UPBEAT CHICAGO MAGAZINE article: "Et tu, Michael?"

I wrote the following piece for a magazine called "Upbeat Chicago" in 1993. The (first) retirement of Michael Jordan shocked the city of Chicago, but my reaction was probably a little different than most.





Et tu, Michael?

By Rick Kaempfer





Michael Jordan's shocking retirement announcement really nailed me. I now want to be a food critic. See if you can follow my train of thought on this.

Every boy on every playground in America wanted to be Michael Jordan. It was everybody's standard dream.

"What are you going to be when you grow up?"
I'm going to be a professional athlete.

Pick your sport: baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer. We just want to be the best in the world. We want to suck in the praise as we hit that last second shot to win the game. We spend the bulk of our childhood pretending to be that person. If the truth be told, we also spend our adulthood wishing we were that person. Why do you think we get so emotionally involved in sporting events? We are living our lives vicariously through them.

Which, of course, brings us to our current dilemma. If Michael Jordan doesn't even like being Michael Jordan, maybe we've been wasting our time idolizing the wrong profession. This realization sent me on a quest.

Let's face it, nobody is one hundred percent happy with their job. The bottom line is they don't call it work for nothing. The cold hard truth is that even Michael Jordan didn't love his work, and all he did was play basketball for a living. Apparently the price of fame is the drawback.

So, our new dream job cannot be one that makes us famous. OK, eliminate rock star, movie star, and politician from our list of candidates.

What's left? After a long night of soul searching I decided that what I really want to do is find a job that allows me to sit on my couch, drink beer, eat snacks, and watch sporting events. Ooooh, what about sportswriter? Now that has some appeal. I tried to think of the downside, then it hit me....sportswriters have to talk to athletes. That would really bring me down. Those poor pro athletes are miserable.

OK, so we have to stay away from sports. What about just watching TV? Yeah, that's it! I want to be a TV critic. What could possibly be the downside? Then it hit me....a TV critic has to watch all of the shows on TV. He or she even has to watch those bad Sunday night made-for-television tearjerkers. Scratch that job. If I had to watch one more movie about wife beating I'd be as unhappy as poor Michael Jordan.

OK, so we have to stay away from TV. Sitting on the couch without watching TV wouldn't be nearly as much fun...so scratch that as a possible career. What about just drinking beer? As appealing as it sounds, it probably isn't very healthy. So what does that leave? Eating.

There actually is a way to do that for a living...become a food critic. That scary looking guy on Channel 7 does it, doesn't he? That's his job. He goes to restaurants, gets all of his food for free, gets to try whatever kind of food he wants, gets his butt kissed by the owner of the restaurant, and gets to try just about everything on the menu.

What about the downside? There is no downside. What if the restaurant is bad? So what? You're still eating for free. What do you spend most of your disposable income on? That's right...food. That would no longer be a problem. Wow, my heart is racing just thinking about the possibilities. Think about it. Have you ever heard a food critic complain about his job? Isn't that guy on Channel 7 always smiling like he has the best job in the world? That's because he does.

"So, what do you want to be when you grow up?"
I want to be a food critic.

Don't be surprised if kids across America are now sitting in front of their bowl of Spaghetti-O's saying: "Mom, I think the noodles are simply divine, the sauce is out of this world, but the atmosphere is lacking a little 'je ne sais que.'"

The Birth of Tommy Kaempfer

I wrote the following piece when I returned home from the hospital after the birth of my oldest son Tommy, October 19, 1995.

The phone rang at the office. It was the very pregnant Bridget on the line. “I’m not sure, but I think my water might have broken.”

Like any rational adult, I went into a sitcom panic. “What do you mean, you think your water might have broken? Isn’t that usually accompanied by a huge swoosh of water?”

After we both calmed down (although now that I mention it, Bridget was pretty calm) we decided to swing by the doctor’s office and have him check. It was his day off and he conducted the examination over the phone with another doctor. The fluid was checked under a microscope.

Bingo.

Like any rational adult, I called everyone I knew and said “We’re going to have a baby!”

Of course, reality set in when we got to the hospital. The woman in the room next to Bridget’s was in her second day of labor. Later in the night we heard a woman screaming in such excruciating pain that we thought it was a baby crying. I knew right then and there that my beautiful wife would be numbing the pain with drugs. The more, the merrier.

I’m pretty sure that my mother set some kind of speed record from Mt. Prospect to Chicago in the middle of the afternoon. Bridget called her sometime around 1PM, and she was in the waiting room by 2PM. Apparently we weren’t the only ones anticipating the birth of this child....Oma wanted to be there when her first grandchild was born. As it turned out, she wasn’t.

After sitting there for eight hours with very little progress I sent her home. That’s when all hell broke loose. Bridget had to be induced, and almost immediately she started feeling intense pain. My memory banks have catalogued this beautiful moment between the anesthesiologist and my wife. It went something like this....

Dr: So, you think you need something for the pain?
Br: Yes, yes, yes....oooooh.
Dr: OK, we’re going to have to ask the father to leave the room for a moment.
Br: Groan. Groan. Groan. Groan. Groan.

(Rick leaves the room, returns 1/2 hour later)

Br: Oh, thank you doctor, thank you. I just wanted to really, really, really, really thank you.


We both knew we were in the home stretch then. Well, at least I knew. I’m not sure if Bridget even knew where she was for the next few hours. Thank God. It was so great to see the transformation from the really unhappy Bridget to the really happy Bridget.

It was now 2AM. Time to start pushing. They called Dr. Sabbagha. He checked out the goods and decided that we still had some time, so Bridget kept on pushing while the doc took a little nap. Molly the nurse helped us push. She held one of Bridget’s legs and I held the other and we coached her through each push. About every third push Bridget’s leg slammed me right in the family jewels.

Then I saw it....

At first I wasn’t sure what it was, Molly had to fill me in. It was the baby’s head. The hair threw me off. I didn’t expect to see hair, I was expecting to see a perfectly shaped bald (Michael Jordan-esque) head. But there was no mistaking it...the time was near.

Molly went to get Dr. Sabbagha, and told us we could keep pushing if we wanted. BIG MISTAKE. With her first solo try, Bridget grunted hard, and poof - there was the head...all the way out. I’m not sure what I said, but I think it went something like this....

“STOP. STOP. STOP. Holy Bleep.”

Molly came back in, saw the head and said...”Oh my God, we better get Dr. Sabbagha.”

He barely had time to get his gloves on before the event. Just a few moments later, at 4:06 a.m. we had a bouncing baby boy.

We didn’t even know the name of the baby when I called Mom up around 4:45AM. We hadn’t allowed ourselves to really put a lot of thought into a boy’s name, it just didn’t seem possible that we would have a boy. Bridget's entire family at the time consisted of nothing but girls.

Naming a child is one of the most awesome responsibilities a person ever faces. Our momentous decision was made something like this....

Rick: We need to come up with a name.
Bridget: It’s a boy. I can’t believe it’s a boy.
Rick: I guess the name Grace Anne won’t work now.
Bridget: Well, what do you think?
Rick: Let's name him after our fathers.
Bridget: I'm not naming him Eckhard or Stanley.
Rick: Fine, then let’s name him after our Dad’s middle names. Peter Thomas or Thomas Peter?
Bridget: I don’t know, I’m getting stitched up right now.
Rick: OK. Thomas Peter.
Bridget: Fine.

Most of our friends and relatives heard about Tommy on the radio. As a matter of fact, in one of the earliest broadcasting debuts in history, Tommy was on the air when he was 2 hours old.

The following is a transcript of that telephone conversation that morning. The participants are John Landecker (center), sidekick Vicki Truax (the only female in the group picture), and proud papa Rick.

John: Oldies 104.3 WJMK, It's 12 minutes after 6:00 with John Records Landecker and Vicki Truax. The hotline...the private line...is ringing. Hello.

Rick: Hello.

John: Well?

Rick: I'm a papa.

(Loud cheering and whooping in the studio)

Vicki: A girl or a boy?

Rick: A boy.

Vicki: I KNEW IT!!! What's his name?

Rick: Thomas Peter.

Vicki: What time?

Rick: 4:06 a.m.

John: Wow. How's everybody doing?

Rick: Everyone is fine.

Vicki: Bridget is fine too? Is she exhausted?

Rick: Yup, she's holding Thomas right now.

John & Vicki: Awwwww.

Rick: 7 pounds, 3 ounces.

John & Vicki: Awwwww.

Rick: And I recorded the entire thing on Digital audio tape.

Vicki: You're kidding? She didn't make you turn it off?

Rick: No. I had it put in a nice place where it didn't get in anyone's way.

John: We've got Thomas' birth on tape.

Rick: Yup. And we got his first bath on tape too, and his first cry.

John: Something tells me we better get more tape. OK, here's his first eyelid opening. Better get that on tape. We're going through his first toll...let's get that on tape. Hey Rick, don't you just want to...

John, Vicki & Rick: Hug and kiss them all the time?

(That was something Vicki said so often about her daughter it was a running joke on the show)

Rick: He is so damn cute.

John & Vicki: Awwwwww.

Rick: Wait a second...is he crying? Hold on.

Sound: A tiny baby cry can be heard.

John: Is that him?

Rick: Yup. His on-air debut.

John: Wow!

Rick: He's got some lungs on him.

John: That kid sounds like he's two years old.

Rick: Yeah, he's got good pipes.

John: Does he want to come in and do a few record talkovers?

Vicki: How long is he?

Rick: 21 inches.

John: So what was it like?

Rick: It was so cool. It was just like the movie "Alien." The baby kind of popped out and looked around. Then he jumped up and sucked my eyes out...

John & Vicki: (Laughing)

John: Then Siguorney Weaver came in with some sort of a mechanical device. It was unbelievable.

Vicki: You guys. Is he all wrinkly. Does he have hair?

Rick: Yeah, he does have hair. That was the first thing we saw. I asked the nurse...ewww...what is that? That's his hair. Oh.

John: Did you get it on tape?

Rick: Of course. Uh, oh. I have to go. We need to take Bridget up to the recovery room.

Vicki: You're still in the delivery room?

Rick: Yeah.

Vicki: That's dedication.

John: How many calls have you made so far?

Rick: This is my second call. I called my mom first.

John: Wow. Well take care of everyone.

Rick: Thanks.

John & Vicki: Bye.

John: There they go. Dad Rick, Mom Bridget and now Thomas Kaempfer.

Vicki: I kind of liked the other name Rick was talking about before.

John: I don't think Bridget was ever going to agree to Ringo.

Why do I write?

By Rick Kaempfer



















My Dad: Eckhard Kaempfer (1935-1989)


Losing a parent has a tendency to change your outlook on life. I know it happened to me. When my father died seventeen years ago, I was 25. That’s a pretty young age to become fatalistic, but I’ve chosen to look on the bright side of being fatalistic. For one thing, I no longer take things for granted because I know that my time on this earth is limited.

I know this is going to sound bad, but I wish my father had been a little more fatalistic. Of course, it’s totally unfair to say that about a man who walked into a hospital emergency room one day at the age of 54, and never came out again. His mindset was understandable. Both of his parents were still alive when he died. He had no reason to ever think about death. And even if he had, all three of his children were already adults (25, 24, and 19), and he had done a pretty good job of raising relatively normal functional members of society. Why would he bother thinking about what life would be like without him?

I know I’m being greedy here. I realize that. He gave me all he could give...and then some. But now that I’m a father myself, I find myself wanting something I never wanted before. His advice. I always considered Dad to be a source of wisdom, even when I strongly fought against it. He was a reasonable man, a thinker, someone who gave quite a bit of thought to his words before they came out. He wasn’t always right, but he was never rash or emotional. In short, he was the perfect kind of person to ask for advice.

And I never did.

And now that I’m a father myself, I have a million questions.

That’s probably one of the reasons I have so overcompensated with my own boys. I’ve tried to use my father as a model—his steady temperament and his guiding hand, while trying to give them what he couldn’t give me. It’s one of the reasons I’ve decided to stay home and raise them. I’m part of virtually every phase of their lives, and I’m constantly giving them unsolicited advice about every subject under the sun just in case they ever need it someday.

Unfortunately, I don’t quite have the fountain of wisdom my father had. He had knowledge that came from a difficult childhood of emigration and language barriers and hardship that I couldn’t even imagine. You learn things when you experience difficulty—and he must have learned so much. Most of those lessons learned, however, died with him. I didn’t have the foresight to ask about them, and he didn’t have the foresight to commit them to paper.

So I write.

That way, what I know will not go away when I go away. Even if my boys choose to ignore it for most of their lives, I’m fairly confident there will come a time when curiosity will get the best of them, and they will seek out wisdom from their father. When that time comes, there’s a possibility I won’t be around to deliver it in person.

The son spends his life trying to distance himself from his father, trying to make his own way in the world, trying to become a man. There’s nothing wrong with that—it’s part of growing up. I certainly don’t take it personally when my boys ignore my advice and insist on making the same mistakes I made. Some kids just learn better that way. I know I did. But there will come a day when they need me. And I just can’t bear to think that I won’t be there when they do.

So I write.

When they do seek me out, even if I’m not around, my words will still be here, to bring me back to life. They won’t have to wonder what was going through my mind when I was in their shoes--because they can read it. And if they end up having boys just like themselves—and my experience tells me they just might—they can see how and why I did what I did.

Why do I write? I know that part of the audience for every word I write includes three grown men I’ve never met. Three men who may one day want to ask Dad for advice. I only have my time, my love, and my words. I give those with all of my heart.

That’s why I write.