It's A Beautiful Day For a Ballgame...

Today's Cubs game was snowed out. But hey, it's mid-April, nearly a month into Spring. Why would it be warm?

My son's first practice is supposed to be Friday at 4 p.m. Since it is Wednesday night and alternating between snow and rain, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say it's not gonna take place...

Yesterday afternoon, I got a call from my ex. She'd been talking to my son about what new stuff he'd need for baseball this year. Since his league is banning aluminum bats, he's going to need a wooden bat...

...and since he grew like a weed over the winter, he'll need new cleats...


...and a new cup.

She giggled and said he'd asked her if I could take him to get that.

Did I mention that he just turned 13?

It reminded me of his first baseball season, in 2003. He was 9 years old. During his first few practices, he let us know that he was not happy about wearing a cup. It was uncomfortable.

During one of the practices, a ball took an odd hop, and hit him right where the cup was. A little while later, he walked up to my ex- and I, looking a little stunned, and said "Man, I sure was glad I had my cup on."

He never complained about the cup again.

Sometimes All You Have to Do Is Ask...

Yesterday I started a series of posts I plan on doing about students I remember. Thinking about past students also got me thinking about past colleagues.

Obviously the teachers I mentioned in the post, I was unimpressed with. That has not been the case overall, necessarily. I've worked with a lot of great people.

My first year out of teacher school, the 1998-1999 school year, I worked as a seventh grade Social Studies/Language Arts teacher at Spencer Elementary School. It is in the Austin neighborhood, the same one I teach in now. It's a physically beautiful, but rough neighborhood on Chicago's West Side.

The job was pretty rough. By seventh grade, a lot of the kids were into a lot of bad things. Over the course of the year, two of my students were shot-- one in a drive-by, and one while playing with a gun. We had innumerable pregnancies. One weekend, students in the seventh grade were involved in a sexual assault, both as perpetrators and victims. The pathology was exhausting. Despite it all, though, you still had to go in and try to teach.

To make matters worse, we had the two stupidest administrators I've ever worked for. I've worked in schools with a bad principal, and I've worked in schools with a bad assistant-principal, but that was the only one I worked at where neither administrator could find their ass with both hands.

Later, I found out that a number of the students in our seventh grade had gone on to good high schools in Chicago, and I imagine eventually to college. We had a great, dedicated staff, and I'm proud to have been part of that staff

The school was so rough that off-duty Chicago police officers were hired to hang out on each floor. I got to be friends with Hector Alfaro, the officer who was on my floor every morning.

Hector worked third shift. He would come work a few hours in the school as he came off of his police shift. He'd head home and sleep, waking up to be up when his kids came home from school.

I'd brought a coffee maker in, and would brew an extra couple of cups for Hector, which he greatly appreciated. At the beginning of the day, he'd walk down the hall to have a cup of coffee and chat after I got my students working on their assignments.

We talked a lot about our kids, and of history, an interest we shared. I found that Hector's parents were both from Mexico. He'd done a hitch as a Marine as a young man. I discovered that he'd been in Beirut, Lebanon at the same time my brother was, in 1983/1984.

There were a lot of bad days at that job. A lot of days, my morning coffee and chat with Hector was all that got me through the day.

I was RIF'ed (teacher talk for "laid off") at the end of the year. I pretty much knew it was coming the day I threw the assistant principal out of my room as he tried to yell at me in front of my students.

I've kept in touch with some of the people I've worked with over the years. I owe my current job to a friend from that year who was the 7th Grade Language Arts teacher. Hector and I lost touch, and I wondered once in a while whatever happened to him. He was a bright guy, and I figured that by now, he'd made sergeant or some other promotion. He was one of the people I was thinking about yesterday.

This morning, when I got to work and went to check my email, the Comcast portal had a story: 2 Wounded in Chicago Classroom Shooting. I hadn't heard about this yesterday, so I clicked on the story. And there was Hector. I googled him and found that since I'd last seen him, he'd become the News Affairs Officer for the Chicago Police Department. I was right-- he had moved up in the ranks.

I was glad to know he's doing well. Frankly, I'm glad to know he's off the streets. Like me, his kids are approaching college age, and I imagine he appreciates the extra income and the relative safety of his position.

I was struck by the coincidence of thinking of him, then reading about him in a news story the next day. Things like that keep happening in my life.

Sometimes all you have to do is ask.

A Superb Saturday and Sunday in Seattle

Saturday, we started our day not in All City Coffee, like we usually did, but in downtown Seattle at the Zeitgeist coffeehouse. The Zeitgeist had wifi, like all the independent little coffeeshops (including All City) seem to have-- another reason for going there, rather than a big chain. I was thus able to finish and upload Saturday's dispatch.

We hopped back in the car and drove about 60 miles north to a tulip festival.


I'd like to say that we were doing it strictly to indulge Andreas's wife Lynn, but Andreas and I enjoyed it as well.



And of course, it made my eventual return to cold and snow in Chicago that much more enjoyable. Really.



After the tulip festival, we stopped at a nearby winery, and tasted a few wines and ciders. We purchased a couple of bottles for that evening's consumption.

We chose another route back that would take us over the Deception Pass Bridge. The Deception Pass was so-named because the first explorers thought that they had found a penisula. It was, in fact, an island.



We parked the car and walked over the bridge to the other side and back.



We stopped and talked to the woman manning the little tourist booth, who gave us some good suggestions where to stop for dinner. We took her suggestion and stopped in a little seaside town and had dinner in The Mad Crab.

The food was marvelous, and so was the view.


Our route back took us to the ferry across Puget Sound. It occurred to me that I'd never been on a car ferry before. It was very cool. Washington State has the biggest ferry system in the country.



The ferry was amazing-- lobbies, washrooms-- even wifi. Our ride was only like 10 minutes. If it hadn't been so short, I might have paid the $6.95 for the day pass for it just for the novelty. Some of the ferry rides in the sytem are longer-- much longer. You can take it all the way up to Alaska.


As we headed back to Seattle, Andreas got a phone call from his attorney. As we left, he'd stopped at a FedEx-Kinkos to fax a letter to his attorney formally rejecting a counteroffer on the house he and Lynn had bid on, in anticipation of another offer. It had never arrived at his attorney's office. It turned out that he had the wrong last digit of the fax number. Since he had the paper with him, all we had to do was fax it again. And then it was then that we found out a hard fact of life: that it's damn near impossible to find a fax machine in Seattle at 8:00 at night. The document needed to be to his attorney by 9:00 pm. After frantically running by every print shop they could think of, it occurred to them to try a hotel. Thank god for the Silver Cloud Hotel-- not only did they fax it for him at 8:45, but they wouldn't take any money for it.

We got home, popped open the wine, and since Will Ferrell seemed to be a theme running through the weekend ("More cowbell!"), we popped in the Old School dvd I'd brought along. They'd never seen it before (it's one of my favorites) and they loved it.

Lynn wasn't feeling well, so she went off to bed and Andreas walked over to have a couple of beers the 9 Pound Hammer, which is right near the Fantagraphics store, the All City Coffee, and the Magic Wheels Motorcycle Club....


When we all got up Sunday morning, Andreas asked Lynn and I if we'd heard the gunfire later the night before. I'm notorious for sleeping through anything (I once slept through a pretty good earthquake in California). We hadn't. As we walked over for breakfast at Smarty Pants, which is next door to the 9 Pound Hammer, we literally walked into a crime scene. Seems like there was a shooting-- Andreas hadn't been imagining the gunfire. The CSI crew had cordoned off the area and was going over it with a fine-toothed comb.

Turns out that a 25-year-old guy, who was not a member of the motorcycle club, but had been visiting someone there, and was, as the Seattle cop politely said, "a known bad guy" (i.e. a gangbanger), had been walking out to his car and a couple of guys pulled up in another car and shot him several times. Between the EMT's and emergency room crew, they were able to save his life.

At least until the next time.

It was unusual. The bikers are pretty nice guys-- I'd been in their club and had a drink with them-- it's an all-black club, and they had no problem with me or anyone else. The guy had been unrelated to the club-- someone had waited for him to come out. Part of the recent uptick in violent crime, mostly young black men against other young black men.

We discovered, to our disappointment, that Smarty Pants was not open on Easter, so we went to have coffee at the ubiquitious All City Coffee, and figure out where to go for breakfast. There we ran into their next-door neighbor Mike, one of the many cool people I've met in Seattle.

Mike is a career musician, and also owns a popular music store in Seattle. A couple of days before, he'd shown us a full-page ad he'd put in a local music magazine, decrying the war in Iraq-- that it was started under false pretenses, and that it was time to bring the troops home. His response was overwhelmingly positive-- he actually had a big increase in business. He had had two pieces of hate mail. He'd responded to them, inviting them to come to his store and discuss it. Neither hate-mail author took him up on it.

We finished our conversation and coffee and headed back home. As we approached Andreas and Lynn's house, I saw something I'd hoped to see while there-- I saw a bald headed eagle circling far overhead their neighborhood. I couldn't get a good picture, but I could see the white head flashing. It was a thing of beauty.

We headed downtown in Lynn's car and went to the Fado, a great Irish restaurant/pub. We got the same great waiter we'd gotten the last couple of times we'd been there. I had corned beef, potatoes and cabbage, with the frickin' hottest horseradish I'd ever had. I grabbed the check-- it's my tradition to buy the last meal when I'm visiting, to thank them for their hospitality-- and we headed out to do some touristy Seattle things.

I finally saw the famous Pike Street fish market. It was not busy, so I saw no fish thrown.



We also headed to a museum/souvenir shop, where I saw many things, including a whale schlong bone.


We finally headed back home so that I could pack. As I got ready to leave, I had conflicting feelings. I missed my wife and children, and was looking forward to waking up in my own bed, cooking in my own kitchen. But I knew I would miss Seattle when I left. Andreas pointed out, in a conversation at some point over the long weekend, that Seattle was, in a lot of ways, a place in which a lot of the ideals of the sixties were realized. There's a real joy to life there, and a feeling of warmth toward other people. There's a general feeling of awareness of the big picture there-- politics, the environment, the arts and spiritual growth. It's a place you don't feel you're constantly swimming upstream to pursue those things.

I loved seeing this bumper sticker, which a recent post by Tocatta made me think of:

Seattle is, for the most part, unrepentantly liberal, diverse and friendly. It's not a perfect place, but it is a marvelous place.

On the plane ride home, I wrote in my journal. It was like a dam burst. I had written only a few paragraphs in it since last June, when in a week's time, I lost a teaching job I loved, a job I'd thought I'd work until retirement, and a beloved friend had been murdered. The last time in Seattle, I'd been struggling with those things. This time, I'd been able to put some time in between those events and now. I was able to enjoy being with my friends, and being in such a lovely place.

Writing page after page in my journal, I was finally able to understand and elucidate why the events of nearly a year before had shaken me so much. They had made me realize that there were, in all liklihood, more years behind me than ahead of me, and that whatever it was that was my life's work, I need to either be working on it, or needed to be working on it pretty soon.

As I journaled, listening on my Ipod to the Roy Orbison record I hadn't heard in over 20 years, I figured out that I needed to be terribly honest with myself about what my life's work was.



My most important life's work is to raise the two children I'm raising. My other life's work includes being a good husband to my wife, to take care of the people in my life, and to leave the world better off when I leave it than when I arrived. I realized that I'm doing fine with the first three things, but need to work on the last one.

I may or may not live in Seattle some day, but in my head and heart, I carry a little bit of the place to remind me what the world can be like, if we work at it a little.

Students I Remember: David O.

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Opening Day

It's the day of the home opener for the Chicago Cubs. And of course, the weather has obliged-- it's cold, and there was a dusting of snow this morning. We've had opening day snowed out in previous years.

The Cubs have had some great hitters in their past-- Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Dave Kingman, Andre Dawson, Rick Monday... it's a long list. One of their greatest hitters got his best shot in last year during one of the Cubs/White Sox interleague games against the White Sox' arrogant jerk catcher, A.J. Pierzynski, who'd deliberately run into him, though he did not have the ball. I'm talking about Cubs catcher Michael Barrett.



This shot was taken by a friend of Kim's and mine, Phil Velasquez, who's a photographer for the Chicago Tribune.

Slacking In Seattle on a Very Good Friday

Andreas and I started our day, as always, at All City Coffee. Seattle takes its coffee very seriously, not surprising for the place Starbucks originates. I've finally learned how to offer my plain old midwestern coffee after having difficulty ordering it in Oakland and elsewhere-- what we midwesterners call "a cup of coffee", people on the West coast call "a drip." Now that I've learned to speak the language of West Coast baristas, my visits are a lot less frustrating.

After coffee, we took off to explore the cd stores of the Capitol Hill section of Seattle. I'd been looking for a cd by The Sonics, a legendary Seattle garage rock band that appears on the Nuggets garage rock set no fewer than three times. We finally suceeded-- I found a copy of "Introducing The Sonics," which was actually their third album, and has "The Witch" and a couple other favorites on it.

A big bonus: I found a used cd of "The All-Time Greatest Hits of Roy Orbison." I'd nearly worn my friend Matt's vinyl copy of it in college, and had long ago given up looking for it on cd.

On the way there, we were driving past a hotel and realized that we were surrounded by people in all kinds of weird costumes; it dawned on us that we must be driving past the hotel Geek-fest was being held at.

Up in Capitol Hill, we ran into Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix was from here, and the guitar he played at Woodstock is in the Experience Music Project, a rock and roll museum that's at the foot of the Space Needle. One of my next couple of trips, I'm going to bring my son here-- to see the guitar (he's a big Hendrix fan) and just because he'd love this place.


By the time we got back home, his wife Lynn was home. We headed over to the nearby Pig Iron Bar B Q.

I had worked for years at the NN Smokehouse, arguably the best barbecue in Chicago, so I'm dubious when someone raves about a particular barbecue. I'm happy to report that the brisket I had was outstanding.



Of course, the company was pretty good too.



One last great score was a t-shirt I bought in Capitol Hill. It had to do with one of the funniest bits on Saturday Night Live in recent memory. All I can say is that "I got a fever, and the only prescription is MORE COWBELL!"

Dispatches From Seattle

I continue to have a rockin' good time here in Seattle.












Yesterday, Andreas and I made our way to Archie McPhee's a novelty store. For you Chicagoans, it's very, very similar to Uncle Fun's.

Getting there got to be quite the ordeal. Seattle is wrapped around Puget Sound, and navigating it can be adventurous. We ended up breaking out the GPS. I was a little freaked when the damned machine started giving us instructions on turns and distances. It sounded like a female Hal talking to Dave.

In any event, we made it to McPhee's and I got some goodies for my wife and kids.


Coming back, I got a great shot of Mount Rainier. This was from the expressway exit ramp that's about two blocks from Andreas' home. If his house had a second story, this is what you'd see from the front window.

Seattle is set in one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. I'm trying to talk Mrs. Yen into retiring here with me. No problem-- I've got 20 years to wear her down.

Apparently, though, there is at least one wise-ass malcontent who lives near Shilshole Avenue who does not share my assessment of Seattle, and altered a street sign to make to tell the world about his feelings.

Seattle Sounds- Friday Random 10

1. In the Summertime- Mungo Jerry
2. Danny's Song- Loggins and Messina
3. She Sells Sanctuary- The Cult
4. Crawling From the Wreckage- Dave Edmunds
5. Pusherman- Curtis Mayfield
6. Sheik- ZZ Top
7. Just One Look- Doris Troy
8. There Is No Time- Lou Reed
9. Are You Ready For the Country- Neil Young
10. Get Down Tonight- K.C. and the Sunshine Band

Notes:
1. This was a one-hit wonder from 1970. I can remember hearing it on the radio as a kid. Yeah, I'm that old
2. There was actually a time when Kenny Loggins didn't suck. This is from that time. Another note- Jim Messina was previously in Buffalo Springfield with Stephen Stills and Neil Young.
3. Love this song-- it was on the jukebox (remember those?) in Danny's, on Dickens near Damen, back when Danny still owned it-- everybody called it "the Elvis bar" because of all the Elvis memarobilia.
4. From the Dave Edmunds box set.
5. From the Curtis Mayfield box set.
6. From the ZZ muthaf*ckin' six-pack, baby! Now that's what I'm talkin' about!
7. A great old R and B number.
8. From "New York," Lou Reed's most overtly political album. Saw Lou on the tour supporting that album.
9. "Slippin' and a slidin'/And playing dominoes/Leftin' then a' rightin'/It's not a crime you know." I don't know what the hell it means either, but I love the song.
10. Do a little dance. Make a little love. Get down tonight, people. That's an order.