Stories, Travel

Faux Car, Faux Driver

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Today’s post is from Steve.

I’m not sure how it happened, but when I was a kid in central Iowa I fell in love with sports cars. That was in the late 1950s. Where I lived there were almost no sports cars, although I had seen a few Triumph TR3s, a Jaguar or two and maybe a few MGs. Sports cars were exotic and rare in that place and time. Most folks considered them impractical and ostentatious.

My dad knew a man in Ames who owned a sports car, a gleaming black Jaguar XK 120. Dad said this car was kept in a locked garage, and nobody in town (even this man’s neighbors) knew it was there. The owner was one of our town bankers. He only drove his Jaguar late at night when the streets were so dark nobody would spot him in it. I’ve always been amused and saddened by the image of a man infatuated with a flashy car that he could only enjoy in the privacy of total darkness.

Of course, I never got to drive a sports car. Other kids my age made sneak purchases of Playboy magazines that they studied with great longing. I bought copies of Road and Track and engaged in fantasies of zooming through the British countryside in a swoopy red Italian roadster. Our family car at the time—a ponderous Ford station wagon with tail fins–was as far from a sports car as any vehicle could be.

In 1960 my family moved to Minnesota so my dad could start his own stuffed toy animal factory. He joined three businessmen there who invested in his factory. That was the year I went off to college, but I worked summers in my dad’s factory as a shipping clerk.

One day I was summoned to the office. One of my dad’s partners, a man named John, asked me to drive his car home. The car was a Karmann Ghia. My heart jumped. This was a <i>sports car!</i> John wanted me to drive his sports car!

This car had an odd history. It had recently been stolen from a car dealer’s lot where John had left it to be serviced. The stolen vehicle was then used as the getaway car in a bank robbery. While the Karmann Ghia looked sexy, it was just a Volkswagen dressed up in a sexy Italian body. With a 40-horsepower motor, this car couldn’t outrun the slowest cop car on the planet. It was tiny, so if the thieves scored several bags of money there would not be room for them in their getaway car. And you sure have to wonder about the intelligence of a bank robber whose plan was to flee the scene of the crime in a bright orange (and badly underpowered) sports car.

That didn’t bother me. I was just thrilled to drive my first sports car!

I was so pumped up that I didn’t want the ride to end. In Wayzata I took a detour and stopped the Karmann Ghia on a little side road that went to the lake. I switched off the engine and sat there grinning with my wheels almost touching the water. Decades later the rock star known as Prince would tease a girlfriend by telling her she had to cleanse herself in the pure waters of Lake Minnetonka. Not me. I just wanted to enjoy the moment.

Then I started my orange car up and went to back out so I could deliver it to John’s home. Only I couldn’t get the Karmann Ghia in reverse. The gear shift offered no hints about how it could be put in reverse. I desperately sawed the shift shaft through the four forward gears, but reverse was just not there! My wheels were almost in the lake. I couldn’t go forward and I couldn’t go backward. I was stuck.

And I was humiliated. If my memory is good, I began bawling with shame as I sat there. The orange Karmann Ghia was just a faux sports car, a 40-horse Volkswagen in wolf’s clothing. I was just a shipping clerk from Iowa, a faux sports car driver who couldn’t even put this car in reverse. Faux car; faux driver. All my fantasies rushed back to mock me.

As some baboons know, it is good to be a reader. I had a tickle of memory that related to the gear shift on Volkswagens. I thrust the shift shaft downward as if to shove it through the floor. It moved down an inch or two, slid left and then snicked into reverse!

I wiped away my tears, backed away from the lake and drove on to John’s home.

Have you ever suffered humiliation when your dreams crashed against reality?

 

Fifty Words, Food

As the Crow… Buys

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Went to Trader Joes to pick up a few things from their flyer.

I’m sure the pasta tastes just like, well, pasta – but the colors were so pretty that I bought TWO!  I felt like a crow attracted to a shiny object.

What bird would you be?

Family, Stories

If the Walls Could Talk

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Today’s post comes to us from Crystal Bay.

My youngest child, Steve, is a 45 year- old single father now. Two years ago, his then wife broke his heart by divorcing him.  They’d just finished building their “forever home” which he’d been designing for years. My thoughts about why this 13-year relationship deteriorated to the point of no return are that he put in 80-hour weeks working, partly on his four businesses and partly on building this masterpiece of a home. He’d come home and just collapse in exhaustion night after night.  It may also have been compromised because of her career as one of Minnesota’s finest actresses in small theater and the Guthrie. Acting was always her greatest passion in life. She wasn’t even sure that she’d want to add motherhood to this lifestyle. At 41, she agreed to have a baby, and another one at 44.

The thing about relationships is that they, too, need to be tended to and worked on. He more or less, in his zeal to create the perfect home for his family, put too much energy and time into it and too little into their relationship. Any relationship can slowly die through neglect, and by the time she finally admitted her unhappiness, it turned out to be too late.

The first year without her was devastating for Steve. At the time, they had a brand new baby girl and a 3-year old son.  He’d yearned to be a daddy for years, and finally was.  The custody arrangement is 50/50, every other week end and 2-3 nights a week.  He loves Charlie and Leo so much that to this day, he weeps at night when they’re not with him.  I personally have never seen a more loving, involved, and devoted father in my life.

He designed this home around making it an adventure for his kids. Wall panels, when pushed, open up to tunnels and secret spaces behind the walls.  Under both staircases, there are hideaways, some with little ladders going up to the second floor with more hidden spaces.  A large book shelf is a hidden door to a kid-sized space, too.

In the second-floor master bedroom, he had a door installed just for a rope swing bridge out to an elaborate tree house. In the backyard, he installed a 100-foot zip line.  His large sun porch has a high brick fireplace.  On the second floor, behind the back side of the fireplace, he built four small bunk beds for sleepovers.  These, too, can only be accessed through hidden doors.

The most special project of all, however, is a 25-foot long spiral slide which goes from the first level down to the lower level. He even put LED lights in it so that the darkness wouldn’t scare the kids.  They come shooting out the bottom of it at fairly high speed.  Many an adult has accepted a dare to try this slide, but usually after having a few drinks first!  It really is scary.

Steve, having only been in this home for a few weeks before he and his wife began living apart, wanted badly to sell it. There were no positive family memories in the new walls and it was far too large for just one guy.  For months, just being in it alone created heartbreak.  He even spent a few months mostly living in a close friend’s cramped apartment to avoid the painful feelings of being in the family dream home he’d built.  None of us wanted him to sell.

Over time, friends and family began to fill the walls with posit

ive, joyful energy. He’s hosted every family gathering in almost two years, and we’ve established a tradition of everyone being involved in making meals together. The kitchen’s so large that a dozen of us can have plenty of room to prepare our own part of the meal.  Even the little kids contribute by mixing things or cutting up veggies. Last fall, after being asked by a neighbor if he’d have the annual neighborhood party, the home was filled with 70 people and had room to spare.  Inch by inch, month by month, this is truly becoming Steve’s home.  When asked if he still plans to sell it, he always says,” I don’t know – we’ll see”.  My hopes that he’ll stay increase with every new project he does for his little ones.  He just got a black lab p

uppy, so that’s also encouraging.  No one more deserves to occupy this grand home than the man who built it.

Note: The Strib was doing a feature about homes which included fun spaces for kids and asked if they could take some photos and do an interview for their Home section. We were all kind of surprised that his creations took up the entire front and back pages. His now 6-year old Leo is standing in the slide’s opening and Steve’s the one at the bottom of it. Another photo captures the clan in the potluck line after preparing our meal together.

How have the walls of your home helped you through life?

Family, Food, Uncategorized

Flour Power

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Husband and I were delighted to find a bag of Swany White flour recently in a natural food store in Fargo. The store owner told us that Nicole, of Nicole’s Fine Pastry in downtown Fargo, won’t use anything but Swany White. Nicole makes great pastries. He also said that Nicole and the mill owner were cousins.  (I love the small town angle in these conversations.) I hadn’t seen any Swany White since the Freeport, MN mill burned down a few years ago.  We had heard rumors that the mill was operating again. We snapped up a 25 lb bag, and hauled it home. I baked French bread with it this past weekend. I used a combination of Swany, Artisan flour, and Bread flour.  We froze all the loaves as we had too much bread already to start another loaf, so I can’t say if the flour quality is the same. It doesn’t have the same bran flecks the original flour had. It is just as finely ground though, like silk.

I think we have more kinds of flour than most people. In addition to the Swany White, we have King Arthur all-purpose white flour and King Arthur bread flour. We have King Arthur artisan flour, French flour, whole wheat flour, and white whole wheat flour.  We also have a bag of White Lily flour for Southern-style biscuits and white wheat berries for a rustic Italian bread we like to make.

Husband is a real fan of baking rye bread, so he has white rye, pumpernickel, medium rye, rye flour blend, rye chops (coursely ground rye berries), rye bread improver, deli rye sour, First Clear flour (it increases the gluten content in rye breads), and frozen rye sourdough starter. He tries to replicate the wonderful rye breads we found in Winnipeg.

On Sunday, Husband bought Rose Beranbaum’s The Baking Bible for me as a Mother’s Day present. I think he had ulterior motives for me to bake pastries for him. Rose is an absolute fanatic about flour, and compares the protein content of various flours and likes to balance the proteins in her breads using bleached and unbleached flours for just the right results. I think she goes too far, but who am I to judge. She really likes Gold Medal bleached flour as a basic baking flour.

Husband’s brother-in-law has tried for years to replicate the hard rolls baked in their home town of Sheboygan WI that are used for bratwurst. They are wonderful rolls that I have not encountered anywhere but in Sheboygan.  Batch after batch has been baked and deemed lacking. I convinced him that the problem is in his home oven, and so he is thinking about a wood fired clay oven in the back yard.  He is also thinking about apprenticing himself to a Sheyboygan bakery to finally solve the problem. If you knew Husband’s  brother-in-law, you would agree that keeping him busy with this is best for all concerned.

We read at Easter about Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness when he says to Lucifer that man doesn’t live by bread alone. I think the Devil has a point, though. Bread is wonderful. I don’t see our going overboard over bread or flour as sinful at all. There are worse things we could be doing.

What makes you go overboard?

 

 

Nature, Stories

Boathouse

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The first time Husband brought me to Winona, probably in summer of 1978, he introduced me to people in town, people out in the country, and one person in a boathouse (which is what residents prefer to call it, rather than houseboat). It was a tiny one room affair, compact and cleverly furnished, and I remember thinking how fun it would be to live there down on the river. It was so compact! I thought it would be similar to living in the trailer as we had those three summers I’ve written here about – very freeing to downsize, and get closer to nature.

I haven’t been aboard a boathouse since moving back here, but have driven on Latsch Island (in the Mississippi, between Winona and Wisconsin) – the boathouse community seems alive and well. I see that MPR recently did a short piece by Catharine Richert, based in Rochester on what it takes to live in a boathouse – not many residents tough it out for the entire winter. There are the animals (muskrats, turtles, snakes, spiders, mice, frogs) to contend with. Then there is the special “maintenance” invisible to landlubbers: ice buildup during the freeze-thaw cycle. The article states: “Unless the ice is kept at bay, water might flood in through a crack under a door or at the seam between the hull and an outer wall. It can pull the house apart, or under.”

But a close-knit community has grown up over the decades, demonstrating “ongoing communal learning with lessons passed on from houseboat owner to houseboat owner”, since there is no Boathouse Guidebook. Richie Swanson tells, for instance, of  ” ‘popping barrels’ — the ritual of forcing sealed plastic barrels under a houseboat to help it float, which Swanson said can take off a finger or a foot if you’re not careful. Swanson said the process is often a group effort among people who share a passion.”

A friend of mine is pictured toward the end of the article… in the purple slippers. She now lives in town, but keeps her boathouse for a work studio. I hope to see this place in person some day.

I agree with the article’s author, “It seems an enviable life for anyone who loves nature, except in those times when nature tries to take back the neighborhood.”

What is the closest you’ve come to living “with nature”?

Baboon Achievers, History, Stories, The Baboon Congress, The Future

Behind the Curtain

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today’s post comes to us from our tim

we begin month 3 of trail baboon part 2. he has been mia altogether now for most of the past year or two but he is the invisable man for 60 days running. are you out there dale??? send me a sign….or an entry…

then you to vs and renee, to jaque to volunteer to make it happen as a perpetual motion machine. the tragedy of the end of the late great morning show was buffered by the trial balloon and we were able suck it up and be thenakful that we had a remnant of the morning show with dale as the man behind the curtain then the essence or our mpr world got shut down and the closing of the dale connelly as an omnipitant leader. i told dale he didnt need to be an enigma and he said something to the effect of “theres nothing wrong with being an ieigma”

i love dale, i love the trail, i love the history and i love the fact that we made it… we transitioned to the next level.

my dad moved to leach lake and spent the first year looking for his coffee group. the good old gang who laughs at your jokes and cries at you pain and understand the difference. the trail is actually the closest group of friewnds i can imagine.

my first wife talked to her mom on the phone every day for 20 minutes and im sure she had a tough time when her mom died because of the gigantic hole it left, my current wife talked to her grandma every sunday and when her grandma started losing it and had to move from the farm to town and then to the nursing home it was a smoother transition to prepare for the inevitable end.

dale and his guest blog weeks — remember how important it was that we never miss a day? 5+ years and never a missed day. how did he do it? and timely and so creative. the jusice that required must have been an interesting premise to life for all that time

now steve writes one, clyde, vs, renee, jaque, bir, all of us.

thanks for the new start and rebirth of the original joy of the morning show the trial baloon and the trail baboon

other than the rebirth of the trial, what new start in your life has been the best?

Baboon Achievers, Family, gardening

Battle of the Boulevard

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Purple is my favorite color; you’d think that purple flowers would be my favorites as well. And for the most part, you’d be correct, except for the aromatic little purple flowers that are taking over my front boulevard.  Creeping charlie, also known as ground ivy, creeping Jenny, catsfoot and run-away-robin, is the bane of my existence.

In general I don’t care for ground cover unless it only covers the ground that I want it to cover. Unfortunately that’s not how ground cover works. I think of it as a virus that I’ve caught. I’ve gotten plants from so many places, that I’m not even sure where I caught the virus but based on where I first noticed it, it probably came from something I purchased at Bachmans. Tsk tsk.

I tried the easier poisonous route last summer and not only did it poison one of my peonies, it didn’t really work. So this summer is the battle of YA and I against the CC. On Sunday we spent about 5 hours weeding and half of that was an all out attack on the purple menace on the boulevard. I did the tedious around-the-flowers/bushes weeding while YA went for a more scorched-earth policy of ripping up whole chunks of sod, roots and shoots and all.  We talked about the fact that we’ll have to do this all summer and probably some of next summer as well.  YA must have concurred; I came home today to find a pile of CC pulled from the side of the house near our raspberries.  So I guess it’s official – it’s the two of us versus the creeping charlie!

When have you had to do battle?

Family, Fifty Words, History, Uncategorized

Fargo

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Today’s post comes from tim

 

fargo was my dads home and his dads home i was the big dog from the cities when i went to visit cousin dan did show me around like it was cool to know a guy from the cities this was at the time when flower power and mod fashion were the rage

tell me about your psychadyllic moments man

 

 

History, Uncategorized

Without Warning, A Growing Trend

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Today’s post comes from Bill in Minneapolis

Seemingly out of nowhere, big beards have become a thing. You might argue that beards have been always with us and certainly that’s true for most of living memory, but those were primarily modest chin covers.

Beards do go in and out of fashion. Apparently, in the century between 1730 and 1830, beards were not only unfashionable but rigorously opposed. In 1830, a Massachusetts farmer named Joseph Palmer was jailed for over a year as a result of an incident stemming from his refusal to cut his beard. He was denounced from the pulpit and in the street.

The beards I’m talking about here are startling, exuberant, prodigious beards. Biblical beards. Beards that haven’t been exuded since the nineteenth century. Jefferson Davis chin ponytails. Rip Van Winkle beards. Jubilation T. Cornpone beards. And I wonder, what started all this and why did it spread so widely and across generations? I didn’t get the memo.

Now I would be the first to admit that I am generally out of the loop and even if I had been aware of the trend, I wouldn’t have been a participant. My own facial hair, should I grow it, would be more along the lines of Robert Bork’s and nobody needs to see that, ever again. But it makes me wonder what triggered the movement toward extravagant hirsuteness (hirsutity?).

I sort of felt the same way about tattoos, when they became a thing. They’re ubiquitous now and scarcely attract notice but I never understood why they became newly popular and what the attraction was in the first place. If you do, explain it to me.

What trends have taken you by surprise?

Travel, Uncategorized

Hints for Riding the Rails

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Today’s post comes Barbara in Rivertown

 

Our recent train trip to the west coast was lovely and relaxing during the two days we traveled each direction. Here are a few tips to the uninitiated, while the experience is fresh in my mind.

Packing

– Have one carry-on bag with everything you’ll need for however long you’re on the train, including a fresh change of clothes. That way you can be free from pawing through your large suitcase – it can just stay in the vestibule with the others.

Earplugs

– Good not only for when you’re trying to sleep. They will not, however, help awakening at the lurching as the train crosses the track-merge connections. Not to worry, the rocking and the clickety-clack will (probably) lull you off to sleep again.

– Earplugs may also be good if you want peace and quiet in the Lounge Car. You could consider creating a “Megaphone Award” prize for each day aboard, to hand out to that one person in the Lounge Car whose conversation can be heard through the entire car. Alternately, you could just chime in with the conversation and yell comments back.

Eating

– If you have a roomette (or other sleeping quarters), three meals a day are included in the dining car. Although not a 4-star restaurant, the food is pretty darn good. (However, the same vegetable will be served with all entrees until the train turns around and heads back the other way.) Remember that you are not getting all that much exercise, and consider eating partial portions, or at least split the dessert with your companion.

– Unless you are a party of four and fill up the whole booth, you will be seated with other travelers, and will meet an array of interesting people at these meals. You may want to have a paper and pen available to exchange addresses with the most compatible of these.

Exercise

– It is amazing how many sore muscle you can get from a lot of sitting! Try and get up to walk around every hour – take a trip to some other part of the train. Beyond the Dining and Observation Cars (located in the center) are the Coach Cars – follow to the end so you can see the track recede as you watch where you’ve just been. Be sure to walk with a wide stance with hands held out to catch you when you fall against the seats, and understand that if this were being filmed, you would look like you have just drunk at least one bottle of wine.

What sort of travel tips do you have to offer from your journeys?