Ron's Big Life Update - February 2002

Well, I think four months is certainly long enough between these giant life updates. So happy holidays, and a safe and happy new year to you all. If that doesn't qualify me for the latest holiday greetings in history, just wait until next year...

The last time I wrote was in November, when I was in danger of being downsized by my company, ADC. Well, I'm still at ADC, and it looks like we're free and clear until May, which is when any layoffs would occur on the calendar. Living fiscal quarter-to-fiscal-quarter is not the way to run a business, and for a while last year, we were living layoffs-to-layoffs. The telecom industry is still far from healthy overall, but it looks like we hit rock bottom late in 2001, and at least we've stabilized there for a while. So I'm just happy to be working at all.

My day-to-day activities have changed quite a bit over the last few months. During our last "reorganization" late last year, I was essentially traded to another ADC facility, about 40 miles from the old building, and 25 miles from my house. The change doubled my commute, and now I'm in a building with no cafeteria (oh GREAT!), doing computer modeling for telecom lasers. Our product looks like a computer chip with a fiber coming out of it, so it doesn't have the whiz-bang cool look of a laser pointer or a CD. Drat! But there's plenty of work to be done, and I'm just happy to be working at all.

And the irony of me working on lasers is plentiful; every time I took a lasers class in grad school (spanning two schools and three time zones), I always got the lowest grade in the class. Without fail. I tried hard, but I couldn't make it sink in. And now I'm exposed to it every day...

On the plus side, I get to do a bit of corporate travel, and I leave Monday for SWEDEN! I have a few days in Stockholm, and I'll be traveling with two other guys from ADC. I wanted to bring Margaret along (a perfect Valentine's Day present), but the three of us are staying in somebody's house over there, and Margaret got vetoed. I still feel pretty bad about not bringing her, so we'll probably take a trip somewhere this spring to appease my conscience.

So the big news: Last year's Emergency Room competition ended in a tie, 1-1. Margaret got stitches in her thumb, and I had The Plague. Personally, I think The Plague beats stitches hands down, but a tie is still a tie. So far, 2002 is tied up at 0-0. Dull...

"Crap From The Past" turned 10 years old in January. I have the longest-running retro show on the Twin Cities airwaves, and (as expected) my anniversary was virtually ignored by everyone in the business. Oh well. I'll be making fancy CFTP shirts next month for pledge drive premiums, which should be sty-lin'!

There have been quite a few holidays since the last time I wrote, so I'll retrace my steps.

We celebrated Thanksgiving with my family in New York. Mom made turkey (yay!), my brother Kenny flew into town (yay!), and we et and et and et. Mom inadvertently cooked the turkey upside down, and it was the best turkey we've ever had anywhere, so I heartily endorse cooking your next turkey upside down. Juuuuuuuuuuicy...

And immediately after we finished eating with Mom, Kenny went out with his friends to go eat some more. Ain't life sweet?

Kenny had some nice stories about the pearls of wisdom he's received over the years from convenience store clerks. A Dunkin' Donuts guy in New Jersey once told him, "You must learn to live with disappointment." Which is unquestionably the most dignified way of saying Tough Patooty that I've ever heard.

Kenny recalled an incident at a 7-11 in New York that sounds exactly like Apu from The Simpsons. Kenny wanted a fountain drink, and was pointing at one of the sample cups on top of the machine. "Do you want this one?" and the clerk pointed to the 12-ounce cup. No, bigger. "This one?" to the 16-ounce cup. No, bigger. 20-ounce? Bigger. The clerk's expression got more and more surprised as he worked his way down the line. 32-ounce? 44-ounce? 64-ounce? Finally, Kenny reached the end of the line, much to the horror of the clerk: 96-ounces. He told Kenny, "This will make you very happy," and it indeed made Kenny very happy. Those guys know everything.

The weather was perfect in NY last November, and we spent 3 or 4 full days driving around New York and north Jersey visiting friends I haven't seen in a while. We had brunch with Karen and Brian, the couple whose wedding we missed when Margaret had her gall bladder removed two summers ago. (Gall stones are still in our fridge, and still look unpleasantly like old hard-boiled egg yolks.) The running joke during the brunch was that Karen offered to make pancakes if we wanted them, but there was so much other yummitude that we politely declined. A few days after we got back, I told Karen that we changed our minds - we'd like pancakes after all. Ha-ha's all the way around. Well, about a week later, we got a priority mail box from Karen and Brian: a pancake and strawberry syrup, sealed in a ziplock bag! Big HA-HA's all the way around. I kept the pancake for a few months, sealed inside a few concentric ziplock bags, but I finally tossed it when it looked like the green pancake creatures wanted out. A joke is only funny until the EPA gets involved...

I noticed an unfortunate trend in suburban NYC - the replacement of small local stores with giant national chains. Granted, some of the old stores were all that terrific (Caldor, Pergament, and dozens of others that Kenny and I didn't work at when we were kids, like Rickels, Bamberger's, Rock Bottom), but at least they had some sort of personality of their own. Now, virtually all of them are gone, replaced by Home Depot, Target, Wal-Mart, and the 2nd biggest mall in the country (right behind Minnesota's own Mall Of America - joy!) Case in point: While at Mom's house, I needed to buy shaving cream, packing tape, and a set of Allan wrenches. These are three fairly unrelated items, and while I could see finding all of them under one roof at a Target/Wal-Mart store, I just wanted to stay away from traffic (on the day after Thanksgiving, mind you) and pick them up at a small mom & pop place. Once I thought about what was still left in the county, I realized that there just aren't any more mom & pop places. I couldn't think of a single drugstore or hardware store that didn't involve a trip to the giant mall. So I trekked out to the Target at the giant mall on the day after Thanksgiving, cursing and swearing at the poorly-designed traffic patterns and trying to avoid the thousands of other disgruntled shoppers who also ran out of packing tape, shaving cream, and Allan wrenches. If the New York City area is an indicator of what the rest of the country will be like in 20 years (as I read somewhere), then wave goodbye to local culture and say hello to giant, impersonal corporate Americana. Quick easy shopping at the huge Wal-Mart, fancy dining at the Subway, Applebee's, and Starbuck's, and nary a dissenting voice left to be heard. I was appalled.

Unfortunately, that's the very same issue that I've been dealing with in the radio world for years. I work for a tiny, local station that's run by community people. The contrast between my station and the corporate-run commercial stations gets more apparent every year, and I think people are wising up to their cookie-cutter mentality. I say, go local, and I'll step down off my soapbox now.

While we were in NY, we drove into Manhattan for a day, and hooked up with some old friends (Charles and J) who've lived there almost as long as I've known them. J lives on a little-traveled street, and there's always parking in front of his apartment (yes, that's FREE parking in Manhattan). J, you can't ever move from that apartment! We did all the things that New Yorkers do - ride the subway, eat pizza, and curse and swear a lot. (I'm kidding about that last one. To be fair, Manhattanites are some of the most polite city dwellers I've run across anywhere. The Big Apple has come a long way since the dark days of the '80s.) We also went down to the World Trade Center site to see how the cleanup was going. It's been hard to describe to Minnesotans just how big those buildings were. It's probably three times bigger than anything in Minneapolis, and I mean three times bigger in all three dimensions. (Total volume - 27 times larger than anything out here.)

While I had a pretty good knowledge of Manhattan, most of my experience was farther north than the WTC site, and I didn't know the surrounding streets very well. It's at the southwest corner of Manhattan, with nothing to the west but the Hudson River, and only a few blocks to the south. Unless you were on an elementary school field trip to the financial district, there wasn't much of a draw to locations that far south in Manhattan. J knows the area much better than I do - he used to cycle along some of the west side streets that have been closed since September.

We took the subway down to a stop a few blocks south of the site, then walked north. At the time, the streets had barricades so that you couldn't get within three or four blocks of the cleanup. What a mess! We'd all seen the pictures on TV, but it was very humbling to see just how far and wide the damage spread. If you were to follow the barricades around all three sides (the fourth side would have been at the Hudson River), you'd walk about a mile. A few of the surrounding side streets were completely torn up to expose the utility lines underneath. (That was fascinating all by itself - nobody ever gets to see all the stuff two feet underneath the pavement, and I can easily see why local utility service has been spotty since September. Lotsa pipes. LOTSA pipes...) And it's still tough for me to get a sense of scale, since I hadn't spent much time gazing upward from the base of the buildings. There were some 30-story buildings just adjacent to the site, and it was very difficult for me to imagine the two towers, THREE TIMES TALLER than these giant 30-story buildings that were standing in front of me. God bless the New Yorkers - those folks have been through a lot lately, and still rank as the most polite of all the big-city people I've run across.

So Thanksgiving was in New York, which was nice. Christmas was in Florida, which was even nicer. We flew into Tampa, rented a car and drove down to Fort Lauderdale to spend a few days with my grandmother (now 91) and Kenny, who flew in for the weekend. After a few days in Fort Lauderdale, we drove back up to Tampa to spend Christmas at Margaret's sister's house with her side of the family. Seven days in Florida does a Minnesota-body good...

We rented the smallest tin can we could get - a brand new 2002 Kia with 900 miles on it. (We would put another 900 on it before we gave it back.) The gas mileage was fine and it drove OK, but I wouldn't want to own one.

Tampa was fun - family and gifts are always a good time. Margaret and I ate at our favorite Cuban restaurant again (Viva "La Teresita"!), twice. It would be wonderful to go there with the whole family, but I don't think something like that will ever happen until the nieces and nephews are grown and out of the house. Aside from the time that Margaret and I sneaked away, Tampa was a kid-centric visit, to say the least.

Fort Lauderdale was a blast. We drove out there through one of the two-lane highways right through the Everglades. Margaret loves the weird nature stuff, so we stopped at a pull-out deep in the heart of the Everglades to check out nature. Margaret found two feathers while she was wandering around. ("I'd say they were from some type of bird." "Thanks, Ron. You've been very helpful.") We showed up at Grandma's house, and Grandma was waiting for us, along with an anniversary card from my aunt and uncle! (Six years already? We keep forgetting our anniversary because it falls so close to the holidays.)

Naturally, we were given a short list of little chores around Grandma's house. (Last year, we bought some furnace filters and changed the battery in the smoke detector. Very easy for us, not so easy for Grandma.) She wanted one of her lamps re-wired, so after an easy trip to Home Depot (I know, don't get me started), and five minutes with a screwdriver, I delivered a perfectly-functioning lamp. She also wanted some flowers planted in the front yard, so Margaret used the same trip to HD to buy one of every color for some particular kind of flower (I forget which kind - she's the gardener in the family). I re-wired, Margaret planted, and Grandma was very happy indeed.

When my grandparents moved down to Florida in 1972, one of the first decorations on their lawn was a ceramic mushroom that my grandmother had painted by hand. It sat on the lawn uneventfully for 29 years, until it mysteriously disappeared in 2001. Someone took Grandma's ceramic mushroom?!? Why?!? Margaret and I thought that was pretty funny, so when we found an incredibly ugly ceramic mushroom at a dollar store near Grandma's house, we bought it, and Margaret planted it right next to the new flower bed without telling Grandma. As Grandma was inspecting her new flowers, the resulting conversation was priceless: "Margaret, where did that come from?" "Well, mushrooms sometimes just sprout up." That seemed to make everybody happy.

Then Kenny showed up. We let him replace a curtain in the garage, because he's the tallest. (You want to be the tallest one in the family? Then, fine. YOU get the tall jobs...) Then the eating began, as it always does at these family gatherings. My grandmother took us to a local Italian restaurant, where the "lighter fare" section of the menu included eggplant parmesan. (No joke.) Tasty, and heavy.

The next day, Grandma wanted us to take her to the restaurant of our choice. We weren't so sure this was a good idea, since I couldn't see her really enjoying the Cuban-style food of the local places. But we found a Colombian restaurant about a mile from her house (walking distance!), and it looked promising enough, so we brought her there. The restaurant was probably new, and still had the sheen of people trying really hard to please. Very friendly wait staff, huge portions, and even live music (a guy playing a little keyboard and singing). They were putting in the effort, and we appreciated it. Margaret, Kenny, and I got sort of a sampler plate - one of everything. Slab of meat, slab of different kind of meat, pork rind thing, beans. All in all, mighty tasty, and a bit similar to Cuban food. (I'd never had Colombian food before.) Fortunately, Grandma found something on the menu that was closer to her tastes - a grilled chicken breast, tossed salad, white rice, french fries. She said her food was very bland. She said that a couple of times, until we realized that being bland was a good thing for her. Well, if she didn't like it, then she was a good sport about it, and we probably won't take there the next time we visit. (We'll go without her and eat ourselves silly!)

We got some good stories out of her during the visit. One time, she went to use a pay phone, put in a dime, and essentially hit the jackpot - a flood of dimes came out the coin return! Wow! Just like in the cartoons! Another story was from our childhood, from when we used to visit the grandparents as kids. There were always plastic pitchers of lemonade and iced tea in the fridge, and the way that we could tell them apart was that the lemonade pitcher had a big masking tape "T" on it. The tea pitcher had no distinguishing features, but the lemonade was "T". I still don't know why.

We were told to pack our bathing suits, because we'd have to go to the pool. It's the law. As kids, when my folks would bring us down to visit, the highlight would always be trips to the community pool. The residents were all senior citizens (it was a senior community, after all), the younger adults were children of the residents, and the only kids running around were somebody's grandkids - just like us. Just adjacent to the pool were the shuffleboard courts, and there were always people playing shuffleboard. If you've never seen shuffleboard, the goal is to give your little plastic disc (about the size of a small frisbee) a shove with a big stick, and try and get the disc to land in one of some painted squares at the other end of the court. A leisurely game, to say the least. The different squares had different point values, and you'd keep score on some small blackboards at one end of the courts with a piece of big, oversized chalk. (Why was the chalk always so big?) I remember shuffleboard being a big deal back then, and Grandma tells me that everyone played; there were shuffleboard leagues that would compete pretty seriously, and I remember having to wait my turn on the courts to play against Kenny. Well, this time, after we dried off from the pool, we showed Margaret the shuffleboard courts. She'd never seen the game before, and it was fun for Kenny and me to explain the significance of the game from our childhood.

The equipment was still in the creaky little closet - the wire racks that held a series of mismatched discs (so that you always had to mix and match to get a full set of your color), the poles that were coming apart just enough so that they always need to be screwed back together, some bowling pins that we never figured out how to incorporate, and a set of erasers and oversized chalk. Kenny and I marveled that it was just like we remembered it - we even joked that our scores were probably still on the blackboards from our last visit in 1982.

Except that this time, there was no one on the courts. It slowly sunk in that all the people who played this sport 20 years ago have passed on. Shuffleboard, apparently, belonged to a particular age group at a particular point in time, and was not something that got passed from generation to generation. I can't speak for Kenny, but I felt a very real sense of loss as we played our first game of shuffleboard in 20 years, knowing that we were probably the only people to touch the equipment in eons, and that we would probably be the last people to play until another set of full-grown grandkids wandered onto the courts out of curiosity. However, it didn't stop us from playing the kind of game that would have gotten us kicked off the courts instantly, 20 years ago...

So we had an afternoon to kill, and Margaret and I decided to drag Kenny to the giant swap meet in Fort Lauderdale. Back in Tucson, we used to go to the swap meet to get our fill of sunburn and cheap junk, so we thought we'd check out the local flavors in Fort Lauderdale. It was HUGE - probably 4 times the size of the Tucson swap meet. I don't think we bought anything, but we ate chili dogs and ice cream, and spent too much time in the sun: it's the True Meaning of the Swap Meet. We used to joke that you could get everything you need in life at the swap meet, and that was certainly true here. Margaret found a guy who sold jewelry tools. She was looking for a tiny anvil, but his English wasn't so good, and the only way she could convey what she wanted was to draw it. He immediately recognized the drawing as "Oh! Poosnya! I don't have." I don't know what language the word "poosnya" is, but it clearly meant "anvil", and he clearly didn't have any. I was most fascinated by the vast array knock-off products, like the "Halo Kitty" items. There were even two different knock-offs of Crest toothpaste - Chance and Crescent, both with artwork in the same Crest font. Bizarre! And now that we've seen it, we probably won't go back. That thing ties up traffic for miles in all directions.

On our last afternoon there, we had a few hours before we were to meet Grandma for dinner, I had a bizarre idea. I must have been in a reflective mood from the shuffleboard, and I wanted to drive up to West Palm Beach to go see the apartment where my other set of grandparents used to live (they passed away many years ago). I hadn't been up there since I was 12, and although I didn't remember much about how to get there, I figured my keen Gerber sense of direction would guide us there intact. Kenny hadn't been up there since he was 12 either, and he seemed up for the ride. Margaret didn't object, so the three of us piled into the Kia, and off we went.

From my childhood, I remembered only sketchy details about the drive up there. I knew you get on the Florida Turnpike north, and I remembered something about the distance 37 miles, and that was all. I figured that there was a ticket you got when you got on the Turnpike, and the distance between exits must have been 37 miles. But beyond that, I was putting my faith in that tiny bit of directional instinct - the same instinct that lets a cat find its way home from hundreds of miles away.

So we drove north, and the Turnpike looked completely unfamiliar. Maybe it's because I used to sleep on the drive, or maybe it really has changed in the 20 years since I last rode on it. But either way, when I saw the sign for "Okeechobee Blvd", I knew immediately that was the exit. Kenny agreed. And sure enough, it was 37 miles from when we got on the Turnpike.

The exit ramp looked completely unfamiliar, and when we came to a traffic light at the end, we just guessed, uh... let's turn left. We drove only about 100 feet when Kenny pointed and said, "There it is!" Yup, we'd just passed a sign on the left side of the road for "Century Village", the large retirement community whose name we'd completely forgotten, but a name that Kenny recognized immediately. We turned around and drove up to the gate.

I was unprepared to talk to the person manning the gate. (The gate was unmanned back when we were kids.) He asked who I was visiting, and rather than explain that the people I knew in Century Village had been gone for 15 years and that I just wanted to drive around and see if it still looks the same, I gave him the names of my grandparents, knowing full well that they wouldn't be on the directory. I'm a terrible liar (I probably should have given the just-driving-around explanation) and we got turned away at the gate. Kenny and I remembered that there was another gate around the corner, so we got back on Okeechobee Blvd. and marveled at how large Century Village was. We turned left at the first light, and Kenny predicted that there would be a Dairy Queen right...THERE! How did he remember that? He was right, of course, and a short distance later we found the other gate and turned into the driveway. It, too, had a gatekeeper, and since I didn't want to bother anybody, we just sat in the car on the driveway for a minute, looking in and trying to remember what it looked like on the inside.

Seeing the second gate brought back all sorts of memories for me, and although our Kia remained parked at the driveway, my mind's eye could travel vividly past the gate to the square perimeter road that encircles the entire community, where you turn right at the pool, go all the way around to the northwest corner of the complex, turn right, then right, then left, onto streets whose names escape me, then you park in the visitor's spaces, walk up the concrete staircase (which had big side rails - big enough to house a bee's nest; I got stung once), turn left at the top of the stairs, and Lila and Dave, my grandparents, lived in the first apartment on the left. "208 Dorchester I". (Kenny, how on earth did you remember that?) I remembered their cozy little apartment, with the sliding doors on the bathrooms and another one that separated the living room from the bedroom, as if there weren't enough room for hinged doors. I remembered the little screened-in balcony outside the bedroom, with the green astroturf carpeting. I remembered their little radio and record player, with their copy of Bobby Freeman's "C'mon And Swim" album. I could picture it all clear as day, and from the few glances I caught over the wall, it all looked exactly the same, just like the shuffleboard courts.

With little else to do in West Palm Beach, I pulled out of the Century Village driveway and headed back toward Fort Lauderdale. We were very quiet during the drive back. I felt stupid for driving all the way up there and then getting stopped at the gate, and I think Kenny and I were both lost in Century Village, circa 1980. Maybe I'll go back the next time I visit Florida and try to smooth-talk the guard at the gate. Or maybe I won't, knowing that Century Village will probably still be there, looking like it did when I was a kid. Except that there won't be anybody on the shuffleboard courts.

Well, I hope you and yours have a happy holiday season, and a happy new year. (!) We're on pace for the warmest winter on record here in Minneapolis, and I'm not complaining one peep.

Stay warm,
Ron & Margaret