Archive for June 2009
A Summertime Story
This is a true story about a boy and a dunk tank. You can trust me on this one. I was there. It all played out under the friendly sunshine of a Midwestern 4th of July celebration, back before the turn of the millennium, at an annual gathering held by the collective families that make up the Wildwood Lodge Club, a private association of seven clans that have joined forces to create a vacation-home getaway in Northwestern Wisconsin.
Our tradition for celebrating Independence Day includes plenty of the classics: a parade (kids ride on hay bales in a red, white, and blue decorated trailer behind the old Ford tractor); competitions of three-legged races, water balloon toss, a scavenger hunt (among many others); a pot-luck dinner; and a dramatic finish of fireworks over the lake.
What began decades earlier as primarily an event focused on one generation of children, had now evolved to incorporate the development of quite a number of third-generation kids and cousins. As a result, organizers were always looking to include new and innovative improvements to traditional entertainment. The dunk tank was a natural addition. Butch, the caretaker, was a local resident and member of the Lion’s Club who had access to a tank, which, amazingly, had no other commitments for the occasion.
This being a new game on our regular itinerary, a lot of questions began to surface regarding the actual process of whom, how, and when. My son, Julian, was six or seven years old, one of the younger members of that second generation of kids at that time. He surprised me with what appeared to be an unnatural level of apprehension about how the rules of this game might develop. In my mind, it didn’t really matter, because I figured he would be more likely to participate in the fish pond event than this new dunk tank.
One popular suggestion was to have the ‘thrower’ who successfully drops a heckling ‘sitter’ into the tank, be awarded the dubious honor of claiming the seat themselves, for the next round. In the end, majority rule decided the watered-down ‘sitter’ who got dunked would earn the right to pick the next victim from the crowd. This rankled my son quite a bit; sincerely fearful of facing the fate of this tank that was easily over his head in-depth, not to mention quite a drop from a perch that was about three times as high as he was tall. I worked to assure him that no one would put him in such peril. Worst case, I assured him I would volunteer to take his turn if someone picked him. He seemed less than convinced of his safety.
It wasn’t difficult to find a volunteer for first ‘sitter’ out of the crowd of 20-year-olds that made up the trailing number of first-generation kids in the group. The challenge was maintaining order in the crowd of willing ‘throwers’ that jostled for position to get their hands on the tennis balls waiting to be launched. With the variety of ages participating, two lines to throw from were drawn, allowing the youngest arms better odds of success. Julian took a position toward the end of the little kids’ line to give him a chance to observe the proceedings a bit before getting himself too involved.
We took turns between the younger throwers and the bigger ‘kids’ (of all ages). The perpetual battle of accuracy versus velocity played out over and over. The still-dry heckler began to hone his craft with the protracted practice he was enjoying. Then, without the slightest warning of what was about to unfold, my son reached the front of his line. He was one of the smaller kids there. I’m sure many allowed themselves to be distracted for the moment, reaching for their pop can, laughing with a friend, getting the sucker out of their daughter’s hair.
Julian reached back, lifted his leg, turned, and fired a frozen-rope line-drive throw that nailed that battered metal disc of a target. Without hesitation, that big guy who had moments earlier been heckling boldly, dropped like a limp doll into the waiting chill of the waters of our great new attraction at the Wildwood 4th of July celebration. Oh, the revelry that ensued! Oh, the look on Julian’s face; half pride, half fear. What had he done? What was everybody freaking out about? What was going to happen to him now? Suddenly, I felt the rush of everything he had been hinting toward earlier. I grew apprehensive. Was I going to have to protect him from somebody’s well-intentioned revenge? I also wondered, “Did he have an intuition that this might actually happen?!”
Fortunately for me, it was all too funny to get caught up in seeking reparations, and some other guy was rallied to the seat. Much of the residual trash talking was targeted at the group of throwers for their letting little Julian be the one to dunk the first person. The line of well-capable throwers was about twice as long as the number of little ones half-again closer. It served to amplify the appearance of disparity that it was Julian who first achieved success.
Do you know the phenomenon that happens as a stand-up comedian gets on a roll? That initial laughter loosens things up to allow for greater laughs to follow, and then each subsequent punch line brings greater and greater laughter? Imagine our reaction if, as people cycle through the line taking turns throwing, Julian ended up being the one to dunk the next guy. Well, he did. Our laughter was all-encompassing. This was just the half of it.
After this scene played out a third time, and the laughter began to mix with increasing wonder and amazement, I negotiated with my son to get him to move back from the little kids’ line.
“Why?” he asked, with genuine innocence and a measure of disappointment.
“Because you can!” I implored.
I had people coming to me to marvel over my little pitching prodigy. I think one of them wanted to negotiate rights to his contract. Sure I’d played catch with him in the driveway, but I didn’t know he could do this!
Finally, it became apparent that the crowd was interested in some compensation for the success he had been enjoying at their expense. I dutifully took my position on the perch. This was not a comfortable place for me. It seemed much higher from this vantage point and proved to be dramatically more stressful than I imagined, waiting for the clank of the mechanism to send me to my doom. “This must be the apprehension Julian was experiencing,” I thought to myself. “I see where he gets it.” I never got around to plying the craft of the heckle. I must admit, even I enjoyed the poignancy of the moment Julian stepped to the front of the line.
He dropped me into the water with aplomb. I immediately picked his mother to replace me.
“You’re half responsible for this!” I sprayed from the ladder.
I think someone may have helped Julian sneak back to the front of the line before his rightful turn. He dunked her with identical ease.
In all, Julian dropped seven people into the bath that afternoon; more than all other successful throwers combined. No other individual throwers accomplished more than a single dunking. The dunk-tank event won a spot in the 4th of July games for several more years, eventually fading from popularity. The memories of that first time have earned a spot alongside some of the greatest in the annals of WWLC lore.
Julian did go on to play some baseball. Batted left and threw right. He rose through the ranks from tee-ball to machine pitch and then kid pitch. His last team even made it to a championship game, facing a team outside his regular league. He had a problem with that. Another one of those premonitions. His anxiety over getting hit by this pitcher seemed illogically out of proportion to me, and to my wife, as well.
As we examined the redness on his skin at the site of impact, marveling at the detail of the stitches of the ball becoming more apparent with time, he informed us that he would never be participating in this sport of baseball again.
.
.
.
Feels Like Summer
Even though it was a bit cool Saturday morning and at times, very rainy, it feels a lot like summer around here.
We took in a movie while it was still rainy and then stopped by the Musky Festival craft vendors on Main Street, sneaking in some fair-type of food and ice cream from West’s Dairy before returning to our place. Hung out on the deck as the sky began to clear up and some sunshine made an appearance, then played some games and grilled dinner. The night turned out beautiful and after eating more than we probably should, we took a walk on the grounds and visited some neighbors. 
Finished the night with a card game and then called it a day. It may not have been the quintessential summer-like day, but it was a pretty darn worthy representation of summer here.
It was a party!
This was no regular trip to the lake, three convertibles and three couples in the bright sun and high heat of our summer days, mixing and matching at multiple stops along the way. We prolonged what normally takes 3 hours into an all afternoon affair with a stop for dinner after 7 p.m. in Hayward, so that we didn’t get up to the lake place till something like 7 hours had passed. Little did we know, the town is celebrating the 60th annual Musky Festival this weekend. We wandered briefly through the midway area to see the rides and the carnival games. It did feel festive.
We stopped in Hudson to see art and have a snack and drinks, then stopped again in Osceola for fried cheese curds and ice cream at the DQ. Paused in Barronett for more refreshments and discovered a risque arcade game at the bar and won a few dollars on pull-tabs. We made it to the Angry Minnow in Hayward for dinner. Guess what I had.
Fish!
It was Friday night in Wisconsin, what else would I choose? I think I only had to endure the birthday song one time in public. That’s not too much to suffer. It was a special day and I appreciate all of you who have shared your well wishes. It worked. I had a very happy day.
What’s Different?
For most people of the world, today is just another day, albeit a Friday, which can be special in and of itself. For me, today is special because June 26 is the date of the day that I was born many years ago. Other than that, nothing is different. For those who see a lot of value in marking a milestone, this is a fair one to mark. To me, it doesn’t mark anything significantly different from yesterday or last week or even last year.
In my younger days, with brother, David, my greatest of pals at that age, when having a birthday 6 months from Christmas was about as good as it gets... (His is in early January, poor guy.)
They all feel the same to me. Wait, there is one change I just learned about yesterday… my health insurance premium is jumping up around $97/month now that I’ve entered the next age bracket. I’m thinking I want to get my money’s worth and show them a thing or two by needing to make all sorts of visits to the doctor now, but maybe that’s not in line with reaching my highest potential for optimal health.
One of the very sweetest gifts I’ve received thus far is being granted the entire day off work, at a time when I was worried I wouldn’t get another day for months due to my recent spat of vacation days. We’re headed to the most precious place I have been blessed to have access to, Wildwood Lodge Club, in the area of Hayward, WI, where Cyndie’s family have membership in a private association of vacation homes; one of the best of my many valuable communities of friends. This trip is to involve several convertibles which will likely mean choosing back roads and making stops along the way for food, drinks, and visits to scenic spaces.
I’ll bring my travel guitar and my hammock that folds into a little pouch and of course my camera. I just may capture something worth sharing here, either in story or by image. But really, what is any different about all of that? Kinda seems like the same old, same old to me.
I’m a lucky guy. Happy Friday!
Watchin’ Movies
I went to a movie theater Tuesday evening and was pleased to find tickets at half-price. Yahoo! On the way out I saw barriers up for the queue of people for a new movie opening at midnight that night. Young folks were already waiting there. The feature I was seeing was attended by about 7 other people. It is strange to be in big theaters with hardly any people in them. It is harder to be lost in a crowd when there is no crowd. I felt like every time I shifted in my seat or made noise with my bag of popcorn it was much more irritating than if there were a hundred other people contributing similar sounds. And of course my chair ended up being a squeaky one. I had just complained to Cyndie that my car door had developed an irritating squeak since I returned from my bike trip. Now the seat in the theater. It feels like the squeaks are following me.
The movie was all gun waving drama and threats and for the umpteenth time I found myself frustrated by the victims automatic response to criminal demands. Maybe I have a death wish, but from the spectator seat I find myself much more inclined to want the victim to choose not to give in to the threats. I completely accept the possibility that I would feel quite different if I were to find myself actually in a real life threat, and if so, that is probably a good thing. However, maybe as a result of a life-long practice of thinking about my death and feeling quite comfortable with the prospect, when I hear, read, or watch scenes where a criminal gets whatever they want, I can’t help wondering how things would change if the victim becomes more of a participant in the situation and less of a puppet in the criminal’s plot.
The scenes that are much harder for me to tolerate are when the criminal turns the threat of harm to someone else to get their subject to comply. If I was commanded to do something I didn’t want to do, with the threat of death, I can see myself challenging the order. “Go ahead, shoot me. Then where does that get you?” But if they threaten me by offering to injure or kill my family, I can’t picture myself being able to refuse to cooperate. When that happens in the movie, then I squirm.
I’m one of those movie viewers that notices peripheral details. I find it very distracting when they are brought into a scene and then not used, like pulling out a suitcase to pack, but leaving without taking it. Or when the focus is on ordering a drink, but then the character never drinks it. Drives me nuts, but doesn’t even make it onto Cyndie’s radar. Cyndie’s movie watching quirk is her involuntary tendency to blurt out questions about what she sees on the screen before the scene is allowed to play out and present the answer… “Why did he pick up that broken bottle?”
We are quite a scene of our own walking out of the theater bickering over our different issues we have watching movies. Go ahead, shoot me.
Consequences
When a message comes at you from three different sources in a short span of time it tends to get noticed. When this happens to me, I find myself assigning an increased level of significance to the subject and become attuned to anything that relates, but I often struggle to identify myself as the target audience. It usually goes something like this in my mind: “Oh, this subject matter is exactly what so-and-so needs to hear based on what they were just telling me the other day…” However, it usually turns out that one of the three sources I have credited with bringing the message to my attention, is the same individual I am now interpreting as the one more likely to benefit from hearing the lesson it holds.
I can’t count the number of times the ultimate lesson turned out to be one that I benefited from. So it is on my mind to unravel a current lesson that feels like one with which I already have a good grasp.
We have a little flip book in a bathroom at home with, I think, a year’s worth of pithy little Zukav (as in author, Gary) messages that I notice on a regular basis; especially when it turns out that no one is bothering to advance the page for days on end.
From page 32:
“Every action, thought, and feeling is motivated by an intention, and that intention is a cause that exists as one with an effect. If we participate in the cause, it is not possible for us not to participate in the effect. In this most profound way, we are held responsible for our every action, thought and feeling, which is to say, for our every intention.” Zukav,Gary. Thoughts from the Seat of the Soul. Meditations for Souls in Process. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989.
So I come home after having a discussion where this very thought was triggered in my mind and I suddenly find the tidbit from Seat of the Soul waiting for me as reinforcement. Maybe it had more impact because that same message was waiting for me for days in a row. But that’s not the point. Later, I log in to catch up on my online community conversations and see they are making reference to a “Thomas Theorem” (W. I. Thomas, 1863–1947): The classic aphorism, stated by Thomas, is, ‘When people define situations as real, they become real in their consequences’.
Accurate or not, we interpret the world around us and the situations we find ourselves in, and then we react accordingly and ultimately experience the consequences. There is always opportunity for correction along the way, but ideally, the correction would happen all the way back at the front end of the chain of events. Since we establish how things are going to develop, and they develop whether we were accurate in our initial interpretation or not, it is in our own best interest to become aware of how we are perceiving situations and choose to frame them in the healthiest way.
I thought I was already cognizant of all this, but for some reason, the message is continuing to arrive for me. The consequences are real in self-fulfilling prophecies. If I want different outcomes, I can choose to see things differently at the outset. It is taking the idea from mountain biking, of watching the trail and not the rocks I’m trying to avoid, and expanding it. It is another version of smiling to become happy, or imagining, visualizing, and expecting the best outcomes for myself to achieve consequences of my choosing.
I’ll be paying attention to this in my life with a little more intent in the near future as a way of heeding a message that has returned three-fold in the last few days.
Bike Stories and Pictures
After returning to only one day of work, I am able to proclaim the greatness of the past week’s Jaunt with Jim bike trip. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not that a day of work was required to establish that perception, it’s just that it cemented my opinion that much more emphatically. And the return to work wasn’t all that bad, either.
About 2:30 in the afternoon yesterday I was distinctly ready for a nap. I was reminded of the day in Grand [Portage or Marais… Oops, I forgot which one. Bet it’s in my journal] when I barely got my tent set up and found myself sitting at its door with my legs out and then just leaned back and laid down to rest and took a little impromptu nap. Heavenly. I think we should add a nap room at work.
With the Twin Cities currently suffering a dew point of 71°F, I miss being on the shore of the greatest of Great Lakes, Superior, and reveling in the coolness it provides. I am so happy that we had the good weather we did last week. Many people in town were worried about us since it was rainy at home and stormy to the south of here, but up on the north shore we didn’t get a storm until Thursday night. Brought the nerves to an edge to be laying out on a football field in a tent when overhead there is a flash-BOOM! with little pause between, but it was a refreshing experience that reminds me of days gone by when we weren’t so isolated in our buildings behind closed doors and windows under the spell of our central air conditioning luxuries. By morning it had moved on and we didn’t have to ride in the rain, just some spotty fog that included an instant drop in temperature of what felt like 10° or more. Hardly worth framing as a hardship.
I am happy to report that the rest of my pictures from the week of biking are now available at my Picasa Web Album. Maybe having my pictures available like that will help inspire some stories from the trip. It just doesn’t feel like this trip lends itself to the retelling in the same way that the Himalayan trek did. It seems to me that a lot of what I would be inclined to write about ends up being that kind of story that ‘you had to be there’ for. Stories that really only pertain to those people who were there and would share the laughter of how Bob fell trying to change into his shorts while Steve held Bob’s sleeping bag wrapped around Bob’s waist or how I rode up to Gary to marvel over his not falling when his crank became disconnected from his chainring but the pedal remained clipped to his shoe, and then watched him roll over the edge of the pavement into soft gravel that was entirely unforgiving and caused him to go down and break his mirror before I rode off in fear I was creating an unsafe distraction. Or how I had been teasing Scott about being a moose and when he later shouted back at Gary and me to look at the tracks beside the road, Gary asked how he knew they were from a moose and I quietly said to Gary, “It takes one to know one.” Suddenly from the distance, Scott hollers, “I heard that!”
I don’t know if I can adequately describe coming down the steep drop from Devil’s Track General Store to Grand Marais in a soaking rain that lasted only a brief time but left standing water on the road as I glanced at my computer to see I was at 39 mph and afraid to touch my brakes as my tires hydroplaned and the bike got squirrely in the gusts of wind and spraying water before the pavement suddenly became dry and the wind effectively dried everything but my shoes by the time we got back down to the school where not a drop of rain had fallen on the tents. Speaking of the General Store, the gal working at the time our little sub-group of cyclists popped in for lunch was seen walking down the aisle of her store grabbing a bag of buns, some produce, meat and cheese when I walked in, and preparing fresh sandwiches for us which she asked us to eat first and come back and pay for later, after the rush was past so she could better spend her time making more sandwiches for other riders showing up. A beacon of trust and efficiency, she was.
Maybe you didn’t have to be there to understand, but those of you who were, you can’t help but smile over the additional details you hold in you minds, can you?
Re-Orienting
In the last 3 months, I have taken two different trips. One lasted 3 weeks and took me to the other side of the world. The other lasted just 1 week and took place in one of my favorite parts of my home state. I’m wondering if somehow the combination of the two trips is causing me to feel more disoriented than I otherwise ever have upon returning from the annual bike trip. The best word for it really is “disoriented”.
The harsh reality of a Monday, first day back at work, ought to do wonders to shock me back to ‘oriented’.
But I won’t give up easily… I’ll still have this on my mind:
Withdrawal
I’m suffering a major dose of withdrawal from the energy and activity of the bike trip. I want to talk with so many people that just a couple of days ago I was seeing everywhere I turned. There are all these precious people and so many opportunities to engage with them all week, that to suddenly have them removed creates quite a void. It’s unfair to my wife, but she just can’t replace the conversation potential that that many people provide.
There are also the riding comrades that for one week are plentiful and guaranteed. Now each of us fall into our individual schedules and concerns, and riding together becomes an exercise in organization and communication. I truly value the privilege of being able to ride with so many great people
Steve
Gary
Laura and Rich
Gary
Mary
I am experiencing some other lingering after effects of the trip. Those souvenirs I received from the biting bugs just may be mixed with bit of a reaction to poison ivy. I wasn’t really needing to scratch all that much Friday, and now suddenly, new itches are appearing. I already looked like I was suffering from chicken pox. I may be paying for becoming a bit careless about limiting my chances for exposure. It’s been a few years since I’ve experienced an outbreak and I guess I have grown less vigilant about avoiding suspicious locations. I did tell Rich that I wouldn’t search for geocaches with him because of the risk of poison ivy.
I don’t seem to be having a bad reaction yet, which is a big thing. The last couple times I was dealing with poison ivy, it became systemic and I would find reactions all over my body, not just at specific points where oil touched my skin. My doctor prescribed a steroid to conquer it those times. The time delay of my skin to react always frustrates me. I was a little unsure during the week because of all the bug bites, and honestly, I think all the ones I was wondering about did turn out to be from bugs. Then on the day after I get home, the first new blisters appear on my hand. I was wondering if the oil might be on my tent or bike or something that I have been handling while I was unpacking and putting things away.
Oh well, it is helping to take my mind off of the withdrawal symptoms I have been experiencing. Also, today offers its own new distractions: Happy Father’s Day all you dads out there!!
Relative Something 