Pictures

Here's a link to some random photos I uploaded from the hard drive. Some day I'll get around to labeling who's who. If you know me, chances are you're here somewhere. If not, you will be soon!

http://flickr.com/photos/27431606@N00/sets/72157605816687586/

ps I have no idea how to post a link from my Ibook so if you need to, cut the link and paste it into your browser. I'm a work in progress.

M

Movin' On Up

I’ve got almost everything stuffed into medium sized boxes ready to stick in the truck tomorrow. Jack has been climbing up and over those boxes and reaching heretofore unreachable heights on the dining room table. He seems very pleased with his newfound athleticism. I’ve been worrying, probably needlessly about the effect the move is going to have on him. The Brighton Avenue house is the only home he’s known and I don’t relish the idea of taking him out of a familiar environment to someplace strange and new. On the other hand my guess is that he is too old to have developed an attachment to a specific place. Anyway, I’m bringing the couch and rug so the new apartment won’t be so unfamiliar to him.

Packing up hasn’t been easy. The house was full of memories that I hadn’t had the time or inclination to address over the last 18 months. Sorting through old pictures, clothes and boxes full of stuff has led to a lot of bittersweet nights recently. I know in my heart that I’m doing the right thing by moving to the next stage of my life, but it’s still hard. It’s going on four years in that house and I’ve become attached to the place. It’s the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere since Becky and I left the Bronx in 1992. For some strange reason I’ve also become attached to Staten Island. Despite the fact that I have choked down more red tomato-sauce based products there than I ever dreamed possible, I’m going to miss the place. So much of the rest of New York has become overrun in the last ten years by snarky hipsters and wealthy yuppies. Staten Island is one of the few places in the City that still feels like the New York I remember from the 1970s. Maybe it’s all those Italians that walked over the plank from Bay Ridge and stopped off for a generation on their way to Jersey. Whatever the reason, living on the North Shore of Staten Island made me feel in touch with the harbor and the City in a way that Brooklyn and Inwood never did.

I have reservations with both Budget and U-Haul for tomorrow; I figure that at least one of them will have a truck for me. I might be off-line for a few days until I get the cable hooked up and my internet access back.

Metatarsophalangeal Sprain

On Saturday Jack and I are moving to Long Island. As luck would have it, while I was down in Virginia this week-end I took a stumble down a spiral staircase, spraining my foot and thereby making the physical part of the move even more excruciatingly painful than I expected it to be. I suppose I have only myself to blame. I had a few too many glasses of white wine at Nicholas’s baptism party which made negotiating the (albeit glossy and newly refinished) stairs more of a challenge than it ordinarily would have been. Well, as they say, shit happens. Hopefully I’ll be a bit more ambulatory on Saturday when I have to start putting large pieces of furniture onto a truck. My doctor told me not to do it but I don’t see him volunteering to move my dining room table.

Being inactive is driving me insane. I use vigorous aerobic exercise as a form of meditation and release and I keenly feel its absence even after four days. Today I found myself contemplating hobbling down to the gym to try out my foot on the elliptical, but then I reminded myself that it was just such an unwillingness to rest after the Long Island ½ marathon that introduced me to the elliptical in the first place. Since January of 2007 I haven’t taken more than a day off from running unless absolutely forced to do so by searing pain. I find this to be a character-building experience and a test of how far I can bend my body to the will of my mind, although anyone looking at it from the outside besides a zen practitioner or another runner would probably judge me insane. There are intangible benefits from exercise that have nothing to do with weight loss. When I run 5 miles or spend 45 minutes on the elliptical I get into a zone. A dropping away of body and mind, if you will. It’s a nice way to break up the day and can become a bit of an addiction. I suppose now that I’m laid up for a couple of weeks I’ll have the chance to meditate on my attachment to exercise.

With the move, I’m looking forward to again being within walking distance to the train station and to enjoy the experience of commuting by mass transit, although “enjoy” might not be exactly the right word. I do know that driving to New Jersey was wearing me down and not doing a great deal for my disposition. Not to mention the cost. I have to fill up the car 6x per month at a cost of $52 per tank, plus $8 per day in tolls. This comes out to be $312 per month in gas and $160/month in tolls. My new commute will cost $255 for two monthly tickets, minus the $120 I get back as a subsidy from my company for commuting by mass transit. I’ll be saving over $300/month in commuting costs alone, and doing my part for the environment at the same time. I also won’t have to pay New York City income tax. More money lying around for Jack’s piggy bank I suppose.

Call Your Congressman

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."
-Abraham Lincoln

I am dipping a toe back into politics and constitutional law for a moment because tomorrow the Democratic House is going to vote on what they claim is a "compromise" on FISA and telecom amnesty. The bill as written would cede vast powers to the president to spy on American citizens without warrants and grant the telecoms broad immunity for cooperating with the government in spying that has gone on since 2001. As my frieng Glen Greenwald notes in his Salon article, "In the U.S. now, thanks to the Democratic Congress, we'll have a new law based on the premise that the President has the power to order private actors to break the law, and when he issues such an order, the private actors will be protected from liability of any kind on the ground that the Leader told them to do it -- the very theory that the Nuremberg Trial rejected. "

The ACLU is working hard to stop the bill in its tracks but without any support from Democrats it may be impossible. Carolyn Frederickson of the ACLU has this to say about the wairetapping provisions of the bill:

"This bill allows for mass and untargeted surveillance of Americans' communications. The court review is mere window-dressing –- all the court would look at is the procedures for the year-long dragnet and not at the who, what and why of the spying. Even this superficial court review has a gaping loophole –- "exigent" circumstances can short cut even this perfunctory oversight since any delay in the onset of spying meets the test and by definition going to the court would cause at least a minimal pause. Worse yet, if the court denies an order for any reason, the government is allowed to continue surveillance throughout the appeals process, thereby rendering the role of the judiciary meaningless."

It is also worth noting that in 2006, when the Congress was controlled by the Republicans the administration tried to get a bill passed legalizing warrantless eavesdropping and telecom amnesty, but was unable. They had to wait until the Congress was controlled by Steny Hoyer, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to accomplish that. A sad day in American history and not the kind of country I want my son growing up in. The Democrats are feckless sell-outs and every last one of them who vote for this bill should be charged with treason.

Risk

Father’s day week-end was pretty cool this year. Erin volunteered to watch Jack on Saturday so I could get in a day of diving out at the old rock quarry near Bethlehem Pennsylvania. Diving in the quarry was a good way to refresh my diving skills and make sure all my stuff was working right. Dave and I headed out at 6am and despite a few equipment issues, it ended up being a good day. My SPG flooded at depth but thankfully continued to work so I didn't have to abort any dives. Dave had some rather more serious fin issues. A small plastic piece the size of a toothpick almost ruined the day for him.

I haven’t been diving since June of 2007 and I sorely miss the sport. It is a very Zen experience insofar as it requires a constant attention to your surroundings and total self-awareness. Petty concerns and neurotic thoughts are banished to the fringes while you glide through the water like a largemouth bass, completely focused on the task at hand. Which is not to say it’s easy. Diving in the Northeast is not the friendly splashfest you experience on a trip to the Florida Keys or the Caribbean. Diving in cold water in the quarry requires (at minimum) a tank, regulator, depth guage, SPG, compass, buoyancy control device with secondary regulator, mask, fins, a dive computer, a 7mm thick two piece wet suit, gloves, boots and a thick full head hood plus a weight belt to get all that neoprene under water. If you decide to venture out into the Atlantic you need to add a redundant air system, lights, a knife, wreck reel and signal devices. Probably about 75-100 pounds of gear overall. You’d also better be in pretty good shape since the physical effect of hanging off a boat’s anchor line 50 feet down the water column in a stiff current is akin to what an American flag flapping on a tall pole experiences in a hurricane. Your reward for all the effort expended going hand over hand down the line to the bottom is 20 minutes on a shipwreck in 45 degree water 100 feet down in near total darkness. There are also sharks. Which you really can’t see. For some perverse reason I find this to be great fun. Diving in the ocean in the Northeast is the closest the average middle-age man (or woman) can ever get to exploring outer space. It is adventure at it’s best and there is always the possibility that when diving on a wreck you’ll find an artifact. Maybe even a gold coin. It hasn’t happened to me yet but I’m going to keep on going.

Over the course of the last year I have wondered whether the risks inherent in the sport of scuba are too great for a single father to be taking. I struggled with this question for almost all of last year’s diving season and as a result, didn’t dive too much. I mean, the poor kid already lost one parent. What would happen to him if I got trapped in a U-Boat and took an unscheduled trip to Davey Jones locker? Anyway, I had almost decided to hang up my fins and take up something safer, like golf, when I got hit by a car while crossing the street back in March and my whole perception experienced a paradigm shift. There is so much random shit that can go wrong that we have no control over. I could have been killed right then and there, and probably would have if the car had been going a little faster or hit me an inch or two higher on my back. Living the straight and narrow is no protection against your karma or the vicissitudes of life. The only thing you get from living in a box for too long is a fear of open spaces and I would never want Jack to deal with the world from a position of fear. In order to be alive, truly alive, you need to take occasional risks and push the envelope. I’m not talking crazy risks, but risks where the danger, albeit present, can be handled if you pay attention. Children, after all, are natural risk-takers. They know instinctually that the risk of falling down is the price you have to pay for scaling the coffee table to see what's on top. They don't even give it a second thought. Its when we get older that we start to fret and worry about things we cannot possibly control. We are only here for a short time and the world is so very vast and wide. What do you want to do with the time you are given?

Misplaced Expectations

We’re having a heat wave. The thermometer has been registering 100 degrees for the last three days which is perfect weather to descend to the basement and work on clearing out the clutter. It’s cool and dark down there and I'm finding stuff I haven't seen in years. Jack has been going a little stir-crazy since he has been confined to three rooms in the house which have air conditioning. Sunday night he was literally running laps around the living room so I took him over to South Beach for a little diversion. When we got there it was 7pm and about 95 degrees. I set him loose on the sand after strolling the boardwalk for a while. He approached the water with some trepidation but I eventually had to dunk his hands and feet because he kept trying to suck his thumb which was full of sand. Whether or not washing his hands in Raritan Bay actually cleaned them is debatable. Even so, it was a nice way to end the week-end.

Speaking of the week-end this one was full of activity. Friday night we drove out to Erin’s place, Saturday it was off to Great Neck to measure the rooms in the apartment, then out east to her mom’s place in Mount Sinai and finally further east to Riverhead for a party. I never seem to get any sleep on the week-ends any more, but I suppose that is to be expected. I have been reading a blog lately which is written by a young widow and single mother of twins under the age of two, god bless her. She recently posted an entry which dealt with, among other issues, the concept of “misplaced expectations”. You know, that vision you have in your mind about the way you expect an event or circumstance to turn out which, often as not, turns out completely differently? I can relate. I remember when Jack was less than six months old I consistently scheduled far more activities than he or I were capable of doing in a day and would get frustrated when I was lucky to even get out of the house before noon. For a while this bothered me, but I have learned to replace the ire of dealing with frustrated expectations with the meditative practice of no expectations. After all, I can’t really control how my son is going to behave, or feel, or how much he is capable of doing on a particular day. The only thing I can control is my reaction to the circumstances. Trying to force my vision of how the day is “supposed” to go onto his behavior is a guaranteed recipe for frayed nerves and a cranky boy. I have learned through trial and error, mostly error, that it is much better to let go. Accept that there are limitations on what I can accomplish and that as much as I’d like it to, willing things to go my way aren’t going to make them happen. Jack has been my mini Zen master, teaching me acceptance and nonattachment just by being himself.

Letting Go of Things

I’ve been going through things lately. Physical things (knee, back, etc.). Boxes of things. Over the course of our long relationship Becky and I accumulated a lot of things, things which have sat undisturbed since she "joined the greater number" last year. But the lease is signed in Great Neck, change is afoot and it has become necessary to finally deal with these piles of things that I have heretofore ignored and left to weather the heat and cold of the drafty attic in the house on Brighton Avenue. I have approached this task with some trepidation since I know I will be called upon to sit in judgment of these things and decide which will be relegated to charity and garage sales and which will be granted a reprieve and end up in boxes in yet another storage area, hopefully to be discovered by Jack when he is old enough to ask questions about his mother and what she was like.

If he were ask that question today I’d tell him that his mother was a bit of a pack-rat. After three days in the attic I have filled up 8 contractor bags full of old clothes, books, fabrics, patterns, sewing supplies, wrapping paper and old luggage. In the morning on the way to work I’ve been furtively dropping off these bags at the Good Will boxes across from Staples. (I say furtively because every day the boxes are filled to overflowing and there are rather stern warnings posted all around about the evils of dumping-which is kind of funny for Staten Island-but who wants a summons for making a charitable donation?)

I’m making headway, but I’m down to the things whose disposition completely confounds me. What, for example, do I do with the diploma Becky earned from her Kung Fu school? What about a drawer full of buttons? Old ID cards and drivers licenses? Artwork purchased on our trips that looked good at the time but upon arriving home was deemed too ugly to hang? Picture frames? Framed pictures? Yesterday I came across the box of maps. Whenever we’d travel, Becky always saved maps of where we were along with information about the area; tourist brochures, blank post cards and the like. Not exactly personal stuff, but not exactly impersonal either. In the era of the internet and GPS, I don’t need a map of Maine, but I felt kind of funny tossing it.

I suppose anyone who has lost someone who has been a part of their life for a long time has gone through this sort of thing. I’m finding I can only take it in small doses; an hour a day or so. Otherwise the decision-making process; what stays and what goes, becomes a little overwhelming. I feel like I am directly responsible for the image Jack will have of Becky as the years go by and therefore what I decide to keep for him is a choice I don’t want to make lightly. On the other hand, if I don’t accelerate this process somewhat I might as well move my bed into the attic because I won’t be done until Thanksgiving.

I identify as a Buddhist and therefore intellectually understand that everything is ultimately impermanent, especially stuff that has been sitting in the attic for several years. Let’s face it, a lot of this stuff was jammed up there when we moved in and hasn’t been looked at in several years anyway. For all intents and purposes it was already gone. And yet, and yet. You look at a mundane task like clearing out the attic differently when doing it reminds you that life is short and death is forever. I think today I'll just concentrate on the pantry. There is very little thought involved when tossing out old pasta. Peace.