THE WALDRONS

There was a time when we would go for walks as a family. Almost every weekend we would go to Green Lakes and walk the trails, until Victoria outgrew her stroller. Then she had to walk, and her walking meant that we were going to hear her complain, and it has been a while since we revisited that family activity. Nowadays, we’re busy. The kids are at swimming lessons on Mondays and taekwondo on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturday mornings. Christine is triathlon training. Keith is … well … he’s working on doing something. But there isn’t a lot that we do together. The kids do their things, the parents do theirs. This summer that will change … hopefully. This week, we purchased Austin his first road cycle. Victoria has now inherited his mountain bike. Until now and for the last 5 years, Austin and Victoria have been riding to the […]

My favorite hobby from the early‭ ‬1990s through the late aughts was fishing.‭ ‬Through my college years,‭ ‬I used to go out on the powerboat with my family and fish for smallmouth bass‭ (‬and the occasional walleye‭) ‬on Lake Ontario.‭ ‬When I moved to New Jersey,‭ ‬I would go out with my friend Dave and later had my own rowboat on the Muscoot Reservoir.‭ ‬When I moved back to New York,‭ ‬after Austin was born,‭ ‬I had plans to continue to fish,‭ ‬and there is an inflatable boat in my crawl space,‭ ‬still in the box.‭ ‬I was going to get a small electric motor for it and fish the local ponds and waterways‭ … ‬it never happened. . . . . For each of the last‭ ‬6‭ ‬years,‭ ‬the children have participated in the fishing derby at the open house at taekwondo.‭ ‬No‭ – ‬fishing and taekwondo have little […]

On Easter Sunday, on the way to Waterville to spend the day at Kevin/Peggy’s house, I stopped at the roadside to take a few portraits of the kids, dressed up in their Easter-attire. The images that I was able to capture were unremarkable at best. She likes to dress-up, yet she doesn’t look comfortable. The eyes are squinting, despite the overcast day. The posture isn’t right. Her smile is … well … it is forced. Keith was behind the camera and cracking jokes to bring about an expression worthy of framing somewhere in the house (as if we he have a lot of up-to-date pics of the kids after their infancy, which we don’t). But try as he might he was unsuccessful. Fast forward 4 days: Victoria is getting ready for school and asking if she can bring her binder to school. The binder – it is a parental strategy […]

A few months ago, the Apple store announced that they were going to offer a coding class to kids who were on spring break and Christine took the opportunity to sign up both kids for the event, scheduled on Wednesday at 4pm. When making plans to take the kids, Keith elected to avoid a loud room filled with kids and stay home. Christine packed up her laptop to complete documentation for work. For the next hour they had the devoted attention of an Apple store employee/instructor as they designed a course for the sphere-shaped robot and then proceeded to program the vectors and velocities that their robots needed to successfully navigate their course. And then, after their class was complete, Austin had a chance to slowly walk through the Apple store and peruse the shelves of tech, telling anyone who would listen about the wonderful tech featured in each device, […]

On the Monday before last – Victoria’s typical day to go to Darlene’s for breakfast – Keith had to go into work early and wasn’t able to keep their date, so they elected to go to the diner on Tuesday. They don’t usually go on Tuesdays, because that is one of Darlene’s days off (and Victoria insists on seeing Darlene), but Keith was going to be busy most other mornings and Tuesday was the easiest, most sure-thing day of the week. When Victoria walked in, she took her usual path to her usual seat walking along the counter, passing about 10 people seated to her right, made a right turn and continued along the counter to her seat in front of the griddle. She didn’t even notice that the first person that she passed, seated at the counter, was Darlene. Keith had to talk her into walking back to the […]

I was finishing cleaning out the basement – my section of it, anyway – when I came across my old laptop. I bought it from Dell 13 years ago for only $450. I had purchased it so that I had something ‘portable’ to take around with me while I was studying for my doctorate. It had a 15-inch monitor and must have weighed 4 pounds. It was slow by 2006 standards and I was already running a lite-version of Linux by the 2010, because Windows was too cumbersome. Soon enough, it had become a fixture in the basement, waiting for me to take out the hard drive and drill a few holes in it. When I rediscovered it on Sunday, I called up to Austin and asked him to come downstairs. He came down the stairs briskly, “Yeah, Dad?” I held out the laptop with 3 small screwdrivers resting on […]

He isn’t accustomed to failure. School work (to date) comes too easy to him. We could force him to participate in sports so that he knows what it feels like to lose, but that doesn’t seem right. Although, come to think of it, he does play soccer in the fall, and last year’s team lost nearly every game without it bothering him, I think. So maybe it wasn’t the losing/failing that bothered him so much … maybe it was that he lost while competing in something he genuinely cared about. Or maybe it was the hit to an ego that expected to win something, but didn’t. Austin has spent the better part of this school year reading a series of books with his closest friends. The books weren’t chosen by them, but instead by a committee somewhere in the area (I don’t know who, specifically). The books were to be […]

This week, Austin’s friend and orchestral-partner, Acadia, was unable to attend school, because she had the flu. Unprompted on Thursday night, Austin asked if he could offer to bring her viola home from school for her, so that she could practice her instrument over the weekend; Christine or Keith would have to drive him to her house so that he could drop it off. Of course we agreed: he brought her instrument and sheet music home with him the next afternoon and he dropped it off to her Friday night. Yesterday, Victoria attended a birthday celebration with her friend and neighbor, Mary. They celebrated at Billy Beez at the mall, but it was an informal celebration – they hadn’t formally rented space at the facility, so Victoria and Keith decided to leave Mary’s present in the car (rather than bring it into the lobby and leave it there unattended). When […]