What's in Dave's Head

Recently Donna and I met up with some friends in Bethany Beach, to celebrate a milestone birthday of a close friend of ours, Monica. Monica introduced Donna and me -- she and I grew up in the same neighborhood in Rockville, and we and her brother John, one of my best friends, were on the Hungerford swim team together. She went to college at St. Mary’s College in South Bend, Indiana, where she was a classmate of Donna. After college, she moved back home and invited Donna, who was from New Jersey, down for a weekend, and invited me to join them for some of their shenanigans. That was the beginning of Donna's and my romance.  In Bethany Beach, along with Monica and her husband Jim were John and Susan, a couple we hadn't seen in years; Larry and Claire, whom we hadn't met before; June, who like Claire had been a high-school classmate of Monica’s, and her husband Rex; and Monica's dad, John Sr. Monica's cousin Pat, who I had also known since childhood, and his wife ...

Donna and I spent Labor Day weekend in New York City. We met up with Donna’s sister Barb and two of her kids: Michael, who lives in Greenwich Village and works for Morgan Stanley, and Erin, who lives in L.A. but flew out for the long weekend. We also met up with our friends David and Allen. David went to college with Donna, and I shared a brownstone townhouse on Capitol Hill (according to the realtor; in reality it was a dump in Southeast DC, in an ungentrified area nearer to the Navy Yard than the Capitol with hypodermic needles in the street and where the liquor store had 1-1/2-inch thick Plexiglas between you and the cashier with a turntable where you would put your money and spin it to the other side and the cashier would then spin your purchase to you) with him and another person after college. Friday evening along the Hudson Our hotel was in Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan, by the financial district, an area I haven’t spent much time around. Barb had arr...

After Kate’s wedding, Donna and I were ready to take a few days off. There’s a considerable amount of stress in planning a big production like a wedding: You worry that you will forget something; that the vendors won’t do what they’re supposed to do, when they’re supposed to do it; that the weather won’t cooperate; and on and on. When it’s over, and everything has gone well, and there were no fistfights or wine thrown in someone’s face, and no one fell and hurt themselves or threw up in the limo or missed the bus and were stranded at the venue; when you realize you got through the day and can’t find anything that didn’t go just as you had hoped, you take a deep breath, say a prayer of thanks, and trade in your real clothes for flip-flops and a tee-shirt. So we headed to New Jersey’s Long Beach Island, a barrier island that we have visited just about every summer since we were married, and where Donna spent her summers since she was a little girl. It's a place that’s made fo...

Our oldest child Kate was married on July 15 to Stephen Ritchie. They were married at our parish of 28 years, St. Louis Church in Clarksville, Maryland, and we held a reception for them in Pasadena at a beautiful venue on the Chesapeake Bay. Donna’s family, mostly from New Jersey but also Detroit, California and New York, started arriving Friday. I really enjoy spending time with them – I think of Donna’s siblings as my own brothers and sisters, and her mom as mine. The weather had been brutally hot and humid all week, but we got enough of a respite that we were able to sit comfortably on the deck, against a backdrop of Donna’s beautiful flower baskets; the pines, oaks and a giant Douglas fir that provide privacy, shade and nesting places for birds; and a lawn that hadn’t yet been turned to dust as it always does by late July. After the rehearsal at the church Friday evening, Steve’s parents, Bonnie and Buddy, hosted a wonderful dinner at a restaurant in Ellicott City. Sev...

Every year on the second Sunday of June, right around our oldest daughter Kate’s birthday, about a thousand swimmers gather to participate in the Great Chesapeake Bay Swim. There’s a one-mile swim off the eastern shore, along a course set with large brightly colored buoys; you swim clockwise, about four tenths of a mile out, then a short leg to the right, then the home stretch, along a jetty made of enormous black jagged boulders that is the landing area for the east-bound Bay Bridge span. The finish line is at a small sandy beach near Hemingway’s restaurant on Kent Island. The 4.4-mile swim begins at Sandy Point State Park, on the western shore of the bay. Swimmers cross the bay between the two giant bridge spans. Competing for the first time in any event is stressful. Everything is foreign -- from what to bring to where to park to where to check in. You’re afraid of not being in the right place at the right time. The Bay swim is no exception. My first open-water swim was ...

One of the things I inherited from my dad was his interest in stereos. An engineer, he prided himself on having high-end equipment and a collection of popular music from the early 1960s – Patti Page, Al Hirt, Pete Fountain, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, people like that. I remember when my Uncle Harley died, my dad took possession of a speaker system in a massive mahogany cabinet – it must have been three feet across, three feet deep and four feet high – that was shaped to fit in the corner of a room. Dad somehow managed to hang it from the top of the staircase so it was optimally positioned to blast “A Taste of Honey” into the living room to balance another very large speaker on the room’s far side. When I was a teenager I had a good stereo system too. Back then, a stereo consisted of an amplifier and tuner, speakers the size of luggage, and a turntable and cartridge, which featured a needle with a diamond stylus. Very 20 th Century. I also had a big and growing record ...

The resort Arenas Del Mar is a beautiful beach resort on the Pacific Ocean and adjacent to the Manuel Antonio National Park. The 11-acre property is steeply sloped, as it lies on the mountains that run right to the shoreline.  Making the climb from the beach to anywhere -- our room or the main open-air communal area, which sits at the top of the property and features a pool, dining room, tiny gift shop, health spa, bar, and the front desk -- is an exertion that reminded me of just how out of shape I am. Temperatures around 90 degrees and humidity befitting a rain forest compounded the fatigue.    Yes, I promised myself, I will start working out again when we get home. Luckily, golf carts are always available to make getting around easier.   The resort has 38 rooms The buildings, pools, and cart-trails were surgically placed among the rain forest. Down by the ocean is another communal area, with a small open-air restaurant, bar, and pool. Our room was on...