The two of us, pre-Corona, out on a date

 We’ve been married for 6,960 days.  Happy Valentine’s Day to my lovely bride.  I’ve made it clear in previous writings many times how I feel about this holiday — that it’s a shameless cash grab by the Chocolatier-Florist-Greeting Card-Industrial Complex, and yadda-yadda, blah-blah-blah.

The fact is — and I’ve probably written about this, too — that what I feel about Valentine’s Day is completely beside the point.  This so-called “holiday” is decidedly not about me at all.

And that is fine.  As it should be.  I enjoy making my lovely bride feel loved.  Plan to do it for many years to come.  That being said, I woke up this morning and thought, “Shit.  I need to head over to Walmart and grab a card and some flowers.”  Unfortunately, our unusually cold winter continues, thanks, apparently, to something called the “Polar Vortex” (sounds like a Nick Cage movie).  So when my tires started sliding on the icy roads, I decided not to tempt fate.  I turned around before even leaving the neighborhood, and re-parked the car in the driveway.

Then, the googling began — “Free printable Valentine’s Day card for spouse.”  (Yes, honey, if you’re reading this, I did say “free.”  It’s not a comment on your worth to me; it’s about saving for that Tuscany trip we’ve been talking about.)

I found a card I liked that allows you to calculate the number of days you’ve been together — thus the 6,960 for us — and printed it up.  I then found some strawberries in the fridge, carved them into hearts, placed them on a nice white plate, and brought those items to her, along with her morning coffee.  She was so touched by the gesture she posted a photo with the comment, “It’s all in the details. Thank you honey.”

First of all, let me say that it was, quite literally, the least I could do.  Imma slide my soap box back over here, and stand up on it for a hot minute.

For those of us who do NOT make six or seven figures every year (and I understand and appreciate I have it better than many), these holidays, lovely though they are, bring an element of dread.  They activate that judgmental scold, that inner voice that asks the question, “Are you good enough? Your Facebook friend from high school is taking his wife to Mallorca for Valentine’s Day, and you printed out a free card.  Look at you.”  Or “Your next-door neighbor bought her kid a brand new car for his birthday.  What did you get yours for his?  Do you even remember?  What kind of parent are you?”

I know, I know.  “Buck up, Buttercup,” right?  This is America.  This is the world as we know it.  As we’ve made it.  Still.  Makes you think, doesn’t it?

Happy Valentine’s Day to all!

A simple gesture to show my love

This morning, as I worked on my daily journal writing, I noticed I was dropping more “F-bombs” than usual, due to what I’ve decided to call the Scorsese Effect.  I showed my sixteen-year-old son Jackson “Goodfellas” last night.  He was more than ready for it.  We’d watched “The Departed,” as part of a Jack Nicholson series, so I decided to branch off into a Scorsese series, since he enjoyed that one so much.

He loved it, of course.  This may be me responding to that nagging, puritanical voice inside my head asking how I could show my teenage child such a graphic film, but I think “Goodfellas” is more of a deterrent to a life of crime than many people realize.  Henry’s journey is a harrowing one, after all.  I doubt there are many young viewers — though I’m sure there are a few — who leave this movie thinking, “I wanna be a gangster.”  You definitely understand, and empathize with why Henry gets into that life, but you also see that it turns him into a “schlub” in the end, wreaking death and destruction along the way.

Joe Pesci as Tommy DeVito in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 picture “Goodfellas”

I’ve got my own memory of the first time I went to see “Goodfellas.”  I took my dad and stepmother Judy to the cinema on Central Avenue in Hartsdale  if my failing memory serves in this instance.  (According to my brother it’s an Alamo Drafthouse now.)  My father and I had bonded through our love of both Mafia stories, — thanks to “The Godfather,” and “Godfather II,” specifically — and of Scorsese.  Dad was a huge fan of both “Taxi Driver” and “King of Comedy.” 

“He’s so good at capturing ‘lonely monsters,'” was what he said about Marty.

When we emerged from our two-and-a-half hour experience, I turned to my father and asked what he’d thought.

“Definitely an instant classic,” he said.

“Right?” I answered excitedly, shifting my attention to Judy.  She appeared less enthused.

“But…” my dad continued.

“What?” I asked.

“At our age,” Judy smiled, “when we go into the video store…”

She trailed off, probably not wanting to be unkind or ruffle my proverbial feathers.  Although I’d known her since age 4 or 5 (we were next-door neighbors for a couple of years) our stepmother-stepson relationship was still new; my mother had passed away only a couple of years earlier.

“We’re looking for movies about puppy dogs and babies,” my dad added, finishing the thought.  

“Puppy dogs and babies,” I said aloud.

Okay.  Food for thought.

Puppy dogs.  And babies.

A puppy dog.  Oh, and a baby.

As I continue to curate the programing for my current Scorsese film festival, I can’t immediately think of a picture he’s made that features either.  I may do “Gangs of New York” next, or maybe get crazy and re-watch “After Hours.”  Not sure how it will hold up, but it’s one of my faves.  Or we could go on a DeNiro tangent and look at “Midnight Run,” or continue down the Pesci road with “My Cousin Vinny.”  Thinking we could use a comedy next.  Not quite puppies and babies, but a good comedy like either of these could help “cleanse the emotional palate” as we move on together in this wonderful endeavor of father-and-son movie watching.

“Eladio” (pen and pencil, from a photo)

Notions of weakness and strength.  I’m not certain why strength and weakness have been on my mind lately, but I have a feeling there are a number of factors making my thoughts trend in this direction.

My father-in-law, Daniel Eladio Reyes de Leon, was a strong man, in more than one sense of that word.  A hard worker, he went at manual tasks — whether painting a wall, building a table, chopping down weeds and dead trees, or even carving that dead wood into baseball bats for his grandsons — with a laser-focused persistence until that job was done.  Then, after his wife or daughter reminded him to eat and drink water, he would refuel and find a new physical task to attack.  Those labors gave him, I believe, great pleasure, and, like Hercules and his twelve labors, increased strength.  Eladio was not weakened by all that hard work; on the contrary, what made him feel weak was inactivity.  Don’t get me wrong:  He was very content to sit in his chair watching his Yankees.  But that contented tiredness — which often led to him being “asleep at the wheel,” as my brother calls it, remote in hand — was not weariness.  It was pure satisfaction.

“The TV’s watching him at this point,” his wife, Sita, would say in these moments.

One evening, sitting in the airy openness of the sala in their Santo Domingo home, Eladio wanted to make a point to me about politics.  In my fading memory, the topic was Donald Trump, though it may have been his complaints about the weakness of Leonel Fernandez, former president of the Dominican Republic.  

“Mira,” he said, taking hold of my forearm in his strong grip.  He didn’t drink much in his later years, but I think we may have had one or two glasses of Brugal at that point.  “Intenta soltarte.”  

“Ummm,” I said, not wanting , as he said, to try to get loose.  I also didn’t want to disrespect him by not honoring his wishes.  So I did nothing, smiling dumbly at him, until he laughed his bright-eyed laugh,  and let me go.  He patted me on my knee.

“Ay, Dan,” he said.  “La fortaleza es muy importante.” (“Strength is very important.”)

“Si,” I answered, rubbing the feeling back into my forearm.  

My father-in-law, leaned back into his big recliner, and shut his eyes, the picture of contentment.

And of strength.  

The power of Steven Dudley’s MS13: The Making of America’s Most Notorious Gang, comes from its exhaustively researched truth-telling. In an era when journalists and investigative reporters are routinely negated, wished away by spontaneous tweets, and branded as “fake news” by anyone who is inconvenienced by facts, Dudley’s work is a refreshing return to a reality formed by truthful reporting. The author does not instruct us on who we should accept, celebrate or condemn; instead, he places his readers squarely in the center of a richly populated, and very real, world, where we must make sense of things ourselves.

Thanks to Dudley’s skills, both as a tireless research scholar and deft writer, MS13 is a book full of well-drawn characters — real people on all sides of the difficult questions posed by gangs — their horrific causes, as well as the terrible consequences wreaked by their existence.

In an age when truth seems to have been foresworn in deference to sound bites and tweets, Steven Dudley’s book is a welcome return to thoughtful examination of one of society’s most pressing questions: What are the factors that cause the tragic transformation of people’s lives into an existence of crime, violence, and desperation, which, in turn, tears at society’s remaining fabric? More importantly — or at least more immediately — we the readers of this impressive work must take this truth and put it to use. We must do what we can to affect change that will, it is hoped, prevent the desperate cycle of violence from repeating itself indefinitely.

 I recently came across an op-ed piece written by an administrator at Syracuse University on the school’s website.  In no uncertain terms, he admonishes a group of students who convened on the Quad — the very location where my well-spent tuition helped me develop a movie-star tan and a kick-ass Frisbee forehand — in some, presumably, non-social-distanced behavior. 

Once I was done cycling through my appropriately adult reaction of being Shocked and Appalled, I fell into my annoying tendency toward Deanna-Troi-caliber hyper-empathy, as I tried to understand the “thinking” behind what happened that night at my Ole Alma Mater.

A few reference points popped to mind:  my own freshman year experience, of course, and the unabashed sense of independence and elation that  flowed through me at 18 years of age.  I thought also of my niece, whose freshman year at Cornell was cut short last year by the pandemic.  Additionally, I revisited an incident at the high school where I work here in the suburbs of Austin, Texas, that took place just last week.

Much like the esteemed vice chancellor, I was tasked by my principal to respond to an online call to students to gather for a “Senior Sunset,” where kids would convene in our student parking lot, and watch the sun go down on the eve of their first day of virtual instruction as 12th graders.

I was more fortunate than Vice Chancellor Haynie, in that I received my intel before the event in question and was able to prevent it with one phone call to the young lady who posted the invite (under her actual name) and her mom.  No investigation, no scrolling through grainy surveillance footage.  Just the conversation, in which I acknowledged the need all people have — especially young people — to come together and be social, and then added my final pearl of administrative wisdom:  The sooner we’re able to abide by these restrictions, the more quickly we’ll get back to “normal.”

That worked.  The student posted a cancellation, and the Senior Sunset never happened.  And here’s what that unprecedented exchange left me with:  Young people are told “These are your salad days.  You’re only young once.  It doesn’t get any better than this.”  They want to live it up and make the kinds of memories they hear their boomer dad spouting about as they flip burgers and gulp Lite beer at the grill in their Psychedelic Furs and “Kiss the Chef” aprons.  Meanwhile, they’re also hearing, “How sad, that this generation will be deprived of these experiences.”

Don’t get me wrong here:  I’m not excusing the students who participated in this latest shit-show of Trump-era “humanity.”  Had one of the revelers been my child, I’d have pulled them out and found a better way to invest $80K a year in a hot second.  But the fuel that caused this fire was the internet.  All it took was one 18 year old, a bong hit, and a decent wifi signal — one child (let’s be honest) who thought, “I wonder how many people would show up if….”

Back in my day, it would have been me and maybe four or five other idiots (some of whom are reading this now, I’m sure) lying in the grass, giggling up at the stars.  Now, it’s a full-scale health crisis that leaves us all wondering how the hell we’re ever going to get out of this horror.

 (That stands for “First Day of School”)

I’ve got to admit it — I’m “SMH,” as they say, at the fact that I am still writing posts under the Love in the Time of Corona heading, five months after I started.

Feeling compelled to reach out to all of those teachers who are freaking out right now, and, by the way, I’m not using the term to minimize what they’re going through.  The freak-out is real.  And justified.  

Today marks a very different first day of school.  It is like previous First Days, in that many of us had sleepless nights last night.  This time, however, that sleeplessness had a slightly different flavor.  Instead of the “butterflies” of trying to picture that faceless group of young people, adding their excitement, anticipation, and straight-up fear to yours, as they fill up the classroom you’ve worked so hard to prepare, the emotion has shifted somewhat, along with the rest of our planet and our lives.

Although it’s been almost twenty years since I was last in charge of a classroom full of high-schoolers, I recall the anxiety dreams I’d have leading up to Day One — everything from having no chalk (yes, chalk) to having no clothes.  But this year, the year we’ve been asked to learn a brand new Learning Management System (LMS) for a group of students with whom we could conceivably never actually (as opposed to — that word again — “virtually”) meet, by people who barely seem to understand how the LMS works themselves, I have only the following words of “wisdom” to offer:

My mantra, as always, is, “SCHOOL WILL HAPPEN.”  It’s up to each of us if we want it to happen to us, or for us.

POST SCRIPT – End of the Day Update for the Chicken Littles among us:

DF:  Look up.  What do you see?

CL:  I see the sky.

DF: And?

CL: And what?

DF: Is it falling?

CL: Ha ha.  Very funny.

DF: It’s not, is it?

CL: No.  No, it’s not.

That’s right my friends and colleagues:  We will get through this.  One way or another, we will get it done.

The author, alias “COVI-Dan,” in his office, ready as he’ll ever be….

Sunday, July 19, 2020 (Day Three of Solitary)

Old pal, and church elder, Nate Dudley, with his two greatest creations

Saturday, July 18, 2020

Sometimes you have to let the dark thoughts come

Friday, July 17, 2020:  Solitary Confinement, Day One

The author, in Solitary, Day One