Begin New Era

Lauren and I packed the last of her things into the minivan yesterday and moved them out of her apartment. It’s the end of an era.

The 302mies – Lauren, Aleksia, and Anita – spent three years in that apartment. It was a pretty nice place – not the lap of luxury by any means, but a decent enough apartment for three university students. It was across the street from a Kwik-Trip, a critical fact in Wisconsin, and only a couple of blocks from the football stadium. It served them well. But they’ve all graduated now – Lauren twice – and they’re heading off to other things. Not too far off, it has to be said, at least not right away – they all have jobs in the city now, though that happened over a long enough stretch of time and with enough uncertainty in the current labor market that continuing to live in that apartment wasn’t really an option.

We’ve been slowly moving Lauren’s stuff back home to Our Little Town, one minivan-load at a time, because it is a whole lot easier to do it that way than it is to rent a truck and try to get into that parking lot on the day when every lease in the city turns over. Ask us how we know that sometime. Fortunately Lauren is a pretty ruthless editor of her stuff and almost all of the apartment’s furniture was leaving with Aleksia or Anita, so aside from trying to fold a foam mattress into the van it was pretty unproblematic.

I will say, though, that the dolly Kim and I bought back when we were still selling homemade soap at craft shows was some of the best money we ever spent.

The nice part about doing this in multiple trips is that it takes a while so there was time for Lauren bring her friend Olivia down for dinner on Wednesday. The rabbit got involved and there were many tarot readings because why shouldn’t there be. I don’t believe anyone tried to do a reading for the rabbit, which was probably an oversight, but we had a lovely time together anyway. Good food in good company is one of the secrets of life, I think.

Lauren and I unpacked the van yesterday and distributed her stuff around the house and into the garage, depending on the specific nature of the stuff in question. Eventually we went over to the County Fair, a place that used to be our second home, back when Lauren and Oliver were in 4H. It features a wide variety of livestock – rabbits, dairy cows, beefers, pigs, sheep, chickens, turkeys, and goats – and an even wider variety of moderately nonlethal food, most of which can be had for only slightly higher than reasonable prices but you know it’s the Fair and that’s what you do. They also have a booth that has the best fried cheese curds in the county, and in this state that is a highly coveted award. There was a country act filling the night with music. We debated what was the best thing we spent too much money on that turned out to be worth it. We had a good time together.

Tomorrow Lauren will head out for an Adventure and we won’t see her for quite some time, but we’ll be here when she gets back and we’ll look forward to hearing her tell the stories.

All eras end. New eras begin. That is the nature of eras. 

We Are Visited by New Yorkers

Americans have always been mobile. Even in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Americans picked up and moved with an ease and rapidity that astonished outside observers, and with railroads and then cars that pattern only accelerated. Not everyone moves, of course, and I remember someone once telling me that the big divide in American culture was not liberal vs conservative or even rural vs urban but instead was between those who settled down and those who got out, but enough of us do that the pattern still holds.

I’m not sure I buy that as the big divide in American culture, by the way, but it does give one a lot to think about even so.

One result of all that for me personally is that there are altogether far too many miles between where my brother and his family live, just across the river from New York City, and where I live, here in southern Wisconsin. We try to bridge that gap as best we can with phone calls, holidays, and random visits, but the fact remains we are both a long way from each other and a long way from where we started.

Thus it was a grand and glorious thing that Keith, my niece Sara, and her boyfriend Aiden came out to visit us last week.

They drove out Tuesday and made good time despite the GPS taking them through Chicago instead of around it – driving in Chicago, even just on 90, is a chore. Yes, Keith is used to driving in Manhattan, but still. They made it, we plunked ourselves down in the living room to hang out and catch up, and this pretty much set the pattern for the entire visit. It was pleasantly low-key that way.

The cat immediately decided that Keith was friend-shaped and was happy to spend time with him while he was here. For a cat that ordinarily runs from visitors as if they were chasing her with a cattle prod, that was pretty welcoming. She’s mellowing in her old age. I’m glad someone is.

When they told us they were coming to visit we asked what they wanted to do while they were here and they said “chill” so that’s a lot of what we did. We also ran them around a bit, though, because that’s just how we operate.

For example, one day Sara wanted to see the cheese aisle at our local grocery store so we went over and demonstrated the awesome power of Wisconsin cheese. It’s actually pretty impressive just how much cheese that grocery store has on hand on a Wednesday morning when you get down to it. The ice cream section is much the same. Wisconsin does not mess around when it comes to dairy.

We also went to visit Lauren, which was on Sara’s list as well. She and Aiden actually stayed with Lauren for a couple of nights, exploring the city there. We went out for dinner at one of the classic places up by the capitol, which yielded one of the weirder moments of the current year. “Your meals come with fries or salad,” said the waiter. “Huh,” we all said collectively, after a moment’s consideration, “In the current climate the fries are actually the healthy option, so we’ll go with those.” Strange times indeed.

Afterward we walked over to the bar where Aleksia works because they have bingo on Wednesday nights and you have to love that. I don’t remember the last time I played bingo. It might have been at my grandparents’ house. We actually did very well as a table, even convincing Aleksia to join us for a round where we ended up with an extra card and she won too. We didn’t win every round, of course. We tried, though.

Bingo Rage is a thing, people!

We left the younger generation up there but returned on Friday to collect Sara and Aiden and drop off my car for Lauren for a couple of days. This drop-off involved lunch at a restaurant that served fresh ramen, and you have to love that.

At some point in your life a little switch flips over in the back of your head and you think, “Huh. Genealogy. That sounds like fun.” This happened for me in my early forties, and it has now definitely happened to Keith so we spent a lot of time looking through all of the records that I have amassed over the years – a vast and haphazardly organized collection of documents, stories, random notes, photos, and assorted memorabilia that we had fun digging into. I eventually ended up putting all of it onto a jump drive (a desperately slow process for some reason) and sent it home with him and we’ve continued our explorations since then.

You forget, as a trained professional historian, just what a surreal experience it can be working with primary source documents.

Keith is an intelligent man, certainly my equal or better, and he worked as a producer and editor in broadcast journalism for decades. Won awards for it, in fact. He’s very good at looking at a disparate collection of sources and putting together the story they tell, in other words. But unless you’ve trained for it, the sheer nonsense that you have to deal with in historical primary sources – where the information was put down by people whose standards of accuracy were often rather casual and who weren’t getting paid to care about it either way, where spellings of names vary across and occasionally within documents, where dates float around like doorbell buttons in front of a drunk, where transcriptions and translations were made by people working by ear who either didn’t know or didn’t care about what they were listening to, where handwriting styles varied wildly over time even if the person was actually writing legibly for the day – all of that can be a bit tricky to wrap your head around. That’s the fun part, though, and between us we’re actually making good progress. I do need to organize what I have, and perhaps this will be the thing that gets me doing that for real.

One night by request we dragged out the Hitster game from Christmas and spent an enjoyable evening playing Young Folks v Old Folks or New Yorkers v Wisconsinites and everyone won at least once though the point of those games is to enjoy spending time together and singing along with the good songs. 

Sara and Aiden left a day early to go to Chicago and visit Aiden’s uncles there, so Keith and I spent most of the last day doing genealogy and generally hanging out. That kind of unstructured time is rare after you graduate from school, but it’s the best kind of time.

Keith left on Sunday, picked up Sara and Aiden on the way home, and made it back safely despite the greater New York City area nearly being washed out to sea the day before. We’re back to normal again around here, or whatever passes for it in these parlous times. Not sure that’s an improvement, but here we are, getting though the days as best we can.

Still too many miles between here and there, though.

News and Updates

1. We just had a lovely visit from my brother, my niece, and her boyfriend and there will be blogging about it soon, oh yes there will. It has been a summer of brotherly love, it has.

2. The World Cup is over and now I have to get back to my regularly scheduled life, already in progress. I’m not sure how I feel about that. The rest of my life involves things like running errands and figuring out what to have for dinner every night and I’m just not looking forward to that sort of thing. I’m glad Spain won the tournament, even though they were not on my list of top five teams I wanted to win. But they were in the final, and to have had Argentina’s blatant thuggery and official favoritism rewarded with a second straight championship would have been a grotesque injustice. I hope the Egyptians are cheering now.

3. Seriously – punching opposing players after the final whistle? I wouldn’t have put up with that from my kids when they were in middle school. Why is this a thing with people who are supposed to be adults?

4. Also, the fact that tens of thousands of fans booed Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and held up red cards when he staggered onto the field after the game like a junkie looking for last night's cheeseburger warms the cockles of my shriveled heart, yes it does. If it weren’t for the fact that he lives in a hermetically sealed ego bubble surrounded by an impenetrable wall of bootlickers and toadies I would hope he might have gotten the hint or at least have been dismayed but I know he thinks they were cheers and flowers. Mostly people do that for each other, to remind us that we’re a majority and soon he and his minions, cronies, lackeys, and slaves will be relegated to the dustbin of history with the original Fascists.

5. It’s Smoke Season again, the inevitable result of the global climate change that right-wingers refuse to accept as real because it would interfere with corporate profits that will never trickle down to most of them but that’s owning the libs for ya. The air here in Our Little Town has been either Unhealthy, Very Unhealthy, Extremely Unhealthy, or Hazardous for a week now – on a scale where 0-50 is normal and 300 is Hazardous we hit 658 at one point, which is impressive until you consider that Duluth MN hit 1165. Naturally, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump thinks he can use this as an excuse to impose huge illegal tariffs on Canada because that’s his only solution to anything that doesn’t necessarily involve voter suppression or white supremacism. Truly we live in the stupidest timeline.

6. If anyone’s reading this in 50 years, I just want you to know that this didn’t used to be normal. We never had a Smoke Season until a couple of years ago. We used to have insects. There was such a thing as snow. You could go outside in the summer without protective gear. Hard to believe, I know.

7. It’s been hot here the last week or so – not as hot as it’s been in Europe this summer but hot enough that we pulled the rabbit inside for the week because we know what happens to rabbits if you don’t do that (RIP Hazel). Between the heat and the smoke we’ve mostly stayed inside and I’m glad that we have lives that allow us to do that.

8. I’ve spent a combined two hours on the phone with my internet provider over the last two weeks because they upgraded something that worked just fine and now it doesn’t. At some point later this week one of their tech people will come out to let me know that this is probably my fault, at least from a financial standpoint, but in the meantime here we are. The kicker of it is that the problem has occurred in the one service that we don’t actually use at all, but every time we threaten to cancel our landline the provider panics and offers us a deal where it’s significantly cheaper to keep it than get rid of it. If we cancel that now, I suspect our bill would go up. I am not sure why they are so bound and determined that we keep our landline but so be it.  

9. Apparently I am one of the very few people who managed to get the Wordle on the day they decided that “Pshaw” was a word. They make weird decisions in that game – not as weird as the Spelling Bee, where a couple of days ago there were supposed to be three pangrams and I got three pangrams, all of which were actual words but two of them were “not in the word book” so they didn’t count – but weird enough and what are you going to do about it, really. It’s a free game, after all.

10. Some days the references around here are so pointlessly obscure that I think I may be the only person on earth who will get them. The title of a recent post, for example, was a reference to a single line in a 1970s sitcom so forgettable that even the original network no longer believes it once aired, but it became a tagline in my family and we remember. Yes, my brother got it. He even named the show. I don’t really expect people to get things that obscure, to be honest. Sometimes you just have to keep yourself entertained.

Our Trip to Canada: Street Art in Montreal and Quebec City

One of the things I like to do on trips these days is observe the street art that you find in different places. Most cities these days have realized that public art adds to the quality of life and they encourage it, which in fact does make for a better experience for both visitors and natives alike. It’s a bit of a hard sell in the US sometimes, but even here there are strides being made. Both Montreal and Quebec City had some really nice public artwork out there.

For one thing, there were a lot of murals in Montreal. Really, quite a lot.

We saw all of these just in our first day.

And all of these were in the neighborhood where we were staying.

This was the view from the window of the smaller family-run hotel we stayed in when we got back to Montreal.

And these were in the neighborhood as well.

This one towers over the city and you get a really great view of it from the Beaux Arts Museum. For those who aren’t familiar, it shows Leonard Cohen, a native son of Westmount.

I didn’t see too many murals in Quebec City, but this one was worth remembering.

In addition to murals there was art pretty much everywhere. The Ring in downtown Montreal I’ve already featured in this space, and the knotted streetlights in Quebec City as well. But there was definitely more to see in both places. Quebec City in particular seemed to focus on sculptures of varying kinds, though that might simply have been an artifact of where we were.

These two were right as you come up the hill and into the old quarter of Quebec City. They’re pretty much next to each other.

The top one below was further downtown, while the bottom one was next to the Ursuline Chapel.

We passed the statue with the rings on our way to the promenade by the Citadel and then found the next two in various places in Old Quebec City.

Montreal was not statue-free, however. This one we walked by on our first day as we headed over to the dumpling place. 

And this was on McGill’s campus, because education and art are things that go together well. 

This was sitting on the sidewalk as we headed downtown one day and it took me a while to get a good photograph of it because just as I was about to take my picture some Overentitled Influencer (tm) barged past me and spent ten minutes ordering her partner around while he snapped away. But eventually they floated off to plague some other quarter of Montreal and I got the photo I wanted.

We found these further downtown.

This one actually sat in front of a Chinese restaurant. For all I know it was an advertisement, but it seemed fun. Coffee cup for scale.

And this one was in front of the Beaux Arts Museum, I think. I like this style so I tend to notice it as I walk by.

There were definitely a few favorites that stood out. This one, for example, was also on the way to the Beaux Arts Museum. It is apparently one large collection of jokes for those who know, from the pear logo on his computer (a nod toward Apple and toward the fact that, according to a quick internet search that I just did, the French word for pear – “poire” – can also mean “a gullible person”) to the squirrel stealing his hamburger bun to the fact that if you go up and look at the computer screen it says “Steve Jobs Is Dead” on it.

This was on the mailbox just outside of our first hotel. Fuck that guy indeed.

And while this was not really meant to be art – just a warning sign for passersby – I have to admit it was one of my favorites. I fully intend to use it online whenever people feel entitled to throw rubbish into my open mind.

One must have standards, after all.