2015 Christmas Letter

ECF

Please give me break. I know that I have neglected the Christmas letter the past few seasons. But here is the deal: I have been hunting elk instead. You see, for the past 60 years, my dad and his cronies trek to some remote corner of eastern Oregon during hunting season. They have been at this a while and their camp is epic. No comfort is spared: Enormous canvas tents are erected; wood stoves are leveled and lit; generators power lights, microwaves, and laptops; days are spent falling trees and making wood; and a lovely open air shit box is strategically placed in a nearby clearing (This is exactly what it sounds like and is a recent upgrade. Up until 1995 they would just randomly designate a downed tree nearby the compound and designate it the “shit log”).

So I have found myself out there the last few seasons and the general take-away is this, Elk Hunting is a misnomer. The practice should be referred to, simply, as Farting. As a well-adjusted adult person, a husband, father, and regular voter, I have no choice but to comment on the pervasive farting.  When at camp, these men have no boundaries and no shame. Furthermore, Elk Camp Farting is an entire magnitude of order more obscene than what takes place in the regular world. If farting were accounted for like temperature, ECF would be measured on the Kelvin scale.

Here are some highlights:

• A group of men stood talking about important recent world events. Many had differing points of view but the men were respectful to one another. As one was making a heartfelt but somewhat lengthy point about his disappointment with the current President of the United States, he let one go. It was really long. Maybe 15 seconds or more. Lots of tonal quality and a crisp finish. Throughout this gastric feat, he never broke from his monologue or showed any non-verbal cue of what was taking place south of the border. To my further astonishment, no one in the group batted an eye or made comment. It was like it did not happen. 
• Breakfast usually happens around 4:00 a.m. (which is delightful). When the food is blackened enough to serve, whoever is cooking goes around the table and scrapes a portion of the meat, eggs, and potatoes onto everybody’s plate. Then this happens: While serving food, the cook’s backside was positioned next to the guy he had just served. It was loud and extremely vulgar. His face was just inches away from the source. Hair was blown back. And yet he just sat quietly, chomping away in silence. Then somebody said, “Pass the fucking butter.”

These are stalwart men and have provided me with treasured memories.

We are down one at The Kingman now since Nina went off to college. Ann Marie and I never see Pete anymore; he might be invisible for all we know. But we continually find enough evidence that he is still nearby and surviving: Balled up socks in the couch, empty milk jugs in the sink, data alerts from Verizon. It is like having the place to ourselves.

Merry Christmas have a great New Year.

2011 Christmas Letter

Occupy Kingman


The poorly executed protest ended ugly. Ann Marie insists that use of pepper spray was not necessary. And though I agree that the use of this agent was cruel and inhumane, it totally worked.

Inklings of the uprising started in October as Nina and Peter began to organize. Lists of grievances were compiled and shared electronically. Ideas were fermenting. By November a plan was hatched and the Occupy Kingman was in full swing as Thanksgiving rolled around. The children had set up a squatter camp in the basement. The protest was on.

At first, we were proud to see the kids expressing themselves and engaging in social activism. It appeared to be a decent and thoughtful exercise of democracy in our own home. We considered the whole deal a wholesome and educational family experience. The protest signs and marches were modest and cute. After all, it was just the two of them. We thought it would end by Monday.

But it did not end and quickly became an annoyance. Security became an issue, the children were continually looting the pantry. In-fighting began, the camp became split as the kids could not agree on what the movement meant. Peter camo-painted his face and demanded to be called Enforcer. Nina stopped washing or combing her hair and would pace around the camp reciting passages from the Constitution. We found that it is impossible to sleep with a drum circle in your bedroom. The makeshift sewer they hastily constructed in the garden and the open fire in the living room also had us concerned.

The messages coming from the Occupy Kingman camp were increasingly disturbing:

“We are entitled to every handheld electronic device and gaming system we desire… I will be unable to move from the couch without at least one hour prior notice… As part of my Basic Human Liberties I refuse to ingest store brand cereal…. As parents, agree that it is your fault if I fail to study or am late to school… No, I do not need a coat. Never ask me again. Ever… You must heat the house to a comfortable level.”

I could sort of see their point on the furnace issue.

Not surprisingly the Occupy Kingman movement eventually became violent. Despite what Ann Marie says I still insist that they initiated the aggression. And because I have chosen to take the high road in this matter, I refuse to list the countless acts of heinousness that were directed towards me, the trips to the emergency room, the bruises— the tears. It is enough to say that the time had come to end this thing. I pulled on my jack boots, raised my riot shield and went at the kids with the pepper spray.

Things are great here.

2010 Christmas Letter

The end is near

2010 is coming to a close with a disturbing turn of events at The Kingman. The kids can pretty much swap clothes with Ann Marie and I now. Nina regularly raids her mom’s closet and Ann Marie doesn’t hesitate to grab Nina’s hoodies when I refuse to turn on the furnace.  Likewise, Peter will head off to basketball wearing my gym shorts and fleece pullover. I can never wear those clothes again because he sweats a lot and it would not be right for me ever to wear them again. Still, I take a smug pride in being the only one around here that stomps around in size 15 boots (although this, too, is just a matter of time; Nina is only in 8th grade).

Beckerhead

I took a book along, just for times like this, and found a empty couch in the TV lounge near the cafeteria. Empty and quiet, there must have been 25 similar couches scattered around the room. Some had burnt orange cushions, others powder blue. It was going to be a long day at the nearby community college during the First Lego League regional qualifying event. As a quasi-chaperone I had no real responsibility or usefulness. I took a seat reclined and dipped into my novel. Within seconds some guy comes in, I don’t look up, but I can hear him talking to himself, like he is deciding where to sit and wants me to acknowledge him. I don’t. Sure enough he sits on the other side of my couch. My Couch. I could smell him.
“Reading a book, huh?” he says. Clearly this guy has powers of observation beyond that of us mere mortals. I look up, not to smile, but rather to just to look pissed and mean. Ann Marie says I have a gift.“Great idea,” more from him now. “Yeah, I just love to read, been readin’ my whole life. Whatcha readin’ there?”

Another mean look. This time I try to muster a true evil glare and turn my pissed off vibe up to eleven. But when I look up, he is bent over the front of the couch with his face next to my knee attempting to get a peek at the cover of my book.
“Oh, Hemingways. I love that guy.” He then produces a Glen Beck book from kids backpack and smiles at the cover.

“Lemme tell ya,” he says. “This fella… this Glen Beck. Whoa!” Then he goes on to evangelize about how Glen Beck is the single true voice of the nation and how he reads all his books and even drove all the way to Washington DC just to hear the dipshit give a speech. I never looked at him once, never stopped pretending to read Hemingways. Finally he shuts up about Glen Beck, talks to himself about the weather for a while then says, “Nice talking to ya!” and leaves the room.

2009 Christmas Letter

Fifth graders are a tough crowd.

Behind the smiling, rosy demeanor affected by every fifth grade teacher I have ever known lurks a neurotic individual hanging on by the skin of their teeth. Stuck in a room full of insatiable 11 year-olds for 25 hours a week, they walk a tight rope between fear and love that is both noble and frightening. Charged with bringing these creatures into adolescence gently and efficiently, they must realize one slip of the tongue will damage these youngsters for life.

So it was in my fifth grade year at St. Francis of Assisi Elementary. It was Christmas; Sister Bernice Marie was explaining the story of how Mary and Joseph were traveling to Bethlehem for the census called upon by the Roman Emperor Augustus. Although it was fairly well known among the class how the story ended, we wanted details, no matter how tangential. What’s the big deal with the census? Why didn’t Joseph have his own mule? What color was the mule?

Kindly, Sister obliged our whims. In fact, in order to avoid further questions, she eventually began to embellish her story with rich details relevant to our own lives. By the time the very pregnant, very uncomfortable Mary got to the stable it was clear to all present that Jesus was going to be born in Lyle Meeuwsen’s loafing shed (seven years later our senior class would build our homecoming float in Lyle’s barn. It became a much less sacred place when I was gluing crepe paper to a giant sombrero while standing ankle deep in manure).

But when Sister got down to the nitty gritty, she was oddly vague: Mary and Joseph were in the stable; Joseph went out to collect wood for fire (Mary had complained that the barn was drafty); when he returned to the stable, presto! Jesus was swaddled in the manger. Apparently, the lesson in biology was sort of an added bonus. In the time it takes to gather an arm load of sticks, a woman can go into labor, fully dilate, and deliver. Granted, the Holy Land is a fairly arid region, wood is scarce, and Bethlehem was no doubt a zoo with the census and everything. We had just one question: How did Mary barricade the manger to prevent the livestock from getting to Baby Jesus?

We all bought it. The labor/fire wood timeline was never brought into question. It wasn’t until the birth of my own children that I really began to question the whole “go get some kindling while l have a baby” scenario. Even 2,000 years ago I doubt that men got off that easily.

Still, it is now impossible for me to look at a Nativity scene without imagining a plywood cut-out of Joseph, stumbling around in the dark behind Lyle Meeuwsen’s barn, cursing the inn-keeper and picking up brush. Minutes later, he clumsily enters the stable: “Hey Mary, I found some dry gopher wood over by the silo… Jesus Christ!”

------ 2009 Bonus -----

As a father he was prone to favor pushing forward rather than clinging to the past. It was his nature to disparage stopping to document, record, and authenticate an experience when another, brighter moment lingered in the near future. His guilt was eased by the habit of his thoughtful wife to save and pack away the artifacts of his children’s recent history. He appreciated that she took the time and care to file away the earliest scribbles and most current social studies projects. Handling these tangible items is like collapsing time itself.

So it was a bit surprising to find Joe on a warm autumn night making his way down the dark hallway, after his wife and kids had since gone to bed, holding in his cupped palm the recently self-extracted lateral incisor formerly belonging to his 10-year-old son. It was the last of the baby teeth from any of his kids; Peter had given it up in hopeful exchange for a handful of quarters. At the end of hall Joe opened a glass front display cabinet and found the tooth jar, a repurposed container that once held candy sprinkles used on a birthday cake. The little tooth, tiny relative to the current size of his kids, gently floated through the stale water and settled with a click onto the pile of teeth at the vessel’s bottom.

The father held the bottle up to the dim light in the hall and shook it, the teeth slipped around, stirring up not-so-distant memories along with bits of gum tissue in equal measure.

For now, the tooth jar is back in the cabinet at the end of the hall. As he makes his way to his bedroom each night, past the doors to his children’s rooms, Joe sometimes glances at the cabinet and is content in knowing that when his kids are long gone, traipsing across the country, busy with their own grown-up lives that he still has his little bottle of little teeth. He will always have their teeth.

2008 Christmas Letter

Everyone is familiar with the feeling of leaning back in your chair to the tipping point and momentarily reacting to the weightlessness of the impending freefall before you catch yourself and get steady again. It is similar to hitting an icy patch on the highway. Everything converts to slow time, the guard rail just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the fact you have no control is only transcended by your disgust for getting into this situation in the first place. You know that something really bad is about to happen; something that is out of your immediate sphere of influence. Yet you started the process, you put into motion the string of events that is pointing toward potential doom. And so it goes that Ann Marie and I pulled the lever on our own demonic Rube Goldberg device this summer.

Lacking better judgment and for having nothing better to do, we kicked off a major remodel of The Kingman. Oh, The Kingman, our Kingman: How we despise you yet are captivated by your magical spell. Like a moth to an open flame, we cannot resist your allure. It was an afternoon in July, the brightest day of the brightest month of the brightest Iowa summer. We were smiling and giddy as we handed over a fat check to our new contractor, who quickly sped away in his pick-up, 2x4s dangling off the tailgate, promising to see us Monday with The Guys. There was demolition in our future. Walls had to come down, we have to get the roof off this thing, get the concrete poured.

Flash forward to a cold snowy Iowa morning in November. The weatherman has upgraded the forecast to include ice and sleet. I can’t move my hands after a previous night’s work ripping soffits out of the kitchen. The digits not covered in coagulated blood are swollen up like kielbasa. I have ingested at least one roll of dusty ceiling insulation and am having trouble breathing. If I could muster a breath, I could certainly see it; our furnace is still getting hooked-up so it’s cold. The HVAC guy is waiting for me to summon the courage to go back into the crawlspace and attach this thing to this other thing. I am not fond of what is under the house. Last time I saw some kind of marmot.

A thin sheet of clear plastic stapled around the perimeter of the addition serves as walls, windows and a front door. Six mil sheeting doesn’t carry a lot of R-value, walls would be better. The kids share a room now. Each night we wedge them between two space heaters, wrap them in quilts and shut their door. Safety standards around here have ebbed a bit. For them to get to the only functioning bathroom in The Kingman they have to navigate a patchwork of holes in the old floor, assorted power tools, cords, and various unidentifiable substances which constantly appear on the floor and walls.

There really is no kitchen now, just a general area where we stand and spoon peanut butter straight from the jar. My family and I pace around the general kitchen area each morning in our heavy coats looking at what the previous day’s construction has wrought. It is a solemn time. We nod a lot. Grunt and gesticulate with our peanut butter spoons, admiring the devastation, imaging doors, cabinets, windows.

Two weeks. Our contractor tells us, “Two weeks.” Ann Marie is tolerant. Ann Marie is tolerant.

So we put this horror into action. We asked for it. Eyes wide open. It’s a process: One day at a time. We started this thing and we will finish it. We hope to be done in time for Nina’s high school graduation.

Now 2009 is bearing down on us fast: We have walls with paint; carpet and cabinets; windows and an indoor toilet; and a furnace that that does a more than adequate job of blowing drywall dust and construction debris into every corner of the house. We still have a Dumpster parked in the front yard, our driveway is littered with lumber and covered in a blanket of snow and ice and the front door is somewhere in Altoona. But it is beautiful (sorta) and we are truly thankful. Peace to you.