Less Than a Year from Publication!

Tags

a plot for pridemore, mercer university press, novel, southern fiction, Stephen Roth

Found a UPS package on my doorstep the other night. It was my fully edited manuscript from Mercer University Press. This is the first step in the editing process as A Plot for Pridemore continues its journey to becoming a published novel in the spring/summer of 2014. I have two weeks to review the pages, respond to suggested changes, and send then back to the publisher. I’m about 90 pages in and have quickly realized that I need to do a better job with my serial commas, among other things. I’m very grateful to have an excellent copy editor review these pages.

I’m getting pretty psyched about this book. Next year should be lots of fun.

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My Little Brony

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boys, bronies, build-a-bear, kids, my little pony, parenthood, shows, super hero squad, television

As is the case with a lot of things, I was the last person in my office of young, hip professionals to learn about the Bronies trend. Bronies, I am told, are a growing demographic of young men ages 18 to 35 who are fans of My Little Pony, a cartoon TV show created in the 1980s and originally aimed at little girls. Hasbro decided to revitalize the franchise with the release of the 2010 movie, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and found an unintended audience of young men who liked the upbeat storyline, the anime-style animation and, well, ponies, I guess. The Bronies trend is now officially a thing, so much so that there is an acclaimed documentary about this community of men who celebrate, and sometimes dress up like, little ponies.

Upon learning about this from my hipster co-workers, then doing a quick Google search, my reaction was disbelief. Why on earth would adult men, some of them middle-aged adult men, obsess about a cartoon for little girls? I even thought about writing a smug, what-is-the-world-coming-to blog post about a fanboy trend run amok. Then, something curious happened. My three-year-old son started watching My Little Pony. It soon became his favorite show.

And you know what? It’s not too bad. It’s well-written, the animation is sharp and inventive, and there are many pop culture references (scenes lifted straight from movies like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example) that adults can appreciate. Unlike some kid shows, the overarching theme is positive and socially progressive – it’s the story of how six very different ponies join forces and learn that they can accomplish almost anything if they work together. I like it better than one of my son’s other favorite shows, Super Hero Squad, which is about the Marvel superheroes working together, mostly to blow stuff up.

A few weeks ago, we went to the mall with our son and stopped by a Build-A-Bear Workshop. He had no interest in building and naming a Teddy Bear. From the time we walked into the store, all he wanted was the baby blue Pony, Rainbow Dash, which also came with her own set of roller skates.

We got him the stuffed animal, which he immediately wanted to take outside. My wife, seeing an opportunity, strapped the pony to the back of his mostly neglected John Deere bicycle, and suggested he take his new friend for a ride. Our son got on the bike, started peddling, and has been crazy about it ever since. He doesn’t even need Rainbow Dash to accompany him anymore on bike rides to the playground. Still, she was the catalyst. I guess that friendship really is, as they say, magic.

A Dawg Fan’s Loss of Innocence

Tags

childhood, civil war, college football, dawgs, football, georgia bulldogs, herschel walker, joe paterno, larry munson, penn state, sugar bowl, william faulkner

William Faulkner once famously wrote that, for every Southern boy, “there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.” He was referring to the Battle of Gettysburg shortly before Pickett’s Charge, when there was still a wisp of hope for the Southern cause. What happened after that was complete disaster but, up until that moment, there was still a chance at victory.

Southern boys of Faulkner’s generation might have still felt a connection to that chivalrous and doomed moment for the South. But for Southern boys my age, that loss of innocence most likely came when their favorite college football came close to lasting glory, but failed.

For me, that moment was the evening of January 1, 1983. The University of Georgia was playing Penn State in the Sugar Bowl for the National Championship. Penn State started out strong, building a 20-3 lead shortly before halftime. But the Bulldogs rallied. With a little more than four minutes to go in the game, Herschel Walker plunged into the end zone to cut Penn State’s lead to 27-23, the last touchdown he would score in his legendary college career. I perched on the edge of our sofa, staring intently at our 20-inch RCA television, willing Penn State to give the ball back. Georgia was going to win the game. All they had to do was force a punt, punch in another score and win the national title for the second time in three years. They had always won in the short time I had been a rabid Dawgs fan. Sometimes it came in miraculous fashion, but Georgia always won. Tonight would be no different. As Faulkner might have put it, “the brigades were in position, the guns were laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags were already loosened…”

At least Sports Illustrated was happy about it.

Herschel never got the ball back. Penn State finally punted with four seconds to go, and the game was over. Joe Paterno, about whom we know so much more today than we did back then, got the victory ride. The Yankees had whupped us again. Less than a month later, Herschel skipped his senior year to play for the USFL, and Bear Bryant was dead. It was a bitter, depressing winter for college football fans in the South.

When you’re a kid and you start paying attention to sports, the tendency is to follow whatever team is having the most success at the time (unless, of course, your parents goad you into rooting for their sad-sack alma mater). For me, the team to follow was Georgia, which had the best player in college football and which lost only four games over a four-year span in the early 1980s. Most of the games weren’t on TV in those days, but Georgia had a brilliant, growling radio announcer named Larry Munson who made every snap vividly intense, and who was at his best when the “Junkyard Dogs” defense had to make a play to seal the win (“Hunker down, you guys,” he once urged them on four straight plays against Auburn. On that day, the Dawgs did exactly that).

The Sugar Bowl against Penn State was one of those awakenings all young sports fans have when they realize their favorite team is not invincible. The next year, there would be an even more painful 13-7 home loss to Auburn, the first defeat between the hedges of Sanford Stadium in more the four years.

Herschel was Superman without the cape (because he didn’t need one).

Georgia would go on to have some good teams and even a couple of great ones, but it would never be quite the same after that. Three decades later, the Dawgs have yet to return to the national championship game. They were one play away last year, almost upsetting Alabama in the final seconds. Maybe this season it will finally happen again. Georgia has another great running back, and lots of experience on both sides of the ball.

At any rate, the start of college football is something I always look forward to this time of year. In October, my own sad-sack alma mater, Missouri, will take on the Dawgs at Sanford Stadium. I’ll root for the Tigers, but a part of me will remember the ghosts of autumn Saturdays past, when the most important thing in my world was the Dawgs hunkering down and finding a way to win.

Watching over the Butterflies

Tags

grief, loss, Maxwell, parenthood, SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome

Today marks the seventh anniversary of my son Maxwell’s death. He died in his sleep at a church day care around lunchtime on Monday, Aug. 14, 2006. He was two and a half months old.

The days after Max’s death were a blur of funeral arrangements, visits from friends and family, and lots of food. By Sunday, the last guests had departed, and my wife and I drove to Powell Gardens, a sprawling nature sanctuary about 45 minutes south of Kansas City. We sat on a bench overlooking the gardens and wrote down in a journal everything we adored about our son: how he looked, how he felt, his growing array of baby expressions and baby sounds. Then we walked a meandering path through the beautifully manicured trees and bushes, which were tended by scores of little yellow butterflies. We’d noticed those butterflies on previous walks over the week, as we tried to make sense of what had happened and contemplated what we would do with the rest of our lives. My wife saw them as a sign – God had put Maxwell in charge of the smallest butterflies, and Max was sending them down to us as a way of saying that he was okay and in Heaven now.

On the one-year anniversary of Max’s death, my wife prepared a large care basket for the workers at the day care, who had grieved with us and had done some nice things to honor Max, including building a small memory garden outside his classroom. My wife’s basket was filled with flowers and food and other goodies, and its centerpiece was a large, ceramic sculpture of a baby angel. We brought the basket to the day care on Aug. 14, and had a tearful reunion with Max’s teachers. They told us they wanted to put the angel sculpture near the garden arbor they had built in our son’s memory.

The next day, we got a phone call from the manager of the day care. As she walked into work that morning, she glanced toward Max’s garden and saw that the angel was covered with dozens of little, yellow butterflies.

The Story Behind the Photo… Maybe (Version 5.0)

Tags

betting, family, football, humor, NFL, parenthood, photo fiction, tosh.o

Jeff felt his left eye twitch rhythmically, as it always did when he’d had more than three cups of coffee or was under intense, pounding pressure. For the life of him, he couldn’t imagine why Kathy had scheduled a family photo shoot at 4 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon.

Right now, posing with his wife and six-month-old daughter for an 8 x 11 glossy that would sit on their mantle for the rest of their lives was the last thing on Jeff’s mind. What was on his mind was football, specifically the fourth quarter of the Dallas-Cleveland game. As they parked their car at Portrait Expressions, Tony Romo and the Cowboys were on the Browns’ 24 yard line, threatening to score again.

“Get him! Get him!” Jeff screamed at his iPhone as the screen showed Romo scrambling out of the pocket with two Browns in pursuit.

“Jeff, you’re gonna scare Madison,” Kathy scolded. “Put the phone away.”

He did for the moment. But he tuned in again as they waited in the lobby for the photographer. The Cowboys had settled for a field goal and now the Browns had possession.

“Hold on to the damn ball,” he implored.

“Jeff, stop it!” his wife whispered.

Jeff had never been much of a betting man, but Madison’s arrival and his modest salary as an apprentice landscaper for The Grass Hut encouraged him to a little coin down on some NFL games. When he picked up the Plain Dealer on Monday and saw that the Cowboys were favored to beat Cleveland by 14 points – a betting line of absurd proportions for a professional football game – he couldn’t help but put $500 on the Browns to beat the spread. After all, the game was in Cleveland and it was late November. Anything could happen in those conditions, he thought.

The game was back-and-forth for three quarters, then Dallas pulled away. The field goal had put the Cowboys up 31-21. Now, Jeff pulled the phone from his pants pocket and saw Dallas had the ball again, and was driving. There were four minutes to go.

“Bring him down!” he growled.

“Okay, honey.” With Madison perched on her hip, Kathy grabbed the phone from Jeff’s hand and dumped it into her oversized purse. “No more Fantasy Football today.”

Jeff winced. Kathy had no idea about the bet, of course. She couldn’t imagine how much he had put on the line for his wife and daughter. But he knew he had to do it. Two years ago, as a high school senior, he played Billy Bigelow in the school production of Carousel. At the time, taking a role in the play was just another way to meet girls. But now those words from Billy’s “Soliloquy” seared him with meaning: I’ll go out and make it or steal it or taaaaake it… or die!

Finally, after what seemed like an hour, the photographer appeared and ushered them to a stool in front of a brownish backdrop. Kathy sat on the stool with Madison in her lap, and Jeff kind of crouched up against them, knees bent, like he had just taken a shot to the gut.

“Get in a little closer,” the photographer told Jeff. “Pretend you like ’em.”

Jeff complied. He noticed the guy was wearing a Browns ball cap. That gave him an idea.

“Hey, man,” he said. “You catch the final score of the game? Last I saw, they were down by ten.”

The photographer looked into his lens and chuckled. “Oh, it got worse. Dallas scored two more touchdowns. What are you gonna do? Maybe we’ll get a good draft pick.”

Jeff felt the sensation of what seemed like three golf balls working their way slowly down his throat.

“Smiles, everyone!” the photographer said.

Photo pulled from tosh.comedycentral.com.

Christmas in August

Tags

children, christmas, drugs, form letters, holidays, law, parenthood, politics, suburbia

If you’re like me, you have probably already started penning the form letter you plan to send to friends and family over the holiday season. Though it’s only August, a lot has already happened, and I don’t want to forget any salient details when sharing my family’s story with people I don’t care enough about to call on the phone or message on Facebook.

The Roth family form letter is a holiday tradition, one that I know dozens of people look forward to receiving each year. It’s important that I get it right.

Below is an early draft of the 2013 edition. Let me know what you think!

Dearest Friends,
As the chestnuts warm upon our happy hearth and the snowflakes gently gather on our three-car-garage home at Whitehaven Hills, we reflect on people like you who have meant so much to us over the years. We pause with regret that we haven’t kept in closer touch in 2013, but we hope this little missive will catch you up on all the Roth family’s activities!

First of all, Madison and the twins are doing just great in school. Maddie celebrated her “Sweet 16” by making the National Honor Society again and earning a letter as the star “mounter” for the Pembroke Day School equestrian team. The twins, Reagan and Nixon, continue to excel in arithmetic and science (History is another matter!) and our five-year-old, Rand, remains the light of our lives. In addition to soccer, gymnastics, fencing and photography, Rand enjoys spending time with his friends. After a four-hour play date and 30 minutes of quiet time at home, it is not unusual for him to ask, “So, who can we call to play now?” Precious!

Jessica continues to enjoy her job as a top researcher for Blecht Pharmaceuticals, Inc. This year, she helped develop a serotonin inhibitor that will allow patients to live without ever experiencing physical or emotional pain. Clinical trials have been very promising, and we expect FDA approval sometime in 2016. Outside of family, professional life and weekend marathons, Jessica can usually be found working with one of the six charities she currently chairs. Childhood obesity is still her main passion. This year, she was asked to pilot the Governor’s Task Force on Chubby Middle School Boys.

Stephen, of course, is a rising star in the tobacco defense practice at Rubenstein, Brown, Moody, Eckersly, Murphy & Rubenstein LLP. He’s up for partner in March, so keep your fingers crossed! Stephen has also recently gotten into politics — he’s treasurer this year for a new PAC called Hedge Fund Managers for a Stronger America.

On a sad note, our houseboy, Edgar, was deported in September. He practically became part of the family during his brief time living with us, and the sight of immigration agents swarming our front lawn is one we won’t soon forget. We are currently in the market for a new houseboy, preferably one who is a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Finally, our precious Pomeranian, Corky, is expecting puppies sometime this winter. Wish her luck!

Friends, we pray the holiday season finds you and your loved ones healthy and well. We hope that the weather is pleasant where you live, and that your local sports team is having a successful season. And let’s keep in touch!

Wishing you the Best,

The Roths

Why’d It Have to Be Snakes?

Tags

garter snakes, my life, snakes, yard work

We have a fenced-in yard that backs up against a sliver of forest and a creek that serve as a dividing line between the two main parts of our neighborhood subdivision. It’s nice to sit on our deck and stare out into the woods, as opposed to looking into somebody else’s backyard. However, I do sometimes worry about the wildlife – especially the snakes. I have never come across a copperhead or water moccasin while working in the yard or tramping through the forest (knock on wood!), but I know they’re out there. Last summer, someone a few blocks from us reported on the neighborhood message board that they had found a small rattlesnake in their yard. A rattlesnake! I didn’t even know they had those in Kansas City!

This time of year, it’s pretty common for me to find garter snakes or black snakes in our backyard. I saw one yesterday slithering through the grass while I was mowing the lawn. I still get that initial, primal chill up my spine whenever I see a snake, then I relax just a tiny bit when I realize it’s a little garter snake that can do me no ill. I steeled myself and calmly positioned the lawnmower in front of the snake, preparing to run it over. Then I paused. The snake was small and harmless. Plus, it was probably helping to keep field mice away from the house, or something like that. It was no direct threat to my family, and was possibly even an ally, just doing its part in the great Circle of Life.

I felt a the slightest twitch of guilt as I pushed the lawnmower forward, expecting to hack the snake into several scaly pieces that I would have to retrieve later with a shovel. But the snake escaped the blade and slithered into a nearby garden bed and, beyond that, the forest. I didn’t feel too bad about letting it go. Perhaps it would tell its friends and cousins about the near-death experience with the spinning blade, and warn them to avoid our property at all costs.

Should I be nervous about non-poisonous snakes in my backyard? Or should I just keep the lawn cut short and hope for no more surprise intruders?