Book Club: Big Russ and Me

My sister and I are on our third book club book with our dad. Since we are reading Tim Russerts book about his father in our book club, here are a few questions:

Thinking about the whole book:

1. Big Russ and Me can be considered a collection of anecdotes. Did you have a favorite story? Why? Did it remind you of personal stories about your father or your upbringing?

2. It is implied throughout this book that the values of the 1950's and 1960's should be incorporated in our contemporary culture. Do you agree? Do you think this is happening?

3. Big Russ represents good values and common sense. Do you think these are unique traits of his personality or are they a reflection of his generation?

4. Russert takes pride in his city of origin: Buffalo, New York. Do you think his stories would be as interesting if they were set in another city?

5. Russert speaks with pride about his Irish-Catholic heritage. Do you think the values that he refers to in the book are heritage specific?

6. What is the appeal of Big Russ and Me? Is it a rags-to-riches story? Is it the reminiscence of simpler times? Or, is it just entertainment?

7. Have you watched Tim Russert on NBC News or Meet The Press? If so, did you notice anything in his reporting style that reflects his upbringing?

8. Tim Russert died unexpectedly on June 13,2008. There was a sizable public response of tribute, mourning and loss. Which do you think most contributed to his popularity, his books or his TV personality?

9. Big Russ and Me inspired many readers to send their own stories to Tim Russert. Consequently, he published another book with those stories titled Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters From Daughters and Sons.

Cheating Men, Part 2

In “this nation of temporary arrangements,” as John Updike described our country in Too Far to Go: The Maples Stories, the marriage vow becomes hard to understand. People still regularly make that vow. Often, of course, we may wonder what they think they are doing, and almost as often, I suspect, they may be completely oblivious as to who or what actually authorizes them to make such a promise. With our "no fault" divorce and our denial of the destruction it brings to lives of children

Today we are so concerned about what we want and how we want it, we have little understanding of what it means to be faithful. We change jobs, switch churches, move from relationship to relationship. When someone cheats in a relationship, we say that they were unfaithful. But faithfulness is a Fruit of the Spirit.

In II Timothy 3:1-5, Paul describes the spirit of people at the end of the age:

But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away!

Paul lists nineteen characteristics, with "lovers of themselves" and "lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God" serving as bookends containing the others within them. How can a person be faithful to another person, much less God, when he loves himself more than others? How can a person be faithful when his own gratification means more to him? How can a person be faithful if he is a headstrong, haughty slanderer and traitor who is disobedient, greedy, unloving and without self-control?

Faithfulness hinges on what we deem as important. We can be faithful to a sports team, a school or even an automobile, but find it difficult to stick it out with friends, jobs, marriages. Luke 16:10 tells us, "He who is faithful in a very little [thing] is faithful also in much, and he who is dishonest and unjust in a very little [thing] is dishonest and unjust also in much."

Who was more faithful that Christ? For 30 years he was faithful to his Father's purpose and for three years of ministry he was faithful to His mission. He was faithful even to death, faithful to His promise to us. Let us be faithful in our vows to each other.

Cheating Men

The chapter for our little book club this week starts with a strange woman coming early to the viewing after the authors father died. It was a woman the father had worked with, a woman who cried uncontrollably, and left before the "proper viewing started." A woman the family didn't know.

The author, born in 1953, says, "Here's the thing. I am now old enough to understand how a guy who cheats on his wife would have to act so that he could cheat on his wife. And then how he'd behave after he did."

What does that even mean? He goes on to say that his dad hated business trips, was always home at 5:30, whistled, was "catholic enough" and enjoyed his children. And that creates an affair proof man?

My father says a man's home situation has to be lacking for a man to want to cheat.Well, to that I say the man is lacking if he's not man enough to be honest and say, It's not working for me - before he's reduced to cheating, sneaking, lying...

Other insane theories include:

1. A theory exists that testosterone levels in men make them more susceptible to infidelity. This theory is based on the hypothesis that men are genetically predisposed to cheating because they are ingrained with the notion that the survival of the species is dependent on their procreation.

2. Men feel a sense of challenge in their infidelity. Actually being able to get away with an affair is a challenge that men enjoy. Additionally they enjoy the challenge of finding other women with which to cheat. To them the affair is more about the conquest then anything else.

3. It's an ego boost. The knowledge that they can find multiple women willing to engage in an intimate relationship with them is a tremendous self esteem builder for some men. They take pride in the ability to attract women and don’t care about the fact that doing so may destroy their relationship.

4. some have even tried to blame genetics

I imagine that the list is endless.

Truth is, adultery has been around forever, and has always given us something to talk about. Most reality TV shows these days center on it, as do gossip magazines. But we are far from cracking the big mystery: Why do some men cheat in relationships? All men know, at some level, that cheating is wrong. From the earliest age, we are taught the virtues of monogamy. "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife." Yet it still happens.

More than 50% of all spouses are victims of infidelity, which means that one spouse in most marriages will suffer the greatest marital pain possible at some time during their lifetimes.
If you are on the brink of an affair, you may not be able to get yourself out before you have done untold damage to your family. I believe having an affair is the most cruel decision you could possibly make.

To avoid temptation, use the following rules from Dr. Harvey: 1) Spend all your recreational time either alone or with your spouse, 2) no meals alone with someone of the opposite sex, 3) no rides in cars alone with those of the opposite sex, 4) never tell someone of the opposite sex that you find them attractive or that you like them and 5) if someone of the opposite sex ever tells you that they find you attractive, start talking about how much you love your spouse.

Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexual immoral. - Hebrews 13:4

A wife of noble character who can find? She is worth far more than rubies. - Proverbs 31:10

If you put away the sin that is in your hand and allow no evil to dwell in your tent, then you will lift up your face without shame; you will stand firm without fear. - Job 11:14-15

Our Little Book Club

My Dad, who has congestive heart failure, saw Steve McKee one morning on the Today Show, sent my step-mother to buy his book for my sister and I, and invited us to join a "book club" with him. He told me that the book was about a guy whose dad had two heart attacks, died when he was like 16 and now he's got heart trouble too. "It's about family and heart disease," he said.

Since my sister and I spent our weekends at our dad's house growing up sitting on his couch watching TV, and just because he'd never asked us to do anything like this before, we jumped at the chance to create a book club.

We decided to read a chapter a week and talk on Sunday nights about what we read. Tonight was our second three-way call. First, we created a family tree chart to help us keep the characters straight and we talked about our dad's dad and his reaction to our grandma's death, a bit about my aunts funeral, and about the joy the authors mom had just spending time with her dad- even if it was a boxing matches and baseball games. So many similarities and connections between just being families. We are smaller in number, more southern in location, and exponentially shorter on detail, but sharing a knowing resemblance - just because it's the shared human experience of a family.

At the end of the second chapter, McKee says, "In the uncanny way the family generations spill one onto the next, revisiting, reinventing, repeating themselves, that's what happened." So as we read this book together as a family and talk about what it means, we are talking about those moments we want to replay for our own sprouting families and those that are better left alone.

So maybe it's taken awhile for us to move from the silence sitting on the couch to reading and talking to each other, but we are there now - and even though we just hung up the phone, I can't wait for next Sundays phone call.

From Steve McKee comes “My Father's Heart,” a memoir of a father-and-son relationship cut short by heart attack, and the powerful pull of love across the empty years. An excerpt:

About two years before the heart attack that killed him, I had told Dad in so many words that if he didn’t clean up his act, he’d be dead in five years. Quit the smoking, get some exercise, stop nailing himself to the cross of his job. We were sitting at the kitchen table, he and Mom and I. Kathy was away at school. Dad had already had one heart attack, in 1963, when he was forty-four. It had been such an obvious warning shot across the bow. How could he not have heard it, when I so clearly had? He looked straight at me and said, “You’re right.” I wanted to reach across the table, grab him by the collar of the white dress shirt he always wore to work, and shake him. All these years later, I still do.

Shake him for proving me right with years to spare. Shake him for the cigarette cough my sister Kathy and I woke up to every morning of our lives. For missing my high school and college graduations, my wedding in 1978. For not being here for me and my wife, Noreen, to share with him the baby, Patrick, that we adopted in 1990. And for Mom, the former Helen Theresa O’Neil of Seneca Parkside, for being his widow for thirty-seven years, fifteen years longer than she was his wife.