The way to express an opinion

My dad and my Grandpa Joe got along well, despite the fact that Grandpa could be difficult to deal with (something which I will attest to from years of personal experience, and I really loved the old coot). Dad explained to me once that both he and his father had poor tempers, something I would never have accused Dad of having, but as Joe was here first, Pops had made up his mind early on that he would be the one to hold his tongue whenever he didn't see eye to eye with his old man. However, that didn't mean he couldn't get his point across when necessary.

Joe rented welding equipment and Pops worked for him. This was back in 1940s through the 1980s, before prefabrication, when a lot of fabrication had to be done right on construction sites. So Grandpa had for rent arc welders, torches, and things which I think were called buzz boxes. As that's good enough for the point of this tale, we'll leave it at that.

These buzz boxes were intended to make instant welds. As I recall, you would hold the thing up to a rivet on a steel girder and it was supposed to make three quick welds to secure the rivet in place. Supposed is the operative word here. The boxes were notoriously finicky, and it was Dad's job to go out to work sites to repair the them when they didn't work.

Pops hated them. They were as difficult to repair as they were to operate. Over a few years Dad learned to fully and completely despise them.

One day as he came in from a particularly tough repair on one of the buzz boxes, Joe could see that his son was not in a good mood. Pops could tell his father thought that maybe he could lighten things. He remarked with a slight chuckle, apparently trying to make a joke of it, "Those buzz boxes are tough to deal with, eh?"

As Dad told it, he replied quietly, firmly, and without looking up at his pops, "Old man, when you die, I'm selling those buzz boxes. Then I'll bury you." It's an old line, but used rightly, an effective one. Perhaps Dad had been holding it back, waiting for the teachable moment.

Joe laughed at it, but kind of nervously. The next day he began selling the buzz boxes.

Pops could let Joe know what he felt when he had to, and without the arguments Joe often had with others. And I think they respected each other because of it.

The peril of tearin' up jack

I remember Amos. He was one of Grandpa Joe's best friends, and lived just up the street. Often he would walk down to visit Joe and if one of us kids were out, he'd stop to shake our hand and say hi. I always thought that was pretty cool of him.
He had a phrase for when he was going some place in a hurry. He'd say he was "tearin' up jack". One day his tearin up jack cost him an extra ten minutes.
Amos was coming down the Lodge Freeway here in Detroit, hurrying to get home. Now, I don't know if other parts of these United States have such things, but on Detroit freeways many exits have turn around lanes at the top of the ramps which allowed you to make a U-turn without making a left turn onto the street where you exited. Maybe you wanted the street a couple blocks back, say, so this way you could loop around to it without making two left turns. It was thought to help traffic flow, I've always guessed.
But anyway, there was often an entrance to the freeway on the far service drive after the turnaround lane. If the street merited an exit it merited an entrance too, right? In this case, Amos was exiting at Forest Avenue but wanted to double back to Warren, which was two streets north. So he intended to take the turnaround lane at Forest and double back to Warren.
"Here I am headin' south on the Lodge tearin' up jack', Amos explained, "And I fly up the ramp and take the turnaround tearin' up jack, and I get on the far service drive and run right down the entrance ramp onto the northbound Lodge." Yep. In his hurry to get home, Amos had become for an instant absent minded and tore up jack right back onto the freeway.
That's the peril of tearin' up jack. You can forget where you're supposed to go.

Grandpaw liked his coffee

Grandpaw Hutchins liked his coffee strong. So strong in fact that he thought instant coffee one of the greatest innovations ever, because he could brew a strong pot of Maxwell House and then add a teaspoon of instant granules to his cup to give it that much more horsepower. He must have drank two, three pots of coffee a day: no lie. He also was a quiet man who rarely if ever raised his voice. He let his actions speak for him. One day coffee, his manner, and Grandmaw Hutchin's will all came together in a profound, sublime way.

It was one of those typically hot, sticky North Carolina summer days which are well known in the south. At the time, though, all they had for cooking was a wood stove. Keeping that stove going on such days made the kitchen, indeed the whole house, tremendously uncomfortable. Finally Grandma had had enough of it. When breakfast was over, she announced that from that day forward until the weather began to cool, the stove also would be allowed to cool during the day. When the breakfast embers died, the stove would not be fired up again until it was time to make supper.

Grandpaw didn't say a thing. He simply slid back from the table, grabbed his hat, and walked out the front door. About 45 minutes later he returned with an electric hot plate. He had walked the mile to the nearest store (he didn't drive), bought that hot plate, and came home. A cool stove meant no hot coffee. He couldn't have that. Yet demanding the stove be kept burning against Grandmaw's orders, well, he couldn't have that either. So he improvised a conclusion which was satisfactory for all.

I think he handled the situation just right. Don't you?

Gram's Rosary

I often visited my grandparents' home. It was conveniently located next door to the house I grew up in. The logistics were not an issue.
I'd sit with my back to the rear entrance while Joe, my grandpappy, sat to my right in a fanciful dining room chair. Grams sat directly across from me. Joe's was the only such chair in the kitchen. And it was his.
Him and Grandma's bedroom was right off the kitchen. Joe and I would talk occasionally; for long periods we'd just sit in silence. I miss that silence.
Anyway, Gram would excuse herself soonly, to say her daily Rosary. Then me and Joe would just sit there.
Oh, occasionally we would talk. We mostly sat in silence. He'd puff on a cigarette, Charltons if you must know, and we'd sit.
Then he'd suddenly order me to hush, and a quiet would descend upon the room.
We would wait. Then we would hear a snore. Me Grams' snore.
"She's saying her Rosary", Joe would remark with a giggle.
They loved each other, they did.

Nobody told me about ball hitches

When you try to write every day, you need inspiration. Sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it doesn't come at all. And sometimes it comes from unexpected sources.

One of the Christmas gifts I received last week was a book about a pivotal time in the history of Detroit. I began reading it last night. Chapter One among other things spoke about the Ford Rouge plant, an industrial complex which was the largest in the world at the time the book takes place, the early 1960s. It turns out that I know a bit about the Rouge, having had first hand experience with it. Why, in fact, it describes how I almost dropped one of Grandpa Joe's welders into the canal slip between the steel mill and the frame plant there.

The Rouge, you see, had I think 11 different plants in its complex. I know the frame plant, Dearborn Assembly, the steel mill, and the glass plant. This is just to offer you a taste of how ol' Henry Ford tried to put the entire assembly process in one spot. The canal slip was a long artificial river dredged deep enough that large ocean going freighters could moor within it for loading and unloading. On the day in question, I remember quite definitely, The Benson Ford was docked right near the incident I intend to describe.

Grandpa Joe rented arc welding machines. Many of them could be towed to a job site. You likely saw them and thought they were air compressors. He rented many of them to Henry's minions. He assigned them each of a number of his own. He made the mistake of one day sending my 16 year old self to pick one up after its services were no longer required.

This particular one had a ball hitch. I had never dealt with one of those before; every other machine I had handled, we just slipped a 5/8 bolt between the the holes in the 'tongue' (a U beam with a U hook at the end) dropped through a hole in the hitch of whatever vehicle you were given at the time, mostly cars, and 'locked' two nuts against one another (you'd screw both nuts up against each other and lock them by taking two crescent wrenches, turning the top one clockwise and the other counterclockwise as hard as you could to 'lock' them into one another). Consequently, no one ever told me that with a ball hitch you must turn a handle on the tongue of a unit (with a cap being slid onto a 1-3/4 or 2 inch steel ball bolted onto your car's hitch) in order to secure it to the towing vehicle. The ball was in place of the hole where you'd have put the 5/8 bolt. I simply slipped the ball hitch over the ball and figured I was okay.

And I was okay, until I was cruising along at around 25 miles per hour on the service road next to the canal slip. Suddenly I felt my old Chevy Suburban (irony in itself) jump, as though a load had lifted off it. Old number Ninety One; I knew it by heart, I did, the number old Joe had assigned it. I instinctively looked into my rear view mirror and saw that the welder had jumped off the ball and was sliding right towards the canal slip.

I cannot accurately describe to you the panic which coursed within my young brain at the moment of that realization. I was going to drop one of Joe's welders into the canal slip at the Rouge. I was going to have to call him myself and tell him that, with the sound of emergency vehicles shouting in the background, HASMAT teams surely on their way to contain the gasoline pouring from the welder's fuel tank into the water. An explosion would certainly exclaimate the event.

Fortunately, that did not happen. The welder stopped within 18 inches of the slip, and a kindhearted soul who witnessed it all came to the aid of the ignorant young boy and helped him hitch the unit properly to his Suburban. That sorry young teen then returned it to the old barn without further incident, and to this day without his Grandpa Joe nor Pops learning of the close call.

If that youngster goes to Hell, it will not be from having dropped a Hobart Welder into the canal slip at the Ford Rouge.

Let the games commence!

Now it begins: the real winter sports season. Beginning this week, I curl in earnest.

Granted, I've curled a bit so far. I've played so-so in three tier 55 spiels (Tier 55 is the polite Canadian way of saying that old guys are curling) and all right in league play. But this week is the real start of my curling season.

We've played since October 24. Yet our season runs until April 7. So do the math: well over half of curling is still ahead of me. The gauntlet begins with a Tier 55 in Sarnia, Ontario on Wednesday, league play Thursday night, and the annual three day men's tournament at the Detroit Curling Club Friday through Sunday followed by the restart of our Monday league, appropriately enough, next Monday.

I currently have seven bonspiels scheduled for the remainder of the season and hope to squeeze in two to four more more. Yeah, I know, I'm holding back. But a guy's gotta attend to life sometimes, and the curling gods don't always work with you (my team is on the waiting list for a few spiels). Still, it's better than football. I'm participating and not merely watching.

And I'm looking forward to it all.

New Year's Day 2017

I honestly enjoy the Christmas season. But New Year's Day has a certain charm of its own, and not the least of which is that it signals the end of the Christmas season.

It's a no commitment holiday for starters. All the pomp and, admit it, aggravation and pressure of Christmas are over and you're happy for it. On New Year's, you can just enjoy the day. In my case that involves eating a big meal with the immediate family, watching as many Twilight Zone episodes on Syfy as I am able, and paying scant attention to the too many football games which have already become so many as to be meaningless. Hey, if everyone with a .500 record or better can go to a bowl game while the few playing for a supposed national championship are elected to play for it, I have to wonder if the whole process is flawed. Either way, there are too many bowl games for the majority of them to actually matter.

But I digress. New Year's also celebrates that we are about back to normalcy, and normalcy has a charm of its own. Think what you want to think, but routine has its advantages: no surprises, no overindulgence and, you'll forgive the overemphasis, less aggravation and pressure. By and large, with New Year's you are less concerned over everything being 'just right'. I think that's better than anything special which the holidays seem to demand of us; you can enjoy company simply to enjoy it.

I really don't mean to be a stick in the mud. I did enjoy the Christmas season. But I am more looking forward to 2017, and yes, hoping to cap it off well during Christmas 2017. But for today, Happy New Year to all. And let's hope we don't miss the Bill Shatner gremlin episode on Twilight Zone.