balls strikes baseball strikes outs out at the plate lock out cant go home again
I loved baseball.
It took me a long to time to get there.
My family was a big baseball family.
My Dad, because they were available on the radio from Chicago in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where grew up, was a Cubs fan.
Back then, teams like the Detroit Tigers argued about the wisdom of having every game on the radio.
My brothers and sisters grew up Tiger fans.
I was 8 when the Tigers won the World Series in 1968.
Back when all the games were played at 3pm on the afternoon so kids at my school, Crestview Elementary were sneaking small, transistor AM radios into class.
At that point I was not a fan.
Baseball and sports, any sport just took too much time and I had so many things to do with all that time in childhood.
There were Gilligan’s Island reruns and Bugs Bunny cartoons to watch and books to read.
Sometime in the summer of I think around1975, I was out with my Dad on a late night drive and he had the Cubs on the radio from Chicago.
My Dad always had the Cubs on.
Not only could we sing the song the started Cubs broadcasts,
Let’s go – batter up – we’re takin’ the afternoon off
it’s a beautiful day for a ballgame for a ballgame today
the fans are out to get a ticket or two from Wala Wala Washington to Kalamazoo
it’s a beautiful day for a homerun but even a triple’s ok
we’re gonna cheer and boo and raise a hullabaloo at the ballgame today
The Chicago Cubs are on the Air!
But we could sing most of the commercials as well.
“You can take Salem out the country BUT ...”
Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau
Don’t know who they were playing but they had a new first baseman named Bill Buckner.
Buckner was a good player with a decent bat but he had a bad leg and was still recovering from the original injury that would later come back to haunt him BIG TIME.
It seems he was on first and tried to stretch make to third on a hit.
Vince Lloyd and Lou Boudreau were the radio team and they about fell out of the booth describing the action.
“Outfielder bobbles the ball.”
“Buckner makes the turn at 2nd, going to try for third.”
“Here’s the throw …
Boudreau starts yelling “RUN BUCK RUN BUCK – – DIVE“
Heres the play
He is …..
HE MADE IT HE MADE IT!!!
BUCKNER SAFE AT THIRD.”
I don’t know why.
It was one of those warm, humid nights you get in West Michigan.
The car windows were open.
It was dark with the car lights showing up as big beams in the steamy air.
In the words of Bob Seger, “It was sweet summertime summertime.“
And I got bit by baseball.
I started watching and listening a lot more often.
And I discovered baseball writing as well.
Some of the best writing in America has been about baseball, both fiction and non fiction.
Bill Bryson’s father was an award sports editor of the Newspaper in Des Moines, Iowa.
A city without any major league sports.
Yet Bill Bryson, Sr. got into an anthology of his account of the famous Bill Mazeroski’s 9th inning World Series Winning Game 7 Home Run writing, “Pittsburgh’s steel mills couldn’t have made more noise than the crowd in this ancient park did when Mazeroski smashed Yankee Ralph Terry’s second pitch of the 9th inning. By the time the ball sailed over the ivy-covered brick wall, the rush from the stands had begun and these sudden madmen threatened to keep Maz from touching the plate with the run that beat the lordly Yankees, 10-9 for the title.“
I joined the Socitey for American Baseball Research long before SABRMETRICS came along to mess up the game.
Out of college I had an opportunity to interview for a research position with the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and I drove home on cloud nine when the Director told me he couldn’t offer the job but was penciling me into the lineup.
I still bear in mind the name of guy on the letter than came a few weeks later announcing who got the job.
The came the strikes.
The first one I really remember in the mid 80’s I was thrilled when it was settled.
Then came the strike in the 90s
To this day baseball folks talk about how many fans were lost in the 1994–95 strike.
I was one of them.
It wasn’t so much that when they returned to work, the two things they went out on strike over were left unsettled.
But that the 1994 season was left unfinished.
It just ended.
And still …
That fall when the season would have been over, for some reason I never been able to find or have explained, the season ending awards, MVP, Cy Young, Gold Gloves, were all made for the part the season that had played.
And that, to this day, for me, broke off my relationship with baseball.
I have not been to a major league game since.
I went often to a local minor league team in West Michigan and enjoyed watch kids playing for a chance as much as playing the game.
And the game itself, the putting the ball over the plate and taking the round bat and a round ball and try to hit it square.
I might watch a World Series game for a few minutes.
But a fan?
Baseball is still important for many, but inessential for most.
Today I read in the Guardian, “In a country where the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, the optics are tricky when a representative such as the pitcher Max Scherzer, who agreed a three-year, $130m contract with the New York Mets last November, is one of the faces of a union complaining that an annual salary of $570,500 is stingy.”
So much money.
So much greed.
I guess Mark Twain was right.
He said this in a speech at Delmonico’s, April 8, 1889.
“The very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!”
If I think about America today, Major League Baseball is indeed the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming all summed up in one allegoric greedy one for me and all for me business.
boats of mine boating other little children shall bring my boats ashore
Adapted from Where Go the Boats? by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894).
Dark brown is the river. Golden is the sand. It flows along for ever, With trees on either hand.
Green leaves a-floating, Castles of the foam, Boats of mine a-boating— Where will all come home?
On goes the river And out past the mill, Away down the valley, Away down the hill.
Away down the river, A hundred miles or more, Other little children Shall bring my boats ashore.
I thought it was fitting that Mr. Stevenson also wrote Treasure Island and I was on an island, looking at these boats, with my Granddaughter Dallas and all I could think was the verse in the Bible, For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also (Matthew 6:21).
And my treasure wasn’t in the boats.
I also cannot help but think of my sixth grade class at Crestview Elementary School in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
As I think of it, many of my teachers started the day reading to us.
Saying that I realize that for the years, 4th, 5th and 6th grade, I had 2 teachers.
Miss Critchell was my teacher for 4th and 5th and Mr. Vanderwheel was my teacher in 6th grade.
Miss Critchell was a rookie and Mr. Vanderwheel had been at Crestview forever.
I can picture them in the mornings getting coffee and Miss Critchell having a nervous stomach about walking into the classroom and not knowing where to begin and Mr. Vanderwheel saying something like, “you know what works for me …”
We would all gather on the playground and blacktop as we called it, outside the school doors and wait for the first bell.
That was the signal to line up by class in front of the glass doors that led into the scool.
Crestview was U shaped and had an entrances to the building off the blacktop at the top of each arm of the U.
Facing the school looking at the top of the U, the left hand side was the 4th thru 6th grade side.
The big kids.
The side that had one large set of boys and girls restrooms off the main hallway.
The right hand side was the K thru 3rd grade side.
The little kids.
The rooms on this side had restrooms in the classroom which was great when you had to throw up.
The restroom in the Kindergarten was an in-room restroom and for some reason, the light switch was on the outside. This made for great fun when someone was in the restroom and the light could be turned off by anybody else.
Not that I would have done anything like that.
That first bell would ring and we would all line up.
We lived so close that many times my Mom would yell, “I heard the first bell!” and we would run out the door still getting dressed or eating a pop tart.
We lived a block down the hill from school and could hear all the bells as they rang.
Every once in a while due to power surge or outage or something those bells would go off on their own.
Sometimes on weekends and sometimes even in the summer.
Time change weekend always seemed to mess them up.
One time I remember, but I don’t remember how old I was, they went off in the middle of the night and rang for what seems like over an hour.
We always wondered who got in trouble for that one and we knew someone got in trouble because our neighbor across the street was Mrs. Schad, who was Chairperson of the school board for as long as I was in school and we knew she had to have been woken up by the sound of the bell as well.
Maybe that is why they got turned off.
As an aside, for the longest time the Grand Rapids Public Schools never closed, never missed a day, for snowy weather. When Mrs. Schad would be interviewed by local media, she would always say she looked out her window and the children were having no problem getting to school.
Those children were US.
We often talked about walking out into the snow and collapsing in fatigue in front of her house but we never did.
After the first bell, all the teachers came and lined up at the different entrances.
The hallways that ended at the top of the arms of the U were walled with glass windows and the doors were steel framed glass and the teachers would all stand there looking out at their day waiting to burst in on them.
Then the second bell would ring and the doors would open and we would file in and tramp down to our class room.
The halls were lined with long rows of pegs and we would hang up our coats and arrange boots and mittens and hats.
In the winter and on rainy days, the hallways were a swamp and everything was damp.
As fast as we could, we got into our classrooms and sat at our assigned seats.
I can’t remember if there was one more bell or if the clock just got to 9AM but the day would start when the two flag monitors, a boy and a girl, chosen by rotation, we all had to take a turn, would walk to the front of the class to spread the flag that stood in the front of the classroom.
One kid took a corner of the flag and stretched the flag out best they could.
The other kid grabbed a hold of the flag pole so the flag wouldn’t fall down.
With right hand over heart, (because the heart was on the right and your right hand was the hand ‘closest’ to the heart – at least that’s what I remember being told) we recited the pledge of allegiance.
I have to ask, is this still done today?
With the pledge over we would sing a patriotic song , usually America the Beautiful or America (My Country ’tis of thee).
I always wanted to sing the “Internationale”.
I didn’t know the words but I knew OF the song from some where in my reading.
Years later in the movie UNSTRUNG HEROS where the little kid hero sings the Internationale and is dragged out in the hallway yelling about rights for the oppressed workers of the world, I was seeing a missed opportunity.
With the song over, we all sat at our desks, the flag monitors returned to their seats and when I was in 4th, 5th and 6th grade, the teacher took out a book and began to read out loud.
Miss Critchell read Charlottes Web, Trumpet of the Swan and Henry Huggins books as I remember it.
Mr. Vanderwheel read “Treasure Island”.
I don’t know if it is a sign of my old age or what, but in my mind, in my memory, I cannot recall anything as spellbinding as Mr. Vanderwheel reading that old book.
Think of that great word.
Spellbinding.
As if bound by a spell.
That is just what it was like.
I know I was taken over by the story and it seems to me that I wasn’t the only one as the classroom was STILL.
Spellbound.
Mr. Vanderwheel made the story come alive.
I wasn’t just listening to the reading.
I was there.
To this day, I will take a square of paper and draw a black circle on it and write 7PM on it. Then I’ll give the paper to someone or leave it on their desk and walk away. Every once in a while, someone would say ‘A BLACK SPOT, Oh no!!”, but I haven’t had anyone figure out what I was doing in forever.
Mr. Vanderwheel just read, with some affectation to his voice for the pirates arrrrrrrgh and Ben Gunn’s voice asking for cheese, but for the most part he let the words trigger our own imagination.
Mr. Vanderwheel also was watching the text and knew the story so that he would be reading something like, “‘There was a Knock on the door. Jim opened the door and ….’ and then Mr. Vanderwheel would pause and say, “We’ll stop right there this morning.”
And the class would go “oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”
Treasure Island has been made into a movie 4 or 5 times and I have seen them all and been disappointed in them all.
None of the movies can come close to the way I saw it my mind when Mr. Vanderwheel read to us each morning.
The morning reading accomplished a lot things and eased the class into each day but it also an incredible gift.
I look at all the gadgets and items available to day that offer to stimulate learning and imagination.
All the games, devices, videos and such and all the wonderful things kids have today.
And I think of Mr. Vanderwheel reading and I remember my sixth grade class.
you say tomato, gazpacho or gestapo call the whole thing off
I try to avoid making comments about the Congressional Representative from Georgia’s 14th district for any number of reasons.
For the most part I wish the same wish I wish whenever I read or hear about her and that is I wish she would go away.
But her most recent comment that the Speaker of the House of Representatives was sending out the “gazpacho police” was just too much to ignore.
I understand that the person in question somehow avoided taking High School Civics or as it was called at Grand Rapids Creston High School, where I went, ‘Government’.
I would have loved seeing this person in the Government class I was in.
I think it was a state law back then, that for anyone to graduate from a High School in Michigan, they had to take a Government or Civics class.
At Creston, that meant Mr. Reagan’s class.
Mr. Reagan knew that every, and I mean every, student had to go through his classroom to get a diploma.
Mr. Reagan knew it and made the most of it.
We knew it too and we all loved it.
Or at least I think we did.
I did.
His classes were not so much classes as they were like a nightly episodes of the Tonight Show.
But instead of being at night, they were during they day.
And instead of starring Johnny Carson, they were starring Mr. Reagan.
The students were not so much students as we were a captive audience as well as the targets for his jokes and efforts to playfully humiliate us.
He loved to pick on the students and he picked on all of us.
He would point at someone and ask, “What color was George Washington’s white horse?”
When the student answered “How am I supposed to know that?” he would just grin and grin and nod and nod.
If no one else in the class laughed, he would stare at the entire class and grin and grin and nod and nod.
See Below *
Somewhere along the line, someone told Mr. Reagan that the Grand Rapids Public Schools required male teachers to wear a jacket and tie on payday.
Mr. Reagan usually had a tie on but he picked up a knee length white lab coat that he liked to wear in place of the usual jacket.
He would stand at the front of the classroom behind a table top podium in his lab coat and read to us the headlines from yesterday’s Grand Rapids Press and then comment on how expectedly stupid or unexpectedly smart the Mayor of the City of Grand Rapids was.
On the chalk board behind him, Mr. Reagan would also list the latest gossip headlines from Creston’s Senior Class.
After reading the newspaper, Mr. Reagan would then read off the list of gossip headlines along with commentary.
“Robin saw Bill with Jennifer at Frosty Boy. Bill is now looking for recommendations for inexpensive wind shield repair.”
No one would be spared.
And once he found out something about you, it was all over.
I remember one young lady who managed to park the family car inside their garage, sideways.
It was winter and the driveway was icy and she was going a little too fast as she pulled in so she hit the brakes, which on ice caused the car to tail spin just as it entered the garage.
The front of the car went to the left and the garage was flexible enough that the wall flexed back and the rear end of the car made it through the narrow opening to slide against the wall on the right.
That part of the wall flexed back, without breaking, so the car slid into place sideways, inside the garage.
Both walls flexed back flat and tight against the front and back bumpers and the car was stuck, sideways, inside the garage.
Mr. Reagan lived on that one for weeks and asked for regular updates from the podium for the benefit of the class.
For me, Mr. Reagan’s class wasn’t so much an educational opportunity as it was a challenge.
If Mr. Reagan was Johnny Carson, I was the new comedian on in the last 10 minutes of the show.
Mr. Reagan came into class and read a long list of students who were out with the flu.
Mr. Reagan then asked if we had heard of the Egyptian flu?
“You catch if from your Mummy,” he said.
“That joke SPHINX!” I yelled back.
I got the bigger laugh.
Mr. Reagan stared at me for a few seconds.
Then he pulled out his gradebook and turned to my page.
“Hoffman,” he says, “ESSAY ESSAY ESSAY,” making notations in the book.
“Essay? Does he have to write reports again?” someone asked.
“Not ESSAY,” Mr. Reagan said, “S.A. Smart Assss…Aleck.”
The points were not for being loud or yelling, the points were for getting the bigger laugh.
There was another time when Mr. Reagan gave us a test.
He passed out the tests and then left the room.
This test was an essay test and we had to outline the steps on how a bill became a law.
I knew there was a flow chart that showed these steps in our text book.
As soon as Mr. Reagan left, I tore the page out of my book and got the hall pass and left.
At Creston High School, each room had a flat piece of wood about one foot square with the words, HALL PASS – ROOM 101 or whatever room it was, painted on it.
Students who left the room had to carry the hall pass with them so that it was visible at all times.
Mr. Reagan had taken the thoughtful step of tying a piece of rope to the hall pass for his room and threading the rope through a roll of toilet paper.
Most teachers kept the hall pass in a desk drawer but Mr. Reagan kept his propped up against the chalk board.
If you asked to use the hall pass, he would ask IN A LOUD VOICE, Number 1 or Number 2?
He did that he said because in case of tie, number 2 would win.
Hall pass in hand, I ran down the back steps and made my way to the library.
You have to understand my High School career.
I myself can’t explain a lot of it but for the most part, I got away with almost everything.
Bucket of water out a third story window on the band.
Giant for sale sign on top of the school marquee.
The usual stuff.
I was known to be a bit goofy but harmless.
And I was for the most part, responsible.
I mean, the school knew I wasn’t going to try and burn down the school or something too stupid.
I was a familiar person in the hallway during class.
My junior year, I wanted to work on the school newspaper but that class met at 4th hour and I had a conflict.
After an interview with the teacher/supervisor, the decision was made to let me be on the newspaper staff but during 1st hour.
The newspaper had a small classroom office dedicated to the paper and yearbook production and Mr. Eikenhout, the teacher in charge of publications, would meet me there at the start of the day and let me in.
Then he would go do whatever he went and did and I was left alone for an hour.
It didn’t take me long to discover that that little room also had a hall pass.
After that I spent a lot of my time exploring the old building.
I learned how to get in the attic.
I learned how to get into the back rooms of the school auditorium.
There were some rooms I went that I was sure no one had been in for years.
It got to the point that finally one of the school security guards came up to me and asked, “Who are you anyway?”
Me running through the halls during class was not all that unusual.
At the library I waved to the librarian and went back to the AV room.
I was a familiar person here in the library too, and had a lot of freedom.
I fluttered the page in my hand at whoever was in the AV room and I said, “Mr. Reagan needs an overhead made of this diagram.”
The person nodded and waved me over to the duplicator.
Don’t ask me how I knew how to use the duplicator but I did and I slid the page in and pressed a couple of buttons and there was a hum and out came a thin plastic transparency of the page.
I got my page out of the machine and grabbed the transparency and ran back to class.
Mr. Reagan was still gone and on the front table next to his podium, was a projector we called an overhead.
I pulled down the screen over the chalk board, turned on the overhead and put my freshly made transparency on it.
And there on the big screen, for the class to see, was the diagram of how a bill became a law.
Nobody said a word.
I sat down and went back to the test.
The class was quiet.
Then Mr. Reagan came back in.
He must have forgot that when he left that the overhead wasn’t on as he used it constantly and he just walked past the screen and sat down.
I tried to get the person sitting in the front row to switch the machine off but everyone was keeping their heads down.
Mr. Reagan looked out a the class then looked up at the screen, it took a few seconds, and he yelled HEY!
He got up and took the transparency off the overhead.
“You all fail the test,” said Mr. Reagan with his big grin on his face.
Then the class got un-quiet.
Unfair!
Not my fault!
“But what about us who didn’t need that,” said, as I remember, the girl who parked her car sideways.
But here is the thing.
No one and I mean no one, not even garage girl, said, “HOFFMAN DID IT.”
This wasn’t like the time in Biology when everybody said HOFFMAN DID IT!
Mr. Reagan couldn’t help himself and burst out laughing.
He knew this would be a great story both for the other classes and the teachers lounge.
“Okay okay okay,” he said, “just finish the test.”
And he turned off the overhead and sat down, still chuckling to himself.
We all went back to our essays and the room was quiet.
“Hmmmmmmmmm” said Mr. Reagan in a quiet voice, “Somebody,” he said, drawing out the word sommmmmme, “had to cut that chart out of their text book.”
BUT I DIGRESS!
I would love it if somehow all the members of Congress had to take that High School government class over again.
But would they learn anything?
Would they have learned the difference between gazpacho and gestapo?
And again I think is this new?
I am reminded of Mark Twain when he said, “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.“
———————————–
*The photograph of Mr. Reagan is indicative of my time in High School.
I was the photographer for the school publications which was a very useful thing to be when you wanted to be places most students were not supposed to be.
For this picture I was told by Mr. Eikenhout to get a photo for the yearbook for the Class of ’78, of the three senior class teacher advisors, Mr. Haskins (My Biology Teacher – the one who asked the class, WHO DID IT and the entire class said HOFFMAN), Mr. Vander Lende and Mr. Reagan.
Mr. Reagan told me he would not be in the picture unless it was funny.
I suggested that we could arrange for Mr. Haskins and Mr. Vander Lende to hang him and Mr. Reagan said set it up.
First I went to the gym to get a rope which I got without any problem.
Then I got the three teachers together.
The center on the basketball team, was walking by and I asked him to stand on a table and dangle the rope over Mr. Reagan who was standing on a low stool.
As I was about to take the picture, one of the school Assistant Principals came around the corner.
I don’t know what he expected to see when he turned the corner but two of his teachers stringing up another teacher was most likely not on the list of possibilities.
He looked at the teachers and he looked at me.
I knew what he was thinking and that was he didn’t know what to think.
At the time, the Grand Rapids Public Schools had come up with a program for those one of kind students who needed a class that no one else in the world might want to take.
It was called the “Independent Study Program” and because of my interest in photography and that the one photography class in the entire school system was in conflict with the only upper latin class in the entire school system, I was allowed to set up not just one, BUT TWO sections of my class schedule with an independent study in photography.
For the most part I was left on my own to put in 10 hours a week on photography.
I would tell my friends that by bringing my camera, I got class credits going to basketball games.
I also had a part-time internship with the Grand Rapids Public School’s Instructional Media Center or IM.
This was the schools districts media center that had special equipment that wasn’t available in each school.
I think that’s were I learned about duplicating machines.
I would show up there a couple times a week and they would send me out to photograph special events at different schools around the district.
The Director of the IM thought I was wonderful.
Nice and polite and on time.
The Director of the IM was the wife of that Assistant Principle.
That poor feller knew what I got away with in school and he also heard about me from his wife.
Now here I was with my camera out and three teachers and rope.
“That’s not right,” he said.
And he grabbed the rope and yanked it down.
“This is how you tie a hangman’s knot,” he said.
And he looped and looped the rope around and then pulled it tight and handed me a rope with a perfect hangman’s knot in it.
And walked away.
Like I said, you have to understand my high school career.
people are trapped in impossible, yet still strangely plausible problems
Perspective.
It’s all about perspective.
In the old TV Show, Barney Miller, NYPD Police Captain Barney Miller’s reoccurring lecture to the people who passed through the police station focused on “not losing one’s perspective.”
The theme was so familiar that it led to this exchange …
Detective Ron Harris : Barney, his wife has decided not to press charges, so I let him go after giving him that spiel you always give about “not losing one’s perspective.” Captain Barney Miller : I’m … flattered that you chose to use it. Detective Ron Harris : Well, I thought it oughta be in the public domain by now …
The article is a review of the just-released Kaleidocycles, a book that according to the review, lets you make paper cut outs of MC Escher paintings.
Mr. Jones wrote:
You are walking up a staircase that winds up to the top of a tall square tower.
It ascends one side, then the next, then the next – and then suddenly you are right back where you started.
This is the kind of problem people who are trapped in the geometrically impossible, yet still strangely plausible, worlds of MC Escher have to deal with all the time. ‘
In his mind-boggling creations, dimensions collide and normality dissolves.
Somewhere in the years at Crestview Elementary school in Grand Rapids, Michigan where I grew up, one of our text books had the MC Escher painting, Which way up?
Maybe it wasn’t in a text book but in a book from our library.
I remember looking at this picture over and over again.
I would trace the steps with my finger tips.
I would think this is so cool.
I would think this is so nutz!
In my mind I can remember standing at someone’s desk, looking down at the book along with both hands on the pages of the book to hold it as flat as possible.
What I was looking at wasn’t possible?
Was it?
I understood perspective a little.
I covered most of my school work and the margins of my textbooks with doodles of a 3D cube.
Did the cube go up and to the left or go down to the right?
Both impossible, yet still strangely plausible
Perspective.
Keep ones’ perspective.
Don’t lose your perspective.
But from where I stand … so many problems today are a problem of perspective and most of these problems are both impossible, yet still strangely plausible.
On the one hand, (saying this without judgment either way okay?) we have a feller who ran for the office of President of the United States and by all accounts this feller lost.
But this feller will not accept this and many people cannot understand his perspective.
If one reads, and it seems like I have read them all, the ‘inside’ accounts of the election, no one and I MEAN NO ONE, dared tell this feller he was losing.
Throughout election night and the next days as votes were counted, no one, and I MEAN NO ONE, dared this feller he did not win.
To this day, this feller cannot admit the he did not win.
Other feelings aside, at this point, I find it hard to blame him as his reasonings, from his perspective, are strangely plausible.
I cannot say that had I been in the his place, based on the information he received, that I would feel any different.
AGAIN, and this is important, I am treating this as a laboratory case to examine the perspective of one individual and to comment on that individuals’ perspective based on the information received by that individual ASIDE from the body of work produced by this individual.
All I am saying is I can see his point, as it were.
This world’s history is filled, littered, with folks who only got the information they wanted to hear from their entourage and most likely never did accept that their information was wrong.
Often I come back to John F. Kennedy and the criticism he got for appointing his little brother Bobby, Attorney General of the Untitled States.
RFK was 35 without much experience to which JFK said, “I can’t see that it’s wrong to give him a little legal experience before he goes out to practice law.“
Such was the predicted furor over the appointment that JFK said he felt like opening his door at 3AM and whispering, ‘It’s Bobby’ to the street and going back to bed.
Here is the point, when he made the appointment, JFK said something along the lines that what he needed was someone in the Cabinet that would tell him when they thought he, the President, was wrong.
JFK trusted that RFK would do that.
If you read the history of JFK’s and RFK’s discussions over the the LBJ pick for VP, I think JFK got what he wanted from RFK.
Maybe this should be made a Cabinet position.
A lifetime appointment for someone designated to tell the President when he is wrong.
Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, sure.
But again, I can understand, with the team this feller had in place, this fellers perspective.
And, by the way, who wants to be the bearer of bad news?
With that in mind, if you were this feller, how cannot you want to quote Joe Jacobs out loud and say, WE WUZ ROBBED?
Richard Nixon yelled ‘WE WUZ ROBBED’ back in 1960.
The Republican Party called for a recount of votes in Chicago and Cook County, Illinois where Mr. Nixon lost by around 8,000 votes.
If I remember it correctly, it was in the book, BOSS, about Chicago’s Mayor Daley by Mike Royko, that explained how the Cook County Board of Elections managed the recount.
Mr. Royko explained that all the ballots were thrown at the ceiling.
Any ballot that stuck was considered a Republican vote.
Guess how the report came out?
Can’t you see today’s Twitter videos of this?
Mr. Nixon didn’t like it but he accepted the report.
But I digress.
Perspective.
So much of what is presented in the news today are impossible problems.
Impossible problems that are still strangely plausible.
They are mind-boggling creations where dimensions collide and normality dissolves.
Try to maintain one’s perspetive.
Try to follow the arguements without losing one’s perspective.
You go up one side, then the next, then the next – and then suddenly you are right back where you started.
MC Escher and his paintings.
In his mind-boggling creations, dimensions collide and normality dissolves.
Normality dissolves.
And, just for fun, remember what was said in the book Godel, Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. (At least I think this is where is was said.)
“All Escher paintings,” wrote Hofstadter, “are connected from the back.”
where is orion? what equinox precession? see that southern cross?
When I was a kid, growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, me, my family, my friends and the whole neighborhood would go sledding at night in the winter time on the hill by our school, Crestview Elementary.
The hill wasn’t a mountain or anything but it was high enough and long enough to be the best sliding hill in the world for little kids.
Our neighborhood had been built on an golf course.
The mainstreet through the neighborhood, my street, Sligh Blvd., followed a more of less, east-west path of what had been a small creek and ravine through the middle of the golf course.
Even though my Dad had grown up on the North End of Grand Rapids and knew that the property had been a golf course, he didn’t realize what building a house along what had been an existing watercourse would mean.
But we learned and relearned every spring when our basement would fill with water.
This was really odd as there were no windows in our basement but there were two floor drains that were connected to the storm sewers.
You can figure out the rest of that story.
The streets that connected to Sligh and went north and south went up hill no matter which direction you turned.
Houses were built along these streets until you got down by our house and the developer must have decided that it was just to much of a hill and the land was left vacant and a public school and park was built there.
Our house was on the south side of the street.
On the north side, there was a single row of houses and then the school property started.
Crossing the street and passing that row of houses, we were at the bottom of the longest, widest hill on the North End.
And that is what we called it.
The North End.
There was even an NE on the street signs.
People from out of town thought that the NE stood for North East.
We all knew it was for North End.
Grand Rapids, had and still has, a North End, a South End and a West Side.
Back when we had a high school, we were the CRESTON POLAR BEARS because we were on the North End.
I recently had to answer some security questions at my bank and when the lady asked what my high school mascot was, she kind of paused and then said, “You are the only Polar Bears I have ever heard of.”
But back to the hill.
It was possibly the best sliding hill ever.
It was a wide, long, long gentle slope with few trees.
A fence ran along one side where there were houses that you had to worry about if you went of to the left, which was an attraction as that side of the hill was steep but then there was that fence at the bottom.
What you wanted to do was stay on the main hill and slide as far and as long as you could.
When conditions were right, you could slide forever.
There are a lot of things I remember about sledding on that hill.
There were always a bunch of kids up there.
There was a wide range of sliding equipment from sleds and saucers to toboggans.
The single bladed snurfer came along at some point.
Over the course of the winter the snow on the hill would get packed down into something just this side of ice in an ice rink.
When that happened, all the old fashioned sleds came out and you could fly down that hill.
Then someone would build a jump and we would all take our chances with that.
No safety gear, no helmets.
Kids started showing up in school with cuts and bruises on their chins that you got laying head first on a sled and speeding down the hill with your face inches above the surface, and you chin banging on the handles.
There was that long walk back up the hill that was the price for a really long slide.
There was the cold.
There was the wet.
Winter meant a lot of cold, wet and cold, wet wool.
I can feel it.
I can smell it.
But what really sticks in my brain were the stars.
I have rarely seen stars like the stars we saw as kids sledding on Crestview hill.
In my mind, it was like the winking twinkling stars in A Charlie Brown Christmas.
When I first saw Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh, I thought Mr. Van Gogh had stood on our hill in winter time.
History tells us that Starry Night was painted in June and in France, but I don’t buy it.
Mr. Vincent was here.
It is one of those time space continuum things that you understand if you stare at Starry Night long enough.
My Dad liked stars and he liked to point out stars to us kids.
I can hear him say, “That’s not a star, that’s Venus.”
I say it the same way to my Grandkidz
I listened enough to my Dad to know that the big cluster of bright starts over head was the Constellation Orion.
At some point in a night of sledding, you would get tired and lay back on the snow and look up at all those stars.
The feeling of insignificance in this world was overwhelming while at the same time you felt close to God and his creative genius.
This was deep snow for a ten year old.
It was welcome to stand up and look across the Grand River Valley to the heights on the other side of the river where a giant red K glowed in the dark marking the K Mart store on Alpine to bring you back into civilization.
Now I live in the south.
When I lived in Atlanta there was too much light to see the stars much.
Now that I live along the Atlantic Coast, I am getting reacquainted with the stars.
But there is something wrong down here.
I can’t find Orion.
I did find a couple of really cool websites that allow you to follow the night sky for your location.
My Dad would have loved that.
And from what I can learn, Orion can be seen down here, but it isn’t right up overhead but low on the horizon.
The problem there is that living in the low country, there are few places where you can get the elevation to see the horizon.
I can, of course, go over to the beach, but horizon goes off to the east and I think Orion is to the southwest.
And that got me thinking, am I far enough south to see the Southern Cross.
Always wanted to, maybe just because it is on both the Australian and New Zealand flag and maybe because of the song that was popular when I was in High School.
So into the google goes Can I see the southern cross in South Carolina.
The answer is no, but the discussion on the Wikipedia page was fascinating.
According to Wikipedia:
The bright stars in Crux [the Southern Cross] were known to the Ancient Greeks, where Ptolemy regarded them as part of the constellation Centaurus. They were entirely visible as far north as Britain in the fourth millennium BC. However, the precession of the equinoxes gradually lowered the stars below the European horizon, and they were eventually forgotten by the inhabitants of northern latitudes.
Saw that last line over.
However, the precession of the equinoxes gradually lowered the stars below the European horizon, and they were eventually forgotten by the inhabitants of northern latitudes.
Again.
The stars were eventually forgotten by the inhabitants of northern latitudes.
I don’t know why I didn’t know that.
That the stars themselves are in motion.
Well, no that’s not it, but that the earth relationship to the stars is in motion.
In another 4,000 years the Southern Cross will be back up here.
No Haiku For You 