2.18.2021 – whose study might in

whose study might in
modest ways contribute to
an understanding

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

If our lives are dominated by a search for happiness, then perhaps few activities reveal as much about the dynamics of this quest—in all its ardour and paradoxes—than our travels. They express, however inarticulately, an understanding of what life might be about, outside of the constraints of work and of the struggle for survival. Yet rarely are they considered to present philosophical problems—that is, issues requiring thought beyond the practical. We are inundated with advice on whereto travel to, but we hear little of why and how we should go, even though the art of travel seems naturally to sustain a number of questions neither so simple nor so trivial, and whose study might in modest ways contribute to an understanding of what the Greek philosophers beautifully termed eudaimonia, or ‘human flourishing’.

Adapted from the book, The Art of Travel (2002, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton.

According to the website, GOOD READS, Any Baedeker will tell us where we ought to travel, but only Alain de Botton will tell us how and why.

As I said in the section on Architecture , what I find irresistible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, hey, I would.

2.17.2021 – there will be times when

there will be times when
most congenial unable to
dislodge our sadness

Adapted from the book, The Architecture of Happiness (2009, Vintage Books) by Alain de Botton, and the passage:

Architecture is perplexing, too, in how inconsistent is its capacity to generate the happiness on which its claim to our attention is founded. While an attractive building may on occasion flatter an ascending mood, there will be times when the most congenial of locations will be unable to dislodge our sadness or misanthropy.

According the The New York Review of Books, this is “A perceptive, thoughtful, original, and richly illustrated exercise in the dramatic personification of buildings of all sorts.”

What I find irrestible in reading Mr. de Botton is his use of language.

I get the feeling that if you made a spread sheet of all the words, adverbs and adjectives used by Mr. de Botton, you just might find that he used each word just once.

Neat trick in writing a book.

If I knew how to do that, I would.

2.16.2021 – wretched but better

wretched but better
in general, than used to be
some progress on earth

As you might have guessed I am talking about instant coffee.

As luck would have it, the Late Great Jim Harrison used these words to describe instant coffee.

Of late I have discovered the foil tubes of Café Bustelo and find that I agree with Mr. Harrison that while still not quite coffee, instant coffee is better than it used to be and shows some progress.

I have long tried all means of making just ONE CUP of coffee.

From instant to the drip funnels that sit on top of a cup to kuerig and while of these had made progress, nothing is as good as I remember the coffee that my Mom’s old Hamilton Beach percolator made.

It might be memory but that is my gold standard and I have tried everything to make that coffee.

It the right moment, I can smell it.

From what I have read, trying to match anything to a memory is a losing game.

But I try.

Why is it so hard to get a hot, rich single cup of coffee at home with a minimum of fuss.

As I started to write this, I tried to remember how and when it was that I started drinking coffee.

Coffee from the a percolator at our house was only made on the occasion of guests in the house.

At some point the coffee maker showed up and we got one of those but I had been drinking coffee long before that.

I know I was heavily influenced by my reading.

In the book, The Good Shephard, which by the way is a REALLY good book and I wish Tom Hanks had had a chance to read it before he made a movie supposedly based on it, the hero, Captain Krause, is a coffee nut.

Captain Krause drinks not cup after cup, but pot after pot of strong hot BLACK coffee.

Late in the book with some coffee still in the pot, he offers a cup to the officer of deck.

The OD pours a cup and then adds cream and sugar to “reveal the type of man he was.”

Then there were the Hornblower Books.

A series of novels on the life of Horatio Hornblower, a British naval officer during the wars with Napoleon.

Coffee is a theme throughout the 11 books from Hornblower’s first taste as a mishipman to complaining how the late the coffee was brought it his office when he was an Admiral.

Hornblower thought just too hot to drink was not hot enough and he sweetened his coffee to a syrup with cream and spoons of sugar.

The odd aspect to these literary pictures of how to drink coffee is that both of them were written by C. S. Forestor.

Somewhere along the line for some reason, I started drinking coffee.

About that time Maxim freeze dried coffee came on the market and my Dad starting having it around the house.

My Dad also was in on the search for a good single cup of coffee but he was primarily a tea drinker but had many a conversation of one cup coffee makers.

The google says Maxim came out in the 70’s so I must have started drinking it when I was 12 or 13.

And from time to time I would have a cup of coffee.

With lots of sugar and some milk for color but that is when it started.

That’s also when my Dad noticed an odd phenomena.

One Sunday afternoon when I was getting on everyone’s nerves just being more or less myself, my Dad called me into the kitchen.

He had made me a cup of coffee and he told me to sit down and drink it.

My Mom watched this and then gestured my Dad into the next room.

I could hear them talking and the gist of it was that my Mom wanted to know what in the world Dad was doing getting caffeine into my system when I was already driving everyone nuts.

Dad told Mom to just watch me.

He said he wasn’t sure why but he had noticed that when I drank coffee, I calmed down a bit.

He said maybe it was just that it was so hot that I had to be careful (when I was 9 I had managed to spill a tea kettle of boiling water all over my legs but that is another story) and being careful I calmed down.

Or that I would usually prop a book up in front me while I drank and that always seemed to slow me down for a bit as I ventured off into other worlds.

For some reason, my Dad said, it worked.

And it did.

Even though I heard them and knew I was being played, I still drank the coffee and for whatever reason I was better for it.

Often after that, both my parents recommended I take a time out for coffee now and then.

That may even have been the reason we got a Mr. Coffee at home now that I think about it.

So began my coffee habit.

For a good part of my life, I had a pot of coffee in the morning and another at lunch and another after dinner.

Over the years I have had to cut back and now I am down to 2 or 3 cups to start my day and the random cup of instant in the afternoon.

As the Devine One, Sarah Vaughn sang:

I walk the floor and watch the door
And in between I drink
Black coffee.

Sarah Vaughn was once asked why she was called the Devine One.

“Ella Fitzgerald said so,” was the reply and as they say, nuff said.

So me and coffee.

Waiter, Waiter, percolator.

The search for a single good cup of hot coffee at home continues.

It is still wretched but in general better.

There is some progress in the world.

As a post script, years later our first son started Kindergarten.

At his first conference, the teacher described him as well you know, one of those kids with an ‘active bottom.’

He was always in motion.

We talked with the teacher about whether or not he needed something like well, what was it called, Ritalin?

The teacher did not want to make and calls or judgments but she gave us this tip.

The next time he was really really active, try giving him the soda pop called Mountain Dew she said.

With most kids, the caffine would rev them right up.

But, she said, a kid who might be a Ritalin candidate, the caffeine in the pop will calm them right down.

I didn’t say anything at the time.

But I sure did think about it over my next cup of coffee.

2.15.2021 – my father’s birthday

my father’s birthday
one hundred and one today
century plus one

Dad, Janet, Grandma Hoffman, Lisa and Tim

I will always regret that I was not able to introduce my kids to their grand father.

But there it is.

Not much you can do.

But I can imagine what he might have done and might have said.

And I think he would have enjoyed where I ended up living along the South Carolina coast.

I cannot go to a restaurant down here and not say to myself, “Dad would have liked this place.”

Dad enjoyed food and he enjoyed a good restaurant.

It made him very happy to go a to famous restaurant and order what they were famous for and have the meal live up to the promise.

Conversely not much disappointed him more than a restaurant that FAILED to live up the promise.

Little did many restaurants know that they had had the kiss of death when my Dad would announce that he had “Crossed them off his list.”

He also had a way to look forward to a meal at a famous restaurant in a way that some kids look forward to Christmas.

And he planned many a family outing AROUND restaurants.

They fact that he 11 children just seemed to add to the challenge and the enjoyment.

At Zender’s in Frankenmuth (which we went to the day AFTER he took us all to see Mark Fidrych pitch at a Tiger Game) I think he got a kick out of walking up to the desk and placing an order for the FAMILY CHICKEN DINNER FOR 18.

When the parade of waiters and waitresses came out with platter after platter of Zender’s Chicken and fix’ns, Dad enjoyed the meal even more.

There was Ann Sathers (found by my sister Mary) in Chicago.

There was New Hellas Café in Greektown.

Include the Gandy Dancer and Angelo’s in Ann Arbor.

I wasn’t born yet but he took everyone to Brennan’s in New Orleans.

He also famously arranged his and Mom’s 25th wedding anniversary Sunday celebration at Win Schuler’s in Grand Haven, Michigan.

Again all of us were there including Grandpa and Grandma Hendrickson.

There was one drawback to this dinner though.

They had got married early in May in 1946 and in 1971, their anniversary, their 25th, happened to land on Mother’s Day.

Schuler’s took our reservation but they also took reservations from everyone else in Ottawa County that day.

To my 11 year old mind, the food was great but we sat in that restaurant FOREVER.

My Dad was not all about fancy either.

If he liked something, he really enjoyed it and he didn’t care where it was.

I remember once he called me when I was finishing up a school term in Ann Arbor.

I am coming to get you tonight. Can you be packed?

I was more than a little surprised.

I had had my last exam earlier that day.

I was planning on spending a couple days in Ann Arbor finishing up on all the things you need to finish up.

I was not packed that was for sure.

But Dad was my ride and I told him that I would be ready.

Later that same day as I was moving boxes out on to the porch of where I was living that term, my Dad pulled into the driveway.

One of the time-space things I wrestle with is that when Dad was driving down to Ann Arbor to drop off or pick us kids up, it have been less than 40 years that he had been at school in Ann Arbor.

I think back to where I was 40 years ago and yes its a long time and a lot of water under the bridge, but it still doesn’t seem that long ago.

He knew his way around Ann Arbor and I think he enjoyed that.

He enjoyed talking to the other students.

One of my room mates was leaving on his way to library to ‘study one more time for the final’ he told my Dad.

My Dad raised his hand palm out and swiped it down to the left and said, “Ahhh if you don’t know by now, you’ll never know it.”

Dad never knew how I took that message to heart.

Dad looks at me and my boxes and says ‘Load them up” and opened the back tailgate of the station wagon.

As I tossed stuff into the car he leans over the tailgate as says, ‘Thanks for being ready.”

I smiled at him and he had this goofy grin that showed up when he had something goofy to say or do.

Like the time he bought a new TV and snuck it into the house before Mom could see it.

While he plugged it in and worked on the cables he told me and my brother Pete to bring the old TV down to the basement.

He figured Mom would never notice.

And she didn’t.

Until my little brother Al said to her the next day, “how do you turn the new TV on?”

I knew something was up by the grin so I waited.

“I had to get out of there,” Dad said.

I waited.

My Dad then said that some lady had called from Church and needed Dad at a meeting.

Dad told Mom he couldn’t go to the meeting as he was driving to Ann Arbor to pick me up.

“So I had to leave,” Dad said with that goofy grin.

I just smiled back and finished packing.

Dad then said he had stopped on the way down and got himself a new McDonalds steak sandwich.

“They are only available for a short time,” Dad said.

“We can stop on the way home and I’ll get you one if you want.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

“If you get one, I guess I’ll get one too,” said my Dad with his goofy grin.

We stopped at McDonald’s in Brighton, Michigan on a warm spring evening I think in 1981.

We sat together and ate McDonald’s Streak Sandwich’s.

And we talked a lot about nothing at all.

I think my Dad would have enjoyed the restaurants down here on the South Carolina Atlantic coast.

I can remember the way he described going to Baltimore seafood joints for crab served on brown butcher paper back when we would visit my brother Paul when he and his family lived in Maryland.

If he had been able to visit us here in Bluffton, I think he would have said he was ready to order a low country boil the minute he got out of the car.

And he would have looked at me and said, “You can order one too, if we go right now.”

And we would have gone to Hudson’s or Salty Dog or Crazy Crab and peeled and ate shrimp and had corn on the cob with redskin potatoes and sausage.

And we would have talked a lot about nothing at all.

2.14.2021 – came a melody

came a melody
in my heart, the sound of love
charles mingus’ bass

Music.

As one person said (and I wish I could find a citation as that always helps so the sake of this essay lets pretend I said this first) music will wake up your mind to know that there is something greater than what we see on the surface.

Fran Lebowitz, in an interview with Spike Lee on Music (arguing who was the greater artist, Duke Ellington or Michael Jordan) made the point that music makes you feel good – feel better – a drug without the down side – makes you happier and doesn’t harm.

I can’t argue.

For Valentine’s is there anything better to express feelings for someone in a way that there is more than what you see on the surface then through music?

For me it is easy to admit I have little to no musical ability or talent.

I am in awe or maybe just jealous of those with voice or instrumental ability.

BUT I can direct others to You Tube.

If it is music and it has been recorded sometime, somewhere, ever in history, you can listen to it on YouTube.

You can also find YouTube clips of a movie made on the Life of JS Bach.

There is a scene where the Emperor of Prussia Frederick the Great has Mr. Bach in for a grip and grin.

Much like the more famous scene in Amadeus where the Emperor Josef II of Austro-Hungary meeets Mozart and Mozart blows them away with his piano playing, Bach is offered up a short tune (written by Freddie the Great) and asked to improvise on it.

Those two Emperors could call in Bach and Mozart.

Who could do that?

Well.

I can.

I have access to music at my fingertips that any monarch or emperor or anyone in the past could only dream of.

With that in mind I offer up for Valentine’s this clip of Charles Mingus’ Duke Ellington’s Sound of Love” from the live album Sound of Love.

I was young and care free,
Not a song have found my soul,
Lost in blues jazz and rag time,
No sound had got to my muse…

I was searching for my melody,
Love blues that gets me ooh,

All alone, sad clown with a circus closed down,
Lost on my merry go round,

Came a melody in my heart,
So yearning…
Taught me to your music out of love,
From the song, for this life,
We all live infinite,
With our lover and beloved,
As one Ellington sound of love…