Danny at Thirty

As I washed my hands in the staff restroom of the large, suburban high school where I work as one of six assistant principals, I fixed on my graying mustache, and a memory came to me in a flash.  I was probably about eleven or twelve, and my mother asked if she could draw me.  My mother was an artist, so the request was not an unusual one; she seemed always to be sketching one of us -- my younger brother, our father, or myself.

She liked to do quick pencil sketches.  Her lines were rapid and many, which gave the pictures a kind of unique immediacy.  Of course, my language to describe her work back then was not quite so florid.  I probably thought her drawings were "cool" or "nice."

One night, as we sat in the living room of our dark-blue shingled split level, my mother sipping, I imagine, her ubiquitous gin and tonic, she came up with a new, peculiar idea.

"I'm going to draw you as I would imagine you'll look at age thirty," she proclaimed.

"Thirty?"  It seemed so distant to me.  That would make the year 1993.  Images of flying cars and robot butlers filled my head.

She had me sit in my father's big, mustard-colored easy chair, and she got to work.

"Get your giggles out," she commented, as I customarily got attacks of nervous laughter, set off by the way her eyes darted from my face to the paper, where her fingers became shockingly nimble, revealing a part of her life that fascinated me:  her artist's training.

I realize now that these modeling sessions were a primitive form of meditation for me, as it was necessary to level my breathing, and steady my gaze on a certain point.  Normally, I'd reach a kind of "no-mind" state, akin to being asleep with my eyes open.  On this occasion, however, I imagined what thirty would be like; would I be married?  To Debbie Francis, maybe?  She was my current fascination back then, with sandy blond hair and dimples that made me want to entertain her just to see them appear.  Did we have kids?  Were we rich?  Were we happy?

Ten minutes or so later, she stopped looking up from the paper, continuing to scribble.  "You can move," she said, her eyes still down.

When I started to make my way over to her, she held the sketchbook against her chest, hiding the picture.

"Oh no.  You'll need to wait till I'm done.  Go watch some T.V."

One of my mother's earliest sketches, "Daddy"
from her high school art class

I bounded down the short flight of stairs to the playroom, where my brother was watching something sports-related.  I'll place this memory on a Saturday afternoon, so let's say "Bowling for Dollars," or "ABC's Wide World of Sports."

"Okay," she called a few minutes later.  "Come on up here."

When I returned to her, she had on the self-critical scowl she always wore after completing a new piece of work.

"Well, here it is."

I took the sketchpad from her.  She'd titled it "Danny at 30."  It was my face, but she'd moved my hairline back a bit, given me some laugh lines at the temple-edges of my eyes, and a dark mustache.  I realized some years later that the picture looked a lot like a studio photo of my dad when he was around that age.

"Thirty," I repeated.

"What do you think?" she asked.

I didn't really know what to say, being as her reason for wanting to draw a picture of the Future Me was a mystery.

"It's nice."

She giggled at my response.

I wonder now, twenty-five years past the age she was trying to envision, and forty-five
years after the memory of her creation of "Danny at Thirty," if her motive had anything to do with the fact that a fierce bout with pancreatic cancer would prevent her from ever seeing me at that age.  She died in 1988, a few weeks shy of my 25th birthday, long before I started growing the mustache I now wear as a matter of course.

I wonder, too, making my way down the school hallway back to my office, where that picture is today.

Bringing Them Back

Me and Mom in a Photo Booth, circa 1965

November is "National Novel Writing Month," and I've taken it upon myself to give it a try.  So far I'm desperately behind where I need to be to actually be finished by the 30th, but I've got something.  I'm never comfortable writing about my writing while it's happening, but I will say this:  It's both wonderful and sad to be bringing back people who have been gone from my life for many years.  The process of writing forces me to have to recall details and moments, to make the characters "come to life."

In this particular story, I am bringing to life a character based on my mother, another on my father, and an older couple based on my grandparents.  All of these individuals died years ago, and as I flesh out these characters, it brings a host of emotions.  In one way I'm delighted to see them all, and then there's that sadness, that reminder that they're gone.  If you've ever had a dream in which your departed loved one appears, then you know the regret that comes the moment you wake up.  

By spending time on this novel, I'm prolonging that dream a bit.  It's difficult to go on, however, knowing it will have to end.  But then, one could easily say the same thing about life.  And yet we go on, and do the best we can, in the hopes we leave some kind of legacy for those who come after us.  

So, for this reason I will continue to work on the novel, continue to bring them all back to life, in the hopes I'll create something that I can leave behind -- something that will live on, long after I am gone.

Another First in This, the Digital Age

Diego Fuchs at about two months old, in the summer of 2003

It's about 5:30 pm on a Friday, and I've prepared my materials for the meeting with which my day will start this coming Monday.  An Alejandro Escovedo CD is playing in my computer's disc drive, and other than a lone custodian emptying classroom trashcans down the hallway, I'm the only human being in this part of the enormous Cedar Ridge High School campus.

During football season, this is my quiet time at work.  The students and teachers pile out between 4:10 and 4:45, and I'm actually able to sit, and work my way, undisturbed, through what's left on my "to-do" list until having to make my way over to the stadium to stand on the sidelines, greet and "watch" our student section and try not to cheer too obviously for our Raiders.

It occurs to me to do something that I've never done before.  I begin to script an email to my eldest son, Diego.  I can do this, because we have enrolled our children in the district where I work, and all middle schoolers (Diego is in sixth grade now) are automatically given a student email address, which stays with them throughout the remainder of their school careers.

The workload facing Diego far surpasses anything he's ever had to deal with before.  He takes Language Arts, World Cultures, Science and Math, along with a journalism elective, art and Physical Education.  It has been tough, but so far he is handling his business, as they say, and maintains a good average.  So I write him this email, whose subject line reads "GOOD JOB!" :

Hi Diego, it's Dad.

Just wanted to take a moment to let you know that I think you're doing a great job.  Mami and I both appreciate how hard you have been working, and yes, we are always going to push you to be even better, because we KNOW YOU CAN DO IT!

I don't think Diego even knows he has an email account, but I'm looking forward to when he reads this, because my message, along with the follow-up sent by his mami are meant to encourage him to continue to work hard, and to know, as Jeanette said in her first email to our child, "we've got his back."  We always have.

And we always will.

A more recent shot of Diego Fuchs, class of 2021.

A Great Day for Frogs

Our backyard play scape in the morning rain

"Look at that rain!" I say, noticing it after helping the boys get dressed for their second day of Raider Baseball Camp.  "Oh well, it's a great day for frogs."

It's one of those things I say a lot.  One of those Dad Things.  I'm not sure where I got the phrase; must've heard it somewhere.  It's one of those things the boys roll their eyes at -- like when we're at our favorite Chinese restaurant, Happy Dragon in Round Rock, and I draw their attention to the string-heavy traditional music playing on a loop and say, "Hey, do you guys like this song?  I wrote this."  They pretend to be pained by my corny jokes, but their vague smiles suggest they will one day be nostalgic about it, just as I am with my own brother about the many, many phrases, quips and bad jokes our father repeated through the years.

Any way you classify this weather, it signifies a rain out -- a re-thinking of plans.  A re-boot of our day.  Jeanette has already left for work, and it is a Guys' Day.  The boys immediately go for their Nooks, and begin constructing houses that will keep them safe from the zombies who creep around the perimeters of their virtual homesteads.

Jackson and Diego playing Minecraft on a rainy morning in June

I grab my tablet and get back into the novel I'm currently reading, until I feel a pleasant sleepiness come over me.  I put the device face down on my chest, the way I used to leave an open book there when I'd get drowsy.  Then I nap, until one of the boys comes in to show me the houseboat they've been working on, and ask me about going to the movies.

I get on the computer and buy e-tickets for the 11 o'clock matinee of Man of Steel.

It's all great stuff.  I'm not a troglodyte who pines for the days before there was this level of technology. I will say, though, that I grew up in a place and time that found me often out in the rain.  My friends and I were explorers, and we were lucky to be surrounded by acres of relatively pristine land.  When I think back on childhood rainy days, I feel the cool droplets on my skin, and I smell the earth, replete with wildlife.  Earthworms were the most obvious, but we also saw salamanders, moles, chipmunks, and yes, frogs.  Lots of them.

Maybe that's where I got that from.  Hmm.  I am feeling somewhat inspired to take the boys out on a nature walk somewhere.  Perhaps I'll do that.  After the movie.  Go out on a trail, in search of some frogs.

Diggin' It

When I was a child, I wanted to be a grave digger.  There.  You see your face?  You see your reaction?  I got that a lot when I would tell people that.  They would ask me the question:  "Danny?  What do you want to be when you grow up?"  And I would say, quite sincerely, "I want to be a grave digger."

You know, as I write the words down, I can see why people responded the way they did.  It's a pretty dark thing for a sweet little boy to say.  Kind of "Addams Family"-esque.  When most people think of grave diggers, they probably think of this guy:

"The Tall Man" from Phantasm, a movie that truly terrified my brother and me

So I can see why it may have creeped some of my parents' friends out when I shared my career aspirations with them.  But, by way of an explanation, I need to share what I was "into" at that time in my life.

I really dug digging.  I used to go out in my back yard and dig holes, just for the sake of digging them.  I wasn't looking for buried treasure.  (I did, however, find the occasional deer jaw, which was pretty cool.)  And I wasn't trying to get to China.  Archeology was a notion I enjoyed, but I wasn't that specific.  I simply liked the experience of making a hole in the ground where there had been no hole before.

I hadn't thought about my grave digger dreams at all, for maybe the last 40 years or more, until this past weekend, when I got out in the yard with my rake and my shovel in order to dig out an 8 x 8 foot patch of grass in preparation for our 4 x 4 raised bed garden we're constructing.  My yard, like many in this area, is populated by a strain of super grass called Bermuda grass.  It grows in a heavy, clay-like soil, and is not your run of the mill pretty sod grass.  You won't find Bermuda grass at any well-manicured baseball stadium or golf course, let me put it that way.  Digging in this stuff should be an Olympic sport.  Or, at the very least, an event in one of those "Tough Man" competitions -- the ones you see late at night on ESPN 2, with giant Lithuanian dudes going up against giant Swedish dudes, pulling trees out of the ground, or doing a 40-yard dash with a refrigerator over each shoulder.

This grass is No Joke.

As I dug out the plot for my vegetable bed, smelling the wormy soil, watching the grub worms roll into shrimp-like balls, and seeing spiders skittering for cover, that simple pleasure came rushing back to me, and I was in the back yard at 18 Hartford Lane once more.  I found myself smiling -- not so much at the nostalgic flashback, but at the simple joy of digging.  It still does it for me.  (The arthritic wrists and throbbing back are new, but hey, that's just part of the package.)

There is a derisive cliche in the world of education.  Some asshole, somewhere along the line, was quoted as saying, when faced with a student who just "didn't get it," "Hey, the world needs ditch diggers, too."  It's a quote I've always hated, but if and when they divide us up, one line for the intellectual phonies, and the other for the ditch diggers, you better believe I am going to reach for that shovel.

(Maybe I'd sneak a pencil into my pocket, too.  I might just want to write about those other assholes, after all....)

"Tracking" Santa - And the Innocence of My Children

At some point not too long ago, someone thought it would be
cute to connect Google Earth and Google Maps with an application that would
allow children and their parents to track Santa on Christmas Eve. I have no problem with it, and actually find
the app a great teaching tool. The
little videos they post in various places around the globe are educational, and
give my kids a sense of global geography, while stoking their excitement about
Santa’s arrival.

It does require a major paradigm shift for me personally,
however, to accept the fact that the Google people have put Santa’s travels
under the watch of NORAD. I’m of a
generation still old enough to remember when nuclear proliferation and the
threat of worldwide Armageddon were a constant in the news, and NORAD was one
of those scary acronyms, along with OPEC, NATO, and SALT. NORAD is the North American Aerospace Defense
Command and became something much more precious than it was when I was young.

Anyway, I’m not trying to be a Grinch about it. In fact, I’m still benefitting from the
mythology of Santa Claus, and I know it’s only a matter of time before neither
of my sons will believe in Santa any more. The wonder and magical nature of Christmas is written in their
expression with every shopping mall Santa they see. Sadly, that wonder will soon be gone (along
with my ability to mitigate and manipulate their behavior with same) and I just
have to accept this sad fact.

Diego sort of floated the idea, earlier this year that Santa
may not exist. I’m sure he picked up the
notion from one of his fellow third graders. Jackson looked at me during this crucial moment, his six year old eyes
truly incredulous. Thinking fast, I
acted as if Diego had blasphemed. “Dude!”
I said in my best stage whisper. “Do you
realize what could happen if Santa or ANY of his helpers heard you say that?”

“What helpers?” he asked, looking around the Chinese
restaurant where we were having our usual – Chicken Lo Mein and Won Ton soup –
as if he expected to see an elf stick his head above a neighboring booth to spy
on us.

“I’m just saying. Be
cool with that stuff. Believing is key
to staying on the ‘Nice’ list.”

Diego’s large eyes narrowed skeptically. Then he left it alone, turning his attention
to the noodles on his plate.

I don’t honestly remember when my belief in Santa went away,
because I don’t remember ever really believing in him. I don’t mean this in any tragic sort of way;
it’s just that I’m not sure how hard my parents ever pushed the myth on me and
my brother. They enjoyed putting cheeky “To-From”
tags on our presents, in the form of riddles that gave hints about what was
under the wrapping paper based on who’d sent each item. For example, a new baseball glove might have
been sent by Tom Seaver, or a set of “Planet of the Apes” action figures could
have come from Caesar, Cornelius or Dr. Zaius. Nerdy, I know, but we loved it, and it’s a tradition Jeanette and I
continue. Diego’s gorilla slippers are
from King Kong and Jackson’s Playmobile jungle set is from Tarzan. You get the idea.

There’s an innocence in my children that I’m especially aware
of during the Christmas season. They
remind me of myself and my brother and the anticipation that eventually gave
way to sleep.

“Diego wakes me up on Christmas morning,” Jackson told me
last night. “He says, ‘Jackson, he came!
He came! There are presents under the
tree!’”

He’ll say it again tomorrow morning, as the myth stays alive
for one more tenuous year of innocence.

The Reason We Had Two

Yesterday morning I caught Diego and Jackson in a lovely, unguarded moment. They were seated together in my comfortable leather chair in the family room, with Diego's "Snakes and Reptiles" book open over their laps.

"Look at this one, Jackson!" Diego said again and again, to which his younger brother replied, "Whoa!" or "Oooh!" or "Wow!"

It was a rare glimpse, and I did what I could to preserve the moment, snapping a few pictures on my phone, but not so conspicuously as to cause them to scatter like Brooklyn roaches. When they leafed upon a picture of a creature that looked particularly creepy, scary or interesting, Diego read aloud to Jackson, who sat there more transfixed and still than he ever is with me when I'm reading to him each night before sleep.

I cast no judgment or aspersion on anyone who has chosen to have only one child. Believe me. There are moments -- regularly -- when I envy them. Like my brother and me, and my father and uncle before us, Diego and Jackson fight almost constantly. Mutual combat is their preferred mode of expressing their love for one another.

It's in these rare, peaceful moments, however, that I'm reminded of why we chose to have two. I can count on one hand the number of "lifelong" friends I have. My brother Mike is always first on that short list. It's a comfort to know, as someone who won't be around all that much longer (I'm speaking relatively, of course. No veiled "threat" intended.) that Jackson and Diego will have each other's backs, so to speak.

They may not always see eye to eye on every issue; in fact, they may grow up to be two very different and divergent people. I have a feeling, though, that their friendship is being forged in the fire that is their childhood, and that the iron being cast will be strong indeed.

Oh and by the way: in case you're wondering, Diego and Jackson have no new "friends" on the way. Nor will they. Ever. As a great man once said, I may be dumb, but I ain't stupid.

The Wood Nymph

I wonder if anyone else would remember the eerie music that came wafting over the breeze for a few summer nights, years ago, in the Hartford Woods. It’s difficult, through the haze of memory, to ascertain what actually happened back then. From my adult perspective I am tempted to explain it away, much as I’m sure my parents must have done, when I surely came complaining of being frightened and unable to sleep. It was probably just some teenagers camping out in the woods, playing their radio by the fireside.

As a child of nine or ten, however, I was terrified by the mysterious night music. The woods at night were like a dark sea, the treetops moving, communicating in the breeze, nocturnal animals communing and commuting like fish under the water’s surface. The chirping of the crickets was a constant undercurrent on summer nights, providing a familiar lullaby. The curious music was an interruption of the night’s usual soothing song. In my horror film-addled mind I heard the singing of a wood nymph. I pictured a white gown blowing in the night’s breezes. She may very well have been beautiful, but her intention was pure evil. She existed to collect up the souls of children, like me, who dared to stray too far from their mothers’ gaze.

In the light of day, when my fear of the woods subsided, giving way to my boyhood explorer’s heart, I blazed the trails with abandon, at times looking for evidence to verify the other side of the story – smoldering embers and used condoms that would support the camping teenagers theory. But I found neither.

A subdivision was built in the Hartford Woods years after we moved away, and it changed the landscape somewhat. However for those children now living on Hartford Lane, where I grew up, the back woods still make up a large part of their world, I’m sure. I wonder if any of them have heard the Wood Nymph singing her songs, their strains cutting through the darkness, carried by the breeze of a muggy summer night.

Do It Your Damn Self, Dora!: When Did Our Culture Get So Interactive?

Okay, this one snuck up on me and has now been bothering me for a number of years. Television has become more “interactive” recently. I guess it’s probably in response to complaints about a more sedentary, passive viewing public, or the rising rate of obesity in children. I understand all that, but I get annoyed and defensive every time Dora or Diego or Handy Manny or whoever the hero is asks for the viewer’s help with the task at hand.

Those of you familiar with modern-day cartoons know what I’m talking about. It’s the moment when Dora looks into the camera with her big, vacant, shark-like eyes and says, “Will YOU help us find the snowy mountain?”

At first, I would nudge my son, saying, “Come on. Say yes. Tell Dora you’ll help her.” Even as a baby Diego would look at me quizzically, before complying and answering that he would help Dora, much to my, and my wife’s, giggling delight.

Eventually, however, the practice has worn on me. Maybe it is more educational, and everything, but I find myself thinking, “Come on, Dora, if you want to take your mangy monkey to the top of the snowy mountain so badly, just do it. Why do you need my help? I didn’t tell you to go to the snowy mountain, or anywhere else, for that matter."

Back in my day, it was all about Bugs Bunny. My brother and I watched him religiously, and as recently as last month, we recited one of his more famous interactions verbatim. I’ve got a few key BB scenes committed to memory, and I’m not sure I would if he’d been asking me for help all the time. Imagine it – Bugs Bunny looking at you, chomping on his carrot, and saying, “Say, uh, Doc. How’d you like to help me pull a fast one on Daffy?” That wasn’t Bugs’s style. Instead, we watched carefully to see what he would do to outwit his opponents – even when we’d seen the episode so many times, we could recite it by heart.

It doesn’t stop at children’s television, either. I used to be able to watch the news, for example, without being asked to text in my opinion in a real-time poll. Of course, the texting in of responses makes a profit for someone, though I’m not sure who. Now it’s out of control. Walter Cronkite never asked me to call in and tell him whether I agreed with what he was saying or not. He was the authority, damn it. Why would he want to know what I had to say about anything?

Okay, so I suppose if I “presume positive intent,” as is my tendency, I could accept the fact that maybe they’re trying to make television a more active, democratic experience by bringing the viewer into the program in these different ways. Maybe I’m just an endangered species about to go extinct – I’m a Couch Potatosaurus.

Still, though, I have to say it again: Bugs never asked me to figure out his problems for him, and yet he always saw his way out of them. He also happened to be hilarious in a way that Dora and her cousin just aren’t.

From the Big Rock to Wii: Batman Then and Now

This morning, in the midst of my half-sleep, I heard a child call out a familiar question, one that made me think I must be dreaming.

“Do you want to be Batman or Robin?”

Suddenly I was back in my yard on Hartford Lane, playing on “the Big Rock,” which doesn’t look so big any more, by the way. It was a large sandstone boulder that the builders probably took one look at and said, “Yeah, we’re not moving that sucker.”

Good thing for us, too, because that rock became our Batcave, Batmobile, Batcopter, and USS Enterprise (I’ve already disclosed the fact that I’m an old-school trekkie) all rolled into one. My brother and I often negotiated who would be Batman and who would be his rather lame teenage sidekick, Robin. The “Boy Wonder.” Sheesh. The argument usually ended well for me and poorly for my brother, because age won out.

“Mike, who’s older, Batman or Robin?” I would ask, crafting my argument.

“Batman,” Mike answered grudgingly. He saw where this was going.

“And who’s older, me or you?”

“You, but –“

And that usually did it; like the immutable laws of physics (whatever that is), there’s no arguing the simple logic of boys.

It was different this morning, however. As it turned out I wasn’t dreaming of my past, or my brother Mike, or the Big Rock. My children were in the living room, awake before I was, as is often the case on the weekends, and they were firing up the Wii, getting ready to play Lego Batman. Like me, Diego has used the age argument to ensure that he gets to “be” Batman. Usually. Unlike my brother, however, Jackson has figured out how to manipulate the situation to his advantage. Jackson knows that if he acts like he doesn’t want to play long enough, Diego will crack, and ask the question I heard this morning.

“Do you want to be Batman or Robin?”

Eventually, one of them relents and agrees to be Batman’s youthful ward, and they get to the business of fighting the various members of the Gallery of Rogues – Joker, Penguin, Riddler, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, and Poison Ivy. They squeal and laugh and scream and bark orders at each other, generally just waking me up in a whole variety of vocal ways. I like that the game has them problem-solving together, as a team. Okay, so they’re not outside, using their imaginations the way Mike and I were. And maybe they should be. But they’re together and happy and I can’t help but smile as I listen to their filial back and forth.

Besides, I’m not sure what they’d think of the Big Rock. I believe in my heart they’d love it just as much as I did. I do harbor a fear, however, that they might look at it and say, “Um, duh, Dad. This is so not the Batmobile. Hand me Mommy’s iPhone and I’ll pull it up for you on Google Images, so you can see what it really looks like.”

Before They Grossed Me Out: Little Creatures, Then and Now

The sun has come up on Shadowglen and the grackles have begun the grim daily task of ingesting those Junebugs too slow to have taken cover. Last night, when J and I were enjoying a nightcap on our back patio, the Junebugs pestered us relentlessly, so they’re getting what my mother, in her down-home way, would have called their “come-uppance.”

The last time I wrote about insects was in an earlier post, when I complained, in true Suburban Squire Style, about my ant problem. Come to think of it, I’ve also written about my New York roach issues. I once wrote a poem that describes a man whose one-bedroom apartment has somehow become infested with flies. One of my best pieces of narrative was the opening of a short story that describes a woman who has just had an exquisite shower. She steps into her living room, feeling refreshed, when a cockroach skitters across the floor, taps her foot, and skitters away again. She sighs before removing her towel and bathrobe and getting right back into the shower.

Does this periodic return to the subject of bugs add up to an obsession? Could be. It might not come as a surprise to some who knew me as a child. Obsession is too weak a word to describe how I felt about the insect world as a kid. It wasn’t the exasperated state I seem to communicate in my writing. Instead, it was a real fascination – a scientific curiosity with what the little buggers were up to, moment to moment, day to day. It wasn’t unusual to find me or my buddy Richie Mahoney squatting down over an anthill, or with our faces peering, just inches from a spider web.

We were drawn by the combat of insects, often pitting ants and beetles against one another. Red ant versus black was one of our favorite match-ups, because despite being considerably smaller than the black carpenter ants, red ants were a whole lot tougher, a dynamic we could relate to as children. We were accustomed to being underestimated.

James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl was one of my favorite books. I loved the idea that a boy could fully enter the lives and stories of bugs. I even had dreams about shrinking down and hanging out with insects myself.

Of my own two children, Jackson is the one who is more like me when it comes to bugs and animals. He’s likely to seek out interesting creatures under rocks and tree stumps. If he sees a gecko, for example, he won’t just remark on it, he’ll go ahead and get it, so that he can turn it around in his hands and inspect it.

Jeanette and Diego fall into the other camp; they’re grossed out and would generally prefer that the world’s wildlife stick to themselves and leave us humans alone.

Not that Diego lacks the scientist’s curious mind, however. Two of his favorite books contain graphic close-up photos, of snakes and reptiles and of insects, respectively.

I often wonder what old Richie Mahoney is up to these days. My hope is that he’s a dad like me, observing the behavior of his children, continuously comparing their experiences to what was a pretty idyllic childhood, looking back on it. Maybe, as I write this, he’s crouching beside a son or daughter, their faces just inches away from a spider web, their eyes wide, as they wait for the action to unfold.

Farther Horizons: When Will They Yearn Past Our Fences?

Sitting in my back yard, watching my two boys play catch, the summer heat begins to make itself known, even at 7:45 in the morning. The heat has been monumental lately, hitting 100 degrees and beyond, day after day, and we’re only in mid June.

There’s a nice breeze, though, and it’s a bit on the cloudy side, so that it feels good to be out here with my two little progenies, playing, talking, laughing – the sounds of wind chimes, air conditioners, birds and dogs punctuating our interactions.

This is one of the reasons we moved from Brooklyn – to give our kids more access to the outdoors, and I’m glad of that. This is not to say, however, that Brooklyn had any lack of green space. In fact, we were blessed to have found a coop just half a block away from Prospect Park, one of the world’s loveliest. But with big city parks comes an element of unpredictability and danger, so that having children cannot help but bring that fear up for a parent.

Parks here are so much more sparsely peopled; even Zilker, at its most crowded, feels less packed than Prospect, or Central, do.

I don’t mean to sound like one of those crazies who are afraid of people, nor would I want to expose my children to that kind of thinking. But the reality is that New York is densely populated, and its mental health facilities are too few. As a result, one has to be aware, at all times, of who’s around. This is probably true at Zilker, too, but not like the New York parks – not to the same extent.

Certainly the back yard is a nice, if tiny, alternative, allowing the kids to be outside in the summer sun, playing with their toys and having a good time.

I wonder when the time will come that Jackson and Diego decide they can no longer be contained by our fences. It’s inevitable; I still recall how much I loved our back yard on Hartford Lane and how exciting it felt to burrow under our back fence and into the Hartford Woods.

Our fences have nothing on the other side of them but other yards here in Manor. I can imagine a day when my kids decide to get on their bikes and venture into the Shadowglenn golf course, at which point we get a call from Diego, who is being detained by the groundskeeper.

Or driving along Route 290 and noticing my children walking or riding along the side. Our yard can only contain them for so long. Soon they will be looking for farther horizons.

Staying Home Sick Will Never Be The Same

I became aware of soap operas as a boy, when I would stay home sick from school. Back then, our options on television were slim in general, but during the day? Forget it. The channels we had available to us in the New York Metropolitan area were 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13. Occasionally a few VHF channels came through, but they were snowy and/or in Spanish.

Channels 5, 9, and 11 were the local channels, and 13 was PBS. 2, 4 and 7 was where most of the good, or at least decent stuff aired. 2 was WCBS, 4 was WNBC and 7 was WABC, and they still are, as far as I know. Those three channels were the ones that carried the nationally syndicated soaps. My mother was not a huge soap opera fan, but I loved TV as a rule, and the unspoken understanding was that being sick somehow gave me the right to watch television all day long.

I vaguely remember stopping on Days of our Lives and watching for a while, being somewhat interested in peeking in on the lives of adults, with sex and violence, and all the other good stuff they tried to hide from me when I was a kid. Then, I would infallibly get bored and switch either to a game show or, perish the thought, I’d turn off the television and actually read a book.

The soaps made a comeback during high school, when it became a favorite pastime of my little group of friends to get together at someone’s house – usually someone who lived closest to our school, because of the time factor involved – and watch the tail end of All My Children (“All My Kids,” as Maria and her sisters liked to call it) before getting into General Hospital.

At first, we watched it as a goof, while sneaking shots of Southern Comfort and plotting our weekend mischief. But a curious thing happened. “GH,” as we called it, started getting . . . good. But I mean really good. There was Hutch “the baby-faced hitman” (Maria’s again) who all the ladies adored and who was plotting to kill Luke. And there was, of course, that most passionate of daytime relationships, Luke and Laura. Although Luke looked vaguely like Frank Purdue with a blond wig made of pubic hair on his head, and Laura looked like every overly made-up bimbette you saw at the Galleria mall on the weekends, the chemistry and Forbidden Love thing were just too much to resist.

Now it appears that the long-running English-language soap operas are going the way of the dinosaurs. I guess with the advent, and expansion, of cable television, coupled with the virtual extinction of that elusive mythical creature the "Stay-At-Home Mom," they just couldn’t compete. When my boys are home sick from school, the absolute LAST thing they would want to watch would be one of the classic soaps. They prefer the Food Network. (Thanks, honey, for that.)

As it happens, I am home sick from work today, and no, I have no interest in All My Kids or GH. I’ve got hours of DVR’d HBO programming to look at. The world most certainly has changed, but I have no doubt those soaps will take their proper place in television’s Pantheon.

Oh wait, I know. I’ll watch some “Novelas.” Ay, si!

The Excitement of Learning

While visiting Jeanette’s office at Pearce Middle School today, Diego logged on to one of the computers and started work on his first ever research project – a PowerPoint slide show on snakes and reptiles. It’s so wonderful to see my son searching for new knowledge. It reminds me of when I traced all the pictures from my Human Systems book using colored pencils to detail veins, arteries, muscles and bones. I was so intensely into that work, because it was self-directed. I’m sure part of the motivation came from the thought of pleasing my parents, but most was born of the fact that it was my project and no one else’s.

It humbles me now to think that project could have been a turning point, had anyone noticed how excited I’d been by it. Who knows what I might have done with my life? I might have become a doctor, like my Harrison classmates, Steven Drexler and Mark Hirschorn. Or, like my best friend, Miki Kasai, I could have ended up a medical researcher.

Sadly, however, no science teacher ever took note of my little independent flip book on human systems. To be fair, if I were to see it today, through my more sophisticated and world-weary eyes, the thing might have inspired a shrug at best.

But maybe not. As a teacher, I came to realize that there is no such thing as a “small” accomplishment to a child. If one of my students finally got it together enough to write a short story with a beginning, middle and an end, after having struggled to get even that far, I would celebrate the achievement, with great fanfare, before getting down to critiquing the details of spelling, syntax, grammar and the like.

And now I am celebrating Diego Fuchs’s first ever research project, “Snakes and Reptiles: Our Scaly Friends,” as if it were a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece of journalistic reportage.

And who’s to say that it might not one day lead him to one?

The Calming Sound of Baseball

Baseball in March is not the same as it is in October. There's more tanning going on out there than anything else, really. Split-squad games with home run balls that drop over the fence into sunny patches of grass, where children run and grab for them.

I suppose the big, serious fans (no not those big, serious fans) get really into watching spring ball, but to me it's even more like watching paint dry than it sometimes can be during the regular season. Oh, come on, don't get like that now. You know the games I'm talking about -- the ones that hit the three-hour mark in the middle of the seventh inning. And then the pitcher has the nerve to step off the rubber and go for the rosin bag, just before the batter steps out of the box, right before he's finally ready to pitch the damn ball.

Anyway, let's just say I doubt these pre-season baseball games get the highest ratings around.

That being said, I will cop to one thing: I love the sound of baseball. I love the din of the crowd when something happens, as well as the continuous murmuring of it when nothing happens. I love the crack of the bat, and the chatter of the broadcasters.

It all brings me back to the summers of my childhood. This was the soundtrack. My brother and father were big fans. I watched the Mets and liked them, but not to the same extent. But it was a constant, and now I associate the sounds of a baseball broadcast with home.

I don't watch much baseball any more, although I did get excited about the Rangers last year. I don't forsee watching many games on television this season, but they will be on once in a while, and that sound will carry through the house like a breeze. And I will feel at home.

The Imperfect Haiku

At age 7, during my first semester of second grade, I wrote an imperfect haiku:

"A dog is made of

Love. And so are

you. And so is a bird."

People look at it now, framed on the wall in my office, and have one of two reactions. It's either an "Aww, that's so cute" response, or some variation on "What were you trying to write?" I don't remember much about this poem -- not the poetry unit we must have been studying, or my teacher praising me for what I'd come up with. I do vaguely recall my parents being excited about it, and I think it was my father's secretary, an amateur calligrapher, who penned it on a piece of fancy French stationery paper, so that my parents could frame it.

As an adult, I can imagine my parents must have been quite moved by what they read. We were not particularly religious, so I didn't get this notion from church, or the Bible. My parents didn't really go around expounding on their philosophies of how to treat other people. So they must have looked at this thing I wrote and wondered, did this really come out of our son? I was the exact age then that my older son is now, so I can easily put myself in their place.

It marked the first time I was ever "recognized" for a piece of writing, so it may have set me on that path, or certainly been one of the determining factors that made me consider being a writer. Of course, the encouragement of teachers and parents is invaluable in the development of a child, and I was definitely afforded some good old-fashioned positive reinforcement here.

Growing up and seeing the imperfect haiku (it's got the wrong number of syllables, according to traditional formula), I was always a little embarrassed by it. I thought it was silly -- a goofy sentiment.

Now that I have arrived at middle age, however, I have come to understand that these words are not goofy, silly or cute. In fact, they're profoundly spiritual. These are the words of a child who looked at the world around him and saw a connecting influence, a thread that ran through all things. He didn't get it from doctrine, dogma or parental speeches. He got it from watching his parents and how they treated each other and him. And how they interacted with the world around him.

The moment I wrote down this poem, I wrote down my philosophy on life. And you know what? It hasn't changed much in the past 40 years.

A dog is made of love. And so is a bird.

And so are you.

The Boy Who Lived Everywhere

I have begun referring to Malik (not his real name, pictured at left) as "The Boy Who Lives Everywhere," because he is what his own mother refers to as a "House Hopper." Malik lives in the house next door and is a very sweet, very polite first-grader, who is just as likely to be in my house on a Saturday afternoon as he is to be in his own, or in the house across the street, or the one next to that. Jeanette and I don't mind having him around, and are prone to ask him to stay for dinner more often than not.

Basically, what he does (and who can blame him for this, really?) is travel house to house, looking for the next best video game to play. He's got plenty of his own, but anyone with kids knows that as far as they're concerned, other people's toys are much more fun to play with than their own. In his way, Malik is a genius.


Malik crossed the line recently, however, when, as he was eating dinner with us, he said, "I sure would like to stay here and have a sleepover with Jackson and Diego. I'm going to go ask my mom."


"Slow down, cowboy," I said. "You forgot something important there, pal."


"What?" he asked.


"Well, we didn't invite you to stay over."


Malik and I shared a moment of silence, just kind of staring at each other. I think he was trying to determine whether or not I was serious. To lighten things a bit, I repeated, smiling this time, "Being invited is important, buddy. Your mom would agree." He smiled his gap-toothed smile, and said, "Yes, sir," a little dejected. I gave him a high five, and we enjoyed the rest of his visit that evening.

This led me back to my own childhood, living in a community that was then about the same age as our present community is now. There was a group of us kids, probably about eight to ten, in all, who routinely roamed the streets and back woods of our area. My mother was a stay-at-home mom, so our house was filled, on a regular basis, with any number of our little crew. We rode bikes and skateboards, and were an every-day presence on Hartford Lane and environs.

The experience with Malik brought back to mind the time my brother Mike was hanging around at his friend Jonathan's house one Saturday. I was in our kitchen at home, keeping my mother company as she prepared dinner, when the phone rang. I wasn't paying attention to the call, but suddenly my mother was beside herself with laughter. She couldn't speak, she was laughing so much. When she finally got it out, my father and I were laughing, too.

Apparently, it was Jonathan on the other end of the line. Six-year-old Jonathan Heller had taken it upon himself to pick up the phone and dial our number. When my mother answered, he very politely said, "Hello, Mrs. Fuchs. This is Jonathan. Don't you think it's about time Michael headed home for dinner?" She'd then done everything she could to contain herself as she sternly directed Michael to come right home, before breaking up completely.

My brother had clearly overstayed his welcome, and poor Jonathan felt his only recourse was to go to the ultimate authority -- my mother. We were -- all of us -- the Kids Who Lived Everywhere back then. As I think on it now, forty years after the fact, it feels like nostalgia to me. But then I look at Malik and am pleased that he is carrying on in our tradition. Sure, we overstayed our welcome from time to time, or invited ourselves over inappropriately. But we did it because we were reaching out to those who lived near us, and isn't that what being a "community" is all about?