I suppose any couple who makes it to 26 years of marriage has some whiplash from constantly turning the other cheek.  If you can’t do it for the sake of your spouse, do it for the sake of the marriage because marriage is a living thing that must be fed and cultivated “til death do us part”.

Against this backdrop is the audiotape of a secretly recorded conversation between Bobby Davis, 39, and Mrs. Bernie Fine, much older than that.   In a lengthy chat on the phone in 2002 Laurie Fine seems fully aware of the man crush her husband had on Davis beginning when Davis was a star struck basketball fan in need of a father figure at 13.

(Bernie would) always say, ‘Bobby and I are going in the Jacuzzi.’ And I’d go to the bathroom and I’d try to come in. The door’d be locked. I’d check: ‘What’s going on?’ ‘Nothing.’ I said, ‘Unlock the door.’ ‘(Bernie) No, we’re in our underwear.’

As the Secret Service and U.S. Attorney’s office escalate the investigation into Syracuse Basketball Associate Head Coach Bernie Fine’s conduct through the years, my thoughts turn to the Fine family.  Here was a celebrity couple living the dream; kids, house in the suburbs, big sports job in a storied college basketball program with the most loyal fans in the country.  How long did the Fines wait for a table if they went to a restaurant with no reservations?  Lucky them.

(Laurie Fine to Davis)  I think there might have been others, but it was geared to you.  There was something about you…

No one knows a marriage except the two people in it, but the taped phone conversation blew the roof off the Fine house like a tornado came through and now everybody is looking inside.  It’s dark in there.   There are secrets.  Head coach Jim Boeheim initially went as far as to say he knows Fine so well that his accusers “are lying” and looking for money.  No one apparently bothered to look in the jacuzzi, or the basement where Bobby Davis spent many nights as a guest of the Fines while Laurie was instructed to check on the oldest child upstairs or thought it odd Davis had such access to the basketball team and the Fine family for 15 years.

(Laurie Fine) You know, Bobby, again … When he goes out of town, I don’t know anything…. I used to live, eat, sleep and drink basketball. Now, I am so the other end the last few years that I couldn’t tell you the recruits they have. Because I just don’t care.

Laurie Fine’s phone comments suggest she knows the head of household — husband, father, community leader–has a thing for young male S.U. basketball fans.  In addition to Bobby Davis, his stepbrother Michael Lang now says he was molested by Fine, though he denied it when asked years ago.  Within the last week another young man, Zach Tomaselli, contacted police to say he was fondled by Fine in a hotel room in Pittsburgh, a charge Pittsburgh authorities state they will examine.

(Davis:) Laurie, can I tell you about what happened? (laughs) You probably don’t even want to know. (Laurie Fine:)  Oh, I’d love to know because — you know what? — I don’t have that intimate, lovey feeling with Bernie. So I…

There’s an upbeat manner suggesting the wife in the sexless marriage was looking for phone sex as much as information.  Like a woman discussing a good recipe, Fine is energetic.

(Laurie Fine)  But you never had any oral sex with him? (Davis) No. I think he’d want to. (Laurie Fine) Of course, he would. Why wouldn’t he?

Why wouldn’t he?  Because it’s wrong for a grown man to want oral sex from a teenager of either gender. What looks more and more like a culture of accepted child abuse in the Fine home, the wife dismisses on the phone as  Bernie’s “issues”.  You know issues.  Hoarding, hitting the bottle, spanking the kids a little too hard.   Lots of wives look the other way for those.

Laurie Fine tells the alleged victim that rather than bother him,  Bernie should just go to a “gay bar” to get his fill of “male companionship”, which confuses a group of people that is law abiding– gays, with a group that is not– pedophiles. There’s nothing wrong with being a homosexual and everything wrong with using one’s position of power to initiate sexual contact with a child.   If the charges against Fine stick, male companionship will be the only kind he gets for awhile.

(Davis) When I stayed there in your basement, he’d come down there every night. I’m like, what the heck, what’s Laurie thinking? (Laurie Fine) What did I think? … And then he’d come down to where you were every night. And he’d say to me, ‘Go check (their son).’ Or… Go lay with him. Go upstairs.’ Anything to get me out of the room. And I knew. I told you when I was walking down the stairs at night, I’d say to myself, Guaranteed he’s not in there. When I’d look in, his papers would be spread out all over and he’d be gone. Right down the basement, door closed.

Where was Laurie Fine’s concern for this young friend of the family who slept over again and again?  Or the “others” she suspects her husband fondled too? On the tape she tells Davis “you trusted somebody you shouldn’t have trusted”, which is great.  Let’s make it Davis’ fault his hero put an adult hand down a boy’s pants.   You could blame him for hoping that this visit might be the first time his father-figure begins to keep his hands to himself or his wife.

Not to be left out, according to what Davis told ESPN, Davis says he had intercourse with Laurie,  for a real exacta of opportunity.  If you offered this script to Hollywood producers they would say enough already.   You don’t have to add every lurid thing you can imagine into one household or no one will believe it.

What makes one woman leave a husband for much less a sin as this, and makes another write off a federal offense as “issues”?  What kept Laurie in it all these years?  The love? The lifestyle?  The for better or for worse?  Did she mind being a shield for her husband’s alleged perversion, or did she hope that someday it would all be over with and they could be the terrific family this community projected them to be? Looked at in clinical terms, it’s a fascinating case.

In 2002 Laurie Fine had concerns her husband’s behavior would catch up to them, hesitating on the phone with Davis,

“Not that I think you’re gonna record anything I say, but I’m very cautious about what I say”.

Viewed any other way, it’s a portrait of disappointment, like finding out it’s your parents who put the gifts under the Christmas tree.  We all wanted to believe everything about the S.U. Basketball program and its people was better than real.

But reality has a way of bigfooting the dream.

Much is written and celebrated about the “firsts” in life.  The first steps, the first tooth, the first day of kindergarten, the first kiss, the first job.  But life is sprinkled with as many “lasts” as there are firsts and the “lasts” hurt a little, even when you asked for them.

Most of the lasts in life go unnoticed.  We discover a beautiful path through a State Park and we vow to return someday.  We enjoy a particular restaurant out of town and deem it worthy of a future visit.  We promise to get together with an old friend  as soon as hectic schedules allow.  But then the friend moves away.  There are other restaurants on new trips taking up all the time, and that trail through the park?   We can’t even remember which park it was. In small ways, we routinely do something for the last time without even knowing it.

If you are a parent, June is a month where the “lasts” scream like fingernails on a chalk board; clashing neon colors and dissonant notes which, if combined with other notes, would otherwise be a beautiful song.  But a particular June comes along and for the first time, suddenly you don’t want it.  June is for proms and class trips, the end of school and the  beginning of family vacations.   When your last child is of a certain age, June signals the end of all that forever.

Today I drove  Christian to Nottingham High School for the last day of school forever.   From now on he will get himself to class –not school–each day when he attends Syracuse University in the fall.  Last Saturday I took the last photographs of my child all dressed up for the prom.  Later that night, or more accurately, earlier the next morning, I stayed awake all night in that odd juxtaposition of joy and panic that comes with an after-party going on in the backyard, the one where 25 teens show up with snacks and drinks and the will to stay awake until daylight.  You remember what you pulled at 18 which makes you worry all the more that everyone will get home healthy and in one piece.  I dragged myself through the next day on no sleep, aware I will never again have reason to spend a long night like that.   I would trade a month more of sleepless nights for just a little more time with my babies.

For 21 years I transported children either to school, home from school, or both, and today it all came to an end.     One week from Wednesday I will attend the last high school graduation in the family.   If, when my first was born in 1986, you had told me I would be doing this until the year 2011, you could have knocked me over with a pipe cleaner.  The year two-thousand followed by any number back then sounded like 300 years in the future.  That’s how long the ultra-marathon of parenting loomed back then.  Now I wonder where it all went.

I have met new friends this month,  learned new skills and purchased a new bicycle, so there are plenty of firsts to recognize and enjoy.  But this particular month of June, June of 2011, mostly has the joy rubbed off of it.  It simply came too soon.

I have raised my children to grow up and leave me, and with some melancholy, I pat myself on the back this month for doing exactly that.

Here are some shots of the Prom last Saturday.

Christian and his beautiful girlfriend Heather Sladik

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Posing with classmates at Thornden Park, Syracuse

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Friends since 2nd grade, Alex Cunniff and Christian

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Parents gather to photograph the lovely couples

Get ready for more construction on the booming Syracuse University hill.   Syracuse University officials today announced that if all government approvals are met,  construction on Campus West Apartments will begin this summer with completion one year later, in 2012.

S.U. has an agreement with Education Realty Trust Inc., a major developer of collegiate housing, to build, own and manage the project near the Carrier Dome and the proposed new College of Law building, on the far west side of the main campus.

The project will be five stories tall and include 312 beds in combinations of studios, one, two and four bedroom apartments.  Each unit will have a full kitchen, and washer and dryer.

There will be a clubhouse in the complex as well as computer lab, fitness center, business center and S.U. Department of Public Safety satellite office.   Retail stores will occupy the first floor.  The entire complex is designed for upperclassmen, graduate students and law students.

This is the second ERT project at Syracuse University.  The first, University Village Apartments, was constructed on Small Road on South Campus off Colvin Street last year.  The total cost of this latest housing complex is not available however ERT officials said it will be financed through the On-Campus Equity, or ONE Plan which allows the university to avoid long-term debt by accessing ERT’s capital.

In addition to the deer, the red fox, the gray fox, the coyote, woodchucks and skunks; on top of the magnificent cooper and red tailed hawks and the pileated woodpeckers that look like pterodactyls, I now have an opossum to add to the collection of animals that share my yard near Syracuse University, but this one walked right inside.

I wondered why the bag of garbage was torn apart in the garden cart in the garage, and why recyclables had walked themselves out of the blue bins and onto the floor.  My mini dachsund likes to chew at the trash but he’s a fair weather trash picker.  These days he’s happiest under a blanket in the house.  This episode was a mystery.

Walking past the cart this morning, with its ravaged plastic trash bag, I saw what I thought was a fur hat that had been thrown out, only I don’t have a lovely fur hat like that and if I did, it would be on my head in this cold and not in the trash.  With lightning-fast slow motion, I realized I was looking at a live ball of wild thing fast asleep in the mess.

I got right on the internet to research how aggressive it might be if moved and I learned, not very.  In fact, I started feeling a little responsible for it because with the deep snow pack for weeks on end, animals like opossum have struggled to find food this winter.  No wonder he thought my garbage was delicious.

But I didn’t think the garage was the best place for him to settle.  After all, we’re coming and going with the car.  And Eika the german shepherd and Otto the dachsund who is about the same size as the opossum might protest in a manner that would be bloody.

So I wheeled the cart with the torn up trash and the gorgeous fur ball to the end of the driveway and allowed my childish curiosity to get the better of me.  You know how your parents tell you not to do something which makes you have to do it more?  I jiggled the cart a little to see which part of the ball had the head.  He slowly looked up, a jagged-eared other wordly creature, not particularly menacing but not adorable either.  Frankly he was cuter when he was just a ball.  His snout was too long, pig-like, and it threw off the aesthetics, but his ink black round-as-marble eyes kind of made up for it.

I left him there in the sunshine, expecting it would be too bright for him to sleep comfortably, and I went indoors.

A couple  hours later I was back and as expected, the opossum was gone; he likely found the driveway too bright for sleeping.  I wheeled the cart back to the garage and just before going inside I learned my theory was only half right.  It was too bright in the cart, so he climbed inside the plastic trash bag, negotiating the plastic ties like Chinese jump rope.  The effect was as paradoxical as the whole scene; beautiful fur on an animal with an ugly crinkled nose; a coat so inviting you’d want to pet it but you might as well put your arms around a rose bush and hug it for all the scratches you’d get in trying.  This creature who was so attached to my garbage was fast asleep and seemingly wrapped in a plastic red bow.

It’s dark outside now and the little guy is gone.  Opossums are nocturnal so I assume he’s doing what any night owl does at this hour in the night.  ( No, I haven’t spotted a night owl on the property yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.)  Tuesday is trash day so the opossum and his friends will feast on a cornucopia of garbage all around the neighborhood; I doubt he’ll need my garage again.

But you never know.  He kind of grew on me this afternoon.  He may be back once we fill up the cart with more garbage bags.

All this wildlife.  Even that which are not Syracuse University students.  It’s getting crowded around here.

You know the drill.  I start ‘em, you finish ‘em. You don’t need to come up with all the unfinished answers, just write as many as you want.

1.  It’s satisfying to break a record in Syracuse for something not related to snow.

2.  I turn to mush when I see the Rautins crying on the sidelines at Senior Night.

3.  They almost make me forget the Red Sox began spring training.

4.  Because they play as a TEAM. And they bring an Orange smile to my face.   Thanks Ken

5.  Laugh at a guy who bought a 34 dollar ticket and could not see the court. Thanks Denny

6.  They make Jimmy smile.  Thanks Don

7.  As for Don’s “making ‘Jimmy’ smile” — that’s an accomplishment for the ages.  True, Cathy. Thanks

8.  S.U. Basketball is the only thing that makes Syracuse winters bearable -and this team is the best of the best!  Thank you Pat

9.  They are a team and care about each other. Just seeing Andy Rautins and how far he has come. Thanks Carol

10. They started the season losing to LeMoyne and by the last home game they’re ranked #1 Yeah!  Thank Denise

As a product of New England, with its history of pro sports teams from Boston, I’ve never been much of a college sports fan.  I don’t even know the roster of the Syracuse University teams from year to year.  For as much as New Englanders like their hockey from Northeastern University and the football from Boston College, they really are a professional sports lot.  I say they’re missing something.  You haven’t lived until you’ve watched a basketball game at the Carrier Dome.

I was privileged to watch the Syracuse-Georgetown game on Monday night.   There is nothing like a classic rivalry to put electricity in the air.  Army/Navy,  Red Sox/Yankees,  Leno/Letterman, Couric/Palin; A good contest makes you sit up straighter to watch.

I sometimes wonder what I would miss most if I ever moved away from Syracuse.  The abundance of fresh water is at the top of the list; Lake Ontario, the Finger Lakes, the Thousand Islands.  I would lament the loss of decent skiing 20 minutes from my house.  My sister in South Carolina has to drive eight hours to reach a little hill in Virginia.  I would miss the wineries throughout Upstate New York, and the Adirondacks so close.  Niagara Falls is a few hours away and route 81 can easily get you to Canada or through Pennsylvannia to the nation’s Capital with relative ease, and without the nightmare I-95 corridor that tortures New Englanders.

And S.U. basketball games at the Dome.  They are a thrill.  There is so much to see that doesn’t even occur on the court.  The student section itself is worthy of a television show; absolutely everyone wears orange shirts and entertains that giant venue with their various traditions and chants.  It makes you feel you’re 19 again.  I attended a small liberal arts college housed in mansions on cliffs above the Atlantic Ocean, but when I watch the student section during a game I think I should have come here instead.

Equally impressive are the thousands of Central New Yorkers who make their way through the biting cold to manage parking restrictions and snow banks to get to the Dome and cheer the team.   We are lucky to have a team of S.U.’s caliber, but the team is fortunate as well to have this level of community support.

Which brings me to this exciting 2009-10 team.  Everyone is talking about them, even people like me who don’t normally talk about them.  I watched the last ten minutes of their contest with DePaul today and warmed with pride as the announcers warned a national television audience that Syracuse was too good a team this year to go down in an 18 point defeat.  They didn’t.  As we all know, they turned it around and won by two.

It may be 10 degrees outside with plenty of winter left on this last day of January.  But when the ‘Cuse is in the House and climbing up in the ranks, winter is the very best season of all.

Across the country mayors watched with interest Pittsburgh Mayor Luke Ravenstahl’s attempts to levy the first-ever tax on college tuition.  The mayor proposed a 1 percent tax to help fund the city’s dwindling pension and to overcome a $50 million dollar gap in property taxes lost by granting tax-free status to nonprofit institutions like universities and hospitals.

Does this sound like any other city you know?  One, say, with a large university and five sprawling hospitals; among them an institution announcing just this week a $222 million expansion, all of it tax exempt?

As you can imagine, Mayor Ravenstahl’s proposal created a nuclear town-gown reaction.  There are 10 colleges and universities in that fine city and the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University lead the opposition.  Spokesmen claimed a tax on tuition would prohibit the brightest students from coming to Pittsburgh to learn, and it was antithetical in times of declining endowments and increasing requests for financial aid.

But the Mayor was stuck.  He told The New York Times “Our colleges and universities are giving less and less while they increase tuition and executive pay and expand their campuses, removing high-value land from the tax rolls. The cost to provide public safety and public works services continues to increase, but our revenue continues to decrease.”

The tax would add approximately $27.00 to the cost of a semester at a community college, and $430.00 per semester at prestigious Carnegie Mellon.  The bottom line: $16.2 million more annually for the city.

Other northeast cities like Boston and Providence, R.I. flirted with the idea of a tuition tax, but it never passed the necessary legislative channels.  Pittsburgh came closest but was scuttled today when the nonprofits agreed to increase their voluntary donations to the city in a one-time deal.  The issue is not dead.  Both sides want a more permanent understanding for the future.

In Syracuse we tweak our own town-gown symbiosis with visionary Chancellor Nancy Cantor working hard to mesh the campus with Syracuse’s struggling downtown.  Like the University of Pittsburgh, Syracuse University shines on a hill overlooking the commercial district.  Cantor created an eye-popping gallery and classroom space in her edgy rehab of the old Dunk ‘N Bright warehouse in Armory Square and now retailers are following the students.   This is a dream for city planners who would prefer organic economic success, and not one forged from increased taxation.  Other proposals like a tram linking the campus to the city center have yet to materialize but the Chancellor gets high marks for her determination to remove students and their spending money from isolation in the storied buildings on the hill.

I can appreciate a city government’s attempts to squeeze more money out of the families who seem to have it.  Living in the University area of Syracuse, I see students driving Range Rovers and BMWs.  They compete for the newest luxury dormitory suites.  I wonder what planet they descended from because it’s so unfamiliar.  I find the college years for my four children are the most expensive of all and for our family at least, it’s back to the basics.  My ex-husband and I mandated college for our children and we have no intention of not funding our own mandates.  Any additional fee adds to the high interest Salliemae Parent Plus loans I’ll be paying off for years.

Other students pay for their own education in an inverse economic formula that is failing our society.  On the one hand we tell young people to stay out of debt and live within their means, and on the other hand we encourage them to go to college even if it means going deep into debt for decades afterward. We are conditioning generations of our citizens to borrow and spend, borrow and spend.  Isn’t that the flawed economic theory that got us into this recession?

I’m also a homeowner in Syracuse which takes the largest percentage of a home’s value in property tax in the country, around 3.5% when the national average is between 1 and 1.5%.  Were so much of Syracuse not exempt from property taxes I’d like to think my tax bill would be reasonable, but other cities with equal percentages of tax exempt land manage to survive without charging extraordinary taxes.  Maybe consolidation of services is the only answer, or maybe we can just tax the college students who drive range rovers.

For the next generation of college kids, the close call for a tuition tax in Pittsburgh should set off alarms.  It didn’t happen this time around, but it’s just a matter of time before some other city takes a shot at it.

The juxtaposition of two stories involving air travel today show how a single act of terrorism can paralyze common sense for decades afterward.

It takes more than one person to bring down a commercial airliner, yet just one man was convicted for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.  Abdel Bassett Ali al-Megrahi of Libya was released from prison yesterday under a controversial Scottish law that allows for “compassionate release” of terminally ill inmates.  Al-Megrahi has prostate cancer and doctors determined his case meets the criteria of having less than three months to live in order to go free before the end of a prison sentence.

The U.S. and Britain opposed this release, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown went to far as to request a subdued homecoming for Al-Megrahi.  The subsequent hero’s welcome in front of hundreds of young Libyans at the airport in Tripoli last night showed those wild and whacky Libyans don’t much care for what westerners consider “appropriate” in this case.  Their scapegoat for the bombings was free and it was time to celebrate.

The 259 people who died on flight 103 and on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland were given no “compassionate release” from this earth.  They were blasted out of the sky from 32,000 feet in altitude just before Christmas in 1988, and pieces of them rained down along with razor sharp flaming sections of the aircraft onto the sleepy little Scottish town where 11 people were killed on the ground.

The bombing brought an end to air travel as we knew it, to Pan-American Airlines, to any hope of detente between the U.S. and Libya. It also killed plane old common sense and I use the word plane instead of plain on purpose.  Air travel is nuts, because the other item making headlines today involves the releases of audio recordings between the pilot of a small commuter plane and the terminal in Rochester, Minnesota earlier this month.

On August 11th, Continental Express Flight 2816 departed for Minneapolis from Houston but was diverted by thunderstorms to Rochester.  Though the plane sat just 50  feet from the terminal, all 47 passengers were never allowed off the plane and into the terminal.  They sat with “wailing babies and a stinky toilet” for six hours overnight after they had already traversed the country from Texas.

The voice recordings reveal the pilot pleading with the  terminal to let passengers in the building, but because Transportation Safety Administration officials had “left for the day”,  it was deemed too much of a threat to our national security.   A TSA spokesperson has since contradicted this rule, stating the passengers could have been taken to a “sterile area” of the terminal.  By morning, the passengers were allowed into the terminal where they waited another couple of hours before boarding the same plane for Minneapolis.

No wonder the airlines are losing money and going out of business.   Who wants to risk a night like that? And that’s after the infamous Jet Blue Valentine’s Day debacle two years ago when passengers were stranded on a plane on the tarmac for eight hours with no toilet, no water, and plenty of wailing babies.

It is my belief that a business that lacks common sense cannot survive.  In this country air travel is like a barb with the tiny angled cuts that allow the sword to slide in, but not come back out without ripping huge amounts flesh.  Once you go through security in our airports, you can never, ever, ever, under any circumstances come back in.     You can only get on that plane and stay on that plane until it gets to another airport where you continue to move in only one direction.

We need a passenger Bill of Rights to protect us from the complete breakdown of common sense in air travel.  The early release of terrorist Abdel Bassett Ali al-Megrahi reminds us those early days of flying planes with large upholstered seats, real silverware, curtains and pretty stewardesses who greeted you as you boarded the plane as casually as you hopped a bus, are never coming back.

We’re in the NCAA Sweet 16 so it’s time for me to get interested.  I admit I’m not a huge basketball fan, but the annual College Basketball Championship is so authentic and pure, it’s about the last true sport’s competition in this country.  So now I’ll watch.

Trouble is, once I start watching, the team starts losing.  I am a jinx.  I do it with the Boston Red Sox too.  In fact, I was so successful at jinxing my team that I was 47 before they won the World Series.  I  inherited this power from my Dad who died at the age of 79 without ever seeing his team win the Series, and I think he listened to every weekend game on his scratchy transistor radio that the Sox ever played.  He was the father of all jinxes.

To combat my bad energy, I suggest the S.U. Orangemen drink a cup of coffee before they take on Oklahoma State tonight.  I’m not kidding.  This is the latest medical news, that a cup of joe one hour before a game or a run or a match, improves performance.

The effect of caffeine on strength and endurance has been studied since 1978, but now researchers at McMaster University in Canada believe they know why coffee does the trick.   Caffeine increases the power of muscles by releasing calcium, which increases strength and endurance for longer periods.  It seems to work on the brain too.  When the brain says “it’s time to stop”, caffeine says, “keep going”!   But any office worker could have told you that.

Caffeine is a tough sell among some coaches and athletes who view the drink as bad habit.  But for those who give it a try,  they might find this sanctioned performance enhancing substance is just the kick they need.   Now, Go Orange!

Postscript:  10:00 pm.  Just like I said,  I jinxed ‘em.  Sorry about that.