I like when my team
gets a big lead in a game
and then pulls away

Today is (or isn’t) the anniversary of the day my Dad died.

There is debate on this because my Dad died late at night in a hospital room with my brother Paul and I at his side.

Paul had called people that the time was near and one by one, my Mom and my 9 other brothers and sisters arrived as fast as they could, but after the moment.

With this mob of people in the room, it was some time after midnight before a Doctor could verify that Dad was indeed dead, so his death certificate is dated the next day.

My Dad would have enjoyed stealing an extra bureaucratic day of life.

To make up for it, when Dad’s headstone was delivered, the stone mason had made that common January mistake and carved 1987 instead of 1988.

As my brother Steve said, “What can you do? It IS carved in stone.“

Dad would have enjoyed that as well.

Once, back when I was in college, my parents visited me and Dad enjoyed walking around campus to see what had changed since he had been there 40 years earlier.

I took them down to the ‘New’ Law Library which was built next to Law Quad.

So the new building wouldn’t mess up the esthetics of the Cambridgesque Law School, the new library was dug 7 stories down into the ground.

I led Mom and Dad down the flights of stairs and past a sign that all visitors must register.

My Mom pointed to sign and I dismissed it with a wave of my hand and my Dad said, “Mike knows what to do.”

We walked around and my Dad inspected the stacks and study carrels and we ended up standing on the stairs along side an atrium that was dug out and sided with windows to let some sunlight into the underground structure.

Mom looked at the chrome window frames and pointed out they were covered in dust.

Dad looked for a bit.

Then walked over to the rail and leaned way out and wrote with his finger:

Ashes to Ashes
Dust to Dust
If your grades don’t get you
The Devil must

“OH BOB”, my mom said, walking away.

This past fall, I got to spend a weekend in Ann Arbor with my granddaughter and its been 40 years SINCE I was in school.

I felt I could have grabbed a pad and paper and walked into a lecture without missing a beat.

I am sure when my Dad was writing in the dust, he felt the same.

Thinking of things my Dad liked, he liked his sports teams.

He like Michigan and I am sure he would have enjoyed last years undefeated season.

His favorite team was the Chicago Cubs.

He grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, with the Cubs on the radio across from across Lake Michigan.

Later in life when he had a cottage in Grand Haven on the lake shore, he put giant rotating antennas to catch the TV signal from WGN so he could watch the Cubs.

At least on good days.

On bad atmospheric days or days with storms, the picture would fade in and out or get all fuzzy.

Many times we would hear Jack Brickhouse saying, “Its back back back bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.” and when the picture came back, it was a commerical.

Came the day in Grand Rapids when Cable TV came to our block.

Dad called and called or at least had his receptionist call and call (My Dad hated the phone and his receptionist, Diane, endeared herself by calling anyone he asked) to get the first available appointment on our street for the Cable Guy.

Cable Guy shows up and looks at the house and told Dad that while he, Cable Guy, could connect the house to the cable, he was not allowed to wire up a house.

Dad would have to do that.

Dad and the Cable Guy looked over the house and Cable Guy gave Dad a couple hundred feet of coaxial cable and promised that he would stop back at the end of his day.

Dad took that cable and spent the rest of day up in the attic and under the roof crawling around until he had cable running to our family room and his bedroom.

True to his word, Cable Guy showed up late in the day, approved of what Dad had wired up and went to work.

Mom came out and called Dad to dinner and he came in sat down at the table.

As I remember it, Cable Guy came with him and pulled out a chair at the table.

Mom was mom and laughed and offered to set a plate.

Cable Guy said he appreciated it but went back to work and we went on with dinner.

Halfway through dinner, Cable Guy called to my Dad, “Sir, if I can show you how this works?”

Dad was out of his chair at the head of the table and into the family room.

Dad walked in and the TV was on and Cable Guy was standing there with the Channel Selector Box (which in those days was the flat box with a slider that you used to change channels).

The Chicago Cubs, in crystal clear cable TV, were on.

Dad sat down in front of the TV.

Cable Guy handed him the box and explained how it worked.

Dad listened but didn’t hear a word.

He was in his living room and he was watching the Cubs.

At that moment, all was as good as was ever going to get in his world and he enjoyed that moment.

(A corollary to this story is when VHS recorders came on the market and we were after Dad to buy so we could rent movies. One Saturday morning my brother Tim pointed out that if we had one, we could tape the Michigan-Notre Dame that afternoon and Dad could watch the tape all week long. Dad got down the Witmark catalog and picked out a machine and gave Tim his credit card and sent Tim and me out to buy one – Michigan and Rick Leach beat ND 28-14 and that tape floated around box of tapes forever.)

Along with the Cubs, Dad kind of followed the Bears.

At least the 1985 Bears.

I think he followed the Bears just to tease the rest of us.

The rest of us followed the Lions.

We would watch every Sunday and there were games where the Lions would be ahead.

There were games when we thought, the Lions were going to win.

Dad would sit back and predict how the Lions would lose.

We would be hopefull.

Dad would say that Lions were once again going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

We would yell NO NO NO! in exasperation.

But Dad had seen this team before.

The Lions, we thought, are going to win this one.

After the Lions lost, Dad would quote Harry Caray and say, “Victory had one thousand fathers while defeat is an orphan.”

He seemed somehow, to enjoy losing or, at least, to enjoy being right that the Lions were so wrong.

I got so mad once at Dad’s black outlook that I asked, “What do you like about Sports?”

Dad looked at me and without hesitation he said, “I like when my team gets a big lead in a game, … and then pulls away.”

growing up with my
sister Mary, hey do you …
remember Freddie?

I grew up in a group.

I have 10 brothers and sisters, though the last brother showed up after the first brother got married so there were never more than 10 kids in the house at one time.

And it was a big house.

We evolved into two groups of siblings.

The first five and the second five with one brother kind of lost in the middle.

I have memories of being a little kid but there are jumbled altogether with those ‘big’ kids in the first five.

They were ones who went everywhere on family trips.

They went to Disneyland and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and New Orleans.

Then they went off to college and we in the second five wondered who those people were.

They would be around in the summer and then leave in the fall but be back at Thanksgiving (when we would all watch the Michigan-Ohio State and scream at the TV) and then back at Christmas (when we would all watch Michigan in the Rose Bowl and scream at the TV).

Christmas also had the added attraction of the first family bringing back germs from college and we all got, in succession, the dread stomach virus or winter vomiting as the brits call it.

Through it all strode the indomitable force that was my big sister Mary.

Determined to be all she could be.

Determined to make us all be all we could be if we would just listen.

Before she left for college, her room was on the 2nd floor (or 4th floor … it was a split level) right over the room I shared with my brother Tim.

We had bunk beds and could knock on the ceiling to bug her and she would bang the floor.

We would knock again.

She would bang again.

We would keep this up until we would hear her get out bed, slam open her door, and stomp down the stairs.

We would dive under the covers and pretend to be asleep and she would kick our door open and yell , “KNOCK IT OFF – I KNOW YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING.”

And we had balanced a cup full of water on top of the door.

Even when she was off at college, Mary would reach out to us.

She wrote a letter to my brother Pete with a sketch of her finger on the paper.

She said her hand had been asleep on the page and she didn’t want to move her finger, so she drew it into the letter.

We read that over and over and just laughed and laughed.

She would put her return address on her letters as ME.

What else would the return address be but return it to ME and of course ME meant our sister Mary!

Which we thought was so cool … until she told us it was her initials (Mary Elizabeth).

About this time my brother Peter brought the word Freddie home from school.

We would be watching TV or in the car or anywhere doing nothing and Pete would say, “Freddie” and we would all crack up.

So Mary picked up on it.

She would write and at the end of her letters include, PS: Freddie.

And we would laugh and laugh.

Mom would call her long distance from time to time and Mary would ask to talk to us kids and Mom would hold the phone out to us and Mary would say ‘Freddie’ and we would fall on the floor laughing and laughing.

They thing is we never told Mary what Freddie meant.

We never told anyone what Freddie meant.

My Mom got upset at being left out of the joke and started guessing at what ‘Freddie’ meant and she really fell off the deep end with her off color guesses which made us laugh harder and made Mom madder.

So today, on my sister’s Mary’s birthday, I have to ask?

Do you remember Freddie?

make managers bit
less uptight – something silly
but acceptable

“I never thought anyone would want to do a book about the madness of the 1970s and 1980s. I had no idea people even remembered our Newton’s cradle,” said Loncraine, 78. “It was something to make bank managers a bit less uptight – something silly but acceptable to have on your desk.”

From the article, “‘It was to make bank managers less uptight’: the toy that put Newton’s law on executive desks by Alice Fisher. Lifestyle editor, in the Guardian.

Growing up in the 70’s … the 1970’s, we had one of these at home.

Everyone did.

We knew it by another name though.

We called it ‘Newton’s Balls’ not Newton’s Cradle and it made a big difference.

Especially when you let the two hanging balls on the ends go at the same time and they slammed into the other three over an over again.

You felt it in … well …

One of my older brothers was studying to be a math teacher.

At one point in his life he had a pet cat named Newton.

He would explain how the action of the steel balls demonstrated conservation of momentum and conservation of energy in physics.

I had just read a book about Robert H Goddard and how he had studied Newton’s laws of physics.

As a kid (the book I had read was a young readers life of Robert H Goddard) the book said Goddard had sent away for multi volume sets of books that he read to learn all he could about Newton and this somehow led him to design rockets and rocket engines.

I thought about that.

I thought about what my brother told me.

And I watched Newton’s balls slowly slow down.

And I realized I was not destined for a career in mathematics.

Understand this was not in the family genes.

There were 11 of us and over time we all attended the same high school.

Every year, Grand Rapids Creston would recognize its top students and one of the awards was the math trophy.

My family brought that trophy home 4 times.

But not me.

Years later there was a family get together at my mom’s house.

I was running late and got there after dinner to find most of my brothers and sisters and a lot of my niece’s and nephews all sitting around the dining room table starring at pieces of paper with pencils in hand.

My brother the math teacher looked up and said, ‘Grab a pencil, we working on quadratic equations.”

I figured these were people who needed something silly but acceptable to have on their desk to help them seem bit less uptight.