Category Archives: History

Family

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It’s a mommy, a daddy and the kids. And their pets. They live under the same roof and do everything together.

That’s what my seven-year-old son says family means. Then I ask him about Mimi and Granddaddy, Pop and Grandma Judy, the great-grandmas and aunts and uncles, the cousins – and all their pets, all their roofs.

They’re all family, too, he says.

And all their friends?

And the people who came before, the great-great-grandparents and the nameless faces that stare back at us from 100-year-old black and white photographs? The ones who came before that? The men, women and children who lived lives we never consider from day to day, but whose every action in life helped shape who we are? Or who we think we are?

Yes. They’re all family, too.

The Britons? The Romans? The Greeks? The Gauls? The Egyptians? The Syrians? The Algerians? The Mongols? Were they family? When does it end? Where, and with whom? How? Or does it end at all?

Take it all the way back. The biological thread stretches backward, unbroken across eons. A hundred, a thousand, ten thousand years ago … someone (many someones) walked the planet then who carried around the very essence of you.

They could not conceive that you would one day exist, any more than you can envision their lives or deaths. Those long-ago people were family.

But what if we’re adopted?

Um. Family is as family does. Momma always said family is like a box of chocolates.

There are other kinds of family.

La famiglia. La Cosa Nostra. The Godfather. The Sopranos. Every time I think I’m out …

I’ve heard members of certain athletic teams call themselves a member of a family. They did not mean this literally. Although other members of certain athletic teams seemed always to be growing their families, one paternity suit at a time. What did family mean to them? That, I can’t fathom.

There are others.

The church, the synagogue, the temple, the mosque, the congregation, the flock — the family.

Between order and genus, there is family. It’s like this: life, domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. It’s all very scientific.

What is family?

It is blood, sure. But it also is the group of people, or the person, or the animal companion that make you who you are, and give you comfort when it can be found nowhere else. That same group of people, or that same person, or that same animal companion can rend your heart and piss you off at depths no one else can understand. Maddening, isn’t it?

They’re close, you see?

Family is close. Even when they aren’t. And there’s this.

Your Mongolian or Celtic ancestor carried within her the spark of you. You carry within you the germ of a germ of an idea of what could one day be a family member who will never know you existed. If you procreate, of course. There’s that.

Which brings us back to:

It’s a mommy, a daddy and the kids. And their pets. They live under the same roof and do everything together.

Yes. That’s good enough for our family. That’s good enough for now.

Family.

Family.

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This is the first installment of my new series, the ASCO Word of the Week. Once a week (or thereabouts), I’ll wax poetic on the meaning of a particular word, a la the famous Essay that not long ago was a mainstay in the admissions process for the revered All Souls College, Oxford. This is not that, but it’s my way of paying homage to that quirky, fantastic tradition.

Parental Anxiety: Just Say Yes

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You might have heard of the Stir. It’s a blog created for moms, part of the Café Mom family of blogs. No? Well, trust me, it’s a thing. I follow it because I write a parent-centric blog, this blog you’re reading now, and because I follow a lot of things like that on Twitter and Facebook.

That’s why I know that this past week, someone from the Stir tweeted this:

“Yikes! That Juice Box Could Be Killing Your Kid.”

Hey, we give our kids juice boxes.

Oh, no. They’re going to die.

Yikes.

Of course I clicked on over to the story. That’s what the tweet was intended to do, make me click the link. The editors at the Stir apparently learned their social media outreach from Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, the publisher-fathers of Yellow Journalism. Upon further review, I discovered that Jay and Chris were not in imminent danger from juice box plague, or whatever horrible calamity that headline was intended to imply. It’s the sugar content in the juice. They’ll die 60 or 70 years from now because of that.

But they are going to die.

____________________________________

They are going to die, and we are going to die, and so are you. Not necessarily in that order.

For some reason, that knowledge doesn’t make me curl up in a fetal position on the couch and await the inevitable, fatal moment in the company of a Mad Men marathon on Netflix.

Why is that? How can human beings, even parents, set aside the rational knowledge of our inevitable demise to go about the mundane daily business of eating, pooping, peeing, working, playing, laughing, frowning, complaining, having sex, driving, walking around and lying on the couch doing nothing at all?

We compartmentalize, certainly. Besides, dying is a long way off … no it isn’t. It’s now. Somewhere in the world, someone just died. And now.

And now.

OK, I don’t obsess about this. I really don’t. But why not? How is it that I can sit here and type these words, reach over and take a sip of this glass of Yellow Tail cabernet, pause and listen to my sons and wife playing together upstairs, let the distraction of the sounds outside my window of peeping frogs and playing children far off on a neighborhood street wash over me in the springtime twilight?

I don’t know. Really, I’m not some existential nervous Nellie. I’ve had brushes with death. I know what it’s like to teeter at the edge of the eternal unknown, but it’s not what drives me every day.

My family does that. And so … I worry.

____________________________________

Not in the Woody Allen, oh-my-God-we’re-all-going-to-die-what’s-it-all-for style of worrying. The kind of worrying that every responsible parent does about their kids.

Anxieties abound:

Are they happy?

Are they healthy?

Were the clothes we dressed them in warm enough?

Are they learning in school?

Are they making friends?

When will the seven-year-old graduate to bicycle riding without training wheels?

When will the four-year-old boy finally learn to pee standing up?

Was the last time I yelled at them one of those moments they’ll always remember about me as they grow older?

Or will they remember instead all the fun we’ve had at places like Disney World?

Or will they remember both, and will those memories be charitable toward me?

Does that even matter?

Will they fall off a jungle gym at the after-school center and break a bone or worse?

Are they getting enough sleep?

Do they watch too much TV?

Do they get enough exercise?

What if we’re doing it all wrong?

What’s that odd swelling on the back of the four-year-old’s hand?

Should we take him to the doctor?

What if we don’t and his hand turns gangrenous?

Do they even make those metal claw hands for four-year-olds?

What if he sticks himself in the eye with his sharp metal claw hand?

And on …

And on …

And on …

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Trust in God, you say? OK.

But God allowed Yo Gabba Gabba and Caillou to happen.

And, you know … every genocide and killer storm and epidemic plague in the history of the world.

No, that’s not going to work for me. See, the way I figure it, God’s not all that interested in the day-to-day minutia that make up our lives. And that’s the stuff I, as a parent, worry about the most. The stuff that informs and shapes the minds of our children, the stuff that won’t kill them in 60 or 70 years, the stuff that parent-centric websites like Cafe Mom would have a hard time turning into a sensationalist tweet straight out of the late 1800s Yellow Journalism playbook.

No, I worry about whether our kids are exposed to enough of the things that will help them live during their terribly long, terribly brief time on Earth.

And I worry that they might fall down and I won’t be there to pick them up, to soothe their anxieties, to tend their wounds. I worry about that, and oh, so much more. I’m a parent. It’s what we do. Worry.

Bad things are going to happen. Bad things, man.

But oh, yes. Yes.

How do we, parents, keep from going utterly insane under the weight of the inevitable?

How do we stop worrying, subdue the anxiety?

We don’t. We participate in it. We say yes to parental anxiety.

Yes.

But …

Yikes.

Something … life … could be killing our kids!

Yes. Yes, it is.

Not yet, though. Not yet.

Yes.

 

Before You Were Born

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The seven year old has been on a roll lately with the questions. Last week, just before bed, he asked me why our family goes to Disney World so often. I was flabbergasted that a seven-year-old boy could ask such a question, but our answer is to just keep right on taking him to Disney World and hope he’ll figure that one out on his own.

Sunday night, though, he caught me off guard with this one.

“What do I care what you used to do before I was born?”

Oh, Holy Mother of Jeebus. I couldn’t very well hit him with the first answer that sprung to mind: “Well, gee. There’s one particular thing I did with your mother before you were born that was pretty dadgum pivotal for you. In fact, if we hadn’t done that thing, you wouldn’t be here right now to ask the question. Want to know what we did? Huh? Do you, punk?”

Instead, I reflected for a moment.

Why is it important?

Fortunately, there was this story in the New York Times to lend perspective. Of course it’s important for our kids to know what went on before they were born. Without what came before – all of what came before – they wouldn’t be who or what they are right now. Whatever that might be.

This is not a new thought. But it is the first time I’ve entertained it. Consider, for a moment, all of the many hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of coincidences and happenstances that had to take place in order for you – THIS you, the person you are RIGHT NOW – to come into being.

Your parents had to meet and circumstances had to conspire for them to have sex. And the same thing had to happen for your parents’ parents. And for your parents’ parents’ parents. And so on. By the time you reach back into the 19th century (not that long ago, really), it’s a miracle that you exist at all.

Oh, yes. We will one day encourage our boys to ask their mother’s mother what it was like to teach those preschoolers for the better part of three decades. We’ll get them to ask their father’s mother about playing basketball for the high school team, even though she was less than five feet tall and about 85 pounds soaking wet. We’ll tell them that their father’s father was stationed with the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam in the early 1970s, and that their mother’s father is a tremendously successful insurance executive in New England. We’ll tell the boys that if they want to hear some great stories, go ask their grandparents about these things.

We’ll let them know that their mother’s first job out of college was working the green room for the Regis and Kathie Lee Show in Manhattan, and we’ll tell them about the time she met Matthew Broderick and a bunch of other celebrities. We’ll tell them that I once saw Michael Jordan play basketball in person, on the night when he switched back from the number 45 to his traditional number 23 in Orlando during the playoffs (and that I still get chills thinking about the moment he took off his warmup jacket to reveal the number switch).

One day, we’ll also tell them about my first wife. There’s no need to do so now, but the question Jay asked me got me to thinking. There were no kids from that first (mercifully short, very unsuccessful) marriage. If there had been, there’s an excellent chance we would’ve tried harder to make it work.

And that would’ve meant no Jay. No Chris.

So, why does it matter? I mean, aside from the fact that the New York Times tells us it matters?

Everything that happened before you were born, my dear son, and everything since, shaped who I am and who I am becoming right this minute. And this minute. And tomorrow. And it shaped who you are, and who you will be. And it will shape who your children will be, if you have any.

That’s why you should care. That’s why it matters. Because you, my beautiful boy, are the culmination of all the hopes and dreams and sexual encounters of hundreds of generations, and it is unbelievable that you are here. You need to understand that. You need to know.

 

 

Driving on Cape Cod

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I sort of ripped the Mid-Cape Highway in an earlier post. Actually, I don’t apologize for that. Now that I’ve been up and down it a few more times the past couple of days, I can see my memory did that road exactly as much justice as it deserved.

On the other hand, I did mention that the trees hid something magical. And, again, now that I’ve had the chance to explore the back roads again, I think I got that one right, too. In fact, I want to put together a book called something like Twenty-Minute Drives on Cape Cod. It wouldn’t sell (because who actually buys those kinds of books?), but it would be something I’d love to find on a bookshelf in one of the many, many rental cottages along Cape Cod Bay and the National Seashore.

Cape Cod Salt Marsh
A Cape Cod salt marsh from Bridge Road.

The first drive I’d write about is the stretch that runs from the intersection of Kingsbury Beach Road and Herringbrook, down to Bridge Road, over to Rock Harbor Road, and into Orleans Center (Main Street).

This 20-minute drive has almost everything I think about when I think of Cape Cod imagery. There are the Cape Cod style homes and cottages, the kettle ponds, the salt marshes, the old fishing docks, the old bed and breakfasts, the exclusive inns, the flowers, and a quaint downtown shopping/dining/arts center at the end of it. I try to make this drive five or six times a trip, because it just feels like Cape Cod to me and I want to remember it.

If I kept going on Main Street in Orleans, I’d run into Highway 28, which is also known as Orleans-Chatham Road. Turn right at the Nauset Middle School, and there’s EVERYTHING ELSE I think of when I think of Cape Cod.There on the right is the baseball field where the Cape Cod League Orleans Firebirds play every summer. On past that are some truly breathtaking Cape Cod style mansions, tucked into the bluffs and woods overlooking Crystal Lake, a handful of ponds, and Pleasant Bay. After a while, it becomes just plain Orleans Road, and you know that Chatham is just around the corner.

Nowadays, Chatham seems to be the Great White Shark capital of the U.S. There have been more than a few sightings lately because of the enormous seal population. So, at a certain intersection, rather than heading for busy, quaint (but touristy) Chatham Center, I headed straight for the Chatham Light.

No one is swimming in Chatham. The mayor can’t be happy.

What I found was reminscent of the scene from Jaws, when the beach at Amity Island was full on the Fourth of July but no one would go in the water. There were a few people on the beach near the Chatham Light, but I only saw one guy swimming for the half-hour I stuck around.

Still, across the street from the beach access stairs was the Chatham Light itself. I do love a good lighthouse, mostly because a lot of them have such interesting histories.

Chatham Light.

Come to think of it, maybe I’m on to something with this Twenty Minute Drive thing. I could start with Cape Cod, and move on to the next state. Maybe Twenty Minute Drives of California, followed by Twenty Minute Drives of Las Vegas, Arizona, Florida, etc. I smell a franchise.

(Hey. Hey, you. Don’t steal my idea, OK? This one’s all mine. Go get your own idea that no one will ever buy.)

Update (6:07 pm): I just saw on the news that they actually did order people out of the water at Chatham after another Great White sighting. I never saw a fin. But the seal population seems to have been thinned a bit.

Cape Cod: Day 2

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The old cottage at First Encounter Beach.

The MomScribe family bought a cottage at Eastham, Massachusetts, in 1986. It was near First Encounter Beach on Cape Cod Bay. They sold that cottage in 2001, but they continued to go there every summer.

That ended this year.

For the first time in 26 years, they set up camp at a different cottage. This one is on Kingsbury Beach, still on the Bay side, about a mile or so up the beach from the old cottage.

It’s still Cape Cod. It’s still the Bay. The sunset looks the same. The hermit crabs and snails and other marine animals look the same. The sand is still perfect for building huge castles, and the locals still apparently practice voodoo (see accompanying photo – but spit over your left shoulder and turn around three times before you look).

The new cottage at Kingsbury Beach.

This place, the new cottage, is fantastic. We would recommend it to anyone who wants to get away for a week or two. It’s still within easy driving distance of our haunts in Orleans and Eastham, and it has a sunset deck!

Something’s missing, though.

A family can’t spend two and a half decades in the same vacation spot and simply expect those memories to drift away on the next tide.

MomScribe and her sister, AuntScribe, were little girls when the old cottage became a family fixture. Now, they both have husbands and their own kids. As the years passed, and the family continued to congregate at the old cottage every August, I’m sure they expected their own kids to build their summertime Cape memories on the foundation begun 26 years ago. A foundation seated firmly on the rickety wood planks of that dear, old cottage.

Weird Voodoo Shrine at Kingsbury Beach. I really can’t explain it.

They’ve made the best of the move. That’s been pretty easy, actually, because this new place is, as I say, fantastic.

Still. The emotional tug of the old cottage is powerful. On the beach today, AuntScribe looked up from digging in the sand when she heard a door slam from the ridge above.

“That’s what I miss about the old cottage,” she said. “You know the sound the screen door made when someone was on their way down to the beach? I miss that sound.”

I remember that sound. It could be heard from the beach no matter how far out we’d wandered at low tide – and the tide goes out for miles on Cape Cod Bay. That sound meant someone we loved – a friend, a family member, a neighbor – was on the way down to join the fun on the beach.

I think about my kids growing up on Cape Cod. I think about the little things they’ll pick up on at this cottage, or the next cottage. I wonder what their “slamming screen door” will be.

It will be something, I have no doubt. And as long as it has to do with family and good friends, that’s all that matters.

Sunset at Kingsbury Beach.

Jay at Cape Cod.

What I Learned from the Trip I Didn’t Take

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I was just reading through my last two blog posts, and I cringed a little. I’m not a preachy guy. I’m opinionated, yeah, and I’m not shy about sharing those opinions. But I don’t ever want to try to pass myself off as some kind of authority on most of the stuff I write about. It’s opinion, that’s all. I was a sportswriter, for goodness’ sake. That’s what I knew. Ask me about baseball, football, basketball and (now) English soccer and I can speak with some authority. The rest? It’s just me being a loud mouth, flexing my rhetorical muscle for the sake of … writing. Because that’s something else I flatter myself about, that I know a thing or two about writing.

Anyway, enough about me and my opinions (which, to reiterate, are just that – opinions).

I started this blog, ostensibly, to tell my kids some stories about my time in newspapers. Here’s one.

Me in 1997. Oh, man. THAT guy needs to be taken down a notch …

Once, there was this sportswriting hotshot who thought he knew everything. That guy was 27, covering the NFL for what was then considered a fairly major newspaper on Florida’s West Coast. (It was me, in case I wasn’t clear enough, and the paper was the Tampa Tribune.) The Tribune has certainly fallen on hard times lately, but back in the mid-to-late ‘90s, it was still a “big paper,” with a large and incredibly talented staff. We traveled all over the place, sending reporters and columnists around the country and the world to write about the teams we covered. My first year on the pro beat was 1997. I was the backup Buccaneers writer and the NFL writer for the paper. It was my first extended taste of traveling professionally to places like Green Bay, Minneapolis, Atlanta, New York, and other cities. I liked it. A lot. And I felt like I did a decent job that first year.

So, at the end of my first NFL season, when it was time to determine which FOUR Tampa Tribune writers would be assigned to cover the Super Bowl in San Diego, I kind of hoped (OK, expected) to be included in the traveling party.

Um … no.

Oh, I was disappointed. Kind of pissed, actually. I felt entitled (who doesn’t at that age?), and I felt ripped off. Hadn’t I earned that trip? Didn’t the bosses OWE it to me to let me go and cover the biggest game of the year?

Um  … no.

They didn’t owe it to me. I only THOUGHT they did. And, because I had absolutely no ability to hide my disappointment at that age, my co-workers KNEW that I thought I was entitled to that trip. Man, I was such a douche.

Anyway, about two weeks before the game, I received a letter in my office mailbox. It was from John Lynch, who was the starting strong safety for the Buccaneers at the time. I don’t remember the exact wording, but it went something like this:

Dear Carter:

I very much enjoyed working with you during this past football season. This letter is to let you know that you are invited to participate in the Lynch Family Foundation Charity Golf Tournament at Torrey Pines on the Friday before the Super Bowl in San Diego.

In fact, I would personally like to invite you to complete a foursome with myself, my father, and radio host Jim Rome. I know we’ll have a great time!

Please RSVP as soon as possible, so we can hold your place in the featured foursome. I look forward to seeing you in San Diego during Super Bowl week. Also, make sure you set aside Friday night for the post-tournament party and dinner. Linda and I would love for you to share our table.

Sincerely

John Lynch

PS I almost forgot to mention that all tournament participants will receive a complete set of customized Callaway golf clubs. Could you include your height and grip preferences in your RSVP? Thanks!

I read it and felt my face begin to flush. I fumed. I ranted. I showed it to everyone in the office that afternoon.

“See?” I said. “See? This is what I’m missing out on! I can’t believe I’ll miss this because the Tribune won’t send me to the Super Bowl! Dammit! Dammit!”

Most people just nodded and went on with their work. One or two told me to pipe down. One guy told me I better not waste time bitching about it, because Lynch needed to know ASAP that I wasn’t going to be able to make it. He was right.

I had to call John!

I checked the letter (it was on official-looking Lynch Family Foundation letterhead) to see if there was a phone number. There was. It had a Southern California area code. I dialed it. It rang. Someone answered.

“Thank you for calling Steak n Shake. How may I help you?”

I was all … “Steak n Shake? What? No, I’m trying to reach …”

And that’s when it occurred to me that the letter might not have been genuine. I looked up from my desk and saw every face in the department smiling at me. And not in a kindly way … more of a we-feel-bad-but-we-still-think-it’s-funny-you-fell-for-that way. I slowly placed the phone on its cradle, folded the fake letter and put it back into its envelope.

They got me. I later found out that my colleague on the Bucs beat was the mastermind. It wasn’t the first time he got me, and it wouldn’t be the last. I deserved every one of those cranks, and I learned a bit about what happens to douches when they take themselves a tad too seriously and forgot to laugh at things – especially themselves.

I covered the next three Super Bowls in Miami, Atlanta and Tampa. No free golf clubs, but good times.

Cape Cod Days

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Cape Cod 2006

Jay’s first trip to Cape Cod in 2006.

We’ll head back to Cape Cod for the fifth time as a family in a couple of weeks. Before we started going there (almost) every summer, I thought of Cape Cod as this exotic place. It was the Kennedys and lobster, sailing and lobster, summer theater and lobster, golf and lobster, lobster and lobster. There was also a deep link in history between my family and the Cape, but more about that curious connection in a minute.

The first time I went to Cape Cod with my wife was for her sister’s wedding in 2005. It took place at this incredible seaside resort built around two Gilded Age mansions perched on a bluff over the Atlantic. You would think that breath-taking setting would reinforce my pre-visit perception of Cape Cod. But I think in this respect, Cape Cod is like any other place you hear or read about a lot and mentally slot into a “mind’s eye” view. What you leave out in your imaginary vision of a place is what I call the street-level view. It’s like that in Las Vegas, where you imagine a never-ending line of magnificent casino resorts glittering in the desert, only to forget the space in between, where you’ll find nameless souvenir shops, outdoor bars, Walgreen’s, the McDonald’s, M&M’s World, 7-11, and the stream of people who wander up and down the sidewalks of Las Vegas Boulevard all day and night.

Cape Cod Light

THIS is how I always envisioned Cape Cod.

The street-level view at Cape Cod is defined by the forested stretch of Route 6, the main artery that runs the length of the Cape from Bourne to Provincetown. There is nothing remotely exotic about most of Route 6, also known as the Mid-Cape Highway. My first impression of Cape Cod was shaped by that drab drive along Route 6. I was expecting Cape Cod-style clapboard cottages, sweeping beachfront vistas, yacht slips and mansions. Instead, I saw trees. An apparently endless mass of trees to left and right for mile after mile after mile. Oh, but what those trees concealed. It turned out to be far more exhilarating than I imagined – and I can imagine some pretty exhilarating stuff.

So, we go back now just about every year. Jay was 8 months old the first time, and he tried to crawl up the beach to Boston. He didn’t quite make it.

First Encounter Beach

View of First Encounter Beach from the cottage.

MomScribe spent most of the summers of her youth at Cape Cod. It was just what her family did. When school got out, they shipped out of Westford, Mass., and settled down in the cottage in Eastham, situated about a quarter of a mile down-Cape from First Encounter Beach on the shore of Cape Cod Bay. They stayed for weeks, living the Cape life, working on their tans and appreciating the sunsets. The girls worked at an ice cream shop, or at Arnold’s – a well-known seafood, ice cream, and mini-golf spot along Route 6 between Eastham and Wellfleet. When it was time to go back to school, the family packed up and shipped north again. But the summers were spent on First Encounter Beach, where my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was among 20 passengers and crew members of the Mayflower to conduct a (bloodless) battle with Cape Cod’s Native Americans. His name was Stephen Hopkins, and he was a part of the third on-shore expedition that issued forth from the Mayflower as the future inhabitants of Plymouth Colony searched for a place to put down stakes. Others more famous than my 10G-grandfather were also there, including William Bradford and Myles Standish. Hopkins was included, we have decided, because he had been to the Jamestown settlement a decade earlier and was (ostensibly) familiar with the native inhabitants.

‘Stephen Hopkins’ at Plimoth Plantation.

In any case, the spot where Hopkins and the rest of the Mayflower force fired muskets and stood among the falling arrows of the Nauset Indians was named First Encounter Beach and would one day become the summer-time playground of my future wife. It is entirely fitting that a descendant of one of those intrepid Mayflower passengers should journey there with his family every summer for a week of eating lobster rolls, exploring the tidal pools, building sand castles and searching for the perfect Cape Cod cocktail (I favor a simple concoction of Captain Morgan and ginger ale).

There is another historical connection between my family and Eastham. Among the Plymouth settlers who left for the Outer Cape in the mid-1640s was Nicholas Snow, who came over a few years after the Mayflower and married Stephen’s daughter Constance Hopkins. Nicholas and Constance helped found Eastham, which was incorporated in 1651. Giles Hopkins, one of Stephen’s sons, also came along. The three of them are buried and memorialized now at the Cove Burial Ground on Route 6, located just north of the Orleans Rotary. Constance and Nicholas were my 9G-grandparents.

Constance Hopkins’ memorial at the Cove Burial Ground.

I took a photo of Constance’s headstone at the Cove Burial Ground on a Tuesday in August of 2007. The next day, MomScribe and I took a quick trip to pick up her grandmother in Connecticut. On the way, at my insistence, we stopped at Plimoth Plantation, the amazing living museum based on the original Plymouth Colony. There is a colonial village recreated in great detail from period maps, and it is “inhabited” by actors playing the roles of the colonists who would have been there in 1627. Of course, the first thing I wanted to see was the Stephen Hopkins house. We found it, and sure enough, there was a portly gent with a beard holding forth on a log chair across the dusty road from the Hopkins house. It was the faux Hopkins, who was something of a character in life, and we listened for a minute to the man portraying my 10G-grandfather before we ducked into the very small hut that served as their family dwelling.

Constance Hopkins, Plimoth Plantation

‘Constance Hopkins’ at Plimoth Plantation.

Inside, we found a young woman in period dress. It was Constance. I added her picture to the one already on my camera of her grave stone. The actors couldn’t break character, so it would’ve done no good to tell her of the strange circumstance of visiting her final resting place the day before. I don’t know if it would’ve meant anything to her, anyway. It meant a lot to me, though. It was one of those moments only Cape Cod could give me. I think about Constance every time I pass the Cove Burial Ground. That’s a big part of my street-level view of Cape Cod now, that surreal brush with the living past. I can’t wait to experience that again in a couple of weeks with MomScribe and the boys.

This time, when we cross the Sagamore Bridge (or the Bourne Bridge, whichever seems quicker at the time) and jump onto the Mid-Cape Highway, I’ll see those thick trees again. But I’ll also see the sunsets, and I’ll feel the breeze off Cape Cod Bay, and I’ll smell the fresh fish and burgers and hotdogs and veggies on the grill. I’ll taste that first cool sip of Captain-and-ginger ale, and I’ll hear the soft waves rolling in off the bay at high tide. I’ll think of the boys running and laughing along the beach, and I’ll remember all the days we’ve spent there already, and smile at the thought of all the Cape Cod days to come.

Cape Cod Sunset

Cape Cod sunset at low tide.

Cap Cod Baby

Jay almost made it to Boston. Almost.

Parenting: Our Political Common Ground

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There is so much that divides us.

Politics divides us. Religion divides us. Money divides us. Ethnicity divides us. Geography divides us. Social mores divide us. Ignorance divides us.

Fear divides us.

More than ever in my lifetime, it seems that we are defined by what we oppose, by our juxtaposition against – and unassailable, irrational anger at – the “other.”

We see it on our cable news networks. We read it on our bumper stickers. We hear it on our radios.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of reading the on-line reader comments attached to almost any story on almost any news website, you no doubt felt like your brain was dragged through a virtual pit of slime. Such vitriol is deeply disturbing. It leaves me feeling like we live in a banana republic, populated by hate-filled ignoramuses. So much of the language seems geared toward the denigration and dehumanization of the “other.”

It makes me angry. Then it makes me sad. Then … I’m a little afraid for my kids.

This is the world we live in. It’s a world that seems to mock my morning ritual reminder to Jay and Chris: be good, be nice, be you, have fun.

Voices of reason are ignored. The appalling becomes commonplace. The outrageous, humdrum. Even many of those who once populated society’s fringes are no longer weird enough to attract attention. The only way to be heard is to lunge further away from the middle, then point accusingly back at the “other” as the cause of it all.

I’m not here to draw a moral equivalency among all of these emotionally charged fragments of society. Of course I come to the table with my own set of beliefs, shaped by my experience and my visceral response to life.

I lean toward empathy, but I’m not above outrage.

I’m surrounded by conservative thinkers. I live in one of the reddest zip codes in the state of Florida. My brother would love to see Sarah Palin on the ballot. My uncle ran for county commission in North Carolina on a Tea Party platform. My dad believes the Federal Reserve should never have come into being. I don’t claim to understand their political views, or how they were derived. I love my family and I love my neighborhood, though, and only occasionally have I ever gotten into so much as a heated conversation with any of them about politics.* I’ve certainly never been politically active (as a lifelong journalist, that’s not on the agenda), even though I do feel strongly about most issues.

*I did feel compelled to correct one truly nice and utterly misguided fellow, who swore that our suburban neighborhood of about 600 homes was dotted with potential terrorist sleeper cells and said, in a very matter-of-fact way, that “everyone knows Obama is a Muslim.” This gentleman, who that day tried unsuccessfully to convince me to watch a Fox News documentary about terrorist sleeper cells in America, no longer lives in the neighborhood. I believe he stopped paying his mortgage and was asked politely by the bank to vacate the premises.

I’m also not one of those who contributes to the irrationality of our discourse by claiming we are as divided as we’ve ever been as a nation. I mean, come on. Anyone who believes that it’s never been this bad need only read up on the ‘60s – the 1860s and the 1960s – to understand that it has been much, much worse in this country.

Yet, something’s not right. I can’t put my finger on it. I’ll leave it to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne in his new book, Our Divided Political Heart, to lay out the history of how we got to this point. Instead of conducting a detailed survey into the sociological reasons for our unease, I’d rather dream.

I dream of a day when our differences no longer define us. I’m not naive enough to even dream that our differences would evaporate in a sudden surge of national goodwill. But rather than let those differences dictate irreparable fragmentation, it would be nice if we could acknowledge those differences in a rational way and search for real solutions. To do that, though, we’ll have to set aside the anger and fear. We’ll have to identify, acknowledge and firmly assign to the back shelves of history those who would espouse the outrageous and appalling.

How? How do we do that?

We embrace what we have in common.

From my perspective as the father of two young boys, I can almost always find common ground with my fellow parents.

Mitt and Ann Romney have Tagg, Matt, Josh, Ben and Craig.

Barack and Michelle Obama have Malia and Sasha.

MomScribe and I have Jay and Chris.

We all know what it was like to bring our children into the world. We all have experienced the awesome sense of responsibility that comes with parenthood. We all want what’s best for our kids. We all hope this nation, and this world, is a place where our kids can thrive and live the lives they choose to live with dignity and purpose.

Yes, politics, religion, money, geography, ethnicity, ignorance and social mores divide us. Parenthood doesn’t necessarily change that. What it does, though, is give us a palpable set of shared reference points. Parenthood crystallizes – or should crystallize – our priorities.

I’m absolutely aware that even the definition of parenthood is an emotionally charged political issue these days. I’m not saying an adoptive same-sex couple of dads in Massachusetts have experienced precisely what MomScribe and I have experienced, or that the evangelical Christian mother and father of 12 in Wyoming would, could or should bring up their kids the way we are bringing up ours. Nor am I saying that becoming a parent makes someone a good person capable of rational thought. There are outliers in every group. For example, I fear for the children who attend Westboro Baptist Church, whose elders clearly occupy what passes for the political and religious fringe at this stage in our history. Nor am I saying that politicians should use their children as a political poultice to artificially smooth over their differences. The world is cynical enough without some disingenuous candidate using his or her children as a political prop.

What I am saying is that there is so much that threatens to tear us apart as a society, but there are things we share, too, and it is important to remember that. I share the state of parenthood with millions, and I’d like to think the overwhelming majority of parents in this country want what’s right for their kids.

So, yeah. I think it would be much more difficult to dehumanize the “other” if parents everywhere, of every political persuasion, of every ethnicity, of every religion, of every tax bracket, really thought about what it means to love and raise a child or children – and remembered that even the “other,” at a deep, foundational level, shares that feeling.

I love my kids. Don’t you love yours? OK, then. Let’s talk.

 

Things Really Were Simpler in 1975

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I turned 6 in 1975. It was the year the Vietnam War ended, and the year of the Watergate verdicts. It was the year Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft, and the year Wheel of Fortune debuted on NBC. It was the year Space Mountain blasted off at Disney World, and the year Busch Gardens opened in Williamsburg. In January we lost Larry; in May, we lost Moe (Curly had been gone for 22 years; I think Shemp was an Immortal, like the Highlander). That year also gave us an extraordinary collection of little baby future femmes du cinema, including Angelina Jolie, Drew Barrymore, Kate Winslet, Charlize Theron and Eva Longoria. Not to mention athletes like David Beckham, Tiki and Ronde Barber, Martin St. Louis, Alex Rodriguez and Tiger Woods.

It also was the year my first wife was born. But that’s another essay for another time.

What I’m thinking about now is how different life was for me as a 6-year-old in 1975 from the life my older son leads as a 6-year-old in 2012. I know, I know – life changes, time moves on, carousel of progress, we all get old, get over it. I don’t know, though. The foggy memories I retain from that time sure do make it seem as if things were much, much less complicated then. I haven’t talked to my folks about this, and I’m certain their recollections would shatter this illusion of simplicity. After all, they were young adults by then, 27 and 26 for the bulk of that year, trying to build a life together in Raleigh after Dad’s adventures in Vietnam and at N.C. State. Of course things were harder for them than they were for their incredibly precocious, artistically inclined, sweet-tempered, blond-headed little angel. (I’m talking about me there, in case you were confused.)

One thing that surely has not changed all that much is the daily struggle of a family to make it all work without triggering a cataclysmic psychological implosion along the way. Which, when you think about it, is a minor miracle in any household, no matter the era, no matter the socioeconomic circumstance.

The differences I’m thinking about are differences in technology, certainly. But also the shifting assumptions about opportunity in America. These are not necessarily unrelated. Although they could be. I’m no sociologist.

For instance.

Yes, I did use an image of the Altair 8800 instead of Angelina Jolie or Charlize Theron. I’m old, remember?

In order to find out all that stuff in the first paragraph, all I had to do was enter [1975] into the Google search field. I found the matching Wikipedia entry, which listed a bunch of events, births, deaths, and other stuff that took place that year. There also were entries from Information Please and something called the People History. And that was just from among the first five search results.

A Google search also revealed that the original video game, Pong, made its public debut in 1975. And that 11 people died in an explosion at La Guardia Airport. And that Portugal granted independence to Angola. And that civil war subsequently broke out in Angola. And that the Rocky Horror Picture Show debuted in American theaters not long after the Rocky Horror Show premiered on Broadway. Ali and Frazier fought the Thrilla in Manila that year, and the Reds beat the Red Sox in a thrilla of a World Series. Carlton Fisk waved the ball fair over the Green Monster that year to win Game 6.

Point is, look at all that information, right at my finger tips, with the help of a wireless Internet connection and my HP Pavilion laptop (the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of the original microcomputer, the Altair 8800, born in … 1975).

I could not have fathomed anything so powerful as the Internet when I was 6. For Jay and his contemporaries, it is commonplace. As are a whole lot of other things that have gradually become technological mainstays in daily life – microwave ovens, mobile devices, HD television, Angry Birds, Fox News on cable, other cartoons and children’s programming on Netflix, and indoor plumbing.

Me, 6, with sheep.

When I was 6, I remember having imaginary friends that helped me put on musical concerts in the backyard. My 4-year-old brother was the roadie. I remember playing Civil War soldiers and trying to play baseball and going to visit PaPa and Grandma Mary near the North Carolina-Virginia border. I’ve seen actual Polaroids (no instagram back then, obviously) of me and my brother with family at the beach and at the zoo. So, I have some idea of what I looked like back then. But 37 years later, I have absolutely no idea what was going through the little mind of that little guy back in 1975. I think I was a pretty happy kid. I know I loved animals, and I had an outsized sentimental attachment to some of my stuffed toys.

Oh, and speaking of toys, that was the year I stumbled across an incredible trove in the hall closet one December morning, only to find them mysteriously gone when I went to show my brother that afternoon. He thought I was crazy, or lying, or both. I thought it was a dream, until those same toys showed up again spread out all over the living room on Christmas morning. So … yeah. That was the end of that for me.

There is one thing that I think has changed. Quite a lot, actually. At least from my point of view. If I thought of my future at all back then (which I doubt I did; I read early, but I didn’t actually learn to think until a year or two ago), then I’m pretty sure there was no question that I would follow the Great American Path. Although I certainly couldn’t articulate it, some part of me just assumed intuitively that I would go through school, get a job, start a family, build a long, successful career, retire in my 60s and live out my days enjoying the company of my kids and grandkids.

There have been plenty of bumps along the way, but I’d like to think I’m still on track for all of that to happen. I’ve been fortunate.

Yet, I wonder if it is safe for Jay to make the same assumptions about opportunity in his future. MomScribe and I will do everything we can to help him and his brother, of course. But how much will we be able to do? Will we be able to help them as much as our generous, huge-hearted parents have helped us through the years? As fortunate as we’ve been, circumstances have conspired over the past four years or so to eat into our meager retirement savings. What will we have in five years? In 10? In 20?

Even more worrisome … will the American societal underpinnings that made it so easy to assume success would come with hard work, talent and good decisions still be reality when my sons come of age?

Jay, 6, with kangaroo.

I don’t know. I am furiously optimistic, though. Some might say to the point of naiveté. Whatever. I suppose it’s because of how I was brought up. I can’t say I was taught that hard work and talent and good decision-making would carry me far, because I don’t recall actually being told that by anyone. I think it actually went without saying for millions of people in our generation. I can’t say I always worked as hard as I should, or that I made good decisions. And if I ever had any talent … it’s certainly been squandered in large increments. But I worked hard enough to reach a certain level in life, and I learned from my poor decisions. The societal underpinnings were there to make that pay off, because of (I believe) my great good fortune to have been born in this particular country, to these particular parents, in this particular era.

Will the luxury of that assumption be there for Jay and his brother? Will hard work and talent and wisdom be enough for them to make it? Furthermore, what kind of technological advances will they witness and embrace as commonplace over the course of the next three-plus decades? How will it affect their everyday lives, their career choices, their ambitions?

So much has changed. Yeah … 1975 was a long time ago. But … no, it wasn’t. Was it?