Musings from Brian J. Noggle

This January 1952 issue of Pageant magazine is its Best of Everything 1951 issue. A time capsule into the immediate post-war world in a digest magazine that apparently sought to take on Reader’s Digest. It’s a general interest magazine, with not so much the high writing of the slicks nor the woman-focus of home magazines.

What’s inside?

• “2001 A.D.–Year’s Best Forecast”, a vision of what life would be like in 50 years. It’s off quite a bit, but it’s all-in for wind and solar power and down on nuclear, which is the state almost 70 years later.
• “She Gets Most Joy From Cooking”, wherein the author of The Joy of Cooking Irma Rombauer is named Woman of the year. Almost 70 years later, the cookbook is still known.
• “The Case of the Curious Cop”, a true crime story that’s interesting even now.
• “The Miracle of the Giants”, a baseball story.
• “The Men Around Truman”, profiles of some of the president’s advisors, many of whom are forgotten today.
• “The Birth of an Island”, a science story by Rachel Carson. Yes, that Rachel Carson.

Along with these articles, we’ve got fashion guides on how to buy items that you can wear or pair for different occasions; the best toys to by for each age group; beauty queens of different festivals; and varied humorous joke/quip collections like you would find in Reader’s Digest.

Along with a full photo of the cover girl on the back:

Cute, but not racy.

No left-wing bias to speak of–the magazine talks about the “pinkos” in government–but a couple of environmental pieces that foreshadow things to come. The “best science story” by Rachel Carson, for example, tells of how volcanic islands are formed and how different plant and animal species might come to it, and how great it is until MAN SHOWS UP.

You know, I miss general interest magazines like this. I subscribe to Reader’s Digest off and on, and I used to subscribe to The Saturday Evening Post and Grit, but those last two changed too much to retain my interest. But I must be the only one; otherwise, we would have more of them around today.

I wonder where I got this; the front cover has an antique mall sort of pricing on it, but I can’t imagine picking this up for a dollar at an antique mall. More likely, it was in a dollar bundle of digest magazines and chapbooks that I bought at a Friends of the Springfield-Greene Library book sale. These bundles, grab-bags really, provide me with quite a few curiousities that I sometimes count as books read. But not in this case, as it is clearly but a magazine.

Yes, it is true, not currently a carefree contractor for-hire, but I’m in an engagement where I have a manager. Actually, I am pretty sure I have thirteen or fourteen managers, or that everyone is a manager except me, but that’s pretty much been the story of my full time jobs anywhere.

So I talked to my manager on Friday, a day ahead of the long weekend, and she asked me if I knew any veterans.

Which seems like an odd question to me.

I mean, my parents met in the Marine Corps. My grandfather also served in the Marines. My father in law was Air Force. Let’s be honest: My children’s school canceled the annual Veteran’s Day slide show because it turned pretty much into my boys’ family tree after I asked my grandmother for a picture of my grandfather in uniform, and she sent me pictures of family members going back over a hundred years in uniform.

My brother signed up for the Marines after high school. Jimmy from the trailer park, the other N in the Triple N Enterprises lawn cutting service, signed up for the Army and went Airborne. Dave, who lived two doors down from my father in Milwaukee and with whom I was very good friends my first year at school, signed up for the Army after high school and went Airborne. My friend Brian, the Elvis impersonator, was in the National Guard for a long time. Todd, the thespian I went to school with, was in the Navy and afterwards played Mike in a staged reading of The Courtship of Barbara Holt.

Those are the people from my close circle who served. I have numerous acquaintances from church who served, and I’m Facebook friends with BlackFive and Baldilocks.

So, yeah, I know some veterans.

Is that odd? Is it because I’m the product of neighborhoods, trailer parks, and cohorts where college was not the default option after high school that I know so many veterans? Is it because I’m the product of a more expressively patriotic age?

Perhaps it was just my manager’s way of getting to my plans for Veterans’ Day.

Which only incidentally had an outward demonstration that might tie into the holiday. As I was in the St. Louis area, I visited Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery and put flowers on my mother’s grave.

And I don’t just thank veterans on one day of the year. But I do thank them. And you, gentle reader, if it applies.

I’ve never been a real photography buff. I mean, I had a couple of cameras when I was a kid, and I’m glad that I had them to document my early life (like this). But I haven’t really gotten into it as a hobby, although I have bought at garage sales a number of tripods for some reason.

However, there is one photograph I’ve wanted to take for a number of years

A couple hills over, a white barn sits partway up the slope. As you drive down the farm road, you can see it in a small window in the trees. Trees climb a hill behind the barn, and trees lie long the intervening hillsides so that the barn is surrounded by the leaves. You can only see it from a spot on the corner before it is again obscured by the trees. It’s especially beautiful in the autumn, with the vivid colors.

So in past autumns, I’ve tried to take the picture with my phone, and it didn’t work. I tried a couple of times with a digital camera, including putting it on a tripod, but it lacked a zoom. Other years, we have only had a single fall color, brown, after dry summers. Some autumns, we’ve had windstorms that denuded the trees right after they turned and I didn’t get a chance.

This year, someone built a large house on a corner lot on the farm road. I gamed out an encounter with a suspicious homeowner as I tried the photo this year, but as I slowed down when driving by, I found the foreground trees had grown so that they overlaid the barn, and the opportunity for my perfect shot had passed.

Ah, well. I took it for granted that one autumn day I would get the shot I wanted even as the years passed and the landscape changed. The house on the corner lot has planted a boundary for trees. In another ten years, I won’t be able to see the new house–or the barn on the hill beyond.

So I guess I will enjoy the vista while I can and only occasionally mourn the photo that never was.

When I was in late middle school and high school, which is to say the time when I lived in the trailer park and down the gravel road in the valley, a lot of family members died. I lost my grandfather, my grandmother, my cousin, a number of great aunts, my great-grandmother by marriage, and then my step-grandfather. Some were far off, but I attended between one and three funerals a year in that span. The older generation, those great aunts, were in their eighties, my grandparents died young, and my cousin was shot at 21.

Suddenly, I’m acutely aware of how those things are aligning again.

The autumn started with notices of death around us. Shortly thereafter, I learned that my aunt has cancer pretty badly, which has spurred a couple of trips to the St. Louis area.

I have since learned that my stepmother with whom I had a rocky relationship also has cancer pretty badly. I learned this from my grandmother, who let me know that fifteen people in the family have health issues of some sort or another.

So my aunts and uncles are getting into their sixties and seventies now. My mother-in-law is closing in on eighty. My grandmother is in her nineties, but you wouldn’t know it. And, who knows, maybe one of these random pains and little coughs I get might actually be the innocent symptom of Something Worse as I fear.

You know, you can recognize mortality and deal with it in one of two ways: You can appreciate every day what you have now and actively treasure those relationships, or you can dread the loss that you know is coming.

Me, I’m making more effort to see my family that lives outside Springfield (which is to say, all of them but my immediate family). I’m trying to live life with better experiences than the simple day-to-day maintenances (although now that St. Louis Blues Hockey games are $80 a ticket, they will be memorable because they’re scarce). I’m going to send more frequent notes and letters to my grandmother who has told me she loves them and reads them multiple times.

Still, even as I do these things, I am pretty sure I’ll dread the future losses. I said you can deal with it in one of two ways. I will do both and let my impulses battle it out in my psyche.

More than 100 vegetable products recalled over listeria concerns

Also not affected, fortunately: Coffee, wine.

So basically my diet remains unaffected.