Musing of the Moment: Iowa Caucus ~ Regrets

One of my biggest regrets is that I never got to participate in the Iowa Caucus. I lived my growing years in Waterloo, Iowa and then moved to Missouri to go to school at Truman State University. When I moved to Kirksville, I registered as a voter in Missouri. And the first presidential election I voted in was in 1992. 

Since I follow politics fairly closely, I've been fascinated ty the Iowa Caucus. When my parents were still alive, they caucused initially for Richardson and then moved to Obama's camp at their caucus site when Richardson didn't have enough people. 

To all the good people caucusing in Iowa today, thank you. 

And I am jealous. 

Random Notes from a Crank

With college football on Saturday and us doing stuff on Sunday, I forgot that Luke Cage was available on Netflix this past Friday. I'm only a few episodes in, but I like it a lot. 

One of my favorite classes I had as an undergrad was Mythology. I stumbled across this article via Scientific American the other day: "Scientists Trace Society's Myths to Primordial Origins." I like the research this person is doing, but you can see these patterns just by studying world mythologies. There are four types of creation myths and two types of fertility myths. Reading Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Frazier's The Golden Bough, and Mencken's Treatise on the Gods can do everyone a lot of good. Reading those could certainly help people from saying their religion/mythology is the "right" one. 

One of my dad's stories that he has related over the years is that when he was in Iowa and went to bar and asked the waitress for a Griesedieck, he got slapped. The company is apparently going to open a brewery sometime soon. 

I read recently that ABC is reviving The Gong Show. I look forward to that. In that same article, the author relates that both the 20,000 Pyramid and The Match Game were aired this summer, and they'll be back. How the hell did I miss those? 

A listicle about the "20 Saddest Cities" came across my FB feed, so I figured to click away. Some of my quick takeaways are the following:

• Don't move to Ohio.
• I'm surprised St. Louis and Indy are on it.
• Knoxville is supposed to be great, I'm told.
• Detroit and Buffalo are not surprising.
• Same goes for Birmingham.
• I like Louisville, and how can it be sad with easy access to such a diversity of bourbon?  
• Memphis has the second-highest violent crime rate in the nation? Wow.

Random Notes from a Crank

I just have to vent this question. When the @#$% are The Bottle Rockets going to put out a new album? 

This weekend we're headed up to Iowa to visit my dad. We haven't visited since my mom's funeral in early February. We'll visit her grave on Saturday and take my old man out to dinner at Texas Roadhouse. He's moving to a smaller apartment in the old folks home. And yes, you just read "old folks home." I prefer that term to "assisted-living facility," which sounds way too technical and sterile. He's going to give my daughter a Norwegian doll of my mom's, which will make Hannah cry. And apparently he wants to give my son a bunch of old coins. He's been more upbeat when I have talked to him lately, so I think he's gotten somewhat used to being solo. I think the move to different apartment will also help.

I wish I could still read Latin like I used to. Right now one of the books I'm reading is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor. Back when I was in Latin classes, I have the privilege of reading Julius Caesar, Cicero, and others in their native tongue. Cicero's speech about the Catalinarian conspiracy is a serious work of art. And I enjoyed Julius Ceasar's style of writing: direct and concise. 

I started reading Brian Wood's comic books about Star Wars. His series informs readers about what was happening between Episode IV: Star Wars and Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. I do believe I'm hooked. I dig the depiction of Leia as a warrior princess. It's a fun narrative. 

Lately the only fiction I read is sequential art. 

For Father's Day I bought my dad The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression by Amity Shales. Virg was born in '27, so he was a little kid during the Depression. I'm thinking about buying the graphic version of the book that came out a while back. 

Random Notes from a Crank

It's come to that time of the year when I'm so desperate for college football that I'm watching a NFL preseason game. I feel so pathetic. 

On Tuesday, the OED Online Word of the Day was "monkey parade." It's a noun, and here's the definition: "An evening promenade of young people, esp. for the purpose of meeting members of the opposite sex." Because I've lived in college towns for good portion of my life ~ Kirksville, MO; Tuscaloosa, AL; and Charleston, IL ~ I recognize these parades. Monkey parades are especially prominent in small towns when college kids travel on foot to a keg parties. I've observed many of them. 

I've been making pickles close to every day since my pickling cucumbers have been producing, which is three weeks or so now. I've been experimenting with different ratios of types of vinegar (hint: go heavy on the cider vinegar and light on the white vinegar) and experimenting with hot peppers in the mix. I did one jar with a serrano pepper and a couple others with jalapenos. Mrs. Nasty tried the serrano-infused pickles the other day. She hung in there, but she said they were pretty hot. I tried them too. They're hot, but serranos impart wicked good flavor. I've also thought about making a jar with three peppers marinating the cucumbers ~ a serrano, a jalapeno, and cayenne. I think I'll call it my "walk into a bar..." recipe. You see, a serrano, a jalapeno, and a cayenne walk into a bar, and... [you fill in the blank]. 

In October, we head up to Iowa to see my parents for their celebration of their 65th wedding anniversary. I hope Mrs. Nasty and I stick around long enough to have a 65th wedding anniversary. 

While I enjoyed The Wolverine movie, reading the comic books series from 1982 was quite a treat. I was somewhat right on what they kept from the comic book for the movie. Regardless, I'm a bit of purist, so I prefer the original comic book storyline, especially because it brings in the rest of the X-Men at the end (for a wedding that goes wrong). With all that said though, the movie reinterprets the Logan/Wolverine character in a thoughtful way. 

After reading the full series of The Northlanders by Brian Wood, I got into his most recent work, The Massive. It's good. I'm looking forward to the second volume. 

Fumbling Toward Culinary Talent: Dill Pickles

Two or three years ago I made pickled okra. Lots of it. For a number of weeks, I was pickling about every other day. 

This summer I acquired seeds for pickling cucumbers, I planted them in late spring, and this week I started harvesting. Yesterday I made my first couple of jars of pickles. 

Because it had been so long since I had pickled anything, I had forgotten my recipe, so I had to call my dad to see if he remembered it. He didn't remember it fully, and the recipe I'm providing below is about as close as I can get to what I did with the okra (with the help of Virg and the InterWebs). 

I'll probably experiment with ingredient ratios from time to time, but this is the base recipe, and I'm sharing it not only for my readers but also for myself. 

Pickling brine ingredients:

1 1/2 cup of apple cider vinegar

1/2 cup of white vinegar

2 cups of water

2-3 tablespoons of pickling salt

In the jars:

1/2 teaspoon of dill seed

Snip of fresh dill weed

1/8 teaspoon of hot pepper flakes

1-2 cloves of garlic

Pickling cucumbers, whole or quartered if they're bigger ones

Process:

Put the dill, garlic, and pepper flakes in the bottom of the jars and then assemble your cucumbers. Put the jars in a pot with water in it and heat on medium-high to temper the jars.

Bring the brine to a boil and let it roil for a while. Using some kind of dipper, fill up the  jars to the line and then cap. 

Ode to Radishes

What you see above is one of the first harvests of radishes from my garden. 

Radishes are not the sexiest vegetables out there. But then again, what vegetable is sexy anyway? What a stupid statement. Fruits tend to be sexy like peaches, strawberries, and grapes.

Anyway, at one time I didn't like radishes. My dad grew them in his garden all the time. Somewhere along the line once I got older, I embraced the spicy root and enjoyed its heat. 

I remember my dad slathering butter on cut radishes. I don't go that route. Instead, I just eat them as is, dip them into a dressing, or put them in salads. 

From what I've gathered, the radish has all kinds of nutritional and health benefits. Check it out:

• WebMD's info
• Best Weight Loss Facts take
• LiveStrong's points

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.

Music Friday: "Stompin' at the Savoy," "April in Paris," "In the Mood," & "It Don't Mean a Thing"

Since today is my dad's birthday, I thought I'd present some music that he grew up listening to when he was a kid and during early adulthood. It's a Big Band Music Friday, folks. He's 85 today.

Here's Benny Goodman and his Orchestra with "Stompin' at the Savoy."

One of my favorite big bands is Count Basie and His Orchestra. Below is the often covered "April in Paris."





If you don't recognize the song by its title, listen and you'll know "In the Mood" by Glen Miller and His Orchestra.





And I'm ending with the Duke and "It Don't Mean a Thing."

Bay 2, Room 10

My sister and I went with our dad in the elevator this morning, and he and the nurse got off on the fifth floor at around 11:15 am for his surgery.

Around 4:15 pm, the surgeon summoned us to one of the rooms of the "day of surgery lounge" to inform us that the surgery went well. They did a triple, not a double, bypass but didn't deal with the valve issue since doing so would have put him in for another hour of surgery. With his kidney issues and being 83, they didn't want to push it. The surgeon related that he's probably had this valve issue for "fifteen to twenty years" and is doing fine with it. He also said that other than the "major blockages," Virg's "tissues looked good" for his age. I don't what that means, but it's sounds positive for his health in the future.

I was nervous going back there since they told us that the surgery would take close to six hours, and if the surgery started around Noon, then four hours didn't bode well. I'm glad to be wrong.

He'll be in the ICU for a couple of days and will then move to the heart care section of the U of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics.

We haven't got to see him yet, but we're going back over at around 9:00pm when visitor hours open back up for an hour and a half window.

Deja Vu All Over Again

Close to four years ago when I traveled to the U of Iowa Hospital to visit my mom after her heart surgery after Quinn was born of June 9, I didn't turn left when I needed to because of the shoddy signage here in the Iowa City/Coralville area.

I traveled to the same area today, and to my chagrin, I didn't take the left turn yet again, driving too far south, cursing the urban planners in this part of Iowa, and eventually turning around to the get to the confusing U of Iowa Hospital.

Virg has his surgery tomorrow. He'll have a double bypass and get a sketchy valve replaced if they can do so.

I'll try to write a message tomorrow to tell interested folks how it went.

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)"

A Good Hoe

A tool I picked up from my dad when I was home is the garden hoe pictured above.

I've praised another tool on this blog before when I talked about the glory of the HoeDag last year.

But this hoe is different. It was free. My dad used it. And it's old. Perhaps it's even an antique?

It wasn't originally Virg's though. He told me he picked it up at a garage sale years ago.

As you can notice from the picture above, it's bowed a little bit in the middle and very long. When I stand it upright, the top of it goes to the tip of my nose. Now I'm not a tall guy, but still, you don't have to stoop over at all when using this fine tool. And it's longer than the hoe I bought a couple of years ago.

But the marks of my dad on this tool. Using his bench grinder, which is also in my garage, he sharpened the blade for efficiency. Unwanted sprouts in my garden, meet your destroyer.

I don't know if this feature of the hoe was standard in the factory, but there's a hollowed out piece of wood on the top of the hoe for your back hand as you work, an add-on that has character.

This old tool reminds me of the famous essay by Wendell Berry, a guy who should win the Nobel Prize in Literature by the way. It's called "A Good Scythe." 

In the essay, Berry recounts how at one time he bought a power scythe for working on his land, and then he went back to using an old-fashioned one for a number of reasons. Toward the end of the essay after he has provided a bulleted list of ten reasons why the old technology is better than the new, he provides two additional reasons: 

1. "I always work with the pleasure that one invariably gets from using a good tool. And because it is not motor-driven and is quiet and odorless, the hand scythe allows you to appreciate your surroundings as you work."
2. "The other difference is between kinds of weariness. Using the hand scythe causes the simple bodily weariness that comes with exertion. This is a kind of weariness that, when not extreme, can be one pleasure of work. The power scythe, on the other hand, adds to that weariness of exertion the unpleasant weariness of strain."

He calls his experience and reflection on using both types of scythes as a "parable" because "[t]he power scythe--and it is far from being an isolated or unusual example--is not a labor-saver or a short cut. It is a labor-maker (you have to work to pay for it as well as to use it) and a 'longcut.' Apologists for such expensive technological solutions love to say that 'you can't turn back the clock.' But when it makes perfect sense to do so, as the case of a good old-fashioned scythe, of course you can!"

So there's pleasure in a good tool just as there's pleasure in eating well from produce you've grown.

Music Friday: "Alabama Pines"

So I came up here for my dad's surgery, which didn't pan out as I related in my last post.

Today didn't go very well. Instead of Virg going to a hospital, my sister and I took my mom to one. To cut to the chase because I don't really want to write much about it and I'm tired, she has fluid collecting around her left lung. At least she's lucid this time. She just needs to get the lung issue cleared up.

I had planned on going home tomorrow after my dad's change of plans. Now I'm back to my old plans on going home on Sunday.

So here I am. My dad didn't go to the hospital. And my mom's in the hospital.

So I give you, with no manner of smooth segue, Jason Isbell and 400 Unit playing "Alabama Pines,"which is the lead song off the new album. And here's Isbell playing it solo and acoustic at a radio station.

Road Trip & Tuscaloosa

I heard about the disaster in Tuscaloosa this morning when I read the news reports and viewed videos of the tornado that decimated T-Town.

But then I had to travel to Iowa because my dad's heart surgery was scheduled for tomorrow. As I got near Iowa City, my sister informed me that the surgery isn't going to happen because once they checked my dad's blood, they found the white blood count and kidney levels too high to do the double bypass. So we wait for about another month.

So now I'm here in Waterloo to visit with my parents and siblings for another day, and I head back on Saturday.

On the way up, I thought about my dad of course, but I also pondered the state of emergency in Tuscaloosa. It sounds as the tornado ripped right through the main thoroughfare in the city and just east of the Capstone. For all I know, the apartment where Mrs. Nasty and I first lived together as a married couple could be gone, wiped by the destruction.

Because of a city I love, it's been painful watching the news.

The picture below is of the Cedar Crest neighborhood right off 15th where our old apartment was/is.

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.

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."

Music Friday: "A Boy Named Sue" & "Hey Good Lookin'"

This Music Friday goes out to my parents.

My dad went in for a heart procedure on Tuesday, and there were complications. Thankfully, they got a stent into the lower artery of his heart. That problem coupled with renal issues almost ended his life, but he wound up in the ICU. He's in a regular room now.

My oldest brother has been staying with my mom, who has had heart problems of her own combined with diabetes and being legally blind. Once my dad's turned loose from the hospital, they'll both go to an assisted living facility where they don't have to worry about cooking food and will undoubtedly get much more social interaction.

So the first song for today, "A Boy Named Sue," is for my dad, who likes Johnny Cash. The father-son relationship in the song is much different than my relationship with my father, btw.

And the second song for today is Hank Williams' "Hey Good Lookin,'" which is a song my mom likes to sing when cooking, a song indelibly linked to her in my mind.

We're headed up to Iowa this weekend to help in whatever way we can.

Lack of New Year Traditions

Yesterday Daiva Markelis on her blog The Adventures of Mighty Bear Woman provided a post about a past tradition for New Year's Eve when, as part of the title, says, "...I was old enough to stay up late but not old enough to get drunk."

I got to thinking about my own lack of traditions associated with New Year's Eve. While I've been known on occasion to howl at the moon (metaphorically speaking), I don't really care for New Year's Eve much. After close to forty years on this earth, only one New Year's Eve celebration really stands out, and that was a big blow-out for the millennial New Year's Eve at "Chuck's Place" in O'Fallon, Missouri. Unfortunately, I didn't make it to midnight that night. But for the most part I turn a jaundiced eye toward the holiday since it is a hollow one for me.

As my dad told me when I was younger, "Life is a struggle." And Virg knows something about that since he grew up on a farm in rural northeastern Missouri during the Great Depression. Since life is a struggle even though some English professors will try to sell you on the "life is a journey" metaphor provided by The Odyssey, New Year's Eve is just like any other day: another day closer to death.

When I think about my own family's traditions around the holiday, well, we didn't have any that I can remember. Back when I was old enough to stay up late but not old enough to get sloshed, I think I probably just brainlessly watched the New Year's celebration TV shows with my parents as my Dad read the Waterloo Courier.

When I was really young, my dad worked as a meat cutter for National Tea and then got laid off. He then sold insurance for a few years, thankfully got a small business loan to open up his own small grocery on the East side of Waterloo, and once he "retired" from the grocery business, he got bored and started a liquor store near the grocery store he sold to my brother.

I worked at both the grocery store and the liquor store. And December 31st was always a day when we were wonderfully slammed with business. Hours flew by because you were busy. The date is a gold rush for liquor stores as you can imagine. By the time I got off work at 10 or 11 on those New Year's Eves during high school and later when I worked over breaks during college, I was tired and tired of drunks.

But as we said in both stores, New Year's Eve is "amateur night." Rather than serving our regular customers who wanted half-pints, fifths, or Texas fifths (1.75 liters) of "bumpy face" (Seagram's gin), "Mad Dog" (Mogan David 20/20), "Erk & Jerk" (E&J brandy), and all manner of hard liquor, we trucked more in various cheap champagnes and spumante. Andre champagne or Cold Duck (one of my favorite names for a libation) for $5, people. And for whatever reason liquers sold well then but more so around Xmas. Nothing says booze like the holidays. You can even get your beloveds gift sets of booze with glasses and whatnot: liquor as gift ~ a gift that gives and gives.

I also dislike how New Year's spawns resolutions, but maybe that's just because, like most people, I rarely keep them. I've had better luck setting goals and working toward those goals irrelevant of the time of the year.

So why do I still lurch toward making New Year's resolutions though? Damn you socialization.

Lately, I've been drawn to something I read about in Brian Haycock's Dharma Road. As the author details in Chapter 18 "Thank You, Thank You," "Most of us have much more than the bare necessities. A Mahayana Buddhist practice is to make a list of everything we are given in the course of a day--not cab fares, but the small blessings that come our way. A tasty snack. A song on the radio. A water cooler with really cold water. They add up. If we keep a list, we can look back at the end of the day and realize just how lucky we are. And we can be thankful for that."

"Much of Zen practice is just to develop an appreciation for everyday life. Whether it's a glorious sunrise over the green hills of Texas or a frantic street scene anywhere in the world, we should take it all in and see the beauty behind it. And we can appreciate that and give thanks for it. Wherever we are, we're lucky to be there. We're lucky just to be." (120-1).

As he details in the paragraph after those two, "[t]he hard times are valuable as well" since "[w]e can be grateful for the trials we face, the obstacles we have to overcome" (121).

Okay, I admit it. I almost made a resolution to do exactly what he details above: listing the everyday blessings or positive negatives that happened in my day. But I didn't. I'm mulling it over. For a short while a few years ago, I was writing a daily tanka, which was usually fun and interesting but sometimes it just turned into work. And I got enough work. I got enough.

I may just do the list like I do my tankas, when I feel like it. But I'm drawn to the discipline of a daily practice.

For example, for today I could note how Hannah, who starts back at first grade tomorrow, held my hand as we went to and from the mall today. And I could also record how my first attempt at making Swedish meatballs didn't go so well. They came out more as Swedish meatblobs. I failed to remember a lesson I've learned before: adhere strictly to the recipe on your first try making a dish. And Mrs. Nasty joked with me about whether I'd write about that dish.

Well, there you go. I did. Duly noted.

60th Anniversary Photos

I thought I'd share a couple of photos from the 60th wedding anniversary of Virg and Deloras.

It happened a while back, but congrats to 60 happy years.