by Timberry on November 6, 2009
New York, New York, the big city seeming more big city every day to me as I become more Oregonian, also every day. Here it is October now and I’m visiting. 
Everything sparkles along with Eva’s three-year-old eyes and her three-year-old smile beams as she greets me from ear to ear, “Grandad.” This is an all-at-once event, past and future gone for a moment, melting into this lovely little girl greeting me as Grandad with a huge smile and a hug.
And behind her, his own little face beaming, the younger sib adapting instantaneously, and, remarkably, since he’s still getting his one-year-old voice and vocabularly, there is Boyan, beaming, and also saying, surprisingly distinctly, “Grandad.” And, just like his sister, giving me another huge smail and a big hug. 
And then there followed a short, but sweet, visit. I picked Eva up at school, we dillied and dallied on the way back home, she showed me her parks and her playgrounds with pride. We read and read and read about princesses and princesses and princesses.
And Boyan, instantly familiar, flashing his smart smile and his mischevious grin. I’m so glad Paul has video, he’s amazing onthe scooter at barely 20 months old. You have to see it to believe, and even then, remind yourself that this little guy is not even two years old until next February.
And thus passed another good visit with Paul and Milena and Eva and Boyan. I sure wished they lived closer.
Some of the pictures here are from the New York Children’s Museum, which was our Saturday excursion.
by Timberry on October 6, 2009
Oct. 2, 2009. Dad turns 90. There’s a flickr link to my pictures. And if you don’t have access, email me.
We celebrated the next day, Oct. 3, a Saturday. Martha arranged it, and gave a very nice speech. Then Jay pulled out his haikus. I hope to post the video on YouTube, but I’m also going to try to recreate some of his commentary, aside from the actual haikus themselves. Where I don’t have commentary it’s because I don’t remember.
This first one is very familiar to the three of us, me and Chip and Jay, who grew up watching football with Dad.
Grass is greener
Things not great on the field
What the heck is goin on?
Put in that freshman.
Unholy Thing
Dad drinks his vodka
he likes it mixed with milk. Yuk.
I want to throw up.
Everybody in our family knows that dad has always liked his licorice more than any other sweets. Not unlike me. Here’s Jay’s tribute:
Black Goddess
Dad turning ninety!
Think of all the licorice
This man has eaten.
Good, True, and Beautiful
He comes from the Church
Virgin Mary watches him
St. Michael protects
His Lucky Day
After tragic loss
He sure did strike it lucky
When he found liz
First, we learned that wonderful Irish grandfather Jack O’Neill was actually mom’s stepfather, not real DNA for us. At least we were 100% Irish on Dad’s side — until the discovery, 10 or so years ago, that the Dudley in dad’s background was actually Dudelein, and we was French
Le Crushing Truth (Family Tree Shockeroo!)
Presumed all Irish
Til shocking revelation
Dudley’s Dudler
Jay pointed out how quick dad was to warn us about “ballooning up” and other familiar “don’t get fat” phrases. And that he had eaten 39 its-it (an ice cream treat popular in the San Francisco area) in a single weekend.
Dad’s World Record
Ya gotta, gotta
push yourself away from that
thirty ninth It’s it.
It turned out later that Uncle Cal had secretly bought a ping pong table and had been practicing for months when he, with pretended nonchalance, challenged dad to ping pong.
Ping Pong Apocalypse
Uncle Cal ready.
Dad plays with gin on table.
Dad whips Cal’s butt bad.
Jay wasn’t sure this actually happened and suggested he dreamt it because of something that had been said. Martha thought it did in fact happen (he is an ophthalmologist).
Weird Day Job
He removes eye balls,
Brings them home to show his kids.
They gleam on the shelf.
Controversy broke out in the neighborhood as the Knights planted trees that threatened the view. There was a discussion but Mr. Knight was unmoved and unsympathetic.
Bad Night for Mr. Knight
Tiptoe to Knight’s yard
One strange and moonless evening;
Too bad for that tree.
For many years in a row, Gram sent dad balloon seat pajamas for Christmas. We all laughed.
The Gift She Keeps on Giving
Each Berry Christmas,
The gift of hysteria,
Balloon Seat Classic.
Mushy But True
Language is useless.
Words don’t capture the feeling.
We love Dad so much.
by Timberry on October 1, 2009
My dad turns 90 today. He plays golf or tennis almost daily, he’s on the web a lot, follows the stock market as if it were a fulltime job, and he’s very sharp on politics and public policy. That’s him at right during World War II.
He is a role model and encouragement for me and other baby boomers as we pass 60 and continue aging.
And dad has something to tell us all about relationships too. After his wife (my mom) died when they were both in their 60s, he married again at age 69. He and his wife Liz had a 20th anniversary earlier this year. That’s them at right, taken a couple years ago. Both of them were then in their 80s.
by Timberry on September 24, 2009
I’m a bit off my normal thought patterns today, waking up in a generic freeway-exit hotel in the California Central Valley, headed for Yosemite National Park with my youngest daughter. 
Yosemite means a lot to me. My dad took my brothers and me there many times when we were growing up in the San Francisco area. As a teenager I went backpacking into the Yosemite high country every summer. Later on, my wife and I took our kids up into the high country every summer. That first picture is me with our three oldest in 1980, on the shoulder below Half Dome.
I’m very much looking forward to the Ken Burns series on National Parks starting this month on PBS. He calls it “America’s Best Idea.” I second that. I’ve lived in Mexico and Austria as well as the U.S., and I’ve traveled to dozens of countries, but I’ve never seen anything like our own national park system. It’s a great privilege to be able to hold the polluting effects of civilization at bay in some of these great parks. Poor Mexico, my country-in-law, has tried hard but is just economically unable to hold back the tide, even though it has some natural beauties that truly deserve it. Too bad. Let’s be grateful for what we have. The website for the Ken Burns series says tell your story; and this is mine.
The second picture here is our family plus pack burro on the far side of the river campsite at Little Yosemite Valley. That was in 1988. They used to rent pack burros in Yosemite for use by families and groups going out into the high country. We’d rent a burro for $15 per day and relieve ourselves of actually packing the stuff on our backs, which made it possible for a family to make a 4-5 day trip up into the mountains. My wife made those high-country trips into great family vacations. And we were always broke, so the $15 a day lodging cost was attractive. They don’t do that at Yosemite any more, because of problems like insurance, and people not respecting the implied privilege. And that’s too bad.
I’m particularly excited today because I’ve missed Yosemite since we moved to Oregon 17 years ago. I do get into the Oregon Cascades a lot, but I’ve missed Yosemite and I’m anxious to visit again.
This last photo, taken above Nevada Falls in 1980, is of our three oldest children, now 37, 35, and 33 years old. I can’t say that I would be looking forward to backpacking tonight (we have a hotel room reserved) but I am very glad we were able to do it when we did. And very happy to visit again, later today.
Photo credits: first one by my wife Evangelina Berry, second by some teenage boy who was talking up our teenage daughters at the time, third one by me.
by Timberry on June 3, 2009
I caught this post on Huffington: Who’s Happy And Why?
One thing that struck me immediately was this, a quote from that story:
For example, studies by Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, show that the extremely poor — those earning less than $10,000 a year — may be rendered unhappy by the relentless stress of poverty. Yet his work shows that after a poor person’s income exceeds that level there is no further correlation between money and happiness. After a certain level of income, typically enough to meet basic expenses, money ceases to be a factor.
What I like about this, particularly, is an idea I think I heard first from my older brother. “For me,” he said, “money has always been a binary thing. Enough or not enough.” I like that. I think it applies to me, and my life. For most of our life, we didn’t have enough. Finally, after the company made it, we did have enough. 
“Enough” is a relative concept, of course. And it evolves. For years, when we lived in Mexico City and the first three kids had been born but were still young, we used to take walks when we could and dream together. Our most common dream was “having a down payment to buy our own house.”
A few years later, it was to buy a house in Palo Alto; to move out of San Jose. And then it was a house big enough for a growing family, two parents and five kids. And it became private high school and then college educations, five of them, all very expensive. “Enough” evolved.
The example of cars. Being able to buy a 1975 rambler station wagon was huge, when that happened. But we survived the old orange-yellow VW van and going up the Sierra highways in second gear, which made the Toyota Corolla station wagon a big deal when we were able to get that. Later, it was never a Mercedes or Porsche, but having a relatively new car, and especially one with 4WD, mattered.
Vacations were fine when they were camping in Camomila, or outside of San Miguel de Allende. And one of the best vacations ever was in Acapulco where we thought we’d been invited to a luxury place (journalist perks) but ended up in Las Hamacas instead. Tour guiding worked fine. We had some really nice vacations later, when there was “enough;” but we didn’t really miss them when we couldn’t afford them.
I liked this, from the same post:
Some years ago I was helping Jimmy Carter gather his thoughts for his book Virtues of Aging, and at one point I said to him, “President Carter, I have a crazy question for you. I’m about the age now that you were when you were president. Have you come to any new perspectives about what matters in life, now that you’re older?” His answer was to the point: “Earlier in my life I thought the things that mattered were the things that you could see, like your car, your house, your wealth, your property, your office. But as I’ve grown older I’ve become convinced that the things that matter most are the things that you can’t see — the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.”
So here’s the thing. At the end of the day, it may be wisest to judge each of our own life successes not from the outside looking in but from the inside out. It’s not about the material things I can show the world, but about how I feel about the work I do; it’s about the relationships I have and the love I share.
Ken Dychtwald Ph.D.: Who’s Happy And Why?
by Timberry on August 27, 2008
by Timberry on August 24, 2008
It was dark. Sometime in 1994 or early 1995. Probably Spring of 1995, come to think of it, an April trip, we stayed at Sunriver, it was cold. Too cold to do much. But that’s not the point.
We drove through Bend, business 97, at night, in surprisingly heavy traffic (for Bend). Cristin and Megan were in the back seat. We played Eric Clapton’s “tears in heaven” from a CD.
After the song finished, in the moment of silence that followed, we heard very quiet sobbing in the back seat. It was Megan.
“Megan! What’s Wrong? What happened?
“I miss Paul,” she said. She was about as old as she looks in this picture.
You can click the audio icon here to play that song …
[audio:http://timberry.me/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/eric-clapton-tears-in-heaven.mp3]
