2025 Pirates Win Predictions - 1/3 Mark

Since the Pirates have played just over 1/3 of their games this season, it's a good time to check in with our family's win predictions.  Today, they stand at 21-36, which is good for the fourth-worst record in the majors.  And that's after winning 6 out of their last 10 games under new manager Donnie Kelly.

I tried to be as pessimistic as possible before the season without being a downer.  That put my projected win total below the rest of the family.  And yet, that turns out to be way too optimistic for this offensively-challenged squad.

To get to 71 wins, they'd have to go 50-55 the rest of the way after going 21-36 to date.  They have the pitching to do that.  The questions are: 

• Will the injury bug stop biting them? 
• Will they field the most productive hitters in the organization?
• Can those hitters hit way better in the next four months than they have in the first two?

Dispatch from the Empty Nest

Since I wondered what the empty nest was like before we arrived at one, I thought I would share some field observations.  On the first Sunday in January of this year, we officially transitioned from our "emptying nest" phase to the real deal.  

Our Timeline

• May 2024: Charlie graduated from Oberlin College with a creative writing degree
  
  
  
• June 2024: Teddy graduated from Allderdice High School
  
• Summer to September: all 4 at home; Charlie umpiring little league and ushering at PNC Park for the Pirates; Teddy working at a growing 3-d printing company close to our neighborhood
• End of September: Teddy enrolled at New England Institute of Technology in East Greenwich, RI for auto repair
• November: a brief job search landed Charlie in an administrative role at Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center
• Also November: we took an "emptying nest" trip to the Bahamas, just the two of us.

• Christmas holidays: Teddy home for three weeks, working and hanging out with his high school sweetheart, whom he's still dating.  All four of us in the house.
• Sunday January 5, 2025: Charlie moves into a 1BR apartment a half-mile east of us the same day that Teddy returns to school (530 miles away) for the winter term.

All at once, after having everyone under one roof again for the holidays, my competent wife and I suddenly found ourselves the only permanent residents of our home.  The transition felt slow, slow, slow, FAST! One or more resident may, of course, return at some point.  For now, though, we've spent these months adjusting to the new normal.

Gratitude List

Two conditions make our transition to the empty nest easier than some.  I frame them in gratitude so that they (hopefully) don't come across as braggadocio.  Neither of these conditions is guaranteed as the nest empties.  First, we still like and love each other.  Like in the potentially-gross-out favorite person way.  That's huge.  Second, our sons are both happy and fulfilled in their lives.  We would support them if they weren't, but it's a great pleasure that they're both launching well.  They even protest a little when we pay for things before accepting our generosity and thanking us.  It's the sweetest.

Also, everyone's in relatively good health (especially since I'm off the crutches I relied on through two commencements last May and June).  We don't take this for granted either.

Expectation

I'm not sure what exactly I expected from this phase of life.  Maybe that the house would be too quiet or that the whole enterprise might feel bleak compared to family life.  I guess I felt vaguely anxious about it, not being the biggest fan of change in general. 

Reality

In reality, I notice the mundane more than the profound.  We get frequent touchpoints with Charlie since he lives close.  He still sits with us at church and comes over for Sunday supper.  One day, he helped me with a two-person yard project when Paige was busy.

Saving up Conversation Topics

With progeny of any age in the house, the family schedule put pressure on when we could actually discuss decisions or update each other on the people or events of the day.  Now, we find ourselves storing up things to talk about until it's a good time to talk.  We might cook together with the radio or a podcast on and then run down our list when we're seated, quietly, facing each other at the dinner table.  I literally keep a list on my phone and fight the urge to "download" from it at suboptimal times.

Cooking Less

We have practiced this adjustment before thanks to summer camp experiences (camper and staff) and then to Charlie going away to college.  Getting down to two mouths to feed, we can actually plan leftovers as a dinner again.  We can also cook certain meals without doubling the recipe.  Young men can, of course, eat on a plague-of-locusts level.  

When we make cookie dough, we bake maybe a half-dozen cookies, form the rest and freeze them.  Then we bake them off a half-dozen at a time in the toaster oven.  It's a kind of bliss.  Also, no one complains when dinner is vegetarian.

Purge Impulse

In the absence of dependents to see to, I find myself wanting to take care of the household.  In particular, I want any item we don't need anymore gone ASAP.  On Charlie's Sunday visits, we often have a little pile of things for him to take if he likes.  Since the pandemic, we've given a lot away using our neighborhood Buy Nothing group.  That trend continues.

Don't worry.  I'm not piling up the guys' personal effects from their bedrooms and carting them to Goodwill.  Just, you know, Marie Kondo-ing my own stuff.

Not Bored

I might have guessed that without school events or shopping emergencies or impromptu kitchen dance parties, "just" the two of us might get bored.  I was wrong.  For one thing, we have more freedom to say yes to things we like to do.  My competent wife sang in the choir for Holy Week, which involved several Lenten Thursday evenings at rehearsal.  I've attended many more Story Club story slams than I used to.  We can also say yes to spontaneous social opportunities more easily.

True confession: we went back to our kids' high school for the spring musical even though our guys don't qualify for the cast or crew anymore.  Who doesn't enjoy a high school musical. Don't answer that.

Sometimes, we take a walk before making dinner.  Pretty wild.

The fact that it's easier to take on projects around the house means I'm taking on more projects around the house.  Honestly, at stretches, I've wished for some of the quiet boredom I'd speculated about.

1:1 Ratio

One way in which we're now definitely spoiled: We never wait to use a bathroom.  There's one for each of us.  When we've had houseguests recently, I've found myself feeling suddenly curmudgeonly about having to share.

Conclusion

So that's it.  Nothing earth-shattering.  Mostly extremely present.  

I tried hard to welcome and see the good in each stage of our children's development into young men.  I'm trying to approach this new phase the same way.

2025 Pirates Win Predictions

Your correspondent failed to update after the family's initial predictions last year.  The Pirates won 76 games for the second year in a row.  That yielded a first for us: a three-way tie on prediction accuracy.  My pessimistic call of 73 wins and Paige's and Teddy's more optimistic 79 win prognostication were just 3 wins off the actual result.  Charlie's 90 fell charmingly over.

This year, two family members predict consistency at 76 wins again.  Charlie again believes this is the Pirates year.  I have seen nothing from the off season or spring training to get me excited.  (Except Jack Suwinski's return to hitting form.  We shall see how that lasts into the regular season.) 

If Tommy Pham is still with the team on Father's Day, I will revise my prediction down to 48 wins.

Books of 2024: The Book(s) of the Year

To conclude this year's reviews, I continue my cheating by awarding not one but two books of the year.  Unlike last year's undisputed champion (George Saunders's A Swim in a Pond in the Rain), I found it difficult to narrow the pinnacle just as I failed to narrow the category reviews.  This constitutes good news if you want more titles to add to your to-read list.

The novel here was published closer to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, and the collection of essays would look quite different without Covid-19.  I read the novel for a random reason and the collection of essays because I'm a completist, and Ann Patchett published another book.

Wishing you a happy reading in 2025!

The Books of the Year

How Green was my Valley, Richard Llewellyn, 1939

Wow.  Wow wow wow.  This book landed on my to-read list when a first draft of our 2022 trip to visit Charlie on his semester abroad in Bath, England included a visit to Cardiff in Wales.  Two reader neighbors recommended reading it to get a sense of Welsh history.  When we edited Cardiff out of our itinerary, How Green dropped in priority.  I'm so glad I returned to it now.  Llewellyn writes in a lyrically beautiful style.  It's difficult to separate the story - three generations of the Morgan family in Victorian era Wales, their valley, the colliery (coal mine) that feeds them and brings them such danger - and the writing.  One might not expect heart-string-pulling poetic prose to tell this story, but one gets it anyway.  Llewellyn describes the characters' hopes, heartaches, triumphs, and moral lessons in simple, gorgeous sentences and paragraphs, all through the voice of youngest son Huw Morgan as he grows up with his parents, brothers, pastor, and community mentors and antagonists.  The people of the valley - and especially Huw's father Gwilym - live by a simple and strong moral code.  That strength comes not from immutable stubbornness but from grafting into its core new input and ideas.  I loved this book, and I'm so grateful to my neighbors Peg and author Janet Roberts for recommending it.  I listened to this book read by the now-deceased English actor Ralph Cosham; he nailed it.

These Precious Days, Ann Patchett, 2021

When Harper's published the title essay of this collection, I photocopied it and mailed it to several friends.  Patchett's long story of an extraordinary experience of new friendship during the pandemic moved me so deeply that I felt the need to share it.  (And yes, I have grandparent tendencies already, mailing published items to friends on paper.)  There may not be a better essay than this one (although that would be a fun debate).  When my summer podcast lull deepened, I requested a bunch of downloadable audio books, and this one came up first.  Patchett does not disappoint.  These essays cover deeply personal topics - relationships in her fascinating family, her penchant for deep, long-standing, female friendships, coping with the world-altering pandemic.  In one essay, she collects the many instances in which people have spoken rudely and frankly to her about not having children.  In another essay, she recounts her encounters with the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  I love her, and I loved this collection.

Books of 2024: Fiction

Despite efforts to maintain a balanced diet of fiction and non-fiction this year, the vagaries of library availability offered up more of the latter when I got to my next book on my to-read list.  I made a special effort to focus on books that had lingered in to-read for a while rather than adding more.  Not easy!

In the end, I read 55% non-fiction in 2024.  Still, that 45% contained gems.  Don't let the number of titles fool you.  I recommend all of these - even the honorable mentions - as strongly as I can.

Books of the Year: Fiction

Tom Lake, Ann Patchett, 2023

This book came within a gnat's eyelash of being my book of the year.  In Tom Lake, Ann Patchett tells two versions of her favorite story: throw a group of people together unexpectedly, and see what happens.  In the present, Lara, her husband Joe, and their three daughters have been thrown back together by the Covid-19 pandemic on their Michigan cherry farm.  Their typical picker helpers can't get there, and they have no choice but to harvest relentlessly together.  To pass the time and satisfy her young adult daughters' obsession with the story, Lara tells them about the summer stock company at Tom Lake in which she was cast as Emily in Our Town and May in Fool for Love during a long-ago summer before they were born.  It's perfect Patchett, mixing the heart-warming with the heartbreaking.  The characters in both timelines prove complex and unpredictable.  In what I've come to consider familiar, I had to remind myself that I could not Google and find out more about the people and places Patchett has invented here.  Patchett uses Our Town as an especially strong thread through the story.  You could call Tom Lake a love letter to that play, in fact.  Patchett manages the flashback and the present deftly, giving neither short shrift.  I am glad that I chose to read this when I needed a diversion.  It went beyond satisfying.  It delighted!

Heaven and Earth Grocery Store, James McBride, 2023

Graham and Laura Hennessey gave Paige and me this book for Christmas 2023.  My competent wife got to it first.  When I got my hands on it, I got excited a few pages in.  This is the first McBride novel I've read.  He tells a wild tale extremely vividly.  McBride's gift for layering characters and plotlines on top of each other impressed me.  Throughout the book, when I thought I knew whose story and which story he was telling, he would introduce someone new, and that someone would have his or her own motivations and ideas.  The new character would bring new action.  Not to telegraph too much, but, of course, those plot lines intersect.  Sometimes, the plotting was complicated enough that I didn't totally follow it.  But I grokked enough, and I was happy to go on the cinematic ride McBride captains.  The eponymous grocery store is in Pottstown, PA in the 1930s.  We see some flashes forward and back, and nearby Reading and more distant Philadelphia figure into the story.  There are two leaps into present-day cultural analysis that jarred so supremely against the story that I had to question McBride's sanity.  Even if he was trying to evoke certain contemporary themes with a 90-year-old story, it's either artless or foolish to make it so explicit.  Or maybe he's working on a genius level I do not understand.

The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece, Tom Hanks, 2023

I'm grateful to my friend Cassie Christopher for recommending this delightful novel.  From the overlong title, you get the idea: the book tells the story of the making of a movie.  If it's set on a movie set, it takes competence as its theme.  Competence recognized and rewarded.  This feel-good theme makes it a breath of fresh air (especially during an election season that has re-elected the most feel-bad, incompetent candidate imaginable).  We meet the writer/director, the crew, and the actors.  The movie in question is a Marvel movie for Netflix (all by different names).  We get the background material for a comic book that eventually gets written and later optioned into a movie.  While at points it feels like maybe a few too many strands of story are being told, Hanks inspires confidence as an author that he will weave all this together.  I would describe the omniscient narrator's voice as Hanks-ian, which is as welcoming as a warm sweater.  Although the book may be 20% longer than it needs to be, I only felt that in the last march to its conclusion.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin, 2022

A Cassie Christopher repeat: she read this book in 2023 and recommended it to me.  Then, at a moment when my competent wife found herself low on books, she read it first out of my under-nightstand pile.  Cassie didn't say much about it, but she did feature it in a short list of non-romance fiction books that she recommended. (She has learned that my spy novel habit and her romance novel habit don't need to cross over into our recommendations for each other.) My competent wife then compared it favorably to Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, and them's salivating words for me.  I brought high expectations to a novel with a setting as weird as the fake Microsoft in Douglas Coupland's Microserfs: video game developers.  Since I'm too old to believe in spending a lot of time playing video games (I'd rather be reading!), I wasn't sure I could get into this world.  To be honest, there were moments when I feared I would start to dislike this book.  That didn't happen though because Zevin writes deftly and from a sweet, good core.  Don't get me wrong; plenty of challenging things happen to characters here.  The most realistic depictions of the messiness of friendship come against those backdrops.  A zag late in the book was one of those times when I thought Zevin would lose me.  Instead, she spurred me to turn page after page with lyrical heights of...writing about (or within) video games.  Gamer or not, read this book.

Honorable Mention

Small Thinks Like These, Claire Keegan, 2021

The Thursday Murder Club, Richard Osman, 2020

Books of 2024: Non-Fiction

I'm making up new categories for Books of the Year this year, and it feels like cheating.  Having already touted memoir and history, I'm now deploying the broader label of non-fiction.  Then again, in a record-breaking year for volume, I want to cheat so I can tell you, dear reader, about more books.

This category features two books that felt in dialog with each other about the topic of attention and its deterioration.  Gloria Mark and Sherry Turkle come to different conclusions, but I found each point of view valuable.  I wonder if the passage of eight years between their books explains the differences or if Turkle would say the same thing now that she said in 2015.  Is Turkle the stern, 1900s disciplinarian while Mark embodies the gentle parent?  If so, I kind of like the combination more than abiding by one alone.

Then, how does one categorize a large collection of essays when one is going to (foreshadowing alert) crown a collection of essays as The Book of 2024 later this week?  Well, I put it here.  It's that Sedaris brand of non-fiction where I can't always discern the line between truth and his imagination.

Books of the Year: Non-fiction

Attention Span; A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity, Gloria Mark, 2023

Who in the 2020s does not worry that our devices and media steadily make us less focused,dumber, and unhappy?  My concern for those things made Gloria Marks's research on attention appealing.  In the field of human computer interaction, she has focused her career on experiments - many of them in workplaces - to understand how attention functions day to day for ordinary people.  Not to spoil the book, but she principally concludes that we should not beat ourselves up about our lack of focus or the small distractions we might engage in on our phones.  While not denying the idea of too much of a good thing (TikTok), Marks reinterprets small digital breaks as serving a similar function to a walk or a conversation with a friend of colleague.  She sees a hierarchy, placing those off-screen breaks higher in value and effectiveness than the screen ones, but she doesn't dismiss a little digital rote activity out of hand.  After we've focused for a period of time - and our digital tools allow that focus as much as they enable distraction - we may do well to virtually step away in order to recharge that focus battery.  She also points out that a "flow state" happens far less often than we think it should and encourages releasing that expectation.  None of this is to say that there's not a crisis: average sustained attention on any one thing has fallen to 47 seconds in the iPhone era.  But Marks would have us be aware of our attention rhythm almost like a sleep cycle and work with it rather than try to white-knuckle our way to a different rhythm.

Reclaiming Conversation; the Power of Talk in a Digital Age, Sherry Turkle, 2015

In what now reads as a recent ancient history text, pre-President-Trump, pre-Covid Sherry
Turkle takes on the sociology of what all of these screens, devices, and "social networks" have done to that basic form of human connection, conversation.  In 2015, when she did her most recent research featured in this volume, college students still used Facebook.  Media has moved on in the intervening years, but her general finding that people converse less and worse now than they did even pre-iPhone remains relevant.  Turkle structures her book with the metaphor of chairs like the two featured on the cover.  Her "One Chair" section covers self-awareness and solitude.  Two Chairs covers family, friendship, and romantic relationships.  Three Chairs examines education, and work, and then she rounds out the book with ideas for a way forward.  This text stands in contrast - actually, outright opposition - to Gloria Mark's Attention Span.  Where Mark would have us forgive ourselves for our market-degraded attention span, Turkle would have us put down our screens and look each other in the eye or at least take a walk outside.  I found value in both approaches.  For what it's worth, I "read" this book in my new hybrid hard copy/audio habit, and I found it easier to consume this one as an audio book.

The Best of Me, David Sedaris, 2020

Having seen David Sedaris read from new and old work in Pasadena in November 2023, I found myself wandering the stacks at the main library.  Sedaris so consistently entertains by mixing poignant family memories with laugh-out-loud surprise jokes.  This collection of old and new work meets that standard.  I partially read it and partly listened to the author read it on audio book.  The latter format, interestingly, included recordings of live readings.  In the middle of a long chapter of studio reading, the listener would then hear one of these recordings in front of an audience.  Sedaris curates his stories and essays masterfully, putting them in dialog with each other.  This long book provided everything I want from Sedaris.

Books of 2024: Stay Away

I always like to share books that I disliked so that other readers might be spared a bad experience.  This year, I disliked more than one book that someone had recommended strongly.  Taste in books is, of course, subjective.  One man's trash and so forth.  Even though it feels funny that someone I know would love a book that I dislike, it's perfectly natural.  

For example, this year, I have a John Le Carré book on both my books of the year and this worst books post.  Also, Arrowsmith won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1926, and Stay True won the Pulitzer for Memoir/Autobiography in 2023.

Books of the Year: Stay Away

Our Kind of Traitor, John Le Carré, 2010

It sounds right to say that a John Le Carre spy novel always hits the spot for me. Our Kind of 

Traitor puts the lie to that statement. I have to wonder if listening to the book - rather than reading it - made it more difficult for me to follow. Sadly, that's true, though. We meet a lot of characters here and flash forward and back in time, especially early on. Around the 65% mark, the action got gripping, and I enjoyed the climax and falling action until the ending plopped pointlessly with no chance at redemption. Come to think of it, the later Cornwall (Le Carre) got in his career, the less I liked the books. Perhaps he suffered the plot-eroding effects of the smart phone era. Perhaps the further he got from his heyday, he started mailing them in. So, while I can mostly rely on him, no author is perfect.

Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis, 1925

My adulthood-long project of reading all of the Pulitzer Prize winners for fiction has led me to fantastic books that I may or may not have discovered through other means. Also, it led me to Arrowsmith, a long novel that seems like contemporary readers may have found quite funny at points. Perhaps they would have considered its 1920s city and countryside cultural comment spot on. Nearly 100 years on, Arrowsmith comes across as a bloated drudgery about a mercurial, unlikable, pompous medical researcher. Lewis must have been doing a thing. I just can't quite fathom what it was. Martin Arrowsmith takes himself plenty seriously and can't see his faults. Correction: at the beginning of hundreds of paragraphs, he can't see his faults. Miraculously, by the end of the paragraph, self insight guides him to the right word or action. I hated this book and am unhappy I read it. Happily, it's nearly out of print.

Stay True, Has Hsu, 2022

Based on Hua Hsu's close age to mine (he's 4 years younger) and based on both of my siblings loving this book, it would seem like I should love it. I'd also heard him interviewed on NPR and heard about the period when he and his father corresponded by fax because his dad had returned to his native Taiwan for significantly more pay and responsibility than he could find in US jobs. And yet. And yet, I pretty much hated this book from start to finish. Its hard to state why, but it may be that four-year age difference. It may be that Hsu liked different bands and pop culture than I did. It seems, though, like the main reason is that Hsu is a self-contradicting condescending jerk. Some would say that it takes one to know one. In the first half of the book, he goes on and on about how anti-capitalist he is while documenting an endless stream of purchases. He waxes entirely too poetically about stuff that never mattered. You made mix tapes and looked down on CD burners? Congratulations. After a terrible thing happens to a friend - a plot turn I credit myself with seeing coming even if I couldn't fully articulate it while reading his descriptions of said friend - Hsu spends most of the remainder of the book gazing at his own navel about whether he had been as good a friend as he thought he was. Then, late in the book, he discovers drugs. Sorry. Meh. Never interested.