Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee
Right now I’m feeling pressed for time – I’m almost done with holiday prep and Nonny is coming next week. I have two separate lists and there’s not much time for sitting around. I read this Billy Collins poem last night and love the idea of having bags of time.
It seems like so much more than just my regular old time; I could get boatloads more done!
What would you do with bags of time?
Today’s post comes from Wessew.
I love playing cards. I rarely ever make a wager on card playing, so my love is not based on avariciousness.
I enjoy making the best of what I am dealt. Early on Crazy Eights and Go Fish were my games of choice. Then, several winter nights in 1963, my whole deck was changed. My sisters and I were taught how to play Pinochle. There was a three day blizzard with little to do except watch the white world outside or the black and red world inside at the table. Pinochle is a great card game. The card combination of Queen of Spades and Jack of Diamonds is key to play and from where the game gets it’s name. The worth of those two in one hand depends on the scoring system you use. In our home system, a single Pinochle was melded as 4 points and a double Pinochle as 30 points. Thus were we trained that Spades and Diamonds go together.
Then we learned the game of Hearts. The object is to score the least points. Typically a heart card in your hand at the end of a hand of play counted one point against you. The Queen of Spades counted 13 against you; a very, very bad card unless you also took ALL the other Hearts in which case you have “shot the moon” and now give every other player 26 points. “Shooting The Moon” was always a coup. Being the last player below 100 points meant you were the victor. One summer, my workmates and I engaged in a four player Hearts tournament. The first guy to win ten games was the winner. We played at break and at lunch for days on end until it came to this: We had each won 9 games and each, in what had to be the final hand, had 90 points each. We were so evenly matched that it reminds me of a Vulcan mind meld. Whomever was ahead was to be dealt with harshly. We knew who needed to get the queen and just enough hearts to keep the game alive. Now we were at a final reckoning. No longer allies. I will never forget that moment. We were working laying carpet at a school in Cannonball, North Dakota. (Very near the site of the present civil disobedience action regarding the pipeline.) We declared victory for all of us and never played the last hand. It felt wonderful.
I play Whist, Canasta, Cribbage, Rummy and Oh Heck among many other card games but the one game I have yet to learn is Bridge. I would love to learn for one simple reason: I understand that in trying to score the best hand possible one can declare “NOTRUMP”. Let me learn and may the Gods of Luck deal me hands for which I can bid….NO DAMN TRUMP.
What is your favorite suit? Why are Clubs so neglected in card playing?
Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.
North Dakota doesn’t have a native son who became president. I think the only president who ever lived in North Dakota was Teddy Roosevelt. We have clasped him to our collective bosom, however, and his only presidential library is due to be built about 4 blocks from my house, on the former rodeo grounds at our local college. The Theodore Roosevelt Center At Dickinson State University website tells us:
“Theodore Roosevelt established two ranches in the badlands of western North Dakota: one called the Maltese Cross seven miles south of the Northern Pacific Railroad (1883) and the other called the Elkhorn, 35 miles north of the village of Medora, North Dakota (1884). Roosevelt never owned a single acre in North Dakota. Like most other ranchers in the badlands, he was a squatter on lands that still belonged to the public domain or the NP Railroad. The Maltese Cross (Chimney Butte) Ranch had already been named by the time he invested in it. He named his second ranch the Elkhorn after he found the horns of two male elk interlocked at the site. The elk had been butting heads in a struggle for primacy when their horns became locked. Unable to extricate themselves, the elk died of starvation. This appealed to Roosevelt, who regarded life as a Darwinian struggle.”
“At the Elkhorn Roosevelt ranched and played cowboy, went on long solo horseback rides, often for many days at a time, and hunted for elk, mule deer, white tail deer, and other quadrupeds. He also grieved for his mother and his first wife Alice, who died together in New York City on Valentine’s Day 1884. In fact, at the Elkhorn TR wrote the only tribute he would ever pen for Alice, who died two days after giving birth to Roosevelt’s first child Alice. He also wrote parts of two of his 35-plus books at the Elkhorn.”
The plan is to rebuild the Elkhorn Ranch house next to the library. For that purpose, large cottonwood logs have been collected from the area, and local ranchers are encouraged to donate logs to rebuild the 60 x 30 foot cabin. A builder from South Dakota has been hired to build the cabin by hand using only tools that were available to Roosevelt’s builders. You can see some of the logs that have already been hauled to the grounds.
It will be quite a job, and I look forward to seeing progress on the cabin when I drive to work each day. The Legislature set aside many millions of dollars to build the library, as long as the TR Center could raise 3 million more. They have a ways to go, but are optimistic that the library and the cabin will both get finished.
If you could design a presidential library for any president, what would you do?
Today’s post comes from Clyde in Mankato
My mail carrier on the North Shore used to joke about the range of mail I received. As a person actively involved in unions, I received a lot of liberal mail. As a pastor I received a lot of conservative mail. And, as a joke, students would fill in magazine subscription cards with teachers’ names. It was a bit of a hassle to stop these, but before I did, the hunting and fishing magazines supplied my name to ultra-conservative organizations. Sorry about that, Steve, but it is true. One of these promised to tell me the evils of public school teachers.
In my life I belonged to many subcultures. Small farm culture, neighborhood culture (three times), teacher culture, faculty room culture, North Shore culture, Iron Range culture, small church culture, lumberjack culture, union culture, University of Chicago culture, nursing home culture, taconite plant culture, team culture, coaching culture, railroading town culture, and many others, such small bar culture, which may surprise you. But I love small bars, especially the rural ones, especially in the north woods, of which there are many. In most of these cultures I was a sort of outsider, never quite at home.
When I write my short stories I try to use these many subcultures. It is fun to revisit some of them in my memory, some not so happily. Lumberjack culture and north woods bar culture are among my favorite things to write about.
I assume Babooners have belonged to many subcultures, too.
What have you learned from the culture’s to which you have belonged, willingly or unwillingly?
Today’s post comes from Steve Grooms
“The Good Place” is one of the popular new TV shows. It’s a clever comedy that plays with notions of what Heaven might be like. I’m not that clever. When I try to imagine Heaven, I end up hoping it would be a whole lot like the places I’ve already known and loved. That says nothing about Heaven but maybe a lot about me and my limitations.
But it is a hard concept for me to contemplate. I once heard about a lawyer who died and was whisked up to some fancy gate in the sky. There he is invited in to do his favorite thing on earth, which was golfing. Amazingly, his very first swing results in a hole-in-one. The next hole was the same, and so forth for the whole round. Every shot went in the hole. The lawyer confided to his caddy, “You know, I didn’t expect to get to Heaven. In my career I, uh, took a few ethical shortcuts.” The caddy turns with a devilish grin and asks, “What makes you think you are in Heaven?”
I remember Lily Tomlin’s thoughts on the Good Place. She was asked if we would have sex in Heaven. “Of course we will!” she said. “We just won’t feel anything.”
Mark Twain has a famous quote on the topic. When asked where he’d like to spend eternity, he said, “Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”
It seems the cartoonist Gary Larson is an expert of Heaven and Hell, for he drew many cartoons on that theme. I’ve found about 30, and there may be more. One cartoon shows a bunch of devils laughs hysterically at notes from a Suggestion Box. In another a devil tells a new arrival, “Your room is right in here, Maestro.” (The room is filled with doltish guys holding banjos.) And in another cartoon a new arrival in Hell has just taken a swig from a coffee cup. “Oh man!” he says, “The coffee’s cold. They thought of everything!”
The more I try to imagine heaven, the weirder it becomes. I have to admit that drifting on a cloud with a harp singing the lord’s praise would get old in a hurry. Any place that has me singing is gonna be more like Hell than Heaven. I’m not the only one to wonder if things might get a little dull in the afterlife. In one of my favorite Far Side cartoons some fellow sits all alone on a cloud thinking, “Wish I’d brought a magazine.”
I’d like to think Heaven comes with a good cable TV package and no irritating commercials. I’m sure Heaven will have really fast internet connections. It would be great if I could eat ice cream all day and not gain weight. In my version of Heaven, in fact, scotch and wine would be health foods. Doctors would frown during annual checkups and ask, “Are you sure you are getting enough beer and pizza?”
And dogs! I want to say that Heaven just would not be Heaven unless it would return me to my dear buddy Brandy, the impudent springer spaniel who shared so much of my life. But right there I’m in trouble again. Before Brandy there was Danny, and a more lovable and loving dog never lived. After Brandy came Spook, the elegant gentleman who never did a single naughty thing in his life. Spook was followed by Katie, who loved me totally and helped me survive a difficult time. I can’t imagine Heaven without any of these dogs, but I can’t quite picture Heaven with all of them milling around my feet.
But while I can’t form a clear picture of Heaven, it is not hard to imagine my personal Hell. For me, Hell would be a windowless room with a telephone, computer and uncomfortable chair. I would be given some crucial task to perform, but to do it I’d have to gain cooperation from my bank, or a large software business, or an insurance company, or Social Security, or . . . you get the idea!
My personal hell would involve struggling to find phone numbers for businesses that don’t want me to call, so they don’t list their numbers. In my version of hell I’d spend hours “on hold” while insipid music plays in my ear. Periodically a voice would come on to say “Your call is very important to us,” which is a lie, a damned lie, actually. And then, after sweating an hour or two on hold I would get to one of those triage tapes that gives me four choices, only none of them will be remotely appropriate for the issue I’m calling about.
When home computers were just becoming popular it was tricky to connect to the internet. (Does anyone remember using a telephone modem? Remember the bizarre sounds they made, like R2D2 vomiting in an echo chamber?) In the early days of home computing, frustrated consumers would have to phone their ISP for help getting online. Before they could talk to a human being a taped voice would ask infuriating questions, like, “Are you sure your computer is plugged in?” Or the taped voice would say it wasn’t necessary to for me to bug a customer service agent with my issue. All I had to do was to log onto their helpful online database!
Now, that would be my version of Hell. And if the managers down there truly “think of everything,” when I walk in Hell they’ll hand me a notice telling me that there was a goof in the Registrar’s Office. I didn’t actually graduate, for I still have to take several more years of German.
What would be your version of Heaven or Hell?
Today’s post comes from Verily Sherrilee
Last week I decided to go to the gym on my way to work. To save time I threw on shorts and a t-shirt and packed my work clothes into my gym bag, slipped on my Birkenstock sandals and headed out. I needed to do a quick stop at the library to return a book before it went overdue; luckily the library is right on my way.
As I walked from the car to the library drop box, another woman pulled up behind me and got out to return her book. She had on a hat, jacket, gloves, long pants, shoes and socks. And there I was in my shorts, t-shirt and sandals. That’s when I realized that I have Minnesota’s weather in my blood.
I did chose Minneapolis based partly on the weather here. As a child, my family spent some of each summer and winter vacation in northern Wisconsin. Winter up here compared to winter in my home town is like those proverbial apples and oranges; I knew even as a 10-year old that I preferred cold and snow to mostly cold and mostly rainy. At the end of high school, I only looked at colleges in Wisconsin and Minnesota and after my wasband finished graduate school, we headed straight for Minneapolis without looking back.
I’ve been here ever since.
This year we’ve had such a nice protracted autumn that I still haven’t put away my summer clothing or brought out any of my long-sleeved items. I’m still wearing my Birkenstocks every day. A couple of days ago a friend of mind looked at my feet and said “Toes `til it snows?” My official new motto.
How to YOU prepare for the winter?
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I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things. — Breakfast of Champions
kurt wrote a book that was released just before he died that may be my favorite. man without a country. kurt talked about his uncle who was an exceptional guy.
He said that when things were really going well we should be sure to NOTICE it. He was talking about simple occasions, not great victories: maybe drinking lemonade on a hot afternoon in the shade, or smelling the aroma of a nearby bakery; or fishing, and not caring if we catch anything or not, or hearing somebody all alone playing a piano really well in the house next door.
Uncle Alex urged me to say this out loud during such epiphanies: “If this isn’t nice, what is?”
we have all at one time or another been put in a place where pain has played a role in our lives. it is part of the human condition but particularly noticeable at times some times more than others. when these times are recent and numbness still hovers it is particularly important to take note of epiphanies large and small.
notice it and say it out loud today… and tomorrow…. and then again next week and maybe it can be a part of your awareness going forward. celebrate the small stuff and do it out loud.
you got an uncle or author or other person in your life that had a saying worth passing on?
Today’s post comes from Bill in MPLS
In the early 1970s, Robin and I and our friend Steve Carley drove to Calgary, Alberta for the Calgary Stampede. In truth, I was only vaguely interested in the rodeo. As it turned out, the rodeo wasn’t especially exciting; the problem was that the competitors were all excessively competent—every participant performed perfectly and the difference between them amounted to seconds or fractions of seconds.
The real reason I was in Calgary was because Wilf Carter was going to be in the pre-stampede parade. Wilf Carter, also known as Montana Slim, was one of the original singing cowboys. Carter was the first Canadian country music star. An unbelievable yodeler, Carter belonged to the ilk of Hank Snow, Jimmie Rodgers, and Gene Autry. Here’s a sample:
The Stampede was my chance to see him in person. He rode in the parade, in a convertible designed, I think, by the legendary Nudie Cohn. The header photo shows that car.
Nudie was a Ukrainian-born tailor who established himself making sequin-bedecked outfits for the likes of Elvis and Roy Rogers and later branched out to designing boots and even cars. Here’s what the interior of the car looked like:
I was going through my cowboy phase then. I was collecting and listening to a lot of early cowboy/country music. You couldn’t get a shirt in those days in the style of the classic movie cowboys, so I was making my own cowboy shirts, with fancy piped yokes and cuffs, curved slash pockets with arrowheads on the corners and pearl snaps. Sometimes the fabric was atypical— hawaiian prints, for instance.
I was never really interested in the actual business of ranching or horses.. What attracted me was the lore and milieu of the singing cowboys. The imagery of the likes of Tom Mix, Ken Maynard and William S. Hart. At the time I was working on a series of drawings I called my Patsy Montana drawings. They had nothing to do with the real Patsy Montana or her songs. She was my muse and the drawings were more along the line of “Even Cowgirls get the Blues”.
In downtown Minneapolis in the 70s and early 80s, on First Avenue, just north of Hennepin, on the second floor, there was a record shop called Pyramid Records. It was a big open space with waist-high benches around the perimeter, on top of which were boxes of records, many of them cutouts, all inexpensive, and chiefly old country recordings and vintage jazz. The proprietor sat in an overstuffed armchair in the center. He seldom made eye contact and never conversation. When you had made your selection, he would reluctantly accept your money. I’ve heard that he just disappeared one night, leaving his entire record stock behind. But he had some incredible, obscure records on offer, if you were in that market. There was a label out of West Germany, CMH, that had reissued classic early country music, including Wilf Carter, Hank Snow, the Carter Family and Goebel Reeves.
I bought them all.
Eventually I moved on from my cowboy phase, though I’ve never lost my interest in either the music or the imagery. I’ve overlaid them with newer fascinations but not many carry the pervasive richness that that long-ago cowboy fixation carried for me.
I can’t judge the extent to which I am deaf to the popular culture and the extent to which I am willfully contrarian. Some of both no doubt. But those are traits I also savor in others. What interests me, what I look for, are the obsessions people nurture that aren’t delivered to them as a readily consumable commodity— obsessions that call for research, diligence, craft and expertise. It could be an art, in the broadest sense, or it could be a collection. It scarcely matters how arcane, how peculiar the obsession might be. After all, the more elusive the interest, the more dedication it requires. And the more dedication it requires, the more it can be uniquely yours.
So, how do you entertain yourself?
Today’s post comes from tim
grandpa bob was my first wifes dad
salt of the earth
high school teacher in milwaulkee
he grew up building houses with his dad in the 50’s and ended up getting a job as a school teacher where he could just show up for work and not worry about business. he kind of trudged through his day.
somewhere in his career he got hooked up to be the guy to look after the field trips for the school kids in the milwauklee school district. he got to take them for walks in the parks and discover how to tell the trees by the bark and the leaves he got to be the guy who did the planetarium show and push the buttons and recite the planets and stars
he got to do lake michigan and the brewery tours he loved life.
then someone asked how bob got that job? did he go through the proper protocol? he got thrown under the bus. after years of loving his work he got put back in the classroom and he was so sad. because he was low man on the totem pole in teacher land ( i guess seniority didnt enter in) he got the class of underachievers from the toughest neighborhoods in milwaukee (milwaulkee has some really tough neighborhoods) he was not a politically correct guy and the stuff that would come out of his mouth was alarming. he believed that the community he was asked to teach was unreachable. they didnt get breakfast so their brains didnt work.
his last remaining joy was walking in the parks around milwaukee that he had come to know taking the kids on field trips. that and going to high school plays. he loved going and went to 200 plays a year in school auditoriums all over the milwaukee area.
he had property all over northern wisconsin, 5 acres here 5 acres there. he had a favorite place around ladysmith where he had a spot on the flambeau river with white pines and a natural beauty hard to beat. he would mow and tweak and groom the property. there was a small cabin next door with an owner who inherited it and didnt ever come and on the other side was a good ol boy who wold come up from new orleans every summer to be bobs buddy. they would sit and discuss the world and the woods and the good old days and every summer was better than the one before.
bob lived out of a pop up tent trailer that he would haul up in may and haul home in october every year. a stove, a bed and walls, who could ask for anything more. his last year up there he decided to leave it up in october and simply come back in april and set up camp. when he came he found his neighbor in the cabin who had some mental illness issues has sold the tent trailer. he simply threw p his hands and walked away. too bad. a bad way to end a chapter but the way it went.
when i divorced his daughter he was called on to winterize her house every year (putting on the plastic over the porch screens and raking the leaves and and to open it up again in the spring. he would stop over to borrow a wheelbarrow, a shovel a hammer and chat for a while. i will always remember his response to a statement it way ‘yeah , yeah , yeah, ” kind of like he was going down stairs. descending tones of yeahs in a row. he used his mantra to mull over his response and let you know he was listening and was aware it was his turn to speak in the conversation.
he comes to mind at this time of year as the leaves turn brown and fall off. and all thats left is the green egg shaped leaves of the hated intruder the buckthorn that takes over and chokes everything out. it is very sad to realize that the natural plants are being killed and choked out by the early coming out and the late departure of the buckthorn. i wuuld like to see a way to stop the takeover of the buckthorn and i think of bob everytime it comes up.
linda has the tree wrench for pulling the buckthorn up but it is hard work. i would like to find a way to clear an acre or a chunk of the woods in a weekend with a crew of volunteers to see what the difference between maintained and non maintained natural woodlands would be. ill bet it would make an impact. maybe in my sparetime
is there a trigger that reminds you of a time or place every time you see /hear/smell/taste it?
Trail Baboon 