Blinq

Flowers Flying Across The Room

You might want to put on the headphones and take a moment with this one.

Flower wilt, candies melt, dinners out make me feel like a lox.

But this is a Valentine's gift for the ages.

Years past, I'd go out and buy an opera for my wife. Not commission one, buy one. I'd look up favorite performances in Ted Libby's guide, then hunt one down at Tower's classical branch on South Street, or HMV, and now what do I do?

What will join Tosca and Il Trovatore and Aida and Cosi Fan Tutte and Peleas and Melisande?

The Drive-By Truckers doing Feb. 14?

Why not. The kids are out of the house. It's just us and the dog. Time put on those high-heeled sneakers.

Loading Grandma's iPod

What do you get the girl who has everything, when that girl is your mother and she’s turning 80?

Apparently not Rick James singing "Super Freak."

"Too much hard rock and people of color talking about some kinky girl," Mom said from Florida after listening to the second batch of songs I’d loaded onto her iPod.

It is not easy making a running mix for your mother, when she’s so fussy about what revs her engine.

I thought I had nailed it the first time. That one had too much rap, she said.

What was I thinking?

I’d paid too much attention to studies that say the way to move that body is to build a soundtrack with tempos of 120 to 140 beats per minute, roughly the same as those of a well-exercised heart.

So there were lots of raucous grooves by Outkast ("Ms. Jackson") and Nelly ("Hot in Herre") and Black Eyed Peas ("My Humps") — light on the bad words because while my mom is proudly liberal, she is also a lady.

Turns out my mother runs on hope.

"I like that ‘She drove a Plymouth Satellite’ song," she said, picking up a lyric from the B-52’s "Planet Claire." "And that ‘Mr. Jones is back in town’ has a good beat. I like that." That was Talking Heads.

"But what I really liked was that song, ‘Stay Positive.’"

That one’s a gritty, mid-tempo number by a young British bloke known as The Streets.

"It was sort of inspirational," she said. "He sings about people who have a lot of problems, but it had a good message. It’s so hard to relate to some of these people — people in desperate straits, street people, junkies. I have empathy for people who try hard and can’t make it. It’s hard to relate to those who live on the street and smoke crack."

Mom plays her iPod Shuffle as she runs along a manicured lakeside path, well-watered palm trees sheltering her from the baking sun. She does a mile one way, then a mile back, moving so slowly that she keeps pace with her walking partner, Selma, who is 84.

The last time I ran with my mother, I had to do a bee dance next to her, continually circling so I wouldn’t lose her. A social creature, she nods to every soul she passes.

When the weather’s foul, my mom’s still at it, relentlessly rounding her condo’s hallway.

When my folks first started flying south, about 20 years ago, her new neighbors were not sure what to make of her.

"I had a woman who was in her late 80s. One day she opened her door and said, ‘You know, you’re going to wear out the carpet.’"

"I told her, ‘But I’m only here six months of the year so I’ll only wear it out halfway.’"

Mom said she’s starting to ease up. She used to run three miles. Now she does two. But she doesn’t miss a day. Her energy, she said, comes from her father, who played softball deep into his 60s.

"I don’t feel old," she said, pans clattering in the background. "That’s because I have a lot of discipline. I think that’s the secret. If you don’t have discipline, everything slips through your fingers. You’ve got to have a plan."

Her problem, she said, is that she has too many things to think about with the birthday approaching — menus, weather forecasts, travel arrangements, the health of friends, the health of the country. It keeps her up some nights.

"All right, dear, do you have enough? I’ve got to make dinner for your father."

Yeah, just one more thing, Ma. Happy birthday and thanks. I’ll be bringing down a real gift from your children and grandchildren when I visit for the weekend.

It’s a tiered necklace by some fancy New York designer, something pretty to wear because it’s important to look good while you’re running in paradise. Don’t worry. Nothing could slow you down.

The Money Pit

I was thinking of posting a picture of a fishing hole -- the traditional "On Vacation" marker.

Yes, I'm off until after Labor Day. It's the first time I'm pausing the fact parade since the metro column began in late February.

Truth is, there's no fishing hole, no sandy beach, no bright green digestif overlooking a cypress grove. I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying home, working around the house and attending to things left undone for the past half year.

Oh, and I'm wondering how to pay for two college tuitions, starting the end of the month. The good thing is it's only money, as my friend Joe used to say.

(Joe grew up in Mamaronek, NY, and his dad was circulation manager of the New York Daily News, so presumably he was in a position to devalue money. Me, we'll be completely broke and in debt when this is all over. Let us eat Ramen.)

We've got quite the punch list around here: fill in holes in the blacktop, bushwhack the back 40, remove heavy limbs torn down by storms, pick up leaves ignored last fall, fix that classic 1950s toilet whose innards I spent $600 bucks to replace recently (because it doesn't stop running, and everynight I stumble through the dark to rattle the handle into silence.)

And then there's packing. Two boys headed for college, two directions at once. One of their schools has produced a helpful list of items.

There's all sorts of crap that I don't remember taking, although my dad has memories of a family station wagon pointing west 33 years ago -- so stuffed he had to use unleaded gas or else he'd scrape the muffler.  Ba-dum!

One item on the list gives me pause. An ironing board.

"You get a receipt for that?" I asked my wife when I realized she'd picked up not one but two mini ironing boards. She had. She's a pro.

I cannot imagine the boys ironing anything while they are in college. I have no memory of ever ironing anything -- even when we had these bizarre rushing-the-season rituals called "formals" where we'd dress up in suits and escort young  ladies to giant Chicago hotel ballrooms where 11-piece band murdered Earth Wind and Fire tunes. Maybe I rented a shirt. Maybe I bought a new one. No memory.

Ironing boards.

I have to say I had a second thought when I saw them:

They'd make cool little bars.

Hello Fadda

It took all of a minute for an argument to begin.

"I'll do the first leg," my father said hopefully, keys jingling in his leathery hand. He'd taught me to drive, about 35 years ago. I've had trouble relinquishing the wheel ever since.

"I didn't fly all the way to Florida so I could be a passenger," I announced.

"I'm taking the back," my mother said agreeably, staking the safest ground.

Father's Day was to be spent on the road -- me driving my folks back from extended winter in Florida because the doctors said my mom's pneumonia made air travel a little too tricky.

So Friday I flew down to West Palm, where I stayed overnight at my folks' before hitting the road bright and early. They indulged my two demands: I wanted to briefly float in the warm ocean waves and eat a grilled fish.

"Be careful," my parents said in unison as I stripped down and took off for the beach. Riptides, sharks, undertow -- all lurked beneath the surface.

They didn't warn me about the jet ski, which nearly took my head off.

The fish was less of an adventure - an excellent onion-crusted yellow tail snapper washed down with a German wheat beer at a place in West Palm that must be crowded in season. This year my folks were  anything but snow birds. They saw parts of all four seasons. I was hoping a rocket trip north would land them to Philadelphia in time to celebrate Father's Day with my own children.

"Your presence is your present," mom, soon to be 80, said poetically.

In the family tradition, I went to bed in the day light and got up in the dark.

About 5:30 a.m. my dad squeezed my toes through the blanket. This is how he used to wake up my brother and I when it was time to go to work with him at the hardware store at some equally ungodly hour.

After my firm correction of dad's announcement that he'd be starting the driving, I took the wheel about 7 a.m. and pointed the Avalon north. It had a fancy navigation system that worked swell, once we got the mechanical lady to stop describing every street we passed. I'd lined up a playlist called "White Trash Rock" that offered plenty of Skynyrd and Southern Culture on the Skids to set the pace. Had forgotten the part in "Polk Salad Annie" where the "gator's got your granny."

We were to push through to South Carolina, maybe farther if we were fortunate with traffic. We weren't so focused on making good time. We larded a couple hours onto the trip so we could drive west, through Charlotte, then the Blue Ridge in Virginia, slicing pieces of West Virginia and Maryland before surfacing somewhere west of Harrisburg. We wanted to enjoying the mountain breezes through the air conditioning.

What was wonderful was how quickly the arguments stopped. Historic soft spots in my personal development were gratefully skirted in conversation. I steered clear of any criticism of my parents' choices. We were all being adults. I'd brought two books on tape -- "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the new one from the "Kite Runner" author. We never needed them. The talk was plenty lively. 

We talked about their first drive to Florida, how they drove on Dayton Beach in my grandfather's 1946 or '47 Dodge four-door sedan, two kids about 20 getting to know each other on their honeymoon. It was a five-day trip in either direction. My dad didn't get another break from the hardware store for another decade. They stopped at an alligator farm in St. Augustine. ( I think that's where the stuffed alligator in my boyhood cabinet  came from.)

"Alligators live a long time," my mother said. "I wonder if they'd remember me."

We avoided a detour to St. Augustine, but hit the usual targets -- Bush, the war, whether plans for Iraq were in the desk, if not on the table, even before 9-11. We chewed on health care, public education, the whereabouts and quirks of every relative, close and distant. It was delicious, even if we had to cover 1,240 miles over two long days.

Each afternoon dad took the wheel, while I napped off lunch. I'd do the mop-up shift.

For weeks I'd dreaded the trip - how long it would be, how slow it would be, how uncomfortable it would be. It was none of those things. For a kid who's lived away from his parents since about the time he learned to drive, it felt again like home.

Hello Again

Is anybody there?

We've had problems getting the old Blinq thing back online, as you may have gathered. I proposed this: if they'd only turn on my comments, I'd start blogging a bit.

So I ask, Is thing thing on?

Forward, Into The Past

Tie a toe-tag on Blinq. I'm getting ready to start another assignment here at the Inquirer.

For those of you who have checked in regularly - hi, Mom and Citizen Mom - you are the reason I've kept such odd hours, failed to maintain any firewall between my work time and family time, and know what's up with Terrell Owens. (Not so much since hugging it out with Donovan McNabb at a Super Bowl party in Miami.)

What I'm moving on to is the metro desk, taking a crack at being a local columnist. Talk about your old media.

I'm hoping to get out more. For most of the past 20 months I've been covering the blogosphere, often from home, with a dog at my feet, following the ripples of the day as they break into news or break apart. I've tried to post things you couldn't find anywhere else. Sometimes that turned out to be warmed-over memories of driving through Montenegro in wartime. I will try to do the same in the paper, minus the Montenegro part. It will be a reported column.

This space will no longer be fed - you may have already noticed a slowdown, a stretching out of posts that almost resemble pieces, as I've begun to make the mental transition to column inches. I am ending on a high; since the beginning of the year, Blinq's had more than a quarter million visits. It took a long time to build that trust. It will be interesting to see how what I've learned on this blog works in print.

So what have I learned? Blogging for a Philly audience is a contact sport. I've learned to take a hit, and I'm sure I'll be taking many more. I've also learned that, no matter what I'm writing about, there's always someone out there who knows more. I've had a real-time relationship with readers that will only help me in my return to the land of daily deadlines. I've learned what makes the needle jump -- what you're interested in reading, and what you don't care for. Despite the lack of comments, sometimes, the software says you like sex and sports. And news that combined the two, say, that one about the mighty-thighed Australian-rules Eagles punter, did land-office business here.

Blinq will disappear from its prime position on the Philly.com homepage. As I start to get a feel for the new job, maybe Blinq will resurface somewhere down the road, in some form, as a sketchbook for the column. Feel free to write in with story ideas, music and restaurant suggestions, barbs - even the occasional scrap of encouragement.

As one of my sons said, "Maybe you could just blog for fun." What a concept.

If Walls Could Talk

Can I get a little help here? With the permission of my wife, I am posting a photograph of the wallpaper that's adorned our downstairs washroom for some time.

When's it from? Who's the designer or manufacturer? Who'd have their bathroom papered with faux bookshelves stocked with such titles as Sapho, Sade and Les Fleurs du Mal.

Other than the Rubins.

Truth is, my wife bought new wallpaper 18 years ago when we moved into the house, and her ambitions to do the room in more modern stripes caused arguments that have flared up during dinner hour for almost two decades.

A compromise, where we'd preserve a tiny portion of the faux bookshelf, and encase it in a frame fixed to the wall, was some how forgotten a few years back, and I would appreciate it if no one reminded her.

But this wallpaper was going to stay up even if it required my lavishing her with trinkets. It's a window into history and the day in April 1988, after putting 600 miles on a rental car, when I pulled into this crooked, 1871 gardener's cottage in the woods.

The man who owned the house, Louis Loewenstein, was sitting by the fireplace, speaking in German to his long-dead mother. His wife explained how the mantel was carved English walnut he'd picked on the docks of Philadelphia. For 50 years he'd been the assistant to the general manager of Wanamaker's downtown. His wife had worked in the millinery department, which accounted for all those fabulous hat boxes in the basement.

On the real bookshelves in the living room stood copies of books by Dos Passos, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald. On a hunch, I opened a few. First editions. Off by itself was a line drawing in some sort of ink - a portrait of a man. The inscription, if memory serves, read "Louis, thanks for everything. ... Cole."

Mrs. Loewenstein told how her husband had been stage manager for Anything Goes in New York a few years out of Princeton, before he moved to Philadelphia and spent a half century helping men run the department store, then slowly slipped away by the fire. I think of him every time I use the water closet.

So, I would love to know from someone a little more about the people whose house we live in. Someone recognize this wallpaper? Anyone?

Two Days In Ohio

Back in action first thing Thursday. Been driving in the fly-over.

Happy Birthday

Harley, one year old today. We think.

Picture taken in fussy bandana the rescue people sent.

After the picture, he shed the nappy and went hurtling through the mud in the dog park.

Happy day.

Puppy

Ah, now where was I?

Where I was, was napping.  I apologize. But when you have a newborn, you nap when the newborn naps. This I don't remember since we had twins.

We have a puppy. His name is Harley and he was left at the pound until the soldiers who rescue Bouviers got the call, then found a safe house for him, and then found us. Our quiet house is again a ball of confusion.

Harley is nine or so months old, and it is like having a chimp in the house.

A chimp who can see out the window.

He's about 32-inches at the top of his head, and approaching 60 pounds. I forgot what it is like to have so much energy at the end of the leash. You could set a Steinway or a porcelain tub on his legs.

He slept by our bed last night, until 3:45 a.m., which was about 15 minutes before he was used to waking up in Texas, where he began yesterday until he was put on a plane with his old blanket and squeaky balls and told he'd be heading toward his new family.

So at 3:45 a.m. my wife took him for a walk around the neighborhood. There was no one to meet at the hour, but the temperature was cool and they continued to bond. The dog already knows who butters his bread. How my wife is able to teach today, without falling asleep on her feet, I do not know.

The whole thing is a whir. Getting him in Newark, watching them deliver the crate and see this big black nose poking out of the door. Looked like a bear's muzzle. Trying to sooth him by the curb as people took their cigarette breaks and wanted to meet him. Just rescued him, we'd say, meaning back off, please? No one got it. 

Finally, after listening to the Eagles on the way home, petting and kissing all the way, we open the door to the van and out flies Harley into the night. Thank God he heads down the hill and where the fence keeps him from further escape.

It's dark, and a low growl is coming from the bushes, where this giant, confused pup is enjoying a moment of freedom that is scaring the hell out of his new family. But he comes, eventually, to my wife, and we go inside, and he goes exploring and we begin the long, slow, filled-with-reverses process of coming to know each other's signs. It's exhausting. But it's what we do.

A note to my editor:

Now that I am again with dog, don't you think it's a good idea to send me and Harley on assignment to the Top Dog Country Club?

Ok, it will cost you plane fare to Minneapolis, but it's only $55 a night for this 42-acre pooch spa in New Germany, Minn. and I could sleep in the rental car. Think of the story you'd get:

Dogs chasing tennis balls into a heated pool, gourmet meals, fresh-baked apple cinnamon biscuits, pedicures, massages, bed-time stories!

Or, we could spare the travel budget and just sent Harley to Mazzu's in Center City. We wrote about the Old City doggie hotel when it opened. It's owner says its averaging three customers a night at $155 to $185 per - with filet mignon an extra $25.