Jeff was born June 14th 1992. He'd have been 19 today. Have I said that he loved to swim? We would go to the local Y and he would find something heavy, toss it into the deep end of the pool dive in, swim to the bottom and collect it, climb out of the pool and repeat - until exhaustion set in or the staff kicked us out. In this picture (not at the Y pool) Jeff probably is five or six. I miss him. Happy Birthday Jeff.
Yesterday, my oldest son Doug played in the last home game of his lacrosse career at Nazareth. NAZ lost badly, but the sun shown. And today he called to tell me that his adviser told him he did an "outstanding" job on the Senior Research Project for his Biology Major. It doesn't get better than that.
My middle son Jeffrey died four years ago today. This is him holding his baby brother August the prior fall. Among the numerous cruelties of Jeff's death is that August (now 5) will never have the chance to get to know him.
"I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly.Douglas is, in the eyes of his father, indeed one in a million. But that phrase takes on an unhappily ironic cast in the age of bi-partisan political delusion. If it sometimes sounds like my criticisms of Obama and his failure to stand up to the right are personal that is because they are.
And earlier this week, the White House budget director declared: “There is an agreement that we should be reducing spending,” suggesting that his only quarrel with Republicans is over whether we should be cutting taxes, too. No wonder, then, that according to a new Pew Research Center poll, a majority of Americans see “not much difference” between Mr. Obama’s approach to the deficit and that of Republicans.
So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director. As he noted, young Americans who graduated during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered permanent damage to their earnings. And if the average duration of unemployment is any indication, it’s even harder for new graduates to find decent jobs now than it was in 1982 or 1983.
So the next time you hear some Republican declaring that he’s concerned about deficits because he cares about his children — or, for that matter, the next time you hear Mr. Obama talk about winning the future — you should remember that the clear and present danger to the prospects of young Americans isn’t the deficit. It’s the absence of jobs.
But . . . these days Washington doesn’t seem to care about any of that. And you have to wonder what it will take to get politicians caring again about America’s forgotten millions."
My son August is 5 years old today. This is another of the pictures his brother Douglas took of him when he was visiting last summer. Happy Birthday My Sweet Boy! I miss you.* And don't forget - Papa loves August . . .
I have posted here several times on William Kentridge and his work. Tomorrow night my visit with August will be over and I will be driving up I-5 from Ashland to Portland when this film is aired. So I will miss it, however not nearly as much as I will miss August. Pretty obvious, I hope. But spending time with my boy like I have this week convinces me that while the title of the film may not be literally true, it pushes us in the right direction - in politics, in art, and in life. That is something I plan to remind August of as he gets bigger.
Jeffrey would've been 18 years old today. There is really not much to say. I filled up the day with meetings and appointments. The distraction didn't really help. I miss Jeff every single day. On this day all I could think about - again and again - is how many of these 'special' occasions he never got to experience. Happy birthday Jeff.
“The Bestiaries, or books of beasts, of almost a thousand years ago contained much that we no long believe. There is no stone in the heads of toads that neutralizes poison and there are no unicorns at all, so the ability of their horns to likewise undo poison is not particularly helpful either. Those old books were compendiums of known and imagined animals, of eagles and dragons and elephants, with lore about their powers, lives and meanings, often moral and religious meanings, They were also compendiums of sheer wonder, but the sense of wonder that emerges from scientific knowledge is at least as great, whether its about Belding’s ground squirrel of the Sierra Nevada that hibernates about eight months a year or the elephant seal that not only can hold its breath underwater for an hour but often does so for twenty minutes or more at a time while sleeping on the shore. Or the blue whale, whose heart is bigger than an American bison and beats about six times a minute, a tenth the speed of ours, or the hummingbird in flight, whose tiny heart beats a thousand times a minute.”*
From a Notebook_____________
Katha Pollitt**
The final vanity, to think
you're not your life, that even today
as\t the last possible moment
you can walk away; as out of cheap hotel,
leaving ten dollars under the key on the bureau.
Why bother to lock the door? The fuzzy TV,
the footsole-colored bedspread,
the quart of milk souring on the windowsill,
you always new they had nothing to do with you
although you were used to them
and even grateful,
alone as you were, in a strange city.
Three years ago today I was due to fly to Chicago for a conference. My flight was delayed by several hours. I planned to surprise my sons and go to see their lacrosse game, having told them I'd miss it because of travel. As I was leaving my office the phone rang; my ex-wife had called to tell me Jeff had been injured during the pre-game warm ups and that he was en route to the emergency room in an ambulance. Jeff never regained consciousness. He died of a ruptured aneurysm in his brain. He was 14 and so would now be nearly 18 and enjoying his final term of high school. This is a picture of Jeff - grinning as usual - taken the fall before he died. I miss Jeffrey desperately every single day. I love his brothers Doug and August even more and more often. Do me a favor, hug your loved ones an extra time today and find some way to show them how much you love them.
