Notes from the Lone Star State

When I left California a couple of weeks ago I promised my son that I'd get a picture of me wearing my grody, old, sweat-stained cowboy hat standing next to the road sign reading, "Welcome to Texas!" All state lines have them. Everything being bigger in Texas, I figured there'd be a rest stop, a picnic area, hell, maybe even a carnival with bands playing. Surely there would be a horde of travelers waiting in line to have their photos snapped alongside what must be a Texas-sized "Howdy!" sign the size of an aircraft carrier.

Nope.

I flew past this little piece of Americana on I-40 at 75 mph. No place to stop and no way to slow down. It was only thanks to my excited anticipation that I had my camera phone poised in hand to catch this little pissant of a welcome sign as it flew past my bug-spattered windshield.

But Texans are like that. A little wary of newcomers.

"Welcome...drive friendly, the Texas way."

The smiles are warm and genuine. But rest assured, they are paying attention to your conduct and behavior.

Where Thisaway meets Thataway

(This is a reprint from another blog I used to write called ThatawayRoad.)

The other day I Googled my own blog searching for inspiration. Danged if I didn't find it!

Smack dab in the middle of Arkansas there is a tiny town called Yellville, where you'll find the intersection of Thataway Rd. and Thisaway Rd., just about a quarter mile from Whichaway Rd. Wouldn't you love to hear somebody out there giving directions to a lost RV family? Shades of Abbott and Costello.

Thataway and Thisaway isn't the only funny intersection you may come to. In an Arizona retirement community residents undoubtedly get a thousand laughs a day from living, as they do, at the corner of Stroke and Acoma Streets.

If you're bored and depressed in Albany, Georgia, you can always go hang out at the corner of Lonesome and Hardup.

Presidents are apparently tempting fodder for local street namers. Folks in Houston, Texas, are keeping true to their largely conservative perspective and their well-deserved reputation for being facetious by naming converging streets Clinton and Fidelity. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, people engaged in brief political commentary by creating the intersection of Nixon and Bluett.

You have to love Americans. We don't get as much credit as we deserve for having a national sense of humor. Just look at some of the street names scattered across our fruited plain:

There are several streets in the U.S. called Psycho Path.

In Story, Arkansas, the only way to get your truck camper to Constipation Ridge is to drive up Farfrompoopen Road.

And, while we're on that unfortunate topic...


Folks in Central Pennsylvania can direct you to Cowshit Lane if you will kindly refrain from stealing the street sign. It seems to happen a lot. In fact, that's why the merchants of Amador City, California, years ago began selling copies of their iconic Pig Turd Alley sign, hoping that it would stop thefts of the actual sign. That must have worked. I bought one.

Some street namers seem to be completely baffled and give up...

Lambs Terrace, NJ

...while others just seem to lack interest.

Vallejo, CA

There are some streets you should steer clear of...

And the famous road less traveled.

Wherever your adventures take you, keep smiling. We live in a very funny country.

Obsolete

I'm sixty years old. It didn't seem like a big deal back in August when it happened. Forty was a big deal but not sixty.

A couple of days ago I was talking about aging with Gloria, my son's mother-in-law and one of the wisest people I know. Specifically, I mentioned that as much as I've learned about the craft of radio performance over forty-three years of it, none of the younger people I work with seem to be interested in picking my brain. If I offer a small nugget of hard-won wisdom it seems to fall with a clunk on deaf ears. I believe I've occasionally seen a furtive wink, a roll of an eye. I'm pretty sure of it.

Gloria nodded sagely. She understood.

It's a shame, I continued, that as we age we learn so much but eventually we die and all that knowledge of fact, of wisdom and experience is lost without ever having been shared and appreciated. Worst of all is the lack of respect that piles on top of the years. Instead of being honored, I lamented, old people in our culture are the butt of jokes.

If brevity is the soul of wit, Gloria is a prophet.

"You're obsolete," she said offhandedly. "We all are, people our age."

She said it as if she had just noticed that my shoe was untied and thought I should know.

I've been unemployed since October and this is the third time in three years I've been between jobs. Radio is an aging technology, an industry being dismantled. We're sputtering to an end together.

I've had a wonderful career and no regrets. If it's over that's fine because I still have plenty of life left in me with wonderful friends like Gloria.

I'll age gracefully. I'll be obsolete, except to my family. That's all that matters.

Sometimes, though, sixty is starting to feel like kind of a big deal.

Riding the CTA

I'm a native Californian. Until two months ago when I arrived in Chicago with no car I have never ridden a bus or train except as a rare lark. Now public transportation is my only means of getting from here to there. Fortunately, the Chicago Transit Authority is rightly celebrated as being one of the best transit systems in the world. You can get anywhere, from here to there... and then from there to there further, on to there elsely and, eventually, your destination... if you just have a map, a transit schedule, a compass, an Eagle Scout badge and a the patience of Job. Through a simple yet sometimes confusing series of transfers and queries for direction you will eventually arrive for just $2.25, total plus a quarter for unlimited transfers.

You just have think of it as an adventure.

On the CTA you can set out for a Sunday farmers market and return home nine hours later with two fully ripened avocados.

You can haul a package to the post office and have it arrive at grandma's house in Des Moines before you reach your front porch.

One day I didn't feel like walking the two blocks to the train station so I took another train to get there even though it took half an hour and I had to stand the entire way, crushingly, intimately close to a bunch of people to whom I had not been introduced.

I'm sure this all sounds terrible to my California friends and family but I am saving several hundred dollars a month by not buying gas. And frankly, being alone in the big city I have nothing but time on my hands. I've read two full books while riding trains and buses. Plus, I've met some -- shall we say interesting? -- people.

More on that later. I have to be at work in three hours and it's twelve miles away. I must run to catch my rides!

Copyright 2011, David L. Williams

Chicago Is...

I've been in Chicago for two months now. I'll be moving into the house we've rented later this week. It's a beautiful old home on a beautiful old street. I can't wait for Carolann and the girls to join me here.

The city is gorgeous in summer but yesterday, a change blew in from Great Lake Michigan. The hot, muggy days and nights that greeted me on my arrival suddenly turned to a hint of Fall with chilly nights. I will admit some trepidation as I face the gradual arrival of the Arctic winters here I've heard so much about.

And so, as I wave goodbye to my first summer in the Second City, I post this slide show I put together with my cell phone camera just to remind me four months from now what awaits us in the Spring.

City of the Big Shoulders

Sixteen days after my arrival in the town that Carl Sandburg dubbed the "City of the Big Shoulders" I am still fascinated; still excited.

It's July and Chicagoans are just adorable. The blistering, humid heat makes everybody on foot soak through their shirts in less than a block, though it is only 8 a.m.

Most of us lug computer bags and backpacks as we walk the streets of Chicago. Most of us wear loose cotton shirts and pants to work. A lot of men wear shorts. You see very few suits, sport coats and ties. That's smart. After just sixteen days even I know those suit-and-tie guys are business travelers trying to earn their freedom, comfort and confidence.

Mid-Westerners are smart and practical. We dress as comfortably as we wish while still looking respectable; neat, clean and simple.

My wild West-Coast Hawaiian prints have no place here except in a box.

Staggering through beautiful streets in the steamy heat we mostly keep our heads down so the perspiration doesn't drip onto our shirts and blouses. Occasionally we look up, nod, and give a pained but encouraging smile to our brothers and sisters who pass us on the sidewalk. We're all in this together.

We have many destinations but one common goal: to just get where we're going.

Chicagoans don't complain.

The City of the Big Shoulders doesn't suffer weather, it wears it with a shrug, a wink and a wry grin.

Everybody here  loves to warn me about the coming brutal winter. They tease and bait me. I think they're trying to goad the guy from Southern California into whining about the heat and humidity; they want me to worry about snowfall and the coming icy Arctic wind

I'm having no part of it. I have big shoulders.

I'm a Chicagoan.

Real Estate Ads

Over the past few months of unemployment I've had conversations with potential employers that never quite came to fruition but got close enough to send me online to look at homes for sale or rent in other cities. In checking the real estate sites nationwide, left coast to right, I have found a common thread:

Nutballs.

I suppose that's harsh. It's certainly not nice though I hope it has a lovable ring to it. Maybe it's just that some real estate brokers have no marketing skills. Not everybody does. But I have read some outstanding ads on eBay written by Joe and Jane Lunchbox that make me think this is a particularly virulent form of ineptitude among real estate agents.

To begin with, all real estate agents have their own pictures on everything: their business cards, newspaper ads, bus benches and websites. They all look nice and clean and happy. But you know what might make me more likely to call them? A picture of a house I know I can't afford.


Show me my dream home. That's what makes my heart go pit-a-pat, not Jack and Jill Darling freshly-showered and nicely dressed for the kill.

When they do give me pictures of a particular house I sometimes wonder if they asked a nine-year-old in the neighborhood to take it. Mostly, I get to see the garage door and often a tree blocking the entryway and front porch. Sometimes I get to see a car blocking the front of the "storybook cottage" which needs "just a little TLC".

Just once I actually saw one I was interested in buying -- the car, not the house.

The inside pictures are usually the most maddening. Just today I went to a website advertising a luxury townhouse in a highly desirable big city neighborhood and it included three pictures: one of the weight room, which I am no more likely to use than if the complex had its own whore house. The second was a picture of the master bedroom. Just the bed, actually. (Nice comforter! And what is the thread count on those sheets?) And the third picture was of a toilet and sink.

Friends, I don't care where you live in this great land -- a toilet is a toilet and 98% of them come in white.

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm different than everybody else. When I'm looking for a new home I want to love the location, how it looks from the outside, and I want to see the warmth and comfort of the family and entertaining areas. I want to be excited about the house and I want the house to love me back.

I just assume it has a toilet and a room for my bed.

Maybe I'm the nutball. I want to feel comfortable with my realtor but we're never going to meet if he or she just shows me pictures of the themselves, the toilet, the kitchen sink or the absolute worst feature I have seen in marketing:

A chair, half a drape and a piece of a potted plant.

Seriously, I pulled this picture from an online real estate ad and I didn't crop anything out of it.

Nutballs.

"It breaks your heart."

A writer who loves baseball must be careful. It's too easy to slip into flowery purple prose about the game and I'm already prone to over-writing. Besides, the love of baseball has already been written with soul-stirring elegance by the likes of Roger Kahn, Roger Angell, Red Smith, George Will, Jim Murray, Joshua Prager, Ken Burns and many others.

This morning  I started watching the Ken Burns documentary, Baseball, for the third or fourth time and for reasons I understand in my heart but can't put into words it still chokes me up. I get teary and a lump in my throat. It's that good, cleansing, happy emotion that makes you feel young, fresh and wholesome again.

The memories melt years from my body; I remember how I felt when my legs were lean, strong and swift and my arms were powerful.

I could smash a fastball to the moon and run like the wind all day with a huge smile on my barely sweating, freckled face. I can still remember the smell of freshly mowed grass under a cool March sky of scooting, fluffy clouds.
 
The base paths are wet from last night's rain. One leaden, water-soaked, torn-cover baseball is heaved toward the mud that immerses home plate. I swing my glued, nailed, taped bat. Foul ball. Pitcher and batter are enthralled by the escalating drama.

See? There I go, pushing the flowery purple envelope. When you love baseball you just can't help it. It's a disease you catch as a child and it festers joyously for a lifetime. As the great sports writer Pete Hamill once wrote:

"Don't tell me about the world.  Not today.  It's springtime and they're knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball."

Pete Hamill has the delicious disease of his youth.

Here are more of my favorite quotes about the game from the men who played it professionally and fed the dreams of the rest of us who still believe we could have:

 

"You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock.  You've got to throw the ball over the goddamn plate and give the other man his chance.  That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all."  ~Earl Weaver

"People ask me what I do in winter when there's no baseball.  I'll tell you what I do.  I stare out the window and wait for spring."  ~Rogers Hornsby

 

"I don't care how long you've been around, you'll never see it all."  ~Bob Lemon

"It breaks your heart.  It is designed to break your heart.  The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."  ~Bart Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind," Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977

"During my 18 years I came to bat almost 10,000 times.  I struck out about 1,700 times and walked maybe 1,800 times.  You figure a ballplayer will average about 500 at bats a season.  That means I played seven years without ever hitting the ball."  ~Mickey Mantle, 1970

"The pitcher has to find out if the hitter is timid.  And if the hitter is timid, he has to remind the hitter he's timid."  ~Don Drysdale

"Every player should be accorded the privilege of at least one season with the Chicago Cubs.  That's baseball as it should be played - in God's own sunshine.  And that's really living."  ~Alvin Dark

 

"You gotta be a man to play baseball for a living, but you gotta have a lot of little boy in you, too."  ~Roy Campanella

 

"When they start the game, they don't yell, 'Work ball.'  They say, 'Play ball.'"  ~Willie Stargell

 

"You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time."  ~Jim Bouton, Ball Four

Pomp and Circumstance

The proper title of the piece is Pomp and Circumstance March 1 in D. It was composed by Sir Edward Elgar in 1901 and takes its name from Act III, Scene III in Shakespeare's Othello:

"Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th'ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!"

Today we know it as The Graduation March. It escorts all high school and college graduate candidates into and from the solemn and joyous, yet bittersweet ceremonies that set them gently on the next path of their lives. We've all been there and if you took it in the proper spirit of the moment there's no way you can be unmoved by hearing the music nor just a bit wistful for your own younger, simpler life.

Our niece, Christina Conley, graduated from Patrick Henry High School in San Diego this week and Carolann and I drove down to pay her homage. Christina is Carolann's brother's and sister-in-law's daughter but she is also the vicarious daughter neither of us ever had. She pretty, she's smart, she's fun and she's a good person with a virtuous heart.


I don't get to talk with Christina much. She hugs me and smiles with familial respect but I don't want to be one of those old-fart uncles who makes embarrassing remarks and offers unsolicited advice. I don't want to pry into her life but I'm sure curious about her interests and passions, her hopes and dreams. She has an excellent mind nurtured by her loving parents and grandparents. She also has a gleam in her eyes that tells me she's excited to be alive and to have the whole world opening to her. 


She reminds me of myself at her age.


High school graduation, poised between sweet, secure childhood and exciting, though treacherous, adult opportunities; young, beautiful and relatively pure, we are arrived at the greatest single moment of our lives. 


As I watched the Patrick Henry class of 2011 walk proudly, with great dignity and yet with goofy displays of the joyous child that still lives near the surface in each of them, I thought back to my own high school graduation and realized something: 


The joy of youth lives in us forever. The trick is to not bury it in disappointments, which are inevitable, and bitterness, which is nothing more than childish pouting. 


We still love you but after today nobody will dry your tears and give you an ice cream cone. Get over it. Get on with it. We still love you.


43 years and two days since my own high school graduation. 


It sounds so long but it lived so fast.

Phone books, Girl Scout cookies and circumcision

Remember telephone books? Well, of course you do. Just because anybody anywhere in the world can be found in fifteen seconds on a computer or mobile phone doesn't mean we're finished with phone books. We can't be, we get four or five of them on our doorstep every year.

I followed a fascinating conversation on Facebook this morning which began with the news announcement that San Francisco has decided to ban the unsolicited delivery of phone books. To politically conservative me it's another laughable example of how local and state governments are assuming control over the simplest matters of our personal lives. It's what some of us like to call the Nanny State. Of course, blaming "government" in a generic sense is easy and fashionable. The fact is, they do these things because a lot of people want them to.

This isn't a political column, it really isn't. Though I do think it is worth noting that San FranNanny (oops, sorry...that just slipped out) has already banned McDonalds Happy Meals and has an issue on next November's ballot that would outlaw circumcisions. (I know...right?)

And now, phone books.

From the reactions I read on Facebook this morning it seems a lot of people are spitting mad about having to dispose of a phone book they didn't ask for and won't use. I'm not kidding, this is a big deal to some folks. Personally, I think a phone book is very easy to throw away and as it doesn't happen more than occasionally it's just not high on my list of things that stress me out.

I don't use phone books anymore, except very rarely to balance a table with one short leg. Since you're reading this on a computer you probably don't use phone books, either, but a lot of people still do. How do I know that? Easy. Phone books will disappear from American life when they cease to be profitable.

As I thought about it I realized there are a couple of fairly serious issues at hand here. First of all, if we're going to ban phone books from being dropped on the porch, why stop there? How about outlawing junk mail? Ye gads! I have to throw that stuff away every single day! It's enough to make a preacher spit!

And what about those business cards people leave in my screen door offering to mow my lawn or fix my plumbing? And free weekly local newspapers I didn't subscribe to and the Pennysaver?

I have to put that stuff in a trash can all by myself!

As long as we're passing laws to restrict people's ability to advertise their products and services because old-fashioned neighborhood commerce now annoys us, I say it's high time to crack down on those pesky Girl Scouts hawking their damned cookies outside the supermarket. (That's not only annoying, it's deadly! Have you read the caloric and sugar content on those boxes? Somebody needs to file a class-action suit against these cute, young tools of corporate America!)

I'm being sarcastic and silly, right? Somebody will do it. Mark my words, before much longer somebody will stop Girl Scouts from selling their cookies.

My money's on San Francisco.

If phone books on the porch are one of our biggest problems I think America is in far better shape than I imagined. On another level, though, I am a bit worried about our society.

It seems to me we're becoming awfully self-centered, lazy, pissy and intolerant of each other.