Cheerful Curmudgeon

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.

Am I the only one baffled by the notion that a pregnant teenager is somehow a worthy part of a presidential political campaign? The last time I thought about teenage pregnancy (which is depressingly often, since I have two teenage sons), I considered a pregnancy to be an “Oh shit” moment which would have to be followed by some very heavy conversations with the parents about what comes next. Were it my child who is pregnant, and thankfully my children are not, I cannot imaging a) publicizing and politicizing the event, and b) focusing so heavily on the decision to marry and keep the child and not at all on the bad judgment which led up to the pregnancy.

While the “right to choose” vs. “right to life” debate is certainly a worthy one, I think a more interesting issue is that of helping teenagers avoid pregnancy in the first place. Equally interesting is how to break the cycle of premarital pregnancy which seems to run in families. I.e., a child conceived out of wedlock is more likely to conceive more children out of wedlock. How do we reach, and teach, those teens?

Sarah Palin may have been one of those teens. According to this article in AMERICAblog.com, Palin’s son Track was born just eight months after Palin married. Regardless of whether the boy was conceived before the wedding or born prematurely, this does give us all a good reason to think hard about teenage pregnancy.

Palin, by the way, does not impress me as a good person to have in the White House. I love this poem by my friend jsg:

The News

I am in Wasilla, Alaska
Tracking the orbit of Governor Sarah Palin
Whose pick for VP has energized Republicans everywhere
And independents like myself
Who are moved to the center
By this most courageous appointment
By such smart politicians.

I hope the photos I am attaching
Complement the text.

Here I am in front of the field
Where the Governor got smooched by her future husband
They will marry and eight months later
Her first child will be born
Which no doubt is the basis for the philosophy
behind her later lack of commitment
To sex education and support for unwed mothers in her state.

Her second child, by the way,
Will go to this high school
Here I am standing in front of it
Where she too will smooch her boyfriend
Get pregnant
And whose pregnancy will be announced to the world
By her mother
Whose willingness to sacrifice the privacy of her daughter
To her ambitions for the vice Presidency is only exceeded
By her willingness to rear her own special needs child
In a fishbowl with staff
Hillary Clinton’s identification with ambition is over forever
Since the Republican Sarah Palin
Has demonstrated to what lengths true ambition
Will take a person
And how clever Republicans must be to jettison all their values
To support her.

Here I am in front of the State House
Where not one person who served with Sarah Palin
Was called during the so-called vetting
They are clever the Republicans
And John McCain is some maverick reformer
To have made such a careful decision.

Here’s the road where Governor Palin’s husband
earned a DUI
and was taken to jail.

Here’s the law office of the lawyers just hired
To run interference for Governor Palin over the firing
Of her ex brother-in-law
Who left his employment
Under suspicious conditions
But of course John McCain’s people knew all that
And were courageous and reformers nevertheless.

Here’s an empty room
Where Sarah Palin has avoided
Speaking with the Press.

Here’s a picture of me in the
MIDDLE OF THE ROAD
Both the Republicans and Democrats are courting me
The future belongs to me
I am delighted to be here
And from where I stand -

The Republicans are doing a really bang-up job
Of earning my loyalty.

Your friend in the center,
jsg, usa

My mother, Marjorie Serby Robertson, passed away last week. I found this poem which beautifully sums up her life.

Old Song

Do not seek too much fame,
but do not seek obscurity.
Be proud.
But do not remind the world of your deeds.
Excel when you must,
but do not excel the world.
Many heroes are not yet born,
many have already died.
To be alive to hear this song is a victory.

Traditional, West Africa

May her soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life. May her memory be a blessing.

(Old Song is from The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart: A Poetry Anthology.)

Yup, I’m a proud papa. Kevin Zemon graduated yesterday from Ft. Zumwalt North High School, O’Fallon, MO.

No two ways about it, I am hugely proud of my son, Kevin, who attained Eagle rank in Boy Scouts. Last night was his court of honor. There are more pictures in my on-line gallery but here is one of my favorites:

Not only is he man enough to speak extemporaneously and do it well, he inspires younger Scouts to follow his example, takes ribbing well, and can still hug his parents publicly. What a mensch!

Staying up all night with a coughing child sucks. No two ways about it. And trying to get a kid to swallow some awful tasting cough medicine can be almost as bad. Honey A Better Option For Childhood Cough Than Over The Counter Medications, reported over at Science Daily gives hope.

The study [by a Penn State College of Medicine research team] found that a small dose of buckwheat honey given before bedtime provided better relief of nighttime cough and sleep difficulty in children than no treatment or dextromethorphan (DM), a cough suppressant found in many over-the-counter cold medications.

It seems like a good idea to me. The nice thing is that if you try the honey and it doesn’t work, you can still give a dose of DM.

Better yet, you can have some honey, too, as long as you have the jar out of the cupboard and a spoon in your hand.