Cape Cod

The year was 1926.  Rising up from the rocky shores of Massachusetts' Vineyard Sound, behind Salt Pond and Oyster Pond, were barren, windswept hills that resembled the Scottish moors.  My great-grandfather and some associates developed a summer community on those hills and named it, appropriately, "The Moors."  The homes they built on those hills commanded spectacular views of the ocean to the south and Buzzards Bay to the northwest.  Lacking central heating, they were intended as summer getaways.  Over the years the community developed an active summer social scene consisting of tennis tournaments, cocktail parties, cookouts, picnics on the beach, and the annual 4th of July parade. As decades passed, the bare hills became covered with trees, whose effect on the ocean view remains a perennial concern.

Atop of one of those hills, my great-grandfather built a six-bedroom summer home for his family. His children, grandchildren (my dad and uncles), great-grandchildren (myself, my sister, and cousins) and now, great-great grandchildren (my nephews, who are ages 7 and 3) had the privilege of enjoying many a family summer weekend at "The Cape House" as we call it.  The beach (which is a 10 minute walk from the house), the hills, the community club house and the woods are scenes of many treasured childhood memories: playing with my cousins and the neighborhood kids, picnics, "flashlight tag", lighting up firecrackers and sparklers on the 4th of July, and endless hours of swimming, sandcastles and shell-collecting.

Thanks to the generosity and hospitality of Uncle David and Aunt Susie, who currently own the Cape House, Donna and I had the opportunity to spend a long weekend there, along with the rest of my family. It was a much-welcome time to get away, relive old memories and create new ones, and enjoy swimming, squirt-gun fights and running around with my nephews. David even treated us to a trip to Martha's Vineyard on his boat.  Cape Cod in summertime is truly magical, as if all of New England rushes to this arm-shaped land of beaches and breezes to squeeze every last precious moment out of its brief, golden summer.

Our Trip to Costa Rica

We wanted to do something special to celebrate both our 5^th anniversary, and Donna’s 50^th birthday, so…Costa Rica!   It was our first visit to a non-English speaking country, and we loved it.

Our flight was to leave Miami early in the morning on Saturday (May 21), so we decided to drive to Miami Friday night and stay at the airport hotel.  The hotel is literally inside the terminal, so it was about a 10 minute walk from our room to our flight.  It sure beat driving the 45-minute drive to Miami before the crack of dawn.

At the airport in San Jose (the capital) we took a shuttle bus to our resort, Hotel Martino, which was about 15 minutes away, in the town of Alajuela.  The Martino was beautiful, built on a hillside with Mediterranean-style gardens, a pool and lush tropical landscaping.   There was a zoo within walking distance, so after settling in we got to see exotic birds, reptiles and of course, monkeys.  Saturday night, we got adventurous…

We didn’t rent a car, so our only way of getting around was by bus.  Saturday night we took a local bus (cost: about 40 cents) into Alajuela, a boisterous, busy place where busses, trucks, cars, bicycles, mopeds and pedestrians whizzed by in all directions, barely missing each other.  Some of the buildings looked like they’d been thrown together out of concrete blocks, corrugated tin and chicken wire.  The craziest thing about Costa Rica is that they have NO street names and NO addresses!  I’m not kidding!  If you ask a native for their address, they’ll tell you something like, “The blue house five blocks south of the church behind the cemetery where the big oak tree used to be.”  Also there are no bus route numbers, maps or schedules, and the busses are different sizes and colors.  Needless to say, we had to ask for help finding the right bus to get back to our hotel but….nobody spoke English!   So, I put my high-school-level Spanish into action.  A very nice lady and her son gave us directions to the correct bus, then walked with us to make sure we didn’t get lost on the way.   Luckily the natives are very flattered when we Gringos make any attempt to speak their language – no matter how badly we butcher it – and we found everyone to be friendly, patient and helpful.

Sunday we took a “zipline” tour of a rain forest.  High up in the trees were a series of platforms, connected by cables.  To get from one platform to another, we sat in harnesses attached to the cable by pulley, giving the sensation of flying over the forest.  At each platform, tour guides were stationed to help each participant along safely.  At one point there was a “Tarzan swing”, a bungie-like experience. The final cable was the “Superman”, with a full body harness that allowed us to “fly” horizontally for a full 60 seconds, over forests and a river.   I have to confess, I got nervous on that one, as it seemed to slow down in the middle of the cable.  I wondered if I was going to be stuck, suspended over a rocky stream.  Of course, that didn’t happen.  Clearly the designers of the zipline knew how the law of gravity works (thankfully).

Monday we took a triple-tour: the Doka coffee plantation, Poas Volcano National Park and finally, La Paz Waterfall Gardens.    Our tour guide, Paola, energetically described everything we saw, in both English and Spanish.  The coffee plantation was fascinating: we learned the painstaking process of harvesting coffee, which must be hand-picked because different parts of the coffee plant ripen at different times.  We learned the difference between the different “roasts” of coffee (French, European, Italian, espresso) are simply differences in the roasting time.  Finally, we were told the plantation sells so little decaffeinated coffee (native Costa Ricans disdain it completely, referring to it as “café-no-café”, or “not-coffee”) that they never bothered to buy a costly decaffeinating machine; they just ship some of their coffee to Germany, have it de-caffed there by experts, then shipped back to Costa Rica for export.

We were very fortunate to be able to experience the Poas Volcano on a clear day this time of year, which is the beginning of the Costa Rican rainy season (or the “green season”, as the government’s tourism office likes to call it).  It was just “volcano-y” enough to allow photos in front of its huge, vapor-emitting, menacing-looking crater, but without the inconvenience of hot lava flows.

Finally the La Paz Waterfall gardens were just as advertised:  three gorgeous waterfalls, and gardens of exotic tropical flowers and equally exotic animals, birds, and…people.   We were just finishing up our descent from the falls when it began to rain – just in time for the end of the tour. Both the Saturday and Sunday tours were very easy and convenient, with buses picking us up right in front of our hotel and dropping us off there at the end.  Even some meals were included.

Our flight wasn’t scheduled to depart until around 7pm on Monday so we caught the adventure bug again early that day and caught a local bus into San Jose, the capital.  We visited the National Museum, a former fort that still has bullet holes from Costa Rica’s Civil War in the 1940s.   We saw the ornate lobby of the National Theater, but my casual clothing (shorts and a tank top) was frowned upon by the security guard so we left quickly.  We strolled the crowded market district, visited a convenience store, checked out shoe prices (disappointingly just as high as in the U.S.), and found an ATM that dispensed both colones (the local currency) and U.S. dollars.

Before we knew it we had to get back to the hotel and get packed in time for our airport shuttle.  As with all vacations it ended before we knew it, but at least we took a ton of photos – and had a day off from work to recover from it all.

"Team Pro" and school vacation give Game Day new life

As 2010 began to wind down, I realized I hadn't hosted a video game day all that year.  While there has never been any such thing as a boring Game Day, it seemed to me that interest was declining. Several of the guys who used to come no longer live in the area, and many of my newer "gamer" friends (a/k/a "Team Pro", the gamer guys of the West Dade Youth and Family Ministry). don't live near me. Donna is blessedly tolerant of the occasional guy invasion of our house, but the noise and sounds of explosions are tough on her. And Saturdays seem to have become exponentially busier, both for us and many families we know. 

Somehow, I hit upon an idea: take a vacation day form work schedule a Game Day on a weekday during a school vacation.  It seems many kids end up bored with nothing to do on the long breaks such as Christmas and summertime.  By the time Donna returned from work all the guys would be gone and I'd make sure the house was so clean it would look like nobody was ever there.

I chose the first Monday of Christmas Break, December 20th, and sent out invitations on Facebook, another first.  The day was a smashing, shooting, exploding success!  A bunch of the West Dade guys made the 45-minute-plus trek to my house. Gianni brought his Playstation 3 with Gran Turismo. Brian introduced something new to Game Day: Yu-Gi-Oh. We were honored with a visit from Anthony Meschino, one of the earlier Game Day fans.  We also had perhaps the widest generational spread to date; our youngest gamer was 11 years old.   The day seemed to come alive with the promise of great times ahead.

Looking back on the '90s, and the value of photos

The decade of the 1990's is not one I tend to look upon with favor.

In the early 90's I was just out of college and trying to sort out my relationship with God and my career path at the same time. Mid-decade, I was trying to sort out what my leadership role in the church would be. In 1995 I received a scary medical diagnosis, followed by a liver transplant in 1998. I saw good friends come and go. The environment in the church, especially from 1992 – 1998, was frequently not encouraging.

Thank God for photos.

In these last couple of days as I have “filled in” the gaps in my Facebook photo collection, a flood of great memories has surged. I remembered that I had great memories! I believe it is my nature to recall the negatives of the past and de-emphasize the positives. Now my perception has been corrected; the decade was full of great adventures, fun times with friends, laughter and joy – despite the many challenges. This helps me look to the future with greater hope and faith.

On the lighter side, being a “techie” I can't help but reminisce with amusement regarding 1990's technology. In '91 I finally got rid of the TRS-80 computer I'd used since high school, the one that originally used a cassette tape for data storage. For most of the decade my computer was a borrowed Macintosh Plus with a 40 megabyte hard drive. No, that's not a typo: 40 MEGAbytes. We still used audiocassettes and 3.5-inch floppy discs. We still had to go to a store to buy music. And I'll never forget the ever-present screeching and chirping of the dial-up modem, followed by the AOL voice: “You've Got Mail!” The Web was born around 1991, and Web designers got way too excited about it way too early, loading sites with graphics and animations when we were still connecting with 56k modems. Hence the derogatory nickname, “the World Wide Wait.” I remember utility companies and other vendors enthusiastically urging me to “Save time! Pay your bills online!” Too bad that I could have written a check, put it in an envelope, addressed the envelope, put a stamp on it and walked it to the mailbox in less time than it took just for the “payment confirmed” web page to load!

We've come a long way. Thanks again to all those who tagged, commented, encouraged and enjoyed all the pictures. Let's all pause, bow our heads and give thanks to God – for broadband.

The Team PRO Chant

The "Team Pro Chant" has been moved to my Facebook profile:
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=500609038441

Holding Fast

The poem "Holding Fast" has been moved to my Facebook profile:
https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150210218083442.

An unforgettable decade

In early 2000 I had a dinner conversation with a friend who was a volunteer in our teen ministry.  She said there was a tremendous need for helpers and mentors in that group.  Somehow, my brain skipped over the part where I was going to groan, “Oh, no, not…teenagers!”, and I asked her what I could do to help.  She gave me the names of a couple of teens who she felt could use some friendship.

All of a sudden, it seemed like God turned on a switch; it could not have felt more so if a massive “CLICK!” had sounded from the heavens.  Almost instantly I was introduced to a whole new world;  I was “off the chain” (the early 2000's slang equivalent of "cool"), listening to Blink-182 and Breaking Benjamin, playing “Halo” and yes, even tossing a football every now and then.  And so what if these guys were born when I was in college?  It happened so fast that even now, a decade later, I’m looking back and asking, “Whoa..what just happened?”

For me, being a youth worker is about being someone who is the opposite of how I am by nature, someone I never imagined I could be and never would have attempted on my own or merely at someone else's urging.  Even Tanya, the friend I had that dinner with in the spring of 2000, didn’t say, “You need to go help those kids.”  She simply shared what was on her heart, and then, I believe, it was God who moved my heart.  That, above all, is what has made this last decade so priceless.

I put together the “Decade of Coolness” video in the hopes that it will bring back fond memories for many of the young people I have had the privilege of knowing these past ten years.  As I was assembling the photos and video clips, it was extraordinarily difficult to keep the length of the project under 10 minutes; I have literally hundreds of photos spanning the decade.  It could easily been an hour long ,and that's a long time to expect people to stare at a YouTube video on their PC monitors or iPhones.  I fear even nine minutes may be pushing it.

“Decade of Coolness” is also an expression of my gratitude; first to God for one of the most life-changing adventures I've ever had, and second, to those who allowed me into their lives and hearts.  Great friends come in all shapes, sizes, and ages.