Month: May 2020

As I might have mentioned, I have assigned each of my boys a book to read, an adult book with few pictures and no comic drawings like you find and they unfortunately find too often in the works of Jeff Kinney and Dav Pilkey. The oldest got The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin and the younger got Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave. They’re both going to write essays about five lessons they learned from their assigned books; then they will swap books and write an essay on the other book.

As I’ve been posting the last couple of weeks, I’ve mentioned when other bloggers have posted poems that inspired me to include those poems in daily poetry writing. But today I cam across Jack Baruth’s weekly roll-up from last week where he quotes Frederick Douglass because:

The beauty of proper English is that it can be mastered by anyone with the will and capacity to do so. It does not discriminate. It is a tool available to all who might wield it in confidence. Frederick Douglass was one such man. He used the discipline of language to effect major change — in his life, in the life of others. In a Newspeak world, he could never have persuaded as he did, could never have accomplished what he did. In this way, the leveling of English won’t serve to erase oppression or discrimination: it will serve to make it permanent. We will have two official languages: English for the people who make the rules, and Newspeak for those who must follow them. The speakers of the latter will live in the eternal sunshine of a spotless present, never troubled by Shakespeare or Douglass in “the original”, never given the chance to express or consume a contrary opinion. O brave new world, that has such people in it!

Which is why I’ve gotten a little more hands-on in pushing my children. They’ve gotten too accustomed to doing the minimum to get by in elementary school, and it’s about time they started to work with real literature and to become fluent in the language they’ve inherited.

The blog received a visitor from someone in Katy, Texas, the other day:

Which led me to a little reminiscience. The spellchecker assures me reminiscience is not how you spell it, but I feel the narcissistic review of one’s life in “What If?” models is at least as scientifically valid as most social “sciences” taught in the universities and, seemingly, more scientifically valid than a lot of computer models designed to guide public policy and citizen compulsion.

At any rate, back in the early 1980s, my sainted mother was newly separated and soon-to-be newly divorced and was seemingly in retrospect eager to vacate Milwaukee. She had numerous friends there, mostly neighbors or friends of my father’s or ex-wives of my father’s friends that my mother got custody of in the divorce. But her family was mainly in the St. Louis area, where we eventually ended up (eventually being a couple summers after the separation). But my mother briefly, it seemed, considered moving to Katy, Texas, where her youngest sister lived with her then-husband as his work took him there.

As my third grade year ended, I had just finished up my beginning music class learning the saxette (a little whistle later replaced by the new-fangled technology or better marketing program of the recorder which replaced it as the beginning musical instrument). I wanted to sign up for the public-school-offered piano class in fourth grade, but my mother wouldn’t let me sign up for one of the limited spots because she thought we wouldn’t be there for the beginning of the year–we would be in Texas, right down the road from Mickey Gilley’s place (research indicates that “right down the road” means on the other side of Houston in Pasadena but not any more–Gilley moved to Branson at some point, so by my mother’s logic, I live just down the road from it now).

However, that did not actually come to pass. We did another two years at Carleton before moving to St. Charles.

Still, the visit from Katy brought fourth some speculation (a couple minutes’ worth, anyway). How would I be different today had I started the fourth grade outside of Houston, Texas, and graduated from high school down there? Would I have developed an affection for my adopted home state which I really haven’t for Missouri? My aunt shortly decamped for Missouri after a couple of years in Katy; would we also have moved back, or would my mother have gotten a job that compelled her to stay in Houston? Would I have a Texas accent and wear a cowboy hat instead of a fedora? Would I have read Westerns instead of mysteries? Would I actually like bro country in the 21st century?

It’s fun to briefly speculate. Except for the last bit, which is horrifying.

Still, what might have been? This seems appropriate:

Sweet Christmas, that song itself came out, what, ten years after the events I’m talking about, which is to say twenty-five years ago.

I asked my aunt about this to verify whether she was indeed in Katy, or if it was Tyler, Texas–about that time, a Texan girl came to Carleton and said she was the great(x)-granddaughter of John Tyler, so perhaps I was conflating the memories. I say great(x) because in the almost forty years since, I don’t recall how many greats were lined up. Four? Five? At any rate, over almost forty years, I am not sure how many of these memories of mine to trust, and I told my aunt that there aren’t many people left you could set me straight.

My aunt set me straight: she was surprised to hear that my mother considered moving to Texas to be near her. She thought we were already in the St. Louis area when she moved to Texas. In my mind, though, it was more serious than that, but perhaps it was from a child’s perspective, as I at the time wondered how desert-like that part of Texas was, and I worried about facing Gila monsters in the yard. So whatever my mother might have said, even in passing, I took it seriously in my even-then neurotic way, enumerating an unlikely bundle of worries. And a likely one: saying goodbye to friends.

Well, maybe we were in St. Louis before my aunt moved to Texas; perhaps my sainted mother talked about it when living in my other aunt’s basement and when she was separating onion rings on an assembly line aside immigrants and was considering anything an improvement. Maybe I’m mixing the timeline up because we moved several times in those years, from Milwaukee to the basement a modest house in a well-to-do suburb to the trailer park to the gravel road. Perhaps my mother only dreamed of this in Wisconsin, perhaps she talked about it with her mother or my aunts in St. Louis, all of whom have passed away. Who knows? I’ve reached out to my brother to see if he remembers any of it or if I am just making up fancies in my mind about my youth.

Next up: I shall speculate what would have become of my had I learned to play piano in the fourth grade. Certainly, it would have prevented me from the current mental and neurotic roadblocks I have to learning a musical instrument in my forties (the guitar experiment ended shortly after this rather sanguine update a year and a half ago). Would I have been in band? My beautiful wife ensures me that is an unalloyed good in high school and hopes our oldest does it should he go to public school next year, even though he’s not that enthusiastic about it. My youngest, though, started piano lessons in third grade and really swings on the trumpet already. Would I have been like that?

I look forward to the full resumption of normal activities so I can fill my days with normal busyness and not this nonsense.

I don’t normally buy the smaller bottles of HE Tide at the Sam’s Club, but our normal larger bottles of Tide were out of stock, and in the current unpleasantness, one must hoard what is available, not what one wants.

But wait a minute: This Tide leaves clothes smelling like Clean Linen:

By implication and inference, then, should we assume that all other Tides leave clothes smelling dirty?

Well, no. As you might know, gentle reader, Clean Linen with capital letters is a patented scent and is like Grape Soda. It’s not exactly what clean linen dried on a clothesline smells like, but it’s an attempt to artificially replicate it, and it’s consistent across all olfactory delivery platforms (like plug-in scented oils, which I guess are really Glade® PlugIns® Scented Oils from my experience testing S.C. Johnson online programs) and various sprays.

We will keep this between us, gentle reader, as my beautiful wife does not like this Patented Scent (as we’ve learned from other platforms), and I didn’t see it when I bought the soap. Hopefully she won’t notice that she cannot stand the smell of her clothes. Although if this causes her to take her clothes off, well, I’ll count that as a win.

Michael Jordan showed no mercy playing sons in basketball: ‘Earn everything’

When we’re playing one on one or me on two here, I don’t hold back–which unfortunately means I sometimes run over the younger of my boys yet.

But I know that one day soon they will eclipse me in athletic prowess permanently, so I have to pad my winning percentage whilst I can.

I mean, that very same youngest whom I sometimes run over in basketball runs away from me in 5Ks. He ran a 26 minute 5K when he was ten, for crying out loud, only four or five years after I last carried him over the finish line in one. They’ve already completed a modified virtual triathlon of a sprint distance (subbing in five minutes of cardio for a swim, followed by a 10 mile bike ride and then a 5K) last weekend.

So, yeah, no mercy. And hopefully they’ll show the same lack competitiveness with their old man once they’re beating me regularly, assuming that I don’t give up playing with them once they do.

Which I might soon. Because one does not make it into the Dad Hall of Fame with a losing record.

What if the world government overreaction to the current unpleasantness is designed not so much to flatten the current ICU-utilization curve but is instead designed to acclimate people to living in confined spaces and communicating on video screens because They know an asteroid is going to strike Earth in 2024, and They want people prepared to live life on the generation-ship Teslarks that will carry most of humanity to the stars before the asteroid strike?

You read too much science fiction, Brian J. you might say.

But I really don’t read all that much science fiction at all! But when I do, it’s from before the modern era, where the themes are more about current goodthink shibboleths rather than the fate of Humanity, which contains a lot of badthinkers.

UPDATE: Friar spreads a conspiracy theory.