Kids Don’t Live Here Any More
In a few short days, we are going to be empty-nesters. James will be off to start college, and Tom will be back at Andover. At least Tom is vaguely local, but with everything intense at Andover, he will have little time for parents between holidays.
One thing I wanted to do today was clean out old links on my browsers. I found all the educational and fun sites for kids—Dinosaur comics, Disney, Hooligans, Geometry Magic, Beowulf, How Stuff Works, Kidsreads, J.K. Rowling, Baseball, Soccer, Chess, etc. Further down the list, sites like those became Scholastic.com, SSAT Online, School Rating Blogs, Big Future-My Organizer, College Board Sign In, Music at Andover, Phillips Academy Student Account Center, and First-Year Experience – Ithaca College.
Clearing disk space on my laptop would a lot less messy if it didn’t involve wasting so many tissues on this runny nose and coughing fits I seem to get doing it.
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ADDED: More I intended to post on Facebook but is here instead:
I recall the day James was born. It was a perfect May morning. When I got home from the hospital that evening, a small thunderstorm had moved in. I remember lying alone on the bed, listening to the rain, wondering about the new future we had made.
I write this in the same room, next to the same bed, looking at the same window, and James will be leaving for college in a few days. His brother is off to boarding school shortly after. And, for the first time in 19 years, there will be no kids here. But what was before that May evening can never return, nor should it, nor do I wish it. Somehow, very improbably for us, we made four new lives.
To say we have been blessed is a commonplace. But I look at the world and know we have been blessed, and I thank God every day for that blessing on all our lives.
This….is good to wake up to
I had this the other day…and right now I’d like another one!
The old home town
That great sage of American culture, Beavis, of Beavis and Butthead, summed up what I think should be the approach Detroit takes to its new future: “This sucks. Change it.” I was born and raised in Detroit. I didn’t leave until I was 26, and it’s not like I went that far when I did; Ann Arbor is only about 40 miles west of Detroit. But…Ann Arbor is worlds away from Detroit, in so many ways. The air for one. I didn’t notice how bad it was for most of my life until I moved to a city without enormous factories everywhere. When you live in a place with an actual downtown you can walk on a Saturday night without the ambiance of random gunfire, you notice these things. Hell, I even worked for almost two years for the City of Detroit. Yeah, I got a ton of stories from there, and I’ll regale you with those at some point, but even then, I knew I couldn’t stay.
I could give you all the conventional reasons why you’d leave a Detroit, but, for the most part, those wouldn’t be mine. The reason I was eager to leave was that Detroit was proud to be stuck where it was. It knew it was having huge problems; but it was NOT going to change the way it was doing any thing. That’s not a good attitude to have when things are going well, and an even worse one to have when things are going badly. I knew a fighter pilot who had fought in Vietnam and I asked him what he would do if he spotted an enemy plane “in his six.” (directly behind you) He said, “Anyway you go is better than the way you’re going now.” Detroit seemed to think it could stand being shot at better than it could change course. Why be proud of not changing? That isn’t it exactly, it’s rejection of how you’d perceive yourself in the course of changing. Detroiters (or is it Midwesterners generally? Discuss!) reject what they would perceive as the arrogance of EastCoasters and the flakiness of WestCoasters for a more “reasonable” view of the world. Even if that perception were even vaguely true, it forgets how virtues often degenerate into parodies of themselves. What was once steadfastness becomes calcified stubbornness, well past the point of being “reasonable”. Now they wake up, find themselves billions in the hole and thinking about selling everything that isn’t nailed down, and a lot that is. Maybe some arrogant flakiness would have been better when times were more flush.
Certainly I’ve been reading plenty o’ punditry across the spectrum about the upcoming bankruptcy of my old town; there’s more finger pointing than Uma Thurman on David Carradine at the end of Kill Bill V.2. Megan McArdle has a pretty good summary of them here at her new digs on Bloomberg.
Here’s the funny thing: Detroit will be a leader in an entirely new area for entities of its size, dealing with a humogouse bankruptcy. It’s not that everyone else’s (Chicago? California?) bankruptcy will be identical to Detroit’s, but often the first one through the door will establish patterns for the others. As Detroit goes, so goes the Nation? Geez, I hope not.
Is there anybody out there?
???
UPDATE: An interesting thing happened to one of the bigger blogging sites recently. In recent months there had been growing tension between Professor Ann Althouse and her commenting community. I’m not going to go into details, but eventually Althouse decided to blow up her commenting community, and shut down comments altogether.
This was upsetting for many of the commenters. A lot of people have invested a lot of their time and emotions there over the years. A few of us took to heart the suggestion that we start our own blogs as replacements. One of those spin-offs has now become the “go-to” site for a lot of Althouse commenters, and is doing a pretty brisk business at the moment. The site was originally called “Lem’s Learning Levity” but has changed its name (possibly temporarily) to “Comment Home“. It is an explicit effort to preserve a chunk of the old community, and Lem has now added several co-bloggers from the old Althouse commentariat.
I sympathize with this effort. Ultimately it is through Althouse that I came to have two friends, Amba and reader_Iam, and my own blogs and to co-blog here from time to time. So I’m very pleased to see this take off. So consider this an open invitation to those of you not already there, to join the Althouse Refugee Movement as we create a new online community. And it IS a community for commenters (though lurkers are always welcome, of course), so feel free to join the fray.
Current Fish
I was asked to post a status for myself here, so here goes.
I’ve been in the hospital with c.diff and cellulitus. (the spell checker wants to change that word to “celluite”. That too.)
I’ve lost a lot of fluids, and my right leg is swollen and red. I was in the hospital for a week, and I’ll be in a hotel for two more weeks
getting IV’s that I guess I will be putting in myself. On top of this, I was booted out of the place I was staying, (yes, while in the hospital!) so in two weeks, where I go to live is unknown. I was told I could “reapply” to come back, but no guarantees. Not that I want to really go back there if I can help it, as I have been nothing but sick since I was there. I need my own space.
More as things develop.
Ron
Two Week Update: I am getting better…..but the c.diff is still there, but much less. The leg is less swollen and red , but still red and stiff enough that they are extending my treatment for 2 more weeks. (I think still in the same place) It’s been good for my head to think things through. Many thanks to all Ambioids for their support!
True Horror
Just recently my nephew Tavor was found by one of his close friends, with his head blown off by a gun. There was no police investigation, since it seemed like an obvious suicide.
Tavor was a straight A student in college, not far from graduating. None of his friends thought he had any special problems.
Tavor was good-looking, popular, talented, athletic and fun to be around. The only thing that seemed a little strange was his secretiveness, the fact that he never talked about his feelings or problems.
His mother Narcy, is my sister. I believe she would have given her own life, if it could have saved his. I believe she loved Tavor as much as any mother could love her son.
Of course I don’t believe this was in any way Narcy’s fault although she is (as her name suggests) a “narcissist.” I really don’t know what a narcissist is, but I guess I know when if I see one.
Narcy brags, a lot, about herself and about her two (now only one) kids. If Narcy ever has a problem with anyone — and that is often — it’s always the other person’s fault, entirely. The other person is mentally ill, and/or evil. Narcy is perfecly sane — those of us who know her are sure of that, because she has told us countless times.
When this happened, needless to say, Narcy was devastated, and could not face life without Tavor. She wondered if she could have helped him somehow, or if she should have known something was wrong.
A year before he died, Tavor had suddenly become extremely angry at his mother, seemingly for no reason. He cut her, and all relatives, out of his life almost completely.
His death was even more tragic because he left in anger, so he and his mother would never be reconciled on this earth.
Everyone told Narcy she was the best possible mother, and that she should not for one minute take any blame. After giving it a little thought, Narcy agreed. This was not in any way her fault. Her son must have had an undiagnosed mental illness, which he had inherited. Nothing at all could have prevented his suicide — he was genetically programmed for it.
Tavor’s biological father, who died long ago, actually did have a mental illness, which caused him to kill himself slowly with drugs.
Narcy is in no way to blame. That doesn’t make it easy, because Tavor is still gone forever. Narcy was a perfect mother to him, and all the anger he felt towards her was just the raving of a mentally ill young man.
I love Narcy very much, she is my only sister. I am glad she has found a way to place all the blame on the DNA of her poor dead ex.
But on the other hand, I don’t like explanations that are over-simplified. I feel like it has to be more complicated than that.
Not that it matters now, it’s too late for Tavor. But I still can’t help thinking about it and searching for explanations that make sense.
How did Hollywood miss this?
Why didn’t John Wayne ever play Richard Wagner in a movie? “Listen up, Wotan…”
Part of a new series: Things Ron Wonders About (TRWA)
Ambiance 