On This Date in 1998

We are suffering through some uncomfortable weather. Since the middle of last week, hot and sticky conditions have settled in like an unwanted guest. Yesterday JoAnna and I could find no relief even with all the fans blowing. I sat outside in the shade and read for awhile during the late afternoon, but it actually seemed cooler indoors. Andy was the only smart one among us. He went to the pool during the evening. Sitting at the kitchen table in front of her laptop computer, JoAnna was working on some campaign stuff that she needed to finish for today. I thought I’d mow the lawn but wasn’t in the mood to sweat more than I already had. Eddie vegged out in front of the TV, having spent an hour and a half on his rollerblades earlier in the day.

Middleton’s Good Neighbor Fest took place this past weekend. The family made a visit to Fireman’s Park, where the food tents and rides and everything else are set up, after Andy’s football practice Friday evening, which meant we didn’t get there until 8:00. While the boys explored the midway area, JoAnna and I had a fish fry at one of the food concessions, played four games of bingo (no winners(, and visited the beer tent (where we just had one apiece). I had given Andy $20 as a reward for his responsible behavior during the week, staying home with Eddie and avoiding any disastrous consequences as a result of this experiment. I gave Eddie $10. How much did the boys have at the end of the evening? $0. This was another experiment, one in which I was pretty confident of the outcome. I just knew the boys would blow it all in one outing. In the future, I’ll ration their financial rewards.

I worked on Saturday, my first (and only) weekend assignment this summer. JoAnna and Eddie accompanied Andy to his weigh-in for football. On the first day of practice, August 11th, Andy weighed 105 pounds. Since then he’s dropped two pounds, which means that he can play any position on the team. 105 is the cut-off, i.e., anyone who weight more can only play an offensive or defensive lineman position. Considering all the food that Andy has packed away since our return from Warren, I have to conclude that Andy is burning up a lot of calories at his football practices. His midsection seems to be firming up; it’s not as gelatinous as it was even halfway through the summer. The jelly belly is disappearing.

JoAnna was in a lethargic mood when I returned home from work late Saturday afternoon.

“I could never live in the South,” she said, an indirect reference to the oppressive weather. Nevertheless, around 7 o’clock, she joined me on a walk to the library, where I picked up and wheeled back home an antique book cart that was going to be used in the Good Neighbor Fest parade. We didn’t eat supper until after 8. I picked up some sautéed vegetables and rice at our favorite Chinese restaurant and McDonald’s for the still gastronomically fussy boys. They love those chicken McNuggets.

JoAnna and I attended the mayor’s breakfast Sunday morning, a traditional Good Neighbor Fest event to which department heads, local elected officials, committee members, and their spouses are invited. The new city administrator was introduced to the group, as he had just accepted the position the previous day. He won’t start his duties here until early November. He was my first choice, so I was very pleased that he found Middleton to his liking. He’s currently the city administrator of Evansville, a community of 4,000 about 20 miles south of here. If you recall, we walked in their parade earlier in the summer to distribute campaign literature for Jon Erpenbach.

As we did last year, a library contingent walked in the parade this year. Two of us carried a banner (“There’s No Place Like the Middleton Public Library”, tying in with this year’s fest theme of “There’s No Place Like Home”, three other pushed book carts (two new models plus the antique one that were loaded with books discarded from the Friends of the Library sale), and the rest of us distributed candy. We wore tan shirts emblazoned with a picture of the sun and the words “Middleton Public Library” and black baseball caps with the library’s name in yellow lettering, The parade route extended for about a mile and a half, and we walked it in 90-degree heat and high humidity. Fortunately, there was a rather strong breeze that provided us with some relief, but most of the group seemed pretty well beat by the time we reached the end of the route.

So between Walkfit and walking in the parade, I certainly got my exercise in for the day. Except for a few minor indoor chores and a trip to the grocery store, I didn’t do much bur read about 100 pages of another book by Russell Banks, the author who is giving the keynote address at the Wisconsin Library Association fall conference and whose books I plan to have read by that time. Rule of the Bone, published in 1995, is a coming-of-age story centering on the adventures of a 14-year-old homeless boy (although in the first chapter he still resides with his mother and step-father) who lives in the eastern Adirondack region of New York state. The book has been very favorably compared to Catcher in the Rye. Earlier in the week, I finished Banks’ epic (758-page) Cloudsplitter, which has sparked an interest on my part in the life of the abolitionist John Brown. Not that I wouldn’t recommend either of these two books, Mom, but there is another title I wanted to bring to your attention, a book I listened to earlier this summer. Snow Falling on Cedars is set in the year 1954 on San Juan Island in the state of Washington. The story centers on the murder of a German-American fisherman and the arrest of a Japanese-American resident of the island and is complicated by a previous conflict their families had over a small parcel of land. It’s a beautifully written book wherein character development takes precedence over the plot. And the story’s ending is very satisfying. The book has been made into a movie, which is to be released sometime in December.

School starts in three days, although on Wednesday JoAnna and I will attend 1½-hour orientations in both boys’ classrooms. We’re hoping Andy will have a good year, that he’ll keep up on all of his homework and generally develop a more serious attitude about school than he did last spring, when his third-quarter grades demonstrated a lackadaisical attitude which we found troubling. My gut feeling with Eddie is that we are still going to have problems until his reading skills are on a par with the rest of his classmates. He gets so frustrated with himself sometime, to the point where he just shuts down and wont’ respond to his teacher or, as was the case last Thursday, with the tutor that we scheduled 4 sessions with prior to the beginning of school (at $40 a crack). This fall he’ll still be involved in a special program with the teacher’s reading and speech teachers 30-45 minutes each day. I just hope that Eddie can make his reading breakthrough before the end of the year.

On This Date in 1998

Artwork by Eddie

The first week of the boys being home alone proved to be a successful experiment. We didn’t regret our decision and now feel confident that Andy is mature enough to care for his younger brother. No more babysitters! The boys still have lots of room for improvement, though. JoAnna and I had to tell them – repeatedly – that our bedroom was off limited. Why they need to watch TV there when we have two other TVs in the house I can’t understand. We also had to remind them – again repeatedly – that the kitchen is the only room in the house where they can eat. It’s very easy to learn whether or not they’ve broken this rule. They’re not very good at cleaning up after themselves, scattered pieces of popcorn and cracker crumbs giving away their habit of grazing throughout the house. This rule, I’m afraid, is one that will need much reinforcement.

Andy survived his first week of football practice with ease. In fact, he very much enjoyed it. His team is already learning plays. On Thursday, he brought home a sheet with the diagrams of more than a dozen different offensive plays. I think he was supposed to study the over the weekend, but the piece of paper remained in the car until Sunday afternoon when I hand-delivered it to him and suggested he might want to prepare for Monday’s practice.

“I will, Dad,” he said, somewhat impatiently.

The sheet remained on the kitchen counter for the rest of the day.

I traveled to La Crosse on Friday for a Wisconsin Library Association board meeting at the Radisson Hotel. The August board meting is always held at the site of the next year’s conference. As a safety precaution, Andy checks in with me by phone twice a day at the library, so JoAnna reminded him, as I did numerous times Thursday evening, that I would be out of town all day when she left for work. La Crosse being a 2½-hour drive from Middleton, I left the house at 6:45, before the boys were out of bed. I figured that if anything was going to go wrong with this independent arrangement, this would be the day. Around two o’clock, the boys left the house and walked the two blocks to Walgreen’s to buy some candy. How do I know this? I found their empty bag with the sales receipt inside. Two Three Musketeers bars. Two packages of Starburst. (There’s something to be said for computer systems that can itemize individual purchases.) They had finished a bag of Chips Ahoy Thursday evening and needed something to satisfy their craving for sweets.

When they returned home, they found the front screen door locked. (My fault, I think. The only key Andy has is to the front inside door. (They would have exited the house by the side door. (Using good sense, the boys walked across the street to a neighbor’s house and called JoAnna at work. She drove home to let them in. I was pleased that the boys handled this situation so calmly.

Friday evening, JoAnna and I attended a catered picnic at Lakeview Park. This informal gathering provided an opportunity for council members and department heads to meet with the two candidates for the position of Middleton City Administrator. (The previous administrator retired last month.) Earlier in the summer, I had pushed for an opportunity for department heads to have some input in the hiring process. I succeeded, but unfortunately, a series of rotating interviews involving department heads was scheduled for this past Friday, when I was in La Crosse. Just so they would get some exposure to the library, I had a staff member give each candidate a tour. I learned from one of the council members on Saturday afternoon that the candidate I preferred was offered the position.

Saturday morning, the family did a “lit drop” for Rick Phelps, “our” candidate for the 2nd congressional district, delivering a campaign brochure to every residence in the 1st aldermanic district in Middleton. The boys, wearing their rollerblades, joined us during the first hour of this volunteer task. Eddie took a hard tumble on a cracked sidewalk, and though he was able to shake it off, he wanted to go home once we finished the area north of University Avenue. JoAnna and I took another hour to complete the area south of University, including a 10-minute rest stop at the Bavaria Restaurant, so she could have a cup of coffee. I quenched my thirst with a large glass of grapefruit juice.

As a reward for our efforts, JoAnna took us out to lunch at Pasqual’s, a restaurant that specializes in southwestern cuisine. Tired or ordering my usual chicken fajita burrito, I tried the beef quesadilla and think I may have found a new favorite. JoAnna usually orders a chicken taco salad when we eat here and didn’t change her ways on Saturday. Andy is partial to the double beef and bean taco. Eddie is happy with a hot dog off the kid’s menu.

During the afternoon, I sat on the bench along the south side of the house and read 50 pages of Cloudsplitter, the latest book by Russell Banks, who will be giving the keynote address at this year’s WLA conference, and enjoyed the scenery, something I rarely get to do. Due to our busy schedules, the bench is usually nothing more than a decorative touch. The boys alternated between watching TV and rollerblading. JoAnna napped and then finished up a couple of small, isolated neighborhoods that we had missed during the morning.

The boys were rollerblading fiends this past weekend. Not only were they outside a lot, but they also lobbied for a trip Saturday evening to Fast Forward, a indoor skating rink, but JoAnna said she was too tired for rollerblading and I’m too wobbly to venture out onto hard, slippery floor where kids are speeding around in circles. We ended up going bowling at the Sport Bowl, located two blocks from where we live. We rolled two games, no bumper pads this time. Nobody set the lanes on fire.

Although I had been keeping a tight grip on my wallet, I agreed with the rest of the family that we would go out to eat afterwards. After some debate, we agreed on Old Chicago, a pizza and pasta place, one of our regular haunts. Barb would have liked our waiter; he looked like Andre Agassi before he lost his hair and got pudgy. Once we returned home, we played 5/6s of a round of Trivial Pursuit, the blue-izers against the brown-izers. By 10:30 we were all ready for bed, and it would have taken us another half hour to finish the game. The brown-izers won.

The nighttime calm didn’t last too long. Eddie woke up in the middle of the night, crying hysterically. JoAnna got out of bed first.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him pleadingly.

“I don’t know,” he said repeatedly, whenever we tried to get at what was bothering him. Did he have a nightmare? Was he sick? He wouldn’t tell us anything.

In exasperation, unable to calm him down, we just left him alone. I returned to the bedroom and JoAnna sacked out on the couch in the family room. Andy, if I recall, slept through all this hubbub. When I got out of bed at 7:30, after a very restless sleep, I found Eddie in his own bed, a rare occurrence lately. Everyone else was still sleeping. I retrieved the Sunday papers from the front stoop and stretched out on the living room couch and read. Eddie was the first to stir; he had to go to the bathroom. I intercepted him as she started to walk across the living room and guided him back to his bedroom. I talked to him about what happened during the night and emphasized the fact Mom and Dad become worried if he can’t tell us what is wrong when he is upset. I thought he should get some more sleep, which he did. He didn’t get up for good until after 9:00.

Sunday was a day to catch up on chores around (inside and outside) the house. Laundry, cleaning, shopping, yard work. As they did on Saturday, the boys either watched TV or rollerbladed, their destination being Elm Lawn School, where they usually ran into friends of Andy’s. I think they went through this cycle at least four times. They were always home within an hour of one of their departures, though. They spent most of the early evening at a neighbor’s house playing with a boy Eddie’s age. Surprisingly, because of their proximity, Eddie and Adam don’t get together that often but always seem to get along well when they do.

We’re all in good health. The boys seem increasingly eager for school to start. I think they are getting a little bored living an unstructured life.

On This Date in 1998

Since today is a carbon copy of yesterday, we’re back at the beach – Kinzua Dam again as flotation devices are not permitted at Chapman Dam. Barb didn’t join us today, complaining of a sunburn, actually a little bit of redness on the upper left side of her chest area. But thanks to Barb, the boys and I came better prepared today. She found a rubber raft in the attic and bought a pail and shovel set, the three “shovels” able to be used a squirt guns. We also brought along beach footwear, so we didn’t have to repeat yesterday’s painful trek along 40 feet of stones to get to the water. The bottoms of my feet are a little sore today, and it feels like there is a bruise in the middle of my right sole.

Unable to continue with Sara Paretsky’s latest book, a major disappointment, I purchased a copy of Cloudsplitter, a 700-page epic by Russell Banks based on the lives of John Brown and his offspring. Banks will be the keynote speaker at this year’s WLA conference, and I promised myself I would read this latest book of his by then. Might as well get started now, I told myself, after finding no other titles by Banks on the shelves. It’s a book that you might enjoy as it deals with Bloody Kansas, the raid on Harpers Ferry, and other events leading up to the Civil War, part of a 300-year conflict that the author refers to as the War Between the Races. After reading 40 pages, I think it’s safe to state that this is a well-researched, well-imagined, and well-written book.

I’m surprised my retreat to the blanket hasn’t been interrupted, but Andy, untypically, is enjoying being on his own. He’s at the water’s edge, inspecting stones, or so it looks from here. Eddie is on the raft, paddling himself around with one of the shovels. Andy and I tossed the Frisbee back and forth for awhile, until my right contact popped out of my eye after two consecutive dives as I tried to make a spectacular catches of Andy’s errant throws. Both times, to my great relief, I was able to pluck the lens from my eyelids.