30 Friday Aug 2019
Posted in Family, Uncategorized
Tags
RB has been in hospital for nearly a week, recovering from pancreatitis. He had a CT scan yesterday which came back clear,
He wants to go home so he can cook ribs on the grill. Given his pancreatitis is related to his consumption of dietary fat, the ribs might have to be put on “HOLD” for a while.
My big life changes began at age 43, RB’s current age. He has already left a job that was killing him this year, between travel and stress. He is hurting now. But good things are happening.
05 Monday Aug 2019
Posted in Family, food, Gentrification, Uncategorized
Tomorrow is my brother-in-law’s, birthday. J’s brother. We met R and D, his wife, in Fredericksburg this morning. Fredericksburg is a quaint, but gentrified, city about halfway between Richmond and Washington. They live in Leesburg, to the west of Washington. So Fredericksburg is a good mutual rendezvous point.
Did I say Fredericksburg was gentrified? That is understating it. The housing prices have been bid up astronomically. There are the ubiquitous converted loft apartments. The downtown has been given over to antique stores, restaurants, and boutique shops. We ate at a restaurant called “Foode”, located in a converted bank building. Truthfully, it had lots of charm.
Across the street from “Foode” is St George’s Episcopal Church. The building with its distinctive steeple can be seen in pictures of Fredericksburg from the Civil War era. The area was of critical importance to the Union’s strategy to capture Richmond, the Confederate Capital. Volumes can and have been written about Fredericksburg in the Civil War. I will stop here.
R has his 76th birthday tomorrow. We had a lovely gathering, fully enjoying the overpriced, but satisfying food. A plate of eggs scrambled with cheese and squash was about $9. Not bad, all in all. $3.50 for a cup of coffee epitomizes the mark-up.
I volunteered to take a group picture for a lovely Muslim family out for brunch. A lesbian couple was not at all reticent about holding hands as they strolled down Princess Anne Street. Just typical scenes of our time.
We checked out a kitchen shop that had a nice selection, including Lamsonsharp forged knives, an American brand in the quality knife market. There were cutesy hand towels with sayings like “I’ve lost my mind. I think my kids took it.”
After the kitchen boutique, we browsed through an antique shop. It was the usual collection of soft drink bottles, furniture, Mid-Century Modern paraphernalia and fussy china. The stereotypical African-American racist kitsch, think Aunt Jemima, from the early part of the Twentieth Century, stood out among the kiosks in the store.
We drove home on U.S. Route 1, a road running roughly parallel with I-95. It was a storied road running from Calais, Maine, at the U.S./Canadian border, to Key West, Florida. There were restaurants and “tourist courts” running the entire route. Today it is all-but deserted. The restaurants were iconic brands like Howard Johnson’s, Hot Shoppes or Stuckey’s. They are all gone now. The tourist courts were the precursor to the motel. They consisted of a grouping of two room cabins, a bedroom with a bathroom. You can still see them, always repurposed to something else like antique shops and always, always shabby and run down, lost time in frame or brick. To take Rte 1 is a relief from the madhouse of traffic that is I-95. One can’t help but wonder what it was once like, back in the day.
Given I have had very little sleep in the past couple of nights, I was an even less enthusiastic traveler than I usually am, which is to say, I wasn’t thrilled about going, but I went. I very much like R and D, I just don’t feel like traveling much any more. I drove a lot in much of my working career. Going somewhere other than to Church, AA, or the Y has little appeal.
When we got home, I took a nap. Now I am writing, watching an Army Signal Corps newsreel from World War Two, dealing with Operation Market-Garden, the failed airborne invasion of The Netherlands in September 1944. This was the subject of the book and film, A Bridge Too Far.
Now I’m watching a segment about DDT, which 75 years ago, was a wonder substance. Now we know as a damaging and dangerous compound, affecting the survival of birds. Then DDT eradicated disese-carrying mosquitos.
I had a phone call from my elder son. He left his gruelling and unsatisfying job and, at age 43, is discerning a new career. We are having lunch tomorrow.
That’s about it.
06 Saturday Jul 2019
Posted in Catholic Life, Family
Tags
Those of you who follow my blog know that I participate in the Catholic tradition of Nocturnal Adoration on the first Friday of every month. We pray and meditate in the presence of the Precious Body of Christ in the form of the consecrated bread.
I think I’m a better Catholic and a better person because of the time I spend with Jesus. I’m a better person, because I’m a little more compassionate and understanding of people, after I give up an hour of my time in the silence and darkness of a Saturday morning.
This morning was special because July 6, 2019 marks my mother’s 100th birthday. She probably hated being a stay at home mother, but I think she was good at it. She was there for us. And maybe that’s why we all turned out more or less OK. There were plenty of times she was bored out of her skull. She was a bright woman, who didn’t get a chance to go to college. She got a good job during a time when any kind of a job for anybody were hard to come by.
And she had some jobs that sucked too. One job was turning Bull Durham bags. Bull Durham was cigarette tobacco that was loose, for those intrepid souls who rolled their own cigarettes. Remember Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon?
The tobacco came in a white cotton bag, a cheap muslin, with a yellow drawstring.. The bags had to be “turned”. They were sewn inside out and people were paid at a piecework rate for turning them, Mother and her sister, Lizzie, and their mother, whom everyone called Tootsie, turned the bags. There was a little wire tool they used to get the job done. This was The Depression, y’all. And I suspect a lot of my readers may not have heard how hard things were.
So when Reynolds Metals, (think Reynolds Wrap) relocated to Richmond around 1940, Mother stood on line to apply for a secretarial job and was hired. She worked for a VP in the International Department, named Mr Zick, because she was fluent in Spanish and he needed a translator. She took Spanish at John Marshall High School. Imagine eighty years ago, one could do quite a lot with a high school diploma.
So she had this job, married my Dad. He went off to war and came back in one piece. Eventually she left work because of family demands. Mom and Dad had four children. I am number two.
Mother sang in the choir, taught Sunday School at Third Presbyterian Church. She would tell us that her neighbors on one side were Catholics, the Carrols, and on the other were Orthodox Jews, the Cohens. I have not vetted my mother’s recollections for accuracy, but her point was about getting along with others who aren’t like you.
And she made friends with African Americans, or as she respectfully called them “Colored People”. It wasn’t hard, we found, when we went about making friends. Our high school integrated in the Sixties and we made friends with the African-American kids. She and my father welcomed them into our home. In a way, it wasn’t a big deal. In another way, these simple acts of friendship and hospitality were revolutionary.
So the family is getting together to celebrate The Fourth and to remember Marian Maude ( cool name, huh?) on her birthday.
Between now and 1:00 PM, I hope to get in some more sleep. My surviving siblings (sister, younger brother) will be at the party. (My elder brother died in 2014). My sons, daughter-in-law, nephews, niece, her husband and great niece will be there too.
There will be food, general cuteness from my great niece, age 3, and fun.
28 Friday Jun 2019
Posted in Exercise/ Fitness, Family
Here it is, Thursday night. I dropped the car off for an inspection. E., my regular mechanic, is on vacation in Lebanon, visiting family. So the other mechanic in the shop is doing work for two. But he did get it done today.
We went to meet with the financial advisor. We still have a little money. Leave it at that.
Between dropping the car off and the sit down with the financial guy, I got a haircut. 💇. It had been two months and two months of pool chemical infusion meant that what was passing for hair was actually a strange collagen abnormality that looked as nasty as it felt.
Then lunch. I had shrimp. They were pretty good.
A trip to BJ’s Wholesale Club came next where we purchased what seemed to be an insane amount of stuff, the BIG jug of detergent, the Ginormous bundle of bath tissue, the snack multipack, 3 liters of mouthwash. Somehow, we managed to spend $250+. The kicker is, we will use it. All of it.
The swim came tonight at 8:24. It would have been sooner, but I left my towel and bathing suit at home, necessitating a trip home to retrieve them. But it all worked out. I had my fastest time for the distance in the whole month. There is hope, pinched nerve and all.
J’s lunch is ready. I pitted some cherries, sliced a nectarine, so She gets some fruit variety from the usual strawberries, She has to be at the store at 4:30 AM. I wanted it set up so I don’t have to fix lunch at 3:00 AM.
We did a lot of stuff together today. It was basic stuff that people do in the course of living, not a European river cruise, or bungee jumping in New Zealand, or trekking in Nepal. You know it felt pretty good, intimate in its own way. Shared experience.
09 Thursday May 2019
Posted in Family
We called my grandfather “Pop”. He seemed, when we were little, to be a big man and I guess he was.
He was a carpenter, cabinet maker and furniture maker. He made antique reproduction furniture at a company called Biggs Antique Furnture. He also built houses with my great uncle, Allen, his brother. He built two of the houses we lived in growing up. At one of them, he lost two fingers at the second knuckle in an accident with a power saw.
His family called him “Charlie”. His first born son was Charles Joseph , Jr, Dad. They called my father “Junior”. My brother was Charles Joseph, III. They called him Charlie Joe
Pop was a very gentle, almost serene man. He had the ability to calm children down. Once my sister got upset about something. He picked her up, placed her in a chair, and put a cool compress on her forehead. She never forgot that.
He didn’t talk much. Once my younger brother and Pop drove to Florida. He didn’t say much the whole trip. Maybe when it was time to stop for gas, he would say it was time to stop for gas.
He smoked Pall Mall Cigarettes. They were “King size” unfiltered, and came in a deep red pack. The tag line in their Fifties era commercial was “Outstanding… and they are mild.” He smoked cigars, too. Cheap ones. His idea of an expensive cigar was. an Antonio y Cleopatra Grenadier. I still have cigar boxes of the kind he smoked. He smoked a pipe too. I didn’t save any of his pipes. I think I have a Borkum Riff canister of his, but it might have been my elder brother’s.. That was Charlie Joe,
On Sunday, Pop got dressed up to go to Church and stayed dressed up all day. Men did that then. Blue collar men that is. During the week he smelled like sweat, tobacco, and sawdust all combined.
He smelled like a man.
17 Wednesday Apr 2019
Posted in Family, food, Love and stuff
Tags
My wife says I just like to say “huevos rancheros“. While it is true I love to pronounce that beautiful phrase, I do like huevos rancheros, as a meal. I will go to brunch at a nice restaurant and pay top dollar for dirt cheap food. Eggs, corn tortillas, frijoles negros, and salsa for somewhere between $12 and $15, a dish a short order cook can and, probably does, prepare.
Anyway, I bought corn tortillas and salsa at BJ’s the other day. Everything else I had on hand. I fixed my own huevos rancheros for my luxurious at home brunch.
It was yummy. Sadly, my wife could not join me. Or my favorite Word Press girl/woman crushes (I hope you know who you are) weren’t here, either, except vicariously, for me.
Food and Love. Food, we know what that is, except Jesus gave food a deeper meaning, when he stated, “I am the Bread of Life.” We live on another plane, as Christians, because Jesus changed our understanding of the world and the components that support us.
Love, on the other hand, has many definitions, love between friends and neighbors, parent and child, the love we have for our country, erotic love, sexual love. I make a distinction between the erotic and sexual, because the passion of attraction we have for others, need not express itself sexually, in a sexual act. In other words, we don’t have to have sex with someone with whom we are “in love”.
The sexual act can be devoid of love. People have sex in order to assure their own survival, either immediately or long term. Desperate women have exchanged sex for food or the means to acquire food. We have sex to have children, expecting (hoping?) these children will care for us in old age. Romantic (erotic) love is secondary to the demands of survival.
It is very common in all cultures that food is shared with the people we love. Many of us will have that experience over the next few days, some of us at Passover seders, others at Easter dinners. And that these feasts involve a transcendent love, where we thank God and celebrate, sometimes, with the people we brought into the world ourselves, or who brought us into the world.
09 Tuesday Apr 2019
Posted in Family, Relationships
I am home from this trip to Florida. The trip back transpired over two days, stopping in Georgia and North Carolina. I drove through the Durham area, where my deceased ex-wife grew up and where her family lived when we were married. I thought about my failure as a husband in that marriage.
Upon my return, I learned my 93-year old stepmother is in hospital with congestive heart failure.
Also my first wife, mother of my elder son is moving back to Richmond.
My life is taking on the makings of a movie on The Hallmark Channel.
I am tired. Physically. Emotionally I am overwhelmed.
29 Friday Mar 2019
Tags
Hey Hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?
My brother-in-law is dying from ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) or Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Slowly, inexorably, he is losing muscular function. He is in a hospice in Florida, near Mount Dora. His illness is the result of chemical exposure in Vietnam, during his combat service in 1969, most likely Agent Orange. The VA recognizes the disease as service-related, but won’t definitively attribute it to Agent Orange exposure. There isn’t much difference and he’s dying no matter what caused the disease.
I haven’t felt very motivated lately, bronchitis and allergies. Just discouraged. I don’t feel like exercising or watching what I eat.
We are leaving for Florida in the morning. J wants to see her brother one more time. The drive will be excruciating, both going down and coming back.
Damn Lyndon Johnson, Ho Chi Minh, John McCone, Gen. Giap. The whole fuckin’ bunch.
28 Thursday Mar 2019
Posted in Family
Tags
C, my younger son, J, and I had lunch today. He tries to cram a wealth of activities into his days off, so he schedules with a precision reminiscent of a satellite launch to the moon.
So the tense drama of today’s lunch began. We did rendezvous at the correct location. He talked about his advanced medical directive, that he wanted his executor to be a Republican. Somehow he thought he could get an absentee ballot cast after he was dead. I informed him that it didn’t work that way, at least in Virginia.
Next we moved on to his pending trip to Costa Rica for his cousin’s destination wedding in November. He thought as long as he was in the neighborhood, he could swing by Chile and Brazil. J and I informed him that South America is pretty big, unlike, say, dropping by Rhode Island and Connecticut while going to Massachusetts. He knows about maps. He knows about distance scales. Somehow applying the concepts to real life had yet to occur to him.
We enjoyed our time together. But I think defending a doctoral dissertation might be easier that lunch with C.
16 Saturday Mar 2019
Tags
I spent the morning attempting to unplug from my Smartphone, television, and the cyberworld. Sleeping helped. Otherwise, no luck. I think it is a matter of discipline. What works against me is that so many of the activities that satisfy me come from the digital world.
After a surprisingly good meal of corned beef and cabbage at Cracker Barrel, I came home and had another nap. The low energy I’m experiencing is attributable to the pollen making its presence felt. Good Old Mother Nature.
I’m doing some trainspotting, watching the Ashland Virtual Railfan LLC Channel on You TUBE.
Early Spring is a great time of year. I have plenty of fond memories, especially when my younger son was little and I was a single parent. His mom’s Healing Touch practitioners group met on Friday nights and we would start our weekends then. Sometimes I would fix homemade macaroni and cheese. Other nights we would pick up a pizza at the restaurant next door to the apartment.
We would watch a Flash Gordon serial or Disney’s Darby O’Gill And The Little People, featuring a yet to make it big Sean Connery. This was in the Dark Age of VHS on videocassette players. Remember? He would fall asleep in my bed. The days when my children always wanted me around them were the best.
My point is that only twenty years ago, the digital incursion into daily life was smaller than it is now. Yet we considered ourselves highly advanced and sophisticated. And we were.
Now I have to check my Smartphone regularly. I am writing this post on the same phone. I’m sure that Aristotle, were he alive today, would be fully engaged with this digital universe. So maybe I will just enjoy the modernity.
