The Duke (Read-Response 2)

I've always been a big fan of John Wayne. I grew up not only watching his westerns and World War II pictures, but listening to how much both my grandma and great-aunt loved him. They even got to meet him once when he was filming Rio Bravo at the Old Tucson studio in Arizona. I remember my grandma telling me how my great-aunt, her sister, got angry while they were filming a fight scene and the Duke had blood coming out of his mouth. She actually walked up to and slapped the man who she thought had struck Wayne, only to find out that it was just a blood pill that the actor had bitten down on in his mouth to simulate taking the blow.

He'd never really been hit.

Reading Joan Didion's "John Wayne: A Love Song" brought this back fresh to my mind. She writes from a reporter's perspective, covering the last two weeks of shooting of Wayne's 165^th film, The Sons of Katie Elder. We receive an enlightening account of The Duke, with the other primary cast members and crew relegated appropriately to their position on the undercard. Dean Martin was a star in his own right, but when sharing the screen with John Wayne, he might as well be you or me.

Didion admits to being fascinated with the Duke from an early age, first seeing him on screen when she was eight years old in 1943. It would be 22 years later that she would finally meet him and write "Love Song", but her appreciation for the man is readily evident in her article. The way he walks, the way he talks, even the way he stands up from his chair…all of those idiosyncrasies that anyone who has ever seen Wayne in a film know all too well…they are part and parcel part of John Wayne. They are not portrayed in his characters on screen. What we are seeing in a John Wayne picture is the star himself, playing a part, but not adopting an accent or movements that are anyone's but his very own.

But Didion does more than focus on how manly the Duke is, or how soft spoken and nice he can be to the people around him. Though she does both of those things to some degree, she takes us somewhere that we, as fans, may not necessarily want to go. Especially in 1965, when the article was published. She takes us down a dark road, albeit briefly, to a time when the Duke really did get hit. But her telling us about Wayne's battle with cancer doesn't make her story morose. It doesn't detract from the overall message that John Wayne is a man. That John Wayne is the man. Instead, she turns the tide on the "Big C" much as Wayne himself had done by beating the disease itself.

She manages to paint an image of a true American Icon, all in a few brief pages, by sharing her personal experiences and relating them to her time spent on the set with the one and only John Wayne.

My grandma and great-aunt would be so jealous.

How to Write Funny (Read-Response 1)

David Sedaris has been introduced to me as a humorist, so when I picked up his book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, I fully anticipated a work rife with witticisms and the occasional turn of phrase that might, at best, elicit a grin from me. I don't normally read non-fiction at all, and reading essays about someone else's life just never seemed all that interesting to me. Then I cracked open the cover on this book, and had my opinion altered almost immediately.

Sedaris covers a wide range of topics in this collection of essays. Most of the essays focus on his family life with his parents and sisters. A few of them find their focus outside the familial unit, like "The Girl Next Door" and "Chicken in the Henhouse." It was in one of these essays that I found what I think I was looking for in his writing.

The essay is titled "Full House" and is about his first sleep over at another boy's house. He was in the sixth grade and has discovered that he's gay. This came as a surprise to me, though I couldn't begin to explain why that is. My brother is gay, and it surprised me just as much to find that out. Maybe it's the religious upbringing I suffered through coming out.

In this piece, Sedaris describes both the events of that night and his budding attraction to members of the same sex. I have to admit, when I read "A naked boy was what I desired more than anything on earth," I nearly threw the book in the trash. It felt dirty and more than a little creepy to me for a grown man to be saying this. I have two kids myself, and nothing scares a parent more than the thought of a pedophile.

I had to step back for a moment and think about what I was reading. This was a recounting of how the author felt when he himself was in the sixth grade, not how he's feeling at 25 or 30 years old. I tried to remember what I was thinking about in the sixth grade and was able to forgive Sedaris his young lustful thoughts as I remembered all the girls I liked in when I was 11. It was a long list.

After my brief moment of panic, I continued reading the essay and like I said, found what I was looking for. What was it about Sedaris that makes his writing so funny? There's nothing funnier than real life, and much like Jerry Seinfeld or George Carlin, Sedaris tells his stories with a truth that belies disbelief and shows him for the faulted person that he is; that we all are. He does this using language that is both genuine and fantastic at the same time, eliciting fits of laughter in place of the grins I'd anticipated.

It is here, in the turn of phrase or even the use of a single word, in an otherwise serious or uncomfortable situation. That is where the comedic genius of Sedaris lies.

D&D 101 (Journal Entry #4)

The stage is set:

It's Sunday afternoon. My laptop sits at my end of the dining room table, my spreadsheets open and ready to go. My dice bag, designed to act more like a bowl when it is opened, is near at hand, several of the colorful polyhedron dice sitting out on the table already. I've got the small battle-mat laid out, with dry erase markers and two cases of miniatures in case there's a fight today. A glass of Mountain Dew rests at my elbow.

I'm ready.

In small groups my players arrive. They are Shannon, Mark, Pam, Ed, Diane, Will and Sean…but only for a few minutes as we greet each other upon their arrival, and again when we say good-bye at the end of the night. For the next nine hours, however, they will be Ithein, Rix, Verena, Tuon, Elmas, Reillithan, and Basil…the names of the characters that they are playing in the world of Riniel.

"Well, I need a recap. Does anyone want to volunteer?" I get no volunteers, so after a silent count of 10, I roll a d8. That's a die with eight sides. Imagine two four-sided pyramids that are attached at their bottoms. I roll a 6 and count around the table to "Diane, thank you for volunteering."

"I don't have a lot of notes," she begins, looking hesitantly around the table. "We were in mountains with a lot of dead trees and we'd just rescued Shannon's character…"

"Ithein," Shannon replies to the unasked question.

"Right, we'd just rescued Ithein and Ed's new character from the drow (evil dark elves), but we hadn't gotten her name yet." She finishes with a sheepish look to the others, who all jump in and help her remember what happened the previous week. She becomes more animated as, with the others' help, she remembers more.

"That's right! We were walking in rocky terrain with very heavy fog and got ambushed by some skeletons…"

"Six," Pam chimes in.

"…and a zombie. Some of the horses ran away during the fight. Basil went after three of them and…Will went after one."

Will grumbles something about no one being able to pronounce Reillithan and everyone has a chuckle, since he has trouble with it himself.

"My horse fell in a crevice that it missed in the fog and broke its neck," she continues. "Then Verena's horse fell in another and was injured, but didn't die." She glares at me for rolling 2d6 and getting two sixes when her horse fell, and rolling two ones for Verena's horse. That's twelve points of falling damage to one horse and 2 points to the other, though they both fell 20 feet. "Basil finally caught up to Luc's horse with Luc strapped to its back since he was unconscious from the kobolds."

Luc, Ed's previous character, had been a little too free with his magic and almost burned an extremely young dragon under the protection of a small group of kobolds. Kobolds are small reptilian humanoids about the size of a typical four-year-old child. One of the kobolds had beaten him into unconsciousness for his carelessness.

Diane begins laughing as she recalls what came next. "So Basil is walking his horse and leading Luc's to avoid losing anymore horses when he hears wolves howling close by. He hears a horse running somewhere in the fog below him and realizes he's back at the last crevice he'd had to cross in the fog. Then he hears more howls, even closer than before, and has to let go of Luc's horse to keep his own under control. Luc's horse panics and races away from the howls and loses its footing, sliding and then falling into the crevice with Verena's horse. Unfortunately, it lands on its back and crushes Luc underneath. Basil can't see through the fog, but he hears the horses running, then the growls of the pursuing wolves, then the screams of the horses as the wolves growls turn to snarls…then silence."

"Basil gets back, empty-handed, and we set off to complete our rescue."

"Thank you, Diane," I say as the players turn to me expectantly. "Ithein, you were sitting on the ground exhausted. Elmas had just finished getting you cleaned up and had braided your hair for you. Reillithan was on the ridge keeping watch. Verena, Rix, and Basil were roguing the bodies while Kur-dan watched over the naked sea elf woman."

"Ed, you're completely naked except for Kur-dan's cloak. What are you doing?"

All In the Imagination (Final -- Revision Piece)

I play Dungeons & Dragons.  There.  I said it.  This isn't a great secret or anything; I freely admit what I do for a hobby as quickly as I admit to having been married twice, divorced once, separated for four-and-a-half years, and having two children. But that only tells you that I play a role playing game. It doesn't tell you why I play, or what the game itself entails, or why I feel the need to "come out" and say that I play.

I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the first time at the tender age of 8. That's right, I said eight….not eighteen. I didn't misspeak or leave out a 1 that leads to 8 becoming 18. Eight years old and I'm reading the same novels that my Aunt Gina is reading at the same time. Although, to be fair, she had finished them by the time I started in on them. She was a senior in High School and I was in the third grade. She was 18, but I was 8.

When I read these books, I'd never even heard of D&D. But there was something in those books that I found incredibly intriguing. Before reading them, I spent most of my time outside, playing "guns" with my brothers and our friends. We would run around the neighborhood with our toy guns, "shooting" each other and yelling "I got you!" when we felt we'd "shot" someone. This was basically "Cops & Robbers" or "Cowboys & Indians".

It was after reading those wonderful novels that I began to dream a different dream. I no longer wanted to be a policeman or a cowboy, righting wrongs with my six-shooter. I no longer saw myself as a bank robber getting rich at the expense of others, or a Lakota Sioux fighting for my very freedom. Instead, I saw myself living out on the road, taking up arms in an epic quest to save the world against insurmountable odds. All in a land filled with elves and dwarves and magic. This vision wasn't shared by most of my brothers or any of my friends, so I only really got to play "Lord of the Rings" with my brother Mark at my grandma's house. There, my brother and I would go for long walks on the outskirts of her farm, pulling up long reed-like cane poles from the ground and using them as if they were swords and spears. We would throw shorter ones like we were firing arrows from our imaginary bows, killing the imaginary orcs and goblins who dared oppose us. My Aunt Gina would want to hear all about our adventures once we got back to the house, so we would sit and tell her about the battles we'd imagined while we'd been out that day.

As I looked up to Gina with adoration, I did my best to be like her. I listened to the same music, which meant The Beatles, The Osmonds, The Jackson Five, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and whatever happened to be playing on American Top 40 with Kasey Kasem. I burned her incense, wore her headphones, and added many layers to the hip 70's artwork formed by burning candles over top of a Pepsi bottle and allowing the wax to flow down and build up around the glass. So it was only natural that I should want to read what she was reading. I remember her laughing when I asked if I could read The Hobbit, and we both still talk about her reaction when I'd finished it over a long rainy weekend at grandma's. I still love seeing the smile on her face as she recalls my first oral book report.

So I was already different from most kids my age when Dungeons & Dragons was first brought to my attention in the seventh grade. One of my friends in junior high played at a local hobby shop on Sundays, and he would often talk about the games during lunch. I really wanted to try it, but when I asked my parents for permission, they wouldn't let me play. I knew I'd found my way to play "Lord of the Rings" and my parents denied me my chance. They thought D&D was this horrible thing that would corrupt me and have me cutting the heads off dolls or killing small animals in my backyard. I tried to find a way around them, but they were too smart for me. They allowed me to hang out with Kenny after school or on a Saturday afternoon, but they wouldn't let me spend the night on weekends or when summer came around for fear I'd play D&D.

This was huge disappointment as I now knew that there were other people out there who wanted to be heroes, to slay evil beasts and rescue damsels in distress. To carry a sword or a bow and have brave companions to fight at our sides. But with my parents' decision, this was a pipe dream. It would be years before I would have an opportunity to play.

So I immersed myself in books, not wanting my imagination to be stifled by the closed mindedness of my mom and dad. I read many classics during my years in junior high, from Twain and Poe to Dickens and Fitzgerald. But I found myself drawn back time and again to Tolkien's classics, and started reading them, all four of them, as often as I could. Since I didn't own copies of my own, I was often at the City Library, checking out the books, reading them, and then returning them. My trips to the shelves holding fantasy novels paid off in other ways as well, as I discovered more novels by more authors. I began to expand my fantasy reading to more worlds than just Middle-Earth thanks to authors like Donaldson, Eddings, and Brooks. These authors combined with Tolkien to thoroughly capture my imagination and keep the fire burning inside of me to find away to unleash that imagination on the world.

It was in my sophomore year of high school that I finally got my first chance to play D&D. My family was visiting another family from church and after dinner I was hanging out with the couples' son, John. John was a couple years older than me, and my parents had a very high opinion of him, so it came as a shock to them when I came out of his room and told them that he was letting me borrow his D&D books. I remember them looking to his parents for clarification, and while I don't remember what was said, I do remember that I was allowed to take the books and the few dice he had home with me. To my parents, evidently, if a good Christian boy like John plays D&D, it must not be all that bad.

I can still see those first rule books. They were very old versions of the game, but they held my interest just the same. I sat alone in my room, listening to the radio and reading through my first D&D books. I can still smell the musty odor of books that have been stored in a box in a garage that allows in too much moisture. I remember running myself through my first adventure, one that was in the back of the rulebook, and discovering that I was lucky to be so fascinated with elves that I made my first character one. You see, one of the monsters was a ghoul and elves happen to be immune to their paralyzing touch! My love of elves from Tolkien's work was only intensified by that first gaming experience.

I kept to myself a lot few those first few months, just me and my imagination. Then I found out that another friend from school had just gotten D&D books of his own, and wanted to get a small group together to play. Our group turned out to be just three of us, but we got together once a week after school to play. Paul was the Dungeon Master (DM) in those early games, and it was his responsibility to guide the game, much like a director does in a movie or a play. Soames and I were the two players, and Paul had each of us running three characters at the same time, to ensure we had a balanced adventuring party. While there wasn't a lot of role playing in those early games, there was a lot of laughter and a lot of fun. I remember one of my characters, Cormack, dying and us stuffing his body in a chest because we didn't have a coffin and didn't want to leave him there, lying on the floor to be eaten by whatever monster came along. Good times.

As the years progressed, I graduated and left both high school, and my high school friends behind. I joined the Air Force, and between work, sports, and a new wife, had very little time for much of anything else. But I continued to read fantasy novels and still wanted an outlet for my imagination. Just after my 20^th birthday, I finally found exactly what I was looking for. After a failed attempt at having a game with friends from work, I discovered a comic book/game store near my work. I stopped by to check it out and met some guys who played there on nearly a daily basis! They asked me to sit in, so I did, and over the next few weeks, I was playing almost every day after work for at least a few hours. I made a few good friends there, and as summer drew to a close, a group of us decided to take our game to someone's house and play each and every Saturday night.

It was at Don's house during those Saturday night games that I really found the type of game I was looking for. Don was DM and had an epic story to tell, with five core players who were in the game from its start. We spent hours each Saturday, working towards the goal of stopping the coming of an evil god into the world of men, and we did it by taking on the roles of our characters and interacting in the rich world that Don created with his words and our collective imagination. It was like participating in a novel instead of just reading it…starring in movie instead of sitting and watching it. I loved that game and all that I learned from it, about how to be a better player, and about how to run great game.

I've evolved into a DM myself over the years, and I continue to evolve as I continue to play. When I'm running my game on Sundays, I sit in anticipation, anxious to find out what my players are about to do with the information I've just given them. You see, I've spent the last week putting my imagination to good use. I've crafted a story for the players to run their characters in, a backdrop that is the world the characters live in. I've spent hours developing characters of my own, characters with goals of their own, and histories that have shaped them into who they are. I've spent days planning the circumstances that surround the players' characters, working out in my head how best to describe each scene that my players will see so that when they enter the dark forest of dead trees, the ground covered in broken bones and thick fog, they will feel the terror rising up in the pits of their stomachs, and be able to feel like they are there, within their characters' minds.

Dungeons & Dragons allows me to set my imagination free in a way that no other medium possibly could. I may not be putting my words down on a page for hundreds or thousands to enjoy, or writing a script that could show millions my vision of epic fantasy, but my target-audience of six or seven friends mean more to me than the nameless masses. I am amply rewarded each week when I see my friends' smile and tell me how much they're enjoying playing in my D&D game.

Dungeons & Dragons is the perfect way for me to enjoy the fruits of my imagination.

D&D 101 (Journal Entry #3)

In my last entry, I gave my definition of role-playing: imagine being in a play without a script, with your mind as the stage. Imagine. That's the all important word when it comes to role-playing games (RPGs). One must be able to use their imagination for so many aspects of playing RPGs that they are effectively impossible to play without it. I say effectively because anyone could play an RPG with little or no imagination. But if you can't imagine what the characters look like, or the smells of a medieval village, of the sight of a dragon the size of your house flying at you breathing fire, then the experience will be lost on you.

A typical Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game session would be difficult without a lot of imagination. In the two groups I play with, it would be impossible. First, imagination is critical requirement for the Dungeon Master (DM). The DM is in charge of all the action. It is his job to determine what is going on around the characters, both major and minor plotlines. It is the DM's job to take on the roles of every character that the players' characters will encounter in the story, from the friendly tavern wench to the evil arch-villain in every tale he tells. This requires hours of work developing storylines, creating characters for the players' interaction, and determining how difficult to make each challenge. DMing is the hardest job in any RPG.

Players may have an easier time and a lot less work than a DM, but they still need a really good imagination if they're going to enjoy the overall experience. It takes nearly as much time for me to create a good history for my character as it does to build the character. Building a character can take me anywhere between 30 minutes to several hours, depending on the character class and level. Certain classes, like the fighter and the ranger, don't take all that long to build. But spell casters like the sorcerer, wizard, and cleric (priest) can take a considerable amount of time as casters get a certain amount of spells to start with, and choosing wisely takes time.

Higher level characters require more time to build as each level is accompanied by enhancements to the character, such as skills points (to do things like hide in shadows or ride a horse), and spells. Higher level characters also receive a lot more starting money, which can take many hours of digging through books to get spent. The amount of history for a higher level character must also be expanded. A first level character may be a sixteen year old farm boy whose family farm was razed by raiding barbarians and is out for revenge. The same character at level ten might have already found and destroyed not only the barbarians that killed his family, but he might have found the evil priest that sent them in the first place and killed him as well!

Now just imagine how much work it would be for the Dungeon Master, creating higher level characters for the Players' characters to meet. All of the same work that the players are doing for their characters goes into the DM's characters as well. The bad thing for the DM is that most of the characters he's creating are villains for the PCs to kill.

Now, imagine him having to do all that work, without his very active imagination…

A Garbage Bag Full of Popcorn (Profile)

I shiver to think about what my life as a child might have been like if not for the love of my Aunt Gina. It wasn't my parents who taught me to ride a bike, or how to make popcorn. It wasn't my mom, or my dad or stepmom who took me to the movies, or to the video arcade. It was my Aunt Gina who did all of those things.

I was about four when she taught me how to ride my first bike. My grandparents had purchased it at an auction and given it to me for my birthday. It was an old bike with rust spots on the frame, painted red with white writing that I'm sure identified the company who made it. The tires, set over white wheels, seemed wide for their size, and were slick with wear, the tread all but worn away. The bike spent its first several weeks out in my backyard, leaning against the house until Gina was over to babysit. When she saw it just leaning there, she just had to get me on it…and get me riding.

I remember her showing me how to guide the bike with the handlebars as I walked along beside it, and how to put the kickstand in the up position so as to stop tripping over it. The lesson was simple: "Keep pedaling and stay on the sidewalk." She ran along beside me, holding the handlebars with her hands over top of mine as I sat on the seat with my feet on the moving pedals. I wanted so badly to feel the wind in my face like I always did on one of my uncles' motorcycles. Then I got the thrill I'd been waiting for when I realized she'd let go of the bike and I was pedaling like a boy possessed. She was laughing as I took off, shouting out her encouragement as I sped off down the sidewalk.

And then she realized that she'd forgotten to tell me how to stop.

She yelled for me and ran after me, but I was in the moment, and it seemed all hearing had left me. When I finally neared the end of our street, several hundred yards at least, I started to for wonder myself how I would stop. That's when I finally heard her voice behind me, yelling for me to "Pedal backwards!" So I did. The braking mechanism kicked in and the bike skidded to a halt as a very winded 14 year old ran up behind me, laughing as I stood there, straddling the bike, staring wide-eyed behind me at the long black streak I'd left in rubber on the sidewalk. I took it a bit slower on the way back, walking the bike most of the way before jumping back on and getting just enough speed to leave a another streak in front of my house.

Sometime after that my mom and dad split up, and with my mom gone to Arizona, Gina became the primary female figure in my life. I missed my mom terribly, but Gina was always there for me, doing all the things with me that a mom might do, even though she was only ten years my elder. In retrospect, it was like someone had a plan for me that included me getting to spend as much time as I could with my aunt, without me having to lose one or both of my parents to something other than a move to the desert. My dad remarried and suddenly we were a family of six, as my stepmom had two sons from a previous marriage. My stepbrothers' dad had weekend visitation, so they spent every other weekend at his house, leaving my little brother and I with our dad and stepmom.

Then my dad got the brilliant idea to drop my brother and me off at my grandma's house on those weekends. This must have been part of the great plan that someone had for me. As Gina was still a teenager, she obviously lived at grandma's house, and so here we were, spending time with her all weekend long!

Before she could drive we would spend a lot of time in her room, listening to her stereo and burning incense or candles, or sometimes both. In this way I was introduced to the Jackson 5, The Beatles, The Osmonds, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and every pop song to make the top 40 from about 1975 until the mid 80's. This had a tremendous influence on the music that I still enjoy today, as did her stories of meeting people like Tommy James and the Shondells and the members of Lynyrd Skynyrd by getting press passes. She would act the role of photographer while her on-again, off-again boyfriend/best friend Larry would ask questions like a reporter. She even taught me a few chords on her guitar, which always seemed to be missing at least one string.

As we all got a little older, and Gina had her first job, we started seeing movies almost every single time we visited for a weekend. We saw all kinds of movies, from Disney classics like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Space Mountain, to Star Wars and The Omen and everything in between. I'm sure a lot of people would have found some of the movies I was watching at my age completely inappropriate, but I just remember loving it. I'm sure that by the time I'd seen the classic 1978 horror film Halloween, I'd seen more horror movies than any other kid in the fifth grade. She absolutely loves a good horror film, and I got to see so many of the classics because she wanted to have me along and to share the experience with me. To this day I still enjoy a good scare.

Most of the times, the movies we saw were at the drive-in and we'd spend an entire Friday night there, watching two or sometimes three movies for $3.00 a car load. Gina would spend the day popping popcorn and loading it into a trash bag that we would throw in the back of her Pinto before we would go. I loved being at the drive-in, and wish there was one nearby that I could take my own kids to once in a while. You could smell the popcorn, but not like at a movie theater. It was so much stronger in the confines of that little car. You could hear the popping sound of gravel as cars drove in and out of the huge parking lot that the drive-in was. All night, you'd hear cars rolling by, and everyone would honk their horns if someone turned their headlights on. Car horns were a part of what made the drive-in so awesome when I was a kid. How many times have you sat in a busy theater, wishing you had a car horn to honk at the group of people five rows back who were talking through the entire movie?

On those weekends that we went to an indoor theater, we would often hit the new video arcade in my hometown after the movie was over. Gina would sometimes play the games herself, but I remember her mostly watching my brother and I play. Unless it was pinball. One of the movies she took us to see was Tommy, a rock opera made by The Who, starring their lead singer, Roger Daltrey. The movie is about a young boy who is traumatized and loses his sight, hearing, and ability to speak. But oh he can play pinball. I remember how much my Aunt Gina loved to play pinball. If the arcade, bowling alley, or roller rink had a Tommy edition pinball game, she could play for hours on a single quarter. The game wasn't that easy, she was just that good.

Thankfully, her influence extended beyond movies, music, and video games. When she was a senior in high school, she picked up her first copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I'd seen The Hobbit on her dresser, lying prone under a candle in the shape of one of those big heads on Easter Island. One rainy weekend when she was feeling too sick to take us anywhere and we were stuck in the house the whole time, I asked her if I could read The Hobbit. She looked at me and laughed, drawing a harsh cough from somewhere down in her chest. She smiled and told me that I could, but that I'd have to tell her all about what I'd read when I finished. I eagerly grabbed the paperback and started reading. I read all weekend long, taking breaks to eat and fall asleep both Friday and Saturday night with the book in my hands, waking in the morning to find that someone had covered me up and tucked me in on the couch.

By Sunday evening, just before it was time for us to go home for another week of school, I'd finished the book. Gina didn't believe me when I said I'd finished it, so she sat up in bed and asked me to tell her the story as I'd read it. So I spent about an hour giving her an eight-year-old perspective on the book. She sat there enraptured by the words as I spoke, her face beaming with pride. Honestly, when I look back at it, a mother's pride. When I was done with my first oral book report, I told her that the book mentioned more books, and asked if she had them and if I could read them, too. She got out of bed and pulled The Fellowship of the Ring out of a dresser drawer and handed it to me to take home with me so I could read it.

The best memories of my childhood all seem to center around my Aunt Gina. She was always going out of her way to make sure that my little brother and I, and sometimes our stepbrothers and even our friends, had the time of our lives. She has always managed to do that. Even today, when I fly down to visit my family in New Mexico, Gina and I will regularly spend time together, watching a movie after everyone else has fallen asleep. I take movies with me when I go, movies that she took me to see when I was a kid. My favorite day visiting her was sitting down to watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. For almost 15 hours we sat watching the extended cuts of those movies, movies that are based on books that she gave me to read at the tender age of eight.

I love you, Gina. Thanks so much for everything.

What Does She Think of Me? (Profile Exercise)

She sits in her car, a dark green Ford Pinto hatchback, waiting for Britt and Mark to get back from the concession stand. She sent them with $2 each to buy drinks and candy, and to play a game of pinball or two with the change. But not popcorn. There's no need for that, as she's popped enough to feed a small army, half filling a trash bag to make sure there's enough for the three of them as they watch movies until the wee hours of the morning.

The boys are 9 and 7, and she's doing what she always does every other weekend: spending quality time with her nephews. This particular weekend, it's a Friday night at the drive-in to see Star Wars and Future World. She has already taken them to see Star Wars twice at the Xenia Cinema, but the outdoor experience of seeing movies at the drive in is so much cooler. Especially for the boys. They can swing on the swing set and climb on monkey bars until the first cartoon is shown at the darkest part of dusk. The old, rusty speaker hangs in the window on one side of the car, coupled with a heater in case it gets too chilly as the night goes on, and the boys love to be the one setting the speaker on the partially rolled down window.

The sounds of their return are obvious, but she glances in the rearview mirror to verify before extinguishing her cigarette. She's not going to smoke in the car with them in it, which is one of the reasons she sends them to get the refreshments themselves. That, and she knows how it makes Britt feel important to have the responsibility to watch over his little brother and handle the money.

She smiles as she blows that last drag of heady smoke out her window as Mark opens the passenger door and squeals with delight that he beat his older brother back to the car. He deposits his Mike and Ike's on the seat with a grin that takes in his whole head before rushing off without a word to get to the swings. Britt is more solemn as he gets to the car, carrying all three of their pops in one of those nifty gray cardboard cup holders.

"You didn't beat me!" he yells after his little brother, "I was carrying more than you!"

She laughs at him. "Aw," she says, drawing out the syllable as she takes the cups from him. "Thanks for carrying everything."

His nose crinkles as he looks at her, his mind working over the smell in the air. "You were smoking, weren't you?"

It's not a question, but a statement of fact, and she knows that this boy she's spent so much of her 18 years with is way too smart for his age. She smiles at him, continuing to laugh as he stands there, looking for all the world like a little tiny version of his father (her eldest brother). "Go play with Mark, Britt," she says in the midst of her laughter.

"Not until you promise not to smoke while I'm gone!" His voice is demanding, and brooks no argument.

She laughs all the harder. "I promise," she says. "Now go play before the movie starts."

As she watches him run off, she thinks about how much she loves hanging out with him. He's always attentive and giving, which reminds her of…herself. She can't deny that it's a good feeling. He barely makes it to the swings before the first Woody Woodpecker cartoon begins to play. She smiles as he gamely comes running back, far outdistancing his younger brother in his now unencumbered state.

As the boys climb into the car, Mark to the back and Britt beside her in the passenger seat, she hopes to one day have a son of her own who will bring her as much joy as her two nephews.

D&D 101 (Journal Entry #2)

I had one of my gaming friends over last night to talk about the upcoming game on Friday. We were discussing creating high level characters as potential replacements for the characters we're currently playing, and the subject of starting gold (money) to purchase equipment came up. As we're playing under a new system that doesn't cover much of anything about characters above level 20, and our characters are beyond that plateau, I commented that I could extrapolate how much gold high level characters should gain based on the amount that lower level beginning characters start with.

Ed looked me in the eye and said, "You're such a geek. How do you just sit and crunch numbers like that?"

I ended my last blog commenting that certain sayings can identify a person as a geek or a nerd. Whether quoting science fiction movies or television shows, or barking out a healthy "By the gods!" at just the right moment, one can easily earn the label geek or nerd. But the surest sign that you're a nerd is when another nerd, in my case a fellow gamer (as in one who plays games, specifically role-playing games like D&D, but now a generally accepted term for video game players as well), calls you out for being too nerdy.

I think I've done an admirable job of presenting my case that gamers are largely thought of as smart, geeky, or nerdy (or even all three!). There are even movies and one episode of a sitcom that deal with gamers as they are, making fun of us with an understanding that is a sure tell that gamers were involved in the writing of those gems. But then there are other movies, like Mazes and Monsters staring a very young Tom Hanks as a gamer gone wrong.

This film, and numerous stories in the 80's led many people to believe that playing D&D was a bad thing; that the people playing were mentally unstable, or worshipped the devil, or made sacrifices "to the gods." This may be a lesser known stigma attached to the gaming populace, but it is by far the worst stigma I've ever had to deal with.

I remember when I was a member of a gaming group at Wright State University, I had the opportunity to talk with a group of parents who were concerned by the bad press and weren't sure that their kids should be playing D&D. I was on a panel of fellow gamers, and we took questions from an audience of about ten parents. We had to field several questions about the worship of Satan and the occult, which put most of us ill at ease as we knew less about the occult than the questioning parent.

Before things managed to get completely out of hand, one parent interrupted the discussion with a raised hand. I'll never forget his question, nor that it was me who answered him, and the entire room.

"Look, I just came here to learn what role-playing is, exactly," he said. "All these wild accusations seem like just that. What exactly is role-playing?"

After a few moments of silence, as the parents settled down and those of us on the panel looked at each other in puzzlement, the answer occurred to me. I cleared my throat and said, "Role-playing is no different than being in a play. Imagine an adlibbed play without a script, with your imagination as the stage. Yes, sometimes there are demons or devils to fight, but in legends of all types, heroes face off with these things and worse. Players get into their characters for a few hours and take on a role."

I can't remember more details than that, other than what I said had a settling effect on our audience and that my "Role-playing is a play without a script, with your imagination as the stage" quote took on a life of its own with the gaming group at the University. To fall into game-speak for a moment, "I made my diplomacy check and won over my audience."

Daddy’s Little…Tomboy (Personal Narrative)

Nothing makes a Dad feel more special than putting a smile on his daughter's face. It doesn't matter how big or how small the action or item that brought on the smile. It could be a Happy Meal from McDonalds when she's three, or a first car for her sixteenth birthday. It's the smile on her face that makes all the effort of raising her worthwhile.

I'm blessed with two children of my own, and as luck would have it, I've been blessed with one of each a son and a daughter. They both came into this world via cesarean birth, and so I had the unusual pleasure of getting to hold and feed both of my children before their mother did. Of course, that also meant that I got the lion's share of dirty diapers to change until their mother's belly was more or less healed. I often remind my children that I was the one giving them their first bottles and changing their first diapers in an effort to stay close to them; they don't live with me anymore and instead, their mother has primary custody and I'm relegated to being a "weekend dad".

It is difficult to transition from living with your children, seeing them every day, helping them with their homework, feeding and bathing them each night, to seeing them once every week or two. The level of influence you have over them gets smaller and smaller and you tend to grow apart. They stopped calling me every day about two months into the separation, and after about six months the calls became so infrequent that even I got used to not talking with them all the time. It's not something I ever wanted to get used to, but I've adapted in spite of not wanting to. I only see my kids about once every two weeks, but I do my best to make the best of the time we have together and to keep my relationship (and influence) with them strong. My son and I are still close, and he's still a shorter, blonde headed version of me. He was old enough when his mother and I split that I'd had enough of an influence on him that he hasn't changed much in the last four years.

My daughter, Skylar, is a different story.

Over the last four and a half years, she's undergone more changes than I ever would have imagined. I have a wonderful picture of the two of us, taken on Christmas morning right before her mother and I split up. She was four years old at the time and I'm holding her in my arms, her head held tightly to mine by her arm wrapped around my neck. She's wearing a pair of lime green shorts and a yellow t-shirt…clothes she picked for herself that morning when she woke up and changed out of her PJs.

The significance of what she's wearing then is that she wouldn't be caught dead in a pair of shorts, now, unless she's going to bed. She used to wear girls' clothes, play with makeup and jewelry, and would allow me to put her in a dress to go out for dinner or a movie, or to visit family or friends. Now, at nine, she doesn't own a dress. She swears she's a tomboy and that tomboys don't wear dresses, and I'm having an impossible time convincing her otherwise. She now wears blue jeans and boys t-shirts and refuses to do anything that she feels is too "girly." Daddy's little girl has become Daddy's little tomboy.

Last summer, when I had the kids over for a week, Skylar wanted to learn to ride a bike. So my girlfriend, Mary, took her out to a bike shop and helped her pick one out. Over the course of about two days, we finally convinced her to actually try riding the bike, and within about 30 minutes, she was off! It was a moment that I was forced to miss as I was spending time with my son while allowing Mary and Skylar some bonding time, but I'll never forget the joy in her eyes when they got back from the large parking lot that she's learned in and told me she could ride. She was all left turns and wide pathways the first several times we rode together, but as the summer went on she became quite the little cyclist.

So it came as no surprise this summer when we knew we'd have the kids for a week that Skylar would want to learn something else that is generally thought of as "something boys do." She's loves playing Tony Hawk's Underground on her X-Box and has a really old skateboard that has become the family Rottweiler's chew toy, so naturally she wanted to learn to ride a skateboard. This meant booking lessons with a private instructor as she has anger issues with failing or having difficulty with something, and in front of a group it's even worse. So we bought her a Tony Hawk skateboard and booked a skateboarding pro of about 20 named Tom and scheduled four lessons for her the week she was to be over.

The first three days of lessons, she was scared and frustrated, and even a little embarrassed when things didn't go exactly as she might have liked. Had I not been there to keep her motivated, I think she would have quit after about the first ten minutes. But I wouldn't let her quit, as she has a horrible tendency to do so whenever things aren't going her way. As I know that things don't always go the way we want them to in life, I have a responsibility to cultivate the "never give up" attitude that I've worked so hard to develop in myself.

After three days of bumps and bruises, though with many more successes than failures, I was still glad that this was to be the last day of lessons, both for her sake and for mine. The smiles had been infrequent and the attitude had gotten much worse as the days had gone by. Her desire to quit was for outstretching her desire to learn, and I, like her, just wanted it over with. But I wasn't about to cancel the last lesson and let her off so easily as that. In spite of herself, I wanted her to have a good experience and finish what she'd started.

"What time is it, Dad," Skylar asks me as we hang out in the living room, watching SpongeBob after breakfast. She has milk dried on her chin and a look of abject boredom on her impish face. I tell her its 10:30 as I use a napkin to wipe away the milk. She responds with an over-exaggerated sigh, shoulders slumping in an early defeat. "Tom's late again," she whines. I look at her, dressed for success in her too-long blue jeans, Z-strap sneakers, and brand new t-shirt bearing images of skateboards and monstrous faces, and realize that her impatience is likely to ruin her entire day unless I do something about it.

So I get up, take her by the hand, and walk her to the front door where her Tony Hawk skateboard sits bearing the weight of her pads and helmet. She stops at the top of the steps, her hand falling limply from my grasp and her attitude starting to worsen. I take a seat on the bottom step and look up at her, lifting the mesh bag holding her pads and helmet from its resting place on her board. "Let's get ready for Tom, then," I say over my shoulder. She's still frowning as she walks slowly, almost dragging her feet down the four or five steps to the floor of the split foyer, her hand dragging along the curving rail that parallels the circular staircase. I help her into her knee pads first, the operation of the black plastic and Velcro contraptions well within her nine-year-old capabilities, but since she still likes to have daddy help her with these things, I continue to make myself useful until she doesn't want my help anymore. I know her independence is just around the corner.

After the knee pads come the elbows, then her helmet, and finally, the wrist guards. Once all the protective gear is on, I suggest we go down to the garage for her to practice her tic-tacks on the level smooth surface of the concrete floor. She readily agrees, her smile spreading from cheek to cheek as we walk the rest of the way downstairs and make our way into the garage.

"Are you going to move your car?" she asks me once she's dropped her board to the floor. I follow her gaze from one side of the garage to the other and briefly envision her skateboard smashing out a window in my car, but realize the likelihood of such a thing is miniscule…about as likely as being struck by lightning. Twice. I tell her to go ahead. "All you're doing is practicing tic-tacks so you can show Tom how much progress you've made." I step down into the garage and maneuver a cardboard box and recycling bin between her and my car just in case the board goes rolling toward it, to save myself the trouble of climbing underneath to fetch her board. "Show me what you can do!"

She steps onto the board and pushes herself along at slow, almost snail speed. I encourage her to practice and she does so, lifting the front end of her board first right, then left, beating out a staccato, off-beat rhythm as the wheels come back down time and again. It takes her several runs before she's satisfied, and she finally makes a run from one end of the garage to the other, bouncing side-to-side most of the way. She's smiling and talking up a storm now, her "bad day" made better because daddy was there to fix it for her.

She's not the only one who is smiling. I'm grinning ear to ear watching her and listening to her talk. But it's more than her smile and good mood that's making me smile. It's the realization that I can accept who she is, and embrace that I don't have a "girly-girl", but a tomboy for a daughter. It hits me there, as I sit on the steps leading down into the garage, that I love my daughter just the way she is.

And there is no greater feeling in all the world than knowing that she's happy.

Daddy’s Little…Tomboy (Personal Narrative – Draft)

Nothing makes a Dad feel more special than putting a smile on his daughter's face. It doesn't matter how big or how small the action or item that brought on the smile. It could be a Happy Meal from McDonalds when she's three, or a first car for her sixteenth birthday. It's the smile on her face that makes all the effort of raising her worthwhile.

I'm blessed with two children of my own, and as luck would have it, I've been blessed with one of each a son and a daughter. They both came into this world via cesarean birth, and so I had the unusual pleasure of getting to hold and feed both of my children before their mother did. Of course, that also meant that I got the lion's share of dirty diapers to change until their mother's belly was more or less healed. I often remind my children that I was the one giving them their first bottles and changing their first diapers in an effort to stay close to them; they don't live with me anymore and instead, their mother has primary custody and I'm relegated to being a "weekend dad".

It is difficult to transition from living with your children, seeing them every day, helping them with their homework, feeding and bathing them each night, to seeing them once every week or two. The level of influence you have over them gets smaller and smaller and you tend to grow apart. They stopped calling me every day about two months into the separation, and after about six months the calls became so infrequent that even I got used to not talking with them all the time. It's not something I ever wanted to get used to, but I've adapted in spite of not wanting to. I only see my kids about once every two weeks, but I do my best to make the best of the time we have together and to keep my relationship (and influence) with them strong. My son and I are still close, and he's still a shorter, blonde headed version of me. He was old enough when his mother and I split that I'd had enough of an influence on him that he hasn't changed much in the last four years.

My daughter, Skylar, is a different story.

Over the last four and a half years, she's undergone more changes than I ever would have imagined. I have a wonderful picture of the two of us, taken on Christmas morning right before her mother and I split up. She was four years old at the time and I'm holding her in my arms, her head held tightly to mine by her arm wrapped around my neck. She's wearing a pair of lime green shorts and a yellow t-shirt…clothes she picked for herself that morning when she woke up and changed out of her PJs.

The significance of what she's wearing then is that she wouldn't be caught dead in a pair of shorts, now, unless she's going to bed. She used to wear girls' clothes, play with makeup and jewelry, and would allow me to put her in a dress to go out for dinner or a movie, or to visit family or friends. Now, at nine, she doesn't own a dress. She swears she's a tomboy and that tomboys don't wear dresses, and I'm having an impossible time convincing her otherwise. She now wears blue jeans and boys t-shirts and refuses to do anything that she feels is too "girly." Daddy's little girl has become Daddy's little tomboy.

Last summer, when I had the kids over for a week, Skylar wanted to learn to ride a bike. So my girlfriend, Mary, took her out to a bike shop and helped her pick one out. Over the course of about two days, we finally convinced her to actually try riding the bike, and within about 30 minutes, she was off! It was a moment that I was forced to miss as I was spending time with my son while allowing Mary and Skylar some bonding time, but I'll never forget the joy in her eyes when they got back from the large parking lot that she's learned in and told me she could ride. She was all left turns and wide pathways the first several times we rode together, but as the summer went on she became quite the little cyclist.

So it came as no surprise this summer when we knew we'd have the kids for a week that Skylar would want to learn something else that is generally thought of as "something boys do." She's loves playing Tony Hawk's Underground on her X-Box and has a really old skateboard that has become the family Rottweiler's chew toy, so naturally she wanted to learn to ride a skateboard. This meant booking lessons with a private instructor as she has anger issues with failing or having difficulty with something, and in front of a group it's even worse. So we bought her a Tony Hawk skateboard and booked a skateboarding pro of about 20 named Tom and scheduled four lessons for her the week she was to be over.

The first three days of lessons, she was scared and frustrated, and even a little embarrassed when things didn't go exactly as she might have liked. Had I not been there to keep her motivated, I think she would have quit after about the first ten minutes. But I wouldn't let her quit, as she has a horrible tendency to do so whenever things aren't going her way. As I know that things don't always go the way we want them to in life, I have a responsibility to cultivate the "never give up" attitude that I've worked so hard to develop in myself.

After three days of bumps and bruises, though with many more successes than failures, I was still glad that this was to be the last day of lessons, both for her sake and for mine. The smiles had been infrequent and the attitude had gotten much worse as the days had gone by. Her desire to quit was for outstretching her desire to learn, and I, like her, just wanted it over with. But I wasn't about to cancel the last lesson and let her off so easily as that. In spite of herself, I wanted her to have a good experience and finish what she'd started.

"What time is it, Dad," Skylar asks me as we hang out in the living room, watching SpongeBob after breakfast. She has milk dried on her chin and a look of abject boredom on her impish face. I tell her its 10:30 as I use a napkin to wipe away the milk. She responds with an over-exaggerated sigh, shoulders slumping in an early defeat. "Tom's late again," she whines. I look at her, dressed for success in her too-long blue jeans, Z-strap sneakers, and brand new t-shirt bearing images of skateboards and monstrous faces, and realize that her impatience is likely to ruin her entire day unless I do something about it.

So I get up, take her by the hand, and walk her to the front door where her Tony Hawk skateboard sits bearing the weight of her pads and helmet. She stops at the top of the steps, her hand falling limply from my grasp and her attitude starting to worsen. I take a seat on the bottom step and look up at her, lifting the mesh bag holding her pads and helmet from its resting place on her board. "Let's get ready for Tom, then," I say over my shoulder. She's still frowning as she walks slowly, almost dragging her feet down the four or five steps to the floor of the split foyer, her hand dragging along the curving rail that parallels the circular staircase. I help her into her knee pads first, the operation of the black plastic and Velcro contraptions well within her nine-year-old capabilities, but since she still likes to have daddy help her with these things, I continue to make myself useful until she doesn't want my help anymore. I know her independence is just around the corner.

After the knee pads come the elbows, then her helmet, and finally, the wrist guards. Once all the protective gear is on, I suggest we go down to the garage for her to practice her tic-tacks on the level smooth surface of the concrete floor. She readily agrees, her smile spreading from cheek to cheek as we walk the rest of the way downstairs and make our way into the garage.

"Are you going to move your car?" she asks me once she's dropped her board to the floor. I follow her gaze from one side of the garage to the other and briefly envision her skateboard smashing out a window in my car, but realize the likelihood of such a thing is miniscule…about as likely as being struck by lightning. Twice. I tell her to go ahead. "All you're doing is practicing tic-tacks so you can show Tom how much progress you've made." I step down into the garage and maneuver a cardboard box and recycling bin between her and my car just in case the board goes rolling toward it, to save myself the trouble of climbing underneath to fetch her board. "Show me what you can do!"

She steps onto the board and pushes herself along at slow, almost snail speed. I encourage her to practice and she does so, lifting the front end of her board first right, then left, beating out a staccato, off-beat rhythm as the wheels come back down time and again. It takes her several runs before she's satisfied, and she finally makes a run from one end of the garage to the other, bouncing side-to-side most of the way. She's smiling and talking up a storm now, her "bad day" made better because daddy was there to fix it for her.

Is there a better feeling than this?

D&D 101 (Journal Entry #1)

I play Dungeons and Dragons. There. I said it. This isn't a great secret or anything; I freely admit what I do for a hobby as quickly as I admit to having been married twice, divorced once, separated for four-and-a-half years, and having two children. But so many people have one stigma or another in mind when they hear that someone plays D&D, I see this as an opportunity to let them know how right they are.

And just how wrong they are.

I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for the first time at the tender age of 8. That's right, I said eight….not eighteen. I didn't misspeak or leave out a 1 that leads to 8 becoming 18. Eight years old and I'm reading the same novels that my Aunt Gina is reading at the same time. Although, to be fair, she had finished them by the time I started in on them. She was a senior in High School and I was in the third grade. She was 18, but I was 8.

As I looked up to my Aunt with adoration, I did my best to emulate her as best I could. I listened to the same music, which meant The Beatles, The Osmonds, The Jackson Five, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and whatever happened to be playing on American Top 40 with Kasey Kasem. I burned her incense, wore her headphones, and added many layers to the hip 70's artwork formed by burning candles over top of a Pepsi bottle and allowing the wax to flow down and build up around the glass. So it was only natural that I should want to read what she was reading. I remember her laughing when I asked if I could read The Hobbit, and we both still talk about her reaction when I'd finished it over a long weekend of rain showers on my Grandma's farm. I still love seeing the smile on her face as she recalls my "book report" before she drove my brother and I home for another week of school.

So yes, I'm smart. Smart enough to have read Tolkien when I was 8, if not smart enough to understand everything I was reading that first time through. I think if there was a "Top 5 Things People Think of When They Hear You Play D&D" list, smart would be near the top. Somewhere right after geek or nerd. I qualify for both of these as well. I spent 20 years in the Air Force as a computer geek. At least that's a respectable kind of geek, but it makes me no less a member of that oft maligned group.

Of course, nerd goes right along with geek. No, I don't have BCG's (birth control glasses) or wear a pocket protector, and my pants are never too short. I don't have an obnoxious laugh or wear plaid, nor do I have a name that takes the mind to nerd like Poindexter, Melvin, or Matilda. But being a nerd is really about being different. My first name is Britt, which I was incessantly teased about in grade school. "Why do you have a girl's name?" got old somewhere about two weeks into Kindergarten. Thank the gods no one knew my middle name is Ashley.

Oh…I just said "thank the gods." If that doesn't prove I'm a nerd, I don't know what else would.

Skateboarding with Skylar

"What time is it, Dad," Skylar asks me as we hang out in the living room, watching SpongeBob after breakfast. She has milk dried on her chin and a look of abject boredom on her impish face. I tell her its 10:30 as I use a napkin to wipe away the milk. She responds with an over-exaggerated sigh, shoulders slumping in an early defeat. "Tom's late again," she whines. I look at her, dressed for success in her too-long blue jeans, Z-strap sneakers, and brand new t-shirt bearing images of skateboards and monstrous faces, and realize that her impatience is likely to ruin her entire day unless I do something about it.

So I get up, take her by the hand, and walk her to the front door where her Tony Hawk skateboard sits bearing the weight of her pads and helmet. She stops at the top of the steps, her hand falling limply from my grasp and her attitude starting to worsen. I take a seat on the bottom step and look up at her, lifting the mesh bag holding her pads and helmet from its resting place on her board. "Let's get ready for Tom, then," I say over my shoulder. She's still frowning as she walks slowly, almost dragging her feet down the four or five steps to the floor of the split foyer, her hand dragging along the curving rail that parallels the circular staircase. I help her into her knee pads first, the operation of the black plastic and Velcro contraptions well within her nine-year-old capabilities, but since she still likes to have daddy help her with these things, I continue to make myself useful until she doesn't want my help anymore. I know her independence is just around the corner.

After the knee pads come the elbows, then her helmet, and finally, the wrist guards. Once all the protective gear is on, I suggest we go down to the garage for her to practice her tic-tacks on the level smooth surface of the concrete floor. She readily agrees, her smile spreading from cheek to cheek as we walk the rest of the way downstairs and make our way into the garage.

"Are you going to move your car?" she asks me once she's dropped her board to the floor. I follow her gaze from one side of the garage to the other and briefly envision her skateboard smashing out a window in my car, but realize the likelihood of such a thing is miniscule…about as likely as being struck by lightning. Twice. I tell her to go ahead. "All you're doing is practicing tic-tacks so you can show Tom how much progress you've made." I step down into the garage and maneuver a cardboard box and recycling bin between her and my car just in case the board goes rolling toward it, to save myself the trouble of climbing underneath to fetch her board. "Show me what you can do!"

She steps onto the board and pushes herself along at slow, almost snail speed. I encourage her to practice and she does so, lifting the front end of her board first right, then left, beating out a staccato, off-beat rhythm as the wheels come back down time and again. It takes her several runs before she's satisfied, and she finally makes a run from one end of the garage to the other, bouncing side-to-side most of the way. She's smiling and talking up a storm now, her "bad day" made better because daddy was there to fix it for her.

Is there a better feeling than this?

It's Longer Than it Used to Be

That's right.  You heard me.  I spent years being told to keep it short...in fact, it was required.  They had regulations in the Air Force, as they do in every other branch of service.  Ours was Air Force Regulation 35-10 before they decided that "regulations" wasn't politically correct enough and we went instead to AFIs...Air Force Instructions.  But I digress...I was talking about my hair.

 
 

Ah yes...hair.  We had to keep it shorter than most of us wanted to, and so we were often being told to get it cut.  I was even sent away from work twice to get my hair cut AFTER I'd just had it cut.  That was embarrassing.  It wasn't like we were Marines, with high-and-tights adorning just the crown of our heads.  No, we had much more leeway than our brothers in other the other branches.  I say brothers, because the restrictions were completely different for our female counterparts.  As a man in the Air Force, I was allowed an inch and a quarter in bulk on the top, with the hair tapering down to a quarter inch in bulk at the sides and in the back.  That meant white walls. For those unfamiliar with the term, look in a mirror and imagine about a quarter inch gap between the top of your ear and your hairline. Yeah. I know. Blocking the back, so there was an even line running straight across the neck, was preferred, even encouraged, but not necessary.  I wore my hair more or less in this style, growing it as long on the top as I could simply to show that I was still a rebel.  You see, an inch and a quarter in bulk may not seem like very much, but with hair gel, you can fit a lot of hair into a very tight spot. My bangs were so long that with my hair hanging in my face they reached my chin! While this was within my rights and within the restrictions placed on us all, I admit I was stretching things to the limit.

 

As I matured, the rebellious streak subsided somewhat, and I wore my hair extremely short, spiking it with the same hair gel I'd come to so heavily rely on when it was longer. Then, it happened. Before I knew what hit me, I was no longer in the Air Force. I was retired. A civilian. No more restrictions on my appearance "in and out of uniform." I was relieved and immediately began to grow and wear a goatee, which also, by the way, isn't allowed in the military unless you're in movie and the actor refuses to shave. I tried growing my hair long then, finding once again my inner rebel, but failing to achieve the look I wanted. I was still using hair gel and the combination of gel with my natural curly waves looked ridiculous, so I went back to short for several months.

 

Then one day, it hit me like a cyclone: lose the gel! So I began growing my hair again, this time not using any product, and was instantly pleased with the results. My hair may be graying, but so are all the rock stars I idolized growing up, so it doesn't bother me overmuch. It is longer than it's ever been and even though it tangles in the wind when my top is down on my Beetle, I love having long hair.