Vacation Rental Property

There is a swatch of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin where every lake has a sugar sand bottom and every lake home and cabin is recently remodeled and comes with birch trees and mature white pines—and beautiful sunsets you can watch from the dock as you listen to the loons call.

I know this place exists because I know a woman who retreats to it via vacation rental property websites on cold dark evenings this time of year. She says she’s looking for a place to rent for a week this summer, but she’s really just keeping winter at bay—that and peeking into the lives and taste levels of people trying to rent out their places on these sites.

The photos—not always professional quality—show decks and docks. And kitchens and lofts and bedrooms and living areas. She examines them closely, looking for unintentionally included details and information.

She doesn’t trust bed linen with pictures of fish on it. Or stuffed fish for that matter. Or deer. Or dark photos of cramped kitchens with mismatched appliances. Or living area recliners that look old and saggy—as if they lurch back and to the left when you reach down and pull the lever.

The copy accompanying these pictures always gushes and glows and makes the place sound like some sort of north woods nirvana. The woman has learned to read between the lines. She enjoys teasing out details hidden there, good and bad.

She likes words like “pillow top mattress” and “top quality sheets”. They communicate a certain level of thought and comfort—thought and comfort you don’t always find in real north woods rentals.

She doesn’t trust adjectives like “cozy” or “quaint”. She considers them code words for cramped bedrooms, mousetraps, and erratic septic systems perpetually one flush away from disaster.

She is on her own private parade of lake homes. She’s a north woods “Nosey Nellie” who would poke in the closets and open the medicine cabinet if these websites would let her.

Maybe she’ll rent a place. Then again, maybe not. She’ll relax and take her time making up her mind. She enjoys the thrill of the hunt. And while it’s only February in the real world, it’s always summer up at the lake on the web.

Iron Range Blowhard Detection

A friend of mine with ties to the Iron Range reports a disturbing new trend in the lunchroom at one of the mines up there.

People have found a new way to call out conversational blowhards and they’re starting to use the Internet to resolve points of contention.

Iron Rangers have always loved vigorous conversation. Not just in lunchrooms. In barrooms. And classrooms. And union halls and political caucuses. Heck, even in confessionals. Everywhere. You have to expect a certain amount of overstatement on just about any topic of conversation up there. You just factor it in.

It’s this new way of calling a blowhard out that’s disturbing (if its true). That and using the Internet to arbitrate the ensuing dispute.

The way my buddy describes it, the party doing the challenging reaches into his back pocket and throws an imaginary football penalty flag. If he’s especially worked up, he may even wave the invisible flag in the other guy’s face first.

This evidently replaces the traditional form of challenge, which as we all know, involves uttering a phrase that alludes to a certain bovine byproduct.

Someone then proceeds to the nearest available computer to “Google” the issue in contention, either validating the original statement or consigning it—and the individual who uttered it—to scorn and derision for the balance of lunch hour.

It’s yet another case of mass communication homogenizing the species and killing local culture.

Windy, free-swinging discussions have been as much a part of lunch hour in those mines as the pasty for more than a hundred years. Some of them have been known to continue unresolved for days, weeks, months—even years and decades. I’ll bet some have followed old miners into retirement, out of this life and (who knows) possibly even into the next.

Somehow, having the Internet available and ready to resolve disputes just seems to kill all that. Some blowhards are meant to be deflated slowly… Over time… Not popped like a toy balloon.

So I’m hoping my buddy is playing fast and loose with his facts. I’m calling him out.

This being public radio, I can’t utter the traditional challenge. So I’m throwing one of those Iron Range invisible flags. And he can’t Google his way out of this one either. We’re going to have to go to lunch at the mine to get to the bottom of this.

Winter Sunset Awe

There is a place on the east side of the Mississippi River north of Saint Cloud, Minnesota where winter sunsets put you in touch with awe. Scrub oak sunsets. Prairie sunsets. There are bigger, gaudier, more lurid sunsets around the world, but what these Central Minnesota winter sunsets lack in spectacle they more than make up for in simple spiritual substance.

You stand in a pasture, daylight beginning to fail all around, a subtler, more graduated light coming on. You quiet your heart and all but feel the planet rotating. Stars begin to come out overhead. Vastness insinuates itself and you begin to sense long, slow cycles of time hidden and interwoven, layer on layer, eon on eon, millennia and centuries and generations and decades and years and seasons and days and minutes, right up to this particular sunset, one of billions that have taken place or have yet to take place here on this spot.

You tune out the cars and trucks hurrying past on the highway and tune in other comings and goings. Glaciers and forests and peoples and species—even the great river itself.

Time on the human scale recedes, Awe arrives and, with it, (if you’re lucky), a certain humility and circumspection. You begin to get the idea that maybe you aren’t as big or important as you had thought. Maybe you’re just one little flicker of life on a small planet spinning on its axis, circling a lesser star in a galaxy of a billion stars, the galaxy itself just one of two hundred-billion galaxies in the universe.

You let the awe percolate, treading lightly as you do. You try not to think too hard, lest the awe fade and you find you’ve snapped yourself back inside human time—impatient time—time that taps it’s toe, looks at its watch and asks what’s next. Time that kills awe.

You try to stay humble, circumspect, and in the moment, even though your mind wants to prattle on like an apostle speaking in tongues after an epiphany. You do your best to ignore it. It quiets down eventually and settles back into the awe itself.

This awe seems to serve an ancient winter purpose—to fatten the spirit for a kind of hibernation; to slow us down and put us in touch once again with all the ancient riddles and mysteries,

This time of year, we seem to be almost genetically compelled to go out, gather awe, bring it in and stockpile it like food or firewood and mete it out slowly and deliberately—to make it last until spring.

All our seasonal stories, rituals, and traditions seem to have been born of this awe; to have been passed down to us in it; to have been created in order to perpetuate it.

We have been telling these awe stories in order to explain the cold and darkness away, and to frame our ancient riddles and mysteries for tens of thousands of years.

Even today, awash in science and mathematics, having answered many of the old questions and solved many of the riddles and mysteries, it seems all our theories, equations, and discoveries lead us back to the same place—to a crossroads in the dark where all the arrows on the signpost point the same direction: Awe.

It’s late afternoon as I finish this. Another hour and it will begin to get dark. I won’t make it to North Central Minnesota for sunset. Not today. Luckily, I seem to have stashed enough winter sunset awe away for this evening. Here’s hoping you’ve got some set aside too.

Now it can be Christmas (from "A Porch Sofa Almanac")

Uncle Frank worked nights in a steel plant, so it was understandable that he looked owly when he and Aunt Babe and all those girl cousins joined Aunt Gick and Uncle Hank and their boys, and Aunt Pat and Uncle Red and their kids at our house for dinner on Christmas Day.

Frank had shocky hair and a vaguely distracted look--like Stan Laurel--and a concave posture that was accentuated when he stood there with his hands in his pockets, surveying the noisy reunion of cousins as the coats got collected and dumped on a bed in a back-bedroom. The chaos was exquisite, but short-lived. Before long, the cousins would quiet down a little or disappear to other corners of the house. His wife would join her sisters in the kitchen. His brothers-in-law would take seats in the living room, to smoke and talk and Frank would sit down at the piano.

He would run through all the traditional Christmas fare – Silent Night, Jingle Bells, The First Noel – that sort of thing. Then he would wander off into popular Christmas tunes--White Christmas, I’ll Be Home For Christmas, Silver Bells, and what-have-you.

He played with a big, rolling left hand that bounced like a couple of heavyset aunts dancing a schottische with each other at a wedding. He sprayed the right hand notes over the top, adding plenty of sustain pedal to make it all ring. It was as if one of those barroom piano players in a western movie had suddenly launched into a medley of Tin Pan Alley holiday fare.

Eventually, he would run out of Christmas tunes. He would pause for a minute, light a cigarette, stare off into space, then turn back to the piano and, squinting through the cigarette smoke, he would begin a mazurka variation of Irving Berlin’s "Easter Parade".

And then it could be Christmas. Then all was right with the world. Somehow, that Easter song written by a Russian Jewish immigrant and played by a Polish American uncle in the din of a large Irish American family reunion with no one really paying attention came to represent all that is good and happy about Christmas for me.

Since those days, I’ve spent Christmas in war zones and Christmas with strangers. I’ve spent a Christmas or two alone--and more than a few in the crowded happiness of my wife’s extended family. But over the years, I’ve developed a resistance to the hype and the hustle. Christmas has become little more than retailers tugging at my heartstrings en route to my wallet.

All that would change in an instant , though, if just once--at a mall or on one of those radio stations that play Christmas music round the clock--or maybe on an elevator muzak holiday tape--they would slip in a piano solo version--almost a polka--of Irving Berlin’s “Easter Parade.” Heavy on the left hand and the sustain pedal.

A Christmas Shopping Memory (From "A Porch Sofa Almanac")

My work takes me out state now and then, and the other week, I found myself walking down a small town Main Street with its stores and street lights all decked out for the holidays. It was snowing and I was suddenly transported back to a Christmas before Wal-Mart’s or mall stores; a Christmas when the stores along another Main Street were all I had.

It was freshman year of high school. There was this girl I kind of liked, although I had never spoken to her. For reasons I don’t understand to this day, I felt obligated to buy her something. All those feelings and hormones were surging. I had no idea what to do with them. Had it been a year earlier, I could have just punched her in the arm hard when we passed in the hall. But I was a high school man now. And now I needed--really needed--to use the last of my summer lawn mowing money to buy her something.

The perfume counter at the drugstore seemed like a good place to start. But the drugstore smelled like my grandfather’s foot powder. And in spite of names like “Evening In Paris” and “Chanel Number Five” the perfumes smelled like the local funeral parlor. I moved on.

I wandered down the notions store gift aisle, looking for something in my price range. But the wife half of the husband-and-wife team who owned the store had chosen all the Christmas merchandise. She was well past fifty. My tastes were running vaguely hot. Hers were decidedly hot-flashy. There was nothing. I moved on

At the record store, I searched bins of 45s looking for one that expressed how I felt. Like my hormones, they ran the gamut from sultry to stupid. The right song just wasn’t there.

I finally settled on a rack for 45 RPM records--a little ceramic dog with a coiled wire body. The records were supposed to fit between the coils. It was the stupidest thing I think I have ever seen, but I took it home secretly – and secretly wrapped it. And the next day at school, after lunch I walked up and handed it to her.

“This is for you,” I said. “Merry Christmas.” And I never spoke to her again.

Small engine repair

There is a moment in any male’s relationship with a small engine—snow thrower, lawn mower, weed whacker, chain saw, leaf blower, outboard, whatever—when he realizes it’s not going to start. No matter how many times he tugs on the rope. No matter how hard. No matter what gerunds he mutters under his breath as he does.

A bond has been broken, A relationship compromised. If this were a marriage, you’d be on your way to counseling. Luckily you’re just a guy with a broken machine. All you need is a trip to the small engine repair shop.

The small engine repair shop. Is there any place happier? The 30-weight-oil-and-gasoline smell. The 16th-of-an-inch patina of gunk on every surface. The repairman’s grease-stained cup with its half inch of cold coffee. The tools—two levels more sophisticated than you have at home—laying right where he can find them whenever he needs them.

There is the quiet, slightly acerbic competence of the small engine repairman himself. Deep down inside, every real male yearns to be that man. To be a professional putterer. To dig around in an engine for a second or two, then tell a customer who lives three tax brackets up the road, “Well there’s your problem right there. Your coil is shot.”

Or your butterfly valve is stuck. Or your set screw fell out. Or any of a million other little “Well there’s you problem right there,” problems the customer won’t understand.

I doubt there’s any feeling on earth quite like realizing your customer has no idea what you’re talking about. Hot darn. It’s open season on his billfold.

And as a small engine repairman you work for yourself—usually just a few steps from the house. If you need a snack it’s right there. You can’t fire yourself and the only retirement you have to worry about is whether or not to retire to the sofa for a nap.

I have a son—an adolescent. One of these days, he’s going to come to me, arms full of brochures from four year liberal arts colleges.

“What should I do, Pop?” he’ll ask. “Where should I go?”

I’ll lead him to an open window. We’ll stand there and listen to the whine of all those small engines in the distance. I’ll hand him a brochure from the local vocational-tech school.

And I’ll tell him, “Three words, my boy—small engine repair.”

Talking Lesser Horrors with KAXE

Here is a link to an interview with Heidi Holtan at KAXE Radio in Grand Rapids. Good people,

Saint Henry of Brookfield

There is a small park across the street from Saint Joseph’s Church in Libertyville, and for a few years back in the fifties, they used to flood it and make a skating rink there in the darkest, coldest few weeks of winter.

On late Christmas Day afternoons, the light failing, night coming on, my uncle, Saint Henry of Brookfield, would load his white four door Chevrolet with cousins and take us all there to skate.

Just getting us to the rink and out on the ice was a feat of extraordinary patience. There would have been nine or ten of us, along with skates, socks, mittens, stocking caps, scarves, jackets and snow pants. All those laces to cinch tight and tie. All that winter clothing to tug into place. He did it cheerfully and, once we were all launched, he would lace on his own skates and get out there too.

He was a working stiff during the week with all the cares and concerns working stiffs had back then. But for an hour or so on those Christmas Day afternoons, he was a light-hearted, high-energy, funny and generous uncle—part Lou Costello, part Curly Howard—the engine for countless games of Crack the Whip—the guy even the slowest kid on the ice could catch when we played tag.

He was good to us, each and all—the best uncle on the best day of the best years of childhood, and when it was time to go home, he untied all the skates, tugged on all the boots, got us back in the car, and led us in Jingle Bells all the way home.

The rink is gone now. I’ll bet not one driver out of one hundred passing by on Milwaukee Avenue knows or remembers it was ever there.

Saint Henry of Brookfield is gone too. But I can’t drive past the place this time of year without glancing over and saying, “Merry Christmas, Hank,” under my breath.

Model T For Sale

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I was out driving the other day—on cruise control… iPod shuffling… seat heater on.

I was doing 70 computerized, fuel-injected miles per hour when I passed a used car place out in the country that specializes in what I call, “rural exotics”.

You know—old American cars. Cars from before 1960.

Kaisers  Desotos. Hudsons. Studebakers. Cars that spent decades in dusty old barns or in the box elders and weeds behind the  outbuildings on some farm.

I’ve never met the guy who runs the place, but I’ve admired his inventory from the highway for years. He always has something unusual over there in the weeds, and this last trip he really outdid himself. He had a 19-something Model T Ford roadster.

It was rusty. The roof fabric was tattered and falling in. It probably didn’t even run, but there it was—a Model T for sale. Probably the only Model T for sale like that anywhere in America.

The scene was a late autumn roadside vignette—a Norman Rockwell painting waiting to happen. Or if you threw in a couple of pheasant roosters hunkering down in the dead November grass, maybe one of those schmaltzy shopping mall wildlife art prints.

Schmaltzy or not, it melted my careworn, technology-jaded, modern-car-driving heart. It was nice to be in a world where you could still buy a Model T from a guy at the side of the road. I don’t know how else to explain it—it was just nice.

If there were still Model T’s for sale at the side of the road, then maybe we weren’t going to hell in a hand basket. Maybe there was still a little old-fashioned, positive, “on-the-up-tick” American “can-do spirit around—the spirit that built millions of Model T’s in the first place.

Maybe there was still a simple rhythm and pace to the seasons. Maybe  things would turn out all right after all.

It was the sweetest little scene I’ve zoomed past in years. It lasted maybe 20 seconds, then it was gone. I had a meeting to get to and just thinking of it, the cares of the world returned.

They returned, but they weren’t quite as heavy. I’d seen a Model T for sale at the side of the road. A Model T, for heaven’s sake. Life was good. 

Combining Corn

I doubt there’s a feeling in the world like the feelings a family farmer must have in the cab of a combine this time of year. Especially with the corn looking as good as it does out there now. They must be giddy. Even the quiet ones who play their cards close to their vests.

Back when comic books were comic books, Disney used to draw Donald Duck’s rich uncle Scrooge swimming elatedly—backstroking through the gold in his vault. Something about seeing a farmer on a combine way out there in a field of corn reminds you of that.

If not Uncle Scrooge, then maybe a Grant Wood farming landscape. Maybe the farmer in that combine cab is awash in the sheer beauty of autumn.

There’s the combine itself—big, complex, and daunting to operate. I’ll bet there’s a certain testosterone-fueled gratification in knowing with absolute certainty that 99% of all Harvard PhDs wouldn’t know how to start a combine engine, let alone maneuver it through acre after acre of corn.

It’s a powerful machine. I know a farmer who used to be a big-time business executive in downtown Minneapolis. He calculates his combine harvests roughly four office cubicles worth of corn every five seconds. Let’s see a Harvard PhD operate that.

Then there are the business mathematics. Farmers constantly calculate and recalculate the number of bushels per acre times the price of corn, as they combine. Then they back out the cost of production.

It’s simple arithmetic. You can trust the number once you come up with it. But a farmer on a combine does the math over and over again, hour after hour, day after day—does it so often that a friend of mine wants to develop a meter for combine cabs that will roll like a taxi fare meter as it calculates profit.

No doubt about it, according to most calculations it’s looking darned good out there. Most farmers have good reason to be elated. If I were a farmer, I’d be tempted to stop the combine for a minute, climb down and turn a few cartwheels in the corn stubble.

I’m a city boy, though. So I’ll stick to watching them out their combining corn and feeling quietly happy from a distance.

Poem: Splitting Indian Mound Oak

The young men we used to be would have laughed

to see the two of us now

splitting Indian mound oak in the yard by hand.

What did those two know about time

or driving the maul through the heart of the wood?

I watched you count the rings.

This oak was tall long before we showed up

it’s roots sunk deep into wisdom.

An excerpt from "Porch Sofa Almanac"

(This essay appears in "A Porch Sofa Almanac" under the title "Cooking With Grandma")

Whenever I hear one of those food poisoning stories come across the radio, I reach over and turn the volume up. It’s only a matter of time until my mother-in-law is implicated.

She’s developed a cavalier attitude toward freshness codes lately. She thinks they’re a sign that America has gone soft. She says common sense and her nose will tell her when something “goes bad.”

It’s the South Dakota Depression era farm girl coming out in her – the one who grew up without electricity, refrigeration or pasteurization.

Either that or it’s the frugal Fridley mother of eight, who routinely performed miracles with loaves of Wonder Bread and cans of tuna fish and got her lunchtime multitudes fed.

There was a brief period – a couple of decades there – when she cooked fairly normally. Now she’s reverting to form, paring the spongy parts off shriveled potatoes and making soup with octogenarian leftovers.

She’s playing fast and loose with the microbes – and reminding us every so often that Flemming developed penicillin from some form of mould.

“Eat this,” I once heard her say as she handed an open container of cottage cheese to a grandchild. “Then I’ll tell you how old it is.”

She’s even found stores that specialize in selling old and dented canned goods and come home with bags full of God-knows what and a glow in her heart that not even the most successful Bloomingdale’s bargain hunter could hope to match.

The woman doesn’t date freshness in days or weeks – or even in months. It’s a matter of years, decades and, now, centuries – even millennia.

There was the can of coconut milk she bought in Hawaii in 1976, last seen on a cupboard shelf in 2002. Asked where it went, she said she’d made cookies with it, and served the cookies to her card club.

“The ladies said they were the best they’d ever had,” she reported smugly.

Don’t get me wrong. The woman is a great cook. She still makes a world class ginger snap, and I’ll put her fried chicken up against anyone’s – any time, any place, anywhere.

But, like Ronald Reagan negotiating with the Soviet Union, I’ve adopted a “trust-but-verify” stance when she cooks. I like my chicken – all my food for that matter – to be at least four decades younger than I am. I want to see it every step of the way from the store to her frying pan and on to my plate.

Especially now, with the Holidays coming and all those old family recipes about to hit the table. I’m going to keep an eye on my mother-in-law. I suggest you keep an eye on yours, too.

Those old recipes are great – especially with fresh ingredients.

Which is why, if I have my say, Thanksgiving will be at our house once again this year.

A Poem For Librarians

Such cheerful, educated souls, behind the desk
whispering in literary collusion,
sharing some egregious pun.
reading in the lunchroom on their breaks.
dreaming, books on chests at night
that they are lion tamers,
cracking whips, firing blanks,
making ferocious data banks stand rampant on circus stools.

When they die,
God puts them on his cart
and shelves them with the saints.

The 12:25 Milwaukee Road Out Of Union Station

I was knocking around the Internet the other evening. I do that sometimes late at night when the rest of the family has gone to bed. I sit at my desk in the spare bedroom and rummage around as if the Internet were an enormous kitchen junk drawer.

I’d been thinking about the old Milwaukee Road commuter rail line that ran north, out of Chicago’s Union Station to Libertyville, where we lived while I was growing up, and from Libertyville west and north—up to Fox Lake near the Illinois-Wisconsin state line. I’d been thinking about the last train out of the city at night. The one that left Union Station at 12:25 in the morning and got into Libertyville an hour or so later. I just had to know if they still ran the 12:25.

And so to the web. The Milwaukee Road is long gone, supplanted by some part-government, part-God-only-knows-what regional transit system called Metra. This I dutifully Googled. Seconds later, the timetable for what was clearly the old Milwaukee Road North Suburban line was glowing at me from the monitor.

It was reassuring to see the stops hadn’t changed. They were all still there and, a lifetime removed, I knew them immediately, and I recited them from memory.

I knew them backward and forward—into the city and out. They’d been drilled into me by countless trips and a generation of Milwaukee Road conductors, who slid from car to car, padding the aisle on tired legs wearing dandruff-flecked conductor’s caps, clicking their punches, calling for tickets, droning those stops in that tired, nasally voice they must have learned in conductor school, sounding as tired and rote and bored as an old parish priest at Saint Joe’s leading the Ladies Rosary Guild at somebody’s Tuesday night wake.

Every mile of the gritty little pilgrimage came flooding back to me. The rail yards and industrial neighborhoods north of the Loop yielding to bungalow-lined north side streets. The first flickers of open space and forest preserve at the edge of the city. The old suburbs, followed by newer, sprawlier suburbs. A few miles of open prairies dotted with hawthorn trees. The switching yard at Rondout. Saint Mary’s Road, the Des Plaines River viaduct, and then Libertyville.

The trip was a rolling meditation. Between the clang of the warning bell, the clack of the track, the whistle at crossings, and the almost-too-regular spacing between stops, there was a rhythm, repetition, and ritual to it. Tibet had mantras and prayer wheels, Lake County had that train.

The 12:25 was the last prayer of the day. If you arrived at the station at 12:26, and you would be in for a long, expensive cab ride home or a fitful night on the waiting room benches. So at the stroke of midnight you’d tear yourself away from your crowd at some Rush Street bar, race across the loop and climb aboard with two or three minutes to spare.

You climbed aboard feeling alcoholically affable, like William Powell’s Thin Man, the last round with your friends at the bar standing you in good stead. But your fellow commuters already on the train started dampening your spirits pretty quickly.

Tired blue collar swing-shift regulars with lunch boxes and tomorrow morning’s Sun Times. Businessmen heading home after dinner with clients. Fans who’d stopped for a beer after whatever game they’d been to. All of them oozing that sallow, almost luminous post-midnight fatigue.

Suddenly, you too would feel immensely tired. You found a seat and, head against the nicotine-oily window, an hour from home, just one more prodigal son awash in reveler’s remorse, you would join them and wait for the hangover to begin.

The car’s door would open, then slam closed, and other passengers would come up the aisle and find single seats. No one spoke. Everyone kept to themselves. You—all of you—sat there, alone together in the cigarette smoke and the diesel fumes and the oil-and-cleaning-compound-scented subterranean dark of late night Union Station. You all sat there, listening to the big locomotive idle, waiting for the engineer to throttle up, and the train to make that first slow, powerful northbound tug.

You sat alone, and yet there was a communion of sorts. It was as if you were all sitting in an Edward Hopper painting, sharing a little island of light and moving down a tunnel that augured through the city night. You were each your own story, to be continued tomorrow; not finished, but certainly done for the day. You were ready to go home and go to bed.

The feeling is not unique to the 12:25. It’s there, on the last train out of every city. It rattles through the night on every subway and commuter line in the world. There’s an empathy at the heart of it—an empathy so strong that it holds you forever. Once you climb on the 12:25, you never, ever get all the way off.

There is a small stretch of right of way for an old, long-defunct municipal trolley line near my house in the suburbs of Minneapolis. It’s no more than two blocks long. It runs through a patch of municipally-owned woods that they couldn’t sell when they tore out the tracks sixty years ago. The right of way is part of a trail system now, and, walking it, I sometimes sense the doppelganger of the last trolley of the night surging past, the same tired motorman, the same tired anonymous passengers, everyone eternally on their way home to bed.

The people riding my doppelganger 12:25 out of Union Station are nameless too. They sit there, bone weary, reading the Sun Times or staring out the window into the night. One man I do know always gets on one stop north of Union Station. He’s a careworn second generation Irishman—the factory working father of a huge family of playground thugs I went to parochial school with.

The door opens, He steps into the car. The door slams closed behind him. He sits, back to the bulkhead, facing me, Irish tough, preoccupied, not looking past the end of his nose.

Who knows? Maybe he’s still with us, in a nursing home in Libertyville. Maybe some nights after whichever of his ten or eleven children who came to visit leaves and the orderly dims the lights in the hall, the old man falls asleep. And, maybe, in his dream, he climbs aboard his own 12:25. And maybe I’m there—a kid he recognizes from 9:15 mass on Sunday, sitting halfway down the car on the left, a little drunk, head against the window, half asleep.

My 12:25 always gets into Libertyville at 1:25. The Irishman and I always step down onto the old platform, and he always walks off into the night.

I stand there for another moment and watch the train pull out of the station, heading west, around a slight curve to the north toward Grayslake. And when the tail end of the last coach disappears around the curve, I light a cigarette, turn my coat collar up and walk off into the night too.

Meditation Upon A T-ball Jotter

I spoke to a Rotary Club recently. I love Rotary Clubs. Such optimism and conviviality. If I ever overcome these feelings of pessimism and isolation, I might even join Rotary one of these days.

This Rotary Club listened politely. Rotary Clubs always do. They applauded politely when I finished. Rotary Clubs always do that too. Then, as Rotary Club presidents always do, the president of this club stood and thanked me and closed by handing me a pen. Pens seem to be Rotary’s universal way of saying thank you for coming to speak. I put the pen in my briefcase and promptly forgot it. I always do.

You know how pens are these days—cheap and generic, always coming and going. You run across one you like and it’s yours for a while, but eventually, it disappears. No one knows how. No one knows why. You reach for your pen and it’s just plain gone. If you hold onto the same one for a week, it’s remarkable. If you keep it for a month, it’s an heirloom.

At any rate, I must have lent whatever pen I’d been using to someone and they must have pocketed it. Because there I was the other day, in need of a pen, and it was gone. So I went to my briefcase, rummaged around, and came up with the one from the Rotary Club.

To my pleasant surprise, the Rotarians had laid a Parker T-Ball Jotter on me.

“Well all right,” I thought, “a T-Ball Jotter,” and I felt just a little better about the world. In an age of anonymous, blah, ho-hum pens, falling into a T-Ball Jotter was a day brightener.

My grandfather the traveling salesman was a T-Ball Jotter man. He owned a maroon one, and not just for a few days or months. It rode in his inside suit coat pocket for years. That pen was as much a part of his life as his scuffed up Gladstone suitcase, his black Ford with the sample cases on the back seat floor, and his notebook of details (penned in T-Ball Jotter) about his network of customers across southern Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and northern Indiana.

He was widowed and he lived with us when he wasn’t on the road. He sold furniture—sofas and tables and chairs and lamps—to a kind of small town family owned furniture store that disappeared decades ago. The department stores in the county seats killed them. Then the mass merchandisers killed the county seat department stores.

I drive across his old territory once in a while. I wonder which of the empty small town storefronts he walked through and which of the Main Street railroad hotels got his custom. I look up at a second floor window and imagine him at the desk in the room after supper, T-Ball Jotting the day’s hard-won orders onto company forms in the 40-watt light of the gooseneck lamp before bed.

He was widowed and lived with us when he wasn’t on the road. There were nine children in the house. Chaos reigned, especially in the morning. But there my grandfather would sit, at the breakfast room table, wearing a freshly-starched white shirt, tie properly knotted, eating his Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and working the crossword puzzle in the Chicago Tribune with his T-Ball Jotter.

It may have been the Tribune crossword that made a confirmed T-Ball Jotter man of him in the first place. He didn’t always finish the puzzle at breakfast and some nights he took it to bed. He had lived with fountain pens his whole life, and was amazed that ballpoint technology would allow him to work the puzzle flat on his back with his pen bottom up.

So he was a T-Ball Jotter man. And every so often, some occasion would come along—a birthday or first communion or confirmation or Christmas—and allow you to be T-Ball Jotter kid. Sometimes, on special days, great aunt, Flo would come through with a T-Ball Jotter, boxed and gift wrapped. It was not quite as good as a card with five dollars in cash, but it was two cuts above a box of monogrammed handkerchiefs from Kresge’s.

A T-Ball Jotter from Flo was a badge of maturity that you clipped into your shirt pocket and wore to school. You couldn’t use it for schoolwork much. It was ink, and inerasable. But it had a heft, and you felt a little more like an adult, at least until you lost it. You couldn’t look Flo in the eye for a while after that.

A few months after I left home to go to college, my grandfather had a heart attack. He was on the road, of course. He sat up in a motel in Kokomo, Indiana all night and in the morning he drove to Little Company of Mary and checked in.

I don’t know what happened to his pen when he died, but a few years ago, somebody brought one of his notebooks to a family reunion. There it was, in turn-of-the-century Chicago parochial school Palmer method cursive—a T-Ball Jotter glimpse of my grandfather plying his trade.

No doubt one of these days my Rotary T-Ball Jotter and I will part ways. I’ll reach to my shirt pocket, and it’ll be gone.

But maybe, if you’re a writer, God hands you a shoebox full of the pens you lost in life when you die. All of them. All the Papermates and the cheapo pushbutton jobs and the one or two Watermans you fell into and fell out with, and thousands and thousands of nineteen cent Bics.

Maybe God says, “Here you go, kid. Try not to lose them this time.”

If so, I’ll rummage through the box until I find this particular pen—this T-Ball Jotter. The one with the Rotary logo that says, “IN APPRECIATION TO OUR GUEST SPEAKER” on the barrel.

And I’ll put it in my shirt pocket and think, “Well all right.”

Excerpt (with audio) from "Cavalcade

She was a single woman in her sixties, a professor who had done graduate work in Paris back in her twenties. Now she was teaching remedial French to the churlish sons of second and third generation immigrants. I was one of the churls.

There were six of us. We sprawled, lolled, and slouched in the student desks in front of her. We exuded indolence, privilege, and a near-hostile reluctance to apply ourselves. We were big, young, strong and male. Had we been cattle instead of humans, we would have been castrated and turned out to the feedlot by now.

We could smoke in class and a particularly acrid cigarette stink hung in the air, mixing with the smell of whatever they were cooking for supper in the refectory in the basement. The slightest hint of the scent of lilacs lingered near the front of the room, as if the ghost of Blanche DuBois had flounced by fifteen minutes ago. This we attributed to the talc in her pullet-like cleavage.

We were among the first in our families to go to college, but education was lost upon us. We were just sitting there. Killing time, that was all. Waiting for the five o’clock bell to ring in the quadrangle hall. We were one clang away from escape.

There was a certain posture one adopted when killing time in those desks. You leaned forward, left elbow on knee, right elbow atop papers, cigarette smoldering between the fingers of the right hand. You stared at the floor, and jittered your right leg fitfully.

From the professor’s platform, it must have communicated close-mindedness; a sense of futility; an unwillingness to even try to assimilate the material. I am sure we didn’t intend it that way.

Sometimes, at night, when I review the long list of people I have offended over the years, I come to this woman. All these years later, I am sorry to have been so inconsiderate and disrespectful. It was rude.

I emailed this essay to an old friend of mine—another failure at French. We met in her class.

“I am sitting in the front row next to you,” he wrote back. “This shared experience is the start of a great friendship. Good that we can look back now with sympathy and respect for her contribution to it.”

Marriage and the remote control

The fall television season is upon us. Meaningful football is back. The networks are hyping the new TV shows. It’s time to review husband-wife remote control etiquette.

Few electronic devices can be so maritally divisive. If I were a marriage counselor, the first question I’d ask any troubled couple would be, “Who clicks?”

There was a time when guys did all the remote controlling. A man’s home was his castle. The remote was his scepter. Whither he clicked she followed as submissively as Michele Bachmann.

No more. With women’s programming in the ascendancy, the modern husband must not only share his channel selection responsibilities, but also surrender the remote itself at times.

It can be fourth and one. The game can be tied. Your team can be getting ready to kick the winning field goal. If she asks what else is on and reaches for the remote, your job is to pass it to her.

To sit there silently while she surfs the lady channels; to join her in watching competitive cupcake baking; or wardrobe makeovers; or spoiled brides-to-be trying on wedding dresses with their spoiled friends.

Your job is to take the program you get and say nothing. Not so much as a word.

Her remote controlling may well be a dare—a challenge, a test. To speak is to fail. To roll your eyes or heave a sigh is to invite confrontation. Simply crossing your arms or legs can communicate petulance or impatience and turn an evening of connubial viewing into a frosty little pas de deux that could last until bed time—possibly even all the way to breakfast tomorrow.

Better to stretch and yawn and excuse yourself. Leave her watching her program on the high definition flat screen, the remote control at her elbow on the sofa arm.

Go down to the basement pick up the old remote and fire up the old analog TV where, hopefully your team will have won.

Sure the picture’s fuzzier down there. But look at the bright side. You’re making a statement.

You’re in charge of the remote control in the basement. That much at least is coming in loud and clear. I’ll bet she can hear it all the way up there in the living room.

Texting While Biking

I was biking the East River Road in Saint Paul the other day when a young man on the kind of single gear bike the kids call a “fixie” came toward me, riding no-handed, sitting upright, texting as he pedaled. He was past me and gone before I realized what I’d seen, but the image has been with me ever since.

It’s a complex image. I am partly in awe of his bike skills, partly amazed at the times we live in, and partly in fear for his health and well-being.

It isn’t easy to ride a fixie. With only one gear and no brakes, it goes when you pedal and stops when you don’t. It’s a purist’s bicycle, certainly not the kind I’ll ever be able to master.

Fixies are for urban male riders in their twenties—guys out to get somewhere in a hurry and on their own terms. Deep in my Baby Boom heart, I’m in awe of them. If I could shave off three decades and fifty pounds, I’d probably be out there on a fixie too, blowing stop signs, swerving through bike traffic on the Greenway, running from Uptown Minneapolis to any part of the Cities I chose, radiating the scruffy insolence of the young male fixie rider too.

Not to be. My half century bicycling career began aboard a hand-me-down Schwinn and has included a variety of other bikes from newspaper delivery bikes to college era ten speeds, to road bikes, and, now, comfort bikes—cycling’s answer to a maroon four door Buick. But no fixie for me. Not at my age.

And, while I used to be able to ride no-handed, I acquired a deep and abiding love of self long ago. I want to preserve me. I don’t want to see me hurt. I keep both hands on the handlebars—usually on the brakes.

Then there’s the matter of the kid’s texting. If you should not text while driving a car, you for darned sure should not do it while pedaling a bike. Your eyes leave the traffic and the trail. There’s that concentration lapse texting always causes. You’re riding on tires less than a quarter-inch wide. You’re a small pothole away from a trip to the emergency room.

I was dumbstruck by the stupidity, then again, I was in awe of the convergence of youth, dexterity, balance and insouciance. It was la-de-frickin-da, up the East River Road at 18 miles an hour with no brakes—and the kid didn’t even need bifocals to see the little screen on his phone.

From the exquisite vantage point of late middle age, I sense an aura of Darwinism surrounding the young man. Either he evolves \ or he goes extinct.

But, darn. He sure was something to see coming down the bike trail, no hands, no brakes, not a care in the world.

Yikes.

A Piquancy Not Unlike A Lesser Horror

Lesser Horror: Any glimmer, thought, or memory from one’s personal past that for whatever reason causes a small, brief but recurring episode of psychic pain or piquancy.

It was dawn on a summer morning a long time ago. I was riding the once-elegant, now-threadbare Twentieth Century Limited, sitting on the elevated sofa facing the sinks in a day car men’s lounge, en route from Chicago to New York for the first time.

I’d been up all night, reading and smoking, too excited to sleep. Now I was watching the Hudson River Valley emerge from the dark two hours north of the city.

A round, gray businessman pushed his way into the lounge. He wore a rumpled brown suit, walked like his feet hurt, and lugged a big, well-traveled, Gladstone suitcase, which he heaved onto a low luggage rack. He opened it and began his morning toilette.

I was watching a master traveler from another era at work. This guy had freshened up aboard this train before. The suitcase had a divider down the middle and he opened the side that held a week’s worth of clean shirts and his shaving kit.

Taking off his suit coat and hanging it on a hook, he removed his tie and laid it across the open suitcase. He stripped off the shirt in which he’d slept, then he appropriated one of the sinks.

Standing there in his undershirt, he seemed to be shaped like a doughy toy top. His chest spilled down and out over itself, down toward a navel-level equator, which was demarcated by a thin brown belt that secured a vast pair of William Frawley class trousers. The man tapered back in from there, continuing south past the baggy pant knees toward those two small, tired feet in their worn-but-shined shoes.

Chin up, chin down, one side, then the other, he examined his face in the mirror. He grimaced to study his teeth, then used the tips of his fingers to push his jowls and several chins up. For a second, I could see how he must have looked as he freshened up on the train forty years earlier.

He opened the shaving kit and pulled out a safety razor and a package of Gillette Blue Blades. He twisted the razor open, changed out the blade, twisted it shut, and slipped the old blade into the used blade slot on the back of the blades. Producing a tube of shaving cream, squeezing a dab onto the palm of his hand, he spread a thin soapy lather on his cheeks and jowls and went to work.

He had the pudgy dexterity of a fat man and, fingers probing and prodding, he gave himself a good close shave—a shave that would have cost him two dollars at Grand Central. He worked almost absent-mindedly, as if he were planning his day—the clients he’d see, the details he’d tend to, the room service dinner in the moderately priced business hotel.

When he finished shaving, he brushed his teeth with tooth powder, then poofed some talc into his armpits and creases. He took a fresh shirt from the suitcase, flapped it open, put it on, buttoned it up and tucked it in, then re-tied the tie. Reaching into the shaving kit, he pulled out an old brush that fit the palm of his hand and curried his thin gray hair.

He took one more look in the mirror and, satisfied, he put everything back into the shaving kit and put the kit and the dirty shirt back into the Gladstone. He closed the bag, shrugged his suit coat back on, and slipped out of the lounge on those sore little feet.

The Twentieth Century Limited stopped running a few years after that. My fellow traveler probably stopped running about the same time. The moment has been with me all these years.

Almost as old as he was that morning, I can’t walk across a set of railroad tracks without bending down, touching a rail, and thinking of him and generations of day car businessmen freshening up before getting into Grand Central aboard a ghostly Twentieth Century Limited that runs forever.