Kodak Moments

Since he first learned to ask to see them, our older boy has been enthralled, possibly obsessed, with pictures and videos. He has watched the video of his own arrival (at the airport, not the hospital) dozens of times and has spent many happy hours looking through stacks of pictures, remembering old neighbors, special days and places.

Somewhere along the way he also became enthralled with the envelopes the pictures used to come in. He considers which is finer: the envelope with the picture of the over-exposed little girl or the boy blowing a bubble. He spends long minutes trying to decide whether the picture with the patented photo correction treatment is better than the one without, and he asks me and M over and over which one we like better.

And the name: Kodak. So bizarre, so made up. He loves it.

This is an obsession I can relate to. Kodak and I share a hometown, and when I began to explore the many thrift-stores of Rochester I found lots and lots of Kodak cameras which I started to buy, quite inexpensively. As my collection grew, friends and family began to pick up cameras for me and I began to amass variations: the same camera but one made in Rochester, another in England and still another in Canada. Or different years with different lenses. Or special cameras made for dentistry, that were basic snapshot cameras but with focal distances of nine inches to one foot, with a little string measuring tape attached so that the hygienist could hold the string against the patient's gum and then pull the camera back until the string was taut to get the picture perfectly in focus. Those cameras had special flash covers so if the bulb exploded, as they sometimes did, they wouldn’t burn the patient’s face.

When I was only a little older than our older boy is now I had a Kodak Instamatic that took film that came in black plastic cartridges and used Flashcubes that had four bulbs in each cube and would pivot 90 degrees every time a picture was taken. Film was expensive and I hoarded my pictures, passing up many opportunities to snap so that I’d still have a couple pictures left when an even better thing to photograph would come along. I never had as many flashcubes as pictures so I would ration my indoor shots. Pressing the shutter was always a leap of faith because it could be weeks or even months before I’d ever see the picture. Sometimes I couldn’t remember what the picture was of, when I’d finally get the roll developed.

So when he asked if he could take some pictures of flowers on a grey day last week, I gave him a brief lesson on the digital camera and turned him loose while I did some chores. Fifteen or twenty minutes later he was eager to download the pictures to the computer so I plugged the camera in expecting to find four or five and HOLY COW he took TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTEEN PICTURES! Actually, somewhere in the twenty minutes he gave the camera to his brother so he only took 201. The following pictures are all by the artist, exactly as he took them. But not all 201. No way.

Riding in 2008 and before

I started working on this entry a while ago and got waylaid, by the holidays and life, yes, but more by a growing feeling like I wasn’t getting at the real deal. At the time I thought I was going to write about a neat ride that I took part in – I can’t say I rode it because I only rode a little of it but I helped crew it and was there, at least in body, for almost all of it.

It isn’t found on our local bike club calendar. There is no food or water at the rest stops and the route isn’t marked on anything but the maps handed out at the ride start. No patch for participating but someone did make up stickers this year. The attitude is pretty much keep an eye out for others and take care of yourself.

The ride is called the Dynamo, named after a similar ride in England, and our version starts out on pavement but pretty quickly moves onto dirt and continues to go back and forth, with quite a bit of dirt, for the rest of the 130 or so miles. A fair bit of the route is through land as desolate as can be while still having some road through it, and it has a major dirt climb at about mile 105, along with regular rolling terrain. Everyone needs to bring anything and everything they may need for the ride but thanks to our generous friend Basil we did have a support vehicle to carry all the tools, clothes, spares, pretzels, Sparks, Clif bars and everything else we brought.

The kicker, of course, is that the ride starts at 10:00 on Saturday night. PM. Here we are at the start: This ride is problematic in a number of ways: 130 miles is a long hard weekend for me, not one ride. The ride left at 10, got back to town about 9:30AM, had eight planned rest stops plus breakdowns, peeing, etc which ate up at least two hours of the elapsed time, so these guys were hauling acre through the night, which is not my specialty. And most of all, I like to sleep at night.

When I was the age of a lot of these guys I would have shown up and tried to do the whole ride, suffered mightily, maybe even cracked and took the sag the rest of the way but I would have gone for it. Why not? Back then I lived in drafty apartments with nobody depending on me in the morning and nobody making the bed all cozy. But now I’m closer to 65 than 21 and I have needy little morning people and a cozy bedmate so why bother? Haven’t I grown up and come to my senses?

Apparently not.

As I tried to noodle through the question of why I was there I kept coming back to a story that my father told me many times. He would have been maybe 16, which means it took place in 1934. On summer evenings, as often as possible, he and his two best friends would oil up and adjust their bikes and cruise all over town. These are my personal pep boys, Marty, Milt and Jack. Dad talked about going through Durand Eastman park and how wonderful and fragrant that was, and maybe they’d stop and sit at the beach for a while. Back then, Rochester was a beautiful and prosperous city with Lake Ontario beaches and plenty of glacial rises to sprint up and glide down. He and his buddies would ride all over town, checking out girls, laughing and racing each other when the moment seemed right. And they would always end up at his uncle Henry’s sandwich shop. Henry and his wife and daughter lived behind the shop and he would let the boys have anything they wanted – homemade ice cream, cookies, candy, corned beef sandwiches, whatever. And then, full and happy, the boys would cruise home a little more slowly because it was dark now, and get ready for bed dreaming about when they would be able to do this again.

So maybe I’m hoping to get a little bit of that warm, ‘riding with the guys’ feeling as I lined up with Kyle, who is a joy to watch ride a bike and boy can he ride, and Blake who rode the whole thing on an old cheap bike converted to a single speed, and Kurt who generated the electricity for his lights (instead of using those wussy battery lights like everyone else) and Mike who brought a small consignment store’s worth of clothing from multiple decades and sports, and Jonathan who rode the team issue race bike right down to his name and country flag on the top tube and who was so grateful when Mike dug into his duffel bag and pulled out a down jacket for him at one particularly cold time of the night, and Marshall who is definitely old enough to know better but doesn’t act or ride like it, and Johnny who rode his 29er mountain bike with disk brakes, shock fork and smooth tires and it didn’t slow him down a bit, and all the rest who, when it got really cold in the dead of night would turn towards the sag car when it showed up like zombies in a horror movie and shuffle over with blank eyes and drape themselves over the hood or press hands, feet or cheeks to the lights or hug the wheels to get at whatever warmth could be had. And when the ride was finished, tired, happy, starved, they went to the Little Grill for breakfast. Nothing like riding with your friends and then grabbing a bite afterwards.

I never rode a bicycle with my dad, but once, when I was in high school, I found a matching his-and-hers pair of old balloon tire bikes in the trash, which I took home and completely went over, polished and tuned them and gave them to my parents as gifts. When I unveiled them on our driveway, my mom looked at hers like she was wondering what in the world she would ever do with this. Dad, however, got on his and rode down the driveway, turned left and went to the stop sign, kept going and rode out of sight, eventually coming back to the stop sign from a different direction and glided back to our driveway with a smile of pure delight. It had probably been 30 years since he was last on a bike and I don’t think he ever rode one again. Maybe that’s why I ride, too. Milt - May 18, 1918 --- January 3, 2005

Photographic Evidence the Blogger has Ridden a Bike in the Past Ten Years

This was taken at the local Bike Club Century last month but there is nothing in it that would indicate it wasn't ten years ago. Not the bike, the clothes or the goofy expression.

That guy could sure use to lay off the whoopie pies and boy could he use a new bike.

Both of which he is working on. Stay tuned.

Six Years Ago

Six years and a month ago M was big. Very big. She was bulbous, spherical, taut with the twins crammed inside her and she had lost that pregnant ‘glow’; it had been replaced by an ever-present film of perspiration since every movement, every action took so much effort. She was big and pink and shiny and she was at the point where she grunted, pursed her lips and sighed a lot, but never a deep sigh because she had no way to take a deep breath with all those babies filling her diaphragm.

Then one rainy day, six years and a couple of weeks ago, she got that blank look on her face, that inward stare that meant she was joining thousands of years of women in that sacred primal birth space. And I saw that look and knew it was time for me to start pacing, boiling water and chain-smoking, even though I didn’t smoke. It was also time to call her parents to come up and stay with Older Boy who was exactly 20 months and one day old.

This is what Older Boy looked like around then.

M seems to be glaring in all the pictures she is in and none of them are electronic but here is a picture of what her parents car looked like at that time.Once M’s parents arrived things had gotten far enough along that the doula thought we should head over to the hospital. When we got there they took M away through some doors and I paced and chain-smoked and then we took the babies home.

OK, not really.

We settled into one of the birthing rooms that had soft lighting and lots of wood and a window that looked out over the parking deck. I unpacked the music that we never listened to and the snacks that we never ate. And then, for the next 24 hours or so M worked and worked and grunted and squatted and breathed and did everything possible, while I held her hand and mouthed “what is going on??” and “what do I do now?” to the doula.

At some point, I’m not sure when, things got surreal and numbers began to change and monitors began to beep and brows began to furrow and the Doctor bustled in and everyone began to murmur and it was agreed that these kids were not coming out without a struggle and M didn’t have the struggle left in her, so they moved us to the surgical area and everybody scrubbed and gowned and got ready.

When we moved from the birthing room to the operating theatre it reminded me of when we were in New York City with some friends. We had finished a wonderful dinner and probably a little too much wine and we were tired out but we set out on an adventure another friend had told us about. We went to the Essex House hotel on Central Park, took the elevator as far as it went, 40 floors or so, then found the stairs and went as far as they went, to a big thrumming mechanical room, and then found a door that put us out onto the lower roof of the building and we walked around the roof, following the outside wall of the mechanical room until we found a rusty iron ladder which took us all the way up to the very top of the hotel, right under the giant “Essex House” sign.

It may have been 11 at night and there were huge floodlights focused on the sign and everything up there was bright and buzzing. But the view was breathtaking. Like this, but try to imagine it at night:

But it was absolutely terrifying and I had no idea how we would ever get back to our regular lives again and what if something went wrong, what would we do? How did we get there? I mean, I know what sequence of events transpired to get us right there right then but really, how did we get there?

The operating room was also bright and buzzing and was crammed with people: me, M, the doula, the anesthesiologist, and because M was carrying twins they had two of everyone else: two Doctors, two surgical nurses, two newborn nurses and two other nurses whose jobs appeared to be to root around in the back of everyone elses gowns and check all the buzzing pagers, let the pager wearer know what it said and then call from the OR to say “the Dr. is a little tied up at the moment but she advises you to go to the hospital and she’ll see you sometime after you get here.”

And then they were there, alive and out.

It was the next morning before everyone was where they were supposed to be in the hospital and I finally called home to tell M’s parents the great news. After the congratulations and inquiries as to statistics and health, we all agreed that it would make sense for M’s parents to take Older Boy home with them for a few days until we were home with the twins. At that point, M’s dad ventured, quietly, “well, there is one thing…”

“Somebody stole our car from in front of your house last night.”

So the twins birthday will always be paired, in family lore, with the night Grandma and Grandpa’s car got stolen from in front of our old house.

The car was found, eventually, and M’s parents drove for a long time after that before trading it in on something newer. And the twins, well, we won’t be trading them in any time soon.
Happy 6th, you two. It is so nice to have you here in our family.

More Ways to Tell You are Visiting a Plumber

A water fountain,

a work sink,

a bathroom that is nicer than any in our house, and

all of these are in the garage.

The following smiles are brought to you by Back to School

Nobody does family like M's family does family

One of the events on our summer calendar was a reunion of M’s mom’s side of the family, held in the Tidy Farm Town where M’s mom’s family is from and where M spent some of her formative years, into her moody adolescence. They don’t have these reunions often - the last one was when M was pregnant with the twins, who will turn 6 this fall. And considering the amount of work that goes into them it is amazing they have them at all. But they do the work: months of emailing until every meal is accounted for, figuring out who will bring what, put the food out and clean up. Activities are planned and tents are rented. Fields are mowed, tires inflated, wood chopped, balloons are hung. And then all sixty-something of us arrive. Although there are a lot of activities there is also ample time and space to sit and talk, catch up on lives, gawk at kids growth and ponder the aging of the aunts, uncles and ourselves. The age range this time was two to 101.

Now don’t misunderstand – I love my family and cherish the opportunity to get together with them, which happens much less often than M’s family does. We’ve never had a reunion with cousins and aunts and uncles. But M’s family is different. Consider the first time I met M’s family:

M decided to introduce me to her family at the weekend of celebrations for her dad’s retirement. He had been a pastor at the same church for 15 years or so and his retirement was a pretty big deal. Four of M’s five siblings came, with spouses and kids. The church had special services and a giant potluck. Someone loaned M’s family a large house where we could share meals and play ping-pong.

I am not the church-going type, or to put it another way, I’m Jewish. So when I found myself dressed up and sitting in a pew with all of M’s family except her dad, who was of course up front, I thought it was kind of novel. My extremely limited church experience had never included a Mennonite service so it was interesting to see the lack of ornamentation in the church. It was amazing when they sang and the entire congregation sang in strong four part harmony. And then the special presentations for M’s dad began, with skits and rememberances and it was all very new and quite moving. And then I looked down the pew at M’s family. And they were all sobbing. Every last one of them including the in-laws. A tissue box kept going from lap to lap, up and down the row.

I had known M about four months at that point, which means we were two months from engagement and nine from marriage. And this kind of open display of emotion was not something my family ever engaged in. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I did nothing but sit there and keep listening, figuring this would be over soon and all the sobbing would end.

After the service and lunch we gathered at the ping-pong house and the whole family sat down and one by one talked about what they were doing these days and how that was and what they were feeling and, sure enough, everybody was gushing all over again. This level of unabashed emotion was absolutely not something I had ever experienced in my own family and as I sat there with my future in-laws I was elated and terrified. I’m still not completely used to this aspect of being with them.

And of course, there was no beer. So as noted above, very different from my family.

So there we were heading off to see M’s extended family. Things started well, leaving the house only about a half hour later than we planned. The mountains start about twenty minutes from our driveway, which is where M’s lead-foot began to fight with her thriftiness and the thriftiness won, aided by the $4 a gallon gas. This meant that M (who does most of the driving on our trips) drove uncharacteristically slowly through the mountains. This also meant the risk of carsickness was dramatically reduced, and we made it through the mountains with some groaning and complaining (from both car and children) but no puking or blown hoses.

At our first stop to let the kids out and pee, I also got a cup of coffee at a fast-food joint. Walking back to the van I was about to ask M if she had brought much cash when she asked me, slightly panicked, if I’d seen her purse:
“Yes,” I said, “in the hat and glove boxes by the front door before we left.”
“Did you put it in the car?” she asked.
“Um, should I have?”
“Well, did YOU bring any money or a cell phone?”
At that moment I realized I had just spent 33% of the cash we had with us on a small cup of weak coffee.
“Don’t worry, I brought the checkbook” which I fished out of my backpack to find it had - one – check left in it. We also had one credit card with us so we weren’t really any worse off than our parents were in all the family trips we’d ever been on when we were kids. But since we are way too cheap to actually get a cash advance from our credit card we opted to sponge off family whenever we needed cash. Which in these modern times is seldom.

We got there eventually. The first night M’s family stayed at a motel together which gave us an opportunity to – yes – sit around and share again, as a big group. The kids also got to swim in the pool. The next morning we moved to M’s Uncle C and Aunt G’s house. Uncle C is a retired plumber. When they first retired they did what a lot of formerly hard-working retirees do, which is they bought a giant motor-home and drove it around with a car flopping along behind it. But they got tired of this pretty quickly and decided that retirement was for the birds so they went to their church and asked for something to do and were promptly sent to a small village in Guatemala to build schools and dorms and they’ve been doing that, eight or ten months a year, for years now. I look forward to retirement to putter and ride my bike but I guess they aren’t putterers.

That weekend in the Tidy Farm Town the Amish and Old-Order Mennonites were having a big flea market and sale for charity so we got to see a lot of those folks walking around and enjoying the weather and company. They don't like to have their pictures taken but their horses don't seem to mind.

Nor do their buggies.

Back at Uncle C and Aunt G's place;

Camp is being set up (no that's not our Westy, but it is our tent in the foreground and some of our clothes on the line), and;

Catch is being played, and;

Uncle C has started cooking on his elevated fire, which is something he learned in Guatemala. Under the fire, in the box, is wet dirt. This way he can cook over an open fire without having to bend over. Some of us were sure this contraption would burn to the ground before the weekend was over.

It was working fine when we left.

Of course, there were two more fires. The firepit is in the back, for recreational purposes, and the steaming cauldron in the front for hot water. And if you are wondering what we did with the water from the steaming cauldron, we mixed it with the cold running water from the sink mounted on a fence.

Have I mentioned Uncle C is a retired plumber?