I Can't Wait Until...

Quite often I hear people say something like, “I can’t wait until…”, where the “until” is somewhere in the future, sometimes many months or even years. I hear people say at Thanksgiving that they can’t wait until Christmas (like I did last week) because it’s the most wonderful time of the year. I hear people say at Christmas that they can’t wait until New Year’s because with the new year is a new start, resolutions and all. I hear people say in January and February that they can’t wait until spring when it starts getting warmer, and the trees and flowers come back to life. I hear people say in April and May that they can’t wait until summer when the weather gets really nice and they can take a vacation. I hear people say in August that they can’t wait until the fall when it’s a little cooler, the kids go back to school and the leaves on the trees turn amazing colors. I hear people say in October that they can’t wait for Thanksgiving because… On and on it goes.

What’s the matter with right now? It seems that we as humans are always looking to the future, looking forward to something further on down the line, something that isn’t… now. Whatever it is, it can never come too fast and it always takes too long to get to that point. Too many times, the things we’re so looking forward to finally come and they disappoint us because they don’t live up to what we built up in our minds. What then? Well, we already have the next thing to look forward to.

I remember growing up and looking ahead to many things and feeling like it was taking so long to get there. As I’ve mentioned before, I always looked forward to the day I could beat my older brothers at something, or at least be as good at something as them. When I finally got there, it didn’t matter because they had moved forward just as I had. Around 4^th grade I started looking ahead to the day I’d leave elementary school and go to junior high school (what’s now middle school) in 7^th grade. While it was nice to leave the “little kids” behind, I quickly found out how much I missed, and never appreciated, recess. When I was in junior high I looked forward to the day I’d go to high school because that meant I wasn’t a kid anymore. But when you’re a freshman and the low man on the totem pole, you’re still a kid to all the upper classmen and you’re treated as such.

When I was first in high school I couldn’t wait until I got my license and could drive, then I would have true freedom! However, there was often not a car available and when it was, most times there was an errand that had to be run as part of being able to use the car. So before I could go out with my friends I had to run to the store and get some milk or bread or something. Oh, yeah, don’t forget to put some gas in the tank, too. I guess I learned that with freedom comes responsibility – and expenses. When I was in my junior year of high school I couldn’t wait until senior year when we would be top dogs of the school. Then senior year went by so quick that we never really got to savor our lofty position and it was on to college.

After two years of college I couldn’t wait until college was done. Not that I didn’t enjoy it, I truly did. I loved the schedule, the way you didn’t have to go to class, the way the professors treated you like an intelligent young adult, not a kid. But I was tired of the homework, the studying and trying to get everything done while working 30 hours or more a week. Two years later, my last final finally arrived and I whipped through it feeling elated as I passed it in to my professor, thinking that I’d never have to do this again. A few of us finished at the same time and talked in the hallway as we went to our cars. One person was going to grad school, another person already had a job and the rest were going to start looking for a job. However, I had never thought that far ahead; I just wanted to be finished with college. I got to my car and just sat there thinking the same thought for ten or fifteen minutes, “Oh my gosh. I’m done with college and I HAVE TO GET A REAL JOB!” I felt like that was it, my carefree, young adult days were over and now I had to get a full-time job and be an (gulp) adult. I turned the key, took one last look around and started driving home. That ride home was the longest, most depressing ride I had ever been on. In a short amount of time, maybe half an hour, I had gone from the highest elation to the lowest depression, all because “I couldn’t wait until…”

Now that I’ve hit the half century mark I have a bit of a different attitude, or maybe perspective. I feel like the passing of time is going faster and faster every year, not staying the same and definitely not slowing down. If there were a Father Time, I’d find out where he lives and tell him to knock it off, to stop speeding up time for me. I’d tell him I want time to pass as slow as it did when I was in elementary school, when it seemed like the school year took forever; like it did when my brothers were always bigger, stronger and better at sports than me; like it did when eighteen seemed like it was so far away that I’d never get there. I’d tell him to ease back on the throttle a bit; that it’s OK, because I CAN wait until Christmas and New Year’s and spring. I like right now and want to enjoy it a little longer before it’s gone.

Thanks

It’s hard to believe that it is already the one year anniversary of 8 of Nine. When I started my blog a year ago, I didn’t know if I would post every week or just post a few and then quit. While I didn’t do 52 posts, I did do 40-something posts, which I think is pretty good. I also didn’t know if anyone would even read the posts, but apparently some people have stuck with me through the year. I just wanted to say “Thank You” to everybody who has visited 8 of Nine over the last year.

Whether you’ve read one post, all the posts or somewhere in between, thank you for taking the time to read all that you did. There are a lot of blogs out there, but you came to mine. I’d like to think that I offer more for your entertainment dollar than others do. For those who have posted comments, sent me emails about a post or went old-school and said something to me in person, thank you for your encouragement. Just knowing that a post made you laugh or brought back happy memories for you makes me feel that my long hours in front of the keyboard are well worth it. For those of you who have become a follower of 8 of Nine, thank you for daring to be associated with me and being willing to put yourself out there for me. It would be a huge blow to my ego if I had zero followers after one year of writing. So to all of you, thank you, thank you, thank you!

I’m very grateful that the blog anniversary coincides with Thanksgiving this year. Thanksgiving has always been one of my most favorite holidays. The turkey and all the trimmings, the pies, the football games – I loved all of them and still do. On top of that, people pause and take some time to be thankful, or more thankful, myself included. I am truly thankful for my wife, my kids, my parents, my brothers, my sisters and my friends, without whom I wouldn’t have a blog. Thanks for inspiring me and encouraging me to do something I truly love – writing.

You may be thinking, “Hey, Joe. What are you going to do to keep us amused over the next year?” Well, I have a few ideas:

·     I think it is time for a new look, so I’m going to pick a new template and change things up a bit.

·     I’ve thought of doing a series on famous family sayings that were heard around my house when I was growing up. My brothers and sisters shared some of these with me recently and I will probably write about them occasionally, here and there, as a change of pace.

·     I found a few old writings from when I was a kid and may use them as part of some posts. One is an assignment written in 1973 about what it would be like in 1999, another is a story I wrote when I was about 11 years old. There’s some funny stuff in those two items.

·     Hopefully people around me will continue to do and say things that trigger memories that are filed away in the archives of my brain. And hopefully, I’ll be able to extract those memories and write about them before they go the way of my youthful good looks, my athletic ability and my energy level.

At least that’s my plan for now, but you just never know what’s going to happen, so I guess you’ll have to keep coming back and see for yourself.

In the meantime, Happy Anniversary to 8 of Nine, Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, and thank you for visiting my blog. I am truly grateful.

Beards Everywhere

I found out last year that November is now called Movember in some circles. According to their website (http://us.movember.com/about/), Movember is a movement where men grow mustaches in order to raise funds and awareness for prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men. Mustaches are OK, I even had one for a while when I was in college, but I always thought beards were better. When I was kid, you could even say that I was obsessed with facial hair, especially beards. I used to draw pictures of a hippie with long hair, dark sunglasses, a peace sign shirt and a full mustache and beard, which I just happen to have a picture of:

Hey, it was the early 1970’s; a lot of people looked like that. This picture is from a 1973 school assignment about what we thought life in 1999 would be like. This was my representation of a “typical” man in 1973. As far as typical goes, I can tell you that my Dad did NOT look like that! My Mom saved the paper for me (by the way, I received an “A” on it), and between the two of us it has been around for almost 40 years.   

I used to think about growing a beard when I got older and actually had some facial hair. That I would have to shave for a while before being able to grow a beard never crossed my mind. In addition to my hippie pictures, I would draw beards on the faces of people in pictures in the newspaper and in magazines. Man or woman, it didn’t matter. Richard Nixon gave a speech? Our paper showed how he would have looked giving the speech with a beard. The Queen of England visited the U.S.? Our Ladies’ Home Journal showed how she would have looked in her hat and pearls with a beard. It’s too bad Mom didn’t save some of those pictures; we could have had a Rogues Gallery of Bearded Famous People. For some reason, I found it amusing to draw beards, mustaches and sunglasses on woman and very clean-cut men. Maybe there’s a psychologist out there who can tell me what that means!

If you think I’m exaggerating about my facial hair obsession, let me give you another example of my artistic talents. The Red Sox were in the 1967 World Series, I was six years old, and I drew a mustache and sunglasses on one player, and a full beard on another. How do I know I did that? I still have the paper:

Bob Gibson with a mustache and sunglasses – how cool is that? Clean-cut Jose Santiago with a full beard? Nice. You see players like that today, but not back in 1967. Maybe Brian Wilson of the San Francisco Giants got his look from my guy.

You can also ask my sister who is a year older than me about my facial hair obsession. She had a doll called Little Lost Baby, a doll that had three faces that you could rotate; sleeping, happy and sad. One day I got the bright idea (probably motivated by my older brothers!) to draw a beard with black magic marker on one of the faces. I’m not totally sure which face I did it on, but I vaguely recall it being the happy face. After doing my art work I rotated the face so it wasn’t visible and went about my day. Later that day, I heard a scream and a yell for Mom, and I knew she had seen my workmanship. I think Mom tried to wash it off, but it was done with a permanent magic marker and didn’t come off. I’m pretty sure my poor sister needed therapy after that incident! A number of my sister’s Barbie dolls also decided to grow beards and mustaches, but I cannot take credit for most of those. The guilty shall remain nameless. I really do feel bad for her though, having to deal with us knuckleheads for all those years.

I continued to draw mustaches, beards and sunglasses on pictures for a while but, alas, I did not have much artistic ability. I also grew a beard in the winter for a number of years, starting in college, and I did have long hair, too, but not as long as my 1970’s hippie. No, I was never quite that cool. And while I think Movember is a great idea, I’m haunted by the idea that there’s a Little Lost Baby at the bottom of some landfill, still not decomposed and still with a black beard on her small, smiling face.

Did It Really Happen?

A couple people have asked me if some of the things I write about really happened or was it really like that growing up. And another person asked me how the heck I remember all this stuff. OK, you got me. I’m really an only child from a wealthy family and every story is made up. I don’t really have six brothers and two sisters, and there were never card games and board games; I didn’t have to learn to get along with others, or how to share things, or how to wait for things; I got everything and anything I wanted, especially at Christmas; my yard was not the football field or the wiffle ball field where we played for hours; I went on luxurious vacations every year; I didn’t have to count out M&M’s in a Dixie Cup. Well, maybe in some parallel universe or imaginary world that is true, but not here in the real world. All I can say is, I write things as I remember them. Does that mean that everything I write is exactly how it happened? Probably not, but what I write is how I remember things and so far no one has come forward and said, “That never happened.”, or “This is what really happened.”, or “This is how that really happened.”.

I know I have a pretty good memory because there are times I bring up situations and someone doesn’t remember it, but as I fill in the details they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. I remember that!” Then we’ll talk about it for fifteen or twenty minutes and laugh about things that happened. Oftentimes it will lead to the retelling of other situations that happened, some even funnier than the original one we talked about. I don’t know why I have such clear memories of occurrences from decades ago – but can’t remember where I left my cell phone ten minutes ago – but maybe it’s because those were some great times and I drank in all the details.

I try not to make it sound like everything was wonderful when I was a kid, because it wasn’t. We weren’t The Brady Bunch or the Huxtables on The Cosby Show. My family went through some hard times, especially trying to feed, clothe and provide for nine kids. I could focus on the struggles I had as a kid, or that we had as a family, but as I look back on my childhood I don’t see the tough times as much as I see how those times taught me something about life, myself or family. In many instances, those tough times taught me what was really important as opposed to what just seemed to be important. That doesn’t mean I always made the right decisions, I made enough bad ones in my life to last ten lifetimes, but I’d like to think that I learned from my mistakes and grew and changed because of them.

My parents and family were by no means perfect. However, my parents raised nine kids, all who are reasonably successful adults. Not one of us is a criminal or a derelict. Trust me when I say that there were other families we knew that had as many, or almost as many, kids as we did and that cannot be said about them. I’m not bragging or trying to put anyone down, but it would have been easy for any of us to turn to a different lifestyle than we did in order to get the “things” many of our friends had. That we didn’t is a testament to our parents and how they taught us to live.

So did this stuff really happen and was it really like I say it was? As far as I remember, yes and yes. I remember it from my perspective and through the lenses of 30 – 40 year old glasses. Things may be a little fuzzy around the edges, but the main part is very clear. I had parents who loved me, and brothers and sisters that I loved (well most of the time anyway). As my Dad used to frequently say, we always had “a roof over our heads, food on the table and clothes on our backs”, despite some fairly hard times. It’s not all flowers and rainbows today either, but I often think that if my parents got through challenges with nine kids, I can do it with two.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Trick or Treat

Halloween is just not as fun as it used to be. There was a time when my wife and I were the young couple in the neighborhood and our kids were the little ones. We’d take them around the neighborhood and everyone would say how cute they were – my son in his Sponge Bob, Woody and Vampire (way before Twilight ushered in the vampire phenomena) costumes, and my daughter in her Pocahontas, Dorothy and Minnie Mouse costumes. Now we’re the “old” couple with the older kids and we marvel at how cute all the little kids are. It’s kind of sad, one kid in college and another in high school and we’re relegated to the over-the-hill gang.

In the neighborhood we live in now, all the kids grew up at once. We used to have tons of kids walking around the streets and coming to our house, now we get about 15 or 20 kids. And half of them aren’t even from our neighborhood. But the little kids are still so cute! Especially when the kids do what kids do and not what the parents want them to do. One mother was trying to do the polite thing and get her little girl to say thank you. “Do you have something to say?” asked the mother. After no response, the mother asked again, “Don’t you want to say something?” The girl, starting to walk away, turned around and gave one of those irresistibly cute little kid smiles and said, “See you later!” Totally innocent and totally cute.

We had a great neighborhood for trick-or-treating when I was growing up. Nobody had a huge yard so the houses were kind of tightly packed together, which was great when we were little because we could do both sides of half the street in a relatively short amount of time and have enough candy to last for weeks. Well, that is, if we could have kept all our candy. When we got home we were allowed to keep some of the candy and the rest went into a big bowl that Mom was in charge of. I don’t remember how much we could keep for ourselves, but it was somewhere between not enough and too little. Nevertheless, we’d choose what we wanted for our private stash and Mom would either approve it or make us put more into the community bowl. You would have thought we were hoarding gold instead of Snickers, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and M&M’s. I always knew exactly how many of each type I had, just in case someone tried to steal one of my prizes. I don’t think that ever happened, but I just didn’t trust my older brothers. Sorry guys. 

When we got older and were able to go out on our own, we did our street and the next street over. Whoa baby, did we get a lot of candy! We got a little smarter as we got older, too. We ate some of the best stuff before we went home and had to give up most of the good stuff. We even got creative a couple of years and would go around once, mix and match our costumes, and go around again. Of course, most of the neighbors knew what we were doing and would give us the “Haven’t I already seen you tonight?” speech and not give us more. Back then, everybody knew everybody in the neighborhood, so even with costumes they knew who we were. However, there were a few neighbors who gave us more anyway and we added to our loot.

I vaguely remember what our costumes were like back then. I remember wearing a Casper the Ghost costume for a couple of years, which was a cheap pullover with one of those plastic masks that made your face sweat even if it was 30 degrees that night. I think I went out as a baseball player one year, which meant putting on my team jersey and hat and carrying my glove. Low cost or no cost costumes were the rule. I also remember going out as a girl when I was about 10 years old, borrowing my sister’s skirt, tights and shirt, and using the smaller end of L’eggs eggs for a chest. I wore a wig, too, but I have no idea where that came from. I never did that again because a couple of my friends were looking at me in an extremely creepy way all night. It kind of made my skin crawl.

Back in the present, the trick-or-treaters stopped coming fairly early and we were left with half of the candy we bought, even after we were giving out multiples to everybody and me and my son had a couple of pieces ourselves. The fun was over before it began. Sure, there were a couple of cute kids that came by, but there was just something missing. A terribly scary thought has just crossed my mind and I can’t believe I’m even thinking about it, but maybe when we have grandkids Halloween will be fun again. Until then I’ll just have to reminisce about how incredibly cute my own kids were on Halloween. Even as I marvel at how they've grown into pretty incredible young adults.