Category: Life

I’ve read a couple of things on other blogs recently that I’ve disagreed with. So, here, let me briefly note them:

• From Hoosier Boy, we get a rip on the classics:
  

  To the meat of the matter: Catch-22 is drivel; unreadable schmaltz. So is From Here to Eternity. In fact, many of the so-called classics are crap, Moby Dick first and foremost. Joyce, Cervantes, and Milton all are impossible to read. Hawthorne I can manage, but why would I want to? Bunyan, blah. I will take bawdy Moll Flanders over The Vicar of Wakefield any day.

  The blogger wants entertainment with his classics.

  You know, he’s not far off in deriding more modern classics–particularly the stuff that comes out of the 20th century. Classics before that are generally popular. I mean, Shakespeare wasn’t high-faluting. The novels of Austen were popular and entertaining to their set. Hemingway, sure. Faulkner–well, that’s 20th century academic classics talking.

  With a lot of things in translation, what’s ‘classic’ is what’s based on an academic’s taste and inclination in translation as well. I always assign an asterisk to what I read in translation anyway. And the aforementioned Indianan made it through War and Peace but I didn’t. I can tell you why: It’s keeping the characters straight. It’s bad enough when it’s a big cast in a broadly focused saga; it’s far worse when each character has multiple appellations depending upon who’s talking to him.

  Popular classics from yesteryear become less approachable when the argot and manner of expression changes, whether across cultures (such as War and Peace and other Russian classics) or centuries (one can appreciate Shakespeare’s occasional turn of phrase without getting the jokes). To really grok the works like that, you really have to dive into them and read a bunch from the era or culture. Then you’ll be steeped in it and might even get the jokes without the footnotes. Back in college, I did get the jokes in Shakespeare because I was concurrently reading Jonson and Chaucer and contemporary poets, so I was conversant in Middle English. But I’m not that way now, and it’ll take a little work to get back to that.

  But it does take a little effort to really get into those classics, and they’ll be more entertaining if you’re so inclined. I am, mostly because I’m pretentious and want to read the classics.

  But it’s a matter of taste, and not everyone is going to like everything.

  But, yeah, James Joyce’s work might be the last couple of things on my shelves that I would read should medical science make us virtually immortal.

  (Link via Dustbury.)

• In a book report for the tome The Joy of Not Working, I questioned whether the book was relevant in the 21st century:
  

  Perhaps the message was on-point in 1997, but we’ve got a couple self-actualizing generations that have sought meaning outside work (or meaningful work instead of careers) since then. So many of the lessons aren’t applicable to more modern readers.

  Kim du Toit would probably disagree based on his post Working Dogs:

  I took an older guy somewhere during my early-morning Uber shift, and we got to chatting about retirement. He was in his early sixties and was thinking about retirement in the next couple of years or so — he’d reached all the retirement “qualifications” in terms of his age, length of service, and so on — and when I asked him what he was going to do after retirement, he said quite simply, “I don’t know.” He had no outside interests other than his work, he said, and had no hobbies or anything to keep him occupied when he would quit working.

  This set off all sorts of alarm bells in my head, because I’d confronted the very same thoughts when I planned on retiring back in 2016 on reaching age 62 (which seems to be the “killer” age discovered by the researchers).

  Worse than that, I either know men personally or have heard of many instances of men who have died soon — very soon — after retiring early. (When men retire at a later age, they paradoxically seem to live longer, as the study shows.) Sometimes, men die within six months of getting their gold watch, after many decades of working with little or even no time off for illness. Where I differ from the study is that I think I know the real reason why this happens.

  We’re working dogs.

  Perhaps I’m a little closer to the millenial mindset than I like to admit, or perhaps I’m just laid back, but their experience differs from mine.

  On the plus side, people in my line die at sixty, give or take, so I won’t have to worry about dying after I retire.

• As you know, gentle reader, I have been known to read comic books even though I’m ::cough, cough:: nearing fifty years old (see Personal Goal Reached, Revisited and Things To Do In Tampa While Traveling For Business).

  Kim du Toit probably would not approve:

  Whenever I’m asked why I haven’t seen the new Masters of the Galaxy (or whatever it’s called) movie, I simply reply that I quit reading comic books at about age 11*, as should every adult. The storylines are boringly repetitive, the action equally so, and the characters’ emotions are, well, set at comic-book level (which is what’s required for a preteen audience who don’t have the mental software to appreciate or even recognize complex emotional issues). It’s fine for kids, in other words; but if someone age 50 tells me he’s still seriously into comic books and/or their movie derivatives, I actually start to wonder about his mental maturity.

  You know, I sometimes wonder about what it says about me that I still pick up comic books from time to time. I do prefer the ones from my youth, though; stuff that I have seen from this century, if you can believe it, is more simplistic as the focus has shifted from the story and the writing to the pictures, as though the pictures themselves are the worth of the thing. No, not really. The stories are.

  But as far as being repetitive, you might recall that I’ve noticed how much Shakespeare mixes and matches the same elements in his plays. And, to be honest, is an issue of Jennifer Blood: Born Again that much of a step down from men’s adventure paperbacks? Probably not.

  Suddenly, I’m all defensive about my reading habits. Aw, who cares, read what you want. Classics, comic books. Just have something interesting to say about them.

COME AT ME, INTERNET!

Excuse and refuse rhyme, and refuse and excuse rhyme, but excuse does not rhyme with refuse, and refuse does not rhyme with excuse.

via GIPHY

So we do try to get our children to keep a clean and tidy room, and we’re probably a little ahead of the curve on it as they do “clean” the room fairly often (whenever they want video games). But “clean” the room often means to pile things willy nilly into their closet. This weekend, the youngest decided he would clean the closet, so he piled all of the things that had been accumulating in the closet onto the floor of the room.

Which overwhelmed them, the poor dears, and they refused to clean and organize the shin-deep collection of mixed-and-matched kid-a-brac. Worse, when told to clean their room, they defied the directive for a couple of days, which caused my beautiful wife to go all Draco on them, levying a punishment of 1 week of grounding from electronics per day until the room was clean.

Well, I knew that an abstract number of weeks stretching into the future wouldn’t motivate them. They cannot conceptualize being grounded from electronics until summer. Heck, even I cannot conceptualize eating healthy for a month on the Whole30® diet, and I’m 25 days through it. Also, I cannot remember what a doughnut tastes like, but I seem to recall it was really, really good.

Sorry, I was daydreaming there for a minute about carbohydrates.

After a couple of days, my wife bought boxes for the boys and told them to just take the stuff on the floor and to put it in the boxes, and we would store it away. Put all of it in the boxes. But the boys did not do such a thing in a timely fashion. As their archeological digs hit different strata of clutter, they discovered things that had been in their closet for months. Fun and interesting things that they must play with right now. So the room was not clean for days.

Instead of continuing with the one day, one more week of grounding policy, I levied additional sanction to impose every day the room was not cleaned. For each day the room remained a mess,

• Bedtime is 8pm until the room is clean.
• No sweets or desserts until the room is clean.
• All “Can I…?” questions are “No.” until the room is clean.
• No snacks after dinner until the room is clean.

None of these worked, as the children racked up sanction upon sanction until….

No sweet cereals for breakfast until the room is clean.

That itself was not the actual impetus to a clean room. It was that I actually bought the nastiest, most vile cereal I could remember from my childhood, which as you can imagine was bereft of any sweet-tasting cereal. Sometimes, Chex was the best we could hope for. The cereal I liked least in my youth:

So I bought it, and I put it on the counter, and I explained to the boys that it was neither grape nor nuts and that they could not put fruit in it like you see on the box. I also bought some Fiber One, which I explained was like the pellets you feed to goats at the petting zoo, but in milk.

Today, the room is clean.

“So I guess we’re eating some Grape-Nuts,” my beautiful wife said.

No, we are not, even in six days when this seemingly eternal torment of no-carbohydrates ends. The box of Grapenuts remains in our arsenal of threats to ensure compliance from our children. “Do it, or you get the Grape-Nuts.”

When my children ask me what I do for a living, I find it hard to explain what a software testing and quality assurance professional is.

They still don’t know, but they do know that what I do keeps me from entering the cool contests that our friends keep winning. Because I’m not allowed to enter because I work there, but the friends can, and they win. True story: Friends of mine have won thousands of dollars in prizes in contests for a company I’ve worked for. So much that the company’s owner wondered if I was somehow scamming him. Since I still work there, he must have believed my protestations of innocence, but there have been no more contests, which has severely limited my friends’ collection of valuable comic books.

So the other day, I’m making hash browns and cottage fries for breakfast, so I pull out my beautiful wife’s expensive Scanpan skillet which I’ve never used before because I’m afraid of expensive things.

So I finish cooking the potatoes at a high heat, and I grab the handle to pour the hashbrowns into a bowl, and….

What freaking idiot thought it would be a good idea to put a metal oval with the brand name right in the handle where you’re going to grab the pan? Don’t they teach the kids in design school that metal conducts heat? It rather makes including a plastic or rubber handle on the pan rather superfluous since the insulating properties are quite rendered useless in that particular area in the middle of the handle where your hand goes.

Unless… the goal is free advertising?

Oh, my God, I’ve just made this a Nazi-sympathizing / racist blog by including a picture of a man giving a Nazi salute. Even though it’s a fictional Nazi illustrating an attempt at humor. What have I done?

Never mind. The important life lesson here is Fear expensive things. They hurt you.

You know how people like to claim that, if their parents had not thrown out their childhood toys/comics/baseball cards, they’d be rich? Yeah, as I’ve proven time and time again, that’s not true. I still have all my baseball cards and comic books from those days, and they have not appreciated much if at all. Most of the comics I own retail for less than the cover price these days, okay?

Another thing my mother did not throw away (among the everything my mother did not throw away): My old G.I. Joes.

Now, my collection began in like 1983 when my father’s then-girlfriend tried to curry my (and my brother’s) favor by buying us toys–and I got my first G.I. Joe, Flash. This was not the big G.I. Joes, but the four inch figures. But my first three (Flash, Snake Eyes, Rock and Roll) predated the swivel-arm grip, so early eighties through the middle 1980s. As I a bunch of comic books last year, the lot included a bunch of G.I. Joe comics, and I could follow along with the introduction (and my acquisition of) the action figures as they were added to the comic book.

The heyday of my collection must have been between 1983/1984 and, what, 1987? In retrospect, it was a blink of an eye, but my brother and I gathered a bunch of them. We even got some mail-away items that you got if you sent a couple of proofs of purchases and a couple of bucks to Hasbro, including the hooded Cobra Commander and a windsurfing board. The growing collection moved with us from Milwaukee to Saint Charles to the trailer park in Missouri. Did we play with them when we were in high school and lived in the valley? I don’t think so. I remember playing with them in the trailer, though, and envying some of the kid across the street’s collection.

My mother kept that collection in her basement in an old toy box.l At some point, I retook custody of it. The toy box, a cheap thing clapped together of particle board, disintegrated, so I put it in a translucent bin. Which has been in the Nogglestead garage for nine years (?!).

And for a long time, my boys could see them, but I would not let them play with them.

Why? A sense of possessiveness? Perhaps. I am particular about my personal relics, and my children are, well, boys who are a little rough with things. Also, I figured that cleaning up and assembling the various pieces would be a little time consuming.

But I recognized that the time window of my children’s interest is closing, so since the boys had a holiday on Monday, I brought the bin in.

I was right about the undertaking: it took me about two and a half hours to wash the items (with a toothbrush at times!) Most of the pieces were here, and only a couple of things were broken (which made me want to seek out my brother and get into a fist fight because undoubtedly HE BROKE IT!). The washing itself was a bit of nostalgic deja vu–when the boys were two and four years old, I’d sometimes pull all of their toys into the kitchen and wash them because they put everything in their mouths at that age. So, on a snowy day, while my boys played in the living room, I washed toys, and was taken back to that.

At any rate, they started playing with the toys as soon as I washed the individual pieces, and they loved it.

They’ve got a snow day today, so they’re playing with them again.

For the geeks amongst you, my collection includes:

• The Transportable Tactical Battle Platform.
• Amphibious Personnel Carrier.
• Sky Striker.
• Cobra ASP.
• Cobra Water Moccasin.
• Wolverine.
• Mobat (one of the reasons I can tell the difference between a tank and mobile artillery).
• Slugger (the other reason).
• Cobra HISS.
• Cobra Stinger.
• Cobra Flight Pod.
• MANTA.
• Check Point Alpha.
• Cobra Bunker.

Action figures include:

• Duke (the mail-in version).
• Scarlet.
• Blowtorch.
• Airtight.
• Roadblock.
• Lady Jaye.
• Bazooka (to be honest, I’m surprised I have this figure; it must have been a late addition to the collection, as it’s in very good shape).
• Hooded Cobra Commander.

And more, of course.

A couple of the action figures had broken bands, which means I’m going to be reviewing on YouTube how to fix them and ordering parts from Amazon sometime.

At any rate, a bit of my boyhood I finally shared with my boys.

And they’ve only broken one thing so far.

Which I’m going to blame on my brother and have to fight him over in one of those sibling fights that is mostly wrestling until we get tired, and then we’re friends again.

You know how you give notice at your job, and suddenly to do things you wouldn’t do if you wanted to keep that job?

Feel free to say “YOWHO!” for “You only work here once.”

Skip this, though, if you’re a contractor or otherwise plan to seek work from that company in the future.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never been this way. I just wanted to invent something on the Internet.

The Bekenstein Bound:

Not to be confused with Broadway Bound.

At any rate, I came across this equation in a book I’m reading on physics. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

In physics, the Bekenstein bound is an upper limit on the entropy S, or information I, that can be contained within a given finite region of space which has a finite amount of energy—or conversely, the maximum amount of information required to perfectly describe a given physical system down to the quantum level. It implies that the information of a physical system, or the information necessary to perfectly describe that system, must be finite if the region of space and the energy is finite. In computer science, this implies that there is a maximum information-processing rate (Bremermann’s limit) for a physical system that has a finite size and energy, and that a Turing machine with finite physical dimensions and unbounded memory is not physically possible.

The universal form of the bound was originally found by Jacob Bekenstein as the inequality where S is the entropy, k is Boltzmann’s constant, R is the radius of a sphere that can enclose the given system, E is the total mass–energy including any rest masses,

To put it more succinctly in a way that I can understand (that is, language that encourages me to eat doughnuts), The maximum amount of information that can be contained increases with mass. Mass/Energy. Whatever.

More doughnuts for me. I must increase gain weight to get smarter.

As some of you might remember, since I just mentioned it almost seven years ago, that I am working my way through a bottle of Old Spice cologne that I got in middle school.

Well, I might have mentioned more recently on Facebook that I’m getting quite close to the end of the bottle, because my brother got me a new one.

Which not only means that I will probably never get to the colognes that my National Honor Society Secret Santa Mrs Griffith gave me in high school.

Also, doing the math, I realize that I will probably never use this bottle of Old Spice completely. When I die, one of my children will inherit it and might slap some of it on to smell like the old man sometimes, or perhaps it will go into the estate sale and make a quarter.

Basically, my brother’s gift tells me that he thinks I smell bad and makes me dwell on my own mortality. Some gift, bro.

My mother-in-law is a bit of a genealogist. So this year, she spent seven months of hobby time working on the Noggle half of my family tree, and she created a four-volume compendium of her findings, culminating in a tenuous link to the English throne.

Behind the scenes, she informs me, she has been eliminating families and entire erroneous lines as she found them.

Which leads me, someone untrained in such matters, that she hopes to present me with the English throne in 2018.

I can’t wait!

UPDATE:It suddenly occurs to me that she might not be doing this for me, but for her oldest grandson. Once the other claimants, including me, are out of the way, someone in her line will become King, and her daughter will rule during the regency.

If anyone needs me, I’m going to binge-watch Game of Thrones for a primer on how to handle royal intrigue. Before it’s too late.

It happens from time to time: The rural mail carrier puts an item from the next stop down the line in our box. Sometimes we get something from the next farm road over that somehow got caught in a machine or stuck to one of our pieces of mail in processing.

But never like this.

Lockwood, Missouri, is fifty miles from here.

Clearly, that got misfiled quite a bit upstream from our local post office.

via GIPHY

So this weekend, I spent some time in the Tampa area (well, not as far north as Tampa, but I landed and departed from St. Petersburg). As you know, I provided a handy guide to Florida fauna and flora for the Midwesterner. So I thought I’d provide a handy checklist of the things I’ve done (and you can, too).

☑	Visit Missouri Comics. Missouri Comics used to be up on Chestnut Expressway here in Springfield, and I used its Web site as a test location when testing for a company I was working for, so I eventually took my kids up to the physical shop, and I bought a number of Marvel Team-Ups in our infrequent visits. Clearly, our three-times-a-year (probably three times, total) visits for dollar comics couldn’t support him, so he moved to Safety Harbor (I’m sure there’s a story there). He kept the name because he does brisk trade on the Internet and didn’t want to lose traffic by changing the domain name. The first thing we did after landing and getting out of the airport was to visit his new location and buy Marvel Team-Up comics.
☑	Attend a business meeting with native Floridians and be the only one wearing shoes. They must put some Florida in the water, because I was not the only one visiting from Missouri, but I was the only one in shoes.
☑	Do the AirBNB thing. Apparently, you can rent a lot of condos in Florida whose owners live there part time (and live the rest of the time, they live at their other condos). When not in residence, they put their slightly used properties on AirBNB, and you can lease them for a night or two. So we did, and we stayed in a rather nice little three bedroom house with one bedroom converted into a high quality home theater, which I didn’t get to use because I was a businessman, doing business. (Is that two Beverly Hill Cop II references in one checklist item? Yes, it is! You get the best allusion deals here at MfBJN!) I haven’t even seen that movie in a while. I don’t know where its presence on my mind comes from. At any rate, this was my first AirBNB experience, and it was weird for me. The house had lots of interesting things, a K-Cup maker, a full and elaborate bar, and I’m not sure what I was allowed to use if anything. I mean, in a hotel, I don’t tear the place up (or, at least I haven’t since the The Variation Machine 1993 tour), but I treated this house like I was a guest there. Also, although the agreement said no pets, I am pretty sure the owners had a cat. Cat food under the sink (which I didn’t eat, because I didn’t know if I was allowed to), a scratching post in the garage–and a woman whom we surprised as she was going around back of the house. She explained there’s a cat in the shed that she feeds twice a day. So I don’t know if the owners lock their cat up in the shed on nights that they’re renting the place (or for the weeks when they’re away). I am pretty sure, though, we would have paid extra to have the cat in the house with us.
☑	Ride a gator. Well, it was a John Deere Gator, and given that I live in the country, I didn’t have to go to Florida for that. But I did see people driving around in golf carts, and not on a golf course.
☐	See a Tampa Bay Lightning Hockey Game. Although they played on Saturday night, I had an early flight, and like the old man I am, I went to be early. Fun fact: I was slated to go to a conference in Tampa around the turn of the century, and the Tampa Bay Lightning were playing at home over that week. As it stands, I left the job sending me to the conference, so I didn’t get to go to the conference nor the game. So the Tampa Bay Lightning are the team I could have seen most but never did.
☐	Wander around Tampa, asking anyone if they’d seen Dave. When we landed, I remembered that my old friend Dave, he of the famous Iron Maiden poster lived in Tampa. So I thought about going around Tampa, taking photos and asking if anyone had seen Dave. Which they hadn’t–I knew from Facebook that he was on vacation himself. Which is what would have made the photos, when shared with Dave, better. Perhaps I’ll catch him, and maybe the Lightning, the next time I’m in town.

My goodness, I’ve been to Florida three times in the last, four years? I’ve been there more than Wisconsin.

Partly because of the business, partly because of family vacation destinations, and yes, partly because there are direct flights. I don’t like to fly. Which is down from “I hate to fly,” which is where I was four years ago.

I mentioned that I could not hear The Miracles sing “Love Machine” without thinking of chickens. I failed to mention that this commercial is my beautiful wife’s favorite commercial of all time, which will come in handy knowing that as our children like to ask for a favorite this or that regularly.

Here’s the commercial again for your reference:

Last Saturday, a boy and I had some time to kill before picking the other lad up from an activity, so we went to a local antique mall to do some Christmas shopping. Which means, mostly, buying things for ourselves and maybe a trinket or two for someone down the Christmas list.

I passed on a Rooster print with iron that I thought might go nicely for my aunt, whom I think has a rooster or chicken theme going. If not, she has a rooster or chicken theme from Brian going, since I bought her a large filigree chicken last year.

But we were also looking to replace something in our kitchen, a print in plastic frame that we had over our sink for years, far beyond the normal lifespan of this cheap particular bit of postery that I bought at a garage sale some decade or two ago.

So after passing it, I returned to the rooster art at the antique mall, and I thought it might do double duty: I would hang it up in the kitchen and see if it flew as a replacement, and if not, it would be great for Aunt Sandy.

Also, as I did so, I did not mention to Heather that I did; I expected her to say, “Is that a …. chicken?” when she saw it. That, in itself is an in-joke: Some decades ago, when she was a comely young HR staffer for the St. Louis County government, she would interview building inspectors by showing them a series of photos and asking them to identify possible violations. One of the photos had a chicken, which was back in those dark ages, not allowed within the county. One incredulous interviewee looked at the photo for building violations, and then said, “Is that…a chicken?” which my then beautiful girlfriend beautiful then-girlfriend, now-beautiful now-wife (::sweats the construction there::) repeated with the same intonation the fellow under interview used.

But she did not.

And, apparently, she now likes chickens in the kitchen. Art chickens, anyway. A couple of years ago, I did a woodburning of a rooster on a board and put a couple of hooks on it, and somehow it replaced a pair of paintings by my great grandmother on our dining room wall. When she saw the new rooster above the sink, she liked it (sorry, Aunt Sandy, unless you really don’t do chickens, in which case, hey, lucky for you!).

It took less than fourteen hours for the Denny’s commercial allusion to appear:

Which she also loved when she saw it on Sunday afternoon.

It stayed on the art work for the week because I was too busy and lazy to remove it, but I see that it has migrated to the woodburned rooster by her hand.

Perhaps I’ll end up being lazy enough that it will remain there until such time as our kitchen is filled enough with chickens that it can make a circuit regularly.

But I doubt, actually, that the tape will last that long. Nor her desire for more chickens in the kitchen.

I recently discovered José Olé Chicken and Cheese Tacquitos come in a strangely enumerated 37 pack:

What, did the authorities in Mexico gullotine frozen food makers that shipped 35 when the customer ordered 36?

Likely not. It’s probably not also signaling that this is a prime product.

I assume that it used to be a 40 pack but the quantity was reduced at some point (at the same or nearly the same low price!).

Still, they didn’t shrink it down to the even number.

Which means that in the future, barring some other reduction in quantity, there will be contention at Nogglestead as two strapping young men spar for the odd tacquito.

Husband puts Eydie Gorme album on turntable.

Wife: Can you please turn that down a little?

Husband: IF IT’S TOO LOUD, YOU’RE TOO OLD!

– finis –

So I was listening to an old Dan Seals album (actually, it was The Best, so it’s less old than Won’t Be Blue, an LP we won on the country radio station when I was young and spun over and over in our trailer park days), and I came across his song “My Old Yellow Car”.

Here it is presented with a slideshow of someone’s old yellow Mustang.

You know, I have a car in my history for which I feel a little affection. Strangely enough, it is not my own Mustang, my third car. A 1984 GT with eight cylinders with high mileage that I bought in a hurry after my second car was totaled when someone sneezed on it (well, rear ended it and pushed me into another car). I pumped a lot of money into that Mustang, replacing lots of parts on it and hoping to have a nearly new Mustang at the end of it, but a transmission failure that laid it up for over a month led me to buy a newer car after renting cars for weeks. I liked the Mustang, but I never got the hang of smoothly starting the car in the cold, and I only drove it for five months in the winter and spring before getting my fourth car.

No, the one I feel affection for was my first car (of course), a 1986 Nissan Pulsar with four cylinders, a manual transmission, a moon roof, and a cassette deck. I bought it with my college graduation money, when returning to House Springs, Missouri, meant I would need a car where buses would did in Milwaukee. I said I wouldn’t learn to drive a manual transmission unless I bought a sports car, but there it was. A friend of the family, a shade tree mechanic, gave me a half hour’s lesson in driving a manual transmission, and I was off (except in this case, “off” often meant “popping the clutch at a stoplight on the highway”).

I mean, the car was nothing special. It didn’t have much horsepower, although with the manual transmission, I could accelerate pretty quickly and beat other cars off the line, especially when they did not know we were racing. The car itself was red, but it was not shiny; the clear coat was mostly peeled off, which meant it was a dusky, dull red. I don’t think I have a picture of it anywhere. I hoped to get it painted, but a couple hundred dollars for a cheap paint job was out of my reach in those early English Degree job days.

It was my first taste of post-collegiate, can-go-anywhere freedom. I drove it an hour to and from work(s), an hour to and from coffeehouses, and up and back to Milwaukee and Chicago on multiple occasions. I picked up my first girlfriend in that car, and I roamed the back roads of my corner of Jefferson County, learning where I could coast in neutral for miles down the hills that pale compared to the Ozarks.

Alas, the car was not as good to me: It had a short somewhere, and it went through numerous headlights, batteries, and alternators which the shade tree mechanic mentioned above would replace without looking for the underlying cause. It left me stranded on the side of the road many times, and when it did so again in a parking lot on Manchester Road, I left it and got car number two (later to be totaled, as mentioned above). The car sat in the back yard of the house where my mother and I lived (and later the shanty of a garage the house had) for years so I could–someday–hunt down the short and repair it. Spoiler alert: I never did, and I eventually donated the car to the cancer society.

But the car is tied to that first bit of youthful freedom, so somewhere in my heart I’m still driving it, listening to a worn Lillian Axe cassette, and smelling a summer breeze full of possibilities.

Well, all right, not necessarily a true history lesson, but certainly a history lesson steeped in legend.

My youngest has a problem with his shoes, namely the tying thereof. As he walks around with untied shoelaces, he pulls them out of the eyelets of the shoes so that he often has both ends of the lace on the same side of the tongue, which means he cannot effectively tie them anyway. Of course, the aglets have been worn away through misuse-namely, the not-tying.

So today in church, he asked me to help with his laces. One of them had a tight knot in it that precluded relacing, as the knot was bigger than the eyelets through which he would have had to thread it. So he enlisted my help with it: “Dad, can you get this knot out?”

I helpfully agreed, but the knot was too tight for me to quickly untangle without tweezers. So I decided on a history lesson instead.

“Do you know who Alexander the Great was? A Macedonian general who conquered a lot of the ancient world. He came to the Gordian Knot, which legend said the person who solved it would conquer Asia. And you know what he did?”

“What?” he asked.

He took out his sword and cut the knot,” I said, and I took out my pocket knife and cut the lace just below the knot.

He might actually remember this story then. But I hope the test on the famous almost-Greeks of the B.C. era comes soon in his fourth grade class. Because it’s entirely possible the only thing he’ll remember is that his father carries a pocket knife.

Because he’s certainly not going to remember to tie his shoes.

(For further reading, here’s further reading on the Gordian Knot.)