9.4.2023 – those nice bright colors

those nice bright colors
greens of summers, makes you think
world’s a sunny day

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
Give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away

From the Paul Simon song, 1973, Kodachrome.

My Dad had a Nikon camera.

The Nikon F series was introduced in the early 1960’s and my Dad had to have one as he got all the new gadgets (including a Heathkit color TV that he built in the basement – it only took a soldiering gun and about 7 months of work).

That Nikon F series was a great camera and really didn’t get left behind until the digital era and it became one the best selling camera’s of all time.

With that camera, my Dad took a lot of pictures or slides as they were called back then.

A few years back one of my Nephew’s digitized all of my Dad’s slides and sent me the files.

Looking through all those photos I came across some snaps my Dad took of our family Labor Day picnic in, what I am thinking was, 1963, but thanks to a note from my cousin, it is 1964.

At least I am hoping it was Labor Day but it could have been the 4th of July.

I could write my Nephew and see if he still has the physical slides and can check the date stamped on the cardboard frame but then I might find out that they aren’t Labor Day and it mess up the writing of this post.

We were the Hoffman’s.

My Dad’s sister had married a Glerum.

And my Mom was a Hendrickson.

My Dad’s snaps show all of us, Hoffman’s, Hendrickson’s and Glerum’s (and it that a Lower in there as well?) gathered together at my family’s Lake Michigan cottage.

It has to be soon after my Dad bought the place as there is no deck yet in front of the place.

All the kids and all the Aunts and Uncles are all gathered in the small yard and short deck that was there in just our first summer.

After that, my Dad added more decks and rooms and then over the years as the Lake moved east, removed those decks and rooms until finally the place had to be moved back away from the lake and almost rebuilt.

We called it the cottage.

It was roughing it as much as my Dad wanted to rough it which meant there was only a stand up shower.

I look at the pictures and I see the all the nice bright colors and greens of summer and I can remember it all.

I can taste the food in the picnic dinner my Mom and my Aunt’s spread out.

It wasn’t so much a family get together as it was mob.

It wasn’t so much of talking and conversation as it was BUZZ and LOUD.

It wasn’t so much a relaxing day at the beach but a day of constant activity

There was something somewhere going on constantly.

Smell the sweet piney smell of the forest around the cottage and feel the spiky-ness of the sparse grass?

I can.

I was three, if the timing on all this works out, maybe 4, I’ll have to ask my brothers and sisters about this pictures.

For the next 20 years, 4th of July and Labor Day meant that everyone was coming to the Lake.

We would wake up early, too excited to sleep and at some point, we would walk down the two track to the road so we could see the cars first and run back yelling THEY’RE HERE, THEY’RE HERE!!

Our Grandparents would arrive and unpack their car and we would carry in various pots and dishes covered with newspaper and tied with string.

The main meal would be thick slices of ham on hamburg buns or something like that and the evening meal would be leftovers with focus being a big pot of my Grandma’s Chili or her hamburger, corn, noodles and tomato hot dish that we called goulash.

All the Aunt’s would bring a hot dish of beans or potatoes along with all sorts of salads.

One of my brothers said to me you know you are getting old when that three bean salad starts looking good.

Then there were the deserts.

My Aunt Wanda’s sweet rolls, which I remember would disappear before desert time as me and my cousins would dare each other to sneak into the kitchen and grab one.

Cakes, and brownies … and pie.

My Mom was known for her pie.

Blueberry, cherry and rhubard.

Blueberries that were purchased from roadside stands on the way from Grand Rapids.

Rhubarb from the Glerum’s garden.

My Uncle Bud Glerum could grow more stuff from less land than anyone we knew and we always shared in the bounty.

It may have been at one of these Labor Day parties that my Grandpa finished a big piece of my Mom’s pie and announced, “Lorraine makes the best pie.”

Family tradition has it that it was long, silent drive home that holiday for my grandparents.

Labor Day.

It was the end of the summer.

It was the real end of the year.

The real new year, not that one in January, would start in a week or so when school started.

Summers were long for us kids.

We got off in June and we knew that July and August were OFF.

And our summer ended on the exclamation point of Labor Day.

All the world was a sunny day.

8.10.2023 – meek little wives feel

meek little wives feel
edge of the carving knife and
study husbands’ necks

There was a desert wind blowing that night.

It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.

On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.

Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.

Anything can happen.

So starts the short novel or long short story, “Red Wind” in the collection of short novels or long short stories, Trouble is My Business, by Raymond Chandler, (Houghton Mifflin, 1950).

How Mr. Chandler took some very simple words and connected them in such a way that lets you feel the heat and dust and see the scene in your mind, the scene with the meek little wife and the knife and the husbands neck, and you can see it as clearly as if it were a scene in a Spielberg movie is beyond me.

A neat trick.

If I knew how Mr. Chandler did that (IE – It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window …) I would do it.

Somehow, deep in my soul, I am sure and reassured that AI or CHATgtp or any computer could NOT write that sentence is just that way.

It has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.

It is the Low Country because it is so low above sea level.

A couple of miles from the Atlantic Coast and, according to my smart phone, 27 feet above sea level, where I am writing from the 3rd floor of our apartment building.

And it has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.

We are in the whatever day of a prolonged heat advisory.

My wife and I both enjoy the climate here, for the most part.

We don’t miss snow.

We don’t miss extended cold weather.

I claim that I lived a half of a century in West Michigan and my bones have yet to thaw out.

And it has been hot here in the Low Country of South Carolina.

Just off the coast, it has not been the dry hot of the Santa Anna Wind Mr. Chandler refers to.

Humidity is also off the charts.

I am not sure what that means as humidity is one of those things that cannot be greater than 100%.

100% humidity means rain.

So humidity here hovers around 97%.

The temperature today will peak around 97 degrees.

The same smart phone that tells me the elevation above sea level also says that the temp with the humidity, will feel like 110 degrees.

I am used to windchill.

Reports that with a temperature of 28 degrees and a 15mph wind, it will feel like 8 degrees outside.

Going the other way is new to me.

Cold air, below freezing is crisp and clear.

Hot air, in the 90’s with humidity in the 90’s is thick and visible.

Cold air is a slap in the face.

Hot, humid air, is a big dog that sits on your chest and slowly squeezes the oxygen out of your blood.

Coming inside from cold air, heat embraces you, wraps you up, comforts you.

Coming inside from hot, humid air, the air conditioning attacks you, assaults your senses and leaves you senseless.

And when you come inside, down in here in the low country, during a prolonged head advisory, it is like walking into a meat locker.

You can feel the fingers of cold wrap around your skin.

You remember the scene in the movie, “The Day After” where the helicopter pilot opens the door and the freeze line moves across his face.

They say life in the south would not be possible without air conditioning.

But life at what cost?

Garrison Keillor once wrote something along the line that the seeds of decay of the Western World were in Air Conditioning.

My Dad was one of those people who thought Air Conditioning saved the Western World.

My Dad always held that in a car, the comfort of the driver was supreme therefore the driver (on trips that meant my Dad) set the level of air conditioning.

For my Dad, that meant full blast.

As cold as it get which was determined how long it was on. at full blast.

On long summer trips in a station wagon filled with suitcases and kids, the middle seat was my Mom’s domain and it seems like my sisters also had dibs on the middle row.

For us boys that meant that back of the station wagon which in those days was a flat cargo area.

We would put some cushions back there and some pillows but for the most part you sat cross legged and tried to get comfortable.

Or it was the front seat.

The front seat with Dad.

The front seat with the air conditioning blowing out 34 degrees of cold air at 50mph.

5 minutes you got cold.

10 minutes you were frozen.

15 minutes you were in agony AND you had to use the bathroom so bad you thought you might explode any second.

I remember one family trip through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan when I was around 11 years and I was near tears, I was frozen, my feet were blocks of ice, I couldn’t feel my fingers and I had to go so bad.

My Dad spotted a gas station and pulled in.

There was a RESTROOM sign with an arrow pointing around the side of the building and I was out of the car before it came to stop.

Running as fast I could, I came wide around the corner and saw the two doors for restrooms and I shoved a door open and took care of things.

I sat in there, with the crisis retreating as I warmed up and relief spread through my body in many ways.

As I came back to the conscious world I became aware of my brothers voices.

It came to me that they were in the restroom.

The restroom next door.

I heard one of my brothers say, ‘I wonder where Mike is?’

I noticed the restroom I was in was all done in pink.

Air conditioning curls your hair and makes your nerves jump and your skin itch.

On frozen nights like that every booze party ends in a fight.

Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks.

Anything can happen.

8.3.2023 – was an actual need

was an actual need
bigger, bigger, bigger, best?
wasn’t that at all

When I was a kid growing up in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the 1970’s, fall afternoons meant football.

Michigan football.

University of Michigan football.

It was hard to miss.

My Dad was into what was called Hi-Fi or High Fidelity sound systems and he had wired our whole house and with a click of a button, his sound system would play in any room, or as he liked it, all of the rooms of the house.

Just before noon on Saturday’s he would tune into WUOM Ann Arbor in time to hear the words, “The Wolverines are on the air” and then the deep bass of the voice of Michigan Football (for UOM listeners) Tom Hemingway would welcome us either to Ann Arbor or West Lafayette, Indiana or Champaign, Illinois or wherever Michigan was playing that day and the broadcast of the game would be the backdrop to another fall weekend afternoon.

Every week.

The format of the broadcast more or less got embedded into your subconscious and when game breaks were made, the same breaks used year after year, you could recite them along with the broadcast.

One game break always came at the end of the 3rd quarter.

“Highlight films of todays game” it would start, “will be available this …” and a list of the locations and times across the state where fans could go and watch FILMS … 16mm movies of the latest game.

My memory says that Grand Rapids fans could go the University Club at Noon on Thursdays.

I never knew anyone who went to see these films but that was what fans had to do to WATCH the Wolverines.

Unless, by chance, the game was TV.

Back then there was only one or two college football games on any Saturday.

Televised games were seen as so powerful a recruiting tool that every team was limited to just two appearances a year with an extra game every other year so no team could be on more than 5 times in two years.

If you wanted to see the Wolverines on a weekly basis, it was game films.

It was game films, OR, you went to see the game.

There was time when going to see a Michigan Football game, or any professional athletic team or concert was all about the event.

Over 100,000 people would pack themselves into Michigan Stadium to do one thing.

Watch a football game.

100,000 and everyone, for the most part, focused on what was going down on the field.

Talk about unity.

Talk about one out of many.

Talk about a shared community experience.

One of my college roommate’s was from Ann Arbor and his folks had a set of 4 seasons tickets and in the years after college, I would often get a call and be invited to a game.

One year, due to wedding, my buddy’s folks couldn’t go to a game and the tickets were offered to me and my wife.

It was the 1991 Michigan – Notre Dame game.

As an aside, we got to our seats and I greeted most of the fans sitting around us.

My wife asked, ‘How do you know all these people?’

I told her that these were seats that Scott’s (my roommate) Parents had for 20 years and everyone who sat there knew everyone.

I then added, ” … and they know if you are NOT supposed to sit here.”

A guy in front of us turned around and caught my wife’s eye and with a big smile, nodded a very firm agreement.

This was the game that is known for a 4th quarter touchdown catch that won Desmond Howard the Heisman Trophy.

One play that won the most valuable player of the YEAR award?

One play in the first game of the year that won the most valuable player of the YEAR award?

YUP!

And I can see it like it was yesterday.

Up 17-14 late in the 4th QTR with 4th down and ONE FOOT at the ND 25, Michigan went for it.

This alone brought 110,000 people to their feet.

Quarterback Elvis Grbac dropped back to pass and looked right, cocked his arm, the crowd held its breath … and pulled his arm down.

The crowd exhaled, thinking the pass play was gone, but maybe maybe maybe, Elvis might fall over and get one foot for the 1st down.

Then Grbac half turned and leaned over so far backwards he almost fell and threw the ball hard and high.

And the crowd again sucked in all the air in Michigan Stadium.

The disappoint of Michigan fans rippled through the crowd like a wave that broke against the jubilation of any ND fan in the crowd.

With the ball in the air going towards no one and no where but the empty corner of the end zone, there was blur along the right sideline.

Like a genie out of a bottle or the sudden appearance of a ghost, teeny tiny #21, Desmond Howard flew and I mean flew, and I mean from the 15 yard line to the corner of the end zone, little Desmond FLEW, parallel to the astro turf surface, flew, never more then 3 feet off the ground.

Now there was no oxygen in that stadium.

Time stopped.

It was like those flashback scenes in a movie where what I saw was like still pictures played in fast succession instead of real life in real time.

The stadium, 110,000 people, for a split second went silent.

The blur that was little Desmond met up the football and he caught the ball with both hands, hugged to his body and fell into the end zone.

And that place exploded!

Everyone as one, focused on that one single second, that moment in time, all part of one collective thought.

Pandemonium, as the papers would report, ensued.

There was no waiting for a review.

There was no need for any other decision by a ref other than TOUCHDOWN.

There was no replay in the stadium.

My memory tells me that is how it happened and that is good enough for me.

The game day experience.

What, really, WHAT could be better than that?

30 Years later, Michigan has the answer.

Bigger, better TV scoreboards in the Stadium.

According to a story in the Detroit Free Press, Michigan is putting the final touches on what will be the 3rd largest scoreboards in the country.

Oh Boy!

According to the story, “This wasn’t ‘how do we spend more money, how do we go bigger, bigger, bigger,’ it wasn’t that at all.”

It was this paragraph that gave me pause.

As for the function of the boards, the plan is to use the additional space to have more in-depth stats available to fans during games, as well as show other games’ scores more consistently, to compete with the at-home experience.

This was done, the giant scoreboards, to compete with the at-home experience.

Big College Sports on the Big Stage in the Biggest Stadium needs the BIGGEST scoreboards to compete with the at-home experience.

The story goes on, “We’re really trying to prioritize what’s done for the fans,” said Jake Stocker, U-M’s director of game presentation and fan experience. “Using this new technology to make it a better fan experience, knowing that people can’t always connect to their cell phones at Michigan Stadium, so we’re giving them that experience.”

Michigan has a Director of Game Presentation and Fan Experience?

I guess they do and he said “Using this new technology to make it a better fan experience, knowing that people can’t always connect to their cell phones at Michigan Stadium.”

Isn’t there anyplace, ANYPLACE on EARTH, where the ability to connect to a cell phone takes the 2nd seat?

Certainly not at a college football game.

To me, for the Leaders and Best, bigger bigger bigger, doesn’t add up to best.

The game I went to in 1991 had over 100,000 focused on one thing.

Today, the Director of Game Presentation and Fan Experience wants you to be at Michigan Stadium and fell like you never left home.

Really.

Then why leave home?

To paraphrase George C Scott in the movie Patton, “God, how I hate the 21st Century.“

6.9.2023 – was all tenderness

was all tenderness
but lit, as if from within
with lively spirit

This has been the glory of the Met: the love, care, craft and experience that go into works as different as these two — starkly contrasting titles, both presented at the highest level.

In “Elisir,” the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz were all tenderness, but were lit, as if from within, with a lively spirit by the conductor Michele Gamba, making his company debut.

From the article,

Is It the End of an Era at the Metropolitan Opera? As the 2022-23 season ends, the country’s largest performing arts institution looks ahead to a future of fewer titles. by Zachary Woolfe

Zachary Woolfe, according to the blurb, became The Times’s classical music critic in 2022, after serving as classical music editor since 2015. Prior to joining The Times, he was the opera critic of the New York Observer.

I don’t do much opera though I grew up in house where opera played a loud role.

My Dad loved opera.

In his war letters from Europe he tells my future Mom that he was able to attend several opera performances while in London and on the continent.

Then he asked, “Do you like opera?”

Not sure that Mom ever liked it as much as Dad but she did appreciate it.

I can still hear her describing how she felt when she first heard Bizet’s Votre toast, je peux vous le rendreml, better known as the Toreador Song from Carmen.

She told how she got out the record and played it for her cousin who listened and then said, ‘meh’ and my mother couldn’t understand how she could not be thrilled.

I call also her my Mom describe who some awe on hearing the voice of Leontyne Price in person.

My Dad lived in the era before online music.

All I can say about that is had my Dad had access to music the may I have access to music, we may never have seen my Dad.

As it was, Saturday’s at my house were known by several sounds.

First was the sound of Bugs Bunny cartoons, which seemed to be on all morning.

Then, in the fall, there was the sound and voice of Tom Hemingway of radio station WUOM calling the play by play of Michigan football games on the radio.

My Dad had wired our house with speakers so the game was one in everyone room.

Then there was the sound of opera through the Metropolitan Opera radio broadcasts with Milton Cross, a regular series of weekly broadcasts on network radio of full-length opera performances, transmitted live from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

I can close my eyes and hear the sound of Warner Brothers cartoons with the opening guitar chord.

I can close my eyes and hear the sound of the opening, “The Wolverines are on the air!”

I can close my eyes and hear the sound of Milton Cross welcoming listeners to other broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera.

My Dad had large closet called “The Sound Room” located off the living room.

In his sound room he had an assortment of radios, turntables and reel to reel tape records and lots and lots of cables.

If the opera was one of my Dad’s favorites, all he had to do was flip a switch or two and broadcast the show throughout the house AND record it at the same time.

There several shelves along the wall and they were filled with recordings of Michigan Football games and opera.

It was a library of sound built with love, care, craft and experience.

I have a distinct memory of needing something important from my Dad on Saturday.

Something like an air pump needle to blow up a football or something really important like that and I found him in his sound room.

No knocking or waiting or regard, I barged in to question my Dad.

He was cueing up a tape and turned and looked at me and said, “NOW JUST HOLD IT. I HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR 20 YEARS TO RECORD THIS!”

So I waited and we listened to the music together.

It was the overture to Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser.

It wasn’t long but it was a short moment with my Dad that was tenderness, and lit, as if from within, with a lively spirit.

Every once in a while I will search out the Tannhäuser Overture on You Tube.

The search takes a split second.

It took my Dad 20 years.

I will listen to the annhäuser Overture on You Tube.

I will think of my Dad.

And Saturday afternoons at home.

3.10.2023 – still, how strangely still

still, how strangely still
water is today, not good
to be still that way

Adapted from the poem, Sea Calm by Langston Hughes as it appeared in The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926) .

How still,
How strangely still
The water is today.
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way

Langston Hughes was just twenty-four years old when his debut poetry collection The Weary Blues was published in 1926.

The first line of the introduction to The Weary Blues reads, “At the moment I cannot recall the name of any other person whatever who, at the age of twenty -three, has enjoyed so picturesque and rambling an existence as Langston Hughes.“

Back in the day when I worked at WZZM13 TV in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I remember a newsroom discussion about travel and places to go and places gone to and plans to go to other places.

I looked up and said in what my wife calls ‘My Hoffman Voice’, you know, the voice you develop in a family of 11 kids if you ever want anyone to hear you – my kids say it cuts through concrete – my Mom said it was just like my brother Bobby’s (who was a baseball coach for 20 years), “I live in house 1 mile from where I grew up, 1 mile from the hospital where I was born and 1 mile from the cemetery where I will be buried.”

Then I said, “Oh am I depressed!”

At the time it was all true.

I lived near Kent Country Club on the North End of Grand Rapids.

It was less than a mile from my childhood home on Sligh Blvd.

It was about a mile to Butterworth Hospital where I was born.

And it was less than a mile from Fairplains Cemetery where my grand parents and parents are buried and where, most likely, I would end up one day.

I was about to turn 50.

Since then, I can say that I have enjoyed a picturesque and rambling existence.

Someone looked at my life and said it was still, too still.

And then that someone decided that it was not good for my life to be still that way.

I am reminded of a silly movie starring Steve Martin named Parenthood.

Mr. Martin watches his life come apart at the seams with the flu, bills, car accidents, kids fighting, job loss and everything else and is ready to lose it.

When his Grandma comes by and kind of in passing says:

You know, when I was 19, Grandpa took me on a roller coaster
Up, down, up, down. Oh, what a ride.
I always wanted to go again.
You know, it was just interesting to me that a ride could make me so frightened,
so scared,
so sick,
so excited
and so thrilled,
all together.
Some didn’t like it.
They went on the merry-go-round.
That just goes around … Nothing.
I like the roller coaster.
You get more out of it.

The movie was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel.

These two guys wrote a lot of movies.

One of those was, A League of Their Own where baseball manager Jimmy Dugan, played by Tom Hanks, says:

It’s supposed to be hard.

If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it.

The hard… is what makes it great.

It is not good
For water
To be so still that way