Carol Archives - Page 16 of 18 - Ramblin' with Roger

The Wife turns…another year older

Lots of people ask if my wife speaks another language besides English. She does – Spanish – but it isn’t used much since almost everything in ESL is taught in English.

It’s always interesting, talking about other people while endeavoring to respect their boundaries. The Wife has never said, “Don’t put my age in your blog.” But I’ve been reluctant to anyway. I have noted that she is younger than I (which is far less revealing than if I were to say that someone was older than I.) One CAN assume she’s over 31 since we’ve been married for over 13 years.

Every year on this date, I write something about her, but I have no idea whether she ever reads it. And I used to TELL her I was writing something.

One of the things I have alluded to is the fact that she is a teacher of English as a Second Language. She works for an entity called BOCES which provides all sorts of training to several school districts in a given area. For five years, she was teaching entirely in two schools in one school district. This year, however, that district decided to hire its own ESL teacher, which means that the Wife had a new assignment, which ended up being three schools in two school districts in two different counties. Suffice to say, taking public transportation for her job has become impossible, unlike mine, which is at one place almost every day.

ESL seems to be misunderstood. Lots of people ask if my wife speaks another language besides English. She does – Spanish – but it isn’t used much since almost everything is taught in English, the lingua franca. It is often assumed that the first language for most of her students is Spanish, when in fact she’s had a lot of kids who speak Urdu (pictured, via Wikipedia) or Chinese.

The Wife went back to school in 1999 and graduated in 2002. Going back to school was scary, I imagine (it was for me!), but she excelled at it.

I suspect that one day she’ll be an administrator – she’s taken subsequent courses to that end – though I suspect she’d miss the day-to-day activity of the classroom.

Well, that’s enough for this year. Happy birthday, dear.

The Lydster, Part 99: Her Father’s Daughter

We’ve been singing “Build Me Up, Buttercup” together.

For years, part of the running shtick between my wife and me has been this: I ask her a question. She responds to the question. Then I ask the question again, because, while I have some information, I often don’t have the ANSWER. I must say that, early on, it used to drive me crazy. Now, I just recognize it as just the way it is.

Here’s an example from a couple of months ago. I had seen some fresh strawberries in the refrigerator earlier, so I asked her where they had gone. She replied, “Well, I was going to make strawberry shortcake, but that fell by the wayside.” Puzzled, I was about to say, “Oh..kay, honey…but where are the strawberries?” which was my actual question. But instead, Lydia said, “But mommy, where are the strawberries?” I had a VERY difficult time not breaking into uncontrollable laughter. Lydia reacted the same as I did. And worse, she knew it.

We also do a lot of singing together. She has a CD of cover versions of a wide variety of songs, from pop tunes to patriotic songs. We’ve been singing “Build Me Up, Buttercup” together. But “Take Me Home, Country Road” is usually her solo performance.

Of course, there are things that Lydia gravitates towards my wife’s interests, such as watching/participating in figure skating or sharing conversations about clothing and jewelry. Still, I’m happy about when she and I connect.

Ike, the plan, and how it applies to me

“Dwight D. Eisenhower…once opined that plans aren’t worth a damn, but planning is essential.”

Did you ever take those standardized career tests that ask, “What will you be doing in five years?” I have, several times. Looking back, there has never been a correlation between what the projection and the reality looked like.

Heck, lately, even planning ahead a few days hasn’t worked out.

When our library staff planned our presentation for staff training, the highlight was supposed to be the premiere of this video our intern Sam put together of the librarians. It was working fine in the dry run. But the day of the presentation, the disc simply would not work. After about five minutes of futile fussing, our director said, “Hey, we can’t get this to work. So we’ll start the rest of the presentation; Roger will start.” Bam! I’m on! That was disconcerting.

At the end of the month, I have a much more extensive presentation at a conference. I was going to work on it earlier this week. But then my wife injured her foot Monday morning; while it turned out not to be as serious as we feared, the initial amount of blood made the bathroom look like a crime scene. I took a half-day, going with her to urgent care.

Then Tuesday, the Daughter was having a moderate asthma attack and I took her to the emergency room, which took most of the morning. The funniest part of the day is, though I gave them her name, the system defaulted to Baby Girl Green, her name eight years earlier when she was born there; they had to fix the record before they could proceed with services, and this was after we’d been there over an hour. I stayed home with her in the afternoon. I was going to get check some e-mail while she rested, except that somehow, I touched the F2 button on my Dell laptop and disconnected the wireless function, and it took me a precious while to figure out the problem.

By the time I get to work on Wednesday, I’m buried with more immediate work to do. Oy.

I was struck, though, by this story about newspaper writer Julia Keller discussing her award-winning reporting about a tornado. Her essay, “Lessons Learned”, seems to apply to much of life:

Allow me to quote that well-known prose stylist Dwight D. Eisenhower, who once opined that plans aren’t worth a damn, but planning is essential.

Much of the information gathered for a long series won’t ever be used. Many of our most treasured insights will be revised, then revised again, and finally abandoned. The majority of our felicitous phrases — the kind that makes us pause just after we come up with them and smile secretly to ourselves — will be relegated to the writer’s version of the cutting-room floor: the “delete” key…

Then, when it came time to actually write the damn thing, I had frustration — because, despite the story’s length, a great deal of my reporting had to go.

Yet I could not have produced the series without having first produced the pile of material that wasn’t ultimately used. My plans may have been shot to hell, but the act of planning was crucial.

Eisenhower’s aphorism, then, is terribly apt — or at least it was for me — as I worked for seven months on this three-part series…

So, even though the plan doesn’t always work out, the process of making the plan still has value. I believe this has been applicable in my life, even when those five-year plans have no apparent validity.
***
Are lots of folks I know of dying this month or am I just getting old? (Rhetorical question: DO NOT ANSWER.)

Donald “Duck” Dunn died May 13. Though best known as the bassist for the group Booker T. & the MG’s, or probably, for a certain demographic, the Blues Brothers band, he played on lots of songs for Stax and Atlantic artists such as Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, the Staples Singers, and Sam & Dave, plus many more. Here is Booker T. & the MG’s-Time Is Tight.

An ex-girlfriend bought me Donna Summer’s Live and More for my 27th birthday. Didn’t think it was my thing, but I ended up playing it constantly, especially Side 4, that 18-minute MacArthur Park suite that, I just discovered, is missing from the CD re-release – here’s a live, 6-minute version of the song. Arthur and Jaquandor have interesting takes on her passing this week.

Lucky 13 Years of Marriage

I am lousy remembering people, but she’s much better at it.

Carol and I have been married 13 years today. I’m surprised; I figured I’d have driven her crazy long ago. (And maybe I have.)

That’s not to say she doesn’t have a few quirks of her own. To wit:

If I am reading a newspaper or a magazine, and set it down to get something, I’ll come back to find that she is almost always reading it. And it doesn’t matter what it is: Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, it will have moved from where I was sitting to her locale. I can’t very well be upset about it because she’s keeping up with the world. When I met her nearly 20 years ago, I noted that there were current events she was oblivious to; not so anymore.

When she tidies up, I really CAN’T find anything. More than that, she can’t tell me either. Whereas when I clean up after her – the kitchen counter is a magnet for her stuff – I have about a 98% retrieval rate.

She’s often late. She HATES that I say that, but it’s true. If she says she’ll pick me up at 5:25, I’ll turn off my office computer at 5:26 and be downstairs before she arrives. I recognize that she’s always squeezing in one more thing.

On the other hand:

She’s amazingly gifted at financial stuff. I have no personal debt. The first mortgage on the house is almost paid off. My sisters both want to marry her.

She’s a decent cook, but a great baker.

She’s way more handy with tools than I ever will be.

I am lousy remembering people’s names, but she’s much better at it. And when there’s someone I feel that I should recall, but don’t, she’ll introduce herself to the mystery person.

Did I mention, a couple days ago, that she’s a great mom?

But more than the particulars, we seem to have reached a certain degree of being in synch that I wouldn’t have thought possible. I don’t want to say we finish each other’s sentences – that’s only a sometimes thing – but we seem to find a way to empathize with our partner’s stuff.

Since we’ve been together, I’ve become a bit more patient and tolerant. She, in part from reading the news more, is more ~~cynical~~ realistic about the ways of the world.

Love you, lovey in the middle. (Mysterious family code)

I is for Irene

Yes, that’s 3 hours, 39 minutes of flying time over an 11-hour stretch.

Irene is one of those semi-popular names in the US, 16th most popular among girls’ names at its peak in 1918 and 1919, 684th in 2010.

Irene has also been designated as a possible hurricane name by the World Meteorological Organization. “The Atlantic is assigned six lists of names, with one list used each year. Every sixth year, the first list begins again.” Things before 1978 weren’t quite so neat and tidy, so Irene was eligible to be a hurricane name in 1959, 1963, 1967, and 1971. While Irene was unused in 1987 and in 1993, there were actually hurricanes named Irene in 1981, in 1999, and in 2005.

2011’s Hurricane Irene caused great damage, as you have probably heard. Albany County was among several in upstate New York designated as disaster areas. Our property only lost some tree limbs. But the storm was life-complicating.

As I’ve noted, my wife and daughter traveled down to Charlotte, NC August 24 to visit my sister and niece. One track of Irene would have come quite close to Charlotte, but the storm stayed on the coast, fortunately. Unfortunately, it traveled up the coast, and while it largely spared New York City, it walloped parts of New Jersey, Vermont, and upstate New York.

The problem was that the family was supposed to take the train back from Charlotte to Albany on August 31, but the trip was canceled by Amtrak, likely because of possible damage, or fear of same, to the tracks in New Jersey and elsewhere.

They couldn’t drive back because of washed-out roads. So they got a flight. Or three:
From Charlotte Douglas Intl Airport (CLT)
Departs: 08/31/2011 at 11:40 A.M. To
Baltimore/Washington Intl Thurgood Marshall Apt (BWI)
Arrives: 08/31/2011 at 1:09 P.M.
From BWI
Departs: 08/31/2011 at 4:37 P.M. To
Philadelphia Intl Airport (PHL)
Arrives: 08/31/2011 at 5:26 P.M.
From PHL
Departs: 08/31/2011 at 9:10 P.M. To
Albany Intl Airport (ALB)
Arrives: 08/31/2011 at 10:31 P.M.

Yes, that’s 3 hours, 39 minutes of flying time over an 11-hour stretch. That is what you’re left with – let’s not even talk about the cost – when one books a flight the day before.

Of course, many people had it a WHOLE lot worse! For a mild for instance, my brother-in-law Dan and his family, about an hour south of us in Greene County, NY, lost a bunch of stuff in the basement. Getting around was difficult because the roads were either flooded or washed out altogether; the schools started a week late, as much because of the impassable roads as the damage to the buildings. Those of you who know upstate geography will appreciate this: the fastest way currently to get from Catskill to Oneonta is going through Albany.

I feel a little testy about the notion that NYC overprepared; it was a hurricane, FCOL!

And there will be more storms that travel further north, because of the warmer Atlantic waters.

I wonder if Irene’s name will be retired. “The only time that there is a change is if a storm is so deadly or costly that the future use of its name on a different storm would be inappropriate for obvious reasons of sensitivity. If that occurs, then at an annual meeting by the WMO…the offending name is stricken from the list and another name is selected to replace it.”

Check out some Vermont devastation HERE and HERE and HERE, collected by long-time VT resident, and my buddy, Steve Bissette.

(And I won’t even get into the subsequent destruction of Tropical Storm Lee, which did damage from the Gulf Coast to upstate New York this past week, as this video from Binghamton, NY, my hometown, will attest.)

ABC Wednesday – Round 9