Month: October 2024

You know, gentle reader, it is the simple joys of life. On Monday, I mentioned how I thwart my own contentment.

But I do experience some simple joys, albeit they’re seemingly few and far between, and they’re not only recognized and their passage mourned while they’re happening, but I seem to forget them once they’re done.

Case in point: One day a couple of weeks ago, my youngest and I walked out to look at the garden and around the property.

He is finishing the cross country season, and he’s started applying for jobs. Which means that he, like his brother, will spend more time outside the home than in it, and these simple, unscripted, and ad hoc times together are coming close to an end. Not that we have a lot of them now; it’s only because he was grounded from electronic devices that directed him from his room and online games. So he was eager to be entertained.

I’d planted some cabbage, cauliflower, and radishes in September as I expected we’d have a couple of months before it got cold. After all, it was cool a couple of months later in the year this year, with it only getting warm in late June. So I figured it would be warm a couple of months later than normal and we could sneak in a late autumn crop. Well, we had a surprise freeze one night which ended the cabbage and cauliflower dreams, but it only seems to have slowed the radishes down. Which is fine; I like radishes more than cauliflower or cabbage.

We looked in on the garden, and then we wandered to the opposite side of the property by the wind break. I don’t even remember why. But the Osage orange trees were dropping the hedge balls, their softball-sized inedible (unless things are really bad) fruits. So we spent a couple of minutes picking them up and throwing them at a tree some yards off. We had about the same arm strength and accuracy, I’m proud to say, mostly because I’m pleased with my performance.

A nice little moment which I enjoyed even as I knew they were coming too soon to an end.

And I probably won’t personally remember that day too clearly on my own in a couple of years. Like I don’t remember watching them in the now-long-departed sandbox. I kind of remember running around in the enclosed back yards with them when they were toddlers. But once they were in school and I was back to fulltime work, time has been a runaway escalator to our soon-to-be (in a couple of years, which is the future tense of recently or was just).

I just read something that says that when you remember something, you actually re-write the memory with some modifications, so the more you remember something, the less accurate the memory can become.

Still, hopefully the next book on Buddhism or mindfulness will be the one that silences the double-effect narrator in my head who very vocally mourns each passing moment before it passes.

In the time between now and then, we have had the windy days that have denuded the windbreak, but the hedge balls remain visible through the leaves. Something must eat them or they break down very well, as we never remove them but they’re always gone by spring.

When filling out my address, I sometimes get Brookline Station pre-populated in the city field.

As I have mentioned (most extensively twelve years ago), my post office is up in Brookline, which was a small railroad town on the Frisco line. So I always assumed that the Station referred to the train station up in Brookline.

For some reason, I was looking at a map recently and noticed that it had another entry called Brookline Station far distant from Brookline:

Brookline Station is actually closer to Nogglestead proper.

This history gives an account of the history of Brookline Township (from 1883, so a recent historical account) which indicates that the town of Brookline, which is in the upper corner of Brookline Township, was indeed a railroad town. It does not mention Brookline Station at all.

However, Brookline Station might have been a part of the Butterfield Mail Stage Route.

Fifteen years on, and I’m still learning about the area. Not that my neighbors have deep historical ties; only two or three families in the immediate area precede us in residency.

Simple one-legged balancing test determines your biological age – so how old are YOU really?

Researchers from the Mayo Clinic found the amount of time you are able to balance on one foot indicates how strong your bones, muscles and nerves are, which are the signs of frailty.

Being frail makes people more vulnerable to health problems because it reduces the body’s ability to cope with stressors and recover from falls and illnesses.

The average 50 year old was able to balance for roughly nine seconds, whereas an 80 year old is only able to manage three seconds.

As you might know, gentle reader, I’ve been studying martial arts for a decade or so (what? already?), and before each class begins, I stand on the mat and work on my balance by lifting one leg and holding or going performing a series of kicks without dropping my kicking leg. I’ve even recently started closing my eyes, spinning, and hopping foot to foot while changing directions of the spins.

So, yeah, I guess it makes sense that I would do better than average on this particular test.

For all the good that will do me in the real world. Apparently, the prognosis is that I will live until I die.

I posted “The Gift Schtick” in 2007; it’s an essay about how you can come into a gift-giving theme for a person based on a particular brand, icon, or image that the recipient likes. For example, my friend the Elvis impersonator gets some Elvis kitsch whenever I send him a gift. My one aunt got chicken things (although the essay says she liked geese, and prior to that she’d liked flamingoes, so maybe I was never that close to her and got her more random than thematic gifts every year).

For a while about ten years ago, I bought Duck Dynasty things for my aunt who passed away in 2019. She’d mentioned she hated the show, so I gave her obnoxious things I came across such as a beach towel and a shotglass set to supplement sincere gifts.

On Sunday, I came across this on the free book cart at church:

The Duck Commander Devotional. It made me think of my aunt.

You know, when I’m wandering antique malls, I’m often drawn to eagle or owl tchotchkes as my mother collected them, so they were safe gifting. I only have a couple such items from her as inheritances–a single owl and a single eagle piece of wall décor.

I didn’t pick up the devotional, and I don’t buy the eagles or owls, but the gift schtick association helps me to remember people with whom the individual motifs are associated. Whenever I see a Father Christmas Santa, I think of a family friend we see infrequently and for whom we are not supposed to buy Christmas gifts (but we do).

It makes me wish I actually had more gift shticks. They’re like abstract personal relics for loved ones.

At any rate, I did not take the devotional as they are not really my thing.

Also, note the scorecard for the borrowed words in the blog:

Yiddish: 2 (schtick, tchotchke)
German: 1 (kitsch)
French: 2 (décor, motif)

I checked it out because I thought kitsch might be a third Yiddish borrowing, but it was not. Then I threw in the French borrowed words just to have a third language to list. Because blogging is about the game inside the game.

This summer, I read a couple of small collections of poetry that were given away by the Salesian Missions in the 20th century (The Way and Priceless Gifts). Late last week, I learned that I myself was on a Salesian Mission fundraising list:

I’m on a lot of Catholic charity fundraising lists since I subscribe to First Things (which is turning more into what the National Review used to be back in the old days rather than a Catholic magazine per se–it even has a lot of writers that used to or still write for the National Review and is getting into the habit of reviewing their books), Touchstone (which I will let lapse as I have not found it particularly engaging), and The New Oxford Review.

It’s possible that I’ve gotten Salesian Missions pitches for years and have not paid attention. They have not, however, had little poetry collections to my sadness.

I mean, I open all the pitches and harvest anything useful. Most of the time I collect the address labels which are so popular now (one day, the return address labels will stop coming, and I don’t want to have to buy my own like it’s the Reagan-Bush years, for crying out loud). Sometimes I get a notepad (I have not only a drawer full of them with my name on it, but many with my sainted mother’s name on them–I should probably make more to-do lists or something). I get little feet medallions, angel coins, and a rosary once. But no collections of poetry from Salesian Missions.

Maybe that’s reserved for the donor lists. Maybe I should send them $5 sometime and see what I get.

I did get a couple of Christmas cards out of this envelope. Perfect for second-strike Christmas card capability. Or for if we find we have enough leftovers from years past so that we do not need to buy a box this year. Especially the ones with glitter on them.

I mentioned to my ha’brother when I visited this weekend that I used to live just down the road. Which is true for some values of “road” and “just.”

I mean, US 67 runs through Oconomowoc.

In the St. Louis area, US67 runs up Lemay Ferry Road and turns at Lindbergh where it runs around the city and crosses to Illinois at Alton, Illinois. I lived in Lemay, before this blog. Was there ever such at time? Yes, but it was last century. And Lemay is not far from that corner where it turns.

This photo is not the corner where it turns; sharp-eyed readers from St. Louis will note that Highway 21 is Tesson Ferry Road, not Lemay Ferry Road–St. Louis has a lot of roads named for the ferries which were replaced by bridges, of course (and St. Louis also has a lot of roads named for bridges). But the light at Lemay Ferry Road changed before we could get the photo.

Also, note the town of Oconomowoc is close to Okauchee and Okauchee Lake. Which means that I was near two locations specifically mentioned in my poetry: “Okauchee Light” and on the highway (I39 six miles south of Tonica) from “Central Illinois Solo”. I was not far from Bee Tree Park in South St. Louis County, but we did not swing that far south in our travels (Jefferson Barracks to lunch to I44). It made me think of specific places I have named in my poetry, and that might be two of three (although some further review might be needed for an accurate accounting). At any rate, I thought about places named in my poetry for a bit during my drive home. You can conduct your own review of named places in Coffee House Memories.

Sorry, I digress.

So in addition to my home in Lemay being “just down the road” from Nogglestead (the Old Wire Road which runs through Battlefield, Missouri, and used to run through my neighbor’s pasture was a part of Telegraph Road in St. Louis County–both followed the telegraph line from Jefferson Barracks to Fort Smith, Arkansas), it’s just down the road from my ha’brother’s house. Of course, my brother in Missouri wins here, too: He lived in my sainted mother’s old house in Lemay after she passed, and he also later lived in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, so he has lived just down the road from my ha’brother twice.

During our trip to Wisconsin this past weekend, I told my beautiful wife that someone in the flight path of Mitchell Field painted “Welcome to Cleveland” on his roof to troll inbound air travellers (although he did it before troll was the word for it–seriously, where did that come from? Certainly not The Three Billy Goats Gruff).

So Facebook, listening in, showed me this particular sponsored post again:

Hey, if it’s in a Facebook sponsored post, or a funny story that Brian J. tells, it must be true.