The last voice mail

My iPhone screen cracked yesterday.  Not a big deal for the most part except for one thing that occurred to me at the Apple Store that lead to a simple question: How do I save a voice mail message?

You see, my dad was not a big technology person.  One of my favorite pictures of him was taken the day he got a digital camera years ago and, in true Dad fashion, said something to the effect of, "How does this damn thing work?" and snapped an accidental selfie of his eye.

Years later, this photo still not only captures my dad, but also makes me smile.  The other day I showed it to someone who just laughed outright and said, "That's beautiful."

That was totally my dad.  When he died unexpectedly in January and it left a black hole in my life I also didn't expect.

See, as he got older (although I suspect he was always like this) he was a total pain in the ass.  Sometimes he would go into "lonely old man mode."  At night before he fell asleep, he'd be sitting alone in his home watching TV and call me randomly.  If I answered and said, "What's the matter?  I'm at school do I need to head down there?" he would sheepishly apologize and say he meant to call one of my siblings.  One night I was at school and saw his selfie pop up on the phone and let it go to voice mail.  It was just a message saying, "Oh Karlsie... sorry, I was trying to reach Puppy..."  with some other somewhat unintelligible muttering.

I don't know why I never deleted it and a month later he was gone.

It right around his birthday when I went into my voice mail to delete something and notice it.  The sound of his voice brought me comfort, a smile and some tears.  It was his last voice mail he left for me.

The summer was a bit of a struggle with me.  I kept artificially busy but there would be times when I would get hammered by a series of small events that would leave me numbly sitting on the couch trying not to get sucked into that black hole left in the fabric of my life.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to go through with duplicating his tattoo.  I had it placed above my right ankle as he was my anchor.  I wanted to keep the "USN" from his WWII Navy tattoo, but chose to slide it onto the anchor itself and have his initials on the banner that originally bore his proud affiliation.  I know when it's my mom's turn to let go of the grass and become part of Heaven's light that shines through the fabric of the night sky, she will float above him as the North Star to continue to guide me.

So yesterday, when a student needed to call his mom, I lent him my phone.  It slipped from his hand and landed face down on the playground asphalt and cracked.  I sat in the Apple Store hoping for an appointment, that never came, when it hit me.  That silly voice mail is the last time I would my dad's voice and I'm just not ready to let that go.  Which is when I asked, "How can I save a voice mail?  I don't think I want to risk never hearing my dad's voice again."  He told me of a program that might work and I was able to import that short statement of apology.

There is now an .mp4 of my dad's last vice mail on my hard drive to listen to for as long as I need.

Farewell Summer

It is the last day of astronomical summer and it's beautiful out. Fall has started to creep in around the edges, but today is sunny and warm and a real rag top kind of day. 

As I drove down the highway on the way to visit my mom, I put iTunes on shuffle to see if the secret mood selector was working today. It was mixing along nicely when I was passing Dorchester Bay and "Blue Roses Falling" started playing. 

Now I admit I love Jake Shimabukuro but in that moment, I felt summer would last forever. 

While I waited for my mom's activity to finish up, I took a walk next door to visit Abagail Adam's garden and muse a bit. 

Summer will officially end in a few hours, but sitting on a bench at Peacefield, listening to Jake play while recording these thoughts on modern technology, I am at peace. 

The Creepy Cherub

 If you walk past the house and look quickly, you will see a cherub holding a lantern in the front yard.  You may dismiss the lawn art as tacky, but there's a story.

Shortly after we moved to this house, I went out for a run one morning.  When I got back about 45 minutes later, the cherub was there.  It's really kind of creepy looking and freaked me out a little.  I assumed one of the kids acquired it somehow and thought it would be funny.

I was wrong.

It appeared.  It appeared magically and it is creepy looking.  It has spent the last 8 or 9 years freaking out those who stop to take a close look at it.

"Seriously dude, it's not that bad..." they all say when I give directions to the house.  (Look for the lovely red brick house with impeccable landscaping.  We're the tan house next door with the creepy cherub bringing down her property value.)

You see, I'm pretty superstitious. And I truly believe this thing has something bad trapped inside, so I try to plant things around it to neutralize the ominous vibes I get from it.  I have never seen silver artemisia die so fast as the time I planted several around the base of the creepy cherub.  (In fact, it may be why Artemis got pissed off at me for a while... we're sort of back to friendly, but I never made that mistake again.)  The only things that seem to be able to hold it at bay is rosemary and sage.

One winter we had so much snow, the cherub got buried in the snow.  It was a happy winter where things seemed to be OK and flow nicely around here... then came the spring thaw.

As you can see, the cherub made it clear it was still here and not carried off by a plow.

Eventually it emerged from the snowbank and declared it's triumph.

A friend suggested dressing it up for the holidays.  Feather boas, knit bombing, etc. might be enough to neutralize the way the spell, "Ridikulous!" neutralizes a boggart in Harry Potter.

I'm too scared to do so.

But today, as I came into the house with the cat food, the Cherub told me it was time for me to tell others of its existence.  I don't know why, but like I say, the thing scares me.

If it disappeared in the middle of the night, as quickly and silently as it appeared, I wouldn't object.  I wouldn't ask questions and I would probably breathe a sigh of relief.

A lesson adults need to learn

There is lots of speculation of what is wrong with this country and the world.  In my opinion it's a simple thing.

One of the things we teach kids is to say, "I'm sorry," when they're wrong.  It's a lesson more adults need to learn or, at the very least, remember.

Take, for example, Campbell Brown's crusade against teacher tenure and her dragging the ladies from "The View" into the battle.  Rather than say, "Wow, I hadn't realized I'd been fed misinformation and tenure actually is being a misused term here...." and looking at what is the real problem (the process of dismissing people who are truly bad teachers - and they're out there), it would be one thing.  Instead these folks have become the public face of misinformation and are more worried that they'll look stupid or weak or whatever than accept we make mistakes.

One of the greatest things I teach kids is, "I used to think, now I know."  It is a way to take a misconception out of the personal realm ("Everyone will think I'm stupid...") and into learning ("Oh, I didn't have all the information so now I understand...").

So let me start with this: the Common Core isn't entirely wrong.  Don't misunderstand me, I still believe it to be deeply flawed in its overemphasis of non-fiction texts and gearing towards high-stakes testing (which is a mistake no matter how you look at it), but the way it layers and builds information from one grade to the next is actually pretty logical.  It also lays down a baseline to make sure that it shouldn't matter where you go to school, you are guaranteed to learn science is real and not some mythology that caters to the fantasy that early humans got to play with dinosaurs.

Let me finish with this note to Whoopi Goldberg, Campbell Brown and all those who think teacher tenure is bad and the union needs to be broken:  Unions are not the root of evil.  If so, then I challenge Whoopi to burn her SAG card as an act of resignation.  I certainly hope that Campbell Brown doesn't belong to the National Writers Union.  I ask why you support police, fire, athletic, actors, writers and so many other unions but feel teachers don't have the right to union support?

So you have a choice right now.  You can stand up in public and say, "I used to think.... but after listening to what others have to say and doing a little research (which ALL good journalists should do), I have learned that...."

Sketch

Childhood memories

Live in my rear view mirror

Guiding my future

The perils of being a writer

Blunt Object

Most writers I know will understand.

The other day I was sitting in the waiting room at the dentist's office waiting for my son when the story began to reveal itself.  It was a young girl who began to let me know about her presence and I began getting a sense of her.  I pulled out my writer's journal and began to take notes.  It was mostly a bullet list of characteristics: what her hair and clothes looked like, what was on her iPod (including what it looked like), some of her thoughts and so on and I diligently took notes on what she revealed.

Wednesday morning I had plans to clean my office after the recent cat attack that left it in shambles but, instead, she began telling me her story and I was obliged to record it.  Three chapters in, I realized I still didn't know her name, so I posted a question over at the Writers Unboxed page asking if this had ever happened to anyone before.  A number of others over there told me that happens to them and pointed to other pieces of literature where the characters are never named.

Phew.

At the end of the first act, five chapters in, she told me her name.

So yes, I wrote 1/3 of a novel not knowing my main character's name.  I knew the name of a couple of kids she hung out with, her teachers and others, but not her name.

There are other oddities in this story so far.  For one, I don't know where it's going.  I know a couple of things that will present themselves, but I don't know how or why yet.  I don't know what happened before the story started to set events into motion.

If I didn't know better, I'd swear I was reading the story, not writing it.

Then I remembered the story J K Rowling told about Sirius Black's death.  She said that right after she wrote the scene she was bawling her eyes out and went to tell her husband.  Her husband told her to just rewrite the scene and keep him alive when Rowling looked at him and said she couldn't because that's where the story went.  I immediately understood but several non-writing friends had the attitude, "That's ridiculous.  Of course you can go back and fix it."

No, no you can't.

So I will let her finish revealing her story to me over the coming week and then go back through with a critical outsider's eye to edit it.  Maybe she will tell me why she doesn't like her name (I'm assuming that's why she's not telling me much about it).  I know she will tell me her back story once she trusts me enough (and yes, I really feel like she's determining if she can trust me or not) and yes I'm keeping my notebook near by for when she starts talking to me again.

It's another one of those perils of being a writer.

Happy Birthday

My mother turned 90 this weekend.

I suppose it's not as great a feat as it once was given medical science in all.  In fact, it was a year ago that she had her first stroke (literally) on the eve of her 89th birthday.  A year and another stroke later, we gathered with a group of women at the skilled nursing facility she's in and had a sing along, cake and ice cream, and just celebrated.

It wasn't a large party but it was a big one in that, had you asked me at this time last year if I thought we'd be having it, I probably would have said, "No."  Yet here we were - me with two of my brothers and my big sister - leading a sing along to standards like "You're a Grand Old Flag" and "Ain't She Sweet."

Mom's engagement picture

My brother lead on guitar, my Pi guy provided rhythm and at one point we got my older boy in there on uke to join in as well.  It truly was just a happy get together celebrating a woman who raised the six of us and used to love to sit down at her keyboard and sing.  Growing up, my parents would have these parties at the house that would always end up with her playing and people singing.

My dad couldn't remember the words to any song (why remember when you could just scat bum-diddy-bum-diddy-do to just about anything?) but he loved to hear her play.  His face would light up and he would whistle along.

Painting of our parents
by my sister, Paula Villanova 

We had a hi-fi in the corner of the living room where my folks would listen to Dean Martin, Nat King Cole and other records.  I still remember the Danish modern cabinet it sat in with it's beige fabric covered speakers and gold threads woven in a diamond pattern through out.  As a kid, my mom bought me a copy of the Mary Poppins sound track and I loved listening to it.

My folks went to fancy dances at the country club and yacht club (which sound far snootier than they really were).   Sometimes my mom would be in the kitchen getting dinner ready and my dad would walk in, whistling, and grab her to give a quick spin and a dip.  She would always growl, "Paul I'm trying to get dinner on the table," and he would wander off with a grin on his face.   Music and dance - what a happy set of memories to have when I think of my folks.

my folks dancing at my wedding in '88

As we grew, all of us had our own phonographs.  Never the close 'n play kind of crap but a real stereo with a record changer and two speakers and everything!  We also had transistor radios - and not just the AM ones but ones that picked up those crazy underground FM stations that were starting to emerge.

Hell, 50 years ago she let me try to stay up late to watch the Beatles on Ed Sullivan and let my big brother Phil take me to see my very first movie: A Hard Day's Night.  He took me to the Satuit Playhouse, where I was so small, he had to hold his knee against the seat to keep it in the upright position so I could sit on top to see the screen.  I remember asking him why all the girls in the theatre kept screaming to which he replied, "I wish I knew...."  It was years later before I understood what his answer really was.

My tastes in music were formed in the sounds of those early years of the big bands, rat pack and crooners that my parents loved and the emerging underground radio of my youth.  Back when WBCN in Boston introduced me to music as diverse as Jimmy Buffett, Gil Scott Heron and Steeleye Span (sometimes all in a single set).  Mom never did get my love of Bruce Springsteen or the Ramones or even where I developed a taste in classical music along the way.  Sometimes she would tease me about it, mocking it on the days I was allowed to listen to "my music" in the car, sometimes she would just flip the dial back to her music.  When they moved back up from Florida a few years ago, my sons were helping unpack and Pi had on a Flogging Molly shirt.  My mom asked what a Flogging Molly was and he replied, "It's where your Irish music meets my Irish music in a happy, drunken place."

All of us for my dad's 88th birthday

"All right then," she said, but I know she likes that he can sing along to things like "Black Velvet Band" and "I'll Tell Me Ma."

Shortly before he died this year, we were listening to the Frank Sinatra channel on XM when my dad lamented how kids like my sons would never hear the great rhythms and melodies of the Big Bands.  So I played Reel Big Fish's "Don't Stop Skanking" for him and he smiled and felt like Pi would be OK with that crazy stuff he likes.

But music was always part of our household and continues to be.

My love of music, and my feeble attempts at playing, come from her.  So it seemed right and fitting that yesterday there were generations of us there to sing and play and rejoice.  I know we won't have her much longer.  Medical science has come a long way, but not so far as to grant immortality and eternal youth.  But it really was a lovely afternoon and the refrain of "Ain't She Sweet" is stuck in my head.  It swings back and forth from my brother's voice to Paul McCartney's to my dad's whistling, but what's important is it's there.