I’m sure you didn’t see that coming, so I’ll explain.
My mom and dad divorced sometime around 1978, when I was 10. I don’t really remember much from that time, mostly because I was 10 and hadn’t developed a sense of context for anything except music. Someone recently asked me why they got divorced. I didn’t have a good answer. It’s not like there was any abuse, or one particular event to point to. No, they just didn’t get along, and all parties concerned seem to agree that they were much better off apart than together. Ed moved out, and my brother and I continued living with mom. Mom remarried when I was 12, and I saw Ed for visitations every other weekend, or however things like that work.
By the time I was 12, my relationship had soured with my dad. I can’t remember what happened or why, but I attribute a lot of it to my being a moody adolescent. I’m sure there are 12-year-olds out there that are wise beyond their years, but I was certainly not one of them.
When Bar Mitzvah season came around for my 13th birthday, I had pretty much severed ties with Ed. That was the year I started at junior high, and that was when I made the friends that would carry me through high school and afterwards. As timing would have it, none of my friends ever met my father. A few years later, the relationship between my brother, Kenny and my dad dissolved as well. I don’t know why.
And we all moved on. Ed remarried while I was in high school, continued to live in Rockland County and work in New York, and eventually moved down to Florida when he retired in the mid-’90s. His wife, Marie, had grown children so Ed’s new life included children and grandchildren without Ken and me. I went to college, then grad school, and didn’t have any contact with him until the local paper in New York had my picture in the “Engagements” section in 1995. He saw my picture in the paper and sent me a congratulatory card, which in hindsight was a really nice thing to do. At the time, I still had traces of my adolescent hot-headedness and didn’t respond. I still regret that.
In the years since then, I’ve mellowed substantially. I’ve been through a divorce and remarriage of my own. And from all those experiences, some very good and some not so good, I’d like to think I’ve learned a bit about civility, tolerance, and forgiveness. I’m most certainly not the same person I was when I was 27. Or 18. Or 12, for that matter.
So skip ahead to 2009. Out of curiosity, my brother’s wife, Maria, decided to poke around on the internet and see if she could find an address for my father down in Florida. It wasn’t all that difficult, and she found one. Maria wrote him a letter asking if he’d be interested in getting in contact with Ken. He was. They exchanged letters and eventually phone calls. And then Ken and Maria brought me up to speed at the beginning of 2010.
I sent my first letter to my dad in February 2010, and it must have been as awkward for him to receive as it was for me to write. I started by telling him I regretted how hostile and immature I must have been back then, and that I can’t undo my actions, but only apologize for them and try to move on. And then brought him up to speed on what I’ve been doing since college – a lot of material to squash into one letter. I knew that a single letter couldn’t completely patch up 25 years of silence, but I thought it was a start.
And he wrote back. And I wrote back. It was nice.
And then I called. They weren’t home, so I wound up leaving a message on their machine. They called back when we weren’t home, so we got a message on our machine. It sounded like Ed was just as excited and nervous as I was, which is pretty understandable. Eventually, we got each other on the phone. That, too, was nice.
We traded calls pretty regularly after that. When I told him that I’d be heading out to Las Vegas for the bachelor party last November, we got to talking about poker. I told him that I’d been playing casually since high school. Mostly 7-card stud, 5-card stud, 5-card draw and a lot of variations on those games. Usually with a lot of wild cards. He told me that he used to play pretty regularly as well, with the same low-stakes atmosphere of my games. I told him that I was a little apprehensive about playing for the first time in Las Vegas, since there was real money involved. He then shared a terrific story that he said he hadn’t told in years. About 35 years ago, on a business trip to Las Vegas, he got to spend a few hours in one of the casinos. He was checking out the poker tables and spotted a table full of old ladies. It looked like they didn’t know what they were doing. He overheard conversations between the ladies and the dealer, like “What do I have? You mean I won? Oh, my word!” So Ed sat down at the old ladies’ table, thinking he could do pretty well against some old ladies that didn’t even know what they were holding. Nope – the old ladies cleaned him out. Apparently, they had a pretty good racket going there, and would do this to those New York-type guys all the time. Ed was so annoyed that he didn’t sleep a wink that night. So his advice to me was not to sit down at any table full of old ladies playing poker.
In March, Liz and I flew down to Tampa to pay them a visit in person. We didn’t want to overwhelm them, so we rented a car and a hotel room, and told them that they didn’t have to play host. Think of it as if we were going to be in town for the weekend, and thought we’d drop by to say “hi”. That worked nicely. We all went out to lunch one day, then Liz and I dropped by in the evening the next day for a few hours.
We talked about the old days and about people I would have known from back then, we looked at some photos I hadn’t seen in 25 years, and tried to fill Liz in on some of the details from back then. It was striking how a handful of my personality traits are directly traceable to Ed. For instance, you may know how I used to follow American Top 40 on Sunday mornings and write down the chart positions in a three-ring binder. I still have the three-ring binder. Well, Ed showed me a book, which included handwritten lyrics of the hits of the day, written in a paperback-book-sized calendar/planner from 1951. Apparently, my compulsion to categorize and catalog music comes directly from him! He also had great math skills, and during his work career, he was responsible for writing many of the specifications for the early computer programs that ran the Nasdaq Stock Market. All in all, a very rewarding trip for all of us. I’m sure we’ll visit again when it’s cold in Minnesota.
I waited to write about all this until I’d had a chance to really absorb it. A few weeks ago, my brother, Ken and his wife, Maria, got to meet up with them in New York. Ed came across to us as simply a nice old guy who’s really happy to reconnect with his kids after 25 years. We were happy to see him and find out how he’s been, and he was just as interested in us. It’s been a really rewarding experience for us, and we feel very fortunate to be able to share some aspects of our lives with someone who’s been wondering about us for a quarter of a century.Compared to all that, the rest of our lives lately feels a little small. I’ll do my best to fill in some of the details of late.
January - My grandmother turned 100, so we flew to DC and spent a few days with the family. They threw a nice party at a local Chinese restaurant out there, with lots of old friends coming into town for the occasion. We got balloons for Grandma, but we couldn't find any with "100" on them. We settled for two "50" balloons.We stayed with my cousin, Heidi. She'd accumulated quite a few bottles of wine in the last few years, from sources mostly unremembered, so we had an impromptu wine tasting party. Old wine can be pretty foul, and they ranged from merely undrinkable to downright mutogenic. Fun, but most unfortunate from a beverage point of view.
Early February - Liz settled into a normal work routine. She has positions at three hospitals in town, and all are considered "part-time/casual". She gets to pick her own hours, and she doesn't have to work nights, weekends, holidays or whenever she wants to schedule a vacation. I thought it was a little odd that she could work at different hospitals, but apparently that's a common thing to do for the medical field. Can't do that with the law stuff or in engineering, that's for sure.
February – I’d heard some where that the best gift you can give is something completely selfless. So this year, for Valentine’s Day, I decided to give Liz a gift of which I could not possibly receive any joy. I offered to sit through a showing of the movie “Beaches”.
For those of you who don’t know, “Beaches” came out in 1988, starred Bette Midler, and included Ms. Midler’s blood-curdling rendition of the song “Wind Beneath My Wings”. Factually, that’s all I knew of the movie until recently, and that’s all I really needed to know to use “Beaches” as the go-to punchline for any chick-flick-related jokes. Liz had seen the movie when she was a kid, and always defended the movie against my never-ending stream of snide remarks. So in deference to Liz, I offered to sit through the movie (even if I had to force my eyes open, Clockwork Orange-style) and approach it with an open mind. Quite the selfless gift, eh?So we watched it. I gave it a fair shot. I thought it was BAD.
Not just chick-flick bad, but objectively BAD as a piece of cinema. Thoroughly one-dimensional, stereotypical characters. Blatantly obvious plot resolution. Acting so wooden it left splinters in my eyes. And pretentious, pretentious Bette hamming it up in every single frame of the movie. And finally, as if the audience had not yet been bludgeoned into submission, the complete destruction of the song “Wind Beneath My Wings”, which had been originally recorded very sweetly a few years earlier by Lou Rawls.If your Valentine’s Day gift to your wife makes you want to die, that should count for something, right? Liz said she would have rather had chocolate.
May – You probably didn’t know that I appeared in a book about American Top 40. It came out in early 2010, but I just recently got a copy for myself. I’m on page 104 of “American Top 40 with Casey Kasem (The 1980s)” by Pete Battistini. Now you know.Mid-May - Liz and I got to see Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings. Holy moly! It's as close to seeing James Brown as we will ever get! You've no doubt heard about the tightness of the band and her amazing stage presence. All true, and then some. She and some band members all stuck around to sign every last autograph for us, which was very, very gracious.
I got to talk to one of her backup singers for a little while after the show. Everything on stage was really tight, so I asked her how many rehearsals they had before they went on the road. Two. Two???? Yup, just two. They have hour-long sound checks, and if they want to try something new, they work it out during the sound checks. There are visual cues onstage as well, so while they're playing, they're keeping an eye on the one person in the band who gives cues to the rest of the band. (I noticed the same thing for George Clinton's P-Funk zoo onstage many years ago.)Late May - Liz's brother got a kitten, named Leonard Montgomery. He got big really quickly after this. They also got a second kitten, named Lorenzo Banks, who I haven't met yet.
June 7 - It hit 103 degrees F in Minneapolis. That's the hottest day in the city in 23 years. It felt like some sort of cruel joke. In Tucson, sure, it's expected to get that hot every day during the summer, but in Tucson, it doesn't spend a week below zero every winter...Early June – We got a new dishwasher. The old one was a ‘70s-era Kitchen Aid, with a heavy metal-lined door. Very old, and of late very ineffective at getting the crud off our dishes. So we checked Consumer Reports, bought one of their relatively inexpensive Best Buys, and take delight in our again-shiny glasses and utensils. I guess there’s not much of a story here, except that it’s good to have a new dishwasher.
Mid-June – There’s an ice cream place in St. Paul called Izzy’s, which is like no other ice cream place on earth. Yes, there are other places that make and sell yummy ice cream from scratch, but none do it quite like Izzy’s.
When Liz and I stopped by Izzy’s a few months ago, I noticed that they had replaced the sign that they use to let us know what flavors are available. The old sign was a big magnet, like a giant whiteboard, and each flavor had its own magnetic circle, which they stuck on the whiteboard if the particular flavor was in the case.
The new sign is a technological marvel, even if it maintained the look of the old sign. What you see is a projector, like the LED-based projectors commonly used in conference rooms, shining a big, rectangular image on the wall. The image includes a bunch of circles, each circle representing a flavor in the case. So cosmetically, it’s immediately recognizable as a replacement for the old magnetic sign.
It was a slow day at Izzy’s, so I asked about the sign. The guy explained. Each flavor has its own name tag, like “Chubby Bunny”, which is slid into a little holder in the glass case so that customers can identify what the flavor is. No surprise there; most places do this. What Izzy’s did is to put an RFID tag on each name tag, and put an RFID tag reader in the case itself, so that the case knows what flavors are being served at that very instant. The RFID tag reader then automatically talks to Izzy’s website, and lets the website show what’s being served at that very instant. It’s posted on the website, plus on Facebook and Twitter, and updated every three minutes. And finally, the projector in the store automatically talks to the website, finds out what’s being served at that very instant, generates the image of the circles with flavors in them, and shines that on the wall right above the ice cream cases. It’s true genius. The guy at the store said that the owners had contracted with a programmer to design and build the whole thing. I was absolutely floored.
While we were eating our ice cream, I wondered aloud to Liz about where they actually make the ice cream. The guy overheard us and said that since it was a slow day, would we like to see where they make it? FYI: if anyone ever asks you if you want to see where they make homemade ice cream, the answer should be YES. We were like 10-year-old kids… He walked us out the door to an adjacent part of the building and walked us around in their surprisingly modest-sized kitchen. Lots of counter space and racks, with two giant ice cream tumbler machine thingys. They looked like oversized front-loader washing machines. And that was it. No assembly-line conveyor belts or anything. Just a spotlessly clean kitchen area. Oh yeah! We asked how many people work on the recipes. About 2 or 3 – just the owners, who are clearly ice cream culinary geniuses.
So that’s the background as to why I think Izzy’s is the greatest ice cream store in the whole universe. Now back to mid-June: their 9th People’s Flavor Awards!
From their entry form: “Every other year we take submissions from our customers for ice cream flavors. We choose four finalists in six categories: Kids, Chocolate, Mix-Ins, Fruit, So Local, and Specialties. We make the flavors. Customers vote at the contest. Ballots are counted and winners are announced in each category, including a Best In Show. The Best In Show receives a $100.00 gift certificate to Izzy’s, his or her name on our wall plaque and their ice cream featured in our dipping cabinet for the rest of the year. Each finalist will receive 2 free tickets to the tasting event, a contest T-shirt, and one pint of their flavor.”So on this particular Sunday, from 1 to 4:30, they had their ice cream tasting event. You pay an admission fee, and you get to try all 24 flavors and vote for your favorites. I had 29 scoops of ice cream, and that was literally all I had to eat that entire day. Our friend, Ellen, had a marathon’s worth of ice cream, or 26.2 scoops. Possibly the best day in all of recorded history.
And since you’re wondering, the Best In Show for 2011 was a flavor called “Mango Django”, submitted by Gaku Sato: Mango ice cream with honey, balsamic vinegar, poppy seeds, dash of cayenne pepper and dash of ground pink peppercorns. God Bless Izzy’s.
July 4 - We spent the weekend at Liz's parents' cabin on Pelican Lake, about three hours northwest of Minneapolis. Perfect weather all weekend, right up until the fireworks display. A big, dangerous thunderstorm was coming our way from the northwest, and we were at the east end of the lake watching it all roll in. For about a half hour, we sat on the dock and watched an immense display of cloud-to-cloud lightning. I mean, REALLY immense. It filled up most of the sky and looked like Hollywood special effects.
They pushed up the start time of the fireworks display on the lake by about 15 minutes, and shortened the whole display to about 10 minutes. From our dock, we could see the fireworks just fine, and although those would normally be considered great seats, the entire display was completely overshadowed by the immense lightning display. Liz tried to get some pictures, but it didn't photograph well. She did get one shot showing a giant lightning bolt, with a tiny little firework going off in the corner. Imagine that picture, with very active lightning activity, for a half hour during what should have been pitch blackness, and that was our fireworks display. Very, very memorable, but not for the usual reasons.After the fireworks display ended, we saw a few boats speeding across the lake to get back home ASAP. And then the actual storm hit. For a good ten minutes beforehand, the air was completely still. No breeze, no nothing. They tell me that's bad. We think we saw some funnel clouds way off in the distance. Then, a very perceptible front moved in. You could actually see it moving across the water in the wave patterns on the surface. Liz's brother said that it should be hitting us in "5, 4, 3, ..." I was inside by 3. And hit us it did! The winds picked up immediately, the temperature dropped by about 20 degrees, and a wall of rain moved over us. In those first few seconds, before the rain hit us, we saw whitecaps on the lake behind the front. And it lasted a good half hour or so. Cleaned out the air and drenched everything in its path, but didn't cause any damage in our area. We got lucky, I think.
Mid-July – The old, old, old basic black half-sphere Weber grill that I got for $5 at a garage sale 14 years ago finally died. Over the years, the insulating lining inside the dome had flaked off, causing a slow chain reaction of destruction that unfolded over many years: No insulation, so the dome got very hot every time I grilled. Dome got hot, so handle eventually got brittle. Brittle handle eventually disintegrated, leaving a single piece of hot sheet metal as the grippable part. Hot metal couldn’t be touched by hand, so got used to using tongs to move and remove dome during use. Tongs are clumsy, and I am even moreso, and I eventually dropped hot metal dome onto concrete patio. Dropped hot metal dome warped, so that it didn’t fit on the rest of the grill. Admitted defeat. Wheeled the grill out to the curb with a FREE sign. Drove to neighborhood hardware store. Asked for recommendation for small charcoal grill. Knowledgeable staff pointed toward their best-selling grill – the old black basic half-sphere Weber grill that I just wheeled out to the curb. Bought grill. Put on patio. Returned to normalcy.The only difference that I can see between the old and new grills is that the new one has whitewhall wheels on it. Otherwise, I appear to have bought the Technics 1200 of grills. May it, too, live forever.
Ongoing - Liz has become the master of all food preparation. To demonstrate, more food pictures.
January 31, Chicken Teriyaki
February 13, Skillet Chicken Parmesan
March 8, Vegetable Beef Soup
March 20, Potato Leek Soup
March 29, Manicotti with Meat Sauce
March 31, Penne Alla Vodka
April 4, Light Chicken & Dumplings
April 4, Light Strawberry Shortcake
April 6, Beef Brisket with Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes
April 6, Blueberry Streusel Muffin
April 7, Pork Tostada with Mexican Rice and Refried Beans
April 9, Chocolate Blackout Cake
April 14, Scrambled Eggs with Feta and Thyme
April 18, Tandoori Chicken with Raita and Cilantro Sauce
April 18, another picture of Tandoori Chicken
May 9, Beef, Pepper, and Snow Pea Stir-Fry
May 11, Braised Short Ribs
May 22, Scrambled Eggs with Basil and Feta
May 24, Spicy Penne with Sausage and Broccoli
June 8, Steak and Garlic Green Beans
June 14, Pan Seared Chicken Breast with Roasted Asparagus
June 17, Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars
Take a bow, Liz. I am the luckiest guy in the world.
Mid-July – Our state government has been shut down for the last two weeks in a stalemate over the budget. Basically, our Governor wants tax increases on the wealthy to plug a hole in the budget but is willing to make cuts that match the tax increases, while our legislature wants only cuts and adamantly refuses tax increases. I’m sure that most, if not all, 50 states had some kind of budget pressure this year, but only Minnesota shut down the entire state government because they couldn’t reach a compromise. The cliché says that a people will always get the leadership they deserve; this must be our own fault.
I don’t say that to be snarky. No, I firmly believe that we Minnesotans have permanently lost the ability to compromise. It’s how politics is supposed to work, but it no longer works in Minnesota.
It seemed like an obvious thing when I was a kid. A specific example from my childhood: I liked vanilla ice cream. I wasn’t a fan of chocolate ice cream, and I would have been perfectly happy if chocolate ice cream were banished from the earth. But I accepted that others in my household liked chocolate. So while my first choice would have been if mom bought a carton of vanilla ice cream, I accepted that mom bought the vanilla/chocolate/strawberry combination. I got my vanilla, others got their chocolate, and the third party candidate of strawberry sat in the freezer until ice crystals enveloped it and we threw it out. That was called compromise. Everybody got a little of what they wanted, at the expense of a having a stale carton of strawberry ice cream left in the freezer for months on end.
It’s called compromise. A little something for you, a little something for me, and we all move on.
Somehow, politics has devolved to a winner-take-all bloodfest, where no effort is made to compromise with the opposing viewpoint. We won the election, so you don’t exist anymore. And to make matters worse, the trend is away from the political center, with both left and right political stances becoming more and more extreme.
I don’t really see any way out of this. We made the mistake of electing people precisely because they promised not to compromise, and that’s exactly what they’re doing in office. It’s at the expense of the entire state, with over 20,000 state government employees currently out of work, a lowering of Minnesota’s credit rating (lowered by Fitch Ratings on July 7 from AAA to AA+), and countless hardships and inconveniences to people who need help the most.
And to make matters worse, it looks like inflexibility is being touted as a virtue all across the political spectrum on the national level, which is not helpful to anyone. There is no hope for nuanced discussions of any issues; any shades of gray are overridden in the black and white of the voting booth, where we’re expected to vote out of fear that the opposing party will destroy the country.
I’m not optimistic. I watch as one European country after another requires some kind of financial bailout (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, perhaps Italy…), and I’m certain that their financial mess will spread to the US in the next few years. Fixing their situations has been straightforward on paper: less money paid out, more money taken in. Very, very painful in practice, but extremely simple in principle.
It’s also apparent to me that our own political leaders could not possibly enact the kinds of austerity measures that the bailed out countries have undertaken. Both the left and the right have built their whole platforms around demonizing the opposing side, and have turned it into less money paid out VERSUS more money taken in. It’s hard to see how either one can back down, even though it looks like common sense to me.
So be prepared for political ugliness on a scale we Americans haven’t seen in our lifetimes. Our elected officials here in Minnesota have given you a glimpse of what’s to come.
On that note, count your blessings, give generously to those that are less fortunate than you, and enjoy the rest of summer. The political apocalypse may be imminent, but not while there’s fun stuff to do outside.
Stay cool!
Ron & Liz
