if you watch only one commencement address this year, make it this one

i am a pigeonholer, a stereotyper, a disciple of pattern recognition and hard, unpleasant truth.

post-2008, i divided the pundits and leaders of the world into two simple categories:  those who saw it coming and warned us, and those who didn't.

after four years of blogging and talking myself blue in the face, i have also come to divide the rest of the world into two categories:  those who look to the first group for guidance on what's coming next, and those who cannot be dissuaded from their belief that the second will lead us out of the mess they either didn't see coming or helped create.

watch this, and then tell me:  into which pigeonhole shall i place you?

a belated father's day post

summer somewhere in texas, and we're on our annual leisure trek, staying at some motel or other.

it's sunny and hot, and we're out by the pool--we lived in the water in those days.  my mom's rubbing oil on my back, my brother's splashing around the shallow end, my dad's in a chaise lounge with the sports section, and my sister--

she had to have been almost four that summer.  just overcoming her fear of the water, she had discovered her ability to float, and, enthralled with this new power, would bob motionlessly around the pool for long stretches of time, gazing skyward, so stable and still that it was easy to forget to watch her.

it was my mother who looked up, dropped the coppertone with a scream, and i whipped my head around to see my little sister's floating body--face down, blond hair fanning out around her little head--bobbing motionlessly in the water.

before i could even move, my father was outta that chair and into the pool so fast he broke a toe on its edge.

and afterwards, when we realized he had merely interrupted my sister's first try at holding her breath, he just laughed with a grimace, and never complained.

he always loved us.  even after what would happen happened, i never had a moment's doubt about that.