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.

Remembering Gen

It wasn’t always easy—she and Earl raised eight kids in a two bedroom, one bath house—but Gen Duffy lived her life with her own unique brand of wisdom and humor. South Dakota Swedish Norwegian Lutheran farm girl wisdom and humor that she transplanted to Minnesota and applied as needed every day for nearly 70 years.

She had the good sense to accept people for who they were and not to try to change them into someone or something they weren’t. And to love them on those terms—for who they were, not for who or what she may have felt they ought to be.

She raised her kids that way—accepting and loving each one for who they were, not trying to make them into someone they were not. Her kids knew she loved and accepted them unconditionally and grew up loving and accepting each other. She more than anyone else made the Duffys the strong, loving family they are today.

She had the wisdom to let her kids be kids. Growing up Duffy, you got to play with fire, run with sharp objects, blow things up and hit them with axes. You got sent outside to play every morning. You came home for lunch, went out again, came home for supper, then out to play until dark.

There were days when the other mothers along Talmadge Way must have thought of the Duffy kids as a roving gang of hell raisers. Gen got her share of phone calls.

When she wasn’t getting phone calls, she was getting other things done. Cooking breakfast and lunch at the A&W she and Earl bought. Doing laundry and ironing for a family of ten. Sewing clothes. Teaching kindergarten, When the neighborhood needed school bus service, she made it happen. And every summer, she and Earl spent their vacation, volunteering for Saint William’s Parish Diner at the State Fair.

She was the first one up in the morning and the last one to bed at night, and yet, somehow, she found the energy to go square dancing with Earl at the Eagles Club on the weekend.

Her brand of love and acceptance shined at Christmas. She used to keep a stash of presents, wrapped and ready for stray people her kids would bring home on Christmas Eve. Nothing flashy or expensive. Just a little something so whoever it was could feel welcome and have something to open.

I got one of those presents my first Duffy Christmas—a pair of thin black cotton socks, from K-Mart, (where she worked for 25 years). Somebody brought a stewardess they’d met on the flight home that year. She got a couple of embroidered dishtowels.

Gen was one of those people the whole community could count on—a joiner, a show-er upper. She hated bowling, but for years there, she bowled on the K-Mart team in some league.

Then there was the Friendly Fridley Seniors Club. She didn’t just go to the meetings. She got involved and made things happen. She had a way of calling members up and extorting baked goods or other commitments for meetings and fundraisers.

Those poor seniors never knew what hit them. It was never, “Would you please…?” Or “could you…?” It was always. “What can I put you down for?” Or, “Do you want to bring coffee cake or rolls?” She never gave them way to say “No”.

She used the same technique to get us to come home and do yard work in the spring and fall.

At Christmas, she sold Friendly Fridley wreaths to a long list of regular customers in neighborhoods up and down the River Road. You haven’t lived until you’ve helped her on wreath delivery day. She rode shotgun and checked off names on a list. You shlepped the wreaths and made the collections. Her wreath bookkeeping was meticulous. Just a couple weeks ago—in the hospital right before Christmas—she was on some family member’s case. They owed her $69 for Friendly Fridley wreaths.

To her, food was an expression of love, and she instilled that love of cooking and food in all her kids. In good times or bad, in sickness and health, food is the Duffy way of telling the world you love it.

So Gen and her kids—and now her grandkids—have a way of describing people and events from family reunions, to birthdays, to weddings, to baptisms, even funerals—in terms of what food was served, how it was prepared, and how it tasted.

If anyone she knew took a trip, Gen would sit at her kitchen table and describe it to you a meal at a time—whether she had been on the trip or not.

She knew who ate what in Italy. How the fish (she would say “feesh”) tasted in Norway. Only last week, the last time I visited her at the hospital, she was talking about how good the meals were on the farm growing up.

She loved cheap processed food as much or more than haute cuisine. She was at death’s door a couple of weeks ago. Her heart was racing. Her blood pressure was out of control. Somebody slipped her some Cheetos and Pepsi, and she more or less instantly took a big turn for the better.

There was that wonderful quirky sense of humor. Her older brother Clifford—a gentle, soft-spoken farmer—used to tell her, “You’re weird.” Then he’d say, “But weird is good.”

I agree. Gen’s brand of weird was especially good when viewed from the perspective of a son in law.

One year for Christmas she gave her sons in law gift wrapped packages of meat. Not prime cuts from a premium butcher shop either. This stuff was labeled “Random Meat” and came from Country Club Market—.Super Valu’s downscale chain Presents being presents, she’d taken a pen and blacked out the price.

I think it was that same year that she gave one of us son-in-laws an old furnace blower motor she’d found under the basement stairs. Nothing says Merry Christmas quite like a couple pounds of random meat and a blower motor.

Earl passed away in 1976, and Gen continued to live in that beautiful little home, she made, surrounded by all the beautiful people she’d made, and all the people they brought home to her. She enjoyed 62 years in that house—a proud, independent woman right up to the end.

In many ways, she did some of her best work in her last years, loving and accepting grandchildren and great grandchildren for who they were, giving them savings bonds at Christmas, painting, gardening, going to church, jockeying slot machines at the casino (her other church), staying richly and wonderfully involved with the world.

So many stories. So much laughter and wisdom and humility and love. There isn’t time for all of it here right now. I understand there’ll be a mic at lunch, and the Duffys want me to encourage everyone who has a Gen story to share it with all of us then.

Finally, the 25th chapter of Matthew, verse 21 reads in part, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant… Come and share your masters’ happiness.”

Please stand and join me in a big, long, round of applause for Ole and Selma’s girl. For the love of Earl’s life. For Pat, Kay, Mike, Jim, Tom, Tim, Mary and John’s mother…

Well done, Gen… Really, incredibly well done.

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,