2011 in review: damage control

It’s the time of year when we look back on all that we’re grateful for, an easy job here. We’re especially grateful for teenagers and twenty-somethings!

Charlie in action for Inferno

I was quietly watching the Beatles’ Anthology on a December Sunday evening when there was a knock on the door. It was Charlie, now 16, with a couple of high school friends. Off went the DVD, and on went the Xbox playing FIFA 2012. Ten minutes later, two attractive girls, also from high school, arrived to join the boys.  I had been thinking about going to the cinema, and asked Charlie what he would have done if I hadn’t been home. “I have a key,” he replied, with a big smile on his face, knowing full well what I was concerned about. He passed his driving test in November, and had his own car before the end of the month. How quickly they figure out how to arrange things when the parents live separately! I may never be able to leave the condo empty again!

It was in his soccer that we saw the best of Charlie this year. His Inferno team had a run of bad luck at the beginning of its fall season, losing players to injury and games to fluke goals. They were all getting discouraged. Then came the game at Sky Park against a team that was certainly no better than them. Somehow, with more of the same luck, we were down 3-0 at half time. Back on the field for the second half, Charlie quite literally took the game by the horns. Almost single-handedly, he pulled Inferno back into it, scoring three goals himself, working very hard, and the final score was 4-4. This was the kind of character that you want to see your children develop.

Charlotte and Nick at his birthday brunch in Santa Cruz

Nick too showed plenty of character this year. He has settled into a long-term relationship, with Charlotte in France. Long-distance relationships are always a challenge, although the two of them were able to spend a lot of time on Skype together. Plus during the course of the year he visited her and she visited him and he visited her again. That’s the advantage of his in-demand career, software coding: he works very hard, but earns enough doing so to facilitate periods of leisure.

On Christmas morning, waiting for Alex and Charlie to come and open their presents, I was again watching the Beatles Anthology on the 42" TV that Nick brought with him when he moved in

Then out of the blue, his start-up employer laid him off in the summer, neglecting to pay for his last month’s salary. A week or so later, his grandfather (Sunshine’s dad) died unexpectedly and suddenly of a stroke. Nick mourned his grandfather, with the family, at the memorial service and on FaceBook: “If there were ever a man I believed to be invincible it would have been you. I see you in my Mom. I see you in myself. You will remain a voice in my heart forever. I always saw such warmth in your eyes – perhaps it is what I’ll miss most. I love you grandpa, rest in peace. Watch over us – let us continue to make you proud.”

Nick quit smoking, took up soccer again, and ploughed on with his coding and his life, insightful and kind, always with an ardent edge. I had the pleasure of him moving into my condo. He decided to start learning to cook, and prepared a boeuf bourguignon, his first, that was a delight. At 25, he’s grown up a lot, and not a bad roommate at all. From Paris, where he’s taking an extended vacation for the Holiday Season, he messaged me on FaceBook: “Thank you for an excellent few months back at the dad pad.”  You’re welcome!

Alex at Disneyland in July

One of the peak moments of my year also involved soccer. I actually won a EUFA lottery for tickets, two of them, to the Champions League final at Wembley last May. Very few people who were not associated with Manchester United, FC Barcelona or EUFA were able to go, and Charlie and I were two of them. “Chance of a lifetime!’ he exclaimed, accurately. What a game, what an occasion! My team, Manchester United, played second fiddle to Barcelona, the best team in the world, but Charlie and I did get our moment of pure joy when Wayne Rooney scored in the first half after a Rooney-Giggs one-two. Even after the game (we lost 3-1) I felt an amazing glow. This was the best football I have ever seen live. Cross one off the bucket list.

Jeremy Neuner took this one of me at work in my office at NextSpace CoWorking in Santa Cruz. It's a great corner office and a wonderful place to work.

Alex, another ManUtd fan, turned down the chance to go to this game, which was timed before the end of school and so required 24 hours of travel for 24 hours in London (not for me: I’m no longer at school!). Also, he would have seen his mother on her birthday if he had come, but would have missed her birthday dinner.  I’ll try to get him to see a fun game this coming year, but it is difficult when the Premier League season coincides with the school year. Now 13, he takes his school assignments very seriously, which is most gratifying, almost as seriously as he takes his video games! He thinks things through very carefully, and his conclusions always have their own coherent internal logic. Perhaps not coincidentally, he is the child who seems to be handling the ongoing divorce the best, keeping very good relations with both his parents.

He’s also very funny. Here’s an exchange from a day when he was visiting my office:

Alex:                      “Do you know that when you fart in the office you lean back so that your chair squeaks?”

Me, lying:            “No, Alex, I was not aware of that.”

Alex:                      “Well, I don’t think that works. Most humans have noses, you know.”

Ava and Alban, Alex and Charlie, on the California Screaming ride in Disney’s California Adventure Park

The high spot of the year was a few days in July at Disneyland in Anaheim. I took Alex and Charlie, Josh, a friend of Charlie’s, Alban and his girlfriend Ava, and Nick and Charlotte. Daphne couldn’t make it. My lovely nephew Antony brought his daughter Ava. There’s more here:  http://ianstock.wordpress.com/2011/07/28/disney-weekend/. To this day, nothing feels better than having fun with the children, as many of them together as possible, even though they’re not really children any more.

Marie-Hélène spent five weeks of summer vacation in Brittany. She couldn’t take Charlie and Alex with her this year, and so I looked after them while she was gone. That was fun. Charlie held a party for his friends in his mother’s house. Exceptionally, I was allowed in the house to help look after the children.  Some of the issues were easy to resolve: up to five boys could sleep over, but no girls, no, forget it, not happening! The clean-up was a scream. Nick and Alban (and Ava, his girlfriend) were supposed to help. They polished off a twelve pack of Newcastle Brown playing UNO around the table in the breakfast nook, while I cleaned up! (No, they did help, but that twelve pack sticks in my mind). Charlie also helped when I asked him to, but posed this surprising question: “how do you turn on the vacuum cleaner?”

We did make it back to Disneyland, or at least some of us did, between Christmas and the New Year. Charlie couldn't make it because of his High School varsity soccer practices, but he did mange a few days at Tahoe with his friends before Christmas. Here are Alex and his buddies Matt and Tamir in front of the tree at the bottom of Main Street.

My favorite parental moment occurred earlier at the bottom of the driveway. I was worried because several of the children seemed to be missing, and it was a pitch black night. Searching for them, I saw the tell-tale lights of cell phones down the driveway. I learned later that they were keeping one of the girls company as she waited for her parents to pick her up. I ambled on down, invisibly to them. They were singing, these angelic little voices, in unison, so sweetly, the sound of a midnight choir. The song included these lines:

“Colt 45 and two Zig Zags, baby that’s all we need,

we can go to the park after dark, smoke that tumbleweed.

And as the marijuana burns we can take our turns,

singing them dirty rap songs. . . .” . From “Crazy Rap,” by Afroman.

Good grief! I made out some of the words as I approached them, and immediately made myself known. But there was nothing burning there: I would have seen it in that black night. And there was no odor. They were just singing a song that they all knew by heart! I breathed a sigh of relief, and the group moved on. The challenges of chaperoning over twenty fifteen year-olds on almost three acres in the pitch dark!

Megane and Tom during the intermission in the Cat Stevens concert in Paris.

Tom missed out on some of these family events, of course. Living in Paris for him is like living in the US was for me in the early years: you miss the family events across the Atlantic. But I did manage to see him twice this year, the first time surprising him at a Cat Stevens (now called Yusuf Islam) concert in Paris in May: (http://ianstock.wordpress.com/2011/06/26/peace-train-sounding-louder-2/). We had an exquisite “Father and Son” moment as Cat sang his song of that name. Tom used to sing me the song sometimes. Then he came to California in September with Megane, his charming Anglo-French girlfriend. He has developed great insight over the years: the positive side of the struggles of his childhood.

Now 22, he is a wonderful young man, and is pursuing his college degree in France as well as earning a living and playing and recording and putting a band together. During an April telephone call, he told me about finding some other musicians who were actually able to obtain paying gigs, not his forte yet. Naturally enough, he hooked up with them and they formed a band for a while. The gigs that they found were in jazz clubs. Tom and his friends could play just one jazz song when they got together. The guy who arranged their first gig for them at a jazz club was there when they started playing. He was still there 20 minutes later, and they were still playing that same song 20 minutes later! They only felt free to move onto the less sure ground of a song that they did not know when he finally left.

I still saw Alban and Daphne a few times at the beginning of the year. Here they are at Chili's for Alex's birthday dinner.

Unfortunately, I saw Daphné and Alban less and less during the course of the year, the former (now 24) getting angry with me in an email in October and not talking to me again until February 2012. Ouch. That hurt.  Well, perhaps not coincidentally, this is the year that the divorce deteriorated. The balance that Marie-Hélène and I had both retained last year went out the window, and it does make sense for her children to support their mother.

I did see Alban a few times, most notably at Disneyland. But I didn’t see him again during the year after Tom’s visit in September. He too is 22, and buckled down this year after he and Ava got together. She’s doing him a world of good. He too quit smoking, months before Nick, and announced on FaceBook as the year drew to a close that “I quit smoking 7000 cigarettes ago.” That one earned him quite a few thumbs up. As the year ends, they are living together in an apartment in Santa Cruz and exchanging adorable love notes on FaceBook. He found a job as an apprentice electrician with a friend’s father.  It’s a good trade, which he can do almost anywhere, but of course there are several steps and it all takes a long time. This post appeared on FaceBook a couple of months after he started his apprenticeship: “12 hour work days and I’m still broke. . .”. One of his friends replied: “welcome to life.”

Ouch! Daphne's car, after the storm

The year did not end well. During a wind storm, a large tree fell in the middle of the night from a neighbor’s property onto ours in the forest, the home which we bought in 1997 and where Marie-Hélène still lives. The house is for sale, but things never move quickly in a divorce. Fortunately, no-one was hurt, but everyone felt the tree hit the ground: one of the children said that it felt like an earthquake. There was damage to the roof of the house (installed only a year ago), the porch roof, Daphne’s car (which was totally written off) and Charlie’s car (less than two weeks old). The insurance covers most of the house, but not the deductibles. It all feels a bit sad over there, with the fallen tree in pieces but not yet removed, and the damage waiting to be fixed or towed away.

A bit of a metaphor, that. The divorce drags on, weighing everyone down. After the sixteen years that we all spent as one family, I’m hoping to keep our three constituent families in some semblance of order. That’s not easy. You can’t right a fallen tree, even if over time you can fix the damage it caused.

By way of a back-up, maybe we can fit in another trip to Disneyland soon . . . .

Tom and Megane come to town!

Disney Weekend

Disney's picture of our first ride of the weekend, Splash Mountain. Ava, Alban's girlfriend, is half concealed by Alban in front, and Josh, Charlie's buddy, is almost invisible behind her. Then come Charlie, Alex and yours truly.

They may be getting older, but Disneyland still works for my next generation. And for me!

So much for small talk. Nick called me a few weeks after I first uploaded this post. He was hesitant. “Dad,” he started out, haltingly, “the Disney post, like there are maybe three or four strong bits in it, but it’s just so long!” Of course, I much appreciate guidance and counsel from my next generation.

I’m lying!

But I am going to try to edit.

I will never forget how much fun we all had during our early years of constant visits to Disneyland in Paris, between 1994 and 1997. Well, not Alex, who wasn’t born yet, but the rest of us. Our move to the US almost stopped those visits cold. How did that happen?The last time Alban went was Thanksgiving 2003. Wow: almost eight years! What were we thinking, not visiting the Magic Kingdom for so long? Nick and Tom hadn’t been to a Disney park with us since the summer of 2000 in Orlando.

This was actually one of the last photos we took, on Sunday afternoon. It's here because it shows our little Disney group, except for Josh, who was kind enough to take the picture. From the left, we have Charlie, Alex, yours truly, Alban, Ava (his live-in girlfriend), Charlotte (Nick's girlfriend, visiting from Paris) and Nick.

This summer, Charlie and Alex were living with me for the month that their mother was taking her summer vacation in Brittany. I had no vacation planned, but suggested a long weekend at Disneyland. They hummed and hawed, not exactly enthusiastic (long drive, with parent, fun place, boring company!), and then one of the boys suggested that we bring the big kids.

Three of their older siblings live in Santa Cruz: maybe we could get them interested. Indeed we could, at least Alban and Nick, if we included their girlfriends. Why not?  Daphne turned the weekend down: maybe she was working. Charlie found a friend, Josh, and we had our group.

Josh and Charlie in the Rainforest Cafe in Downtown Disney on Saturday night before the dinner arrived. They did calm down after the food!

By popular acclaim, the first order of business on our first morning in the parks, the Friday, was TomorrowLand, for the new 3D Star Tours show and, of course, Space Mountain. By 10.45 am there was already a 60 minute wait for the former, and so I took our six tickets (Nick and Charlotte were yet to arrive) to the Fast Pass distributors for the ride. We received the day’s last Fast Passes for Star Tours before 11 in the morning. In fact, there were only five left, but the cast member kindly scribbled “+1” on one of them so that we would all get in. The time for our admission? Between 23.30 and midnight! It was going to be a long day of Fast Passes and rides.

There was a 60 minute wait for Space Mountain. Okay: if we had to wait 60 minutes, we’d wait for Space Mountain! Here are Alex, Charlie and coke in the Space Mountain line on Friday morning. Note the chains. Our group spent a lot of time sitting on those chains at different rides. Unfortunately, on this occasion the ride broke down as we waited. We hung around for a while, and were among the 20 or 30 people at the front of the line when cast members finally decided to send us away. As a gesture, because we were almost on the ride when all this happened, they gave us each a Fast Pass for any ride we wanted.

As a gesture, because we were almost on the ride when all this happened, they gave us a Fast Pass for any ride we wanted. (Fast Passes are sort of like VIP access to rides, entitling you to jump most of the line. You can get one every two hours).

Splash Mountain came next, and was our first ride of the day. If you don’t know it, it’s a great ride. The park’s old-fashioned real railroad train rolls through it from time to time, there are scenes of “zipadee doo-dah, zipadee ay, wonderful feeling, feeling this way” playing on the banks of the stream, and on top of all that it’s a wonderful log ride.

I’m fond of the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, our hometown funfair, and it has an okay log ride until you compare it with Splash Mountain. Why has nobody ever even equaled Disney in designing and building rides? Good feelings come at you from all directions, for most of your senses. They’re pretty much all worth the wait.

Nick and Charlotte putting on a show on Splash Mountain, much to the amusement of the woman behind them! That must have been quite difficult to stage: the camera flashes during the biggest drop on the ride!

Not having explored Disneyland for so many years did create a little anxiety for Alex. Each of his brothers and sister had learned to enjoy roller coasters as they grew old enough to ride them, with a little help (read peer pressure) from their older siblings.

Splash Mountain again, this time on the Saturday with Charlie, Alex, Josh and Vincent, half hidden. Alex had learned where the camera was by this time: Josh and Charlie already knew!

But they were regular visitors until they turned 12 or 13. So learning to enjoy roller coasters was a natural progression for each. Without the same progression, Alex was a little worried about the peer pressure that might come from his three older brothers.

He voiced these concerns sitting at home in Santa Cruz one evening before we left. I told him that he had nothing to worry about, and that none of his siblings would force him on a ride that he was worried about. Two hours later, Charlie walked in from some social event and out of the blue announced in an authoritarian voice that whatever happened, Alex would be going on roller coasters at Disneyland. I kept my peace, and Alex went back to his video game. He knew that the pressure was on, whatever I said.

Thunder Mountain Railroad, the "train fou," on Friday. I was proud of this photo. The carriage was moving pretty quickly across my field of vision, and the digital camera's shutter is not the fastest. But here we have from the rear Alex (with Josh hidden behind him), Alban (with Ava hidden behind him) and Charlie, all relaxing toward the end of the ride.

He had enjoyed Splash Mountain in the morning, but the true test would come with Space Mountain later in the day and Thunder Mountain Railroad. The latter is my favorite roller coaster ride. The children called it the “Train Fou” in Paris, the crazy train, and all of us loved it there. It was an older ride at Disneyland, but still had the same great mountain mining décor, hints of Colorado and Rocky Mountain silver mines, to spice up the great ups and downs and whirling around.

Needless to say, Alex loved it, although he preferred Space Mountain, a faster and wilder ride, in the dark to help scare you, when he tried it later that day. That was his favorite, he proclaimed, immediately after his first try, before convincing me to go and retrieve him another Fast Pass for it.

"It's a Small World After All!" Still. Alban and Nick are no longer children, but they did enjoy taking this ride again. Here they are with Ava and Charlotte. This was one of our regular rides during the years we held Annual Passports at Disneyland in Paris. This weekend, we sat together again on the benches in the little boat, and it was all very emotional. Well, maybe that was just me. Disneyland in Paris was home to some of the best early moments of our beautiful blended family.

The next day he took to California Screaming too, and insisted on going on it again. So much for that little anxiety! A little help from his brothers, and Alex was on his way to teenage roller coaster heaven: whatever had he been worried about!

Past Disney visits were often in the air for the older members of the family. Alban reminded us that for a while Nick had been the only one tall enough to go on Space Mountain, and had gone on it constantly, time after time, visit after visit. I remembered the parents’ anxiety back then, trying to keep track of our turbulent little crew as we made our way around EuroDisney in Paris (its original name). Someone was always getting lost and finding his way to the lost children’s office. Normally, that someone was Tom! (He lives in Paris now, which is why he did not join us on this trip). We felt his presence every time when we didn’t have to look around for a missing child.

Splash Mountain again, after Antony arrived with Ava and Vincent in tow. She is having a great time going down this big drop behind her dad. Alban (looking half asleep for the camera) and his Ava are behind them, and there's an old guy in the back!

Saturday brought our group more people: my delightful nephew Antony brought his lovely five year-old daughter Avalon and her nine year-old cousin Vincent to spend the day with us. His wife Courtney had given birth about a week before to Carys (it’s the Welsh for “love,” explained Antony), they live in San Diego, only about an hour and a quarter from the park, and Ava needed a day out. She has a special feeling for Charlie and Alex, and was delighted to come and see them. Hail, hail, the gang’s all here!

After a few photos of the ten or eleven of us to prove that we were all actually together, Alban, Ava, Charlie, Josh and Alex moved over to California Adventure to pursue their obsession with scary rides. One of their destinations was the Tower of Terror, the ride which looks like an apartment building after a bomb went off in a higher floor somewhere, and which somehow manages to tower over the entire park.

Waiting in line there, they again sat on the chains that cast members move around depending on how many people are waiting for the ride. They’d been doing the same thing at different rides all the time we were there.

Ava and Vincent with candy floss (I mean cotton candy) in front of the Disneyland railroad station.

Only this time, the chain that Alban was sitting on broke, and sent him sprawling. Oops! He told us about this breakage later with a truly gleeful expression on his face. This was something to write home about!

He continued the story with a mention of a Fast Pass which was lost at the same ride. “We lost a Fast Pass,” said Alban, to which Ava (the older Ava, his girlfriend) jumped in: “I lost a Fast Pass!” Let’s hear it for full disclosure!

Disney's best pure roller coaster in Anaheim is California Screamin' in the California Adventure. The ride starts with speedy acceleration on the flat before the cars rocket UP the first hill. I was waiting for our crew, and found them in this car thanks to Charlie's hand signal. See it? Only the top of his head is visible, and there are no other recognizable heads at all.

Alex did not go on the Tower that particular time, and so it was Alex who overheard the cast members’ exchange about the lost Fast Pass after his siblings and friends were back on the ride. “Yeah,” one cast member said to his colleague, “that was the same asshole who broke the chain!” Yeah Alban! I guess I can’t say that he’s my a–hole, but I can say that he is my step-a–hole!!

I did want to show the young people a Disney show, but knew that this was going to be a challenge. I picked Fantasmic, described on the Disney web site as being made up of “digital projection, fireworks, live performers and larger-than-life set pieces,” and tried to herd them together on the Saturday evening for the show.

Here's the second in the series, with that acceleration in progress. This time, we can see both Charlie and Alban. Alex and Ava are each there, next to Charlie and Alban respectively.

Epic fail!

After dinner at the Rainforest Café in Downtown Disney, Nick and Charlotte disappeared: she was still jet-lagged. Josh and Alex promptly disappeared as well, to Thunder Mountain, they said, the crazy train. I texted them for twenty minutes telling them where we were so that they could find us again. Then Charlie gently notified me that they were not coming back, no way, not for the show at least. Okay.

About two thirds of the way through, Alban whispered in my ear that he and Ava were bored, and they went off looking for a ride. I’m beginning to get the message!

Here's the last one of the series. I'm proud of this one too, which caught Alex and Charlie in their car going at almost full speed. The shutter couldn't adjust itself quickly enough to freeze this very fast action.

By the end of the show, when the fireworks took up the baton, Charlie and I were the sole survivors. A high school friend of Charlie’s had suggested that he check the show out, which was presumably why he was still with me at the end. “Only the end was any good,” he affirmed. Well okay, the end was the best part, but I was enthralled pretty much throughout.

The rides continued on Sunday, although I did mention another show once, to universal blank stares. Late on Sunday afternoon, Nick and Charlotte left for Santa Barbara and Alban (who was working on Monday) and Ava left for Santa Cruz, taking Alex, who had a middle school party on Monday. The group was splintering, as our big blended family is prone to do.

This is a blown shot. I was trying to capture that same California Screamin' car as it continued its circuit, and missed it completely. But check out the decor.

I drove back on the Monday with Charlie and Josh, who both managed to fit in several hours at Six Flags in Valencia on the way back. It was a great drive after they came out of that park, full of the crazy roller coasters they had been on.

But I wasn’t sure that the weekend had worked as I had hoped, bringing older and younger siblings together with their friends, and giving everybody a good time, because teenagers don’t necessarily tell you the good news. In fact, they’re pretty cagey much of the time.

Ava and Alban at the Rainforest cafe.

I wasn’t sure until, that is, I saw on Tuesday morning Charlie’s post on FaceBook from his cellphone on Saturday night. We must have been at the Fantasmic show, or maybe the fireworks, or maybe on our way to a late evening ride. It would still be a couple of hours before we found our way back to the hotel rooms.

“I love life!!!” he wrote on his wall, right out of the blue.

Only it wasn’t out of the blue, it was Disneyland working its magic on us yet again. “Long weekend at Disneyland for family and friends, $3500 on MasterCard. Three words on FaceBook, priceless!!”

Hail, hail, the gang's all here! Except for Josh, that is, who again took the picture. Thanks, Josh! Vincent is behind me on the left, and Alex and Charlie are behind Charlotte and Nick. Ava and Alban, and Ava and Antony complete the group. The younger Ava seems to be expressing a certain displeasure! She definitely fits in with her big cousins!

“Peace Train Sounding Louder”

Tom showing me his new earring at the cafe on the square in front of Bercy where we met up before the concert.

On to Paris, for a couple of days.

I was going to see Tom, only he didn’t know it yet. Tom had actually been the trigger that started me on this whole early summer vacation. In February, he had made one of those dad calls, you know the ones that begin with 30 seconds of small talk and continue with “please send me money.” I have nothing against those calls, by the way, and especially not against this one. “What do you need it for?” I asked, always the first question in the dialog.
“Cat Stevens is playing a concert at Bercy,” came the reply, “could you please get me tickets.”

Tom and Megane during the intermission at Bercy.

“Of course,” I said, and our conversation continued easily once the subject of money had been taken care of. I looked up the concert on line, and spontaneously bought four tickets instead of the two he’d requested. I’d always loved Cat Stevens, ever since the winter of 1971-2 when, living with Kathy Grant and Dennis Cruise in Edmonton, Alberta, “Teaser and the Firecat” and “Tea for the Tillerman” were playing constantly all over town. I was a hippy then, hitch-hiking my solitary way backwards and forwards across Canada, and Cat’s music and lyrics were a perfect fit.

Yet I’d never seen him live in those 40 years. I’ve seen a lot of the great classic rockers live, up to and including the Beatles. Yes, that’s right: in fact, the Beatles were my very first rock concert. Now, now, Ian, stop showing off! But I’d never seen Cat. Part of the reason was that he had made an abrupt switch of careers intertwined with a spiritual discovery, all of which meant that he had totally stopped playing music. It’s hard to go see someone who isn’t there.

Here he is, the man himself, early in the show at the Palais des Omnisports, Paris.

I hadn’t known that I’d be able to go this time when I bought the tickets. That depended on how much I earned in the interim. I did look for other things to do if I made it to Europe at the end of May, and two days after the concert there was the UEFA Champions League Final at Wembley Stadium. This was beginning to look very serious!

As May 26, the date of the concert, approached, it became clearer that I was going to be able to go and make a vacation of it. I decided to surprise Tom, and not let him know that we were going to meet up at the concert. How perfect would that be, this “father and son” at a concert given by the writer and singer of the great song of the same name!

Tom was born in Paris when his mom, Nick and I lived in this second-floor apartment above the "Disco Livres" store here. 34, avenue du Général Leclerc, 75014Paris

There were nay-sayers, of course, who talked about the difference between seeing Cat Stevens back then and seeing Yusuf now, voicing my own doubts and worries. What if he didn’t play his old songs? What would new Yusuf songs sound like? What would he sound like? Who was he now, calling himself Yusuf, a practicing and apparently devout Muslim? I was convinced that the incredibly nice guy responsible for “Morning has Broken” and “Sad Lisa” would take care of his audience and give us what we wanted. But how can you be sure? Fingers crossed! Whether or not he sang “Father and Son,” which Tom in his turn has sung for his dad, I figured that we would have fun together.

Here's the big screen, which was on the left side of the stage, our left. Modern concerts are so good at letting you see so much.

The surprise, in a café on a terrace in front of the concert hall, went well. Tom showed me his earring and I bought him and Megane, his girlfriend, a drink. The concert was timed to start at 8 pm, and we stopped at the T-shirt store inside the auditorium to buy a couple of souvenirs. The lights were already dimmed as we made our way to our pretty good seats. That voice was already singing, “Lilywhite” to be precise. I couldn’t believe it and tapped Tom on the shoulder: “he sounds exactly the same!” He did. He looked a whole lot different, with that bushy grey-white beard and his eyes hidden behind glasses. But it was the same voice signing the same songs.

Here's Megane, during the intermission. She and Tom were dating when I visited last summer, but they had apparently taken time off in the interim. Things seemed to be going well between them this evening at least.

Maybe it was relief that the concert wasn’t going to be as strange as some had foretold, or sheer joy at rediscovering those beautiful songs that meant so much all those years ago, but I started tearing as he sang “Miles from Nowhere,” and basically didn’t stop tearing on and off until we were outside again after the music was over.

“Miles from nowhere,” went the song, “not a soul in sight, oh yeah, but it’s alright.

I have my freedom, I can make my own rules, oh yeah, the ones that I choose.

Lord my body has been a good friend, but I won’t need it when I reach the end. Miles from nowhere, I guess I’ll take my time, oh yeah, to reach there.”

Cat Stevens in front of his Moonshadow backdrop.

I was right there all those years ago on the Trans-Canada Highway, somewhere in the middle of the Prairies or maybe North Ontario, thumb out, squinting into the sun, feeling the big sky, the massive land, literally miles from nowhere. I was dreaming again of a better world, a world where everybody cared and was strong enough to care. Those years drifting along an interminable highway have illuminated my entire life. They have too rarely been revisited or relived. This night with Yusuf was one of those rare times.

During the intermission, the young people found friends. Mathilda is Megane and Tom's friend who accompanied us. She is from Watlington, a village on the Thames in Oxfordshire, and her boyfriend's name is Olivier Myboyfriend! I forget the name of their friend with his legs dangling over the barrier. Check out the guy with the beard top left glaring!

“Well I left my happy home,” sang Cat, “to see what I could find out, I left my folk and friends with the aim to clear my mind out.

Well I hit the rowdy road and many kinds I met there, many stories told me of the way to get there.

So on and on I go, the seconds tick the time out, there’s so much left to know, and I’m on the road to find out.”

I was back in a modern Parisian concert hall sitting next to Tom, feeling warm and full, feeling just fabulous. This is what it was all about, a continuum, the father a little less naïve than he was, the son a young dreamer wanting to make a living playing the music he loves.

There was an intermission, and we wandered off to grab a beer and Tom and his friends chatted with other friends they found there. I kept daydreaming to myself that Cat would sing “Father and Son” for Tom and me in the second half of the show, and I really wanted him to sing “Peace Train” too, just because that was what he was all about, that’s what this was all about.

"Father and Son."

Of course, he did both. It was that type of night. Yusuf was Cat Stevens tonight, and he was playing for fans like me, and he was going to make us all as happy as he could. He’s that type of guy. I put my arm around Tom’s shoulder when “Father and Son” started, and sang along, and Tom put his arm round my shoulder and sang along too, only much better: Tom has a voice! The tears were streaming down my face throughout the song. The young people looked across at me at one point, a little worried for me, I think. There was nothing to worry about. This was it, exactly as I had fantasized.

Cat told us about how he had finally picked up a guitar again, after 25 years without touching one. His son had brought one into his house, and left it in the living room. After a few days, Cat had felt the guitar calling him, and had picked it up. Father and son.

"Now I've been smiling lately, thinking about the good things to come, and I believe it could be, something good has begun. Oh peace train sounding louder, glide on the peace train!" You will have noticed that it is a steam train, a monster with a peace sign on the front. The same sign is on the T-shirt I wore that night, a birthday present from Alex.

Peace calls him too. Yusuf worked all those years without his guitar in “education and relief,” he told us. “Peace Train,” was the last encore, sung from the heart. One of the musicians had brought his baby with him when he came back on stage, and played with the baby in his arms. The musicians all threw good old hippy peace signs to the audience before turning away and finally leaving the stage. It’s been a while since I saw that at a concert.

“Cause out on the edge of darkness, there rides a peace train. Oh peace train take this country, come take me home again.”

Amen.

Steam Trains in Scotland

My summer vacation, taken early this year, focused on trains. I fitted in a few friends and family, of course, but this vacation was all about trains. Most of them were real, although there was a special one in Paris that was imaginary and beautiful.

The view from by bedroom window in the Cairngorm Hotel in Aviemore. The buildings opposite are the train station, and there is fresh snow on the mountains in the distance. On May 20th!

Last summer’s vacation in Scotland had included a disappointment: the Caledonian MacBrayne ferry to Mallaig from the Isle of Skye had broken down, and as a result I had missed seeing and riding on the Harry Potter steam train. So this summer I was going to start with that train.

Of course, the best laid plans of mice and men . . . While still in California, I tried to make a reservation online for the Harry Potter train, known as the Jacobite outside of the movies, a tourist train owned and operated by West Coast Railways. There was no space available at any time during the week I was planning to stay in Scotland. Eek!

The Strathspey Railway, showing the locomotive which pulled my afternoon tea train. The company supplied this photo of the train leaving Boat of Garten station. Neither train nor weather was quite as appealing for my ride!

I modified the plans slightly, still taking the first Caledonian Sleeper train to the Scottish Highlands after arriving at Heathrow, but this time making Aviemore my first stop. Aviemore had its own steam train, the Strathspey Railway, and online in California there was no difficulty reserving space on this one.

I even had an afternoon tea on the Strathspey train, of scones, clotted cream and strawberry jam, a bit tackily served, but a nice touch nonetheless. Aviemore was lovely, even in classic “variable” Scottish weather, everything from heavy rain at one point (snow settled on the Cairngorm mountains above the town) through periods of bright sunshine interspersed with high winds, all in a day and a half.

The Dalwhinnie distillery, seen from the train. The guide said that it was the highest distillery in the Highlands, at over 1,000 feet. The trees are bending in the gusting wind.

The high point was an early morning bike ride on a bike rented the afternoon before. I knew that I would wake early because of jet lag, and sure enough was in the saddle by about 4 am. Nobody moved on the moors around town, candlelit by the northern dawn, and I rode on in a peaceful and still silence before disturbing two deer at the side of the road. One, the smaller, ambled away, almost indifferent, not at all scared. The other bounded off in fright, zig-zagging across the heather and barking each time he hit the ground: a beautiful sight, and a bizarre sound.

I also took a tour of the Dalwhinnie distillery during the afternoon. It was only a fifteen minute walk from the station, just a few stations down the line from Aviemore, but that was a cold and blustery walk. The wind blew and gusted in my face, going both directions it seemed, to and from the distillery. The occasional showers had me bowing my head and squinting while the wind whipped the rain into anything approaching a hole in my clothing. All told, a very Scottish walk on a very Scottish day.

First sight of the "Jacobite," Harry Potter's train to Hogwarts, at Fort William Station. Until the films, there was never a steam locomotive of the red color of the Hogwarts Express. This black locomotive is more typical. The carriages in real life are the same color as in the film.

After a break for soccer at Old Trafford down in England, I finally arrived on another Caledonian Sleeper in Fort William, home of the Harry Potter train. There had still been no reservations available on line, but I had noticed on the reservations web page a little note to the effect that the train’s guard would have a few tickets available first come-first served on the day. I crossed the platform from the arriving sleeper to find the guard on the Harry Potter train, which was waiting for its scheduled departure for Mallaig. There were several people without tickets, and she accommodated us all. We were on!

Another steam train at almost exactly the same spot, this one photographed in 1987 when Sunshine, Nick and I passed through town during an October vacation in our little Ford Transit van conversion.

What a fabulous ride! For no particular reason, I have other photographs of steamers at this station and on this line at other times dating back to 1966-7. But, probably because of finances, I had never been able to take the steam train on it, until now. It was worth the wait.

Just as it had in Aviemore for the first steamer of the holiday, it was raining, only showers at first. Some of the passengers were a little disappointed that the droplets of rain trickling down and across their windows blocked their view of the stunning vistas we passed by. It wasn’t a complete blockage, but the scenery was harder to admire. Bad weather interferes with so much on vacation!

The Jacobite at steam on a curve, taken by leaning my head out of the open carriage window. That steam locomotive whoomp-whoomp is just a great feeling.

In this case, it didn’t bother me. I simply opened a window at the end of the carriage and peered out. We had been advised not to do this, because of the vegetation growing so close to the line, but I did it anyway, just as I had done fifty years before as a trainspotter. I learned as a child to check for possible obstacles while leaning my head out of the window (the sign above every one of those 1960s windows read “Do Not Lean Out of the Window!”), and the skill had not gone away. I watched the engine whoomp-whoomping away up the track, and the carriages snaking along behind. I saw the rain showers lash the mountainsides, and the wind whip the waves on to the shore approaching Mallaig.

The Hogwarts Express's most famous landmark, the Glenfinnan Viaduct, itself on a curve. I have no idea how this viaduct, on a branch line in the distant Scottish Highlands between two fishing villages, could ever have been worth its initial cost. With a total of 21 arches, the tallest about 100 feet high, it was completed around the turn of the last century (1901).

Mallaig, a fishing village and ferry port, was in the middle of a storm when we arrived, about two hours after leaving Fort William. I walked out toward the rocky ocean front, and was almost blown backwards by the force of the wind coming onto the shore. The blustery day that had begun in Fort William had taken a turn for the worse. I retreated into the village, found a lovely pub with a combination of a working coal fireplace and a working wireless connection, and checked emails while lunching on fish and chips. A conference call with IBM was scheduled for after we returned to Fort William, and I wanted to prepare.

I found other trains during the vacation. At York, after another look at the wonderful National Railway Museum (free admission!), I did a little trainspotting for old time's sake. Trainspotting is not complicated. You stand on a platform and take down the numbers of locomotives or multiple units which pass by. As I walked along the platform, this Freightliner goods rolled through in front of the station cafe on the footbridge.

The call never happened, at least not for me, because of our extraordinary ride back to Fort William into the face of a  major storm. The weather had broken by the time we reached Mallaig, and by the time for the trip back the storm was at its height.

Our first hiccup, soon after leaving Mallaig, was a branch that had apparently fallen, not across the line, but leaning into the path of the train. The footplate crew stopped and apparently examined it, because we waited for five or ten minutes before slowly chugging on. The only way that I knew what had happened was that the branch whipped along the side of the carriage and against its windows as we passed it by, making quite a thwack.

Here's a more typical trainspotter's view of the station. We normally stood at the end of the longest platform, so that a train at any platform did not block our line of sight to another passing through or on its way out. From this end of the platform, you can see a glimpse or more of three trains. The one in the foreground is one of Sir Richard ("obsessed with virgins") Bransom's Cross Country trains.

Our fun was not yet over. The wind was gale force now, the rain was constant, and we were going up a steep hill. We whoomp-whoomped to what felt like a delicate halt.

I wondered if there was another fallen branch. There was a pause, and then we tried to advance: we barely moved, a few yards at most, and then the locomotive briefly whoomp-whoomped rapidly, and we came to a halt. The train stood still again, a little longer pause this time. I was admiring the scenery and trying to figure out what was going on. It seemed clear that for some reason we could not advance. At the end of this longer pause, we backed up, maybe a couple of hundred yards. “That’s the wrong way, guys!” I thought to  myself. We paused again, and then took a run at the hill. This time we stopped even earlier.

Yet another steam locomotive, this one a GWR pannier tank at Bodmin. It is owned and operated by the Bodmin and Wenford Railway, which has offered steam service in Cornwall for 25 years. What was I doing in Bodmin? Guess!

By now the guard was telling us what we were beginning to guess, that we were having trouble climbing this hill, the steepest on the line, and that the locomotive’s driving wheels were slipping on the wet rails. The strong wind too was playing its part, because the curve in the cutting at the top of the hill allowed the wind to suddenly blow at full force straight at the front of the locomotive. She (the guard) reassured us that she was sure that we would get up and over the summit with the next try, because the steam railway’s most experienced engine driver was now taking over from our current driver. We held our collective breath.

This is the most extraordinary stretch of the Great Western Railway's main line from London Paddington to Penzance. Brunel built it along the seafront through Dawlish, the town on the hillside behind the train. I loved this spot as a child and then as a trainspotter. We took holidays nearby a couple of times. During this visit, I hauled the suitcase along the sea wall to Dawlish Warren, putting paid to the suitcase, which lost a wheel somewhere along the way.

We backed up further this time, maybe half a mile or so, and then stepped on the gas, figuratively speaking. Although we must have accelerated up to around 30 mph pretty soon after starting this run, we slowed and slowed as we climbed, and by the time of the curve at the top of the hill, we again ground to a halt after the locomotive briefly whoomp-whoomped rapidly. That was apparently the sound of the steam turning the driving wheels with no traction. A half a mile run up did not carry us over the summit. I was beginning to ask myself whether there enough hotel rooms in Mallaig to house this entire train load of passengers if we couldn’t finally make it back to Fort William, and the answer was pretty clearly no. There were maybe 50 hotel rooms or other tourist accommodations in the village, and we were numbered in the hundreds.

This is Paddington Station late in the evening. My grandfather and his brother worked here for most of their respective careers with the Great Western Railway, but I was just here to catch a train. That is the one on the platform to the right, the Penzance sleeper train.

At this point we were about an hour and a half behind schedule, the pauses between remedial actions were getting longer, and the guard was looking a little worried herself as she bustled along the carriages addressing diverse passenger concerns. Everyone realized that we weren’t supposed to be going backwards and forwards like this!

We backed up again, this time by a good mile, maybe more. Another pause. Then off we went again. There was less immediate acceleration this time, and we seemed to be going pretty slowly as we neared the top of the hill, but this time, finally, we kept going past the farmhouse which had marked the limit of our progress thus far, around the bend and through the cutting at the top of the hill. There was no rapid whoomp-whoomping this time, and the passengers cheered. Somehow, even though it all felt pretty much the same as the previous attempts and even though we were cresting the summit and had not yet started our descent on the other side, we all knew that we had made it.

The passenger notification that greeted us on our return to Fort William. No trains running anywhere in Scotland! Fortunately, Fort William does have quite a few hotels, and I found a nice room within the hour. The power then went out in the hotel, restaurant and all, and I had the feeling that we were back in Santa Cruz, where power goes out almost every storm. That's called a smart grid: not!

At least, we made it back to Fort William, after more fun and games. This was wild country without a storm. With one, there were obstacles everywhere. Back in Fort William we were greeted with the news that all train service in Scotland had been cancelled because of the storm, one of the most powerful of the year! Trees were down here and there all over, apparently, and the powers that be had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. My plans changed again: instead of moving on to Oban as planned, another beautiful trip across the Western Highlands with another distillery to tour at its end, I just about found a hotel room in Fort William. Almost all had been snapped up when the train station essentially closed its doors. Bit of a real Scottish Highland day, all things considered!

UEFA Champions League Final 2011

It may be a coincidence, and it may be karma, or it may be nothing at all except a combination of circumstances that arose for no reason at all, but I personally have been very lucky recently. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the UEFA Champions League this year.

My first game during this two-week trip to the UK was at Old Trafford, Manchester United's home field, on May 22 for the last game of this year's Premier League season. This banner in honor of Ryan Giggs hangs at the Stretford End of the stadium. He has been playing for the ManUtd first team for 20 years!

The UEFA Champions League is the annual competition among the best professional soccer clubs in Europe. These clubs select themselves for the tournament each year by winning the national cup in their respective countries the previous year, or by placing high enough in their respective national leagues the previous year to qualify. In England, the top four clubs in the Premier League qualify, as do the top four clubs in Spain and Italy and the top three in Germany and France. If I remember correctly, every European country has one team or more playing in the Champions League every year.

The Premier League trophy was presented to the team after the game, a carefully staged affair where only the professional photographers, jostling each other in a temporary wooden enclosure, got a good view. After the presentation, players and the coach strolled around the field in a kind of informal lap of honor. This is Sir Alex Ferguson, who has coached ManUtd since 1986 (yep, that's almost 25 years!), with a group of young people. My guess is that they are his grandchildren. A cute, human moment that you won't see on TV.

My team, Manchester United, qualified for this year’s Champions League (2010-11), as did Chelsea, Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur, the uniquely named club abbreviated as “Spurs” which my dad supported all his life. I already blogged here about ManUtd’s match against Valencia at Old Trafford in the Champion’s League in December. That was the first precursor of the luck to follow: the match was played on my birthday, and David (an old schoolfriend) and I had a great time watching it. Okay, the score was a 1-1 draw, which was less than ideal, but it was my first visit to Old Trafford, the Theater of Dreams where the club plays at home, and it all felt pretty special.

ManUtd duly advanced in the tournament, as did Chelsea and Arsenal, and thanks to Tom in Paris (more about that in a later post) I discovered in February that the final of this year’s Champions League was to be held in May in London at the new Wembley Stadium. I immediately checked the availability for tickets for that match on line.

It is very hard to capture soccer action from the stands. The only time that you can really do it is during a set piece, like this free kick. If I remember correctly, this Blackpool free kick scored. The ball in the photo is to our right of the head of number 15, Nemanja Vidic., ManUtd's Serbian captain. Poor Blackpool were relegated from the Premier League after this loss at Old Trafford: all rather sad.

This game is the European equivalent of a Superbowl, and so tickets are always very much in demand. The teams who make it to the final each get a substantial allocation, 25,000 for each team this year, which they themselves allocate typically among their season ticket holders, the people who have paid for seats at every national league game of the season. UEFA, the body that administers soccer in Europe, also allocated itself 25,000 tickets this year. Only 12,000 tickets were available to the general public, to people EUFA called on their site “neutral football fans.” (For those of you who don’t know soccer, that is ridiculous statement: if you’re a fan, you’re absolutely not neutral!)

EUFA decided to sell those 12,000 tickets to people who won a lottery for them. As each fan who won the lottery could buy two tickets, that meant about 6,000 winners. I don’t know how many applicants those winners were drawn from, but quite a few. Registration for the lottery took place between February 24 and March 18. On the last day for registration, there were still 8-12 teams in the tournament (the round of 16 was not yet complete, but some of the teams that would advance were already known), and so no-one entering the lottery had much hope of seeing his or her team in the Final. Maybe that reduced the number of entries.

After the game, 68,000 supporters pile out of the stadium and make their way home. This was taken on the road to the tram line. There were stalls and tents set up to sell T-shirts and souvenirs. We waited about half an hour at the station for the tram. There were six days to go until the Champions League Final in London.

I gave it a shot. In a way, I didn’t care who played: it would be a great event whoever was there. Yes, of course, I’d prefer to see Man United and Barcelona, my team against the best team in the world, but that was a long way away, both time wise and in the realm of possibilities. Besides, what chance did I have of winning the lottery?!

I concentrated on work. There were other reasons for wanting to fly to Europe in May, but none of them would be convincing if I didn’t have a good first quarter of 2011. Fortunately (see: there’s that luck again!), I had a great first quarter.

On April 5th, an email arrived from Ticketmaster. I figured it was junk, another list of pending classic rock concerts, but no: “Dear Ian Stock, We are pleased to inform you that as a result of the lottery process, your application with the customer reference number: 508094 for the UEFA Champions League Final 2011 has been successful.” Good grief: I had actually won! I never ever win things, and certainly not lotteries. Can’t say that any more, now can I?

The Guardian's Sports page on May 28, the day of the Final. It voices what we all hoped to see in a match that I only dreamed about when I signed up for the lottery. If you live under a rock or otherwise avoid soccer in your life (may I take this opportunity to express my profound sympathy!),the two players are: in the Barcelona shirt on the left, the current FIFA world player of the year, Lionel Messi, and in the ManUtd shirt, Wayne Rooney, whose overhead kick in the local derby against Manchester City was rated the best goal of the Premier League's entire season.

By this time, the semi-finals were set up, and Manchester United and Barcelona were both still in the tournament. ManUtd faced Schalke, the upstart German club who had wiped out Inter Milan in the quarter finals but who were new at this and likely feeling the pressure. Barcelona was playing their old favorites in Spain, Real Madrid. It was Jose Morinho, now managing Real Madrid, who had engineered Barcelona’s defeat last year at the hands of Inter Milan in the Champions League semi-final, but I didn’t fancy his chances of accomplishing the same feat twice. In short, my dream match, every soccer lover’s dream match of this year, was getting closer.

My first instinct for the second ticket was to sell it. If an English club was in the Final, it would be worth a small fortune, probably enough to cover the entire cost of the trip. But it wasn’t the money that worried me. I have five sons (that’s where my luck has held through the years, by the way, in my children), all of whom are pretty fond of soccer.

I met Charlie at the airport, London's Heathrow, at lunchtime on the day of the game. UEFA representatives were there to greet people from Ford, Heineken and other Champions League sponsors. One of these representatives was kind enough to set us up in front of their placard for this picture. Note the ManUtd crest on my polo.

How was I to choose who to offer the ticket to? I started with Alex, the youngest and a Manchester United fan. Logically, he should have jumped at the chance, but lately he tends to say no to a lot of things, in particular to anything new and different. The added complication was that the Final was taking place before the end of the school year, meaning that we couldn’t turn the trip into a vacation. Final exams were happening the next week, and so he would need to fly out on the Friday before the game and back on the Sunday after the game. Sure enough, his first reaction was that he didn’t want to spend 24 hours flying to see a soccer game lasting two hours, and he turned it down.

I tried Charlie, the next oldest, fully expecting him too to turn it down. Charlie is a serious Arsenal fan, and year in year out Arsenal are serious ManUtd rivals. But no, he barely paused before accepting the invitation. When I pointed out that the chances were then good that ManUtd would be in the Final, he just shrugged: “it’s the chance of a lifetime.” Hey, that’s right: I’m a fair bit farther along in my life than Charlie, and this was to be my first ever UEFA Champions League Final. Charlie figured it out.

Here's another one of Charlie at the airport. Turkish Airlines impressed because they managed to pick both finalists to sponsor, even though they were not sponsors of the Champions League as a whole. Not bad judgment, that!

I didn’t have any final exams this year, and so booked a two week vacation around the Final and flew to Heathrow on May 18th. Work again cooperated, with a public offering to help with at the beginning of May, completed before I was due to leave. And a friend at NextSpace, an Englishman who is an Aston Villa fan, told me that his dad, Paddy Campbell, of Glossop, Derbyshire, a ManUtd season ticket holder for donkey’s years, could probably find me a ticket for ManUtd’s last Premier League game of the season on Sunday May 22. They had already won the league, and so there was nothing at stake, but the trophy would be presented at the end of the game and this sounded like a great warm up to the Final the next weekend. I delightedly got in touch with Paddy, and crossed my fingers.

This one's a bit dark: the flash was playing up during this trip. It shows Charlie in front of Zinedine Zidane, hero of the French World Cup campaign in 1998, in the UEFA space in Hyde Park devoted to the history of the Champions League. Zidane was caught by the photographer as he shot the volley with his left foot (he is right-footed) that won Real Madrid the final in 2002. It was a beautiful goal, and Charlie's always been a big fan of Zidane's.

You guessed it: Paddy not only found me a ticket, the season ticket of a holder who could not make the game, he found it for free. I owe you, Paddy!

Duly interrupting my week in the Highlands of Scotland, I watched a very entertaining game at Old Trafford. The supporters were in fine voice in the tram on the way to Old Trafford, and in finer voice in the stands. I learned new songs, most of which are pretty much unprintable and involve Liverpool (a traditional local rival) or Manchester City (another) or both. ManUtd were down 2-1 against Blackpool at one point, but came back with some lovely fluid moves to win 4-2. “Campeones, Campeones,” sang the crowd in Spanish, “Olé Olé Olé!”

The first thing I noticed on the tube with Charlie on our way to the Final was that the ManUtd fans were no longer singing that song in Spanish. At Old Trafford, they rarely stopped. It made sense in a way, singing that song non-stop on the day that the Premier League trophy was presented to Sir Alex Ferguson, Manchester United’s manager and coach. But I felt that its absence on the tube to Wembley was a bit of a sign, an unspoken expression of self-doubt.

We're getting closer! Walking from the tube at Wembley Park station, we arrived at the new Wembley Stadium, built after the old was knocked down in 2002 (about). We're starting to feel it!

They were still pretty loud on the tube. It was the first time that Charlie had heard English football fans on their way to a match, and I could see the surprise on his face as they roared their chants and songs up and down the carriage and then on the platform. Barcelona fans and passers by alike looked uneasy.

We had taken the tube from Heathrow, where I had met his arriving flight, direct to Hyde Park, where EUFA had been putting on a show all week. We saw the Champions League Cup, an impressive hunk of silver, and a sort of museum of past Champions League highlights. Then lunch in a pub at Marble Arch, a walk along Oxford Street and on to the tube at Bond Street for Wembley Park. It started raining as we arrived at the stadium, and we elected to find our seats under cover straight away. We bought programmes and watched and waited.

There was a show before the game. Much of it probably worked better in TV than from the stands, but this was a fine moment. The crests of each finalist straddle the UEFA crest (of course bigger: bureaucrats often suffer delusions of grandeur!) The red-shirted guardsmen at the bottom of the photo have taken time off from guarding the Queen to escort the Cup to the stadium.

After the match, Sir Alex commented that he had never played against a better team, and he must have known that (as I did, as most soccer fans did) in advance. More power to him, then, for not trying to play defensively, which would have been an alternative approach to take, Mourinho’s approach with Inter Milan the year before. No, his team played the same fluid attacking soccer that is his and their trademark.

It made for a great game, because Barcelona seem incapable of playing any other way: both teams ran themsleves ragged attacking.  It was beautiful, fluid play almost the entire match.

Half time found the teams even at 1-1, and the ManUtd goal, courtesy of a Rooney-Giggs one-two and a perfect shot from Rooney, had woken up the ManUtd fans, who had generally been quieter than the Barcelona fans. They weren’t the only ones woken up, incidentally. I happened to glance across at Charlie as I leapt up howling after Rooney’s goal, pounding the air with both fists, and there he was, my Arsenal fan and heir, howling away and pounding the air with both fists just like his dad!! Good times!

Here's the Barcelona end of the Stadium, where most of their 25,000 fans were cheering their team on. They were loud and colorful and a sea of movement, especially in the second half as their team took control of the match. They watch these players every week, and must know by now what they've got.

We came back to earth in the second half, as Barcelona ramped it up, demonstrating why people are starting to talk about them as the best team ever. Literally. Charlie and I had seen them before, with Alex and Marie-Hélène at Candlestick Park during the summer of 2009. They were playing an exhibition game against Chivas de Guadalajara, the Mexican professional team. It had been like watching the Harlem Globetrotters, only playing soccer. Chivas scored first, and Barca only managed a 1-1 draw that day, but the scoreline gives you no sense of their total superiority on that field of play. Barcelona were running rings around Chivas, and making it look easy.

Here is the ManUtd contingent, holders of the 25,000 tickets allocated to their club, at the other end of the stadium. The words read "Spirit of 68," a commemoration of the first time that ManUtd won the Champions League (then called the European Cup) in 1968, at the old Wembley Stadium against Benfica. That match featured Bobby Charlton, Dennis Law and George Best, the holy trinity of my youth, for the winners.

They were not that much better than ManUtd, but a memory of the Final illustrates how that second half went. Soon after the kickoff, three or four Barcelona players, who had possession on Charlie’s and my side of the midfield, were surrounded by a superior number of ManUtd players running in hard and seeking to dispossess them. They did it just right, according to the book, hard and fair tackles, and by rights should have come away with the ball.

But no, the Barcelona players flicked the ball back and forth among them, as they love to do and do incredibly quickly, with the ManUtd players hot on their heels again and again, and then one of the Barca players flicked it out of the danger zone to another player unmarked in the middle of the field. The Barcelona fans again cried, “olé!”

Here we are in our seats, Block 550. This was taken by a ManUtd supporter from Lincolnshire.

David, my friend and a ManUtd fan from Marlow, watched the match on TV and commented that Barca always seemed to have 8-10 men in midfield! Very dispiriting for United, doing it right, doing what they were supposed to do, time and again, almost to no avail.

There is an inordinate amount of press comment on the Final, just as there is on a Superbowl, much of it accurate, and I won’t repeat it here. It was obviously disappointing to lose 3-1, the second time that we have lost to them in this season final in three years. But as Charlie and I made our way in the crowd toward the train back to the hotel, I heard myself saying again and again, “they’re just so good.” And the Barcelona players are.

The flash messed up again, but here we are with Barcelona ready to kick-off for the second half. We had an awesome view of everything, as it happened, all the movement off the ball from both teams, the speed of the match, the moments when we were simply in awe. In a good match, that may happen a few times. In this match, it happened again and again. And there we were, right there in the thick of things!

It is not a coincidence that the three nominees this year for FIFA’s Ballon d’Or, the annual award for the best footballer in the world, Messi, Xavi and Iniesta, all play for Barcelona, the first time that has ever happened. That match was the best football I’ve ever seen live, and I’ve seen a fair bit over the years. ManUtd were not embarrassed, but they were well beaten. “Campeones, Campeones, Olé Olé Olé!”

It was a beautiful game, and Charlie and I were very lucky to have been able to watch it live and in person, at the new Wembley Stadium in London.

Patriot Guard Riders

You don’t expect much from the airport shuttle, not from any airport shuttle. A timely arrival at the airport is all that is promised and all that you need. So when you hear something of an inspiration en route, as I did last month, it stays with you.

Dennis with his bike, christened "POWMIA," at a Gilroy parade of the Patriot Guard Riders. The bike is a Kawasaki 2007 Vulcan VN 2000cc engine Classic LT.

Dennis first explained why he had a part-time job driving the shuttle. He had retired not long ago after 20-something years driving tour buses all over the United States and much of Canada. His children were grown, the youngest had completed college, and he was set, except for one little thing: his “motorcycle habit.” That’s the phrase he used, and I had an immediate picture of him on his Harley on Sunday afternoons winding through the Santa Cruz mountains. Yep, that was a hobby that was worth a part-time job to support.

But there was more to the story. Dennis did enjoy his Sunday afternoon sorties, no doubt about it, but what drove him on his motorcycle, what drove him to spend $311 for a new rear tire every 9,000 miles (both the numbers were his), was something a lot more serious.

Dennis with his wife and granddaughter at the Gilroy parade. Naturally enough, his T-shirt reads "Support Our Troops." Dennis and his wife have a son in Special Forces, who can't even tell them what country he is in. They write to him at a military PO Box. That's got to be hard for him and his wife.

Dennis is a ride captain for the Patriot Guard Riders. Sounds terrifying, doesn’t it, in a way? The phrase carries echoes of those phony patriots who tell us all what to do to justify their self-centered politics. No, Dennis is a whole different kind of patriot, right from the heart, all about looking after other people, and pretty damn good at it.

When Dennis returned from Vietnam in 1967, he did what he had to do, found a job, married, had children: in short, he lived a good life. He gave up his “motorcycle habit” to raise his children (it’s an expensive hobby), and then took it back up a couple of years after his daughter graduated college.

He joined the Patriot Guard Riders (http://www.patriotguard.org/). They ride alongside and escort the young men and women who have completed their tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, and sometimes, so sadly, those who never did finish in one piece. The Patriot Guard Riders escort them home or to their final resting place.

He told me of one particular trip when they rode shotgun for a busload of returnees on their way from the huge US Marine base at Camp Pendleton, down by San Diego, to Alameda Naval Air Station across the Bay from San Francisco. These were young people returning home to the Bay Area, and they would be meeting their families again, finally, in Alameda, after how long apart?

Dennis didn't send me any photos of one of his escort missions, and so I looked online to get a flavor of them. Here in 2009 Patriot Guard Riders escort the motorcade of Individual Augmentees (military people, in this case sailors, on their way to a posting) to a welcome. To get a more complete picture of Dennis's convoys, add a few hundred bikes and riders!

This was a bus ride that none of those returning soldiers would ever forget. The Patriot Guard Riders turned out in force for them. There were 646 big bikes or more escorting that bus the 400 plus miles from Camp Pendleton to Alameda. Some dropped out and others joined in, but there were 646 or more big bikes for the entire route home of these returnees.

Think about that for a moment.
We’ve all seen those groups of bikes out for a Sunday afternoon ride in a group, and we’ve all been impressed by the roar of 20 Harleys gliding by. Think about 646 big bikes doing the same. Dennis said that they rode two abreast at two second intervals. Any less and they were too close, any more and people cut between them. That’s a no-no. They haven’t joined up 646 strong in honor of our returning heroes in order to be interrupted by grandpa on a visit to the grocery store. I did the math: 323 times two seconds is over ten minutes. At 60 mph, that’s a total of ten miles of bikes in front of and behind the bus. That is one hell of an escort!

According to a Patriot Guard Riders blog, where I found this photo, it shows Patriot Guard Riders attending a military burial in Liberal, Kansas in response to a scheduled appearance by the Westboro Baptist Church in May 2006. The blog is at: http://pgrnyvrp.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/

I peppered him with questions, and Dennis explained more. They were able to stay together for ten minutes of drive-by on busy freeways because law enforcement agencies allow them to. They not only allow them to, they help the convoys, for example by blocking freeway entrances until the whole escorted convoy has passed by.

Other local law enforcement agencies are informed about the convoy, and set themselves up on bridges over the freeway: police officers, firefighters, paramedics, all waving to the returning soldiers (the civilians) or saluting them. Groups of bikes take turns to ride up alongside the bus, on both sides, and then peel off while others ride on up alongside. Are you getting goosebumps yet?!

Hear that roar! Dennis said that he was sure that the families waiting in the Alameda Naval Air Station could hear their loved ones coming from a mile away, droning and roaring closer and closer as hundreds of big bikes turned off the freeway with the bus and finished their long ride escorting the men and women home.

This shot appeared in the Stamford Advocate, with the following credit: "The Patriot Guard Riders motorcycle group precedes the casket carrying the remains of Staff Sgt. Derek Farley down Routes 9 and 20 in Schodack on August 25, 2010. (Skip Dickstein/Times Union) Photo: Skip Dickstein." I bet that this photograph made Staff Sgt Farley's family and friends feel about as good as anything could have made them feel.

Welcome home, soldiers!

Dennis is a Vietnam vet. He remembered the weird way he was welcomed home after his tour of duty. I remember those times too, the moral ambiguity of that far away war, the political passion that interfered with everyone’s appreciation, our appreciation, of the sacrifices that our young men (just men then) were making. It was a terrible time to be a soldier, fighting for a native land that saw you as a pawn in somebody else’s game, a victim or a perpetrator in the country’s own internal struggles, when it saw you at all. Dennis said simply that he did not feel much of a welcome when he returned home.

Here's Dennis with a World War II veteran during Veterans Appreciation Day this year in Dixon CA. He told me that 200 big bikes showed their appreciation that day.

Rather than become embittered, as did so many back then, Dennis has fixed the problem. He and thousands like him in the Patriot Guard Riders (he says that there are now over 215,000 strong, but not all ride) now assure the young men and women returning from these terrible wars (because all wars are terrible on some level) that they return with honor, knowing how much their country appreciates what they have done for us. I never even knew that any of this was happening. This short shuttle ride was an inspiration, an eye-opener.

Way to go Dennis! You’re the man!

July 2011: here’s an example of what Dennis and the Patriot Guard Riders do, taken from a recent newscast on the return home from Afghanistan to the Bay Area of the body of US Marine Staff Sergeant Nicanor “Nick” Amper IV: http://www.ktvu.com/video/28554478/index.html. Thank you, Sergeant. Rest in Peace.