2.19.2020 – Beg your pardon? But …

Beg your pardon? But …
suspension of disbelief
You see his new clothes?

I don’t agree much with the current President.

But I feel I have to cut him some slack.

Mr. Sam Rayburn, a past man of house, advised new members of Congress to ‘Vote their District.’

Mr. Trump, if nothing else, has the support of his core electorate.

I am not in that core.

I should not expect to approve of what he does or says.

I should not and I do not.

It is what it is.

But these pardons.

Are you kidding me?

My wife asked with everything else, why was I so worked up over these pardons?

Like I said, I can understand most of what Mr. Trump does.

It’s politics.

But Rod Blagojevich?

That is just dumb.

S T O O O P I D.

If there was one case.

If there was one person.

One person that the collective country as a whole would point at and say ‘UNCLEAN’.

One person who truly deserved his punishment.

I would have said Rod Blagojevich.

I do not suffer fools gladly.

Mr. Trump makes dumb and foolish political decisions but they are still part of politics.

This is just dumb and foolish.

This is running around naked and saying, “look at my new suit.”

Sorry but I don’t see the suit and sorry but I am not sorry.

I can see no purpose to this but to piss people off and thumb his nose not at just his detractors but at every single person in this country.

Fiction writers strive to bring readers to suspend their disbelief and accept the story being told by the writer.

I have to suspend my disbelief as Mr. Trump runs around naked.

I cannot accept he is wearing the new suit.

Michael Corleone said it best in the movie, The Godfather.

Michael got Carlo to confess that he had sold out the Family and set up Sonny.

Michael tells Carlo, “But don’t keep saying you’re innocent; it insults my intelligence and makes me angry.”

That is where I am.

2.18.2020 – Words for commute

Words for commute. Brief,
unpleasant experience
My mauvais quart d’heure

Each work day I make my drive to work.

It isn’t the worst thing in the world.

It is brief.

It is unpleasant or at least less than pleasant.

It is an experience.

It is my mauvais quart d’heure.

Mauvais quart d’heure (moʊˈveɪ ˈkɑr ˈdər/) is not french but an english term borrowed from the french.

According to the Online Oxford Dictionary of the English Language, it means, a short period of time which is embarrassing and unnerving; a brief but unpleasant experience.

A bad quarter of an hour.

Perfect.

I had never heard the term before.

Not surprising that the frequency of its use (as measured by the OED) is band 1. Band 1 words is made up of extremely rare words unlikely ever to appear in modern text. These may be obscure technical terms or terms restricted to occasional historical use, e.g. abaptiston, abaxile, grithbreach, gurhofite, zarnich, zeagonite.

Mauvais quart d’heure.

An obscure, technical, unused term.

Yet I feel a mauvais quart d’heure, experience a mauvais quart d’heure, go through a mauvais quart d’heure, twice a day.

2.18.2020 – simple pleasures

simple pleasures
what does innocence smell like
bake those biscuits brown

Sometime in my life a romance with biscuits began.

Maybe it was just the name of Paul Bunyan’s head cook, Hot Biscuit Slim (and the dessert cook, Cream Puff Fatty) that got me going.

Maybe it was the reoccurring theme of biscuits and gravy, biscuits and RED EYE gravy on the Beverly Hillbillies.

Maybe it was Atticus Finch calling to Jem, “Son, why don’t you come down out of there now and have your breakfast. Calpurnia has a good one. Hot biscuits.”

Maybe it was reading how Mrs. Truman was told they didn’t serve biscuits at the White House.

At least they didn’t until Mrs. Truman showed up and gave the kitchen hell over store-bought cold dinner rolls and hot biscuits turned up for the President’s breakfast.

In my brain somewhere is a memory of coming home from a summer trip in Northern Southern Michigan or was it upper – lower Michigan, the Sleeping Bear area.

My Dad spotted a Kentucky Fried Chicken and pulled over.

Taking the family out to eat must have been a bit of gut check for my Dad, what with wife and nine or ten kids and most likely a cousin or two for the fun of it.

Seems like there was a Lower along this trip.

We got buckets of chicken and boxes of biscuits and sat out on picnic tables on a summer night.

The biscuits came with packets of honey.

I ate about a dozen biscuits.

Okay, not a dozen, but I know I took more than I should have.

And so it started.

I wanted to learn to bake biscuits.

Not just any biscuits, but the biscuits that were the stuff of culliary legend.

The food stuff that built a country.

My Mom let me try Bisquick first and we moved on to Pillsbury biscuits in a cardboard tube.

Good but not good enough to create legend.

I moved on to baking powder and cooking oil and got pretty good making a biscuit I really liked.

One summer, before going back to school in Ann Arbor, I wanted to bring the taste of summer with me.

Like Grandma in Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury who would be “drawn to the cellar of winter for a June adventure”, I wanted something that might be a sudden patch light in the Michigan snow.

So I learned how to make blueberry jam.

Blueberries that had grown up along the shore of Lake Michigan and sucked in sunshine until they were ready to burst.

That jam and my biscuits were my secret weapon that winter.

Loved my biscuits but I didn’t mind when my friend Salle stopped by with a loaf a bread.

She said she saw the bread through a bakery window as it came of the oven and all she could think of was my jam.

We ate the whole loaf and a jar of jam.

My body misses those days, but I digress.

My biscuits were good … but not (yet) great.

I kept studying the cookbooks and came away with a missing ingredient.

Lard.

Remember lard?

When Cousin Vinnie goes into the diner and the menu lists, BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER and orders breakfast, the cook starts by dropping a cup of lard onto the grill.

Lard and a hot, hot oven.

Now my biscuits were something.

Brown, crunchy, soft, flakey all at the same time.

Biscuits and gravy.

Sausage gravy.

Ham gravy.

White pepper gravy.

CHICKEN GRAVY.

I get hungry in an awful bad way just thinking about it.

For Christmas my son gave me a cast iron skillet.

I had been looking at it for a couple for weeks.

Thinking this was just the thing for biscuits.

Finally got around to trying it.

I am near 60 years old.

After years of trying I have it.

A simple recipe.

A simple skillet.

A simple pleasure.

And the smell of the biscuits baking.

Down south there was a comedian named Jerry Clower.

Some of his stuff is just poetry as comedy.

But the sound of his voice telling stories of the south is a thing of near mythology.

I came across an interview with him done by Mississippi Public Radio when he was asked what was his fondest memory of growing up.

He talked about a day where you had to work in the fields but it rained.

It rained and so you couldn’t work.

You would sit on the front porch, watch the rain and smell the biscuits cooking.

Smell the biscuits cooking.

Biscuits.

A simple innocent pleasure.

Biscuits cooking.

The smell of innocence.

Boil em cabbage down
Bake em biscuits brown
The only song that i can sing is
Boil em cabbage down

Someone asked, all this and no recipe?

Whups.

2 cups of flour
3 teaspoons of baking power
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup of lard

Cut the lard into the dry ingedients

Add 1 cup of milk and knead into a dough
Flatten and cut out biscuits with a glass or a jar or a biscuit cutter
Place tight together so they raise in an ungreased iron skillet or baking pan
Bake in a hot 450 degree oven until brown (about 20 minutes)

Smell those biscuits baking and relax

2.16.2020 – From 1920

From 1920
Forward to 2020
Dad’s Century Mark

Yesterday my Dad would have celebrated his century mark.

Instead, he died back in 1988.

Far short of the mark.

I not sure, aside from the grand kids born after 1988, that he missed much.

I am sure that he felt he had had a full life and he wouldn’t miss much of the world left behind.

He lived through the depression.

Graduated from Creston High School in 1936 (having been ‘advanced’ two grades – something he always regretted and spoke out against – not only did it make him the smallest kid in school it also made him eligible for World War 2 earlier than he might have been)

Graduated from the University of Michigan in 1942 and spent the next 3 years as an army dentist here in the United States and in Europe.

He would say he was ready to go back and see Europe as soon as the Government was ready to pay for the trip like the first time.

Got married in 1946 and raised 11 kids (8 boys and 3 girls).

Lived long enough to see and enjoy a lot of Grand Children.

So many stories.

I remember once he was sitting at the top of the stairs looking down at the TV in the basement.

The Chicago Cubs were playing and Dad was watching the TV with binnoculors.

I asked him, ahhhh, what was he doing?

“Watching the Cubs”, he said, “I am sitting in the bleachers.”

I said I don’t think he would have missed much, but there was one thing, one person.

Let me tell this story of the night he died.

He had had a stroke on Wednesday and I think he came to terms with what had happened to him the best he could.

This was the following Monday and we had all (AND I MEAN ALL) had been in the hospital most of the day.

It is my feeling that he hung around long enough for us the come to terms with the situation as well.

Monday night, one by one, my brothers and sisters said goodnight and left.

My Dad couldn’t talk but communicated with us by squeezing our hands.

My Mom stayed for a bit then also said goodnight and kissed him.

My brother Paul and I stayed behind.

And my Dad let go of this world.

It was quiet and still and almost peaceful.

At this moment he seemed to be asleep and the only noise was the beep of the monitors and the hum of hospital machines.

Dad’s heart rate had been steady all day but now I noticed a slow steady slow down.

It was like when you were working on your bike with the bike upside down,

You could work the pedals and get the back tire spinning and when you stopped pushing the pedals, the bike would slowly, so slowy, spin to a stop.

I said to my brother Paul, “Do you get the feeling he is slowing down?”

We stood up on either side, me on the right and Paul on the left.

The heart rate on the monitor dropped to 60 and an alarm sounded which brought in a nurse.

She took one look.

Paul said to the nurse, “Should I call my Mother?”

The Nurse nodded and Paul left for a minute.

The heart rate continued to drop.

Paul came back and we held his hands.

The heart on the monitor went flat, beeped once or twice and went to a steady flat line.

My brother leaned down close to my Dad’s ear and said, “Dad? Can you hold on? Mom is coming.”

The heart monitor perked back up and for 3 or 4 seconds, the monitor showed a jagged line of activity.

Then it went flat again.

I do think my Dad missed Mom.

I think of my Dad getting on the bus to heaven and he heard my brother and he looked back .

Looked back for 3 or 4 seconds.

Would have liked to see my Mom.

But he didn’t want to miss that bus.

I think of that often.

It was one last amazing moment in a wonderful life.

During the days since the stroke, I had, in the way people do, said to myself, “I can handle this. But I do not want to be told that Dad died.”

It worked out that no one ever did.

My last gift from my Dad, I like to think.

Another note, when my Mom died, everyone was there with her in the room.

Everyone but me and my brother Paul.

So many stories.

Dad (Robert Hoffman) and his sisters Millie (Lower) and Marion (Glerum)

In Henry the V, Big Bill writes, “

This story shall the good man teach his son;
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered”

I tell the stories to my kids and my grandkids.

I remember.

I miss him every day.

2.15.2020 – get your stuff, get out!

get your stuff, get out!
the ink is black, page is white
What … What year is this?

Three Dog Night released “Black and White” back in 1972.

I remember watching an animation drawn to fit the music on the Sonny and Cher show.

Turns out the song was first released in 1956 by (BIG SURPRISE), Pete Seeger.

Side note, if you follow this blog, Pete Seeger keeps popping up doesn’t he?

This week in Adairsville, GA, a landlord couple settled out of court for a discrimination lawsuit.

They kicked a renter out of a house they owned, knocking on the door and calling the renter a “n—– lover” and telling the renter she had two weeks to move out.

In a later conversation with the renter, the landlord said, ““I don’t want them in my property. Maybe you like black dogs, but I don’t,” she said on the call, according to the lawsuit. “So just get your stuff and get out.”

Understand these are not allegations.

This is what the landlord ADMITTED that they said in the settlement documents to avoid losing their other rental properties (which have now been registered under their kids names).

What had the renter done?

She had coworker’s family over for a play date.

The coworkers family is black.

You can read the story here, written by my good friend Jonathan Raymond at 11Alive.com.

It is 2020.

I have to so much to say boiling inside that the words are steaming out of my fingers but this is a family blog.

What ruler can I use to measure my feelings?

Again and again I am told I don’t live in the south, I live in Metro Atlanta.

They are not same place.

Our Church is a very healthy mix of White, Black, Hispanic, Asian and any one else out there.

Our Pastor, who grew up in the Atlanta area, has had churches here for the last 40 yeas and is a past President of the SBA, says there is no other church like ours in the area.

I find it hard to believe.

Or maybe I don’t want to believe it.

Maybe I believe it but I don’t want to accept it.

But when I read stories like this, I have to believe it.

People do feel and think like these landlords.

But I don’t have to accept it.

Color is skin deep.

Racism, still alive and well under the surface, goes all the way to the bone.

Black and White – Pete Seeger Lyrics from the album the album Love Songs for Friends & Foes (1956).

Oh, the ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
To read and write
And now a child can understand
This is the law of all the land
All the land

Chorus with child’s voice:
Oh, the ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
To read and write

Their robes were black, their heads were white
The schoolroom doors were closed so tight
Were closed up tight

Nine judges all, set down their names
To end the years and years of shame
Years of shame

Chorus with child’s voice:
Their robes were black, their heads were white
(Whistling the tune)

Oh, the slate is black, the chalk is white
The words stand out so clear and bright
So clear and bright

And now at last, we plainly see
The alphabet of liberty
Liberty

Chorus with child’s voice:
Oh, the slate is black, the chalk is white
Together we learn to read and write
To read and write

Oh, a child is black, or a child is white
The whole world looks upon the sight
What a beautiful sight

For very well, the whole world knows
That this is the way that freedom grows
Freedom grows

Chorus with child’s voice:
Oh, a child is black, or a child is white
(Whistling the tune)

Oh, the world is black, and the world is white
It turns by day and turns by night
It turns by night

It turns so each and every one
Can make his station in the sun
In the sun

Chorus with child’s voice:
Oh, the ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
To read and write
And now a child can understand
That this is the love of all the land
All the land

Chorus continued with child’s voice:
Oh, the ink is black, the page is white
Together we learn to read and write
To read and write

Black & White -Three Dog Night Version

The ink is black
The page is white
Together we learn to read and write

A child is black
A child is white
A whole world looks upon the sight
A beautiful sight

And now a child can understand
That this is the law of all the land
All the land

The world is black
The world is white
It turns by day and then by night

A child is black
A child is white
Together they grow to see the light
To see the light
And now at last we plainly see
We’ll have a dance of liberty

The world is black
The world is white
It turns by day and then by night
A child is black
A child is white
The whole world looks upon the sight
A beautiful sight

The world is black
The world is white
It turns by day and the by night
A child id black
A child is white
Together they grow to see the light
To see the light