Do people have patina?

Posted on by December 5, 2012

My wife and I were talking the other day about old cars…and new cars…and she mentioned that she hated when the “clear coat peeled off on these newer cars… I like the old cars with the paint that got a patina as it wore out”.

This comment got me thinking.  I know a lot of people who seem to have developed a “patina” as they got more mileage under their belts.  Every year brings more character and inner light…more outward signs of the great life they’ve lived.  Like the cars with a bit of primer and rust showing through….beauty for the wear.  Some of the older customers on my mail route are like this…they let their light shine brightly even if the exterior is a little battered. There has to be something underneath to shine through when the new is worn away.

On the other hand, I’ve known a few people who seem to have a good bit of their “clear coat” worn off, too.  Nothing shiny or new about them…just the dull paint underneath that the gloss used to cover up. I guess that the “gloss” is enough for a lot of people until it doesn’t shine anymore.

Most folks run a lot deeper than what’s on the surface.  I’ve never known anyone who didn’t have something good about them…but some people take a lot of patience and positive attention to notice what the good is.  It’s pretty superficial of me to think that I notice or understand what any “patina” or “clear coat” or any other hazy allusion means , really…I don’t have a handle on much….but I do appreciate the patina when I see it.

 

photograph by David Freiburger @HotRod.com

 

Thrift Stores and the American Dream

Posted on by December 4, 2012

My wife and I were visiting a small town in Georgia once and asked one of the locals “where the thrift stores were?”

She looked at us as if we had something fishy going on…and then said, “You mean where the poor people shop?”.

We are into thrift stores.  There aren’t many that we pass up.  We’ve got to check them out.

Big cities, small towns…we check all their thrift stores out.  There isn’t much that gets the “OK” for a diversion more often than a thrift store we’ve never visited before.

In all our thrift store visiting, it hit me that a pretty strong indication of how well an area was doing could be found in their thrift stores.  We live in a land of plenty.  No matter what the media tells us about how the economy is doing, in the area of material goods we really do excel.  The purest example of a consumerist society is on display when you go to a store that sells the “cast offs” at the tail end of a product’s utility.  We go through a lot of product. An area that can support a number of thrift stores is usually doing pretty well financially…or at least is an area that’s pretty good at consuming.

What I’ve found to be true is that thrift stores really do mirror what’s going on in a community.  Places that have a lot of people, consume a lot of material goods, and that have a high turnover in the goods that they do buy tend to have the best thrift stores.  It’s not just the “worn out” that makes it to the thrift stores, either.  It’s often the stuff that has to be “moved out” to make way for the new.  Check out a thrift store around the first of the new year…you’ll probably find some items that were replaced at Christmas.

The lady’s comments about “poor people” is really kind of funny when you dig a little deeper into who is doing a lot of the thrift store purchasing.  Many of the people we see in thrift stores these days are dealers.  People with smart phones scanning the book section to see what might be salable , others checking labels to see what might have potential on Ebay, and all of them seeing how they can use the low end supplier to make a profit.  Prices at the thrift stores have gone up as a result…but like any business the “bottom line” is making sales, not necessarily only selling to the “poor people”.  It is strange to watch all this play out.  Thrift stores are popular with a pretty broad range of people for a lot of reasons…the fact that items can be researched almost instantaneously takes a lot of the “magic” out of shopping like this…but makes it easier for the dealers to run a business.  When it became easy to research and buy and sell, you saw a whole lot of people get into the thrift store market.  When a business that was set up to give the lower income folks an alternative to retail is hit hard by people recognizing that low prices equal a better profit margin you really have to wonder who the business is serving.

I’m a big fan of the second-hand market.  My father once called me a “good scrounger”.  I guess it kind of hurt my feelings a little…never really thought of myself as a scrounger…but I suppose that we are pretty good at supplying our needs with “recycled” items.  There are a lot of ways to be green.   A person can buy the brand new, organic cotton, hand sewn shirt from the fair trade store in the trendiest section of the hippest town…or maybe just buy a used “recycled” flannel shirt from the thrift store.  I guess it all works out in the end.

Idaho

Posted on by December 2, 2012

We took a pretty epic road trip this summer to see some of my relatives out west.  6,000 plus miles in a 12 year old Dodge Grand Caravan…and not a single breakdown.  We were blessed.

We spent 3 days with my cousin on some land I inherited when my Dad passed away.  Northern Idaho is beautiful.  I remembered this from the trips we took to the land when I was a child…but it had been 30 years since I’d seen it, so I had a lot of gaps in my memory to fill in.

It was great to see how much my family enjoys traveling.  When you have a group that enjoys the journey as much as the arrival it really makes a trip a lot nicer.

So a big trip like that can be our “shakedown cruise”…circumnavigation of the globe should be next.

another cup full

Posted on by December 1, 2012

There’s an old story about a Zen master talking to one of his students.  After offering the student a cup of tea, he starts to pour …but when he reaches the brim of the cup, he continues to fill the cup.  “Stop, master…the cup is full!” the student declares, tea running onto the table and down his leg.

At this point, the teacher tells the student, ” You are like this cup…full of your own opinions and conclusions.  How can you learn until you first empty the cup?”

I am afraid that I might have a second cup handy to handle the overflow.

It is easier to build a new container for the extra than it is to get rid of it.  I’m not sure why it is so hard for me to “empty the cup”…by choice, I seem to want to hold on to a lot of things that get in my way.  I curse the wastebasket I left in the middle of the room…finally moving it and realizing that I didn’t have to trip over it in the dark…realizing how easy it all was when I finally took some action to fix the problem. Until something changes, it’s “the way we’ve always done it”…and I continue to work around an issue that’s “fixable” until I decide or someone else decides to fix it.

There is a story about a holiday ham.  The man in the story loved his hams…prepared the same way every time.  Each time the ham was being prepared, his wife would cut the end off the ham before she put it into the oven.  Finally, one day he said, “Why do you cut the end off the ham?  Seems kind of wasteful…”  His wife replied, “Well…that’s the way my mother always did it…you like my mother’s hams don’t you?”

The man replied, “Well…sure I do..they’re delicious…but that still doesn’t answer the question.”

His wife said, “well…why don’t you call Mom.  Maybe she can give you an answer to your question”.

So he called his mother in law.  When she picked up the phone, he asked her the question about the ham.  She told him that “she didn’t really know…it was just the way it had always been done in her family. Why didn’t he call her mother and ask her why she cut the end off the ham?”.

So, sure he was getting closer to an answer, he called his wife’s grandma. “Hi”, he said, “I have a question for you.  Every time we have a ham, my wife cuts off the end.  Apparently, her mother did the same thing for years.  They say that you taught them to do it.  Why do you do that?  What does it do for the ham?”

There was a pause on the other end of the line…and then Grandma said, “Well…my pan was too short.  I had to cut the end off to make it fit.”

I know how to cook a ham….the same way I’ve always done it…and nobody’s going to tell me different.

My cup is full.

 

 

a shelf full of simple

Posted on by December 1, 2012

I love to accessorize.  I don’t mean that I love purses and shoes….( I’M A DUDE!!!!)…I just love to gear up for whatever might lie in my future path.  At this point, I should say that it’s probably not politically correct to make a gender based comment about guys that buy purses and shoes…so I’ll say “to each his own” and let it go at that.  I personally feel no need to buy any purses…and would rather buy boots than shoes.  I will end up with a drawer full of 13 mm box end wrenches from time to time…though I’m not sure how or why that happens.

So…I’ve established in a long-winded and disjointed way that I love to accessorize.  I love to prepare.  I love to gear up.  I love to defer the actual work by getting ready for the work.  I’ve realized this about myself…I put things off by making sure all my ducks are in a row.

“Not yet,” I’ll say, “almost there..soon it will be time”… and buying one more clamp or a measuring device or a different tool is going to get me to the place where starting a job is the only way left to go.  I’ve prepared myself into a corner…NOW I’ll have to start.

I see videos of guys overseas making a chest of drawers with a toothpick, a sharpened license plate, and some reconstituted coconut milk for glue.  That’s pretty darn impressive to me.  I’m not like that…I live in a developed country…and I prepare.

Looking at my sagging bookshelves I realize that , scattered among the shelves, I have way too many books about living the simple life.  I may even have books about what books to buy to help me in my quest to live the simple life. I have books about living the simple life, I have books about other people trying to live the simple life, I have books about people complaining about people who don’t live the simple life…I have a lot of books about the simple life. It is confusing to me in the end…and I don’t have time with all my reading to live simply.  It takes a lot of work to get ready to do something simple.

That doesn’t really even touch on the section about living a minimalist lifestyle.

I desire a simple life…stripped to it’s bare elements, freeing me up for family and friends, freeing me to be the kind of person I need to be to really LIVE…not just sleepwalk through my years. I tell my wife, “a pair of boardshorts, some flip-flops, 2 t-shirts, a toothbrush…that’s all I’d really need.”  I think she knows, though, that like Steve Martin in “the Jerk”, I’d be grabbing at least 10 of my “simple living” books on the way out the door.

I know that I am almost there.  There is a revised edition of the one book that will push me into action coming out in the Spring…I can hardly wait.

I will be an expert on simplicity if it takes the rest of my life.

 

Lutefisk…and the Odor of Christmas

Posted on by November 20, 2016

I grew up in a Norwegian household.  My father’s mother was born in a sod house in the Dakotas, one of the first generation to be born in the United States. In my father’s home growing up, his parents still spoke some Norwegian…and he spoke some while I was growing up. I don’t know any Norwegian…although I did try and listen .

One of the Christmas traditions that we had during the holidays, along with lefse and swedish meatballs and a whole bunch of different kinds of Christmas cookies, was my parents cooking and eating lutefisk.

Lutefisk is a Norwegian delicacy.  I wish that I didn’t know that…it speaks volumes about the Norwegian culture.  It makes me question a lot about a culture when some of their favorite foods have any of the strange attributes that lutefisk has. Norwegians can be quiet…and weird (it takes one to know one, you know?)…and this lutefisk thing is a good example.  Maybe it’s like getting a tribal tattoo …some stoic Viking holdover…a strange display of fortitude…”look what I can swallow!!!” …or, to be more in line with the Norwegian inflection, “look what I can swallow.”  I’m not really sure.

Back in the days when refrigeration was non-existent, cod was hung out to dry for a couple of weeks…and then reconstituted in a lye based solution to finish out the process.  It is then purchased by a Norwegian, brought home, and cooked as a special holiday treat.  It is a gelatinous meal…one that I’m told doesn’t have a whole lot of taste except for the butter that you pour over it.

My parents would wrap the lutefisk in cheesecloth so that it would hold together while it was being boiled.  The kitchen would be full of the aroma of potatoes cooking, swedish meatballs…peas…and the overpowering (thanks to the lutefisk) stench of vomit. Not to take away any of the appetizing potential of a big tray of lutefisk or anything….but it really does smell like vomit.

Ho, Ho, Ho…and Merry Christmas. It wasn’t intentional child abuse on my parents part…it was just part of the celebration of a longstanding cultural heritage…but from here on out , whenever I smell someone’s stomach distress, part of me wants to look around for the lutefisk and expects to see Santa just around the corner, ringing a bell in front of a little red cauldron.

I’ve heard that our sense of smell is one of the most powerful “memory triggers” that we have.  What a powerful trigger lutefisk is. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forget it.

My parents are both gone now…we haven’t had lutefisk for a long time.  Maybe it’s a Christmas tradition I need to start in my home?  Cook up some lefse…break them all in with something delicious…and then hit them hard with something strange like lutefisk. If I can get them all to keep their noses pinched, they’d never see it coming. That’s what parents do…help build memories,right?

 

Old Cars

Posted on by November 29, 2012

Old cars will leave you hanging.  They break down far away from those you love…they squeak and squawk and growl and groan…they act differently than you’d expect…all these things and more can be expected when you drive an old car.  But….

you always remember your old car.

A new car is old after you’ve owned it for a while.  It is never going to be as old as a car that started out old, though.  It will have your scars…it will be full of memories that only you could remember.  An old car will have your memories, to be sure…but it will also have the mystery of the owners before you. An old car has MOJO.

Old cars can be inexpensive to drive. If someone hasn’t decided that it’s a “classic” yet you can buy an old car for a song. It all depends on the context, I guess…old is old and if folks don’t recognize that it’s an “antique” that’s all it will ever be in their eyes…just old and “in the way”.  Parts can be cheap…who would need a neutral safety switch for a 1974 Plymouth?

When you drive down the road in an old car, it’s like being inside a rolling time capsule.  Old cars are a nostalgia trigger for a lot of people….”my family used to own a Valiant…I remember that..” and it feels good to be a part of a good memory.

Cars are a marker, too.  Now the cars from the 90’s are old cars…and I catch myself thinking, “Nah…that’s pretty new“…until I realize that it’s 20 years old already.  Sometimes we gauge time by what we were driving when we worked at the hatchery, or the warehouse, or the grocery store, or the bookstore…a rolling resume of a random work history.

When we brought our first child home from the hospital, we treated her like she was made of glass.  Into the back seat of the old white Valiant,  strapped her into the thrift store car seat…carefully driving back to the apartment we were living in across from the Fuddruckers in Asheville.  If a child were to draw a boxy car, it wouldn’t hurt to have a Valiant as a model.  It was just an old car…bringing home a new life.

Now…almost by default…we drive newer cars.  They’re easier to drive…don’t take as much attention and upkeep and “listening for the new squeak” as the older cars do…but we sure do miss our old cars. Maybe someday we’ll wax nostalgic about our Dodge Grand Caravan…but I doubt it.  It’s something about the MOJO factor..or lack of.  If it didn’t start out cool…it’s not going to end cool.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beauty in the Musty

Posted on by November 28, 2012

I love books.  I should expand on that thought and say that I love actual books.  I have an e-reader and I think it’s pretty cool to be able to read a download…but I can’t fool myself into thinking it’s an actual book. I’m reading what I know is something they call a book…but it doesn’t look or smell like the books I know.  Turning a page on a screen just doesn’t feel the same as holding a collection of paper with words printed on it in my hands.  Sometimes if I need to find a real creative way of looking at it, it makes me feel like one of the apes in the movie 2001…clambering around the obelisk…unable to process this new thing in their lives.

I have a big collection of books.  When you bring them home a handful at a time, over the course of 30 or 40 years, the pile can grow to an unmanageable size.  It’s not hard to find yourself pushed out of your own house…and everyone in it paying for your interest in a too wide-ranging list of subjects.

Recently, we remodeled and I got rid of a bunch of books.  I actually got rid of truckloads of books. It was a lot of books that I got rid of.  I think that at the time, I was pretty traumatized…but now I’d be hard pressed to name any of the ones that I got rid of.  It made a small dent in the pile.

It is a lot harder to take a book to the book sale or to a thrift store than it is to press delete.  The e-reader is a boon for the minimalist lifestyle.  If your Nook ever smells musty, something in your life is seriously wrong.  The pages of the digital files will never yellow…never harbor black mold…never tip off the coffee table…but will never feel like a book, either.

I think that it’s my perception of what it means to own a book on my “electronic reading device” versus an actual physical book that’s really starting to kick in lately.  It cheapens the value of it all…it’s not a part of my experience with books so it doesn’t have the magic that discovering a title that I’d been looking for has.  I don’t remember ever feeling my heart race over my good fortune after doing a successful Amazon search for an ebook I was looking for.  Something so easy to find…and so easy to delete…just doesn’t feel right.

I deliver the mail.  I deliver the physical mail that people still write to other people.  Legal notices, fliers about free pizzas, magazines, passports, packages full of surprises of all kinds…it’s all real and all capable of giving me a paper cut at any time.  I don’t think that people are going to keep a file on their computer filled with all their love emails (unless you’re General Petraeus, I guess) …it’s too hard to perfume them and wrap them up with a piece of red satin. We need the physical thing for it to have any importance long-term.

I can’t imagine anyone saying, “Ohhhh, my…I remember this tweet.  Remember when Grandpa sent us this tweet when he was still alive?  Oh, what a tweet that was.”

Every generation has a chance to rail against what they think they’re losing.  When I was younger, it seemed like time moved slow enough that I could believe that nothing was ever going to change…now it seems like it’s all speeding up.  We’ll miss books someday. Maybe they’ll be an archaic curiosity, something we trot out like a fossil from the sandy cliffs…maybe they’ll all end up in a box with the old 8-tracks, I don’t really know.

I love books.  The must and smell and falling apart and stained covers…the dogeared pages and some other person’s highlighting…the randomness of finding a used copy of a treasure that’s had a life of its own.  I love it. I hope it sticks around for a while.

Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood vs. The Flintstones

Posted on by November 27, 2012

I have a bad tendency to wax nostalgic over things that I knew in my younger days.  I’m really not that old…how did this happen?  Cartoons are an especially easy target.  The cartoons of the 30’s were drawn more artfully, the cartoons of the 60’s were cooler, etc….on and on, spouting opinions like they were something more than something everybody has.

Now two of our children are almost grown…driving around and going to “big kid’s school”…and every once in a while I’ll hear them talk about things back in the day…like Pokemon or some other “old” cartoon that just was a little better than what’s coming around now.  (They’ll say, “Awww…we never liked Pokemon!!!!  What are you saying?”  and I’ll have to tell them it was just an example.)

One of our children is still pretty little.  This fact brings me to Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.  It’s based on Fred Roger’s Neighborhood and it is a wonderful show.  Each episode covers an “issue” that a little guy or girl might be going through…like trying something new…or, especially helpful at our house right now, going to the potty.  They sing a little song that we’ve adopted as a reminder:

“When you have to go potty…STOP and go right away! Flush and wash and be on your way!”

It’s a simple, simple, simple thing….but hard for a little one in the middle of building the tallest block tower ever to remember.  I’m a big fan of this show.  I am a huge Backyardigans fan.  Children’s programming right now offers some amazing choices. Daniel Tiger is shown on PBS…and like my wife’s favorite grown up show, “Love it or List it”, we don’t miss it if we don’t have to.

Which brings me to the Flintstones.  Oh, back in the day we watched us some Flintstones, Now!  But…it really wasn’t all that …all that.  It was funny, sure…It was a fresh concept at the time, sure…but good grief…I use Hanna-Barbera as my example of the low water mark for animation. It wasn’t all that great.  Kind of like watching a rerun of an old Seinfeld show…leaves you wondering what you thought was so hilarious the first time around.  The animation in any of the Hanna-Barbera stuff was flat and workmanlike….it got the job done but didn’t elevate…didn’t bring any new beauty to the table. The humor was sort of accessible for kids, I guess…but… (I just realized that the Flintstones was originally a primetime show…like our modern day Simpsons…so being a “kids show” might not have been an issue at the time…but DANGIT….it’s a kids show now so I’ll stand fast on my opinion).

Fred and Wilma are icons.  They are fond memories.  My little one likes to watch them on occasion …but they aren’t Daniel Tiger.

I guess when you get down to the root of my displeasure…it’s to be a grown man and realize that there was not a single show on television in my era that helped me learn to go to the potty.  It’s a skill that I’ve pretty much mastered by now…so it’s not really an issue…but I’m more aware of my lack of television based training having seen Daniel Tiger’s teachings.

I do know how to run a car off the power of my feet, but the Flintstones taught me exactly ZERO about going to the potty.  Thanks for nothing, Fred.

Back to Watermelon Sugar

Posted on by October 10, 2018

My cousin gave a copy of this book to my mother back in the early 1970’s.  She read it…and later let me read it.  I was pretty young and unformed at the time…and this story of the commune Ideath had a big impact on my developing worldview.

Richard Brautigan was a troubled man who seemed to respond to his harsh early years with an innocent approach to his writing.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the poets known for his work during the earlier Beat period and an editor and proprietor of City Lights bookstore, said of Brautigan,

“As an editor I was always waiting for Richard to grow up as a writer. It seems to me he was essentially a naïf, and I don’t think he cultivated that childishness, I think it came naturally. It was like he was much more in tune with the trout in America than with people.”

I think it’s this innocence that I was, and am, drawn to.  Water seeks its own level…and even though, after all these years, I’ve seen enough to know that the world is not always an innocent place…I’m drawn to a benevolent way of looking at it.  Richard Brautigan might have been trying to create an idealistic world in his head…and his writing was right for an idealistic time like the 60’s.

In the early 80’s, Brautigan’s writings were maybe not seen as relevant any more.  His writing was tied to an era…represented an era to some degree…and when the era had passed his importance had passed also. In 1984, at the age of 49, he committed suicide with a 44 magnum pistol. His body was discovered a month or so later by a private investigator.  Despite rumors to the contrary, he did not leave a suicide note.

He suffered from depression and alcoholism most of his adult life…his childhood was about as rough as it gets…but his writing was gentle and full of humor.  Even after he started to slide off the radar of popular culture in our country, he had a big following in Japan and was popular in Europe.  Much of his writing was compatible with the ideas of Zen Buddhism, so his popularity in Japan made sense. When I was a child I didn’t understand any of this…had no knowledge of who the man was who wrote the book about the “hippies”…but I loved this book.  It had short chapters that read like poems…chapters that painted a picture and left room for my imagination to fill in the blank parts.

My mother wasn’t a hippy.  She did want to put giant flower stickers on our new Fairlane station wagon…my Dad talked her out of it…but she wasn’t a hippy.  In California, it was easy to have a little hippy living inside of you and be pretty straight-laced…easy to be a “covert hippy” in attitude and a horn rimmed accountant in execution.  This book is one of the artifacts from my childhood…not as important as most of the events that really shaped me…but still a part of what matters to me.  Many of his books are still in print…and available through any bookstore.