Tag Archives: Humor

Corpus Christi Beach to Bay Relay Marathon: A Crucible For Runners

If Aging Racefully, my 2022 Beach to Bay Relay Marathon team, were a horse, it would have been scratched from the race. If it were a building, it would have been condemned. An airliner, it would have been grounded. And yet, inspired by our perpetually sunny, 84-year-old, triple bypass and cancer survivor team captain, Herman Vacca, we somehow hobbled to the finish line.

My five teammates and I are all over sixty, so our replacement parts outnumber our original equipment. And while our rate of decay is accelerating, so is our determination to face down aging’s deleterious effects: Two of us delayed lower body surgeries until shortly after the race, and I was having great difficulty breathing after running three miles. Not exactly the makings of a dream team. 

So, what’s behind our mad compulsion to finish our four-to-five-mile legs against all medical advice? What gets our creaky joints out of bed to train through South Texas’ pea soup summers and gazpacho winters? Why do we care so much about a meaningless race?

The answer is our ten-year captain, Herman Vacca. How can we bow to the ravages of age and quit training knowing that Herman, who is at least fourteen years older than any of us, runs five miles every other day to prepare for the race? How can we not finish our legs knowing he always finishes his? And how can we ever thank Herman enough for inspiring us to keep running when it would make so much more sense to stop?

All that’s true, but it’s still up to each of us to finish our leg despite an underappreciated phenomenon about Beach to Bay that needs to be more, er, appreciated: While four or five miles might not sound like much, the grinding heat and humidity of mid-May Corpus Christi make it a bucket list test for any runner.

Several years ago, after completing the five-mile last leg, I was sitting on a curb, semi-conscious, struggling to catch my breath when I was joined by a much younger, Austinite runner in a similar state. For several minutes, we were incapable of speaking to each other, but after we regained our faculties, he looked at me and asked between gulps of air, “What’s the deal? I can run a marathon in Austin and not be this beat. I don’t know if I can make it to my car.” 

I squinted up at our white giant sun in our blowtorch blue sky and answered, “It’s always like this.”  

“Do you ever get used to it?”

“No,” I replied and pointed him toward the beer tent. 

This year, because our team was slowed by medical issues, I ran the last leg from about 12:30 to 1:30 p.m. After three miles, there was a physical sensation of pushing against a wall of heat and humidity. There was also a menacing pinprick sensation along the top of my head as my feet burned on the asphalt. Unable to breathe the soupy air, I stopped for a minute to retch and then began walking while struggling to catch my breath. 

I was forced to intermittently run and walk the last two miles. The saintly volunteers at the water stations provided me much needed kind words and desperately needed hydration. A few of the many people who drove by shouted encouragement, and a few die-hard Ocean Drive homeowners endured the sauna-like conditions to douse me with water. I thanked each of them profusely; I’m not sure I’d have made it without their support. While I understand the impulse to cheer on the winners, if you’re looking to help people who are really suffering, stick around to root for us in-over-our-heads nonathletes struggling to finish our legs in the midday sun. 

Slowed by our medical issues, my team completed the race in 6 hours and 25 minutes, a mere 4 hours behind the winners. Overtaken by several glaciers along the way, we finished 974th.  I couldn’t help but think how proud my father would have been; he always told me whatever I do in life, strive to finish 974th.

As lousy as our time was, we were okay with it. We knew we’d done our best under difficult circumstances. And the satisfaction that comes from that is what all those postrace Beach to Bay revelers are celebrating. 

It’s a well organized race with a fun atmosphere that every runner should experience at least once. 

But be prepared. 

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Retirement Diary: The First Seven Seconds

 I accomplished my main retirement goal within the first seven seconds of the first day. At precisely 5:30 AM, as it had for forty years, my despised alarm clock blared Monday morning mayhem into my sleepy skull. Eyes still closed, I reflexively reached over to spank the snooze button when I realized with a start that this day was different. Today, this work dog had slipped the leash: I was free! Free to do whatever I wanted for the whole day. Free in a way I’d never been in my entire life. No parents, no boss telling me where I had to be and what I had to do. Free as an eagle sailing an updraft over a high mountain lake. Free as a lion slinking through the tall grass on a broad African savannah. Free as a dolphin leaping along big surf off a black Hawaiian beach. Free! Living for the pure joy of it. No longer waking every weekday and having my first thought be, “Is there any excuse I can use to get out of going to work today?” Not tethered by mid-year reviews, yearly evaluations, customer ratings, puny raises, or my boss’ scowl. Never again driving to work ruminating about all my long overdue projects while praying that I wouldn’t get sidetracked by the crisis du jour, only to get hit as I stepped into the office by two hellish crises du jour. Not looking over my shoulder at computer savvy younger employees or an ambitious subordinate. No longer one email away from disaster. Free of the weight of my boss’ expectations and my own petty ambitions. No longer having to make good impressions each time I interacted with every single person up my supervisory chain. Free of the burden of having to always say the politically correct thing and of constantly editing my speech to avoid giving any, even dimly perceived, offense because that was absolutely verboten. No more awkward small talk with my fellow nobodies as we waited for the important people to show up late for meetings. Not having to make everyone laugh at some halfwitticism during and, most critically, at the end of meetings. No more pretending that something of great consequence had been accomplished during a meeting and solemnly discussing it with another employee as we exited the conference room. No more spreadsheets.  No more PowerPoints. Never again having to sit through any presentations of any kind. No more charts. No more fiscal years. Never again having to live under the tyranny of a supervisor’s moods. Never again counting to ten before responding to a provocative email. No more heart palpitations as I frantically search my crashing computer for the CYA email that will exonerate me from responsibility for some misbegotten project that has finally exploded into the flaming fiasco it was always destined to be. No more weekends and holidays ruined by a work crisis. Never again staring forlornly out my office window at sultry summer, crisp autumn, snowy winter, and balmy spring days. No more Microsoft Office updates. No more searching for lost files and documents. Never again fearing that the last thing I’ll see in this beautiful world are life-sucking fluorescent lights as I’m gurneyed feet first out of my office. No more thermostat wars. Never again feeling your heart thud against your chest when you’re suddenly ripped from the deepest REM sleep by the horrifying realization that you screwed up something crucial at work in some unfixable way. No more Human Resources, Accounting, IT, or Legal. No more impatiently waiting for vacation requests to be approved. Being free to drink a beer with lunch – or breakfast. Not having to answer calls I don’t want to take. Never again filling with dread while watching the lengthening shadows of another mournful Sunday sundown as I pondered whether this will be the week that my ineptitude will finally do me in at work.

As I lay in bed with my hand poised over the snooze button, all these memories and more swept over me in a tsunami of regret – and pride –because, even when weighed in the scales of the Old Testament, forty years is a long time to persevere through suffering.

And so, on the seventh second of my retirement, I fumbled in the dark for the alarm clock’s power cord and gave it a yank. Then I slowly rolled over and dreamed my way into the Promised Land.

BEATERMANIA

“I’m gonna drive it ‘til the doors fall off,” is the mournful boast of beater drivers everywhere. No one really drives their car until the doors fall off. But I did.
It was a 1985, 4-banger Mustang I bought off the showroom floor. It was red. It was love at first sight. It was a big mistake.
I’ve always driven clunkers, and, while the door falling off the Mustang was a singular phenomenon, I’ve been fascinated by the fact that their other parts follow pretty much the same order of failure.
The first to fail is the helpful alarm that buzzes when you open the driver’s door with the key in the ignition. If you’re seeking proof of satanic forces, look no further than the fact that you always realize you’ve locked your keys in the car at the precise instant the lock clicks shut.
The next to go is the gas gauge. This isn’t so bad because you usually have a pretty good idea how much gas you have – until you don’t. One night, I ran out on the Crosstown but happily realized there was a gas station at the next exit which I thought I just might be able to coast to. But as I exited, a blockhead on the access road refused to yield. If I braked, I wouldn’t make it to the station, so I yelled, “I can’t stop!” Terrified, he locked up his brakes and I crawled to the pump.
The electric windows are next. This is doable, so long as the AC works.
Then comes the coup de grace: The AC’s final, catastrophic failure. It’s always between $1200 to $1600 to fix which is always between $1200 to $1600 more than you have.
If you’re forced to drive during a Corpus Christi summer with the windows up and a broken AC, you might as well put lumps of biscuit dough on an ungreased baking sheet in your lap because you’re cruising around in a Dutch oven. So, you break down and get the windows fixed.
Some try to prove how tough they are by climbing Everest or cage fighting. But they’re nothing compared to summer driving without AC. I did it for years, and it completely changes your focus. You become as aware of wind direction as an America’s Cup skipper because the survivability of every stoplight depends on whether there’s a breeze blowing through your car. Shade is also lifegiving, so you cozy up to tall buildings, 18 wheelers, and shade trees.
I was well into the Mustang’s broken AC phase when the door fell off. It was about 12 years old and had six trillion miles on it. The Gulf Coast’s salty air had done its worst, and rust was all that held it together.
That day, I parked at an office building, and as I opened the door it broke off with a loud crack and crashed to the ground. It was a big shock to me, but not as big as it was to the woman pulling into the space next to me.
I jammed it as best I could into the back seat and drove doorless to my long-suffering mechanic, Donny. He came out of his shop, and I howled, “I’m getting rid of this beater!” He put his head in his hands and wept softly.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My son’s starting college,” he sobbed.
Taking pity on Donny, I had him weld the door shut.
I drove it another few weeks, but now I had to enter through the passenger door, very carefully Fosbury Flop over the spiky K2 of the handbrake, and plummet to the driver’s seat. I was pushing 40 by then, and this was a bit much.
I’d been to the dealership several months before, but sticker shock had sent me running. This time, my wife and I headed there with our two rambunctious kids determined to make a deal.  The plan was to buy my wife a new car; I’d get the keys to her clunker, and we’d trade in the Mustang.
It took five excruciating hours because the salesman kept leaving to implore the sales manager to approve the deal’s latest iteration. It would have taken less time to interrupt Edsel Ford’s Saturday golf game and ask the great man himself.
Finally, all that remained was appraising the Mustang.
I don’t know what came over me. Maybe it was the screaming kids, or the five hellish hours of financial embarrassment, but, whatever it was, I told the salesman, “You know, I was here a couple of months ago, and it was appraised then.” He found the record on his computer and gave me $500.
I hustled the family out to our new car just as the salesman headed for the Mustang. As we drove off, I suddenly remembered I’d left my beloved Van Halen 1984 cassette in the tape player. I skidded to a stop, ran to the Mustang, jackknifed in the driver’s window, snatched the cassette, gave the approaching salesman a quick wave, and ran back to our car.
As we drove away, I watched in the rearview mirror as the puzzled salesman yanked harder and harder on the door handle.
Score one for the Beater Brigade.
Peter Merkl is a longtime resident of Corpus Christi.

DIGITAL AHAB

It’s not surprising that those who grew up playing with computers seem to trust and even love them as adults. They’ve happily integrated computers into every aspect of their lives – from the workplace to their refrigerators – and routinely accomplish astonishing things with them. And because they’ve developed an intuitive sense for how information can be manipulated on a computer screen, this integration is almost cyborg-like in its seamlessness. So, as the physical world increasingly disappears into the screaming vortex of the digital, it’s become very clear that The Future belongs to them. The question is, what does that leave for those of us who grew up playing with Lincoln Logs and Hula Hoops?

I’ve always hated computers because, like many Lincoln Loggers, I know them for what they are— inflexible bureaucrats of the worst kind: Select the wrong item in a dropdown menu, and you’re toast. Forget to capitalize one letter in a 16-character password, you’re burnt toast.

They’re the sneering clerk at the DMV who, ignoring your cascading tears of despair, informs you in an emotionless monotone that your third attempt at filling out Form OH-478 was successful; however, it’s been replaced by the OH-478/A, which must be filled out in triplicate, notarized, and witnessed by six Cambodians.

They’re the cold-eyed teller who declined your deposit because you reversed the last two digits of your account number. And as bank guards and men with butterfly nets dragged you out, you shouted, “If dyslexics ever line up to deposit money in my account, you Einsteins better let them!”

And now that everyone carries a little computer with them everywhere they go, I feel like a wretched Captain Ahab who woke one day to find his ship crewed entirely by small white whales.

And yet people love them. They’re so convenient, they say.

Too convenient, I say.

I recently took a college class and watched in astonishment as the students around me surfed the Web on their laptops. They were on Facespace, news sites, and shopping for everything imaginable. It was so bad that occasionally the professor announced, “Okay, stop surfing. This is important.” A few managed to slowly raise their heads, but they were soon bored and drifted back to the comfy confines of the World Wide Web.

And when people are forced to wait even a few minutes for anything, they whip out their smartphones faster than Billy the Kid pulled his six-shooter. Every waiting area looks like a roomful of impatient monks bowing their heads in silent prayer to tiny, rectangular, glowing gods.

But computers finally beat me.

This year, our employee evaluation software refused to cooperate with me. Desperate to appear at least somewhat competent, I spent a frantic half hour struggling to submit my self-evaluation form, but everything I tried lured me down one digital blind alley after another. Finally, my young boss came by and asked how the form was coming.

“Oh, I just happen to be looking at that,” I replied airily, “but I’m a little stuck.”

He reached over my shoulder, clicked on something, and instantly submitted my form.

Staggered by the brute power of Darwinian forces, I gulped loudly. He smiled down at me in the same hopeless way Sister Paula did while she was laboring to teach me long division.

I’m thinking about wearing a beanie with a propeller on it for the rest of my life.

FRANKLIN IS GOD

The Fourth of July is the best day to show off what is, for many Texans, our secret super-power: barbecuing. On the outside, we look like ordinary citizens. But, give us a hot grill and some hamburger patties and, buddy, prepare to be dazzled. And people love us for it. What else can you do for family and friends that makes them as happy as cooking up a mess of BBQ?
But for the more devoted of us, that’s not enough. We seek to ascend to a higher realm. So, we graduate to smokers. And smokers inevitably, tragically lead to that most thorny of all barbecue riddles: brisket.
Now, we find ourselves waking before dawn to light the fire and lovingly massage our brisket with the latest sure-fire dry rub from HEB. All day long, like a punctilious steelworker, we stoke the fire in the blazing Texas sun struggling to keep it at the exact temperature recommended by the latest internet guru, and, in the process – as our spouses love to remind us – wind up smoking ourselves as much as the brisket.
And then, after way too many hours of toil and trouble, the great moment finally arrives when we cut into our beloved, only to find that it’s edible, but just too dry, too tough, too fatty, too smoky, too whatever. But rather than do the sensible thing and quit, we grimly accept the faint praise of our guests as they glumly saw and gnaw away, and silently resolve that next time we’ll lower the smoker temperature two degrees and try that new rub with the pineapple tenderizer.
Some of the more devout among us have made the barbecue stations of the cross by journeying to Central Texas to sample Smitty’s, Kreuz’s, City Market, et. al. hoping to discover their smoke-ringed secrets. You can easily spot us; we’re the ones poking at the moist brisket slices with our knives and studying them from different angles, like a desperate doctor in search of an elusive diagnosis. We’ll occasionally even hold one up to the light as we wonder how they managed to achieve such excellence.
And so things remained in the barbecue world for many years, until one day – like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky – Aaron Franklin, The Chosen One, appeared.
Several years ago, rumors began spreading out of Austin about a new barbecue joint that was serving the brisket of the gods. The story was that because Franklin’s closed as soon as the food ran out, scores of acolytes lined up every day before sunrise to wait for the place to open at 11:00.
I scoffed and dismissed the reports as mere hipster hysteria. That is, until I watched a cooking show about Mr. Franklin. During the interview, he tossed one of his smoked briskets onto a cutting board, and – I swear this is true – it jiggled like a water balloon. “No way!” I shouted as I replayed it, “That’s not possible!” If you did that to one of mine, it would jiggle nearly as much as a slab of granite. I immediately resolved to make a pilgrimage to Austin.
I got to Franklin Barbecue at 6:15 AM, and there were already twenty people ahead of me. At first, the waiting isn’t so bad. The whole thing has the cool, analog vibe of lining up to buy Zeppelin tickets in 1977, and it’s kind of fun to commiserate with your fellow postulants: The young, foodie couple behind me had flown from Kentucky just to try the brisket.
But, by the time the doors finally opened, I was completely over it; no barbecue could ever be worth this much time and trouble.
As the line slowly progressed through the ordinary looking dining room, I carefully examined the plates of the customers who’d already been served. After five hours of waiting, I half expected the brisket slices to be levitating and have halos around them, but they pretty much looked just like mine.
I finally made it to the counter, got my slices, and beelined for one of the communal tables. Filled with skepticism and feeling duped, I finally tasted The Chosen One’s brisket.
I’ve only eaten at one three-star Michelin restaurant; I splurged on lunch at Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin in NYC. What I remember most about that remarkable meal is the moment I realized that if a supremely talented person devotes their life to it and brings a manic attention to detail, cooking can approach the level of an art form. I was struck by that same realization at Franklin Barbecue.
My advice: Get on The Pilgrim’s Trail.

AIR TRAVEL AS CATTLE DRIVE

With one word, one of my fellow passengers perfectly described the experience of modern air travel.

I was recently waiting to board a 737 in yet another cookie-cutter terminal located somewhere in the USA. The flight had already been delayed three times, so when it was finally announced we’d be departing shortly, all 150 of us rushed expectantly toward the boarding area.

We stood there for another 20 minutes in an angry, sweltering mob with no explanation for the additional delay from the harried gate attendant. I locked eyes with the guy next to me who smiled wanly and said, “Moo.” That pretty much sums it all up.

Ten years ago, airlines sold 73% of their seats. Today, thanks to algorithms, they’re filling 84%. This increase has led to higher profits, but at the price of customer sanity. More passengers mean overcrowded boarding areas, slower boarding times, less room in overhead bins, stressed-out flight attendants, and a general, dehumanizing feeling of being herded.

My recent flight delay caused me to miss the last late-night connecting flight to Corpus Christi. As I stepped off the plane at DFW, an airline employee hurried by and handed me a boarding pass for a flight at 9 the next morning. “What am I supposed to do for the next 10 hours?” I asked as she rushed away. She shouted over her shoulder that she’d try to find me a hotel, and then promptly disappeared for a half-hour.

When she finally came back, she said the only nearby hotel with a vacancy was located in another terminal inside the airport. I told her that sounded great and asked for directions.

The hotel was hard to spot because it was just a retail storefront among many others in the terminal. As I approached the front desk, the pretty, perky clerk gave me a big smile and asked,”Are you planning to take a shower?”

After a hard day on the road, I figured I probably didn’t smell great, but still the question struck me as odd. “Why do you ask?”

“Because it’s $20 more to take a shower.”

“How would you know if I took a shower in my bathroom?”

“There’s no bathroom in your room. There’s only one shower, and it’s located down the hall.”

“What if I need to use the restroom in the middle of the night?”

“There’s a men’s room in the terminal.”

“There’s a men’s room in the terminal?“

She gave me another big smile, and said, “We’re not really a hotel. We’re more like a place to take a nap.”

Suffice it to say I spent a sleepless night in a tiny, frigid room curled up on a five-foot-long plastic upholstered couch shivering under the kind of blanket they give you for free if you subscribe to Sports Illustrated. The long night was interrupted only by my middle of the night, sleepwalking, sleep-haired trek through the terminal to get to the men’s room, which greatly amused everyone in the vicinity, except me.

The next morning, I was sitting bleary-eyed in my tiny window seat on a tiny jet to Corpus Christi watching as a very nice, very huge man was shimmying his hips like Shakira to try to fit between the armrests of the tiny seat next to me. It soon became apparent that this was impossible, so the stewardess reached over and raised the armrest between us. As he crashed into his seat, I was smashed up against the bulkhead like a swatted fly. For the next hour and sixteen minutes, our bodies were in constant, intimate, sweaty contact. As I finally deplaned, I thought the least the airline could have done was offered me a cigarette.

Believe me, I appreciate the speed of air travel and its relative affordability. And I also understand that narrow seats and full planes help keep ticket prices low. I’m just suggesting that the airline industry keep in mind that the cold, hard numbers in their algorithms represent human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

THE DAY I WON THE LOTTERY

Even if your whole life has been nothing but luckless drudgery, the fact is you can never be completely sure what will happen tomorrow. Maybe the cards will finally turn in your favor. One crazy day, they turned in mine – a little bit.
For years, I’d always driven to the same convenience store at lunchtime to get a printout of the winning lottery numbers to check against my losing numbers. There was a ritualistic sameness to it as I’d sit in my car sucking on a 32 ounce drink, checking the numbers, tearing up my losing ticket, and cursing myself for being stupid enough to keep playing this sucker’s game.
But on this day, I quickly saw I had picked three of the numbers. I opened the car door to go get my $3, but fell back into the seat when I saw I had four numbers. I thought I had somehow gotten hold of two winning number printouts, but no, it was actually my ticket. And then I suddenly realized I had five of the numbers.
My shocky, fevered brain then determined that I had picked all six numbers.
The tattered remnants of my soul shot out of my body and flew over the Circle K. I was free in a way I hadn’t been since I was a barefoot five year old running around my backyard.
But then stern reality reimposed itself, and I realized that I had misread the sixth number. There was an immediate physical sensation of crashing back to earth. After a minute or so, I looked at the printout and saw that I had won $1063 for picking five numbers. It was a long, long way from the 20-something million that would have almost gotten me completely out of debt, depending on whether my wife had gone shopping that afternoon.
I went back to work and tried to play it cool, but the ticket was burning a hole in my pocket. Was this little scrap of paper really worth $1063? I told my boss what happened, and he gave me the rest of the afternoon off. I made a beeline for the lottery office on Corona.
I walked in the door, and the lady behind the counter looked at me and said, “Let me guess, five out of six numbers, right?”
“How did you know?”
“Because every other winner who walks in here is happy, happy, happy. The only ones who look like their dog just died are the five-out-of-sixers.”
I cashed the check and went to pick up my kids early from after-school daycare. You have to understand that the father of a 6 and a 9 year old spends most of his time explaining to them why he can’t afford to buy them the thousands of things they’re always wanting. So when they came running up to me, and I shouted, “Tell me what you want me to buy for you,” they both skidded to a stop and stared at me as if I’d been body snatched.
That night I was careful to tell my wife “$1063, that’s how much I won in the lottery,” in that order, because I didn’t want her to go through anything like my ordeal in the car.
Some hijinks ensued the next day after my kids told everyone at school that their dad had won the lottery, but we weathered it.
Overall, my advice is to play the billion dollar lottery. But, have somebody else check your numbers.

Just Another Childbirth, No Big Deal

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As I watched the most beautiful girl in her class walk across the stage to collect her college diploma, I thought back to the first time I saw her 22 years ago.

Her mother and I had driven to the hospital very early that morning, running red lights (!) the whole way, but the doctor sent us home because she wasn’t far enough along. So we’d spent the rest of the day trudging up and down hills and walking around and around our apartment complex trying to speed things up, but nothing  seemed to work. When I told her I’d read about a woman who had climbed stairs carrying two heavy suitcases until things started moving along, she made a face, rolled her eyes, and went to bed.

By then it was 10 at night, and I was hungry. I searched the freezer and found a lobster frozen in a tube of seawater that I’d bought months before as a joke. I dropped it into a pot of boiling water and instantly the entire apartment reeked like Boston Harbor at low tide. That did it. She came into the kitchen, green at the gills, and announced we were immediately going back to the hospital. (More red lights!)  We were broke and had no insurance, so the plan was natural child birth: in and out of the hospital in 24 hours.

At first it was kind of fun. They put us in a homey “birthing room”, MTV was on, and the doctors and nurses were laughing and making jokes. Then about 4 in the morning the laughter stopped.  The baby’s blood pressure was too high and there was some danger the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck. Suddenly the comfy bed turned into a gurney, and I was running beside it careening toward an operating room.

The doctor gave my wife one more chance to push. She tried, but she was too far gone. The half asleep anesthesiologist on call ran in, his bare feet covered by blue doctor’s footies. Trays and other equipment were quickly wheeled in, and several O.R. nurses appeared. The prep for the C-section looked like something being thrown together at the last minute, which is exactly what it was.

A nurse noticed my ashen gray, sweaty face, quickly grabbed my arm, and dragged me back to the birthing room. A low pitched, keening sound I’d never made before or since emerged involuntarily from the back of my throat. “It always looks like that,” she assured me, “but they know what they‘re doing.” She left, and after a few minutes of taking deep breaths and feeling ashamed because I’d left my wife alone, I staggered back to the operating room. I held my wife’s hand and tried to appear calm. There was a ripping sound, a baby’s cry, and the doctor happily shouted, “How about a girl?” Nurses rushed the baby off and I was led back to the birthing room.

After a while, they took me to see my daughter. There she was in a clear plastic basinet with a McDonald’s warming light overhead. The nurse picked her up and handed her to me. I stared into those sky blue eyes, and saw everything all at once: loving, smiling, sleeping, laughing, crying, crawling, walking, falling, rising, running, playing, learning, dreaming, studying, leaving, graduating, working, struggling, marrying, mothering, nurturing, worrying, aging, dying, and loving.

As for me, my beloved, insatiable, all consuming self shattered like a windowpane hit by a Nolan Ryan fastball, and all that remained was the perfect baby girl I held in my arms.

How I Made Saint John Paul II Laugh, Twice

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In 1979, I spent a semester at the University of Dallas, Rome campus. A few days after we arrived, five or six of us decided to wander around the city to get our bearings. We wound up in St. Peter’s Square where we saw two parallel lines of barricades running down its center about twenty feet apart. When we asked why, we were told that when John Paul II returned that night from Mexico, he would be driven through the square in an open car. We hustled over to a spot right next to a barricade and began the long vigil.

As we waited, I thumbed  through  a little book of helpful foreign phrases for English speaking travelers. I sat up straight when I realized that some of them were in Polish. What better way to  stand out to a Pole in a crowd of screaming Italians than to yell something in Polish? We carefully studied the  book to choose just the right phrase and practiced it together all afternoon.

The huge crowd became electric when the Pope finally arrived. As his car drove slowly by, our little group shouted out in Polish, in unison, “Where are you going with our luggage?”  His head snapped around, and for a second his eyes flared with the burning indignation that would eventually smelt the Iron Curtain. But, when he saw it was a group of smiling, dumb – probably American – students  desperately trying to attract his attention, he laughed and gave us a blessing .

A couple of months later, we were working our way back to campus from the train station after a 5 day trip through several countries.  We were too broke even for youth hostels, but we did have Eurail passes, so we had slept on the trains.  We were tired, hungry, and didn’t smell great.

As we walked behind the Vatican, we saw several people obviously waiting for something. They told us the Pope was coming back from a dinner in town, and that this road led to his private drive. Just then, a large car drove up and stopped right in front of us. John Paul II popped out of the sunroof and everyone began taking pictures and wishing him a good night.
I threw my suitcase down, knelt beside it, and began frantically searching for my camera. I couldn’t find it. In desperation, I dumped its contents onto the street, but it was no use; it wasn’t in there. Then I noticed that all the cameras had stopped flashing, and that our little group had fallen into an awkward silence.

I looked up and saw that the Pope was patiently waiting for me to find my camera. As I knelt in the gutter, surrounded  by my dirty socks and underwear, I threw my arms out wide and shrugged my shoulders as if to say, “That’s life.” And then the Pope, the Occupant of the Throne of St. Peter, the Vicar of Christ threw out his arms wide and shrugged his shoulders as if to agree, “Yeah, that’s life.” He laughed, threw me a quick blessing, got back in the car and was driven away.

I miss him.

The Bad Dad Diaries, Volume I

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When the kids were little, I was badly sleep deprived, so I wouldn’t actually “wake up” until a half hour or so after getting out of bed. It was a weird, semi-dream state that left me incapable of communicating beyond grunting, nodding, and hearing every third word. My wife, on the other hand, was immediately wide awake and ready to organize the new day.

Every morning I’d rush – half comatose – out to the car, still fumbling with the buttons on my shirt, racing to get the kids to school on time. My wife would follow behind, herding the kids ahead of her while deftly fixing Erin’s hair or stuffing Matt’s homework into his backpack.

As I’d back the car out of the driveway, she’d hold on to the window frame sidestepping and shouting instructions like a NASCAR crew chief. “Pick them up from daycare at 5:30 and get Matt to soccer practice by 5:45. Erin needs to be at choir by 6, so it’s going to be close, and you know how they are if she’s late. I put an after school snack in their backpacks so don’t buy them any junk food. I’ll make spaghetti when I get home from work.” Watching her recede in the rearview mirror, I often thought I should buy her semaphore flags so she could get off one last signal before I turned the corner.

Amazingly, it usually worked. Except for that time when I got home about 7, and she asked, “Where are the kids?” Thinking it was some kind of fun, new guessing game, I smiled, looked around, and replied,” I don’t know. Where are they?”

“The daycare closed an hour ago,” she growled.

“I thought you…were…supposed…to…,” I quavered. Apparently I‘d missed a signal that morning. But, a quick trip across town to the daycare director’s home and a steep fine later all was well.

Most of the time though, thanks entirely to my wife, our morning routine worked well, and we all arrived wherever we were going on time. The first time she was out of town; however, there were a few snags.

I had no idea what she did every morning, but I figured waking up 10 minutes earlier would give me plenty of time to do whatever it was. After my alarm clock went off, I woke the kids, told them to get dressed for school, and went off to get ready for work. When I came back, I was surprised to find them in the living room sitting on the bottoms of their feet (as only those under 8 can do without requiring emergency dual knee replacement surgery) watching cartoons in their underwear. When I asked them why they weren’t dressed, Erin, without taking her eyes off the screen, said, “Mommy always gives us stuff to wear”

I ran to their rooms and found everything but Matt’s right sneaker. I tossed them their school clothes as I sped past them on my way to the kitchen, where I poured two glasses of orange juice, popped two glazed toaster pastries into the toaster, and hustled back to Matt’s room to find his lost sneaker. I’d looked everywhere and was looking there again when I spied it cowering in the black recesses of the farthest corner under his bed.

I was shimmying like Shakira under the bed and just managed to brush it with my finger when an alarm I’d never heard before went off. I lurched forward, banging my head on the underside of the box spring, and grabbed the shoe just as Matt yelled,

“It’s smoky.”

I again raced past them, their eyes still locked on the TV now blaring the Looney Tunes theme song, to find two bright orange tongues of fire from the toaster licking the underside of the wooden kitchen cabinets like twin flamethrowers. Forgetting whatever they taught me in Cub Scouts about fighting fires, I picked up the glasses and splashed OJ on the toaster. Fourth of July sparks burst from the toaster and the wall socket – but the fire was out. I pulled out the plug – more sparks – picked up the toaster and threw it into the sink.

That very second, my wife called. “Hi. You should have left for school 5 minutes ago.” Bang! I slammed down the phone and ran to the car dragging along two hungry, confused kids, their shirts on inside out.