Who Do You Love?

I haven’t written anything guaranteed to send me to hell lately. What better time than Christmas week to break the skid?

Chris Henry died last week after falling out of the back of a moving pickup truck driven by his fiancé. For those of you who are not football fans or crime reporters, Henry was a wide receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals who had a brief and—to put it mildly—checkered career.

His NFL record is undistinguished. He caught 36 passes in his best year; the league leader is usually around or above 100. He last scored more than two touchdowns in a season in 2006, when he had nine, which is a considerable number.

Henry would have had better stats had he been able to stay on the field; he never played in all 16 games of a season. Far more impressive than his on-field accomplishments is his rap sheet:

December 15, 2005 – Stopped for speeding. Had no valid license or insurance. Marijuana found in his shoe. Pleaded guilty; no jail time.

January 30, 2006 – Arrested on multiple gun charges, including concealment and aggravated assault with a firearm. Pleaded guilty; no jail time.

April 29, 2006 – Allowed three underage females (18, 16, and 15) to consume alcohol at a hotel. Pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and sentenced to 90 days; served two. (That’s right: two.)

June 3, 2006 – Stopped for erratic driving; failed breathalyzer.

November 6, 2007 – Allegedly assaulted a valet parking attendant. Found not guilty at trial.

March 31, 2008 – Punched a man and threw a beer bottle through his car window. Henry later claimed it was a case of mistaken identity; he thought the man was someone else who owed him money. Sentenced to house arrest.

The past eighteen months had been relatively quiet for Henry. There were reports he wanted to clean up his act, and had done so. On the other hand, a 911 call received the day of the fatal accident describes him “with no shirt on, and he's got his arm in a cast on the back of the moving truck…beating on the back of this truck window... I don't know if he's trying to break in or something. It just looks crazy. It's a girl driving it."

No one but his fiancé knows what went on during the preceding domestic disturbance, but what we do know doesn’t sound like someone who had made material changes from his previous conduct.

Why do I care about this? Mostly it’s because of the outpouring of grief over another life wasted. Please. Chris Henry had done a hell of a job of wasting his life all by himself long before this unfortunate episode. A lot of people died that day; he was just one of them.

Am I glad he’s dead? Of course not. I’m not feeling bad about it, either. I didn’t know Chris Henry. From what I know of him, I’m okay with that hole in my life. I do know my daughter’s boyfriend’s father, who was just diagnosed with colon cancer at 51, in large part because no one bothered to mention to him that it ran in the family. My Beloved Spouse’s best friend’s mother broke her hip. My mother may have had a small stroke a couple of weeks ago. These are people I know (and in my mother’s case, love) who did nothing to contribute to their misfortunes. These are who I feel for today.

I sometimes wonder how many people who shed tears over Chris Henry, Dale Earnhardt, Kurt Cobain, or Heath Ledger have someone close to them who is in need. Maybe it’s a health problem. Maybe they’ve been laid off and don’t have a pot to piss in. And their families are sending flowers and making contributions in the name of someone they didn’t know, never met, and who might well not deign to say hello if they met on the street.

I’ll never understand it. But thinking about this makes it a lot easier to understand how things are as fucked up as they are.

Something Else to be Thankful For

Thanksgiving has passed at The Home Office, as has most of the food. (We’re still good for a couple of days worth of lunch-quality leftovers.) The Parental Units came down from the ancestral home in western Pennsylvania to spend the weekend, and remind us all of a rare thing we can be thankful for: my family actually gets along.

Proof of this can be found in our activities, or lack thereof. Dinner at Famous Dave’s. Some conversation. Watch a movie. More conversation. Thanksgiving Day was football, conversation, and the annual Feast. We then relaxed by bullshitting a while, and watching some football.

We did leave the house a few times. Took Mom to Costco. Went to a high school hockey game that involved The Sole Heir’s beau and enjoyed it so much we went back the next night. (More on that in a later post.) Introduced Mom to Mello Yello. In all, about as relaxing and entertaining a three days as could be had.

The visit was only cut short when a potential storm from the northeast chased them home first thing Sunday morning. (Research indicating the Steelers-Patriots game would not be televised in the Washington metropolitan area had no bearing on this decision.) The storm petered out into a drizzling rain that lasted all day Sunday and traffic was heavier than expected, but they made it home without incident. (Mom did get to snarf another Mello Yello at a rest stop. Now that she’s hooked, I’ll have to teach her the term “jonesing.”)

We get together a handful of times a year, but this Thanksgiving visit has become the most satisfying. The day may come when they don’t feel up to the trip; then we’ll drive. People have teased me about living in the last functional family in America. Sour grapes.

One last thing. The Steeler game was televised in Washington after all; the listings were incorrect. It looked great on that fifty-inch HD screen, Dad. Stick around next time. We have room.

Coffee Break's Over, Back on My Head

Wow. That was fun.

The Sole Heir and I got back from our third Home Office Western Tour late Saturday night. This is Wednesday, and I have enough of my life put back together to start writing again.

The trip was a success by any measure. A three-day drive to Colorado (the Crazy Like Me Correspondent flew ahead) to visit the Sibling Correspondent and his family at The Home Office West. Relaxing in the pool and hot tub—he has his own little resort there, clean towels and everything; you just have to make your own bed—cooking out, seeing the mountains, getting corny Western-style sepia-tone pictures taken, letting the stress and East Coast Overload fall from us like snow off of a roof on the first warm day of spring.

Craze flew home on Sunday and the Sole Heir and I drove northwest, into Wyoming. The next five days were a fantasy vacation: Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks, then driving along the Yellowstone River through Montana. (The Yellowstone is the most beautiful little river you'll ever see, which is saying something, since we saw the Wind River, too.) Little Bighorn Battlefield was much more moving than we anticipated, and the Story Pines Inn was a beautiful little gem the GPS needed a dirt road to get to. Devils Tower, Deadwood and Lead (motorcycle week at nearby Sturgis; bummer). Surrounded by burros and buffalo at Custer SD State Park. The Badlands. A drive-by of the Spam Museum. (Honest to God. We were too early to go in. We got pictures.) Wisconsin frozen custard at The Dells and Italian beefs at Portillo's. Miniature golf on the course where I taught her to play when she was three. (She routinely kicks my ass now.) Glen's frozen custard in Cheswick PA, where I learned to love it. An hour with the Ancestral Correspondents. Then home.

The statistics: 5,186.2 miles driven through fourteen states. Perfect weather, except for about twenty minutes driving through Indiana, when it rained so hard I couldn't see a hundred feet and The Sole Heir kept giggling about how she quit driving just in time. We saw prairie dogs, gophers, a golden eagle (up close), two bald eagles in flight, grizzly bears and wolves (albeit in a preserve), deer and antelope (just hanging out, not playing), the aforementioned rowdy burros, and well over five hundred buffalo, a couple as close as ten feet away. We saw hot springs and mountains covered with snow in August, which might not mean much to a Sherpa but is unheard of in Maryland. We stayed in three towns with combined populations of less than 2500, and ate a meal in the Two Bit Saloon.

And now we're back. The bills will trickle in, and they'll actually be fun to pay, because every one is a memory. By Monday afternoon I wasn't stiff anymore. Back at work two days now, still mellow, a little confused as to why everyone else thinks some of these things are so important.

Ready to go again.

Some May Little Note Nor Long Remember August 22, But She Will

Wednesday, August 22, 2007 is a day The Sole Heir will not soon forget.

She opened by not just passing her driver’s test on the first try, but getting a license photo she likes. Granted, she photographs well, but she’ll learn as time goes on that the Maryland MVA hires photographers who were fired by the Department of Corrections for taking unflattering mug shots.

Next came another special occasion: her first major league doubleheader. Seeing two games for the price of one is a cherished memory of my adolescence. Twin bills are rare now, unless they clear the yard after Game One so they can resell the seats for Game Two. Seeing two games for the price of one was a new experience for her. She was jazzed.

I had planned to watch at least part of the games so we could compare notes. I turned on the game, saw they were losing 14-3, and went upstairs to read before chancing Game Two.

Five minutes later the phone rang.

SOLE HEIR: Are you watching the game?

ME: I was going to, but I saw it was 14-3, Texas.

SOLE HEIR: Well, it’s 16-3 now. (Uproar drowns out voice. I hear her shouting to her mother, “Was that a grand slam?”) They just hit another grand slam. It’s 20-3.

She called back between games to ask if I could find out whether losing 30-3 was a record. (It was, for the American League. In the National League, where they still play real baseball as God intended for it to be played, the record for runs in a game is 36.)

She drove herself to school the next day on three hours sleep. Not easily daunted, she called me Friday morning to ask about the dinner out I promised her for passing her test.

“Am I limited to the usual list of restaurants?” she said.

“What do you have in mind?” I said, visions of Morton’s or The Palm dancing through my head.

“How about Camden Yards?”

So we went to the game again Friday night. And the Os lost again. She went back today with her mother, as her birthday gift for a friend. They lost all four game she saw this week. That means it will be at least the day after tomorrow before she starts politicking to go to another game. I say this with great confidence, because the Birds are off tomorrow.

That’s my girl.

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, Part II

You know how you can tell you’ve had a great vacation? When you’re paying the bills with a smile on your face because reading the credit card statement reminds you of what you did.

Here’s the gas we bought on the way to the tour of Camden Yards. Dinner at Famous Dave’s. The boat ride on the Potomac. Lunch at the Smithsonian. The liquor store to buy the beer for the cookout. Souvenir shop at the Football Hall of Fame.

My brother has his receipts; so do my parents. Nothing special. No safaris, or hang gliding onto a glacier. No one rappelled into the Grand Canyon, though I suspect my younger niece might be game if someone put it to her in the right way.

It was just three generations of a family, ranging in age from twelve to eighty, who, unlike the great majority of families, genuinely enjoy each others’ company.

We don’t get together as often as we’d like. The Ancestral Correspondents still live in the family estate in western Pennsylvania. The Sibling Correspondent and his family are in Colorado. That’s a lot of ground to cover for a casual visit. It’s not nearly so far as you might think, though; not when everyone involved knows that a phone call would bring any one of us to do whatever was needed. There are families living across the street from each other who can’t say that.

You can’t get any closer.

Damn, that was fun.