State Government Can Shut Down, But Family? Never

The state government is about to shut down. The politicians keep using the family budget at the kitchen table image.

In honor of the looming shutdown and in the spirit of the times, I’m going to call the family together tonight—Democrats, Republicans, and Independents—all of us—to make a few cuts and look for ways to increase revenue,

My wife and I will propose we stock fewer treats like popsicles and ice cream bars in the freezer. We’ll float the idea of a gasoline conservation program too. You know—fewer rides to the mall and to friends’ homes. We’ll encourage alternate forms of transportation, including walking and bicycling as well.

The fourteen year old wants to be a lawyer when he grows up. He’ll oppose the reduction in treats, and suggest we conserve gasoline by having him mow the yard less often—without a correlating reduction in allowance, of course.

He may even introduce an expert witness—his buddy from down the block, who is in no small part responsible for our excessive spending on popsicles and ice cream bars in the first place.

His buddy will testify that activities like mowing, and walking or biking to the mall are both unsafe and nerdy.

Our son will then close by pointing out that mowing, walking and biking burn calories, leading to even higher rates of popsicle and ice cream bar consumption.

We will roll our eyes, sigh, and turn to the older kids—the ones who drive already—and suggest they pay for their own gasoline. They will whine and cry as if we were suggesting they pay 90 percent capitol gains tax. Especially our son the Ron Paul Libertarian

And so it will go, back and forth, cut spending, raise revenues. Right there at the kitchen table. At some point, someone—my guess is the fourteen-year-old’s buddy—will get up, go to the freezer and return with popsicles and ice cream bars for everyone—popsicles and ice cream bars he didn’t pay for.

Talks will break off around ten o’clock. No deal will be struck and we’ll all go to bed to sleep secure in the knowledge that unlike Minnesota, the family can not and will not simply shut down.

Graduation Open House

Sometime late this afternoon, my wife and I will get in the car and drive over to a high school graduation open house for the daughter of a couple of old friends of ours.

The house itself won’t be open. The party will be in the back yard. We’ll walk up the driveway, through the garage they cleaned specially for the occasion, and out the back door to the patio.

And there they will be—our old friend’s people—talking pleasantly, munching open house food, renewing the once-removed friendships we’ve all established with one another at weddings and birthdays, anniversaries, Super Bowl parties, and other occasions like this one over the years.

There ought to be a name for the relationships we have with our old friends’ other old friends—with their neighbors, and in-laws and aging high school pals and college roommates. With all the nice-enough people living their lives parallel to ours—people in the middle distance we’ve come to kind of know.

What should we call them? Step-friends? Friends once removed? Friends in-law?

This afternoon on the patio, we’ll all catch up with one another. We’ll hear kid news (good and bad)—and talk home improvement projects, aging parents, yoga classes, bike trails, and Lord-only-knows what else.

This is the rich, loamy soil in which life in Minnesota is rooted. We’ve built a state-wide self help group and support network out of relationships like these. There may be six degrees of separation elsewhere, but around here, there’s only this network of old friend’s old friends. And even an anti-social old guy like me will come out of his shell and mingle for a while.

The graduate will do her best to mingle too. Then her own friends will show up and the party will split into two factions—young and old.

At some point, my wife and I will slip out and head home, feeling comfortably reassured. Life will be proceeding apace for these two old friend’s and their group of old friends.

And this fall, when the graduate goes off to school, she will no doubt meet people who will become her own old friends and populate a lifetime of events like this for her—whether she cleans up the garage or not.

Old Barns

Maybe it’s spring, or maybe I’ve turned another one of those middle-aged corners, but I’ve been feeling a little blue about Minnesota’s old dairy barns lately. They seem to be on the way out, and it’s a shame.

You know the kind I’m talking about: Big old time barns with room for the whole herd downstairs and room for a winter’s worth of hay up above.

I’ll be out in the country, driving somewhere, and I’ll come over a rise, and there it will be—another swaybacked eighty-plus year old behemoth. Rotting. Paint peeling. Hay mow doors hanging on broken hinges. The whole structure ten years beyond repair and falling in on itself. And a little piece of my heart will fall in on itself too.

There was a time when the landscape was dotted with barns like these. And silos… And maybe a crossroads church or a two room schoolhouse or a small town water tower on the horizon. Now this.

Five generations of some family farmed out of that barn. It was morning chores, evening chores, with a full day’s work in between, day after day, year after year, decade after decade.

Lord-only-knows how many generations of cows it housed, but twenty-plus generations of barn cats came and went. Not house cats. Barn cats. Scuffed up, mean, half-wild things. Cats that scared the family dog. They kept the local rodent population under control, though—in exchange for a pan of fresh-from-the-cow milk now and then.

I can’t drive by an old barn without thinking of all the farm reports and milking time polka music that came over the five tube AM radio that sat on the milk room window sill—music and news from the small town radio station ten miles off. It was always the same station. Day after day, year after year, decade after decade, the radio dial never changed.

The old barns are disappearing now. It’s the end of an era, I suppose—just another in a long list of inevitable changes. Going the way of our old sports stadiums. It’s cheaper to build new than it is to maintain them.

I’m going to miss them.

It’s spring, though. The section roads are less icy and more drivable. Think I’ll grab a handful of polka CDs and head out to say good bye one more time.

Downward Facing Dude

Yoga is all the rage in Minnesota these days. We’ve got store front and strip mall studios and health club classes running 18 hours a day. Target is selling yoga clothes, and mats, and towels. Yoga water bottles… Yoga tote bags. Yoga everything. People just can’t get enough yoga.

Except middle aged Minnesota males. Something owly and obstinate deep in their “guy psyche” just can’t let them get with the program.

Probably just as well. Who wants to see a mirrored room full of sweaty guys doing the child pose, or the lotus, or the warrior, or any of those other poses? Not even guys themselves.

It’s a perverse question. Chicken-or-egg? Which came first? All those inflexible bodies or all those inflexible minds?

The guy in me wants to say that years of snow shoveling, yard work, old athletic injuries and other tweaks and kinks have come home to roost and make yoga impossible for us.

I suspect, though, that that rigid “guy” mindset keeps middle aged men from embracing yoga.

What guys need are yoga poses they can relate to as husbands, fathers, and members of the community—as… well… guys.

Poses they can achieve in baggy old sweat pants. Poses that take tight tendons, well-marbled meat, and sedentary lifestyles into consideration.

How about a pose called, “Searching for the Remote,” where a guy gets down on his knees somewhat gingerly, puts his forearms flat on the floor, and turns his head to the side as if peering under the sofa?

Or, “Balky Lawnmower,” where he places his feet wide apart and stretches, one fist at hip level in front of him as if holding the lawnmower handle, the other flying far out behind, like he’d just pulled the rope and the mower hadn’t started.

Maybe we could replace yoga’s iconic “Downward Facing Dog” pose with something called, “Downward Facing Dude.”

Yoga for guys. It’s a big idea. An important idea. An idea that could improve life for thousands of men across the state.

I’m going to meditate on it as I do my guy yoga today—that is if I do guy yoga today.

I seem to be stuck in a non-yoga pose called, “reclining chair.”

Everything's Bigger in New York. Even Snowstorms.

Is it just me? Or do other Minnesotans think the national media gets a little overwrought whenever the East Coast or the South catches a little winter weather?

Sure they’ll pay lip service to torrential rains on the West Coast or a blizzard blowing across the Great Plains. They might even show a waiting area full of stranded travelers at the airport. Or a couple of jackknifed semis out on the Interstate.

But you can tell down deep, they don’t care. Their hearts aren’t in it. They’re just phoning the coverage in.

Let it snow nine or ten inches in New York or Washington, though. Watch how they cover that.

Reporters in color coordinated winter survival gear brave the elements to file breathless remotes from desolate and devastated locations like Central Park South or the National Mall. There’s panic in their voices. This is it. The end of civilization as we know it.

Atlanta storm coverage is even worse. But at least when it snows in Atlanta you’re treated to those amusing shots of southerners trying to drive in snow—or push cars out of those towering three inch drifts without having any idea about how to push cars.

Chicago, on the other hand, seems to be more Midwestern—like us. When a big storm blows in, they shrug it off and start digging out. That's Lake Shore Drive in the photo above. Did you hear Chicago complain?

It’s those darned East Coast media types. It can take six days for a storm to cross the continent. The storm can make life miserable from the Rockies to somewhere east of Pittsburgh. The East Coast types won’t pay any attention.

Only when a big storm longs to be a part of it, New York, New York, then and only then will they start spreading the word.

It will be as if the storm appeared out of nowhere. Right over their heads—as if it singled them out for the kind of punishment no one else in the world has ever received.

So I’d like to offer the following message to East Coast media types on behalf of Midwesterners everywhere—people who know from real snow and 80 below wind chills.

Suck it up, Buttercup. Quit your whining and deal with it. We did. And get ready. The way this winter is going, any day now, we’ll have to deal with it all over again.

My Mother, the Universe, and a ukulele

My mother is dying. A day at a time, an episode at a time, she is shutting her systems down. Withdrawing. Preoccupying herself with the Big Riddle.

Those of her children who live close by oversee the details of her care. Nursing home. Hospice. Oxygen levels. The inexorable advance of the pneumonia. The menu for meals she will no longer eat. Her children on the scene are a tenuous tether to a world where she no longer wants to be. Those of us who live in other places hover and worry at a distance via cell phones, text messages and email.

She is Irish, and she was raised Roman Catholic, but she has become vehemently agnostic these past twenty years. She despises the rites, the priests and the church hierarchy.

“Let those pampered old men bear the children,” she has taken to saying. “Let’s see how fast their outlook changes then.”

She loathes the Church’s salvation story itself.

“It’s just a story,” the woman who schooled me in the Baltimore Catechism rants. “Something they made up to get through the dark months.”

Her blood pressure is low these days. My guess is that changing the topic to religion would fix that, but it’s probably best we don’t. The word is out among family and visitors. It’s tick-a-lock, regarding religion. Even the most devout visitors—people who usually tell sick people they are praying for them—drop their eyes and mumble they’ll keep her in their thoughts.

No matter how agnostic she is, that numinous aura that always shows up at the end of a life is beginning to hang in the air and color everything. Believers might say there are angels hovering around. This would cheese her off immensely, were she to hear it.

“No there are not,” she would respond if she heard them say it. “The damned angels are just part of the story too. The one made up by old men and imposed—no inflicted—on women…”

We’d be off to the races all over again.

Darn that nagging, numinous whatever-it-is. Spare her the faintest whiff of holiness, thank you very much. If the product were available, she would find the remote control that adjusts her hospital bed, elevate herself, and spray an aerosol can of, “Aura-B-Gone” into the air around her.

On the other hand, I seem to be especially aware of whatever-it-is that’s haloing everything these days. My mother is dying and the whole world is shimmering. I refuse to try to shoehorn it into any one religious tradition. Life is too big, too complex, and too short to waste time trying to make one set of beliefs fit all.

Instead, I rely on an abiding sense of awe for the Universe that created this world and my mother, and plunked her down in the middle of a big Irish family on the South Side of Chicago where, a few decades later, she gave birth to me.

Everything shimmers these days. Even the ukulele my children gave me for Christmas. It is a simple and happy little instrument. It makes me feel simple and happy to play it—even badly—even though my mother is dying.

As I play it, the ukulele provides a rhythmic, tonal rubric over which I would drape a melody, should I ever stumble across one. It establishes a basic, plinking, plunking, optimistic little framework for life, and I have been working to find simple songs for it.

The Internet is full of ukulele sites. The sites are full of songs I first heard on Sundays at our house after we moved out of the city, up into the suburbs. My grandmother would talk my grandfather into making the drive to spend the afternoon, and, often, other great aunts, great uncles and family friends would make the trek too.

They would arrive fresh from mass in their South Side parishes, bearing Sealtest Ice Cream Cake Rolls they’d bought at the local drugstore (a South Side cake roll would have melted on the way out). Back then, a cake roll seemed numinous in and of itself. There would be dinner and talk, then Sealtest Ice Cream Cake Roll, and then someone would suggest my grandmother play something on the piano.

She was a contemporary of Irving Berlin, and, like Berlin, her roots were in ragtime. She would play Maple Leaf Rag, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, and a few other rags. Eventually, she would wander off, down four or five decades of Tin Pan Alley tunes. Sometimes one of her sisters or friends would uncase an accordion and take up the cause. Always, the others would gather around the piano and join in the singing.

In rummaging ukulele sites, I have found all those songs again. They shimmer with the spirits of the people gathered around the piano. They shimmer with the Universe too.

“We were rough and ready guys but oh how we could harmonize…”
go the words to an old song called ‘Heart Of My Heart.’ It was a favorite with the ice cream cake roll crowd, a song about singing a favorite old song.

Rough and ready? No. Good and gentle would be more apt. But oh, how they could harmonize. They’re harmonizing with the Universe still.

I stood at their gravesides. I watched a generation of priests sprinkle aspergillums of holy water on their caskets and pray for perpetual light to shine on them. If she were on top of her game, my mother the agnostic would tell those priests to stick their perpetual light where the sun doesn’t shine. She loathes anything maudlin. She despises the euphemisms and platitudes in which we wrap the cold hard fact of death.

I think, though, that she would appreciate—and maybe even come to embrace—the infinitely larger harmony that seems to resonate everywhere in the Universe—that seems to be the essence of the Universe itself.

The ukulele chord progression for the last few bars of “Heart Of My Heart,” is simple: E7, A7, D7, G. The words go, “I know a tear would glisten if once more I could listen to the gang that sang ‘Heart Of My Heart’.” Think I’ll go buy an ice cream cake roll, bring it home, have a big slice, and go to work on my harmonies.

Flying squirrels and the people who attract them

A friend of mine who lives on a small lake up north reports flying squirrels have discovered the bird feeder outside his living room windows. The squirrels are nocturnal, and I can imagine them gliding in—a squad of rodent paratroopers out there in the dark—their drop zone that pool of yellow light from the windows.

We found an old magazine article full of flying squirrel lore and little known facts about them the last time they showed up. But we’ve lost it now, and anything I told you about flying squirrels would be hearsay at best.

I have spent years observing the guy who owns the feeder, though. I consider myself an authority on the kind of human behavior it takes to attract flying squirrels.

You need what this guy calls, high appreciation—to be able to observe and take pleasure in nature’s small details. The wind in a white pine this time of year, for example. Or the way a coyote sneaks across the ice on the lake in the distance.

Content yourself with the small things and you will almost certainly acquire a contemplative frame of mind. With any luck, you will find yourself living in a stand of pine, ash, oak, maple, and ironwood a few miles outside of town.

And if you tend your feeders diligently, you may discover you have flying squirrels for neighbors—and that the neighbors don’t mind dropping in for a late evening snack, bringing an entirely new set of stuff to observe and appreciate.

High appreciation and simple observation can generate new questions too. Ever since the flying squirrels showed up, we’ve been going back and forth, wondering what a group of flying squirrels ought to be called. Is it a, squadron? A circus? Lately, I’ve been calling it an, “O’Hare of flying squirrels.”

We live in complex, noisy times. Often, Life seems to drive back and forth outside the house with the subwoofers thumping all night.

And it’s when Life is at its fractious, most distracting worst that you come to appreciate little things the most. Like a fire ticking and flickering in a north woods wood burner and flying squirrels gliding down to feed in the snow.