Cats & Dogs...

Never a cross word between them, each sister loves the other first and foremost, more than life itself.

OK, I’m lying. I mean they’re sisters for Pete’s sake.

(An Aside: Who is Pete? Google says the use is a euphemistic variant of “for Christ's sake”, invoking Saint Peter.)

Anyway, you get my point.

Both girls have now grown into strong, independent, women, successful in most ways that matter, but very different people.Same DNA, same environment growing up, but as opposite as cats and dogs. Other parents tell me the same thing, I hear it all the time. It’s curious how that happens so frequently.

No matter how close the kids are or aren’t, some degree of sibling rivalry is inherent and unavoidable though.

When I used to mount that bazooka of a VHS Camcorder on my shoulder to film them on Christmas mornings, I captured hours of film that is reminiscent of the stories vets tell me about their Vietnam experiences. Long hours of total boredom, interrupted by flashes of frenzied insanity. Those old tapes, since converted to CD’s, hold some of the most excruciating, mind-numbing video of nothing going on, ever filmed, occasionally interrupted by brief sparks of incriminating dirt worth watching.

Ruth would be all sweetness and smiles, totally sucking up to the camera and hogging the spotlight. Hannah is five years younger and in those days wanted to do everything her big sister did. So she would come toddling over to get in some camera time with sissy. Ruth smiled broadly into the lens, giving it her saccharine best, waiting for the slightest diversion to unceremoniously push Hannah down and out of the frame. Hannah was unable to pronounce the first letter of her words back then so in background you can hear a hurt whine, objecting to her sister’s nastiness: “Ditter, Ditter!” incredulous that she would be so brutally discarded.

Fast forward ten or eleven years when Ruth left the house to go see her friends. The front door closing after her was like a starting gun at the races for Hannah. She would break into her sister’s locked bedroom and ransack her closet. Ruth always liked clothes and Hannah liked a bargain, free was best. I don’t believe Ruth ever did find out what happened to those tall suede boots of hers.

A few years later after Carla and I moved to a new house, and the girls took over the old one, housemates. Hannah was a nightmare of independence that observed no house rules, hours, private property, or any expectation of “normal” civil behavior.

Ruth is like me, quiet, orderly, and somewhat predictable. Hannah like her mom, out of the box, spontaneous, with no embarrassment button or governor on her speed.

Spending time with Ruth is soothing, quiet, intelligent and rejuvenating. I’ve always said that spending time with Hannah is like being sealed in a jar with a beautiful hornet.

These days, Hannah is miffed that Ruth follows other yogis on Instagram, but doesn’t even follow her own sister. Hannah sees it as a lack of support. Ruth is tired of people asking: “Oh, are you hannahgypsyon’s sister?” Ruth wants to be known as Ruth.

When it comes to siblings though, we all have our cross to bear. When I went to my 25th High School reunion, (26 years ago TYVM), I was frequently asked by my own classmates: “Wow, are you Kenny Haller’s brother?” Kenny and I were like Ruth and Hannah. He was a bit of a wild-man, well known by the guys, girls, and the police. Mr. Excitement, I studied fruit flies in my bedroom.

So I didn’t make a splash, and he did, but still, when my own classmates asked if I was Kenny Haller’s brother like I may have some kind of a celebrity connection, was bad. It was the only thing that may prevent them from immediately turning away and going to the bar. 

Pretty depressing, I understand, Ruth.

At the end of the day (another over-used cliché) Kenny and I are blood. Ruth and Hannah are too.

I just hope they both remember that when we all share a B&B for a week next month in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

I want to feel safe when I eat food in the house or walk to the bathroom in the dark. No ex-lax cookies, no toilets covered with Saran wrap. They’ve outgrown that kind of thing, right?

My hope is that Ruth’s shoes all go back home with Ruth, in her own suitcase, and no one asks if she is hannahgypsyons sister, and that when Hannah is spotted doing handstands on the top spire of the Cathedral, Ruth applauds along with everyone else.

My prayer is that we all just laugh and have a great time, even if we have to pretend to be close and like each other.

We need to keep up appearances, the way all nice families should.

Rape or drunken consensual? She was 15 and he was older. The law calls it rape regardless of the circumstances. One more of the “me too” crowd, chiming in 15 years after the fact. Somebody’s daughter, some daddy’s little girl.

This one happened to be mine.

Hannah is 30 now, living an exceptional life of teaching and travel. Acroyoga workshops around the globe. But it’s her Instagram following that allows her the freedom she has always taken, one way or another. Sponsors pay her to wear their clothes, stay at their resort, maybe sit on their couch, now her couch. Just mention it in a video, and with internet speed, hundreds of thousands of her followers see the product. It’s a powerful new face of advertising that reaches huge target markets, relatively inexpensively. Most of her followers are female, 15 to 45. Lots of videos of “flying” with her “base”, yes, but perhaps more impactful, are her words.

Writing to her base, observations, conclusions, stream-of-consciousness revelations, answers and questions to the crowd…Hannah touches many lives in some very positive ways.

Here’s one from last night. It’s uncomfortable for me to read; I never knew about it. On one hand I’m a little hurt that she didn’t confide in me 15 years ago. On the other, it may have been for the best. As her dad, I would have felt the need to “do” something about it. Fuck up the guy in some way or blow the whistle to the cops. Either one would have only served to give me some satisfaction at the expense of prolonging the hurt to her, simultaneously inviting public shaming and humiliation to surround her travels in this town. Maybe it’s best I didn’t know.

She gets many hundreds of responses to these things. I’m appalled at how many of her peeps have said “me too”. Same experience when I was 14, 15, they say. 

Hannah has already given me permission to repost anything she puts up. 

This is pretty raw and made me think twice about reposting it, but she has already shared it with a half million people, guess a handful more is just one very small step forward, in the right direction.

I could feel her body relax, releasing all connection to the conscious world, immediately after she slipped into her side of the bed. Sliding up behind her, fitting like two interlocking puzzle pieces, I let go too. Although I had been about to get up and start my day, savoring the moment held me back. 

Lying with her there in the dark, as I have for more than 40 years, still filled me with an almost giddy excitement. It’s always been the thing I loved most, just having her with me, next to me, in our bed, together.

Everything else takes a back seat. Dog water that needed to changed, the call I have to make first thing: “Hi, Greta, I want to adjust my auto insurance and the deduction.” The never ending “to do” list that insists on a front row seat in the light of day, tugging at my shirt, demanding attention, all of it  melting away in that moment of hushed intoxication as we lay safe under the armor of flannel sheets and a tattered blue bedspread.

10, 9, 8, 7, 6...

When we found that the SpaceX rocket was scheduled to launch yesterday morning, Pablo and I were both excited to go see it up close.

And no, Pablo doesn’t speak Spanish. His name is Paul. Apparently his mother called him Pablo for some reason and it stuck. He’s a bit of a tech-geek, a former “Remote Cross Platform Mobile Application Developer” whateverthatmeans and unless you have many extra hours to spend, never, I mean never ever, ask him about bitcoin. A very bright, sweet guy who develops content with Hannah for her massive Instagram following and acts as her “base” in their Acroyoga practice and workshops. Not easy. She’s a self-admitted “bossy flier”. But No Habla Espanol, mainly Habla bitcoin, and tech stuff.

On the drive down for the 10:36am lift off, Google told us that admission to the Kennedy Space Center was $50 per adult, although you get $4.00 off if you are old and creepy. Carla isn’t either of those things but since I double up on both, it would have been $192. for the four of us. The promo said that we should count on spending several days there to really take it all in. Carla had to work last night, Hannah and Pablo had a workshop to teach, and I need to be all diapered up and in bed by 7:30, so we decided to pass.

The second best spot to watch the show, other than the Kennedy Space Center itself, is at Space View Park. It’s on the shore of the Indian River, immediately opposite the launch pads, so that’s where we landed.

Pablo was bummed that he wasn’t close enough to be shaken, rattled and rolled and have his hair all singed off, but was a good sport about it anyway.

We had a perfect viewing spot, the day sunny, mostly clear, and hot enough in the direct sunlight that I lingered back under the shade of a large oak until just before liftoff.

The excitement was palatable in the crowd as the countdown began, everyone chanting along: T minus 20, 19, 18, 17…

No dummy, I had already asked some local dude which of the platforms we could see silhouetted against the sky was #40, where the SpaceX rocket was, so I knew exactly where to focus.

Standing behind a shady military monument with my eyes fixed on pad #40, the entire crowd started to cheer at liftoff…but I couldn't see shit. It turns out the local guy didn’t know his head from a tater so I had positioned myself in exactly the wrong place, with my view of the awesome fires of liftoff entirely blocked by the military monument. I was looking one way while the crowd was oohing and aahing looking in an entirely different direction… the right way. Sharp guy that I am, when the rocket started to visibly clear the monument and I saw fire in the sky, the rocket mostly traveled straight up behind the flagpole immediately centered behind the monument base. It was like watching a flagpole eclipse, the tall black shadow of the flagpole silhouetted by rocket flames shooting out from both sides. That was cool, but I couldn’t see the damn rocket itself and the people around me were too tightly packed for me to move. With the flagpole shadow centered on my face only, completely blocking my view, I made appreciative sounds along with the crowd, just to fit in.

The real show for me though was the SpaceX return and soft landing five minutes later. The resulting sonic boom was deafening. I didn’t have to light any of the cherry bombs I had brought for back-up if it failed to impress.

Seeing the rocked descend and land like that was the real-life, Technicolor version of the cheesy black and white science fiction movies I so loved as a kid. Buster Crabbe (Google it, youngsters) would have been proud.

Experienced camera guy that I am, I captured it all on my iPhone, but for some reason it looks like a close up of the back of some guy’s head.

Here’s the real deal, shot by someone in the crowd with us at Space View Park yesterday. Their photo doesn’t look like the back of some guy’s head though. 

They must have had a much better camera than I do.

Avoiding A Facade Lifestyle...

Urban sprawl kept pushing us farther away from the city, necessitating a one-hour commute to my office in downtown D.C.

Five days a week, I became just another tight collar in a Lemming hoard circling the Beltway, chasing our tails, down and back.

By 1984, when we moved in, that old log cabin was riddled with small gaps in the chinking. Any strong wind could blow out a candle burning inside. Built as a poor man’s house on land that had been a grant from Lord Fairfax, it hadn’t improved on its ability to hold the heat in wintertime since the day that farmer first hung a door on his new home, 260 years prior.

Both feet flirting with the kerosene heater while doing my best to keep Ruth warm, I was in love with the place. Our choice had been between a modern townhouse or this old cabin where the water pipes froze solid each winter and keeping warm was a challenge to our ingenuity that we gladly accepted.

I was tired of apartment living, way too much like overpopulated gerbil cages stacked atop one another. Tired of rush hour parking lots that had the audacity to call themselves streets. There was no rush about it.

Leaving my button down, chrome and glass office on “K” Street every weekday afternoon was pure joy, like being sprung from jail, and motoring directly back home to Camp, Waywayonda.

That cabin, and the Civil War era farm house built onto it, sat in a clearing surrounded by woods that had belonged to the Loudoun Timber company since the late 1800’s. There had been no logging, no activity, and we had no neighbors.

All that came to an end as the area was snatched up to make way for a huge master community, hundreds of McMansions built side by side. Monolith tract homes offered towering three story foyers that opened up to grand staircases, all intended to impress. Vacuous form over function. For me, the impressive part was in the sheer volume of the genetic duplicates and the willingness of customers with an extra million or so, happy to buy into that facade lifestyle.

The Catholic Church made us the proverbial offer we couldn’t refuse. With everything natural being stripped away around us, we took the money and moved farther West.

An elaborate Rectory sits on the spot where the church plowed the protected property under in the dark of night.

That cabin may be long gone, but my memory of snuggling with Ruth while daring a smelly kerosene heater to light my outstretched feet on fire, is very much still burning, alive and well.

Be The Change...

The first time I heard the phrase “Be the change you want to see in the world”, it was from my daughter, Ruth. She walks the walk, putting in many hours every week, trying to help in places where hope is hard to come by.

It’s been over a year now since Ruth took on a new challenge, taking on an unpopular social need with a Syrian family. They couldn’t navigate the maze of American culture and legal demands without a strong and dedicated advocate. They, and she, have walked a gauntlet of virtual abuse, experiencing first-hand the hate and prejudice that our current administration seems to champion. They’ve also seen the flip side, the welcoming love and support that is inherent in our DNA as Americans.

I couldn’t be more proud, not just because she is my daughter, but because she is one of the many in this country who still believe in the words of a different lady who has championed countless millions of immigrants who also needed a helping hand.

"Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”

This is a look at Ruth’s most recent visit with her Syrian friends…

A few weeks ago I was hanging out with my Syrian friends, and one of the little boys, age 8, was trying to tell me about something he had eaten recently. The English word for it was on the tip of his tongue. In one years’ time, their English is astonishingly good, and it’s endearing when they forget a word, and struggle to find it. “Muffin... toast.... DOUGHNUT!! That’s it! I had a doughnut! Mmmm, it was so good!” He went on and on about a first for him, eating a doughnut.

Tonight I came armed with two dozen assorted Krispy Kreme doughnuts. We all sat on the floor, kneecap to kneecap, and shared a huge home cooked meal, as per usual (to them “No thank you, I’m not hungry” means a 4 course meal instead of a 6 course) and swapped jokes and stories. The kids proudly showed me their most recent tests, they are all thriving in school, all happy and well adjusted, and although I can take zero credit for it, I am overwhelmingly proud of them. The love in their family is palpable.

After dinner, we stuffed ourselves with doughnuts. And then, they brought out a small cake they had made. “Happy birthday!” little Fasial, age 6, shouted. “But it’s not my birthday!” I laughed. The older girl, age 15 explained, “We don’t really know what to call it, but it’s one year since we met you, and we love you so we wanted to celebrate it.”

And, as I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, for once it was me that struggled to find words.