Month: November 2019

Confidence Game

I went out and bought gas yesterday. That may not sound like a big deal to you, but the last time I did that was on September 16, the day we arrived in River Falls. I had filled the tank in mid-state Wisconsin on our way up here, and I still had nearly half a tank at that point. Admittedly, I rarely drive; I can walk to town, and anytime we go to Minneapolis or otherwise hit the highway, we take Kathleen’s 2018 Camry hybrid rather than my 15-year-old Ford. After a while, it had become a game as I tried to see how long I could go without buying gas. I checked the gauge each time I got in the car, and as long as I had confidence that I could make it home without running out, off I went. It was kind of like the classic Seinfeld episode in which Kramer is taking a test drive in a new car that is on dead “E,” but he keeps passing exit after exit, confident he could make it to the next one. Today, though, we are supposed to get six inches of snow and my confidence ran out—I don’t want to risk getting caught somewhere during a blizzard because of my stupid personal contest.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

This weekend, we attended the River Falls HS fall musical. I did not expect much, because they were putting on my favorite musical, Les Mis. I have seen it in London and in Nashville, and I have always loved the powerful music and the idea of a modern-day opera in which the entire story is told through song. I know little about foreign languages and how translations work, but I have always been amazed that a musical written in French could be translated to English and still rhyme during all of its clever and emotional lyrics. If you are not familiar with the play, it is an incredibly complex show to perform, involving elaborate staging, costumes, and orchestration as well as numerous strong voices (there are six lead performers). For instance, the role of Jean Valjean requires a male lead who can stretch his voice over three octaves—a tall order for a high-school amateur. I’m sure the early rehearsals were painful for the directors and teachers. I know enough about these things to understand that it takes a long time for the performers to grow confident enough to feel comfortable in their roles. To my astonishment, however, this group pulled it off, and the performance was amazing. Everything worked well, and the girl who played Eponine was especially good. I had seen many high school plays during my years at Harpeth Hall, and even performed in one, but this was the best I had ever seen. I wondered how they could do this show in such a small town, but it turns out they had been rehearsing for four months before putting on the sold-out shows. At Harpeth Hall, they started practicing at the same time (early August) for their musicals, but the show is usually scheduled for Labor Day weekend, so they have only four weeks of practice before the show. As we walked out with our grandkids, Kathleen said, “We have to make sure we see every play they put on.”

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

The other day, Kathleen and I watched an episode of The Unicorn, a new network TV show. The show is not great. It’s just a typical sit-com, but we watch it on occasion because we love the lead actor, Walton Goggins, who played Boyd in one of our favorite long-form series, Justified. This episode concerned his 14-year-old daughter who wins the lead role in the school musical. In the first rehearsals, she is terrible, and her voice is a scared little whisper that can barely be heard. That’s when they realize she only got the role because the teacher felt sorry for her after her mother just died. She wants to quit, but her father makes her go through with it, despite doubts that he might be doing the wrong thing and setting her up for public humiliation. Over the course of the practices, however, the girl slowly gains confidence, and she is spectacular on the night of the show. She is a changed person from that point on, as her new-found confidence permeates the rest of her life.

But that’s not what I wanted to talk about.

Our grand-daughter, Abigail, is nine years old. Her parents have encouraged her to try lots of different things. Her mom was a very good volleyball player and urged Abigail to try it this fall. She had previously played soccer, but hated every minute of the sport. She seemed to have a similar attitude when she started volleyball. Abigail is a quiet girl who visibly withdraws when faced with social situations or anything that would draw attention toward her. We attended her first game, and it looked like more of the same. She played with her characteristic timidity and couldn’t serve the ball over the net. Of course, neither could anyone else. On the rare occasion when a serve cleared the net, all of the inexperienced girls moved away from the ball as if it were a live hand-grenade about to explode. Every time she made a mistake, Abby would look nervously toward the bench, waiting to be pulled from the line-up. The team was terrible and lost game after game. Luckily, though, Ben and Amber have a basketball court in the lower-level of their home, and they worked with Abigail, as did Kim, her maternal grand-mother and former volleyball player. Slowly, Abigail began to improve. Then, near the end of the season, a remarkable thing happened. She came up to serve and nailed it. Then she scored another ace. And another. Gaining confidence with each winning stroke of her arm, she scored five straight points. At that point the league rules required her to rotate out of the serving position. The older girls on the team rushed over to give her high-fives and congratulate her. She looked over at us, and her smile lit up the gym. She simply glowed. After that, she was a changed player, eager to get her chance to serve again, and much more active in returning the ball or setting up her teammates. A few days later, we heard a knock at our door at night and were surprised to see Abigail standing there, all alone. She was bundled up with a biker’s light on her head and had walked a half-mile to our house in the dark and the cold to deliver some mail of ours that had been forwarded to their house. I could not have imagined her being brave enough to do that just a few weeks earlier. All I could guess was that the self-confidence she discovered on the volleyball court had spread over into other aspects of her life. Such is the transformative power of confidence.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about.

As we brace ourselves for the first serious snow of the year and come to grips with the idea that we may not see the ground again until April, I am reminded of why we moved up here in the first place. The look on Abigail’s face when she started nailing those serves was worth all of the aggravation we have experienced during the move. That smile will keep us warm during the long winter to come.

Unfrozen Cave Man Ambassador

In these divisive times, I have purposely avoided discussing politics in this blog. I missed most of the televised Watergate hearings in the 1970s and the Clinton hearings in the 1990s, because I was attending classes or working during the day. Now that I am retired, however, I have been able to see all of the current impeachment hearings, and it has been riveting. Yesterday, US Ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, provided moments of high comedy along with his bombshell revelations.

In the early 1990s, Saturday Night Live’s Phil Hartman had a recurring character that appeared in several sketches. He was called the Unfrozen Cave Man Lawyer and explained that he fell into some ice thousands of years ago during an ice age, was unfrozen by scientists and sent to law school. As a personal injury lawyer, he always started his closing arguments with a statement that began, “I’m just a caveman. I know nothing of your modern world, but I do know . . . etc. etc.” It was a great character, and I think of him fondly every time I hear someone pleading ignorance of something everyone in the world understands.

If you have not been following any of this, yesterday, Sondland admitted that he helped implement President Trump’s illegal plan to use the Ukrainian government to investigate his political opponents in exchange for giving them military aid that had already been allocated by both parties in Congress. This is clearly an impeachable offense, and Ambassador Sondland implicated the President, the Vice President, and his immediate supervisor, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, saying that he “was only following orders” from his bosses. This defense was reminiscent of the WWII war crime trials in which Nazi leaders argued that they were innocent because they were told to implement the Holocaust by military superiors. During his hours of testimony, however, Sondland carefully chose his words to avoid making himself appear guilty of crimes that might land him in prison. This is where the “Unfrozen Cave Man” reference came in. First, it should be noted that Sondland has never been accused of being the smartest person in the room. He obtained his crucially important position in our government because he donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration party. He is completely unqualified to be ambassador to Antarctica, let alone the European Union. When he is compared to the life-time diplomats who testified before him, this fact becomes graphically obvious. Again and again, he reminded the committee, “I am not a note-taker. I never take any notes of my meetings, and the White House and State Department have refused to give me access to any records of those meetings. If someone else testified that I said that, it must be true.” After the fifth or sixth time he said, “I don’t have any notes of that phone call; as I said, I’m not a note-taker,” I started getting a mental image of Sondland as the Cave-Man Lawyer leaning over the jury box and intoning, “I’m just a cave man. I know nothing of your modern pencils and notepads.”

The late, great Phil Hartman:

The Midas Touch of College Football

It has been an interesting college football season. Last week, four of the remaining undefeated teams met in two dramatic head-to-head games. On Saturday night, LSU hung on for a close victory over perennial champs Alabama. Earlier in the day, Minnesota defeated Penn State. “LSU, Alabama, Penn State,” you might say, “big deal; they’re always good.” But Minnesota? They haven’t been any good since the Eisenhower administration! How can this be that they are now 9-0 and in the discussions involving the national championship race?

Well, anyone following the careers of Jack and Kathleen Henderson would have seen this coming. Allow me to explain.

When I first moved to Gainesville for grad school in 1988, Florida had a mediocre football program, with more losing seasons than winning ones. Then, in 1990, Steve Spurrier was hired as football coach. In 1991, Kathleen and I were married and the confluence of events began to run together. That year, the Florida Gators won their first SEC title. A few years later, they won their first of three national titles. Despite this success, we were not big football fans while we lived in Gainesville. We loved the basketball team and had season tickets to the games. The football fans, though, were too loud and obnoxious for our taste. We never attended a football game while living in Florida. Then, in 1997, we moved to Tennessee and learned what truly obnoxious fans were like.

We arrived in Nashville during the Peyton Manning Era. We didn’t really have an opinion about the Vols or Peyton before moving to Nashville, and I’ve come to admire and appreciate Manning since then. But at that moment in 1997, every day featured more hagiographies in the papers and on TV about the quarterback who had apparently arrived in Knoxville by walking across the Tennessee River. We grew to hate him and UT just because of our contrary natures and the insufferable fans we encountered. We became fervent Florida football fans during that fall and cheered Manning’s fourth consecutive defeat at the hands of the Gators. Despite our opposition to the favorite sons of our new home, however, they won their first national championship since 1951 the following year. If you are keeping score at home, that means we lived in two places, and both of them claimed national championships for the local college team.

That brings us to this year. The University of Minnesota is about 30 miles from where we live today. The football team has a storied history that included three AP national titles before World War II and another in 1960. Since then however, the Gophers have experienced decade after decade of disappointment. The last few years brought more losses and a new coach, C.J. Fleck, to campus. We arrived in the region in mid-September of this year. The Gophers have not lost a football game since then. I’m just saying. After beating the Nittany Lions last weekend, Minnesota is 9-0 for the first time since 1904, 115 years ago. By this point, it must be viewed as something more than mere coincidence that everywhere Kathleen and I have lived as husband and wife, the college football team in the area became national contenders. Call it a Midas Touch in terms of football teams.

In short, don’t count the Gophers out for the NCAA football championship for this season.

Slow Progress & New Friends

I woke up the other morning to a beautiful, light dusting of snow on the ground.  I’m guessing that I won’t think it’s all that wonderful in a few months. Last March, during spring break, we visited up here for a few days, and there were still six-feet-deep snow drifts surrounding Ben’s driveway. I went for a run yesterday morning with the wind-chill temperature about 20. The first thing I did when I got home was get on Amazon and order some better running gloves, socks, and a ski mask. The other adjustment we will have to make is the shorter days. We are far enough north that there is less daylight than we are used to having. In the winter, it stays dark until after 8:00 and gets dark earlier at night. Then again, we don’t plan on being here all winter. There are Caribbean cruises, friends in warm climates, and craps tables in Vegas all beckoning to us during the drab, grey days of January and February.

We are still settling into our new home in incremental stages. I have now painted the entire place except the kitchen and three bathrooms, which will require more thorough updating before I paint. Painting over an interior stairway was especially challenging, as it includes a drop of nearly 30 feet from the peak of the upstairs vaulted ceiling to the bottom of the stairway in the basement. Luckily, the movers cooperated by destroying a large desk of mine during the move. I was able to take pieces of the shattered desk and cobble together a scaffold over the stairs. Then I balanced a ladder on top of that and could reach most of the ceiling edges with a long stick. I completed that part of the task while Kathleen was out of the house so as not to induce a panic attack. We have also ordered new furniture and carpeting, which should arrive in the next week or two. We are waiting to put most of our books and other things on shelves and into cabinets that will have to be moved by the folks laying the carpet. Thus we still can’t find some stuff that might be hidden at the bottom of boxes in our storage room. One of my favorite folksingers is Loudon Wainwright. Back in the ‘80s, he captured the frustrations of moving from one home to another in a song called “Cardboard Boxes.” Here is a sample of the lyrics and a link to a YouTube video of the complete song.

We got the books and the records and the tapes and the pictures
And the pots and the pans and all the breakable glass
The living room couch and the dining room table
The washer and the dryer; what a pain in the ass

                                    –Loudon Wainwright, 1985

Aside from that, we are slowly adjusting to our new town, meeting people, and finding our way around River Falls and the Twin Cities and its suburbs. Thank goodness for GPS, or we’d still be stuck on the various interstates weaving in and around Minneapolis and St. Paul. About once a week, I’ll go to a local restaurant in the morning to read and enjoy breakfast. “The Kinni Café” is my favorite for this, as they offer a discounted price for seniors along with friendly, personable service.  The other day, I overheard a conversation there that captures the laid-back attitude we’ve seen among the people in this small town.

1st man: “Have you seen George lately?”

2nd man: “Yeah, but, ya know, he’s had some health issues.”

1st: “No kiddin’; what’s goin’ on?”

2nd: “Well, his heart stopped.”

1st: “Jeez, that’s too bad.”

2nd: “Yeah. They had to, ya know, get it goin’ again.”

1st: “Ah, well that’s good.”

Here they were, talking about a friend having a heart attack, and the tone sounded as if they were discussing a dodgy lawnmower engine that wouldn’t start on the first pull. I guess they don’t get excited easily up here.

In terms of friendships, we are slowly meeting new people. We went to another meet raffle and, once again, Kathleen won two massive T-Bones worth about $20. The bartenders, Greg and Sandy, now know her by name, as do Lisa and Kayli, two students who moonlight as waitresses. Last night, we stopped in for dinner and had a great conversation with a fun couple we had met on an earlier visit. We are older than the parents of Jake and Nina, but we enjoy talking to them whenever we cross paths. We have explored several other bars in town, but the Nutty Squirrel has become the one we stop at most frequently. The other night, grand-daughter Abigail (age 9) walked the half-mile to our house by herself to deliver some mail that had gone to their house. She called first, afraid that we might be out at “that Nutty Squirrel place.” Is it bad when your grandkids know what your favorite bar is?

Our duplex/condo is part of an elongated cul-du-sac at the end of a long street adjoining a golf course. I think there are 28 units in 14 pairs of buildings. Most of the people who live here are retired, and they have all proved to be helpful without being intrusive. They also hold periodic happy-hour gatherings on Wednesday afternoons for about an hour. It seems that 6 to 12 people attend each of these, although, the particular people might vary. The first one we attended was outdoors on the grassy common area, but lately we have been driven indoors by the cold temperatures. The people are all pleasant and bright, which makes for lively and enjoyable conversation. In particular, Jane and Larry taught English at UWRF before retiring. I had a great discussion with Larry last week about the history of mystery and detective stories, ranging from Edgar Allen Poe, to Sherlock Holmes, to Ross McDonald, to contemporary writers. While painting walls, I have been listening to a Great Courses lecture series on that very subject, so the timing was fortuitous for me.

In short, we have been impressed with the friendliness and intelligence of everyone we have met. DMV clerks, waitpersons, delivery men and women, cable installers, and everyone else with whom we have been involved have been helpful, competent, personable, and bright. Two factors play into this, I think. First, of course, is the public education system. We pay considerably higher property taxes up here than we did in Tennessee, but we are happy to pay it if it results in better education than the abysmal public schools of Tennessee. Another factor that affects the quality of the work force in Wisconsin is that they seem to pay higher wages. Every business we go into has a “Now Hiring” sign, and many of them mention the hourly wage, which is better than comparable jobs in Nashville. I suppose this all means they are able to attract smarter workers with a strong work ethic. This is all just impressionable evidence and a small sample size, but, so far, we have had pleasant interactions with almost everyone we have met in River Falls.