8.20.2021 – hot dogs for dinner

working life at home
adventure into the fridge
hot dogs for dinner

I had hot dogs for dinner the other night.

I like to think I am a pretty good cook and can pull off a good meal anytime anywhere but the other night I just didn’t feel like it.

The wife was out and the boys weren’t interested.

I looked in the fridge to see what sandwich I could pull together.

With covid and working from home it will hit me that I haven’t been out this room for hours, maybe days or even weeks.

I need to move.

I need to do something.

I need adventure.

So I look inside the fridge.

It is the big adventure for the day.

A package of hot dogs caught my eye.

I heated up three in a pan of water.

The adventure for the day got that much better.

I cannot eat hot dogs without thinking of my days at Crestview Elementary School in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Specifically I cannot eat hot dogs with thinking of my friend John and Crestview Elementary School.

I cannot eat hot dogs without the image of my friend John walking down the the main hallway of Crestview Elementary with a hot dog, just a hot dog mind you, no bun, in each hand.

I wonder what type of machine it would take to eliminate that image from my mind.

Maybe my first sign of alzenheimers will be if I eat a hot dog and don’t think of John.

I see John in my mind when ever I eat a hot dog, either at the ball park, at the beach, and at the local gas station with its rollers of hot dogs of indeterminate age being offered to the public.

(Okay so I don’t eat gas station food, but when I look at those rollers, I think of John.)

The elementary school I attended when I was kid was designed, built and run on a daily basis without a lunchroom.

Non of the schools in Grand Rapids were.

They were neighborhood schools.

Schools built in a neighborhood.

Where students WALKED to school.

And where students were expected to WALK home for lunch.

But.

Once a month we GOT to have lunch at school.

For us, eating lunch at school was a priveledge.

It was a party.

Well, it was a party from our point of view.

We never asked out teachers what they thought.

But I am sure that they loved it.

It was a hot dog lunch!

These hot dog lunches were once a month.

We all lined up and we were walked down the hall to the kitchen window were we were given a hot dog (or two if we had ordered two), a bag of potato chips, a tub of vanilla ice cream and a bottle of orange drink.

It was all so FREAKIN COOL!!!!

The ice cream came with a wooden … well … slat in the shape of flat spoon.

I could never use one without thinking I was going to get a splinter in my tongue.

The orange drink came in a bottle.

A glass bottle.

A glass bottle with a cardboard plug.

It wasn’t pop and it wasn’t kool aid.

It was orange.

It was a drink.

It was orange drink.

And that brings us to my friend John.

John didn’t eat much

John didn’t like food.

John didn’t weigh a lot either.

Neither did I for that matter.

As a testament to this, a few years later we were all at Riverside Junior High School.

I happened to be in art class one day and on that day we were drawing hallways.

In other words, the teacher got us out of the classroom and out her hair but giving us drawing boards, paper and rulers and said, go draw the hallways.

Me and a few other guys walked off as far as we could get and sat down in the empty hallway outside the gym.

We were all drawing away when the gym door opened and out came the Gym Teacher.

Just say that word out loud will you?

Gym Teacher!

Tell the truth you wanted to use the bathroom right?

The Gym Teacher, whom it was rumored had been kicked out of the Marines for being too tough, looked up and down the hall way and then looked right at me.

“Hoffman,” he said, “what do you weigh?”

There were maybe 157 questions I was prepared to answer at that time but my weight was not one of them.

“Hoffman, YOU! What do you weigh?”

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, 55, 60 pounds sir, maybe.”

At that time time I weighed the same I did in 6th grade, two years earlier, but was 6 inches taller.

Those jokes about running around in shower so the water might hit me weren’t jokes.

The Gym Teacher looks at me, an evil smile on his face, and says, “Get in here, I got some skinny kid needs someone to wrestle.”

If I had been told to walk across a room of hungry, angry rattlesnakes it would have been better than this.

Wrestle.

God’s gift to kids to make sure they understood the law of the jungle.

The law that said skinny little kids with glasses were doomed.

Since moving to the South Carolina coast I enjoy swimming in the ocean even though the locals say if you go in the water, you become part of the food chain.

Hey, I have been on the lower links of that chain all my life.

The Gym Teacher at Riverside Junior High spent an entire month on wrestling.

At the end of the month, you had to wrestle a minimum of two times for your grade that marking period.

The only way to wrestle more than two times was to win and that was something that never ever ever occurred to me.

Three years of Junior High meant that in my life I would have to wrestle six times.

I figured I could do that.

I figured this out in 7th grade knowing I had two more years to go.

Like having the flu, it couldn’t be avoided just lived through.

But I could do that six times.

Now fate was NOT throwing me under the bus.

Fate WAS the bus.

And I was in the way.

The Gym Teacher looked at me until I stood up.

I said I had to draw the hallway.

The Gym Teacher said the hallway would be there when I got back.

He knew this wouldn’t take long.

I looked at him.

He looked at me.

I felt like a French aristocrat being led to the guillotine,

All you can do is get it over with.

I walked through the doors and into the gym.

The gym class, all in gym clothes, looked at me as if I was the funniest thing that ever happened.

Years later, I agree with that.

It was pretty funny.

The Gym Teacher needed a skinny kid and found me.

I can still see that gym

That marvelous amazing expanse of polished hard wood.

The huge American flag that seemed to be on loan from Fort McHenry.

I could not look at that flag without seeing the red stripes that represented the blood shed so that little skinny kids like me could be free.

Free to go to gym class and wrestle.

And there, in the center of mat, waiting for HIS fate, was my friend John.

John didn’t like hot dog buns.

John didn’t like ketchup or mustard.

When John got his hot dogs they were just hot dogs.

Naked hot dogs.

Wrapped in the waxy paper that you had in lunch rooms.

John carried them vertically, straight up.

I can see it as clear in my mind as clear as the view out the window.

It was like John had the handle bars of a harley locked in his grip as he went down the hall.

John carried those hot dogs, one in each hand, back to classroom.

John’s Mom was one of the ladies who prepared the hot dog lunch which is most likely why John got away with two naked hot dogs.

This also may have been the reason John’s Mom was always part of the group of Mom’s that made the hot dogs.

To make sure John got his naked hot dogs.

Then we ate at our desks.

I remember how for the first time for many of us we saw how other people ate.

Sure we ate in restaurants but who watched how people ate when you were at a restaurant.

At hot dog lunches I watched.

I watched how other people put some ketchup on their waxed paper and dipped their hot dog in it.

I watched how some people used just ketchup and some people used just mustard and some, like me, used both but some, unlike me, mixed the ketchup and mustard haphazardly on the hot dog instead of making two distinct lines.

Then there the people who ate all their hot dog and then ate all their chips instead of alternating bite of hot dog and then a few chips and then another bite of hot dog and then some more chips.

I was sure this is what people meant when they talked about a balanced diet.

And then there were crazy people.

I watched as these people crunched their bag of chips into chips and then, to my horror, stirred the chips into their ice cream.

To me, in the 60’s, this was one step to main lining heroin.

Who would do such a thing.

I very much remember years later on a date, my date got a shake and fries and once the food was on the table, started dipping her fries in the shake.

I must have freaking out flashed back to Crestview and the chips and ice cream or something because all my date could say, seeing the look on my face, was “What? What? What?:

We didn’t go out again.

Another thing that comes to mind is that at home we often discussed the finer points of Hot Dog Cuisine.

While we differed on almost everything, there was universal agreement that the hot dogs at Crestview Elementary School hot dog lunches were the best.

It was left to my brother Tim to decide that all you had to do to make a really good hot dog was boil about 1,000 hot dogs together at the same time.

Simple yet difficult.

Somehow perfect.

It is amazing to me how much an easy way out of dinner can create so much to think about.

PS – so you are all wondering what happened in Gym Class.

To this day I cannot figure out how, but John won both matches.

I cannot remember for sure if I got pinned but I think I was.

For the record, and I have to include my sophomore year of gym class at Creston High School where we also had to wrestle for a grade, was 10 matches and 10 losses.

Four years of gym class plus the 2 matches from the hallway.

A perfect record.

That is how I remember it.

A perfect record and if no one asks any questions that’s how it stays.

One funny thing is that we went back to the art class and the guys I was with told the art teacher what happened.

She was so mad, she went down and balled out the Gym Teacher.

I didn’t see it but I heard that the Gym Teacher was so stunned that he was speechless.

I liked that art teacher a lot after that.

As an aside she had always been nice to me since she had held up a picture of a ‘collage’ and asked what was the focus point.

Most everyone in class yelled out that farmer and his wife.

I yelled ‘American Gothic.’

Also that Gym Teacher always said that if you gave your best, you would never get less than a C in his class.

By the last year of Junior High, when I was another 4 inches taller and still weighed the same, my wrestling matches set records for how short they were.

I have a distinct memory of laying on the mat and yelling PIN PIN PIN and GET ON ME YOU DORK to the guy who supposed to pin me.

I still got a C.

I think by that time, when it came to me, even the Gym Teacher was ready for the easy way out.

3.27.2021 – Beverly Cleary

Beverly Cleary
for Henry, Ribsy, Beezus
Thank you very much

The other day I wrote about how a book I was reading made me laugh out loud.

I clearly remember the first time a book I was reading made me laugh, I mean really laugh, not the polite guffaw, but the unable to suppress hilarity and I don’t care who knows it laugh.

It was in 4th grade and I was reading to myself.

If I was reading to myself in 4th grade there is a good chance it was during a time I was supposed to be doing something else.

Most likely arithmetic.

If I was reading, I was being quiet.

Me being quiet was not a state of affairs that any teacher wanted to interrupt.

I was happy.

She was happy.

I was reading the book Henry and Beezus by Beverly Cleary.

Most likely the book was tucked inside my arithmetic book.

Henry was in a crowd at a bike auction with his friend Beezus and her little sister, the now very famous Ramona.

At that time in literary history, Ramona was still a footnote and not a defining character.

I was rolling through the words and could feel the hot crowd of sullen people gathered at a Police Auction of old bikes.

I was there at the auction for all intents and purposes.

I certainly was not following along with the arithmetic lesson.

Henry and Beezus and I were stuck in the crowd, surrounded by tall adults with no room to see.

All seemed hopeless in the airless, hot crowd.

When Ramona yells out, “I am going to throw up!”

Have you seen or experienced something so funny that you lose yourself in the humor of the situation?

Laughter burst out of me with the same explosiveness as if I HAD thrown up.

Maybe the fact that I suffered from ‘barfphobia’ the fear of throwing up in public made it extra funny.

I was there and I heard and saw the crowd react, which was to get out of the way and get out of the way quick.

I laughed and laughed.

And laughed and laughed.

This is where the magic that followed me my whole life steps into the story.

After a bit the mists cleared and I came back to the classroom.

I realized someone was calling, “Mr. Hoffman?”

It was my teacher.

My teacher, at the time ‘Miss’ Critchell, who later became a very dear friend, was looking at me.

“Well”

The arithmetic lesson had stopped.

Everyone in class had stopped.

Everyone was looking at me.

Everyone could see that I had a book open inside my arithmetic book.

But it was too funny.

I could see and hear Ramona and I could feel just the way Henry felt.

“Oh that Ramona,” I said out loud.

“She had to throw up!”

Miss Critchell wanted to laugh.

Miss Critchell tried really had to not laugh.

But I could tell, she wanted to laugh.

Maybe she remembered reading this part of the book.

I was in for it I knew.

“Why don’t you close your book and join us for bit,” said Miss Critchell.

No hallway.

No sentences.

No appointment to see the Principal.

I put Henry and Beezus into my desk and life went on.

And I can remember the relief like it was yesterday.

I read all the Henry Huggins books.

I read them all several times.

Had I known I would have made a mark on the inside cover like I did later with “The Caine Mutiny” to know how many times I had read them.

Somehow Beverly Cleary really understood the way kids brains worked.

Why a kid wanted a bike.

Why a boy could not ride a girls bike.

Why a clubhouse was the single most cool thing, after a tree house, any kid could every want.

According to Wikipedia, “As a children’s librarian, Cleary empathized with her young patrons, who had difficulty finding books with characters they could identify with, and she struggled to find enough books to suggest that would appeal to them. After a few years of making recommendations and performing live storytelling in her role as librarian, Cleary decided to start writing children’s books about characters that young readers could relate to. Cleary has said, “I believe in that ‘missionary spirit’ among children’s librarians. Kids deserve books of literary quality, and librarians are so important in encouraging them to read and selecting books that are appropriate.”

See that line, decided to start writing children’s books about characters that young readers could relate to?

I knew every kid in the Henry Huggins books.

I hated and feared Scooter.

I really like Beezus.

Was I Ramona?

They were all my friends.

Ernest Hemingway wrote something along the line of if what you write becomes part of the collective experience of the reader, you are indeed a writer.

TO THIS DAY I think the first bite of any apple tastes the best.

And WHY?

In the book Beezus and Ramona, Beezus hears a CHOMP … bump bump bump.

She investigates and finds Ramona by a crate of apples surrounded by a dozens of apples on the floor.

Each apple has one bite taken out of it.

As Beezus watches, Ramona selects an apple and bites it, CHOMP, and drops it, bump bump bump.

Ramona looks at Beezus and says, “You know how the first bite tastes best?”

The thought became part of my collective consciousness.

Using the Hemingway test, Ms. Cleary was indeed a writer.

Ms. Cleary it was announced Friday, has died.

She was 104.

She was named a Living Legend in 2000 by the Library of Congress. In 2003, she was chosen as one of the winners of the National Medal of Arts and met George W Bush. Her books have won awards, and she is lauded in literary circles far and wide.

In and interview she once said, “By sixth or seventh grade, “I decided that I was going to write children’s stories,” she said.”

I hope she knew how much I enjoyed her books.

They are a river that ran though my life.

And I am grateful for it.

Thank you very much.

6.19.2020 – days I hope will come

days I hope will come
rendezvous with Life I keep
fear I deeply, too

From the poem I Have A Rendezvous With Life by Countee Cullen

I have a rendezvous with Life,
In days I hope will come,
Ere youth has sped, and strength of mind,
Ere voices sweet grow dumb.
I have a rendezvous with Life,
When Spring’s first heralds hum.
Sure some would cry it’s better far
To crown their days with sleep
Than face the road, the wind and rain,
To heed the calling deep.
Though wet nor blow nor space I fear,
Yet fear I deeply, too,
Lest Death should meet and claim me ere
I keep Life’s rendezvous.

Born in 1903 in New York City, Countee Cullen was raised in a Methodist parsonage.

He attended De Witt Clinton High School in New York and began writing poetry at the age of fourteen.

An imaginative lyric poet, he wrote in the tradition of Keats and Shelley according to the website, https://allpoetry.com/.

It was another one of Cullen’s poems that may have been the first real poem I ever read.

Back in the 1960’s at Crestview Elementary School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the school took part in the Scholastic Book Program.

We would get a 4 page newsprint catalogs of cut rate paper back books and we would be encouraged to order a book or two.

We still had to pay of course but the prices of these books were pretty cheap.

The day the orders were due, most kids in class would show up with a white envelope with a dollar in it along with an order for 1 or 2 books.

Then I would go up with order for 5 or 10 or 20 books.

I have to admit that when it came to books and me, my parents were very generous.

Maybe they figured if I was reading I wasn’t in trouble and that alone was priceless.

After a week or two, we would come in from recess and on the teachers desk would be a big box.

In this day and age of Amazon, it is hard to explain how exciting a big brown box could be.

The teacher, most likely Miss Critchell as I had her for 2 and a half years of grade school, but that is a different story, would open the box and we would see that it was filled with books and a bunch of orders.

Once we settled down, the teacher would pick up an order form, rummage for a book and call out Diane, Ruby, Richard or Cindy and those kids would go forward and the teacher would hand them their book and their order.

And I would wait and wait and wait.

Then the teacher would count the last books and look at the last order and say, “Mike, these are yours,” amd had me the box.

And that was it for me for the rest the day, maybe that week.

Teachers were as happy as I was.

Call It Courage, The Mystery of the Blue Cat, Up Periscope.

I can still remember the titles.

The smell.

The feel of a new book.

I can say I have spent all my life in information services, with the last 20 years creating an online environment for news.

But before that I worked for, going backwards, a publisher, the public library and for almost 10 years, a bookstore.

That all got started back in grade school.

I would order almost anything off of those Scholastic Catalogs.

My Mom would look over the list and ask, “Are you really going to read that?”

Of course I would say.

Though I admit sometimes I just wanted the book.

Out would come the checkbook and the next day I would give my teacher a white evenlope with the order and my Mom’s check.

I feel like I read them all the books I ordered.

I know I read a most of them.

Most of them in a matter of days.

I know I got lifted eyebrows over, “A Students book of Verse” or something like that, but I know I got the book.

I remember looking at it when it came and wondering why I ordered it, but there it was.

I remember that it was 4th or 5th grade.

Crestview had been integrated by them.

I was sitting at my desk.

I would read at my desk when we were supposed to working on other subjects.

I would open a book in my lap to hide it and read.

I always thought my teacher didn’t notice.

She might not have noticed the book but she had to notice I was being quiet.

And if I was being quiet, the teacher wasn’t going to do anything to get me to stop being quiet.

I had the Students Book of Verse open.

I was thumbing through it, never having read much poetry aside from anything I might have had to learn as a ‘Memory Selection.”

Somehow, someway, in 1970, the editors of that book managed to include the poem “Incident” by Countee Cullen.

Never heard of it,

Never heard of Cullen.

But I read his poem.

I slapped the book shut and put it in my desk and slammed the lid.

I was shaking inside.

Had anyone seen me reading that poem.

Had anyone known that that poem was in my new book.

How has THAT poem got into this book?

To this day I wonder that.

I like to think that some young editor at scholastic snuck the poem in there with the hope that one kid, like me, might learn from it .

It was the 60’s..

About the same time we had a school concert with lots of Bob Dylan songs.

I might have got looks when I slammed my desk but no one, including the teacher, said anything.

I hid the book back in the box and later that day took all the books home.

When I had a chance to be alone, I got the book out the box and read the poem again.

For a little kid there were just too many emotions.

One was WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Another was awe.

Awe because, while I couldn’t verbalize it and today I still can’t, how could all this emotion and feeling and meaning be contained in the words of poem.

A short short poem and it said so much.

I looked around at my classmates and could not understand.

You could say that’s when I discovered the power of poetry.

Makes me laugh to think that I am now writing these daily haikus.

Dandelions in a forest of redwood trees with poems like Incident.

Maybe besides poetry there were other things that I understood that day.

Things that were WRONG WRONG WRONG.

Not much I could to make it right.

But I could try.

It wasn’t the wrong I wanted to concentrate on but the right.

A rendezvous with life

Even though I have fear, I have hope.

And I give thanks for the parents who wrote those checks for those books.

And I give thanks for a wife who understands and we always try to give books as gifts to the kids.

And wait for those days I hope for.

For those who have never read it, here is Countee Cullen’s Incident or Incident in Baltimore, written in 1925

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.

November 18 – Couldn’t keep it in

Couldn’t keep it in
Let it go, so, let it go
Turn away, slam the door

Disney song on a Monday morning?

When I was a kid, Disney songs were all pretty light hearted and happy tunes.

Whistle While You Work, Zip a Dee Doo Dah and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Light hearted, saccharine and fairly meaningless.

Got me thinking of music class Crestview Elementary School.

We had a weekly visit from a music teacher and we learned songs for the school wide spring concert.

One year, sometime in the late 19060’s, when the music teacher must have been right out of college when learned tunes from Simon and Garfunkel (59th street Bridge Song), Peter, Paul and Mary (Leaving on Jet Plane) and Bob Dylan (Blowing in the wind).

I guess it was a bit much for the school board and the next spring we sang Lets Go Fly a Kite and Chim Chim Cher-ee from Mary Poppins.

But I digress.

I have heard this song for years.

I never seen the movie, but my a lot of my grand children’s toys play it over and over again.

While there is much discussion to the meaning of this song and the role its plays in the movie and what is portrayed as an allegory, it is the phrase, let it go, that sticks in my mind.

Recent news from family up north has put choices of life and death into focus.

So many things, issues, hurts and concerns lose their importance when the either – or of life and death are truly in mind.

Let it go.

Slam that door.

But that leaves the question, what does matter here on earth?

Assuring yourself of a salvation throughout eternity stands out.

But what about the here and now.

What matters?

I was stuck by a passage this passage of prose.

“… there does come a point in life where a great deal that used to worrisome simply becomes easier.
It is surprising how easy life can get.
A man and a woman look at each other across the breakfast table and realize it’s been a long time since they’ve had bad feelings about each other, these two who’ve gone through rough patches when big arguments could come up suddenly out of nowhere that left them emotionally drained and sorrowful for days, and now it feels as if they’ve turned a corner found something easy, a simple pleasure in each other, in their domestic arrangements, in their mutual life …”

Garrison Keilor, Life Among the Lutherans, Augsburg Books, 2009 (Church Organist, Page 77)

September 14 – in spirit, same mind

in spirit, same mind
tenderness and compassion
having the same love

based on:

Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind.

Philippians 2:1-2 (NIV)

What happened to compassion today?

Where did it go?

Once my brothers and sisters came home from Crestview Elementary School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we told our Mom that there was a family of kids with no winter coats.

It was fall and starting to turn cold and these 3 or 4 kids arrived at school and went out for recess without warm coats.

Our Mom, without telling us, called the Principal, Mrs. Adams (as I said at my Mom’s funeral, Mom knew Mrs. Adams really well, for some reason, I sure didn’t know why).

And Mom made arrangements to get these kids winter coats right away.

Mom did not want the kids or us to know about it but Mrs. Adams had the kids write thank you notes which we found later.

Compassion.