Cheerful Curmudgeon

As I was running the other morning, I jogged past a mom who was shepherding her little ones out the front door and over to the school bus stop. The mother was a few steps behind her young daughter and I caught this snippet of conversation:

Mom: You have a spelling test today, Susan. I don’t know where your words are.

Susan: I know them, Mom.

Mom: You sure?

I was stunned; this mother had had the chance to build her daughter up by responding, “That’s great, Susan! I’m so proud of you.” Instead, she told Susan that, not only was her word not to be trusted but that her ability to actually learn her spelling words was in doubt. With those double blows to her ego, it was no wonder that Susan had no answer to her mom’s question.

You can spoil a child with too many material things but you cannot spoil a child with too much love. Legitimate praise for a job well done, legitimate recognition for honest effort, is always in order. Imagine how good it feels to have someone tell you that they believe in you, that they believe you did something well. Give the gift of that feeling to your children as often as you can. Be your kids’ biggest cheerleader. I know you can and I know that you will be great at it.

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.