Transcendental Dad

From out in the driveway where I had just pulled in, I can hear her practicing. The sounds of my daughter’s electric piano pushes through the closed windows. I recognize it instantly. She’s playing Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” READ MORE

O P I N I O N TRANSCENDENTAL DAD By Dan Szczesny Little Bean and her fellow third-grade friend have an idea. A concert idea. They are going to perform a recital for us. With READ MORE

This time of the year, the couple days before new year, hits different for me since Little Bean was born. I’ve never written in detail about those days when she was born, and I won’t now. I suspect I never really will – the irony of not writing about one of the most frightening events in my life and writing a parenting and family column at the same time does not escape me. READ MORE

She’s changing. She’s moving into her own sense of how she wants to live. I doubt she’d be able to verbalize this growth, but she’s becoming, well, her. READ MORE

Finally, as she always does, my wife became the voice of reason, pointing out that based on some old pictures of me as a kid on Halloween, I wasn’t exactly putting on a trick-or-treating Masterclass. There are pictures of me as a magician. As Daniel Boone, of course. As Casper the Friendly Ghost. As Batman, of course. READ MORE

As I write this, on September 22, we’re about 10 hours away from autumn, and that means the old man would have been 96 today. I’ve been telling his story in bits and pieces for READ MORE

But we do what we must as parents, so when the ladies of the house insisted we go to the ocean over Labor Day weekend, I packed the sunblock, water bottles, change of clothes and blanket and off we went. READ MORE

My daughter has always leaned more toward outdoorsy pursuits, getting her hair muddy as she studies tadpoles for example. But Theatre Camp has provided a new and surprising sort of challenge. Words, and song. The fact that it’s the Little Mermaid helps, but memorization is a different sort of pursuit than, say, fishing or hiking. Putting on a half-hour theatrical show with a dozen second- and third-graders, and doing it in one week, seems to me, to be far more challenging. READ MORE

He could choose, for example, to simply show us that he found a dead chipmunk. Instead, he chooses to eat it, damn the resulting upchucking that comes later. Then, once he’s realized that eating a dead chipmunk makes him sick, he could choose – based on past experience – to not eat that new dead chipmunk he found. But again, that’s asking too much. He will likely eat ALL the dead chipmunks regardless of the outcome. READ MORE