Ode à la Grand Marais

When I was twenty-two, my best friend Jon and his girlfriend Jill invited me to join them for a weekend festival in Grand Marais on the North Shore of Lake Superior.  It was something of a family tradition for Jill, and apparently that year was the first summer the honors had been opened up to non-family members.  I was flattered, and didn’t have anything else going on that weekend, so I said I’d be there, on a lark.  I haven’t missed the Fisherman’s Picnic since.  The first few years I was there I learned the history of the group – who the regulars were and how the stateside kids had gone up and met the Canadians and they had all hiked up the rivers and jumped from bluffs and played in rapids together and other harrowing feats.  Near-death experiences in the formative years nourish life-long bonds; this I know as someone who was once seventeen.  I know how romantically dangerous a street dance on a Saturday night can be, juxtaposed against afternoons leaping forty feet into an icy brook with complete confidence.
But by the time I showed up, we were older, if not necessarily wiser.  When I started going up we were walking back to the campground from town as cautionary tales – with our cigarettes, and our liters of vodka and the innocent DQ Mr. Misties we poured the Karkov into.  We were higher than the kites we flew all afternoon Saturday on the beach, but we didn’t care, because it was the most fun we’d have in one weekend all year.  To be a hedonist among puritans, just once a year, is an experience I highly recommend.  It will discombobulate you, but luckily that word sounds a little dirty, so you’re already on the right track.We went on for several years, kayaking in the harbor, Bingo-ing at the legion hall, and climbing on the rocks overlooking the bay.  One weekend per year, we got to get all our crazy out at the end of summer and come back to the city to be serious for the oncoming winter.  That is, until Jill’s parents bought a house in town.  We all claimed to have figurative roots in the town, now suddenly they had put down literal ones.  And it's an adorable little cottage a block from the main drag, with an extra bedroom.  Then something different happened.  Jill, who had long since broken amicably from my best man, married the guy she was destined for.  And they had twins.  Twins!
Ages on, most of us still make the pilgrimage every August, though now things have changed slightly, and not in any way I could have predicted. My friends and I still go up north every summer, and those with kids bring them along.  We all have mellowed, though we’ve done so at different paces.  Some of us have children, others don’t.  Some of us still camp, others don’t.  Most of us still hike out to the bonfire one of the nights, and get just a little bit silly.
I was the first at the campsite this year, and that’s never happened before (I didn’t even make it up first the year that I paid for it).  My initial priority was getting my tent up and checking out the rainbow over the bay to the East.  When my campmate arrived, he & I enjoyed a couple beers and some homemade brittle and waited for the familied friends to get in touch.  After they did, we were anchored in the town with them and in the festival for the weekend.  I don’t have children, but I know quite a few of them, and it is a humbling moment the first time you turn to the baby you think you know and realize you’re talking to a fully formed human child, capable of running, and laughing, and skipping stones, and you have stories that predate her.  She did not exist when most of your life took place.  She is a Descendant.
When you have so many years of history in a place it is tempting to claim it as your own.  When you can no longer differentiate the years you were down by the lake from the years you were up on the hill – and no one thing happened in any specific summer or another – you don’t just have a history, you have a mythology.  Yet while it’s tempting to claim it as your festival, it is so much bigger than you.  It is the one who shaped you, not the other way around.  It went on for decades before you arrived, and it will go on just as merrily if you never come back.  But you are that little girl.  You are a product, a Descendant, of it, and you owe a little piece of who you are to it.  Here’s to you, Grand Marais… may you shape and mold many good friends to come.

Thanks, Pop.

I recently saw this post on the Newscut Blog by Bob Collins.  It got me to thinking.  I have seen pictures of my dad when he was younger than I am now.  In fact, I once made a lamp for him and my mother made from slides from when they were first married.  It didn’t occur to me then, but now I am a couple years older than he was in those old photos.  I’ve heard stories from when he was younger than me.  The only problem with this is, the things people tell stories about are the exceptional things:  great accomplishments, life-altering journeys, epiphanies, and the like.  I don’t feel my personal story-worthy life events even compare with what I knew about my dad when I turned 19 and moved into my first apartment.  He was an Infallible Elder to me then.   All of the wonderful, relatable things I know about him, the things that have made us peers, I’ve learned since then.  I’ve learned that we’re a lot more alike than I ever assumed growing up.  I remember going to a Twins game with him and my friend Jill at the HHH Metrodome and having Jill tell me afterwards how weird it was to see the two of us sitting together, both leaning forward, arms on our knees, fingers interlocked, our weight on the balls of our feet, in the exact same pose as one another without intending it.  It was made more noticeable by the fact that white guys with beards tend to look alike, but at age 23 I was already becoming my father.

You think by the time you move out of your parents’ house that you know everything there is to know about these people who raised you.  I know I did.  After all, I’d spent every day of my life either with them or in relation to them.  What I hadn’t considered was that they hadn’t spent their every day in relation to me.  They had a whole life together before I came along.  A life when they made some of the same choices and mistakes that I have since made, because there are certain lessons that cannot be taught, but must be learned.

When I was 20 I moved to California, and my dad helped me get there.  When you spend two and a half days in a truck cab with someone, sleeping in rest stops with all your possessions just behind the back wall, there’s no way to not learn a few new things about them.  On that trip I learned about Dad's college weekend road trips, but also that he had a lot more wisdom to impart than just how to use a band saw (although this has proven helpful too).  That trip is also why, when Mom tells me that Dad is driving solo from my sister’s house in Seattle to my parents’ home in Tucson, I don’t worry.  I still want my mother to check in when I know she’s on the road.  Dad I know I don’t need to worry about on crazy feats of endurance travel.  I’ve seen the man do it.

After I bought a house back in Mpls, Dad came north to help me paint it.  I recall coming home one day to find he had climbed up the ladder to the porch roof with the six-foot A-frame ladder over his shoulder.  He had then propped the A-frame against the side of the house on the pitched roof to hang onto my louvered attic vent with one hand and use the other hand to paint the peak of the gable of my house (I assume he did this while I was at work because he knew I’d talk him out of it if I were home).  That is something I would never do.  Not for anyone.  I don’t necessarily have a fear of heights, I just don’t trust my own sense of balance that much.  If he ever asked, though, I’d do it for Dad.  Because I know he’d do the same for me, and has.  I won’t go into specifics, because I don’t want to give him ideas, but there are countless things that I’d never dream of doing ordinarily that I wouldn’t hesitate to do for my father.  When someone has your back like that, you have to reciprocate.  The man taught me how to be me, for god’s sake.  You can’t ever hope to repay that – all you can do is pay it forward.  Thanks, Dad.  I love you.  Happy Father’s Day.

Of Ice and Men

I was thinking about something last week while my team lost our final curling match of the season.
My Grandfather (maternal, I never knew my paternal) died when I was twenty years old. I remember very few moments of my early childhood, but those that I do involve his errorless hand. Not in some creepy Jim Jones way, but merely as the trusted family elder who knew a lot of things about a lot of things. All of my uncles, competent men who were experts in their fields, would defer to him and ask his opinion.
When Grandma moved out of their house a couple years later, I was just starting to curl at the St. Paul club, so my mother nabbed his old trophies for me as they were clearing out the house. I thought, wow, my grandfather led his team to victory! After six seasons of playing the game myself I now know that this, of course, is not even remotely true. Curling is a four-person game. From the order of names on the trophies in my den I would guess my granddad played second or third for his team. So there is a good chance he got chewed out on a semi-weekly basis. Don’t get me wrong – curling is a tactful sport, it’s not like anyone was tearing into him, but if he flashed a take-out, or hogged a guard, I’m sure his teammates let him know just how short he fell of their expectations.
It is a really odd thing… picturing my grandfather, the family patriarch, as a curler. Picturing someone turning to my grandfather, sacred elder of my childhood, and calling, “why weren’t you on that earlier, chucklehead?!” This is not the portrait I have of him in my mind (perhaps my mother’s may come closer to that than mine). The vision makes him instantly more relatable, not the wise distant elder, but some bumbling guy who happened to sire five children (and he was a great father who did raise them well). I have to say I think I prefer this idea of him. I never really saw too many likenesses between us until I could imagine him stepping out onto the sheet and forgetting he had his gripper off and landing ass-first on the ice. Or having to buy the first round after the game because he missed his last shot. He has attained a hallowed place in my pantheon of Stoic Old Men Who Talk Straight, but the idea of him throwing 42 pounds of granite across the ice makes him seem like a fallible human again. It is so easy to canonize the dead, and some people will always condemn you if you try to make them human. I however am happy to see the ills of my heroes so I know I can someday hope to become a shadow of what they were on this Earth. So thanks, Grandpa - you still have mighty big shoes for me to fill, but with this new perspective I at least have a fighting chance.

...and so this is Christmas...

So we got our tree up. Merry Christmas. While we were decorating, we had KQQL 107.9 in the twin cities blaring carols on the radio. It brought some ideas forth.
I have always loved Christmas music. Though I tend to skew toward the secular carols, I once performed O Holy Night for the assembled congregation of the Lutheran church in which I grew up, so I can hold my own with the Christchild, too. When I was small my parents had what had to be the oldest stereo system in the western hemisphere hooked up in the living room above the fireplace. The amazing thing was that it had better sound than any Bose radio on the shelves today - it just didn't have any components: just a tuner and a turntable. As such, my knowledge of Yuletide cheer was informed solely by Kenny Rogers' Christmas albums and a Time/Life collection of holiday classics on vinyl (I think the cover had some kind of Currier & Ives-ish, sleigh ride print on it). But man, when Perry Como tells you there's no place like home for the holidays, and you've got a fire going in the fireplace and you've never known a holiday away from your own family, damnit you believe him.
So now I'm older. I've noticed a happy trend in new recordings of old classics, and it distresses me. I do not have the gravitation toward fun carols that I once had. "Up on the Housetop" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" no longer hold the magic they once did. These days what I really want to hear is "Happy Christmas." The wholesome "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire" has given way to the realistic "I've grown a little leaner, grown a little colder, grown a little sadder, grown a little older," and I do need a little Christmas now.
Here's an example I've been thinking about lately: In 1943 Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane wrote a song for the Judy Garland vehicle, Meet Me in St. Louis, and they gave it decidedly dark lyrics. More than just dark, though, they were topical to the plot - "next year we may all be living in New York." There was no way it would ever do anything but exposit storyline for this single movie and depress the viewers of the film. Luckily, they changed it slightly to be less ominous, and in the process made Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas a universal sentiment of the holiday season for anyone who's ever had an extended family.
The song took an unfortunate turn in 1957 when Frank Sinatra was cutting an album called A Jolly Christmas. Why he felt the need to include this beautifully melancholy song in any kind of Jolly compilation is beyond me, but he approached Martin with a request to "happy up" the song. That is when it received the loathsome anti-climactic lyric it is best known for today: "Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow. Hang a shining star upon the highest bough." This is a Hollywood ending for what was never meant (despite it's cinematic beginnings) to be a happy-ending song. The first rewrite, and the one I know from my Time/Life childhood Yule dreams is this: "Through the years we all will be together, if the fates allow. Until then we'll have to muddle through somehow." As someone who has family in three different states, and who sees the people with whom I was raised and with whom I came of age maybe once a year, this lyric speaks to me on a very deep level. In this version, there is no guaranteed reuniting "in a year" or "on Christmas Day" - we just know we're all getting by and god-willing we'll all get together soon to sit with one another and pretend it hasn't been that hard after all. It is what the Holiday season is about - hope for tomorrow's reunions, and resolve to keep a fire going in that ancient hearth beneath the old stereo, just in case someone graces my threshold bearing Yuletide cheer. I don't know if I'll be in a position to host guests in a year, but for the love of god, if you people show up at my door we will be together, and that is what matters. Until then, I'm happy to muddle through as best as I can. So Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas Now.

Time flies when you're not really changing at all.

Just a heads up: this post might embody the "meandering" part of the subhead of my blog (which to my Facebook friends is available here - it's always bugged me that Facebook links to the note within its own confines, but not to the actual blog), than the "rants" portion.
I've spent the last couple days going through the magazine museum in my living room. As mentioned in my previous post, Lisa has a bunch of 1970s Better Homes and Gardens that she just got, and she also has a few issues from much longer ago in her stockpile. In addition she has received through some consumer website or another a free subscription to BHG this past spring. So I got to thinking, and just sat all afternoon going through the October 1949 issue, then flashing forward 25 years to October 1974, then another 35 year jump to the October 2009 one that just came this week. I have to say it's been fascinating.
First of all, let's review the context in which each of these issues came out:
1949 - We had just recently emerged from a victorious and clear-cut, good v. evil struggle in Europe and the Pacific that had lifted us out of the depression, and with Truman in the white house we were rushing headlong into the post-war prosperity the 1950s would become so known for. NATO had been formed and formalized in the spring of that year, and the seeds of the cold war had been sown, swinging the pendulum from the social state of the new deal to the red scare that would soon follow.
1974 - We were in the process of dialing down a long divisive war fought for dubious reasons in Southeast Asia. Nixon had just resigned for something decidedly unbecoming of his office, and the future of civility and order in our nation itself seemed to be at stake. No one seemed to want to deal with life here in the U.S. Pendulum: somewhere between authoritarian eavesdropping state and libertarian uprising against a tyrannical federal power.
2009 - We are currently fighting a war which I will not politicize here (if you've read any of my previous posts you can probably guess where I come down on it anyway). In addition, the pendulum is in virtual fibrillation, we're in the middle of an economic hemorrhage unlike anything anyone under seventy years old can remember, and we're being told the way to pull out of it is spending. On anything whatsoever.
With that in mind, the most striking difference is the ads in these magazines. In 1949 the majority of the ads were for home improvement items - washers (and a lovely article on how to save time using an automatic washer), vacuums, water heaters, etc. The magazine itself was more geared toward both making a home, but also building and maintaining it. The ads and articles contained just as many men as women. In 1974, the ads were mainly for life improvement items - travel packages to Hawaii and the like (this was two years after the Brady Bunch discovered their cursed Tiki there, so I'm sure the Pacific Islands were all the rage, vacation-wise), but also liberally peppered with pet foods and detergents. This year, what the overwhelming majority of advertisements in BHG are about is self improvement items - they're selling cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, clothing, pharmaceuticals, and sleep aids & mattresses (and the overwhelming majority of people in these ads are female). With all the time savers of 1949, all the vacation packages of 1974, and all the drugs and makeup of 2009, would anyone care to venture a guess as to which generation is sleeping better at night?
Also worth noting is the gender targeting of the different incarnations of the magazine. In both 1949 and 1974 the issues were geared toward both women and men, whereas in 2009 the demographers have clearly decided for us that it is the woman in the family who is in charge of the daily comings, goings, and upkeep of the house - even though now it's more common than in the previous years that she works outside the home as well. Indeed, the article in the 1949 issue titled "How-To for the Handy Man" or the ones detailing how to get better mileage out of a car or create 3 styles of bookshelves "designed for men" would look out of place next to the CoverGirl spreads and Curel ads in today's edition. But perhaps that is more a function of magazines having to cater to more highly specified audiences and fewer of them being aimed at the entire household unit.
To be sure, the older issues definitely had a gender skew as far as roles within the household were concerned, but I almost think it is less offensive than today's demographic skewing. Yes, in 1949, and even 1974, it editorially assumed the father was concerned with the structural and mechanical workings of the household, while the mother (yes, always one father and one mother) was more concerned with the nurturing and aesthetic aspects, but at least it was honest about that. In 2009 however, it does not even pretend to care what a man does in the home, and as such it has all but abandoned the building and maintenance in favor of design and furnishing (showing, perhaps, that it cares a great deal what a woman does in the home).
In the aforementioned "How-To" article in 1949 they had three pages of illustrations with little captions telling one how to coat one's own nails, prevent rust on tools, evenly sand a curved surface, etc. In 2009 they had an article with really intriguing photos about how a couple remodeled their old outdated basement into a finished family room area. It did not, however, say how they did it. It was half a page of text talking about aesthetics, the apex of which was mentioning that darker colors help the giant plasma T.V. blend with the room. The feeling I got from it was along the lines of "you're female and home all day, so here's what you should buy," even though it never has to come out and say it (though I must admit I am charmed that in every one of these issues they have recipes for Halloween cookies, and that they all still have a recipe contest as well, even if today's prizes are considerably larger).
Overall though, the greater editorial arc of Better Homes and Gardens has been one away from actually making a home and toward filling one. "Here are the techniques you can use to be domestically competent" has skewed to "Here are the things you should buy to make your home comfortable." Perhaps that's a product of us collectively trading in "Building Things" for "Expensive Numbers on Paper Being Pushed Back and Forth," or perhaps it is just laziness on our part ("if someone else will put a window in for me, I'll have time to pick out expensive drapes."), but it makes me want to finally finish my basement with some nice built-in "Man's" bookshelves - just as a tribute to those ridiculous but competent people who made homes before me.

Unkie Kev

So, I've known my sister for quite some time. Almost thirty years, in fact. I remember when audio cassettes first came out and we'd record radio shows in the living room. Everyone else hated their siblings, but I couldn't see what was so horrible about a big sister. I remember when she thought I was a cool brother and would take me to high school parties when I was like thirteen. I can't believe my parents never said anything when I'd come home smelling like smoke (for the record, I didn't start smoking myself until several years later). I remember really understanding Dylan for the first time when I went to visit her at UW Madison. It was the first time I associated 'folk' with 'cool' - the beginning of my grassroots philosophy of public service, to stretch a metaphor. I remember the crazy pride that filled my chest when I spent a week with her in the Dominican Republic while she was working with the Peace Corps (see the 'Under the Mosquito Net' blog on the right). I had honestly never known any one who was making such a tangible difference in the lives of others. I remember when she first moved to San Francisco. It was so cool to hang out in a different city and know I knew someone, so I belonged - kinda. I remember when she got married to Bryan. I had been going through some tough personal times, but she (they both) went to such lengths to make sure I was okay, despite the heavy plate I know was in front of them.
My sister Bert is one of my favorite people in the world, and I could not be happier that she's going to have a tiny Bertlet that I can be the creepy Midwestern uncle to. Bert, I promise I won't teach him or her any swears until they're old enough to know not to say them in front of you. Just please don't give them the square-head haircut that Mom gave you. All the best from fly-over land, and most sincere congratulations to you and to Bryan!