A Farm in the Country

I was watching a television show last week and there was a reference to a dog being taken to live on a farm out in the country, where he would be able to run around all day with the other dogs. This, of course, was not true. The funny thing about this is, it is the exact story I was told when I was a kid about one of our dogs and I totally bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

I was just a little guy then, I couldn’t have been more than six or seven at the time. I don’t really even remember too much about our dog at the time, other than he was a Shetland Sheep dog, he was getting older, and his name was Tuffy. From what my older brothers told me, he was a great dog. Back then, there was a place called “the Pit” (short for sandpit), which was just outside the woods behind our house and was a bunch of sand piles and large rocks. My brothers would go out in the backyard and say, “To the Pit!” and Tuffy would take off and wait for them at the Pit. As you can imagine, dogs weren’t tied up or kept in the house all day when we were kids.

Somewhere along the line though, Tuffy turned into a dirty dog and started trying to do things with us kids he ought not to have been trying. To top it off, Tuffy tried taking a bite out of anyone that didn’t like his actions, and that was the end of the line. Fortunately, I don’t recall any of this happening. I do remember being told that he was getting the treat of a lifetime, that my parents were going to bring him to a country farm where he could run around and play all day with a bunch of other dogs. I saw that as Dog Heaven. They assured us “Three Little Ones” that Tuffy would be very happy there, that he would have room to run, and he’d have a bunch of dog friends.

I imagined it always being sunny and warm there, with fields of grass to run through from morning to night. I would think about it from time to time and smile to myself, thinking of Tuffy hanging with his new friends, and figuring he wouldn’t even miss us due to all the fun he was having. For years, I believed that Tuffy was just about the luckiest dog in the world. Well, along with the other dogs on the farm.

It wasn’t until I was in about eighth or ninth grade (into my teenage years for those who don’t want to do the math) that I learned that Tuffy had been put to sleep. I was shocked that my loving parents could do such a thing, I was horrified that my older brothers were okay with this, and I was totally embarrassed that I never figured out that there was no farm in the country where dogs go to live out their last years in complete and total bliss. I guess it was one of the last vestiges of childhood that was torn down, the last of my innocence. Old dogs don’t go out gracefully; they go out suddenly and permanently. Maybe this is why I never got a dog as I got older.

Ah, to be able to go back to those days when everything was right with the world. Santa came every Christmas, the Easter Bunny came every Easter, I was going to be a baseball player when I grew up, and old dogs went to live on a farm in the country with a bunch of other dogs. At least in their world it’s sunny and warm all year round.

Let It Snow

We’ve gotten a lot of snow this winter here in the Northeast. The way people have been talking, you’d think we’ve been getting two to three storms per week, though if I really think back, that has happened only a couple of times. People I know, and even some I don’t know, have complained to me about the snow. It seems that a lot of people are sick and tired of the snow.

We haven’t really gotten that much snow the last couple of winters so maybe people are out of practice when it comes to winter, but come on, we live in the Northeast and it’s winter! It’s going to snow and it’s not always going to be at a convenient time. I get it to a certain point; you have to clear the walkway and the driveway, you have to clean off the cars, and then you have to drive to or from work in a snowy mess. It’s not all fun and games as an adult like it was when we were kids.

It seems to me that we used to get more snow when I was growing up than we do now. I don’t remember many winters where there wasn’t a decent amount of snow or when we weren’t able to be skating on the ponds. That was just part of growing up – or was it? I looked back and found a website that listed the annual snowfall in Boston, MA by month. Covering the years from when I can actually remember things up through high school, this is what I found:

 Season       Total (inches)

1966-67         60.1

1967-68         44.8

1968-69         53.8

1969-70         48.8

1970-71         57.3

1971-72         47.5

1972-73         10.3

1973-74         36.9

1974-75         27.6

1975-76         46.6

1976-77         58.5

1977-78         85.1

1978-79         27.5

Throw out 1972-73 as an outlier (what happened that year?) and 1977-78 (“The Blizzard of 1978” skewed those numbers) and we’ve averaged 46.3 inches per season. This season we’ve gotten 42 inches, so I’d say we’re pretty much average this year. Maybe some whiners around here need to get out and do some fun stuff in the snow instead of cursing their very life for living where it snows. Maybe the adults need to go back to their childhood and have some fun.

Winter didn’t stop us from going outside and having fun when we were growing up. We went skating, we went sledding, and we built snow forts and had snowball fights. We played Alaska, a game where we pretended we were in Alaska, caught in some huge blizzard, and we had to rescue someone. We made noises that we thought sounded like the wind, we threw snow up in the air to make it be like it was snowing out of control. We pretended we were rolling down the side of a mountain or, gasp, falling over the side of a cliff! Lucky for us, we had our buddies with us to keep us from plunging to our deaths.

We didn’t complain about the snow, that’s for sure. The more the better as far as we were concerned. It gave us more choices of what to do. And that’s what it comes down to for all the people who’ve been whining about the snow – choice. You can choose to see the negative (clearing the driveway, cleaning off the cars, driving in the snow) or you can choose to see the positive (the beauty of the bushes, trees, and lawns coated in white, sledding, skiing). I’m choosing to let my inner (winter) child enjoy the snow.   

Back From Vacation

I was on vacation last week with some of my wife’s family and they have younger children in the 6 – 9 years old range. It’s been a while since I’ve had to deal with kids that age, as my kids are now 17 and 20. It didn’t take me long to realize there are some major differences between my kids and the others.

The first difference was being woken up by kids at 6:00 in the morning. At that early hour, they are up and ready to go. You’re still sleeping? Not for long! They tried to stay quiet, but after about ten minutes of progressively louder whispering they started talking in their regular, middle-of-the-day voices. They obviously didn’t get the memo that it is alright to sleep past the normal time they get up for school. I usually get up at 6:00 AM for work, but I’d be very content to sleep past that time for a week or two. So I lose a few hours of the day by sleeping in, but who cares? I mean, it’s VACATION! My son could sleep until 10:00 or 11:00 (maybe even noon) and not feel bad about it. Of course, he’s not going to bed at 8:00 – 9:00 PM either, so I guess there is a tradeoff there.

The next difference is that younger kids go in and out of the house about a thousand times a day. And they slam the door every time! Not long after eating breakfast they are out to ride their bikes (slam!). After a few minutes one of them needs a drink of water, so he or she comes back in (slam!). Guzzle down that water and it’s time to get back outside like there’s a 30-second time limit on the break (slam!). Then someone realizes that someone else just went in for water, so they come in to get a drink, too (slam!). Repeat this process for every kid (slam!) multiple times (slam, slam, slam!) and…well, you get the picture. My kids either stay in the house, or when they go out there’s a quiet click as the door closes and we don’t see them or hear them for two or three hours. When they come back they quietly close the door. Ah, that’s nice.

The last difference is that younger kids get bored during the day. What? Bored? Did I mention that it’s VACATION? I guess that having fun for hours at a time gets old pretty quick for younger kids. You can only ride your bike, play games, watch movies, go to the beach and goof around for so long, and then it gets monotonous. Throw in breakfast, lunch, dinner and snacks in between, and it seems like a pretty good day to me. I have a remedy for the boredom: sleep later and there won’t be as many hours to fill! That would take care of a couple of issues at the same time. We’d all be able to sleep later and the kids wouldn’t be so bored.

Now I don’t want it to sound like it was all bad or negative, because it wasn’t. It was actually a really great week. I had fun with the kids at the beach and I love to listen to them as they tell me about things from their perspective.  I got to spend some time with both my own kids, which doesn’t happen as much as I’d like these days. I got to spend some time with my in-laws, both of whom are kind, generous and entertaining. Last, but not least important, my wife and I got to spend a lot of time together, without the usual stuff that gets in the way at home, like work and schedules. You can’t beat that.

The week flew by and it wasn’t long before I was back to the real world. It’s at times like those that I sometimes wish I was still a kid, where vacation is not just a week or two, but the whole summer, and where I’d have so much time in the day to do whatever I wanted that I’d get bored. I’d just have to remember to close the door quietly on my way out.

Goofing Around in the Back of the Car

With the start of warm weather, Road Work season is in full swing here in the Northeast. Even though most of it is done overnight, the work can continue past the 6 AM stop time and cause traffic issues for those of us trying to get to work on already busy highways. One day last week that scenario played out for me and I was stuck in a traffic jam about 7 miles away from my exit. After a few minutes I was behind a school transportation van and couldn’t avoid noticing a little girl in the last seat because she was staring straight at me. Once she got my attention, she smiled and waved to me until I waved back.

As we inched up the highway I noticed she was doing the same thing to other cars that were passing the van, with mixed results. A few people waved back and she’d smile and go on to the next car, but most of the people didn’t even acknowledge her existence. When the traffic stopped, she would stare at the car next to her, concentration on her face, just waiting for someone to look at her so she could smile and wave to them. It appeared to me that some people gave their full effort to not look at her. Maybe they didn’t want to smile while sitting in a traffic jam, thinking that maintaining the angry face would make the cars in front of them go faster. In that little girl’s world, traffic jams are not a problem.

That incident reminded me of riding in the back of our station wagon as kids. When we all went somewhere in the car, us younger ones sat in the way back part of the station wagon. Did I mention there were no seats back there? Back in those days, seat belts were not required and no one used them, so for us to be sitting back there was no big deal. We could have a lot of fun in the back end of the car. There were many opportunities to annoy my older brothers sitting in the back seat: I could simulate a bug crawling on their neck; I could pull their hair and duck down behind the seat; I could tap their shoulder so they looked at the person sitting next to them and then laugh at them for falling for that old trick; I could sing really loud and/or off-key right behind their ear. Yes, there were lots of things I could do and they couldn’t do anything because we were in the car. As long as I didn’t hear Dad say “If I have to pull this car over...” I felt like it was anything goes.

When bugging my older brothers got boring we’d play games back there, like counting the number of cars of a certain color, or looking for cars from other states if we were on the highway. If we weren’t driving on the highway, we’d exaggerate the turns and roll into each other or amplify the bumps and bang the roof. Eventually, it would get out of hand and Dad would give us the old “If I have to pull this car over…” bit again and we’d calm down – at least for a while. At one point, we had a station wagon that had a third seat – that faced back instead of front. I don’t know whose brilliant marketing plan that was, but you could only fit two kids in it comfortably, it forced you stare at people behind you and it kind of made you feel nauseous going backwards all the time. Besides, it was no fun in the back if you couldn’t even roll around a little bit. I think we just folded the seat down and didn’t use it after a while.

One fond memory I have is riding in the back end of my oldest brother’s 1965 Barracuda. If you don’t know what they looked like, they had a big, sloped rear window. I remember my younger brother and I would lay back there and pretend we were in a military airplane. One of us would say, “Pilot to bombardier. We are over the target area.” The other would reply, “Bombs away!” and we’d whistle to simulate the bombs falling and then make the explosion noises as we made a direct hit.  That was one of the few times that the trip was too short and coming in for a landing was not welcome. 

I want to be more like that little girl in the back of the van, in whose world traffic jams are not a problem and can even be fun. Maybe I should start smiling at people and waving to them. If they don’t smile and wave back, I can always pretend I’m flying high above the traffic in my B-52. Bombs away!