Mass Audubon

My friend Aimee has worked with me for about 7 years. Her car is white, on the left; mine is the green one, on the right. Most every morning, the later-arriving of the two of us will seek out the other's car and park in the open space on either side of the first-comer. It's a fun little tradition we have had for the past two or three years. If by chance we arrive at the same time, we'll get out of our cars and greet each other, "Hi Parking Buddy!" 

Also cool: both of our cars sport a Mass Audubon decal. 

What I wasn't able to capture in this photo was my friend Cyndi's car, which was to the right of my vehicle when I took this picture. Her wheels also has a Mass Audubon sticker on the back. I tried my best to frame all three sticker-bearing vehicles, but in so trying, Aimee's sticker was an indecipherable blur. 

Oh well. But give it up for preserving nature! Give it up for fun work friends!

Returning Home from Work Conference

One of my greatest blessings in life is that I only travel for work once each year, to a conference that is always held in New England. True, there was last year, when I also traveled to Nashville, Tennessee for the international version of that same conference, but the time before 2016 when I hit that confab was 2005, in San Diego. So I've got it great when it comes to work-life balance (or, as one friend probably more accurately labeled it, "work-life integration"). 

I'm home each night by 5:30, only missing dinner if I feel the need to have a night off. I leave at 8:30 each work morning, driving my son to Kindergarten on my route to my office. I rarely miss breakfast, and when I do, it's mostly due to me wanting to get in exercise at the gym before the workday begins. I wouldn't have it any other way. 

And yet, I was gone just long enough (one night, totaling about 36 hours) for my kids to miss me. This was how Becky captured the moment when I returned home from conference. Our four kids mobbed me at the door! I felt so loved. It reminded me briefly of all of the nights when our kids were younger, and when, each in their turn, would run to the back door to embrace and welcome me home. 

Our three oldest kids don't run to me like that any more. Only our three-year-old Grouse runs to me and wraps his little arms around my legs. I love those moments, and there will be only a few more weeks or months of it before he, too, follows his older siblings' leads and won't get up from his chair to greet me home. 

So you better believe that I savored this sweet moment, holding on to our kids a little bit longer. 

..and then, we scarfed down dinner and headed to our daughters' school for a movie night, where I was helping to chaperone! Talk about a whirlwind!

12-Year Anniversary: Biking on Martha's Vineyard!

To celebrate our 12th wedding anniversary, me and the Mrs. hit Cape Cod and Martha's Vineyard for a 3-night, 4-day visit. After spending Easter Sunday with my parents at the Catholic chapel I grew up attending, we left our small traveling zoo of four kids with my 'rents and then drove to Falmouth. We stayed at a sweet place called Inn on the Square:

We spent Easter evening walking around, exploring, and relaxing, basking in the quiet of our hotel room and life. Okay, maybe we did think of our brood once or twice, but otherwise it was wonderful to just be two. The inn is an easy walk to picturesque old Falmouth. We dined out, read, walked, and re-connected. We also brought our bikes, anticipating a few nice rides throughout our stay while carving out one day to spend on Martha's Vineyard, about a 45-minute ferry ride off Cape Cod.

As a lifelong Massachusetts resident, I needed to seriously atone: I had never been to the Vineyard before. But hey, I have friends who grew up in Arizona and still have not been to the Grand Canyon! 

We ended up deciding to bring our bikes to the Vineyard, which was a smart idea. It was not yet tourist season, which was good and bad: good because there were almost no crowds, but bad because very few attractions were open. Instead, on our actual anniversary day, we biked for over 30 miles around the eastern Vineyard. It was awesome (most of the time)! There was light cloud cover much of the day, which gave us shade from the sun, but it also got quite chilly at times. Although I had brought my bike compression shorts, I forgot them at the hotel, which resulted in a dang sore ride after about 15 miles :-(

So yeah, we both could barely walk afterward, and we got the shakes whenever we contemplated having to sit down once our bike ride was over. Our butts hurt so bad. But what's making a memory if a little soreness isn't involved, amiright?! 

Plus, it was definitely terrific to show that we did something a little different, outside-the-standard dinner and a movie to celebrate an anniversary. Maybe we'll run a marathon for lucky #13!

Brothers' Teamwork

This was the setting earlier today at the Mass Audubon's Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary on the North Shore of the Bay State. The sky was completely overcast all morning for our boys' hike. Mommy was at MIT with our girls. 

Moose, Grouse, and I spotted plenty of different birds as we walked along the wooded trails, but they were disappointed to not see their preferred animals: deer, bears, skunks, wild turkeys, and Grouse's current favorite animal, a basilisk. We saw some nesting boxes on tall poles, where bats were napping, and we encountered a mom and her two teenage kids, who were feeding small birds out of the palms of their hands.

Naturally, my little boys' legs tired much quicker than mine did. I had a grand vision of hiking the three biggest trails at the Sanctuary and pushing through lunch to make the most of our outdoors time. But our sons had a vastly different idea: After about 90 minutes outside, they needed to go potty, then they wanted a snack, and then they wanted to go home. It was a choreographed set of demands that led, inevitably, ever closer to our waiting Blue Bomber mini-van, which would -- magically -- transport our sons, bless them, back to the safe ensoncement of Netflix and popcorn at home. 

Tough nougie, boys! Nature-bound we were!

As we made our way back to the Visitors Center's commodes, our sons and I spotted an oasis tucked into a corner of a trail: a kids' zone full of easy-to-handle wood, perfect for stacking, jumping on, and knocking down.   

We energetically made a b-line for this area. And of course that is when the skies parted and the sun broke through the clouds, warming us up. We breezed through the noontime hour, as Moose and Grouse worked side-by-side to build up a small log cabin. I was struck by the awesome sight of my sons working together. Grouse was determined to push that heavy (for him) dolly full of wood up a small incline as his big brother pulled on the handle and made way around other wood contraptions. 

I didn't take too many other photos at the site, because I wanted to be present to see my little boys working together and figuring things out as a team. It was marvelous to see. 

A Time-Out on Easter Sunday

Here, in photographic documentation, are the four stages of being cute whilst in a time-out. On Easter Sunday. On your way to church with your family. Granted, we got out the door on a Sunday morning -- en route ad to my parents' house almost one hour away from us -- much earlier than we typically have to leave home on Sundays.  

So maybe Grouse was miffed that his normally leisurely wake-up, s-l-o-w breakfast, and playtime was heisted by our plans to spend Easter Sunday morning at my Mom's Catholic Mass. Them's the breaks, kid! 

Grouse's response to those breaks interrupting his routine was an epic meltdown just as we arrived at my parents' home on this bright and sunny morning. Becky took Mr. J on a walk toward my Mom's chapel while I hung back with our other three kids, their cousin, and my parents. Becky and Grouse had to stop on the nearby college campus to enforce Grouse's time-out, and that is when our littlest son started hamming it up for the camera!

Happy Easter Sunday morning, Mister Grouse! You made it one we will never forget, and not for all of the right reasons! In case all of you are wondering: Yes, he endured his time-out well. No, he most certainly did not make it through the full ninety-plus minute Mass. But yes, he did get his Easter basket and did fill it with Easter eggs from Nana's backyard. 

Rome, Easter Sunday 1997

This was the scene on a beautiful Easter Sunday morning in St. Peter's Square twenty years ago. As noted in my previous post, my friend Sara (in the back row, right hand raised, next to the woman in the white shirt) and I happened to meet up with two of the six other women days earlier in Florence, and these two suggested we explore Rome days later with four of their friends. From bottom left to bottom right: Heather, Tara, Katie, Sara, Jocelyn, Margot, and Leonora. All Americans, all Catholics (at least at the time), all studying in Europe for a semester. 

The eight of us woke up in different hotels (yes, I had my own room) super-early Easter Sunday morning. We wanted to snag good views of St. Peter's Basilica, where Pope John Paul II (who was then almost 77 years old) would conduct Easter Sunday Mass. We managed to beat the crowds to St. Peter's that sunny, chilly morning, so much so that the eight of us got the first or second "row" behind the security perimeter, with pretty great sight-lines of the Basilica, the Swiss Guards, and all of the ceremonial pomp of Easter Sunday.

Did I ever feel awkward being the lone dude sightseeing with seven women? Not really, not that I remember. Sara and I basically weren't speaking to each other, having had our fill of each other while traveling just the two of us. Having more people in our traveling party was great! I didn't care that they were all women. I didn't feel left out or an eighth wheel. We all made an effort to rotate among the eight of us as we toured, spending time breaking off into smaller groups for a bit over these days. I think this strategy kept all of us sane as we spent from early morning to late at night hanging out.      

And that included Easter Sunday. Getting our spot was one thing. And then we waited for hours. We ate. We talked. We joked. I don't remember a thing anyone said that morning, except for one wisecrack from Margot (with the auburn hair and in the green jacket in the far right of the photo above). I don't exactly recall at what point in the morning she said this, but let's just say the throngs of people were getting restless and pushy, which freaked us out because we were packed in like sardines and were so close to that security perimeter. I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought of the football crowd tragedies of the past, where scores of people were crushed against barriers. 

Anyhow, with temperatures rising as we lost more and more space around us, Margot looked around as I stood next to her and yelled, "Happy f*&^@g Easter, my fellow Christians!"  

I can't end on that sarcastic note. Aside from parting words that I wrote in my journal about Easter Sunday afterward, words that we all said to each other when our group of eight split up (I met up with other friends to head to Greece, Sara struck out on her own, and these six American women traveled north to Salzburg, Austria, with Katie inviting me to join them), I don't recall anything else people said on this day. 

So I will say that being at Easter Sunday Mass, and not merely as a spectator chalking something off a bucket list but as a real believer, was a very moving experience. And I was with a friend, and several thrown-together for a brief moment of time acquaintances, who also believed in God. We all wanted to be here on Easter Sunday, choosing this location and this time to show our faith instead of continuing on our merry way of traveling. It was important to me, and to them, these women my age, and all of these thousands of other people from likely around the world. 

There is something very faith- affirming, transcending all our individual differences, about that. I probably thought of that at the time. But I marvel in more profound appreciation of it now, twenty Easters later. Happy Easter! Sunday will come.   

Rome at Easter-time, 1997

Twenty years ago this week, I was in Rome with my good friend Sara from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She's in the far-right corner of the photo above, with a slew of other American junior year students we met through serendipity on this wonderful trip.

Sara and I were Junior Year Abroad students at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Sara and I had been friends for a few months, and we decided (like most international students did) to use our gargantuan two-month break between academic semesters to travel around Europe.

We were both nominally, culturally Catholic and average-scale believers. We attended church occasionally, not always, but definitely more than just the holy days. So as Sara and I planned our vacation, we looked at the calendar and realized, "Hey, we could be in Rome for Easter Sunday! Wouldn't that be amazing?" The other young women in the photos above and below had the same idea, as did thousands more people. So we would have plenty of company with like-minded people trying to get to Rome and squeeze in to St. Peter's Square for Easter Sunday Mass! 

The photo below was taken at about 1 in the morning early in Easter Week, probably like the Monday before Easter Sunday. Sara and I were in Florence and had run out of luck trying to find a youth hostel or hotel for the night. We ran into these two American girls (Margot on my right shoulder, from Saint Anselm College; Heather on my left shoulder from Providence College) who attended Catholic colleges in the U.S. but were studying in Salamanca, Spain, for the spring semester 1997. Two became four as we all tried to find a place to sleep for the night. An Albanian man named Joy joined our search, and eventually we found some hotel rooms. This was Margot and Heather's room, moments after the proprietor had swapped out a urine-stained mattress cover and Margot had re-negotiated the room price on account of that board of health violation! 

We were all sleep-deprived loopy, plus we had been thrown together by the fates. So we all hung out until even later in the night/morning. I remember thinking that Margot in the grey long-sleeved shirt was cute. I went off to my own room after Sara and I made plans to meet up with Margot and Heather in Rome in a few days. Sara and I spent another day in Florence without these two new acquaintances.

And then there was Rome! By this point in our travels, Sara and I were downright tired of each other's company. We'd been traveling, just the two of us, for over a week. Margot and Heather were a breath of fresh air, and when they told us in Florence that they, too, were going to Rome to meet up with even more American friends, Sara and I jumped at their suggestion for us to meet up with them, too. 

Remember, this was in the age before smartphones and ubiquitous access to e-mail. We planned, on the spot, with no cell phones, to meet days later at a precise time at a specific location in one of the world's largest cities at one of its most hectic, bustling, crowded times, with hundreds of thousands of extra tourists jostling in a city of several million citizens. And it worked! In talking about this feat recently with Sara, we both marveled at the serendipity of this time and the charm of making life work in a less tech-heavy world. 

If our group or this larger group had had a slight change in plans, then the next few days in Rome would never have happened, and we all would have gone about our plans with no recourse. Rome still would have been fun, but the fact that we did meet up, that the back-of-the-envelope plan came to fruition, made it all the more remarkable and cool. Heather from Providence College had what felt like a pit crew of friends, all also from Providence. Below from left: Sara, Leonora, Jocelyn, me, Katie, Heather, and Tara. Margot took the photo, as we trudged toward Vatican City on the Saturday before Easter Sunday.    

The only way I remember any of these women's names and where they went to school is because I kept an extensive journal my entire junior year abroad. Hat-tip to a long-lost UMass-Amherst friend, Jenny Richardson, wherever she is now, who strongly encouraged me to do so. My memory is very good compared to a lot of my friends, but not so good as to recall twenty years later the names of six people I knew for just a few days. Two of my good friends, Ted and Brian, also attended Providence at the time and were in the same graduating class as Leonora, Jocelyn, Katie, Heather, and Tara; of course we played the "Do you know?" game when I met all of these girls. But without that journal, I would have no way to remember that Margot went to St. Anselm College, and frankly, why should that matter, then or now? Just a nice-to-know.    

The eight of us spent three full days together, meeting up on Good Friday and separating on the Monday after Easter. Katie, the one in the grey sweater and jeans to my left shoulder, and I hit it off well; she asked Sara if I had a girlfriend, and we spent a lot of the time conveniently lagging behind the other six in our impromptu travel party. In retrospect, she played me like a fool and I took it hook, line, and sinker. But as Sara recently reminded me, "That's what made this time of life fun! It was carefree and constantly changing, testing things out." I guess so.

Six months after Rome, I happened to be at Providence College on an early fall weekend. Katie and I traded e-mails to connect, but it didn't happen. I never saw any of the other four Providence College girls above, and -- again serendipity struck -- Margo happened to be at Providence that same weekend. I do remember seeing Margot all to briefly outside a house party. We caught up for a minute or two in time, and that's that.

To be honest, until drafting this post and coming across my printed-out journal and seeing these photos again, it has been about 15 years since I've thought about these all-too-brief acquaintances. It's unlikely our paths will cross again, and that's just the happenstance of life. It's nothing to mourn. To do so would be seriously over-inflating a brief window.

But it is a lot of fun to think back twenty years this week, who I was with, what I was up to, where I was, and remember what I can of this snapshot, when life truly was very carefree and I could dream about a future while basking in the beauty of an ancient, mammoth city at its most dangerously over-crowded yet intoxicatingly feverish time -- all while spending it with near-total strangers brought together by the universe and finding commonalities (in the sense, sure, that the eight of us were all Americans, but also that most of us lived and went to school back in the States about 90 minutes from each other and knew some mutual friends).     

I am naturally inquisitive about people: what makes them tick, what their views on the world are, how they see themselves in it. I would be interested to somehow learn what this Rome group has been up to in all of the years that have passed since Rome at Easter season.

20 Years Ago: Corfu, Greece

My friends Jamie (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Kasha (UMass-Amherst, with her back to my old camera) on Corfu, Greece 20 years ago this week. We were staying at an atrocious hotel called The Pink Palace, which we snarkily called "Club MTV/STD" due to the copious amounts of alcohol, loose morals of many hotel-goers, and the strong vibe that guests basically were imprisoned at  stayed at this joint their entire time on Corfu: no going into town for meals, no walks to explore the scene outside the compound, no cultural exposure. 

Looking at many of our fellow hoteliers during our brief stay, I don't think they were all that interested in cultural undertakings or life beyond the pink-walled insane asylum. It felt dirty. It reeked of booze, sleaziness, hyper-sexual adrenaline, and American ignorance. We couldn't wait to escape, and we did early and often.

Our meanderings around the island of Corfu gave us a lot of cultural exposure. One of the most eye-opening things we saw was this sign on a little road. This single-structured place offered car rentals, currency exchange, and -- of all things -- surgery! I actually think it was closed when we passed by, so thank goodness none of us had the need for any of its varied services! 

The Market Basket Horse

Our three-year-old Grouse loves to wear his long-sleeve shirt with a bumblebee cape, and he loves the antique horse outside a Market Basket! I didn't know these things were still around. It's a throw-back to my childhood and makes me want to take my littlest son to this store so I can see his delight myself. 

I think I found some time this afternoon, actually. It's a date with Grouse!

No-Go Area

I first heard the term "no-go" when I was in high school. At the time, my extracurricular reading focused on "the Troubles" in Northern Ireland, a euphemism from the people living there that they used to describe the tension between and terrorist trauma inflicted by pro-Ireland and pro-U.K. paramilitaries in a land bitterly divided along socio-economic and religious lines. Below is a famous landmark in Northern Ireland's second-largest city, Derry (called Londonderry by pro-U.K. factions), to mark a no-go area that Protestant citizens, police, and the British Army were warned to avoid. 

(And you have an answer for why I didn't date much in high school or college...too much time with my nose in a book and my mouth incapable of halting nerd-speak about current events from constantly pouring out).

I was, indeed, reminded of this famous sign this past weekend, when our daughters got fed up with their young brothers barreling into their bedroom. 

As a parent and adult, I can see both sides: Mouse and Goose want to have privacy, quiet, and time to themselves for play; Moose and Grouse want to know what their older siblings are up to, want to be entertained, want to cause some mischief, want to be together. And they're too young, too impulsive, too not in-check with their emotions or in-tune with others' emotions to understand the more complex feelings that their sisters have and why they want to be barricaded in their bedroom for a spell, away from boys. 

Believe me, a lot of air has been consumed by Becky, me, our girls, and our boys in this internecine, frequent battle. Slamming doors, raised voices, pleas for quiet, demands for us to step in and solve it. 

...and that's just from the neighbors! [Thank you, I'll be here all week!]

"Air War 2017" has been raging with little sign of a lull for while. Why "Air War?" Because it's just been so much hot air, all of it wasted in a venture for either side to get what they want. So this past weekend, our girls took visible action on the matter. We awoke to see these multi-colored signs on their bedroom door:

#robotmonsterthing!

And it breaks my heart just a little bit when Grouse, the youngest of our tribe and the only one who cannot read and obviously has the most limited understanding of others' emotions and needs, waits alone outside his sisters' bedroom, with a plastic shopping cart full of dolls and toys to share with his sisters, only to be met by a shrill, frustrated "Go away!" from the other side of the door. 

These signs are a start, but we need to all come to the negotiating table, lay down our emotions, and hash this out. 

Pompeii, 20 Years Ago Today

These are my Junior Year Abroad friends Jamie (University of Wisconsin), Kasha, and Luke (both of UMass-Amherst), on an otherwise empty rail station in the Italian town of Pompei twenty years ago today. The four of us were waiting for a train to Brindisi, on Italy's east coast, from which we would take an overnight ferry to Greece. 

It was a magical, sun-splashed, carefree time of life. I want to go back to that time, with these friends. Yes, that includes Jamie, who in the grainy photo above is flipping me off as I stood on a platform across from the trio.  

We had earlier spent several days in Rome. Jamie and Luke were dating at the time. Kasha and I? Not dating. I was interested in an American girl I had met some time earlier in our Rome travels. After Rome, we traveled to the ruins of Pompeii (the name of the ruins has two i's in English, whereas the modern-day neighboring town has just one i in English. Fact of the day!). We toured the ruins, which was a sobering experience. It is impossible to not shudder about how awful the eruption of Mount Vesuvius was, and how those poor people had little time to react to this act of nature. 

  

As I write this post about this single event in my life from April 6, 1997, the words of a Billy Joel song come to mind: So many people in and out of my life, some will last, some will just be now and then. Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes, I'm afraid it's time for goodbye again. 

Jamie is back in Wisconsin, Luke is in Nevada, and Kasha and I are in the Bay State (just a town or two away from each other, though we haven't seen each other in about a decade). We're friends on Facebook, we all have been blessed with kids, and we're all in a new stage of life. 

And sometimes, when I let my mind wander and feel inspired to post, I revel in these times and the memories of these friendships, from a time of life when none of us spent a lot of time thinking about kids or jobs or bills or the day-in, day-out routines of life -- the same house, the same co-workers, the same this, the same that. I confess to thinking of Pompeii and these good friends and the special time and special place that brought us together. 

Will we ever be in the same place again? It's doubtful. That's alright. It makes these awesome memories even more important, I guess. And it makes me stop to consider that I will be thinking of this current time of life in 20 years the same way that I'm now thinking about Europe, Pompeii, traveling by train, staying up way too late, friendships that seemed so cemented. 

I didn't intend for this post to take a melancholy turn. Really. I thought I was just going to put up a simple, probably dry-ish travelogue post about Pompeii and my friends. 

15 Years Ago: East Somerville

This is not a very flattering photo of me with my great friend, Robyn. It's another display of my atrocious selfie skills. For another, this was January 2015, when I was in the throes of being at my heaviest weight. I've seriously improved my weight and fitness, but my selfie skills remain in need of addressing!

Robyn and I have been friends since September 1994, when we were freshman at UMass-Amherst. One of her friends from high school lived on my level, so Robyn stopped by a lot the first few weeks to visit her friend Jessica, and in a short time I started hanging out with Robyn. We have been friends ever since, even though a lot of friends we made the first semester of college moved away or moved out of our lives. Such is the nature of friendships. Now, Robyn is one of my longest-held friendships, going on nearly a quarter-century!

This week, I'm reminder of another milestone in our long friendship. Fifteen years ago tomorrow, Robyn and I were hanging out in her apartment in East Somerville. At least at the time, it was a heavily Brazilian and Hispanic neighborhood. I wonder how much it may have changed in all the years since. It was a gritty area, with very few green spaces. I lived a few blocks away, the closest we had been since freshman year. 

Late on a Friday night, a chilly wind blew through her screen door that led on to her second-story back porch, and I was sitting in a natty old chair next to the door. Robyn and I had had one or two beers, like we did on weekend nights. 

What most sticks out about this night, 15 years ago tomorrow, is the power of friendship and the blessing of being open, honest, and vulnerable with another person. 

I've always been introverted, more comfortable with a few super-close friends and not caring to know tons of people. That affinity for closeness has blessed me often, and this night was proof, where I could open up to a good friend of almost 10 years. 

It was all part of a journey that began more than five years earlier, and which had taken a step forward the year prior with a different friend, under a different circumstance. That chilly wind wasn't the only thing that made me shiver in that natty old chair. I felt scared, exposed, raw. 

And just what was this conversation about? What made me feel so many strong and conflicting emotions? Here is the answer: I told Robyn that I was bi. She was the first friend I had ever confided to or shared this with in-person - although I had disclosed this personal news to a friend of mine one year earlier (see the sentence above "taken a step forward the year prior").  

This revelation was before I joined the Mormon Church, and before I knew much of anything about it. I was dating a girl (not Robyn) at the time, though our relationship was on a slow decline, and she didn't know this part of my identity. Being in the LGBT tribe in the late 1990s and early 2000s was still fraught with challenges, before wider social acceptance and rights developed. I didn't know where this conversation and journey would go, but it was the first big step on this path. 

Feelings of shame, embarrassment, confusion, muddled-ness, anxiety, and regret ran through me on this chilly, momentous night. But I also felt alive. It was an intoxicating mix of feelings. Robyn was a wonderful friend, asking me early on as we chatted, "Aww, do you need a hug?" She pulled up next to me on her couch and embraced me. I'll never forget that moment.  

Looking back, I wished I could have bottled it up for all the times I needed to get over fears and insecurities and just be alive, just be me. It felt like an act of rebellion against my timid, introverted self. This is who I am, this identity is a part of me.  

And each April 6th, I make a point of thanking Robyn for being there for me, for supporting and loving and befriending me.  

Father and Son

As I write this, a song by the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens called Father and Son plays in my head. It doesn't have direct relevance to this post, but it's a song that might take on new dimensions as my sons and I grow through life together.

Moose and I have a fun relationship, with ups and downs, peaks and valleys. He is strong-willed, full of energy, highly excitable, rough-and-tumble, and easy to show his emotions. Those are characteristics that I admittedly don't use to describe myself a lot of times. So it makes for an interesting dynamic for us to navigate. We're learning as we go. 

That's not a complaint at all; far from it, there is a comforting sentiment to it, showing that we both need to learn and adapt despite our ages and different family roles. 

The other night, Moose left my side for a minute after bedtime. Going to his bedroom, he pulled out a box of LEGOs, quickly found two sought-after pieces, and crafted a very simple finished product. Simple in design, but huge in what it represented:

"Daddy," Moose said, returning to his parents' bedroom, "I made this for you!" He was so excited to show me.

"What it is?" I curiously asked.

"It's a 't' for Tim! I can bring it with me to school when I miss you."


Floored by his sweetness and thoughtfulness. 

30 Year Anniversary: The Joshua Tree

Okay, so I'm almost a month behind in posting this, but on March 9th of this year, U2's incredible album The Joshua Tree turned a whopping 30 years old. I was 12 years old when it first came out, and music was not really on my radar at the time, so the musical and cultural significance of this beautiful output was lost on me for a time. 

It's hard to believe that three decades have passed. In that time, U2 morphed from this musical exploration of American roots rock to expanding into American blues and gospel with Rattle and Hum, to their capturing the vibe of a new, post-Cold War Europe with Achtung Baby and the inferior Zooropa, to the massive detour into Europe's dance, techno, and electronica scenes and sounds on Pop, to finally their return to what made them the best band of the 1980s (as crowned by Time magazine in the mid-1980s) with All That You Can't Leave Behind, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, and their more recent, less well-received offerings (No Line on the Horizon and Songs of Innocence).

As much as I love and have so many personal memories of life wrapped up in Achtung Baby, The Joshua Tree has it beat for the title of U2's best album, in my opinion. One measuring stick is that this album only has one bad song (Exit), while Achtung Baby for me features several (The Fly, Acrobat, and Love is Blindness, meaning that this album ends on a pretty inferior note, as albums are meant to do anyhow. "Mothers of the Disappeared" on The Joshua Tree is no shining star either; it's no coincidence it's the last song on the LP, but it has a haunting lyrical quality that speaks to me, so there!

Here is how Bono described the vision for this album, in an NPR interview aired last month. NPR interviewer extraordinaire Steve Inskeep asked, "Is it true that this album was going to be called The Two Americas at one point?" Bono replied, "Yeah, it was. There's two Americas: there's the mythic America and the real America. We were obsessed by America at the time. America's sort of a promised land for Irish people -- and then, a sort of potentially broken promised land...Rather arrogantly, we don't think you [Americans] own it. We think America is an idea that belongs to people who need it most."

I think that Bono took that searching for the mythic and the real America with him when the band convened, and nearly broke up during the recording of, Achtung Baby, trying to discern the mythic and the real Europe in the earliest days of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR, the sense of potentially limitless freedoms washing across once divided lands across the European continent. But I'm (as usual) getting ahead of myself. Back to The Joshua Tree.

Holy crap, what an awesome album! Has any album ever started so strongly, so stirringly, so confidently? And not just with the first single, Where the Streets Have No Name, but through at least the next two or three in the track listing: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For, With or Without You, the biting, Reagan-damning, spoken-word featuring Bullet the Blue Sky, and the dire warning about heroin abuse couched as a kind of dark, star-crossed song Running to Stand Still. You're only five song in to the album, and it's taken you on a roller coaster ride of emotions in under 23 minutes, not even halfway through the album time-wise.

The next cluster of six songs aren't as instantly recognizable perhaps as that opening trio of instantaneous classics, but for me, they're each beautiful and meaningful. It's clearly not the best song on the album, but Red Hill Mining Town has been my favorite U2 song for two decades. 

I just love the plaintive, pleading tone in Bono's voice in Town's chorus: "I'm hanging on, you're all that's left to hold on to...I'm still waiting!" It's a song about the massive mine strikes in England at the time, and yet you'd never guess it as a casual fan. A part of why I like love/want to have this song played at my funeral is that it is, until the 30th anniversary Joshua Tree tour going on now, the only Joshua Tree song to have never been played live. I also loved it because famed Irish film director Neil Jordan shot a video for it, which was not aired for many years. It's not really a strong video.

In God's Country is an infectious, up-tempo song coming after several dark, dire tracks. It features an incredible guitar offering by The Edge and closes with the lines "naked flame, she stands with a naked flame, I stand with the Sons of Cain, burned by the fire of love..." That's the Statue of Liberty, a fixed image for Bono of the mythic and the real America. Plus, I've always loved the opening lines, "We need new dreams tonight." There's something both of inspiration and stagnation in those words. 

Take it or leave it with Trip Through Your Wires before coming to One Tree Hill, a beautiful song about one of Bono's close friends, who died months before the album came out. Again The Edge offers a stupendous riff, one of the most memorable for me on any U2 album. I'm listening to it now while blogging, and it's sensational. 

Because this is me, and this is my blog, and it's often featured my fever for making lists, here is my most to least favorite songs on The Joshua Tree. 

Admittedly, I take peevish joy out of being a non-conformist to a degree with my voicing of "best" songs, sometimes placing more weight on less-popular tunes simply because the great sea of casual fans scream out for the over-played, the most popular, the crowd-pleasers, the songs guaranteed to be later co-opted for TV commercials and shows (cough, One Tree Hill, cough). It's one reason why I think Baby You're a Rich Man is one of my favorite Beatles songs -- it's not nearly as famous as Can't Buy Me Love or She Loves You, which to me don't hold up over time and I've never really liked them. 

'Nuff said. Here is how I'd rank The Joshua Tree songs: 

1. Red Hill Mining Town

2. I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

3. With or Without You

4. In God's Country

5. Running to Stand Still

6. Where the Streets Have No Name

7. One Tree Hill

8. Bullet the Blue Sky

9. Trip Through Your Wires

10. Mothers of the Disappeared

11. Exit 

And...exit.