Many years ago after Pamela and I got married, we began the creation of a family.
Sometimes it seems like yesterday, sometimes it seems like 100 years ago.
Perspective is such a fickle thing.
That I have been an absentee blogger has never been lost on my wife.
She said to me tonight, and quite casually I might add,
“When are you going to change the picture on your blog?
Write a post about the annual Easter Egg Hunt with the girls.”
I hate it when she’s right.
And I really hate to think she could be a better blogger than me.
If she blogged as well as she ‘Pinterest-ed’, she could put me to shame.
The reasons my blogging has slowed down to an incessant but slow drip is a post in and of itself,
for many varied reasons.
Tonight, though, I am here to talk about eggs.
Brightly coloured eggs.
Easter eggs.
Hard boiled eggs.
Egg salad sandwiches in a shell, yet to be born. [yum]

When our girls started walking we devised a plan for an Easter Egg Hunt to be held in the backyard on Easter morning.
We bought plastic pastel colored eggs that could be filled with all kinds of goodies, from candy and small toys (that nowadays are labeled as DANGEROUS! Your KID could CHOKE on THIS!) to dollar bills and matches.
(yeah, I’m kidding about the matches, calm down)
In New England, Easter morning could be rainy and cold so we needed to use something that would hold up to the elements.
It was the Easter Bunny’s job (namely, me) to hide the eggs in the backyard while the girls were sleeping.
When they woke in the morning to find an incredibly beautiful Easter Basket on their nightstand (compliments of Mr. & Mrs. Easter Bunny)
they were ready to don the appropriate clothes for the ‘going-to-get-mine-before-you-do’  Easter egg hunt.

Now it should be said that Mr. Bunny liked to have several Easter cocktails on the night before and while hiding the eggs wasn’t a problem, remembering where they were the next morning could sometimes be.
There are still eggs somewhere in our yard that I may never find.
I’m still looking for the elusive ‘Ben Franklin’ egg from years ago.
Can’t remember the exact year.
I’ve thought of using some power equipment to try and find it but the money I would spend doesn’t justify the means.
Right now, anyway.
Many years (and mornings after) would find the once loveable Mr. Easter Bunny reduced to the ‘Stupid-Easter-Bunny-that-doesn’t-know-how-to-hide-shit-we-can-easily-find’.
And, my moniker grows so damn lovingly.
I love it.

Fast forward to 2012 . . .

My girls have grown into young, beautiful and intelligent women and yet, I still have to hide eggs.
I am not a freekin’ Easter Bunny anymore, I am a grown 53 year old man.
I don’t have long and fuzzy ears or a cute little tail.
My ass is now flat.
I need three wallets to assimilate an ass bulge.
And I’m a crazy curmudgeon that thinks the world has gone insane.
Maybe I’m insane because I’ll still be out this Saturday night hiding eggs and loving it, rain or snow.
And on Easter morning I will still have no idea where the hell I put them . . .
In my heart, I’m hoping they keep the tradition going
because as silly as it was it’s a part of Pamela and me that will live on.
And maybe in the end, that’s what it’s all about . . .

A Happy Easter to all.

Holl amrantau’r sêr ddywedant
Ar hyd y nos
‘Dyma’r ffordd i fro gogoniant
Ar hyd y nos.
Golau arall yw tywyllwch
I arddangos gwir brydferthwch
Teulu’r nefoedd mewn tawelwch
Ar hyd y nos.

O mor siriol gwen a seren
Ar hyd y nos
I oleuo-i chwaer ddae ar en
Ar hyd y nos.
Nos yw henaint pan ddaw cystudd
Ond i harddu dyn a’i hwyr dydd
Rhown ein goleu gwan i’n gilydd
Ar hyd y nos.

Translation

A sleeping beauty that I will meet, someday [God willing]
I may even have your glass slipper by then, Stell.
Not like you ever needed it . . .

~m

I was doing some work on my blog last Sunday and found a new template that I loved.
It’s the one you’re looking at right now.
It’s called ‘Absynthe’.
I wanted to make sure everything worked and entered some text in the ‘search box’ in the upper right hand corner of the site.
As I scrolled through the search results, I came across a post called ‘Empty House’.
Hmmm, I thought, and I clicked on it.
I wrote this post in late August of 2008 before Jenna went off to college.
I always wax philosophical whenever a daughter leaves the homestead.
Although I can’t for the life of me remember writing it
(1200+ posts will do that to you, I guess)
I read it with the eyes of a new reader, a wonderful and incredibly insightful moment for me.
As I read the post, I felt warm tears forming.
Since the death of my father, life looks a bit different to me these days.
I read my own words and got blown away.
I felt weird.
I’m not supposed to be that jazzed by something I wrote, am I?
Yet, I was.
I am not blowing my own horn here just saying that the craft of writing is a magical thing.
Sometimes it gives you back something totally unexpected.
Very unexpected.
Check out ‘Empty House’.
After checking Google, it looks like I did write this.
And I did check Google, several times.

********************************************

If these old walls could speak,
I wonder just what they’d be saying
the comings and goings of life; the hellos, the goodbyes
tears of the restless nights, memories of suppers shared, stories told

time shuffles his feet like that of an old man
that just can’t help but grow older,
he’s now quiet as a mouse
listening to the days gone by in this almost empty house

Sunny days and skies of blue, little girls saying, “I love you”
echoes from a heart that breaks
Simply because it knows,
that nothing can ever stay the same,
life is ever changing and the tiny souls once held in gentle hands,
aren’t meant to be held forever
But it’s so damn hard to understand and accept ‘temporary’
Take them to the edge and tell them to “fly”;
towards all that makes their hearts happy,
all their souls desire,
every dream they could ever hope to find
just fly . . .

We’ll watch you walk away embracing this wonderful thing called life
but inside we’re still calling out your name
Although you can’t hear it, we want it that way
maybe we just needed to tell you

in everything you do, know that this almost empty house will always wait for you
Doesn’t matter how long or how far away you’ve been, it remembers,
like we remember . . .
that whenever you’re here, you are truly home.

~Dad

Malarky Monday is HERE!

AND HERE!

AND HERE!

AND HERE!

You know the drill by now.
Watch, read, listen and [hopefully] LAUGH!
Visit the above links after your visit here and be sure to have some
paper towels to wipe off your computer monitor.

I originally intended to go all political this week but have decided against it.
I’m not wussing out, I just hate listening to a certain faction of people whine incessantly
about the small stuff, okay?
That said, here are some pics that had me howling at the mOOn, so to speak.
Happy Malarky Monday peeples!!!
Be sure to click on the linx above after your visit here.
Danke . . .

Hopefully, you’ve heard or seen Chris Farley,
the motivational speaker
from Saturday Night Live.
Saw this and busted two guts . . .

This geographical phenomenon has always bugged me as well.

My God, I hated my 8th grade English teacher.
She had legs that belonged on a Grand piano and no tits whatsoever.
No wonder I never got a hankering for Raymond Carver.
Bummer.
Thanks for nothing, Nancy . . .

Last but not least, I am chillin’ out
wit my gnomies . . .

Happy Malarky Monday!!!!

It was 5 years ago that I hit the ‘publish’ button for this post.
Many things have happened since that innocent and ‘so me’ post.
I like to think my writing has matured a bit and that I have taken many of you
on my journey down the road of life.
I want to thank each and every one of you for being a part of my life (good or bad)
for the past 5 years.
You have enlightened me, guided me, made me laugh and have given me solace when I needed it most.
You guys are incredible.
I will pat myself on the back for blatant consistency.
I think I can give me that.
There are several people I need to deeply thank.
Pamela, for believing in me when I no longer believe in myself. (and letting me know about it)
My three girls for keeping me on my  toes. Always.
For Jon, he keeps me cooking. I love cooking,
He is a man that will drive through hell and high water to have a bowl of my Cincinnati Chili,
Thanks, Jon
Last but not least, my family from Australia.
Maureen, Mark, Kelly.Zoe, Mel, Steve, Tash, Stick, Wil, Stella, Lucas, Issac, Max and all!
(who did I miss?)
Thanks to all that have visited and commented.
Read some ”’old”” Murph  . . . .
And watch the video at the end!

This is a piece I wrote several years ago but still seems to me to apply to the present day music industry.
I am still a musician at heart but venues to work in are drying up faster than a droplet of water in a bucket of dry sand.
It’s an abysmal state of affairs these days musically and sadly we all saw it coming.
Some say business is cyclical. I wonder.
Hey, Paul McCartney played the halftime show Super Bowl Sunday, right?

Remembering Miss American Pie

The musicians of the 60’s and 70’s had a wealth of powerful and insightful compositions from which to draw their inspiration. The songs had shine and creative musical integrity that would forever set them apart from today’s musical mainstream.
The music spoke of the dynamic of the human experience; from love found and lost to political innuendo shaking hands with world peace.
The older generation frowned upon these freedoms of expression and saw the music created as an irrevocable evil to be stamped out in the hopes of ending the reign of terror that floated over the airwaves.
From the shaking hips of Elvis to the Mop-Tops from England to the androgynous and enigmatic David Bowie, the music written back then made us think and connect; it gave us an up close and personal view of the broken heart.
So what the hell happened to perceptive content?
Music, in its purest form is therapy, a most fundamental discipline of meditation the human race has, but along the way we altered the magic formula, ultimately changing its destiny as well.
It’s supposed to make you feel good.
Just think of a song that truly means something to you, take out a piece of paper, and jot down five things that come to mind immediately.
Chances are you can come up with more than ten.
That’s the miracle of music; when something unexpected touches the heart.
Much of what I hear today is tainted, biased and so musically inept that when I hear one of these prized gems, I can only wildly shake my head and slobber saliva like an angry PBR bull (which tends to make loved ones around me very uncomfortable).
A rule of thumb for future songwriters regarding lyrics: if it rhymes with shucking but has nothing to do with corn, get out a thesaurus and find another word.
The English language is chock full of them. Really.
It seems that few people write real songs anymore; that is a simple and yet sobering fact, not a generality. If it weren’t for artists like John Mayer and Dave Matthews, I’d have lost my mind by now.
Much of the music today is like bad poetry, arranged, set to a groove from the late eighties, and thrown into a 4,000 track, all digital recorder (yes, all the tracks must be used, read the contract).
Recently, while listening to a song on a brand X radio station out of Boston—the exact frequency slips my mind…you’re welcome—I remember thinking to myself, what language is this guy speaking?
I strained to hear anything remotely intelligible.
Musically speaking, the song was as mundane and pedestrian as an arrangement that oozes from a generic portable keyboard purchased at Wal-Mart.
I also thought that somewhere in the midst of this urban cacophony, I could hear the sound of a dog being run over and over, and over again… I’m not positive about that and maybe it’s just me. Somebody call the ASPCA.
The inspiration for this article came to me as I ambled down Main Street a few weeks ago (us old guys don’t walk, we amble…it’s much hipper) when a pulsating sub-compact Toyota Celica loaded with what sounded like two, maybe three 18-inch subwoofers drove past me towards City Hall, emitting music so thunderous it almost knocked down the lady walking next to me.
Initially, I thought it was just wind.
I didn’t get the license plate number because I was too busy bending over to retrieve my own two eyeballs off the sidewalk.
Sound pressure levels that can cause buildings to vibrate precariously…hmm, I wondered if the Slater Building was up to code on that one.
Nope, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
Then there’s the whole debacle surrounding present day artists hiding behind the 5th amendment, and we all can see what a gush of rotting sewage that is, but it doesn’t mean we have to buy a bucketful of it.
When a major proportion of the music available has a “parental advisory” sticker slapped on it, what’s left for those of us who prefer substance in what we listen to?
Maybe we need a special store that caters to people fed up with listening to music and lyrics that insult our intelligence with the glorification of worthless profanity while wasting our hard earned money on garbage that someone in the recording industry somehow deemed fit for human consumption. Bon appétit.
Maybe I’m not meant to understand what all the hype and excitement in the industry is about these days, because I’m no longer a child.
But there’s always that outside chance that as I struggle with my own foreseeable mid-life crisis, I’ll pleasantly discover that perhaps I’ve grown a little bit wiser in the process.
Just watch the Grammy Awards this year for a taste of the ultimate in garishness.
In the end, the music we choose to listen to and support should remain solely in the hands of the listener, but the overall message that it brings should be more of a boon to society as opposed to an outrage against the machine.
Comedian George Carlin hit the proverbial nail on the head when he stated that, “…inside every silver lining, there’s a dark cloud.”
Get out your umbrellas, kids; it looks like rain.

Happy 5 To S&M!!!!!!!
See you for the next five years . . .
I hope!

It was 20 years ago tonight that my wife elbowed me at 1:30 in the morning saying,
“My water just broke. Get some sleep.”
Get some sleep?
Yeah, right.
I called Pamela’s mom and told her to come over immediately (to watch a sleeping 3 year-old Sarah)
and it wasn’t soon after that we were changed and in my silver Datsun 210 on the way to the hospital.
It was cold as hell and my brakes were grinding to the metal.
Pamela thought we would never make it to Hannemann Hospital.
We did.
At 8:11AM (2.7.90) Pamela gave birth to our second daughter, Jenna.
Tomorrow afternoon we will have a house full of family and Jenna’s college friends
and more Chinese food than you can shake a stick at.
We will also be watching some Supernatural episodes (Jenna’s favorites, methinks)
We will basically have our own ‘Supernatural Bowl’.
Could be much better than the actual Super Bowl itself.  (no Dean)
Happy birthday, Jen.
Mom and I love you and your sisters more than you will ever know.
Have a ‘supernatural’ day, okay?
Here’s a Supernatural gag reel that you may not have seen.
See you tomorrow afternoon, kiddo.

I have no clue as to where the year went but it went and here we are.
As you embark on many new journeys and adventures,
I wish all of you peace and much love in the coming year.
2010 holds many things, some expected and some not so much.
What the year holds for me is anyone’s guess.
I see good and I see some bad.
That’s life I guess.
For all that have visited and commented here over the past year,
I thank you from the bottom of my sock.
Somehow ‘my heart’ doesn’t seem quite deep enough. 
Happy New Year!

ps.
and yes, this post is up at 9AM E.S.T  
Why, you ask?
It’s New Years Day in Australia right now!
Goodonya!

I began thinking about the old black pot belly stove that sat in the cellar of the house I grew up in.
No idea where the thought came from but it triggered a total waterfall of memories for me.
The stove was fat in the way a corpulent Santa Claus would be.
It had an ornate shiny silver ‘belt’ of trim around the belly and a flat top where you could actually put a skillet and fry some eggs or place a kettle to boil water.
I vaguely remember my father heating some hot dogs and  Boston Baked Beans on it one winter night when the power went out, though my sister would have to validate that.
Many magical things happened in that cellar over the years.
There were the band rehearsals where I learned to play songs like ‘Ohio’, ‘For What It’s Worth’ and  ‘Rocky Racoon’.
I learned that Wild Irish Rose was total rotgut at $2.98 a bottle and that weed was something to be smoked and not ripped from the garden to be added to the compost pile.
Guild, Fender and Martin guitars were awesome and playing the introduction to ‘Black Magic Woman’ on a Fender Rhodes while high was a near religious experience.
(My Mom knew, but said very little)
It was in that special place that I slowly broke away from childhood innocence and began to see all the crazy possibility in the world.
It was in the ground level bay window that my father would set up one of those chintzy silver tinsel Christmas trees.
You know, the ones that were lit up by a squeaky and archaic tri-color rotating light that turned the tree from red to green to yellow to yack?
My father would plug it in and run outside and stand in the side yard and stare at it as he shook his head in total Yuletide affirmation.
After my sister’s wedding (reception), 100 or so people descended on the house; upstairs, downstairs, in the cellar, 9 Old Worcester Road was transformed into a surreal but quintessential Animal House complete with music, booze, food and crazy people walking through screen doors.
I’d never seen my Dad totally blasted until that night.
Christ in a sidecar, he was funny.
Even funnier the next morning. (don’t talk to me, just don’t talk to me . . . )
The cellar was also the location of a very special place created by Sarah and Jenna (my two oldest daughters) called, ‘Mr. Boston’s’.
My father had remodeled an old bureau into a bar on wheels, an idea he got from God knows where.
Take a bureau and turn it around so the drawers are facing away from you, cover the back and sides with paneling and put a nice wood trim around the top corners and you have a bar.
I can still see the tacky yellow linoleum he put on the bureau top.
The ‘drawer’ side faced the bartender where there were drawers filled with drink mixes, napkins, toothpicks, martini glasses, broken corkscrews and booze (except in the off season).
There was a maniacal clock with backwards numbers and hands that hung on the wall behind the bar. (the second hand went backwards)
On the face it boldly asked “Are you ready for another one?”
It’s ironic that when you were drunk it actually made some sense.
The girls would go straight to Mr. Boston’s whenever we went to visit my mother and father. Sarah would usually start out as the bartender because she was older and Jenna would be her soul customer (*ms, intentional).
We could hear them laughing and yelling as we all laughed and smiled upstairs.
Eventually, they would get a bit bored with the limited clientele and come back upstairs to recruit some fresh meat.
We would all go downstairs and ‘get served’ as the girls became both bartender and waitress.
They would take orders on their paper pads and serve us wonderful food and drink.
That was until we got our bill.
($768.00 for 2 burgers and drinks!?!?!?! Your prices are too high Mr. Boston)
I guess what I realized today was that my cellar was a place where small dreams came true for many people, including my two oldest daughters.
And I know that everyone reading this post has their own ‘Mr. Boston’s’ as well.
Write about it tonight . . .  and remember.
It’s only a few pen strokes away . . .

“Come to the edge.”
“We can’t, we are afraid.”

“Come to the edge.”
“We can’t, we will fall.”

“Come to the edge.”

And they came.
And He pushed them.

And they flew.

~G. Apollinaire

Graduation ’09 is done and dusted but the torrential rain of emotions put Pamela and I through the proverbial ringer.
As we both sat outside the other night mesmerized by the roaring firepit she quietly said,
“Things are changing again.”
When things change, a subtle discomfort settles in.
For as happy and proud as we were for Sarah, we also share her sense of trepidation, a subject not many people talk about.
But it’s there in every single family attending a graduation.
After the ceremony we had an old fashioned BBQ back at the house with burgers, hot dogs and salads galore.
There was laughter and music, beer and cigars, goodbyes and tears when roommates and friends had to leave.
Later that day, Pamela, myself and the girls went to move the remainder of Sarah’s belongings from her room and let her say goodbye to her college high atop Mt. Saint James.
As I waited by my truck for Sarah to come out of her dorm for the last time,
I looked around at the ivy-covered buildings that had occasionally surrounded me over the past 4 years.
My own sadness at saying goodbye leaving the comfort of this place surprised me.
Thank God for sunglasses.
It was quiet in the car on the way home with everyone lost in their own thoughts.
I thought about a large Monarch butterfly I’d seen in the air that morning as I listened to the list of graduates being read.
It flew gracefully down towards the moving sea of black mortarboards below disappearing amidst the caps and gowns; almost like it was going home.
For Sarah, another class has already started as of tonight.
She must want stronger wings . . .