Exploring
The Boy and Papa
This morning, the Boy was showing Papa his newest truck design as I made breakfast for everyone.
A few minutes earlier, he was explaining how his friend N has designed his dream truck, and it, the Boy explained, would be completely illegal. “He had spikes on his tires! Big spikes! That would destroy the road!” he explained incredulously.
When the Boy was walking Papa through his design, I smiled: it had a wrecking ball, several guns, and various other accessories that would make it rather difficult to drive on public roads without drawing unwanted police attention.
Monday
The day started with a ride back up to the north of the county to pick up my car.
I’d mapped the route on Strava, and it really didn’t seem so bad: 28km with nothing too intimidating in terms of ascents. But I’m not the cyclist I was 15 years ago. My legs aren’t what they used to be; my heart and lungs labor under what would have been the slightest effort at my fittest. And so when I hit the segment some Strava user named “Cleveland St. Climb – West,” it completely kills me.
It’s really pathetic. Look at this thing:
A mere half-kilometer that rises a mere 35-meters, with an average gradient of 8%. I finish in 3:08, with an average speed of 8.7 km/h. Of all the Stava users who have tackled that climb, I am the 386th fastest.
Details from my fitness tracker show just what a trial it was for me:
Ridiculously high pulse for a ridiculously slow speed. But I’m 46; I haven’t done serious exercise in years. I shouldn’t be surprised, and I’m not. But of course, I am.
When I got home, I did to the yellow bell bushes along our driveway what the ride did to me:
Big Air Adventures
The Boy spent the afternoon/evening at a birthday party held at Big Air, a local trampoline park. This particular attraction fascinated him, but he was a little nervous about taking it on. Until one of his friends invited him to join him.
Three from Saturday
Friday
In the morning, I took the repairman’s advice from yesterday and started repairing (again) our dishwasher. How many honest repair guys will tell you, “You could fix this yourself and get the part cheaper on Ebay,” after giving you a quote of $354 for the repair? Not many. To be sure, he got his $80 trip/diagnostic fee, but honested himself out of another hundred bucks or so. Or perhaps he honested himself into more, for I’ll certainly never call anyone else .
The discharge pump was faulty, he said, and it came out this morning just as easily as he said it would. “There might be one or two screws down there — I can’t remember,” he said, “but then just rotate it and pull it out.” No screws — just a simple rotation and out it came.
In the afternoon, the neighborhood boys came over, and the Boy’s new Lego set came in, so there was only one thing to do.
The Ride Back
The Boy and I took the Honda up to the north of the county where a Polish friend has an auto shop. It’s a bit of a drive, but we trust him completely, and he’s taken care of our cars for probably close to a decade now.
Today, the Boy and I decided we would ride our bikes back — not quite home, for that would involve riding on roads I wouldn’t at all feel comfortable taking the Boy. Not quite home, but relatively close. In total, 11.48km in 57:02. Not bad for a seven year old. Not the longest he’s ever done, but still, not bad at all that speed.
Ice Cream, 1973
More discoveries from the past. Haven't seen myself in baby pictures in years.
Young Man
My father, when he was about 15 years younger than I am now.
A few years after this photo, taken in 1973, he was mowing with this mower and it rolled over on top of him. Today, it might kill him; then, he got up, probably cussed a bit, and rolled it back over and continued.
The Discovery
I have been going through my mother’s things, and it never occurred to me that she would have done the same thing with her own mother almost twenty years ago when my grandmother passed. She would have discovered pictures, looked at them, puzzled over them, organized them. They, too, would have been snapshots and portraits, but from a different time, from a different reality.
Today, I found those images.
Images that look as if they came from a Ken Burns documentary. Images of my family that are completely foreign to me. I can’t look at these and think, “Isn’t that Aunt L in the sixties?” I don’t recognize the places, the faces, the adults, the children — I don’t recognize anything.
Were they not in my mother’s belongings, tucked away in a Rubber Maid storage bin, could I not recognize one single last name and think, “I believe that was my grandmother’s mother’s family,” had I not known that they were my family, I would never know it.
And now I am so full of questions, so curious, so wanting to know everything about these people — and so frustrated that I didn’t find these years ago, when I could ask Mom about them, when I could take notes, when I could maybe even hear stories.
I have one cousin I can ask, and will do so shortly…
Sunday
Polish lessons with the Boy in the morning.
Finishing up a project in the afternoon.
The Moment the Shutter Clicks
The moment the photographer presses down the shutter release and takes a picture is, at that instant, a beautiful moment worthy of remembering forever. That's a lofty way of looking at it, to be sure, but there is some truth to that statement even regarding the most rudimentary, spur-of-the-moment snapshot. This was even more the case before the days of digital photography and vitrually-infinite storage. Each image actually cost money and eventually had to be stored. So I think we might have been a little more circumspect about taking photos, taken a little more care then.
Tonight, I began going through old photographs that Nana had saved. There are thousands of them, and I have looked at each one of them and put them in one of two pile: save or discard. The discard pile is at least twice as big as the save pile. From a practical standpoint, it has to be: I'm planning on scanning all the saved pictures. But even more so, the vast majority of the pictures are, despite the seeming worthiness to the photographer's eye, utter crap. They fall into one of two categories: time has had its way with the photographs and they're washed out, turned pink, darkened, or completely washed out. In short, there's no picture there anymore. The other category has to do with subject matter and composition: it's meaningless, or it's something like the backs of two people standing talking at a car.
Friday
Thursday
Yesterday, we bought a new piece of furniture for Papa. He doesn't have a closet, so we bought him something like a wardrobe. And the door opened violently as we were taking it out of the house (owners moving -- everything must go!) and the door broke right at one of the joints. So first thing this morning: round up some clamps from a neighbor and get to gluing.
I added "fix cabinet door" to my summer to-do list just so I could check it off.
Next, the kitchen counters need resealing and repolishing. The Boy was eager to help. He chattered away the whole time about how important it was to take care of our granite ("Daddy, what's granite?") and how we were such good homeowners to be so conscientious about everything and how it's important to spray all the sealers and polishes evenly (shortly after I told him that -- he likes to do that as it makes him feel adult) and a thousand and one other things.
Late afternoon: K comes back and sets about making another cobbler from the blueberries that are now ripening like mad every day.
And the Boy had to get in on that as well.
Today’s Ride
16.79km at 1:55:57 — average speed 8.7km/h