Posts Tagged ‘family’
A Thanksgiving Memory
I can’t help falling into my usual cynical attitude about a holiday that celebrates this country’s good fortune of decimating the tribes of original nations living here and building massive wealth and success on the backs of immigrants, many, if not most, of whom were mistreated as slaves. At the same time, I have nothing but fond memories of this day of family, friends, power lounging, game playing, football watching, over-eating, Christmas-season launching fun.
I particularly recall a neighborhood football game when I was a young teenager. We often played games with whomever was available, usually with limited success on adequate numbers. On this day, not only did we have plenty of players available, since it was a holiday, we even had spectators showing up to watch us. It was the absolute best! Until I got hurt. I don’t recall the exact mechanism of injury, but I bruised my tailbone something awful. At the time, I figured something might be broken. I cried. That is brutal for a teen boy to do in front of such a big audience. As I gingerly walked off the neighbor’s yard, headed for home, my sister, Linda, took a photograph of me that captured the moment, eventually helping sear it in my mind evermore.
That moment is closely followed by a vivid recollection of trying to sit at the dinner table on the hard chair for the traditional Thanksgiving feast. It required a pillow. For some reason, the second memory is a view outside of myself, seeing me try to sit down on the chair. I understand why I might remember how I looked walking off the neighbor’s yard because of the photo, but I find it curious that I have remembered the image of trying to sit down on that chair from a similar vantage point, instead of from within as I experienced it.
This year, I am thankful for all the blessings I am able to enjoy, and I continue to regret that it comes at the expense of others less fortunate than I. It’s as if our society is just another variation of a Ponzi scheme. It’s no wonder that I have always loved and hated this holiday at the same time.
Look at that! I can’t commit to one feeling or the other and a story about my ass hurting, all in one post.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!
More Sports Speak
It is Sunday morning and after a two-week wait due to a bye in their schedule, the NFL Vikings play football again today. As if I really need more sports this weekend. Friday night, I attended the Gopher basketball game at the U of M, and yesterday morning, I was back down there to see the football team. Later, at home, I caught the hockey team in fine form on television, triumphing over Bemidji State. But this year, with Brett Favre as quarterback, watching the Vikings is once again becoming almost as interesting for me, as college sports.
One other thing has renewed my interest in professional football this year. Julian organized an online pool of competition in which we pick the winner of every NFL game each week. Brings back memories of the old ‘office pool’ I used to do when he was young. It instantly makes games that I would otherwise care less about, particularly interesting. It also forces me to become aware, if even superficially, of the status of every single team in the league.
We are competing for bragging rights, but win or lose, I have gained the increased entertainment value that playing such pools provides. As well, it has been interesting to witness how often Julian’s and my predictions appear similar. As a result, our year-to-date total is dead-even. Just last week, I was thinking that I will need to find a way to get a little distance between us. When all the participant’s selections were locked in and became visible, it became clear how difficult that is likely going to be. Julian’s and my picks were identical.
One of the tricks to getting more guesses correct than all the other people in the pool, is to pick at least one unlikely upset. The hope is that no one else will have the same selection, and then you just need your underdog team to steal a victory for you. The reality is that the odds are much greater for the outcome to go doubly against you, since being wrong instantly puts you behind everyone else. There ends up being multiple ways the game can be seen as an upset.
One easy way to assume you will get a pick that most of the others won’t choose, is to bet against the home team. That can be a hard decision to make. This year, when I finally felt the situation was right to try that ploy, it turned out perfect, except for one thing. Julian saw it exactly the same way. He and I were the only two who correctly guessed the Vikings to lose that week. Like father, like son.
Laughing at Life
Woke up this morning in just the right mood to enjoy the silly interactions that being up early together with my lovely wife can bring about. It is interesting to discover how funny, old Saturday Night Live skits can be when revisited, decades later, by way of discovering you are living the scenes of which they were poking fun. This morning we found Gilda Radner and Bill Murray’s characters, Lisa Loopner and Todd DiLaBounta, materializing. I thought it was funny enough, until Cyndie pointed out that I was being Lisa, not Todd. Ha ha, that’s so funny.
Together we found ourselves remembering some difficult times of days gone by, raising children together, and from this distance of time, were laughing about things that were far from funny back then. Then there was some mention of sleeping long enough to heal our livers, …or not. Not sure if we accomplished that, but we seem to have rested our funny bones, because they were rarin’ to go this morning.
Mary's comment response... depicts it beautifully
Finding some of the stupidest things to laugh about can be such a treasure. And cultivating the ability to laugh together, the deep belly laugh that takes your breath away, can be such a priceless treasure. It is, indeed, a reward that can be earned for the work done to develop a long-term relationship; a healthy, growing relationship. All those tough times together finally produce this. Funny, isn’t it?
My Side of the Bed
It’s funny, how time allows the best of intentions to succumb to our natural inclinations. I think it is pretty obvious that a vast majority of people evolve to a comfort zone of familiarity. We do a lot of things a particular way because that is the way we did it the time before. If something works, why change it? When you select your seat for lunch everyday, how often do you pick the same one you were in the day before? Do you park in the same space at your workplace everyday?
When it comes to stories about doing things a particular way, since that’s the way it’s always been done, I have a favorite. It involves a recipe being passed down through generations, on how to prepare a roast. When a daughter finally asks why the instructions say to cut the end off of the roast, Mom explains that she does it that way because her mother always did. Eventually it is revealed that Gramma started doing it because she didn’t have a big enough pan at the time to fit the whole thing. There are variations on that theme, but they all present the similar point.
One of the primary examples of a person with patterns, for me, was my father. There were certain ways that he did things, and there was a strong level of importance transmitted about not messin’ with his routine. He always sat at the head of the table where he kept a tray with his items of interest: ash tray, box of Kleenex, course-ground pepper, smoking pipe and paraphernalia. When he wasn’t around, it was the first place I wanted to sit. If we ever monkeyed around with anything on that tray, you can bet we understood the value of getting everything back the way we found it.
A long time ago in my life, I made a decision to specifically not do a lot of things in the same way my father did them. Many of them were pretty valuable health decisions involving diet, smoking, and alcohol. One of them was more frivolous. I wanted to intentionally NOT have one place where I sat at the table. I didn’t want to have one side of the bed that was mine. I wanted deliberate randomness.
Time, and my natural inclinations, overcame my intentions. I have developed many, many patterns, not the least of which is vividly revealed by my side of the bed.
28 Years Ago Today
The last time I showed this photo, someone exclaimed that I looked like I was 16 years old. Well, I was a whopping 22, and today marks 28 years hence that day that Cyndie and I exchanged vows in the public ceremony we call a wedding. It was 7 years after the day we mark as our dating anniversary. I asked her yesterday what she thinks would have happened if we hadn’t attended the same high school. Maybe none of this would have transpired. I said we would have met anyway.
I am a very lucky guy.
For all our differences and the many difficulties, we are pretty well suited for each other. I owe a great debt of gratitude to the counselor who helped us to work through some of the issues we each were dealing with at a time our relationship was under the most strain. I can truly say we are happier together now than ever before.
On this very same day, 21 years ago, we received a most stupendous gift, with the birth of our second child, Julian Walker Hays.
I am a lucky dad.
We are celebrating separately this year. Elysa is flying to Chicago to be with Julian, and Cyndie and I are up at Wildwood. It is a very happy day. Ain’t love grand?
Thinking About Family
Thinking about family has me remembering a period of feeling disconnected from my family of origin. When we would gather for holidays or family events, I found myself feeling out of the mix, like oil and water. Topics of conversation, attitudes about the world, parenting styles, life choices of behavior and activity, all seemed to clash with my perspectives at the time. Either as a result of how this made me feel, or because the same feeling wasn’t occurring when I was involved in activities with my wife’s family, I was finding it more comfortable to be with the family I married into.
It didn’t last. However, one factor during that time related to my feeling disconnected, was some self-examination I was doing that involved my father. I had recently identified that depression was a contributor to my less than ideal life experience and one very vivid demonstration of it manifest in my behavior with my wife and children that mirrored how my father behaved. I was finding myself developing an adult life that patterned right off the one in which I grew up. It actually felt quite natural. It wasn’t anything I had to learn, it was how I already, inherently knew how to behave. But it was imperfect, and I label it as dysfunctional. To behave differently was something that I would need to learn.
One of the facets of that learning involved recognition. It created a conflict in me when I was amid my family of origin, as I struggled to recognize signs and interplay that were once invisible to me, and identify my reactions and my role in it all. At the time that I was trying to change my thinking and how I interpreted the world around me, I seemed to struggle the most when I was with my family of origin. In hindsight, that doesn’t surprise me at all. I believe that as I change myself, others eventually change their interactions with me and that may be part of why I don’t feel uncomfortable around my family of origin now. That, and the fact that I have had more time refining my role of practicing better mental health in my own head.
There is something oh-so-pleasing about rediscovering your own people. I don’t remember the specific incidence, but I definitely had a distinct “aha” moment of recognition that there were others who are more like me than anyone else I’ve met, and they are my siblings. I am a Hays. Regardless any differences we may have, there are basic characteristics that form the foundations of who we each are. Any time I have had a bit too much exposure of other people’s families, I now know that I just need to get together with my siblings and find connections with someone who deep down shares an entirely unique bond with me. It allows me always to remember how lucky I am to have family.
Odds ‘n’ Ends
Leisure time with extended family, when it goes well, is absolutely priceless. In this case, I am with Cyndie’s family. Yesterday I got to watch two of her brother’s kids wrastlin’ and giggling and roughhousing on a couch, the youngest one in nothing but a diaper. They looked so much like a couple of little bear cubs battling away in those mock skirmishes that teach them all sorts of things about themselves. I bet these kids are ready to go out and hunt for their own food.
Later, kids were at the game table with aunts, uncles and grandparents, hootin’ and hollerin’ and guffawin’ up a storm, learning how to play a game so that winning isn’t everything and the fun is in just the celebration of the game. I had a thought about how different the environment an only child grows up in must be from those with siblings.
Recently, I saw photos of a family with 6 kids and I thought about how that seemed like such a drastically large number of children. When one of the photos of the kids was a pyramid of the six of them it struck me that my siblings and I did that very same pose for a picture. I grew up in a family of 6 kids! Siblings, cherish each other and everything that having brothers and sisters provided for your development (honestly, both the good and the bad!).
In the morning, after a late breakfast, we tested a couple of table games with dice or cards, out on the deck. It was an idyllic time, outside in the sun and shadows of the trees, overlooking the lake, with Cyndie and her parents, exploring new games and engaging in some good-natured competition.
I tagged along on a trip to town in the afternoon and picked up a new file for a sculpture I’m working on out of a branch from a pine tree that died in our yard at home.
I can’t get myself to work with power tools to sculpt, because they remove material too fast. I want to work slow. I like using a finishing tool to shape things because of the smoothness it creates in the piece to enjoy while I handle it during the process. I like seeing the wood grains that get revealed and change as I file and sand.
In town I did some people-watching at the grocery store while Cyndie and her mom waged war inside. So many well-to-do vacationers in town for the holiday. We are an overweight population. If I may pass judgment, on vacation, folks dress in all manner of embarrassing looking outfits. I stayed in the car, out of sight.
Happy Independence Day, everyone!
Relative Something 