Other People's Kids

Tessa, 

A migraine is mixing with caffeine and my Super Bright, High Contrast, Back-lit Hi-Def computer screen to form the perfect headache.  The caffeine should help, but all it does is remind me that there's no way to pass out, because you had seven mug-fulls of Irish Breakfast.  Sigh.

Junior High youth group tonight.  I'm not sure what to expect.  Last week we had a lock-in, which is, without a doubt, the single worst idea I've ever come up with.  That includes my "Who Can Eat This Pile of Habaneros?" idea and my "Missions Trip to War-Torn Mexican Border Towns" idea.  I was expecting 8, then 11 RSVP'd the day of.  That night, 25 kids showed up; a dozen of them showed up 2 hours early, only 9 of these kids went to our church.  Half of them had no intentions of listening to me, none of them had any intentions of sleeping.

I learned some things that night.  I learned that 14-year-old girls think my brother is "super cute."  I learned that anything beyond 15 kids just blends into a blurry, screaming, mass of Bieber hair.  I learned that I do not bounce back for a 36-hour sugar bender like I used to.  Most importantly, I learned that when given the choice between listening to a 7th grader's iPod and being water-boarded, I will fill up that bucket of water myself.  I'll even hang myself upside down, just please, I'm begging you, no more Katy Perry.

People like a good turnout though.  And I got a lot of attaboys on Sunday.  I forget sometimes that I should happy about the flood of children, because that's kind of the point of this job.  It is a good thing, but its also the kind of thing that makes you wish Nerf made tranquilizer darts.

I Heart You 

The Pup-osal

Tessa, 

Gaze upon him.  Stare into his big glassy eyes.  He is half Goldendoodle, and half St. Bernard.  He's a St. Berdoodle, or a Goldentard.  I really don't know.  No matter, he's 100% yours.  He's 13 hours away, but he's flying out to see you in a couple days.  He will then commence to dance about our home in that robotic puppy-like way, that joyful I-just-learned-to walk manner, and we will all be happier.

Then he will pee in the corner and we will be slightly less happy.

But we will clean that up, and the happiness will return in full.  Life will very closely resemble a scene from a French film, where a young couple strolls along the Riviera, staring deeply into each others' eyes, getting to know the person they already love intently.  Except, it won't be the Riviera, it'll be a city street in St. Paul, and the young couple is staring at a puppy.

I can't wait.  Who doesn't want to be loved unconditionally by 130-pounds worth of man's best friend?  so Tessa: will you take this puppy, have and to hold, to walk and to feed, in he-ate-a-thesaurus and in health, till death do you part?  I know I do.

I Heart You

p.s. - go here: WhatShouldWeNameHim.blogspot.com

Inamorata, Volume One: Mischke

Tessa, 

On the way back from Chicago, I struck upon a good idea.  Leave me alone for 7 hours in the boring wastelands of the Badger State and I will produce exactly one idea worth expanding upon.  The idea was this: list off my favorite things, one entry at a time.

The list excludes the Big Ones.  You, The Good Lord, the 1st Amendment, Wendy's Spicy Chicken Sandwich -- these are everyone's favorites, they go without saying.  Plus, there's already a whole slew of internet chatter on the Spicy Chicken Sandwich.  I'm not gonna say anything that hasn't already been covered.  So here goes...

Volume One: Tommy Mischke

I got a Sony Walkman for Christmas in 1993.  I was eleven yeas old.  It was late at night, and I was laying in bed, wearing my Batman underwear, trying slow my brain down long enough to fall asleep.  This was my least favorite part of the day.  I put my headphones on, flipped the switch to my shiny black Walkman, and thumbed the dial across the FM landscape.  I only listened to Oldies, which meant that a) I wasn't interested in 95% of the available channels, and b) I was guaranteed to not hear anything new.

I flipped to AM.  I didn't listen to AM radio, and wasn't really sure why it was even there.  It was like FM, but without all of the things that made people want to listen to FM.  A guy talking, some music in Spanish, someone reading the news.  And then there was someone else.  This guy didn't sound like a talk radio host; he sounded like someone who had about 30 seconds before the real host came back from the bathroom and called security.  He was talking about the solar system, about how a group of European scientists wanted to drop Pluto as an official planet.  This grabbed my attention.  I'd just finished my science project on Pluto.  If they yanked it's Official Planet status, I'd have to start over.  I sat up.  The man continued.  Pluto was the only planet discovered by an American, the Europeans can't take Pluto from us.  "If you absolutely must yank one of them," he begged, "please, yank Uranus."

11-year-old-Me exploded into laughter.  I covered my face with my pillow and laughed harder as the man went on and on.  My parents knocked on the door and told me I was supposed to be sleeping, that I'd better be in bed mister.  I listened till midnight, and the show was over, but I was hooked.

Tommy Mischke could turn a newspaper article about some drunken nun in Germany who crashed her riding lawn mower into a telephone pole into 30 minutes of quality material.  This was better than anything on TV.  Mischke took calls cold, meaning people calling the station expected to get a call screener, but got Mischke instead.  By the time they realized who they were talking to, they'd already been on live radio for 12 minutes.  Mischke once took a call from a guy named Al, who called in to ask about a weather update.  Tommy told the guy he was the station meteorologist, Blow Zephyr, and kept the guy on the phone for over 4 hours.  When the guy turned on his radio and heard his own voice, Mischke convinced him it was atmospheric interference.  I know about this stuff, after all, I'm the station weatherman, Blow Zephyr.  They talked another 90 minutes.

This one time, he called the operator with a caller on the line, and...well, here: you listen.  You'll see.

See!  It's chaotic and weirdly troubling, and it's broadcast on 50,000 watts to...er, dozens of people.  Most importantly, in a sea populated by ten thousand cookie-cutter sports/politics junkies, Mischke stands alone.  He's the only radio host to go for an entire 2 hour show without uttering a word.  2 hours of dead air.  Complete radio silence, interrupted every so often by commercials.  Anyone else behind that mic would've been out of a job; Tommy was awarded Best Twin Cities Radio Personality that year.

So there it is, my favorite person to listen to.  I don't know what it says about me, but If I ever go crazy, start hearing voices, I hope they're old Mischke reruns.  Here's one more for the road.

I Heart You.

Sweet Former-Home Chicago

Tessa, 

I'm all growed up.  I know this because I was sent to a conference, with business cards.  I think the idea is that I'm to hand them out to other grown ups.  The thing is, it's the Covenant Church; having business cards at that convention was like having oars in desert.  It's cool you've got them, but you certainly don't need them.  Everyone's related, or you graduated with them, or their parents went to North Park and made a sacred pact to get pregnant at the same time and then send their children to North Park, where they would fall in love and continue the cycle.  Business cards?  Please.  

 The staircase at the Chicago Cultural Center.  Marble mosaics on everything.  It's easy to see why they don't make 'em like this anymore, but I kind of wonder how they made them like this in the first place.  I remember coming to this place on our class trip in the eighth grade.  A trillion chips of stone and tile, spelling out all the great authors and thinkers.  I recognized some of them.  Defoe, he wrote Robinson Crusoe.  Kipling wrote the Jungle Book, which was remarkably free of talking animals.  Disney lied to me.  But maybe that's why Kipling was up there and Walt Disney wasn't. 

It always impressed me that even the places people couldn't see with the naked eye were gilded little masterpieces.  Pretty sure this place predates the zoom lens, so why go out of the way to make the mural reach to the ceiling?  Must have been an excess of Tiffany's glass laying around.  "Might as well use it all, Lou."

Ah, the hotdish-laden feast of Sällskapet.  Everyone said "Hi."  You were missed.  All the kids are so big.  It's only been six months, but they keep growing like we can just move the ceiling or something.  Jackie hugged me, Christopher punched me.  People were glad to hear we're doing well, which is what I told them. I suppose we'll have to make sure and do well now, or I'll be a liar.  I don't think doing well is out of the realm of possibility.  Doing adequately makes me happy enough most days, but adequate never changed the world.  

Harriette sends her greetings.  She hasn't grown at all since we left; still the same canon-ball-with-legs.  Our friends are great.  Some of them fed me, others let me sleep on their floor.  It was good to see them all, but it made me realize how great it was to have all of us in the same place for those years.  It was a hard stretch; everyone poor, carving next month's rent out of bad jobs.  But we won't look back on it like that.  We'll look back at all of us, younger and healthy and able to stay up till all hours of the night eating and drinking wine and cracking jokes.  No mortgage or kids or out-of-town conferences.  Just a bright flash of unburdened revelry that came before all of the things that will come after this. 

I Heart You.

An Argument in Favor of Health Insurance

Tessa, 

Do they give out Oscars for videos that are only 43 seconds long?  They will this year.  My back still hurts from this, which shouldn't surprise you, since I haven't stopped whining about it since I finished skidding. I'm definitely getting older.  I don't have the whole "wisdom" thing that's supposed to come with that, but I do have the aches and pains bit.  

Hung out with Peter last night.  He's still fighting the reality of his newly-acquired singleness, and its tough to watch him feel so beat up.  He wants so badly to take care of someone who doesn't want the help, and that's a biting feeling.  Everyone goes through it; its a right of passage.  But you still want to wrap the people you love in bubble wrap some days.  

Other days, you want to move all your earthly possessions into a new home.  Maybe "want" is not what I meant.  Maybe "have to because your landlord hasn't paid his mortgage since Reagan was in office" was what I meant to say.  Sure, we're bracing for a new opportunity: somewhere out there is an empty house that's going to be our first home.  But it sort of feels like we're always bracing for something, and I am growing weary of setting up camp again, only to find out train tracks have been laid straight through the middle of the tent.

An upside is inevitable, for Peter and for new home buyers, but there is work to be done in reaching it.  Thanks for sticking it out with me.  Ahead lies an era of quietude, when we'll sit on a porch swing and ask ourselves whether we put the hostas in the right place.  I'm looking forward to that.

I Heart You.

Frozen Solid Weekend, 2010

 You didn't give me a camera; you gave the gift of hours wasted in happy editing while I ought to be doing something else.  And that's what loving wives do.  This is Frozen Solid, 2011.

Tessa, 

Got a call from my Jr. High principal yesterday.  His assistant, actually.  "Hi, David.  This is Steve Groen's assistant calling."  Whoooosh.  I heard nothing more she said.  Suddenly I was 13 years old, sitting in a chair strategically designed to give Steve Groen a height advantage over whichever student had earned their way into his office this time.

Today, I was that kid.  I was that kid most of the time.  3 tardies earned you detention.  That rule alone was enough to award me the lion's share of the available detentions, but today I was in for trying to start a club.  It was a club that, for a small admission fee ($20) allowed you into the group.  We had a dozen members.  Once in, you had the chance to guess who'd win all the NFL games for the upcoming season.  The member with the most correct guesses won a bunch of the admission money.  Me and my buddy Matt pocketed a healthy share for coming up with the idea.  Everyone was happy.  Especially the younger kids, who would have paid $20 just to sit with the older kids at lunch.

To Mr. Groen, this club was less of a club, and more of combination gambling/swindling outfit.  I was not so much Co-Chair of the Football Appreciation Club, as I was "totally out of line, young man."  It sounded so much worse when he said it.  It always sounded worse coming out of his mouth than it did inside my head.  And so that was detention #1 in a limited collectible series of 47; all signed by me, and Mr. Groen, and my parents.  My mom instituted a 1 Detention = 1 Hour of Vacuuming rule, and we had the cleanest house that year.

"Mr. Groen heard you had taken a job with Bethlehem Covenant, and was hoping you could speak to the kids at chapel next month."  I told her that I was responsible for most of Mr. Groen's grey hairs, and that I seriously doubted he wanted me back in the building.  She laughed, and I realized she thought I was joking.  Sure, I can speak at chapel; I probably owe the guy that much.  47 hours of detention, absolved by 20 minutes of every man's worst fear.  Sigh.  He told me once that I'd look back and wish I'd behaved myself more often.  I just didn't think this would be the reason.