Random Notes from a Crank

In a recent visit to my local CVS, I scanned the clearance liquor/wine rack. To my surprise, I found bottles of Manischewitz Blackberry wine for $2.77. It's a sweet, kosher wine that I sold at my dad's liquor store way back when. In fact, if I remember right, a Lutheran church bought cases of the Concord grape variety for communion wine. 

I'm a sucker for clearance booze racks, which reminds me of Colonial Party Mart. 

Colonial Party Mart was a liquor store back in my undergraduate college town of Kirksville, Missouri. They went out of business sometime in my junior or senior year. They were selling booze cheap as hell, probably at cost, and boozehounds  descended upon that establishment and got lots of good stuff at great prices. Unfortunately, when my friends and I got there, all that was left was mixing liquor and off brand stuff. I do think we bought some Ouzo though. I can't remember if it was the cheap stuff or one of the good Greek brands.

!Opa!

Figuring out how to spell that exclamation above led me to this interesting article: "What Does the Word Opa Mean Exactly?"

And that expression reminds me of the Norwegian expression of "Uffda." My mom had a plaque of that expression hanging on our back door. I need to use that expression more often. 

Music Friday: "Here Comes a Regular"

Today the only band I've listened to is The Replacements, one of my favorite bands of all time. 

For a short while in my life I worked as a delivery guy for my dad's liquor store. I'd chauffeur boxes of booze to bars and restaurants throughout Black Hawk County (IA) but mainly in Waterloo. I saw lots of "regulars" on my rounds of liquor peddling. 

"Here Comes a Regular" is the closing song of Tim, one of the finest albums of the 80s.

Below is the studio version and a live version circa 1989.

Random Notes from a Crank

On Sunday my son and I made three pie crusts from scratch and then made a pumpkin pie. Is this a minuscule victory for, as my Dad would describe them, the "women's libbers" like me? 

I now know why my parents would never buy me the game Mouse Trap as a gift. You always lose the pieces (we're missing one of the balls and the rubber band), and the game, as a whole, is boring. When you have to patch together the game, it doesn't work very well. 

If you've been paying attention to this blog, I closely follow college football. But this NFL deal, there's something to it. I lived in St. Louis for five years and rooted for the Rams and want them to do well, but if I had to pick one team to root for in the NFL, it would have to be the Vikings. That was the team I cheered for as a kid. Other than those teams, I like the Falcons purely because of Julio Jones.

Thoughts from the Road and Porkopolis

Today we traveled to the Cincinnati metro area because my daughter's dance posse troupe group is competing in a national event this weekend.

It's an easy drive from East Central Illinois to Cincinnati, city nicknamed Porkopolis but named after a true badass Roman named Cincinnatus. Only three and a half hours. And once you get past the southern part of Indianapolis, the countryside gets beautiful. I've never been in this part of the country, but the Ohio River Valley is a handsome spot of land, no doubt. As we ventured toward the metro area, the landscape got quite hilly -- not rolling hills, but more reminiscent of the Ozark "Mountains." Because I've used to driving the interstate along wide open spaces, I always feel slightly off kilter driving fast with all the greenery and hills close to the divided four-lane. I had the same reaction when Mrs. Nasty and I took a trip to upstate New York and Pennsylvania over a decade ago when I presented some research at the International Conference on Mark Twain Studies in Elmira, NY. You can take the boy out of Iowa, but you can't take the Iowa landscape out of the boy.

This whole dance shindig is at one of the many Great Wolf Lodges around the country. Whoever thought up this concept was smart as hell. It's a faux gargantuan log cabinesque hotel with a conference center, arcade, restaurants, ubiquitous Starbuck's, and (mostly) indoor water park with slides, rope climbing deals, and other such frivolity. One of the water slides is like a roller coaster. Another slide can be done by a whole family of five. This curmudgeonly bastard is going to get wet.

Post-Kirksville Thoughts

As some of the "regulars" of PlannedOb know, Mrs. Nasty and I went up and over (mostly over) to Kirksville, Missouri for my fraternity's 40th Anniversary celebration. We imported my mother-in-law from Florida to come up and watch the kids while we were away for the weekend festivities.

What follows are my so-called thoughts based on my experience in Kirksville this past weekend. If you also traveled to Kirksville for the same shindig, feel free to react or provide your own observations in the comments section.

• For a local fraternity to stay continuously active for forty years, hence never having issues that shut it down [knock on wood], that's pretty darn impressive. In fact, I'm told it's pretty rare. I'm sure there have been times, in fact I know of some, where the viability of the chapter has been sketchy, but forty years in a row is impressive. 
• I observed young people doing stupid stuff I once did. 
• Ronzas rule. Head-to-head, a ronza beats a calzone every time. Not even a competition.
• I was struck how my old haunts are gone, mainly The Flamingo and Bogie's. 
• Having a downtown Arts Center for Kirksville is a major deal, I think. But the lack of variety of dining establishments surely deadens that happy addition to Adair County.
• I had forgotten how bad roads are in that town. Yikes. 
• As for my local fraternity house, I just don't get it. There's a perfectly good basement for the actives and other people to have fun in, but they choose to ruin the upstairs foyer for their shenanigans. Using the main foyer as a party area has many ramifications on the smell, appearance, and viability of the house. If you extrapolate the causal chain for many years, the consequences are not good. Major complaint right there. 
• I hadn't been back to Kirksville for what probably is about seven years when Mrs. Nasty and I stopped by on our way traveling from Iowa to St. Louis. If I can make it, I hope to get together with other alumni and actives this summer for one of those work weekends. We'll see if the date works for me though. 
• The Dukum Inn, what was considered somewhat of a "townie bar" or an expensive bar during my time there, has changed impressively. It's tripled in size, and the drinks don't seem as expensive anymore. Or maybe I just have money now.
• Meeting my brothers from college days makes it clear that we don't change all that much. We just get older and perhaps somewhat wiser.
• Then again, I am impressed with the diverse professions and accomplishments of my brothers. 

Random Notes from a Crank

At the end of every Inside the Actor's Studio, a program that I watch on occasion, the host James Lipton ends with a gauntlet of questions he got from some French talk show host (if I remember right). One of those questions is "What is your favorite curse word and why?" I watched the program that featured Tom Hanks when it aired, and his favorite curse word was "horse shit" because, if I recall correctly, it doesn't get used enough and it's very specific. Like Hanks, if I were to pick an underrated curse word, I'd have to go with "dog shit." Lowly old dog crap is what I'd pick. In comparison to Hanks' favorite, the poo of dog is not highbrow at all. Only the wealthy have horses, right? The hoi polloi have dogs, and they shit a lot. That stuff is common. Just think of saying something like, "That proposal is dog shit." That means it not even worthy of horse shit found in stables. It's common shit. 

Recently I picked up some stuffed jalapeno peppers wrapped in bacon at the local supermarket. I won't be doing that again. The bacon was incredibly fatty, even for bacon, and the filling had a bland sausage intermixed with some manner of cream cheese. So, since my bell pepper plants and poblano pepper plant croaked because of a cold spell, I plan to get a jalapeno pepper plant and do my own stuffed peppers, but I'll be using Laughing Cow cheese shoved inside them, and I plan to wrap them in turkey bacon. Healthy choices and all that stuff.

On a TV channel (Inspiration) I had never heard of before until recently, they've been playing episodes of The Brady Bunch. I used to watch that show all the time when I was a kid, and now my kids are watching it too. What an anachronism. One of yesterday's episodes we taped was the Johnny Bravo one when the whole gang becomes a musical group. I was troubled by one episode though that has the plot line of Marcia wanting to a female "Frontier Scout" like her brother Greg. As one would imagine, the plot focuses on Greg making it extra hard for his sister to become a Frontier Scout, but Marcia perseveres. Then in a twist at the end, Marcia suddenly decides not to become a scout because that's "boy stuff," and then Marcia turns to Carol Brady and asks about checking out some "fashion magazine" since she's a girl. Luckily, I usually watch these programs with my kids. After the plot twist, I loudly stated, "That makes me mad. That's wrong" in front of my two kids. My eight-year old daughter asked why, and I went into a diatribe about sexism, about how women can and should have equal opportunities and not have to necessarily do what people consider "girly" things. She agreed and said, "Yeah, that is wrong." Stoopid sexism.

On a more humorous note, I had forgotten about how often "groovy" was used as a descriptor on that program. People are groovy. Events are groovy. All sorts of stuff is groovy. Groovalicious I tell ya.

In addition, there's the hair. Oh, the hair styles. When I went to Alabama from '98 to '02, I thought those Southern fellows had shaggy hair. But the Brady boys, especially Greg and Mr. Brady with those white dude 'fros, that male lineage is lousy with shaggy hair.

I've been listening to The Hold Steady quite a bit recently. Today in the car I was playing the band's latest album Heaven is Whenever, and the opening track on the disc is "The Sweet Part of the City," which is song that's an homage to a certain part of Minneapolis, the band's hometown.

The song got me to thinking about the cities and towns I've lived in and their sweet parts. And these are all personal connections of course, but I thought I'd share. Heck, it's a blog. If you don't like it, get your own blog for your own solipsism.

In Waterloo, I'd have to go with my dad's stores, Virg's Foods and Independence Ave. Liquor, that he was able to start with the grace of small business loans somehow. I spent a lot of my working youth in those two establishments, learned a lot, and grew up in them. Likewise, the practice range at Byrnes has a great deal of significance to me since I at one time in my life was obsessed with golf and being the best golfer I could be, practicing till my hands started to bleed, stressing out about my swing plane, practicing my natural draw, trying to hone mindfulness (because once you get a decent swing, most of the important work in golf is done inside one's head). And the park on the outskirts of town with the concrete dinosaur my friends named "Fugly" is a place that rings of sweetness. I'll admit to a picnic there with one of my girlfriends once that led to spontaneous nookification.

And then the house at 1051 Wisconsin St. I grew up in, of course, a home my parents lived in since the early 50s. They sold it a couple of years ago and now live in an assisted living facility.

In Kirksville where I got my B.A. and M.A., the core places for me were Pickler Library and my fraternity house at 207 E. Normal, a place that was nothing close to normal. We eventually got a new house at 815 S. Davis, but for those of us who went through the chapter during a certain era, the 207 house was our house. It wasn't a pretty place. It got the job done. It worked. From people turning up the volume on our shitty living room TV with a pen because we didn't have a remote and the volume button was broken to our brilliant idea of having a band, aptly named Shaft, play on the front porch mid-afternoon on Friday right in front of Baldwin Hall when classes were in session, it was a good place to be. Now that area is plot of grass next to a parking lot for the university.

Likewise, the place where Mrs. Nasty and I first lived together as a married couple has either been wiped off the face of the Tuscaloosa landscape, or it possibly just was severely damaged. The tornado of April 27 did its diabolical work. Then there's Bryant-Denny, Morgan Hall, and our crappy GA office in Rowand Johnson.

With St. Louis, I'd have to go with my office at Meramec with my good friend. Not an aesthetically pleasing place, but I got a lot of work done there, and we laughed a lot--even wrote parts of my first major published article in that office. I still miss my neighborhood in St. Louis--Lindenwood Park and Francis Park. My daughter doesn't remember St. Louis much at all, but most summers, unless it was raining, we went for a stroller ride to either Lindenwood or Francis Park every day. Our two-bedroom home was/is tiny, but I still really like that house. We were only the third owner of that house that was built in 1939.

As for our current patch of land on Cedar Drive, I'd have to go with the Nasty backyard.  

Maps and Atlases

I first got to thinking about maps and atlases after reading a post on February 18, "Friday Draft: Fairy Tale with Maps," on Sandy Longhorn's blog, Myself the Only Kangaroo among the Beauty. In her post, she's working through a poem that, as she says, "has bits of autobiography" in it.

As I related in part of my comment to her post, "I'm also nostalgic about maps and atlases. You splay out the folds or pages, and you see potential on paper. A GPS just squawks at you."

Another cheer for the old technology, people.

And ice cream socials.

We went to Hannah's ice scream social a few weeks back. While they had all kinds of games to play and "bouncy houses," as Mrs. Nasty describes them, they were also selling books at 50% off.

One of the two books we picked up for Hannah is the Beginner's United States Atlas from National Geographic Kids. The photo below is a similar structure for what you find for every state, but the state featured in the photo is Iowa.

On the pages for each state, you get to learn about "Land & Water," "Statehood," "People & Places," a "Fun Fact," along with pictures and info about the state flag, flower, and bird. Assorted factoids dot the pages with appropriate visuals, such as the one associated  with the hog above: "Hogs outnumber people five to one in Iowa, which produces 25 percent of all hogs raised in the U.S."

So maybe that's why I like porcine goodness? I know I ate a heck of a lot of pork when I was growing up, even the dreadfully chewy pork cutlets that my dad loves.

But back to maps and atlases here.

Americans are known for not being very knowledgeable about geography.

Could GPS squawk boxes and phones be making us even worse?

Some Max Headroom-like voice is perhaps making it easier to find places you need to get to, but we could be losing, as a culture, our ability to get, as a farmer might say it, the "lay of the land," a knowledgeable background about geography. Could we be going from geographically dumb to dumber because of passive reliance on gadgetry?

I don't know, but my initial answer is "Yes."

But the question of whether technology is really helping us develop our intelligence/knowledge is something not enough people consider, and that question is part of the driving thesis within Nicholas Carr's book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, a book I believe lots of people should read.

As veteran writing teachers know, various pundits--educational or otherwise--heralded the personal computer and then the Internet as a boon since they felt the technology would help students become stronger writers. One could argue, and some have, that students are writing more than they ever have before because of computers and texting.

But think about the quality and depth of that communication.

The medium, as Marshall McLuhan opined decades ago, frames the message. If you're considering online fora, at least with a blog you can write as much as you like. With Twitter and Facebook and whatever's next, you're limited by character count. 

The whole warm embrace of the new reminds of the guy who sold us our mattress years ago. During small talk, he asked me what I was going to school for, and I told him my standard line that I plan to "teach writing and teach people how to teach writing," and his response was something along the lines of "Well, why would you study to do that? The computer will just do it for you." It was one of those moments in my life where I almost told someone, "You're a moron."

That's obviously an extreme example. But the anecdote, for me at least, displays how some people might think the newest technology is always better. It's improvement, right? It's new. The machine will do it for you. It makes our lives "easier," more "convenient."

Another anecdote that comes up for me is a conversation I witnessed where one person asked where she could get some fabric for something she was making. She related that she looked all over the Web and couldn't find any stores in the area for that merchandise. The fellow who was talking to her handed her a phone book, and she found what she wanted pretty quickly.

But part of the impetus for this post though is my nostalgia for the old technology of maps and atlases.

For a short time I had a job as an "Regional Admission Coordinator," which is a fancy phrase for an college admissions dude who traveled to high schools to give presentations. The pay stunk, but I had a job and health insurance while I finally figured out that I wanted to go back to grad school. Based in Kansas City, I traveled the western part of Missouri--west of Columbia and Jeff City--along with Kansas and Nebraska--Johnson County, Lawrence, Topeka, Omaha, Lincoln, Grand Island, and some towns in between.

Driving around the Midwest in a state vehicle with only an AM/FM radio (in certain parts of my territory, it was country music or nothing), I relied on those maps and atlases. And when you hit a small town that you've never been to before and you need to find the high school, scout for flag poles, my friends.

Throughout my travels, maps oriented me and helped me see the state I was traveling in. For me, the squawk boxes of now are cold and indifferent and possibly invite passivity. The map, in contrast, is tactile and comforting. And if you're planning a trip, you depend on your brain to figure out your route while learning the towns you'll pass along the way.

Even earlier in my life, the U.S. atlas we had at our home evoked possibility.

Sure, I lived in the medium-sized blue collar town of Waterloo, Iowa, but as a kid I dreamed of living in northern Minnesota (good fishing) or in cities like Milwaukee or the Twin Cities while visiting places like New Orleans, Portland, Louisville, Seattle, and Philadelphia. By scoping out the state maps, I learned about places in all kinds of states through the process of looking around rather than being only focused on the destination.

The process is important.

That Distant Land

In the process of helping clean out the books from my parents' house a while back, my dad, who is pictured above when he was much younger and living in northeast Missouri, gave me some books of fiction I gave to him for father's days and birthdays.

It all started, I think, when I gave him That Distant Land: The Collected Stories by Wendell Berry since I thought he'd like them. Berry focuses on his fictional setting of Port William and its inhabitants throughout the years. I don't know if the stories originally had dates attached to them, but That Distant Land provides the date of when the story happens. The book starts with "The Hurt Man (1888)" and ends with "The Inheritors (1986)."

There obviously was a heck of a lot of change from the late 19th century to the 80s, and the stories reflect that some though Berry is more interested in telling a strong narrative that focuses on everyday people, farmers mostly, in a small town in Kentucky.

Many of the stories are odes to the old fashioned way of farming even before people started using tractors like the one pictured above. Port William is a community of farmers--not a rural factory.

I've read more of Wendell Berry's non-fiction than any of his stuff. He's one of my favorite writers because of his social commentary that critiques our "progress." And it was impossible not to see sociopolitical implications of how he depicts the characters and their predicaments.

In a commonplace book-like move here, I thought I'd just present some passages from  stories that I underlined or scribed marginalia beside because I like the ideas or I simply enjoyed the craft of his prose. You can read them and do what you want to do with them in your minds:

• "I had learned what I knew, the bare outline of the event, without asking questions, both fearing the pain that I knew surrounded the story and honoring the silence that surrounded the pain." From "Pray Without Ceasing (1912)"
• "And in some of the people of the town and the community surrounding it, one of the characteristic diseases of the twentieth century was making its way: the suspicion that they would be greatly improved if they were someplace else." From "Pray Without Ceasing (1912)"
• "'Elected's ass! Auctioned! A governor gets elected by auctioning hisself off. Governors don't govern Kentucky--companies govern Kentucky. We'll see the day when some damn company will tear the capitol down and sell it off for doorstops.'" From "The Discovery of Kentucky (sometime in the 50s)"
• "'But when you quit living in the price and starting living in the place, you're in a different line of succession.'" From "It Wasn't Me (1953)"
• "'Everything about a place that's different from its price is a gift.'" From "It Wasn't Me (1953)"
• "If a man eighty-two years old has not seen enough, then nobody will ever see enough. Such a little piece of the world as he has before him now would be worth a man's long life, watching and listening. And then he could go two hundred feet and live again another life, listening and watching, and his eyes would never be satisfied with seeing, or his ears filled with hearing." From "The Boundary (1965)"
• "For a long time, in Port William, what had gone had not been replaced. Its own attention had turned away from itself toward what it could not be." From "That Distant Land (1965)"
• "The important thing, Art said, was for a man to feel good and be satisfied with what he had." From "A Friend of Mine (1967)"
• "Elton turned the melon and drew the cut the rest of the way around. The knife had not penetrated all the way through, and he had to strike the melon lightly against the ground to open it. And then he took one of the halves and sliced it twice. The flesh was dark red, juicy, and sweet. He ate it in huge bites, not bothering to spit out the seeds. He sat, eagerly eating the melon, looking out and down where the Sand Ripple valley opened into the wider valley of the river. The second half of the melon he ate more slowly, working the seeds free of the pulp and spitting them out. He had a gift for such moments and he was having a good time. When he had eaten the melon he took a drink from his jug, and then he lit a cigarette and got up." From "A Friend of Mine (1967)"
• "They needed the feeling that they would have when at last they would be done, the feeling of having done it and of being done. They needed their being together and all the talk that passed between them. They needed even what they dreaded, the difficulty of their work and their hard pride in being equal to it." From "A Friend of Mine (1967)"
• "What he was struggling to make clear is the process by which unbridled economic forces draw life, wealth, and intelligence off the farms and out of the country towns and set them into conflict with their sources. Farm produce leaves the farm to nourish an economy that has thrived by the ruin of the land. In this way, in the terms of Wheeler's speech, price wars against value." From "The Wild Birds (1967)"
• "From them he learned the ways that people lived by the soil and their care of it, by the bounty of crops and animals, and by the power of horses and mules." From "Fidelity (1977)"
• "The emergency rooms and corridors were filled with the bloodied and the bewildered, for it was now the tail end of another Friday night of the Great American Spare-Time Civil War." From "Fidelity (1977)"
• "Timber cutters, in recent years, had had their eye on these trees and had approached Burley about 'harvesting' them. 'I reckon you had better talk to Danny here.' Burley said. And Danny smiled that completely friendly, totally impenetrable smile of his, and merely shook his head." From "Fidelity (1977)"
• "The Port William neighborhood had as many people, probably, as it had ever had, but it did not have them where it needed them. It had a good many of them now on little city lots carved out of farms, from which they commuted to city jobs." From "Fidelity (1977)"
• "Danny Branch was one of Wheeler Catlett's last comforts, for Danny embodied much of the old integrity of country life that Wheeler had loved and stood for. In a time when farmers had been told and had believed that they could not prosper if they did not 'expand,' as if the world were endless, Danny and Lyda had never dreamed beyond the boundaries of their own place; so far as Wheeler knew, they had never coveted anything that was their neighbor's." From "The Inheritors (1986)"
• "Off beyond the highway they could see a farm that was becoming a housing development. The old farmhouse and a barn were still standing in the midst of several large new expensive houses without trees." From "The Inheritors (1986)"

An Acknowledgement of Our Unsophisticated Desires

Back when I was in Iowa, my two brothers, my sister, and I went out to dinner on a Saturday night with all of their significant others. I was solo since Mrs. Nasty and kids weren't along for the trip to Iowa City that morphed into visiting my parents in Waterloo.

I can't remember a time when all of us had eaten dinner together without my parents since I usually only see all of them on holidays and such.

But as we ate dinner at Lone Star, we got on the subject of being healthy. Fittingly enough, I think we were talking about this subject before we ordered our steaks since, you know, large hunks of beef are healthy. And then we made some small talk about how exercise is important.

There was a moment in the conversation about exercise when it seemed that all of us had similar thoughts about what was the best kind of exercise. As my one brother mentioned the healthy benefits of sex and my sister started laughing because, apparently, she was thinking the same thing, I'm pretty sure my oldest brother and I had similar thoughts. At least we all had sparkles in our eyes.

My sister-in-law said something to this effect: "That's what all you guys think about, you [Nasty]s."

Norwegian Wood

Above is a picture of my grandmother's steamer chest. When she took the ship from Norway to America way back when, this trunk held all of her possessions.

The chest is now my sister's. In the process of dividing our parents' stuff that hasn't gone to where they live now, she got the trunk, and I got an antique kid's rocking chair from my parents, a chair I fondly remember sitting in as I read books and watched TV.

But there's a story behind the chest and my grandmother coming to America when she was very young. She came over when she was somewhere between eight and ten years old if I remember right. When she was sent to America, her parents stayed behind in Norway.

From what my mom has told me, my great-grandparents got a divorce in Norway at that time (sometime in the early 1900s), which had to be a badge of dishonor within a socially conservative Norwegian culture (think about Isben's A Doll House, for example). Apparently, they got a divorce, and my great-grandfather then married a Swedish woman as his second wife. For reasons unknown or possibly out of spite, my great-grandmother sent her daughter to the US at a young age.

From what my mom says, my grandmother landed in New York City like other immigrants, and then she traveled by train to Montana to live with her aunt and uncle, who raised sheep therre. Eventually, her new family, which also included her aunt and uncle's children, moved from Montana to Montevideo, Minnesota.

But what gets me is that my grandmother was put on a steamship not knowing any English at all. All she had was this trunk and a tag around her wrist directing the higher-ups on the ship where she needed to go. What a precarious situation, but maybe it wasn't all that uncommon. I don't know. My mom tells me that my grandma told her that she remembered people talking to her, but she had no idea what they were saying.

As my mom says, her mom wouldn't talk much about the trip or her parents because, as you can imagine, the whole deal had to be traumatic and the cause of much bitterness. Grandma, I'm told, did talk fondly about living in Norway though--the beauty of the towns and surrounding countryside, the fjords, etc.

In contrast the troubling history associated the trunk, I have good memories of this steamer chest made of Norwegian pine.

The first thing I can remember from when I was very young was hiding in this chest when playing hide-n-seek with my nephews who would often visit during the weekends.

This chest is connected to my very first memory, the first thing I remember. I hid in it and thought myself very clever. It was not only a great spot to hide, but the red synthetic fur that lines the inside was fun to feel.

I did get in trouble for hiding in the chest though. I don't remember why exactly, but it probably was because it's an antique. I didn't get put in a time-out back then (did they even have such a thing in the early 70s?), but I remember my mom scolding me.

And in another positive note, Deloras also stored her Xmas ornaments and holiday brick-a-brack in this chest at our house on 1051 Wisconsin Street, the home where they lived since the late 50s. And I associate holidays at my house with Norwegian Christmas cookies--cringla and fudamumbuckles--and gatherings where the whole family opened presents on Christmas Eve.

If you were puzzled why I was playing hide-and-seek with my nephews, that's because I'm the last of my siblings. I was one of those happy accidents, or as Virg told me one time as we drank a few beers in the 19th Hole after playing golf, "The damn rubber broke."

Because of the years separating my three siblings and me, my oldest brother has two sons who are actually older than their uncle (me).

But the strangeness of being the final kid is that I didn't get to know my grandparents just like my mom didn't know hers. Three of my four grandparents were gone before I popped out in 1971. I only met my grandmother, my dad's mom, once, and that meeting was at an old folks home (the old terminology) made of cinder block painted institutional white in rural northeastern Missouri. The only remark I remember her making to me, if I remember right, was "You're Judi's brother, right?" Then my dad shuffled me off to some waiting room-like area where I watched TV and he talked to his mom.

I didn't write the digression about my experience with grandparents (mainly lack thereof) in some attempt to milk sympathy from readers.

Rather, I'm just happy that my kids know their grandparents.

The mementos from the past--the rocking chair, the 4/10 shotgun I have of my grandfather's, etc.--are nice, but they don't beat the lived experience.

Taking Home

The picture above is from when my father was in boot camp during the Second World War. As far as military uniforms go, I've always liked the Navy's. Then again, both my dad and my oldest brother were in the Navy although my grandfather (WWI) and two uncles (one in WWII and the other in Korea) were in the Army.

My sister scanned this old photo of Virg and sent it to me since the local TV station in my hometown, the city that was the home of the Five Sullivan Brothers, is doing some segment on veterans. She sent it to the station and then me.

There was a time when I thought about going into the Navy right out of high school. I never took the military test or contacted a recruiter because that would have put the hard-press on me with military recruiters constantly pestering me.

I would have gone in right before the first Gulf War, which didn't involve the Navy as much as other wars have, though I may be wrong in that assumption. I'm no scholar of military history.

But I was too interested in college instead of learning a trade such as being an electrician. I traveled to Kirksville, Missouri for schooling, which strangely enough is just north of where Virg went to high school in La Plata, birthplace of Lester Dent, author of Doc Savage pulp fiction. Virg's family settled in northeastern Missouri after my grandfather didn't do well farming in Minnesota and found better prospects in the Show Me State.

But to get back to learning a trade, as I was fond of telling my colleague where I worked previously, there are some days when I think to myself, "Maybe I should have been an electrician."

Just like anyone else who gets some years behind them, you begin to think about the past choices you've made and how little decisions have greatly affected how you got to be where you are now or who you're with or what's happened in your life in general. If you think too much about such things, the alternate causal chains may drive you crazy.

So where the am I going with this? Hell, I don't know. I've all over the place in this post.

I guess I'm thinking about living a full life and the choices I've made since Virg will head down to Iowa City at the end of the month to have major heart surgery.

One aspect of my dad's personality that I might have picked up on is that, as many people know, Virg is not afraid to give you his opinion. He can be brutal with his honesty. He's demanding. And he sometimes says exactly what's on his mind. Unfiltered.

For some jobs, like being an electrician or a meat cutter or a manager of a grocery store, those tendencies are perfectly fine. For other professions, they can be a detriment on certain occasions.

Regardless, this weekend the Nasty family heads up to Waterloo to gather belongings and other artifacts from my parent's house that is now going to be sold since they've moved into an assisted living facility. I'll be bringing back a deep freeze, gardening tools, and other assorted stuff.

I'm not going home; I'm taking home.

And that makes me sad.

Music Friday: "One"

I remember hearing today's featured song blasting from car stereos in my high school's parking lot quite often during my senior year. Metallica's ...And Justice for All was released just in time for the start of fall semester 1988.

Metallica's "One" is a video from my youth that creeped me out a bit back then, and it continues to make me slightly uncomfortable now because of the same reasons--the scenes from the 1971 film adaptation of Johnny Got His Gun, the 1938 anti-war novel by Dalton Trumbo, which is the inspiration for the lyrics of the song.

I regret to say that I still haven't read the novel although I plan to do so sometime.

But I do know the main character of the novel loses his arms, legs, and all of his face, but his mind functions just fine. He's a prisoner of war in his own body. Or as the lyrics relate, "Body my holding cell."

Although the main character's horrible situation is an extreme case, the video reminds me of guy I saw at the Indianapolis Children's Museum this winter when we took the kids there.

As I was with my kids riding the carousel, there was a young man with possibly his nieces or nephews or perhaps even his kids. The gentleman, obviously a veteran of our violent excursions in the Middle East, had one leg and merely nubs for arms. His arms only went to about halfway down to where his full biceps used to be. He had to use a crutch underneath the arm opposite his leg to walk.

Back during the fall semester I think, one of my colleagues sent an email to a bunch of us asking about any song lyrics that would pair well with poems for the general education literature class she was teaching. I don't think I mentioned "One" when I responded to her query.

In retrospect, I think the song would pair well with Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est."

I don't intend to cast a pall on your Friday, but "One" is a song that floated into my consciousness recently since I worked out while listening to ...And Justice for All on Wednesday.

For the lyrics of the song, you can check them out after the jump.

The Power and Warmth of Personal Attention

Last night we went to one of our favorite restaurants in the area, Thai Noodle in Mattoon.

We hadn't been there in a while since Mrs. Nasty stays up north to work during a good portion of the winter and spring's weekdays, so it was good to enjoy the establishment's tasty dishes. I'm no expert on Thai cuisine, but I like what they provide.

Another aspect of Thai Noodle that keeps us coming back is the charisma and warmth of the owner. She seems genuinely nice, and we've frequented the restaurant since it opened. Since we usually visit the place when Hannah is at dance practice, it's typically Quinn, Mrs. Nasty, and me who get to enjoy the spicy goodness the restaurant offers.

The owner is fond of calling Quinn "little man," and she's one of the few "strangers" he seems to take a shine to, which is a contrast to most folks since he's likely to act quite shy around people he doesn't see on a regular basis unlike his sister who seems to want to talk at length to everyone.

But the first title I had of this post was "The Power and Warmth of an Independent Business," but I decided to edit it to "Personal Attention" because some independent businesses are not necessarily "warm" and don't excel in "personal attention." Some independent businesses, in fact, don't make it because they don't offer those qualities of customer service.

The original title reflects my own bias for small, independent businesses since my father, initially through the grace of a small business loan, started his own grocery store and then then opened a liquor store after his retirement from the grocery store (sold it to my brother) during my childhood and early adulthood.

However, people consistently shopped at Virg's Foods and Independence Avenue Liquor (and at one time, Virg's Better Burgers, a diner) because my father was/is friendly, paid attention to his customers' needs, and provided fair prices while consistently using a loss leader strategy to attract new customers. When you price a 40 oz. of Old Milwaukee for 79 cents in Waterloo, Iowa, people flock, buy them, and buy other goods. When you run a special on chopped ham (a luncheon meat I hated to slice), people buy it and other items. When you run a special on baby back ribs, people need other foodstuffs or maybe some beverages. When Black Velvet is cheap that week, customers will buy 7-up to mix with it.

What I find, however, is that small, independent businesses do generally provide stronger customer service than the corporate clones, the big box retailers.

Personal investment and personal attention matter.

Or, to put it another way, as Quinn stated in the car as we left the restaurant, "That was good stuff."

Royals Flushed

Since the baseball season is approaching, I've been watching the MLB network's ongoing program that airs every evening, 30 Clubs in 30 Days.

Last night the program featured the Kansas City Royals, a team that hasn't had a winning since 2003.

People who know me know that I'm a Cubs fan. I've been a fan of the baby bears for a long time. As as native of Iowa, a place where there are many Cubs fans because of the reach of WGN via cable and the AAA affiliate of the Cubs is in Des Moines, it was natural for me to root for the Cubs. One of my favorite professional baseball players of all time is Andre Dawson. I loved listening to Harry Caray. Ryne Sandberg was one of the best second basemen ever.

But before I started cheering for the Cubs, I also followed the Royals, the American League yang to complement the National League yin. The first MLB game I ever saw was when I was very young, and the Royals played the Yankees in what is now called Kauffman Stadium. My parents and I visited my oldest brother, who lived in Blue Springs at the time, sometime in the 70s. I can't remember what year exactly.

The Royals teams of the 70s and 80s were solid with a host of great players: Hal McRae, Amos Otis, Al Cowens, Frank White, Willie Wilson, U. L. Washington, Paul Splittorrf, Mark Gubicza, Dan Quisenberry, Darrell Porter, Bret Saberhagen, and of course George Brett, the Hall of Fame third basemen who flirted with hitting .400 in 1980 but ended up with an average of .390.

What the commentators on last night's program talked a lot about is the organization's very deep farm system and how the future looks bright for the Royals.

I sure hope so because I'd like to see the Royals get out the wilderness, and from the look of it, there are some serious athletes who will be major-league-ready by 2012.

I'd sure like to see them beat the White Sox head-to-head this season. But if they don't, there's always the Minnesota Twins, another team I like because they play fundamentally sound baseball and seem to be able to do more with less than other clubs. It's what's called "the Twins Way."

I'd like to see the Royals find their way out of loserdom.

A Hopeful Wine Trail

On Tuesday in the local paper in these here parts, the Managing Editor had a column titled "New Wine Trail Adds to Tourism Opportunities in East-Central Illinois."

When I think of Illinois, wine is not a product I associate with the Prairie State. But the author, Bill Lair, points out the growing list of wineries in East-Central Illinois, many of which I had no idea about until yesterday. The one I did know about was Cameo Vineyards in Greenup, but some of the wineries mentioned are southeast of the Nasty family homestead here in Chucktown. They're located pretty close to Indiana in the Wabash River Valley, which isn't that far of drive.

But the wine areas I've frequented (the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York, the Mt. Pleasant area and the quaint town of Hermann in Missouri), have a more concentrated aspect to them. All those wineries are bunched together. With the Missouri wineries, the towns are close to the Missouri River, and they reflect a Germanic heritage. You not only get Germanic style wines, but in Hermann there's also opportunities to get your wurst on.

Uhmmmm ... sausages. Meat in tubular form. Me like lot.

What I'm getting to here is that the wine "trail" Lair pitches seems to entail a lot of driving.

And if we're talking wine, I'm not fond of sweet wine, which is featured in the editorial for whatever reason. I like able-bodied red wines. Mrs. Nasty, however, likes the white stuff, especially that ice wine from Wagner Vineyards that we discovered from our travel to Elmira, NY when I presented a paper at an International Conference on Mark Twain Studies back in grad school.

So I'm for these wineries producing some strong red wines, maybe some of that native Norton grape.

But the editor is also idealistically calling for a microbrewery in the area. I'm for that too of course, but it'll be tough market with college students who inhale Keystone Light and a limited population when college isn't in session.

But when I think about it, over in Kirksville, MO where I went to undergrad and got my Master's, in a town of 17K there was and hopefully still is a small microbrewery in operation. It opened long after I left that dusty hamlet in '98. Damn you Fates.

And besides the town of Kirksville, there isn't much around in Northeast Missouri. At least if a brewpub opened here in Chucktown or Mattoon, the establishment could pull from larger neighboring towns.

Or maybe I'm just being idealistic.

Not Collecting

While I don't have very many shows I watch on a regular basis, one regular on my television viewing docket is American Pickers on the History Channel.

The show has Mike and Frank traveling around the country to scavenge through people's junk piles to score valuable finds. With all of the places these guys go to, I'm consistently surprised by how much stuff/junk that people collect/hoard. One guy on last week's episode related that once he quit smoking cigarettes and drinking, he had all kinds of extra money to play with, so he began buying stuff he liked. From a snarky perspective based on what the guy had acquired over the years though, the dude might have been better off drinking.

What the fellas on the show are looking for, of course, are all manner of antiques, and in particular they tend to be smitten by interesting signs, vintage motorcycles, oil cans, old toys, and on and on and on. All that stuff apparently sells really well.

What I consider from time to time when watching the pickers do their thing is that I don't collect anything. I used to. I had comic books and baseball cards, but I sold those when I was hard up for money years ago. The fact I used to have the issue of The Amazing Spider-Man when Green Goblin gets defeated for the first time (pictured above) smites a little bit.

I guess I have some hickory stick golf clubs down in the basement, but they aren't all that valuable. And I haven't played golf in years. It's used to consume my life--practicing every day, competing in tournaments, playing for the varsity team in high school, dreams of a pro career--but I now tend to agree with Twain that the game is pretty much a "good walk spoiled." And, hell, some golf courses seem to make disincentives for people to walk the course anymore, which is ridiculous.

But with collecting stuff, I have little passion for encasing comic books in mylar or hanging up old golf clubs even though both can be kind of neat if you have the right items. I have lots of books, but that's maybe that's more of an occupational hazard with my profession. It's not like I'm collecting rare books or first editions.

I guess I don't have the passion for collecting although I'm entertained and interested in what people collect.

Flashbacks of Junior High

I was reading a post on Roxane Gay's blog the other day, and she makes a funny crack about how the members of her writing group should all get Members Only jackets.

The image of Members Only Jackets created flashbacks to junior high school, the fashion thereof, and other desires.

I admit I had a Members Only jacket back then in sixth and seventh grade. I got compliments from girls, which naturally made me nervous and self-conscious. Well, for full disclosure here, I doubt it was a true Members Only jacket but a knockoff of some sort that my mom picked up at the Waterloo K-Mart after strategic whining from yours truly. So a K-Members Only jacket. It wasn't in an elite membership -- let's just say that. My parents, two people who lived their early childhoods during the Great Depression, were/are the practical sort, so the jacket although goofy in obvious ways wasn't too dissimilar from regular jackets. And at K-Mart prices, there's no problem there.

The other fashion staple of the early 80s were pants that were the rage in my corner of northeastern Iowa at the time, probably a year or two after they were the in-garment on the coasts. You might have guessed what I'm talking about here: parachute pants.

Yes, parachute pants. I'm still waiting for them to make a comeback simply because I want to laugh at people for wearing the stupid garment. I will not lie though. I wanted a pair. At least one pair to be like the cool kids would suffice. But Virg and Deloras saw right through that fashion silliness. Add the strangeness of somewhat skintight garments with multiple zippers and pockets to the fact that they were expensive, that's not a good equation for this guy. No parachute pants for this fellow. No way.

Oh but I did appreciate them. I did a lot of appreciating since as we know junior high is when puberty hits. And young ladies at that time, well, they wore parachute pants. The noise the pants made as girls walked down the halls of West Junior was erotic to me. Like others, I had sensitive antennae to such things, which leads me to the accidental foresight my parents had when I get to thinking about it.

I mean, how do you hide a boner in parachute pants?

As you might have predicted, there are stores on the Internet who will gladly truck in economic nostalgia for those of us who desire, who desperately need, parachute pants. Click HERE for one such store. I wonder if I can talk Mrs. Nasty into buying a pair.

Culture Through a Story

Through my son's daycare facility and through my daughter's elementary school, we've been buying loads of books from Scholastic. One of the many joys of having children is that you get to relive your childhood through their literature: The Lorax, Sammy the Seal, Puff the Magic Dragon, Green Eggs and Ham, Goldilicks and the Three Bears, and many, many others.

Lately the featured book for Quinn has been The Three Billy Goats Gruff, easily one of my favorite bedtime stories. I equate my Dad with the telling of The Three Pigs, another of my favorites, since he told the traditional story where the pigs scare the Big Bad Wolf with the butter churn. I had no idea what a butter churn was back then, but once explained, I found the situation hilarious. Stupid wolf.

But the story I equate with my Mom is those three goats and that bastardly troll, a jerk and a bully. My grandmother was a full-blooded Norwegian. She came over on a boat alone, knowing no English, with a tag around her wrist telling people where to send her: some town in Minnesota - perhaps a story for another post. So my Mom is quite familiar with trolls because of the stories she was told as a child. In fact, she told me that when she was a kid, her mother would occasionally scare her my telling her that if she didn't do this or that, trolls might visit the house. And no one wants that if you've read The Three Billy Goats Gruff. A troll would eat you. Not a good situation at all.

I've always enjoyed the story arc of the Three Billy Goats Gruff since it appeals to my hatred for bullies and loudmouths. And there's deception. The brothers knew the biggest goat would take care of the troll. While I don't like hoaxes in academia or government or politics, I like a good hoax in fiction.

But the whole story makes me sad a bit too since I never had a chance to meet that grandma (or most of my grandparents for that matter) since I was the last-born, born so out of place in the line of siblings that it was obvious that I was an unplanned pregnancy. As my Dad told me once over a beer after playing eighteen holes of golf, "The damn rubber broke." It's not as harsh at it sounds. We had a good laugh about it, and then he added something along the lines of "but you've been a blessing" or something like that.

So here I am, an example of the absurdity of existence, an effect of faulty birth control.

Regardless, since I'm a mutt and I never really had much of a connection to my other bloodlines (Danish, German, English, and French) other than how my Mom has a fierce loyalty to Norway, I am jealous of folks who have a deep connection to countries where their ancestors came from. I've always been fascinated by Norway because of my grandmother's connection to the country (she grew up there as a child), but I've often felt like a poseur if I talk a lot about it.

These thoughts have come up recently because I'm reading an excellent memoir that discusses living with a divided consciousness. White Field, Black Sheep is a book that, in part, delves into how being a hyphenated American can be a burden and a pleasure. The book takes me inside a mindset and circumstances I'm not familiar with, and learning about the author's background, that part of Chicago, and her experiences has been interesting and insightful. Click HERE if want to check out the book.

But back to goats. They're the real stars of Quinn's life right now, anyway. This Norwegian folk tale engages him, and I'm happy for that because, besides a few stories, that's about all I have to cling to about my Norwegian heritage besides some really tasty Christmas cookies: cringla and fudamumbuckles.

Over the Cedar

I don't know why I've been thinking about this lately, but I've been pondering my childhood and where I grew up. I guess it's inevitable as I make the slow lurch toward 40, but I'm pretty confident some of the reading I've been doing lately is part of the cause (see "Thoughts on the Midwest").

But when I think back to growing up in Waterloo, Iowa, one image that I come back to is going across the Cedar on the green 18th Street bridge most days when I would work at my Dad's grocery store--crossing over from the west side to the east side, the "bad part of town," a phrase that is so racially-tinged and socio-economically tangled that it deserves its own post or essay.

I made that trip over the Cedar all the time when I was much younger than working age when my Mom and I would stop in at my father's store to shop, and that was when Rath Packing Co. was still in business. When I was young, I remember it being huge--trailers stacked up waiting to unload pigs and cattle for the killing floors, the musky stench of death and dirt and diesel, the white water tower with the Rath logo on it-a red, rudimentary image of an Indian chief, the Packer's Inn bar across from the plant whetting the appetites of working folks.

Later on, once Rath went belly up in '85, the city was hurting. Bad. The 80s were not a good time to be in Waterloo with Rath closing and John Deere (the city's largest employer) with its multiple layoffs throughout the decade. Reagan espoused "Morning in America," and Waterloo's America exemplified job losses and hard times. The mornings were pretty damn dark.

While I can't describe my parents as white collar by any stretch of the imagination, I also think growing up in Waterloo gave me a certain blue collar mindset that usually serves me well but also creates crankiness since I work in academia, a place where sometimes being straightforward and at times blunt and also prone to being intolerant of bullshit are not prized characteristics.

But I'm still hung up on these questions: Why Rath? Why is that trip over the river and a now defunct packing plant so emblematic to me about my hometown? Maybe it's mere repetition because that's what I did since I made that trip across the bridge so often.

But the academic in me (damn you!) makes me think it means something more.

Wintry Mix and Counting Crows

The forecast for driving tomorrow doesn't look good. Weather.com provides the menacing "wintry mix" descriptor of what'll be like on the roads. Thank goodness it's all interstate from Chucktown to Waterloo.

But we'll be taking our time.

A friend from high school quoted a snippet of "Anna Begins" from the Counting Crows as one of her Facebook statuses (or stati?) today, which then turned me on to listening to August and Everything After.

That's a great album, and like Blind Melon's first album, August... reminds of a certain place and time (Kirksville and in particular the "Gin Mill"). Good times were had, people.