Cheerful Curmudgeon

We just watched Around the Bend with Michael Caine, Christopher Walken and Josh Lucas. To say that it was way better than I expected would be a gross understatement. I  thoroughly enjoyed watching the family secrets slowly reveal, the characters slowly grow together, and the idiosyncrasies slowly resolve into sense.

There were moments when I chuckled at the thought of creating a situation like that for my kids. (Don’t worry, guys, I won’t really do it. Probably.) Mostly I left the film with a sense of gratitude for the closeness that we do have in my family. No, we aren’t the Brady Bunch but I think we do pretty darned well.

Joe Zemon with his sons

We do have our bits of estrangement in the family, though; my grandfather, Joe Zemon, being a case in point. Neither my father nor my uncle (the two dashing young men in the photo to the right) would say word one about him to me or to any of my four cousins, yet I’m named after him. Who was he really and, before dying young, what did he do with his life?

I do kind of wish there was still a way to take a road trip with my dad and sons. It’s too late to take my father along (moribund jokes aside) but I expect there will be more trips with the kids.

You’ll find Around the Bend on Netflix (both watch instantly and as a disc). Highly recommended.

David, my younger son, co-organized the St. Louis Saab Convoy last weekend. Despite miserable weather, the St. Louis Swede Speed club got about 25 people to bring a dozen cars out for the St. Louis Save Saab Convoy, urging GM to sell Saab rather than close down the line.

Fox 2 News even covered the event. Click the photo to watch Fox’s video.

David promotes Saab on Fox 2 News

Great job, David! Maybe your next Saab will have a Spyker engine hiding under the hood.

My hat’s off to David who is finishing up Fast Track Calculus this morning at Rose-Hulman. For those of us who are not entering freshmen engineering students with a yearning to get the calc out of the way, FTC is a full year of calc compressed into just five weeks.

David and friends: XKCD must have known that today is the final exam. Here’s a little something to cheer you on your way.

Newton and Leibniz

Candy and I dropped David off at Rose-Hulman yesterday. He is taking their Fast Track Calculus program, 15 credits of calc in just five weeks. Whew! After that, he gets a week off and then dives into his freshman year.

Here are a few photos. (Click to see them larger.)

Candy and I got to see Caedmon, Cindy, Geoff, Becky and Derek yesterday. Caedmon sure is getting big. (Click the picture to jump to the photo album.)

Caedmon, Geoff and Cindy

Cindy and Geoff did a great job and produced Caedmon Geoffrey, a wonderful, healthy baby boy at 7:12pm on May 20. He’s 9 lbs 1 oz, 21 inches tall. His plumbing works so well that he peed on the doctor during delivery. I take that as a great omen!

Researchers have found a strong correlation between newborn feeding patterns and the seemingly immutable “night person” or “morning person”  patterns which govern our adult lives. Dr. Emily Erudita of the Hatch Institute of Mamalian Studies reports in today’s issue of Pan Generational Physiology,

In a study of 1,063 adults, 97.2% of the “night people” had been fed in the evening as newborns. Furthermore, 97.6% of the “morning people” had been fed in the morning as newborns. The remaining approximately 2.5% may have been fed during those periods but conclusive evidence was not available due to failing memories on the parts of the only living adult relatives and a lack of timestamped photographic records.

Dr. Erudita has announced her imminent departure from the Hatch Institute and will be founding a company to provide infant betrothal services, guaranteeing that no married couple need ever be mismatched again.

Today, my beautiful bride and I have been married ten years and I’m looking forward to at least another 10,000.

I hope that you, too, find the love of your life.

I very much enjoyed the time that I got to spend with my father-in-law, Lester Start. Sadly, he was taken from this world much too soon.

My wife and her siblings have created a web site as a publishing platform for his sermons and talks. Please visit Lester Start’s Works.

Genealogy research has led me to connections with distant cousins that I never knew existed. Yes, I know that many purists consider genealogy to be the study of (primarily dead) ancestors but I rapidly hit dead-ends in that realm since I am of Jewish, eastern European and Russian descent. Between the pogroms and the Nazis, there is not much left for me to find. Since I have not been able to focus on my ancestors, I defocused my attention and have been actively documenting the living branches of my family tree.

Last month, I wrote to Harold Zemon, my first cousin once removed, and asked for information about his branch of the Zemons. He replied with a wealth of data which I did not have. Most exciting was this brief note about Moses Zemon, Harold’s father:

Moses Zemon… was very close with his brother Isaac a/k/a Joe a/k/a Uncle Ike…. My father & Uncle Ike were wonderful sons to our grandmother Rose Zemon.

This is the first first-hand information that I have about Isaac, my grandfather. I never met him since he passed away when my father was a child. For reasons that my father never explained, he never told me anything at all about Isaac.

I have also swapped a bunch of email with my second cousin once removed, Wayne Zemon. He filled in his branch of the Zemon tree, all the way down to Robert and Alison Wiseman. My son, David, noticed that Robert and Alison are about his age and zipped right over to Facebook to contact everybody by those names. He was able to, in surprisingly short order, talk on the phone with the right Robert who was tickled pink to find any connection to the Zemon name. Until I began corresponding with Wayne, my branch of the Zemon’s had had no contact whatsoever with Wayne and his sister Ruth (Robert and Alison’s grandmother). In case you are wondering, Robert and Alison are David’s fourth cousins.

Jule Turnoy, another second cousin once removed, has been sharing her knowledge of the Freiler line. Believe it or not, she and I were introduced by the Steve and Laura Stroud of Elgin, Illinois, who live in (and have beautifully restored) Philip Freiler’s home.