Beer as "vitally essential"

While the U.S. Supreme Court pretends to deliberate on whether or not to deny health care coverage to some 40 million Americans (we all know how this is going to turn out, don’t we?), a Lithuanian court has ruled that beer is “vitally essential” to that nation’s interests, blocking a strike of workers at a Carlsberg brewery, declaring the making and selling of beer to be an “essential service.” The ruling puts beer in the same class as medical supplies and drinking water. One has to wonder if it wouldn’t have been better for the Obama administration to bring in the Lithuanian lawyers to argue the case for health care insurance being “vitally essential” to our nation’s interests. Or at least they might have been able to raise beer to that stature for our country.

Skipping School

I wonder whatever happened to Wayne Wagner, class of ’67, Wichita High School Southeast. I never knew or even met him, but for one class period in the fall of 1965 I stole his identity. At the time, I was attending East High School, though most all of my friends, including my girlfriend, Terry, at the time, were at Southeast. So I spent a good deal of that first semester of my junior year skipping school – 37 times until finally caught. (My senior year I was granted transfer to Southeast, East wanting to be rid of me and Southeast not knowing of me.) The first time I skipped that fall was during the first week of classes. I spent the morning listening to music (Rolling Stones as I recall) at a friend’s house; she had a boyfriend also at Southeast, and we had thought it would be fun to go there and meet up for lunch with our respective girl/boy-friends. So we did. That early in the semester it was easy to slip into the school and blend in with the student body. I met up with Terry and we went through the lunch line without problem. Her class after lunch was art and she suggested that I join her. The art teacher called roll and I was hoping he wouldn’t notice me in his class which was meeting for only the second time, but when he got to Wayne Wagner and no one responded – Wayne was absent – he made an assumption that I – who apparently bore some resemblance to Wayne, who he had only seen once – was Wayne. I did not correct his error.

The lesson that day was in perspective. We all collected drawing pads and charcoal and went out into the hall to sit and draw the line of lockers disappearing into the vanishing point. I was given particular encouragement by the teacher, who apparently saw promise in my rendering. When I finished, I signed the drawing “Wayne Wagner” and handed it in. I never heard what happened the next day when Wayne presumably was back in class and had his hallway perspective drawing returned to him. I like to think that he got an A.

First Day of Spring

On the first official day of Spring, as I worked this afternoon in the back yard (78°), indications that this past winter was one of the mildest of all time:

1. Sage is probably the heartiest of our perennial herbs. I’m able to use it regularly, fresh, in the Thanksgiving cornbread-sausage stuffing. But it’s usually died off by mid-December under the snow and freezes. This year it survived the whole winter and the shrub is still surviving, if not full, vibrant. I might have to make a Saltimbocca for dinner this week.

2. At the beginning of December we got our first snow, about one inch. It didn’t require the use of our snow blower but I thought it best to get some gas and try to start it in preparation for the snow I thought must be to come. But it wouldn’t start and so I took it in for a tune-up which turned into a two-month hassle of resolving a recall of the injection system. Fortunately, I didn’t need the blower for those two months, or the month since. This afternoon I started it (successfully) for the first time in order to run out the gas tank. It took two hours for the still-full tank to run dry.

3. We had four gold fish in our above-ground pond last year. In November I tried to get them into an indoor tank to winter-over but was only able to net two. I assumed the other two had either been dinner for a raccoon or cat (as has happened in the past) or I would find their floating carcasses when the ice went out this spring (as has happened in the past). The small pond typically freezes through over winter. But as I was emptying and cleaning out the pond this afternoon I saw both of them desperately swimming in the slowly diminishing water. I netted and reunited them with their buddies from last year in the indoor tank. How they survived under the ice without oxygen or food I don’t know. A few weeks from now they’ll all four go back into the pond. Late next fall, when I try again to bring them indoors, they’ll have forgotten altogether their being brought in or not brought in this winter. But they’re gold fish, so they’ve probably already forgotten.

Movies Today

As I watch all the previews for movies on TV these days, I’m beginning to think I may not be able to see another movie ever again. Or at least not another movie in the theater. A couple of years ago I vowed not to see any movie that featured explosions in its advertising. That increasingly became a lot of movies. Recently I’ve added CGI monsters or violent car crashes or fantasy weirdness in general. I just want to watch movies about real people in real places dealing with real situations, something I might be able to relate to. I have no use for cartoons writ large on the movie screen. But that is apparently what we’re being given and I understand I’m not in the demographic for what passes for entertainment these days. The only comfort I take away is that I’m saving some amount of money in my retirement by not plopping down $10 for that crap. -- Hey! You kids get off my lawn!

First Fish

Catching a fish (and a relatively nice fish) on the first trip of the season, especially on a new stretch of water, comes as a surprise. The second fish (another nice one), a few minutes later, is another surprise. The third is almost becoming a habit. Later, further downstream on more familiar water, water that is more flaccid, not cut by spring flooding, less promising than last year, I find a small run up against a bank, flick my fly in the riffle at the head of the run, and a second later I have a 14” brown on (large for this stream), both of us unsure (I imagine it’s the first time this year this fish has been caught), it runs downstream, then across, I force it on its side and slide it into my net, but it flips out and makes another run down and across, but I get it on its side again and into the net, release the fly, a strong and beautiful fish. The first trip of the year is always the best. The streams are easily accessible, last year’s weeds and grasses matted down. There hasn’t been any pressure. The fish are gullible. A month from now I won’t be the only fisher on the stream, the vegetation will be a head-high wall blocking access to the stream, and the fish – those not already caught and taken – will be wary. This first trip sets up a promise that can’t help but be spoiled as the season goes on. But after years and years I’ve learned to take what I can get when I can get it. And keep trying to overcome the failure I know is certain to come. Maybe it’s fishing that’s made me the cynic I am.

Heroes

Ever since 9/11 our country has bestowed the honorific of “hero” on anyone who wears a uniform – soldier, firefighter, police – only for putting on a uniform. I hope that now that one of these “heroes” has committed an atrocity in Afghanistan – killing 16 civilians, including 9 children and 4 women, injuring 5, and burning some of the bodies – we can back off designating anyone who volunteers to do what most of us don’t want to do (usually because they don’t have any other option) as a “hero” and reserve that term once again for those who go over and beyond their assigned duties to save the lives of others, often at risk to their own lives. We really shouldn’t have heroes who commit atrocities.

Spring Break

Today’s the first day of Spring Break. I was reminded of this this morning when I went to post next week’s schedules in my two online classes and found there were no schedules to post because we have next week off. Spring Break has no meaning for me anymore. When I was teaching full-time and on campus I would always use the week to get away, for a fishing trip in Arkansas, a visit to Berlin and Prague, or just a long weekend in Chicago or New York or San Francisco. “Break” meant a physical break, an escape, getting away. But now that I’m retired (or semi-retired to the internet) there’s nothing to get away from. Or rather, I can now get away whenever I want. We went to Chicago last month. Next month we’re going to Italy. We are going to Chicago next weekend, though not because it’s Spring Break for me but because it’s Spring Break for my sister, who still teaches full-time and is coming to Chicago for her get-away this year.

Odd perhaps, but for me Spring Break wasn’t much of a vacation for me as a student. I never went to – or particularly wanted to go to (or for that matter could ever afford to go to) –Padre Island, South Beach, or Cancun. As an undergraduate, I would usually just drive home for the week, perhaps catching up on some backed-up schoolwork, more likely just lounging around watching TV or going to movie matinees. As a graduate student, the week was a hard study week, spent mostly in the library (this was before computers and the internet), catching up on reading, preparing for papers and tests that were to come.

It was only when I became faculty that I could afford – both financially and demands of work – to get away for Spring Break. And for all of the 22 years that I taught full-time, I can’t recall one when I didn’t use the time to travel, even if only for a long weekend a day’s drive away. But that was then. I don’t need the break now. Indeed, it comes – as it did today – as something of a surprise. And I plan to spend the week just going about my days as I’ve been going about my days the past two years – reading, walking, writing. Maybe I can get into the garden. Or out on a trout stream. Or maybe take a bike ride. But I don’t need an official break to do any of those things most any week. In that sense, every week is Spring Break for me now.

The (Third) First Sign of Spring

I’m watching the first televised game of the Chicago Cubs on WGN (a preseason game with the White Sox) as is my custom. Also as is my custom I’m drinking beer and eating a bag of salted-in-the-shell peanuts. I’ll drink some more beer and eat another bag of peanuts in three weeks on opening day of the regular season. I’m not sure when or how this custom began, but it’s been going on for at least a dozen years. When I was teaching full-time I generally was finished in class by early afternoon, so was able to come home and watch the games. I recall at least on one occasion letting my class go half an hour early so I could make the start of a first game telecast.

I’m not necessarily a Cubs fan, not necessarily a fan of any particular club. My baseball allegiances have always been determined by proximity. When I was in my early teens, I was a fan of the Milwaukee Braves because the Wichita Braves were a minor league franchise of the Milwaukee team, and my little team was also the Braves and our uniforms were facsimiles of the major and minor league clubs’ uniforms. So I was a Braves fan. There was only one baseball game on TV each week (The Game of the Week) and it was only occasionally a Braves game, so most of my following was done via the box scores in the newspaper. When I was in college I was only 30 miles from Kansas City, we got Kansas City TV and radio stations, so I was able to follow the Royals, and for five or six years in the ‘70s became a Royals fan. For one season I lived in Minneapolis, just 10 minutes from the old Twins’ park in Bloomington, so for that year I was a Twins fan. When I got to Iowa City in the late ‘70s I could get all of the Cubs games on WGN TV or radio (back when Harry Caray was in his prime drunkenness) and so became a Cubs fan. But again, not a fan in the usual sense of the term, more of a casual fan, a proximate fan, a tele-fan. A fan that needs some reason to bide away an afternoon drinking beer and eating a bag of peanuts.

The (Second) First Sign of Spring

The temperature rose above 60° today (near 70° finally) and I brought my moccasins out of the closet where they had been sequestered since last October. For most of the spring, summer, and fall I wear moccasins (sans socks) most days. I’ve done so off and on – mostly on – for at least 50 of my 64 years. I don’t know how this habit began. I have pictures of me as an Indian Guide, age about 12, wearing moccasins. There are also pictures of me at about age 15 (embarrassing pictures of me in a baseball uniform, striking poses mimicking early ‘60s baseball cards) wearing moccasins. There was a professor of theater at Wichita State (Wichita University back then) when I first went to college who wore moccasins and whose daughter was the girlfriend of a friend of mine and perhaps he was an influence. Maybe in the late ‘60s and ‘70s the moccasins fit into my faux-hippie and faux-scholar personas. Certainly they fit neatly into my move into the outdoors, camping and fishing, in the ‘80s and ‘90s. But I guess what probably works throughout my moccasin days (or years) is that they’re inexpensive and they’re comfortable, simple. And year after year, pulled from the back of the closet, they’re a welcome harbinger of spring.

Willy Loman and Me

I may have to drop Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman from my Drama class. I’ve included it every semester for the past 15 years, and it generally works well in helping students learn about character, motivation, empathy, and plot, not to mention tragedy. But three years ago, a problem emerged that I hadn’t anticipated: I turned 60. Which, as one of my students pointed out in discussion (not in connection to me), is the age of Willy “I’m tired to the death” Loman in the play. (Coincidentally, the original Broadway production opened on February 10, 1949, three days before I was born.) Making it worse, each semester, as Willy stays forever 60, I grow older year by year. And my students continue to describe Willy in their discussions and papers (with no conscious reminder to me) that he’s “an old man,” or “a very old man,” or “a very old, sad, demented man.” I have to check myself from correcting their misperceptions (“He’s only been horribly overworked, burnt out” or “60 is the new 50”). And I hesitate anymore to read my students’ evaluations of the class (“I liked the readings, but the teacher is a very old, sad, demented man”). I have, though, made sure to emphasize in our discussion of the play the one positive thing that Charley finds to say about Willy in the Requiem: “He was a happy man with a batch of cement.”