The Beds We Make: Judy v.1

I made a bad decision about getting married, the first time around. We were young. We were kids. My intended was a sterling person, one of the best I’d ever known, and we were surrounded by friends cheering us on in a foreign country, an exotic land thrust more than a mile up under a pollution-free ice-blue sky, with (at least where we were working) no heat and no running water. Our parents, the people we could ordinarily rely on to nod, smile kindly, and ask such pertinent questions as, “Are you out of your freaking minds??!!” were thousands of miles away in another hemisphere, in a long-ago world of no internet, email, cell phones, texting, or Skype. So why not get married? What the heck, everything else was uncharted territory – I mean, to answer the call of the wild in the middle of the night, I was trekking out back to an adobe hut with no seat in the middle of a chicken yard. So we cast our fate to the wind. And eventually, the wind blew the marriage away like a Bolivian dust storm. Pretty much all my fault, in my opinion, so do I now regret getting married? Feel terrible about it, yes. Regret it, well, that’s a close one, but no, because I learned a lesson, I got a do-over, and I made a better decision the second, and final, time.

The Beds We Make: Dad v.2

When I was a kid, really young, I stared at my father's photo in his college yearbook. It was a football photo. My dad was posing with the ball, his other arm outstretched as if to stiff-arm a would-be tackler. But there was plainly no tackler there, since Dad wasn't even wearing a helmet, probably to best show off the crop of dark hair blooming over his equally dark eyes. Years later, I would replicate that pose in our dining room with the full pads and helmet of my junior high uniform, ready for would-be tacklers who might pop out at me from behind the dining room door.

Even then, however, what had stayed with me more than my Dad's quarterback pose (because he was, in fact, the University of Dubuque's quarterback), was the caption next to the photo, which proclaimed that my father was, "...small, and not very heavy, but his gameness and grit have earned him the nickname, 'Fighting Bob.'"

It was probably weird for a kid in sixth grade, but, maybe under the spell of my dad's apparent football prowess, I listened avidly, over and over, to the story of how my parents met. One fall day in their hometown perched atop the left shoulder of Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi, my dad strolled by my mom's house wearing his college letter sweater. My mom, by all accounts and evidence the smartest, prettiest, and poorest kid in her high school, was out in the yard raking leaves.  He saw her, she saw him, and that was that.

My mom's vivid descriptions of the figure my dad cut in those days drove me back to his college yearbook, to get a sense of the guy who got the prettiest girl in school. And I noticed something peculiar. Paging for the first time beyond the Sports section, I was startled to see that people had defaced the book with hand-written notes, page after page of them. There were hearty wishes for success in life, but just as often, or more often, there were glancing references to events that appeared to have nothing to do with studying. Or quarterbacking, for that matter. One such inscription mentioned a girl's name and chortled, "On the first date? You old tool hound!" In fact, that sobriquet, tool hound, made repeat appearances throughout the book. I didn't quite know what a tool hound was, but I somehow suspected he wasn't  taking apart carburetors in his dad's garage.

I don't know how much time passed before I got what my dad was up to in college, but I do know it was sometime after I was trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to be up to the same thing. I figured I'd get there by and by, but meantime, I couldn't quite get over the fact that the thing had been going on at all, anywhere, all those years ago, and that my dad knew about it.

The Beds We Make: Dad v.1

 When I was a kid, really young, I stared at my father's photo in his college yearbook. It was a football photo. My dad was posing with the ball, his other arm outstretched as if to stiff-arm a would-be tackler. But there was plainly no tackler there, since Dad wasn't even wearing a helmet, probably to best show off the crop of dark hair blooming over his equally dark eyes. Years later, I would replicate that pose, only with full pads and a helmet, in my Clarence Olson Junior High School uniform, ready for would-be tacklers who might pop out at me from behind the closed door in our dining room.

Even then, however, what had stayed with me more than my Dad's quarterback pose (because he was, in fact, the University of Dubuque's quarterback), was the caption next to the photo, which proclaimed that my father was, "...small, and not very heavy, but his gameness and grit have earned him the nickname, 'Fighting Bob.'"

It was perhaps weird for a kid in sixth grade, but, perhaps under the spell of my dad's apparent football prowess, I listened avidly, over and over, to the story of how they met. One fall day in their hometown on the banks of the Mississippi  atop the left shoulder of Illinois, my dad strolled by my mom's house wearing his college letter sweater. My mom, by all accounts and evidence the smartest, prettiest, and probably the poorest kid in her high school, was out in the yard raking leaves.  He saw her, she saw him, and that was that.

My mom's vivid descriptions of the figure my dad cut in those days drove me back to his college yearbook, to get a sense of the guy who got the prettiest girl in school. And I noticed something peculiar. Paging for the first time beyond the Sports section, I was startled to see that people had defaced the book with hand-written notes, page after page of them. There were hearty wishes for success in life, but just as often, or more often, there were glancing references to events that appeared to have nothing to do with studying. Or quarterbacking, for that matter. One such inscription mentioned a girl's name and chortled, "Only one date? You old tool hound!" In fact that sobriquet, tool hound, made repeat appearances throughout the book. I didn't quite know what a tool hound was, but I had a sneaking suspicion he wasn't  taking apart carburetors in his dad's garage.

I don't know how much time passed before I got what my dad was up to in college, but I do know it was sometime after I was trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to be up to the same thing. I figured I'd get there by and by, but meantime, I couldn't quite get over the fact that the thing had been going on, anywhere, all those years ago, and that my dad knew about it. I assumed that anything appearing on my horizon, of course, had to be new.

If you say so

The year started with a friend emailing me to say she had seen my piece in the December Monthly and suggesting, "You should do something with your writing. A blog?"

Okay.