Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Father’s Day is a big deal for me every year, just not so much in the traditional “Dad’s day off” kind of way so many fathers seem to celebrate. My idea of a great Father’s Day has always been to in some way, shape, or form hang out with my kids being a Dad, or with my own Dad, being a son. This is the first Father’s Day for me since my Dad passed away, a transition for sure, but it’s also the first Father’s Day since I became a grandfather. Lots and lots of emotions competing for a spot in the limelight today.

I’m a little bit late out of the box with musings today. The man cub was into hanging with his Papi, and that’s just as good on Father’s Day as being around my kids. All of them were around this weekend, too. Li’l bingo got married last night and that added another daughter-in-law to the fold. Another child to celebrate on Father’s Day. It’s quiet for the moment, the excitement of the wedding now just a gentle buzz of fuzzy memories and and soft smiles.

Being a parent has been the single most difficult thing I’ve ever done. For that matter, it’s still the hardest thing I do. This is likely the case for any of you out there who have kids, too. Technically it’s not really all that complex, and the work itself isn’t all that too very difficult. I mean, sure, sometimes that full diaper spills over, or for that matter the first not so great experience with adult beverages spills over, but really the clean up is just a clean up, just like any other clean up. What makes the whole enterprise so bloody hard is that you simply care more about the outcome of your work as a parent than just about anything else you’ve ever undertaken.

My Dad wasn’t there but all three of my kids were together yesterday, The Heir and Lovely Daughter there to support their no longer little brother and his wife on their big day. The night ended with countless best wishes for the new marrieds, followed by round upon round of “Happy Father’s Days” for the Dads present. It felt right and it felt good and it felt like success. Like my own Dad would be proud of the Father I’ve become. Three happy and successful kids and me, Dad, feeling pretty good about the whole parenting thing. Until they all gave me my Father’s Day hug, got in their cars and headed off to their own homes, leaving me to worry about whether I’d done enough to prepare them for tomorrow. And then tomorrow after that.

It’s Father’s Day, after all.

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

Sunday musings…

1) Clishmaclaver. Foolish talk.

Synonym for Sunday musings.

2) Wedding. “The Heir” is hitched! My oldest son, Dan, married his fiancé yesterday. They are another CrossFit couple–they met at the original Comet CrossFit that Dan and his brother “Lil’bingo” opened 4 years ago. This is the 5th or 6th CF marriage I’ve been a part of but the first one I’ve actually attended. Everything about the CrossFit angle is really pretty cool. There’s no question that you will know how your mate will react to a stressful situation if you’ve met them in a CrossFit gym, eh?

Lil’bingo was Best Man and sent Dan and Brittany off with this final note in his toast: “Join me in today’s Saturday get my Big Bro married WOD in 3-2-1…Cheers!”

3) Miracle. Are you at a stage in your life where you are able to interact with a baby? It’s really quite astonishing, isn’t it? The whole 9 months of making the thing, and they come out just right an unbelievably high percentage of the time. I don’t think it really matters where you are on the almighty deity scale, but the simple fact of a baby is a miracle if you ask me.

Birth is when the fun just gets going. Now, I will admit at this point that I am looking at the whole baby thing a bit differently this time since I am a grandfather to the particular baby I have in mind, not the father. It’s all smiles and cooing and “will you look at that” for me. No diaper changes or fussy gas bubbles for Papi. All fun and giggles and hand ’em back.

Still, even with and or all of that, a baby is nothing less than a miracle. I hope we get a bunch more Chez bingo, but for now I’m filled with joy whenever I see my little miracle.

4) Passages. A pop psychology author, classmate of my parents, once examined life’s stages in a book titled Passages. While I am no fan of her work (somewhat shallow and bereft of any real insight), her choice of a term for major phases of our lives is pretty good. “Passages”. Kind of evokes a journey of sorts. That part of her writing was pretty good.

Our family wedding this weekend has me thinking a bit about those passages as we careen north on one of Ohio’s super highways. Young people truly become a kind of real adult when they take on the responsibility of nurturing a third entity, their marriage. Mrs. bingo and I used to joke that we would feel like we were “real” adults when we owned our own washer and dryer, but really, we’d gone and grown up as soon as we consciously put our marriage ahead of either of our individual selves. This realization is all we really ask of our young marrieds in their middle passages.

Many of our tables at yesterday’s wedding reception had empty seats, or seats that emptied early. That final passage demands as much attention as the first one, it just doesn’t really end as well. Still, it’s also a miracle that we go so very long before that last passage begins. I was struck throughout the day with a single thought: slow down and stay. Stay tiny. Stay young. Stay vibrant. Stay.

In the end those passages are a one-way trip. You never back up. There’s really no such thing as a Mulligan or a do-over. It’s amazing how much help we need as we start our journey and then again as our journey comes to an end. In the middle, well, we have control. Dwelling in either the past or the future diminishes our present. Doesn’t it make sense to look at each day as its own kind of little miracle? Perhaps aware of what came before (a baby) and conscious of what lies ahead (an empty chair), all the while rejoicing in the miracle of right now.

Now is what you have. Treat it like the miracle that it is.

I’ll see you Christmas morning…

–bingo

Sunday musings…

1) Inconvenience. “Inconvenience is only adventure wrongly considered.” C.K. Chesterton (1908).

I’m gonna chew on this and visit it next week. This is really good.

2) Wedding. It’s wedding season 2.0 for Clan bingo. Our progeny and their friends are in full wedding mode. We seem to be on the 2/month plan.

v2.0 is quite a little pricier than v1.0.

3) Patent. Jonas Salk would be 100 this weekend.

With all of the hysteria about Ebola it’s worth noting that literally hundreds of thousands of children were either killed or crippled every single year in the U.S. from Polio before the Salk vaccine was developed and widely disseminated. >300,000 children were killed by Smallpox each year. Last year some 56,000 Americans died from the Flu. Every single one of these has been, or could be avoided through the use of a vaccine. All of them trace back in some way to Salk.
When asked who owned the patent on his vaccine Salk was said to have answered thusly: “Well, I guess the people, I would say. There is no patent.

Could you patent the sun?”

3) Short sale. Lots of meanings for this, especially with the whole real estate bust thing. Kinda scary words at any time, but all the more frightening when we hear that the big gov-backed mortgage giants will once again loosen their lending standards, arguably the initial step that built up our housing bubble in the first place.

As usual, though, the obvious leap is not the one I’m interested in today. The more frightening short sale is one in which you sell YOURSELF short. Settle for something that is not good for you, or not really good enough, because you think what you have is somehow all you deserve. That’s terrifying, and I’m calling you out, right now.

Why are you still in that job that makes you shudder at the very thought of waking up on a work day? That boyfriend or girlfriend who is always dragging you down, telling you you’re not good enough without them, or holding you back because they can’t handle your success? Tell me, why are they still in the picture? Seriously, you’re gonna have to help me out on this one because I just don’t get those kinds of decisions. Defaulting to the status quo only makes sense when the status quo is pretty darned good.

This is not about selling yourself, this is about assigning worth. I’ve talked a bit about this before but I was reminded of it this weekend when I met a young woman who can reasonably be described as “the whole package”, and yet she seems to have tied herself to someone who wishes to hold her back, just as the anchor holds the speed boat at bay. She is selling herself short into what should be a booming market for who she is and could be. She, you, all of us are worth so much more.

Don’t sell yourself short.

I’ll see you next week…

Sunday musings…

1) Substantiate. Among the definitions or meanings is “to make more substantial.” Could use more of this.

2) Wedding. Mrs. bingo and I are once again in San Diego (nice town ya got here, by the way), this time for a wedding. Not just any wedding, mind you, but a wedding that took place on the deck of the Midway. Whoa. I can’t begin to describe the chills, the raised hair on the back of the neck thrill when we realized that we were actually on the elevator that brought countless aircraft up from below, and that we were descending to meet the bride.

Seriously, thrill of a lifetime.

3) Promotion Class. Did you know that each year a defined number of Admirals (and presumably Generals in other services) is promoted as a class? Me either. These classes will gather on occasion, but they usually go their own ways throughout and after their careers. Kinda busy, you know, keeping the free world safe.

The groom is one of these Admirals, one of 12 in the Class of ’99. Including him, 8 of these men and women were in attendance (as well as an Admiral from ’00 and the General husband of an Admiral). Awestruck doesn’t begin to cover the collective reaction of the other guests.

What was striking, to me and to most, was the camaraderie on display in this particular group. They’d done this before, been assembled by choice many times before, and this time came from all over the globe to share in a comrade’s joy. In their Dress Blues they moved among us with a grace and a certain dignity that was palpable, while simultaneously cavorting like college classmates who snuck away to the beach. I searched for words to describe what I saw last night, and found one this morning.

I spent the evening in the company of 8 (+2) substantial men and women who provided lessons in honor, loyalty, and gravitas simply by being together in the room.

4) Home. Where do you live? Morgan Freeman: “Everyone lives somewhere.” Do they? Do you?

Where you live is more than where you are domiciled at the present moment. The distinction between “house” and “home” is real, is substantial. Home requires effort; house requires a checkbook. A house demands upkeep of the walls, the various and sundry systems and furnishings, but a home demands an on-going commitment to what is contained within those walls.

Home also seems to contain a notion of place. A “where are you from” kind of statement or sense. You’ve committed to a certain zip code, learned the rules of the road so well that you move through that larger space in a continual comfort zone. It might be described as simply as knowing where to find eggs for emergency muffins on a rainy Sunday morning, this notion of “home in place”.

I wonder, and I readily confess that I worry about my friends who have multiple “homes”. Does home travel with them from place to place, simply injected into the particular space they occupy at any given moment? Maybe. I know that I am always “home enough” whenever I happen to be accompanied by Mrs. bingo, but still, I’ve needed a map every day here in SoCal.

“Everyone lives somewhere.” Indeed.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at August 26, 2012 8:52 AM

My Dad sent out an email blast to the whole family. Seems he was cleaning around his part of the kitchen counter (that’s right…there’s a “his side” and a “her side” in my parents’ kitchen) and he found an old wedding band. He knows it’s old because it’s been worn smooth. There’s some disagreement about whether or not you can read the inscription, which is kind of a bummer since that might identify the owner of the wedding ring. Hence the email.

“Anyone lose a wedding band? Any idea whose this might be?” Never mind all of the questions that my siblings and I have, like, “why are you cleaning the counter?” or “who would take their wedding band off and put it on THAT counter?”.

My brother, ever-helpful responded. “Rumor has it that Darrell lost his.” My bride rode to my rescue: “Darrell did NOT lose his wedding band; it’s just too small for him now. I’m wearing it stacked with my wedding ring and my Anniversary ring.”

To which Randall replied: “My bad.. I heard he was getting a new one.. I didn’t realize all the cross fit built up his finger muscles!!”