practice apocalypse

little boy
camo pants
Spidey socks
feathery hair
dirty nails
red cheeks
mixed teeth
front gap
deer shirt
legs crossed
on bed
killing zombies

27 April 2012
State College PA

/ / /

It’s National Poetry Writing Month! A poem a day, each day in April.

fatherhood

the phone just isn’t enough
too many frequencies are lost
between the vocal chords
and the inner ear
cast by satellites and towers
into the atmosphere or outer space
bloodless plastic against the ear
is no substitute for a small warm palm
wrapped up in my fingers
or a kamikaze jump with a feral yell
from the couch onto my back
living in the magical future
it’s easy to think that a computer screen
and a tiny camera are the same as contact
but we’re not on different planets
just in different states
and the bus ride gets longer each time

6 April 2012
Brooklyn NY

/ / /

It’s National Poetry Writing Month! A poem a day, each day in April. I debated posting this one because of the content, but it’s where I’m at today.

Listen to this poem using the player above.

/ / /

Thanksgiving Day

Prospect Ave rooftop
two sisters, one lover
endless blue sky
iced tea and cigarettes
next roof over pigeons
gathered for the holiday

we laugh, hold hands
feel the sun on our faces
grateful for the morning
for bagels and cream cheese
for reunited families
for the laughter of children

half my heart is missing
the other half is here

words of wisdom

“it’s only a paper moon”

no, that’s not what he’d say

“you’ve got to take care
of your family first”

is that it? or maybe

“keep your head down
and get a separate room
at the end of the hall”

it’s not as if all his sayings
were collected in a book
this is a guy, after all,
who was famous for not talking

I wish he were here now
because I’m at the bottom
and can’t figure out what to do
I think he’d be a good one to ask

we used to spend most of our time
talking about big bands
or the latest episode of Lawrence Welk

I remembered all the names of the Welk people
even though, truth be told, I’d only seen the show
a few times

but I always knew I could get him talking
if the subject were Pete Fountain
or the Glen Gray band

he took me to my first concert
Pete Fountain and Al Hirt
at The Shell in Canandaigua

two guys from New Orleans on stage
two guys from Pittsfield, Massachusetts
in the audience, swinging

when I wake up, the first things I see
remind me of him: a purple moon,
a vase of flowers, a Parisian riverside

and out here in the living room
another of his paintings
and a cross-stitch of my first initial

did he ever have a long night when he doubted?
when he couldn’t pay the rent and the food
was running out and it was all too much?

he was from a different era, when men
didn’t talk about those kinds of things
they were just expected to hold up their end

he worked at the same place for 48 years
never took a sick day — not one
my resume looks like the classified ads

in later years I heard some rumblings
he was stubborn, his weapon was silence
and I guess that may have been true

I never saw it, though
he was who I wanted to be
a class act

someone called me that yesterday
“a class act”
but I can’t see it

I’d like to be sitting in the passenger seat
of one of the endless parade of white cars
listening to WYLF (the “music of your life”)

maybe he’s driving me to my clarinet lesson
or he and Grandma are taking me to Burger King
or over to their apartment for dinner

Ring Dings and a block of Velveeta in the fridge
potato-chip chicken and mini cheesecakes
broccoli covered in cheese and Ritz crackers

and that old glass coffee mug with the recipe
for Irish coffee on the side, mostly whiskey
with some coffee to take the curse off it

even though by that time neither of them drank
but they always had liquor in the credenza
in case a mixer broke out / it never did

god what I’d give right now to go over there
to explain all this and how it all happened
and ask him to forgive me and to tell me

“I love you and you’ll be OK”

is that what he’d say?

Listen using the player above.

/ / /

his small hand in mine
“I love you, Dada”
my arm around his shoulders
“I love you, too”

/ / /

part of a river of stones

Listen using the player above.

/ / /

Justice for all, service to others and a love that liberates people. — Tavis Smiley’s summary of Martin Luther King’s philosophy.

I have a dream, too
and on the cold days I fear
that a dream is all it will ever be

but when my boys are playing
laughing in the sun-warmed yard
I am hopeful for our future

/ / /

part of a river of stones

Listen to this poem using the player above.

/ / /

This is the first poem of the year for me, although it’s the third one to make it to this site in 2011. One note: The person 99% of you know as my father is not the person mentioned in this poem, which refers to my biological father.

Perchance to dream

On the first night in my new apartment –
after fifteen years of sleeping in our bed –
I closed the door to my bedroom,
pushed it tight until the latch clicked home.

On that first night I was a boy again,
waiting for the yellow eyes to appear
around the corner at the end of the hallway
like they had night after night when I was a child.

For years I was afraid of partially opened doors,
preferring to see nothing or to see everything;
to know what fate had in store the moment it
lumbered around the corner, thirsting for me.

Even earlier in childhood I’d had a similar dream.
I was in my bed in my pajamas with the feet on them,
and the door to the hallway was open and I could hear
the footsteps, the heavy pounding on the wooden floor.

One night my mother came through the bedroom window,
snuck in under cover of darkness and spirited me away
from the party going strong in the living room
while my drunk father was supposed to be watching me.

I don’t know when he first discovered I was gone
or what he did next. I like to imagine him in a panic,
searching for me, tearing the house apart, tears on his cheeks –
like he failed to do all those years.

But I’m sure it was nothing so dramatic. Probably a phone call
to my grandparents’ apartment on Main Street.
My grandfather would have picked up the phone in his quiet way.
“Yes, they’re here. They’re sleeping.”

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Technically, my sister and I are half-siblings. But that’s only true in DNA terms. I wrote this poem for her as her Christmas present. The picture below is of us, just after I read it to her on Christmas morning. I love you, Sis.

half
(for my sister)

that word has no meaning
Watson and Crick might say half
but I love you completely
love isn’t based on a sequence
of nucleotides, on the order of
adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine
love has to account for history
has to factor in changing tables
and wide smiles in baby seats
remember when –
but of course you do, your memory
is better than mine
I’ve been away much longer
than we were together
I’ve missed too much of your life
I don’t know the stories
don’t recognize the names
if it weren’t for photographs
I’d remember even less
and yet you’ve never wavered
never had a harsh word
you’re what everyone hopes for
what I hope for
you’re a gift I’m still unwrapping
a mirror in which a better man is reflected

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Apple
(for my mom)

They say the apple
doesn’t fall far
from the tree.

Sometimes
it doesn’t fall
at all.

I am suspended
in the sun,
depending on you.

My skin,
in your image,
reddens.

Inside me
are the seeds
you planted.

The worm seeks an entrance
but I am strong,
as you taught me to be.

My sweetest days
are yet to come.

Storytelling

telling stories in our hotel room
keeping my game face on
my Superman fights a giant robot
John’s defeats a huge gorilla
Bernie’s Man of Steel takes on a fire monster
he’s tired so he forgets
sometimes his villain is a robot, too
I’m wearing a necklace made of Kryptonite
my powers are fading
keeping my game face on so they won’t notice
never expected this hotel room
never expected the hurricane
and yes, that’s a metaphor
what kind of kit do you pack for a storm of rejection?

What I Would Give For What We Had

In Lenox, Massachusetts, on the picturesque corner
of Main and Housatonic Streets,
is a building with walls made of butter-yellow brick.

Looking up from the sidewalk to the second floor,
you can see the windows
through which my family used to see the world.

There was a drop ceiling in the den that gave way
under the weight of rainwater,
dousing my grandfather as he removed a sodden panel,

standing on a chair to get a better grip, while lightning
lit the windows of the pharmacy below.
There is a shop that sells art photos and gourmet chocolate

where the garage used to be. “Home again, home again
jiggety jig,” my grandmother would say
every time. Back when she used to ride in the car, back when

she used to have places to go. I am so old I can remember her
driving herself, the modern woman, cigarette
fashionably cradled by elegant fingers, red nails catching

the sun that elsewhere lit trees on our famous hills.
It was only in the leaving that I realized
the loss, only in the black-and-white grandeur of deco

living rooms and dancing at the Crystal Ballroom.
Now I would trade anything for that place,
that time, those days when a street corner was the world
and all I knew was safe and protected within it.

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Another poem for my wife.

The Oak Tree
(for Jennifer)

I had already asked you three times
you’d wisely declined
I was too young, too unproven
played the saxophone in a latin jazz band
you repaired houses for the poor
we each made barely enough to pay the rent

the fourth time was under an oak tree
at your mother’s house
you finally agreed, throwing caution
to the Pennsylvania wind
we were back East on a rare trip
to see our families, to display one another

that tree had been there for years and years
since the fields next to the dairy farm
were turned into a housing development
for upwardly mobile college professors
whose daughters spoke two languages
and traveled the world on the way to good lives

no one thought we’d last
they all said I was too young, too unproven
played the saxophone in a latin jazz band
couldn’t provide for you
all those beautiful 1950s sentiments
born of monochrome evenings with the Cleavers

but under that oak tree –
a sign of stability, of permanence –
you agreed to place a bet on the long shot
I held your hands as a stray leaf fell,
like your resistance, to rest
in the lush green grass behind the houses

after you said yes
we traveled north to my parents’ house
my mother gave me a wedding ring
that had been her grandmother’s
granting us her blessing
even though she doubted our future

the oak tree is gone now,
cut down by your mother
all these years I’d thought she hated what it represented
only found out this week that it was damaged
in an ice storm and had to be cut before it fell
so many things misunderstood

I may regret all this openness later, but for now a little missive here on the blog seems like the easiest way to answer all the questions that are coming up now and will be sure to come up soon. It’s getting more difficult to come up with plausible stories about what’s happening, so let’s try the truth.

Tomorrow, Jen and Bernie and John (my wife and sons) are moving to State College, PA, to live with Jen’s mom. In a couple weeks, I’m moving into a one-bedroom basement apartment in Albany – even more downtown than I live now. We’re not sure how long the new arrangement will last.

Why is this happening? Primarily because we can’t afford to live together anymore. Jen’s been out of work for 18 months and counting, and I don’t make enough to pay the bills. In fact, my most recent job change was probably the straw that sent to camel to the poor house. I’m thrilled to have my current gig and to work in the world of bicycle advocacy, but it pays what non-profits often pay. We gambled that one of Jen’s many high-scoring civil-service tests would pull our fat out of the fire, but New York State has no budget and isn’t doing much hiring these days, so that gamble didn’t pay off. We lived on fumes (and with the help of our families) for a long time, but the tank is now empty.

This is a very dark time for the rebellion, and there’s no way to sugarcoat that. Our hope, though, is that something will turn up and allow us to get Jen and the boys back in time for school in the fall.

So now you know the rest of the story. Wish us luck, and keep us in your thoughts, along with the thousands and thousands of American families who are going through exactly the same thing.

Listen to this poem using the player above.

My assistant helps me repair the truck.

Red Truck Elegy

Dozer, the beefy black lab, wants into the car
he sniffs the air, scenting my son’s watermelon lollipop

just a few feet away sits our red truck, silent, flashers on
a gift from my dad, it’s different from the red truck

my wife and her baseball team would cram into the bed of
back in Oregon, after the game, going to get ice cream

this red truck is smaller, though it’s hauled its share of wood
the bottom is rusted, looking like something you should

discover with a submarine while searching the ocean floor
I performed my only successful automotive surgery on this truck

using the last wire coat hanger in the world to wire up
the muffler and tailpipe, which were grinding against the axle

my dad couldn’t have done much better, because he
doesn’t know anything about cars or trucks either, despite

being much better versed in practical things than I am
and more comfortable with getting his hands dirty

John flits around the garage, moving from mechanic to Dozer
to the two lazy German shepherds who lie at the feet

of an elderly couple on the garage’s only two chairs
eating submarine sandwiches and adding to the local flavor

if the truck is dead, we’ve decided not to resuscitate it
we’ll just cut the cord that anchors it to us and let it sink into memory

captured in the occasional photograph, just like its bigger brother
with my father-in-law’s head poking into the flower-packed bed

I’ve heard enough stories about that truck that it looms in my created past
almost as large as he does, gone just after I met him, gone too soon

this truck, though, was here just long enough to carry us to the top of the hill
and now we’ll walk down the other side on our own

Listen to this poem using the player above.

A poem for my son John and his grandfather, after whom he was named. John Packard died in April 1996.

John, again
(for my younger son and his grandfather)

he’ll never smell his grandpa’s pipe
never hear him laugh or make a corny joke
he’ll never feel the rumble of the BCS
as it plows up the rich earth for planting
he’ll never sit at the oval table
never pass a bowl of fresh-picked veggies
or watch his grandpa butter warm bread
he’ll never be tickled by a mustache
or smell the sweat on an old t-shirt
never be picked up in a wiry embrace
or put his cheek against rough stubble
but he’ll carry with him the joy in the land
and he’ll walk with solid steps on country lanes
he’ll laugh when laughter is needed
and he’ll stop to help a stranger
he’ll see in his mother’s eyes
the eyes whose gaze he’ll never feel
and he’ll know what it is to be loved

Photo of Bernie at the 2010 Albany WordFest (Photo by Keith J. Spencer)

My son Bernie (age 7) just found out that his poem “Dance To The Chocolate” won in his age group in the Fair Trade Delmar Chocolate Poetry Contest. He gets a prize, gets to read at the award ceremony, and gets his poem printed in the paper. It’s a good month for poetry in the Crane house. Here’s his winning poem:

Dance To The Chocolate

Dance to the music right?
Wrong! Dance to the chocolate
Dance to the chocolate
Dance to the chooooooocolate
Yay!!!

Bernie reading at Third Thursday Poetry Night in December 2009. Photo by Dan Wilcox.

My 7-year-old son Bernie has been writing poems for the past year or so. Today he submitted his first poems and tonight he’s attending his second open mic at the 2010 Albany WordFest. I’m so proud of him and I’d like to share some of his work with you.

The first four poems were inspired by a contest being run by Fair Trade Delmar, an advocacy group in a small town near Albany. They’re looking for kids to write poems about chocolate. The prizes will involve chocolate and the winners will also be printed in the town paper. Here’s Bernie’s suite of poems for the contest.

Chocolate Poems

Chocolate

Chocolate chocolate chocolate
Chocolate is all I can say

Dance To The Chocolate

Dance to the music right?
Wrong! Dance to the chocolate
Dance to the chocolate
Dance to the chooooooocolate
Yay!!!

Chocolate Catastrophe

I love chocolate I’d eat
It day and night but
When you find them really
Take a big bite.

You Love It Too

You love chocolate too
Don’t you? Well if not
START LIKING
IT NOW!! Well eat
It now. I guess it’s either
Now or never.

* * *

And here are two more short pieces, the first of which I find both sad and beautiful.

I don’t know why

I don’t know why
I go to school
I don’t know why I eat
I don’t know why I even live
But I do and I know why
I’m me

me me and me

me I love me me you
love me me love me
me play me play me
play games me

Listen to this poem using the player above.

Origins

Tell me where you’re from

from the Berkshire hills
from a yellow-brick building
with a drug store in the bottom
from a mother and a father
who gave me love and madness
from firefighters in a flooded basement
and old men with missing fingers
from the daddy longlegs, north-pointing
and the tobacco-scented southern earth
from industrial towns in upstate New York
and the blue-carpeted van
from this school and this one and this one, too
always new, always being introduced
from the haven of my room and
from dreams of the ocean
from dinosaur bones and long words
and pretty girls with the same first name
from 27 houses and apartments
in too many towns and cities
from first cars and first kisses
and second chances and third strikes
from the Irish and the German
from the 17th-century seafarers
from the town cowherd and
a documentation analyst
from a radio host and a typesetter
and the receptionist at England Brothers
from drunks and crazy women
who shouted at busts of Wagner
from the laundress and the waitress
and the jailed superintendent
from fire-red Mustang convertibles
and tickling under the dining room table
from submarines and Thailand
and the Housatonic River
from scalding sauce and icy water
and bandages and tears
from desert sands and bald tires
and cheese crackers and Wendy’s
from Chapel Hill to Lexington
Amarillo to Tucson
from the foothills to the mountains
to a backyard filled with stones
from a Big Wheel to a bicycle
to too many unknown homes
from the saxophone to the microphone
to the studio to the stage
from Citalopram and therapy
depression, bliss and rage
from messy rooms and folded laundry
from turn that down and crank it up
from countless hours of talking
and countless talking of ours
from Furukawa to Yokohama
from Catholicism to Methodism to
atheism to Buddhism to atheism
from selfishness to fatherhood
from one side to the other
from husband, father, lover, cousin,
uncle, friend and brother
from Main and Church, from Plunkett,
Chad Circle and Knapp Road
from Dodge and Tanque Verde
from Aoba-ku and Glendale
from Raymond Street and Kellie Court
from Lenox, Pittsfield, Lanesborough,
Syracuse, Oklahoma City, Rochester,
Potsdam, Hilton Head, Concord,
and more and more and more
from Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter Thompson
and Douglas Adams and Hayden Carruth
and George Lucas and John Williams
and John William Coltrane and Steve Lacy
and Charles Mingus and Paul Desmond
and Nova and Batman and Walt Whitman
and Donald Hall and Albert Goldbarth
and Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac
from doubt and fear
from courage and confession
from harmony and discord
from humor and illness
from long-dormant and active
from diagnosis and treatment
and from all the same places you’re from

so…

Tell me where you’re from

Listen to this poem using the player above.

A memory of taking my older son to the bus when he was in first grade.

darkness, whispering

he seems too small
to withstand
the yellow
metal embrace

it gathers him in
and he disappears
lost behind the vinyl
seats tall as walls

I try to wave
but he doesn’t see me
so I walk back home
in the pre-dawn
darkness, whispering
softly, to no one,
“that’s my little boy”

Listen to this poem by pressing the play button above.

Miso Soup
(for Jennifer)

the only thing better than the taste of the sushi
is the lingering aftertaste
mixed with miso shiru and warm ocha
a sensation so rich
it’s almost another meal in itself
I always order one extra piece of unagi
and remember walking into Meiji Jingu
holding your hand
you gave me a book on Zen –
I was into that then –
and I gave you an atlas of our world
so we could choose the next destination
we sat in the kaitenzushi-ya in Shibuya
and watched the endless parade
of plates, daring us
in Nikko, we took a photo in an unexpected
tram car that was right there on the sidewalk
then climbed up all those stairs
to see the sanzaru
there were many little tremors and
the one big one
that had us scurrying for the doorjamb
just as the shaking stopped
and yes, there were cherry blossoms –
there always are –
right outside our bedroom window
and the cleaning man came by each week
and always seemed surprised to see us
we gave him our maple tree
(and you gave me its cousin years later)
I savor these moments and roll them around
on my tongue, heavy with the dusky taste
of shoyu and the tang of vinegar in the rice

Listen to this poem by pressing the play button above.

A Blackfoot woman

I am not an Indian

My great-great-great-great grandmother
was a full-blooded Blackfoot Indian.
People say full-blooded not because
they have any proof,
but because it sounds wild, native.
If you do the math, that makes me
1.5% Blackfoot, and not very wild at all.
Say what you will about Ward Churchill;
he was right that all our accomplishments
as a country, all our technology, all our freedom,
all our music and poetry and art and dance and theater,
is being created on land that we stole from people
whose names we don’t even remember.
In college, my roommate’s best friend
paid less for his tuition because he was
above some arbitrary threshold
of Native American ancestry.
Not full-blooded, but bloody enough.
He was generously allowed
to learn quote-history-unquote
in a government building on the very land
his ancestors occupied before they became
little more than discount coupons for the state.
Another branch of my family has lived
in New England since 1638.
We never owned slaves, you’ll hear them
attest proudly, and it appears to be true.
Less lauded is my some-number-of-greats
uncle John Flanders, who served
with distinction in the army of Gen. John Sullivan,
helping to rid upstate New York of the Iroquois.
Sullivan’s troops burned and shot and hung and scattered
the people of many nations, including the Cayuga.
The army destroyed their town of Coreorgonel, and in its place was
established Ithaca, now a haven for higher education and
an oasis for studiers of organic farming and
Native American spirituality.
Living at Coreorgonel were the remnants of the Tutelo people,
who’d been forced from their homes
on the border of West Virginia and Kentucky,
and who were taken in by the Cayugas. It has been
112 years since any human being spoke the Tutelo language.
Sitting on a stage at the Tokyo Film Festival, director Chris Eyre
(of the Cheyenne-Arapaho, remember them?)
was asked by a member of the audience whether he preferred
to be called “Indian” or “Native American.”
“We have so many other problems to deal with
that we don’t have much time to worry about
what we’re called,” he said.

Listen to this poem by pressing the play button above.

Entrances & Exits

Jason Lee Borders entered the world
on a late-summer afternoon in 1973,
sharing his father’s middle and last names
and containing a small flaw in his DNA
that he also shared with his father,
who, unlike Jason Lee Borders,
wasn’t strong enough to resist the genetic revolver.
Instead, he held it to his temple and pulled the trigger,
and a wash of alcohol broke through the levy
and swept the borders away.
Before the little boy drowned,
his mother crept through the window
and ran with him into the night,
gene still intact, waiting.

Jason Lee Gustavson entered the world
in a courtroom in 1979
after the requisite paperwork had been filed;
a new identity, a new life,
another in a long string
of relocations and reorientations.
By this time, even at his tender age,
he’d made one of the few choices
to which he’d remain true,
deciding early on
to leave his father’s revolver tucked in its padded box
in an unlocked drawer of the old oak dresser.
As it turned out, though,
his father wasn’t the only parent with a gift,
and generations of overflowing bathtubs
in the brains of his maternal ancestors
were slowly leaking through his own skull,
surrounding his spongy gray being
with a dark fluid that obscured light and memory.

Jason David Crane entered the world
at a kitchen table with his grandparents
in 1994 after a late-night session of salsa music.
They’d gone through all the family names
when his grandfather suggested the family
for whom an aunt had washed the laundry.
As a gesture to the father
whose name he was leaving behind,
Lee became David
and he became a man.

Jason-Lee-David-Borders-Gustavson-Crane
entered the world and left the world and
entered the world and left the world and
entered the world. His bathtub overflowed
and he sank beneath the water,
one hand clutching the smooth porcelain side.

I wrote this in Oakland, CA, in October 2008 while getting ready for my sister-in-law’s wedding.

Oakland photo (c) Jason Crane

Tomorrow the Wedding
for Amy & Michele

Tomorrow the wedding

      today hauling cans of soda,
      bottles of beer.

Phone: the Italian groom

      carrying a bouquet of balloons
      back to the apartment.

Meanwhile…

      eastern family, recently landed,
      descended from the pure blue.

Our temporary hilltop home,

      where we sit silently
      on the sun-warmed porch,
      looking out over Oakland
      at the glittering bay beyond.

Sixty-Seven Unopened Videocassettes

Thirty years and fifty percent of my DNA
have brought me to a double-wide with a steep driveway,
tucked away in an enclave of trailers not far from the iron banks of the Ohio River.
She asks me to call her “nanna” because all the children do.
He’s missing most of his teeth – waiting for a new set of dentures.
I have no hook on which to hang this porch conversation,
this three-decade history lesson and game of tag.
So we talk about tobacco farming, long-haul trucking,
and spying on the Russians from within a cigar tube deep beneath the Mediterranean.
I learn about great-uncles and great-aunts and an extra uncle,
only to learn that money and land and other tragedies have driven wedges into this family, too.
I want to walk into the dining room like Antwone Fisher,
but the table is given over to Charlie Brown and Linus –
Christmas decorations awaiting transfer to their holiday destination.
There are sixty-seven unopened Star Trek videocassettes,
a bathroom crammed with history books,
lighters from the Navy,
a robe almost like the one I wear,
and an old shaving cup with a worn brush.
No matter what happens, I’ve erased the most terrible vision –
awaiting the end with the moisture of regret dampening my cheeks.
“The next time you come, darlin’, we’ll have chicken and dumplings.”

Photo from the David Faust Collection

Long Haul
(for my father and his father)

it wasn’t easy keeping all those wheels on the road
another late-night diner and a nap in the cab
hauling one of the damned things was hard enough
it took a man to pull two

it wasn’t easy to raise seven of them
the boy was first and then six – six! – girls
you’d think we would have stopped trying
to make him a brother

and since he was a solitary boy even then,
he would put on his suit and walk down to the little church
that was happy to have an usher
an extra boy to pass the hat for what little there was

he wrecked the car, I made him replace it with college money
I wasn’t teaching him a lesson about responsibility
I was trying to hang on to my boy
the one who’d always had his eye on the horizon

and then later, when he was home from the service
we’d go down under the church to drink at the Legion hall
thick smoke in the air, cheap beer on tap
looking down the barrel of a one-stoplight life

it took a man – and I knew it – to leave
to drive and keep driving until he’d built a better life
to be more than I was and to do it with dignity
and I never told him, but I was proud

(Thanks to David Faust for letting me use a photo from his collection of St. Johnsbury trucks. That’s the company for which my grandfather drove.)

Hummingbird photo by Derek Scott.

Memorex Hummingbird
by Jason Crane

Memorex hummingbird hovers above the nectar cup;
animatronic woodpecker hunts for scuttling food.
Nature or Disney ride? Who can say?
Disconnected as we are from snow falling off branches.
I hold the binoculars steady and point out the Blue Jay
as it pecks the last leaf on the winter elm,
and through those lenses peek the unspoiled eyes of my son.
He shouts, “I see it!” and is rooted to the spot,
A sapling full of the coursing energy of the yet-to-come.

A small sampling of people for whom I’m thankful. Not complete and in no particular order, but worth writing. I may add to it, too.

Jennifer: 14+ years of putting up with me. I don’t know how she does it. Or, for that matter, why.

Bernie & John: It’s incredible to be unconditionally loved by your kids. Plus, they’re fun to wrestle with.

Mom, Dad and Gretchen: What haven’t we been through? Actually, skip that question, because I’m finding out that this year there are quite a few new and unpleasant answers. They’re always there, though, and that’s amazing.

Linda, Todd & Sarah, Tammy, Dick, Denise & John, Lynne & Mike & Jack & Grace, Jill, Jimmy & Karen: Couldn’t ask for a better family.

Carol, Amy & Michele, Sandy & Carol Jr. & Autumn, Dorothy & Ethan, Kit & Sue, et al: Couldn’t ask for a better second family.

Bernard & Dorothy Flanders: My debt to them can never be repaid.

Jeff & Leeann & Jake: They know how to be friends, which is a hell of a lot rarer than you might think. And one of these days, Jeff and I will have a very successful show together. Probably a strip-tease show.

Kevin & Jen & Momo: My oldest friend (and his wife, who would probably be disturbed to learn that she’s my second- or third-oldest friend). Uncompromisingly honest and loving people with a real cute kid.

Josh & Jen: Smart, funny and wonderful. Josh is always expanding my world, which is just about the highest compliment I can pay.

Team RocBike: You couldn’t ask for a better gang to ride with, blog with, and be positively influenced by.

The musicians, promoters and record labels who’ve made The Jazz Session possible: What can I say? “Beyond my wildest expectations”? Yeah, that about covers it.

Chuck & Bobby D: Never were two guys more accepting of my crazed need to wave at everybody. Plus, they pick good tunes.

Jo & James: Even kinder than they are talented. And they’re supremely talented.

Sue & Jenny & Katie-Kate & Elinor: Love ‘em, love ‘em, love ‘em. (And miss ‘em, too!)

Tom & Susan: Beautiful people who made Raymond Street just barely tolerable.

Satoru: Pops up when I least expect it, and is always welcome when he does. One of those people you know will be there when you need him.

Otto: He understands and inspires.

The members of the Rotary Club of Albany: Nice people doing nice things, as Harry Shearer would say. Except in this case, it’s true.

Yesterday I posted this uncharacteristic message as my Facebook status:

“Hey, all you opponents of gay marriage: F*CK YOU! (What? That’s not helpful? Oh, sorry. But, uh, f*ck you bigots anyway, OK?)”

This, as you might imagined, generated quite a few comments:

Dean Bowman at 1:36pm April 23: What about opponents of marriage?

Heather Dingman-Glenn at 1:40pm April 23: The majority of students at my school feel that all rights should be equal and are open to all kinds of relationships. However, I would say the boys have it worse than the girls. This is a high school where the majority of the parents are military.

Jason Crane at 2:48pm April 23: @Dean: I’m with you, man. State recognition of unions for legal purposes, and then let folks follow religious practices if they choose, with no state sanction or recognition whatsoever. (Unless, of course, you were just being funny.)

Wendy Ramsay at 2:59pm April 23: Snaps to that!

Julie White at 3:23pm April 23: Ideally, I think that the majority of the rights that come with marriage should just be given to people as basic human rights–you know, like health care, adoption for anyone who’s a fit parent and wants to make a family with anyone else–but as long as we live in a state that thinks that monogamous committed relationships should be rewarded, then … Read Morelet’s at least be equal about that. But in Julie’s utopia, no one kind of human relationship (as long as it’s consensual and doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights)would be privileged over another (I know, dream on)… off my soapbox…but this is why I actually have a hard time with the gay marriage issue…a lot of ambivalence.

Jason Crane at 4:07pm April 23: @Julie: Right on! Although I don’t think any of those rights should be given. We’ve already got them. I think we need to stop letting the corporate state take them away. But that’s just me being a punk. And shamelessly stealing from Utah Phillips.

Brenda Yarger Abel at 4:27pm April 23: Wow! Way to promote tolerance.

Jennifer Cornish at 4:59pm April 23
I’m strongly opposed to asshole marriage. Letting assholes get legally married just sullies it for the rest of us. It’s just sick. I mean, there are all kinds of statistics showing that assholes are behind the majority of domestic violence attacks, robberies, burglaries, bombings, wars and crappy BSG season finales. And I’m pretty sure that being … Read Morean asshole is very strongly correlated with being a pedophile. I mean, how can we let these people get married and (GOD FORBID) have kids? It’s like they ruin marriage for us decent people who just want to raise our non-asshole kids to be non-assholes. I’m not saying they should be discriminated against for being assholes. I mean, people can be however they want to be in the privacy of their own homes, but when public schools teach that it’s ok to be an asshole, that’s where I draw the line. Once we let them get married, they’re going to turn the rest of us into assholes too.

Jason Crane at 5:14pm April 23: Amen!

Jason Crane at 5:59pm April 23: @Brenda: It’s always hard to tell if someone’s kidding or not on this here Facebook. But in any case, I’m kinda over being tolerant of intolerance.

Jennifer Cornish at 7:57pm April 23: Is tolerance of bigotry ‘tolerance’? Interesting question.

Brenda Yarger Abel at 10:12pm April 23: Is it not possible to oppose gay marriage, without being intolerant of those who support it? Since bigotry, by definition, is intolerance of anothers beliefs religion or opinion, it would appear that the one F-bombing those who disagree would be a better example of the bigot.

Jennifer Cornish at 2:30am April 24: I think that by saying ‘Fuck You’ to gay-marriage opponents, Jason is being less of a bigot than those people fighting to take away the right for responsible, consenting citizens to get married and live their own lives in peace. I wouldn’t try to actively take away a bigot’s right to be a bigot.

Jason Crane at 7:13am April 24: Thanks, Jenn. You’ve said it better than I could have. I’m just tired of having people’s religious views imposed on my supposedly secular government. Discrimination and bigotry in the name of religious opinion are still discrimination and bigotry. No excuses.

Many people who are smarter than I have made the following point more intelligently, but here goes: You don’t get to shout “intolerance” when people oppose your bigotry. If you try to deny people their civil rights based on your religious preferences, then you are a bigot, and no one — absolutely no one — is bound to respect your point of view or shy away from denigrating it.

Software journalist Bruce Byfield has an interesting post today about free software evangelism and why he keeps his mouth shut at parties.

I tend to feel — and act — this way regarding most evangelism. It’s usually not fun to have political discussions at parties because people have so few facts at their command. Maybe it’s my personality, but I find it very hard to have “discussions” between entrenched positions where there is no hope of movement.

We had 15 or so folks at the house today for John’s third birthday party. After the party, a dozen of us headed to El Mariachi in downtown Albany for some great Mexican food.

Toward the end of the meal, my 6-year-old son Bernie had to go the bathroom. I took him to the bathroom and he entered the toilet stall, locking the door behind him.

When he finished going to the bathroom, he tried to open the door. I could see the handle moving, but the door didn’t open. After about 30 seconds, he started to panic. “I can’t get the door open, Dad!” He said. “Go get someone!”

I asked him what the lock looked like, and tried to calm him down by getting him to describe the mechanism to me. It didn’t really work, though. He was really in a panic and asking me to get someone. The stall and the door went all the way to the floor, so there was no way for him to crawl out.

I looked up and noticed that there was a two-foot space between the top of the stall and the ceiling. Next to the stall was a urinal. Not knowing what else to do, I climbed on the urinal and waved my hand over the top. Bernie climbed onto the toilet and reached up for my hands. I grabbed him and he tried to climb up the wall of the stall while holding my hands. I had no leverage at all, and I couldn’t exert much force to pull him up.

Bernie slipped back and almost landed in the toilet bowl. We decided to try it again. This time he got a little more traction on the wall and was able to climb up high enough for me to get my hands under his arms. Together we got him on top of the wall. I put one arm around him and yanked him off the wall at the same time as I jumped down off the urinal. We landed on the floor together and instantly started laughing at the ridiculouslness of the whole thing.

Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which seems like a good time to mention that back during the Civil War, two of my cousins were jailed by Abraham Lincoln for sedition. You can read the entire story in the March 2006 issue of Flanders Family News. (This links to a PDF file. The story starts on Page 9.)

Enjoy!

By the way, lest you interpret this the wrong way — I’m a big fan of Lincoln. But how could I pass up this story?

All our bookshelves were made by our fathers,
crafted by calloused hands from woods
soft or hard, fine-grained or no,
fashioned in damp basements or dusty barns
on Saturday afternoons while Black Magic Woman
or Love Me Do played on what used to be the nice radio.
The bookshelves are, like all fathers’ creations, imperfect,
slightly wider at the front,
fitting some books better than others.
In one, there is a pair of hearts carved,
delicate filigree surprising
from a splitter of logs, a man of the earth.
The bookshelves are a framework, intended
by our fathers to be filled with thoughts
of our own choosing, maybe with a gentle nudge
from a “doctor of books.”
But it is we who must encumber the wood
with our own words, we who must choose
which volumes to stack or lean,
we who receive the hard or soft legacy
cast in simple wood by complex men.

In 2008, I was a panelist on the Parents Panel of the Albany Times Union newspaper. That meant writing a monthly article and occasional blog posts. Here is part 1 of my look back at 2008 from a family perspective:

2008: A look back at my year in parenting (Part 1)

We’ve been there two other times, too:

Five Rivers adventure

Return To Five Rivers

Unfortunately, it also has one major design flaw. The light switches that control every light in the auditorium are located about three feet up on the wall outside the auditorium, and the switches blink.

How do I know this? Because while the theater was filling up and the final ensemble was finishing its rehearsal, my two-year-old son, John, saw the pretty blinking light and pressed all the switches, turning off every light in the auditorium. Some people started leaving. My wife overheard one patron say, “They must not want us in there now.”

I saw what John had done and turned the lights back on. The rehearsal finished, and the rest of the show went off without a hitch. But some architect ought to be giving the college a refund for that part of the design. Or they should have a “no two-year-old boys” policy.

The Four Families get together for a holiday shindig:

I highly recommend my friend Jeff Vrabel’s account of his son Jake’s nocturnal adventures:

Read The Adventure Of The Wandering Pajama-Clad Toddler.

When you’ve finished that, dig back into the archives for my own story, The Great Escape.

The fine folks at Thacher State Park in Voorheesville, NY, had a Native Thanksgiving celebration this weekend. Here are a few photos from our time there:

Late Summer In Albany, Part 1:

Late Summer In Albany, Part 2:

Dorothy Flanders

Dorothy Flanders Beloved wife, mother, grandmother CANANDAIGUA – Dorothy M. Flanders, age 92, died Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2008, at M.M. Ewing Continuing Care Center in Canandaigua. She is survived by her husband of 68 years, Bernard J. Flanders of Canandaigua; two daughters, Linda Jacquot of Dresden and Sally (David) Gustavson of Canandaigua; five grandchildren, Tamara Jacquot of Dresden, N.Y., Todd Jacquot of Arizona, Jason (Jennifer) Crane of Albany, N.Y., Gretchen Gustavson of Chili and Dana Cordice of Canandaigua; three great-grandchildren, Sarah Jacquot and Bernard and John Crane; and nieces, Denise (John) Breen of Kentucky and Jill Sohl of Maryland. Mrs. Flanders and her husband moved to Canandaigua from Arizona in 2000. There will be no calling hours. Services are private. Interment will be in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Pittsfield, Mass. Memorial contributions may be made for M.M. Ewing Continuing Care Center to F.F. Thompson Foundation, 350 Parrish St., Canandaigua, NY 14424. Arrangements are by Johnson-Kennedy Funeral Home Inc., Canandaigua.

I miss you, Grandma.

The Family, 2002
Front, left to right: Bernie Crane, Sally Gustavson, Tamara Jacquot
Middle: Jason Crane, Bernie Flanders, Dorothy Flanders
Rear: Gretchen Gustavson, Linda Jacquot, Jennifer Crane, Dave Gustavson

Dorothy and Bernie Flanders, married for 68 years

I’m very sorry to report the passing of our cat, Domino. She’s been living with me in Albany for the past several weeks, and I came home tonight to find her in the den, no longer living.

Jen and I got her from the Hermitage Cat Shelter in Tucson, AZ, in 1995. She was 6 months old when we got her, and she’d been left in a box in the desert with her sister; left there to die. Luckily, she and her sister were rescued and adopted.

Since then, Domino has traveled with us to Pennsylvania, Japan, South Carolina, New York City, New Hampshire, Rochester and Albany. She had a very happy seven years or so, particularly in Japan, where the fish were fresh and plentiful. Those years of relative bliss were followed by The Child Years, of which she was less than fond. In recent months, she’d been sick, losing a lot of weight and lot of hair. She’d made a nearly full recovery, however, since moving to Albany with me.

She was a strange pet. Aloof, not too fond of humans. Many of our friends went years without knowing we even had a cat. She was always attached to Jen and me, though, and was our practice child before the real things came along.

So raise a glass to Domino. A good cat who led a happy life and who will be fondly remembered.

So, as part of my new strategy to get less involved in Albany than I was in Rochester, I … uh … signed up for the Parents Panel of the Albany Times-Union newspaper. Well, there goes that plan.

Here’s my first appearance in the paper and my first and second posts on the blog.

Enjoy!

As I may have mentioned, I work for UNITE HERE, the hotel workers union. I’ve worked for the union for several years, a fact which is not unknown to my extended family.

Today, I was visiting my grandmother in her nursing home. My mom was there, too. My grandmother had an old photo on the bed with her, and I asked her what it was. Turned out to be a photo of my grandmother with the staff of the — wait for it — hotel at which she worked.

That’s right. My own grandmother worked at the Wendell Hotel in Pittsfield, Mass. She was a switchboard operator for about five years in the late 40s and early 50s. And no one ever mentioned it to me. Oy!

Here’s a picture of my grandmother with the Wendell gang. She’s in the front row, fifth from the right. This photo was taken at a company picnic somewhere in the Berkshires. (Click for a larger version.)

And here’s the Wendell in about 1912:

I did some preliminary research on the hotel, and came up with these:

• A collection of images of the Wendell Hotel throughout the years
• An essay about Park Square in Pittsfield, on which the hotel was located (scroll down for photos of the hotel)

I also discovered this paper (PDF) by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which has the following note:

March 1926: Pittsfield on the air for the first time in its history when AIEE [American Institute of Electrical Engineers] broadcasts the very first words, “We are broadcasting tonight From the Wendell Hotel, in Pittsfield Mass. at the AIEE’s annual banquet”.

The following is from the book Pathfinder to Greylock Mountain, the Berkshire Hills and Historic Bennington by William Hamilton Phillips, published in 1910:

Crossing the line into Pittsfield on the Berkshire trolley road the first objects of interest are Arrowhead, the house of Herman Mellville, the author, and once the site of an Indian village; the former summer residence of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose ancestor, Jonathan Wendell, was an early settler of the town and from whom the Wendell Hotel in Pittsfield was named.

The Wendell is mentioned again in The Practical Hotel Steward by John Tellman, published in 1913.

If you’re interested in learning more about my union, you can visit UNITE HERE’s Web site.

Fatherhood

Guardian of sleep
Protector of winter dreams
Chronicler of snow stories
Teller of bedtime tales
Snuggler on winter nights
Hugger with gentle arms
Gazer of wistful looks
Namer of newborn boys
Holder of tiny hands
Crosser of busy streets
Dreamer of far-off scenes
Kisser of sleeping limbs
Singer of simple songs
Soother of nighttime cries
Carrier of tired limbs
Father of children.

29 Dec 2007

Last year, I decided that I would stay in my pajamas on Christmas Day, no matter what. I went to my folks’ house in pajamas, ate dinner, etc.

This year, I stayed in my pajamas again, including during visits to my parents’ house and to the nursing home where my grandparents live. Here’s the evidence:

Jen and I at my parents’ house. I’m wearing the Superman jammies Jen got me, and a crown she got for the boys. I’m a boy, right?

Me, Bernie, Jen and John at the nursing home

Our neighbors across the street gave us their old Hungry Hungry Hippos game a couple weeks ago. Yesterday, John ate one of the small balls that come with the game. It was about the size of a small marble.

Today, it was returned to us.

I don’t know about the hippos, but I’m sure not that hungry anymore.

My son Bernie sings his 2007 hit “If I Don’t Know What To Do” in glorious Dolby (TM) sound!

Here’s a photo taken of my grandfather, Bernie Flanders, on August 15, 1930. He was 17 years old, and he played clarinet and saxophone in this band. My grandfather is standing, fourth from the left. (Click on the photo for a larger image.)

My grandfather played a huge role in the person I became — particularly my love of jazz. Here’s more about that, excerpted from a larger piece I’m working on:

My grandparents have played a big part in my life. My grandfather was a saxophonist and clarinetist when he was younger. He played in a swing band with some guys from the GE plant where he worked. When I was growing up, my grandparents had one of those console stereos that was a piece of furniture. It looked like the bottom part of a hutch when it was closed up. It was painted white, and the speaker section along the front had a curtain covering it. To get to the controls, you opened the top of the console. Inside was a turntable and a receiver. My grandpa had a big collection of swing records – including an entire series of records by Glen Gray and the Casa Loma Orchestra. These records were made in the 1950s, when Gray decided to create an archive of classic swing tunes by recreating the arrangements of the famous big bands.

I learned every note on every one of these records. Unlike most kids in the late 70’s, who were memorizing the lyrics to “Detroit Rock City,” I was learning the horn parts to “Nightmare” and “String of Pearls” and “Take The A Train.” I also developed a real passion for Nat “King” Cole that continues to this day. My grandfather new most of the soloists from the records – particularly the sax and clarinet players. He and my grandma were also big Lawrence Welk fans, and they both knew the names of every musician and singer and dancer on the show.

My favorite album, and the one I learned the best, was Kenton In Hi-Fi. Kenton made this fantastic recording in 1956 for Capitol Records, and it features many of Stan’s biggest hits – “Artistry In Rhythm,” “Eager Beaver,” “Unison Riff,” and “Artistry Jumps,” to name a few. It also features the very gutsy tenor saxophonist Vido Musso, a ridiculous trumpet section led by Pete Candoli and Maynard Ferguson, and the drumming of the incomparable Mel Lewis. This record swings its ass off from start to finish, and it’s a huge piece of my musical upbringing.

I still love big band music, particularly when it gets cold. I’m not sure what the correlation is, but as the winter approaches, I pull out all my Ellington and Basie and drift back into the first half of the 20th century. I listen to swing music throughout the year, but the strong pull of nostalgia is only there in the winter.

* * *

Going back to music for a minute: I had a very strange musical upbringing. I listened to Nat Cole and Stan Kenton at a time when most kids were listening to disco and Kiss. As I got older, I stayed on my own course. I got some hand-me-down 8-track tapes when I was maybe seven years old. I can’t remember all of them, but my two favorites were a Kiss greatest hits collection (which I loved because Kiss was my cousin Todd’s favorite band, and thus my favorite band, too) and a collection of performances by Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. I can only recall one song from that collection – and orchestral version of Burt Bacharach’s “Do You Know The Way To San Jose?” What kind of kid listens to big band, cheese rock, and the Boston Pops? Did no one in family own a radio?

One explanation for my early musical taste is that I spent so much time in the Hagyard Building with my grandparents, who didn’t listen to the radio all that much. It’s odd that they didn’t, because listening to the radio has been my grandfather’s main passtime for the past 15 years or so. I don’t remember listening to the radio a lot with my parents, which again is odd because they both worked at a radio station. I think I really started listening to the radio after we moved to New York State. Or at least that’s when I remember riding in the car a lot with the radio on, catching up on some of the music I’d missed.

Not counting the Kiss 8-track, I didn’t own my first rock record until I was in high school. I fell in with a crowd that was into prog rock. The first rock tape I remember owning was a copy of Signals by Rush, a Canadian rock band that my friend Jeff calls the “best all-girl band of the 70’s.” Somewhere around my freshman year, this group of friends turned my on to Yes, Genesis, Rush, King Crimson, the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Asia, Jethro Tull – all your prog rock favorites. I still love those bands now, although my tastes have broadened considerably since high school.

The first record I ever spent my own money on was Chuck Mangione’s 1978 album An Evening Of Magic: Live At The Hollywood Bowl. I got the album on cassette (two cassettes, if I remember right) and wore the thing out. In addition to Chuck on flugelhorn and electric piano, the concert featured Chris Vadala on saxes and flutes, Grant Geissman on guitar, Charles Meeks on the bass, James Bradley, Jr. on the drums, and a full orchestra. Vadala tears it up on every track. This album set the stage for my approach to jazz for years to come.

* * *

About the Kenton record: When I was first listening to it as a kid, it never occurred to me that I might one day talk to members of the band. And I don’t mean that I never thought I could reach those heights. I mean it literally never occurred to me that the band existed in the real world, and that some people had jobs that allowed them to talk to musicians.

I probably heard that record for the first time when I was four or five, and I got to know it well a decade later in junior high. Fifteen years after that, I interviewed Maynard Ferguson, one of the trumpeters on Kenton In Hi-Fi, and a legend in his own right. I didn’t ask him about that particular record, although we did talk about Kenton. He was a funny, approachable, articulate man, and he was very generous with his time as a guest on my radio show.

Before I ever thought about interviewing famous musicians, I thought about becoming one. As a young child, I took classical guitar lessons, but I was never very good and I didn’t last long. Right before I went into 7th grade, my cousin-hero Todd sent me his clarinet, which he’d traded in for an electric bass. I started playing clarinet in junior high, switched to saxophone in high school, and decided that being a professional musician was the life for me. As it turned out, though, I got much closer to the top level of performers as an interviewer than I ever did as a performer.

I’m not really sure when it was that I realized that musicians were actual human beings. Isn’t that strange? When do we cross that line of perception and discover that recorded sound is produced by regular people? How do we do it? I don’t think anyone ever told me that all those records were made by people just like me. I guess one day I just put together all the images I’d seen on TV with the records I’d been listening to and made the connection. All these years later, there’s still an element of magic and awe involved in talking with someone who was on a milestone recording.

I found this photo here, at the Library of Congress’s American Memory collection. The collection is chock-full of amazing artifacts, so go take a look.

Two nights ago, I read him his books, and then turned off the light. He gave me a kiss and said, “Daddy, will you leave so I can go to sleep?”

“You want me to leave?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

So I left. He turned over, cuddled under his covers, and went to sleep on his own. He did the same thing last night and tonight. It’s exciting to see, and also nice for us, because it puts us back on adult time much earlier. We still have the nice ritual of snuggling and reading books, but he’s comfortable enough now to stay by himself in his room while he falls asleep.

I was talking to a good friend the other day who mentioned that kids seem to go through a developmental leap each spring. She’s seeing it with her daughter, and we’ve really noticed it with Bernie. I ascribed the change to John’s birth. I figured that maybe Bernie just decided to act more like an older brother. Whatever the reason, he’s certainly becoming more grown-up by the day.

When you have your first child, you’re deluged with cliches about how fast the child will grow up. As much as you think you’re ready for it, you’re not. Bernie has gone from a five pound preemie to an active boy in the blink of an eye. It didn’t always seem like a blink along the way, but it sure seems that way now.

The wedding party was small because we were planning to travel back east for two receptions — one in Pennsylvania and one in upstate New York. We got married when we did because were about to move overseas. Or so we hoped.

A small wedding was a fantastic idea. David (my best man) and I had a relaxed morning before the wedding, stopping at Baggins Sandwiches to eat a little food and chat. Then we headed to Michaels Crafts and bought some ribbon to string between chairs so we could create a little aisle to walk down for the wedding. Jen and Priscilla made some flower arrangements at my aunt and uncle’s house.

Shortly before the wedding, Dave and I arrived at the house to change into our wedding clothes. I wore a vintage 1930′s blue pinstriped wool suit. Yup — a wool suit for a desert wedding. That’s macho! And stupid! Jen wore a beatiful cream colored silk outfit with a sleeveless blouse and pants. Her hair was long and flowing and she looked gorgeous.

Dave and I set up chairs for the guests, and hung the ribbon from the chairs to make the aisle. We also set up a semi-circle of rocks, inside of which Jen and I stood during the ceremony. Dave is an artist, and he actually made my gold wedding band. Jen’s wedding ring was a family heirloom given to me by my mother.

We walked down the aisle to a Yo-Yo Ma/Bobby McFerrin tune from their album Hush. The JP did his thing, and we said our vows. Mine included a verse from the song “Sweet Lorraine” — When it’s raining I don’t miss the sun / For that’s when my baby smiles. / And to think that I’m the lucky one / Who will lead her down the aisle. I’m not sure whether Jen heard any of that, because she cried throughout the ceremony. I tried not to take it personally.

Following the ceremony, I walked over to the JP with a check to pay him for his services. He said he only took cash. Dave overheard and went in the house to ask my grandfather whether he had any money. Grandpa came up with the $75, and I avoided going to jail, or whatever happens when you don’t pay the JP.

Then it was off in my grandparents’ white Chevy Corsica (complete with cans hanging off the bumper and the traditional “Just Married” sign) to La Indita, a great Mexican restaurant in downtown Tucson. The whole gang was there, and we had a great dinner on the outdoor patio behind the restaurant. The patio was surrounded by vine-covered trellises filled with singing birds. Dave made a lovely toast, and Jen and I danced our wedding dance to Chet Baker’s recording of “Time After Time.”

When we got back to our apartment (a guest house on Dodge Blvd. that Dave Gordon described fondly as a “hole”), Dave had put flowers on the bed and lit candles around the apartment. Given the dry weather, it’s fairly surprising that the guest house didn’t burn down.

I’m pretty sure that most folks we knew thought the marriage wouldn’t last, but they were wrong. Here we are, 10 years, two kids, five states, and two countries later, more in love than ever.

John is doing really well. He’s breastfeeding very successfully. Jen is quite tired, but she’s recovering. We’re all just very happy to be home.

I really need to take a shot of John’s feet. They’re huge!

More soon. For now, take a look at the photos.

And with Bobby McFerrin, Ralph Abernathy, and Lawrence Welk. Wacky!

We hope to be able to take John out of the O2 tent to feed him around lunchtime today. And we hope to have everyone home tomorrow.

He’s already taking after his brother — he has a little problem with his lungs, so he’s in an oxygen tent in the special care nursery until at least tomorrow. Bernie had to do the same thing, and he’s completely fine, so we expect to have John with us very soon.

Jen came through with flying colors. She’s really doing well. As for Bernie — he gets to meet his new baby brother tomorrow!

Here are some photos of the day. More details will come in the days ahead.

As happened with Bernie, Jen’s health has been an issue this time around. Her blood pressure has been quite high, which can be a sign of preeclampsia. So she’s been on bed rest for the last three weeks, which is annoying on its own. Why? Well, no two doctors have the same definition of “bed rest.” Doctor #1 said it meant lying in bed and getting up only to go to the bathroom. Doctor #2 said, “Most of my colleagues would prescribe bed rest, but there’s no evidence that it has any effect, so just take it easy.” And Doctor #3? “Bed rest means bed rest, but you shouldn’t just stay in bed. You can move around.” Got it?

Doctor #3 also made a 9-months-pregnant woman on bed rest wait for 45 minutes in his office until he showed up for our appointment on Friday. We’d already been at the hospital for 90 minutes before that for our weekly tests, too. Good stuff all around.

Not to mention that we picked this doctor (after our midwife plan was nixed) because he’s a family practitioner with an OB specialty. That means that he’ll be the guy who actually delivers the baby, rather than just getting whoever is on call. Except that he’s going on vacation on Friday, so he probably won’t be around when the baby’s delivered after all. If we’d had this doctor for the whole pregnancy, that might just be the luck of the draw. But we didn’t even get this guy until two weeks ago, and he knew he’d be on vacation.

This whole thing just needs to end. A nice, healthy baby. A happy, healthy mommy. And a less stressed me.

All that said, it’s still fantastic that the baby has had three more weeks in the womb than we expected. It’s over 7 pounds now, which is also really great. Bernie was 5 lbs 15 oz, and he was three weeks early. At this point, Baby #2 isn’t technically premature (just two weeks early), and the baby’s weight is fine.

Who knew having a baby could be so challenging? What’s that? You say everyone knew? Oh.

In this issue, we delve into the story of Francis D. Flanders and his brother Joseph R. Flanders. They published a newspaper in Franklin County, New York. They ran for and won elective offices.

And they were jailed by Abraham Lincoln.

That fascinating story, plus:

• Bunny McLeod Graduates From College … at 65!
• Flanders: The Ontario County Connection
• The Mystery In Mt. Hope Cemetery
• Flanders In Politics
• Flanders In The News
• …and more!

Please visit flandersfamily.org to download the newsletter.

Bernie and I went out for sushi tonight at Shiki on Clinton Avenue in Rochester, and we had a wonderful time. He was in a great mood, and we really enjoyed every minute of the evening. To see him eat, you’d think he hadn’t been fed in about a week. He had four pieces of tamago sushi (egg sushi), four pieces of tatsuta age (a sort of Japanese fried chicken dish), two pieces of tekka maki (tuna sushi roll), and some miso shiru (miso soup.) Here are a few shots of the boy in action:

Shiki is Rochester’s best Japanese restaurant. There is no competition. Seriously. There are other Japanese restaurants, but none of them can hold even a tiny candle to Tanaka-san’s little masterpiece of an eatery. It’s probably the best Japanese food I’ve had outside of Japan, and believe me when I tell you that I’ve eaten sushi in big cities and small from coast to coast. Yesterday was Shiki’s second anniversary, so go over there and stuff yourself with some of the best food around.

And here he is playing his favorite drum:

To add insult to injury, it was then up to Dear Old Dad to go home, get out the list of Bernie’s classmates, and sign all the cards and envelopes on his behalf. All while he’s sound asleep, I might add.

Can anyone explain to me what the point of that is?? We’ve already been scammed into a holiday created by the greeting card companies and probably subsidized by government largesse sucked from our pockets by the powerful Heart-Shaped-Box Lobby. Now I have to fill out greeting cards for kids who can’t read, so they can be the imaginary love interests of other kids who can’t read?

Exactly. I’ve moved more than 20 times so far, and I’ve always felt cut off from any particular “hometown,” except for Lenox, Massachusetts, where I lived until I was five. I still feel like I’m home whenever I’m there, even though most of my life has been lived elsewhere. The first person I dated had lived in the same house her entire life (about 15 years at that point). My sister lived in the same house from the age of 5 until she was 24. My parents have lived in the same house for the past 20 years.

All of that seems very odd to me. Or maybe it’s better to say that I can’t really relate to it. I’ve always prided myself on my ability to adapt to new surroundings. I find that I get the itch to move after I’ve lived somewhere for about a year.

I’ve now lived in Rochester for five and a half years. It’s almost impossible for me to leave the house without running into people I know. Every restaurant, every store, every concert, every bike ride. A few of those folks even like me, and more than 1,500 of them voted for me for city council. That’s just weird.

I started thinking of this today when I was at Palermo’s Meat & Food Market on Culver and Norton. Guy, the owner of the store, knows my family and me by name, as do several of the employees. While Bernie and I were in there today, we ran into my good friend Otto (don’t forget to check out his new site) and his son Frankie. A few minutes later, Otto’s brother came in. Everybody was chatting, laughing, telling jokes, ordering food from the deli counter, and just generally behaving in the way I always imagined adult life would be.

So what does that all mean? Does it need to mean anything? For one thing, it means that I have roots here in Rochester. I never expected that to happen. It also means that it’s still possible — if I make the effort — to live life meaningfully in a circle of people who care about me. That’s a great feeling. When we had our near-baby-event yesterday, we had friends and family close at hand who were willing to drop everything to help out.

I didn’t expect our life here to be like this, and I’m still trying to figure it all out. In the meantime, it’s cool to have friends.

Bernie was born three weeks early because Jen had to be induced due to complications from preeclampsia — a pregnancy-only disorder that results in dangerously high blood pressure.

This time around, Jen’s blood pressure had been normal for the first eight months of her pregnancy. Recently, though, her blood pressure has begun to creep up, and today it really spiked. Our midwife called a doctor, who sent us to Highland Hospital. The doctor said that a reading as high as Jen’s was almost a guarantee that they’d induce labor — tonight.

I scrambled to get someone to watch Bernie — first our friends Pamela and Dan, who took him for a couple hours, then my sister Gretchen, who took over from there. I had met Jen at the midwife’s office, so we were driving two cars. Jen and Bernie headed over to Pamela and Dan’s, and I followed close behind. About a half-mile from their house, I was stopped at a red light … and I got rear-ended by a minivan! It was unreal. Luckily, the guy didn’t do enough damage to my car to make it impossible to drive, so we exchanged information and he left. I called the insurance company to file a quick claim, and then met Jen at home so we could head to the hospital.

Off we went to Highland Hospital, where we waited for about three hours while Jen had blood work done and had her blood pressure routinely checked. Her blood pressure was high, though not as high as the initial reading by the midwife. When her blood work finally came back, it was perfect, and the doctor diagnosed gestational hypertension — high blood pressure caused by pregnancy, but not as serious as preeclampsia. We have to keep monitoring it, and Jen has to reduce her workload (read: Bernie) around the house.

The weird part of it all is that I was psychologically prepared to have the baby tonight. The initial opinion of two different doctors was that we’d be giving birth to Crane Baby #2 before we left the hospital. At first, that was a shock. We quickly calmed down, though, and prepared ourselves for the process. Then, three hours later, we were sitting at the kitchen table as if nothing had happened.

That’s all for the best, of course. It’s better for mother and baby to get closer to the due date (March 17), and it’s still our plan to do a home birth with our midwife if that’s possible. One nice element of the hospital stay was that Jen was hooked up to a baby monitor for about 90 minutes, and the baby’s heartbeat was rock solid at 140 beats per minute, or as I like to call it, Techno Tempo.

So now we’re home. Jen is fine, the baby is fine, and we’re proceeding toward our expected delivery date. I’ll keep you posted.

He was the first vegetarian I ever heard of. If memory serves, he became a vegetarian after a visit to a chicken farm.

He also had quite a sense of humor. What I remember best are his twisted takes on classic nursery rhymes. Here are a few for your enjoyment:

Hickory dickory dock,
Two mice ran up the clock,
The clock struck one,
And the other escaped with minor injuries.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells,
And one stinkin’ petunia.

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet,
Eating her curds and whey.
Along came a spider and sat down beside her,
And said, “Is this seat taken?”

Yoikes! It’s been way too long since I posted something here. Work has been crazy recently. As you know, I work as a labor union organizer, and that’s not a 9 to 5 job. I worked every night last week, and almost every night this week (in addition to every day).

Despite all that, I have had a bit of time to read, watch and listen to some cool stuff. In the reading department: I just checked out Scurvy Dogs, a pirate comic written by Andrew Boyd and Ryan Yount. The premise? Classic pirates (Yar! and all that) try to get jobs and find love in the modern city. It’s hilarious, and the preceeding description can’t hope to do it justice. Get it today. You can thank me later.

I also had a conversation in my local comic shop (Comics, Etc.) the other day about the big crossovers of the 1980s. I was buying some back issues to fill in my collection of DC’s Millennium crossover, and the guys and I got to talking about how “the kids these days are reading Infinite Crisis without ever having read the original Crisis On Infinite Earths.” Before I go on, I’d just like to reiterate: I’m married, and I’ve fathered two children. Thank you.

The point is that some of those old crossovers were really hip. OK, they were also shameless attempts to get you to drop a whole month’s allowance in one trip to the comic shop, but still…

In defense of “these kids today,” the big comics companies (DC and Marvel, primarily) haven’t made it easy to get into the back-catalog material. It seems like they reset their entire universes about every six months, and most of the changes that take place in the big crossovers don’t last. Robin died — now he’s back. Superman died — he’s back, too. In Millennium, the parents and friends of many of the DC universe’s biggest heroes were revealed to be Manhunters bent on destroying the universe. All those people are still in their respective comics, and it’s as if the whole Millennium series never happened. Oy!

On the listening tip: My friend Otto Bruno is host of the fantastic Sunday Music Festa program on my favorite jazz station, Jazz90.1. He recently loaded me up with more than 400 episodes of the Jack Benny radio show from the 1930s and 1940s. I’ve been collecting old radio shows since I was a kid. This was quite a haul! I’ve been listening to them in cronological order. I’m still in 1933. It’s great to hear Jack make jokes about current events, just like Letterman or Leno (except funny, unlike the latter example). For example, one 1933 monologue contained jokes about Greta Garbo, King Kong, and Gandhi. That’s right, Gandhi. The sound quality is all over the place on these recordings, but they’re a priceless snapshot of that time. You can check out a big collection of Old-Time Radio mp3 CDs at OTRCAT.com.

Back to the reading list for a moment: In combination with these radio shows, I’m reading a biography of Jack Benny written by his wife, Mary Livingstone, with the help of her brother (and former Benny writer) Hilliard Marks. It’s a fun read, and a touching look at the life of a great entertainer. As far as I know, it’s long out of print. I found a first edition of it this week at the Yankee Peddler Bookshop here in Rochester, NY.

Finally, the watching list. Jen and I have been catching up on the TV show Scrubs. My sister gave Jen the first two seasons for her birthday and Xmas. It amazes me that a show this good even made it on to TV, let alone that it has survived for several years. Brilliant!

A final note: If you’d like to know more about my family than you could ever imagine, you can head over to The Flanders Family Blog and download the latest edition of Flanders Family News, the monthly newsletter I publish. Enjoy!

Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I got the baby gate, put it up in the doorway to our room, and put him on the other side of it. As I turned to go back to bed, I shut the bedroom door … and discovered that Bernie had taken the knob off the door. Jen and I were now locked in the bedroom.

We live in a house built in 1902. The doors are original to the house, and many have missing or broken knobs, so very few of them actually shut. The door to the computer room, for instance, can only be opened with a butter knife. Thinking that maybe the bedroom door could be opened that way, Jen and I began calling through the door to Bernie, asking him to get a butter knife. He said “No!” and went into his own room. We heard his door shut.

We began to tear apart our bedroom — which usually looks like someone has already torn it apart. We were searching for some sort of implement to use to open the door. We tried a pen, a small screwdriver, a marker, a wooden clothespin, a plastic clothes hanger, part of a sewing machine … nothing worked. Then I remembered that there was a kitchen knife in the top drawer of one of our dressers. This dresser used to be in the computer room in our old apartment, which also had a door that could only be opened with a knife. I used to keep the knife in the dresser in case I ever got locked in the room. I tore open the dresser drawer, grabbed the knife, and discovered that it didn’t fit into the locking mechanism of the bedroom door.

Now we were starting to get desperate. Our bedroom is on the second floor, and it overlooks the porch roof. I considered climbing out the window, walking across the porch roof, and swinging down onto the porch. I went to the closet, got my fedora, leather jacket and whip, and cued John Williams to start the orchestra.

OK, I actually looked out the window, saw that it was raining, considered my lack of shoes, and decided against the Indiana Jones moment.

We thought about whom we could call. My sister lives close by, but she and my mom were on the way to Massachusetts. My dad was home — nearly 45 minutes away. We have friends close by, but even if they came, what could they do?

It was right about then that I remembered that the closet door in the bedroom had the same kind of knob as the bedroom door. I also remembered that it was loose. I reached over, yanked it out of the door, and used half of it to turn the lock in the bedroom door. We were free!

After a few hours of sober reflection, I feel I’ve learned an important parenting lesson from the ordeal. It is this:

Always keep a fire axe in your bedroom.

Louise and Christina went to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to stay with their aunt Johanna (Lay) Honecker and her husband Francis. Johanna, my great-great-great-aunt, paid for the girls to travel to the U.S. Two years later, on 28 June 1899, the rest of the family came over from Germany, also aboard the Kensington: parents Peter and Catharina; brothers Jacob, Bernard and Carl; and sister Johanna. (The youngest sister, Anna, was born after the family arrived in the U.S.)

On 28 September 1908, Louise married my great-grandfather, Orren Elmer Flanders. On 30 November 1912, they welcomed my grandfather, Bernard Orren Flanders, into the family. The rest, as they say, is history.

(Louise Lay was born May 1866. She died on 31 May 1956 and was buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.)

And here’s a little more history about the S.S. Kensington — the ship that carried the Lays across the Atlantic:

Kensington and Southwark were sister ships which began their careers with the American Line, and then served Red Star and the Dominion lines before heading to the shipbreakers. Despite these changes, both ships retained their original names.

Southwark was built by William Denny & Bros. of Dumbarton, while Kensington was built by J&G Thompson of Glasgow. Both ships were launched in 1893. They each made their maiden voyage on the American Line’s Liverpool-Philadelphia service, Southwark on 27 December 1893 and Kensington on 27 June 1894. In August 1895, both of them were transferred to Red Star and placed on that line’s Antwerp-New York service. (At the time, both Red Star and American were operated by the International Navigation Co.)

In 1902, International Navigation changed its name to International Mercantile Marine and acquired a number of other lines, including the Dominion Line. After making their final Red Star voyages in March 1903, Southwark and Kensington were placed on Dominion’s Liverpool-Canada service and remained there for the rest of their careers. Kensington made her final voyage in November 1908 and was broken up in 1910. Southwark made her final trip in May 1911 and was scrapped later that same year.

(Source: greatships.net)

Imagine my surprise, then, when just a few weeks of digging turned up a goldmine of family history. Turns out the Flanders clan has been exhaustively researched, and I was able to link my branch to the main trunk of the family tree. My ninth-great-grandfather, Steven Flanders, came to Massachusetts in the 1640s, and the line has been traced all the way from then to now.

The only problem was that no one seemed to be talking to anyone else about all these distant cousins we all have. So I decided to jumpstart the conversation with a Web site, newsletter and e-mail list. You can find out about all those things at flandersfamily.org. Enjoy!

We stayed in Brewster, in a house my parents rented. It was close to Sheep’s Pond, where we went on the first sunny day. Massachusetts is filled with small lakes — called “ponds” by the locals — and some actual ponds, also called “ponds” by the locals. (The most famous of which is probably Walden Pond, favored site of Henry David Thoreau.)

Early in the vacation, Jen and I left Bernie with my folks and made our annual pilgrimage to my hometown of Lenox, Mass., to see James Taylor play his July 4 show at Tanglewood. Wonderful, as always. His band this year included Rochester’s own Steve Gadd on drums; Larry Goldings on piano and organ; Lou Marini of the Blues Brothers on sax; and the great Arnold McCuller on backing vocals. I also got to see my first fireworks over Stockbridge Bowl, an old Berkshires tradition.

One thing that really surprised me about the Cape was the food. It wasn’t very good. Particularly the seafood. From what I’ve read, the Cape has been so overfished that most of the seafood you get there is flash-frozen far away and shipped to the Cape, making it about as much a seafood paradise as, say, Pittsburgh. Plus, it’s incredibly overpriced. I went to the Kream -N- Kone for a fried clam platter with onion rings and fries. The price: $19.99. You’re welcome.

If you’re going, there’s at least one other thing to avoid — the ZooQuarium in Yarmouth. The name alone should have been a warning. And when we pulled up and discovered that it was housed in a huge concrete bunker, we should have turned tail and fled. But for some reason we plunked down $30 to get in to what was essentially a petting zoo with a sea lion. It was like paying $30 to go to Petco for the afternoon. And Bernie’s not a big fan of loud noises, so the main attraction — a sea lion show in a big concrete auditorium — sent him running back outside in about 10 seconds. Traveling tip: Avoid the ZooQuarium.

On the plus side, the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History was wonderful. The museum itself was closed when we went, but we walked the trails, which were beautiful. If the trails are any indication of the quality of the museum, it would be worth a visit. The John Wing trail (named after an early white settler of the area), wound across a marsh and a cranberry bog before crossing a small island and ending at a secluded beach. Absolutely gorgeous.

We also had fun in Plymouth, one of my old summer haunts. (And the town where I famously spent a week at the age of about 7 eating Ding Dongs and candy at my grandparents’ house, and returned from vacation as round as a basketball, much to my parents’ chagrin. They made me jog every night for a week or so, but natural growth eventually took care of the weight.) Bernie and Jen and I went to Plimoth Plantation, a living museum which houses a 17th-century settler village and a Native American village. My one comment about the Plantation is that I’d like more third-person interpretation in the settler village. It’s interesting to talk with actors playing the part of 17th-century pioneers, but when you ask them how they did a job without a drill and they respond “I know not of this tool,” it doesn’t really answer your question. Overall, though, a really interesting trip, even in the rain with a two-year-old.

We also went to the Mayflower II, a replica of the original that was built in the late 50s as a postwar sign of friendship between the UK and US. The boat sailed from the UK to the US when it was built, and it has sailed several times since. I remember going there as a kid and learning this deathless humor: April showers bring May flowers, but what do May flowers bring? Pilgrims. (I’ll be here all week. Try the Indian corn.)

When I used to go to Plimoth Plantation as a kid, I always fantasized about my family having arrived on the Mayflower, which of course they didn’t. In the intervening years, though, I discovered that my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather (that’s nine “greats”) Stephen Flanders came to Massachusetts in 1638. The Flanders line goes through my maternal grandfather Bernard (after whom my son is named) and my mom to me. At Plimoth Plantation, when I looked through many of the books on early settlers of Massachusetts, my family was in there. So that was pretty hip.

If you go to the Cape, make sure you go see some games in the Cape Cod Baseball League. One out of every six former college players in Major League Baseball played in the Cape League, which is the premier college summer league in the country. Jen and I read The Last, Best League by Jim Collins, which tells the story of the 2002 Chatham A’s. We went to a couple A’s games, and they were everything we’d imagined. Future stars, before all the hooplah. Don’t miss it. (To get a little taste, you can listen to Cape League games online.)