A blast from the past

You aren't going to believe what happened to me last week. No way. It's amazing news.

I'm still a little stunned myself. I haven't told anybody yet. Not even my wife, whom I usually tell everything to.

Not yet, but I will. You, my friends, will get a world exclusive a few lines from now.

But first ...

****
As I started suspecting a few weeks ago, I will indeed be making a long, long trip out of town for Thanksgiving Day. And it won't be to visit relatives or friends.

For the sixth consecutive year, one of our football teams has made its way all the way to the state championship game. They clinched it with a win at the dome in Marquette on Saturday, Nov. 21. The title game is at Ford Field in downtown Detroit on Friday, with a kickoff at 9 a.m. Central Time. (It's 10 a.m. down there.)

The team had looked like it would be defeated in the first weeks of the playoffs. But they won against two strong teams and then dominated their regional opponent and, on Saturday, their opponent in the state semifinal game. Next stop: Detroit.

So much for my plans for visiting friends this week and having a quiet Thanksgiving dinner at home (for the first time since 2003). And the funny thing is, 2009 was supposed to be the "regrouping" year for our team, the one when the players acquire varsity experience, take a few lumps, exit the tourney early and get to do some deer hunting. But everyone has matured faster than expected, the team improved markedly during the season. And the 2010 team? It's really supposed to be something. Who knows how many more Thanksgivings I will spend down there?

I'm going to go down there--I just don't know how yet. Three options. Last year, for the first time, I was able to ride on the team bus--experience the entire week with the team. They sent two buses down to Detroit. This year, due to budget cuts, they're just sending one team bus, and odds are 99:1 against me riding along.

Option two is the fan bus, if there is one. Here's what that would be like: ride in the bus for 10 hours or so, climb out to watch the game (about 2 1/2 hours), then climb back on the bus for the 10-hour drive home. Remember to pack along the Tylenol!

Option three is the way I have gone almost every year: Driving down there myself, in my own car. Coincidence or not, I bought new tires a week or two ago, so that part should be OK. The advantage of that is that I can visit my older son (who visited here last week) and have time to talk with him. If I go there by myself, we can really talk. If my wife and/or son invite themselves along, there is almost never time or privacy for that. So I think you know what I would prefer.

In past years, we have watched the Lions game on TV, then watched a movie, or else the kids played some games. Once or twice, we have all gone across the river into Canada, to spend a few loonies--Canada's Thanksgiving Day is in October, so Thursday is an ordinary working day there, and all the stores and restaurants will be open. If we do that, though, we to take our passport cards along, and David doesn't have one.

No matter what happens, I am on the road by 7 a.m. Friday, heading downtown to the Ford Field parking lots. After the game and the press conferences, I start the 10-hour drive home. We have had very mild weather for November--some snow is supposed to move in this week, but the ground is not frozen, the lakes are fairly warm, so everything should melt quickly and roads should be no worse than wet.

Saturday, I try to gather my thoughts together for the article about what happened. It's a long, difficult time. What I really need to do over these next few days is get some extra rest--It's going to be a busy week.

****
Back to the main topic: my surprise. It's about an old girlfriend who has found me. She is delighted that she has. So am I.

She was my girlfriend before N was. And B. And S. And even my wife. And I have never seen her in person.

Our history dates back nearly 45 years, when I was in high school. I was taking German in high school (in suburban Milwaukee), and we were told that if we wanted to, we could write to a penpal in West Germany. I wanted to try it, and that is how I started writing to a girl named Martina. We wrote on this onion-skin paper, trying out our German and English on each other, folded it up booklike, put it in thin envelopes with red and blue diamonds on the edges (to indicate air mail), put extra postage on it and mailed it.

We wrote about ... I don't know. This and that. Whatever teenagers talked about during the mid 1960s. Popular music, of course--the Beatles were big on both sides of the Atlantic, along with the other British groups. I was a Rolling Stones fan even then, and the Beatles were a close second. She liked the Beatles most, and when their "Help!" soundtrack record album came out, I scrounged up enough money to buy a copy and mail it to her. That cost some money. I think my dad cut out a thin piece of plywood to keep it from getting smashed--evidently it worked.

We wrote for about two years. Then ... I don't remember. Either she graduated from her school or I did from mine. Anyway, life intervened, and we stopped writing each other. Kids, you know. They have the attention span of a fruit fly.

But I remembered her, her name, the city where she lived ... and when a German woman named Martina contacted me via Facebook last Friday, it awoke those memories of a Martina from long ago. I asked if she is the same Martina L. who lived in R. ... and she said she is.

Today she is a "Chefsekret�rin bei einem Strafverteidiger" (chief secretary of a defense attorney), is married (second marriage) and has a son and granddaughter. Her Facebook profile says her favorite quotation is "Vergangene Tage, nicht weinen, dass sie vor�ber, l�cheln, dass sie gewesen."

Literal translation: "Past days, don't cry that they are over; smile that they happened." A pretty good philosophy on life, I think.

All that happened out of the blue. So now I am trying to remember how to speak and write German, what the different words mean, the rules on word order and word endings and umlauts and genders and cases and all that stuff. I haven't studied German for over 40 years. So among the things I will look for while downstate this week will be ... a good German language guide and dictionary.

Wow. Amazing.

Love's something something

Oh, the things we do for the people we love!

Late last week, my wife asked me to do something: Can you record a movie for me? A few movies? Fourteen hours' worth?

It seems that the Hallmark Channel was carrying eight movies based on the Love Comes Softly series of books by Janette Oke. It's a series of books set in the 19th century, following the life of a family living in the prairies or the West. They are described as Christian drama TV movies.

All the movie titles are three words long, and the first word is "Love" or "Love's." Love's Something Something, for instance.

There are eight movies in the series, and Hallmark broadcast seven of them, back to back to back to back to back to back to back. At two hours apiece (including commercials), that's 14 hours of recording. Enough to deaden the rear end of even the most ardent Hallmark movie fan. Then we found out that the times in the TV listings were incorrect, so we had to adjust the schedule.

But we got it done. The movies were recorded and eventually burned onto DVDs. She watched one Tuesday night (I was gone, covering volleyball) and said she enjoyed it a lot.

For what it's worth, Wikipedia says that the Hallmark Channel movie versions "do not completely follow the books, and therefore take place in an alternate universe from the novels." Alternate universe? Is that like alternative reality?

At any rate, my wife is happy to be able to see the movies on her own schedule, so she will probably do something nice for me. Maybe a nice dessert or a favorite dinner, when we have the time. Last night, we had wild rice casserole for supper. Haven't had that for a long time. Yum!

****
We do things in the name of love or the quest for love. I do. You probably do, too. Here are a few other things taking place in the name of love.

My friend S and her husband are hosting a woman from the Northeast U.S. this week. They have been looking for a "third" (for a triad relationship) for a while, and in recent months they have gotten to know this woman. She is visiting them this week (their first encounter), and I hope things go super well for everyone. Barring a long downstate trip for football, I hope to visit them later this month for a much more conventional visit.

My friend B flew out for a long weekend last night, heading out to meet a friend. She met him online (as she met me), and this is their second weekend visit. She is happy and excited, and I am happy for her. No idea when she and I will meet again. It won't be soon, alas.

A week ago, I covered a volleyball tourney out of town and then visited my friend N--just a few miles away. I brought along a new DVD player. She had recently bought herself a new TV (her old one died), but never has had a DVD player. I thought she should have one--they aren't expensive and (aha!) it would give me a much greater range of movies I can bring that we can watch together when I visit.

So I bought one and brought it over, and N was very surprised and grateful. We snuggled up on the couch to watch two films that night before heading to bed.

****
I thought my football season would end last Saturday, but it didn't. I have spent five consecutive Thanksgiving Days downstate because of the football finals. I didn't think it would be six in a row, but then I didn't think our team would win last Saturday. They did--they blocked a punt with one minute to play and scored the winning touchdown on the next play. So now ... who knows?

My life isn't quite back to normal, but it's a lot closer. The stress of preparing for the sale of my mom's house is done with. That long, rough week ended. My mom seems to be doing a little better, too. I visited her on Tuesday.

My wife and I had a couple quiet nights last week, watching this and that on TV--usually old TV shows on DVD. That's the plan for tonight. Not too exciting, but those were good evenings. It's nice to sit next to one another. We're both feeling fine.

The H1N1 flu has been widespread in the local schools now. The entire district closed for the last three school days in October. They tried to open last Monday, Nov. 2, but still had over 25% absenteeism. (If more than 25% of students are out, the school doesn't get funding and has to make up the day later.) So they closed at noon and stayed closed all week. Many other school districts in the western U.P. have done the same.

I called my older son last week. As it turns out, he will be driving up north to visit us this weekend. The reason is complex, but it has to do with his job and finding out whether he can be "on call" from the western U.P. over Christmas week in case the computers down near Detroit have a problem. Can he and his laptop do that work from way up here in the boonies? That's what he's coming up here to find out.

We talked Monday night. Wednesday, per his request, we purchased three pizza pasties for Friday night, and we'll head somewhere else for a pizza another night.

Max, one year later

Late one night this week, just as we headed upstairs to bed, we heard a rumble behind us. It was the sound of small, running feet. The feet of the world's fastest cat.

Max was on the loose and feeling his oats. He dashed up the stairs and across the bed to the window--he likes to sit in windows, even when it's night. I caught up with him and petted him for a minute or so before helping my wife get into her nightie (one of my daily duties--it can get complicated, because sometimes the arms don't go in the right places--a game we have developed over the years).

After the kiss good-night, Max was in the doorway, meowing. I made a move, and he dashed off. I followed him downstairs (at my own speed) and caught up to him by the big window in our middle room, another of Max's favorite vantage points. There, it time for more petting, and Max pressing his head against my hand as I petted it, making his motorboat sound (loud purring, sort of from the throat; it's hard to describe). He was happy. We didn't hear from him again until morning.

A quiet observance at our house in mid-October marked Max's one-year anniversary as a feline resident. "Max," I should note, was his shelter name, but we never came up with a better one, and Max he remains. He lived in a smallish cage at the shelter for over a half year before some people decided to take him home. Us.

It sure wasn't an easy start. Charlie hated him and told him so. Maggie snarled at him. That was depressing, because the reason we wanted to get a third cat was to give Charlie someone to chum around with around the house--Maggie is an old cat (17 in human years) and doesn't like anything/anyone new.

But after a while, things got better. Charlie started tolerating Max, and they stopped snarling at each other. Later, they would lie on the same bed, on the same sofa. After that, they started licking each other around the shoulder when they met. Not that Charlie likes it when Max ambushes him, but Charlie ambushes Max, too, so fair is fair. It's just kitty games.

Here are some photos of the cats from recent months. As you see, they share the same sofa ...


They share the same bed ...


They share the same shopping bags ...


They even try to share the same sun (with Maggie) ...


When I go into our bedroom to change clothes, Max usually pops up out of nowhere--probably from one of his many hiding places, under the bed. Urrow! Buzz, buzz, buzz! Max likes to get his head rubbed and pushes his head up into my hand. He will lie on the bed during the day. But at night, after we go to bed, when the other cats spend the night on the bed (Maggie, nearly always; Charlie, for a while), Max doesn't. He's somewhere else.

Max likes sitting in windows and gazing outside. Maybe he's remembering his days as a stray before going to the shelter. Maybe he is thinking back to the time when he was roaming around outdoors. The outdoors can be very unfriendly, you know. Rain. Cold. Wind. Scrounging for food. Avoiding bigger creatures who are also roaming around, scrounging for food.

Inside, Max is safe, warm and well-fed. The sun is warm coming through the windows, even in winter. He likes his sunbaths. There are beds and upholstered chairs to curl up on. People will pet him and rub the top of his head. When he gets bored, he checks up what Charlie is up to, or else he goes to get a bite to eat or sees what Mom is doing. And when the mood is right, he never fails to find a reason to race through the house at top speed, dashing up and down the stairs or down the long hallways.

He is, after all, the world's fastest cat. I've tried to get a picture of Max running. But all I get is just a tail or maybe the rear legs, departing the scene at warp speed. Rumble, rumble up the steps. Think of a galloping horse. Sort of like that.

A little later, he's back down and suddenly tearing through the house. Rumble, rumble. We don't have to see. We can hear. We're more used to his ways now.

Maybe a month or so after we got Max, he went missing. We were sure he had somehow gotten outside. It was in the evening, the fall sun was long gone, and there was about an inch of snow on the ground. I got into my coat, grabbed a flashlight and tried to find him.

I found cat prints right by the house. They went this way. They went that way. I tried following them. Under the neighbor's trailer. Around the church on the corner. Across the street. I asked a neighbor, who was getting into her car, whether she had seen a skinny orange cat around. She hadn't. I went down an alley, where I lost the trail. I was so tired and frustrated and sad as I trudged along. Heartbroken.

I finally went inside, took off my coat and reported no success. Sat down in a gloomy mood, feeling really bad. About two hours or so later, as it was getting about time for the cats' evening meal, I saw a glimpse of orange out of the corner of my eye. Max was walking downstairs, where he had apparently been all along.

So now, when Max goes missing for a while, we know he is safely curled up, snoozing in one of his many hiding places. When it's time for supper, he'll be around.

At this very moment, he is sitting in a chair a few feet away, eyes closed. The World's Fastest Cat is recharging his batteries.