10. Breakfast With Charlie

Most mornings this summer, my four-year old Charlie, of the golden curls and ornery disposition, crawled out of bed first and padded downstairs, determined to have cereal with his dad.  He’d squawk big-time if Walter (9) or Jack (7) tried to intrude on his special time with dad, so this became our very cool custom.

9.  An Afternoon at Interlochen

Right after my birthday in August, Walter, Charlie and I piled into the new ’06 Cooper and took the annual MINI road trip to Traverse City and environs, while Jack went to Cedar Point with his mom.  The three of us wrapped up our travels by spending an afternoon at Interlochen State Park.  I hadn’t been there for almost a decade, and it was cool to make it back to a place where I had camped many times in my youth.

8.  IKEA3

If you’ve seen the billboard on Groesbeck, I gotta tell ya the store is worth the trip, or three trips in my case.  It’s just the most enormous collection of couches, posters, martini glasses, rugs, kitchen cabinets, Swedish meatballs, slippers, lamps, sinks, coat hangers, and everything else you could possibly imagine cramming into your house, all fairly well made and criminally inexpensive, as opposed to cheap.  Plus, when you get tired, the restaurant is ridiculously efficient in serving up yummy food and great coffee for reasonable prices.  This was cool because it restored my faith in shopping.  

7.  Slugs

While cleaning out the garage in July, I picked up a pile of yard debris only to come across two of the most beautiful slugs you’ve ever seen.  They were about three inches long and had shimmering iridescent sides and these cool looking feeler-thingees (technical term) sticking out of their heads.  It was only when I realized that they had actually touched my hand that I got grossed out and even then, I knew that was a personal problem.  I showed them to my kids, then gently dropped them into a pile of mulch behind my back fence.  This was cool because it was easily the most awesome thing I saw all summer.   

6. “Hey Girl” by The Delays

I know, I know, ya’ll were listening to Gnarls Barkley, but I couldn’t see kicking out the cash for such an unknown quantity, I don’t listen to the radio (except NPR), and I won’t steal music over the internet.  So I was stuck with this gorgeous mix of twangy guitars, thundering drums and lovely falsettos as my track for the summer.  This was cool because in a slow summer for recorded music, it gave me something new and purty to listen to.

[Runner-up: “Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)” – Eels]

5.  The Summer of Great Graphic Narrative

As is my custom, I read a bunch of comics over the summer and I must say, this time I really cashed in.  The best of these were: Fun Home, Alison Bechdel’s heart-rending memoir of growing up with a closeted father; David B.’s Epileptic, a French graphic novel portraying the narrator’s second-hand struggle with the title malaise; and Frank King’s Walt and Skeezix, an unrelentingly humane collection of the Gasoline Alley comic strip from 1923-1924, both profoundly ordinary and ordinarily profound.  This was cool because I learned a lot from these books, and not just that comics aren’t for kids anymore.      

[Runners-up: Acme Novelty Date Book – Chris Ware; Art Out of Time – Dan Nadel, Ed.; Black Hole – Charles Burns; Clyde Fans – Seth; Drawn & Quarterly Showcase #1-4; Get a Life – Dupuy & Berberian; How To Be An Artist & The Fate of the Artist – Eddie Campbell; Late Bloomer – Carol Tyler; Love and Rockets #1-16 – Jaime Hernandez; Mome #1-4; The Book of Leviathan – Peter Blegvad]

4.  Daily New York Times

We started getting the daily edition of the New York Times right after school let out in June. Thus, my fondest memory of summer 2006: sitting in the big chair in my living room, gulping down a large portion of news and culture — from our sorrows overseas to the Tigers’ saga here at home — along with my morning coffee before the kids got up.  This was cool because it was an island of calm in my otherwise busy life.      

3.  Summer Fun with the Fam

That would be my beloved spousal unit, Julie, the aforementioned three boys, and

my beautiful Brittany, Babe, also known as The Scourge of Squirrels.  As you will

discover through far too many digressions this year, I am a family man at heart,

and I had a ton of fun with them this summer.  From swimming at Bliss Beach on

Lake Michigan during our annual stay at Topinabee to catching the World Series of

Old Time Base Ball at Greenfield Village on my birthday to just hanging out at

home as we did Labor Day weekend, I spent my summer with Julie, the boys, and

Babe, and while I’m ready to go back to work, it all served as proof of how really

cool it is to love spending time with the people you live with.  

2.  The Odyssey of Homer, Robert Fagles, translator

I read a lot of stuff this summer, but this is what I turned to before or after the Times in the AM, and it rocked my world.  I’d been forced to read bits and pieces of it When I Was Your Age, but coming back to it as a grown-up was a revelation. Robert Fagles’ colloquial rendering is a tactile, moving, and complex tale – one that will surely repay repeated readings.  The single moment I take away from this time through: Argos’ tail thumping on the floor in recognition of his master.  This was cool because I always like the sense of accomplishment that comes of working through something weighty during my time off from school. [Runner-up: Freight Train Graffiti – Roger Gastman, Darin Rowland, and Ian Sattler]

1.  Two Free Nights with JBH

If you’re lucky, you’ll marry well.  By some miracle of fate or divine intervention, you’ll find someone you cherish and can live with (always the trick), and you’ll be blessed with beautiful children or a groovy gerbil, as the case may be.  In any event, you’ll have a family with this person, and at some point after, say, nine years or so, you’ll realize you haven’t spent one single night with just him or her in a long time.  Then you’ll enlist a relative or trusted friend while the two of you catch a movie (we give Little Miss Sunshine two big thumbs up) or attend a former student’s wedding (let’s give a shout-out to Mr. Matthew Brown and his lovely bride, Elizabeth).  Of course, you’ll talk too much about your kids on these nights, the dog won’t know what to make of all those empty beds, but when you wake up the next morning, you’ll have to admit it’s nice to have a little peace and quiet around this joint.  Then you’ll stop by Starbucks for what passes for a romantic moment with your beloved before you pick up the little devils who are the center of your family life.  And it will all be very cool because you will be a very lucky person.