I normally love writing for kids. It’s a weird turn of events in later years. But one of the byproducts of writing science and history articles for kids is that you learn things you just would have been very happy not learning.

For instance, climate change is making spiders bigger. Yes, bigger. I’ve always sort of been worried about climate change and the prospect of floating on a door atop the future Mid-European Atlantic that used to be known as ‘Germany’ but now I have to add big spiders to that nightmare. Enjoyably enough, in future research I learned that spiders can also survive in space. So when global warming does get bad enough and humanity is forced to go live on Mars, spiders can follow us.

Another scary fact is that there are the frozen bodies on Mount Everest. And they are used as landmarks for people climbing up and down. I’m not so scared of the idea of dead people. I am, however, terrified stiff by the fact that there are people on Earth stupid enough that when they run into a frozen man in a Columbia jacket their only thought is ‘Oh, I have to make a left at Larry.’ And then off to the ‘dead zone.’

There’s a haunted radio station in Russia that’s been broadcasting a dull monotonous tone for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades. Horrifying. I’d love to visit it, but the most terrifying aspect of that ghost radio station is that it’s in Russia.

You can die from holding in a sneeze. This wouldn’t bother me, but it’s also possible to die from sneezing too hard. Sneezing. The function we can’t control can kill you if you don’t do it like fricking Goldilocks.

King Charles II used to drink red wine mixed with cremated skulls. He wasn’t the only one either, as this was a way to be healthier. Also, the barber was where one got bled. If you were sick, you were ordered by the doctor but it was beneath him to make people bleed. This doesn’t terrify me as much as make me sad that I didn’t live then. I bet people almost never had to go to work. Yes, it was because they had died, but still. No work.  

My last bit of research dragged out that some ants turn into zombies via parasitic fungus, which – wait for it – manipulates their brains. (This is how it starts.) I don’t have any problem with ants, but the fact that they can be killed and then redirected to eat my hotdog. It just seems rude.

I guess it’s good as all my other terrors are real life. A mortgage. A neighbor who sings to his tennis racket. After these daily terrors, what’s a spider with wings or an ant that’s trying to kill Andrew Lincoln? Manageable. Now, I have to get my tennis racket.  

My siblings and I have long given up the one-upmanship of our formative years. I, for example, rarely bring home dead squirrels anymore. My brother no longer sends our mother his W2s. Amanda gave her a few grandkids. I did my part by moving 4,200 miles away. And I think I was winning until my sister Julia announced that she was going to take my mom on a trip around Ireland.

My mother has been mentioning ‘Ireland’ to my dad for thirty or forty years until she gave up the ghost and started going on cruises with her friends. But a lifetime of mild disappointment was nothing compared to what I was facing now?  

Namely, how was I going to compete with my sister taking her to Ireland? Short of finding Brigadoon and setting up the Once a Century Pub Crawl, I couldn’t. Alas, bitterness set in.

But one night I awoke in a sweat and possibly surrounded by candy wrappers. It was a moment of clarity that went like this: You live near Ireland you bugwit. This was followed by more positive insights such as: I could fly to Ireland! I could do it as a surprise! It would be fun!

My moment in the son sun.

There were two concerns.

The first – a heart attack. My mom is notoriously jumpy and conducive to scares. Not just conducive, but with a predisposition that a doctor should look at. We once sat at a table together for an hour before I scared her into vaulting milk all over her shirt by asking what time it was.

So, in order to avoid employing Dublin’s emergency services, we decided to do it in a pub, with me sitting and waiting, and her seeing me. This would hopefully avoid any shock that we’d have to awkwardly explain at a viewing.

The second – my dad. My dad’s inability to keep a secret or retain information without blabbing it to all who hear is famous within our family. In fact, it’s famous outside of our family. Word has it that in one of his past lives in the revolution era colonies, he was hogtied days before Paul Revere’s ride. Another early life was sent into Brittany as decoy on June 5, 1944.

And so I arrived, I walked to a pub, got a Power’s Gold Label, asked the bartender where the Hairy Lemon was. He pointed me about 40 yards down the road and I drank the liquor with joy. Once inside the Lemon I Guinnessed myself and took up a small table by the door. They came in, my mom flipped (no medical issues), and my sister and I cheersed a job well done.

The following day happened to be her birthday (33^rd) and we embarked on a great weekend of Irish history, archaeology, beer, food, and rugby. This is all despite the pub crawl my sister and I did on Friday, whose venues grow dimmer and dimmer the later they were visited. Somewhere in there was a Five Guys visit. A door code for a bathroom that I’ll always remember (0502). And the night was capped off at the restaurant of the hotel, which, my sister assured me was during the day a charming Irish pub/restaurant. This assurance came because at night it was lit and had the otherwise ambience of a vampire orgy. Everyone was much better looking than us and somehow younger by several hundred decades.  

When the red light went on and the dancing began we made our escape. Our left half our pints on the table mocking us as we ran. In the morning, as promised, we dropped into the restaurant and were greeted by a sweet-smiled young lady with blonde hair. She airily directed us towards a table and took our order. Under her breath, I could have sworn she said “you didn’t finish your drinks last night.”

We left this rendezvous out when filling my mother in on events, mainly because we were afraid to implicate her. Who knows what rules bind the Irish Vampire. It didn’t matter. Had we been bit by vampires, at least we’d have been in Ireland – the land of the jovial and friendly and inviting. That evening, exhausted by walking and touring, we stopped at a place for seafood chowder and brown soda bread. The barmen and women told us funny stories, bantered with us, and snapped jokes at us. By the time we were turning on the rugby, we were ready to drift off. And I wish I had before the end.

…and went on to spread booze throughout the frontier

The apple has seen some tough days. It’s the malicious culprit in loads of folklore. What knocks out Snow White? What has Adam ruin the lot for humankind (according to medieval art, not the bible)? And is it the Golden Pear of Discord or the Golden Banana of Discord that sparks the Trojan War? No, it’s the Golden Apple of Discord.

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Despite its evident tendency to introduce ruin and mayhem, the apple was a constant in my early life. They made their way into my oatmeal and lunches. They were offered under the suspiciously-rhyming decree that one a day would definitively forbid the approach of a certified healthcare professional. Throughout the year, apple culture peaked around October. We bobbed for apples at our school Halloween festival. We lost teeth in caramel-covered apples, where they stood like crooked little tombstones. And in September, a class trip to Steyer’s Orchards introduced me to the glories of apple cider. (The next day, spent entirely on the toilet, stomach acids swirling after two jugs of cider, I was introduced to consequences of actions. And the importance of two-ply toilet paper.)  

One positive story about apples came from the folk character Johnny Appleseed. He was a simple frontiersman who wore threadbare clothing, wore a tin pot hat, and wandered and seeded the frontier with apple trees. The real man was John Chapman, born in 1774 in Massachusetts and raised in Pennsylvania. The legend isn’t far off from reality. He collected seeds from Pennsylvania cider mills and roamed the frontier delivering apple seed to families and starting nurseries. He walked around barefoot and slept rough. He was very kind to people and animals and became a vegetarian in later years. This was remarkable at a time when most people ate whatever they could to get calories in an American wilderness notably bereft of Trader Joes.  

But Johnny Appleseed wasn’t simple. He created nurseries, which he fenced in and for which he hired caretakers. He returned when a couple of times a year to work on them. By the time he died in 1845, he owned more than 1,200 acres of valuable frontier land. Moreover, contrary to the Disney version of Johnny Appleseed, he wasn’t bringing people apples for food, he was bringing them apples for booze.

The first apples sprung up as malus sieversii in the mountains of Kazakhstan. And no doubt the first person to bite into one never did so again. They are so bitter that they were only marginally preferable to dying of hunger. So people didn’t eat them, but they did press the hell out of them and let the resulting juice ferment. There’s no record of who first realized fermented apple cider made you drunk enough to tongue kiss a woolly mammoth, but by the time the Romans show up in the British isles in 55 AD, the people there were drinking a cider-like beverage and developing the rules for mob football. The Germanic tribes and the Normans were drinking similar beverages, and the Romans spread this newfound elixir throughout their entire empire. And Europe and the Mediterranean were drunk on apples.

For some reason, I used to take a great deal of delight in telling others my dreams. I guess this bad habit lasted until college, when I was informed that describing one’s dreams to another human adult had the same effect as slowly reading a phone book to them in a monotone voice while administering 400 ml of NyQuil. So it made people fall asleep with the added bonus that when they woke up, they absolutely despised you.

So I stopped. Having more than enough points against my personality, I chose to cut my losses on that one and just keep my dreams to myself. Until, of course, now. Now, I have a blog so if you are reading this just remember a. that you chose to, b. you can stop reading anytime you want, and c. you probably like me or are plotting against me. In any case, please don’t hate me.

Last week I dreamed about spiders. You’re going to want to notice that at the end of spider there’s an s. In English, this designates a plural. Not one spider, spiders. In my dream, they were literally flying through the air. Towards me. Big ones. But the kind with sharp legs. Oh it was awful. Then, I noticed another spider – this one that was sort of big and meaty, like a small dog, and was sitting in the middle of a web watching television. So, naturally, a bunch of former NFL players showed up and began poking him in one of his several eyes. I thought this was a bad idea and evidently I voiced that opinion because the big spider agreed with me (verbally) and then decided he should hang out with me. He did not leave my side for the rest of the dream. I think we went to the movies and he was charged the child rate.

hen we got off the metro at Ladvi, the brewpub was right across the lot. Pivovar Cobolis. It was a monster. Burke says the pub here used to be an old dinosaur from the communist era. It’s easy to see old men hunched over red tablecloths sipping ten degrees and smoking at a rapid pace.

Now, it’s filled with the pre-concert droves heading to Depeche Mode. They are dressed in black and many of them sport hairdos popular when Depeche Mode made its appearance in 1980. Everyone is nice. Everyone loves our dog, who lies on her stomach on the floor and awaits cookies.

One of the great parts of moving to a new home is finding new places in the area. For us, this usually means pubs, cafes, restaurants, and grocery stores. This is a good payoff to the extreme stress of moving to a new place. So, after a month and a half of limbo and disruption, we get a new pub.

It’s about noon and Burke is teaching in the bedroom. I get the dog’s harness on her and we step out into the hot day. Her tongue instantly curls into the ladle that tells me she doesn’t like the heat. Indeed, the sky is blue and deep, but the air is hot and not as cool as I want it to be in the shade. But as we have just moved to a new part of Prague, it is time to explore. It’s time to get lost.

Since I am the navigator on this journey, getting lost happens fast. Almost too fast. We pass a hotel where my friend works and then a Lidl. And then we’re in unknown territory. There are lots of flat blocks and an occasional sign for a shop. The sun is hot and so we wander into a small park and sit under a tree. I pour the dog a little bowl of water and we look around.

I don’t deal with ‘new’ too well. Never have. On the first day of school each year, I was baffled by this policy of simply changing teachers. Who does that? And just when I’d gotten used to the last one? Now, having bought a flat in an unfamiliar part of town, I am dealing with new every day. New shops, people, parks, grass, buildings. My stress and anxiety levels are at the same level as when I’m in a place I can’t leave and forced to listen to death metal. While my brain knows that this is a very normal, human and temporary reaction to a very normal, human temporary experience, my heart and soul are just pissed off that I put them into this position.

The dog and I look around. She sees none of her friends from Petřiny – the grumpy old dachshund, the two poodles, the blind retriever, the chihuahua whose tongue is always hanging out of the side of her mouth. I see nothing that I recognize. The foxtails that are eating up Petřiny grass isn’t here, and while there is nothing wrong with them, the streets and green lots here have yet to provide the same comfort that they did in Prague 6.

I hand over a cookie to the dog. In a mutual state of glum, the dog and I agree that noon-thirtyish is not too early to visit a pub. So we get up and make it our passive goal. The dog is panting, so I pick her up and carry her as though she is Shihtzuvian royalty. I pass a woman and she smiles and addresses the dog. She comments on the queenliness of (I hope) the dog. But, hey, who cares.

“Ahoj Maisy,” she says.

It’s Friday. I am on my couch hovered over my computer screen. I am writing test materials with a Shih tzu lounging on my knee. Burke is working on lessons in the armchair. The cat is on the desk mocking the dog with her ability and agility to get to high places. The dog whines.

It’s only when I go to the kitchen that I realize people are outside. Kids whir by on bikes, people in groups walk dogs, the pub next door is slammed with people. It’s 5:30 pm.

I love the summer. As a teacher, I have a slower work season, don’t have to talk to many people, and mostly enjoy the fact that I can wear shorts and sandals. As I live in the Czech Republic, things here slow down to a crawl in the summer months. It’s all but an unspoken understanding that things don’t happen when it’s hot. Or June. Or Friday. Or Thursday because it’s Friday adjacent. But summer in the Czech Republic is the time of year that the Czechs love to dress head to toe in spandex and ride their bikes for the day. They walk and lounge and don’t seem in a terrible rush to get much done.

How I envy them. Though some might not like this tendency to slow down, I think the Czechs have a very healthy outlook when it comes to work-life balance. If you write an email to someone on Friday at 4 pm you will hear from them on Monday at 10ish. In the U.S. it’s totally possible you’d hear from them on Friday at 8 pm or even Saturday at 9 am. Though I’ve always been a bratty stepson who pokes fun at his adoptive country, in this case the Czechs do it right.

When I was a kid, summer in the Langhorne countryside was green and spent without clothing on. There was always activity on the street, the neighbors would gather on the driveway across the street drinking wine or soda. No matter, they were enjoying the time when their kids entertained themselves in the outdoors and mostly out of earshot.

We kids would disappear into the woods as soon as we could every day and come home for dinner (maybe) and covered in poison ivy and ticks and ticks with poison ivy. We were sunburnt and barely noticed it. I was 20 before I realized that people didn’t just turn brown in July automatically. Sometimes we’d spend the day at our community pool. On rainy days, we’d spend the afternoon on the Barr’s deck playing Dungeons and Dragons.

Eddie and I played baseball all summer and when we came home from practice at 5 or 6 pm, the faraway shouts of our friends would let us know where we needed to go to catch up – the woods, someone’s backyard, the Barr’s deck or sandbox. The rules were more lax in summer, and so Eddie and I were allowed to sleep over more often than during the school year. We’d sit in his kitchen eating cereal, the Phillies game and Harry Kalas’ voice a perennial presence.  

I remember being baffled by my parents’ need to work. Where did they go each day? Mr. Schorpp brought us to camp on his way to work and I couldn’t wrap my head around it – who worked in summer? Surely this awful wrong would be righted by the time I got older.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t. Now, while I hover over my keyboard and hear the far-off shouts of people enjoying their time outside, I can’t help but wish I was eleven again. Or at least Czech. In any event, this blog is done and I see a spandex-clad man paying his check, so I am going next door.