Harry Potter changed our family 23 years ago

Elissa at The Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Orlando.

Today is Harry Potter's 44th birthday.

Or at least it would be, if he were real.

In the Potter books, the boy wizard was born on the 31st of July 1980. As one website has it, the fact that July 31st is also author J.K. Rowling's birthday "does not seem like a coincidence."

I knew nothing of the Potter-verse when the first book in the series – "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone," or the "Philosopher's Stone," as it was titled in the UK – was released in the U.S. in September 1998. We had just had our third child a month earlier, and well, my life centered much more on diapers and late-night feedings than it did on children's literature.

It was a few years later, when Elissa was in second grade, that Mr. Potter entered our lives. Elissa's teacher, Mrs. Kastelic, was going to read the first book to the class and Terry had some questions about it. She didn't know much about Harry Potter, so she decided to read the book herself.

And thus it began.

Terry was blown away by it. Our voracious young reader Elissa was, too.

And in time, so was I. I read all the books and listened to the audio versions a few times, enjoying the immense talents of the great narrator Jim Dale.

By the time the series was four or five books old, you could count on some portion of our family lining up at Barnes & Noble at midnight to get one of the first copies of any new Potter release. Once, my mother-in-law Judy even took the girls for one of these late-night Potter parties.

We watched the movies, of course, and to this day we still sometimes play a Harry Potter trivia board game when we're all together.

The depth of the narrative, the intricacies of the Potter universe, the growing pains of the young characters...it was all perfectly timed for our kids.

Whenever we visit The Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Florida's Universal Studios, you better believe Elissa is there in full Hogwarts robes. She is as dedicated to her Potter fandom at 30 as she was at age 8.

So happy birthday, Harry. And thanks for being such an important part of our family for all these years.

An entire stage of life captured in one JCPenney Portrait Studio photo

About a month ago, my sister-in-law Chris brought over some old photos she found at her house, most of which were baby/toddler shots of our eldest daughter Elissa.

The image above was one of those shots. It was probably taken in late 1994 when Elissa was less than a year old. Chris laid it out on our kitchen table along with the other photos.

Our youngest, Jack, looked at it and said, "You look so 90s, but Mom doesn't seem to come from any one time."

My round glasses most certainly peg me as a young mid-90s dad, but I would argue that Terry's semi-poofy hair places her solidly in the same era.

Regardless, it struck me how much of a story one photo can tell. I remember this time of life very clearly. I often say it was a "magical" time, and I mean it.

Terry and I were both working full-time, her at Lincoln Electric in the International Engineering Department and me as a sports writer at The News-Herald. She worked days while I worked nights.

That meant we never needed to pay for daycare. I was with Elissa all day, while Terry took the night shift after she got home from work around 5:30.

Oh, we took full advantage of our parents' willingness to host their grandkids whenever the opportunity arose and we wanted to go shopping or get stuff done around the house. But for the most part, Elissa spent her babyhood at home with one or both of us.

Still looking at the photo, Jack asked whether we knew at the time we wanted more kids, or whether we ever thought, "We're good, one is enough."

The answer is that while we didn't know we would have more children, we certainly knew we wanted more. We were still relatively new parents discovering what it meant to raise a tiny human. Every Elissa milestone (rolling over, sitting up, crawling, walking, talking, etc.) was new for us and a cause for pre-Internet private celebration.

I don't know if I'm imagining all of this after the fact, but I remember it as an exciting (if exhausting) time in which the possibilities seemed endless. We were young and had a whole life ahead of us. So many plans, so much anticipation for the future, so much joy in the present.

I see all of that in this picture. I also see a much darker and fuller head of hair on me, and a little baby who, later in life, would prove herself to be smart, funny and talented in many ways.

I see a wife who exhibited so much strength...and still does. A couple of years after this picture was taken, Terry left the full-time workforce to take care of things on the home front. She would never work full time again, but I can tell you she did more good at home than she ever could have done working for a company.

Our second-oldest, Chloe, arrived a little more than a year-and-a-half after this photo, and while the magic never went away, it was often overshadowed by the chaos of having multiple kids.

We would, in time, become more tired, a little more stressed, and undoubtedly more busy than we were when this picture was taken. But we never lost the excitement of the parenting adventure, nor did we ever waver in our love for the children with which God blessed us.

I see all of that and more in this portrait of three very happy people so many years ago.

The temptation, when you're trying to be healthy, is to eat the same things over and over, day after day

When I started working with my personal trainer Kirk a month or two ago, he mentioned that I should be eating roughly half my body weight in grams of protein every day.

I weighed a little over 200 pounds at the time, so the goal was about 100 grams of protein a day.

I was actually already getting much closer to this amount than I realized, but because I am so goal-oriented, I immediately leapt into action to ensure I would exceed those 100 grams.

I added Greek yogurt and low-fat cottage cheese (both solid sources of protein) to my diet. I also began drinking a protein shake a day, and I changed out my leafy green lunchtime salads in favor of turkey breast sandwiches.

Mission accomplished. I've probably been averaging 150 grams of protein, which is a good thing when you're regularly strength training and trying to build muscle.

The problem is that, having enjoyed success with this regimen, I'm sticking with it through thick and thin.

My dinners vary, but my breakfast, lunch and snacks are all the same every day.

The food choices are healthy, but I know I need more variety. Consuming essentially the same thing on a daily basis almost inevitably means I'm eventually going to fall short on my intake of certain vitamins and minerals.

Or at least I believe that to be true. I haven't consulted a nutritionist about it.

The point is, healthy eating should not be formulaic eating. I've not gotten sick of anything in my new diet to this point, but I'm also depriving myself of the joy of variety and experimentation.

I will have to fix that.

I just so relish the feeling of accomplishment when I get to check the box on my daily to-do list that says, "Eat 100 grams of protein."

The official summertime uniform of the Midwest suburban dad

We never got together and formally ratified this (there are, after all, probably a few million of us), but somehow, collectively, many of us non-coastal, suburb-living dads have made a decision.

We have silently agreed that we're all wearing pretty much the same thing to the graduation parties, barbeques, and other soirees to which we and our wives are invited each year in June, July and August.

The designated uniform is this:

• A solid-colored polo shirt (POTENTIAL FANCY VARIATIONS: A short-sleeve button-down with a semi-daring pattern, or perhaps even a polo with multiple shades...scandalous!)
  
  
• Khaki shorts (POTENTIAL FANCY VARIATIONS: None. You'll wear the khaki shorts and like it, though some of the more daring will perhaps opt for darker shades.)
  
  
• Deck shoes with short (hopefully no more than ankle-length, but preferably no-show) socks (POTENTIAL FANCY VARIATIONS: I guess you can wear some nice sneakers, you slob.)

There are exceptions to this, of course, and quite a few of them. Many more dads have real fashion sense than you might realize, but the rest of us are going with the ensemble described above. It works, it's comfortable, and it requires very little forethought.

I do have a few short-sleeve button-downs I'll break out for especially momentous summertime occasions, but for the most part, it's polo-khakis-boat shoes for me, brother.

Dads, if you and I are at the same grad party, and I see you across the room as I'm filling my plate with potato salad and pulled pork, and you're sporting this dad uniform, I will tip my bottled water at you in a gesture of solidarity.

Then I will walk over, discern whether you are a Tool Guy, a Car Guy, or a Sports Guy, and engage you in relevant small talk until it's time for my wife and I to leave.

This is the suburban dad lifestyle. Embrace it.

My top five 1980s arcade games

I spent quite a bit of time (and money) in arcades in the early and mid-80s. The games were so much better than the systems we had available on our TVs at home that it was worth dropping a few bucks in quarters for an hour or two of fun.

For me and my friends, the primary destinations were Galaxy Gardens (the nearest game room), Up to Par (the biggest game room), and Fun and Games ($3 all-you-can play Tuesday nights!)

I don't have any photos from the time, but I distinctly recall wearing a series of very 80s painter's caps on these arcade excursions. Often I would decorate these caps with small metallic pins of my favorite musical acts of the time...most notably Men at Work, the Police and Duran Duran.

I did not, for the record, wear any neon, though.

As I've mentioned here before, video games kind of passed me by once the 90s rolled around, but I still have very fond memories of the golden era of arcade gaming.

Here, then, is one man's (and only one man's) ranking of the five best games from that period. Many of my fellow Gen Xers will be outraged to find Pac-Man/Ms. Pac-Man, Defender, Dig Dug, Centipede, Missile Command, Berserk, Joust and a host of others left off my list. Those were all worthy choices, they just didn't make my personal top five.

(5) Vanguard

This is a dark horse entry, to the point that many won't even be familiar with it. I was a frequent player for a few reasons, including the variety of settings through which you could fly your ship, the fact you had four directional fire buttons, and maybe most importantly, the very cool, Flash Gordon-inspired music that would play when you passed through one of the glowing energy fields. I pumped a lot of tokens/quarters into this one. (Speaking of great 80s video game music, while I never liked the game itself, you can't beat the driving distorted guitar riff of Reactor, which you could hear cutting through the arcade noise no matter how crowded it was.)

(4) Gorf

Gorf was among the first games to incorporate voice synthesis. It would semi-mock you with cries of "My Gorfian robots are unbeatable" and "Prepare yourself for annihilation!" Like Vanguard, I liked the variety in this one, even though it kind of ripped off Space Invaders and Galaxian. If you could get through the five different challenges, you would rise in rank from Space Cadet to Space Captain. If you could survive five full cycles of missions, you would reach the ultimate rank of Space Avenger. You could also get yourself more ships if you were willing to spend TWO quarters instead of one. This was a big investment but often worth it.

(3) Donkey Kong

I have grown to love the original Donkey Kong more in the 2000s than I ever did in the 80s. I play it on my laptop thanks to the amazing MAME emulator, and I've gotten to the point that a game isn't successful if I don't make it past the first "pie" board, as pictured here. (I call them "pies," but I think they were supposed to be tubs of cement or something similar. Mario was, after all, a career tradesman.) I love the barrels and rivets levels, and the pies are great, but I can do without the frustrating elevators. All in all, though, a very fun experience every time you press that one-player start button.

(2) Galaga

Lots of people loved (and continue to love) Galaga. It took the concepts of Galaxian and Space Invaders to another level of enjoyment, rather than just recreating them à la Gorf. The wrinkle whereby you could allow your fighter to be captured and then earn it back to be a double-firing, dual-ship juggernaut at the bottom of the screen was genius. And as valuable as they are to the environment, I never minded wasting hundreds of those darn bees every game. They deserved it. We have a replica cocktail arcade game in our basement that includes the original Galaga, and I play it often.

(1) Track and Field

My early-80s gaming friends could have told you even before they clicked on this post that Track and Field would be #1 on my list (and it isn't even close). If you were around back then, you will remember this as the game in which players had to repeatedly hit two buttons quickly to propel their little track athlete through the 100-meter dash, long jump, javelin, hurdles, hammer throw and high jump. The faster you alternated button hits, the better you did. Which led some to cheat through the use of combs or pencils held in such a way as to create a faster cadence of button mashing. I always played it straight, though, and I was pretty good at it, which is probably a big reason why I liked the game so much. Depending on the whim of the arcade owner, this game could be set to end after the high jump no matter how well you did, or it could simply start over through the cycle of events, though with tougher qualifying times and distances. Either way, this is one I wish I also had in my basement. But I just checked on eBay, and these machines are going for anywhere between $1,800 and $4,000. I didn't love it that much.

Running through neighbors' backyards probably carried less risk in the early 80s than it does now

Mr. Kevin C. Buchheit, the man who served as my Phone-a-Friend when I appeared on "Who Wants To Be a Millionaire" (true story).

Today is my friend Kevin's birthday. I've known Kev as long as I've known our mutual friend Matt, which is to say since about 1974.

Kev has always been one of my best friends. We shared a lot of common interests growing up, and I'm very proud of the work he did for 20 years as a U.S. Border Patrol agent (a job from which he is now officially retired).

Back when we were annoying adolescents, Kevin, Matt, Jason, Todd and others of our band of Harding Drive friends would do something we simply called "The Route." We would traverse the entire length of our street on foot, but not using the sidewalk.

No, we would do this by sneaking through people's backyards, one after another. This would involve hopping fences, pushing through pricker bushes, avoiding dogs, and generally trying to keep a low profile as we trespassed on everyone's property.

The logical question is why exactly we did this. And I have no logical answer.

I have no answer at all, actually, logical or otherwise. It was just something obnoxious that, had the Wickliffe Police ever been notified, probably would have landed us a stern talking-to, if not outright conviction on some low-level misdemeanor.

I believe I completed the entire Route on both sides of the street, though for whatever reason, the west side was easier to navigate than the east (fewer bush-related obstacles and lower fences, as I recall).

As I think back on this, I realize we were fortunate not to have been threatened by an angry neighbor at one point or another. Plenty of them probably owned firearms, and some were likely of the shoot-first, ask-questions-later variety.

But then, the people of Harding Drive tended to be a little more tight-knit in those days, and I'm guessing most would have recognized who we were (even in the darkness of a summer evening) and simply yelled at us, rather than putting a bullet in our backsides.

Nowadays? My sense is that just as many people own guns in 2024 as did 40 years ago, but now they seem to be less trusting and more likely to use them on unidentified intruders.

All of which is to say I'm thankful we survived long enough to celebrate Kevin's 55th birthday today. Lord knows, we pulled plenty of stupid stunts back then that could have kept at least one of us from making it this far.

Happy birthday, Kev.

When you're the youngest by a wide margin, you get to hear about the totally separate life your family lived before you came along

I had no idea how to illustrate today's post, so I just went with this great photo of my son Jack taken many moons ago.

Today is my brother Mark's birthday, while this Saturday will be my sister Debbie's birthday. They are awesome siblings, and they deserve to have the best possible birthdays. So happy happy to my big bro and big sis!

I have mentioned here before that I am the youngest of four children. The gap between me and my next sib (Mark) is nearly 13 years. I came along relatively late in the game, as my mom was 37 and my dad 40 when I was born, which was pretty old for new parents in 1969.

You say "mistake." I say "pleasant surprise."

Anyway, this meant I would often hear stories about the days when Mom, Dad and the three kids lived in Park Forest, Illinois, then later in Euclid, Ohio (on good old Pasnow Avenue).

I never lived in either of those places. By the time I was born, we were firmly settled in Wickliffe on Harding Drive, where I lived the first 22 years of my life and where my mom lived for 57 years until she passed away.

The Park Forest and Euclid houses may as well have belonged to another family altogether. I have no connection to them, nor can I relate to the things I'm told happened in them.

It's like my parents and siblings lived a completely different existence in which I played no part at all.

Thus, I can readily relate to our youngest child, Jack. He constantly hears stories about our old house on East 300th Street, where Terry and I lived for the first 11 years of our marriage. All four of Jack's older siblings have memories of that house (though I wonder about Melanie, who wasn't even quite 3 years old when we moved out of the house).

To Jack, it's just a house on a street we often drive down. The other day he told me he has trouble even remembering exactly which house was ours.

And why should he remember? He never lived there. It's a place to which he has no attachment at all.

Yet it's also a place where we as a family – well, six of us anyway – made many lasting memories. It was the first house Terry and I owned, the place to which we brought home four newborns, and the place where we celebrated many other firsts and milestones.

It's a house full of happy memories...memories that necessarily exclude Jack, much like those old homes in Park Forest and Euclid do for me.

The silver lining in all of this? As the youngest, you often get spoiled rotten. You get everything your older sibs never got.

On balance, I still think Jack and I got the better end of the deal. 

When you're not someone who swears a lot, people find it either funny or disconcerting when you do

It's a minor miracle that, having grown up with Bob Tennant as my father, I'm not someone who swears particularly often.

(NOTE: We use the word "swears" here in Northeast Ohio in the same way those in other parts of the country might use "curses" or "cusses." It just means uttering what are commonly referred to as "bad words.")

It's not that I don't ever swear, I just don't do it often. And when I do it, most of the time it's in a joking or funny way.

At least a couple of my kids find it borderline disturbing when I use a swear word, though, even when they know I'm quoting someone else or doing it simply for comic effect. They're just not used to hearing it from me.

On the other hand, while my dad didn't go around cussing up a storm, he would routinely toss around many of George Carlin's famous Seven Dirty Words.

I remember one time when I was maybe 9 or 10, and my nephew Mark and I were in the living room with Dad. Dad told us both to kneel down and touch our faces to the carpet, and then to repeat after him. We complied.

DAD: "I suppose."

US: "I suppose."

DAD: "And you suppose."

US: "And you suppose."

DAD: "That my ass is higher than my nose."

MARK (who was 4 or 5 at the time): "That my ass is higher than my nose."

ME: "Ahhhhhhh! Mark, you can't say that!"

Dad and Mark thought the whole thing was hilarious. I, on the other hand, apparently had my delicate Victorian sensibilities gravely offended.

I don't think myself morally superior simply because I'm not someone who swears frequently or with any conviction. If anything, the fact that I don't swear, don't smoke, and only very occasionally drink makes me about the blandest suburban dad you can imagine.

But like Popeye, I am what I am.

And you can take that s**t to the bank.

BLOG RERUN: The flawed strategy of the bunnies by the side of the road

(NOTE: I have mentioned here before that I often have little idea which blog posts are going to resonate with people and get a lot of clicks and which ones will fall flat. When I published the following in June 2021, I thought for sure it would be a hit. It still makes me laugh. But the engagement was almost zero, and page views were minimal. I still can't understand it, so we're trying again. Maybe I'm wrong here.)

Originally posted June 11, 2021: I take the majority of my morning walks/runs along our street, Miller Avenue, and its creatively named westward extension, West Miller. Together, these streets provide a simple (if hilly) 2.32-mile loop I use as the basis for most of my A.M. excursions.

The route passes by a series of wide grassy areas in which you can usually find some combination of deer, racoons, possums, birds, and skunks, depending on how early you get out the door. Also featured there are what Terry and I simply call The Bunnies™.

These are some common species of wild rabbit, but we never call them "rabbits." It is always "The Bunnies™."

This morning while chugging down West Miller, I had a very typical encounter with one of The Bunnies™.

A bunny will be happily chomping on grass by the side of the road as I approach. He/she will then see me coming. If these bunnies were smarter and had some system of passing down tribal knowledge, they would have learned from their parents that I am a common sight on the streets in the morning and am absolutely harmless.

(As an aside, I wanted to use the rabbit equivalent of "tribal" in the previous paragraph, so I looked up what a group of rabbits is called. There is apparently some difference of opinion out there, but one of the common designations is a "fluffle" of rabbits. Really. I would have happily used that word except I don't know how to render it in adjectival form. "Fluffle-ey" knowledge? "Fluffinial" knowledge? "Flufflenian" knowledge? I have no idea. So I stuck with "tribal.")

Anyway, rabbits don't seem to have any method of societal knowledge transfer, so they rely purely on instinct. And this bunny's instinct told him I could definitely be a threat and he should do what The Bunnies™ always do when I approach.

He stayed where he was and sat perfectly still.

This is not, it must be said, an ideal approach. For one thing, The Bunnies™ are not camouflaged against the grass, so they're readily visible even from a distance. And even though they generally do a good job of remaining motionless, it doesn't matter. I'm already staring right at them.

Regardless, here's what also happens every time: They will stand there until I get within a few feet, and then they'll run away in terror. Every time.

The problems with this whole philosophy are evident:

(1) You, as a bunny, are very quick. By waiting until I'm right on top of you before you run, you nullify this advantage and make it easier for me to lunge out and get you (which, let's be clear, I would never do, but you don't know me).

(2) More importantly, if this is your strategy, then you have to stick to it. Have some nerve, bunnies. If you're going with the stand-perfectly-still approach, see it through to the end. The assumption here (the key to this whole method of defense, really) is that I don't see you in the first place. Why ruin it by running away at the very late minute and making yourself extremely obvious? Why, The Bunnies™, why??

I have no answers, but I'm considering some sort of leaflet campaign among The Bunnies™ urging them to reconsider their absolutely terrible approach to keeping me from killing them.

Which, again, I would never do. But they're bunnies. They can't be expected to know I have their best interests in mind.

Learning to go to bed on my own

For 32 years, I have been sleeping next to my wife.

When we were first married, we had a queen-sized bed, which meant we were fairly close to each other every night.

Then, when we moved into our current home in 2003, we bought a king-sized bed, which afforded us acres and acres of personal space in which to stretch out as we dozed off.

But we still went to bed at the same time, even if it meant we were no longer right next to each other.

This is the point, though, where Terry and I differ. If she is tired, she can climb into that bed by herself and fall more or less immediately to sleep.

I, on the other hand, have a really hard time falling asleep if she's not there.

More specifically, if I know she's in the living room watching TV, I will lay there with my eyes wide open until she comes into the room and turns in for the night.

I cannot, for whatever reason, easily get to sleep unless she's there.

This generally hasn't been a problem except when I need to get up early the next day, and therefore need to get to bed early the previous evening.

An early wake-up time for me is 5am. That's when I get up on days I work out at the gym, and it requires me to fall asleep at or before 10pm the previous night if I'm going to get enough rest.

Terry prefers to go to bed somewhat later than 10 o'clock (sometimes later than 11 o'clock), which leaves me in somewhat of a conundrum.

Either I learn to fall asleep without her there, or I drag my way tired and sleep-deprived through the next day.

So far, try as I might, "tired and sleep-deprived" appears to be winning.

I can't explain why I need to have my wife there if I'm going to sleep. I just do, and the harder I try to overcome it, the worse it is.

Rather than forcing Terry to turn in well before she's ready, I'm thinking what I need is a life-sized Terry robot next to me in the bed. It will be programmed to kiss me goodnight, then turn over and go to sleep like Terry does.

I would also like it to say "Yes, honey, of course you're right" in response to anything I say, but maybe that's asking too much.

♪ ♫ Everything hurts! Everything hurts! ♫ ♪

My wife is both an active person and someone in her mid-50s. Sometimes these two realities clash, particularly when she engages in high-intensity yardwork or certain home projects.

The result is soreness felt across her entire body. She even made up a song to describe this feeling, the complete lyrics to which are contained in the headline of today's post.

"Everything hurts! Everything hurts!"

It's just those two words sung over and over to an incongruently happy little tune. I used to laugh when she sang it, in a way that only someone not suffering from full-body discomfort can laugh.

That is, until I started strength training. Suddenly, I understood the deep meaning of the "Everything Hurts!" song in ways I didn't fully anticipate.

As I mentioned last week, I have (finally) begun to lift weights, something I should have started doing years ago. I do it under the tutelage of my trainer, Kirk. Well, sometimes I do it under Kirk's guidance, and sometimes I do it on my own.

Either way, I'm currently in the stage where I go the gym and work out, and anywhere from 12-24 hours later, my muscles hurt.

Part of this comes from being an older Gen Xer like my wife, and part of it is apparently the unavoidable consequence of activating muscle fibers that have lain dormant for many years.

My daughter Melanie, an avid gym-goer and someone in excellent shape, warned me this would happen.

"For about two months, it's going to be bad," she told me at the outset of my strength training journey. "Then you'll get to the point where it's way more enjoyable and sometimes you can't wait to get to the gym and lift."

I'm going to take her word for it on that last bit.

Actually, I already like the workouts themselves just fine. I love breaking a sweat, and I appreciate the work Kirk and I do on achieving proper form for each exercise.

It's the aftermath that gets me.

Hours after my first leg day last month, for example, Jack and I drove to Toronto for a weekend getaway. What started as intense leg weakness following the workout that morning soon developed into considerable leg soreness.

I walked around Downtown Toronto the next day kind of bowlegged. Every time Jack and I would get into the car, I had to turn around and essentially fall into the driver's seat, rather than bend down and slip easily into the vehicle as I normally might.

It's June 12th as I type this, so I'm not necessarily yet enjoying any of the fun results of strength training. That's coming, and there may even be signs of it by the time you read this.

But in the meantime?

Come on, sing it with me...

"Everything hurts! Everything hurts!"

I'm no Luddite, but I still organize my life largely with pencil and paper

If you're someone with a smartphone (and I really hope you are...it's 2024, after all), you have at your disposal thousands of apps to help manage your time and keep track of your life.

There are calendar apps and scheduling apps and reminder apps and apps that help you find other apps, etc. The best ones are simple to use and render some aspect of your life easier to wrangle.

I use many of these apps myself. But if you were to ask me, say, whether I'm free the evening of July 16th, I would grab my phone not to load one of these apps and check my availability, but rather to text my wife with a simple request.

"Hey, could you please send me a picture of the calendar page for July?"

She would respond with a photo of the calendar that hangs on the side of our refrigerator on which we write down important events, appointments, birthdays and anniversaries, and all manner of things of which we might need reminding.

As I say, there are plenty of apps that could do this for us, including some pretty nifty family calendar apps. But we choose to stick with the tried-and-true analog approach of writing stuff down on the kitchen calendar.

Similarly, while I construct my weekly to-do lists in Microsoft OneNote, my day-to-day lists are written in pencil on small sheets of lined white paper. As I accomplish each task, I check it off.

Are there faster and easier ways to do this digitally? Absolutely, especially within OneNote itself. But for whatever reason, I stick to non-digital wood byproduct as my medium of choice for daily task management.

I cannot tell you why I/we do it this way. Habit, maybe? Familiarity?

It's certainly not "ease of use." There's nothing easy about asking my wife to take a picture of our home calendar and text it to me. It would be much faster simply to consult a shared calendar app.

Maybe it's the satisfaction of physically checking something off a list. Or the subconscious connection to a time 40 years ago when my mom wrote everything on our own kitchen calendar.

Or possibly it's resistance to having to learn something new, though I really hope that's not it. The day I start thinking that way is the day you can feel free to put me in a nice rest home somewhere.

I guess it really is just force of habit. Eventually we'll shift our approach to all-digital timekeeping, I'm sure. In the meantime, I like to think it's a small nod to a slower time when we all collectively had less to do and more time to write it down.

10 older-person things I never thought I would do, yet here I am doing them

 

It's just a Snapchat filter, but this may as well be how I look these days.

1. Paying close attention to the identity of birds that land on our back deck
   
   
2. Finding myself suddenly and randomly thinking about insurance coverage
   
   
3. Making a little noise every time I rise from a seated position (Note: A noise from my mouth, I mean, not from...other places on my body.)
   
   
4. Watering my grass every day (Another note: I only water the two spots in the backyard where we planted grass seed this spring. Give me another 10 years and I'll likely be doing the whole lawn.)
   
   
5. Making a full and protracted stop at a stop sign as an act of defiance to the guy who is tailgating me even though I should be the bigger person and ignore him BUT IT'S 25MPH ON THESE STREETS, SIR, NOT 40 AND YOU NEED TO SLOW DOWN
   
   
6. Related to that, saying (loudly, even when I'm the only one in the car) "Nice stop!" to someone who rolls through a stop sign. On occasion, I've also been known to throw in a "Nice turn signal!" to anyone who fails to use theirs.
   
   
7. Being unable to keep myself from saying things like, "Yes, but at least back in my day, popular music had MELODY and INTELLIGIBLE LYRICS."
   
   
8. Getting visibly angry at the weeds growing through the cracks in our driveway
   
   
9. Earnestly wondering whether I should take up the bassoon (this thought has occurred to me way more often than I care to admit)
   
   
10. Telling the same stories and jokes to the same people over and over, having reached the bottom of what I had assumed was an endless well of charming anecdotes in my brain

I don't blame my in-laws for assuming I would only be a fleeting part of their daughter's life

From left, this was Judy, Terry, me and Tom on our wedding day (June 6, 1992). I'm sure Judy and Tom did not see this coming when they first met me six years earlier.

Today would have been my in-laws' 63rd wedding anniversary. Tom and Judy were married on July 1, 1961, but sadly, neither is still around to celebrate the milestone.

I vividly remember the first time I met them. Terry and I had been dating for a couple of weeks when she brought me home for the first time in mid-March 1986. I feel like it was a Saturday afternoon, but I can't be sure of that.

Tom and Judy were relaxing in their living room when we walked in and Terry introduced me. I was on my best, most polite 16-year-old boy behavior and said something to the effect of, "It's very nice to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Ross."

They returned the sentiment, but in a decidedly half-hearted way. It's not that they were impolite or anything, but they didn't leap out of their chairs to greet me, either.

The reason for this, I found out sometime later, was that they figured I wasn't going to be in the picture for very long. According to Terry, they thought she was in a fickle stage and would be moving from boy to boy for the foreseeable future.

I was also a kid from school and not someone from church, which undoubtedly colored their initial assessment of me somewhat.

We all know how things turned out, of course. I stuck around for the rest of both of their lives. (And let it be known, a few years after Terry and I started dating, I also began regularly attending the Church of the Blessed Hope. So really, how bad could I have been?)

I've always found this story to be funny, but I've also reached the point in life where I kind of get it, too.

Terry and I have raised five kids into adulthood. For better or worse, we know how most high school relationships end. Tom and Judy had no reason to think the kid in the jean jacket standing in their living room trying to impress them would play any role in their family's long-term future.

What were the odds they would never manage to get rid of me? As my dad would have said, slim to none, and Slim just left town.

Yet, in the face of any reasonable expectation, here we are.

I miss them both. Before they each passed away, I would have appreciated one more opportunity to look them square in the eye and say, in all sincerity, "I told you so."