Damned leaf raking wimps

It’s fall, and roving gangs of young men with gasoline-powered blowers have descended upon the neighborhood to blow the leaves out of some of the neighbor’s yards. They work quickly and efficiently, six-to-ten-to-a-crew. They rev their engines high for ten minutes or so, then they move on, leaving my neighbor’s yard clean, my yard full of leaves—and my heart full of conflicting emotions.

I admire their youth and their industry. For young men with gasoline powered blowers and the will to work, money must seem to be falling from the sky this time of year. If I were young, I’d be out there gunning my engine right along with them.

But peeking through the living room drapes, watching the crew next door work, I can sense past generations of leaf raking Minnesotans looking over my shoulder and shaking their heads in disgust.

Not raking your own yard. Phooey. It’s just plain un-Minnesotan. How were you raised\ for crying out loud?

Raking your yard is your last chance to get in some good, old-fashioned, contemplative yard work before the snow flies—a chance to assess not just the state of your lawn and flower beds, but the state of your mind as well.

You can do a lot of reflecting on the business end of a rake. The scratch of the tines, the cascading sound of the leaves, and the smell of autumn on the air… It will help you get right with the world

It’s humbling-yet-affirming work. It builds character, provided you stick to it.

A friend of mine who lives in the Chippewa National Forest up near Walker tells me he raked himself to a standstill the other day. He just couldn’t shake the idea that the trees had him outnumbered and surrounded. So he gave up. He went in, had a peanut butter sandwich, and took a nap. The leaf piles in his yard will be there until spring.

Not me. Nossir. I’ll show those roving gangs of leaf blowing young men and the neighbors who hire them. I’ll get out there and rake my own yard myself. I’ll stick to it , too. Until every last leaf is gone, It’s good work. It’s Minnesota work. It will do my Minnesota heart and soul good.

New U football coach needs old fashioned gumption

There’s a new breed of football coach stalking the sidelines these days—a 21st Century man. A dispassionate Chief Executive in expensive slacks. A corporatist with systems for offense. Systems for defense. Systems for everything, right down to scheduling Booster Club snack stand duty.

Coach Vince Lombardi built his Packer system around the sweep play. Bud Grant’s system just out-gritted the opposition. This new breed of coach relies on a system of percentages, data, and options so complicated that he carries it around on a plastic coated, color coordinated chart the size of a pancake house menu, and he seems to consult his chart at length on every play.

It’s complicated at the high school level, more so in college, and all but impossible to comprehend in pro ball.

Watching Vikings coach Brad Childress study his chart, my friends and I have taken to turning to one another and shrugging. Fans are screaming, Momentum is surging or ebbing. Players are panting, sweating, striving and grunting. And there stands Coach Childress, studying his chart, the picture of actuarial dispassion.

It’s, the chart, the whole chart, and nothing but the chart with these guys. Even when common sense dictates they do something else.

Up 41-16 against the Gophers two weeks ago, the Wisconsin coach went for a two-point play after a touchdown late in the game. It was rubbing the Gophers nose in the score. It was just plain bad sportsmanship. Asked why he did it, the coach said the chart told him to.

All well and good, as long as “Coach” wins. But when their teams lose, all these modern coaches seem able to do is stand there and look analytical. Evidently, indignation and outrage are not on the chart.

It’s unprofessional. It’s juvenile. But sometimes coaching football calls for a good old fashioned expletive-filled meltdown. The kind oldtime coaches with 2.0 grade point averages and degrees in Geography and bum knees from their own football glory days used to have.

Sadly, no. Not to be. Not from this new breed of coach. He’s playing the percentages, not our traditionally-reviled rivals. Meanwhile, up here in the bleachers, we fans fume and fulminate.

It’s time to dig in and make a stand. C’mon. Put some heart into your system, Coach. Stop crunching numbers. Start crunching the other guys.

Wish I bought that bird a bus ticket

It was October in the Boundary Waters. It had been raining for two days. We were three young guys hunkered down in a leaky tent on Lake Agnes, just south of Lac le Croix.

There is only so much hunkering down you can do with two other guys in a leaky tent. If the monotony doesn’t get you, the soggy sleeping bag will. Sooner or later, for sanity’s sake, you have to get up and get out. So I pulled on a cheap plastic poncho and crawled out to have a look around.

On a path near camp, I came across an old robin. He was hunkered down too, huddling in the roots of a huge old white pine, and I squatted down to say hello.

He was a bedraggled little guy. His face feathers had gone gray, and there was a far-off look in his beady little eyes, as if he were thinking about the warm weather at the other end of the flyway—weather he would never experience again. He was obviously awaiting the inevitable.

I told the other guys about him when I got back to the tent, and we thought maybe we could pack him out with us when we left. Maybe we could find a shoebox and some cotton batting in Ely. We could put him in it, along with some birdseed and water, and give the box to a bus driver headed for Florida. The driver could release him when they got there.

But we forgot him. We stayed too long and had to pull up stakes in a hurry. We were three miles and two portages down the river toward Ely before we remembered.

Every so often, I find myself on one of those paths that wend through the north woods, up a hill, around a curve, over the roots of an old white pine. I look down and see the ghost of that robin looking up with accusatory disgust.

“You left me,” he seems to be saying. “I could have seen Miami one more time.”

The guilt is not insurmountable. But it’s feathered and frumpy and wet with cold October rain. I should do something to put things right.

So if you see an old robin around let me know. I just looked online. Bus fare to Florida is ninety-nine bucks one way.

"Porch Sofa" reviews

The press is starting to review "A Porch Sofa Almanac". Also, # 1 Best Seller in Saint Paul Pioneer Press's local nonfiction last Sunday Thought you might enjoy:

http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/103937433.html

http://knitthink.typepad.com/flyoverland/2010/09/a-porch-sofa-almanac.html

Working in stone.

A friend of mine up north owns a beautiful old stone house on a small lake. It was designed and built, rock upon rock, by an old Finn named Arvid more than sixty years ago, and his work is purely and simply art. The place is holding up well, but there was one defunct doorway my friend wanted to close off—to make part of the stonework—and he wanted to do it in Arvid’s style.

You don’t find master stonemasons just anywhere these days, but after asking around, he finally found the right guy—a man about fifty—a poet who works in granite, not words.

My friend and I stood and watched the man work the other day. He is infinitely patient and deliberate, and he melds his stonework into Arvid’s with respect for the old Finn and an understanding of how he worked.

The two men never met. It’s just one stone man reading the work of another, appreciating the thought and craftsmanship, matching the style right down to the mortar mix.

It’s no small feat. Arvid built perfectly flat walls with square corners. So this isn’t just a matter of piling up rocks and slathering them in concrete. Every stone has to be studied and hand-split. It’s a matter of finding the flat plane embedded in the rock, then using a hammer and cold chisel to reveal it.

Over the years, the man has acquired a reverence for the stone. He says every piece of granite is a billion-year-old living thing.

Each stone has a place in the wall—a spot where it is meant to be. If not in the row he is working on, then further up. Like art, or music—or writing come to think of it—it’s a matter of composition—of harmony—of aesthetics.

There’s a feeling that radiates off someone who has moved beyond mastery—a humility and happiness—a contented wisdom and timelessness that makes you go all philosophical—even if you just stand there and watch. I’ve been feeling that feeling all week long.

What’s a couple hundred years in a wall to a rock with a billion year resume?

Somewhere an old Finlander named Arvid is smiling.

Election Year Lawn Signs

Is it just me or are election year lawn signs contributing to political polarization more than they used to?

The wording hasn’t changed. It’s still just the candidate’s name… and maybe a slogan… or a party affiliation. But after all these years of talk radio, Internet politics, and angry cable TV pundits, we seem to have changed. The signs seem just a little more, “In your face” somehow.

Especially signs for candidates we don’t like.

A simple walk around the block seems to trigger a bout of smoldering, muttering, Minnesota-nice resentment… All those signs for the other guy… Why’d you move into this neighborhood anyhow?.

Darn that myopic so-and-so next door. Sure he lent you his snow shovel last March. Sure the shovel is still in your garage. But if he’s going to vote that way, you just might keep the shovel. You’re going to need it to dig out from under all the problems his candidate is going to aggravate instead of fix.

…If his candidate is elected, that is. Surely a plurality of Minnesotans could not possibly share that point of view.

Which brings us back to lawn signs. Minnesota human nature is such that we tend to use these signs as political barometers.

Never mind the polls. The more lopsided the neighborhood sign count, the more heartened or disheartened we become about our candidate’s chances in November. This time of year, any Democrat living in a Republican neighborhood—or any Republican living in a neighborhood that skews Democratic—is sure to be mired in a lawn sign funk that’s going to last through election day. The first holiday lights will be twinkling before the last neighborhood election year lawn signs disappear.

And it’s that funk—fostered in no small part by those lawn signs—that’s turning our politics so blue-and so blah.

One of these nights after supper, the phone is going to ring. I’ll pick it up and some precinct level volunteer will ask if they can come over and put in a lawn sign.

“Nah,” I’ll say. “We’re going to pass this year.

“See you on Election Day, but no signs. Not this year. Nope. No thanks.”

"Cut it out or I'll cream ya."

There was this day at the beginning of 7th grade when I saw a couple of kids from my class pushing a sixth grader around the playground at lunchtime recess—establishing the pecking order for the year, I guess.

Being one of the larger kids—way too big for even the eight graders to haze—I told them to cut it out or I’d cream them.

They cut it out. The sixth grader slipped away. The bell rang. No one got creamed.

The next day at lunch, I came around a corner of the school and found the sixth grader and a couple of his friends pushing around a wild-eyed little fourth grader.

So I told them to cut it out or I’d cream them. And they did. But the moment has been with me ever since.

What is it that turns people who’ve been hazed into hazers? How can they put experience and conscience aside and perpetuate this stuff? All these years later I still don’t get it.

It’s a testosterone-addled guy thing, I guess… A primitive socializing mechanism maybe… Bullying as ritual… Everyman’s chance to be the alpha dog for a few minutes… And a time-honored tradition too.

First you’re hazed. Then you haze someone yourself. Is this great or what? Pass it on.

Pass it on in the locker room. Pass it on at the frat house. Pass it on on the job or down at the club.

And most days, it seems foolhardy to try to make guys stop it. I mean what’s your problem? You can’t fight human nature. It’s just boys being boys.

My seventh grade classmates probably turned out to be fine men. The shifty little sixth grade hazee-turned-hazer is probably an okay guy too.

I’d like to think, though, that sometimes at night, just before they go to sleep, their consciences tweak them just a little; that they think back and wince about the hazing they took part in.

If, at this stage in life, their consciences don’t bother them, I hope a voice from somewhere deep in their memory speaks up and tells them, “Cut it out or I’ll cream ya.”