growing up with my
sister Mary, hey do you …
remember Freddie?

I grew up in a group.

I have 10 brothers and sisters, though the last brother showed up after the first brother got married so there were never more than 10 kids in the house at one time.

And it was a big house.

We evolved into two groups of siblings.

The first five and the second five with one brother kind of lost in the middle.

I have memories of being a little kid but there are jumbled altogether with those ‘big’ kids in the first five.

They were ones who went everywhere on family trips.

They went to Disneyland and Yosemite and the Grand Canyon and New Orleans.

Then they went off to college and we in the second five wondered who those people were.

They would be around in the summer and then leave in the fall but be back at Thanksgiving (when we would all watch the Michigan-Ohio State and scream at the TV) and then back at Christmas (when we would all watch Michigan in the Rose Bowl and scream at the TV).

Christmas also had the added attraction of the first family bringing back germs from college and we all got, in succession, the dread stomach virus or winter vomiting as the brits call it.

Through it all strode the indomitable force that was my big sister Mary.

Determined to be all she could be.

Determined to make us all be all we could be if we would just listen.

Before she left for college, her room was on the 2nd floor (or 4th floor … it was a split level) right over the room I shared with my brother Tim.

We had bunk beds and could knock on the ceiling to bug her and she would bang the floor.

We would knock again.

She would bang again.

We would keep this up until we would hear her get out bed, slam open her door, and stomp down the stairs.

We would dive under the covers and pretend to be asleep and she would kick our door open and yell , “KNOCK IT OFF – I KNOW YOU’RE NOT SLEEPING.”

And we had balanced a cup full of water on top of the door.

Even when she was off at college, Mary would reach out to us.

She wrote a letter to my brother Pete with a sketch of her finger on the paper.

She said her hand had been asleep on the page and she didn’t want to move her finger, so she drew it into the letter.

We read that over and over and just laughed and laughed.

She would put her return address on her letters as ME.

What else would the return address be but return it to ME and of course ME meant our sister Mary!

Which we thought was so cool … until she told us it was her initials (Mary Elizabeth).

About this time my brother Peter brought the word Freddie home from school.

We would be watching TV or in the car or anywhere doing nothing and Pete would say, “Freddie” and we would all crack up.

So Mary picked up on it.

She would write and at the end of her letters include, PS: Freddie.

And we would laugh and laugh.

Mom would call her long distance from time to time and Mary would ask to talk to us kids and Mom would hold the phone out to us and Mary would say ‘Freddie’ and we would fall on the floor laughing and laughing.

They thing is we never told Mary what Freddie meant.

We never told anyone what Freddie meant.

My Mom got upset at being left out of the joke and started guessing at what ‘Freddie’ meant and she really fell off the deep end with her off color guesses which made us laugh harder and made Mom madder.

So today, on my sister’s Mary’s birthday, I have to ask?

Do you remember Freddie?

make managers bit
less uptight – something silly
but acceptable

“I never thought anyone would want to do a book about the madness of the 1970s and 1980s. I had no idea people even remembered our Newton’s cradle,” said Loncraine, 78. “It was something to make bank managers a bit less uptight – something silly but acceptable to have on your desk.”

From the article, “‘It was to make bank managers less uptight’: the toy that put Newton’s law on executive desks by Alice Fisher. Lifestyle editor, in the Guardian.

Growing up in the 70’s … the 1970’s, we had one of these at home.

Everyone did.

We knew it by another name though.

We called it ‘Newton’s Balls’ not Newton’s Cradle and it made a big difference.

Especially when you let the two hanging balls on the ends go at the same time and they slammed into the other three over an over again.

You felt it in … well …

One of my older brothers was studying to be a math teacher.

At one point in his life he had a pet cat named Newton.

He would explain how the action of the steel balls demonstrated conservation of momentum and conservation of energy in physics.

I had just read a book about Robert H Goddard and how he had studied Newton’s laws of physics.

As a kid (the book I had read was a young readers life of Robert H Goddard) the book said Goddard had sent away for multi volume sets of books that he read to learn all he could about Newton and this somehow led him to design rockets and rocket engines.

I thought about that.

I thought about what my brother told me.

And I watched Newton’s balls slowly slow down.

And I realized I was not destined for a career in mathematics.

Understand this was not in the family genes.

There were 11 of us and over time we all attended the same high school.

Every year, Grand Rapids Creston would recognize its top students and one of the awards was the math trophy.

My family brought that trophy home 4 times.

But not me.

Years later there was a family get together at my mom’s house.

I was running late and got there after dinner to find most of my brothers and sisters and a lot of my niece’s and nephews all sitting around the dining room table starring at pieces of paper with pencils in hand.

My brother the math teacher looked up and said, ‘Grab a pencil, we working on quadratic equations.”

I figured these were people who needed something silly but acceptable to have on their desk to help them seem bit less uptight.

Mr. Baan’s Bar and
Mookata Noori Pocha
Fikscue Azizam

Jenny Lawson, in her book, “Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things” , writes that sometimes she needs ‘a word that I just made up for words that you have to invent because they didn’t yet exist.’

With today’s haiku, you might think I am indulging myself with words I had to invent but they didn’t exist.

But you would be wrong.

Today’s haiku is made of names of restaurant’s from the article, “The Restaurant List: Our 50 favorite places in America right now,” in the New York Times.

In the movie, The Natural, baseball player Roy Hobbs, played by Robert Redford, goes out to dinner with an old coach played by Richard Farnsworth who takes him to an Italian restaurant.

The coach starts eating as says something along the lines of, “… you can’t pronounce it, but it sure does eat good.”

I like that line and how it applies to Italian food (and I always have to ask what was Italian food like before Columbus brought tomatoes back from the new world – there was no saucy pizza before 1492 so maybe that is were Neapolitans got the idea … but I digress ) but I am not sure how it applies to restaurant names.

Noori Pocha?

Fikscue?

Azizam?

You can’t pronounce it but it sure does eat good?

Maybe – but I will know never know as I am pretty sure I will never eat in any of these places.

Growing up in a family with 11 kids and a Dad who liked to eat out, eating out was interesting.

Like my own family when we got to seven kids, we didn’t so much go to a restaurant as much as we invaded it.

There was a cafeteria on the North End of Grand Rapids, Michigan were we lived that my Dad enjoyed named Schenshul’s and when Mom needed a break for Sunday Dinner we would all pile in the car and drive up there after church and pile out of the car.

We drove around in what today is called a Van but we called it bus.

In front it had a drivers sear and a passenger seat with the engine … yes the engine … between the two seats.

It had double doors on the passenger side and the last one in sat on a four legged wooden stool that my Dad would place just behind the front seat.

That was with one kid seating on that engine.

In the summer time that engine block would get HOT so my Dad had a couple of wool army blankets that he would set on top of the engine and you would sit on that.

A little kid in summer, wearing shorts, sitting on itchy wool blankets on top of a motor.

No air conditioning back then either.

Don’t even ask me about seat belts.

That was just the transportation.

I am not sure what folks thought watching us all pile out.

I know what they thought of the bus though.

One time there was dent in a door and for reason known but to my Dad, he covered the dent with a stick-on fluorescent flower.

On a trip somewhere at a stop, me and my brothers were wondering around the parking lot waiting for the rest of the family and we heard these two old guys point out the bus and the flower and said, “Stupid Hippies.”

Oh did we laugh and laugh and couldn’t wait to tell Dad when we all got in the car.

No sure what he thought but he left the flower.

Back to Schenshul’s, one time I remember we came through the doors and someone on the restaurant crew looked up and saw us in the line and yelled out, “IT’S THE HOFFMANS! BREAK OUT THE WHITE MILK.”

There were several layers of ‘rites of passage’ when dining at Shenschul’s.

The age when you got your own tray.

The age when you got to push your own tray.

The age when you to order for yourself.

The age when you got to reach over the edge of the cafeteria line and help yourself to a dessert.

The age when you got to CARRY your own tray to the table. This was a biggie and one that my parents were reluctant to okay as there were many close calls.

I myself don’t remember that I or anyone in my family ever dropped or tipped a tray so everything slid off but we saw it often enough.

The final passage was where you got to sit.

Those folks at Schenshul’s would often pull together tables so we could sit in one long group but just as often my Dad would let us take a cluster of tables and we could sit away from our parents.

To sit with the big kids at Schenshul’s.

That’s when you arrived.

State more widely known
through University than
any other means

Among the very first laws enacted by the Legislature of Michigan after its organization as a State was one for the establishment of the State University, founded on the act of Congress of 1826, which appropriated two entire townships of wild land for the special purpose. That action on the part of its original legislators, suggested by a clause in the constitution pg 092enjoining upon the legislature the “encouragement of learning and the general diffusion of knowledge among the people,” was highly creditable to their intelligence, and was the key-note to the subsequent prosperity of the State. A prime mover in this enterprise was the Rev. John D. Pierce, the first superintendent of public instruction; and among the professors first chosen were Asa Gray and Douglass Houghton, the first as professor of botany and zoology, and the second of geology and mineralogy. By careful and judicious management the University has progressed so rapidly that it is now awarded a prominent place among American institutions, and in foreign countries the mother State is more widely known through the fame of her University than through any other means.

From the The Red Book of Michigan; a civil, military and biographical history by Charles Lanman, Detroit, EB Smith and Company, 1871.

1871.

By 1871, The University of Michigan was, more than any other means, the reason any knew there was a State of Michigan.

It would be another 20 years before football even showed up.

Last week I was on campus with one of my grand daughters.

Me and my grand daughter and her parents walked around central campus in the early dark.

It had been 40 years since I was a student and I could have stepped back in time and been right at home.

When I had been there as a student, it was a little more than 40 years that my Dad had been a student.

I am just now realizing that as he walked around the campus with me, he could have stepped back in time and been right at home.

My Dad was at Michigan 30 years after his Dad graduated.

I wonder if his Dad visited him in Ann Arbor and felt like he could have stepped back in time and been right at home.

His Dad, my Grand Father, was the first Hoffman born in the United States.

Now I was walking around that same campus with one of my grand daughters.

We walked up to the bronze M in the center of the Diag, the center of Central Campus.

I asked her if she wanted to go school in Ann Arbor and she said yes but then she is just seven.

I told the tale that if anyone stepped on the M, that person would fail their first test.

She looked at me and looked at the M.

Then she looked me right in the eye and stamped her foot on the M.

Well …

That’s my grand daughter.

Maybe 55 years from now …