December 26, 2011

‘Tis the night after Christmas
I’m flat on my back.
The holidays were exhausting,
And I’ve hit the sack.

I’d wrestled a raw turkey
At six in the morn’.
No time to ponder
The day Jesus was born.

Didn’t know there were so many
Ways to cook that beast.
Everyone has their method
To prep it for the feast.

You can fry, broil or roast it,
Depending on your taste,
But it’s agreed by expert chefs,
You need to baste, baste, baste, baste.

A fortnight ago
The list had been long.
Cards, lights, gifts and wrapping,
It went on and on.

The more we accomplished
The more the list grew.
Buy this and buy that
We were still not yet through.

We made a gingerbread house,
Cheesecake and pecan pie.
Could it be Christmas Day
Was finally drawing nigh?

Time was on my side.
No more shopping days remained.
Soon relatives arrived
From as far away as Maine.

The Christmas Eve service
— A moment of tranquility —
Reminded us briefly
Of Jesus’ humility.

Then Christmas arrived.
The children awakened.
We tore open our presents.
Who wants eggs and bacon?

We moved on to lunch.
We ate and we laughed.
We piled on seconds.
And passed the carafe.

Now with stockings and wrapping
Strewn from ceiling to floor,
Thoughts of clean-up and dishes
Make me all the more sore.

Just let me rest a little while longer.
I’ll soon be feeling better.
Then I’ll tackle those pots and pans
And start my thank-you letters.

Re-printed with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

February 12, 2011

It’s been nearly a week since the Steelers lost in the Super Bowl, and you might say it’s just a game, but I’m not quite ready to give up on finding out precisely where to lay some serious blame.

On Feb. 4, we of Steeler Nation were full of optimism. With tickets purchased from StubHub for $3,500 apiece for upper level seats on the 40-yard line, my wife and I were on a flight to Dallas.

I admit I was nervous about the game from the time I knew we would be facing the Packers. But knowing our Super Bowl XLV Terrible Towels were safely packed in our suitcases, I felt empowered .

When you tell people you are going to the Super Bowl, they convey their “good lucks,” tell you to “bring home a winner,” instruct you to “cheer loudly for me” and then, finally, “go Steelers!” So going there to witness the game firsthand, you feel a certain responsibility to produce. Now it’s personal.

We arrived in Dallas to five inches of snow and slick road conditions. Dallas has neither snow plows nor salt to treat the roads, and from the friends we stayed with we learned that no one owns a snow shovel.

We were soon to learn that Cowboys owner Jerry Jones gets blamed for just about everything that goes wrong in Dallas, so why not blame him for that once-in-50-years freak snowstorm?

On game day we got to the security check point three hours ahead of kick-off. That’s when they told my wife she couldn’t bring in her umbrella (rain was forecasted) or her binoculars case. In the process of stashing them under a tree near the entrance, her lucky Steeler hat with black and yellow spikes vanished.

My wife hung her head and said if we lost the game it was going to be all her fault.

The loss of the lucky hat was just the start of more losses.

Christina Aguilera lost her place in the fourth line of the Star Spangled Banner. The Steelers lost the coin toss. My wife got lost on the way back to her seat after going to the restroom.

Around this time 1,200 displaced fans were yelling their displeasure at Jerry Jones for stranding them without seats because temporary stands had not been completed (even though it was the NFL’s responsibility).

The Steelers held their own for a while, but with 3:46 to go in the first quarter my Terrible Towel stopped working. Talk about a wardrobe malfunction. I was waving my towel furiously, so how did Aaron Rodgers hit Jordy Nelson for a 29-yard pass and Green Bay’s first TD? Adding insult to injury, Howard Green then penetrated far enough to disrupt Big Ben’s throw to Mike Wallace.

Had my official Myron Cope Terrible Towels lost their super powers?

I began to think that maybe I shouldn’t have washed them after the victories in Detroit and Tampa.

Now, with the black and gold down 14 to zip, Steeler fans went numb.

And the gigantic video screen wasn’t helping matters.

As first time visitors to JerryWorld, as Dallasites call it, we had never seen a screen that size. Almost five times the size of ours at Heinz field, the $40 million high-definition monitor is the world’s largest and could lull you into forgetting to scream when the Packers had the ball. Bombarding spectators with replays and flashbacks and shots of celebs in Jerry Jones’ private box, it was mesmerizing.

As were the margaritas. I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I discovered they were serving margaritas, my refreshing beverage of choice. Even at $19 (served in a plastic Super Bowl XLV commemorative cup, mind you) they were worth it. It was the Super Bowl for heaven’s sake!

So by halftime I’m semi-deaf from the video screen, anesthetized with margaritas and asking the young couple in front of me how to crack the glow stick I’m going to wave during the performance by The Black Eyed Peas.

Just before the second half began, a fellow Steelers fan passed me on the aisle and said calmly, “Keep the faith.”

He was right. I gained newfound energy. So every time the Packers huddle broke, we yelled as loudly as we could.

But in the process of spending $1.2 billion on a monument to himself, Jerry Jones had erected a building that was just too immense for crowd noise to have much impact. From our seats, the 6-foot-tall players were a mere quarter-inch tall, so how was our yelling and carrying on going to bother Aaron Rodgers’ play-calling?

Try as we might, though, in the end the seconds ticked down to a shocking reality.

I know we let everyone down back home by not bringing home a winner. And we apologize for that.

Still, one has to wonder, “What if?”

What if my wife hadn’t lost her lucky hat?

What if Mendenhall hadn’t fumbled?

What if Suisham hadn’t missed that 52-yarder?

What if I hadn’t washed my Terrible Towels after their previous Super Bowl victories?

What if Jerry Jones hadn’t been born?

Re-printed with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Our 19-year-old son started hiking three weeks ago in Georgia. His destination: the end of the Appalachian Trail in Maine. But it’s all about the journey.

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Today is our son Chas’ 19th birthday. He’s out doing what he wants to be doing — hiking the Appalachian Trail. A year ago Chas decided to do what the British call a gap year — a year off between high school and college. He wanted to study music, guitar in particular, achieve his Levels 1 and 2 snowboard instructor certifications in Canada — and hike the Appalachian Trail.

So Chas requested a deferral from the University of Puget Sound in Washington state, where he had been accepted:

“Through this year off,” he wrote to the admissions office, “I hope to gain a better understanding of what I may want to study. I am planning to hike the Appalachian Trail where I hope to gain a greater sense of independence, search for my passion and enjoy the time I have out in the wilderness. I think I’ll learn a lot about myself through this journey that will help me through college and the rest of my life.”

Deferral granted.

Three weeks ago, he hit the trail at its southernmost point in Georgia. If all goes well, he’ll reach the other end, in Maine, by mid-August, in time for the start of classes.

‘It’s more of a social thing’

The Appalachian Trail, a continuously marked footpath 2,179 miles in length, was completed in 1937. There are other epic trails Chas could have chosen — the Pacific Crest Trail (Mexico to Canada) or the Continental Divide Trail (“spanning the backbone of America”) — but the A.T., as it’s known, is the most user-friendly and a good one to start on.

Now designated a National Scenic Trail within the National Park System, the so-called “green tunnel” stretches north and south through forests and over the major mountaintops of 14 Eastern states, with a shelter, privy (a very lovely word for outhouse) and water source every 8 to 10 miles or so. It is said to take 5 million steps to complete the trail.

“You can walk for six months and feel as though you are in the great frontier,” Laurie Potteiger, a manager with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, told me. “If you look at the map, it’s a very narrow strip of land that has been acquired to provide a sense of wilderness.” With 2 million users annually, it is hugely popular.

Chas was inspired to do the trail in high school, when he attended a week-long outdoor education program in New Hampshire. His interest was also piqued by Brian Hannan, who used to work at Ruggeri’s Food Shoppe near our home. In 2001 and 2005, Brian “thru-hiked” the trail: He completed the entire trail from Springer Mountain, Ga., to Mt. Katahdin, Maine, in a single season.

One day of food for Chas Stewart
(3,945 calories)

• Drinks: Water, Emergen-C, green tea, Starbucks VIA Italian Roast, cocoa, mega-green Vitamins.
• Breakfast (calories): Rolled oats (380), shredded coconut (120), shelled hempseed (174), flaxseed meal (120), chocolate chips (281), raisins (110), cranberries (100).
• Lunch: White corn tortillas (200), peanut butter (380), jelly (200).
• Dinner: Dehydrated Khatmandu curry and rice (680).
• Snacks: Deluxe trail mix (300), two granola bars (620), dehydrated Turkish figs (220), Tom-Toms turkey snack sticks (80).

Sometime during one’s first hike, you receive a trail name. “B-man” is Brian’s. B-man is now a camping specialist with REI in the SouthSide Works. As his job permits, he returns to reunions with hikers he has met over the years. Because of the close associations hikers develop, he refers to the A.T. as “the social trail.”

Brian, along with REI assistant store manager Amy Legeza, accompanied Chas for his first week of the hike (they jump at any chance). Chas is now officially on his own, but reports having made many new friends already.

Off the trail, within 10 miles or so, there are towns to satisfy one’s craving for civilization. Shuttle drivers and kind souls mysteriously appear when you need them to take you there. It was from one such town with an Internet cafe that Chas sent us his “impressions so far” in an e-mail home:

“I guess it’s more of a social thing than I thought it would be. I thought the social aspect was going to be secondary to the hiking. You walk this 2,200 mile trail, but the trail is not about the hiking. … It’s about being in camp and meeting all these different people and hearing their adventures and telling your own stories.

“The hiking seems irrelevant now. It’s just an excuse to be out here. This experience revolves around more than just getting to Maine. It revolves around your own self-discovery and the sense of adventure and camaraderie that the expedition leaves us with.”

‘Don’t do anything stupid’

Chas’ journey began on March 13, when he and I arrived in Amicalola Falls, Ga., the beginning of the 8-mile approach trail to the official start. He signed the thru-hiker’s register as the 13th person to leave that day (out of 23) and the 245th thru-hiker to register there so far this year.

As I witnessed other hikers being dropped off at the sign-in area by their parents, grandparents or friends, I was somehow reminded of kids arriving for their first day of college. Chas and I were meeting the people who would be part of the mosaic of his total experience:

• Christian, 26, from Quebec, resigned from his advertising job to pursue his life’s dream of hiking the A.T.
• Jason, in his 20s, from Kentucky, likes to study Christian wars, and is getting back in shape after being hit by a drunken driver.
• Doug, 62, from New Mexico, is a general practitioner and a carpenter.
• Robert is taking the semester off from Virginia Tech.
• Then there was Alex, who was just coming off the trail. Alex had started the week before, but got sick when it rained 3 inches. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he warned Chas as he climbed into his mother’s car to return home. That was my son’s first reality check.

And to each of them and their family members I handed out what hikers call “trail magic” — unexpected acts of assistance or gifts, usually of food — in the form of my homemade chocolate chip cookies I had brought from Pittsburgh.

Before thru-hikers set off, it is customary to weigh in. A simple nod and a question, “How much?” refers to the weight of your backpack. Chas’ weighed 36 pounds, including gear, two full water bottles and three days of food.

Curious for a taste of hiking, and to delay having to say goodbye, I walked with Chas for the first three miles. Let’s just say it was cold, muddy, alternating hail and snow, windy and rainy — the type of subtle, persistent rain where you don’t realize just how wet you are.

After we hugged and said our parting words, I wended my way back to my cozy lodge at Amicalola Falls, imagining Chas walking northward and setting up his tent that evening with what must have been very frozen fingers.

‘A bear cub scampered across the trail …’

“It’s definitely about the people,” B-man told me when he got back to Pittsburgh. “But for Chas it will soon be about the trail when he starts doing 20 miles a day. He’s just getting his legs now.

“People will begin dropping off for any number of reasons. One day they will be sitting by a road and they tell you to go on ahead and that they are just going to have a sandwich — and then you never see them again. They don’t want to tell you they are dropping off. By the time he gets to Virginia, 60 percent of the people who started from Springer Mountain will have dropped out.”

Last year 1,425 attempted to thru-hike. Of those, 367 made it — or 26 percent. To date, fewer than 10,000 have thru-hiked the trail, including those who have completed it going southbound, starting in Maine and ending in Georgia.

Clearly, thru-hiking is not for everyone.

First, there are your run-of-the-mill hazards — ticks, mosquitoes, pesky black flies, poison ivy and even skunks that have been known to crawl into a hiker’s sleeping bag.

But that’s not what keeps my wife, Franny, up at night. It’s the thought of the authentic perils: injuries, getting lost, lightning and storms, snow, hypothermia, crossing surging streams on slippery logs, poisonous snakes. (Keeps me up at night, too, but I hate to admit it.)

We’re worried for good reason. “I don’t remember the trail being pounded as much by Mother Nature as it has been this year,” says Laurie Potteiger from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. “More thru-hikers have been thwarted by snow and ice than in any year for decades.”

And did I mention black bears — Ursus americanus?

We’ve made Chas promise to phone us once a week from wherever he is, which is just often enough for us to maintain our sanity and him his independence. In his most recent call, he reported seeing two ears peering from the other side of a fallen tree.

“At first I thought it was a dog,” he said, “because it was the size of Morgan” — our Welsh corgi. “Then a bear cub scampered across the trail in front of me. I made some loud noises in case the mother was nearby, which fortunately she wasn’t, and kept on going.”

Recognizing all the potential for danger, we are reassured knowing that hikers on the A.T. naturally form a protective and caring community who look out for each other. Chas recently took a 70-hour Wilderness First Responder course offered by Outward Bound to learn how to manage medical problems in remote environments. He is just as likely to provide aid and comfort to another hiker as he is to receive it.

Supporting Chas has been a family effort. Franny factored in Chas’ BMI (body mass index) and then calculated that he would burn 4,000 calories daily at a starting pace of 10 miles per day for the first month. That means three meals a day plus four calorie-laden snacks (see sidebar).

Taking into consideration that Chas can’t eat gluten or dairy, our daughter Natalie assisted Chas in developing the daily menus and creating the spreadsheet I refer to when packing meals and snacks for four or five days at a time. In my role as “ground control,” I then mail these to post offices in towns fairly close to the trail along his way.

Chas was more casual about getting in shape than he was about his nutritional needs. There was not a lot of conditioning involved — no running up and down Negley Hill or Cathedral of Learning stairs. Then again, it helps to have 19-year-old legs. He has comfortable boots broken in from a month-long hike in Alaska with the National Outdoor Leadership School two summers ago, though he’s likely to need another pair.

In any case, Chas was advised to treat the first month like spring training, which seems appropriate, since a NoBo (North Bounder) like Chas gets to follow spring’s awakening from south to north.

‘It’s complete freedom’

It’s been three weeks since I flew down to Georgia with Chas and returned to Pittsburgh. Knowing what the conditions can be like out there, we check his forecasted weather several times a day. (Which reminds me to check it again. Gatlinburg, Tenn.: Mostly sunny. Highs in the mid-60s. Waxing moon.)

Most hikers keep journals and some like to post their journal entries and photos on various websites. Since Chas is going non-digital, we imagine his experiences by reading the journals of thru-hikers from past years. One night at Tessaro’s restaurant in Bloomfield, we met Moira Harrington, the manager, who had kept a journal from her thru-hike in 2008. Her April 13 entry paints a picture of what Chas might observe in North Carolina:

“Coming down the back side of Bluff Mountain was magical. Out of the cold, snow-laden tundra of Max Patch … into a spring summit garden … dotted with blossoms of Hairy Vetch, Fire Pink, Trailing Arbutus, Bloodroot, and yellow, red and white Trillium. A green carpet of ground cover was dotted with Dutchman’s Breeches and Spring Beauty. The day was the kind you can normally only dream about hiking through.”

“The trail provides a setting in which nothing else matters,” Chas wrote us in that first e-mail. “It’s complete freedom.

“For many, this is their reason for being out here. The trail lends something different to everyone that walks it. Personally, I’m still trying to find out what it’s going to be. But one thing is for sure — to get the most out of the experience one must follow the two mottos of the trail: ‘It’s the journey, not the destination’ and ‘hike your own hike.’ Live by these and the rest will come sooner or later.”

The celebration of Easter today can remind us that we are all on our own spiritual path — both literally and figuratively. May we all have the wisdom to divine the answers to our own roles in the world.

Chas is blessed with a quiet determination. With every step he takes, he comes closer to learning what answers the trail will yield.

Whether he walks all 5 million steps of the Appalachian Trail remains to be seen.

So far, Chas has hiked approximately 468,104 of them.

But he’s not counting.

Re-printed with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Funny thing, just about everyone in my family has caught it.
Actually, it’s not that funny, says CHARLIE STEWART

November 1, 2009

I like to write articles from personal experience that make people laugh. So when my son got swine flu this past week, I was thinking to myself, what could I write about swine flu that is funny. The conclusion I came to is that there is nothing really funny about swine flu.

While my son was achy and feverish and coughing, it was all I could do to take care of him for four days. My wife was in China on business at the time, and I had blissfully forgotten how hard it is to take care of someone when they are sick. They can’t do anything for themselves. You have to beg them to take fluids. They have to be reminded to take medications and you have to practically put them in their mouth.

In my son’s case, for some reason, he never lost his appetite, so I was always trying to think of creative things he would like to eat while suffering from the flu. And they had to be gluten- and dairy-free, as he is newly diagnosed as having allergies. That kept me quite busy.

I didn’t actually get him tested, because doctors and hospitals would be overwhelmed if we all rushed down to confirm suspected flu. I was told that if one has flu-like symptoms, you most likely have what the World Health Organization is calling “pandemic influenza H1N1 2009,” and to stay home.

It was definitely a pandemic in our family. After my son came down with it, I got mild flu symptoms from being the caregiver. My daughter in college in Portland got swine flu. The only living thing in the house that hasn’t been infected is our Welsh Corgi.

And indeed it seems everyone has a child or a niece or a nephew or a grandchild with swine flu.

To humor us through all of this, there aren’t even any good swine flu jokes out there. Except for maybe the one submitted by Angel Castillo on the dailycomedy.com Web site. Did you hear that kindergarteners are learning a new alphabet? A-B-C-D- E-F-G-H-1-N-1-L-M-N-O-P …

As I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what is so funny about swine flu, all I can think of is that swine flu is giving our young an awful fever, keeping them from being educated for three or four days and bestowing on them a hacking cough that stays with them like an old set of luggage.

You know what’s funny? You may think swine flu is called swine flu because it comes from pigs. Well … not exactly. Actually it’s because the media thought it would be easier for us folks to remember than its official title of “quadruple reassortant virus.” Now, to me, that sounds like something you really don’t want to catch.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention describes this particular flu as having two genes from flu viruses that normally circulate in pigs in Europe and Asia and in bird genes and human genes. My pharmacist said they could have called it anything, such as “bird flu,” but that was taken.

What’s not so funny is we’ve been trying to take my doctor’s advice seriously. We were advised to:

1) Wash hands frequently;

2) Keep hands away from faces, especially the nose and mouth;

3) Cough into the upper sleeve;

4) And if one is a caregiver for someone with swine flu, the Allegheny County Health Department recommends maintaining a distance of six feet from the afflicted.

As Bill Cosby used to say when imitating what might have been Noah’s response to God’s request for him to build an ark 300 cubits by 80 cubits by 40 cubits: “Rrrrrright … !!”

My mother neglected to heed No. 4 when she was visiting her grandson. Now she’s flat on her back with a cough and chills.

And I can’t touch a doorknob now. I was not so sensitive about touching faucets and handles in public places, but I’ve gotten more and more paranoid. For good reason it seems. According to the Pennsylvania Department of Health, germs can live for up to eight hours on all the surfaces you touch, like money. When my son was sick, I was washing the dishes with the hottest water I could handle and then running the dishes through the dishwasher — twice!

While I was on my way to the doctor’s office last week, I asked the woman next to me how she’s coping with swine flu and if she touches elevator buttons. She gave me a knowing look and said she doesn’t pick anything up off the floor, ever; she uses her foot to kick down the handle to flush in public rest rooms and keeps her hand sanitizer handy.

In my case, I wash my hands thoroughly (without singing “Happy Birthday”) after I’ve touched anything in public. And for extra insurance, I always carry anti-bacterial wipes, which are particularly useful after a party when you have greeted lots of people.

Except for a swine flu party that is. If hosting a swine flu party, you are supposed to do the opposite. You call up all your closest friends who haven’t yet become infected. You get real cozy with each other and don’t cover your mouth when coughing, don’t wash your hands, but do share your silver and glassware, and hope you go home with H1N1, which will then supposedly allow you to build a natural immunity to the various forms it may take in the future.

Needless to say, the CDC doesn’t find that humorous and frowns upon the notion of a contagion-spreading, swine-flu fest.

And what about that vaccine we’ve been promised? The government keeps saying it’s coming, but most of us can’t get it yet, and when it does arrive, we all will have been exposed anyway. Polls suggest 60 percent of Americans don’t want to receive the H1N1 vaccine, even after it’s widely available. That’s fine with me. I won’t have to wait as long in line.

This flu may not be as dire as predicted — after all, regular seasonal flu kills about 36,000 Americans every year — but it is estimated that “millions” of Americans have had it, resulting in 20,000 hospitalizations and, sadly, more than 1,000 deaths. And this despite the fact that a public health emergency was declared by Janet Napolitano, secretary of homeland security, way back on April 26, well before President Barack Obama’s recent declaration of a national emergency.

At any rate, the worst of the swine flu may almost be over, according to two University of Purdue math researchers. Sherry Towers and Zhilan Feng used a fancy mathematical model to predict that cases of H1N1 will peak “near the end of October.”

If true, we are almost out of the woods. Unless my Welsh Corgi catches something. But my veterinarian assured me that when it comes to viruses, humans have more in common with pigs, and dogs have more in common with horses.

She might be right, because as far as I know I have never contracted a bug from my faithful 16-year-old pooch. Still, I’m not taking any chances. The “bucking bronco bug” is not getting me. If my dog starts sneezing, I’m tossing him his food and treats from six feet away!

Re-printed with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

A former stay-at-home dad pines for the simpler days

June 13, 2008

I was a stay-at-home dad for 10 years, when the kids were little. It didn’t seem so simple at the time. I remember the drill:

Get up early, get our three children ready for school, find all the parts to their school uniforms, make breakfast and pack lunches (one for a vegetarian), pick up some other neighborhood kids in the carpool, drop them off at school, run back home for the forgotten homework, go to the grocery store, then the toy store to find a birthday present, meet with the parent committee to plan the annual school fund-raiser, put in a load of laundry, do carpool pickup, and run back to school for the forgotten social studies textbook.

That was just a warm-up.

Then began the kaleidoscope of after-school activities — timed with military precision down to the last green light — followed by homework, assisting with assigned projects that seemed intended more to test the will of parents than the acumen of our children, visits to the emergency room for a broken collarbone, torn ACL or attack of appendicitis, with dinner somewhere in the hazy midst of it all.

As mystifying as all of that seems in retrospect, turns out that was the easy part of parenting. And now it all comes back to me …

When our kids were cute and cuddly and could crawl up onto our laps or into the seat of a grocery cart, they were admired by older adults who clearly knew something we didn’t. It was as if they were trying to pass on a secret warning when they tried to remind us how precious these years are. “They go fast,” they said.

Don’t I know it now!

With an older teenager and two 20-somethings, you get to ponder more heady stuff — like the proper response to a request for a 3 a.m. curfew, your daughter’s tongue piercing and photos of your child skydiving in a 10,000-foot tandem free fall; the balancing act of calling ahead to parents hosting high school graduation parties vs. trusting your kid to be responsible; and other stimulating topics, such as whether your child should be allowed to go by herself to work on an organic farm in Mexico, travel by train in China over Chinese New Year when 200 million Chinese are simultaneously crisscrossing the country, and determining the sleeping arrangements for the boyfriend your daughter has brought home.

Each of these conundrums gets to be met head-on with the usual dramatic reactions and outcomes on both sides in the final confrontation. It’s the age-old push/pull of parenthood and adolescence — establishing reasonable limits while nurturing independence.

It wasn’t always like this …

Some of my biggest worries not long ago were whether or not I could find a particular Beanie Baby for my son, help him collect pogs, Pokemon cards, Power Rangers and, hold on there, remember Tamagotchis, the digital pet you had to feed and clean up after?

What was so hard about keeping up with the vaccination schedule and getting rid of lice? That was downright child’s play compared to dealing with our children doing who knows what (I know what I did when I was their age) and staying out with friends who are also doing who knows what, because that’s what kids do.

Give me Disney World back again! I could manage that. I’d be more patient. Hellooooo, Donald Duck. Please, give me a second chance. Anything would be better than worrying about tattoos, the health effects of tanning salons, dreadlocks, Internet access, R-rated movies, drinking, driving … did I mention drugs?

Well, I guess it’s just the cycle of life. But I sure can’t wait for the day we have grandchildren, so I can just go back to the basics — burping and potty training.

So, Happy Father’s Day, whatever stage of life you are in.

Reprinted with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Spring 2007

In its first issue of 2007, Wired magazine ranked Pittsburgh seventh among the “10 Top Tech Towns,” citing Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science school and Google Pittsburgh’s new Oakland office as the two primary reasons. Perhaps the ranking should have more specifically gone to “Pittsburgh’s East End,” where CMU and Google are just the start. Throughout the entire East End, high-tech businesses are cropping up byte by byte, many of them based in information technology. Here’s a whirlwind look at just some of what prompted Wired to say that our own backyard is a great place “to get your geek on.”

You know the tiny fraction of a second it takes Google to answer your query when you
“google” it? That’s what roughly 40 newlyemployed software engineers have been hired to work on at their new offices in the Collaborative Innovation Center above Panther Hollow on the Carnegie Mellon campus (see page 36).

“We cannot read the person’s mind,” says AndrewMoore, former CMU professor of computer science and robotics, and now director of Google Pittsburgh, one of Google’s 41 offices worldwide,“and that’s what makes it such an interesting puzzle intellectually, because we have to do the best we can to anticipate what the person is really interested in, based on very little knowledge.”

So why did Google come to Pittsburgh to do that?

“If you look at the impact that CMU has had worldwide on technology, it’s been phenomenal,” says Alan Eustace, Google Senior Vice President for Engineering and Research, who came in from the company’s headquarters in California for the opening
of the Pittsburgh office. “We are in a worldwide talent acquisitionmode now, [trying] to find the best people, and CMU was obviously a source of that.”

“We also love the city,” adds Eustace. “Pittsburgh is a tremendous environment for families, for business, and for economic development, and all of those things were very important for our decision. But in the end, it came down to people and technology, and this is a great place to do business.”

It was the formation of a special technology business district called the Greater Oakland Keystone Innovation Zone that enabled the state to provide $8 million toward the $28 million in construction costs for the Collaborative Innovation Center.Other hightech corporate tenants sharing the space with Google in CoLab I, as it has been nicknamed, are Apple, Intel Research, and aMicrosoft-supportedCenter for Innovative Robotics. In all, about 100 new jobs have been created.

“This is an example of academic excellence and business excellence coming together to benefit the region,” says Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato.

Following the success of CoLab I, CoLab II will be built on the other side of PantherHollow, next to the Carnegie Museum. It is hoped that CoLab II will accommodate the balance of an anticipated additional 100 Google employees as well as attract nanotechnology companies to Pittsburgh in the same way CoLab I has become a nexus for software companies.

Google is not the only player in the neighborhood dedicated to improving the way we search the internet. Squirrel Hill resident Raul Valdes-Perez, a former CMU professor, is the CEO and a cofounder of Vivisimo along with Jerome Pesenti of Squirrel Hill and Chris Palmer of Regent Square. Vivisimo is a business search software company located at the corner of Forbes and Murray, above the Rite-Aid on the third floor.Having grown to 50 employees since its founding in 2000 and boasting sales that have doubled in each of the past three years, Vivisimo is listed as the second fastest-growing Pittsburgh-area private company and is expanding into the space formerly occupied by the Italian restaurant Per Mie Figlia.

“Most of our revenue comes from selling the software to businesses or government,” says Valdes- Perez, referring to the Velocity Search Platform, chosen for the official web portal of the U.S. government (www.firstgov.gov). It is the same software he donated to the city of Pittsburgh for its web portal (www.city.pittsburgh.pa.us). For the second year in a row, InfoWorld magazine has named Vivisimo Velocity the winner for the best enterprise search solution.

Vivisimo also offers a consumer search of the web at www.clusty.com. When asked the obvious question—the difference between his search engine and Google—Valdes-Perez responds, “The differences are our ability to handle the full internal complexity of business search and our richly productive user experience. We also provide advice and consulting to our customers.”

Valdes-Perez feels the East End is ideal for starting a business. “If it’s information technology, all you need is space and computers and an internet connection. I think it’s a great place to build a business, because you have access to a lot of talent, costs are low, life is easy.”He finds his company’s Squirrel Hill location convenient because it eliminates “all the hassles of driving downtown,” adding that it’s also more “organic.”

With other computer technology-related businesses in the building, “this corner is becoming Silicon Corner,” says Valdes-Perez.
Across the hall from Vivisimo is Collaborative Fusion Inc., formed in 2001 by CMU grads Atila Omer and Bryan Kaplan.

“Because we were both in school and working on the company at the same time,” says Kaplan, vice president of operations, “we looked for an area that was nearby so we could easily commute from school.”

Ranked among the top 50 best places to work in Western Pennsylvania by the Pittsburgh Business Times, Collaborative Fusion has about 20 employees who have developed and are marketing an industry-leading software application that allows states to identify, select, and send volunteers who want to help during a disaster.

Kaplan, who hails fromthe west coast, has been very impressed with the city and its people. “Pittsburgh has a lot to offer, and the East End specifically,” he says. “Coming from Los Angeles, which is a thriving culture, and coming here, which is more of a neighborhood-oriented culture, has been a pleasant change.”

Kaplan, who hails fromthe west coast, has been very impressed with the city and its people. “Pittsburgh has a lot to offer, and the East End specifically,” he says. “Coming from Los Angeles, which is a thriving culture, and coming here, which is more of a neighborhood-oriented culture, has been a pleasant change.”

Rounding out “Silicon Corner,” on the second floor of the same building is CyberConXion, a video game center co-founded by Leon Edelsack and Larry Hochendoner. “We are using information technologies for entertainment in a social setting, as opposed to sitting at home by yourself,” says Edelsack, a resident of Squirrel Hill. “Imagine your Tuesday night bowling league, but in the 2ist century.We compete against other gaming centers across North America.” CyberConXion also offers programs led by CMU students to expose middle and high school-aged girls to creative technologies such as web design, digital editing, animation, and robotics.

Another beehive of information technology companies is inTheDesign Center on the corner of Baum Boulevard and Morewood Avenue. Lars
Olander, a resident of Edgewood and partner in Real Estate Enterprises, which owns and manages the building, says that about 65 percent of his tenants have some sort of high-tech use or business.He admits, “For a lot of tenants I have a hard time grasping what their business is. When they start talking about software, I kind of shakemy head. So, we take gambles a lot of the time, because I have no sense of whether their business model makes sense, but we’ve fared pretty well.”

One company inTheDesign Center that’s paying the rent on time is Digital Site Systems. Farro Radjy, president and founder of the company that now has eight employees, has taken 10 years to fully develop the family of Quadrel products. “We provide real-time quality management via the internet to the leading multinational and international construction materials manufacturers worldwide.” For example, from Pittsburgh they manage the concrete manufacturing process for 20 plants owned by Aggregate Industries in Denver.

“A company like this will have 10,000 mixtures in all 20 plants,” says Radjy. “That’s 10,000 recipes that have to bemanaged concurrently. It’s like a huge cookbook, and we manage the results in real-time as they are loading the materials inside the trucks.”

Radjy says he likes the convenience of being within walking distance of his Shadyside home. “It’s a wonderful part of the city,” he says.

Babs Carryer doesn’t even have to walk to work. This experienced entrepreneur, who enjoys commercializing technology and has been involved with hundreds of early-stage companies, just has to go upstairs to the third floor of her Highland Park home. There her handy husband, Tim, who won a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette renovation award in 2006, has outfitted an office large enough to accommodate the six members of her start-up team when they get together for strategy meetings. Their business, RemComm, which stands for “radio emergency communications,” received a grant of
$100,000 from Innovation Works for taking first prize in Pittsburgh Technology Council’s 2006 EnterPrize Business Plan Competition.

“What we’ve really done is link radios to computers via software, which enables first responders in an emergency to send and receive messages via radio instead of having to rely on cell phone communications that are inoperable during disasters,” says Carryer. Her friend and Highland Park neighbor Rick Johnson wrote the software which they successfully tested in Mississippi after Katrina, when they helped reestablish communications with field trucks that had lost contact with Salvation Army headquarters in Jackson.

RemComm is just getting revved up, but at the other end of the scale is Management Science Associates, located in the Eichleay-owned building on the corner of Penn and Fifth avenues. With 800 local employees, it is the largest Pittsburgh-area computer consulting firm.

“We track the movement of thousands of items, such as candy bars, through 650,000 retail outlets,” says Steve Gongaware, director of business development.

As further evidence of the company’s success, under a settlement agreement between the tobacco industry and the states’ attorneys general, Management Science Associates was named to receive all of the 25 year’s worth of data that will be used to determine each tobacco company’s market share and portion of the $206 billion settlement.

This is just a sampling of the information technology activity going on in the East End. In themetropolitan statistical area, 808 software firms employ more than 9,000 people with a total annual payroll of $672 million. And there are 300 start-ups in the Pittsburgh metropolitan region each year among all tech categories, of which Pitt and CMU combined produced 20 direct spin-outs—an all-time record.

Our university leaders, university technology transfer offices, faculty and students, local and state officials, venture capitalists, and sources of funds and support for early-stage companies are all making a concerted effort to encourage more and more start-ups in the region. Credit the quality of our local institutions for our success, both at UPMC, which, according to Jay Douglass, manager of business evelopment for the Software Engineering Institute, is recognized
globally as one of the top healthcare IT organizations in the world, and at CMU where the Ph.D. program in computer science is ranked number one in the country along with Stanford, MIT, and UC Berkley.

In fact, many of the start-ups are developed right in the classroom. Shadyside resident Aron Hall came to Pittsburgh in 2000 to study at CMU’s nationally recognized Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship. In Dr. Tom Emerson’s course, Entrepreneurial Business Plan, Hall developed the strategy for his wireless and wired network security appliances company he’s named Hobnob and which he is funding with proceeds from the sale of a previous start-up called Marimba that went public in 1999. Originally intending to go back to California after graduation, Hall says, “everything took off in Pittsburgh.” Emerson, who says four to five companies spin out of his class every year, was impressed enough with the business plan to give Hall an “A” in the course.

Now Hall and his four employees work from their East End homes or fromone of themany local coffee shops; Hall calls it a “virtual organization.” He lists the advantages consistently mentioned by other information technology entrepreneurs working locally: “there are lots of smart people, customers are close by, you can conveniently access the universities for help on the technical side, office space is relatively inexpensive and available, and there’s good coffee nearby.”

Even after Pittsburgh was named the Most Livable City by Rand McNally in 1985, was displayed numerous times in all its glimmering glory on Monday Night Football, hosted the All-Star game, and saw our young Mayor Luke Ravenstahl on the Letterman Show, our proud city is nevertheless still hard-pressed to shed outsiders’ perceptions of a smoggy steel town. Our new motto should be “If you get them here they will stay.” Jeanne Antonuccio, President of About Pittsburgh, Inc., a relocation consulting firm, witnessed firsthand the positive reactions of a group of eight University of Michigan graduate students who had been invited to Pittsburgh by one of Antonuccio’s corporate clients.

“They loved all the shops, the diversity of housing, the open cafés and were impressed when they sawWalnut Street’s Coffee Tree with wireless internet connection and the open garage door,” she says. Upon seeing the Apple store in Shadyside they commented, “There must be cool people living here.”

And more job seekers from out of town will be taking a peek at Pittsburgh after seeing it named by Wired magazine in January as one of the country’s “Best Geek Cities.”

There is no argument that Pittsburgh has yet to reach its potential in the high-tech market. Commenting on a somewhat bleak assessment of the state of Pittsburgh’s knowledge economy, which places us more in a league with Baltimore, St. Louis, and Indianapolis than it does with geekdoms like Palo Alto, Austin, and Boston, Don Smith, director of the University Partnership of Pittsburgh admits, “We do seem to have an abundance of the building blocks, yet we are not seeing the outcomes that we want to see. The study indicates that we need to start an additional 60 companies a year in technology.”

Fortunately, optimism abounds in the high technology world. It has to. Out of ten companies that Steve Robinson, an angel investor from Squirrel Hill, might invest in, he says, “You hope for one that is a pretty big winner.” That gaming
spirit is also reflected in the attitudes of today’s students, according to Tim McNulty, a Point Breeze resident and one of Carnegie Mellon’s associate provosts. “This is a very entrepreneurial generation of students,” says McNulty. “They come here with a sense of ‘I want to be a part of starting something.’”

And it will take patience. “The city itself is really maturing in its attitude towards and its ability to embrace and support entrepreneurial companies,” says Professor Emerson. “I’ve been here seven years, in which [time] we’ve built quite an infrastructure to support high-tech and entrepreneurial companies. And so I think the city is well-positioned. It usually takes a while for these things to bear fruit, but it’s beginning to produce early evidence of lots of high tech jobs.”

With many thanks to SHADY AVE magazine for granting me permission to reprint on my website.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

The last place I wanted to spend a year was Hong Kong.
I’m sure that comes off as being spoiled, but I cannot speak Chinese, don’t like overcrowded cities, prefer to breathe clean air and think Chinese food is a great take-out option, but only in moderation.
In fact, truth be told, I had no desire to spend a year anywhere besides Pittsburgh. I take that back. You could drop me off at any corner cafe in all of France, hand me the International Herald Tribune and a double espresso and I’d be in heaven.

But my wife, being the persistent, insistent woman that she is, had her own agenda, and frankly, she wore me down to the point that I relented to spending a year in one of the world’s most populated, expensive and polluted cities.

For Franny, it all made perfect sense. In Hong Kong she would be close to her sources of supply in China that manufacture the children’s books, toys, premiums, pet products and housewares she designs and imports to the United States.
For me, the decision wasn’t as cut-and-dried.

My family has lived in Pittsburgh for eight generations and, call me unadventurous, but for my purposes, Pittsburgh is still quite livable. Besides, I’d been to Hong Kong numerous times previously in the same importing business as my wife and, as far as I was concerned, I had done all there was to do in Hong Kong. I’d been up to the Peak lookout to witness Hong Kong’s spectacular skyline, shopped at Stanley Market, taken the Star Ferry and eaten at the Jumbo Floating Restaurant in Aberdeen. I’d even conducted business over tea at the Peninsula and been fitted by the tailors in the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

More compelling to me, though, was the argument that living in Hong Kong for a year would be a beneficial experience for our three teenagers. They could find out what it was like to live in a foreign country, immerse themselves in a different culture, learn a new language and gain a more worldly view and an appreciation for what they have by traveling to other Asian countries where food, water, fuel and shelter are considered precious.
But it wasn’t until I sought advice from my minister, who advised me that it would be good for me to pull up at least a few of my roots, that I agreed. Deep down, though, I was hoping that the whole idea would die of its own weight.

After all, Franny would have to get the kids enrolled in Hong Kong schools, locate housing and secure work and study visas. She would have to find and train someone to manage her local office and find a family to rent our house. In fact, the to-do list turned out to be endless before getting on the flight overseas. I would have thrown up my hands, but, remember, my wife is persistent and insistent. Before I could say “fortune cookie,” in August 2004 we were on the 27th floor of a high-rise apartment building, overlooking the business district, called Central, and Victoria Harbor.

Sulfur-laden air from neighboring Guandong Province in China drifts down the Pearl River and mixes with the emissions from local coal-burning utility plants and the fumes from 110,000 heavy and light trucks running on cheap diesel to create what is politely called a “haze” that engulfs Hong Kong.

On some days, its tallest building, the 88-story International Financial Center, was no longer visible from our apartment. It was difficult to keep up with the maintenance on the filters in the air conditioners, and it wasn’t long before I showed up at the emergency room of the Adventist Hospital and was prescribed inhalers for my asthma.
But, clearly, I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Upon arrival in Hong Kong, everyone had something to do but me. Franny went to her office in Hong Kong or ventured deeper into China to check on the production of her merchandise. Our daughter Natalie got busy choosing from a list of enticing courses offered to visiting students at Hong Kong University and was soon being privately tutored in Mandarin on a regular basis. And our two youngest, Julia and Chas, started 11th and 8th grades respectively at the Canadian International School of Hong Kong.

Me? The nonworking spouse, homemaker, Mr. Mom? After waving goodbye to the departing school bus, I bought the South China Morning Post at our corner newsstand and made a 10-minute walk to the nearest Starbucks. Having been a regular at the coffee shops in Pittsburgh on most mornings, I sought the comfort of familiar surroundings from which I could try to get my bearings.
What to do? What to do? What’s a guy to do in Hong Kong for a year? I’ve always liked writing, so I chose to pretend I was writing a regular “column” — what I called a dispatch — to family and friends every two to three days just to see how long I could keep it up. Not having a house to maintain and having fewer distractions afforded me the quiet time to sit undisturbed at my laptop.
My material was the sights and sounds of the city, starting with the difficulties of hiring a maid with whom we could communicate in a common language. The idea of these dispatches was to describe experiences I never would have had in Pittsburgh, such as negotiating getting a haircut and manicure with only the most meager facility in Chinese, consisting of “please” (mgoy) and “thank you” (mgoy).

Thus challenged to know even basic phrases or how to count to 10, I thought I should also commence weekly Cantonese lessons. Soon enough I could buy a newspaper, ask how much things cost, request a cheaper price, give a taxi driver basic instructions and order my usual at Starbucks. (Yaht boyee, gafay, mgoy, peng si yaht yeung.)
What was scary was when a clerk actually thought I was fluent and replied to me in Chinese, going on and on about this and that while, of course, I didn’t understand a single word. So I just reverted to “mgoy,” hoping that they had just finished complimenting me on my proficiency with the language.
Not having a car (only 6 percent of the people in Hong Kong do), we went everywhere by public transportation or walked. Near our apartment building, the Park Towers, were restaurants, my laundry, hardware stores, grocery stores and open-air fish, meat, flower and vegetable markets.

I often stopped there for one of my favorite after-school snacks, fresh mangoes imported from the Philippines. With very few expatriates in sight in our neighborhood of Tin Hau, we felt as if we were experiencing authentic Hong Kong.
When we did have contact with expatriates, it was often at the numerous cultural performances, live concerts, dragon boat races and other sporting events we attended.

One such event was the Hong Kong Rugby 7’s, the culminating tournament that involved 77 teams from around the world.
As the venue for the most social occasion of the year, Hong Kong Stadium is transformed into a scene resembling a cross between the old Rolling Rock races and a Steelers playoff game. When our daughter Julia showed her colors by sporting an American flag on her cheek, she got a taste of exactly how other countries feel about United States foreign policy. “Go back to Iraq, ya’ damn Yanks,” one fan shouted at her from the crowd. That’s one way of gaining a worldly view.

Since we were going to be spending a year in Hong Kong, I thought I would have business cards made. I would need a Chinese name to print on the reverse side. Over lunch my friend, Raymond Cheng, dubbed me “Tse Duk Laye,” which, he said, means “profit by giving away.” He told me, “Your name says that you might help build a school, care for people, forgive people, pay your bills on time and teach your children well.”

Proud and excited, I arrived home in time to share it with my wife’s colleague, Cathy Wong. Despite my Chinese tutoring, I must have used completely incorrect intonation, because she said it came out, “When are you going to die?”

I was just slightly better at learning how to cook with a wok than I was in the language department. At least I had been smart enough to buy a Chinese cookbook that was printed in English before I left Pittsburgh. I’m glad I did, because the million-dollar apartment we had rented didn’t even come with an oven. I also gained an appreciation for dishwashers, because the apartment didn’t come with that, either.

When we were finished hand washing and drying the dishes, we had time for scenic hikes and afternoons at the beach. Hong Kong may look as if it is all glass, steel and cement, but actually it is 60 percent parks and nature reserves. The children even started surfing, and we took sailing lessons on a 45-foot sloop, sharing the shipping channel with freighters, barges and hydrofoils.

For indoor sports, it was ice hockey for Chas. As pleasant a surprise as it was to find out that Hong Kong had a thriving hockey league, it was equally satisfying to see enthusiastic but well-mannered behavior by all of the hockey parents.

On the more adventurous side, we tasted mooncakes made with lotus paste during the Mid-Autumn Festival, went to the Happy Valley racecourse and knew all the local spots for checking out the latest in copy watches, copy handbags, copy DVDs and video games. For exercise, Franny loved getting up early to join her Tai Chi and fan dancing classes in Victoria Park. Natalie accelerated her fluency in Chinese by volunteering to teach the children of incarcerated parents at the Beijing Sun Village in China.

One day Chas came home from school and said, “Dad, I need a cow eyeball for science class.”
Now, normally a kid will come home from school and say he has a project due the next day which, if you’re lucky, involves a glue stick, blue marker, shoe box or a copy of Time magazine. But Chas said we had to find an eyeball they could dissect the next day.

I like to imagine this happening in Pittsburgh but, being in Hong Kong, all we had to do was find the right butcher at the wet market in North Point and say “ow ahn” (cow eye) while pointing to our own eyes. In an instant the butcher reached above him to unhook a small plastic bag containing two eyeballs. A pair sold for $1.50.

When the children had their school vacations, we also took full advantage of Hong Kong’s strategic location as an Asian travel hub and went to 13 countries during the year, thanks to an around-the-world fare we had secured through All Directions Travel in Pittsburgh (412-566-1710). Among the countries we visited were Madagascar, Bhutan and Sri Lanka, where we happened to be during the tsunami, but that’s a different story. And for their class trips, Julia’s junior class explored New Zealand for a week, and Chas and the eighth-graders saw the sights in and around Beijing over a three-day period. I can think of only one significant drawback as a result of all of this travel, and that’s the baggie full of foreign change that will sit in my bottom dresser drawer in perpetuity.

I might have missed the rest of my family more had my mother not come to join us on three of our trips.
What I did miss, though, were seeing blue sky, having fresh green grass under my feet and being in my seat at Heinz Field during the Steelers 15-1 season. I did catch one Steelers game on TV and discerned that one of the main advantages of being in Hong Kong is that, with the 12-hour time difference, “Monday Night Football” conveniently airs live on Tuesday mornings, so you can actually stay awake for the whole game.

I admit I started off as the reluctant traveler, set in my ways, unwilling to make a break from my comfortable habits of Pittsburgh. But, in the end, I learned I could retain part of my routine and still seek new adventures.

For instance, I put my interest in video production to use in producing a short video titled “Made in Hong Kong.”
And my background in business enabled me to teach a short graduate level course in Risk Management and Problem Solving to middle managers at a components factory in China. Had I not lived in Hong Kong, I might never have learned that the most valuable jade is the color of mutton fat.

As difficult as it was to pack up and move the family overseas, maybe we happened to be in Hong Kong at just the right time, right after the respiratory ailment SARS was in the news and before the avian flu reaches pandemic proportions, if it ever does.
It has occurred to me that the enthusiastic welcome we have been receiving since our return reflects the fears and concerns that family and friends may have had for our safety.

So, in response to people who ask me what our year was like, I offer that it was interesting, difficult, fun, challenging, fascinating. I suppose I would do the same thing if I were reliving the same decision of whether to go all over again. I would hope that if the clock were turned back, I could be more gracious to my wife by displaying a greater willingness to go in the first place.

As for the future, if invited to Hong Kong, I’d be happy to visit any time and have an official 13-course dinner with the friends we made. I just wouldn’t want to live there — again.

(Charlie Stewart is a freelance writer now back in Squirrel Hill.)

Re-printed with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

In Sri Lanka the day after Christmas, what we saw on our way to the beach

January 5, 2005

On holiday from Hong Kong, my family and I had just celebrated Christmas in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The next morning we were met by local friends who had offered to take us to the tropical beaches at the island’s southern tip. The day’s bright, sunny skies were typical of Sri Lanka’s “winter.” We were happily anticipating two days of relaxation and water activities at the Unawatuna Beach Resort, just past Galle on the narrow two-lane coastal road.

Altogether 10 of us piled into both a hired van and a private car. Once out of Colombo we glimpsed the ocean and commented on the fishing villages comprised of closely packed and flimsily constructed wooden shacks.
We wondered aloud what would happen in the event of a typhoon or other severe weather, but were assured by our host that nothing like that ever happened in Sri Lanka.

Halfway to our destination, we drove through Beruwala where suddenly people were streaming towards us from the dirt roads and paths that led from their seaside villages to our right. Many were crying and screaming, obviously very frightened. We thought there had been a car bombing.
We learned later they what they were shouting: “The sea is coming into the land!”
As water mixed with debris began flowing slowly under our car, we had to turn around. By now the faces of fear and panic were on both sides of our car. Mothers and fathers scurried beside us holding their small children or assisting an elderly parent. At one point I saw a man running alongside the road being hit in the shoulder with the side view mirror of a passing truck.

When the chaos caused traffic to stop, a large group of Sri Lankans approached the side of the van demanding a ride. As I watched, I worried for the safety of my wife and children inside. At first, the driver, Pala, refused to let them in — the nine-passenger van already had seven — but then they began pounding on the sides and windows.
I asked our daughter, Julia, to describe the scene inside: “Fifteen men, women and children, including three babies, squished into our van and we all moved over so that my brother, Chas, was sitting on my sister, Natalie, and I had all the luggage on my lap. Mom was in the front passenger seat. One girl was cut on her side. Another child’s hand was bleeding. The children were crying and the women were wailing. At first we were in shock as we looked into the panic-stricken eyes of these families. But Natalie began to console one of the girls sitting next to us who was crying and we all followed her lead by smiling at the babies, holding the hands of the girls and stroking their backs. The entire car soon settled down, and it was more or less quiet for the rest of the car ride except for the four kids who got sick and threw up out the window and in the van.”
Parts of their conversations were later translated to me by our friend, Naqeeb: My son is missing … My mother is missing … Our neighbor is dead … My friend is missing … My money and my house are gone.

After two hours, the evacuees were dropped off at their destination near a relative. We continued on to the Mount Lavinia Hotel, safely situated on a bluff above the ocean, where we could regroup. It was there that we first heard on the radio news the word that has become all-too familiar: tsunami.
From an overhanging balcony by the hotel’s pool, we could see the beach stretching up to Colombo. We watched the last of the tidal waves as they rose and fell back, subsiding with less and less force. While we witnessed a man being rescued 20 meters off shore, tables, chairs and other household items floated by, stolen by the ocean’s current.
Meanwhile at poolside, sunbathers, seemingly oblivious, were applying suntan lotion. As we stepped up to a sumptuous luncheon buffet, “Strangers In The Night” was accompanying the surreal scene before us. And the band played on.
By late afternoon we were safely back at the hotel in Colombo, overwhelmed by the day’s events. I called room service and remained glued to the BBC, CNN and local Sri Lankan stations. The tour desk informed us that the Unawatuna Beach Resort, where we were going to spend the day and night, had been swept away and that some of the guests and staff were still missing.

Awakening the next morning to the news of the ever-rising number of casualties, we went to the Red Cross where we were provided a list of medical supplies that would be needed over the next 24 hours. My son, Chas, and I and three locals cleaned out two pharmacies of their stock of antibiotics and painkillers and we had the satisfaction of knowing our donation was included in a truckload headed south that same evening.
Meanwhile Franny, Natalie, Julia and my mother set up a “Tsunami Victims Help Desk” in the hotel lobby. They listened to the tragic and heroic accounts of some of the 300 survivors who had been evacuated from the beachside resorts and were now being put up on mattresses in the hotel’s conference rooms. They collected over 100,000 rupees ($1,000) in cash that day, plus every imaginable kind of medicine that hotel guests picked out of their travel kits to give to the Red Cross. Our “Help Desk” became a model for six or seven other hotels nearby.

Though feeling guilty, we went on a pre-planned tour of Kandy’s famous botanical gardens and the lush mountainous areas of Sri Lanka, including endless tea fields on steep-sloping terrain. Coming back through the Colombo hotel’s main doors two days later, the lobby lounge was even more crowded with tourists whose resort rooms had been demolished. Some were in the bathing suits they were wearing when the tsunami hit.

One survivor we met was Alex. He had been separated from his girlfriend when their romantic beach bungalow was destroyed. With casts on both legs, he was taking a flight back to Britain the next day. His girlfriend’s decomposed body had been located the day before. We met her father who had flown over to assist Alex and had the unthinkable task of identifying his daughter’s body and returning her home.
Our last day in Sri Lanka, we went to a collection site for donations and helped form bucket brigades to load and unload trucks filled with water bottles, used clothing and medicine. We were rewarded by drinking the delicious milk from freshly cut king coconuts.
We departed Sri Lanka for Hong Kong on New Year’s Day as the world’s largest, most logistically complicated peacetime relief effort was getting under way. When we emerged from the Kowloon tunnel in our airport limousine, Hong Kong’s glamorous skyscrapers stood in contrast to the devastated structures of the poor fishing villages we had just left behind.

As witnesses to the effects of one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, we all feel we have been through a life-changing experience.
From televised images we have seen the devastating power of nature. We have seen firsthand the faces of fear and the chaos resulting from panic. We have learned that even as mere individuals we can play a part in a larger effort to help bring relief to those whose lives go on.

And we now have a greater appreciation for the value of our lives and pray for those families who have suffered through this catastrophe.

Re-printed with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The acceptance (and other) letters are in the mail this week.
Does the anxiety stop here?

Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Do you know what time of year it is? Well, yes, it’s tax time, but it’s also when colleges start sending out the thin letters of rejection or the thick letters of acceptance. My daughter is just moments away from being notified by the various colleges she has applied to.

Hearing from them will actually be a relief, because families (i.e., parents) with college-bound kids are obsessed with the topic. You can be talking about the probability of property-tax millage being lowered and, sure enough, the next thing you know, the conversation has reverted to colleges. What college is your daughter applying to? What college is your daughter applying to? Then you start doing some wild, mental calculations like: “Hmmmm … if her daughter is applying to Yale and mine is too, and they’re both from Pittsburgh, then by how much does that reduce or better my daughter’s chances? How many girls from Pittsburgh does Yale need in one class?”
My daughter and I did a road trip this past summer to see some of these colleges. In fact, we drove 2,500 miles, through eight states and saw 11 colleges and did three drive-bys. For the past nine years I’ve been a stay-at-home dad. It’s nice to see that a lot of the things I’ve been trying to reinforce by providing stability on the home front are also valued at college. For instance, on the tour at Oberlin, our student guide was kind enough to point out the substance-free dorm. That’s helpful to know. But it also did make me wonder: What goes on in all the other dorms?

We are fortunate to live in a time when our children have so many choices available to them. At the University of Massachusetts, you can take Finnish. You never know. Some day you may have an unexpected layover in Helsinki. They have human dog sled racing at Dartmouth and an ice skating marching band at Brown. They were also proud of their three libraries and 5 million volumes at Brown, but Dartmouth has 11 libraries so, if it’s libraries you want, head to Hanover, N.H. If libraries aren’t your thing, Middlebury has log rolling in the indoor pool and, for your entertainment, Vassar has a Steinway piano in every dorm and it’s 50 cents to play a round of golf at their golf course.
Bard College was one of my favorites. I think I could do better there than I did at my own alma mater. In the tutorial at Bard, the teacher and the student decide together on what the grade should be. I’ve got a good idea what I would suggest. Besides, how badly could I do anyway if I took their African drumming class?

But I probably could have done all right at Brown, too. There don’t seem to be any rules. Courses are pass/fail and the parents aren’t notified if their kids are caught with drugs. They must assume that if you are old enough to be able to fill out an online application form, you must be old enough to be responsible for your own drug reactions.

We also learned some of the popular lore such as how Bowdoin got its mascot. Apparently an alum, Adm. Donald B. MacMillan, was exploring the North Pole in the early 1900s and shot a polar bear. Somehow, he got it all the way down to Maine, because there it is today in a glass case in the lobby of the gymnasium. And that’s why Bowdoin students are the Polar Bears. You can only imagine how unimpressed my vegetarian daughter was. Even with SATs being optional and the second best food in the country, they never did receive her application.
After visiting so many campuses, I found that I longed to be back at college. They have the best themes for parties, and that’s when I noticed that the tour guides really started to get animated. There’s Diva Night at Skidmore and Foam parties at Vassar. (Of course, these people never experienced Easters Weekend at the University of Virginia. Now that was a party. It was so good they banned it in 1982.)

But I don’t think I could get into college now. The pool of kids entering college in two years will be the largest group of qualified college applicants in history. Lucky me. That’s my younger daughter’s class.

You have to have a “hook” to get into college. Used to be that you were a shoo-in if you’d rowed at Henley or been captain of the fencing team. But now you can’t just be a mere valedictorian. You also need to have opened at the Met, arrested the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest or defended your theory on how to stop the sun from dying out. While you’re asleep, there are parents out there plotting their fourth-grader’s college entry credentials.

I can’t wait to get back out on the road with daughter No. 2. I’d like to beat the rush, but she’s still busy being a kid. She’s hard at work setting a Guinness record for hours asleep by a 16-year-old during spring break.

Re-printed with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

How do kids these days find out about sex? Not from this dad, alas

Saturday, May 31, 2003

I was busy minding my own business one morning last week when a front-article in the Post-Gazette on the sexual practices of 12-to-14-year-olds caught my attention. “20 Percent Have Sex Before 15,” the headline blared.
The first very interesting thing I learned is that 12-year-olds are now considered teenagers. This was news to me which, I guess, is why we have newspapers in the first place. The second thing I gleaned is that my son, being 12, has a one-in-five chance of having you know what. Unfortunately, the article reminded me that my wife had told me (yes, toldme), let us say six months or so ago, to give him The Talk. Somehow it had slipped my mind (perhaps because I would rather clean the hair out of the shower drain), but now I remember how that conversation went.
“Have you talked to our son yet?”
“About what?”
“You know perfectly well about what.”
“I do?”
“Yes, you do.”
“Well, I guess that’s a ‘no,’ then.”
“So, when are you going to talk to him?”
“Soon.”
“Soon is not good enough. You need to set a date. How about this weekend?”
“Why do I have to talk to him?”
“You’re his father. It’s your job and I told the girls.”
“Are those the only reasons you can come up with?”
“I’m sure if you give me a minute I’ll come up with three more.”
“Well, what if I find an older boy, someone our son can relate to, and he can tell our son? That’s what my father did.”
“Yes, and, as I recall, you learned absolutely nothing because you were too embarrassed to admit you didn’t know anything and so you told him you knew everything, when actually you didn’t know a thing.”
“That’s true. I had to wait until college to find out what was what.”
Soon, my son and I were alone one early Saturday morning on the way back from hockey practice. (I had lost my nerve on the way to practice.) I turned the radio off.
“I want to talk to you about sex,” I heard myself saying. Had I really said that?
No sooner had the words squeaked out of my mouth than the reply came back. “That’s stupid.”
“I know,” I said. “I didn’t have sex until I was a lot older than you are, but . . .”
“I don’t want to hear about your love life.”
“I think it’s important you learn about sex.”
“I already know,”
“How?”
“You pick it up.”
“Well, that’s what worries me. I want to make sure you get the right information.”
“I’m going to give you the silent treatment,” he threatened.
So, that’s how that went down. No wonder there’s teen pregnancy. This so-called “tradition” of The Talk that is supposedly handed down from father to son, generation by generation, probably got no further than Adam. What are your options when you are told, “That’s stupid!” “Gross!” or “I’m jumping out of the car if you tell me any more?”
I’ve been wondering what I’m going to do for the rest of my life and I think I’ve hit on it. I’m going to produce a DVD called “The Talk.” It should come in handy as a symbol to our wives of our good intentions. It will actually be blank inside to save on the production costs and boost profits a bit.
“Son, my father gave me this DVD when I was 12 and now I pass it on to you. Notice that it’s still in its original sealed packaging. I recommend you don’t open it either. Better to learn the hard way, like I did.”
“And, in case you don’t open it, I just need to say one thing.”
“Please don’t.”
“If you could just let me say….”
“Don’t.”
“Remember to use a . . . “
“I’m not list-en-ing.”

P.S. My son will disown me if he finds out I wrote this. So, we never had this talk, OK?

Re-printed with permission from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette