live my one wild and precious life

This did not sound like a good idea at first. The little one came home from first grade full of enthusiasm and with a stack of hand-made posters to tape on each TV that declared this week TV turnoff week; no video games, TV, movies, computer entertainment of any kind for the entire week. With a big smile he started putting up his posters and announced that we should start getting board games out of the basement so we would be used to them when April 20th came around. His enthusiasm could not be resisted, despite my internal dialog about the loss of entertainment for the little source of lost revenue and time.

The big kids both immediately declared they would not be participating. They were going to go to the sanctity of their rooms, use head-sets, and continue to enjoy the wonders of modern electronic entertainment, eliminating the possibility that I could foist the little one off on them and continue working.

In the end, I had no choice. I just bowed to the inevitable, and got the board games out for me and my little boy. That was six days ago.

First it was easy stuff. Then we switched to HeroQuest. Then to Battle Masters. Finally to “the Fury of Dracula”, pulling some of the great games out of my basement from the 1980’s. Slowly, the big kids came out of their rooms and listened in. Soon, they were playing with us. It wasn’t long before they were fully engaged, and I could slip away quietly back to my office to get some work done.

It was a great week. We played dozens of games, like a family, for the first time in my memory. The DVDs and Playstation and Wii remained cold, while we rediscovered the pleasure of a long, intense board game in the living room. Sure, I didn’t get as many work hours in as I had hoped. But it was a great experience, a good lesson for everybody, and in the end, a better way to live our one wild and precious life.

It’d been a hard week. Taxes are due for the company, and since we’re a full C corp, that’s a little more than for most people. I counted 11 forms that need to be filed by 1/31. I’m not that bad at taxes, but the filing of the forms and getting it just right is rather stressful for me.

It comes at a bad time, right on that thin strip of time between the holidays and the week of Photonics West when, it seems, every major project becomes overdue. During those three weeks, I have days and days of extra work to do, for which I don’t get paid, for my volunteer work on standards, which leaves little time for anything else.

But because it’s been freakishly cold, we got the usual additional fun; late starts, snow days, and my car deciding it was time to express itself mechanically. It’s enough to make this optimist fall into a fetal position and weep.

On top of all that, my computer hard drive started dying. I know I shouldn’t complain; I keep a RAID drive for just this reason, and anyway it didn’t just up and die, but started making more and more noise as if to warn me that it’s time was up. By the time I’d pulled all my important files off, my office sounded like the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The stress level was through the roof, and the window between dropping kids off and picking them up seemed too small by half.

On my way home from an errand around noon, I shuddered at the thought of lunch alone, then going back onto the flight deck to try and get a few more hours of work done before the chaos of returning kids. Then I saw Kristin’s Cafe, all in happy yellows and purples, and I knew just what to do.

I sat at the bar overlooking the (blissfully) warm kitchen, listening to “Indigo Girls” as I sipped coffee, and ordered up a “Kristin’s Burger” with all the fixings, and felt the stress slough off me like yesterdays mud. For $8.53, I got the most rejuvenating break. Sure, I still had to go back to the flight deck, but there was a just enough more energy in that emotional battery that I could make it to the finish line.

Small steps an even breaths are sometimes essential to living this one, wild, precious life.

It was a surreal event. Sort of a cross between “Mission impossible”, complete with sound-track, and Dr. Doolittle. I mean the one with Eddy Murphy with the talking gerbil. A stealthy spy action film, with chickens.

We were going away for Thanksgiving, and we had run out of neighbors to take care of the chickens. Actually we had one left, the nice woman who had just moved into town, seemed a bit bored, and hadn’t spent any quality time with a rooster yet. But we needed to save her for the week between Christmas and New Years, or we wouldn’t be going to Cancun after all. But I digress.

My wife came up with the idea really, based on the days when the second clutch of chickens were still chicks, too big for a box in the back room, but too small to be put with those brawny New Hampshire Reds. We had to set up the kiddie tent in the garage, park our cars outside, and let them trash the place, knowing we’d need to hose it down in the summer. That worked out ok, so it seemed logical to reopen “Chicken Hilton” by setting up the tent, covering the floor with hay, getting an industrial sized food bin and a self-heating water dispenser, and leaving the chickens in the garage for the two days we’d be gone. Sure, they’d get bored, and I don’t think they like walking on concrete, much less sleeping on it, but then again we just reminded ourselves of those horrible pictures we saw on the web of commercial poultry farms, and we decided to give it a go.

The trick, though, was getting them into the garage.

Chickens roost in the same place every night. You have to train them early, and they just keep coming home to roost, no matter where they were all day. I guess that’s where we get the expression. Anyway, we couldn’t get them to roost in the garage, and we can’t catch them during the day. So the plan was to let them go roost in their run, let them fall asleep, and then go get them one-by-one and move them to the garage while they were asleep. It sounded simple at the time.

Well, it didn’t work out quite that well. The first bird I moved was Buckbeak, the lame barred rock that used to be the leader of the second clutch, but now was just barely ambulatory. She didn’t mind being carried, but she was less than enthusiastic about being grabbed in the dark. I brought her around the back, closed the garage door, and set her in the play tent. She couldn’t really get away, since she’s lame, but I was surprised when she started limping towards the door to the laundry, making a ton of noise. It turns out that one great way to wake up a chicken is to carry it around and drop it on a cold cement floor nowhere near the smells of the roost. I grabbed her and tossed her into the tent, and went for the next bird. The three New Hampshire reds went in rapid succession, while the rest slumbered on. Only the Reds liked being woken up even less than Buckbeak, and they decided it was Buckbeak’s fault. Chickens can be like that some times.

I ran back to the run to find the rooster up and awake, and all the hens stumbling to someplace hard to reach. The reason was simple; I could still hear Buckbeak’s alarm calls from the garage on the other side of the house. The rooster was going to protect his flock, even if he was half asleep. I grabbed him next, and carried him with two hands all the way around the house. I figured he could keep the Reds in line. He was even less thrilled with his new digs. By the time I got back to the run, the chickens were on the move, trying to get out of the run. I grabbed the next bird and ran for it, right though the house this time, terrified of leaving chicken droppings on the Persian, but even more worried the birds would run for the woods and be lost forever. After three or four more birds, one of the Reds ran past me into the laundry room as I brought Little Blue past. She startled me, and I tossed blue into the garage with a flurry of feathers and a squawk from the rooster. I chased the Red down and tossed her in as well.

By now we had the whole family engaged, some guarding the laundry room door, others opening and closing doors in the house, and my wife and I running with chickens. Every time we added one, it seemed they got more upset.

It was well after 10:00, quite late for chickens, before they quieted down and fell asleep, mostly clustered on the top of the grille, or in a torn box in the corner. But they were safe, and that’s what counts. Mission accomplished.

In some ways, keeping chickens is a lot like parenting. Just with more feathers.

I was really pissed off about it; after traveling to Omaha, Boston, Madison, Tucson, and back to Boston, I really wanted to spend the weekend at home, licking my wounds and enjoying a new video game I got for my birthday. But this weekend is “MIT Splash”, and my son needed me to drive him to Boston at 5:30am on Saturday morning, sleep overnight, and drive back at 10pm on Sunday. Another weekend vaporized to travel, and to family obligation.

MIT Splash, though, is really quite an event. About 2000 precocious high school and junior high school kids make their way to MIT for two days of classes in everything from theoretical mathematics to “introductory interstellar warfare” or “building with duct tape”. All the classes are taught by student volunteers, and most of the parents hang out on campus to serve as support staff for the kids. It’s a great opportunity for my son, and I’m pleased he is spending his weekend this way, even if it’s not my ideal way to pass the time.

And yet…

Here I am sitting in the student union building of MIT, getting caught up on my reading, and my writing, and even my lens design work with free coffee and wireless internet access, in the community of startlingly bright kids and in most cases startlingly bright parents as well, and I realize there is nothing wrong with this. It may not be what I planned, but life is like that some times, and our time is what we make of it; nothing more.

A deep relaxation settled into my shoulders last night as i had a second glass of Sauvignon Blanc from Anjou in a nearby bar, waiting for my son’s call saying he was done for the day. I slept like a baby in a beautiful hotel, had a luxurious breakfast, and today I feel refreshed and energized. My son is studying math at MIT, and I’ve got coffee and wireless. What more can I look for in a Sunday afternoon, really?

One wild, precious life.

I am preparing this week for a pilgrimage to my rural roots, in the heart of tobacco country. We are going by car, a long and arduous journey back to my Daddy’s boyhood home, to commune with kin my own children have never met. I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised, and for clarity enough to see some larger significance in this foray, even if it is just the resut of cultural contrast, the layering of generations, the passage of time. My family’s demons will be there as well, some more alive and well than others: a history of racism and disparity, some long-buried family secrets. Ignorance, but maybe also growth. I am hoping for laughter and tears, in limitless and measured amounts, and perhaps some insight as well.

I know, we all think about John Locke all the time, right?

I’m reading a book about James Madison, and the writing of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Madison was the author of both the Virginia plan, which was the basis for our system of government, as well as the wording of the Bill of Rights which was submitted as the first ten amendments to the constitution. Pretty amazing accomplishments, and more important than being the Fourth president, for which he is most remembered, IMHO.

But the book also describes a social pariah named Col. George Mason, the next door neighbor to George Washington. In May of 1776, Mason wrote the “Virginia Declaration of Rights”, on which Madison’s Bill of rights is based. Not only that, but he was sent to Congress in June of 1776 to demand the Congress issue a declaration of independence, based on the rights of government in Mason’s Declaration. When Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he drew on two significant pieces of scholarship; Mason’s Declaration and Locke’s principles, on which Mason’s Declaration of Rights is based.

So why don’t we know who George Mason is? Well, when Madison refused Mason’s proposal to add a Bill of Rights to the Constitution, Mason said he could not sign the document without one. His refusal to sign the constitution, after working so hard on it for four months with the other delegates, caused his fall from favor with George Washington. And that erased his place in history.

So it goes like this;

1) Most world governments are modeled after the US Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, or the English Bill of rights, written in 1689 by Locke.

2) The Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights are based on the writings of George Mason in the Virginia Declaration of Rights.

3) Mason also based his work on the writings of English Bill of Rights, but with more consideration for Locke’s other writings such as the “Letter Concerning Toleration” and the “Second Treatise on Government.”

4) So if all these great men were refining the ideas of the man before him, where did Locke come up with the original treatise on government that started it all? Surely he didn’t lock his door and write it in an afternoon. He must have drawn from other documents as well.

So my next quest is to figure out where Locke’s notion of the Natural Law and Rights of Man came from.

A year ago, I met some wonderful and inspiring writers in New Haven, and began to see that taking my writing seriously needn’t be a solitary sport. For months I became passionate about writing, working on several stories in parallel, and beginning to believe in myself as a writer. Six months later, I had to give up their company for reasons I won’t go into here. I kept writing, and formed a new writing group with some friends a little closer to home. But the passion and enthusiasm I had for it seemed to fade away, and I began to despair. My writing suffered. It seemed I had nothing to say, and no reason to say it.

Thursday night, though, I found the cause of my discontent. In another discussion with one of the members of my new writing group, I learned that I had started worrying about what other people thought of my work. Will it get published? Will people read it? Will they think it’s too depressing?

“You can’t listen to them. Non-writers always want you to write something happy. But that’s not interesting. Stop thinking about it, and just write what you want to explore, to understand. Great work will follow.”

So I did. I dusted off a story idea from more than six months ago. It’s fun, exciting, and yes, a little morbid. And I don’t care. I just spent more than an hour writing with a freedom I haven’t felt in months. Perhaps it’s too soon to declare success, but I really feel like I’ve had a breakthrough.

It is Tuesday. Any anyone conversant in my postings of the last year know that Tuesdays are not my favorite days. But this Tuesday wasn’t half bad.

Every Tuesday, if my wife is on travel or playing a gig, I need to load all three kids into the car and drive 45 minutes to The University of Hartford. We drop off my daughter at her guitar lesson, then take my oldest to his piano lesson, across town. Then we (I’m saying we because, throughout this whole experience, my six year old is strapped into his car seat saying “I’m bored” and “Are we there yet?” over and over)zoom back to Hartt to pick up my daughter and drop her off again at her Chorus. Then it’s back to get my oldest, then off to Whole Foods for the shopping and a quick gnosh, then back to pick up my daughter and then back home. Whew!

Just typing it is exhausting. It’s a four hour, 90 mile extravaganza that leaves us all grumpy and tired, not to mention feeling robbed of another Tuesday evening.

This week, though, my six year old gave me an idea. I don’t know why, but for some reason he started talking about pie on Friday or Saturday last week. “I want pie!” replaced his usual moan of “I’m bored!” for the past few days. And it got me thinking. What if, instead of Tuesday being the dreadful “music lessons” day, we looked forward to every Tuesday because it was “pie day?” Would that work? I decided to find out.

My little one likes apple, but in my mind this is the time of year for strawberry-rhubarb pie. Sure enough, they have no apple at Whole Foods, but they do have a stack of fresh baked strawberry-rhubarb pies. So I bought one and we took it home.

Now it turns out that, growing up in New England, it is no surprise that I think of Memorial Day as the beginning of strawberry-rhubarb season. That’s because it’s when rhubarb is ripe, and making pies out of rhubarb dates back to colonial new england, when there was precious little fresh vegetables to eat in May, and rhubarb was so bitter that it was practically inedible without sugar (hence the pies). But strawberries aren’t ripe until mid-June, right? Well, as it turns out, it’s all a misnomer. The kind of pie-making rhubarb they grew in New England was red, and so was called strawberry rhubarb. There weren’t any strawberries in strawberry rhubarb pie. That came much later, like the 20th century, and the era of frozen strawberries. But I digress.

So we got home, and cut up our strawberry-rhubarb pie. I expected some squawking from the six year old, but he was perfectly happy with the result. It was sweet and sticky, and slightly sour, and thoroughly delightfully pie-like. We all enjoyed our pie, and the tiring drive was forgotten.

I think I’m going to get to like Tuesdays.

The rooster has been a pest lately. At one year old, his spurs are just the right length, his legs are big and strong, and his hormones are at their aggressive peak. Even so, he’s easy to deal with if your hands are free. He can’t catch them both, so you just move your open hands to either side, wait till he lunges for one of them, and squish him into the ground with the other hand by placing it firmly between his shoulders. After a minute, you can let him go, and he’ll just walk away.

But this morning, I was in a hurry. I went into the run, where all nine hens and the rooster have been living, to change their food and water, and collect the morning eggs. I got into the run using a rake to push him back, since my hands were full of water and food. Once in, he left me alone, for the most part.

But getting out was not so easy. He knew I needed to get through the door, and he stood there, guarding it. My hands were empty, except for the one egg I’d collected from the laying bin. Knowing I’d need both hands, I gently slipped the egg into the hip pocket of my jeans, and bested the rooster in personal combat. I pushed him aside, and opened the door to the run to get out. Just as I slipped through, however, one of the chicks, the Buff Orpington (called “Buffy”, of course) slipped through the door and into the yard before I could close it.

At first she just stood there, as surprised as me that she had escaped the run. Then she started to run for it. As fast as I could I dived after her, grabbing her by the tail. That’s when I remembered I had a raw egg in my pocket.

I tossed Buffy unceremoniously into the run as I felt the liquid sliding down my hip pocket, onto my pens, my car keys, and… my cellphone. I pulled the shell and as much of the sticky mess as I could out of my pocket, and ripped my pants off to keep the egg from spreading.

There I was in my skivvies, trying to wipe all the egg yolk out of my cell-phone while the curious chickens looked on. Too late; the phone went black.

Defeated, I went upstairs, washed my pens and keys, cleaned up the phone, and changed my pants. Twelve hours later, the phone suddenly turned back on again. What an amazing device. What a wild, precious life it is. With chickens.

I’ve described “the birthday trips” before, but for those who haven’t heard it, here’s the strategy we use in our family to raise our kids to, in the words of Ayn Rand, “think of the world as their own back yard.”

When a child turns six years old, I will take them anywhere in the country of their choosing.

When a child turns twelve years old, I will take them anywhere in the world.

In each case it’s just the child and me. And the child is in charge for the duration of the trip. They call the shots, they give the directions. I keep them safe, and hold the money.

These “birthday trips” are rather pivotal in our children’s lives. I have seen amazing changes occur in our bigger two kids after their six year trips, and especially after their twelve year trips. Here is an entry for my daughter’s trip last year to Belize and Guatemala. So I’ve always been very proud of how the birthday trips have worked out.

This year, though, when my littlest turned six, I wasn’t a high-falooting executive with more money than time. I was a self-employed entrepreneur with no clear understanding of what the future would hold for us financially. And when my boy said he wanted to go “to the city in the desert”, I began to hyperventilate about the expense of taking him to Las Vegas. But there was the sanctity of the birthday trip to consider, and I agreed. Much to my delight, however, he changed his mind just before his birthday, and said he wanted to go “Geocamping”.

I think he had made the word up, but 20 questions later revealed that he wanted to drive somewhere and go car-camping, and then spend all our time looking for Geocaches. I breathed a sigh of relief, and booked a campsite for opening day in Litchfield, CT, just off of the Appalachian Trail (yes, it goes through CT!)

Now I’m not much of a camper; that’s mom’s territory. My idea of roughing it is when the hotel has a kitchen, and we cook some of our own meals. Sleeping on the ground is, to me, an oxymoron, and I suffer from chronic asthma. Nevertheless, he insisted he wanted me, not mom, to take him, and so on April 25th, we went.

It was wonderful, and he had a fantastic time. Sure, I was covered in soot, and terrified I had poisoned us both after each meal, but despite the burger that landed in the dirt, the campers talking to 1am, many mis-adventures and mis-steps, we had our fun. My boy just loved sitting by the campfire making s’mores, or eating breakfast, or just watching the fire burn up sticks and twigs. And me? I could sip coffee and watch him for hours.

That last morning, before we packed it up, my boy slept in. I made the fire, and brewed some of that wonderful, smoky, campfire coffee that is just unequaled in this life. I sat by the fire, listening to the birds, writing the beginnings of a new poem in my journal, and being grateful for this unexpectedly peaceful chapter in the book that makes up my life.

One
Wild
Precious
Life.