Going Blue


"Make sure you write."

Those were the parting words my mother said to me as I left the family station wagon and headed into my college dorm for the first time.

The moment was playing out perfectly:  All three of us sitting in the front seat of the car, my mother crying, looking me in the eye as if I were going off to war.  My father, focused forward, thinking of the traffic. And then that line which sticks in my head these 30-odd years later.

Even then it sounded strange to me.  It was 1985 after all, telephones were plentiful, although it was cheaper to make long distance calls after 11.  It was before cell phones and the ubiquity of connection, but our room had a phone, a push button one with a long cord so we could walk into the hall for privacy.   So asking me to write seemed, well excessive.

I told her I would call.

Now I am in the driver's seat, of the car at least.  But really of nothing else. We are sitting in the same spot preparing to drop off our own precious cargo into that same Ann Arbor dorm.

The child is going to exit the car, I will have no grand pronouncements about how to stay in touch ("Make sure you Snapchat me?") and our world will change.

Weeks before she leaves we feel the tectonic plates of our family shifting again.

Last year when the first one went off to college it was like the world's first earthquake, unsure if the ground would ever stop moving.  If we would ever regain our footing.  And then they return home, and there are those nights when you have the chance to set the house alarm and everyone is home and in their beds and the world feels safe and right.

And then they go back out and you settle into a routine, albeit altered.

Now a second shift is taking place, a week before she leaves and it's different.  Yes, we've been through it before, but every change is change, each child decides how they want to transition away.  Some with a whimper, some with a roar.

This child always had a flair for the dramatic. There will be tears.

She barks demands from the kitchen telling my wife to order another case of her fave beverage.  We look at each other knowing that we only need a few more cans. This isn't a fall into each other's arms and cry moment, it's simply a realization that the fridge will be a little less full of certain things and the next time someone will want that drink is Thanksgiving.

Because the biggest lesson we learned from child one to child two is that it's not about the dropping off, it's about the coming home to the undisturbed bedroom, the quieter house, the emptier space.

In her brother's first year away we felt connected, but in a different way.  It's weird not knowing their people, their universe, hearing names or seeing faces online, but rarely meeting them in person.

We learn about things that happened to him three months after the fact. He laughs about memories we don't share.

We stay connected through our own means, different with each child, each parent.

Years ago on a family vacation we were being shown to our room by a bellman who stopped to point out the location of the closest ice machine. My son and I looked at each other and laughed, finding it an odd point of interest as we walked between the sandy beaches and blue waters of the Caribbean.

Now whenever I travel, whether to London or Cleveland, I snap a picture of the closest ice machine and text it to him.  No words are passed, no response necessary, just a connection from the life before he left.

So that's what my mom meant.  In the mixed-up emotions of a time when my parents were on the cusp of their own empty-nest-hood, before I thought of them as people with lives outside of mine, they must have been wondering what their life would be like at the other end of that car ride.  She was asking me to stay connected to her, this family, that life.

We arrive home and say goodnight to one child, instead of three.  Our house is a Presidential Library to all the things they achieved in their first 18 years, their rooms museums to their school projects, the hallways are galleries of their artwork.

I check online for a posting to the world to see where she might be. There are more ways to stay connected, so many ways to watch them as we move from the center of their lives to the periphery.

But I do hope she calls.  Or writes.
















Land of Ice and Fire

We left Washington worrying about Trump eruptions, ISIS movements and warming temperatures. 

In Reykjavik they worry about volcanic eruptions, tectonic plates and a melting ice cap. 

 It is a place that knows its future lies in its past.  Its strength in its people.  Its economy in its land.

In 2008 the economy was destroyed by men in suits. 

In 2010 relief came in the form of a volcano that disrupted air travel across Europe and put Iceland back on the map.

When the economy was tanking it was revived by nature.  They went from spreadsheets and balance sheets to ice sheets and Geysers, Blue Lagoons, Volcanoes and Waterfalls.

Tourism is up 3 fold.

The 320,000 people who call themselves Icelanders are proud and protective of their small island.

They often brag about how they are the best at this or the most at that, and then with a chuckle add, “per capita.”

Most Nobel Prize winners, per capita (1), highest rate of golf courses per capita (66), happiest population per capita (98%)

In the years leading up to the financial crisis the Iceland economy was driven by access to international credit markets.  When the crisis hit all three main Icelandic banks went belly up.

Iceland had enough of the rest of the world.

Iceland's energy doesn't come from the Middle East, it comes from falling water, heat from the earth, the force of the wind.

It is an extended family with one jail and few tenants. 


“When there is a crime they put the security pictures up on Facebook and someone says, ‘Hey that’s Einer’ and the police go get them,” our guide said.

Top punishment is 12 years in jail for murder, with good behavior you could be out in four.

“Cheaper than divorce,” they joke.  But it's unlikely with a murder rate 20x lower than the world average and few people marry with two thirds of babies being born out of wedlock.


The landscape is so reminiscent of the moon that NASA sent Apollo astronauts there in the 60's to train.  When the creators of Game of Thrones needed a place that looked untouched by man in an imaginary time, they chose Iceland.

They are a happy lot brought up on fear of elves and other previously unscary things.  Christmas is characterized by the story of Grýla, an Ogress, part troll/part animal, who, in the lead up to Christmas, comes down from the mountains in search of naughty children to boil in her cauldron.

Iceland’s story is not of immigrants.  It is a land of similarly situated people who care and watch out for each other. 

Their happiness rating has always been near the top of any industrialized country.  A fact that didn't change even as the country pushed through financial chaos.

Icelanders don't fear Vikings or gun violence, its bankers and volcanoes that can bring them down.

Icelanders know they can survive with what they have within their borders.  They have no standing army, they don't share a border, most have never been to Greenland, their closest neighbor.

“What will you do if Donald Trump wins,” the cabbie asks one of my children on the way to the airport.

“Move to Iceland,” she replied.

 The cabbie laughs and said:  “That’s what everyone tells me.”
 


Measuring Adulthood


Someone declared that turning 18 makes you an adult.

I don’t know who that was, but I’m pretty sure they didn't have a daughter.


You can now vote.  Go to war.  Buy lottery tickets.  Legally marry.   

At 18 the world calls you an adult, but you have been this way since about the age of three.

Always an old soul.  Always intuitive and perceptive.  Always aware.

And while your 18th birthday is the headline, it is also the age of my business career, which started the week you were born.

It is no coincidence. 

When a young couple finds itself pregnant with the first child it's like being caught in a Tsunami that tumbles and tosses you until you land hard on the beach, a baby in your arms at three in the morning, the hum of a lactating machine in the background, the father fills a journal with out-sized emotions as if he were the first person in the history of the world to become a parent.

Pregnancy with the second child brings different emotions.  More fear than the first time but without the same new-car smell excitement.  Instead of a rolling thrill ride, it is a train coming down the track and it's gonna run over whatever normalcy you've built into your life.

So sometime in late 1997 we knew you were coming.  Your brother just past his first birthday when we learned you were percolating.

The Clinton/Lewinsky mess was about to explode and I was still writing for a living when I knew that we'd need more room, a bigger house, a second everything.


I hired a consultant and found a company in New York and transitioned from being a journalist with a degree in English Literature to a CEO with nary an Econ class to his name.

Mommy sat on the hospital floor, holding you swaddled in a blanket co-signing bank documents.  It is the kind of thing you do when you are just starting out, because we were young and figured there was time to make mistakes...if we made any at all.

I couldn’t know then that we would raise venture capital in the summer of 2000 just as the dot com bubble burst.  I couldn’t know that we’d launch our flagship product in New York and Washington in January 2001 just months before both cities were attacked.  I hadn't yet lived through the purchase of a South Korean business where the employees quit en masse to compete.  I hadn't survived September 2008 when my CFO frantically called saying that Lehman Brothers couldn't pay their $75,000 bill from the previous month.

But the company grew, as did you, and I would chide my employees by comparing:  "She's crawling, are we?"

I can recall every up and down of this business, each deal that we won and lost, every business slight, bad month, disgruntled employee, as I lived and died on quarterly financial reports.

I have no similar memory of our time with you.

There must have been bad nights, but we forget, fights and messes we don’t recall, highlighted by happy times captured in photo albums and the cloud.

I am unable to remember what it was like, the daily rhythm of you as a small child.  I remember trips, birthdays, moments, but they don’t tie together.  All I know is we want more of them.

Business is a difficult child, behaving well, then poorly, growing, then going flat.  But when we needed growth we'd buy something, when earnings disappointed, we'd cut.

But not with you. 

There are times we probably wanted to sell you off or you wanted to have us fired, but it doesn't work that way with love.

The bigger the business gets the more it needs me.

The bigger you get, the less you need us.

You and Marketresearch.com were born the same week, but I no longer compare the growth paths or trajectories.  I built a company through acquisition, people were hired and fired, businesses bought and sold, but you outpaced them all. 

No matter how low you think our stock might be you cannot fire us and we cannot let you go, even in a down market, when cash is low and sales are weak.  None of this matters, our currency is love.

It doesn’t matter if you walk across that stage with a diploma or sign a document that calls you an adult, because you remain in our hearts the girl who earned the name Messy Jessie because you always smelled of vomit, everything you ate ended up in an orange ring around your neck rolls.

You are not a business that needs a budget and cash flow statement to tell us how you are doing.  We watch you move through this world with amazement and we know you are the best investment we ever made.









Forty Nine (49): The Age of Vision


I fumble through the rack of "cheaters" at the local drugstore.

The training wheels of eyeglasses.

Which am I, a 1.0?  1.5?  I can't be a 2.0.

I was sure the blurriness was a brain malfunction.  I'd never worn glasses, never had trouble from near or far.  Even during law school, all throughout the growing up years I was the one who could read the label, the dosage, but no longer.  Now I squint, hold things up to the light, view a menu at a thousand paces.

I then blamed it on bad restaurant lighting.  But soon I was expanding the font on my iPhone, scratching my nose with newsprint, borrowing glasses at lunch time.

I'm still fine from long distance.  I can see a street sign before others, Natalie's time in the 200 Freestyle displayed on a video screen across the pool, the movie details on the outdoor marquee.

But I can't see what's right in front of me.

The second child is in college-preparation mode, her departure coming into focus.  The first child is knee-deep in his new environment: the freedom, the fun, the friends, the future.  His daily hurdles are no longer ours. We can't see them.

But I can see the future.

I see it in the lives of friends.

While our first went off to college, some in our orbit became empty-nesters.  While our parents move to Florida, some of the adults from our childhood fade away.

I see a future where the extended family dynamic changes, holidays when everyone coming to us is not an option, or atleast not the default. School schedules don't jive with life, the amoeba is breaking apart.

But I can't see up close.

I get home early one evening, dinner is done, the girls scamper away, it's 7:15 and there is nothing left to do.  There are hours that I cannot fill.

I see the future in the pace of our lives.

A house goes from bustling to quiet, a calendar empties from full to scattered.  For the past 18 years we squirrel away the moments when we have time to ourselves, to read a book, write a note, watch a show undisturbed.

Now there is more time than things to fill it up.  A weekend morning when no one needs anything from me.

Sundays have morphed.  At first they were exhausting struggles of who would get up with the kids. It moved on to Hebrew School drop off and soccer practices, pick ups from sleepovers, trips for bagels to feed a house full of teenagers who crashed on our basement couches.

Now we go to Yoga class alone and return before the house has stirred. The children wake in time for lunch.  Soon there will be no kids, nothing to rush back for.  Why wait in the Sunday morning line for one bagel?  I can go on Monday instead.

I can read the road signs off in the distance, but I don't recognize the icons on the Waze app in my hand.

Early in Game of Thrones Ned Stark warns that "Winter is Coming."  In the show seasons last for years.  A change of season is upon us.

How do you fill the quiet hours of a February weekend without kids to serve?  I see the future, but I can't quite make out this evening's calendar.

There are no glasses for that.




A New London Christmas


For 17 years I have been making the same trip, same time, same general routine.

I leave from Dulles the Sunday of Thanksgiving, arrive in London Monday morning, go to the office in time for my morning meeting (10:15 back home, 3:15 London time).  

Regular visits to this coffee shop or that bookstore, depending on where I'm staying.  Beers with MRDC'ers, a lunch or dinner with the team, maybe meet a friend.  It never never dulls.

Whether a drink at the Jamaica Wine Bar, pasta at Guiseppe's, a walk amid the Christmas lights on Oxford Street, I never tire of this city, listening to these people, watching.

In the shadow of the Paris attacks there is an unease that has replaced the usual holiday joy.  

Maybe it's no different back home, but riding the Tube here you can sense everyone looking more closely at each other, the bags they are carrying, wondering.  

Someone in our office, apropos of nothing, mentions how his morning train gets backed up at the same point each day, three trains lined up in the same tunnel and they all think the same thing, easy target.

Piccadilly Circus is filled with tourists, lovers surround the Eros Statue which is shrouded in construction materials.  A group of Muslim men walk the area with pamphlets that read, "I am Muslim and I love Christ."  Police stand by, waiting for trouble.

My plane taxis away from the gate, Thanksgiving behind me, another ritual on the horizon.  I exhale, take my Melatonin with a glass of red wine and am asleep before we are in the air.  I am awakened by the woman sitting next to me as she leans in too close, bumping my shoulder and asking why we are flying so low.  The Captain announces we are returning to Washington.

Everyone thinks the same thing.

We land, surrounded by firetrucks, the lights are stark through my rain splattered window on the cold dark night.  It turns out we've hit a bird.  Even in the bleariness of my Melatonin coma I know we are not leaving any time soon.  The rush to the Virgin desk, the luggage, home in time to put the girls to bed and back at the airport at 7 the following morning.

We all want to believe that we are keeping calm and carrying on, but we know it's coming.  Just like the shooting that occurs in California while I'm there, is it Middle East terrorism or just more gun violence?  Either way we are not surprised.  

It has penetrated our thinking.  The 20 minute Tube ride, the 10 minute walk through the train station, the 8 hour flight home, it is there.  They have won this battle.

"So now we're bombing them," the cab driver says to me, referring to the Parliament vote from the previous day.  He is driving me back to Paddington Station early on my last morning.  The Prime Minister said Britain is safer now that the bombing has begun. "What good does it do bombing Syria," he asks, "if they're living next door."




Changing Rooms


We don’t see gradual.


I looked up one day from our intense preparation for his college departure and realized, he was already gone.

Our parent's generation doesn't seem to understand.  Somehow my departure from the stage wasn't such a cataclysmic event.

When they say "What's the big deal, no one died" I want to shake them and say "you don't understand, I'm just gonna miss him, his presence, the pleasure of his company."

I am trying not to be overly dramatic about the first one leaving the nest, but even the most hard-bitten friends have talked about the emptiness that comes when they do.

“It’s like they cut a hole in your heart,” according to friend I would call, unemotional.

 Nothing ages you like your children's passages.  When you send them off to college and realize the clock really is ticking, not on them, but on you.  It forces us to think about all we are in the midst of: Jobs, marriages, friendships, life.

In a much passed-around article, columnist Michael Gerson compared dropping his child off at college with the ending of the universe.  He notes that Cosmologists, who I thought gave facials, “assure us, our sun and all suns will consume their fuel, violently explode and then become cold and dark. Matter itself will evaporate into the void and the universe will become desolate for the rest of time.”

Okay, that’s dramatic, but only a little.

We started preparing early, at the start of senior year, a time everyone told us would be a disaster.  But it wasn’t.  The college application process, the waiting, the pull and push of a teenager trying to escape childhood and parents trying to keep order.

Everything flew generally on time and according to plan.    

And then one night a few weeks ago I headed upstairs to drop the new copy of Sports Illustrated on his bed and found myself in the center of his empty room.  There were lots of days like this, with work, friends, and his own angst changing the household routine, I would leave before he was up and he was out when I went to bed.  His job as an 18-year old waiter conflicted with my schedule as a human.  I could go days without seeing his face. 

I hadn’t been in his room in weeks.  It used to be a regular hang out.  At first to tuck him in, read a book, make sure he was asleep, then make sure he was home.  It was a place where serious talks took place and stories were told in the confidence of darkness.  

And now I stood in a foreign zone, duffle bags splayed open like patients on an operating table, packages of t-shirts and socks, various dorm room requirements, fresh toiletries still in their packaging.  Along the perimeter was his past.  An outer ring of memorabilia that tracked his childhood: 

A baseball glove, a collage of pictures with kids from another neighborhood, stacks of books from various years, Narnia, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Road. Some are dog eared, some un-cracked.  Old bobble heads, long-forgotten ticket stubs, a sea shell, baseball caps of all sizes, a faded art project, a piggy bank stuffed with pennies, a replica of the Forum, an empty Coke bottle from Israel, a deconstructed science project.

A friend of mine calls this a “memory minefield.”  These places that shake us with their history, of a time that no longer exists.  

I look for them in every room, every block of our neighborhood, every memento.  The school, the restaurants, a dent on the couch, things from a different era, when the house had a different rhythm. Gerson said that parenthood is a lesson in humility: “The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else’s story.”

Hunting around these corners, preparing myself for these moments, I realized that while I was still on stage, he was already gone.  Off on his new adventure, while I am here with the memories, a minefield for me, a past for him.





These Four Walls


The most common narrative in literature is the hero returning home.  

 But not all homes are equal.  We get more from that first house than anywhere else.  The memory of that first bedroom, the curve of the living room couch, the light behind a certain fixture.
 
Singer/songwriter/hero Bruce Springsteen said all his songs come out of that place.  "My deepest motivation comes out of the house that I grew up in and the circumstance that were set up there."  He said it's a place "you carry with you forever, no matter where you go or what you become." 

 In a new book Michelle Obama said "Everything that I think about and do, is shaped around the life that I lived in that little apartment.” 

 So what will our children remember?

 The impact of these four walls scrapes at me as they run off, realizing the walls that we built are those that will define them.  Our house, the place we designed with the photos we picked, the drapes she chose, the books we stacked, are the ones of their childhood memories.  

Springsteen and Mrs. Obama describe the memory fragments: the smell of the kitchen, the light at the end of a father's cigarette, the sound of a sibling on the other side of a thin wall.

Parenting expert Wendy Mogel tries to assure parents not to mistake "a snapshot taken today with the epic movie of your child's life."  But how do we know what will stick and what will fade?  Will they remember the time I got up and made breakfast or the time I slept in?  Will they recall the time I yelled when I was right or the time I was just having a bad day?

A few weeks ago on Spring Break in a darkened and hip restaurant in South Beach my middle child started to cry without provocation.  It was just the three of us, me, the college-bound eldest and the middle.

She explained the burst of emotion came from the knowledge that with travel, summer, camp and jobs, it was coming to an end.

"This is the last week we'll be in the house together," she said.  "As brother and sister."

And then the day came, their last breakfast around that kitchen island, the scene of so many morning comments, passed forks in silence, shared muffins, stolen last pieces of French toast.  The only fireworks were in my heart as he gnawed at a bagel and she measured out gluten-free granola into her yogurt. On their first day of school there were pictures and new backpacks, sharpened pencils and juice boxes.  Today there was no fanfare, just two adults looking for their car keys, going in separate directions to different schools. 

It will never be like this again I thought, and she articulated.  So much of what has occupied our minds in that home over the past 18 years has been about what they are seeing. No longer are they learning this lesson or that, those days are past, either they saw it or they didn't.  They remembered it or not.  There is still much to learn, but it's too late to change the arc.

Last week the middle child needed to go to the National Archives for a school project.  We drove through rush hour to get in line with the Spring Breakers and when they all ran to see the Declaration of Independence, we viewed some obscure document, took notes and finished.

With time still left in our morning I grabbed her hand as we ran across Constitution Avenue to the National Gallery of Art.  Somewhere below the gallery, between the section that houses the old masters and the moderns is a gift shop, a waterfall and a little cafe.

I hadn't been there in years and so a few wrong turns around a series of 15th century European sculptures until we emerged at the gleaming underground.  There wasn't much food yet and so she got water and I got coffee and we sat for just a moment.  There were mostly old people eating sandwiches out of brown bags, others who worked at the gift shop setting up their stalls.  And next to us a man and women dressed for work drinking coffee and eating Tootsie Pops?

We listened to the conversation, the clack of shoes on the floor, the workers making lunch for the tourists.  And I told her that she won't remember this day, but I hope she will one day know the complete pleasure of having 15 minutes with your daughter and sharing an espresso.

"I always remember this stuff," she assured me. "I have a good memory for this kind of thing."

The Symmetry of Birthdays

I’ve always liked the symmetry of our birthdays.


As if we planned it.  This year my dad turns 78, I turn 48 and my son 18.

Every year something rises to the fore, the growing child, the aging parent, the next stage.

Forty eight it turns out, is not the year I inch closer to AARP, it’s the year he leaves home.  Everything takes on the tinge of this event that is still several months away, but still there.

It reminds me of the scene in When Harry Met Sally as she weeps about turning 40.

“And I’m gonna be 40” she says, amid hysterics.
“When?” Harry asks.
“Someday.”
“In eight years,” he deadpans.
“But it’s there.  It’s just sitting there.  Like this big dead end.”

I don’t yet know what I am feeling about this next phase, but I keep watching for it, around the corners of our daily life.  A recent New York Times piece gave me the green light to feel something.  The article about empty nest dads articulates some of what is coming as our first born speeds down the runway toward college.

“The empty-nest transition is harder on fathers than conventional wisdom might have us believe. Men’s experience of this life passage has changed dramatically from what they might have felt — or admitted feeling — 40 years ago.”

I agree with the sentiment, but why was this article written by a woman?  Is no man capable of explaining why a child leaving home is deadening?  Terrifying?  Sad.

According to her there is a happy reason for all this unhappiness:  
“Fathers occupy a more central place in family life than they once did: Since the 1960s, fathers have more than doubled the number of hours they spend on housework and now do about a third of household chores, according to the Pew Research Center.”

So that’s it, the extra run of laundry, the additional sock repaired brought us closer to our children?  I think not.  Dads are parents too.  Actually, dads are people too.  It’s less about the chores that we complete and more about the hole that exists in our days and the redefinition of a role we acquired the day these children scream into our lives.

It’s all about the clock.

I have heard more men talk with sadness about how their weeks have been defined by their child’s soccer schedule, a joint commute to school/work or the shared sporting event.  The first big hit comes when they get their driver’s license, a couple years before they leave and our time with them is carved into even smaller pieces.  If we are not their driver, their coach, their ticket purveyor, who are we?

“Men’s identity is now invested in a more intimate, hands-on fatherhood; fathers see themselves not just as breadwinners but as caregivers and confidants, and feel deeply attached to kids they have changed and bathed and driven.”

A driver’s license is a license to stay away. They no longer rely on us to pick them up from school, the haircut, tennis practice is now something to be shared with friends. The household rhythm is off, the empty seat at the table, the un-dented couch cushion.  But what will be a year from now?  A therapist might call this anticipatory anxiety.  No shit.  

As we age our birthdays become less about us and more about things outside ourselves, the age of a parent, the number of candles on our child’s cake, the lines on a face, the distance between visits.  This birthday is not about who I am today, but of what’s next.  

Until now there was a crude road map for what to expect when you’re expecting, schooling, skinned knees, grit, grade school, high school. 

But not now. 

What is life like on the other side of that door?  The door they’re about to walk out of?












The End of Summers


"Only kids get summer vacation?" one of our children marveled years ago when they realized our jobs extended beyond June.  

 Now I can tell them that summer vacation exists, even in adulthood.

 When my children were barely seven years old my wife proposed sending them away to camp, I was not a fan.  After all, I had done the math.

If we followed her sleep-away camp scheme, we’d lose almost a full year of growing-up time.

A seven-year camp lifespan times seven weeks, that's 49 weeks of no kids.

 "We only have them for 18 years," I pleaded.  "Why give away a year of it?"

 I soon learned we were not giving them away as much as bribing someone to take them to a land of lakes, mosquitoes, bunks and friendship.

Once the inevitable happened and I lost the argument I told myself there was value for the children in shipping them off.  What I failed to grasp was the value for the adults.

With the children staggered in age we only lost one the first year, then another, and soon we were staring down the barrel of seven weeks of undiluted childlessness.  

 A thought scarier than sending them in the first place.

There was trepidation as we packed everyone off with last minute checklists, snacks for the flight, runs to the local airports, final day tantrums, misplaced articles of clothing and then -- all was quiet.

Walking through the door that first evening I was transported to my grandparents' home, a place where lights remained off in the mostly empty rooms, un-dented couch cushions, entire carpeted rooms with nary a footprint.  

 On the dining room table sat two glasses of wine, a  bowl of vegetables, two lonely plates and a piece of tin foil that housed two sad little pieces of grilled fish.

What was this minimalist, vegetarian spread?

 "I didn't want to waste a serving piece," my wife said.  "It's only us."

 There would be no more meals at home.  

 This was our introduction to the joys of adult summer vacations.  We discovered a world of late liquid dinners, trips to the beach and middle-of-the-week movies.  We reveled in the guilty pleasure of completing long-delayed projects or reading a book.  And we were not alone.  Friends who rarely left the confines of Montgomery County were suddenly never home, everybody wanted to stretch.

 Even the interruption of visiting day brought new joy as the heart actually grew fonder over the missing month.

 That was 6 years ago.  

 Now we are on the other side.

This year we got barely two weeks of kid-free time.  Summer jobs, high school sports, teen tours and college visits overlap for short periods.  Our endless summer was reduced to one night in Naples Maine, before rushing to pick up another child in another city. 

 The trumpet blew at this year's camp visiting day, signalling the end.  The sound kicks off a Pavlovian reaction of tears, hugs and clinging children.  This year the tears were ours. Summers are coming to an end. 


Homeland Part II--Good Borders Make Good Neighbors

Sometimes a neighborhood turns bad.  Sometimes it always was.  

 There is much to contrast between Israel and Turkey.  But their mutual complaint is about their "tough neighborhood," they say with a roll of their eyes.  

 The Israelis love their neighborhood, just not their neighbors.  Every street corner, every road and hillside has a Biblical antecedent.  On a visit to an Army base the driver explains the area is called Herodion, where King Herod stopped on his rush from Jerusalem to Masada.  His Mother's carriage overturned and he feared she was dead.  To show his gratitude that she survived he built a town to commemorate it.  It ultimately became his burial plot.

At the last minute our visit with the soldiers is altered by the recent kidnappings.  We switch to a bullet-proof minivan because you don't know what it will be like down the next block.  We stand on a hilltop with soldiers pointing out the Palestinian and Israeli overlapping neighborhoods.

The soldiers, men and women, explain their day.  In Washington people show off their wall of fame, photos of politicians they've met for a moment.  The man (boy) in charge of this base shows us a picture of two Israeli F-15 Jet Fighters flying over Auschwitz. "We are not just the protectors of this land, we are protecting the Jewish people," he tells my children.

The flight from Israel to Turkey is only 90 minutes, but when you land at the Istanbul Ataturk Airport the two worlds collide. Woman in Burqas mingle with tourists in shorts and tanks waiting at the Burger King. The expensive jewelry stores glisten, the Hermes scarves stack neatly.

But baggage claim brings it all together as our luggage from Tel Aviv rests on the turnstile alongside flights from Baghdad and Najaf.
Turkey shares a border with Syria, Iraq and Iran.  Israel's border partners are well-known, but no less volatile.  When you ask about the contrast and concerns they all say with resignation, "This is the Middle East."

But how they deal with the internal and external threats is illustrative:

  • In Israel my kids notice the doorman at the King David Hotel wears a taser on her belt
  • In Turkey, thousands of daily visitors to the Blue Mosque, their most traveled tourist destination, has no security, no metal detector, no bag check.  The only thing strictly enforced is the dress code.
  • At Ben Gurion airport they ask you numerous questions about why you were in Israel. The usual stuff like "were your bags with you all the time" preceded questions like, "what Jewish holidays do you celebrate?"
  • There were 4 security check points before we got to our gate on Turkish Airlines, including one at the front door, where we sent our suitcases through an x-ray machine before we were even let into the air conditioning.
Turkey is a sprawling country across two continents, and their worries are not about Israel, but the influences of their fellow Muslims.  It is a fiercely proud place whose bright red flag with a crescent and star flies from every hilltop.

It is a land of earthquakes, carpets and kilims, where 90% of the people are Muslim, but Burqa's are officially banned on constitutional grounds of the "secularity of the state."

In Israel all the Army bases are Kosher and celebrate Shabbat.

 When people emigrated to Turkey in the early-20th century they were told to pray wherever they could, a Mosque, a synagogue or a church, as they were all houses of god.  That is no longer the case.  A city of 15 million people has 3,000 Mosques, 250 churches and "only 2 or 3 working synagogues," according to our guide.

Both countries are divided, some reaching for the future with others pulling it into the past. Israel is a place rooted in its history, but has embraced a future that gave way to a start-up nation of businesses and board appointments.  Modern Turks wrestle with their progress as well, more worried about whether their neighbors will quash it.

While countries can't move, people can.

France is in the midst of a record migration of Jews to Israel, who have had enough of their neighborhood and are getting out.  

“I love France, and this is my country, but I am disgusted now...In Israel there is an army that will protect us. Here, I can no longer see a future for my children," one French Jew told the New York Times before leaving home.




Homeland


The interactive map on the seatback in front of me is an education.  Flying to Israel from Istanbul the city names illuminate as we pass over or near them.

It is a history lesson, geography quiz and newscast: Allepo, Hommes, Damascus, Baghdad.  Tripoli looks so close to Beirut.  As you approach Tel Aviv the Bible comes alive, Beersheba, Nazareth, and then reminders of the wars, Aqaba, Suez.

Jerusalem is hopping at 11:30 on a Saturday night, old and young, religious and secular, Jews and Arabs walk past the Nike store, the World Cup blares from every restaurant.

Crowds of young people stare into televisions big and small watching France vs Honduras.

On the first day Yad Vashem is swarming with tourists.  The last time we were here the kids were too young to go.  Now they tell us about all they learned from their secular schools and how they didn't focus on the Jews.  "A lot of what Hitler wanted to do was about the purity of the Germans, killing the Jews was only part of it."

The soldiers who sit next to us with their Uzi's tilted across the table take on new meaning.  They are only 18 months older than my son who is disappointed about eating his hamburger without cheese, since we are at a Kosher restaurant.

The King David Hotel and the Old City don't disappoint, they look as we remember or as the postcards remind us.  It's hot in the market at Machane Yehuda, vendors screaming, a woman sneezing on the basket of cheeries fondled by every passerby.

The kids ask why the Falafel tastes so good, and the hummus?  There are no answers, like the mystery of New York bagels, I tell them.

You hear about the three young boys who were kidnapped from the settlements, but still the tourists shop, the markets open, the buses run, the flags fly.

 



More Than a Day at the Races


We were running late. 

The traffic from JFK was solid the whole way. Before getting to Belmont we had to find a Howard Johnsons in Queens, which housed our tickets.  But these golden tickets only got us through the front door, if we could reach it. 

Stewing in the back of a steamy cab we dug into the racing sheets.

“Hey dad, look, there’s a horse in the next race from Maryland,” he said.
“That’s a sign,” I told him.

I had prepared a day of teaching my son how to handicap based on facts, but it turned into a day of patience, luck, intuition and inevitably betting on losers.

Seven minutes to post time.

Looking out the cab window nothing but cars and people, the grandstand half a mile ahead on the other side of the track. 

“And look at this,” he said, “the horse’s name is Ben’s Cat.”

The blood drained from my face.  My hands sweaty. 

My son has a friend named Ben Catt.

“That’s our horse.”

We leapt from the car and ran.  Past the people in pastels, the broken bourbon bottles and cigar butts. 

“Dad, you run ahead, I can’t bet anyways.”

I pulled out my phone and with three minutes to go I could see the security team waving their wands over every whale belt, horse pin, and powder green hat.

My son and I had made a deal, we’d bet every race, ten bucks a horse.

“You need limits,” I told him.  “Never dig into your pocket for more money.”

I pull out the cash, sprint up the escalator to the window where I place my bet with a minute to post time, as Josh falls in behind me, the winning ticket in my hand.

“Did you bet the ten bucks?” he asked.

“I bet the whole thing,” I said, doing the calculations on what it would mean to our $100 if he won.

We settled in the back, and they were off.  

“So how much do we win?” he asked after the horses crossed the finish line.

“For coming in fourth?  Not much,” I told him.

Facebook is awash in endings, graduations, leaving home.  I don’t care what Webster says about commencements, they are not beginnings. For parents they are only endings.

But when our oldest was born we won the birthday lotto as the calendar gods made him miss the Kindergarten deadline.  So while many of his friends are high school graduates heading off to beach week, he is just a rising senior.

Under the gauze of his final year in our house, lots of things become "once in a lifetime" opportunities, including the possibility of a triple crown winner.

So we flew to New York, and managed the traffic and ran to the race and placed the bets, and survived the disappointing horses.  We cheered our hearts out for Chromey, as the locals call her. 

And we got stuck on the train platform for three hours and missed our flight home and made friends with some Arkansans and walked through Manhattan until we found a place to eat and watch the end of the Rangers game deep into double overtime.  And the next morning we were back at the airport and then home again 24 hours after we placed our initial bet on Ben’s Cat. 

We were wrong about the horses.  But right about the opportunity.



A Camera in Canyon

"Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your children's children, and for all who come after you..." 
--Theodore Roosevelt

"Dad, can I borrow the camera?"

It was like hearing the roar of a Tyrannosaurus, this sentence emerging from extinction.  We are in the depths of the Grand Canyon, just south of the Colorado River, seven miles into a 10-mile hike.  My 13-year old and I are trailing the rest of the crew, save for our guide who intentionally staggers behind.  

 There are so many things about the sentence that grab me, not the least of which includes the fact that she spoke to me.  We have a fine relationship, but she's 13 and I am, well, her father.   But here along the Havasu Canyon there is nothing to do but talk, spot the occasional waterfall, eye the hikers who come and go, the sad mules hauling crates of groceries to the village, or backpacks for those unable to carry the load.

And so she speaks to me. 

And the sentence fills me up.  She asked if she can borrow "the" camera.  Not a camera, because in this wifi-ravaged section of the world there is only one camera and it is a camera.  One that you hold with two hands (no selfies), that zooms in and out with buttons labeled W and T.  Okay it's not exactly a Nikon and my pockets aren’t filled with yellow boxes of Kodak film, but for a moment we are back in time.

It is a question I asked my dad dozens of times as a kid.  Sometimes I probably got an "Okay" and others I may have been warned against the shrinking number of pictures in the roll.  Similarly, I warn her there will be no outlets and she needs to be careful how long the camera is on and how much battery she might use.  Make sure not to look at all the pictures because it's such a battery suck.

She excitedly snaps a shot of a distant waterfall.  The kind of photo that won't mean much in a day or so, nobody is in the picture, the distance too great to be memorable.  

 But it was what we, as parents, wait for, the reason we take these trips.

Our days in the canyon are filled with moments like these, that mean little to the kids, but everything to us.  Watching them play cards in the day's fading light, the songs they sang along the trail, the games they invented as the miles of endless rock passed by.

 There is this need within us to go back, not to a happier time, but a simpler one where our days are focused on fixing the next meal, the footing on a narrow pass, the depth of the water, warmth at night.

We pay money to leave our expensive lives and spend time in a place that escaped civilization.  

 We meet a park ranger who brings us a jar of goo. He tells us about how the tree was struck by lightning and as they removed it he discovered the treasure of a honeycomb.  "Have a taste," he says with infectious enthusiasm.  And as we share a spoon with this tribe of travelers, we wonder how we could get this excited about our jobs?

Then we take seven hours to walk the miles out of the canyon, past the waterfalls, through the Indian reservation, around the rock formations and then up, up, up the narrow pass to the safety of the plateau, where we load our car.

 An hour into the drive we hit a hotspot and everyone's phones begin chirping, lights blink, the car fills with voicemails and Snapchats, we clog the chargers.  Our children's eyes no longer lit by the golden sun of the canyon, but the green glow of their screens. And then they are gone, back to the future and into their world, and so are we.

Forty-Seven

So this is 47.

The plans were all set.
Flights to Utah, lift tickets, reservations, dinners with friends.
And then the snow came.

School was cancelled.
Then the planes.
We re-thought the weekend.

Then they opened one runway.  And our plane arrived.  We plowed through Georgetown and a foot of snow...
But we missed it.

So we stopped for Chinese food.
Just me and two of the kids.
Jessie fell on the ice.  She laughed hard.  Her brother harder.

We were the only people in the restaurant.
They made us sit in the corner "in case a large party showed up."

So in the morning we drove to Deep Creek Lake.
And knocked down the world's biggest icicle.
Bought groceries.
Ran on the frozen lake.

The kids had time to ski.
I made time to write.

The ski lift ticket on my birthday read:  Feb 15, 2014 -- Adult Twilight.

I hope not.


The Gift of Long Hours

There is something powerful about watching your first-born child's chest rise and fall.  Listening to the air pass through his lungs, his small pursed lips.  I didn't think I was going to be this kind of parent...The one with the pocket mirror.  The one who wakes him only to put him back to sleep.

I move my face close to his to feel the fever.  His skin aglow in blue monitor lights.  Memorizing every fold, each crease, the way his brows arch.  I try to catch the movements in his eyes as they roll through another deep cycle of REM.

His face twitches as he stretches his neck.  He's not in pain, it's just the expressions of a new born, the jerky movements as he tries out his new parts. The faces only we see and think they are funny.  The face we fell in love with for the first time and then all over again.

When I need to check his temperature I don't feel it with my hand.  I take advantage of this opportunity to get close to him.  His breathe is warm on my ear.

I gently, barely touch my cheek to his.  Then I realize I don't know which razor stubble is his, and which is mine.

It's been more than 16 years since I've had the chance to spend so much time watching him sleep.  How long had it been since I checked on him.  Sure I give him a thorough smell test when he gets home late on a Saturday night. Do I detect smoke?  Drink?

When have I cared for him in this way.  So completely.  He doesn't cry when he hurts.  Instead, he tells the doctor about the pain.  Rates it a one to ten. He can walk, when he has the strength, getting himself to the bathroom and pees in a special plastic container so the medical team can examine everything that goes in and out of his body.

It's a staph infection in his chest. There have been tense moments. Especially at first when we weren't sure if we could get him home from the coastal Spanish town where he'd been studying.  Scarier yet when the hospital didn't know what it was.  A mysterious bite under his arm our only clue.

But after a few days in the hospital, a host of treatments, doctor visits and endless blood-taking and pee-examining he seems better.  More alert, his color is back, fever is down, swelling is receding.

And then it becomes a gift.  When the marrow-shattering fear subsides and the parental nightmare fades, it is our time.  This isn't about a near-death experience re-shaping my world-view where I come out the other side stopping to watch rainbows.

It's about a parents' awareness that our children are with us, if we are lucky, for 18 years.  And then if it all goes according to plan they are swept off into the world and leave us to our life if we can only leave them to theirs. 

I desperately want to feel close to him.  Adolescence now an obstacle. Tensions rise over school, friends, curfew, cars, money, homework, Facebook, phones, computers.  But none of those matter here in the dark of the hospital room.  At night we watch ESPN.  He in his hospital bed hooked up to monitors and IVs.  I rest in a recliner.  We talk about the games. The slowness of the baseball season.  How will the Redskins do?  He asks about things at home. He tells me about his trip to Spain without me asking.  It won't be this way next week, but it is tonight.

And with a scant two years left it's on our minds a lot.  What life lesson can we still impart?  What final factoid can we squeeze into him hoping it becomes part of his philosophy?  

We are in his presence for periods of time that we haven't had since before pre-school.  Interrupted by doctors and family and visitors and bouts of sleep. In our normal lives there are no long hours. just times together before we have something else to do.

Tonight he and I had dinner in the hospital cafeteria.  We sat there well after our tasteless food was picked over.  We laughed at how he couldn't tell if his last bite was a piece of chicken or a carrot.  At home the meal would have been a short segue.  Tonight it was a destination.

The hum and wheeze of the machines that clean his system and fight the poison, rouses and confuses me.  Is that his breathing?  Are those strained noises his body trying to do something it can't?  I check his fever.  Its four o'clock in the morning.  He moves his head and squints in the early light.

"Did you just put your cheek up against my face?" he asks in a whisper, somewhere between sleep and wakefulness.
"I did," I said smiling, feeling like a teenager caught sneaking in past curfew.
"That's just weird dad," he says, before fading off to sleep.




The Lesson of Positano


In every village there are four men -- never more, never less -- who sit in the square with their cigarettes, their espresso and their newspapers, arguing, laughing, reading, living.

The cab driver explained that working 7 days a week for 7 months was too much.  So he called a friend. And when he takes a day off, his friend drives.  And when his friend needs a break, he drives.  He works until dinner and then his friend works till midnight.

"The only one to work 7 days is the car."

He smiled at this discovery and looked in the rear view mirror to see if I was equally impressed.  I held the question as long as I could, but it spilled out.  The American question that had to come and his Italian Amalfi Coast answer was at the ready.

"So do you make more money?" I asked

"What does it matter?" he replied.  "I have more time.  More time at home.  In my garden.  With my kids."

It reflects the story of the Mexican fisherman.

An American investment banker at a pier in a small Mexican village eyes a small boat with one fisherman.  Inside the boat were several large yellowfin tuna.  The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The Mexican replied, “only a little while.”

The American then asked why didn’t he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family’s immediate needs. The American then asked, “but what do you do with the rest of your time?”

The Mexican fisherman said, “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siestas with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine, and play guitar with my amigos.  I have a full and busy life.”

The American scoffed, “I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing, and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually New York City, where you will run your expanding enterprise.”

The Mexican fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the American replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the Mexican.
The American laughed and said, “That’s the best part.  When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”


The American said, “Then you would retire.  Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siestas with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos.”



The Giving Tree

I am reminded, in this coastal paradise, of the children's book.

The place built into the side of an Italian shoe is pure.

They are forever waiting for the sun to rise so the tourist will come.

All through the cold rainy months of October through May.

And then the sun comes out and warms the water, dries the olives and lights up the lemons until they are as big as grapefruits.

Soon the boats come out, sidewalks fill, the hotels open and the people follow.

The olives grow until they are picked and then smashed for their blood.

And then they wait for the earth to give again.  The sun, the wind, the rain, the ocean, the limestone, the lemons, the olives, all for pleasure.





Camelot on the Italian Coast

Positano:  A Place

The Amalfi Coast is not a place that does anything.  It exists solely for people to enjoy.

To eat the bread, with the olive oil and a little salt and not gain weight.

The smell of the lemon trees that never dull.

To eat the pasta, big heaping plates al dente with a pile of grilled fish and not get fat.  Or even full.

To do nothing and not feel guilty.

To sleep late and know you are missing nothing.

The boats sway as if on a timer.  

The birds and insects sing together, an orchestra conducted by nature.
The only thing that takes away are the unfortunate bathing suit choices of the men.