Average Day

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Okay. Here's how you go about determining which day is "Average Day" for you and your significant other (SO) or whole family. And by "family" I mean nuclear, extended, blended, or circle of intimate friends.

Let's say your birthday is May 12, the 132nd day of the year. And let's say your SO's is October 25, the 298th day of the year. Add these day-of-the-year numbers together and you get 430. Now divide by how many of you there are (duh, two). The result is 215, and the 215th day of the year, August 3, is therefore Average Day for you and your SO.

Done and done! You've got yourselves a fresh and eminently eligible excuse to party—and plenty of time (usually) to create a richly detailed plan of outlandish celebratory attack. Just muster the unmitigated gall to have an unmitigated ball; and be sure to rename it something besides "Average Day," because it's going to be anything but, yo! An anagram of your names might be a good place to start.

Blended families can benefit especially from celebrating Average Day. Each member's day-of-the-year number (DOYN) plays an equal role in the equation, and the unique and proprietary nature of the resulting date can help foster a sense of unity and belonging.

The only thing to remember is to round up should you wind up with an Average Day DOYN like 199.3; the decimal simply means it's the following morning, afternoon, or evening: in other words, the 200th day of the year.

Give figuring out your family's Average Day a try right now. I said, right now—unless you want my daughter Thea to cut you.

If you don't have a calendar that shows DOYNs, click here for a table created by some guy named Coletti.

# # #

My dog just doesn't get my fixed-rate, 30-year mortgage

I am about to present a rather substantive quote from the February 20, 2009, issue of THE WEEK, a magazine among whose charter subscribers I am proud to number myself. I'd also like to attest, wholly voluntarily and free of compensation, to the accuracy of the ambitious claim made by THE WEEK's masthead:

ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT MATTERS

I provide this up-front endorsement as a preemptive measure, because I have not obtained THE WEEK's permission to reproduce the passage below, and am hoping no one there will get pissed off with me once they see how heavily I'm trying to promote the rag gratis.

Now to the substantive quote:

It's hardly Star Trek, but scientists have taken one small step toward the process of teleportation, says The New York Times. Utilizing the almost-magical properties of quantum physics, scientists at the Joint Quantum Institute in Maryland were able to transport information instantly across several feet of space, from one atom to another. With a microwave pulse, scientists "wrote" quantum information onto one atom. They induced both atoms to become "entangled." Entanglement is a mind-boggling quantum phenomenon in which two bits of matter somehow instantly affect the other across space, as if they shared a single identity. After the entanglement, the second atom had the same information that was written on the first atom, even though no information had traveled between them.

Did you get that "entanglement" business? Me neither. Stuff like that is why theoretical physicists and logicians go bonkers at a disproportionate rate.

Now, a lot of people think I'm Godless. They just don't know me well enough to know I'm not. Sure, maybe everything, including Darwinian evolution, got rolling with the Big Bang; but I firmly believe something or someone had to have been swinging the granddaddy of all mallets that day, and it's perfectly fine by me if we call the swinger "God."

But the gnawing thing for me about God is, I'm not sure the human brain is ever going to develop enough to fully understand what he or she or it had or has in mind. Not when a mind of that grandeur can whip up concepts like "entanglement" as a warm-up for the complex stuff.

In truth, I think the ultimate truths about God and the universe will probably forever elude human grasp. They'll remain as inherently and intractably incomprehensible to our pea brains as "30," "year," and "mortgage" will to my dog's.

# # #

On saying it all

In her lavishly inventive second novel, Hotel World, Ali Smith says it all in nine syllables. ...

you
must
live

you
must
love

you
must
leave

# # #

Lula Wheeler

Pictures can lie in both directions: They can make us look better than we do and worse than we do, and the truth dwells somewhere in-between.

We do not actually look as godawful as we think we look in those snapshots that make us cringe. Nor do we look quite as appealing as we think we look in the shots we'd happily display, a hundred feet tall, in Times Square.

Good or bad, it's serendipitous at any rate.

Everything depends on what's going on in the hundredth, thousandth, ten-thousandth of a second after the button is pressed. Light can flatter us or flatten us and fatten us. Too swiftly for the naked eye, our faces can zip through umpteen fleeting stages of goofy while shifting from one expression to the next—and only the camera can freeze them for lingering scrutiny and long-term humiliation.

But when everything really falls into place in that instant the shutter's released, when the light's a touch more than right, and every facial feature has paused precisely at Perfecto! before an eyelash steps out of line, you can wind up with a photo as celestially exceptional as the portrait of Lula Wheeler. That small, literally stunning (it stunned me) senior portrait I saw one time at Farmington High.

Maybe it wasn't serendipity in her case. Maybe she actually was so otherworldly sublime all of the time. If so, my sincerest sympathies to the boys of the charter class of Farmington (Mich.) High School—the class of 1921. They must have suffered an unremitting torment of longing from September to June.

Though rendered in black and white and shades of gray, Lula Wheeler peered past my shoulder and toward her future with eyes of luminous blue. She had the hint of a dimple in her right cheek, the suggestion of a cleft in her chin, and lips indubitably shaped by Nature to snare young men's souls with the slightest smile.

Let's just say, "Oh ... my ... God" and leave it there.

But here's the thing about all this: It wasn't just that Lula Wheeler's excruciating beauty burrowed into my brain like an ethereal projectile. It was the mind-blowing, satori-like realization that—by that moment, and as if within the milliseconds it took for the notion to lay siege on my noggin—child goddess Lula Wheeler had already lived out every bit of whatever thrilling future lay before her on portrait day '21. Had savored its every joy, suffered its every sorrow, and superseded the portrait before me with innumerable succeeding portraits marking the benign or malign passage of time.

Had already, presumably, waxed wizened and withered, or, more likely, returned to dust.

# # #

Let's look it up in the dictionary

The moral of this story is to own more than one dictionary. Preferably several of increasing size. It's not like wearing two watches and then never being certain what time it is. It's more like never getting stuck with something like this:

res • o • nance (rez-uh-nuhns) n. The quality or condition of being resonant.

res • o • nant (rez-uh-nuhnt) adj. Of, pertaining to, or exhibiting resonance.

# # #

From an e-mail to a friend dated June 7, 2007

My father-in-law is 81. He is dying of congestive heart failure. His kidneys are just about shot and it's just a matter of days. My mother-in-law took him to the hospice yesterday. His last trip to anywhere.

This man has been an object of scorn for me as long as I've known him. He treated Susan and her brother badly after marrying their mother when Susan was twelve. Needless to say, he was the model of prospective-stepparent perfection prior to tying the knot. Then he kicked Susan out of the house when she was just seventeen.

He'd promised Susan's mom he'd support her, that she could quit her job. Also needless to say, neither of those things ever happened; in fact, he retired a good dozen years before she did—from part-time self-employment mowing lawns. It was she who supported him, for the most part, from their wedding day forward.

And the band just played on and on and on.

Now he's teetering at the edge of oblivion, Will, and I find that I no longer harbor so much as a shred of rancor toward him within my amply larded breast. I am glad of that, and at the same time I feel sorry that I have resented him for my wife's sake for so many years—especially since Susan (a better human being than I can ever hope to be) has never, ever, ever treated him with less than the courtesy and consideration that every father considers his due. Her goodness indicts my humanity, mocks my pretensions of decency, makes me feel ashamed.

Last evening, at dinner, she told me something so piercingly poignant that it brought me almost to tears for Hank—a thing I never would have imagined possible.

She told me that her mother drove Hank home from the hospital yesterday afternoon to collect a few things before taking him to the hospice, where his medications would be discontinued and his exit from this earth eased in all ways possible. But as they were about to leave the house, Hank told Nancy he wanted to complete the nearly finished jigsaw puzzle he'd been working on for weeks.

And then he sat down at the table and put the handful of remaining pieces into place before getting back in the car.

# # #

How I found out about "truthiness"

When my stepfather was at the peak of his popularity as a small-time television personality in Detroit, some folks from a weekly magazine covering the movements and minutiae of local celebrities showed up at our home to ferret some facts and snap some snapshots for a spread about "Cowboy Colt."

Even at seven or eight I could feel what I then did not know was moral outrage welling within my childish breast as the photographer started staging the first of many phony-baloney shots. For instance ...

~ My mother, younger brother, and I huddling next to the Cowboy on the couch, pretending to listen to the Cowboy reading aloud, our faces fixin' to explode from smilin' so hard, our necks about to snap from gazing upwards at him adoringly. (Never happened and could not have happened in a million years.)

~ My brother and I racing down the front walk, pretending to greet the Cowboy with squeals of potentially lethal glee, as the Cowboy pretended to emerge from the car in triumphant return from yet another butt-busting two-hour workday. (See "million years" above.)

And if the phony-baloney photos weren't egregious enough, there were the putative facts in the story itself.

I learned, for example, that performing rope tricks topped my personal inventory of fun things to do, buckaroo. I queried my mom about this reeking blob of bull pucky using the 1950s equivalent of "Yo! What's up with this?" In those days, the only good use I could think of for rope was binding my brat brother's hands and feet.

She explained, matter-of-factly, that juicing the truth was a common and innocuous practice in the world of magazine journalism. I registered the explanation, but it did not satisfy. As far as my little-kid mind was concerned, the truth, juiced, was just a stinkin' lie.

(How did you find out about "truthiness"? Please comment here or drop me a line.)

# # #

What having six children can mean

In the fall of 1990 one of my kids started college, one started high school, one started junior high, and one started potty training.

# # #

The thing my grandparents didn't teach me

My maternal grandparents were simple people of uninquisitive intellect and grossly limited means. They were also the center of my world.

Their few sticks of furniture didn't match. Their clothes came from such emporia as Woolworth's, Federal's, and Sears. They took their meals at the kitchen table or before their black-and-white TV. Went for fish-and-chips Friday nights at that little fish joint on Gratiot called the Riviera.

Joe drove a black Ford Falcon with three on the tree. Leona didn't drive.

They let my brother and me stay overnight for a couple of weeks at a time. Bought us breakable toys at Woolworth's and Kresge's. Let us drink pop by the gallon and scarf stove-cooked fudge with two hands. Took us to the Riviera if we happened to be over on Fridays.

They didn't read books, go to movies, vacation. Joe's favorite pastimes were drinking Stroh's beer, smoking Old Golds, solving Detroit News crossword puzzles, listening to radio broadcasts of Detroit Tigers baseball games, doing all of those things simultaneously. Leona's were watching As the World Turns, playing canasta, knitting, and catching up on gossip over coffee consumed at the kitchen table.

My grandfather laboriously cut the grass with a manual reel mower. My grandmother made egg noodles from scratch and kept a lace-trimmed hankie up her sleeve.

More than my mother or my father or my stepfather or anyone, Joe and Leona taught me how to love my babies. How to listen to them, laugh with them, play with them, hug them, spoil them as needed.

They also tried, through casual slurs and routine critical comments, to teach me the basics of bigotry the way their parents and grandparents had taught those basics to them. But, thankfully, the lessons never took.

# # #

My idea of Heaven

... contains the ultimate Magic 8 Ball®.

You go into this room where the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball sits on an otherwise bare, unprepossessing table. An equally unprepossessing chair is there for you to sit on; maybe it's one of those clunky steel folding chairs, chocolate brown or battleship gray, like the ones you've seen at all those all-you-can-eat charity spaghetti pigouts you go to.

Anyway, the thing about the UM8B is, you don't have to phrase your questions for a "yes" or "no" type response. You can ask the UM8B literally anything—about literally anything—and it will give you the unadulterated dope right there on the spot. Yup. The pure, unvarnished, pull-no-punches truth. "The whole truth and nothing but" that hardly ever rears its ennobling head in court no matter how much swearing goes on.

And never mind asking ho-hum crappola like "C'mon, who really shot J.F.K.?" or "Did President William Jefferson Clinton—or did he not—have sexual relations with 'that woman'?" or "What is the meaning of 'is'"?

No. What I'm talking about is ...

I go into the room. I sit down before the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball. I nod my head to the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball in the most respectful manner imaginable. I clear my throat and pose my question: "Hey, what was the deal with my mom and dad's break-up, O Ultimate Magic 8 Ball?"*

I then grasp UM8B with both hands. I lift and gently but emphatically, and of course reverentially, shake UM8B two, three, seventy times. I upend UM8B and watch with paralyzing anticipation as the oracular icosahedron bobbing within its encapsulated watery murk slowly rises into bubbly view, and ...

Lo and behold!

There's like a book's worth of luminescent microscopic verbiage on the exposed icosahedral surface. But this being Heaven and the Ultimate Magic 8 Ball, I have as little trouble reading the tiny treatise as I would the first line of an optometrist's wall chart at arm's length.

What, oh what, does it say? you wonder. I'll get back to you when I'm dead.

* See blog entry entitled July 14, 1987.
Magic 8 Ball is a registered trademark of Mattel Inc.

# # #

So you think you know your teenager

I was sitting in the dimly lit auditorium with a dozen or so others, waiting to watch the ballet mistress put the girls through the wringer for their upcoming performance of Coppelia.

Shortly before the action started, the only other father in the room wended his way me-ward and plopped down in the seat on the other side of my daughter's pink parka. He introduced himself with a New England accent and dove right into bragging.

His daughter not only dances but commands first-chair status in the middle-school band. Tenor sax. She can play all the instruments, as a matter of fact, and is an all-A student to boot. Popular as it gets, quite frankly. And blah and blah and blah and blah ... and did I mention blah?

He had to interrupt this litany of the little saint when the little saint herself rushed up, asked him to hang onto her bracelet, and darted off. (Okay, okay, he hadn't been exaggerating about the emerald eyes or cascading locks of shimmering gold.) She was no sooner gone and the beat, unsurprisingly, went on.

Walking out to the car what seemed like several years later, I asked my daughter if she knew the girl I'd been reluctantly learning so very much about. My daughter said she only knew the girl by name, and that she played some kind of instrument in the school band.

"A bunch of girls were mad at her tonight," my daughter added. "They think she took Zoey's bracelet."

# # #

Mas sobre mi padre

He says, "Will you count some money for me?" I say, "Sure."

He reaches into a pocket of his topcoat and pulls out a pad of bills as thick as a desk calendar. They are restrained by a ragged leather wallet wrapped with a rubber band. He leans toward me from the armchair and hands me the wad.

There are more bills stuffed into a secondary compartment of the wallet. He begins counting those himself.

The sun coming through the window is falling directly into his eyes as he hunches over the work, turned sideways in the chair. I pull the blind. The Lions are losing to the Redskins on TV.

We count the money. I arrange hundred-dollar bills in piles of ten, get momentarily derailed when I hit a seam of fifties and twenties, but continue counting extra carefully until I've assembled nine piles of a thousand dollars each and one pile of eight hundred. He hands over two hundred from his stack to make it an even ten thou by me on the couch, plus four hundred on the ottoman.

He was going to buy a Cadillac Seville from a guy in Grosse Pointe, he says, but the car had been Bondo'd and the guy had lied about it and he'd offered the guy seven thousand on the spot but the guy said no go. And besides, the '78 Coupe DeVille he's driving was plenty good enough, and why should he be looking to buy a Seville at his age anyway?

I said he should buy a Seville if he wanted to, because so what? It's his money, his life.

Throughout all this, my father's navy blue skipper's cap with the patent-leather brim (exactly like the skipper's cap his idol Frank Sinatra wore in Pal Joey) never leaves his head. Nor does he doff his topcoat.

One of my kids later asked if Grandpa was a policeman. I told her huh-uh: my father was a character in a book by Charles Dickens.

# # #

Why parents get to say, "This hurts me more than it hurts you"

Friday evening. I'm dropping my daughter off at Colleen's house for a spur-of-the-moment sleepover. My daughter is thrilled beyond words to be spending the night at the home of a friend. I am thrilled beyond words that she possesses a friendship of sufficient quality and intimacy to have produced a bona fide slumber-party invite. My daughter, like me, does not friends easily make.

Colleen rushes out of the house and bounds down the porch steps, followed by her mother and her sister. I greet them on the sidewalk and thank the mother for according my daughter this exceptional treat, my daughter's fair face fairly illuminating the neighborhood with visible rays of joy.

The mother tells me, "Colleen was getting so desperate. She called just everybody, and none of her friends could come over. And then she thought, 'Hey! I'll call...'"

My precious child. The last resort.

# # #

Butnots and morethans

He is Mad Magazine, but not The Onion.

She is Seinfeld, but not Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I am more Samuel Beckett than James Joyce,
more haiku than heroic couplet.

Your turn...

# # #

The death of me

I'm so mad at you I could scream.

You told me you were only going to take I out for ice cream, and the next thing I know you're saying you're gonna take both Dick and I.

What's up with that? That just totally sucks.

And now I hear you've gone behind Dick and I's back and invited Jane and Sally out for ice cream with you, Dick, and I. Well, poop on you, you goofball.

Who's gonna be joining the party next? Father and Mother? Why not invite Spot and Puff to come along while you're at it?

Here! Take back this Jonas Brothers CD you gave I. Those buttheads suck as much as you do.

# # #

Them superbugs have to eat too

We watch as the lioness crushes the wildebeest's windpipe with casually lethal proficiency. We watch as her pride-mates shred its still-trembling flesh and drink from a gaping trough in the steaming carcass.

But...

The narrator admonishes us not to judge Nature's ways in the light of human sensibilities. Nature does not favor the lion over the antelope. Each performs its assigned role in the indifferently brutal pageant of existence, contributing equally to the delicate balance on which continuity depends.

Lions kill, or die from not killing. And in culling the weak, the old, the infirm, they help to ensure that the wildebeests, along with every other species upon which lions prey, will produce succeeding generations from only the fittest stock. They, the lions, are doing Nature's essential work.

Which brings me to one of the problems I have with prayer.

Because if lions are doing essential work, so too must insidious microbes be doing essential work. Insidious microbes must kill to survive, must kill to obey the mandate to cull.

The wildebeest prays, "Please, God, don't let these lions crush my windpipe and consume my pitiful, tick-ridden body." Much as we pray, "Please, God, don't let these Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus lunch all the life out of li'l old me."

# # #

July 14, 1987

A belated birthday card with a dollar bill and a handwritten message inside: Dad, this card may be a day late, but it's not a dollar short!

The card had prompted his visit.

He stayed a few hours and they were possibly the best I have ever spent with him. He was there for a change. Not distracted, preoccupied, glooming. He was interested in me for a change. Asked about my work, my life, my family. He chattered and chuckled with my children and actually conversed with my wife. Only once did he descend into his usual doleful musings about loving and losing my mother.

He spoke of a photo snapped early in their marriage. He a young nightclub drummer, she a young nightclub singer. They were holding hands and she looked ineffably beautiful.

He still adores that girl in the snapshot; still pines for that girl in the snapshot's love.

There is that in his voice and his eyes when he speaks of these things that makes me believe him in my heart. There is this, too: He has never, never in 35 years, said anything about her that was not shining praise. She, for her part, has never in as many years said anything about him that was not bitter or recriminatory or hateful.

His may be a form of delusional madness, but hers seems the greater sickness.

I will never know for certain either way. I am interested only in knowing the truth, not in ascribing blame. But this mystery will remain impenetrable. Each of them harbors a discrete version of the past grown more real in nearly four decades of estrangement than the unalloyed truth itself, whatever that truth may be. Within each of their minds, each feels utterly free from fault.

He, according to him, worked two jobs and was faithful and devoted. She, according to him, just up and left for no reason.

He, according to her, never worked two jobs in his life and was a philandering and neglectful bastard. She, according to her, endured all she could take till she could not take any more.

Would that I could sue them solely for the sake of veracity. Could force them into court and make them swear on a stack of Bibles. Could grill them on the stand without mercy. Could make them produce witnesses in defense of their testimonies. Maybe then I could get to the bottom of it all once and for all.

From what I have seen and known of my mother, however, it is easy to believe her capable of becoming disenchanted with married life at the still tender age of 25, wanting oh so much more for herself, including more limelight maybe (she, the former child star). Easy to believe her upping and leaving a husband who was working two jobs ... or three jobs ... or four.

From what I have seen and known of my father, it is easy to believe him not impervious to the attentions of other women. Attentions more or less easily provoked with the help of booze and nacreous drums. It is easy, too, to believe he believes a distorted vision of the past to the point where fantasy has obliterated fact. Yet the pain in his voice, in his eyes, is audible, visible, as he speaks of losing my mother's love.

My mother. His first wife. That gleaming girl holding his hand in the snapshot. That girl who never was.

# # #

Yes indeedy! Make my light beer drinkable, please

Maddest of all props to the advertising arm of Anheuser-Busch for at long last putting the finger on that quintessential light-beer property that's been eluding my cognition for lo these many years. I refer, of course, to ... drinkability.

Drinkability, people! I say again. And may my bellowed "Eureka!" resound across the land or at least Kansas City.

How could I have been so daft, so addled, so easily circumvented by the preposterously obvious, as to fail to arrive at that conclusion unaided by Bud Light shills? I do, I do indeed want my light beer to be drinkable.

So, good-bye and good riddance for good, ye beers of chewable and rectal-suppository stripe. Ye powdered forms and nasal-spray types. Ye lozenge-based brews (suckability) and ye roll-ons, too. I'm casting my lot with drinkability you see. And here, my dears, is mud in your eye.

# # #

Unknown endings

I don't remember the last time I carried my son, the youngest of my six children. He was probably five; could have been six. Probably had to do with rudely foul weather and rushing the two of us from one sheltered area to another (perhaps our car). Or maybe I just carried him to bed.

I can't recall.

Hoisting and hugging and lugging my son was something I'd done many times a week since his infancy, decreasing, predictably, with each passing year, but taken for granted as a reliable feature of quotidian life, a thing I simply did, regularly and routinely, and would go on doing.

Only, I didn't.

I picked him up, that distant day, and carried him from some point A to some point B for some now indeterminate reason. And then I put him down and that was that. I was all done carrying my son and didn't know it.

It's a good thing, though, I'm thinking. We'd die too much inside should little unknown endings like these be recognized for what they are.

# # #

Gloria

A poem about my mother ...

If self awareness was
original sin then
what of that woman
who bore me
now?

Has she
(gone witless)
reversed God’s ire,
restored Eve to prefall purity,
regained Eden’s pristine clarity
in the insolent fluorescent haze
of Hilltop Haven?

Is scabrous skin thus
flawless flesh,
and hideous breath
the saccharine suspiration
of surpliced seraphim

who with bent heads and
barren gazes
glorify Almighty God
in hymns of unpremeditated
shrieking?

# # #

Are we the best God can do? and other incredulous musings

How can God be perfect and still have made us? Would it have killed God to wire us not to publicly opine about or privately obsess over, say, Jessica Simpson's freshly acquired beef? Or was God shooting for silly in addition to rashly irrational? Who knows: Maybe the point of evolution was simply to bring us from baboon to buffoon. If so, mission accomplished. We are one sorry-ass collection of illogical, stubbornly (in some cases proudly) ignorant, and largely unable to meaningfully prioritize (e.g., beef-beefing) idiots.

Also ...

How come God needs to be worshiped, not to mention feared? Do you demand to be worshiped by your children? Do you boast about your dad-fearing or your mom-fearing, as the case may be, kids? Isn't God supposed to be the ultimate parent, not the ultimate pathologically insecure, stroke me, stroke me, stroke me, tyrant?

And how come so many Christians seem to place more stock in what's in the Old Testament than what's in the New? Didn't Christ redefine the definitive point of view (rhyme intentional)?

• Love thy neighbor as thyself (gotta love gays then, y'all).
• Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
• Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone.
• Easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, et cetera.

I guess what it comes down to is, the New Testament just does not provide the comfy foundation of scriptural say-so for all the bigotry, intolerance, money-grubbing, backbiting, and back stabbing that are so woefully prevalent in so many self-described Christian lives.

So ...

Forget the faith, methinks. Just gimme the begorrah.

# # #