“Did you ever wonder what dogs do on their day off? They can’t lie around and do nothing; that’s what they do for a living.” — George Carlin, American Humorist

The irony of today’s post is not lost on me.  Much of what I call “navel gazing” is really comprised of me wondering about stuff, and hoping it’s “relate-able” enough for those of you who take the time to read my seven-to-twelve paragraphs on whatever the current thing I’m wondering about might be.

I’m always wondering, and I always have.  My father encouraged it; in fact, he was the one who introduced me to George Carlin and his observational wonderment — some of it pretty misanthropic at times.  My father wondered a lot himself, sometimes taking the time to write down his musings on three-by-five index cards, a practice I have inherited from him.

When I was in college, my colleagues and I would partake in certain activities meant to, shall we say, “spur wonderment.”  I used to wonder so much that at one point, over a pizza that was being devoured by myself and a couple other ravenous college friends, one of them lost his temper and, with his mouth full of cheese and tomato sauce, he let out, “Jesus, Dan, enough!  Do you ever wonder who wonders?“

Well that shut me up.  For the time being, anyway.

And these days, I do wonder who wonders.  In this age of Google and Wikipedia, and Ask Jeeves and the rest, one really needn’t wonder any more.  The answers are all out there, just a few clicks away.  My nine year old regularly asks me to “google” the answers to questions he has for me, the once omniscient father.

My brother and I still laugh about how my father used to stammer through explanations of the things we didn’t understand.  He was an unusually intelligent person, and nine out of ten times he knew the actual answers to the questions we had for him.  But on that tenth occurrence, we always knew when he was stumped.  He’d say things like, “Well, now you know, that’s an interesting question,” or “There are a lot of conflicting theories about that.”

We’d let him struggle for a while, before one of us inevitably said, “In other words…..”  And the other  would respond, “You don’t know.”

After a few years of this, the “you don’t know” wasn’t necessary any more.  Dad would either laugh and admit that he really didn’t know the answer, or he’d defiantly say, “No, no, I actually know this!”  It didn’t matter much; our admiration for him didn’t flag.  He wasn’t all-knowing, but that was okay.  He still knew a hell of a lot more than either of us did.

I wonder . . . if all the answers are out there on the Internet somewhere, is the quest for knowledge over?  Is the wise man on the  mountaintop out of a job?

More importantly, I wonder this:  If there’s nothing left to wonder about, do we continue to be human?  Or have we morphed into something else?  And is that something else something more, or something less?

It’s officially 2013, and in two days, I’ll be back at work, wearing the professional mask, or hat, if you prefer, for the first time in a couple of weeks.  I’ll have people — many people — stopping me to wish me a happy new year, then hoping to get their questions answered, questions particular to them in their particular niche at our school.  I’ll wish them well, exchange pleasantries, then do what I can to answer their query.

Then I’ll sigh, remembering this quiet time — the perfect week between Christmas and New Year — as a fading, pleasant memory.  For now, I bask in it.  I enjoy being in my pajamas on a weekday, sleeping late and sipping my coffee in my sunny home office.

Back when I was a younger person, this wondrous week was when I’d come down from the hinterlands, back to my home in the suburbs of New York City.  Sometimes we had snow, sometimes not.  I can remember Amtrak train rides that were delayed by frozen tracks and fallen limbs from wind-swept trees.  One of my fondest memories is coming down from Syracuse University with my buddy Mignon.  She was kind enough to give me a ride in her dying Scirocco, a car in such poor shape that the heater gave out, causing us to shiver during the five-hour drive home.  To make the time pass, we played travel games like Boticelli and something we called “The Movie Game.”  Mostly, we laughed a lot.

My snowy childhood home, One Scott Lane, in Purchase, New York

Once we arrived home, it was all about reunions.  Our friends would find their ways home from the various institutions of higher learning they attended — places like the University of Vermont, Franklin and Marshall College, Brown and the various State Universities of New York — and we would reconvene in a number of places.  Sometimes we’d meet up at one of our homes.  More likely, though, we’d end up at one or another of two local bars — the Cobblestone and the Hilltop — which sat (and still sit) right next door to each other on Anderson Hill Road, near the SUNY Purchase campus.  They were comfortable bar-restaurants, with decent food and reasonable drink prices.  We were known there, and the bartenders and bouncers were kind to us, so we brought our reunions, and our money, to these two places regularly.

It was good to catch up with friends, to break out the old inside jokes, tell stories of college life, and get happily plastered.  Of course, we did a few things we probably shouldn’t have, things we now warn our own children against, but there was a perfection to be had in that week between Christmas and New Years that can never be duplicated.

I first became at least vaguely aware of the tragedy in Connecticut this morning when, as my wife texted me to let me know she was safely landed in New York she mentioned, ever so briefly, “There was a shooting at an elementary school in CT.”

Embroiled as I was all day in the usual string of emergencies that is my job as a high school administrator, I couldn’t follow the story as closely as I would have liked.  At one point, at the end of the day, I caught a glimpse of President Obama on my secretary’s computer.  As he fought back tears, describing the collective grief of his nation, I began to understand, for the first time, and in a very real, very visceral way, the severity of the situation.  I could see it on Mr. Obama’s face.  His very demeanor made me understand the loss our country suffered today.

The real emotional work came when I picked up my sons from school.  As I said, their mother had arrived in New York earlier in the day, so the task of talking with them about what had happened fell on me alone.  Normally, Jeanette and I would have gotten together and discussed this first.  Today I didn’t have that option.  I think my children knew, almost immediately, how heartbroken I was, and, before setting off in the car, I told them I needed to talk to them about something serious and horrible, and that I needed them to listen.

This got their attention, and both looked at me from the back seat of my car, a bit of fear in their expressions, as they strapped into their seat belts, just as they do each and every day I pick them up behind their school.

“A man went into a school today and killed some people, people who had done nothing wrong.  A lot of people died, including children.”

I was a little shocked by my own words, and by how matter-of-fact they came out.  It was as though I needed these two boys to know that I was in control, that I was still their father.

And that they were safe.

The questions came fast and hard, one after the other.  “Who was he?”  “Why did he do that?”  “Is he still alive?”  “Will he come here?”

I did my best to answer all the questions, and I found this last one most interesting of all.  “No, Jackson,  he’s not coming here.  He’s dead now.  And you guys are safe in your school.  Your teachers make sure you’re always safe.”

We do lockdown drills at my school, just as they do at every single public school in the United States.  Always, there are those teachers who take it a little less seriously — I had to speak to one recently, who seemed somehow put-upon as I asked him to find a classroom and hide with the students and teachers, instead of making the photocopies that were so important to him at that moment.  I suspect our next drill will be taken more seriously now.  I don’t know how effective these drills are, but we do what we can, and I can do nothing more than hold my sons tight, tell them I love them, and reassure them that as their father I will do all I can to keep them safe.

Covering a class yesterday at my school, I asked the students what they had planned for the weekend.  Most said they would be catching up on sleep, one talked about a trip to see family down in the Valley, and another mentioned hanging out at the mall.  When they asked me the same, I told them I’d been considering taking my wife out on a date to see the new James Bond movie.

“It’s so funny,” a boy said, “how they, like, keep bringing him back every couple of years.”

I didn’t quite know how to respond to his comment.  I suppose it is kind of “funny,” in the sense that our taste for this character has not waned since Dr. No was released fifty years ago.  Because I turn 49 next month, I can say that James Bond has been a part of my life during the whole journey, and yes, I have seen new incarnations come and go.

I’m particularly fond of Sean Connery, because I remember how close it made me feel to my father, watching those films.  Connery was always my dad’s favorite, though I think had Dad lived to see our present Bond, Daniel Craig, he’d have approved.  Sean Connery had such style and power, and he didn’t take himself overly seriously, which helped.  I have strong memories of lying in my parents’ big king-size bed watching Bond films with them.  My father loved telling me about all the exotic locations in which they were shot.

Most of my memories of seeing Bond flicks in the theatre were of Roger Moore, in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  Barbara Bach fascinated me and all my friends, of course.  But I wasn’t a huge Roger Moore fan.  He went too far to the tongue-in-cheek side, so that I didn’t find his “license to kill” at all believable.  Also, by the time 1977 rolled around, and they came up with Jaws, his rival in The Spy Who Loved Me, it was clear they’d run out of ideas, in my mind.  My brother and I went to see Octopussy when it came out during my sophomore year in college, but we were so addled with all manner of controlled substance, I remember virtually nothing about the movie to this day.

I vaguely recall going to see Timothy Dalton as Bond, and liking him okay, but deciding, perhaps, that my life in Bondage was coming to an end.  Pierce Brosnan was a 007 for the ladies.  He was handsome and charming — maybe even sexy, according to a few of my female friends.  But I never bought Pierce as an ass-kicker.  Also, 2002, when Die Another Day was released, happened to be the year I married Jeanette Reyes, and we had more important things to worry about — like buying our first home and having our first baby a year later.  Yes, I took note of Halle Berry’s Ursula Andress-inspired bikini, but nothing else stayed with me.

When Daniel Craig took over in 2005, I became interested again.  He was billed as a “darker” Bond, probably because he was really the first 007 who was actually scary.  I had no trouble believing that this man was an assassin.  So I watch Casino Royale and Quantum of Solace every chance I get, whenever they’re replayed on TNT or TBS or some other basic cable station.

And I’m now more than ready for Skyfall.  The action is more frenetic than it once was.  The explosions are CG and much, much louder than they were in 1962.  The punches feel real, and the campinesss is still there, but much more subtle.  They still shoot in exotic locations, which I love, and, lying on my king size bed with Jackson, explaining the intricacies of one of the poker scenes in Casino Royale, brought pleasant recollections of my father.  I wonder what Bond will look like when Jackson is my age, in another 50 years……

A colleague and I were recently chatting, killing time during lunch coverage, when we do nothing much more than provide an adult presence in the cafeteria and answer the occasional student question.  As it turns out, he and I were born approximately a month apart, so there is no cultural reference we can drop that the other will not get.  Despite being born 1,500 miles apart, we had many of the same experiences and influences growing up.

This says a lot about the power of American media and the Hollywood dream machine.  As recently as a hundred years ago, if you were to speak to someone from East Texas and someone from the well-to-do northern suburbs of New York City, it might have been like comparing beings from two different planets.  Don’t get me wrong — I’m sure there are aspects of our lives and attitudes that might confound each other.  But thanks to large helpings of mass culture, we grew up with the same rock and roll bands, songs, television shows, films and iconic actors.

John Travolta would not top any of my lists, were you to ask me who my favorites are, even though I saw him recently in Pulp Fiction (for the umpteenth time), and his performance, like so many others in that film, is spectacular.  His effect — or maybe the effect of the dream machine that created his persona — is undeniable.  When my friend and I discuss the “Travolta Effect,” we talk about things like hair and clothes, and how he took us from Kotter to Saturday Night Fever to Urban Cowboy to Grease.  

Apparently John has fallen on more difficult times of late.  Since Pulp, his career has been hit and miss. He made an embarrassing, Dianetics-inspired movie, based on L. Ron Hubbard’s book, Battlefield Earth, which may have been the low-water mark.  He’s had a few mini-comebacks, including a drag musical (Hairspray) and an animated mega-hit in which he voices a dog who believes he is the super-hero Hollywood has created.

More notoriously, in one of the more lurid stories this past summer, John Travolta was rumored to have received some “questionable” massages from a rather shady masseur named Luis.  Then of course, many others came out of the woodwork to say they, too, had had massages that ended up being much more than a rubdown.

I don’t pretend to know any of the gory details of what went on there.  Like my friend, and most men in our demographic, I’m sure, I have turned away from the uglier aspects of John’s recent travails.  I did happen to notice that Gotti, in which Travolta will play the title role of John Gotti, Sr., is in post-production.  Barry Levinson is the director, and Kelly Preston, Travolta’s real-life wife, plays Victoria Gotti, the spouse of the Dapper Don.

So we’ll see.  Maybe Johnny T. has one more comeback left in him.  And who knows, maybe my colleague and I will start sporting shiny Armani suits and smoking big, fat Cuban cigars, and the Travolta Effect will once again be in full force.

Every now and then — usually after playing with his friend K’Jon in after school — our seven year old son Jackson will make a play for a pair of earrings.  The idea mortifies my wife and amuses me.  She associates piercings with thuggishness.  I shouldn’t make light of her concern.  I know where it comes from.  There’s a path we want our boys to walk toward, and it’s one of possibilities and healthy living.  And then there’s that other path — of rebellion, that winds its way through city streets at night, through tattoo parlors and after-hours clubs.

I’m not relegating Jackson to either life just yet.  He does have a rebellious spirit, however; anyone who knows him at all can tell you that.  He’s not defiant, exactly, although he certainly has those moments.  He’s what Katy Perry might call a “firework.”  If there’s any sign of anything even slightly resembling a party breaking out, he perks right up, wanting to be first in line.  As soon as the intro beats start pumping to a popular song, his face changes, and he becomes entranced, letting the music move him — both figuratively and literally.  He dances like a dervish, throwing himself around the space in wild abandon.

His impulsivity is probably what scares his mother so much when he starts asking for earrings.  I wonder if he’ll do what I did when I was seventeen years old.  Of course, I was anything but a rebel.  Sure, I did some things that, in and of themselves, might be considered rebellious or risky, even, but I was always a momma’s boy, when it came right down to it.  But that summer after my senior year, before shipping off to Syracuse University, I decided to do something that would make a statement about me.  One day, after my lawn-mowing shift at the Arbors in Rye Brook was over, I found myself in the house of a young lady I had befriended.  I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I do recall her holding my face in her hand and staring into my eyes, as the ice pack she held on my left earlobe had its desired numbing effect.  She then positioned a potato she’d cut in half behind the earlobe, and said, “Little pinch,” as she worked a needle straight through my flesh and into the potato.

I left her house with a stud earring, my stomach fluttering as I imagined my mother seeing this new adornment for the first time.  Funny, it didn’t occur to me to wonder about my father’s reaction, and sure enough, when my dad got home and finally saw it, he shrugged and said, “Hm.  Looks pretty good.”

My mother had a slightly different reaction, however.  Her initial response was, “Okay Danny, joke’s over.”  We enjoyed a good prank in my family, and she was sure this was one of those (or maybe, like so many occasions, she was trying to convince herself of a truth she hoped existed).  Once she’d had a close enough look to realize this was no prank, she said something unexpected.

“What’s her name?” she asked.

“Who?” I replied, knowing full well who.

“The girl who did this to you.”  Her voice sounded different, ringing of a dead seriousness that was new to me.

“Why do you want to know who she is?” I asked cautiously.

“So I can put a hole in her, the way she put a hole in you.”

I could easily imagine the same interaction between Jackson and his mom, as well as my reaction being quite like my father’s — a shrugging acceptance.  It occurs to me now that having my mother around to help bring up this little rebel might have been a helpful thing; however, in many ways, my mother, the late Carol Runyan Fuchs, was the biggest rebel I ever knew.

I recently returned to Texas from a month-long vacation to my childhood home of New York.  I had the opportunity to visit with many good people, including family and old friends.  With my two sons, I spent the first two weeks or so tripping down Memory Lane, doing my best to give them a better idea of who their dad is.  This included a visit to my father’s grave site in Valhalla.
My point here is that I had many “blogworthy” experiences while in New York.  Yet I wrote about none of them.  When I ask myself why I wasn’t able to jot down Word One, I think about a conversation I had with one old friend, as we sat drinking beer in one of the East Village haunts of our youth.  He mentioned enjoying my posts in the past and wondered why I’d stopped writing my blog.

“I guess I’m just a little tired of my own voice” I answered wryly.  “‘Yeah, yeah, this thing your kid did reminds you of this thing that happened in your past. We get it, Dan.'””

“Uh, okay,” my friend said when I was done mocking myself. “Well I still thought it was good.”

I don’t mean to make light of praise.  Even though gratification comes more quickly than it did back in the days of sending short stories, along with a self-addressed return envelope, we writers still yearn for feedback.  Especially when it’s positive.

Good and great writers find their voices and share them as much as they can, unapologetically.  I wonder, though, if the authors whose work I love ever went through a period of silence like the one I’m breaking with this post.

I’m sure my three-month hiatus is more complicated than I make it out to be here.  The reasons I’ve not been writing anything are probably numerous.  One of them may have been that I was too busy living my life to write about it.

Be that as it may, however, I am, apparently, back.

The mid-season NAO tournament was this past weekend and man was that a lot of baseball!  It started on Thursday night with Diego’s game.  Then two each for both teams on Saturday, then one more for Diego on Sunday, along with two more for Jackson’s team (the Manor Hellcats), who made a nice run and ended up ranked fourth in their age group.  Both boys, in their first times out there playing the sport, have become important members of their respective teams.

Unlike their dad back in his day, both my sons seem to want the ball to come their way, to see what they can do with it.  Jackson is an infielder, like his Uncle Mike, and gets a good deal of action standing at the pitcher’s mound during t-ball.  Diego is in left field, as I was at his age.  Unlike me, however, Diego gets disappointed when no balls get hit to him in the course of a game.  I always heaved a big sigh of relief when the defensive half of the inning went by without anything coming to me.

I did have a pretty strong throwing arm, which Diego seems to have inherited.  He has had a few nice put outs — of kids rounding first, surprised to see the ball end up behind them in the first baseman’s glove, of kids trying to stretch singles into doubles, thanks to overzealous first base coaches, and one beauty at home plate.  On this last one, Diego threw a strike from left, and it got there so quickly, the poor kid tried to run back to third before the catcher tagged him out.

Jackson stands at the pitcher’s mound with so much confidence, I can’t help but think it’s where he belongs.  He’s caught a couple of line drives for outs, and gobbles up ground balls with beautiful footwork, before tossing the ball to his first baseman, who almost always drops it. 

In the heat of competition I have had to check my responses.  I don’t want to be That Dad, and never thought I would be.  Honestly though, he’s in there, lurking near the surface.  When I watch either boy compete, I inch closer to the edge of my seat, palms sweating and I have to remind myself to keep breathing and keep smiling.