First thing

My morning routines keep shifting, slightly, in tone and practice. A month or so ago, when my meditation practice was brand new, I was waking up extra-early every day, excited to start the day. Not quite as much right now, though I keep getting up earlyish. Thoughts of the day and of business are drifting more into my mind as I meditate, and I'll be damned if I've figured out how to stay still and mindful for much beyond when the coffee is ready.

I am likewise less excited about my current book, Joseph Telushkin's Jewish Wisdom, than I was about my prior one, Chogyam Trungpa, though this ebbs and flows sometimes on a daily basis.

I have taken to going out on the porch to read to capture some of the morning coolness, and it's interesting to see who's out there. There's an older dude who walks his cat on a leash with his morning cup. It would, of course, not be surprising if I saw the guy up close and discovered that he is my age. That's about where we are in life.

All in all, what I see consistently over the years is that one hunk of my life, in this case my morning routine, will feel like I have it nailed for a little while, and then that sense of having it just right will wither and decay, so I have to change things up. And keep on truckin.

Accountability partner

I thought of this over the weekend, then resisted doing it, for obvious reasons, but here goes. The blog has had many uses down through the years, here is a new one: accountability partner.

I hereby pledge to getting my weight down to 175 by the beginning of next soccer season. I was 183 this morning. It's not that I am fat, but I carry more weight than I need to around the belly, and I am well aware that my diet is suboptimal, and that as I age this becomes more and more real. And I can feel the additional weight in the waist bands of certain pants.

It is going to be hard to get this done based on exercise, so I will have to work on diet. Thankfully, as time has gone on and Mary continues to pummel us with things she reads about meat and the environment, it is easier for me to reduce meat in my diet, especially red meat. Though we did eat a fair amount of it while she was out of town, just cuz it's easier to make dinner around meat than around not meat. Also cheese. Am trying to reduce that.

There. I've done it.

Back to normal

The household is back to its normal trinitarian state now: father, son, and holy spirit. Just kidding. But in truth, Natalie is safely in Rome, having spent a world-class evening and day with my friend Eric as she recovered from jet lag, and Mary is home from New York. The latter is particularly good, as we have spent too much time apart this spring. Between my trip out West, going to Mexico with mom, my week in the Northeast, and now her week up there with her mom, we have spent a full month apart out of the last three. Which is fine, but a lot.

I am happy not to be going to work today. I suppose I'm particularly tired out from spending a week not just primary breadwinning, but also being responsible for all meal planning and execution as well as carting Graham to things (fortunately not so many) and also scooping the cat box. We gotta get Graham on that. And then, in the end, putting Natalie on a plane, which was not particularly hard work, but it's always bittersweet saying goodbye and sending her off on her next adventure.

But now, it's time to put on the lake manager hat. My neighbor and partner in lake crime prevention John and I have a date to meet on the dam and "exercise the valves", something we are supposed to do annually but didn't get done last year because we were too helter skelter, in our own lazy Southern way, to get organized to do it.

On spousal dominance

So Mary's mom Mary Lee has had a little health scare, really a health update, a raising of everyone's collective consciousness that, at a soon to be 87, she can't just clicking along timelessly as she seems to have an inclination to, alternately setting and cleaning the table, watching CNN and listening to NPR while taking notes so as to lead current events discussion groups at the Osborn or elsewhere.

Since George Sr passed away coming up on a decade ago, Mary Lee in many ways has come into her own and become a more relaxed and relaxing person, albeit with her quirks, which we all have. It is difficult to ascribe that to anything other than his absence. George Sr was a fantastic guy and grandfather and a good dad generally, although there were issues for sure. As a father-in-law, I couldn't have asked for anything better.

But as a spouse, maybe he was a little domineering. Apparently he made some specific wardrobe demands on Mary Lee, nothing crazy, but then again in some sense anything is crazy. He was a strong-willed holder of opinions, and certainly he made the vast majority of the money in the household. I wasn't around while he was actively working. But what I sense is that his primary breadwinner status might have been lorded overweaningly, and in a way that didn't acknowledge some of Mary Lee's best properties and encourage them to come out.

And I wonder to what extent I replicate that with Mary Lloyd. Certainly it is something I need to look at as we progress towards emptynesterdom and the next phase of our relationship. I need to keep doing a better job of supporting, acknowledging and encouraging instead of guilt-tripping and playing the wage-earner victim card.

The blur

Busy weekend. Mary's mom is having health woes, so we put Mary on a plane yesterday to go North to help her siblings take care of her while she recoups in the hospital or rehab or otherwise moves forward on her journey. Aside from that there was soccer, a memorial service, buying Natalie a backpack, and cooking dinner for my mom and her new boyfriend Matt in a belated Mother's Day celebration. Which also meant (as Mary reminds me so often) planning, shopping, even getting extra propane.

I had intended to go to war with the pollen encrusting and enveloping the deck. That didn't happen, though I did get the ashes out of the fireplace and get cat puke off of an old comforter of Natalie's (actually Mary told me it had been left to us by the Norwegians who rented from mom the year before we came back, so we could just let it go. But we won't).

The highpoint was yesterday, when I was "helping" Natalie with the puzzle she is working on (I've fit in maybe 5 pieces out of 300) and we listened to Abba and Paper Boi, the rapper from Atlanta.

Addendum, for future reference:  a couple of days later, when "we" finished the puzzle together, Natalie put on "The Final Countdown" by Europe. It was rather hilarious.

Amongst the books

When I was in Cambridge last week, I had coffee with an old friend who has become quite a successful novelist and teaches at one of the universities around there. We started talking about all the stacks of books around, and she professed that she was saddened by them, and by the fact that when we died, all that work of reading them was gone. She started talking about her mother, and all the reading she had done, and all the books that had been around her various abodes when she passed, especially some vacation cabin in Canada. "My husband had a piece about in The New Yorker." I confessed that I had read it (I'm pretty sure). Her husband is a well-known (and justly so) critic, and also teaches nearby.

This morning, as I made my way through my morning reading routine amongst all of my books as well as a couple of papers Natalie wrote this last semester, the deep irony of what she was saying came to me. Because, far from being lost when we die, in the best cases (which happen often unless we are complete assholes), the digestion of the texts and the culture of it lives on in scholars and readers and is bequeathed to those around us.

And this is particularly true of those who, like my friend and her husband, live and die by the pen.

Anticipating nostalgia for the cut on my hand

While I was helping Natalie move out of her dorm room last Thursday, I got a cut on my hand. We were in a rush to get her on a train, then I had to get to Boston to have lunch with Leslie, so I just shrugged it off and kept going. Of course I never cleaned it or put any kind of stuff on it. Over the next few days it didn't get much better, it got red and sore, and by the time I was driving south with her Saturday and Sunday it was totally bugging me.

When I got home to NC, I put some hydrogen peroxide and then bacytracin on it, and covered it with a bandaid, and it has been getting better. Which is nice. On the one hand, I want it to get better. On the other, I have this somewhat morbid interest in it, I keep wanting to check it out and see how much it has progressed over the last 12 hours.

But the irony is, and this is pretty typical of these kinds of little boo boos, that I kind of don't really want it to get better. I'm glad it has stopped hurting, and I am academically interested in its progress, and I don't relish the process of putting the bandaids on it, but somewhere in me there's a resistance to letting go of it. Maybe it's a mild baby tendency, the fact that I can feign injury for certain tasks, even if I haven't figured out what they are. And I've had this feeling before.

Jury duty

Was called to Hillsborough for jury duty, part of a citizen's duty, no problem. The problem was why I was there. Or, rather, why the 50-odd of us were there, between the judge, the officers and staff of the court, the DA and his assistant, the two police officers who were witnesses, and the potential jurors.

It was a relatively affluent-looking white woman in her 30s-40s with a little black dress and a tight, austere bun, accompanied by her dad, fighting a DWI. Literally 50 people were there, some paid by the state, others disrupting their days, so she could fight a DWI.

This was white privilege at its absolute worst. She either blew a .08 or she didn't. It was clear from the defense attorney's questions during the voir dire that he was going to cast doubt upon the credibility of the breathalyzer test or some failure of due process on the cops' part. But if it was the former, where was his expert witness? If the latter, where was his corroborating witness? Was it the father of the accused, who was there protecting his little girl.

Complete and utter bullshit. They better be glad the didn't impanel me.

David Thaden

Found out today that David Thaden passed away last Friday. He tought me English in junior high, and I think he was the coach of the track team too, though if he was he didn't know a ton about it. I don't remember all that much from his classroom.

None of that matters. What matters is that I remember him as being a good guy and someone whose classroom I was happy to go to each day. That's a big deal.

It is interesting that the teachers I remember from middle school are all male: Dave Thaden, Jim Charles, Freddy Kiger, Tony Yount, Wayne Pollack. Not all of them were perfect human beings, though there's no reason to go into that now. I think it's most likely because my dad was even more imperfect, so the presence of relatively stable male role models was a big deal. Plus most of them were either into what they were doing or made a really good show of it.

The Faces of God

Just back from my grueling but most enjoyable trip up and down the East Coast, about 1500 miles over 7 days. I ended up with ten planned meetings, and some significant hanging out with another dozen or so folks, mostly family.

I have continued to think about what both Atul Gawande (in Being Mortal) and Daniel Pink (in When) have said about how people trim down their circles of friends and acquaintances as they age. It makes a lot of sense, and feels right. Older people don't need broad social circles as they did when they were younger. We don't need the ego validation. We know who we are, for better or worse, and if we are fortunate we have made peace with that. The fortunate amongst us also have the economic security that makes us have less need of the instrumental advantages of broad networks, who can do what for us, and vice versa.

And yet, and yet... There is still something beautiful and special in talking to people. By way of contrast, books or other bits of media offer us moment in time distillations of another person's consciousness, or, rather, the honed product of someone's deliberate and considered labor over a long period of time. But the person him or herself, that's something else entirely.

I know I know, we never quite get that either, as we are all continually performing ourselves for others, fronting, dipping, darting, acting out our longings and insecurities in ways we can't ourselves have half a handle on, so the person him or herself is itself a mythical being akin to Snuffleupagus, but having access to and dialogue with lots of people is a special thing, much like the Borges character who falls down the stairs, hits his head, and sees all of Being beaming out from one of the risers above. That's what we can get if we are both lucky and diligent.

But it takes work, and lord knows I'm tired now.

New day

And so, coming up on 10 years after we left Princeton, an era seems to be coming to an end. David and Carol (and Helen and Margaret and Maxie) are actually leaving town, for realsies. David's job in San Francisco has of course been going on for almost a year now, but the family has stuck around Princeton, even as the girls have gone off to college. But now they have a lease in San Rafael, and an actual plan to decamp for California, so it seems things will conclusively shift westward.

With that, our deepest tie to Princeton will be cut. There are still plenty of people we love here, but will it be enough to bring us back here with any regularity? Now that the place we have camped out twice a year for a decade will be no more?

Have I written this post before? Or one like it? Probably. I'm too tired to check now.

In other news, we went across the new Tappan Zee today coming over from George's house. Like butter.

The road

Apologies, my readers, for the deafening silence of the last week. It has been long and full as I've worked my way up the coast: DC, New York, Larchmont, New Haven, Boston. Tomorrow I retrieve my girl from the City of Elms, and we will rocket back down the coast more rapidly, as she will be missing her cats rather intensely, and Sunday is, after all Mothers' Day, and we must fulfill its claims. Next week should be a good deal better.

The big news this week was that Graham got a 100 on a math test, after having performed much less well on one a few weeks back. Which freaked him out quite a bit. So we hunkered down together and I helped him learn his trig, including 90 minutes on the phone before bedtime Tuesday night as we prepped him for the test. Which was not as entertaining as The Wire, but is much more edifying. I'm durned proud of the boy.

Little reminder

In DC, just had coffee with a friend whose wife works for the EPA. He confirmed to me how toxic the working environment is there, how great a departure it is from the climate even under Bush, when the political appointees at least sought to engage with the professional staff and look for input when formulating policy. "They come in and lock their doors" was the basic message. Oil company people come in to set policy. Scandal continues at the top even long after Pruitt's departure.

It is easy to lose sight of just how far the degradation of our public culture has gone.

Inbox

There have been times that I looked at my email inbox despondently, it was dominated by stuff that was sent to me automatically by marketers, and I was made to feel alone by the fact that there wasn't much in there from individual human beings that I knew and liked. I suppose I should first thank Microsoft and Google as well for figuring out how to sort inboxes into different types of mail. That has been helpful.

The more important change has happened in my business and in my engagement with what I am doing. Right now I look at my inbox and see email from people that I like and love, some of them clients, some of them prospects. Enough of it, but not too much of it.

More importantly, I can go hours and even days and get none of this good email and be totally cool with it. I don't feel abandoned by the universe. I always have a more than full task list on the little yellow pad eternally perched off my right elbow, full of good thing to do. And that's all I need.

Ever fuller integration

As the years have progressed and my blog has continued to do the same, or has at any rate persisted, the deep interconnection between many of the themes that have recurred here has become apparent to me. The relationship between entropy, flux, and contingency, which I fastened onto at the very beginning, remains key. Care of self, loved ones, stuff, and money, risk management, blah blah blah blah blah. For those of you who've been with me for a while, you know what I'm talking about.

But the regular practice of sitting meditation has raised my consciousness of it to a new level. And not, by the way, because I have been able to consistently Commune With Tha One as I sit. I still have monkey brain all the time.

No, it is because I am feeling the muscles in my hip and butt region become incrementally more flexible, and this provides me with a physical reminder of what I am trying to do, throughout the day. Which in turn encourages me to continue best practices: sit ups and push ups, stretch hamstrings for 30 seconds in shower, brush teeth, maintain task list, blog, try to eat less crappy food, etc. It has even helped me get out on the porch and sweep pollen in the evening, or learn to be more patient and mindful in helping Graham learn to study better, or scoop the litter box for Mary.

It has not yet inoculated me to the seductive charms of tuning in to the NBA playoffs in the evening and watching, say, Denver vs Portland for 20 minutes, even though I don't really care. There is always room for improvement.