Six Years in Suburbia
One of the things Rebecca and I like best about our home is the location. A fifteen minute walk in any direction will bring you to all that is great about America – chain department stores; Home Depot, chain restaurants; Chinese take-out; and clear-cut, 20x20 fenced yards with one piece of plastic playground equipment. We are also a short walk from Metro – the easy-to-understand, color-coordinated public transportation system that serves Washington D.C.
We all know the many wonderful things that “The City,” as folks who grew up around here call it, has to offer. And I’m not even talking about the young co-eds and drugs. But while it may rank as the top one or two power cities of the world, I recently saw that Teen Beat did not rank it in the top fifty as a destination for night-life. This may be why Metro closes at midnight on most nights.
But, seriously, the fact that we can, if we choose, go days without having to get in our car to drive somewhere to partake of one of life’s necessities – the 99-cent Taco Bell menu, seeing Archie Bunker’s chair, a Starbucks mocha latte - has been an essential element in why Rebecca and I haven’t upgraded to a place that would make us house poor like so many of our friends.
Now, Rebecca and I realize that we are giving up something by living in the yuppie suburbia that we do. A move to the country would grant us access to air that contained fewer toxins, provide us the ability to see cows and smell manure whenever we wanted, and maybe even have a P.O. box as our mailing address. It would also probably increase our chances of being grandparents while Maya and Jonah are still in their teens.
Which, finally, brings me to the point of this blog post. Yesterday, December 14, we celebrated Maya’s 6th birthday. 
Because we’ve gone ice-skating a few times recently and she’s gotten pretty good at it, Maya wanted to have an ice-skating party. Here she is carving it up yesterday.
Because none of the local ponds were frozen over, and anyway, I can’t think of any local ponds, we had to go to the local skating rink. In keeping with the theme developed above of how great our location is, how many of you reading this live near an ice-skating rink that is accessible by public transportation?
Having the party at the ice rink rather than a local pond was fine by me since it set my mind at ease that none of our guests would fall through the ice and get trapped. What a head-ache that would have been for us!
After deliberating over who to invite for two or three days, Maya settled on ten of her friends, including Jonah, her cousins Gabriel and Bella, five of her classmates, and Celeste, her friend from our street. Rebecca sent out the E-vite and we were all set.
The way it went was this, we rented a “party room” at the ice-rink that consisted of four cinder block walls, three folding tables and enough folding chairs. My mother-in-law made a tray of baked ziti, Rebecca made some cupcakes,
I poured the drinks, and my father-in-law provided the entertainment.
Thus fortified, the skaters strapped on their skates and headed to the "sheet" to flop around on the ice for a couple of hours. Of the young ones, only Jonah had skated before. But, I’m happy to say that no one hurt themselves except for Bella (no stitches were involved). There were also a few of us old folks that were lacing up skates for the first time in years (my sister Cathy)
or, in some cases, ever (my cousin Mike).
Neither of them admit to any bumps or bruises.
After skating, we came back to our house and gathered around the Christmas tree while Maya opened her few birthday presents. We had asked folks not to bring presents, but no matter how many times you tell that to grandparents, they don’t get the message. And anyway, Maya has been to a few parties recently where the parents did not tell folks not to bring presents, so she was excited to have some presents to open.
Maya was really excited to get a jewelry box from my parents and a camera from me and Rebecca. When Rebecca was tucking Maya into her bed last night, they debated keeping the night light in the room on or off. Maya wanted to keep it on in case she woke up and wanted to take some pictures.
After Maya opened her presents, she, Jonah and Celeste ran around the house crashing into things. This prompted my Dad to remark that someone was going to end up in the emergency room. That would have been no problem, from our house we can catch the 9A bus and be at the hospital in 24 minutes.
Esta haciendo los recuerdos con los Rolling Stones (segunda parte)
Rebecca and I purchased a lot of DVDs in
The catch is that they are all bootlegged. Imagine walking into a store that is selling nothing but bootlegged DVDs. Imagine that this could be your job, bootlegging DVDs and selling them for $2 each.
Even though we checked out each DVD we purchased on the store DVD player to make sure it was more than just an empty DVD, once we got them home onto our machine, some of them didn't work. Here's where this blog post would get real technical if I were a technical guy. But I'm not. If there is an opposite to a techno-geek, (something like a techneophyte), I'm it. Light switches are as complicated as I dare to get. I let Rebecca handle everything else. Whenever my guy friends get into discussions about digital versus HDTV, or how many channels they get, or pistons versus spark plugs or some such idiocy, I do my best to stay out of the conversation so as not to be emasculated.
But, to put our DVD issue in layman's terms, the problem seems to be that certain DVDs are made for certain places in the world and they won't play in other places. Don't ask me how they know where they are. I can't remember if it's the formatting of the DVD itself, the wiring of the DVD player, or what, but a bunch of the DVDs that we purchased in Ecuador are useless to us here except as coasters.
I brought two music DVDs in
Since it's nearly pointless to watch a concert video without sound, I started pushing buttons and somehow got myself to a screen that had "Audio" as an option. That sounded like just the fix that I needed so I selected it and lo and behold, I found myself on a screen with an option to select a different type of TV. Not a different model, but some different frequency or something. The techno-geek in me remembered something from a past conversation about T.V.'s being the root of the problem, so I selected the other T.V. from the one that was already selected and all hell broke loose.
The screen started rolling from top to bottom at great speed. Static lines started moving diagonally across the screen. The only sound you could hear was the war cry of the Bohemian Wahoo. This sudden change into techno-anarchy made it impossible to read the words to undo whatever the hell it was I had just done. Crap, I thought. More indiscriminate button pushing didn't help. Fuck, I thought. Something that started out with so much promise ended up completely fucked up.
In a last ditch effort to salvage some shred of manhood, I took the Stones DVD out and put in a DVD that I know works in our player - something Made in China but sold in the USA - held my breath and encountered the same problem. The screen rolled from top to bottom at great speed. Static lines started moving diagonally across the screen. The Bohemian wahoo cried it's war cry.
So basically, when you put a DVD in our DVD player, it's impossible to see what the hell is going on. It's impossible to read any of the words or see any of the pictures. Our DVD player is kaput. I am so discouraged that I can't even remember if the sound was working so we could at least listen to a movie.
Making Memories with the Rolling Stones
The other night I called my friend who lives on the street to see if he wanted to stop by. Since it was a week night, and it was already pretty late by the time I thought to call him, I expected to have to work a little bit to convince him. When I got him on his cell phone, I said to him all in a rush, “I just listened to Sticky Fingers and I’m listening to Beggar’s Banquet now and I’m probably going to listen to Exile on Main Street next. Why don’t you come over?”
“That sounds cool.” He said. “I’ll be there in a minute.”
So much for the hard sell, right?
About five minutes later he came walking down the street with a drink in his hand and we proceeded to tear it up in my kitchen listening to the Rolling Stones, talking, dancing and just having a good ole time. Though, because we are both responsible grown-ups and had to go to work the next day, one of our four eyes always strayed to the clock.
I haven’t yet figured out how many hours of sleep I need to function properly the day after I’ve had a few drinks, but I think it is in the 4-6 range. It also helps (a lot) if I don’t have my last drink minutes before my head hits the pillow. On this night, after my friend left and before I went to sleep, I made myself some spaghetti, drank a bunch of water, swallowed a few aspirins, and still felt pretty lousy the next morning. But it was the day before Thanksgiving and work was pretty slow so it didn’t matter much.
If you haven’t listened to Sticky Fingers recently, you should. We’ve all heard a lot of those songs on the radio before – Brown Sugar, Wild Horses, Bitch, Can’t You Hear Me Knocking – and probably are sick of them. I’m sure I’ve turned at least one of those songs off while it played on the radio recently.
But hearing them in context with the rest of that record - Sway, Dead Flowers, Moonlight Mile – reminded me how musically outstanding the Stones were during the late 1960’s early 1970’s. I had forgotten how much I liked the Sticky Fingers record. It’s a classic example of taking something profound (music, relationships, Hostess Ding Dongs) for granted just because it is there for you whenever you want it.
It also reminded me of something that happened to me many years ago when I was in college. I went through this period where I was bumming around about this girl that I liked who was spreading herself around for other guys. So, to make myself feel worse, one night I decided to sit alone in my dorm room in the dark listening to “I Got the Blues” from Sticky Fingers. I Got the Blues is a real slow, melancholy song that among other suicide greeting card ready lines, contains the lyric “feelin’ low down, I'm blue".
At some point my buddy stops by and this really depressing song is playing and I’m depressed over this girl that this guy had actually put some moves on. I let him in without turning the light on and he comes in and when I think about it now, I think “what a loser I am!” There I am in college, the greatest time of my life to that point, and I’m passing the hours sweating it out over some silly little thing like unrequited love!
Anyway, after trying to cheer me up some and get me to go out with him with zero success, my buddy asked me what I was listening to. I told him and all of a sudden it was alright with him that I wanted to sit in my room by myself in the dark. He left. Somehow the fact that I was listening to the Stones didn’t make me so pathetic. Maybe I was cool, even, to be feeling low down and blue over a girl and just letting the Stones wash over me.
I wonder now if my buddy remembers that night and what he thought about my situation. I don’t talk to him anymore so I can’t ask him. I probably wouldn’t ask him anyway, I think I’d just rather he forget about it. If I ever run into him again we’ve got lots of times to reminisce about when we were both happy, so there is no need to remember a time when we were not.
And anyway, my new memory of Sticky Fingers is dancing in my kitchen with a drink in my hand while my friend from up the block takes a break to pour himself another.
