Fungible Convictions

You weren’t that easy.

“I’m not much of a talker.”

Matter of fact, people took that to mean you were tough — as in a nut to crack.

Yet it was a crack, in your voice, that I’ll remember about you most, two words offered to the air at Grandma’s memorial — “Oh, Nina.” — like you’d arced an arrow over our family and it’s taken all these years for it to find a place to land.

You weren’t that easy, but you were so very good to us. I’m glad you’re where you want to be now, getting your well-deserved reward…she must be thrilled:

It may be August, but I have to start prepping material to drive my mother-in-law insane at Christmas.

Me: “Toots, explain ‘Christmas Is Coming’. You’ve got a fatted goose. But you’re telling me to put a penny in the old man’s cap? Not even…you’re saying put in half a penny. And if I don’t have half a penny, just say ‘god bless you’? BUT YOU’VE GOT A FATTED GOOSE. At least give the guy part of the drumstick.”

Michael (father-in-law): “You know the Kingston Trio did a version of that song. It’s all about booze.”

Scorecard from the Puff ‘n Putt, Montauk, NY. [Large version.]

Four months ago, in a private post, I wrote about the frustration of searching for a house and doubting whether our then-two, soon-to-be-three failed offers were a sign we were being too rational:

[W]e’d probably be in a house by now if we let irrationality take over just once—if we reacted with a crazy excited emotion to a perfect kitchen while ignoring the crap elementary school, the old boiler, and the hand-carved headstones in the basement marking where cat corpses have been buried in the foundation. And after twelve and a half months, I don’t know if our—especially my—adherence to auditable decision-making has been a good thing or bad thing.

It was a good thing!

Yesterday, Lindsay and I closed on a great house.

It’s a single-family house; on a semi-dead-end street (the street runs up to a major park but winds just a bit to connect to another small road); we’re a short walk to the great elementary school, to bus stops, to good friends’ new house, to a BBQ joint. In fact, we’re bookended by BBQ: there’s the restaurant down on the main road, and our friends tell us the town has barbecues in the park.

The year of bad luck came in handy to make the good. Our three prior failed offers meant we knew exactly what to pay (we beat out eight other offers) and we had all our paperwork in perfect order, making for a quick P&S…so that when an offer $18,000 above ours came in two days later, it could only be relegated to backup offer status.

We’ve met a few neighbors and have been offered babysitting services already (one step at a time, folks).

The house itself indeed needs work, but nothing overly terrifying. We’ll have to replace the hot water heater. We needed a structural inspection to make sure the cracks in the foundation needed simple sealing—which they do—rather than major work. And in the grand tradition of my house-hunting spreadsheet, I’ve already made a home-improvements spreadsheet with the 80 tiny items mentioned in the inspection.

<Side note>
If you’re looking for a stellar inspector, go with Morgan Cohen. Our family was warning us that most inspections aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, but then they saw Morgan’s report…so yeah, go with him, though only if you’re good at letting the sheer number of things he finds wash over you and concentrate on the things that need addressing immediately.
</Side note>

Besides the mortgage aspect of “adult stuff we haven’t had to handle before”, there are some other things. We’ll have an energy audit so we can be eligible for tax incentives when we switch to gas heat. We hired movers well ahead of time and will pay them in cash rather than hire friends two days before and pay them in pizza. We have to learn new vocabulary: flashing, disposal gasket, soft mortar joint, and, most importantly, “get the scotch, your father just finished the sheetrock”.

But after so very long, so many open houses, so many offers, we have the house we were looking for.

Written by a fellow Georgetown Prep alum…

A Tale of Two Reunions
By John Michael Keeley, ’85

On the surface, we were just like the hundreds of other alumni who returned to Prep for Reunion Weekend last year. We cheered the lacrosse victory over Landon, we marveled at the dazzling improvements to campus, and we smiled and hugged and laughed over dinner and drinks and so many great memories.

But your 25th high school reunion is different, we in the Class of 1985 learned. It’s more poignant and bittersweet than you can imagine—a true marker in middle life—and the intensity of the emotional experience was almost lost on many of us. Because before we could convene and commiserate and celebrate as a class, we had to find one another.

You see, the Class of 1985 didn’t spend the prior quarter century connected. We didn’t come of age with Facebook and LinkedIn. Cell phones and the internet? They weren’t widely available until we’d been out of Prep for 10 years. In those analog years of our early adulthood, the Laws of Maturing were inexorable, even for the many of us who remained in the DC area. Colleges, graduate schools, jobs, marriages, children—like the imperceptible forces that shift tectonic plates, the mile markers of our lives drove us far apart from each other and from Prep, so gently and gradually that most of us didn’t notice.

That all changed last March, dramatically, joyously, some might even say insanely—but, all of us certainly hope, permanently as well. The Class of 1985 was blessed and cursed to have one of its own return to Prep as Director of Development and Alumni Affairs just six weeks before our 25th Reunion. And it didn’t take long for him to demonstrate how serious he was about reuniting us.

The e-mails and Facebook messages and phone calls and texts started coming immediately, at all hours of the day and night, humorous, sincere, and, above all, relentless. The message took many forms, but it always boiled down to this: “You need to be at Reunion. Your classmates need you. Prep needs you.”

What began as one man’s amusing quest to track down classmates quickly became a coalescing cause. Class agents Jimmy Molloy and Chip Purcell signed on instantly. And then Anthony Calamitsis, and Rick Valencia, and Keith Marino, and Leonard Lee, and Derek Mackey, and Ninat Lekagul, and David Fending, and Bill Napier, and Vince Fiorentino, and so many other classmates who hadn’t been in touch with each other or the school for as many as 25 years.

We dug out old phone books. We spent countless hours on websites like Facebook, whitepages.com, and peoplefinders.com. We called classmates’ college alumni offices. We called their parents. Alvaro Anillo actually went knocking on doors. Even the lawyers among us searched on sophisticated law firm databases—and didn’t charge a single billable hour. As the ranks of “lost” classmates got shorter and the list of Reunion attendees grew longer, the shared obsession grew exponentially.

Classmates with unbreakable scheduling conflicts broke them. Family plans set months before were shifted or scrapped. Fate intervened when the volcanic ash plume that crippled transatlantic travel canceled Joel Wells’s business trip to London, and ingenuity was rewarded when Henry McGovern figured out a way to get around it to travel from Poland.

Something magical was happening, something none of us had ever experienced, and we began awaiting each e-mail report of a found classmate or a new Reunion registration with nothing short of childlike wonder. In that environment of giddy anticipation, a little more than one week before Stag Night, every single one of us was crushed.

Loren Chen, an outstanding student, talented wrestler, and friend to all, had died 2 ½ years prior, in a car accident the day after Thanksgiving 2007; it was the same day, it turned out, that Father Galvin died. The news brought shock and sorrow, and more than a little bit of anger. How could one of us die unbeknownst to each other? How could such a small group have grown so far apart?

And then the emotions hardened into resolve. Ten classmates who’d been doubtful signed up over the next two days. By Stag Night, we had located 85 of our surviving 91, more than double the list Prep had when we started. In all, 44 of us attended, more than any Reunion Class, and more than another 20 of our classmates sent deeply heartfelt regrets. But we did have two special guests. Loren’s mom, Claudia, and his brother, Ming, moved us with their memories of Loren, who became a chemist at NIH after attending Georgetown, and the stories he told his family about us each night at dinner way back then. In honor of our graduation year, we had wanted to raise $85,000 as a Reunion Class Gift. We ended up raising $95,000—a new Prep record—and made the gift in memory of Loren.

We learned a lot more, too. No fewer than four of our class brothers had battled insidious, physique-maiming strains of cancer. Two of our classmates had actually been given last rites. Four men from a class of 92 battling cancer before the age of 40 is a statistical absurdity. Miraculously, all four survived and were on campus that amazing April weekend last year. A class that never won the IAC in football, basketball, or baseball was undefeated against cancer, and determined to never grow far apart again.

One year later, the smart-alecky e-mails and Facebook messages and text messages are still flying around, laced with plenty of invites to happy hour and to baseball games and to trade business opportunities. Classmates have been meeting up all over the States, even overseas. And now we’re planning a 26th Reunion, with golf and a cookout at Prep in June, because we never want more than a year to go by without an opportunity for all of us to gather again.

It turns out that our 25th Reunion was more a resumption, of a special shared experience that was always there and always will be. You can leave Prep, but Prep will never leave you. We know this now, and know that it’s in every one of you and your classmates, as well. Your commitment to Reunion can and should begin before the special weekend’s arrival, and if you commit, the rewards will carry forward in a powerful, renewed bond.

So heed our story and take this final bit of friendly advice, one Prep alumnus to another: You need to be at Reunion. Your classmates need you. Prep needs you.

To see the schedule for Reunion Weekend 2011 and sign up for the events, some of which are open to all alumni, regardless of graduation year, please click here.

For my birthday, Linsday got us both tickets to an Irish whiskey tasting class at the Boston Center for Adult Education down on Arlington St. We went last night.

The instructor, Randall Bird, was pretty damn great. As I told him in the email below, he would have fit in perfectly at any hackin’-the-breeze conversation at MIT:

Dear Randall,

Lindsay and I just wanted to thank you for the great class last night (it was her birthday present to me in fact!).

The depth of your knowledge — particularly your interest in doing your own metalworking to go with your own distilling — reminded me of some colleagues at MIT…which is why I ended up asking about the source of [whiskey ingredient] supplies last night.

Guys at MIT created this tool called Sourcemap, which maps supply chains of consumer goods, and one of the first things they did with it was to go to brewers in the Scottish highlands and islands to show how setting up a local bottling cooperative was a better use of their money than shipping everything to England. Check out this video around the 5:00 mark to see what they mean:

It’s also interesting how open supply chains cut both ways…Diageo may want to obscure the fact that their grain comes from Argentina, but Office Depot just signed up to use Sourcemap to prove to buyers that their recycled paper really is 100% recycled.

Best, and thanks again for holding the class,

Andrew

Bird also just started announced whiskey/food pairing events at the Artistan’s Asylum, a studio/hackerspace in Somerville, with Monday 7-9pm being the first time I think. Lindsay and I definitely recommend it if you can make it Monday or sometime in the future.

From “Functional” on the album Thelonious Himself by Thelonious Monk. “Functional” is one of those songs you play for a good friend and then make things all awkward by saying, “This is the song I want played at my funeral.”

I’ve played guitar for about sixteen years, and being a self-taught, by-ear, messer-arounder, I’ve almost certainly developed awful habits.

I say “almost certainly” because I honestly don’t know. And after seeing my acoustic guitar crack where the neck meets the body because I never learned how to maintain my instruments, I’m finally going to start asking the stupid questions I should have been asking all along.

First up: in this little one-off recording of “Cunla” I made tonight, is it normal to sometimes hear the upper half of steel strings when I hammer on? It can be awfully dissonant. But is that just how things work when you play fast single notes on a steel-string acoustic?

Click to listen: Cunla (excerpt in single pass)

I’d really appreciate any comments…

Sav-Mor Liquors, next to the Whole Foods on Rt. 16 in Medford. Sav-Mor’s signs are good for guffaws year ’round.