You have to face some hard truths about yourself when you listen to a 28-hour audio biography of Ulysses S. Grant in its entirety

According to the comedian John Mulaney, "All of our dads are cramming for some World War II quiz show, and I can't wait to watch it. We're just gonna change channels and see our dads winning $900,000...on Normandy trivia."

He was referring to the penchant many men of a certain age have for military history. For me it's more about World War I, while a lot of other guys I know are fascinated by the Civil War, but his point is well taken.

I never thought much of this until a couple of months ago when I checked out an audiobook biography of U.S. president and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant and proceeded to listen to it from start to finish over the course of three weeks.

All 27 hours and 51 minutes of it.

When you happily invest that much time learning – in minute detail – about the life of someone who died nearly 140 years ago, you're forced to step back and ask yourself a seminal question:

Why?

Why did I do that? What drove me to want to know all about, say, the Grant Administration's fiscal policy in the 1870s? Or his military strategy in the Vicksburg campaign?

Why did I care so much? Why was the whole experience so enjoyable?

My first instinct is to say I don't know, but that's only because I don't want to acknowledge the truth, which is this:

At some point in the recent past, I have become an Old Guy.

There's no denying it. If you were able to break down the readership of that Ulysses S. Grant book ("The Man Who Saved the Union" by H.W. Brands...highly recommended), I'm certain the vast majority of its readers/listeners are men between 50 and 80.

There are exceptions, of course, but there is little doubt we are the target demographic.

Listening raptly to a 28-hour retelling of President Grant's life also suggests that you have given up caring about the things that really matter in life. Instead, you have decided to focus on the most irrelevant details. "Save for retirement? Who cares? What I really want to know is where Ulysses S. Grant ranked in his graduating class at West Point!"

This probably goes without saying, but it also suggests you're a nerd.

Well, I should say I'm a nerd. And an old guy. And someone whose head is filled with useless knowledge and a strong desire to obtain even more of it.

C'est la via, that's me. But I'll bet you didn't know that when President Lincoln promoted Grant to General of the Armies in 1864, he was the first commander to hold that rank since George Washington.

That's impressive that I know that, right? I mean, that's pretty cool?

Right? Pretty cool?

Sigh...yeah, I know.

If you need me, I'll be in my room reading my next fascinating book, the life story of World War I French general Joseph Joffre.

Don't act like you're not jealous.

Our Thanksgiving dinner table looked exactly the same every year in the 1970s and 80s...and the 90s...and the 2000s

 

Full disclosure: I stole the photo above from the folks at Bob Evans, who want you to know they're basically ready to cater your entire Thanksgiving if you'd like.

But in some ways that image isn't too dissimilar from the reality of my Thanksgivings growing up on Harding Drive. We had a lot of the same foods, and every year we would take a picture once they were all cooked and set out on the table.

The thing is, other than maybe some discoloration from the early years before film technology really evolved, you very likely couldn't tell the difference between the 1972 photo and the 1998 photo.

Or between any two years, really. This is because we ate the same stuff year after year, decade after decade.

Don't get me wrong, it was all tasty stuff, but it never varied.

Which was fine by me, though I always thought it was funny that we took pictures of the same table with the same tablecloth and the same platters of Thanksgiving deliciousness, with no regard to the fact that these images ended up being essentially photocopies of one another.

My mom was a great cook, but she also scored points for consistency.

Terry started attending our Thanksgiving dinners as a teenager. She found it strange that we had turkey and ham and roast beef as options, but we never had homemade pies (they were, she recalls, usually store-bought Marie Callender pies).

To be fair, I always thought it was odd that her family had side dishes like rutabaga on their Thanksgiving table, though for the record, I liked that rutabaga. Some years I think my mother-in-law Judy and I were the only two people who ate it.

Anyway, I miss the Thanksgivings of years past, probably because so many of the people who were there are now gone. So it goes.

I still don't think there's anything wrong with having multiple meats on Thanksgiving, though.

I expend inordinate amounts of mental energy making sure all of my devices are sufficiently charged

We live in a world of wonderfully advanced personal technology, at least compared with the largely analog one in which I grew up.

We have mobile phones, tablets, laptops, watches and sundry other gadgets designed to make our lives easier, and in some cases more fun.

You can argue whether these devices achieve their stated purpose, but one thing you can't argue is that they all require some sort of electrical power to operate.

I don't know how much of my brain is used to make sure all of my stuff is fully charged and operating throughout the day, but I bet it's an embarrassingly large amount. I constantly find myself wondering:

• "How's my phone battery doing? 30%? I'll never make it through tonight. Gotta charge it."
• "Will the iPad have enough battery life to last through this flight?"
• "When's the last time I charged my Powerbeats?"
• "Why is my watch always at 5% when I take it off at night? What am I doing all day that drains it so much?"

That kind of thing.

I'm forever looking around for charging cords and complaining that I need a new <INSERT DEVICE NAME HERE> because the battery doesn't last as long as it used to.

Speaking of which, there's a subtle art to prolonging device battery life. In the case of my personal laptop, I try to keep it charged between 20% and 80% because that's supposedly the "sweet spot" that keeps a lithium battery working most efficiently.

Or so I've read. This is one of those areas in which I'm relying on Internet strangers to tell me what I should do. (Increasing battery life and changing various filters on my car. Those are the two areas in which the world's collective online knowledge serves as my guide.)

I used to keep constant mental track of how my AirPods were doing charge-wise back when I was running and walking a lot. I rarely exercised without those little white headphones jammed into my ears.

Now that I go to the gym most days, though, I don't listen to music. And I'm not sure why. I like to concentrate on my lifts and making sure I'm using correct form, I guess.

I'm usually one of the only people at the gym not wearing some sort of headphones, I've noticed. I'm also frequently one of the oldest – if not THE oldest – person there.

I don't think this is a coincidence.

9/11 was the closest thing my generation has experienced to the JFK assassination

Today marks 61 years since President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in Dallas. Every year on this day I go back and read old news accounts of the assassination, and I watch Walter Cronkite's coverage of the event, including his emotional confirmation that the President had died.

It would be six more years before I was even born, so I of course did not experience JFK's death firsthand. But I've heard enough about it from my parents and siblings to get a sense of just how shocked the nation really was.

My brother Mark tells a story of having to play outside by himself later that week because so many families were keeping their kids inside, apparently as part of some unspoken, quiet and respectful mourning process.

Talk to any American who was a child on Friday, November 22, 1963, and they will likely have a story of being in school when the news broke. For many, it was the first and only time they saw their teachers show emotion, let alone cry.

The only point of reference I have as a Gen Xer is September 11, 2001, though I wasn't in school at the time but rather a 31-year-old father of four toiling away at my job in marketing communications at the Cleveland Clinic Children's Hospital for Rehabilitation.

One of the nurses came running down the hall past our office that morning saying, "They bombed the Pentagon!" While that wasn't strictly true, it did get my co-worker Heidi and I to turn on the TV to find out what had happened.

The first of the two World Trade Center towers had already come down, and we watched live as the second one fell, shockingly and unexpectedly.

Then we heard about the plane crashing into the Pentagon. That was quickly followed by rumors that another hijacked plane was flying near or above Cleveland, prompting the Clinic to shut down and send us all home.

That night our family attended a prayer service at church, then we waited in a long line at a Shell gas station amid speculation that the price of gas was going to spike above $5.00 the next day (it never did).

The parallels between JFK's assassination and 9/11 are somewhat obvious. In both cases, if felt like the world had changed forever.

But I get the sense that JFK's death was a bigger collective shock. Kennedy's election had brought a fresh new spirit to the United States. The aura of "Camelot" made him and his family objects of adulation by millions.

There hadn't been a presidential assassination in 62 years, since William McKinley was gunned down in Buffalo in 1901. There was no template for people on how they should react, how they should mourn, how they should speak.

Not that 9/11 wasn't horrifyingly unique in its own right. But we had been dealing with lower-level terrorist attacks for many years, both inside and outside of our borders. It was horrible, but it wasn't entirely out of the realm of possibility.

Not that it matters either way. Both events are seared into the brains of those who experienced them, and few will ever forget where they were and what they were doing when they got the news.

It's not the kind of thing you ever want to carry with you, but if you were there, there's simply no getting around it.

BLOG RERUN: One unfortunate side effect of full-time work is feeling disconnected from the day-to-day reality of your home

True to form, the AI Blog Post Image Generator created this surrealistic tableau when I prompted it with the phrase "busy household." Yet somehow I think it fits.

(I originally posted this on November 27, 2015. It still rings true.)

We are a single-income family. I go to work five (sometimes six) days a week, while my wife Terry stays home and runs the house. This is no small feat, considering that seven of us live there, but she does it well.

Or at least I assume she does it well, because I am rarely a witness to the daily operations of our household. I leave for work at 7 a.m. and am usually not home until somewhere between 6 and 7 p.m. In between, there's a whole bunch of stuff that happens without any input from me whatsoever.

Well, except the money. The money I earn funds the operation. But that's OK because I like it that way. As I always say, I am in charge of Accounts Receivable. My wife – who pays the bills and manages monetary outlays – has complete jurisdiction over Accounts Payable. This system works for me.

But on those days when I happen to be off or working from home, I get a glimpse into how one goes about helping to manage the lives of two college students, two high schoolers and a middle schooler. Terry is constantly running to and fro, packing lunches, helping with homework, reminding kids to do this assignment or practice that piece of music for band.

She spends much of her days driving to various schools to drop off forgotten soccer socks and misplaced trumpets. She runs errands and cleans the house. She serves as the Uniform Mom for the high school band, a never-ending job that requires gobs and gobs of hours and effort. 

She goes to daytime school events, emails teachers when there are issues to be addressed, and takes kids to various doctor and dentist appointments.

It's like this day after day after day after day.

And all the while I get only a glimpse into it. I hear about what's going on through hurried texts and quick afternoon check-in phone calls.

A typical conversation between Terry and me goes like this:

ME: So how was your day?

TERRY: <proceeds to rattle off 147 different things she did involving the kids>

ME: You did all that? Today?

TERRY: Yes.

ME: This Melanie person you mention. That's our ninth-grader, right?

And so on.

Don't get me wrong, this approach to life is a good one for us. Or at least it is for me, as I'm not the one having to serve as cook, maid, chauffeur and administrative assistant for six other people with crazy schedules. But I think Terry is OK with it, too.

It's just that all of these things happen without my knowing it, which makes me feel a bit disconnected from the reality. It's as if the family lives a separate life that I get to participate in for only a few short hours every night and on weekends.

Speaking of my family, if you see them, tell them I said hello. I miss them. And I'm fairly sure I know all of their names, too.

The chick magnet that was my 1984 velcro Men at Work wallet

 

My first wallet was very much like the one pictured above: an all-fabric, velcro-closing affair with the logo of the Australian band Men at Work prominently displayed on one side.

While Men at Work were a very, very big band in, say, the 1982-85 range, they were never a cool band in any sense. Nor, it must be said, were Velcro wallets ever particularly fashionable.

That wallet was an undeniable (almost defiant) confirmation of my dorkiness.

Yet I loved it. I really did.

Besides the fact that it touted my favorite musical group, it also suggested I was grown-up enough to need a wallet. Which, in fairness, I probably did. I would usually have a few bucks to put in it, thanks in part to my dad's continued generosity and in part to my job as a dishwasher at Tizzano's Restaurant.

That job, my first, paid $2.50 an hour. All under the table. Oh, and the owner of the restaurant, Mike, would make you anything you wanted to eat during your breaks.

I didn't have credit cards at the time, of course. And by the time I got my driver's license in November 1985, I had ditched the Men at Work wallet for something in plain black faux leather (i.e., the kind of folding wallet I still carry around today).

So my Velcro treasure keeper was never especially full.

But it was mine, and it told the world about my favorite band, which was good enough for me.

By the way, I took the image at the top of today's post from eBay, where as of this writing you had two choices if you wanted to buy your own vintage Men at Work Velcro wallet. One was going for a reasonable $19.95, while the other was priced at a somewhat overblown $49.96.

All of which goes to show that you can buy absolutely anything on the Internet...even if, by any standard of good judgment, you probably shouldn't.

Smaller pets are eternally babies, even when they're getting on in years

 

The feline in the photo above is Ginny, the oldest of our three cats and also – by a considerable margin – the smallest in stature.

Ginny (named after Ginny Weasley from the Harry Potter series) joined our family nine years ago this month. According to one online source I found, this makes her about 52 in human years.

Not a senior citizen, by any means, but a lot closer to old-cathood than she is to kittenhood.

Yet I still often think of Ginny as our youngest simply because she's so small. She just seems very kitten-like.

By the way, it's commonly thought that calico cats like Ginny are smaller than other cats simply by reason of being calicos. That's not true, though. It turns out calicos can range from small to large. The reason calicos tend to be smaller is that 99.9% of them are females, and female cats are naturally smaller than males.

Whatever the reason, Ginny will seem forever young any time she is near her two siblings: fat floofy Molly and svelte-yet-undeniably-masculine Cheddar.

When those three are physically close to one another (which isn't often, given their mutual distrust), Ginny always looks like the little kid tagging along with the big kids.

We are in a period of relatively good cat health in our house right now. We lost three of our kitties in one 16-month period between February 2022 and June 2023, so it's nice to have everyone looking and feeling good, especially when I realize how much we pay in vet bills when they're not looking or feeling good.

Still, whenever I see Ginny and realize she's going to be a decade old next fall, I remember what it's like when they start going downhill.

Not at all fun.

Which is why I choose to continue fooling myself and believing Ginny is in fact a kitten who will live forever.

It's better that way.