Who’s Afraid of the Big Five-One?

I’m a little late for my annual birthday essay this year. It’s only partly because I wasn’t sure how to handle this one. 51 is a number that doesn’t immediately lend itself to clever prose, although my sister pointed out to me that “51 backwards is only 15.” So, okay, that’s cool.

The important thing about having reached this particular age is that it means absolutely nothing to me on a personal level. I have by now reached well beyond the mid-point of my anticipated life span, yet this fact does not bother me. That’s probably because I’m still a number (10, give or take) of years away from giving retirement any serious thought. In ten years my girls will be in or on the cusp of their college years, and that’s about the time I will begin considering living on a fixed income.

So 51 is not a milestone. It’s not a nice, round number like 50, which always sounds more impressive than it really is. Neither is it 60, which is when I won’t mind those senior discounts so much. Physically I have parts of me (my brain, for example) that refuse to accept that I am no longer 25. The rest of my body (literally) feels every one of those 51 years now. Especially, and I know precisely how cliché this sounds, when the weather changes. Mrs. Woody and I both have internal barometers that tell us better than any analog or digital weather station when the barometric pressure is changing. We can’t tell whether it’s going up or down, but we can tell you it’s moving.

Mentally, though, I don’t feel the chronological advances. I have what is probably an unfortunate tendency to gauge myself against my Dad when it comes to aging. Dad for me always epitomized the “grown up” male figure. He was nearly always larger than life from my perspective. And I’ve never seemed to measure up.

I will say, however, that when I catch my reflection at certain angles these days, I see parts of Dad staring back at me. My hands, for example. Even now, looking at them while they type, they’re not Dad-like hands. Yet, in the mirror I can see those big, beefy hands that were one of Dad’s defining physical characteristics. In fact, my arms, when I see them in profile, remind me forcefully of Dad, especially when he was conducting.

So how else to define what this birthday meant to me? The best way, really, would be to describe how we chose as a family to celebrate it this year:

We went to San Diego.

A couple of years ago, my birthday celebration was a day at Disneyland. That was fun, but it was only the one day. This year we did a long weekend that included Friday and Monday. We visited Sea World, took a tour of San Diego Harbor, visited the Fleet Science Center, hit the San Diego Zoo, and did probably our first and last visit to Legoland on the way home.

I haven’t been that tuckered out in months. But it was fun every single day, and we got to see lots of neat stuff.

Which, for me, is precisely why I’m not worried about 51. When Dad was 51 I was never sure that he was actually enjoying the places we visited as a family. This was probably because of Dad’s propensity for grousing whenever normal humans were otherwise having fun. Take Disneyland, for example. Dad apparently loved Disneyland. Yet, aside from “Pirates of the Carribean,” I don’t recall Dad ever having ridden anything that involved less-than-dignified entertainment value. I, on the other hand, went on at least three different rides with my daughters yesterday at Legoland, including one that takes the rider and puts him or her in various, decidedly undignified poses, including upside-down, so that my blood was not restored to normal circulation (“sluggish”) for at least seven hours. And what’s more, I enjoyed them.

51? I can handle it.

National Book Month

We always get a kick out of National Book Month. Not so much because it’s highlighted on our calendar — I didn’t even know it was National Book Month until Mrs. Woody told me it was this morning — but rather for its entertainment value.

Mrs. Woody pointed me to an article in LDSLiving Magazine called A Great Escape. The article was a staff piece that chats up the benefits of reading in a family dynamic, and provides a few pointers they took from the National Book Foundation for “getting the whole family involved in National Book Month.”

First one on the list: “Family trips to the local library. Encourage each family member to check out at least one book.”

Or simply stop by my house, and you can borrow several of our library books.

One book each? We are a family of voracious readers. Daddy can’t always take time to read because he’s always under hideous deadlines at work, but reads whenever he can. The girls, however, are rarely without a book (or three) under way. Mrs. Woody taught them both to read early on, and both girls were well above level by the time they were of kindergarten age. It’s only gotten better with time.

In fact, nine year old Doodle just finished the entire Harry Potter series this year for the first time. She’s read the first few novels several times before, but was always a little scared of the later books. This year she finally got motivated and read all the way through them.

Our trips to the library require a special backpack on wheels. A typical trip to the library for this family begins with rounding up all the books we’ve finished. This is made easier by having the girls put them underneath the end table that we use as our “Library Table.” We stuff them all into the backpack, which is usually filled to capacity, and return them at the desk.

We have to return them at the desk partly because we’re pretty sure the library has misplaced one or two of our returns over time, and we don’t want to have to pay for them. But mostly it’s because our library cards are nearly always at or near capacity, and we need to have books checked in before we can check any more out. It’s a vicious cycle.

So, I’m sorry, but encouraging my children to check out just one book would be tantamount to child abuse in this home. We feel cruel when we limit them to five apiece. My arthritic limbs appreciate their restraint, though.

I blame my mother for part of this, by the way. Here’s another woman who cannot walk into a library without checking out at least ten or more volumes. It’s pathological.

The second tip involves “family reading night.” Really? Just the one? We must be overdoing it, because I defy you to visit this family on a night (or day) when we’re not reading. Of course, they amplify this by suggesting that you hold a family discussion, giving everyone a chance to talk about the book they’re reading.

This is fine as far as it goes, but for every pithy tome the girls read, there’s plenty of what I consider to be “fluff” reading as well. These are the series books that you find in the juvenile section that take, maybe, half an hour to read and are filled with characters that, if they were to become films, would make me want to hurl popcorn at the screen. Still, this family discusses plenty of what gets read. It has even led to Jelly taking her first tentative steps into the world of Role Playing Games because her imagination has found such fertile ground in her reading over the years.

This tip was cute: “Family game nights about literature.” Um… like we’d have time for that. Everyone has their nose buried in a book.

The final tip from this article, though, I heartily agree with: “Reading with your kids. Not only does this help your child realize the importance of reading, it is a great opportunity to spend one-on-one time together.”

It should go without saying that Mrs. Woody and I have done this from the start with our girls. From the time they were old enough to hold up their tiny heads, we were reading to them. We got to where Mrs. Woody and I both had memorized several of their favorite stories over time. The girls, too, were memorizing as it turned out. Whenever Woody was tired and wanted to cut story time short, he’d try to abridge the story. The girls would immediately know that Daddy had skipped, and make me go back and do it right.

In a way, it’s sad that we have to work so hard to encourage people to read books. It speaks to the shorter attention spans that people seem to be developing because of half hour sitcoms, sound-bite news, and anything you can find on the internet. Probably one of the reasons why I’m not a more popular blogger is that it takes me so much longer to say what most bloggers can say in a few sentences. I’ve always been too long-winded for the generic internet.

Still, there’s hope. Demonizing an author like J. K. Rowling simply because she chose to write about a world where magic exists with terms like “witchcraft” and “sorcery” should always be balanced against the undeniable fact that she motivated an entire generation of new readers. It does not mean that millions of kids will grow up to become pagans. It does mean that millions of kids may grow up with a greater ability to read and comprehend even greater messages contained in numberless volumes of truly classic literature that a thin, wiry, bespectacled wizard may have unlocked for them.

So celebrate National Book Month. Or, if you’re anything like our family, National Book Life. It makes a difference.

Now Where Did I See That…?

It can be hard to keep track of things I’ve run across at one time or another on the internet. This is particularly true of funny things; that is, things that I find funny even if no one else does. For example, I’ve been saying for years that I have MAS, but bad. “MAS,” for the uninitiated, stands for “Male Answer Syndrome.” I’d say I inherited it from my Dad, but Dad was generally right. The true MAS sufferer has something more akin to Blatherer’s Disease, where unfiltered text drains down from the brain directly to the mouth. But can I find the page where I first encountered what I consider to be the definitive essay describing this malady? I cannot. Some old joke page, probably, long since dissolved into the ether.

Fortunately, good material never dies on the internet. It generally gets recycled, rebranded, and claimed by thousands of authors who want their fifteen minutes, even if they have to steal it. Here is a version close enough to the one I remember from years ago that it might be the original. Note the designation “A Humor Us Original!” on that page. Heaven only knows.

Ever wondered where the end of all this surfing will take you? Have you ever pondered what awaits the person who has visited the estimated billions of web pages on the internet? (Note: I’m old enough to remember when they were counting pages in the tens of millions. In internet time that makes me the 2,000 Year Old Man.)

I came across the End of the Internet several years ago in the early days of my career as a web designer and programmer. I even included links to it in some of my web pages at work. This, so far as I can tell, is the original and I was delighted to see it’s still there. There are others who have tried to expand on this idea, of course. But I love the simplicity of the page. A few simple HTML inline style codes, and there it is. The end.

Musical humor is not hard to come by. Some of it, unfortunately, must remain my private little joke as language becomes problematic in more modern routines. So, as much as I’d love to link to the guy who lambastes Pachelbel’s “Canon in D,” I won’t. But nothing prevents you from searching YouTube and seeing what you come up with (look for Rob Paravonian). Just be warned that the guy gets pretty worked up about it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

On the other hand, sophisticated humor need not escape us. I was surfing YouTube late one night while waiting for one of my database processes to run (I spend a lot of my evenings this way) and came across this gem from Richard Joo. I first became aware of this fabulous pianist when he was fronting Billy Joel’s attempt at classical piano writing, “Fantasies and Delusions.” But this clip from a routine he’s performed around the world just floors me every time I see it.

I cannot count how many times I have personally performed the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s “Messiah.” For five years running (six this Thanksgiving weekend) I have performed in a community sing-along of select choruses, and we always do this one last. The problem is that after opening as the tenor soloist, and basically being the bedrock of the tenor section, I’m exhausted by the end of the performance. It’s worse now that we do two performances back-to-back to accommodate what has become a very dedicated — and very large — crowd. But I hope I’ve never sounded as tired as this organist must have felt in this classic recording. It sets performers’ teeth on edge whenever they hear it. A must listen every holiday for that very reason.

And, of course, the Nuns of Turtle Creek are a must-see event every year. No idea if they were the first, but they are by far the best.

An a cappella group called “Straight No Chaser” from Indiana University went viral with their comic interpretation of the Twelve Days of Christmas. Unfortunately, the original has disappeared because the guys have done a “reunion” album, and that’s the only version you can find on YouTube right now. It’s still got good stuff, but I miss the original. This one sounds somehow more canned.

That’s it for tonight. Perhaps more when I remember what I’m missing and try to put it somewhere safe for next time.