The Ides of March: The Promise of April

Just as I was beginning to think Covid had a positive facet (no mass shootings) the bottom feeders emerged. I won’t honor them by going on about their horrific eruptions of self loathing. Abide no hatred. We shouldn’t let it be just a t-shirt, a passive sentiment. How is a whole ‘nother deal. I guess it starts with the wearer.

I went to KC to get a haircut for the first time in a year. Being two weeks past a covid vaccine shot, I figured if I was careful I could do this. I didn’t know it was my barber’s last day before he quit for good and moved to SC. A sign of something. I’ve gone to him since I moved back to KC 35 years ago. We wore masks. I’ll sure miss him.

Snafu and Fubar as honklings…

Among my early memories of Easter were two ducks my mom named Snafu and Fubar. They grew from little fluffballs that followed me around, to big pushy honkers that bit the dogs. The story I got when they (were) disappeared was they were renditioned to a farm where they would have long and happy lives. The folks said we’d go visit them sometime. “When?” “We’ll see.” When rocks grow and congress passes laws for the good of the people. “We’ll see.” That phrase took its place beside the time-honored “Well, you’re not everyone else.”

The Ides. Covid is spiking again. Vaccines abound, but no pills for stupid--Spring Break! Brackets were busted to smithereens. KU lost by 34 points signalling the sad, phlegmatic end of their era when the Trojans beat them like a very old, warped gong. Enough negativism. Books are where it’s at. Always have been.

The rest of this is about books F and I found interesting, some we’re reading now, and those awaiting TBR. Freddie is reading Damaged Heritage, having finished both of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s books, The Sympathizer (2016 Pulitzer Winner) and The Committed. She did them as audio books, and I only read physical copies so I’ll have to order them. Probably will since she dug both of them. She said while they were both very good, she liked the first one best. Her present read, Damaged Heritage is a hardback so I can grab that when she’s done.

My own tastes are eclectic and not so current. Didion’s latest book isn’t real current either since most of the essays in “Let Me Tell You What I Mean” are from 1968 to 2000, but she stands up to time so well, and her phrasing is magic. “On being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice” is prescient as it addresses today’s scandals from a vantage point of 1968. And her thoughts about California back up my own: she said, in “Notes from a Native Daughter:” “...California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” Things did work out for me there, but the huge cost of living and the earthquakes finally sent me packing. I could see the ocean from where I lived and all that said to me was “you’ve run out of continent.” I often kept the blinds closed.

Do I recommend “Let Me Tell You What I Mean?” It’s required reading in my opinion. Then comes a strange little book by Beth Ann Fennelly, “Heating & Cooling, 52 Micro-Memoirs.” Some memoirs are a sentence long, lonely on an otherwise blank page, and some are several pages. All are titled. In the acknowledgments, she says, “My mom…affirms me daily…despite saying, “This book has a lot of penises, Beth Ann.” This book is alternately powerful, sad, laugh-out-loud funny. You’ll read it more than once. So, yeah, buy it.

“Design Since 1945” is a compendium of “wonderful examples of design within the realities of corporate teamwork.” (Peter Dormer) It belongs on the shelves of serious designers, collectors and anyone who has cast an envious eye on an Eames chair.

A “lost” manuscript from Capote’s younger years “Summer Crossing,” is what I’m reading now, and I’m into it. It’s, in a word, delightful. The story behind this cool find is that when he struck wealth and success in 1966 with “In Cold Blood,” he moved from his Brooklyn apartment and dumped boxes at curbside. One box contained the handwritten manuscript for the never published “Summer Crossing” which he’d started in 1943 and finally abandoned. A thoughtful house-sitter rescued the boxes and, in 2004, they were auctioned at Sotheby’s. Capote scholars had long thought this manuscript lost. As I read its bright, lilting passages, I’m glad it was rescued.

Happy April. G

(A PS about the Capote book. Having read further, I encountered a phrase using a racial slur not once but three tines in a couple of pages. That kind of tore it for me. Sure, it was 1943, but the book would have lost nothing had that phrase been eliminated. So, my original enthusiasm has dimmed for “Summer Crossing.”)

I C E P O C A L Y P S E

Weather event comfort food. These’ll mape you tawk wike dis. So don’t put one in your mouth and get on the phone.

The wind whistled down from Antarctica and Canada and brought a massive cold front, middle and back with it. Record-breaking cold. Cold so cold (chorus: How cold was it?) that you had to break the smoke from the chimney. So damn cold (How cold was it?) so cold that we had to chop up the piano for firewood—but we only got two chords. This weather event broke all the Kansas City records since 1889. All of them. The Wise Acres barn was built in 1890 and this is the coldest winter it’s ever seen.

That’s not all I learned from Icepocalypse. I learned to lie to Ferrellgas in the future about propane “keep-full” because I put in an order on February sixth and they’ve not shown yet. Today is the 20th and the level is dangerously low. From now on I tell them I need a fill at 50%. Their customer service is a cold joke all by itself. A series of recordings devised by Josef Mengele informs you alternately, that your Ferrellgas team is excited to serve you, and a tired male voice says something about the weather. I can imagine the excitement in my behalf. I can see the “team” jostling for a chance to talk to me, fighting over it. “let me, let me.” No one ever answers.

And I learned not to be hostage to a rusting, outmoded fragile bunch of power grids. Though Evergy did pretty well with conserving power blocks and rolling outages. But we’re looking at a 22.5 Kw Generac now. That would keep us going through a “weather event” or too many birds on the wire. Out here, every time you hear thunder it’s time to hunt up the lanterns.

Seriously, hostage no more. Costs would include a concrete pad for the unit, a propane fill if I can find a company that’s capable of doing it, the unit itself, an automatic smart switch, and the electrician to hook it all up. Then, when lights flicker, on goes the unit, Netflix isn’t even interrupted. Summer, the unit would shed AC if and when it became too much of a draw, but that’s acceptable. Winter it would keep Wise Haus cozy. I’m on it. So are a lot of other people. But a couple of 55 degree days (coming right up) and most of those will forget about it. Me, I’m a comfort hound, with some bulldog in the pedigree.

Books. I may be reading more during Bubonic times. And I took a Billy Collins course that got me all iambic and note-taking, thanks to a Masterclass subscription F gave me last year. It did broaden my scope in poetry, and poetry is a fine thing to mix into nonfiction and fiction. I got another round of Masterclass for Christmas, and I’m looking at a Roxanne Gay course, among others. She’s bad ass and a word priestess.

Just read in a collection of essays about a bamboo species that blossoms once every hundred years. And that goes for plants in Indonesia or a greenhouse in Michigan. They are all connected. Nature, man. F informs me that was a plot point in “Crazy Rich Asians,” that the wedding was to be held where and when a bamboo forest was to bloom in its 100-year cycle. Two more books I’m reading now: Regular Haunts, New and Previous Poems, Gerald Costanzo, is somewhat breathtaking and deserves a slow, careful read. As the author says, “When I first heard about America, it was already too late.” Let that sink into ya noggin. Another is Small-Time by Russ Shorto. Another good one. About a small town’s version of The Mob. I had to buy it new as I couldn’t wait for it to “mature” into used paperbacks. (Russ Shorto is the Americanization of the Sicilian name Rosario Sciotto)

The wind is blowing out of the south.The horrible Icepocalypse is slinking back up north. And covid vaccines are slowly becoming available. Be optimistic. Breathe. Visualize. Hydrate.  G

Time Capsule, 1950. (An excuse not to do taxes)

Cash got bored with us. He’s in the living room.

Millie is sleeping against the tax files and I don’t want to wake her. And I don’t want to do taxes. It’s on my want-to-do list though, somewhere after “Go to a rock fight.” Right before “Get a spinal tap with no anesthetic.” So, I’m looking at my coffee cup and thinking time for a blog. 

The time capsule. It was a tin Folgers can, the kind you opened with a windup key and it went “whoosh” when the key started, filling the space around it with an aromatic coffee smell. The can held an actual pound of coffee unlike today’s fake ll.3 oz. cans. I’m drinking Folgers Black Silk as I write this, and recalling how, when Folgers was still in KC you’d drive anywhere near it in downtown and it was like being suffused in a giant “whoosh” Folgers can opening; even if you didn’t drink coffee you had to like that “waking up” smell.

I wrapped it in oilcloth and taped it…

Anyway, back about 1950 I filled a Folgers tin with various boyhood items and buried it. I guess I was saying goodbye to childhood in anticipation of teenage years. But I made a map so I could come back in fifty years and dig it up. Seventy years ago. The map is gone but the can may still be there in my grandmother’s side yard. The house exists. I saw a For Sale sign in front of it a few years back, and entered it; some men were working inside, circle saws shrieking. The place had shrunk as all our childhood haunts have downsized. I probably could have found the coffee can with a metal detector, but the thought of getting permission from the seller, and the various utilities and their little dayglo marker flags was unappealing and I left.

It was full of totems. Indian head pennies, wheat cents, a Mercury dime with that thing on the back that looks like an axe. A Lone Ranger Atom Bomb ring—really, there was such a thing and I had one. Talk about shoehorning one premium in with another one, reminds me of an account we had at a little Iowa ad agency. A bank. The president was an old guy and strange. He’d bought about a thousand spoons because he thought people would play them. Like the spoon lady (check her out, she’s great!) But he was wrong. So he told us to use them as premiums in ads. Six spoons for starting a checking account. No crazier than a Lone Ranger Atom Bomb Ring, actually. Their tagline was “The oldest bank in town.” Somehow it got changed to “The oddest bank in town” with the advent of the spoon ad. I had nothing to do with it. 

More items in the can: some decoders. A Radio Orphan Annie decoder that decoded Ovaltine come-ons but we repurposed it to code certain words and teacher descriptions at grade school. Diecast toys. A dime-sized itching powder tin, empty. Arrowheads. My best swirly-color shooter marble. I might have to go back and dig that can up in the dark of night. Maybe not. It’s right off of 39th and Troost where drug deals go down. I was at a car wash near there and a guy tried to sell me a video camera, new in box, ten bucks. Back to the Lone Ranger ring. If you sat in a dark closet, took the plastic finned piece off and put your eyeball up to the little radium-filled scope thing you could see…stuff. Radioactive stuff. Maybe I could find the can with a geiger counter. You had to pay fifteen cents and a boxtop and wait weeks to get this thing that would maybe burn your eyeballs out. Thank goodness it bored me so I only looked at it maybe twice. Attention deficit can be good.

Hey, we got through January. Soon it’ll be the year birthday of the scourge. Maybe come summer we’'ll all be vaccinated and back to, uh, normal. Whatever that is. Bless you all—I hope the best for you and us. Hang in there, good people. G

Nothing says 50’s like bulbosity and seafoam green.

(This is a politics-free zone but I have one word for 2021 so far: JesusChristoManassusKenworthLoadaSchistDropForgedMotheramaCarambaBananaDingDong. And Whoa. That’s it. Speechless. Words fail.)

That lovely seafoam and forest green sculptural scooter above is a British Maico and it sold for around $600 in the early fifties. Fifteen to twenty grand might get you a nice one today. Reminds me of a Hudson Hornet. And that color! It’s Ike on the golf course, homemaker in her all-electric kitchen, Marshall Plan, More Doctors Smoke Camels pastel and proud of it soft two-tone GREEN. It was a tossup for me whether to go bull-baiting, cop head-turning red for my 1949 cruisemobile Ford, or this Seafoam Green. Guess I’d rather be red, thanks, and no turning back. If I rob any banks or payday loan storefronts it’ll have to be with my ’03 Chevy pickup. But that particular green was a thought for awhile. And it has nothing to do with what follows—I just liked that Maico is all.

Good color, green. We got married here thirty-three years ago. Seems like last week.

Haleakala Volcano, early a.m

History. Thirty-three years ago today, F and I got married in Maui. It was at a small, charming church in Kihei, the Keolahou Congregational Church, by the Reverend James W. Pifer, a portly gent who was featured in that night’s production of Fiddler on the Roof at a Maui playhouse.

A good friend on the island, Tim Morrow, gave us a furnished condo at Kaanapaali Plantation for the length of our stay. He was in the process of selling it, and shortly before we arrived an NBA player said he wanted it, and he wanted it immediately. Tim said wait a couple or three weeks. It’s a wedding gift to some friends of mine, for their stay on the island. NBA guy says no deal, now. Tim says no deal then, sorry. NBA guy waited. We didn’t know about this until afterward or we’d have made other arrangements.

This same friend had been an ad agency owner in Chicago years before, and one of his stories involved taking a horse up to a prospective client’s office in an elevator. Tim was flamboyant, fun and generous. I had spent a lot of time with him years before when I’d been interested in partnering in a Maui agency that was floundering (not his, anything he turned his hand to flourished) but it was not to be.

Freddie and I had a beautiful time on Maui, and what a way to start our life together. In these crazy times, it’s even more of a pleasure to look back on those idyllic days and nights. Reminds me of a Sinatra song, some of which went: Like painted kites, those days and nights, they went flyin' by, The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky. Whoa, getting nostalgic here. Heck that’s okay. Thirty three years. Think it’ll stick?

That parrot picture to the right was taken in Lahaina and the bird guy says, “Don’t panic, it’s organic.” But the birds were polite to the newlyweds. We spent a lot of lazy hours on the beach, cooling off now and then in that azure blue Pacific. The little pic above left was taken on Haleakala at sunrise. Cold up there in the early a.m. Shoot, I want to go back right now, but they’re having covid problems like anywhere else—on a lesser scale, though, thanks to careful attention to CDC guidelines and a strict mask and gathering law. We did go back a few years ago and it was just as Edenic as it was before. Like they say, Maui No Ka Oi.

HHRs, Deer Season, and a Houseful of Books

Darrel down the road got a nice buck with a .243 Winchester. Freddie got one with her HHR. Darrel has a hunting license, F has a driver’s license. Used to be hunting meant, well, hunting. These days they come to you. Thank goodness, she wasn’t hurt, but the HHR, well, different story. November and December in Kansas are peak times for deer crowds. My own HHR is a bit retro. I love those laker wheel covers, but they won’t stay on. They skip down the road looking for a windshield to pock. So I don’t use them. Underneath are smoothies with baby moons. Also retro. And the shoebox Ford has spinners just like the one I had in high school. It stays in the garage during deer time.

 Moving inside, the house is full of books, stacks everywhere. Fiction, poetry, literature, every subject and genre imaginable. I see A Field Guide To Mammals, a book on pens, another on Winsor McKay (Early Works). What compelled us to get those? We are both hungry readers, lookers, ingesters. The stairs need to be negotiated carefully so as not to topple stacks on every riser. Shelves are bowed with weight. Maybe we can sell them. If we can part with them.

 I finished Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, 866 pages. If you put it in a stout bag and waded into a crowd, swinging it, you’d take out dozens before you could be stopped. Don’t worry, I’m not going to review it, other than to say it’s well-researched and offers a satisfying bibliography and index. It won the National Book Award. Oh, and the National Book Critics Circle Award but be wary of anything critics do in a circle.

Tattered and tired at the end. The book was, too.

 I read it partially because my stepfather worked on The Manhattan Project. I thought it might help me to understand him better; it didn’t. One cannot choose one’s parents, or one’s step-parents. Roof, three squares, can’t complain. Nor did I begrudge him that pastime, that major blasting device. It did serve to end an awful war. Why do politicians want war? No book explains that to my satisfaction.

 I finished it. Don Rickles would say, “Whaddya want, a cookie?” My hand seized up into a useless claw innumerable times just holding the thing up in front of my face as it sent me off to dreamland at night. That benchpress volume was better than Ambien or Valium, probably.

 I used to finish all books once started; it was, I suppose, a superstition. Good or bad, finish the sucker. Then, years ago, after three or four bad ones, I threw Hillbilly Elegy across the room. I don’t have enough time the rest of my life for this shit. All writers write bad stuff, even the greats. (Except for Thomas McGuane and Joan Didion. If they did, it never reached print.) But Jeezo Capeezo, don’t charge money for them.

 Books to avoid in my opinion are anything by pundits, celebrities, past presidents, presidents’ wives, or anything about politics, except, of course, those wondrous fears and loathings by Hunter Thompson. (Only the names need be changed and those books are quite contemporary.) But so many thousand books are published every month that hundreds are quite good. Sadly, you have to waste time and money on ones that aren’t, to find them. And don’t depend on Pulitzer winners; half of those are incomprehensible. Edgar finalists can be pretty good; it’s how I discovered Nick Pizzolatto.

 And speaking of good writing, here’s a rather awesome newsletter that’ll take you into the labyrinths where the minotaur and forbidden knowledge live. It’s by J. David Osborne, one of the world’s great thinkers: he’s a teacher, publisher, a prolific writer (By The Time We Leave Here We’ll Be Friends and many other strolls through fascinating horrifica), and philosopher. You will come away wiser.

 Merry and Happy to you all. (Never seen chestnuts roasting on an open fire, though, could be a New York thing) May the New Year bring Covid relief and better times for all. Nugget: the very measures that may keep us safe from Covid, will probably help us avoid the common cold. Cool.

 Here endeth the holiday offering. Your friend, g.