Traveling Misanthrope

I do a lot of driving. It always brings out the misanthrope in me.

I go on a lot of recreational drives, like into the mountains of north Georgia or up U.S. 441 toward the Great Smokey Mountains National Park (one of my favorite drives in the world) or on various backroads that seem like they might be interesting. The roads on these drives tend to be twisty and turny and I don't always know them that well, plus I'm trying to enjoy the scenery, and I'm on the lookout for any thing or place worth stopping at to visit or to take a picture of.

So I don't drive especially fast.

Oh, most of the time I'm driving the speed limit, sometimes a tiny bit faster – I may go 50 in a 45 MPH zone, but that's usually as fast as I'm willing to go. But that never seems fast enough for most of the cars that end up behind me. When I'm out there driving, trying to enjoy the scenery while also keeping my eyes both on the road and on the car's mirrors, it seems like all the other cars want me to drive faster than I am, and they sure as heck don't like it when I slow down to look at something that I might find interesting enough to take a picture of. I get passed or tailgated by just about everybody. The only scenery the other drivers care about, it seems, is the trees and mountains whizzing by in a blur as they speed off towards…wherever it is exactly those other drivers are going.

And it makes me hate them, every one of them. Stupid tailgating cars! I drive like I have a sense of self preservation. The other drivers seem to think they're immortal. They drive as though when they're around, all laws, including those of driving, the road, and physics, are suspended. My driving is informed by the knowledge, like Mr. Flood's gentle handling of the whisky jug in that Edwin Arlington Robinson poem, that "most things break." And that includes people who drive like idiots, or who drive too fast on twisty, turny roads they aren't familiar with.

It's pretty much the same on the roads I travel regularly, the roads I am familiar with. Even when I'm just heading to work, I still drive like someone who knows you should exercise caution when piloting a ton of metal down the road -- which is to say, I don't drive fast enough for everyone else.

I don't really know what the people in the cars behind me are thinking. Probably I spend a lot more time thinking about them than they spend thinking about me. There's probably nothing personal when they zip by me at 100 miles an hour. I doubt they really think, "Oh no! It's that Chris Burdett guy who always drives so slow," when they see the hind end of my Hyundai Elantra on the road ahead of them.

I doubt they enjoy passing me.

Do they?

My First Digital Camera

It's been a long time since I was on the vanguard of anything, but I did have one of these things (a digital camera) years before everybody had one in their pocket (in the form of a smartphone, or "pocket computer" as I prefer to call them). I came fairly early to the party of taking pictures digitally and storing them as files and posting them online for the amusement of others.

This is my first digital camera, a Kodak DC210 Plus, which I still have and which still works and which I bought on the same day as – in fact, just a few minutes before – my first date with Anna, more than twenty-three years ago, on August 11, 1999. And here are a couple of the first pictures I took with this camera, one of me in the Nissan Sentra I was driving then, and one a couple hours later of Anna standing in front of the place we met that day (though not in front of the actual restaurant where we ate):

I didn't buy the camera because I was going on a first date, but going to buy the camera – at an Office Depot on Holcomb Bridge Road in Roswell – may have given me a certain confidence that I didn't otherwise have. I had been thinking about getting a digital camera for a while, and had done a little bit of research on what kind to get – though back in 1999, opportunities to easily do "research," at least online, were not what they are today. In any case, having a first date at a Chinese restaurant (Marco Polo; it's not there anymore, and neither is the Office Depot) that was near a store that sold cameras was the impetus I needed to go ahead and make the purchase.

I wanted a digital camera mostly to supplement the up-until-then all-text travelogues that I loved writing and sending out via e-mail when I went on trips; I wanted to post my travelogues online, with photographic evidence. I put the camera to use in that capacity just a few weeks later when I went to the TechLearn conference in Orlando for ExecuTrain – the third year in a row I had gone to that particular conference. I spent all my free time on that trip at Epcot, as I had the year before, and took lots of pictures, some of which I posted to an AOL-hosted page I created. That post is now available on Planet Burdett.

Even though I enjoy looking at the Orlando-trip pictures, I'm very happy that among the first pictures I took with this camera, besides the "selfie" of me in the driver's seat of my Nissan Sentra (though the term "selfie" didn't exist then), is the picture I took of Anna that night after we had dinner. There's even a date stamp on it! (I hadn't yet learned how to turn off that date stamp.)I also used it just a few days after buying it to take pictures at Zoo Atlanta, when Anna and I went on our second date the following Saturday, and also when we went to Savannah and Rock City and Amicalola Falls and lots of other trips Anna and I went on back then, when we were young and hadn't yet become parents (or even gotten married, for many of these trips). I created online travelogues for some of them.

Hey, look: this camera has a whole megapixel! That was a lot of dots back then. It also has a 2x zoom, which also was quite respectable in 1999. It takes four AA batteries, and records its images on a CF (compact flash) card, the SD card having not been invented yet.

A couple of years later, I replaced this camera with another Kodak DC model, which I don't remember and no longer have (I think it might have been a DC3400, but I'm not sure), but which made two megapixel pictures, and then a couple of years after that, when I was ready to get really serious about photography, with an Olympus Camedia E-10 (which had four megapixels, which probably really was just about enough). These days I take the majority of my pictures with my pocket computer, a Google Pixel 5a, but I also have a Canon 60D and a Nikon P7800, both of which I like and use sometimes.

Fly Like an Eagle

Without meaning to, my friend Kevin Eames – sadly now the late Kevin Eames – nearly ruined a couple of good songs for me.

I remembered one of them recently, when J. and I were on our way home from somewhere, listening to a playlist of a bunch of old rock songs on shuffle, and the song randomly picked by MediaMonkey (one of the apps I use) was "Fly Like an Eagle" by the Steve Miller Band. It was the first time I'd heard it in a long time. I'd forgotten how hokey and pseudo-profound – but also embarrassingly sincere and actually kind of meaningful – it is, including as it does the following lines:

Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh, there's a solution

I can't hear this song without thinking about something Kevin said to me at least twenty-five years ago. He told me once that when he was a kid and heard this song, he thought "house the people" was an inquiry into the well-being of "the people" – not "house the people," but "how's the people?", as in (as Kevin said at the time, in a faux-Jersey accent) "How's them people? How they doin'?" (Neither of us said anything, in any accent whatsoever, about how the next line, "Livin' in the street," is a depressing reference to the homeless problem.)

I don't know if what he said was true or not; I don't know if Kevin ever actually misinterpreted the song in this way, or if he was just being silly. But I'll tell you this: Whenever I hear or think about "Fly Like an Eagle," which admittedly is not often, I can't help but hear "how's the people?" in the lyrics.

Kevin told me another time, even before he had nearly ruined "Fly Like an Eagle" for me, that when he was teaching history at a small private Christian school, the school had a Christmas store they called Santa's Secret Workshop, and that one day he heard one of his students sing "Santa's Secret Workshop" to the tune of that great guitar riff that starts off Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" – and that he surprised the student by saying, "Hey, that's Jethro Tull, isn't it?"

And now, whenever I hear Aqualung – again, admittedly not often – I hear a deep voice intoning "Santa's Secret Workshop" in the same melody as Martin Barre's repeated six-note guitar riff at the opening of the song. (And yes, in case you're counting it out on your fingers as I did, "Santa's secret workshop" and "Sitting on a park bench" – the opening line of the song, sung by Ian Anderson to the same melody – do have the same number of syllables.)

I'm sure Kevin's children know that he could be really funny – Kevin told me once that Hilary told him he was "sillier than the other dads," which I have no trouble believing he was. But do they also know, I wonder, that Kevin had friends who prized his sense of humor, were perhaps even changed by it, and who really, really miss it?

I miss Kevin. I'd give anything to hear one of his corny stories again.

Eighteen Years Ago

Eighteen years ago today I taught my first college English class.

It's significant that it was eighteen years ago because in that English 1101 class, virtually all of the students were "traditional" college freshman, in that they were nearly all eighteen years old and just out of high school. So, for them that class was half their lives ago; they were eighteen then – approaching adulthood – and they are 36 now – approaching middle age (with a rapidity that probably sometimes surprises them, if they're experiencing their late 30s like I did.).

For me, however, that English 1101 class in 2004 wasn't even quite a third of my life ago; I was 37 then, and had already spent a decade and a half in the computer training industry before being able to leave that field and move towards what I'd decided I really wanted to do nearly twenty years earlier, teach college-level English.

Next year, in 2023, most of those former students of mine will turn 37, and I will probably post something then about how now the students I had in my first year of teaching are the age I was when I taught them. The student has become the master (or something like that. I wasn't really a "master" when I was their teacher, but I was finally becoming old enough to begin to recognize that fact, which is perhaps the beginning of wisdom.).

Of course, I'll still be older than they are; they may turn 37 next year, but I'll be 56, the age at which…well, an age I've never been before, so I don't know "at which" what. I guess I'll find out. In any case, I'm pretty sure that then I won't be any wiser, despite being nearly two decades older, than they are; probably I never was. They may be approaching the beginning of wisdom, as perhaps I was at their age, but I'm approaching my dotage with a rapidity that sometimes surprises me.

So, anyway…eighteen years ago today I taught my first college English class.

(The picture above was taken eighteen years ago, around the time I started teaching; the picture below, for contrast, is just a couple of months old. I've changed a bit in eighteen years, no?)

The Air Conditioner Is Me

See this dilapidated window-unit air conditioner? Ancient, rusty, falling apart; it looks like it couldn't possibly work, doesn't it?

Well, guess what (I know I'm broadcasting this so obviously you can't possibly miss)? IT WAS RUNNING!

I encountered this air conditioner yesterday afternoon while cutting through an alley in Clayton, GA, on my way back to my car. Since I saw it from the back, I'm not sure what store or office it was cooling, but I'm sure the people inside appreciated the relief from the heat and didn't care how dilapidated the air conditioner was.

As someone who is a little dilapidated, and who sometimes feels ancient and rusty and like I'm falling apart, I'm grateful for the lesson. Whatever it is.

Stay Proud

In just a little more than an hour, Pride Month will end, and I'm sorry to see it go. All the rainbows have been really nice, haven't they?

You know what else is nice? The notion that a person shouldn't be ashamed of being different. And the idea that people should respect each other and be good to each other. And the belief that a person should accept themself for who they are, and not be afraid to be true to themself.

That's nicer than a rainbow.

Becoming a Dad at Forty (or so)

Me, shortly after becoming a parent for the first time, and right around the time I turned 40

Another picture from around the time I turned 40. I'm not sure if I was really asleep in this picture or just pretending.

I was forty when I became a parent for the first time.

Actually, that's not true, that's just what I tell people. I was 39 when my first child was born, though I did turn 40 about ten weeks later. For simplicity, though, I tell people (if it ever comes up, which frankly it hardly ever does) that I didn't become a parent until I was forty – even though the truth is that I was still in my thirties. Just barely, but technically in my thirties nonetheless. Practically still a kid!

There are, of course, a lot of things a person isn't prepared for when they become a parent for the first time, but in my case there was one extra thing I wasn't prepared for, in fact hadn't even thought about: How often I would be mistaken for, just assumed to be, the grandfather rather than the father.

The fact that I was going gray, was in fact mostly gray, by my mid-forties didn't help. By the time my second child came along when I was forty-three, I probably really did look like a grandfather. A young one, true, and devastatingly handsome – er, well, young, anyway – but lots of people become grandparents when they're in their forties. There are plenty of people my age, younger, even, who look like me, and who are grandparents.

But I was not one. And it really bothered me when people just assumed I was.

I can't remember the first time it happened, but I remember once when Elyse, my second child, was about three and I was forty-six, we went to McDonald's for breakfast – Elyse had gotten a McDonald's gift card for Christmas; whoever gave it to her knew that we liked to go there once a week or so and get pancakes and sausage after taking my other child to school.

So this one morning I'm writing about, as Elyse and I sat and ate our breakfast at the McDonald's in Snellville, the one near the Target, there was an older couple at a table near ours – and by "older," I mean older than me; probably in their sixties if not in their seventies; old enough to justify an assumption that they were grandparents – anyway, this older couple was smiling and waving at Elyse and trying to make friends with her, as some people do when they see young children in public.

On our way out I tried to avoid them, but we had to go right by their table to get to the door, and Elyse smiled at them and told them her name (after they asked, of course) and proudly showed them her gift card. The woman looked impressed and said, "Did you take Grampa out for breakfast?"

My heart sank. Elyse was probably confused. (Grampa, or Pa, my father wasn't with us; what was this lady talking about?) I just smiled a smile I didn't really feel, didn't bother to correct them, muttered something about how we loved the pancakes, and got us out of there as quickly as I could. I hope I didn't show it to Elyse, but I was in a funk the rest of the morning.

This was not the first time some version of this had happened; by then it was common enough that I steeled myself for it, knowing it was likely to come.

Why did I dread it so, though? There's no shame in being a grandparent, even if you aren't even fifty yet, and, as I've already said, plenty of people are grandparents before they're fifty. I'm sure if I really had been the grandfather, I would have been proud and pleased to be recognized as such. But since I was not the grandfather, I felt a little insulted that these people might be implying (not on purpose or with any awareness, of course) that I looked too old to be the parent of a toddler. I wasn't obsessed with youth or with looking young or anything; it didn't bother me at all to look like I was in my mid or late forties when I actually was.

But to be someone who was forty-six, and looked it, and was just assumed to be too old to be the father of a young child? That bothered me. And I guess in part that's what I felt like was going on when someone referred to me as Grampa or Granddad or whatever.

But I was proud of my kids – still am – and didn't like it when people didn't realize I was in fact the father of these wonderful children. Now that their ages are in double digits – Elyse is less than a year from being an official teenager, for pity's sake! – people tend to realize I'm the father, which I appreciate. Also, it does give me a bit of added security, and also some pride, when I fill out an official form, at the dentist's office, let's say, and on the "Relationship to Patient" line, I get to write Father.

1995: A Saturday Night at ExecuTrain

Kevin Eames, in his office at ExecuTrain, one Saturday very much like the one described below (except, obviously, this picture was made during the day and not at night). I really miss Kevin.

A corner of my office at ExecuTrain in the middle of the 1990's (and man do I wish I still had that Marx Brothers poster!) 

The lake and the back of the ExecuTrain building

It's dark outside. Sitting at my desk, not actually working, I can't see the lake that my office window overlooks, but I can see my own reflection in the window, and the reflection of my office and all the stuff in it. From my computer's CD player and speakers Ella Fitzgerald sings "Oh, Lady Be Good." [I realize now, more than twenty-five years later, that she was still alive then, though only for a few more months.] I love that album – The Songbooks (a compilation of some of the best songs from Fitzgerald's "Songbooks" recordings for Verve). I borrowed that CD so many times from my friend and coworker Chris Luse that my boss, Karen, gave me my own copy for my birthday. Ella Fitzgerald and jazz are still new to me, and I love this form of music that is so different from what I grew up listening to.

It's Saturday night and I am at work in my office at ExecuTrain in Alpharetta, Georgia. I'm twenty-eight years old. During a lot of weekday afternoons, when I otherwise would be at work, I go out looking for a house to buy, my first house, which I will borrow from my 401(k) to purchase. [The house I ultimately picked was that blue two-story in Lawrenceville, the one I lived in when I first met Anna, and in which we lived for the first three years of our marriage.] The arrangement I have with Karen is that I can leave work early in the afternoon to go house-hunting with my real-estate agent, Evelyn, provided that I still get all my work done and meet my deadlines. That is why, despite being in what is typically a Monday through Friday job, I am at work on a Saturday night.

My friend Kevin is here, too, working in his own office a few doors down from mine. He has an arrangement like mine with his boss, Jason, except instead of looking for a house – he and his wife Lisa already have a house – he is working on his Ph.D. at Georgia State. [I didn't know this at the time, of course, but a little less than a year later Kevin would have a heart attack, from which he recovered fully, but which was the first manifestation, as far as I know, of the years-long struggle with heart problems that would ultimately end his life, twenty-three years later.] I wish I could spend the whole evening hanging out in Kevin's office and talking about the things we like to talk about -- books, music, Rocky & Bullwinkle, and sometimes even work -- but we both have a lot to do.

So we are in our offices working. Right now, in this moment [and from the present I am writing in, as opposed to the present I am writing about, "this moment" is actually a quarter of a century ago], before any of what I know will happen to us happens, Kevin and I are both young – I have yet to turn thirty; Kevin is still five years away from forty – and healthy, and we have years of living before us. We have a lot to do; we are at work on a Saturday night; it is dark outside, and we cannot see the lake that's just outside our office windows.

"Try to Keep the Ball Low..."

There is quite a bit of wisdom to be gleaned from this exchange between Charlie Brown and Lucy (from March 19, 1969), but I don't think the real takeaway here is "try to keep the ball low." (I think it's something about how often the better choice is to just shrug and say, "It's a mystery to me, too," because, really, the Lucy Van Pelts of the world don't want to hear your answers.)

Books I Have Lost

Not everyone who loves to read values books as physical objects; plenty of people love reading but don't need, or even want, to be surrounded by bookcases filled with books.

But I do. I value books as physical objects, and I want, maybe even need, to be surrounded by bookcases filled with books. It makes me happy.

And it really bothers me when I lose a book. Three years ago when we moved into our current house, I had boxes and boxes of books to move and unpack, and at some point--several months, actually--after I was done, I realized there were some books I couldn't find. It's possible I got rid of those books in a fit of downsizing, but I doubt it--the books in question I don’t think I would ever have wanted to get rid of, and one of them, Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, is a book I did get rid of once, and then bought another copy of some months later when I found that I wanted it back. I'm afraid that somehow amidst all the hubbub of our move I lost or misplaced a whole box. (And what else may have been in that box that I haven't missed yet?)

Whenever I get rid of books I regret it. Oh, I don't miss every single book I've ever gotten rid of, but I'm never sure which books I'll miss and want back. About twenty-five years ago I read The Magus by John Fowles; it was brilliant and compelling, but also long and challenging, so at some point I got rid of it. I wish I hadn't. I doubt I'd re-read the whole thing again--though I might--but it would mean something to me to have it on my shelves. I also used to have a great hardback Modern Library edition of Emerson's essays, but I got rid of it because Emerson's work has long been in the public domain and is readily available online if I want to read it on my tablet, and the book was taking up valuable shelf space...

The next time I get the idea to purge some of my books, I'm going to box them up and put them in the attic instead of getting rid of them. That will make it easier to get them back three months later when I decide I do want them after all, and will give me the pleasure of going through the box and finding some things I'd forgotten about.

Nostalgic and Pensive

One unexpected way in which getting well into middle age has affected me is that when I learn that some artifact of my youth--a person, a building, a store; nearly anything--is no longer here with us, even when it's someone or something that wasn't that important to me when I was growing up, I find myself unaccountably nostalgic and pensive.

I grew wistful a few years ago when I found out that Doug Henning had been dead for more than a decade, though I hadn't been especially attached to Henning in my youth (other than, I will admit, a certain amount of hair envy, but that's a whole other story). Though this fact shouldn't really have moved me at all, I felt sadness and disappointment when I learned that, many years ago, Shields and Yarnell had gotten divorced. It's more understandable that one day eight or ten years ago, when I drove by the site of the Ingleside Presbyterian Church building I went to every Sunday when I was growing up and saw that it had been razed, I was very saddened indeed. Should it make me melancholy when I realize that I'll never again shop at Treasure Island or Richway, or never again eat at the Wendy's Superbar? Probably not...but sometimes it does. These are all people and places that I don't think about every day, but when I do remember any one of them, I get sentimental and stop whatever I'm doing to stare off into space for a while.

It's silly, I know. The world we live in today is filled with wonderful people and buildings and stores that contribute to the richness of our lives, even if they weren't around when I was eight or ten or twelve. There's nothing magical about someone, or something, having been on TV, or on Lawrenceville Highway, in the 1970s when I was a kid.

But yesterday both Helen Reddy and Mac Davis died. I haven't thought much about either of them in years, but I'm sorry they're gone.

On Grits and Grannies

Every morning I wake Elyse up at 6:55 and say, "It's time to get up, Honey." She mumbles and turns over to face the wall, and I ask, "Do you want me to make you some grits?" She says "Uh-huh" into her pillow, and I ask, "Do you want to stay in bed until they're ready?" Of course she says yes.

So I shuffle off to the kitchen to make her some grits.

I'm quite happy using instant grits, Quaker Instant Grits with Butter Flavor, to be exact. I do wonder how a grits purist would feel—and I'm pretty confident there are grits purists; I'm sure a quick Google search would return many very opinionated grits Web sites—when I recall that scene in My Cousin Vinny when the witness on the stand asserts that "no self-respecting Southerner uses instant grits." Well, maybe I'm not a self-respecting Southerner. In many ways I'm only southern at all by an accident of geography: I love but can't personally relate to the works of true Southern writers like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner and Eudora Welty. In fact, if I were able to go back in time and have a conversation with any of them, it's possible I wouldn't even be able to understand them through their thick Southern accents.

But about those grits....

When I was little, starting (I believe) when I was five years old and my family was freshly returned from our brief life in Maryland, and lasting at least until I was eight—this I can say for sure, and I'll tell you why in a minute—I would often be left for a morning or a day with my grandmother at her little brick house in Tucker. I suppose my mother needed the time to go to work at a part-time job, or run errands, or maybe do some shopping; I don't know that it ever occurred to me to wonder where Mom was going when she dropped me off at Granny's. In any case, I remember those times with Granny with a great fondness, as something I very much looked forward to. Whether that is exactly what I felt at the time I really can't be sure, but I can tell you that now I miss them terribly; I would give nearly anything to be a kid again on my way to Granny's, where we would read stories, color in coloring books, and, when I got a bit older, sit and watch "Wheel of Fortune" with its original host, Chuck Woolery, on that small rabbit-ear-antennaed color TV that sat on the rolling cart in her living room. (And that is how I know that these times with Granny went on at least until I was eight: in 1974, when I was seven, we couldn't have watched "Wheel of Fortune," for it didn't begin its lengthy run until a year later.)

One of the details I've been remembering the most lately, the thing that makes me wistful as I prepare my breakfast these days, is seeing Granny make grits for me on those mornings more than four decades ago. I was much more interested in eating than in cooking, so I didn't pay close attention to what she did, but I know it involved bowls and pots and measuring cups and water from the tap and grits from a bag she kept under the counter—she probably used quick grits, for I don't think instant grits existed yet, and even if they did, I want to believe that my grandmother wouldn't give in to them, as I have. Finally, when the fixings were all prepared, she would ask me, "Soupy or not?" Some days I would want them soupy: plenty of water for very thin, easily slurped grits. Some days, not: only the proscribed amount of water, or perhaps even a bit less, for thicker, more substantial grits.

So when I fix a bowl of grits for Elyse every morning, I am temporarily taken back to the early seventies, to that small kitchen in that little brick house in the suburbs of Atlanta. It's one way to keep my grandmother alive and with me, and to keep alive within me the memories of people and places who were once so important to me. And in a very real way, it keeps me alive within me; the me that once was, many years ago, and in most important ways is still here. Someday when this story will mean something to Jessica and Elyse, I hope a little of my grandmother—their great-grandmother—may live within them too, and perhaps a bit more of their father than is already there. Someday I hope it will resonate with Elyse if I ask her if she wants her grits soupy or not. (If I asked her that question now, I'm pretty sure she would just wrinkle her nose and say, "Make them like you always make them." Which, by the way, is a little bit soupy; I use five ounces of water for one bowl rather than the four ounces the directions on the box call for.)

The thing about getting older, if you're me, anyway, is that you can look back and see how wonderful, how nearly perfect, many of the pieces of your past have been. But you also realize that you slogged through these near-perfect times largely blind to how truly wonderful they were. Back then, I took it all for granted, as children—as we all—are wont to do. I was clueless. I still am.

I'm not the first person to say this—it is, in fact, something of a cliché—but it helps you understand the importance of appreciating every moment, of realizing how lucky you really are, of trying your hardest to take nothing for granted. The importance of really taking the time to enjoy a good bowl of grits. It's such a simple thing, and yet, as you can see, it's really not.

I'm glad I get to prepare grits for my daughter for breakfast. I'm sorry I didn't realize what a precious thing it was, all those years ago, to have a granny who would make them for me, just the way I wanted them—soupy, or not.

(NB: I started this several months ago—actually, in a different form, several years ago—but am just now getting around the finishing and publishing it. Everything I've written here is still true, except that lately Elyse hasn't been eating grits as often; now she's more given to requesting Pop Tarts or Honeynut Cheerios. Maybe I'll write an essay about my lengthy history with Pop Tarts and breakfast cereals some day.)

These Are a Few of My Favorite Things

In Mr. Putter and Tabby Write the Book, one of my favorites of Cynthia Rylant's Mr. Putter and Tabby books, Mr. Putter sets out to write a mystery novel (The Mystery of Lighthouse Cove he intends to call it, and the title is as far as he gets), but instead, after a series of distractions and procrastinations, he writes a book called Good Things which lists, as the title suggest, things that are good. His ever-supportive friend and neighbor Mrs. Teaberry tells him not to worry, because, as she says, the world is full of mystery writers, but writers of good things are few and far between.

Inspired by Mr. Putter's literary efforts, and Elyse's recent (but now waning) fascination with the song "My Favorite Things" from The Sound of Music, I am going to write an annotated list of the Good Things in my life, the things that make me happy (a few of them, anyway). Here they are, in no particular order but the order in which they occur to me:

Napping and Reading

Probably my favorite thing to do lately is to settle down in the reading chair downstairs with a cup of coffee on the end table and a book of short stories, and to read a short story, drink the coffee, and, when the need strikes, put a bookmark in the book, lay all the way back in the recliner, and take a nap.

I try to steal a glance at the clock just before I nod off so I'll know how long I slept; it usually ends up being twenty to thirty minutes, but is occasionally as long as forty-five minutes. (Once I slept a whole hour, but that's pretty rare.) (Also, if I do need to be awake by a certain time, like during the school year when I need to be sure to open the garage door before Elyse's bus comes so she can get in, I set a timer, but I try to start reading early enough so that that won't interfere with my nap.)

Reading and Napping

Reading short stories is one of my favorite things to do, and combining a good short story with a cup of coffee and a nap (as described above) is heavenly. For a long time my favorite short-story writer was the late Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, but I recently finished his The Collected Stories (which is not the same thing as "complete stories," for there are over a hundred of his stories not included in this collection) and I don't have anything else by Singer to read. I've also been reading Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, John Cheever, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Grace Paley, among others. I don't read nearly as much science fiction, fantasy, or mystery as I used to; I seem to have lost most of my old interest in genre fiction. Maybe I'll come back to it one day.

Roaming Around Stone Mountain

Another favorite thing is when we all (me, Anna, Jessica, and Elyse) go to Stone Mountain Park. I especially love it when we take the Summit Skyride up to the top of the mountain (someday I hope to be in good enough shape to walk all the way to the top, but I'm not there now) and walk around, enjoying the wind and the view of Atlanta in the distance.

I also love going to what they now call the Historic Square (formerly the Antebellum Plantation) with Jessica to explore the old houses and take pictures, and riding the train and/or playing miniature golf with Elyse.

Years ago, before we had kids, Anna and I used to go to Stone Mountain to spend a Saturday or Sunday afternoon on the lawn in front of Memorial Hall, mostly reading. Before I met Anna, I used to go there by myself to read on the lawn. Often I would walk up to the top first, back when I was young enough and in good enough shape to make it, and then change clothes and spend a whole afternoon reading on the lawn—I read all What Hearts by Bruce Brooks there one afternoon—and sometimes even writing, on a little Hewlett Packard palmtop computer I used to have.

Watching a Movie and Eating Pizza

I'm also at my most happy when we stay home on a Friday or Saturday night to watch a movie and eat pizza. It's pretty challenging these days to find a movie we all agree on; sometimes we watch what we call a "cooking show" ("Best Baker in America," "Cupcake Wars," "Kids Baking Championship," etc.) or, when there's something available that we haven't seen already, a family-friendly scripted show, like episodes of a new season of "Just Add Magic" on Amazon Prime or "A Series of Unfortunate Events" on Netflix (though I believe both shows are now concluded). Lately we've been watching "The Worst Witch" on Netflix.

We don't always watch TV, but when we do—no, wait, we do always watch TV. Or at least it seems that way sometimes. But a good TV show—or movie, when we can all agree on one, or when Anna and I decide to watch something (Condorman most recently) whether the girls stay with us or not—makes me happy.

Working on a Puzzle and Listening to Podcasts with Annie

Okay, we don't literally always watch TV. In fact, Anna and I don't watch that much television on our own; when we're awake enough to do something after the girls have gone to bed (rather a rarity lately, frankly; we're usually both exhausted by then) we go downstairs and work on a jigsaw puzzle and listen to podcasts. For a long time we listened to "Radiolab" or "The TED Radio Hour," but lately we've been listening to "Planet Money." We've probably done fifteen or twenty puzzles in the past five years, many of them prominently featuring cats (not a surprise) and/or small-town general stores.

* * *

This is hardly an exhaustive list; there are plenty of other times when I'm happy (when we go to Rock City or the zoo; when there's ice cream in the freezer; payday and the following two or three days, until the money's all gone), but this is a pretty good introduction to the kinds of things that I believe make life worth living.

STAR WARS and "Star Trek" and Jessica and Me

For the last couple of days, Anna and Elyse have been camping at Stone Mountain. While they were gone, Jessica and I watched Star Wars (the real Star Wars, the one that came out in 1977 and blew me away when I saw it at the age of ten, which needs no colon and subtitle or episode number) and four episodes of "Star Trek" (the real "Star Trek," the show that came on the air before I was even born and which I really loved when I was in fifth grade, not long after I first saw Star Wars).

It was quite a triumph to get Jessica to watch them with me. She's been resisting Star Wars for years, though I knew, and assured her, that she would be captivated by it. She liked "Star Trek, " too, though the first episode, "The Man Trap," has that scary salt vampire creature that kind of freaked her out. I warned her, but she wanted to start at the beginning, so we did, scary salt vampire monster or not. That was last night; we watched three more episodes this morning. None of them had scary monsters, but the creepy kid in "Charlie X" has a pretty scary look sometimes.

I had forgotten just how much I was into "Star Trek" back when I was Jessica's age (or actually about a year younger). I had a worn copy of The Star Fleet Technical Manual, which I think I got—possibly stole—from someone at school, and which I used to pore over for hours at a time. I had a copy of David Gerrold's great The World of Star Trek, which I read in pieces (that is, not all at once, from front to back) over the course of a year or so, mostly concentrating on the episode guide which (if I remember correctly) was at the end, and the color pictures, which I believe were in the middle. I'd love to have that specific copy again; I do have the book, a trade-size paperback that came out in the mid-eighties, but the actual copy that I had in fifth grade, which was printed back when the original three-season series was all there was of "Star Trek," is lost to me; I think I loaned it to my friend Skipper and never got it back. I also had several copies of Alan Dean Foster's novelizations of the "Star Trek" cartoon series, but I don't think I actually ever read any of them.

I also started my own science fiction novel, which was a blatant rip-off of "Star Trek" except that I envisioned my ship's captain as looking like Lou Ferrigno, the body-builder actor who played the Incredible Hulk in the popular TV show of the time. Thankfully I never got past the first chapter of that novel.

I loved, and still love, not just the premise and story lines of "Star Trek," but the look of it: the Enterprise, the uniforms, all the reds and blues; the whistles and beeps of the ship's computer, the swish of the doors as they slid open; the style of the captain's chair, which I really wanted in our living room in Lilburn; the phasers and communicators and tricorders; every inside set that looked convincingly like a real starship bridge or sick bay or transporter room, but also like a TV studio set; every outdoor set that looked a little bit like a planet a landing party might be beamed down to, a lot like the planet the landing party was beamed down to last week, and even more like a studio set with props painted to look like boulders and sky and alien ruins.

I hope Jessica wants to watch some more "Star Trek." I do love it.

Nostalgia and T.V. and Me and Jessica

Not everyone is affected by middle age the same way, so I don't know if this is a common experience or not, but one of the things middle age has done to me is to make me pine for things that weren't all that good the first time around.

Earlier tonight I was searching for one thing on the Internet, and, as happens so often and so easily, I got distracted by any number of other things. In the process, I came across a mention on some random guy's blog of the great -- er, "great" may be a bit generous; let's say the factually once existing Vic Tayback. Many years ago, Tayback played the cook and owner of Mel's Diner in the great -- er, again, too generous; in the late-1970's sitcom "Alice."

And, seeing that, I was overcome with a wistful longing to see "Alice" again.

It wasn't that great a show, really; definitely not one that I made sure to always see when it was on back then, and not one that I watched regularly in syndication on Nick at Nite or TV Land; in fact, I probably haven't seen "Alice" in close to forty years. But I did enjoy it when I saw it, which was at least somewhat regularly between 1978 and 1980 or so. If you were around back then, you probably remember the show's breakout star, Polly Holliday, who played waitress Flo on the series, famous for her exasperated cry of "Kiss my grits!" when Mel would get on her last nerve. You may also remember, if your head is as full of as much ancient pop-culture trivia as mine is, that Dave Madden played one of the regular customers at the diner; Madden is perhaps most famous as manager (and Danny's foil) Reuben Kincaid on "The Partridge Family" -- another show I would love to see again, despite its mediocrity.

But what I really want, of course, is not so much to see "Alice" or "The Partridge Family" again -- I feel a similar nostalgia for "The Brady Bunch," and have it in my Hulu watchlist, but I've only actually watched one episode -- as it is to be eight or ten or twelve again, in my childhood home in Lilburn, in the living room (or the den; for a time we had a TV set there, and for some reason I remember watching "Alice" there more than in the living room) with my family, watching...well, whatever happened to be on would do, actually. To be young again, my whole life before me, my parents a full decade and a half younger than I am as I type this, my only real responsibility getting through sixth grade with grades good enough to get me promoted to seventh, my grandmother still alive, my extended family still close enough that I see my cousins every couple of weeks and my cousin Scott, then my best friend, at least once a week, my vague dream of someday being a novelist not yet fully formed, and certainly not dead, as it sometimes feels now.

Without meaning to, I have infected Jessica with a similar nostalgia, though in her case I guess it can't truly be called "nostalgia," since she was not with me forty or more years ago when I originally watched the TV shows she now watches on DVD or streaming from Hulu or Boomerang: "Gilligan's Island," "The Monkees," "The Flintstones," "The Munsters," "The Addams Family"; none of them great shows (though it pains me to admit that "Gilligan's Island" and "The Monkees" are not exceptional TV shows, for I do love them so), but all of them fun and funny and entertaining and basically harmless. I do feel a little guilty sometimes that, in encouraging her fondness for these shows, I am giving her attachments that are totally foreign to just about everyone else her age: when Peter Tork passed away recently at the age of 77, I saw several remembrances of him and the Monkees from my peers on social media, but I'm pretty sure none of Jessica's peers had any idea who Peter Tork was, or that he had even existed.

I don't know if the longing for mediocre elements from your past (even for things you didn't like; sometimes I listen with great enjoyment to songs that I hated when they were first out) is common or not, but I am pretty sure it's a common desire to want to recreate some of your own youth for your children. Jessica, if you read this years from now, perhaps even when you are near my current age, I'm sorry I've done this to you, but I'm really, really glad you like "The Monkees."