I was skyping with my children while at an amazing B&B in Dingle, Ireland, population of right around 2,000. "Boys, tomorrow, we're going to see the Cliffs of Moher. They're like the Cliffs of Insanity from Princess Bride. Ok, see ya later." Then on a whim, I googled it. I was spot on: they were the exact cliffs used as the establishing shot in the film (one of my favorites), and I was going to see them in a day!
In junior high, that's middle school for you whippersnappers, I listened to the radio a lot. That's when I discovered U2's Pride (In the name of love). Then Joshua Tree came out. Then some years passed, and I found myself dating a big U2 fan in college. It seemed like the relationship might be going somewhere (it did, and that "somewhere" has been pretty freaking nice for the last 27 years), so I borrowed her cassettes and CDs and made myself a U2 mixtape.
In case you aren't up on your US geography, I had a professional artist work with a professional cartographer to mock up this sophisticated image...just for you!
It wasn't in a race or anything, but for fathers day one year, my wife got me a driving experience.
It was my 40th birthday, 2012. The world didn't end because of the Mayan calendar thing that in fact, never predicted the end of the world at all. So that's probably a good thing.
Being a milestone birthday, it seemed like a fine idea to get onboard a tiny airplane and jump out of it. It may not have been such a good idea after all, but I went into it with plenty of unearned optimism.
Well, ultimately, children belong only to themselves, and they are just lent to us for a little while. So from that perspective, someone lent me a literal person. He is the best birthday present ever in the history of gift giving, and I get reminded of it every year on my birthday because his is just one day after mine.
This is a sad story.
My father-in-law bought a couple hundred acres in rural Tennessee. He carved a road with a tractor, cut down a lot of trees, milled a whole lot of wood, and built a house. Damn, that's a manly man. Ron Swanson had nothing on Kendall Patterson.
