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The divorce rate in the United States has been reported in the 40-50% range for as long as I’ve been paying attention. That range is too low.
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Boathouse shindigs are my kind of parties. Years ago, we were at a barbeque in someone’s backyard when one of the children of the host fell going up their deck stairs and needed stitches. The hosts both left with their child, and the rest of the party goers pulled together to put away the food and clean up the party. While picking up cups and dishes, I knocked a full glass of red wine left on the fireplace hearth onto their white living room carpet. That experience is why I’ve always appreciated cleanup at the boathouse. It is more of a covered patio. It is elevated with a walk-in basement below, but the party area is a concrete slab with a roof overhead–perfect for spring and autumn nights. And also, perfect for cleanup. A pushbroom, and snow shovel for a dustpan, and maybe some spot mopping, and the renter gets their security deposit back.
At a recent church event hosted at the boathouse, I was hanging around waiting for cleanup to start. My wife, Sheri, works at the church, and as is the case with most nonprofit organizations that depend on volunteer labor, the spouses of the employees were voluntold to help clean up. Just like I witnessed the bizarre behavior of the teens when the boathouse was used for homecoming, I leaned against the boathouse wall and watched a peculiar ritual of young adulthood with which I was painfully familiar. The twenty and thirty somethings were well lubricated, and the alcohol gave me a glimpse of how the reserved professionals and parents behaved when they dropped their shields of decorum. Listen, nothing debaucherous took place at the boathouse, much to my disappointment. If people are going to let loose and compile regrets for the morning, I want to see something worthy of my penchant for storytelling. I was left disappointed in that regard.
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The boathouse in Wash Park has a long and storied history. I mean, it must, right? I’ve never looked into it, but it looks old, and it’s definitely the anchor of the park, the neighborhood, maybe the whole southeast side of Denver. It is the hub of the Independence Day bicycle parade, couples get married there, and it is an easy meeting spot for people walking together in the park.
But it doesn’t house any boats. Maybe they store the floating plastic paddle swans under it in the winter, but for all of its iconic grandeur, they ought to have an old Mississippi riverboat cemented into the lakeshore next to it.
A riverboat would make a nice backdrop for homecoming dance pictures for the high school adjacent to the south side of the park. We are in the midst of a universally acknowledged, social-media-exacerbated, mental-health epidemic, so the homecoming dance sounds like a great way to encourage our young people to spend face-to-face time together. And it is. I am pro hoco. But as I leaned on the boathouse Saturday night, trying to stay out of the way and not brush against any of the girls who seemed to have shopped for dance gowns in the lingerie department, it occurred to me that the predance picture ritual might not be helping.
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Waymo cars driven by humans are techno-mapping the streets of Denver. Local TV ads are recruiting D.P.D. officers to fulfill their destinies and become ICE agents (read that sentence in your best James Earl Jones voice). There are over eight billion people on the planet, but a handful of lunatics possess nuclear codes that could wipe us all out. People get their news from platforms that also allow us to sell our old air fryer or garden hose to our neighbors. I miss plays at the high school football game because I get distracted by the drones filming the action. And I just want to go deep in the mountains and build a lean-to out of sticks and mud.
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She looked at the back seat of my open-top, two-door Jeep Wrangler and asked, “How do I get in?” Her face lit up with delight as she watched her bandmate step on the back bumper, throw a leg over the roll bar, and plop into the seat next to hers. “You mean I can just climb in? Ooh fun!”
My youngest kid’s high school band played at halftime of the Colorado State University football game Saturday night. Just before the performance, my son texted asking if we could take a couple of other kids home when the bus got back to Denver around midnight? I didn’t recognize one of the names, so I asked for cross streets to gauge against my feelings of hospitality. I’m a nice guy, but I’m not building a resume for sainthood. And I follow the Herm Edward’s doctrine that nothing good ever happens after midnight. She lived close, so I “generously” agreed.
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I bought a rubber stamp from a door-to-door rubber stamp salesman once. It was early in our whole grain bread bakery career–maybe 2005. He was wearing a suit and tie long after Friday business casual had seeped into the other four days of the week. He carried a brief case that he opened on our bakery counter. It didn’t actually have briefs in it at all. He had dozens of rubber stamps in little molded foam compartments. He had big stamps that said, “PAST DUE,” in all caps, and small round stamps that said, “Have a nice Day!” in letters arched around a smiley face. He had stamps with rotating numbers so you could adjust the date, and stamps with custom corporate logos. Of course, he had bottles of various colors of ink, and ink pads with lids to keep the ink from drying out.
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When Sheri was pregnant with our first child, we decided we needed a safer, more sensible family-oriented car. Nothing like pregnancy to open our eyes to the death-tempting lifestyle we’d been socially conditioned to accept. You might have thought we were lion tamers or sword swallowers, not an inside sales representative and his bank-teller wife.
It must be fun to sell cars when a young couple enters the dealership with bright eyes and bushy tails, and maybe a little drool forming at the corners of their mouths to offset the sparkle of innocent naivety in their eyes. I came prepared with my internet printouts from the KBB website determined to get the best of my adversary in his clip-on tie and rubber-soled wingtips. We found a car we liked, and as we started the negotiation process, our salesman pointed to another couple sitting with one of his coworkers at a similar showroom desk. He said the couple was interested in the same car, and that it was the only one with those features in inventory. As Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” I think I offered $500 over sticker. The ink wouldn’t come out of the pen fast enough as I hastily wrote the biggest check of my young-adult life. My bride was impressed. With the salesman. Through the years, I justified my impetuous overpayment by reminding myself that the car had clearly protected our baby from all the untamed lions in Minnesota.
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I subscribed my wife, Sheri, to a paid Spotify account for her birthday several years ago. To help you gauge how incredibly cheap I really am, I think a Spotify account is like $10 a month. Or maybe $15. Or maybe it was $10 back then, and now it’s $15. Anyway, the point is, $10 a month took thoughtful consideration for me. “That’s $120 a year, don’t you know. Why can’t you use the free version? Do you really need to be able to create playlists? Can’t you just sit by your boombox and press the cassette record button when the radio plays your favorite songs like the seasoned Gen-Xer you are?” Generosity just oozes from my thoughtful consideration.
This gift for Sheri allows for three logins using the same username and password. I immediately signed my phone into her account, and within a week, I found another of my devices I could use to occupy the third loggin. Happy birthday, Sheri. I’ll be commandeering 2/3rds of your cheap-ass gift.
Believe it or not, that’s not the end of the Spotify story.
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“Did your mother ever have any kids that lived?” I’ve always loved that insult from the classic 1986 movie, Stand By Me. Not only did Vern recover from Teddy’s jab, but along with Chris and Gordie, the pre-teen buds continued on their 20 mile trek to see a dead body. It is hard to argue that with smart phones in every kids’ pocket, we have taken both a giant leap forward and a devastating step back.
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Nothing frustrates me more than hearing a man complain that his wife doesn’t love him unconditionally.
He’s right. She doesn’t love him unconditionally. And she’s not supposed to. It’s a stupid thing to complain about. It would make more sense to complain that his lawn mower does a shitty job shoveling snow.
How can a relationship that starts with a long list of conditions be expected to magically morph into unconditional love? People partner up for a variety of reasons–popular among the categories are aesthetics, intellect, wit, and charm. If he is looking for unconditional love, maybe he should look to a relationship that’s not completely dependent on so many conditions. His anger is misdirected. But honestly, it’s not his fault.
He’s likely never been loved unconditionally.