Author: Peter Watkins

It Gives One Pause and a Little Tug

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20061 Comment

Dear Will:

Earlier this month my father turned 83. My mother’s 80th birthday is in about 10 days. So imagine my excitement when they told me they had decided to take a trip to Turkey. Their plane left this morning.

My parents enjoy traveling, but Turkey was never really on their list. However, when my sister’s husband, who works for the military, found himself assigned to a military base there, my parents’ vacation priorities shifted. Flying to Turkey is the sort of thing that parents do, apparently, especially when there are a passel of grandkids involved. Even when you’re in your eighties.

As you well know, that bond between parent and child is a strong one, not typically muted by passing years. Consider, for instance, that my sister Susan was born over 40 years ago. She has long since “left the nest.” Meanwhile my parents are really beginning to show their age, having fought battles with cancer and strokes and even a couple of knee replacement surgeries. Given those facts, it’s not hard to construct a pretty good case against this trip. Believe me, I tried. But even though my father acknowledged that this trip probably wasn’t the best idea, they would not be dissuaded. Their course was set and their cause was clear: One of their babies—and that baby’s babies—couldn’t make it home for holidays (much less Sunday dinners), and they didn’t want to wait any longer to hug and hold each one of them and admire the refrigerator art of a my sister’s five children.

That tug of affection across generations is an eternal verity, a manifestation of the ineffable bond linking son to father to grandfather and on. Even before the days of Christ, Malachi spoke of the hearts of fathers turning to their children, and the hearts of children turning to their fathers. It is that selfsame spirit which leads the curious to embark on a passionate search for ancestors, the resulting family tree branching back into history a dozen generations or more. It’s an amazing phenomenon.

I’ve had all of this on my mind lately, and not just because my elderly parents are traveling half-way across the world when they might be better off sitting on the sofa and watching the NCAA Tournament (my Bruins are in the Final Four!) You see, just last week I received via email an electronic copy of my wife’s genealogy and discovered that someone, by some means, has traced her heritage back into the 1500s. That’s over 400 years worth of family foliage, a staggering amount of research and a humbling glimpse of one’s past. As I stared at the screen of my computer I was in awe:

Christopher Worrilow – Born, 1579, Haughton, Staffordshire, England; died in 1605 [so young!], a year or so after his son John was born. He and his wife Margery died on the same day.

Wouldn’t you love to know how they died, and who raised little John, and the answers to half a dozen other questions? I don’t even know where to begin such an inquiry, but I do know this: The Internet has now made it possible even for a hack like me to tinker with family history. (You should check out familysearch.org—wow!) At any rate, it does give one pause—and a little tug—as eternal forces compel us to try to pull together our families across continents and cultures and many generations.

PW

Paruntz on the Fritz

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2006Leave a comment

Dear Will:

My laptop is on the fritz. I will resist the temptation to bore you with the aggravating details and spare you an unpleasant accounting of my interaction with technicians who don’t speak English and a service center run by apparent morons. Instead I suggest we spend these few moments together considering the sad state of an otherwise useful phrase such as “on the fritz.”

Does anyone actually say “on the fritz” anymore? As it came off of my fingers there in the first paragraph, it occurred to me that I hadn’t said it or read it since the Carter Administration, and even then it surely must have sounded a bit dated. The last time I used it, in fact, I may have thought to myself, “Now there’s a spiffy little phrase”—even though surely nothing had truly been spiffy, or even nifty for that matter, since the Truman Administration. Those words were stuck on a dusty shelf along with “on the fritz,” replaced since then by other manifestations of cool, such as misspelling wurdz for effect (although I confess that the effect on me is an unintended one).

What exactly is the provenance of “on the fritz” anyway? It seems to suggest that there’s just the one fritz out there, apparently overloaded with all of our broken-down junk. “On the fritz” is where you put something that isn’t working right, right? I pity the original Fritz for whom this particular idiom was named. How badly do you have to muck things up for them to name a negative idiom for you?

(Aside: I suspect that things have not been “mucked up” since Calvin Coolidge was in the White House, but that’s another matter altogether.)

No doubt I learned “on the fritz” from my parents, (or should I say paruntz?). I’ve noticed that we do that to our kids, and I’m not sure it’s fair. Let me give you an example: Around our house, when you give someone a little playful goose in the keister (another word I learned from Mom and Dad), we say that you have given that person “woobs.” It’s a word I invented (or at least, I think I did) when my firstborn was a little guy. (I don’t even know how to spell woobs since it doesn’t rhyme with any real word. Even now, as I look at it, I know that you are mispronouncing it, as if it rhymed with “tubes,” for example. My guess is it needs some of those weird European vowels, like this: wöôbs.) The point is that at some future date my poor unsuspecting kids will leave home and discover (to their horror) two things:

  1. It is not socially acceptable to goose those around you. It’s rude in fact. Inappropriate. Generally not good.
  2. There are only 5 people (all relatives) who use the word woobs. Everyone else sticks to plain English.

At which point my kids will probably wonder why, with so many wonderful people in the world, God stuck them with us. And they’ll think to themselves: “Those two have been on the fritz since Clinton was President.”

PW

Living in Fear of Parked Cars

On By Peter WatkinsIn 2006Leave a comment

Dear Will:

Consider yourself warned: My son Luke (15) has started to drive. Like any rational being, I face this prospect with dread and foreboding. And with good reason:

  1. I was 15 once. I remember what a good driver I was when I had a learner’s permit . . . or even a year later when I had a driver’s license for that matter. I vaguely recall running over curbs and bashing in some guy’s passenger side door. (All right, I admit it: I vividly recall those humiliations.) After failing my first driver test, I passed the second time by the thinnest of margins—and the evaluator told me he regretted that he had to give me a passing score. I was a danger to anyone near a paved road in the San Gabriel Valley. You should feel lucky to have lived through it.
  2. I’ve spoken to my insurance company. My premiums are going to go up a couple of grand about six months from now. The alternative is to buy an old junker, cover it for liability only, and put Luke on the vehicle instead. Know anybody with a $2,000 car that runs great?

I now find myself a passenger in my own car, which I hate. It takes much longer to get anywhere now that the driver is often going below the speed limit. And don’t get me wrong: Luke is turning out to be a genuinely OK driver, but there’s something about his tendency to drift to the right (where all of the cars are parked) that for some reason makes it hard for me to relax and enjoy the ride. He also hasn’t yet mastered the art of checking his mirrors and blind-spot before switching lanes—let’s just say it keeps me alert.

I’m sure that the day will come when I am thrilled that he can drive himself to jiu-jitsu and early morning Seminary (hooray!), but in the interim my beard is growing grayer by the day. I would anticipate my hair falling out in clumps had it not all fallen out in clumps on its own several years ago.

I can’t help but wonder if my state of unease (and occasional terror) is in any way akin to what our Heavenly Father must feel as He watches us career through life with little regard for the basic rules of the road. Wouldn’t we all just love for Him to simply take the wheel and deliver us where He wants us to go? But alas, it doesn’t work that way, does it? We must find our own way, mastering the skills required to navigate the roads of life on our own—come what may.

Perhaps that analogy is a bit hokey, but you can’t blame me for having a heightened awareness of an imminent afterlife. After all, now that I’m in the passenger seat there isn’t much separating me from those parked cars over on Hewes Avenue!

PW