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Category: Family

People for whom I’m thankful (an incomplete list)

Published 26 November 2009 by Jason Crane

A small sampling of people for whom I’m thankful. Not complete and in no particular order, but worth writing. I may add to it, too.

Jennifer: 14+ years of putting up with me. I don’t know how she does it. Or, for that matter, why.

Bernie & John: It’s incredible to be unconditionally loved by your kids. Plus, they’re fun to wrestle with.

Mom, Dad and Gretchen: What haven’t we been through? Actually, skip that question, because I’m finding out that this year there are quite a few new and unpleasant answers. They’re always there, though, and that’s amazing.

Linda, Todd & Sarah, Tammy, Dick, Denise & John, Lynne & Mike & Jack & Grace, Jill, Jimmy & Karen: Couldn’t ask for a better family.

Carol, Amy & Michele, Sandy & Carol Jr. & Autumn, Dorothy & Ethan, Kit & Sue, et al: Couldn’t ask for a better second family.

Bernard & Dorothy Flanders: My debt to them can never be repaid.

Jeff & Leeann & Jake: They know how to be friends, which is a hell of a lot rarer than you might think. And one of these days, Jeff and I will have a very successful show together. Probably a strip-tease show.

Kevin & Jen & Momo: My oldest friend (and his wife, who would probably be disturbed to learn that she’s my second- or third-oldest friend). Uncompromisingly honest and loving people with a real cute kid.

Josh & Jen: Smart, funny and wonderful. Josh is always expanding my world, which is just about the highest compliment I can pay.

Team RocBike: You couldn’t ask for a better gang to ride with, blog with, and be positively influenced by.

The musicians, promoters and record labels who’ve made The Jazz Session possible: What can I say? “Beyond my wildest expectations”? Yeah, that about covers it.

Chuck & Bobby D: Never were two guys more accepting of my crazed need to wave at everybody. Plus, they pick good tunes.

Jo & James: Even kinder than they are talented. And they’re supremely talented.

Sue & Jenny & Katie-Kate & Elinor: Love ’em, love ’em, love ’em. (And miss ’em, too!)

Tom & Susan: Beautiful people who made Raymond Street just barely tolerable.

Satoru: Pops up when I least expect it, and is always welcome when he does. One of those people you know will be there when you need him.

Otto: He understands and inspires.

The members of the Rotary Club of Albany: Nice people doing nice things, as Harry Shearer would say. Except in this case, it’s true.

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Bigotry and plain language

Published 24 April 2009 by Jason Crane

Yesterday I posted this uncharacteristic message as my Facebook status:

“Hey, all you opponents of gay marriage: F*CK YOU! (What? That’s not helpful? Oh, sorry. But, uh, f*ck you bigots anyway, OK?)”

This, as you might imagined, generated quite a few comments:

Dean Bowman at 1:36pm April 23: What about opponents of marriage?

Heather Dingman-Glenn at 1:40pm April 23: The majority of students at my school feel that all rights should be equal and are open to all kinds of relationships. However, I would say the boys have it worse than the girls. This is a high school where the majority of the parents are military.

Jason Crane at 2:48pm April 23: @Dean: I’m with you, man. State recognition of unions for legal purposes, and then let folks follow religious practices if they choose, with no state sanction or recognition whatsoever. (Unless, of course, you were just being funny.)

Wendy Ramsay at 2:59pm April 23: Snaps to that!

Julie White at 3:23pm April 23: Ideally, I think that the majority of the rights that come with marriage should just be given to people as basic human rights–you know, like health care, adoption for anyone who’s a fit parent and wants to make a family with anyone else–but as long as we live in a state that thinks that monogamous committed relationships should be rewarded, then … Read Morelet’s at least be equal about that. But in Julie’s utopia, no one kind of human relationship (as long as it’s consensual and doesn’t infringe on anyone else’s rights)would be privileged over another (I know, dream on)… off my soapbox…but this is why I actually have a hard time with the gay marriage issue…a lot of ambivalence.

Jason Crane at 4:07pm April 23: @Julie: Right on! Although I don’t think any of those rights should be given. We’ve already got them. I think we need to stop letting the corporate state take them away. But that’s just me being a punk. And shamelessly stealing from Utah Phillips.

Brenda Yarger Abel at 4:27pm April 23: Wow! Way to promote tolerance.

Jennifer Cornish at 4:59pm April 23
I’m strongly opposed to asshole marriage. Letting assholes get legally married just sullies it for the rest of us. It’s just sick. I mean, there are all kinds of statistics showing that assholes are behind the majority of domestic violence attacks, robberies, burglaries, bombings, wars and crappy BSG season finales. And I’m pretty sure that being … Read Morean asshole is very strongly correlated with being a pedophile. I mean, how can we let these people get married and (GOD FORBID) have kids? It’s like they ruin marriage for us decent people who just want to raise our non-asshole kids to be non-assholes. I’m not saying they should be discriminated against for being assholes. I mean, people can be however they want to be in the privacy of their own homes, but when public schools teach that it’s ok to be an asshole, that’s where I draw the line. Once we let them get married, they’re going to turn the rest of us into assholes too.

Jason Crane at 5:14pm April 23: Amen!

Jason Crane at 5:59pm April 23: @Brenda: It’s always hard to tell if someone’s kidding or not on this here Facebook. But in any case, I’m kinda over being tolerant of intolerance.

Jennifer Cornish at 7:57pm April 23: Is tolerance of bigotry ‘tolerance’? Interesting question.

Brenda Yarger Abel at 10:12pm April 23: Is it not possible to oppose gay marriage, without being intolerant of those who support it? Since bigotry, by definition, is intolerance of anothers beliefs religion or opinion, it would appear that the one F-bombing those who disagree would be a better example of the bigot.

Jennifer Cornish at 2:30am April 24: I think that by saying ‘Fuck You’ to gay-marriage opponents, Jason is being less of a bigot than those people fighting to take away the right for responsible, consenting citizens to get married and live their own lives in peace. I wouldn’t try to actively take away a bigot’s right to be a bigot. 🙂

Jason Crane at 7:13am April 24: Thanks, Jenn. You’ve said it better than I could have. I’m just tired of having people’s religious views imposed on my supposedly secular government. Discrimination and bigotry in the name of religious opinion are still discrimination and bigotry. No excuses.

Many people who are smarter than I have made the following point more intelligently, but here goes: You don’t get to shout “intolerance” when people oppose your bigotry. If you try to deny people their civil rights based on your religious preferences, then you are a bigot, and no one — absolutely no one — is bound to respect your point of view or shy away from denigrating it.

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Evangelism (the open source kind)

Published 13 April 2009 by Jason Crane

Software journalist Bruce Byfield has an interesting post today about free software evangelism and why he keeps his mouth shut at parties.

I tend to feel — and act — this way regarding most evangelism. It’s usually not fun to have political discussions at parties because people have so few facts at their command. Maybe it’s my personality, but I find it very hard to have “discussions” between entrenched positions where there is no hope of movement.

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The Great Men’s Room Escape!

Published 15 March 2009 by Jason Crane

toilet-stall

We had 15 or so folks at the house today for John’s third birthday party. After the party, a dozen of us headed to El Mariachi in downtown Albany for some great Mexican food.

Toward the end of the meal, my 6-year-old son Bernie had to go the bathroom. I took him to the bathroom and he entered the toilet stall, locking the door behind him.

When he finished going to the bathroom, he tried to open the door. I could see the handle moving, but the door didn’t open. After about 30 seconds, he started to panic. “I can’t get the door open, Dad!” He said. “Go get someone!”

I asked him what the lock looked like, and tried to calm him down by getting him to describe the mechanism to me. It didn’t really work, though. He was really in a panic and asking me to get someone. The stall and the door went all the way to the floor, so there was no way for him to crawl out.

I looked up and noticed that there was a two-foot space between the top of the stall and the ceiling. Next to the stall was a urinal. Not knowing what else to do, I climbed on the urinal and waved my hand over the top. Bernie climbed onto the toilet and reached up for my hands. I grabbed him and he tried to climb up the wall of the stall while holding my hands. I had no leverage at all, and I couldn’t exert much force to pull him up.

Bernie slipped back and almost landed in the toilet bowl. We decided to try it again. This time he got a little more traction on the wall and was able to climb up high enough for me to get my hands under his arms. Together we got him on top of the wall. I put one arm around him and yanked him off the wall at the same time as I jumped down off the urinal. We landed on the floor together and instantly started laughing at the ridiculouslness of the whole thing.

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Lincoln jailed my cousins

Published 12 February 2009 by Jason Crane

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Today is Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which seems like a good time to mention that back during the Civil War, two of my cousins were jailed by Abraham Lincoln for sedition. You can read the entire story in the March 2006 issue of Flanders Family News. (This links to a PDF file. The story starts on Page 9.)

Enjoy!

By the way, lest you interpret this the wrong way — I’m a big fan of Lincoln. But how could I pass up this story?

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POEM: Bookshelves

Published 31 January 2009 by Jason Crane

Bookshelves

All our bookshelves were made by our fathers,
crafted by calloused hands from woods
soft or hard, fine-grained or no,
fashioned in damp basements or dusty barns
on Saturday afternoons while Black Magic Woman
or Love Me Do played on what used to be the nice radio.
The bookshelves are, like all fathers’ creations, imperfect,
slightly wider at the front,
fitting some books better than others.
In one, there is a pair of hearts carved,
delicate filigree surprising
from a splitter of logs, a man of the earth.
The bookshelves are a framework, intended
by our fathers to be filled with thoughts
of our own choosing, maybe with a gentle nudge
from a “doctor of books.”
But it is we who must encumber the wood
with our own words, we who must choose
which volumes to stack or lean,
we who receive the hard or soft legacy
cast in simple wood by complex men.

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Lights out, everybody!

Published 23 December 2008 by Jason Crane

Last night, Jen and the boys and I went to see some percussion ensembles from the Albany Youth Symphony Orchestra. The concert was at the Massry Center for the Arts at the College of St. Rose. The Massry Center is a brand new performance and rehearsal building with state-of-the-art facilities.

Unfortunately, it also has one major design flaw. The light switches that control every light in the auditorium are located about three feet up on the wall outside the auditorium, and the switches blink.

How do I know this? Because while the theater was filling up and the final ensemble was finishing its rehearsal, my two-year-old son, John, saw the pretty blinking light and pressed all the switches, turning off every light in the auditorium. Some people started leaving. My wife overheard one patron say, “They must not want us in there now.”

I saw what John had done and turned the lights back on. The rehearsal finished, and the rest of the show went off without a hitch. But some architect ought to be giving the college a refund for that part of the design. Or they should have a “no two-year-old boys” policy.

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Celebrating Bernie’s 6th Birthday

Published 4 November 2008 by Jason Crane

Here’s a slideshow of photos from this past weekend, when family from across NY and PA came to celebrate Bernie’s 6th birthday. (His actual birthday is today.)

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