Last Monday, at about 5:15 am, my former student and friend Mark Hartburg died after a 15-month battle with leukemia. He was 20 years old.

Mark was a two-year member of both Ceili Club and Royal Fools. In addition to these ties, Mark was also a self-proclaimed computer geek who liked to build his own computers, so we talked shop pretty often. Mark invited me over for his graduation party and his birthday party, and I visited him several times in the hospital over the last two years.

Mark was remarkable in that he was always cheerful, at least in front of me and anyone else I have ever talked to. Mark was born with a spinal cord issue, spina bifida, which required him to have surgery on his spinal cord when he was two days old. That was supposed to clear it up, but the issue kept coming back, leading to several surgeries over the years, sores on his foot, a walking boot for a few months, confinement to a wheelchair for several months, and amputated toes, and finally, his leg was amputated just below the knee. Once his leg had been amputated, he had months of rehabilitation. A few months after his amputation surgery was healed, he started having chest pain, and so he went to the hospital, where they discovered a mass of very aggressive leukemia surrounding his heart.

Thus started 15 months of chemotherapy. After aggressive treatment, Mark was declared cancer-free last January. There was much joy all around, as it had been a long road. Mark started back at college, and started making plans for his future. Then, in late spring, the doctors discovered the cancer had come back in the brain and in the spinal column. Mark again faced aggressive chemotherapy, and continued to be upbeat. I received an e-mail in May that the doctors had nothing else they could do, and that Mark only had a few days to live. So, Mer and I went up to the Cleveland Clinic to see him, and we had a good visit for over an hour. Mark was tired, but very much himself, and we left being confused since he seemed in such good shape and spirits. It turned out that the doctors and family had not told Mark that he was going to die, and so he did not know. He also refused to die. He kept insisting on treatment, and he started getting better to the point where the doctors got him on a bone marrow transplant list. Then, the Monday before he died, Mark was told the cancer in his brain and spinal column were gone, and the bone marrow transplant was scheduled. All looked well. On the following Friday, some fluid started collecting on Mark’s lungs. The doctors were not too worried – they thought it was a fungal infection that could be taken care of. Saturday was his sister Kaity’s graduation party, although Mark could not  attend since he was in the hospital. Sunday, the results came back that the fluid in Mark’s lungs was full of leukemia, and there was nothing left that could be done except to try to help Mark have some decent comfort. Monday morning, Mark died. His parents told us that he opened his eyes and fixed them on his mother, who told him that it was okay to go. He looked around the room, and then looked out the window at the sunrise, and he died.

Mark will always be a model for me of patience and perseverance and real joy. If anyone had a “right” to be bitter, it was Mark. Mark’s dad told us that he asked Mark one day recently if Mark would change anything about his life. He expected Mark to talk about the wheelchair. Mark got fairly angry and said he would not change anything. He said his wheelchair had helped him meet people that he would not normally have met, and some of them were now his best friends.

Mark loved to make people laugh, and was a very game soul in Fools. He created a stir at one show when he was practicing doing wheelies in his wheelchair off stage. He loved to do wheelies and was pretty good at them, but on this occasion, he went over backwards, knocking over a large plant at the same time. He was fine, and the audience loved it. Mark also always seemed to be okay when we made his leg the topic of jokes when on stage. I hope it never came across as cruel, because Mark always laughed, so we brought it up fairly often in the group. Mark just loved to laugh.

It was remarkable that Mark joined Ceili Club with his leg problems, but he did fine. When he had to wear his protective boot, he just danced in that. Once he had to stay in his wheelchair, he wheeled around and sometimes through the dance floor, and often kept time by pounding a baseball bat on the floor of the room. After his amputation and after the fitting of the prosthetic, Marc started dancing with us again (and this was after he had graduated from CVCA).

Mark was very much full of life, and I am glad he was my friend. I am sure that Jesus greeted Mark and told him, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Last weekend was a fun and busy time, as most of June has seemed to be. Meredith writes down what we did each day on her calendar, and in June there was only one day out of all 30 where the day was blank (meaning we did not do anything noteworthy, on the 20th). For comparison, March had eight blanks and February, thirteen.  It has been a busy little month, and has been hard to keep up with here in the blog!

Last Saturday, we met up with Meredith’s parents and Aunt Mary and about six other former CVCA teachers for a reunion/lunch at Olive Garden. The food was good and there was a lot of reminiscing going on. The lunch did go a bit long – over two hours, and so I had to get up and walk around a couple of times since the wooden chair was not playing nice with my back.

After Olive Garden, we had one graduation party, in Kent. The party was one of Meredith’s students, Kaity, and the party was much fun. There was a ton of good food (as if we needed yet more food), and Kaity’s friends are a lot of fun. We spent quit a bit of time talking with Sarah, one of Mer’s favorite students who graduated two years ago. Kaity also had an adult-sized bouncy house, which we tried. It turns out that bouncing around in the house was a good time, but requires a lot more effort than I would have thought. Mer and I also played a very pitiful game of cornhole (a bean-bag toss game), that I eventually won, but with no great skill level. It was a great party, and I was glad Kaity was able to have such a good time. Her brother, Mark (one of my students), had been fighting leukemia for over a year, and was in the hospital at the time, and Mark ended up dying early the following Monday morning. It sounds terrible that I would be happy that Kaity would have such a great party at a time like that, but her family had gone through so much grief that I was glad they were able to celebrate something like Kaity’s graduation.

Mer and I then headed over to Porthouse Theater near our house. Porthouse is an open-air theater on the grounds of Blossom, an open air concert space where the Cleveland Orchestra plays during the summer. Porthouse was doing the musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Yes, it is a dorky thing to have a musical about, and it was a really good time. The show was mostly fluff, and the music was very modern (only one melody you could leave the show humming), but it was a funny show (on the whole).

The set was a school gym, which was pulled off well. The contestants were all fairly nerdy, and were the source of most of the humor of the play, although much merriment was given from the definitions and/or the “use it in a sentence” for the spelling words (“Although she insisted her casserole did not contain an indigenous South American frog, the casserole still tasted like crapaud” – pronounced “crap-o”). As an added twist, there were five people from the audience who were on stage (their friends or families had made a donation of $100 to get them on stage), and that was very funny as the MC of the evening kept on making up fun-facts about each person as they came up to spell (“She advanced to the bee from Hudson Middle School by spelling her winning word, ‘filthy rich.'”).

Each character had a back-story to add interest to the play: one student was being driven too hard, one was haunted by failure from the previous year, one got there after the two top people from his school could not go, etc.). It was probably a bit saccharine of the play to do it, but I thought it worked, and it made the play be a comedy instead of a farce.

Meredith, being Mer, kept track of how she would have done on the spelling words. She went down on some very long and technical word. I, being me, could not even remember what the spelling word was 30 seconds after it was announced, let alone spell it.

It was a beautiful evening out, so it was a fun time to see a play at Porthouse. It had been a busy Saturday, but a good one.

Sunday, we headed down to Aunt Mary’s, where we had lunch with Aunt Mary and Dale and Carlene. It was a good visit, and Carlene proudly showed us her two new books on decorating cupcakes; Carlene is a pretty incredible baker, and these books had given her some new ideas (in fact, she made cupcakes that looked like fruit pies for a party at out house later in the week).

After lunch, we headed north to a graduation party that was in a pavilion at a park. It was actually a grad party for three CVCA students, but Mer only knew one of the students and I had not had any of them in any of my clubs, so we were there to see Mer’s student, Keanna. The food spread was ridiculously huge, including an enormous spread of desserts. Mer and I ate and chatted, and kept a wary eye on a line of clouds that were bearing down on the park. It did not take long to realize a storm was coming in faster than we were eating, but we figured we would be okay because we were in the pavilion, with ten or twelve feet of roof over us on either side. We were wrong. The storm came flying in with torrential downpours and wave after wave of high winds. The rain was coming at us sideways, and was having very little difficulty in bridging the twelve feet of space under the roof. It was kind of fascinating, and everyone in the pavilion took it in stride. It was kind of like being on a water ride at an amusement park. Although we got wet, we did not get soaked because of the roof, and after about 15 minutes most of the storm had blown over. So, Mer and I were able to laugh about things with Keanna, and we headed home for a change of clothes.

Last week saw us catching up with lots of folks we had not seen in awhile. Having sold the house, Mer and I now feel we can be more social, and not only go out with friends and family from time to time, but even initiate outings. Such was last week:

On Tuesday, Mer and I caught up with our pastor, Ken, and his wife Janet. It was Janet’s birthday, so Mer and I invited Janet and Ken out to eat to celebrate. Janet decided she wanted to go to the Golden Corral in Canton, so off we went. The Golden Corral is a buffet, so rest assured that Mer and I had way way way too much to eat. We had a great time eating and chatting, and then we went back to Ken and Janet’s house, where they demonstrated Tetris Attack (at our request). Tetris Attack is a 1995 Nintendo game that we had heard Ken mention a lot, and it is a head-to-head competition about keeping rows of blocks from getting too high on your side of the screen. It was much fun to watch those two go at it.

On Wednesday, we headed up to Beechwood (a suburb of  Cleveland) with Zach and Londa. For months, Zach has been touting the gastronomic wonders of an ice cream parlor up there called Mitchell’s. The ice cream was quite good, although probably not as good as Handel’s. However, Mitchell’s had great ambiance and outside seating, and had a 30-minute drive each way in which to visit with the Churchills. It was a good time.

Thursday, Mer went down to Aunt Mary’s to welcome her parents, who were arriving in town. They were not  going to get in until 8:00 or later, so I passed on going with Meredith since I had to work on Friday. It turns out that they made very good time and made it to North Canton a little before 8:00, and Meredith was home just as I was going to bed, so I could have gone after all.

Friday, we headed down to the old stomping ground of New Baltimore to party it up with the extended (and I do mean extended) George clan. The Georges used to be our neighbors, and have known Meredith since she was 3 years old, so they are very close and dear to us. All of the out-of-town children and grandchildren were in town, so the Georges threw a get-together. There were the Georges (Ray and Sara), and six children (or spouses of children), twelve grandchildren, Dale, Carlene, Aunt Mary, Meredith, and me. It was a busy household! I had made a pan-full of chocolate-peanut-butter bars, which proved to be a pretty big hit. I ate some amazingly good pulled pork, and chatted with Sara about her dad for over half an hour, which was pretty fascinating. Meredith got to visit with her girlhood friend Melissa, and they got to play Dutch Blitz (a game involving speed and multi-tasking that I will not play with Meredith). Most people spent a lot of time visiting around the Georges’ large dining room table.

Not a bad little week!

Last Friday, I took Meredith out for dinner to celebrate us selling the house on Wednesday. I wanted to take her somewhere nice. A few months ago, I got a promotion in my e-mail from Restaurants.com where I could buy $25 gift cards for $2 each (the catch is that you have to spend $35 total at the restaurant), so I bought seven of them, three for restaurants I already know, and four for new (to me) places. I looked through the four new places, and they are all nice, but they also have fairly snooty menus with things I probably would not like to eat. One of them had a chicken dish, so that was where we went.

Richfield is a little town about 15 miles northwest of us, and I have never paid it too much attention. I called up the Richfield Taverne and made reservations for the outside patio, and we headed out that way. The Taverne is very nice – the inside is spacious and has an old-time feel, including a decorative tin ceiling. The patio was very pleasant, with only about ten tables. We both ordered the chicken dish, and enjoyed the evening air. The food was good, but not necessarily stunning. As we were finishing up eating, a duet set up and started playing light jazz, which was very fun. I was not enthusiastic about the dessert selection, but I needed to spend $2.00 more to get my discount, so we tried a chocolate-and-berry cake that turned out to be very good. Normally, I do not like chocolate and fruit mixed together, but this one had the fruit drizzled just on one end, so I was able to split most of it with Meredith. All in all, it was a good way to celebrate.

Saturday was “my day,” as long as we still made it to our two scheduled graduation parties. I wanted to check out a trail in the Valley that we had not yet tried, and so we headed off to the trailhead. The trail is called Wetmore, which I joked was probably a warning. It was. The trail was also primarily a horse trail, and it turned out to be over 5 miles long. And it was hot. Still, ignorant of the arduous walk ahead of us, we plunged in. At first, the major issue to watch out for was horse droppings, but then we got to the first very shallow stream we had to ford. No problem. Over the whole trail, we had to ford four or five streams, and none was very difficult, but they were usually very muddy on the banks. Mud kept cropping up on the trail, and the horses had churned it up quite a bit. Still, we kept on until we figured we were well over halfway back to the car. At that point, there was about a mile-long stretch that was more churned-up mud than dry ground, and we had a tough time picking our way along the side of the trail in an effort to stay dry and fairly clean.

We cleared the worst of the mud, and we ran into a very nice man whom we had seen at the start of our walk. He stopped to chat and found out where we’d parked, and informed us we were about halfway back to the car. I think he meant to be kind, but that came as a bit of a blow. The happy news is that the back half of the walk was fairly dry, but it compensated for that by being really hilly. We got back to the car tired and hot, and went back home to each take our second shower of the day.

We then headed to Silver Springs Park in Stow, a park not too far from where we live. There was a graduation party going on there, and we had never been to the park before. It turns out they have a great playground for little kids. Anyway, the party was in a pavilion and the food was great (burgers and such, with cookies and cupcakes). While we were eating, I saw two students come walking out of the woods, so I figured correctly that there was a trail in the park. Since it was a park, I figured that the trail must be fairly short. I was not doing too well on my figuring. We decided to give it a try, and the trail turned out to be over two miles long, with a few muddy sections, and Mer was in sandals. We ran into another kind man who helped us choose the right paths to get back to the party, and 40 minutes after we set out we got back in time to have some cake, which had been cut while we were walking. All in all, I figured we walked about 7-8 miles on Saturday, in addition to the 12 miles I ran in the morning. I was pretty tired.

We then went to a second grad party that was very close by. It was at the house of a colleague, and we had some good food and a good visit with a teacher friend. We were also entertained by the casual but competitive all-ages volleyball game that went on the entire time we were there. We then went home, full and tired.

On Wednesday, around 4:00 in the afternoon, the deed for our old house transferred to the new owners. After 2 years, 11 months, and 2 weeks, we became a one-house household again. I will post soon about the lessons I learned over the last three years (God had to use a fairly big spiritual two-by-four on me), as well as the tons and tons and tons of blessings we received. It has not fully sunk in yet, but I am taking Mer out tonight (Friday) to celebrate. Many thanks to family and friends who wished us well and prayed for us and showered us with support for three years.

(Oddly, it turns out that this is the best picture I have of the house. I guess I never took pictures of it.)

Last Friday we headed over to Aunt Mary’s spiffy condo. She had invited us over for pizza, along with “Aunt” Zovie (not a real aunt, but a life-long family friend), and the “Hubes” (short for Hubeles, other long-time family friends). I had not seen Aunt Zovie in two years, since Uncle Bob died, and it had been a full year since we had seen Don and Donna and their family. The get-together was a great time. I like getting together with Aunt Mary, and Aunt Zovie is a lead contender in any competition to determine the world’s most gracious person. Don is just drop-dead funny, and Donna and the children are delightful. Don kept us laughing recounting his experience playing the semi-bad guy in The Fantasticks (he said playing a guy who is cynical and likes to mess with youth was a “real stretch”). The pizza hit the spot, and Aunt Mary served up the same light-but-great cake that we got her for her birthday. What a wonderful way to spend a Friday.

Saturday was again dedicated to making the rounds of graduation parties. We had three on Saturday. We started off the day at a grad party by a lake in southern Akron. We sat on the dock, eating Asian food (a rarity for mid-west grad parties) and cake (quite common, but welcome). We saw several of our students, and we saw fellow teachers the Schillings and the ever-expanding McSparran clan.

Grad Party, the Sequel, was held in a back yard in Hudson. It was strange in that we had been to the same place for a grad party last year for the older brother’s graduation celebration. It does drive home how fast the year goes when you repeat visits like that. There was some excellent comfort food (hot dogs and sloppy joes) as well as cake and several kinds of bars. We had a very pleasant visit with the older brother and the father (the graduate at these kinds of parties is usually too in-demand to talk to any one person for too long).

Grad Party III, the Expansion, was at another house in Hudson. This was the first grad party I had ever been to that involved multiple schools. In addition to CVCA, there was a graduate from Walsh Jesuit High School and one from Ursuline High School. This meant the party was huge and crowded, and it meant this was the first CVCA-affiliated party I had ever been to where there was a full bar. But, more importantly, they had the biggest and best dessert buffet table I have ever seen. There were buckeyes, and cookies, and cake, and more. They also had a ton of real food, and I had a barbecue sandwich that was probably the best I have ever had. Happily, since this was the third party of the day, I was fairly full and could not make myself sick at the dessert table.

Sunday, we had one grad party, here in Cuyahoga Falls. This was an interesting one in that the student we were helping to celebrate was not in Mer’s classes and was not in any of my groups. Jimmy is a very friendly young man, and we both met him on a Diakonos spring break trip three years ago, and he kept stopping by to say hi to me and to Meredith. I was very pleased that we were able to celebrate with Jimmy. There were Italian sausages and hot dogs for real food, and cookies and cupcakes and brownies for dessert. I handled myself with a little more dignity than I had on Saturday. We had a long visit with one of my Royal Fools and Ceili Club students and her family, and we got to see the McSparrans as well.

After the grad party, we headed over to the square, down by the river in Cuyahoga Falls. We wanted to check out the last day of the (free!!) three-day Cuyahoga Falls Irish Festival. We started at the back stage (of three stages), and we met up with the woman who leads the Hibernian Club Ceili Band. She was there selling music and whistles and such, and she gave me a dance CD for Ceili Club. We then took a seat in front of the stage and heard a great band. They were very much in the Irish tradition, but played almost all original songs. The had a guitar/banjo player, a guitar/bagpipe player, a pipes/whistles player, a percussionist, and a bouzouki/mandolin player. They had a great sound – probably the best band I have heard at the festival in the three years I have gone. We stopped by to say goodbye to Mary Ann (the band leader), and headed over to the second stage, via the river walk, which is pretty.

The band at the second stage was okay. They were a bit heavy on guitars, but they got on my good side early by singing a song about Portland (Maine, not Oregon). Sadly, they had completely inane banter in between songs that was really irksome, and so after 4 or 5 songs, I asked Mer if we could go. She agreed.

Sunday officially ended the great ten days of eating out. Hopefully, I can do better in the coming weeks at not eating quite so much.

The great food and social quest continued last Wednesday and Thursday. Every spring break for the last five years, I have gone with CVCA’s service group, Diakonos, to help out a community project, usually Habitat for Humanity. Last Wednesday, our friend Lesa held an end-of-year party for the Diakonos kids at her house. Mer was a bit reluctant to go along since she had not gone on the trip, but I convinced her that spouses were welcome. She ended up having a pretty good time, since about 3/4 of the students at the party were hers.

There were about 15 kids at the party, and tons of junk food. The real food was roast-your-own hot dogs, which were fun and tasty, but the real prize of the evening was the dessert spread. Whoa. There were warm chocolate chip cookies, the best no-bake cookies that I have had in years, s’mores, my chocolate-peanut-butter bars, and other various cookies and treats. I was better than I could have been, but it was not a temperate evening.

We had fun eating and chatting, and then we headed inside to watch the DVD of all the movies that had been taken on the trip. It was funny to watch the kids ham it up for the camera. We also watched the annual talent show that had been taped, and that went well. Some of the individual videotaped “confessionals” where students could say anything they wanted went a bit long for a party atmosphere, but it was still a nice evening. Mer and I had to leave toward the end of the video because it was getting late for me (I had to work the next day).

Thursday we headed over to Clarice’s place for another game night with Clarice, Matt, Josh, and Kristen. We started the evening with Tribond, a game where you have to guess what is the similarity among three words. That turned out to be a frustrating game. My team only got to go twice – Mer’s team won by going twice, almost “running the table.” It is not a whole lot of fun to sit for 30+ minutes not getting to play. If we play the game again, we need to have three teams of two, and not two teams of three. It turns out that out of all the questions asked that evening, our team did not know two of them – the two questions we were asked and missed. Ah, well.

We then played a semi-improv game that Shannon and Jo had given us called Don’t Make Me Laugh. To a large extent, it was like charades, but with very weird things to act out (like “Be a buoy in a kiddie pool”). Since five of the six of us have done improv before, we had a really great time with that game. It was a nice bonus that Clarice and I ended up winning, but even before we knew that, we had a great time.

Mer and I almost broke the food chain after the party, but I had a Dairy Queen craving, so I stopped. That kept the (what ended up being) 10-days-of-big-eating-in-a-row steak going.

Last Monday, Mer and I were invited over to our friends’ (Eric and Shanna’s) apartment for dinner and to meet the new kitten. Eric and Shanna are both dog people, but they are not allowed to have a dog, so they decided to adopt a very cute kitty that they named Atlas. Atlas is a black-on-black kitty, and he is very energetic and playful and seems really healthy. It was a delight to get to hold a kitten again and have him zonk out on my lap. Good kitty!

Eric and Shanna have a very cool apartment on the ground floor of a house. It is very much a Chicago-style apartment, with nice woodwork and very high ceilings. Eric and Shanna were allowed to paint the place, and they chose great colors. They were also able to put out an elegant and pretty and matching table setting at the (roughly) ages of 25. Mer and I still can’t put out an elegant table setting at pushing 40.

They made some very good Italian food – two kinds of pasta and a tasty garlic bread. Eric remembered that I like Sprite and made sure he had some on hand for me, which was very considerate. Shanna had procured cookies and cream ice cream and hot fudge for dessert, and even had some ice cream cookies in stock as well. Our reputation for hearty dessert eating apparently went before us.

After supper and dessert, we gushed over Atlas, and then played an English-nerd game, Bethump’d with Words. Bethump’d with Words asks about the history of the English language and the definitions of words and the difference between American and British English. It is quite a fun game for word-nerds, and it was made even more fun by playing with Atlas while playing the game. Sadly, I had to call the game short before it was done because it was getting late and I had to work the next day.

Tuesday evening I “produced” my first concert. I organized a teacher concert at CVCA as a dry run for a potential fundraiser for next winter. It grew out of my desire to hear Eric and Shanna’s band, Bethesda, outside of a bar setting, but it grew into quite a nice little event. My fellow CVCA teachers, Matt and LT (known as the CVCA-only semi-real band The Flealands), opened the evening by playing acoustic guitars, mandolin, and djembe drum, and they sang. LT and Matt are both talented musicians, and they had a very nice sound together for two guys who don’t really play together. They did about 45 minutes’ worth of music, and then we turned the stage over to Bethesda. They took about 15 minutes for setting up and for a sound check (we ran out of time before the concert to do a full sound check), and then proceeded to do a 45-minute set as well. The sound was occasionally spotty for Bethesda; it turned out that the guitars were overwhelming the soundboard and messing up the vocal balance. Because of the quick sound check, each instrument was checked by itself, and so when the entire band was playing louder songs, the soundboard kind of freaked out. Still, the sound was more or less corrected at the cost of just one or two songs, and even then just at the cost of a clear vocal balance.

The crowd was much fun – there were about 100 people there, which is very good for a random Tuesday in June after school has let out, and with a minimum of advertising. The students seemed to really enjoy the evening, and that made it a success in itself. Regarding the concert, I learned several things, and that made it valuable to me – I learned we needed to start 30 minutes earlier for the sound check, and we needed two sound techs instead of just one (one led to too much running around, up and down stairs to and from the tech booth and stage). I’m hoping this will translate into a concert worth paying $5 for next winter.

After the concert and the clean-up, Mer and Dubbs and I went to Friday’s for dessert. I generally need some unwind time after evenings where I am partly responsible for the event, and so we went out to talk, laugh, and relax. All in all, it was a very good evening, even without the presence of Atlas.

Last weekend was pretty much about celebrating graduations with our seniors. Friday we went to two graduation parties (a midwest tradition of lots of food and cornhole and students). The first graduation party was at a park pavilion, which was nice since it was a pretty day. They had four (yes, four) cakes, so Mer and I ate too much and then actually managed to win two cornhole games, which is very unusual since we normally stink at the game. For those of you who don’t get to grad parties, cornhole is the game of throwing beanbags through a hole in a board. It actually is pretty fun, in a bocce or croquet sort of way.

The second grad party was at the student’s house, and was full of CVCA people. The father is on the CVCA board, and the mom substitute teaches at CVCA, so they know everyone at the school, and most of the school seemed to be there. The food was plentiful and excellent. The student (a very nice young lady) had spent a good amount of time carving out a cool path through the woods on their property; she then had the path lit by tiki torches and a bonfire. It was much fun.

As an aside, Friday was the first day of ten (yes, ten) straight days of going out for me and Mer, and most of the events involved food. It is amazing that we both don’t weigh 250 pounds.

Saturday I went running with Jason and Nate, and then (after I showered) Mer and I went to the Crooked River Grill to meet up with several fellow CVCA English teachers for breakfast. We were celebrating a former English teacher being back in town. Beverly, the teacher in question, was only at CVCA for one year, but she was (and is) an excellent teacher, and we were all very fond of her. She moved back to her home in Kentucky after her husband died from cancer, so we lost her. But, she was back in town to see “her kids” graduate; that is how much she loved her students – to come back four years later to see them graduate. Amazing. Anyway, we had a great time catching up (and eating an excellent breakfast), and Beverly expects me and Mer to come and visit her this summer.

After breakfast and a nap at home, we went to two grad parties. The first one was at a very cool house where most of the rooms had doors that opened right into the back yard, which overlooked a river and woods. There again was lots of good food, including a sundae bar (yum!). The house was full of students whom Mer and I knew, so we had a good time.

The second grad party was lower key for me – I did not really know the girl being celebrated; she was a student of Mer’s. The food was more of the snack type, which was good since it could have otherwise been the third big meal of the day. I did have a piece of cake.

Not to be worn out by three social outings, we went from the grad party back to the music club Musica. We have had some poor experiences at Musica, but we were giving it one last try since our friends’ (Eric and Shanna’s) band, Bethesda, was playing there that night. Happily, for us, Musica got it right this night. There were two bands we saw besides Bethesda, and we enjoyed them both. The sound was mixed pretty well, and one band was mostly electric but had a good sound, and the second band (on after Bethesda) was just acoustic guitar and banjo. They sang a lot of older folk songs and original songs in the folk tradition. It was a nice surprise from a venue that is usually much more hard core. Bethesda put on a great show, about 30 minutes long, and they sounded pretty good. The only mixing issue was that I could not hear the pedal steel guitar, but given that the rest of the band was blending well, I was happy to take that. We stuck around for one song of the headline act, a woman indie country singer who is well known nationally, but whose name I forget. I was tired (it was after 10:00), and her sound did not excite me too much, so we left. It had been a busy little day.

Sunday was church and then a nap – pretty typical occurrences for me on a Sunday. That evening was the formal ceremony of graduation for CVCA’s seniors. Faculty (like Mer) are required to go, and I go along since I usually know some of the kids and I can sit next to Meredith. Besides, the reception before the ceremony has really good desserts, including chocolate mint brownies that are quite tasty. Graduation was pretty typical – awards and speeches and the calling of names and giving of diplomas; it went by pretty quickly, and we were leaving just after 8:00. We ate a quick supper and watched a Quantum Leap episode on DVD, and then went off to bed.

Last week was a puttery little week.

Monday – Mer was gone on Senior Trip, so I was left to batch it. This meant homemade pizza and Spider-Man 2.

Tuesday – Aunt Mary invited me to her place, and we got take-out from Grinders. We then watched competitions on the Food Network, which I enjoyed. I especially liked “Chef vs. City,” where two teams of chefs had to do various food-related things in Chicago. It was fun to see Chicago from a food point of view.

Wednesday – I went down to Atwood Lake for the last evening of Senior Trip. I get to see Mer and hang out with her, and there is always a special dinner and “senior share” where the seniors get to say what they like (as long as it is positive). The weather was great, the food was very good, and the kids were kind. This year, the praise and thanking of classmates and teachers was more frequent than in past years, but it was also more general; they students tended to thank “the teachers” and “my classmates” and very few singled people out. This is not a bad thing, just different from past years.

Saturday – Mer and I had two graduation parties, one at The Ledges park nearby, and one at a very nice home in the area of Canton about 40 minutes away. We ate well at both. We were planning on seeing Aunt Mary, so we made it part of the trip to the greater North Canton area. We had a good visit for about 45 minutes or so.

Not a bad little week!