed the fate of the letter in human discourse. Emails are fast, convenient and cost nothing to send. Letters require things like a pen, paper, an envelope and a stamp. Then once the recipient finally receives the thing the urgency of the communication has been lost. Personally I can’t remember the last time I sat down and wrote a letter, but yesterday alone I shot off a half dozen emails. I recently saw a skit some show did where they asked a bunch of random young people on the street if they would write their grandparents a post card. Even when given the cards most of them couldn’t figure out how to use them, where to write on the thing, where to put the stamp, and even what a stamp was. It was all good for a laugh but honestly how would someone 25 years old know how to send a post card in the first place? When was the last time you sent a post card.

I say all this because yesterday afternoon a dear friend sent me a text (of course) out of the blue. The subject concerned this great man…

E.B. White, famed essayist and author of Charlotte’s Web was often sent letters from strangers who admired his many contributions to top publications like Harper’s and the New Yorker. One such letter came from a man named Mr. Nadeau who wrote to ask White about his opinion on what he saw as the “bleak future for the human race.” Here is E.B. White’s reply…

I can’t imagine being able to craft such a poignant, lyrical and wise letter like this. These three short paragraphs feel like a balm, like a comforting hug, a warm bowl of soup on a bitter cold afternoon. I don’t know how White’s optimism was received by Mr. Nadeau but something tells me that perhaps he came away slightly less cynical about the future. The best part was, he now had a physical keepsake in his hand signed by a great man that he could place in a frame above his desk to remind him that a brighter day was possible.

Maybe this will become one of my projects when I retire. I will set about trying to resuscitate the craft of the hand written letter from the ash heap of history. 

But when time is of the essence…I’ll stick with emails.

Dreams are Stubborn Things

Now that Tax Day is behind us we are freed up to start worrying about more important things. For me that would be my upcoming book launch party on May 6. Pam has taken ahold of the creative planning for the event with her usual flair and tenacity. A Sunday afternoon trip to Party City yielded a couple of bags full of gambling-related paraphernalia, the snacks and beverages have been decided upon, as the RSVP list continues to grow. So…what am I worried about? Two things…

A. That no one will show up

B. That everyone will show up

Here’s how my brain works. With regards to A…May the 6th is still over two weeks away. A lot can happen between now and then. People get sick, they have car accidents, emergency root canals, their houses burn down, just a few of the many last minute things that could conspire to prevent their attendance. Consequently, there is the possibility that no one will show up. On the matter of B…I am told by party planning experts that many more people show up at events like this than RSVP to events like this. Moreover, I have been told by at least a dozen people that they will for sure be coming but their names appear nowhere on the RSVP list, hence my concern that everyone will show up.

I know that I should chill out about this. No matter who shows up or how many, it will be a memorable evening. Like my emcee for the evening, Tom Allen, reminded me over lunch recently, “Relax, dude. All you have to remember is—don’t say or do anything stupid—that’s my job!!”

Still, there’s no getting around the fact that I have been imagining what something like this would be like for at least half my life now. I’ve been writing stuff since I was in Middle School. I’ve dreamed about what having a novel published would be like for years, which has gotten me to thinking about dreams and why some come true and others don’t. I have come to the conclusion that most dreams die, not from a lack of opportunity or money, but rather from a shortage of imagination. I have always allowed myself to imagine this reality, I’ve always allowed myself to believe that it was possible. So now that the time has finally come, I’m not surprised by it. It’s almost exactly like I’ve always imagined it would be. Before anything of value can happen to you, you have to be able to imagine it. 

Dreams are stubborn things.

Spring at the Dunnevant House

Spring has sprung at the Dunnevant house…

Comfort

Perhaps the most sought after human condition is comfort. All of us long for it. When financial rewards come we don’t admit to riches, we prefer the elegance of the word comfortable. Our possessions are often referred to as creature comforts. In the movies just before things start to heat up someone says, “Let me slip into something more comfortable.” Let me share with you what comfortable means to me.

Today is Saturday. What I am about to describe for you is typical for me on Saturdays. It has always been my most comfortable day. The day started a couple hours ago with my everyday wake-up routine. But now, Pam is in the kitchen while I write this, making our special Saturday morning breakfast. We never eat breakfast together on any other day. Our routines collide awkwardly during the work week. But on Saturdays she makes a proper sit down meal. This past week I sent her a Tik-Tok video of a delicious looking breakfast dish that someone had made. I thought that she might like it too so I forwarded it to her and now she’s in there playing that video over and over, making sure she doesn’t miss a step. 

Its now 8:23 and Lucy hasn’t come downstairs yet. She hasn’t peed since 10:00 last night, hasn’t eaten since 5:00 yesterday afternoon, and yet she still lounges on our bed by herself. Why? Because neither of us has “issued her a proper invitation to come downstairs.” You heard that correctly. She is a lunatic.

After breakfast I will workout. For me this used to entail a trip to American Family Fitness. But my 19 year membership at that institution ended with COVID. Since then my workout has become an improvised routine that takes place in my home with dumbbells and the two staples of DIY fitness—push-ups and sit-ups. Saturday is not a road work day, so there will be no walking, running or biking.

Then around 10:30 or so I will spend two hours putzing around in my yard. There is perhaps no other activity in my life from which I draw more pleasure than taking care of my yard. Its not a huge yard so it doesn’t take forever. The tasks involved vary by the seasons. Sometimes I rake, other times I mow. I gather sticks, remove Lucy’s deposits. I trim the edges of everything. My leaf blower gets a workout. When I’m finished two hours later I will admire my work for a few minutes as I walk the perimeter. This work is the very essence of comfort for me. My real job of 42 years isn’t physical work. Its a job that involves slow moving things like growth. Sometimes it takes years to measure real progress only to have it vaporize in the ill winds of interest rate policy. Not so with my yard. I can see the results of my efforts in the lush, clean lines of the mower. Comforting.

After a shower I might grab an afternoon nap, nothing more comforting than a nice nap. Then at 3:00 our volunteer shift at Hope Thrift starts. Pam will man the cash register while I am collecting donations at the back door. I spend a lot of my 3 hour shift harassing the other volunteers, teasing them about one thing or another. Sometimes I slip across the parking lot to Wendy’s or McDonalds to buy them ice creams or French fries. When I’m feeling extra generous…both. At least once during my shift I will encounter someone at the back door who has been in the process of cleaning out a dead parent’s attic. Their grief is still raw. I mostly just listen. Other times I will see a family of immigrants inside looking for and finding bargains. I smile at them and they smile back. It’s always quite a comforting afternoon at the Thrift.

Afterwards we will go out to dinner with old friends who also have spent the afternoon at Thrift. We will find a nice place to catch up over a meal and a beer. These are the type of friends who you can easily relax with, the very best kinds of friends.

And, that’s it…my Saturday. It will be the most comfortable day of the week. Hope your’s was too.