Month: July 2016

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Coming of Age

This year, as Heather likes to put it, our marriage is old enough to vote. Or to smoke. Or even to get married itself.

Yes, it’s been 18 years since Heather and I stood in a friend’s garden and said “I do.” Which, honestly, seems impossible. I mean, it was just last week that Heather and I were nervously watching rain clouds and wondering about the wisdom of an outdoor wedding, right? It couldn’t have been 18 years since my hair began popping loose in defiance of everything my sisters could spray on to hold it down?

Hmmm. Come to think of it, there’s not that much hair to spring loose anymore. Which means …

Wow.

Every year, a few more of my friends say “Congratulations!” Every year, a few still jokingly say “That’s it?” Either way, we’ve gone just a little further down the road that turns a good wedding into a great marriage, where, as I’ve often quoted Grandma Elsie, “If you make it through the first 30 years, the rest is easy.”

Easy. That it most certainly has not been. In that span, we’ve moved three and a half times. (Once was Heather coming to join me in Kansas.) We’ve endured floods, hailstorms and chronic illness. We’ve said goodbye to too many and hello to more than a few, while becoming “parents” in a way we never expected as we became guardians to her disabled aunt Missy. We’ve encountered the proverbial richer and poorer, better and worse, in sickness and … well, we’re still kind of getting that last part down.

And somehow, along the way, we laughed and loved and lived enough to send 18 years running by. True fact: 24 hours takes forever to pass, but 18 years goes by in a moment.

True, this isn’t one of the “name” anniversaries that gets commemorated, like the Gold Anniversary or the Silver Anniversary or the 35th Level Pokémon Master Anniversary. But as Heather joked, 18 is one of those numbers that tends to loom pretty large on its own. And the more I think about it, the more I realize how fitting a comparison it is.

When you turn 18, you’ve spent most of your life learning … and realize that you’ve only just started.

When you turn 18, you realize how much you’ve been gifted with … and, if you think about it, how much responsibility has been placed on you.

Eighteen is the age where you can do so much in your own name, from joining the Army to being charged as an adult. It’s a point that grew from “Wow, that’s old” as a little kid to “Wow, that’s tomorrow” as a high school senior.

It’s a point where you suddenly look back on fears and memories alike with a bit of wonder. And, if you’re lucky, with a bit of anticipation as well.

I consider us to be very lucky indeed.

True, nobody’s issuing us a cap and gown tomorrow. (I said we were lucky, right?) But in a real sense, every day has been a new graduation.

So Heather my love, thank you for 18 wonderful and unforgettable years. Our marriage is all grown up now, even if neither of us seems to be.

And if tomorrow, our marriage doesn’t run off and try to buy booze with a fake driver’s license, I think we’ll be doing OK.

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“Conventional” Wisdom

OK, who else is ready for the pep rallies to be over with?

If you’re an unabashed fan of the Republican or Democratic national conventions, my apologies to the three of you. (Anything will have someone who cheers for it – I give you the Oakland Raiders as Exhibit A.) But I suspect I’m not alone on this one. Like most former reporters, I’m something of a political junkie, but when it comes to getting to the end of convention season, my inner 6-year-old starts to wake up, kick the back of the driver’s seat and ask repeatedly “Are we there yet?”

If the conventions served an actual purpose, I could probably forgive some tedium. Life isn’t french fries and ice cream, after all; not everything that’s necessary is going to be fun as well. But I’m having a hard time seeing what the reason could be, other than to demonstrate how a political party can blow through $64 million in a week.

“To choose a presidential candidate?” That ship sailed a long time ago. Thanks to the modern system of primaries and caucuses, the conventions are little more than an expensive rubber stamp for a choice that voters made long ago.

“To introduce the candidate to the nation?” Once upon a time, yes. But we’ve had folks campaigning for over 15 months. If someone has been avoiding the major players for that long, are they really going to tune into two weeks of infomercials now? (The RNC’s mediocre television ratings suggest otherwise.)

“To get a ‘bounce’ for our candidate?” Traditionally, the saturation coverage of a political convention has caused a candidate to gain in the polls as they get promoted and their opponent vilified. But as the political website FiveThirtyEight.com has noted, that effect has gotten smaller over the years and tends to be canceled out quickly now that the parties hold their events right after each other. These days, a bowling ball has more bounce than most national conventions.

“Because we’ve always done it this way?” Pretty much. Never underestimate the power of inertia, especially when it puts on its best clothes and calls itself “tradition” instead.

I’ll grant you, this is $64 million apiece that isn’t being spent on more annoying political ads – or rather, is being spent on one big multi-day commercial that’s announced in advance and easier to avoid. And asking a campaign to not spend money is like asking my dogs to not eat crayons; it’s a good idea, but it’s just not going to happen.  So unless we come up with an alternative, canceling the conventions simply means stuffing our mailboxes with more fuel for the fireplace and our phones with more requests for “Just a moment of your time.”’

It’s time for something … well, unconventional. And I have an idea.

A few years back, when Colorado seemed ready to burn itself to the ground, I suggested that both campaigns cancel their conventions and put the money they saved into disaster relief instead. That got a flood of support from readers and about as much attention as you’d expect from the campaigns. But if we revise the plan and give ourselves enough lead time, maybe we can save our sanity in 2020.

Let’s have the campaigns put their money where their mouths are.

You want to see America’s space program revive? Take the time and cash you would have normally spent on a convention and put it into a few school STEM programs instead.

Do you want more attention for Americas’s working poor? Pour your convention budget and volunteers into an area’s local utility relief efforts, or their housing assistance program.

Take that platform and make it more than just words. SHOW us what’s important to you for a week by your actions.

Will it be for the cameras? Of course. Will it be self-serving? Probably. But it’ll get something done and leave a mark in a way that no overhyped balloon drop ever could.

Pep rallies are fun for a little while. But every sports fan knows it’s all about the game.

Let’s get the players on the field and see what they can do.

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Totally Floored

When in the course of home improvement events, it becomes necessary for one family to dissolve the fabric-covered bands which have connected one piece of flooring with another, a decent respect to the opinions of the Times-Call’s readership requires that they should declare that this was a heck of a way to spend a holiday weekend.

Yes, while the rest of Longmont was practicing its skill with legal and quasi-legal exploding objects, we were busy ripping up a lot of downstairs carpet. This was mostly due to the efforts of a few generations of house pets, all of which had important messages to leave in the former dining room, if you catch my drift. So when our own Duchess the Wonder Dog decided to leave her own updates and found the mailbox already full – in the form of a ruined padding – well, it was time to introduce some “postal reform.”

In the course of this expedition, we quickly found certain truths to be self-evident. They didn’t exactly involve life, liberty, and the pursuit of cheap Chinese incendiaries, but many of them will be familiar to home owners nonetheless:

1) When outfitted properly in goggles, breath mask, gloves and knee pads, you will vaguely resemble a junior Darth Vader on his way to umpire his first minor-league baseball game. Except that Darth Vader’s goggles never fogged up in the middle of the job.

2) It is amazing how much you can accomplish in one night when you don’t care how much sleep, sanity, or major vertebrae you lose.

3) There is a proper, simple way of removing carpet strip by strip for easy portability. Somewhere in the third hour, that way will be discarded in favor of attempting to fold half the room up like a piece of oversized origami. Again, you really didn’t need those vertebrae anyway.

4) Few things in life are more entertaining than ripping up the long strips of tacks and nails that held the carpet down.

5) Few things in life are more painful than rediscovering those same strips with your sock-clad feet.

6) There is always one more staple. Even if you scour the floor with a magnifying glass, a metal detector, and the great-grandson of Sherlock Holmes, once you paint your primer on the plywood, a dozen staples will magically appear like the next row of sweets in a Candy Crush game. You will become very familiar with your floor scraper  and a certain level of vocabulary.

7) It takes longer to disperse primer fumes than anyone would realize. Longer than a baseball All-Star game. Longer than an especially intransigent session of Congress. Possibly longer than a geological age of the Earth.

8) Speaking of ancient epochs, it will also be discovered that there is a certain fascination in home archaeology. Beneath that carpet will be an indelible record of every family that ever passed through the house, lacking only Egyptian hieroglyphics and Roman graffiti to be complete. You will quickly see how many dogs have lived there. You will quickly appreciate what nearly four decades of Christmas Eve dinners for the entire extended family looks like. You’ll even find the occasional artifact from the last poor souls to lay down a carpet here, which gives you an extra 3 cents to put toward the new flooring. Little did they know they were paying it forward.

Finally, with a new appreciation for your house (and a new resolve that liquid beverages will never be allowed in it again), you are ready for the loud BOOM – not from fireworks, but from your bank account abruptly disgorging the funds needed to recover your primer-painted plywood with something human beings can walk on. You will celebrate wearily but wholeheartedly. And if you’re like me, somewhere inside you’ll rejoice that you’ve mastered one more staple of an actual adult’s skill set.

Or maybe that should be “one more foundation brick” of it. Because you are never, ever going to mention staples again for as long as you live.