Tag: family

Funeral

September 6th, 2025

Yesterday morning I dropped off my grandson, Asher, at the Waldorf school. It made no sense to me to drive all the way back home since I need to pick up the boy in four hours, so I wandered around the east side of Milwaukee. I decided to walk from Brady Street south on Van Buren to the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist. The cathedral is the heart of Catholicism in southeastern Wisconsin. Sometimes the heart seems to be suffering from arteriosclerosis, yet it still beats. Many years ago, when our kids were at the Waldorf school, I would often hike down to the church. Somehow, after nearly a quarter century, the journey yesterday seemed significantly longer.

The doors of the cathedral were unlocked. Way back when, the place was always open during the day. During the winter months, homeless people would huddle in the rear of church, often sleeping in the pews buried in their overcoats and caps, just trying to stay out of the bitter cold for a while. When I walked into the sanctuary yesterday, there were no homeless folks, but there was a funeral Mass in progress. A woman handed me a pamphlet describing the liturgy. I took it and sat down in the back.

The Mass was for Thomas “Tommy” August Salzsieder, a person unknown to me. The priest was in the middle of giving a eulogy. I wondered how well the priest knew Tommy. I have already been to funerals where the presider knew almost nothing about the deceased, and his speech was basically a work of fiction. The priest described Tommy as a man of faith, and that “his life was not ended, just transformed”.

I also wondered about that comment. What does “transformed” actually mean? Looking at the assembled mourners, I noticed a lot of people with grey hair or no hair at all. They were all elderly, my age. We are all in the batting order for this transformation of our lives. The priest talked about heaven, a concept that I simply do not understand. When I was young, I thought heaven was someplace where God pats you on the head and gives you a cookie for being a good boy. Now, I have no idea what it is. Honestly, heaven does not sound terribly inviting. I would be okay if the end of my life was like when they put me under anesthesia for surgery. Nothing. A void. A blank screen.

I thought about Tommy, and frankly I envied him. His work is done. He no longer needs to fight or struggle in life. Life is beautiful and glorious at times, but it also literally exhausting. Tommy can rest now, whatever that actually means.

The liturgy was a work of devotion. I could tell that. The cantor did a soulful rendition of “Panis Angelicus” from Cesar Franck. A funeral can be inspiring if there is love involved, even love that is buried in grief. I have been to funerals where it was obvious that the service was the result of reluctant duty. People went through the motions hurriedly in order to get the dead person deep in the ground as quickly as possible.

A while back my therapist gave me an odd question. He wrote and asked,

“What do you want Asher to remember about you — not what you did, but who you were?”

I have no idea. In a way, the question seems irrelevant. I won’t care what Asher remembers when I’m dead. I’m pretty sure of that.

However, what Asher remembers may very much matter to him. His memories might affect the trajectory of his life. Will he remember when I was angry and impatient? Will he remember when I had his back? Will he remember when I failed to listen to him? Will he remember that he received unconditional love from me?

But I’m describing things I do, but not who I am. I don’t know who I am, not really. Maybe Asher will have a better idea of who was when I’m gone than I have right now.

I hold Asher in my arms at night so he can sleep. When I die will a meta-parent hold me in their arms? Will God whisper to me,

“I embrace you now. I have always embraced you.”

Santa Claus-of-Color

August 23rd, 2025

On Thursday morning I took Asher to see his therapist. He goes every week to get help for a number of things. The boy is only four and a half years old, but he’s had more than his fair share of trauma. Asher spent an hour with his clinician, and then I came back to the office to collect him at the end of his session. He wasn’t quite done, so I sat around and talked with Eli and Dr. A. Eli is the office manager and Doctor A runs the whole show.

Doctor A smiled at me and said, “Frank, only four more months and you are going to be our Santa Claus.”

I need to explain this. Three weeks ago, I was sitting in the clinic’s office and Doctor A remarked on the luxuriant growth of my beard. I do have a decent beard. I’m bald as an egg, but I can grow a beard. It reaches down to my breastbone, and it is mostly white and curly. Doctor A, out of the blue, asked if I would be Santa Claus at the clinic’s holiday party for the kids. I thought about it for a moment and said, “Yes”. A life changing decision.

I had thought that maybe Doctor A had been kidding me about the Santa gig. She was not. The woman was deadly serious. I’m committed. I have never been a Santa, and as my wife told me, I would be a rather grumpy one. However, it is my time in life to be St. Nick for children that are involved with the clinic.

When I came to pick up Asher on Thursday, Dr. A start talking to me about the Santa thing again. Eli made comments too. They both seemed much more excited about this event than I am.

Doctor A said to me, “We are going to have to feed you. Now, when you are the Santa-of-color, we need to give you soul food. Frank, what do you know about soul food?”

Whoa…back up. It needs to be noted at this point that Eli and Dr A are Black. The clinic has an eclectic ethnic population, both with regards to service providers and clients. Asher and I are very white. So, how the hell am I going to be the “Santa-of-color” for these kids?

I have been thinking about it. I’m white, but I tan well. Right now, considering my facial features, I could probably pass for somebody from the Middle East or North Africa. Many years ago, When I first met my wife in Germany, she was absolutely convinced that I was Turkish. In the German culture, at least at that time, Turks were considered people of color, and not in a positive way. Could I be an Egyptian Santa? Egypt has some Coptic Christians, and I know a smattering of Arabic. By the time Christmas rolls around, I will be pasty white again. I’m sure as hell not going to try a Trump fake tan. This is just bizarre, but I’m still going to be Santa.

Back to Doctor A’s question. I replied to her, “I like BBQ.”

Both Doctor A and Eli shrugged and groaned. Bad answer.

I tried again, “I’ve had collard greens. I like red beans and rice.”

They both smiled. I had some minimal street cred.

Doctor A talked enthusiastically about soul food. She asked me,

“Frank have you ever had the mac and cheese? You know, the kind that Black people make?”

“Uh, no.”

Eli grinned and said, “Oh Man, it’s got that crispy layer of cheese on the top.”

Doctor A told me, “Frank, it’s goooood. You got to try it.”

I was getting hungry. I hadn’t had anything for breakfast, and these people were talking about food to die for. Fortunately, Asher appeared, laughing and jumping around. It was time to go.

I said, “Asher, we got to go. These people are going make me pass out from hunger.”

I bet we talk more about the Santa gig next Thursday. Doctor A had joked about me wearing African colors when I with the little kids. That might actually happen. I have no idea where this is all going.

Ho ho ho.

Little Things that Go Sideways

August 15th, 2025

I came home from visiting a friend on Tuesday afternoon. My wife, Karin, wanted me to be home to care for our grandson, Asher, so she could go to her knitting guild meeting. As I backed into the driveway, I saw my wife standing in front of the garage. The garage was open and the RAV4 was inside of it. Karin looked very upset as I pulled in.

I parked and Asher came over to my car and smiled. He said, “Grandpa!”

Karin did not smile. She said, “The car and the garage door are broken.”

Oh.

To digress for a moment, when I was growing up, the standard reaction to a statement like that in my family was origin was emotional chaos. There was always a lot of hollering. Enormous amounts of energy were immediately expended on finding somebody to blame for whatever bad thing had happened. That was the priority. After an initial burst of rage was directed at somebody, then, maybe, an effort would be made to solve the problem. Sometimes, the issue never really was solved. The important thing was to find a scapegoat.

I used to react like that for a long time when I was younger. I think that my wife still expects me to blow my top when she bears bad tidings. Sometimes, if I am worn out, I do, but I don’t get angry nearly as often. I frankly don’t have the stamina for it. Rage takes a lot out of a person. In any case, I barely reacted at all when she told me that things had gone sideways.

My wife explained that she had been backing into the garage when suddenly the door came down hard on the rear of the car. It shattered the rear window. Neither Asher nor Karin were hurt, thank God. However, the accident terrified them both. It would have freaked me out too.

I examined the damage. Ugly. The rear window in the RAV4 was pratty much gone. The storage area in the back of the car was littered with tiny pieces of glass. The garage door was hanging cockeyed. One of the cables had torn away from the bottom panel of the door. It’s an old door, the original door from when we built the house in 1991. The wood on the bottom panel was rotted out in some places. I don’t know if the cable let go before or after my wife was backed into the garage. It doesn’t matter. The door was now junk.

There was no point in me getting upset. My wife was already stressed out. I went about starting the process to fix things.

It was already late when I stared making calls to our insurance, both auto and home. I called a garage door contractor. They were closed for the day, but I got hold of their 24 hour service guy. He convinced me to wait until the next morning for an inspection (they have a $200 surcharge for after hours service calls). I left the RAV4 in the garage (it rained hard later in the evening). I closed the door as far as it would go. After that, it was completely immobile.

I’m still making calls. For the last couple days, I have been talking to insurance adjuster, contractors, and car rental companies. I will be calling a collision repair shop as soon as they open this morning to find out when I can bring in the RAV. This is all a hassle, but it’s one I can manage. The garage door was replaced yesterday. Eventually, it will all get repaired and life will go on.

The Milwaukee area, where we live, suffered torrential rains and severe flooding six days ago. It was bad. We got lucky, and had no damage to our property. Other people in the metro area got hit hard. A large number of residents had flooded homes or flooded cars. One family’s home in a nearby suburb was hit with so much water that the foundation shifted and the basement wall collapsed. Those people are now homeless. That house is probably a dead loss. Those folks have real problems. Our issues are minor.

We had to wait two days to get rental car that is paid for by our insurance. I initially found the delay to be annoying. We finally picked up the rental car yesterday afternoon. The office manager at the car rental explained to us why he did not have a car for us right away. Apparently, that facility only rents out maybe seven or eight cars per day. Since the great flood, they have been renting out thirty cars per day. They don’t have thirty cars available. Nor do any of their other locations in the area. They ran out of cars, and they still don’t have enough to go around.

I have to admit that I am fortunate. Other people are not.

Oh well, it’s time to make some calls.

The First to Leave

August 3rd, 2025

Mike died on the evening of July 25th. That’s what I was told anyway. I have been thinking about Mike since I heard about his passing. We weren’t close friends, and I last saw him in 1980 or maybe in ’81. During the intervening forty-five years, I have connected with him three or four times, and all of those interactions were relatively recent and brief. They consisted of a couple emails, a snail mail letter, and an aborted attempt at a phone call. We haven’t had an actual conversation in decades. I have no idea what he looked like in the last months of his life.

Mike was in my West Point class. We graduated together in June of 1980. We were in the same company at United States Military Academy. The Corps of Cadets at USMA consists of four brigades, and each brigade has nine companies. Mike and I were in the same company, B-4 (B Company of the 4th Brigade). We joined that unit in the fall of 1976 as plebes (freshmen) and stayed there until we graduated and became 2nd lieutenants. We spent nearly four years in the same barracks, day in and day out. Upon graduation, our paths diverged, and they never really crossed again.

B-4, like the other companies, was in many ways a fraternity (even though there were a few women in each unit). Over time, a cadet gets to know his or her classmates. You make friends. Some people are close, and others not so much. Eventually, a common bond is formed, and in some cases that bond remains intact for years, even decades. I’ve maintained contact with maybe half a dozen of my comrades from B-4. Mike wasn’t one of them. Once we graduated, we separated and stayed that way, that is until I learned that Mike had cancer.

Mike was a stranger to me when he left this world a week ago. I know nothing of his time in the Army or of his career in the civilian world or of his family. That’s why I grieve. I missed out on most of his life. He only died a few days ago, but he has been missing from my life for a long, long time.

I have never gone to a class reunion. Now that I am the legal guardian and a primary caregiver for a four-year-old, I doubt that I will ever go to one. I know that some of my classmates want to attend one of these events, because people are starting to check out of the net. If we don’t reunite now, we might never do so. I don’t know if Mike was the first to go. However, his passing is a wakeup call.

Fat

July 27th, 2025

I try to take my grandson, Asher, to a playground every day. Sometimes the visit is brief. Sometimes we are at the park for an hour or two. The point is that he is a four-year-old boy, and he needs to be outside and active. He needs to be moving.

I read an article about Dr. Oz, the man currently in charge of Medicare and Medicaid. He recently went on a rant about the nation’s obesity epidemic. It is a bit hard for me to take Dr. Oz seriously considering that his boss in the White House is almost as wide as he is tall. However, Oz has a point. Americans are fatter than we were in years past. It’s a fact.

A couple days ago, I took Asher to a local playground near a Salvation Army center. The Salvation Army has ongoing summer youth programs. Asher and I were at the park when a column of kids and their chaperons walked from the center to the playground. There were probably twenty or thirty children coming toward us. They were of various ages, both boys and girls.

In that group I saw that about 25% of kids were overweight, a few of them morbidly obese. That really kind of bothered me. Once the children arrived at the playground, most of them went directly to the swings and the slides and the monkey bars. They started organizing games among themselves. They were loud and rambunctious. They were doing exactly what kids are supposed to do when they are outside. They were in constant motion and generally having a good time.

Most of the heavier kids did not participate in the horseplay. They found a place to sit or lie down. Asher played with a few other children in a big sandbox. They took turns excavating a buried toy. One overweight older boy helped, but he remained prone the entire time. He laid on his belly while digging in the sand with a small shovel. He didn’t even bother to sit up. When he was done playing, it took enormous effort for him to get back up on his feet.

I was a fat kid. In grade school I was chubby, so I know how it is to be an overweight child. My folks took me to the “husky” section for boys’ clothes at the department store. I often felt embarrassed about my weight. I usually was one of the last kids to get picked for a team in gym class. Life sucked. I know how the heavy kids at the playground feel.

Somehow, once I got into middle school and high school, I became more physically active and I “thinned out”. I was actually in good enough shape in my senior year to get accepted into the U.S. Military Academy. Honestly, I don’t know who or what helped me to get in shape, but I did change. Now, I’m old and I could stand to lose five to ten pounds. I probably won’t, but at this point in my life it might not matter so much.

I think obesity does matter for these children. They are going to have serious health problems in the future, if they don’t already. I don’t blame them for their condition. I’ve been there. They need their caregivers to help them get fit. They need adults to help them get moving.

Asher is fit. He’s strong and agile. I am going to help him to stay like that.

Anger

July 26th, 2025

“And there’s always a place for the angry young man,
With his fist in the air and his head in the sand.
And he’s never been able to learn from mistakes,
So he can’t understand why his heart always breaks.
But his honor is pure and his courage as well,
And he’s fair and he’s true and he’s boring as hell
And he’ll go to the grave as an angry old man.”

from the song “Angry Young Man” by Billy Joel

I lost my temper yesterday morning. My wife gave our little grandson, Asher, French toast for breakfast. He tends to be a fussy eater, but he’ll eat French toast, if it is made a certain way. Yesterday, there was a problem with it. Eventually, I had a problem with it too.

Asher likes his toast with honey, syrup, and vegan butter. These three toppings need to be added to the French toast in a certain order. Yesterday, Asher put a spoonful of organic honey on his French toast. Then I poured a bit of organic syrup over the honey. Then Asher suddenly realized that he had forgotten to apply a dollop of something that looked like butter on the bread. There was a crisis.

Asher cried out, “I didn’t put the butter on! I forgot! Now, I’ll have honey all over my knife!”

My wife tried to console him. She suggested that he flip the bread over and try the sequence again. He did that, but that just meant there was honey and syrup on both sides of the toast. Karin got him another, pristine slice of French toast. There was something wrong with that one too. Asher was upset and yelling.

There was a back-and-forth conversation between Asher and his Oma that continued without any resolution. Asher refused to eat, but my wife kept looking for ways to appease him. Finally, I couldn’t listen to it anymore. I slapped my hand on the table and stormed out of the kitchen.

Anger has definite physiological effects. When I got mad, I could feel my face flush and my heart race. The stress hormones were doing their thing. What I noticed the most was the aftermath. Once the emotional storm had passed (it probably only lasted two minutes), I felt exhausted. I was a bit lightheaded, and my joints hurt. I was shaky.

For many years, I was a rage-oholic. I was angry almost all the time. When I was younger, the anger used to energize me. It got me moving. It often got me moving in the wrong direction, but I was active. Now, that I’m 67 years old, anger wears me out. It’s too much work to stay pissed off. I still lose my temper. I guess that I always will, but I can’t maintain that intense rage. My body won’t tolerate it. I have mild hypertension, and I don’t need to have a heart attack. Asher and my wife don’t need that either.

Many years ago (it seems like everything in my life was many years ago), I participated as a facilitator in a program to help families with troubled teenagers. In one session of the program, we talked about feelings. The program tried to distill a plethora of emptions down to just four: mad, glad, sad, and scared. The idea was to get people to recognize their feelings and maybe handle them in constructive ways. “Mad” was the big one for me.

I am a product of my generation. When I was growing up, males were not supposed to be sad or scared. My father belittled me if I ever cried. Showing fear was frowned upon. If I couldn’t be sad or scared, then almost every emotion got funneled into being angry. That’s what my dad did. That’s what I learned to do. Being angry has not done me much good. It hasn’t done much good for anybody around me. It’s been highly destructive.

I have been told that there is such a thing as “righteous anger”. The notion is that there are times when a person can be enraged about injustice and oppression, and that sort of anger is a positive thing. I suppose that it is, but I have never experienced it in a pure form. My anger has always been tainted with ego and selfishness. If righteous anger exists, it is exceedingly rare.

I’m not so angry anymore. Why? I’m not sure. Years of Zen meditation has helped. Learning how to cry and feel sadness has helped. Understanding and accepting at least some of the world’s suffering has helped. Growing old has helped. I was an angry young man. I’m too tired to be angry old man.

Clutter

July 22nd, 2025

The house is a mess.

Well, I guess it all depends on how you define the word “mess”. When I was in the Army, decades ago, I liked to have things organized, with everything in its place. That was so long ago and so much has changed.

Now, I live with my wife of forty years, and with our four-year-old grandson. Neither of them has much interest in tidiness. Our home is clean, but it is always teetering on edge of chaos. I’m not sure that it can be any other way.

My wife is from Germany, and in some ways, she maintains that Teutonic passion for order. However, she is also an artist, which means that she is a perfectionist with regards to her work, but is often indifferent to clutter that surrounds us. Karin is a fiber goddess. She has spent well over sixty years mastering the mysteries of knitting, weaving, crocheting, dyeing, spinning, sewing and felting fiber. She can do it all. When focused on a project, she is attuned to the smallest flaw or discrepancy in her work. She is endlessly creative. However, she also struggles to find her phone and car keys.

Our grandson, Asher, is a four-year-old who, like his Oma, is interested in all sorts of things, usually all at the same time. He dumps out his toys, plays with them enthusiastically, and then promptly forgets them. Eventually, the floors in the house acquire a thin covering of playthings, some of which I sometimes step on. I find that irritating.

I try to pick things up and put them away, but apparently, I am not supposed to do that. Our grandson protests loudly if I move a toy from the place where he has put it. He wants, or needs, things to be in a certain location. So, after experiencing his wrath, I just leave stuff where it lays. My wife has worked out a deal with the boy for him to stow away all of his stuff at the end of the day in exchange for some time to watch mindless YouTube videos. I go to bed early before all this happens, and when I get up it looks like the cleanup fairies have done their work while I was in bed.

My wife has a one room for a craft studio. Actually, most of the rooms in the house are also unofficial craft studios. Her projects cover most of the horizontal surfaces in our home. To an objective observer, her primary craft studio looks like a grenade exploded in it. I have sometimes made forays into her sacred space, but not often. I avoid moving anything. If I do, without fail, she will ask what happened to the object that I set in a different place. It is best for me, when I get annoyed by the apparent disorder in her studio, that I simply close the door to the room and move on.

My wife and grandson are selectively organized. Maybe all people are. Trying to keep everything in order would make a person crazy, or crazier. I have also become selective about how tidy my world needs to be. Some things matter. Most don’t.

Going Home

June 27th, 2025

“There’s no place like home”. – Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz

Back in July of 1976, I joined the Army. To be more specific, I was accepted as a cadet at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. USMA is part of the U.S. Army, but it is a military organization sui generis. Nothing else in the Army, or in the world at large, even vaguely resembles it. I could try to describe it, but there isn’t enough space in this essay to make the effort worthwhile.

The first year as a student at West Point is brutal. It’s a harsh environment for a “plebe” (that’s what a freshman is called at USMA), and going to that school is kind of like attending an Ivy league college and doing time simultaneously. The first chance for a plebe to leave the place is at Christmastime. After five months of getting jerked around by upperclassmen, I was anxiously looking forward to going home for two weeks.

I didn’t get to go home. My home no longer existed.

In order to explain what I mean, I have to give some background information. Before I left for West Point, my parents had already decided to sell their house. They never mentioned any of this to me while I was still living with them. My folks loved secrecy. I grew up in a home where paranoia permeated everything. In any case, I found out about the sale of the house after it had already been sold. My parents sent me a letter with a newspaper clipping that advertised the fact that the old house was available for purchase. I did go back to my family on leave, but I went to a place I had never seen before in my life.

They say that you can never go home. That’s true. I found out immediately after I met up with my parents and brothers that I was an outsider. My five-month absence had left a vacuum in the family structure that had quickly filled. They were happy to see me, but I wasn’t an integral part of their day-to-day lives anymore. I was a just a visitor. That new status was hard to accept, at least at first.

Would it have made any difference if I had been able to go back to the house where I had grown up? Probably not. If anything, going back to that dilapidated old farmhouse would have made the change more poignant. Even if my family had remained in that home, it would not have been mine anymore. I would have still been a stranger there.

It’s been nearly fifty years since I last saw the inside of the old house. I think the structure still stands. It has to be well over one hundred years old by now. I don’t how it’s been remodeled over the years, and it really doesn’t matter. If I walked into the front door, I would still feel the presence of ghosts in the rooms. They would not be friendly ghosts. They would be there to trigger my bad memories of growing up in that place. I have plenty of dark recollections. I am not nostalgic about my childhood. I prefer not to be reminded of it.

You can’t go home. For some of us, it’s not even a good idea to try.

Resilience

June 25th, 2025

I asked the young woman to help me find the building. We were on the northside of Milwaukee and the local area was forbidding. The street had been dug up recently and almost all of the structures bordering the road looked abandoned. Actually, it wasn’t hard for us to locate the recovery center. It was the only property that looked well-maintained. The building was like a welcoming home set among some ruins.

I parked in the lot next to the building. The young woman went into the rehab facility to take a drug screen. I waited for her to come back. If she passed the test, then she would come back, grab her bags, and start residential treatment. If she failed, well, I had no idea what we would do. I would probably have to take her back to some shitty motel until she could get into another recovery program. I didn’t even want to consider that possibility. I would just wait to see what happens.

Years ago, when I was a boy, this part of town was a bustling economic hub. All of these vacant buildings were factories. They made things for A.O. Smith and for Masterlock. Teams of workers filled these places and made money, for themselves and for their employers. These businesses were humming with activity. That was a long time ago.

Now, it’s desolate. The neighborhood has a post-apocalyptic vibe to it. I bet at night it looks very Blade Runner. The car parked next to me had a yellow club on the steering wheel. The owner had placed an open copy of the Bible on top of the dashboard. The pages of the book were water-damaged and stained. I’m not sure what would deter thieves: the Bible or the club. Maybe neither or maybe both.

We drove through the local area in order to get here. On the main drag were many shuttered businesses. Even the liquor stores and the Baptist churches couldn’t make it around here. That’s rough.

I sat in the car and waited. There were trees lining the street, at least part of it. Milwaukee may have severe poverty, but the city keeps things green. I think that makes a difference. No place is truly a wasteland if there are trees growing there.

It’s been hard for the young woman. She has struggled for so long. I have lost count of how many rehab programs she has attended over the years. It is both depressing and inspiring to me. She often relapses, but she never, ever gives up. She wants to get clean and stay clean. She is the most resilient person I have ever met, and I admire her courage.

She came back out of the building with one of the counselors. The counselor was smiling and friendly. They picked up the young woman’s belongings from the car. Then they went back inside.

I sat in the car and sighed deeply. I could relax at least a little bit. She was in the program.

She was safe.

Coming Full Circle

May 31st, 2025

We took our grandson, Asher, to the May Festival a couple days ago. The May Festival is an annual event put on by the Tamarack Waldorf School. It celebrates the arrival of spring, which in Wisconsin is well-worth celebrating. We live in a climate where it is not unusual for people to wear hoodies on Memorial Day or even well into June. It has only been within the last week or two that all the trees finally have their leaves. When our world suddenly turns a vibrant green it’s definitely party time.

The festival was held in a tiny park a couple blocks from the school. Tamarack is located on Brady Street on the lower east side of Milwaukee. The school really has no green space of its own, so the park is better place to celebrate the annual resurgence of the natural world. There is a small knoll in the park. That is where everyone gathered in a circle at the beginning of the festival. Karin, Asher, and I got there just as the show was about to start. We found a place in the circle. It was an eclectic group: caregivers, little kids, and a few teachers. The school has a diverse population. It even had that twenty-five years ago when our children attended the school. In a way, it felt like we were back home.

One of the teachers led the entire circle in an a cappella version of a Waldorf song. The tune was accompanied by body movements. The teacher had told all the newbies to watch what the older kindergarteners (“the tall pines”) did and just follow their lead. The song was a hymn of praise to nature and springtime. It might have been a bit overly sentimental, but it struck a chord in each person in the circle.

After the song, the kids dispersed to do other activities. The school had set up a station to give each child a temporary tattoo (the logo for the school). There was also a table to get bags of popcorn. There was a place to blow soap bubbles. Most of the children gravitated to the jungle gym. That’s where Asher went.

I stood on the mound and stared at the other families at the gathering. My mind flipped between the present scene and images from a quarter century ago. There was feeling of disorientation and profound sadness. A lot can happen in a family in twenty-five years, and in our family a lot did happen. A kid went to war. A kid got divorced. A kid did time in prison. Those are just the highlights. My mind flickered between memories of our children when they were innocents and the current group of kids playing and laughing in the park where I was standing. So much was different and so much has been lost. I didn’t know what I was doing when I raised our kids. As I watched the children, I asked myself, “Do I know any better this go around?” I have no idea. Then I caught a glimpse of Asher doing exactly what a four-year-old should be doing. I got my balance back.

Karin and I struck up a conversation with a kindergarten teacher who might become Asher’s guide in the fall. We told her a bit about the old days, when this school was just starting. Karin and I were there at the very beginnings of the organization. We didn’t stay long. I couldn’t deal with the chaos and conflicting interests that accompanied the birth of the school. I was an angry and impatient bastard back then, and I was not at all helpful. We homeschooled for three years and then we came back to school after the dust settled a bit.

The teacher was fascinated by our history lesson. Karin drifted off to talk to other folks that she knew. I told the teacher more stories of the school. She seemed interested and I love an attentive audience. I told her about the time I was a chaperon for our youngest son’s class trip to New Orleans. We went there in 2008, three years after Katrina. That was an adventure, but then I am convinced that any visit to New Orleans qualifies as an adventure. The teacher I spoke with had been to “N’aalins” years ago and she fell in love with the town. So, did I. We agreed that the city has a soul, and it teems with both angels and demons.

Later, I found Karin again. She was talking with a young man who had once been a teacher at the school. I didn’t recognize him at first. His hair was thinner, and his middle was thicker. We talked for a while. He remarked that we were back in the school with Asher, and that we had “come full circle”.

That’s not quite accurate. A person never comes full circle. A person may return to a place or to an organization, but that individual comes back different and returns to something that has also changed and has changed forever. We are coming back to Tamarack, but it isn’t the same school. Oh, the school is still in the same building, and the curriculum is pretty much the same, but in some ways, it is alien to us.

I looked at the new parents at the festival and I saw strangers. They have more tattoos and piercings than my generation ever had. They have different views of what it means to be a family. They have different challenges, and they probably can’t understand our struggles. They are bringing new things to an education model that is already a century old. Their children, like our Asher, are entering a world beyond my comprehension.

At the same time, I can see, or better feel, the similarities between these young people and me. We have the same fears. We have the same hopes. We might all become friends. That is my hope and wish. My wife and I are entering the winter of our lives. The other parents are beginning their summers. All of our little ones are laughing and crying in the early springtime of their generation. We have that in common.