There Ought To Be A Store

There ought to be a store just for guy holiday shoppers—a place that worked less like a big box mass merchandiser and more like the neighborhood hardware store.

You’d walk in with a pretty good idea what you’re looking for. Some old guy would come padding up and asks if he can help. You’d tell him what you were after and he’d take you over to a pegboard full of whatever-it-is.

If you looked a little confused by all the options, he’d explain the differences—just like he’d explain things if you were talking faucet washers or bolts or brass fittings.

“Now this one here is machined a little better,” he might say

Machined better. Check. A guy holiday shopper could understand and use information like that. It’d help him make logical decisions. Especially if he were shopping for something exotic like jewelry or lingerie.

The old guy could keep you from buying her something that wouldn’t go over so well—like a new hammer or a quieter garbage disposal unit.

A hardware store approach to holiday shopping would resonate with a guy’s logical, linear, task-oriented approach to shopping.

Everything in the male psyche compels a guy to be an object at rest. Especially this time of year in cold, dark, northern regions.

When the unwelcome and uncomfortable obligation to holiday shop disturbs this inclination toward inertia, a guy will do whatever it takes to become an object at rest again just as quickly as possible.

The potential for profit is mind boggling. There would be no sdiscounts. No door buster special prices. Every man in America would gladly pay full retail and then some to just get in, get his shopping done and get back to the sofa and the remote control as quickly as possible. He’d pay even more If the store wasn’t decorated for the season and or playing all that seasonal music.

What do you say, big box retailers? If not a whole store then maybe just a couple guy-oriented aisles. C’mon. It’s the Holidays. Help the shopping impaired American male out.

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.