2.10.2022 – you say tomato,

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.

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.

12.9.2021 – people are trapped

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 …

I found the words for today’s Hiaku in the article, From snubbing Mick Jagger to explaining the cosmos: the secret life of MC Escher and his impossible worlds by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian today.

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.”

12.7.2021 – where is orion

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.

Not sure that I would trade Orion.

11.17.2021 – found in rare places

found in rare places
beauty being fugitive
how to possess it

I feel lucky.

Know what I mean?

I feel lucky.

I have lived in three places in my life.

For the first 50 years of my life I lived in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

On the North End of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

I used to say I lived 1 mile from the house where I was born.

Well I wasn’t born there but where I lived, after coming home from Butterworth Hospital.

Come to think of it, Butterworth Hospital probably wasn’t much more than a mile away either.

Growing up in Grand Rapids and going to an elementary school where 90% of the kids came from Grand Rapids, I remember one of my teachers going around the room and asking each kid which hospital they were born at.

There were three possbilitlies.

Butterworth was the most mentioned and the coolest as it made you think that was where the pancake syrup came from.

Then Blodgett.

But Blodgett was such an odd sounding name that we all decided that had you been born at BLODDDDD-ghet you yourself were kind of odd.

And then there were the few Catholic kids who were born at St. Mary’s.

There were so few Catholic kids at my school as most Catholic kids in the neighborhood went to Blessed Sacrament.

BUT they didn’t go to Blessed Sacrament until 2nd grade.

So these kids were part of our class for two years and then mysteriously disappeared from school.

They disappeared from school but not from the neighborhood.

We would still see these kids in the park and such.

And the word would spread, ‘They go to Blessed Sacrament.’

As my only other exposure to Catholic churches and schools at that time was St. Mary’s Hospital, I figured ‘going to Blessed Sacrament’ meant they got sick.

It was weird too because in the morning after school started we could look out the windows at the Blessed Sacrament bus as it stopped at the corner and we would see these kids line up and get on the bus and go off to therapy I guessed.

That bus stop was at a corner right next to our school, Crestview Elementary.

The Blessed Sacrament bus in the morning came by that corner, as I mentioned, after school had started.

The Blessed Sacrament bus in the afternoon came by about 10 minutes after our school got it.

Over the years it had become part of social schedule of Crestview Elementary to gather at the corner and when the Blessed Sacrament Bus stopped at the corner, exchange greetings with those kids on the bus.

Language used in these greetings was most unusal.

It would have been okay had you been deaf as both groups of students also used sign language to express themselves.

That it was the B.S. bus was just a gift of the Gods.

In the short story, I Went to Sullivant, James Thurber writes, “Now and again virtually the whole school turned out to fight the Catholic boys of the Holy Cross Academy in Fifth Street near Town, for no reason at all–in winter with snowballs and ice balls, in other seasons with fists, brickbats, and clubs.“

I knew just what that was like.

This exchange lasted as long as the bus was at the corner and then satisfied that honor had been upheld, everyone went home.

When I got to sixth grade and was a member of the school safety squad, that was my corner.

Most of the time, being so close to the school, the kids who had to cross came and went quickly and I could take off.

But every once in awhile I stuck around … just to observe don’t you know.

That year, the Crestview Greeters must have got louder or more persistent or something because neighbors complained to school.

I never figured out how it came about but the Principal, Mr. Domagolski, arranged with Blessed Sacrament to have his wife ride along on the B.S. Bus.

Mrs. Domagolski road the bus and reported two things to Mr. Domagolski.

The first thing she said was she had NEVER heard such language.

Mrs. D needed to hang out on our playground a little more often.

The 2nd thing she said was, “AND THAT SAFETY JUST STOOD THERE AND DIDN’T DO A THING.”

I know this because both Mr. Vanderwheel, the teacher/coordinator of the school safety squad and I got called in the Principals office together.

When you think about it, this was again irony on the greek tragic play level.

It was in Mr. Vanderwheel’s class that I was awarded around 364 demerits.

And now both of us were in the Principal’s office.

Mr. D repeated the line, “the safety didn’t do anything” and glared at me.

I can’t remember what I said or if I melted into the floor.

This was big time crime.

And I was in for it.

I think I did ask what could I have done?

And what was I supposed to do?

I was about 5 feet tall and weighed about 47 pounds.

Any 4th grader could have beat me up and most of the mean 4th graders already had.

Really?

I was supposed to stop this crowd and make them shut up?

And besides that, how was this NEW to anybody?

It had been going on for as long as I could remember.

Mr. D stared at me then looked at Mr. Vanderwheel and back at me and said slowly, one word at a time, “YOU ARE OFF THE SAFETY SQUAD.”

In my mind I remember that he walked over and unhooked my orange cross belt and let fall to floor but that may not have happened but it felt like it.

You remember the TV show, BRANDED, where the show’s opening depicts Chuck Conners getting drummed out of the Army and and his sword taken away and broken over someone’s knee?

That’s what it felt like.

And we left.

Mr. Vanderwheel kinda sorta said he was sorry but there was nothing he could do.

But he did do something.

He let me stay on the squad a substitute.

Which was kind of funny as a safety had a corner every other week.

As a sub, I was getting calls almost everyday.

I never ever got that corner by school again.

I am pretty sure that once or twice Mr. D say me on a corner with my belt.

It seems to me like I waved.

But it was never mentioned again.

ANYWAY, as I was saying, I lived a mile from the house where I was born and a mile from the cemetery where I would be buried.

That was Fair Plains Cemetery, a City Of Grand Rapids Public Cemetery where my Father and Grand Father was buried.

My Dad said so many people from the North End in general and our Church, Berean Baptist, in particular, were buried at Fairplains that Resurrection Day was going to be like a Sunday School picnic.

From where we lived at the time, a small triangle connected my house, my mom’s house and the cemetery and that was my world.

Once when I was working at WZZM13 in Grand Rapids, there was a general conversation in the newsroom about travel and traveling.

General Conversation in the newsroom was one of the best things about working at WZZM13.

Here was this great big room, crammed (pre-covid) with desks, TV’s on everywhere, radios and cop scanners blaring and everyone would be engaged in a general free for all conversation on anything but the news.

Never knew what we would be talking about and what might be said, but everyone contributed.

I remember once to make a point, I raised my voice in song and sang the ‘WHERE OH WHERE ARE YOU TONIGHT’ song from HEE HAW.

I got to the second WHERE and the entire newsroom or at least all those who knew the song, joined in.

The best part was the look on the face of the people who didn’t know what was coming and when we all hit the “THHHHHHPTTTT You Were Gone” people screamed.

So into this conservation on travel, I interjected my “I live a mile from where I was born and I mile from where I am going to be buried” and Jenn, the noon show anchor, tears up and says, “That is so depresssssssssssssssssssssssssssssing.”

Little did I know or ever imagine that my job would take me to Atlanta, Georgia and then to the South Carolina coast.

I now live almost 1000 miles from where I thought I might be buried.

The plan today is ashes in the ocean but that’s another story.

I am living in a place I had never heard of before.

I am living on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean that I had only even seen twice in my life.

And I am lucky.

I have met a few local people down here.

And by local I mean people who grew up here.

It isn’t easy.

30 years the population of Bluffton, SC, was 738.

Today it is over 30,000.

Less than 1 out of 30 folks down here are locals, long time locals.

And you know what?

They don’t go to the beach.

Nothing new to see there for the long time locals.

For me?

Everything is new.

I love it.

This is a rare place.

The beauty in places like this are fugitive.

I wonder how I can possess it?

I wonder can I possess it?

And I quit wondering and just enjoy.

I am lucky.

Lucky to see this new, to see this new at my age.

And just enjoy it.

Lucky.

Moonrise over Folly Field Beach – Novemebr 2021

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

A dominant impulse on encountering beauty is to wish to hold on to it, to possess it and give it weight in one’s life. There is an urge to say, ‘I was here, I saw this and it mattered to me.’

But beauty is fugitive, being frequently found in places to which we may never return or else resulting from rare conjunctions of season, light and weather.

How then to possess it, how to hold on to the floating train, the halvalike bricks or the English valley?

The camera provides one option. Taking photographs can assuage the itch for possession sparked by the beauty of a place; our anxiety over losing a precious scene can decline with every click of the shutter.

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.

9.25.2021 – my being able

my being able
to read, get hold of a book
these impressions last

Came across this statement the other day.

I mention that away back in my childhood, the earliest days of my being able to read, I got hold of a small book … I remember all the accounts there given of the battle fields and struggles for the liberties of the country … [that] fixed themselves upon my imagination … and you all know, for you have all been boys, how these early impressions last longer than any others.

This was said by Abraham Lincoln.

I didn’t read that statement as a kid but I knew this painting as a kid.

Young Abe Lincoln by Eastman Johnson – 1868 – *University of Michigan Museum of Art*

I cannot remember a time in my life that I didn’t know the images and story of this painting.

Imagine my delight when I happened to walk through the University of Michigan Art Museums (it what was supposed to be Alumni Memorial Hall) and discovered that Michigan OWNED the painting but another time – it’s a great story.)

I grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in a home with a fireplace.

A fireplace for show and not for heat but a real working fireplace that we used often.

When I could, I would turn off all the lights and try to read by firelight.

Maybe that is why I needed glasses so soon.

It was fun.

It was cozy.

It made me really appreciate Thomas Edison and the stories of the Rural Electrification Act.

I cannot remember when I started reading or maybe I should say I cannot remember my life without reading.

Back in the day, if you attended the Grand Rapids Public Schools, your family had to buy school books.

This changed by the time I started school but being the 8th kid in a family of 11 kids, it meant that we had piles of school books all over the house.

At some point I picked up the early Dick and Jane books and went on from there.

But the time I got into school it seems like I had already read many of the text books I would use in elementary school.

And I got bored.

Me being bored led to me finding other things to do during class.

This is sometimes known as disruptive behavior.

I wasn’t trying to be disruptive but goodness it was boring to just sit.

This often led to interactions with my teacher that resulted in me being sent out into the hall.

The hallways at Crestview Elementary school were lined with benches and shelves and pegs for coats.

I was supposed to sit there and reflect on my disruptive ways.

I didn’t mind being out there alone but there was always a chance that another class might walk by and see me on their way to gym or music or something.

If that happened there was a chance that one of my brothers or sisters would see me.

If they saw me, they would tell on me when I got home and who needs that.

One time I saw my brother’s class coming and I hid under the coats hanging there.

When we got home my brother, all so innocently says, “Mike, what were you doing in the hallway?”

I of course denied it and he says he saw me.

I forgot that I was denying it and yelled that he couldn’t have seen me as I was hidden.

My brother yelled right back that maybe my top half was hidden but my legs and shoes were there in the hallway.

At some point the decision was made that instead of the hallway I would be sent to the library.

This may have something to do with the fact that the classroom wall along the hallway had a row of windows across the top.

In the hallway, if you climbed up the wall and stood on the shelf over the coat pegs and jumped up you could see and be seen through those windows.

Don’t ask me how I know that but like I said, it may have something to do with why I was now being sent to the library.

I was ready to complain about it because I complained about everything.

Then it sunk in where I was going.

I was going to the library.

Honestly, and I remember this clear as day, my first thought was of Brer Rabbit and don’t throw me in that briar patch and I almost said, “Don’t send me to that library” but somehow I figured that my teacher knew all about Brer Rabbit so I kept my mouth shut for once.

Also, somehow or other, as much I understood the relationship between being a little disruptive and being sent to the library and that this relationship was open to exploitation but I decided to play it honest and not push it.

Someway I knew this punishment was privilege and I could mess it up.

And I was disruptive enough without trying.

So I kept my disruptive behavior to organic origins.

From then on, at some point in any given day I would get wound up or bored or both and my teacher would catch my eye.

I would hang my head for a second or two, I got real good at showing despair, and get up and walk to the door.

‘Shall we saw 15 minutes?’ my teacher would say.

I would nod and walk out.

I would walk down the hallway first to the Principal’s office.

There I would approach the school secretary who would open a drawer and get out a set of keys and find the library key.

I would take the keys and walk to the library and unlock and open the door.

Then I would take the keys back to the School Secretary and say, “15 minutes today.”

She would replace the keys in the drawer and nod her head.

I returned to the library and closed the door and turned on the lights.

I was in third grade.

I was in the library by myself.

I was alone with all those books.

Few things in life have been more enjoyable than that moment.

At different times in my life, being alone in the bookstore where I worked or first one to the various public libraries where I later worked I have come close to this feeling of empowered freedom.

The library was filled with books.

Books were the keys to everything.

I had the key to the library.

What more could anyone want?

Some philosopher is in the back of my brain, George Santayana seems to be attached to this thought but why ruin a moment with the google, saying that happiness is a shack to live in within 5 miles of a major university library.

And then there was young Abe Lincoln.

Young Abe Lincoln loved to read.

Young Abe Lincoln reading by fire light.

Young Abe Lincoln walking miles to borrow books.

Young Abe Lincoln waking up to find a book wrecked by dripping snow and walking miles to offer to work for days to pay for the damage.

Young Abe Lincoln’s delight at being given the self same book when the debt was paid.

Young Abe Lincoln alone with his book.

This is the kicker about these young Abe Lincoln stories.

They all seem to be pretty much darn close to the truth.

What is about Mr. Lincoln?

Of all people, Leo Tolstoy was recorded as saying, “If one would know the greatness of Lincoln one should listen to the stories which are told about him in other parts of the world. Once while travelling in the Caucasus I happened to be the guest of a Caucasian chief of the Circassian … {This Chief] lifted his hand and said very gravely ‘But you have not told us a syllable about the greatest general and greatest ruler of the world. We want to know something about him. He was a hero. He spoke with a voice of thunder; he laughed like the sunrise and his deeds were strong as the rock and as sweet as the fragrance of roses. The angels appeared to his mother and predicted that the son whom she would conceive would become the greatest the stars had ever seen. He was so great that he even forgave the crimes of his greatest enemies and shook brotherly hands with those who had plotted against his life. His name was Lincoln and the country in which he lived is called America, which is so far away that if a youth should journey to reach it he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man.’

I am not sure of all that.

I know I was once a little kid in America.

I knew that Mr. Lincoln was once a little kid in America.

I liked to read.

He liked to read.

I think we could have hung out in the library.

That fixed itself upon my imagination, and you all know, for you have all been kids, how these early impressions last longer than any others.