Black Box Album

I went to see Album at LaGuardia’s Black-Box theatre last Friday night. It was a simmering evening depicting the high-school years of four teen-aged men and women. The picture above was the set for a stunningly complete emotional depiction of adolescence.

Jocelyn Catasus was the supportive friend who knew too much without being a know it all. I wish I had had friends like her when I was in school. Her performance was alive without showiness; her Peggy was the teen in control who you could still see the insecurity in.

I knew “a Billy” like Aaron Berke’s Billy, but that was at Cambridge Friends’ School (where I went to repeat 6th grade). The patina of experience he spread on the basically insecure character covered like cream-cheese on a bagel.

Bridget Giuffrida’s Trish was the most teen. In her I saw my daughter. From the opening strip poker scene where she was self-consciously modest to the pure terror she showed looking around the cheap motel room after her character had run away with Boo, she was vulnerable in a way that totally supported the “Brian Wilson monologue.”

Christopher Diaz’s Boo reminded me of my own insecurities in Highschool (though I tried to embody a cross between the hockey shy player Bobby Orr and paisley-psychedelic George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic [oil and water: do not mix]). When he put on the horn-rimmed ray-bans and affected the tones and cadences of Bob Dylan I was back in the commune I grew up in in Boston with insecure and pretentious posers all around.

When the last scene came together at the Quarry and they had all reached the “biological-growing-up” they had so frantically sought throughout and receded to the Album of the title like a year-book of HS nostalgia I felt the bitter-sweet youth I lost so long ago trying to grow up too quickly. These young men and women brought four awkward years to life with this exceptional play and I think that having the writer as the director made this all the more special.

CODA

I went to see the play with my almost-in-high-school-daughter who had rehearsed with them one day because she was using a monologue form the play for her High-school auditions (applying to HS in NY is akin to applying to college in the rest of the country, but that is another story). The play-write and director, David Rimmer, had generously invited Chandler to come sit in with them one day at rehearsal. He said that she was really helpful because she was the age of the cast in the opening scene and brought a lot to the truth of the play (chronologically). Watching the play with my daughter made me aware of how important first love, biological and emotional, –so long lost to me– shapes the rest of our lives. I want to thank David Rimmer, Jocelyn Catasus, Bridgit Giuffrida, Aaron Berke and Christopher Diaz for bringing this all alive to me.

Hope Wins

Where to begin?  I was up and at the polls before they opened and there were 20 people there waiting at 5:45 am.  By the time they opened the polls in Woodside, where I vote (at 6:08, don’t get me started), there were 100 people there.  Excitement lit up the foggy pre-dawn darkness.

The machines were cranky as they started and the people in the 47^th district had to wait until the most experienced blue-haired old lady came and jiggled a lever on the back just so to get the machine back into order.  I was seventh in the 47^th district, 007.  You’ve seen the picture.

Teaching and grading papers all day there was a strange air of camaraderie and hope.  Spike’s dad put it into words as we watched our kids practice soccer last night before the results were in: “It’s like Nine-One-One, everyone has feeling of secret connection.”

Indeed, as the kids played soccer at McCarren Park two Hasidic men came up with their gloves and joined the Latino guys who were playing softball in the warm November evening.  Only in New York do you see Orthodox Jews shagging fly balls with strangers.

As Mason and I drove back to Queens NPR called Pennsylvania for Obama, and one of the wags said: “I can’t imagine a path to the Whitehouse for McCain that doesn’t include Pennsylvania.”  Before we got over the Greenpoint Bridge they were calling Florida for Obama, and Mason took my cell and excitedly texted Linda that news (and Dole’s SC Defeat).  I came home and ate with supreme hope.

During the day I got an email on my phone from a friend from the 70s who had lived with me in Boston and known me in my messenger days.  We had been through a fair amount together and he contacted me out of the blue as a way –I assume– to reach out of his white New England life and celebrate with a dear old friend (of color).  I had similar calls and emails from Australia, Ireland and Northern California.

This impulse, this digital coming together is, for us progressives, like coming out after a storm.  The last 8 years have been hard.  Personally, I have felt “occupied” like I did as a young non-white man in Boston in the 70s.

So these contacts made because of the HOPE of the Obama campaign feel especially good.  To be reminded of the good and decent whites who were my dear friends during the horror of bussing in Boston in the 1970s, the people who reminded me that I was a man, a friend, a  person of value “un-adjectivized” (not a black man) has begun the thawing.

Before Mr. Obama’s election I was still in my shell.  I was a bit jaded and cynical about friends from the “way-back-machine” contacting me and asking me to drink the Kool-Aid.  I didn’t want to HOPE because I didn’t want to be disappointed.  I have been stand-offish.  But their naïve enthusiasm was touching.  It reminded me of going to anti war marches and Pete Seger concerts with my parents in the 60s.  I don’t think that the 60s, in light of the Republican avarice we’ve lived through from 80 onward, were all that great.

SO last night, and all day yesterday I felt like we had finally become a nation again.  I felt the possibility of Human Companionship.  On September 11^th, 2001 we all receded to our livingrooms to watch our lives and country on television.  We got the “Dulce et Decorum Est” romantic version of America.  All of those grand Ken Burns PBS documentaries seemed more real than playing baseball or listening to jazz.  I feel like our nation slipped into a massive communal state of DuBoisian double consciousness, alienated from ourselves by our image of ourselves as something else.

When Spain was attacked on March 11, 2004 the nation came outside together.  After 9-11 we went into our living rooms and isolated.  They re-established their humanity in the most basic way.  I have been jealous of that European land for these four years.  Yesterday we came out.  We came out in the millions.  We got a 9-11 mulligan and we chose to participate instead of isolate.  The contacts from Europe, Australia, California and Vermont are contacts from our higher place.  America can stop fearing.  We can HOPE again.

One of my colleagues has called this the moment that America becomes Post-Colonial.  We have stepped (a little bit) beyond the colonial and imperial traditions we’ve inherited and begun to live up to our constitution.  The whole world is breathing a sigh of relief because we can choose someone who has a vision of a greater America that doesn’t have the 1945 and 1992 unipolar American power in mind.  “We don’t have to subjugate/ in order to be great.”

America has returned to the dream by electing Mr. Obama.  From Dakar to Dushembe, from the steppes of Mongolia to the factories of Viet Nam there are people who are seeing the America of FDR, JFK (neither of whom were angels), the America of hope and individual opportunity, the America of the Great Society, the America of freedom to be (not to earn), for the first time.

GOD BLESS AMERICA

The Kids Right Now

4/21/2008 5:57 AM
Here is another gem from Lennox to keep with the “Daddy remembering is like fish talking” zinger that she announced at the park the other day. Speaking of Mason “pulling the girls legs,” or teasing, about something or another, Lennox observed, when he exclaimed “I’m joking,” in a deadpan tone with the slightest roll of the eyes: “a joke is when people laugh afterwards.” Miss Lennox is quite the witty little thing and really enjoys saying things that make people laugh.
Now Mason is a witty guy, his ability to frame things in new ways with his excellent 11-year-old vocabulary is legendary. It began when he was younger than Lennox when he tacked onto one of his parents’ bromide about “when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade,” the coda “and sell it!” at dinner one night. He used to get so angry when Linda and I would crack up at something he said, some little witticism (which I cannot remember any of right now [see “fish talking”]) because he thought we were laughing at him.
Chandler, never much of a joker, is the best linguist in the house. She saves her parsing for two main categories of utterances: requests and commands. She can detect, with annoying and unerring accuracy the slightest hint of resentment, bossiness or command in the day-to-day talk of a house. “Put water in the pitcher before you put it back in the ‘fridge,” is a statement where the tone, syntax or intention can embed an insult potent enough to stop the morning in the tracks. “I would do that but you cannot just boss me around like I’m some sort of nitwit. I have my reasons for not refilling it, and the way that you ordered me will NEVER get me to do it. I’m so mature that we might as well have restarted the Hattfields and the McCoys up for a century of good Appalachian vendetta: hillbilly omerta in Woodside.
When we think to frame our utterances in the form of requests, “Chandler would you change (meaning clean) the guinea-pig cages today?” “Sure” she’ll reply. But in that request, framed in a way so as not to rankle Honey, Rocky and Buttercup’s “mommy,” is enough wiggle room for her to not do it until bedtime; her chores become late night filibusters against bedtime. All day long, as we politely remind her that the cages need attention we are parried, feinted and dodged with grammatical explications, “I said I would, and I will, just not right now.” Chandler’s quiver is filled with arrows that any semiotician would be proud to use. Her ability to “lawyer” will be wasted on the law because with the silicone slickness of her linguistic abilities and the cudgel of her willingness to take offense remains untouched by discipline in the old-fashioned 50s sense (most recently enacted in the 1970s on the Brady Bunch), which she reminds us came with primitive behaviors like corporal punishment.

Update and a Quiz

1/26/2008 6:23 AM (sorry, this is a long one)

Yesterday, Friday the 25^th of January, 2008, Lennox came home with a flier about the upcoming 100^th day of school (2/7/8). She is encouraged to bring 100 objects: “Please help your child to choose 1 item and count 100 pieces of that item.” So last night Lennox was counting out 100 pennies from the penny jar and insisting on a “bigger, the biggest ziplock bag, because there are 100 I need to fit in here,” with characteristic eye-rolling, intensity and sarcasm. (The bag she wanted and got is big enough to fit her head in and use as a space helmet.)

I wish that 100 pennies still meant as much to me as they do to Lennox. I fear that Even Mason and Chandler have relegated the copper penny to the economic trash-heap, not worth bending over for unless they are heads’ up. Sigh, I remember when you could get three peach pits for a penny from the (unsanitary) jar on the counter of the corner store kitty corner from the Rice school on Appleton and Dartmouth Streets. A nickel would sugar up all of your friends for a game of baseball or ring-alevio (all-ee-all-ee-in-come-free). They have new and wondrous things in their childhoods, but my kids, trapped in this new city and new apartment, who haven’t discovered their peers and places, lack the independence that we had in 19-and-sixtey-nine. (God, I sound like Abraham Simpson!)

(MMMM-excellent coffee this morning)

Chandler is just loving her school. Everyday she comes home with another anecdote –that can’t wait- about the antic in her classroom. I wish that I had paid closer attention so that I could tell you of the antics of Abla, Chewmaka, Andrew, and Aniqa (accuracy). Mr. Binyaris had them write a poem in Math Class (so the “no-child” tests must be safely in the rear-view and they must be back to their usual talented and gifted antics). Rarely does Chandler come home when she is not excited about the day’s goings-ons, whether it is her latest 90-something exam, some difficult (and interesting) word problem, or some logical ditty that a teacher tossed to the class at the end of the day to keep them busy. So when I meet her, with her 30 pound back-pack (and I don’t think I am exadurating) I take the bag from her shoulders and the stories from her day and walk home in paternal bliss.

Mason is, I think, bored to tears by PS150. He listens to Chandler’s after-school update with seeming blasé-ness, but can always recount the characteristics of the players in her stories if asked. He can often answer the brain teasers that Cha-Cha has brought home, and he usually responds with stories of the incompetence and knuckle-headed-ness of his classmates. He is so ready for a school that challenges him that I can see it like an aura (or the curly half-fro he declines to cut that shoots tendrils towards heaven like a vine thirsting for knowledge).  He’s been home, sick with a fever, for the last two days and we’ve been keeping him from watching the Disney Channel the whole time.  I caught him reading The Outsiders in front of a tivo’d repeat of Zack and Cody (the one where they cut school and end up in a rock video).  When I came in the room he hid the book and pretended to be paying attention to the TV.  I need to remember this when I rag on them about watching too much Cathode Ray.

I’ve been teaching an API (ACT Prep Intensive) for seven days now.  It runs (or crawls) from 9:15 to 12:45 everyday.  I have given an ACT practice exam each day, and we are all really tired.  INTENSive is the right word.  They are so sick of writing body paragraphs, introductions, elaborations, re-writing criterions and examples that I hope none of them has access to guns.  And the worst part is that every time I give them a practice ACT Exam, which gives me an hour that I don’t have to drill, cajole, entertain or teach them, I have to grade it.  It is like a western, where the good-guy is forced to dig his own grave.  Practice exams are good, they teach them how to write a passing essay (or that they are not yet writing at a passing level), and they show the student what is missing from their essays.  But they all need to be graded.  I need to grade them.  I am paid to grade them.  Everyday I go home with 19 ACT Exams to grade.  Now I know the shortcomings of each of the writers six exams in, but I still have to read and mark all of these problems in the hope that they will start to stop making those mistakes.  I like to think of it as erosion, or the _____ (insert non-white-ethnicity here) water torture, but I’m not sure whether it is their compositional defects that are being eroded, or my sanity: drip-drip-drip.

 I spend so much time with them that I feel like we are all victims of the Stockholm Syndrome. I think we all have an unhealthy identification with each other over the stress of this exam and the 4 hours a day we spend together. I am even rooting for the students who don’t “play nice” (do as I say) to pass this exam. The plus side is that we are functioning like a cult; we are the fraternity of true ACT-Test-Takers (Western Queens Council). On Wednesday they will take the test and we will all miss our bank-vault-prison and the captors that put us there.

Today I was working on the Black Literature Series Committee’s Scavenger Hunt: Here is one of the questions I’ve composed:

 

Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 Narrative

Were I to be again reduced to the chains of slavery, next to that enslavement, I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me. For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the

(Choose one to complete the passage)

a. most hypocritical and avaricious, in the south.

b. meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

c. greediest and neediest of all Americans.

d. generally most Christian and charitable in all of this, God’s land.

 

I think I’ll try and exercise a bit before the kids and Linda wake-up, thanks for reading (and drop me a comment).

Happy New You

 

12/31/07 05:35:55 AM

Where has the year gone? Has it gone into the trash heap or the archives; I’m not sure which. Into the archives is another beautiful year with a wonderful family. We’ve just moved into an apartment which seems to fit us better. We, for the first time, are in a home big enough for all of us (the second bathroom is key).

Here is an outline of the biggies I can think of this minute:

New House

We love our new house and are looking forward to finishing moving in. Three bedrooms and two baths is the right fit for us. Mason has his own room and it is big enough to send him to. Chandler and Lennox are working out the wrinkles in their new quasi-cohabitation. Generally permission is granted to cross the armistice line; especially since Lenna got her princess netting and pink rug. It is strange to be in a modern building and the view, as I look over the BQE and east into Woodside and Rego Park and watch the sun rise as I write this the sky and the contours of the land are enthralling to me. I love watching when the LIRR rolls out of Woodside on the way to Jamaica: a long silvery snake a half a mile on.

Family

 

I am still so in Love With Linda that it scares me. She is the model for everything beautiful and desirable in my life. I wish I could be with her more and, paradoxically, more like her. I am blessed to be chosen by her to spend these days together with her.

Chandler continues to thrive at the TAG school she’s in. She has a lot of homework and does it without complaint, though she looks at the confections of Cable TV as the just and right compensation for her work. At least is is mostly Disnified Pre-Tween Confections, though she will be a teenager on February 23^rd.

Mason and I survived the soccer season (he’s quite good) with me as coach, though he declined to play winter league indoors. Mason’s way with words continues to amaze Linda and I mostly because he is not the squeaky wheel. Out of -or out from under- the hubbub of the family Mason will make a wry comment that puts everything that we are all elbowing to the front to try and frame just so into context. He does so uproariously and seemingly without effort.

Lennox is growing up so fast in so many ways. Just like with her sister we are often fooled into thinking that she’s older because she’s so damned verbal. She is also sassy in a way Chandler can only dream of (and rue). So when she puts her hand on her splayed hip and rolls her eyes as she wipes stray locks out of her eyes explaining “whatever, duh!” we lose track of her age (5) and size (just right). We start trying to reason with the sarcastic teenager that she apes rather than the Kindergartener that she is. Needless to say we miss having Kindergarten across the street, but we’ll see how this move will effect our lives (passive aggressively I think the earlier wake-up and travel will be good for the family).

School Year

I loved my Fall 1 Classes and I am really enjoying the Lit Elective classes I am teaching. The Contemporary African American Fiction and the Black Lit Survey have been soul-expanding (as much as teaching a class can be). I love the students at LaGuardia CC. Teaching them is a dream come true. In many of their faces and papers I see myself struggling intellectually to come into my own. It is a humbling flashback when I see the same misunderstandings that I made in someone else’s paper. It is a merciful reminder of my current domestic bliss when I see the sturm und drang of youthful courting around campus. I look forward to working on my own intellectual and academic development this next year.

Amir’s Murder

The horror of Amir Hassan Reed’s murder this year has put a lot of things into perspective. I am so grateful to be alive, which I generally take for granted. I take life, mine and my beautiful family’s to be a given that shall continue along, but it “Ain’t Necessarily So.” I had taken it for granted that I would wake up to the same cast that I went to sleep with. It is rare that such a Cause Célèbre visits our lives, and I had often wished that my life would intersect with drama and fame. Sigh, I wish that I had marked my door with blood so this angel never came. What I found most annoying and titillating was the comments left on the SFGate site articles: people who knew the least seemed to make the strongest comments. This puts all of my “Willie-Neckbone-Expertise” into perspective: the more I think I know, the less I know.

48 Years

I turned 48 this December. I remember in 1974 thinking that it would be the year 2000 when I was 40. It seemed so abstract and distant (and of course I took it for granted that I would live that long). Well until this year I’ve held up well. During the spring my Achilles tendons started to act up (and I didn’t go to the doctor). In the Fall, playing soccer with Mason I tore up my ankle (and I didn’t go to the doctor). This December my ankle got infected and I went to the doctor. I will go to physical therapy soon because I really miss my morning runs through Sunnyside, Woodside, Maspeth and Long Island City. I’m feeling trapped by my infirmity in spite of the fact that I did go for a bike ride yesterday. Linda is sick this morning so I don’t think I’ll have that luxury.

Dreams

I still haven’t written the great American novel, but I have been working on a story. I haven’t published my dissertation, but I hope to. I want to do more original scholarship rather than just “willie-neckbone” out opinions on things I know little about. So I will continue to do as the Sanskrit Proverb suggests:

Look to this day
For it is life
The very life of life.
In its brief course lie all
The realities and verities of existence,
The bliss of growth,
The splendor of action,
The glory of power –

For yesterday is but a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision,
But today, well-lived,
Makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day.

Happy New YOU, Love Stafford.

Its My Birthday

Today it is my birthday. I turned 48 at midnight. There is no sugar-coating 48; I am pushing hard upon 50. So I just want to thank god for my blessings and liabilities here publicly to you.

So I woke up this morning with a bit less wind in my sails than usual and I laid in bed for 45 minutes before I got up and graded papers. I am grateful that I am a morning person and that a “late” wake-up is 4:45am, and I can still grade 4 papers before I have to think about the secular concerns of the day.

 

Linda’s Class bought her flowers and baked her a cake for the last day of class. (The cynic suspects that they were playing for the party day of class.) Their Betty Crocker confection and floral gift the day before my birthday remind me how I wish that I could give Linda flowers and bake her cakes every day. I am so grateful that she has chosen to share her life with me. Those LaGuardia students get her for one semester, I am blessed with her for an “eternity of nows.”

 

On Saturday, Mason’s last game of the season, he took a ball to the face. It knocked him graigh back on his ass. Though is nose was bloodied he hopped right back up and refused to come off. I often think of him as less, but he is much more than his father imagines him as.

 

Chandler hates the colors we chose for our new apartment. She told us not to use either of the colors we chose but we kept our own council. Her anger was evident. I think she could have lived with rust and taxi, but she was hurt that we did not take her advice more than the color of the place. I am sure that part of her vexation was how small her side of the room looks now that we’ve spliced the big bedroom for the girls.

 

Lennox presented her cheek for a kiss goodbye on the way into school yesterday. She wanted to get through the door quickly more than she wanted to stop, turn and pucker-up. For the first few months of Kindergarten she was all about the goodbye, as though she wasn’t sure how the day would go. Now she looks forward school more than public doting on by dad.

 

I added a photo to todayeye that I took (when I had a working digital camera) which had my 34^th birthdate on it. It is a bit morbid, but an arresting image because of the patterns and textures. I love to take pictures, and I miss my camera, but I think I’ll get one soon enough. I’m even grateful that it is broken because instead of taking pictures I am noticing them and thinking about how I “would” take them, framing them in my mind as much as swiping the image.

 

I am, for the first time, sad that a class is ending. I will be giving final exams for the rest of the week, but the classes I taught (the collection of people more than the accumulation of facts, work and knowledge) were really great corporate personalities. Now each class has its stars comets and tails, but looked at as a whole, they become the black-velvet-starry-sky-portrait that you take as a whole. I will even miss the clueless student who asks what I meant after I went through a 20 minute explanation of a sheet which “says-it-all” anyway. (“thesis, topics, evidence, analysis, proofread!”) Soon he won’t be in my life and I won’t remember his name when I see him in the atrium. My life will be poorer for his absence.

 

The blessing of my 48^th birthday is that I start to see the patterns. Linda’s love, that has more lives than all the cats in the shelter. Chandler’s sense of self, Mason’s strength all spring from Lennox’s independence. Students will replace students. Images will present themselves anew. Life will evolve and change. Linda is still here.

 

 

 

Paella Risotto

With all of the turmoil that reminds me of Cali I remember the yummy meals we all used to share. I wish I could have Julie’s Albondigas for Dia De Los Muertos or Javier’s Tortilla
Española (always cooked to perfection) or Sean and Naemi’s Japanese Cole Slaw and Potato salad, or just another day with everyone.

Paella Risotto ala Stafford

2 Cups Rice

6-8 Cups Simmering Broth

Sausage (Not Much)

2 Cups Chicken boned and cubed

Onion

Garlic

Red Pepper

Vegetable (Asparagus, or Green Beans, or Okra, or whatever)

Shrimp (or Fish)

 

Prep (chop, wash and thaw) all vegetables, meat, shrimp (& fish) and anything else you want to add. Have them ready in separate bowls because once you start you have to keep stirring until the dish is done.

 

Sauté Sausage and remove (I put the sausage on a paper towel to remove the extra grease)

 

Sauté Onions, garlic and Red (& Green) Peppers in sausage fat

 

Mix in two cups of rice and sauté on low for a few minutes (not long)

 

Either add enough broth and start sautéing or cut off the heat until all the ingredients are prepped

 

Once you start to sauté you must keep mixing the rice, onions, pepper and garlic.

Keep stirring

Slowly continue to add broth as the rice absorbs it

Keep stirring

As the rice plumps up keep tasting it

Keep stirring

Add the chicken after about five minutes

Keep stirring

When it is close to cooked, (keep tasting) add the shrimp (&/or fish)

Keep stirring

When it is closer to cooked, (keep tasting) add the veggies and sausages

Keep stirring

In the three to five minutes that it takes to cook the shrimp and veggies get everyone to the table and ask the kids to wash their hands.

Serve hot.

 

I like to serve it with some onion and garlic relish. When I have beans, I garnish it with them too.

 

 

More Missing Amir Hassan

Chandler, the youthful scribe of our broken hearts, wrote another letter that I discovered in her room. I found it when we were looking for Halloween Costumes lost since we bought them: the confusing luxury of living life. Though the kids aren’t speaking about the tragedy much, there continue to be silent signs of Amir’s passing. Mason’s weekly essay (which he covered with his arms when I asked about it) is about Amir. Lennox alone is undamaged in our house in Sunnyside.

Here are some youtubes of our lost prince: Amir in a revival of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. Stick with it, these flickering images are all we have left outside of our hearts and dreams.

When I watch this Recorder Recital at Emerson I am reminded of my lack of patience at the kids’ performances and recitals. I am going to try and treasure them from now on. Even the kids who don’t die untimely deaths are only children for a few years. I am going to try and stop rushing Chandler, Mason and Lennox through their childhood and savor our todays.

Today is October 21, 2007; Thank you GOD.

Chandler’s Letter to Amir

I found this dry-erase letter in Chandler’s Room when I was up there.  I think that its medium, its very impermanence, says as much as Cha-Cha’s eloquent  words.

Quickly Kids

Chandler at 12, 2 years out of Cali, took the subway to and from 7th grade herself today. She and Aneka were escorted to the subway by Aneka’s Hijabed mom, who had decided that nothing eventful was going to happen on the way to or from school to our talented daughters. The last couple of times is was my turn to escort them I was little more than an afterthought. They spent the whole time on the way to school discussing the layers of the atmosphere for a science test. They know the way and they never looked back for me, assuming I’d be alright. Chandler reported that on the way back they had fun, buying icees and talking with their friends on the N or W and 7 all the way home.

Lennox (5) is writing lots of letters, cards and books to my dad, whose birthday just passed. The image is of one of her ice cream cone calculations (how many scoops, how many flavors and how high it would be, etc.). Kindergarten seems to agree with this little scholar.

Mason’s soccer team, which I coach, is 3 and 0, and Mason is tied for the team lead with 6 goals. This week was a bye-week and I actually missed schlepping out to Greenpoint for the Tuesday night practice. We’ve got to work on “running off the ball.” In the last game one of Mason’s goals was particularly nice. He got the ball with a defender right on him about 2o’ from the goal. He pulled it back and to the right to get a shot around the defender and nailed it to the far side of the goal (passed the goalie who was out of position).

We are all good, and I miss all of you.