The last few years I have spent the month of July tent-camping in Michigan. Parts of the family will join me for much of this but I usually spend a week or two alone. Every morning of this month begins with a 3-4 hour reading and writing session on the beach. As for what I’m reading, each year I choose a different topic to research and I will have a few books on that subject and will spend my mo...

before bed, marty reads harry potter to anthony and i. we are on book 5. this is her second time through the series as she read the books to alex and bella several years back. i read the first four books to anthony but he and i flamed out as i kept falling asleep during my reads. this is why marty took over. she is admittedly WAY better at reading potter than i am as she does animated voices and has an enviable reading stamina, even when exhausted. while she reads i work on my crossstitch. anthony, well, he is almost always moving about the room in some way, either walking back and forth on the bunk bed rails (until he slips and painfully wedges himself between the bed the and wall) or plays hot lava traversing the small space by jumping from object to object. the only time he is still is when he's eating an apple, his pre-bed snack. humorously, this allows him to be just as loud when he is sitting still as when he is balancing, climbing, and jumping about the room.

part of his apple ritual stands as one of my favorite anthony-isms. when he is done he goes to his second story window, loudly throws it open, reels back, and chucks his apple core onto the front yard. the first time i saw him do this i asked, a little alarmed, what he was doing. he casually said he was giving the rest of his apple to nature, you know the squirrels and birds or whoever might come upon it and need a snack. when he saw the expression on my face he added, "mom said it's ok". then the next morning as we head off to school, he will sometimes point out his apple, saying, "hey there's my apple from last night" and he will sometimes glance at an empty part of the yard and wonder aloud who got to enjoy his apple last night. i'm left wondering, not aloud, what the hell i'm going to to do for entertainment when my children are grown and gone.

i get an irrational and unexplainable amount of satisfaction in seeing one of my children lost in a book.

if you're wondering if i experience this bliss when i see other people's children read, the answer is no. when i see children reading who are not mine i think, "well at least they're being quiet". ...

anthony has been walking around with a stop-watch around his neck. a parent he walked by commented on the accoutrement asking if that is normal behavior in our house. i told them only when the library's summer reading competition fires up. the kid with the most reading minutes over the summer gets their picture hung in honor of their achievement. anthony has pointed to that section in the stands and due to this target now wears a stopwatch around his neck as to not miss a single minute of potential reading time.

in partial regard to the book i posted about yesterday, i remember when my former boss and mentor turned fifty i asked her if there was a best part of hitting this lofty milestone. she had an answer ready and looked happy to share it. with more than a small hint of excitement in her voice she said it was the realization, finally, that everyone is not talking or thinking about you and that in the rare moments that they actually might be, knowing that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't matter one iota.

for her, this epiphany proved one of the most liberating and meaningful parcels of wisdom ever set before her. the fact that my boss and mentor was an african american, female executive in a wildly conservative banking environment should add some weight to this discovery. while not yet fully there, i can sense myself trending in this direction. i can also sense the saliva building around my mental jowls at the thought of biting into the philosophy whole.

part one is over here

towards the end of king's memoir he penned a sample passage of a bar scene. in reading it bella ran into a number of words she didn't know. this turned into concern about fighting with the language and that this struggle might take away from her enjoyment. she expressed this to marty first. marty said she should maybe wait to read them. bella agreed.

when she mentioned this to me i reminded her we would be reading them together and i could help with any words she didn't understand. she said it wouldn't be the same and we should wait.

i'd be lying if i said the notion of sitting in bella's new bunk bed reading stephen king books with my daughter every night of the summer didn't have me bristling with anticipation. i already had it planned out. we were going to start out by reading them in the same order i met stephen king: pet semetary, it, tommyknockers, needful things. from there we'd branch out. i saw a large part of my summer hopes slipping away with my daughter's prudent decision making.

seeing my uncertainty, bella said, "it's like you say dad, sometimes wanting is better than having".

boy do i hate it when my good advice sinks its teeth into my own buttock.

update: in the end the pull of trying him out proved too enticing so on saturday june 8th at 10:03 pm, my daughter and i began our first joint-reading of stephen king beginning with the same book i first read when a little older than her, pet semetary. we would have started at ten on the dot but i had to pee. unfortunate timing that. but we sat on the porch with multiple candles burning. i read the first chapter, using my clearest and most measured reading voice. when i finished the chapter i excitedly looked over at my daughter who was sitting on a deck chair facing me. her hand extended toward me, palm up, requesting the book. she said, "nice try dad but you don't have what it takes. hand it over." so she now has the reading duties and she is quite good at it. i'm convinced she learned most of her character voice skills from her mother when marty read all seven of the potter books to alex and bella a few summers back, employing a wildly impressive array of voices and energy. after i handed the book over, bella leafed through the pages i just read, finding passages and telling me "this should have sounded more like this dad" and would then re-read the lines with am admittedly higher level of enthusiasm and skill. aside from struggling with the elderly neighbor Jud Crandall, who via bella sounds more like a young hiphop artist, she's knocking it out of the horror aisle.

and now that we have a few nights under our belt, i must say that these neat and tender reading moments i'm sharing with my eldest child makes all the early years, fumbles, questions, trials, sacrifices and challenges of getting to this comfortable, close spot we can share together and look forward to every day ... well ... it just makes all that early work and effort seem crazily trivial.

part one is over here

one thing i haven't mentioned through all of this is why bella is so ravenous to read stephen king. the reason is bella fancies herself a bit of a horror writer. she has written a number of scary short stories. they definitely are not what you'd expect to come out of a twelve year old girl, who otherwise seems as normal as bella seems at least.

she mostly has done this in her free time and just shared it with family and friends but one day she asked me to proof-read a school assignment for her. when i did it was one of her horror stories.

TROY
what is this for?

BELLA
english class.

TROY
you can't turn this in at school.

BELLA
why not?

TROY
because the department of family services would come here and take you away from us.

BELLA
why?

TROY
because this is twisted and deranged. i mean don't get me wrong, it's very good. the problem is its almost too good and thus twisted and deranged.

it turns out she was very excited to turn it in and had already talked it up to her friends and teachers. our compromise was she had to include an author's statement with the assignment. what she quickly penned to appease her stickler-father follows:

part five

part one is over here

yesterday's mention of bella giving up television reminded me of a related story.

now that bella is older, about a year back, marty suggested we get a proper television so she could comfortably have girlfriends over and for gatherings, sleepovers and the like. our conversation quickly and excitedly turned into a top-down redesign of our living room, sketching out a remodel to take it from its present state--which is about two steps from looking like the monkey cage at the zoo (we're missing simply a swing-rope from the ceiling)--to a fully re-imagined space that included an L-couch, a wall mounted flat-screen, surround-sound, a stained-wood mantle, matching built-in bookshelves lining the walls, and new natural-wood, functioning french doors (note: these were recently installed). marty envisioned herself curled up under a fleece blanket watching some of the series-tv she's missed over the last decade. i imagined myself buried in the couch's corner, watching weekend football, wearing a pair of tired sweats, a fresh bowl of stove-top corn on my lap and a few logs popping in the over-sized fireplace. both marty and i were plenty eager to assume these relaxed positions.

a few weeks later while out with bella on our dad-lunch, i revealed this plan to her. instead of the shriek i braced for, i received an inflectionless response that she kinda liked not having a tv didn't want to get one. i almost reached over to her feel her forehead thinking she must have taken ill in the time it took me to utter my sentence. this sorta moving target is one of the core reasons parenting is often named the hardest thing you will ever undertake.

later in the day when alone with marty i began a conversation with the words, "you're not going to believe this but ..."

TROY
you're not going to believe this but when i told bella about our plans for the living room, she said she didn't want a television.

MARTY (stopped what she was doing and looked at me)
what?

TROY
yeah, she said she didn't want a television. she liked not having one. she said having one would change, ruin even, the tenor of our home.

MARTY (after a brief pause)
well screw bella. i want a television. when she has a home of her own she can preserve the tenor of it all she wants.

this would be that target i'm trying to aim at picking up and moving again. and not just like moving two paces to the left but like moving in a fast and serpentining pattern that i'd need an uzi to hit, and as confessed before i'm working with a home-made slingshot. truth is, ninety percent of the surprises i contend with come from the two women in my life saying things i don't expect (and sometimes just the plain, darn opposite of what they said before). the other ten percent comes from the boys in my life doing things i don't expect, things like:

• dropping toys down the neighbors sewer vent.
• riding red wagons down hills while standing on top of them, surfer-style.
• climbing trees so high you can't even yell loud enough for them to hear you screaming, "get down! now!"
• or like, our six year old arriving at the dinner table with hundreds of dollars in his piggy bank and saying it's just his chore money from the last few months. of course when you combine (1) the fact that he gets fifty cents a week and (2) his brother and sister's banks are suddenly empty, his defense starts plummeting faster than his computer time over the next two weeks.

but at least with the boys, while i may not expect all the things they do, i do understand them. this is what makes raising men a more tenable undertaking for another man.

but moving back to the original topic, bella and television, don't think that the rapidity in which my daughter accepted stephen king's advice (mentioned yesterday ), which she encountered exactly once before mine (and having shouldered my advice dozens of times) has been lost on me. i see it. i see it most clearly. i also imagine it is not the last time she will accept notions from a fella new to our lives before she would take my own, identical, tested and trusted counsel. i'm sensible enough to see that coming and yes, i'm already saving money for the therapy i'm sure to need when the dark scenario actually happens for real.

and for any other people possibly fighting this fight, or other similar fights, with their small humans, i will share the closest i ever came to persuading bella to abandon her digital herion (without the assistance of a best selling author at least). the nearest my methods took me happened after we attended a school event (her induction into the national junior honor society--sorry, proud father, couldn't resist). before the ceremony began two students from the school performed for the audience, singing and playing acoustic guitar. they performed beautifully, so rife with confidence and composure, especially for two junior high age girls sitting in front of better than a hundred people. after the event the pre-show music came up in discussion. bella acknowledged who they were and said they were amazingly talented. i asked bella if she thought she would be as good as those girls if instead of watching shows on her computer time for the last two years she had practiced guitar. bella thought for a moment and said probably. i repeated her 'probably' and added had she done that people might be watching her playing guitar on television instead of her watching other people do enviable things on television. i watched her reaction, closely, and saw something happening but admittedly the success lasted about as long as a netflix login. that said, that brief moment is the closest i ever came to getting bella to put the media needle down.

part four

part one is over here

i put two conditions on bella's reading of stephen king. the first was that we would have to read the books together. the second was that before we start, she had to finish reading his memoir, On Writing, a book i had given her several months earlier.

the only issue with the first condition is she said i'd need to find five hours a day to give to the effort. i'm confident i do not need to go into the nine kinda ways this was not going to happen so we quickly negotiated that down to a more realistic thirty minutes a night, and maybe the occasional hour depending on my schedule and the plot line.

regarding the second condition, the moment we concluded our time-each-day bargaining she turned and ran from the room. over the next several days every time you'd see her she'd have king's memoir on her; either opened for reading, stuck in her armpit if walking, or resting on her thigh if sitting. a brief aside—on the top of bella's reading log for the library's summer program, she added the words 'you can't compete' followed by three exclamation points. i, the library staff, and multiple summers worth of other kids in the reading program can attest to the undeniable truth of this declaration.

an unexpected bonus from sir king totally came when he slammed, viciously, television saying time spent watching was wasted, forever lost and offered no redeeming value, namely in this case, to one's writing skills. bella said she got that and was considering fully giving up tv and computer, replacing it with reading and writing. while my mind furiously staved off a that's-what'-i've-been-saying message bella continued on, "so who would have thought you and stephen king feel the same way about television. crazy." spared.

but, for any ground i gained on the television front, my dinner table suffered as he also says that if you really want to be a writer you cannot let things like social norms stand in your way and to properly hone your craft you might need to read during certain social routines. he named family dinners specifically. bella informed me, so i wouldn't be surprised, that she will now be showing up to dinner with a book or writing pad in hand and i couldn't protest because she was just following the advice of someone i told her to read. un-spared.

part three

bella, who just turned twelve, has been asking pleading to read stephen king for the last two years. of course, each time my response has been a wordless glance over my glasses. she knows what this means. and she hates it. still without a word from me, she exclaims, "why not!". i explain she is too young for the likes of stephen king. to her huff i explain he will still be there when she isn't too young. to her second huff i explain she needs to save some things for when she is older because if she consumes it all now there will be less to enjoy later. to her third huff, i explain she only gets one childhood and it is my job to protect her from leaving it too early, for the wrong reasons at least.

that talk happened more than a year ago. over the last few months bella has built a shrine to King on our family bookshelf, meticulously organizing all of his works, all that i own at least, onto a single shelf. i've caught her a few times either (a) re-scanning the shelves for any books she may have missed or (b) staring longingly at the bindings of the collected works and maybe even placing her fingertips on the glossy wall of bindings in a way that could only be described as reverent. the other morning i walked by while she was in the second state. i asked what she was doing. she said sadly she was waiting until she was ready. i replied i thought she might be ready. her head snapped up and her eyes shot open. she asked me to repeat what i just said. i did. she asked me to repeat it one more time just to make sure. i did again. she danced in place. she hooted. she screeched. she whirled in circles. she reached her hand out towards the books touching them softly, letting them know they'd be together soon and softly, but excitedly, ran her hand down the length of the volumes reveling in the memorable moments awaiting her.

while we walked to the bus stop fifteen minutes later she asked why i changed my mind, what was different. i said she was different. she was more mature. she asked for specific examples. i recounted the night before how i asked her to walk a dog that was staying with us (due to bella's dog-sitting business). it was late and she didn't want to walk the dog and said as much. i explained that other people in the family had taken the dog out that day but she had not and it was her turn and she told her clients she would so she had to do what she said because someone was paying her money based on that understanding. she turned and left the room. she got dressed and took the dog out. and not just for a quick circle of the block as i expected her to do but for a good, proper walk. she came home still mad but instead of injecting her mood on the home, she retired to her room, went to bed and woke pleasant as usual. i explained that one of the reasons for green-lighting her was her more mature handling of problems which even six months ago would have been a big dramatic affair.

i added that it was also her evenness and reliability. not only is she consistently responsible in her chores and duties (jobs and school) but she has also been steady in her conviction to read stephen king. she has shown it to be more than just a passing fancy.

and there is a third reason. i didn't mention it to her but it is something i've discussed here before (i think) and that is the school bus. based on her reports, the conversations are every bit as salacious as anything stephen king has ever penned ... and at least he's a grown man who has experienced many of the things he's writing about which trumps information that comes from older siblings, cousins, uncles and neighbors. so if she's going to hear such things, she may as well hear them from a human, mr. king, that has actually experienced such things (and while i'm there to bandy about the questions that remain).

part two

a neighbor sent me an email with a link to a movie trailer for enders game. i guess he and i talked about the book at one of our neighborhood gatherings. those who know me know i did not click on the link. instead i sent him the following reply: to which he replied: no matter how good they make this film, and i'd wager it will not be good at all, their effort could not possibly be better than the millions of versions that won't be imagined in the young minds that will not read the book because they saw this film. most unfortunate.

excerpt from parenting from the heart by Jack Pransky

Excerpt from It's Easier Than You Think by Sylvia Boorstein

a friend of mine who is a university philosophy professor recently asked me to pre-read a book he wrote on happiness. i think i came to mind because i've probably read more books on positive psychology and happiness than most. of all the great points he illustrated in his book, my favorite line was, "One should not be an asshole in the pursuit of happiness." while it might seem overly obvious, i reckon we've all bumped into a soul or two who would benefit from such counsel.

excerpt from uncertainty by jonathan fields

a couple times a year i try out a few new magazines. while i enjoy reading the content and studying their pixel perfect layouts, what i enjoy most about magazines is the newsstand experience (good newsstands at least), with its rows and columns of shiny and new. it's clear lots have people have been busy.

initially, i had started writing a gripe about how i find the letter from the editor in most magazines to be boorish and less thoughtful than it seemed like it maybe should be, but i just deleted it. i decided that instead of being critical of most—and who the hell am i to say anyway—i'd compliment the one i enjoy most: David Zinczenko of men's health. he has a style and approach that i find unassuming and real. i imagine him obsessively toiling over his next topic, searching for that one story or experience from his past that will best illuminate the spirit of the pending issue. i imagine these final epiphanies come while he's shiny with exertion from one of his many activities. while i appreciate some might not deem him inspiring, i think we could agree he takes his space seriously and works hard to fill it with relevant reflections from his life. and in the end, that's all any of us can conscientiously ask.

a few of his introductions i most enjoyed.

• Experts Express
• Nothin' Stupid
• Under Construction

imagine if you were asked to write about a runaway horse crashing into a family's wagon on a narrow wooden bridge. would your rendition be close to this?
excerpt from William Faulkner's The Hamlet

an anthony reflection. the amulet is a graphical novel which is quite good, especially if you liked the Bone series.

excerpt from Aging Well by George E. Vaillant

my man B Franklin as Poor Richard.

Poem by Mary Ann Hoberman from the book named The Tree that Time Built.

another excerpt from John Stienbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent

excerpt from John Stienbeck's The Winter of Our Discontent

excerpt from Larry McMurtry's LonesomeDove

excerpt from Jim Harrison's novella The Man Who Gave Up His Name