Let's Get Real

My driver's license was set to expire at the end of June, and the DMV would not let me forget it! Throughout the spring I received reminder after e-mailed reminder. The trouble was, the DMV had closed all of their locations in response to the COVID-19 crisis. When at last they rolled out some limited office hours, by appointment only, none of our service centers up here in Northern VA were open yet. And still the no-reply messages came reminding me to renew my driver's license!

 Finally, I was able to schedule an appointment for July 7, just a week after my ID became invalid. Technically, the governor extended all DMV documents for three months, but tell that to Safeway where they scan the barcode to see if you are of age to buy beer, no matter how many laugh lines you can point to around your eyes.

Starting in October, airlines will require REAL ID for anyone planning to travel, and my new license will be verified to use that way as long as I bring the required documentation with me to my appointment tomorrow. Like most things bureaucratic, the directions were several pages long and not as clear as I would liked. Even the one-page overview was a bit complicated in its explanation of required documents and list of "Most commonly used documents," so I set aside some time today to gather my paperwork so I'll be all set when I put on my face mask and head over to the DMV not earlier than ten minutes before my appointed time.

Fortunately, I had read the list before and I knew that, since my passport was expired and out for renewal, that I would need a copy of my birth certificate, which I ordered a few weeks ago from the DC Vital Records Department. I also knew right where my social security card was, and then it was only a matter of setting aside the mortgage statement and the power bill when I paid them this month. (That's right-- I don't have paperless delivery! I also still get the newspaper delivered to my door. What a dinosaur! You'd think they would sell me some beer at the grocery store based on those two facts alone.) Anyway, I think I've got my 

One proof of identity
One proof of legal presence
Two proofs of Virginia residency
• Two from the primary list, or
• One from the primary list and one from the secondary
list
One proof of your social security number, if you’ve been
issued one
Current driver’s license if you are applying to exchange one
issued by another U.S. state, territory or jurisdiction for a Virginia
driver’s license

and hopefully, I'll have a REAL ID sometime tomorrow morning. Otherwise, I might have to call on the Blue Fairy.

From Coast to Coast and Around the World

If you read my 8x8 series last week, you know that I'm a fan of both lists and the 70s, so it shouldn't be surprising that from time to time I like to tune to the 70s on 7 station on the satellite radio in my car, especially on Saturdays when they replay an entire edition of Kasey Kasem's American Top 40. They choose an episode from the current week, but in some year of the 1970s.

As I listen, I reach back in time and try to place myself where I might have been when the playlist was new. It's often pretty hard to figure out what was going on during some random week of nineteen seventy whatever, but not so yesterday. The date was July 4, 1970. I was 8 years old and my family walked down the street and around the corner to watch the town Independence Day Parade.

It was hot and the sun was shining in my eyes uncomfortably when I noticed my parents chatting with two strangers, a couple who, it turned out, had just moved in across the street from us. When the parade was over, our new neighbors invited us over for a cold drink.

Their house had air conditioning, which was a novelty in New Jersey back then, and they had the curtains drawn to keep the refrigerated air in. They also had wall to wall carpeting, and I'll never forget the cool, dim, silence that greeted us upon entering their home for the first time. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, it was clear that they did not have any children-- everything was cream and white, and there was nothing of interest to my brother and sister and me, so we sat stiffly on the couch next to my mother. The men drank beers, and the women had wine, but the only thing they had for us was ginger ale or diet ice tea. I picked the latter, and immediately regretted my choice after the first saccharine sip.

We didn't know it then, but these folks would become some of my parents' dearest friends: playing bridge and drinking together almost every weekend, double dating for the church charity balls and casino night, celebrating our birthdays, trick or treating with us on Halloween, and adopting one of our cat's kittens. And when their first child was born a two years later, he spent his first Christmas with us because his mom was visiting his dad who was stationed in Okinawa for the year.

Over the next fifty years we would visit them in Jacksonville, NC, Monterey, CA, and Bangkok, Thailand. My mother would move to Virginia Beach, VA when she split from my dad, because they were living there, and my sister, brother, and I, and eventually even my dad, would all follow. We lived in two different houses, right down the street from them. My sister and I babysat their kids, and we took their son to his first concert.

Like the long and winding road the Beatles sang of in the single that was number four that week, our common story will never disappear, but it first hit the charts on July 4, 1970.

Plane Old Planes

My dad was a guy who could tell you what kind of airplane it was that was flying over your head. He would point to the sky and say 707 or L1011 or DC9. Maybe it was because he worked for the airline, but it might have been why he worked for the airline; I’m sorry to say I never thought to ask. Still, as members of an airline family, we kids could identify the planes at the gate as we walked by the huge plate glass windows, and we always asked what kind of a plane it was before we left for any trip.

Back then, the popular new kid was the L1011, a wide body luxury plane with a lounge and a bar in first class, but the queen of the fleet was definitely the 747. Truth be told, I spent many transoceanic hours crammed into a coach seat on a 747 (thinking of airline seats now though? the width of the seat and the legroom make that experience seem almost first class, or certainly Business, AKA “Ambassador” in TWA speak.) I also spent many hours in both business and first class, thanks to the airline industry's pre-deregulation professional courtesy policy. By any measure, HRH 747 took me a lot of places I wanted or needed to go.

Even so, I don't remember the last time I saw one in person before tonight. That's when, up at my garden to water, came a rumble then a roar as Air Force One (or the plane that is AF1 when the president is aboard) lumbered low in the sky on its way to lead the 4th of July flyover. She was followed by a number of vintage crafts from as far back as WWII, a bunch of helicopters, some jet bombers including the stealth bomber, the Golden Knights, the Thunderbirds, and the Blue Angels. It was quite a show, and I enjoyed it all the way as I walked home. We were right over the flight path.

Heidi was unimpressed. "Am I paying for this?" she asked in irritation, but I couldn't agree. In the words of Tattoo on Fantasy Island, The plane, the plane!

Well Read

I listened to and then watched a recording of five of Frederick Douglass's descendants reading excerpts of the speech he gave in 1852 called, What to a Slave is the Fourth of July? I was familiar with this scathing rebuke to Americans delivered 8 years before the Civil War began, but I was reminded of how wrenchingly relevant those words are today.

The readers were all kids between the ages of 13 and 20, and their voices perfectly fit Douglass's words, strong and rightfully condemning. I was spellbound listening, and I felt almost as if I knew them, and then I realized that they reminded me of so many students I have taught over my career-- smart, passionate, critical, and strong.

I can't wait to hear those voices, again.

I Don't See It

Several folks have mentioned lately that I resemble my mom. They are referring both to photos and my in person appearance, and I take it as the compliment it is meant to be: all who have said so knew and loved her.

But I really wish I saw it too.

What Time Will Tell

Tonight, after a 3 month delay, our writing group is finally going to meet. Responsible citizens we, the plan is to sit outside at a distance of 6 feet dining on individual take out meals. Before we adjourned for the pandemic, our annual Slice of Life Story Challenge celebration was scheduled as the next meeting. It is our tradition to read back through the March writing we have all done and select a favorite piece for each of the four of us.

Truth be told, I think we all love this session because the pressure is off-- the writing is already done. I know that's true for me. I also love it because it gives me the opportunity to read and reread a month of pretty great writing from each of my friends.

And that's what I did this morning; I spent a while revisiting our posts, blog by blog, day by day. Wow! What an extraordinary month to document! On March 1 it hadn't even entered anyone's mind that the corona virus might impact school, let alone close down the entire nation. By the next week, we were considering time away from our buildings with uncertainty, and on March 13 school closed for what we thought would be a month.

Through the next weeks we wrote of distance learning and quarantine, at first a novelty but soon a steady, wearing grind fraught with worry for our students, until on March 24 the governor closed schools for the rest of the academic year.

Re-reading our writing from then, I'm struck with how unaware we were, like children waving on the beach as an enormous wave looms behind them. Even at the end of the month, how little we knew of what was yet to come. It seems like years rather than months since the challenge ended; the crawl of time has been filled with so many enormous events, and I can't help but wonder what I might think when I look back on my writing in another three months.

8 Birthdays: What a Wonderful Life

When I hatched this 8 lists of 8 concept, a quick little tote on my fingers confirmed that the last eight would be on my birthday. That's easy, thought I.

Turns out, I was wrong. It was nice to know where I was headed all week, but picking the top 8 of 58 wasn't quite as simple as I expected. I have had a lot of wonderful birthdays.

When I was a kid, being born on the last day of June meant never having to go to school on my birthday. Sure, it meant never having my mom bring cupcakes for the class on my birthday, but somehow, that trade-off always seemed worth it. Especially since my mom went all out for our birthdays, particularly in the cake category. I had a cake castle with a princess in a cake dress, a barn with coconut grass and animals, my brother had covered wagons, and a circus train, my sister had a jack-in-the-box for her first birthday, and there were all sorts of cats and Snoopys in between.

With all that in mind, the first entry on my list is a bit of a cheat-- it's all my birthdays before the age of 10 (which is an arbitrary number, but I have the sense that 10 is the age when my kid birthdays ended).

18

The year I turned 18, my family spent 2 weeks in a rented villa in Portugal at the end of which I headed off to London to be a counselor for a summer program at the English branch of the Swiss boarding school I had graduated from the year before. I spent my 18th birthday at Heathrow Airport, holding up greeting signs and shepherding kids on to shuttle buses bound for Surrey. No one knew it was my birthday, and I forgot it myself several times throughout the day. So this is what it's like to be an adult, I thought with sadness and pride. That night, as I played poker with the other counselors, there was a knock on the window, and there was my family-- my mom, dad, brother, and sister had rerouted their trip home to Saudi Arabia to spend the last couple hours of my birthday with me.

19

The year I was 19, I canceled my counselor job from the summer before to spend a summer term at college. One summer was a requirement of my university, and although I hoped to get an exemption, it was not a sure thing, and all my friends were planning on being on campus that summer. One boy in particular encouraged me to stay, and when I did, he was a constant companion. When he found out it was my birthday, he offered to take rent a canoe and take me fishing on the lake near our school. As we paddled about casting our lines unsuccessfully, he suggested I turn my back to the bow and keep fishing as he paddled us to a place he knew was lucky. Nearing the end of the lake, I heard a chorus of voices and turned to find all my friends singing happy birthday on a little beach.

 Not 24

"Are you going to write about the time Teresa and Elaine showed up and crashed your birthday?" my brother asked me this afternoon. "Because that was one of my favorite of your birthdays," he laughed.

Yeah. No.

40
and
50

Our whole family gathered for a week in Maine on both of these milestone birthdays. We hiked, canoed, ate lobster, and had an all out wonderful time. Just 2 more years 'til 60!

53

I've spent a lot of birthdays in Buffalo, where Heidi's parents live. Mostly, it has to do with summer travel and coordinating our visit with her brother or nephew. In 2015, I took matters into my own hands, organizing a trip to Jamestown, NY, birthplace of Lucille Ball and home of the Lucy Museum. Can you say Vitameatavegemin?

57

I flew out to Minnesota to spend time with my mom right after school ended last year. Heidi joined us on the 29th, and the three of us played games, went to the pool, ate at one of the best restaurants in the Cities, and walked around St. Anthony's Falls on The Mississippi River. It had been 7 years since I spent my birthday with my mom, and this would be the last time I'd ever get to do it. It was a great day.

58

Despite the restrictions of the pandemic, today was quite possibly the quintessential birthday for me; in fact, if my sister's family had been here, it would have been nearly perfect. I ate peach and blueberry galette for breakfast, worked on solving a murder box until 10, went over to my brother's for sandwiches (from Earl's!), games in the back yard with both my older nephews, and lemon cupcakes. Once home, Heidi and I closed all the curtains and pulled the recliing chair up to the TV to pretend we were at the movies. (We would have had popcorn if we hadn't been so full of cupcakes.) When the house lights came up on Troop Zero, I wiped a tear and walkeda up to water my garden. Then it was home for lobster rolls and corn on the cob.

I know, right?