Rage is back

I'm finally on summer vacation. It's been an unusual yet relaxing transition, from work to vacation. The final day of school for students and most teachers was eight days ago. I volunteered to come back every day this week for a few hours to work with a student who had missed a large segment of the semester due to a broken leg. Our school is not equipped with elevators, and my classroom is located on the third floor. She broke her leg in February, had reconstructive surgery in March, and was only cleared to walk up stairs on the third week of June. Crazy, huh? Well she is a really smart student, so I didn't mind coming in to teach her. Basically she ran her own experiments and worked on practice problems while I cleaned up my classroom and perused craigslist for used jeep cherokees.

My dad has a heart condition which worried my mother more than anyone else, mostly because my dad has a healthy distrust of doctors and probably doesn't take his own condition all that seriously. My mother loves doctors and hospitals and medical insurance. I thinks she sees in their bureaucratic complexities and excessive verbiage a sort of stability or safety. This is probably the same reason why she buys twice as many groceries every month as what we could possibly eat.

Anyway, my dad was excited to take his (mostly annual) summer trip to California. Usually he takes this trip by motorcycle, but my mom imposed her strong will on my dad and after lengthy coercion (she spoke with him once over dinner), convinced him to --- wait for it, because this gets good --- take his car. That's right. My mom convinced my dad, who views cars as a necessary but loathsome component of human living, to brush the dust of his old car and drive it to California.

I accompanied my dad to WalMart three weeks ago and helped him to buy his first smartphone. He had many questions, most of which were composite questions (unclear amalgamations with multiple worries, thoughts, and disjointed fragments stitched together in traditional Mr. Dad fashion), which I attempted to answer in as clear and precise of a manner as noisome and morally questionable environment of WalMart would allow me to do. He had spent the last two weeks sending me text message version of the ten minute rants he previously delivered over voice mail. I do not know if this is an improvement.

Halfway through the scheduled itinerary of his trip, my dad sent me a picture message of Mt. Rushmore. It was taken from a crazy angle, from the left and way way way beneath, so that the heads of the presidents appear tiny and in profile. At that angle my dad had effectively erased the presence of Theodore Roosevelt. I don't believe this was an intentional move on his part. Nevertheless, this picture message must have marked an important point in the trip for him, because he showed up back in town one week later, preceded by several days by a text message reading, and I so excitably quote, "All further points west have been canceled due to lack of enthusiasm driving automobiles." After spending twenty three years as a spectator to my dad's life, watching with incredulous fascination at his profound inability to flourish in the modern world, feeling not unlike a fan of the Detroit Lions watching the team play season after season while the city crumbles around them, I can honestly say for the first time that I know exactly what he is talking about.

I've been keeping up with my reading, in case you were wondering, although not to the extent of my friend Stephanie who has read over forty books this year. Forty books! I think I'm in the mid twenties, but I'm going to focus exclusively on small slim tomes for a few weeks and see what happens. I read Love, and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Lillies of the Field by William Edmund Barrett, and Rage is Back by Adam Mansbach. I liked the last one the best, and I think it inspired me to re-read some of my favorite books from past years. I'll keep you in the loop.

Here is a photograph I recently took of a non-living dinosaur: