Dad's day at the Ryman

There's this picture I know which will mean nothing to many folks. Most pictures don't I'd imagine. They're someone else doing something else, and that's that. Most pictures are innocuous that way I suppose.

Some are captures of moments which mean little but for the excitement of that moment for those involved. Some are public and capture the peculiar importance of what it is the photographer was shooting. The VJ Day sailor and nurse, his great embrace and her great acceptance, reflect that sentiment. A birthday party or wedding are more the embalmed history of those being partied to or being married show that as well. They are important to all involved or at least, to those photographed.

And then some pictures tell a story which we would all embrace should the tale behind the picture be known by all. I know one of those.

My father loved country music, especially the twangy bluegrass genre which found its way into northern cities such as Detroit as the great northern flight fed them during the hungry days of industry after the Second World War. He met his wife that way, as he had become friends with her brother, my uncle, who himself had fled an impoverished North Carolina in the days after the war seeking a better life for his family. His extended family had, being among them my mother, came north as well. So my parents met. So is my personal history at its' start written.

Years pass, and time yields towards itself. Dad never lost his love of country music, and never lost his love of its history both personal and in its music. He became a salesman for a company, a national company of which he was merely its local rep. And that took him beyond his proscribed territory. It took him to cities which were beforehand out of his range.

He once found himself in Nashville, Tennessee, for a trade show, where he had a few moments to himself. So he took some of those moments and he went to downtown Nashville, to see the Ryman Auditorium where many of his country music heroes had performed. He took a tour and stumbled into an opportunity to envisage himself among country music's elite. He could have his own picture made at center stage as though he were performing among the country music elite.

They gave him a cowboy hat and a guitar. They told him to take a certain spot on the stage, strum the guitar, look one way, and smile, and they would take a picture. He did it all. And he came out looking, as if in an analogy he had used often himself about others, as a kid in a candy store. He looked like a country music singer in his own right.

He was smiling as though it was meant for him to be there. As though he should be there. And as though he was comfortable, right where he should be.

He was a kid smiling like a kid living his wildest dreams. No doubt he was. I see it in that picture I know.

The World as I know it

I really don't know what to think sometimes...

I thought I'd sleep till Noon, yet here I am at 4:59 AM trying to compose a blog about I don't know what.

My van is in Canada, a phrase which almost rhymes. It could be in a better place I suppose. But then, so could I.

We've all been through it, eh? Everything looks good, no clouds in the sky, and in a moment a severe thunderstorm warning with hail. And we worry.

I'm sorta worried right now. My car's in another country. What do I do?

I wait a few more hours, then call the mechanic I've been recommended. Then I go from there.

Ah life. I wouldn't trade you for the world.

Lucky Jim? Lucky Marty

Awhile back I stumbled upon the type of thing one often stumbles upon on the Internet: a list (this one by Esquire magazine) of 80 books in no particular order which Esquire insists everyone ought to read. To my delight (I can be delighted rather easily it seems) I found several books on the list which I actually have read: The Things They Carried by one Tim O'Brien, a rather grotesque Vietnam War tale which I thought far too full of itself; Jack London's The Call of The Wild, which I remember little of except that they made us read it in Grade 7; The Killer Angels, a simply marvelous historical fiction from Michael Shaara wrapped around the Battle of Gettysburg in the American Civil War (I gained a great respect and admiration for the Confederate General Longstreet after reading it); and Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff about the Mercury astronauts, where I similarly learned to like Deke Slayton. On the list too though I have not read it was David McCullough's The Great Bridge, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. As he did such fine jobs with biographies of John Adams and Harry Truman I find myself interested in how he might make bridge construction an exciting read. But what most delighted me to find on list was, of all things, a little comedy which I first read after my wife, who had had it assigned to her in an English course at the University of Detroit, complained to me that neither she nor the rest of the class understood. So I borrowed it immediately. Five pages in I was laughing so hard I was, as the cliche insists, crying. Or hurting, as both adjectives are suggested by like cliches. The book, which by one of those strange intersections of time and circumstance I just happen to be rereading just now, is Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis.

It really is very funny in its very English way. There are passages which until yet I laugh so long and hard at that I have to stop reading for minutes at a time. Then I have trouble getting back to the text because the funniest moments just keep coming back to me. Yes, it is that good. If you like dry, droll, yet still somehow over the top English humor.

And you should, you know. The English have a delightful way of melding sublime understatement, surreal juxtaposition, and outlandish slapstick in hilariously satisfying ways. A wonderful example from Lucky Jim is a passage where an absent minded driver comes near to a head on collision with a bus. His passenger, the actual lucky Jim, describes the incident in harrowing comedic detail, finishing with a description of the obviously excited and screeching bus driver, "...his mouth opening and shutting vigorously.' I'm chuckling at it still.

The closest American approximations are the Marx Brothers and, believe it or not, Bob Newhart. The English, they know humor. Americans should get to know English humor better too.

And I'm not talking Benny Hill either, you walking primates out there.

Dietary temptresses

Tuesday morning I had to go to Gaylord, Michigan. I stopped at Birch Run just past Flint to grab a bite to eat, thinking I would go to Tony's Restaurant. You get a pound - that's right, one pound - of bacon with every meal. Yes, that sounded good. Eggs and toast and hash browns and all that nice salty bacon. Then I reminded myself I was under orders to cut down drastically on my salt intake.

Cue the Homer Simpson moan of total despair. Oooooooooooooh. So I went into a nearby Tim Horton's and ordered a dry, toasted bagel and a bottle of water. Those who know me know that that alone required an act of supreme will: Marty simply does not go into Timmy's and not leave without an extra large black coffee. Yet as I had burned my coffee quota before I was barely out of Detroit, water would have to do.

Yesterday morning I had to go to Springfield, Ohio on business. I was meeting my friend Mark for breakfast at the local Cracker Barrel. What would I have: the double meat breakfast with sausage and bacon, scrambled eggs, and biscuits and gravy? Or do I opt for the Uncle Herschel's, with hash brown casserole, biscuits and gravy, and a big slab of hickory smoked cured ham steak?

Heavy sigh. I had a bowl of oatmeal and a muffin.

Heading home up US 68, I thought of this Amish store north of Bellfontaine. It's a neat little store with Amish furniture and Amish arts and crafts. Plus it has an impressive food section, where among other delights of the palate you can buy absolutely the best chocolate covered raisins on Earth. I mean, these things put Raisinets to shame; I decided I'd stop in and buy some. You can eat them like potato chips.

Like. Potato. Chips. Another snack I can't have with any regularity. And these raisins are a double whammy: caffeine and processed sugar are in milk chocolate. So I drove past the Amish store. But I swear it gave me a sly wink and a come hither look as I went by. I didn't know anything Amish could do that.

Yes, I know it's for my own good. But right now, today, this new diet is just harshin' my buzz, dude.

The Battle of the Wash Basin

Our old laundry basin has been in need of replacement for years now. It has been leaking rinse water for as long as I can remember, and the ancient barrel trap underneath has plugged constantly. When it sprang a fourth leak, the time had come to permanently replace it. There were by then more buckets catching drips below it than actual floor space beneath the cement double basin.
The campaign began with a trip to Home Depot, where we found most of the materials we needed. I say most because efforts like this always end up needing more supplies than one at first thinks, and the history of the conflict, man versus plumbing, bore out this truth. Yet we had garnered the bulk of what was necessary, and the enemy was duly engaged on Saturday morning.
The old tubs were too heavy to be moved easily, so they had to be broken apart and carried out in pieces. Selecting a short handled five pound sledgehammer which looked like the one Thor uses in Marvel Comics, and holding towards the sky as he did for strength and symbolism, I began to strike the cement walls of the beast. I also felt a little like the ape in 2001: A Space Odyssey who has just learned to use that bone as a weapon, banging the hammer into the cement as Also Sprach Zarathustra resounded in my mind. Soon the old basin was in small bits, which I carried out for the bulk trash pickup.
While setting the new basin in place after clean up, I made one tiny miscalculation. I love using PVC for the drains, but you have to make up your mind exactly how you're going to piece it together because when the glue sets, and it sets frighteningly fast, you're, ahem, stuck with the final product. There are no mulligans, no re-dos. So when I secured two parts together and stupidly angled one 180 degrees opposite of what was required, it meant quite maddeningly that all I could do was go and buy another trap. Yet with the trap purchased at a local hardware and the correct alignment, I was soon finished with Saturday's work and sat back to relish my victory on day one of the battle.
Day Two should have been easy, but I went a step too far, trying to remove an old cast iron pipe which I could have and should have worked around easily. But arrogance and pride being the Devil's tools I had made up my mind that it had to go. I mean, it had to. I had already bought the PVC supply line to replace it. I was, I believed, more of a man that it was a pipe.
A sad and silly mistake. I would have been better off sacrificing the, literally, 89 cents the proposed replacement parts cost me, for all I did was create a leak where one had not before existed. Yet now it was far too late on Sunday to do more than make a fifth trip to the hardware (I did mention the other four, for those unexpected yet necessary parts, didn't I?) for putty to mend the leak temporarily so that we could use our washing machine. But the putty would not hold, even after the third application (and two beers; was there a connection?), and the drip, though slight, mocked me. The battle mainly won, though, the drip caught easily in a two and a half gallon bucket, I resolved that total victory would come today, Monday. I was 95% victorious as it was.
It is dripping more slowly this morning. The bucket is not even half full. Do I call off a permanent solution until the weekend, take time from work today to end it all, or call a plumber?
Heh, heh, call a plumber. Right. I'll keep you informed.

Grandpappy's a Pokemon trap

My son and his family were able to stop by the other day, and I found myself in a good conversation with my granddaughter. She had plopped onto our couch as I sat in my chair, and was excitedly telling me about the fun she had taking pictures of the Fourth of July fireworks. They were in the Soo, at the top of the Tower of History tourist attraction there. So they had a great vantage point, and I'm glad that she's getting into a neat hobby.

She was talking about some of the shots she took, but checking her phone regularly. That was fine by me. She's a near teen after all, and I'm okay to get any attention I can get. Not that she has an early case of the teen surlies, if that's what you're thinking.

Suddenly she said, "Keep still, Grandpappy," and rose up to creep towards my chair, pointing that phone straight at me.

"What? What's wrong?" I asked, concerned, well, for me.

"Keep STILL!" she barked, sounding a lot more like a full grown woman than a 12 year old. I kept still.

Stealthily making her way across the living room, she was within about two feet of me before pressing something on her phone. Then triumphantly she turned it around to show me the cartoon bird which was on my shoulder. Which she had 'captured'. "Look what I got!" she said proudly. She had caught a Pokemon. She was playing Pokemon Go as we were talking.

Now I'm the one who felt played.

Bill James and the world

It is fascinating where certain interesting ideas may be found. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is must reading for any baseball wonk, almost entirely (surprise, surprise) for its in depth analysis of the game and its players. Still, that doesn't mean that every scrap of value found within it is restricted to interpretations of the true American National Pastime.

Mr. James at one point laments the rise of professionalism in our nation over the last fifty years or so, indeed comparing it to the many other -isms which have infected our body politic. Sportswriters and reporters have become journalists, whereas at one time they had the simpler jobs of reporting the news or sports, with someone to answer to if they didn't stick to those specific jobs. But James takes it further: teachers have become educators who teach to tests rather than teach the subject at hand. Cops have become police officers, garbage collectors sanitation workers, and so on.

The result is that we now have self aggrandized professionals in all fields, but to what point? James opines rather well that legal professionals delivered us the O. J. Simpson verdict, but not justice. On other fronts, he says, journalism has made reporting on news and athletic events adversarial rather than benign. Doctors evolving into physicians and nurses into health care professionals have driven the cost of an aspirin in a hospital to $35 while doctors used to make house calls. You get the point.

While we cannot agree with him on every particular (health care costs have went up for reasons beyond and better than a simple change of attitude, even if you believe they have gone father than reason might allow, and reporters are almost naturally adversarial) his general point is well founded. Why do we see teachers so differently lately? At one point, they had the rather straightforward job of making kids sit down, shut up, and pay attention, while expecting and getting the general support of the community. Now, we demand results from them, codified and quantified based on all kinds of data which the general public doesn't understand yet supports in the cause of education. Why can't we be happy that the kids end up with a high school diploma? Surely most of those earned over the course of American history have been reasonably granted?

Why can't cops catch the bad guys and lawyers by turn prosecute or defend them? What are we really seeking when we make things into more than they are? The net result seems to be displayed through that incident with Barbara Boxer awhile back. You know, the one where she asked to be called "Senator" rather than "Ma'am" because she earned it? Instead of becoming the professionals we claim we are, we instead begin to be arrogant about what we in fact perceive ourselves to be.

We do not mean herein to pick on Senator Boxer in particular. Really, we don't; nor do we wish to disparage the jobs which are done every day and well by all the good teachers and cops and doctors and nurses out there in our land. But the sanctification of what, in the final analysis, we as individuals do for a living cannot help us to truly appreciate the necessary jobs being done for us and by us each and every day. It seems that we've lost something of our innocence, indeed of our humility, when we demand a certain grovelling before us as we earn our daily bread.

We hate to say that all a teacher is is a teacher, or that all a doctor is is a doctor. Yet we cannot escape the feeling that a real teacher or a real doctor should feel that way. It is one thing for the general society to venerate any given individual's very good and very much needed work, indeed up to and including that of, say, trash collector (Would you do that? Pick up others' garbage? Then respect the ones who do). But for the professional to demand that treatment, quite frankly, reeks of a lack of professionalism.

By and large, true professionals command the respect they deserve. They command it precisely because they stick to their jobs rather than trumpet about them. They tend to know their place, and to know that they are not irreplaceable. They know their jobs are bigger than they ever will be. They do them in that light: as best they can without ever thinking they are better than anyone else because of it.

Be appreciative of all the things others have done for you. Be humble about what you do for them. If there is a better prescription for a better world, we do not know what it is.