I'll be right Backgammon

Backgammon is a board game that dates back to approximately 3,000 B.C. and has it's origins in the middle east.

My relationship with my wife dates back to 2008 A.D.  and has it's origins on the internet.

Baseball may have marked the passing years for America, but Backgammon has marked them for me and my girl.

Here we are on our wedding anniversary, May 15, 2018, after completing eight years of marriage. She's pretty, right? She's also a great mom to our boys and bakes cakes that melt in your mouth. Well, don't let the sweet smile, kind eyes, and sweater full of goodies fool you. She is a competitive demon.

I learned early on that when it comes to passing the time with her, there is nothing more important than winning. Giver her an arbitrary premise, a sheet of cardboard with squares printed on it, and a generalized set of rules, and suddenly your ass is grass and she's the lawnmower.

The best evidence I can present for her gaming disorder is anecdotal. It likely happened in 2008 while we were on a date. She shared a story of her father becoming enraged because she was beating him at a game of Othello while sharing her attention with a television program. To her father, who was losing while giving his full attention, that was the last straw and the game flew. Little did he know his daughter shared DNA with the likes of Kasperov, which made her hard to beat. She also apparently has some of her dad's DNA, because she's a sore loser too.

We were in a starbucks on November 22, 2008 having a coffee date. That could be the day she shared the Dad Threw The Othello Board story with me, because I showed her how I could use my Palm III to play Othello with her. I beat her soundly. She raged out and struggled to turn off my device. In the process she spit out her mouth full of coffee over me and the window of the Starbucks. To preserve our four month long budding relationship, we decided to try a game with less personal history, and in walked Backgammon.

I already knew how to play, so I figured if she started out losing, she'd be more Bruce Banner than Incredible Hulk. Sound logic, even as I look back on it after all of these years.

She had a different idea, and that was to purchase not only a game board but a journal as well, where we could record each of our games and track our progress. That way in the future we could reminisce over ass-kickings she'd handed me throughout the years.

How did the first encounter go, you might ask? Take a look for yourself. The game took place on New Year's Day, 2009. She never played before and out scored me seven points to two.

The subsequent encounters on January 3 and 4 also fell in her favor. One might think I was throwing the games on purpose to curry romantic favors from her. Nope! She was just that good, but still competitive, and always sweet, as you can see in the inscription she wrote inside the journal.

And speaking of competitive, how in the world did she know that our relationship would last? When she wrote this dedication, we'd been dating less than a half of a year, but somehow she knew. Either that or her competitive side made sure it would happen.

This year I will have known my wife for ten years, and I am writing these words on our eighth wedding anniversary.

Here's a page from the journal marking the day we wed. We didn't play Backgammon on our wedding day, unlike the day I proposed. That was October 10, 2009, and I beat her two points to one.

Notice on the top of the page where I've indicated our wedding date. This was likely done before we began playing on May 17, the first time we did so as husband and wife. She beat me, of course. See the numbers below the tally marks? That's the cumulative point score since we started playing in 2009.

A month later we found time for a game and apparently made a side bet for that day's play of winner getting a full body massage from the loser. I got a big old goose egg and my wife got three points, each punctuated by me with drawings, the first being a frowny face, then frowny with tongue out, then a middle finger.

It's been a long journey for us, marriage and Backgammon. I am still behind in the points standing 265 to 220. Sadly now, it is time for a change.

It is with a heavy heart that I report the irreparable damage of our original Backgammon board. Notice the playing surface is broken,  likely caused by something heavy in the back of my car falling on it. The dice were already replaced, the spare pieces lost, but the original journal remains.

For nine years this board marked the growth of the love shared by my wife and I, and saw the beginning of a life long commitment as husband and wife. It's like our "The Notebook," but without the 'I can't remember who you are' stuff. Now it is time to move on.

As we begin our ninth year of marriage, we do so with a new Backgammon board. These pictures show the test game we played last night. In honor of our old board, we did not keep score in the journal, but I will reveal that my wife Paige beat me once again. Happy Anniversary dear.

I'm finally old enough to care about March Madness

Today my alma matter Loyola University - Chicago will play in it's first NCAA tournament since 1985.

Wanting to cheer the Ramblers on with all sincerity, I looked into why the team is called the Ramblers. Apparently it was a name given to Loyola's football team in the early part of the 20th century which referred to all of the traveling they did to play their games. A rambler is a person who walks for pleasure, especially in the countryside. That's all good and fine, but the football team ceased to exist after 1930.

Of course then it makes sense to simply slap that name onto our basketball team. But wait, why is there a wolf on the team merch now? Funny story. In 1982, Loyola wanted a mascot like all the other big teams out there, so they played on the Rambler theme, and created "Hobo Rambler", or "Bo" for short. He was literally a bum with tattered clothes and LU branding on his hat, as you can see in the picture.

He probably even had some sort of cute, oversized bindle (that's the stick with the handkerchief filled with goodies tied on the end that bums in movies and television shows are known to carry). in 1990, someone finally asked why we had a homeless man as our mascot and replaced it with a wolf, an animal associated with St. Ignatius Loyola himself.

Hopefully in the heaven where socially unacceptable mascots are sent, Chief Illiniwek and Bo are sipping some sort of brown liquor and enjoying today's game. Go Ramblers!

voting apathy

This is my mom and dad. They married in Austria in 1955. It was a small ceremony, and afterward they sat at an sidewalk table by a cafe, and watched the Russian Army withdraw from their ten year occupation after the end of the second world war.

Twelve years previous to that, my mother mourned her aunt who was brutally raped and murdered by a Russian soldier, while at the same time my father, a teenaged American citizen living in Europe since he was five years old, was being passed from relative to relative in Vienna to avoid Nazi incarceration.

During that war to end all wars, my mother's mother used to keep a pistol in her apron for protection around the house which was located near the Hungarian border. My father watched a victim of an Allied bombing run as he was euthanized by medics who believed there was nothing else they could do to help.

They both witnessed the war first hand, saw it's build up, cried at the Anschluss, noted the dwindling number of Jews and Gypsies, blacked out their windows at night, and waited for it all to be over so they could exhale.

In case you were wondering about the importance of voting, I suggest you ask them. 

My dad died at the end of last year. He lived to be 89 years old and never once hesitated to stand up and have his vote counted.

My mother is 85 years old and serves as a polling place election judge. She never once questioned why she should. She already knew the answer.

To them, policies were more important than personalities, and that's how they decided whom they should vote for. It's a value they instilled in their children, and it's how I am raising mine. And yet when I consider the current political climate, and societal worship of celebrity, I grow concerned.

My father and mother witnessed first hand the murderous beginnings, flourishing, and desperate aftermath of a genocidal socialist government in which the people had no say. They witnessed the cold brutality of a communist government which unleashed the madness and frustration of its army upon civilians without a conscience. They did not consult Oprah or Alec Baldwin for their opinions. This is why I know only people who have been through what my parents endured will ever truly appreciate our democracy.

Mom and Dad never threatened to go to Canada if their candidate lost. They never ridiculed the other voter as unintelligent. Instead, they realized how precious our system of self government is and how quickly heated rhetoric and exclusionist actions can burn it to the ground.

We are losing the lessons of democracy and fail to realize the cost needed to replace it once it's gone. The cloth of its mighty blanket is wearing thin from abuse at a time when the weather is worsening, so I caution all of you who disregard the importance of your vote to beware political chill which causes us to shiver. The resulting illness won't be the fault of the unfeeling wind, but rather the population that relies on a long dead people to maintain the shelter they built.

Educate yourself.

Make good decisions.

Vote.

Inspire Me!

As a writer aspiring to be published, there are times when my frustration causes me to fall into the trap of thinking like Crash Davis. Crash isn't a writer, but rather he is a character in "Bull Durham."

What do I mean by this? Go watch the movie, or follow along here. I'm referring to the part on the bus where Crash, who is tasked with maturing the rookie pitcher Nuke, instructs him on how to handle interviews with a pre-cast set of responses. In this way, he seeks to educate the youngster on how to at least sound like he knows what he's doing. 

Anyone who's tried their hands at writing and becoming published is often exposed to much the same advice. We're bombarded with a continual string of quotes about writing and being a writer and eventually we blame our lack of success on not espousing enough to sound like these big league writers. Then we start writing down the quotes, memorizing them, praying some day we'll get the chance to use them at a cocktail party right after delivering an elevator pitch that skyrockets us into the big box book stores.

It's totally what Crash Davis told Nuke to do. 

With it being the start of a new year, I thought I'd share twelve of these quotes with you other aspiring authors. Memorize these. They are your friends.

“Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy–which many believe goes hand in hand with it–will be dead as well.”

-Margaret Atwood

A little dark, Margaret, but so was "Blind Assassin."

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.”

-Gustave Flaubert

Ah, the French, they are so... French.

“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”

-E.L. Doctorow

Apparently he's pretty good, so you might just have to memorize his name and drop it frequently.

“To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.”

-Truman Capote

Truman was a bit of a weirdo. He claimed to know Greta Garbo intimately, but never actually met her. Who would do that?

“Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For these two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.”

-Roald Dahl

So true, Roald.

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

-Isaac Asimov

Much respect, you're my favorite science fiction writer.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it’s also a gift. It’s a gift to yourself and it’s a gift of giving a story to someone.”

-Amy Tan

She's turned awkward family relations across generations into gold.

“The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.”

-A.B. Yehoshua

The New York Times called him the "Israeli Faulkner." Having slogged through "Sound and the Fury," I'm not sure how to feel about him.

“I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.”

-Charles Kuralt

This is Sunday Morning, on CBS.

“Whether you’re keeping a journal or writing as a meditation, it’s the same thing. What’s important is that you’re having a relationship with your mind.”

-Natalie Goldberg

She's applied Zen teachings to the art of writing, but I'm Catholic, so I try to apply guilt to my writing.  

“Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.”

-Meg Rosoff

I'd like to meet Meg some day. She wears strange looking glasses.

So, read, write, and good luck, but be careful. If you are a success someday, you'll have to be able to throw out a phrase that wraps up what you do in a not too literal way.