Older and Doing Okay

I am now officially older than I was.

As a historian I know that this process happens gradually, day by day, a steady accretion of time that has no borders, but there is something about a calendar that sticks in the human mind and we as a species always know, pretty much to the day, when another year has gone by. One day doesn’t feel all that different from the next, but the differences accumulate and suddenly you realize that the world you lived in not that long ago is gone and it’s a whole new world that greets you in the morning.

You learn that as you get older. You learn a lot of things as you get older.

It was a good birthday once I got past all the grading that had to be done and moved on with the rest of the day. All four of us were together and we had dinner and played cards and talked, and that’s pretty much all I ever want for my birthday these days. I made General Tso Chicken. Oliver came out ahead in our Phase 10 game. We enjoyed each other’s company, as we always do.

I don’t know how people get good photos out of cell phone cameras, but perhaps the graininess is part of the story as well.

After our card game Lauren took me out to see her friends at a local purveyor of fine beverages now that everyone is legally allowed to do that and they all sang happy birthday to me when I got there, which was lovely. I’ve known many of them for a decade now. They’re good people to talk with and very welcoming. Aleksia even bought me a Green Tea Shot for my birthday and it was tasty!

I stayed about an hour, until the clock ticked over to midnight and we sang happy birthday to Aleksia, and then I went home where the old people go at that hour so the younger folks can do their thing on their own. It was a marvelous way to end the day.

It’s not such a bad thing getting older when you have family and friends to share it with.

I Speak for the Trees

We have become the sorts of people who have multiple Christmas trees.

I know how this happened, and to be honest it wasn’t really an excess of Christmas spirit. That sort of spirit has been hard to come by in recent years, and this year has been particularly elusive for a lot of reasons. It’s hard to be festive when the world conspires against it, and defiance will only get you so far.

Following along with the tried and true strategy of “fake it ‘til you make it,” however, we have been getting things decorated anyway. Over Thanksgiving Oliver, Maxim and I set up the long strand of blue lights that we always have across the front of the house, and Kim has continued her newfound tradition of putting more blue lights – the kind that blink in random patterns – on the broccoli stalks that still stand in the raised bed garden in the front lawn and you have to admit that is a rather sneakily cheerful thing to do.

But normally this sort of thing requires only one Christmas tree.

We even upgraded that last year and got one that is bigger and rounder than the one we’d been using for a while in order to keep that number at one, which of course speaks to the main problem. We simply have more ornaments than can comfortably be placed on a tree.

We have our own ornaments, some of which we have acquired over the years and some of which were given to us as gifts. There are the ones that the kids made when they were younger, which of course have sentimental value. I have two Gritty ornaments that Kim got for me. We finally remembered to bring the box of ornaments that I inherited from my mom a couple of years ago up from the basement, many of which are either gorgeous – my mom had a pretty good eye for these things – or sentimental or both. And we have my burgeoning collection of “travel ornaments,” which is a nice way of saying “keychains.” This is mainly my project, though Oliver and Lauren contribute to it as well. Mostly I pick these things up wherever we end up traveling because they are inexpensive, indestructible, and a nice reminder of good times. And since we’ve also become People Who Travel – an odd thought, but not one I’m complaining about – there are a lot of those.

So this year Kim bought a small tree just for the travel ornaments. It’s not short, but it’s kind of thin and it has a festive “blue and white” color scheme that isn't really obvious from the photo. It came prelit with bright white LED lights, which give all of the ornaments a kind of backlit feel to them. It’s a nice way to both highlight and quarantine all the keychains and the like.

We had to figure out where to put it, since the main tree has its own spot and the living room didn’t really have a space for a second tree, and eventually we decided that the dining room was fine. Midgie agreed.

The angel on the top is from my parents. They bought that in 1963 for their first Christmas together. It seems happy there.

The main tree is in the usual spot in the living room and we spent most of Sunday decorating it since there was a dense fog advisory here in Our Little Town and I’d already done the grocery shopping and all the grading I planned to do for the end of the semester. We weren't going anywhere. It was a good window of time to get the tree up.

Right now we’ve kind of stalled a bit, since the trees are basically done and now we need to figure out how much else to put out and how much just to pack away again for next year. We have surprisingly few open horizontal spaces to put things, it turns out.

As problems go, it’s not so bad.

To Sleep, Perchance to Entangle

Way back in October I did a sleep test, and it turns out that I’m doing it wrong.

I know. You’d think I’d know how to do this by now, having had more than half a century to practice it, but apparently even this simple task is beyond me these days. At some point I will simply be amortized out and sold for parts.

In the meantime, I have been given a Machine.

It is a little Machine, roughly the size of a loaf of bread if you include the reservoir that has to be emptied every morning and then filled up again every evening. It’s surprisingly quiet. It has bright lights that go out eventually and several buttons that make a satisfying click when you press them. It automatically connects to the nearest cellphone tower and reports on whether you have used it, for how long, and under what circumstances. It may also echolocate the cat and report on that as well. It needs to be cleaned on a rigid and unforgiving schedule. And right now it is making me very, very tired.

The good folks at my local medical purveyor started texting me about this Machine a few weeks ago, but since I don’t answer texts or phone calls from unfamiliar numbers it took a while for this fact to sink in. Eventually they were succinct enough in the texts that I could see their point in the preview screen so I wrote back and after some stilted conversation they eventually said they had one of these things for me but I needed to come in to get trained on how to use it.

So we set up an appointment which I then canceled so I could go tailgating (total regret about this fact: zero) and then rescheduled for last week.

On the appointed day I ducked out of work a bit early and headed over to what I had previously known as a bar but which now houses the medical equipment people – and no, I am not making that up – where I met an enthusiastic fellow who spent the better part of an hour telling me how much my life was about to be revolutionized by this wondrous Machine.

“You won’t understand how you lived without it!” he said. “Prepare for the best sleep of your life!”

This turned out not to be true.

I think he could tell that that vast majority of the enthusiasm for this transaction was occurring on his side of the desk which seemed to sadden him, but I did promise that I would give an honest effort to make it work and I do believe I have kept this promise as best I could since then.

Still not true, though.

I didn’t use it the first night as it requires a supply of distilled water that I did not have, but a quick trip to the local grocery on the way home from work the next day solved that problem. And then I had to get it set up.

These things are a lot simpler when you’re looking at one on a desk and a genuine Machine enthusiast is walking you through all the parts and procedures. When you’ve got one at home and you’re staring gimlet-eyed at all of the various bits and bobs trying to remember what end was up and how it all connected together, it is rather more complicated. But eventually I got it all lined up and connected and even figured out how to put the little mask on. Because you have to wear a mask.

There’s about a hundred different sorts of masks. Did you know that? I didn’t. Not until last week, anyway. There are masks that are just little tubes that you stick up your nose. There are masks that you could use to explore shipwrecks of Spanish galleons off the coast of Florida. And there are different masks for pretty much every step on the gradient between those two end points.

I hate having things on my face. Masking up for the pandemic was a genuine drag, though I did it because I am not an idiot and didn’t feel like sacrificing myself or my loved ones so some psychotic grifter could score political points for his re-election campaign. This is called enlightened self-interest, folks, because sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do in order to achieve a larger goal. I know. Life is hard, but there you go. I am capable of doing things I do not care to do if there is a purpose to it, which is how you know I am an actual Adult.

So I picked one that just rested under my nose but left my mouth uncovered. I get one free change, though.

Eventually I got the tube all snapped together and – after about fifteen minutes of topological mathematics – figured out how to get the apparatus connected to the mask to clamp onto my head. The tube back to the Machine comes off the top, in case you’re wondering, so I look like a post-apocalyptic unicorn and now that’s an image you have in your mind too.

It’s actually not that uncomfortable if I don’t move, though if I open my mouth the air that is being gently forced up my nose immediately comes down whatever the little pathway is for that and exits out my mouth, which is really, really disturbing. Once I have this thing on I have to keep my mouth shut, and there are people out there who would tell you that this is worth the price of the Machine all by itself though there has to be an easier way to get me to do that, I think.

I can fall asleep with it pretty easily most nights if I start on my back. But the problem is that a) I sleep on my side, not my back, and b) I rotate like a gas station hot dog while asleep. The Machine Guy dismissed this out of hand. “Your body is just trying to compensate for the very problems you came in here for this Machine to solve!” he enthused at me, his clothing and verbal intonations slowly morphing to look and sound like the Wizard of Oz. “Once you have this, you won’t need to do that!”

This turned out not to be true either.

For four of the last six nights I have strapped myself into the Machine, laid down on my back, and with surprisingly minimal fuss drifted off to sleep. And then two hours later I rotate onto my side, get entirely tangled up in the tube, wake up, try to get back to sleep while resting my face on the apparatus, spend some time attempting to reset the mask which by now has slipped over toward one or the other of my ears (which is surprisingly unhelpful, really), try to find a different position that might work, and then take off the mask, turn off the Machine, and – eventually – go back to sleep for whatever is left of the night.

All of which gets reported to the Machine Guy over the cell phone system.

Kim sleeps through all of this, which is how you know we’ve been married a long time.

The Machine Guy called me on Monday to see how it was going, despite already knowing this thanks to the snitching of the Machine, and he seemed unhappy when I actually told him. So on Thursday I am going back to the local medical purveyor’s office at what I still think of as a bar if I am being honest, and I’ll see if a different mask will make any improvements.

I am not sure how all of this is supposed to help, to be honest, but I am giving it a genuine try.

A Round Birthday

Kim had one of those Round Number Birthdays last month, so naturally we had to celebrate.

The problem, though, was that she originally tried to leave much of this up to me and I have no party skills whatsoever.

“What do you want to do for your birthday?”

“That’s up to you. I’m the birthday girl.”

We went around like that for a while until she realized that this was probably a losing cause for everyone involved and she started telling me what she wanted so I could just go ahead and do it. I spent thirty years backstage on the lighting crew. If you give me a plan I can get it done just fine. Just don’t ask me to do the planning.

In the end, she wanted a pizza party and you know? That sounded like a good idea. I called around to a few places without much success until finally we went to a local place and just asked them if they could host a party with two or three dozen adults, and to his eternal credit Benny the Manager didn’t even flinch. “Sure!” he said. “We’ll block off this section of the restaurant and run a tab for you and you can settle up at the end of the night.”

Reader, he even let us bring in our own cake. Three cheers for Benny.

We managed to do this on Kim’s actual birthday which was the Saturday after Thanksgiving this year – the one day that wasn’t already spoken for over break and, to be honest, the main reason we scheduled our wedding on that same Saturday nearly three decades ago since we figured people could travel for it.

It took some doing to get things set up, including a last-minute stop to pick up party plates for the cake, but in the end it worked out pretty well. Everyone got a wristband so the cashier would know they were with us, we successfully managed to shoo out a number of people who apparently can’t read large signs about things being reserved for an event, and we had a grand time. It was good pizza.

Eventually it was time for the cake.

At this point it seems relevant to note that there was a slight miscommunication regarding the cake decorations. I ordered it from a local supermarket bakery, which had the inestimable virtue of being open on the Saturday after Thanksgiving so I could pick it up, and they asked me a few questions.

“What do you want it to say?”

“Happy birthday, Kim.”

“What sort of decorations do you want?”

“Flowers would be good.”

“What’s her favorite color?”

“Green.”

And thus we ended up with:

It was tasty nonetheless.

The embroidered cloth in front of the cake was something that Kim stitched for our wedding. It’s based on a Ukrainian pattern and we had it wrapped around our hands then. It was nice to see it again.

Lauren had suggested that we go out barhopping afterward but it was a very cold night and by the time the festivities ended that turned into a nice evening at home, hanging out with the four of us plus Max and Nolan.

Happy birthday, Kim!

Tailgate Two!

I had a medical appointment scheduled for 8am on the day after Thanksgiving, which wasn’t something I knew you could do until the guy offered to book it for me. It wasn’t for anything urgent but I figured I’d have time around then and it would get me moving for the plans we had later that day, so why not.

And then I discovered – on Thanksgiving Day – that our plans were actually much earlier than I had thought so I had to move the appointment. It is not easy to reschedule an appointment on a holiday and I knew (or at least hoped) that speaking with an actual person was probably not going to happen, but eventually I found the proper phone number and left a message and hoped for the best. I told them – truthfully – that I had a family commitment that I couldn’t miss.

What I didn’t tell them was that this commitment was a tailgating party. Although in the end I think they figured it out.

Last year Lauren and her roommates decided to host a Parent Tailgating Weekend where they invited all of the various parents to join them and their friends for a festive afternoon of grilling, drinking games, and football, and I have to say that it was a lot of fun. We ate. We drank. I played my first ever drinking game (Boom Cup) and if I didn’t quite win then neither did I lose and I’ll take that. We even got tickets to see the game, which was terrible but we enjoyed it anyway. We had a very good time, and when your adult daughter invites you up for a gathering with her friends you can definitely count that as a parenting win.

So when Lauren and her roommates decided there would be a Second Annual Parent Tailgating Weekend, we were all in for it.

Except that this happened much later in the season than last year, so rather than the crisp fall day of the first one it was very much Winter In Wisconsin, with a high temperature that day somewhere in the teens Fahrenheit (which is Very Cold in Celsius). This was heightened by the fact that the game was much earlier in the day. Last year’s game started around 3pm, which meant we could slide up there around lunchtime and still have time for – hypothetically speaking – medical appointments in the morning. This year, however, game time was 11am and if you know this particular campus you know that nothing says College Game Day like alcohol consumption at 8 in the morning. It beats medical appointments, anyway.

We didn’t get there until around 9, though, because we are old and because we had to weave around the fenderbender that happened right in front of us as we neared the stadium and also because we stopped to pick up two dozen fresh bakery donuts for the festivities. For a reasonable fee we found a place to park – right behind the house were this was happening – and as parents and Old People we celebrated the fact that that the tailgate had been moved indoors.

There was plenty of food and all of it was good. The parents of the actual hosts for this event run a barbeque restaurant somewhere and brought a pile of tasty meats. And in true Wisconsin fashion, there were plenty of beverages. I brought a bottle of homemade Irish cream that disappeared pretty quickly, and at one point Lauren introduced me to something very tasty whose name escapes me now but which consisted of elderflower liqueur and champagne.

I also got to experience my first shot of Malort.

If you do not live near Chicago or its cultural basin you have probably never heard of Malort and in this you should count yourself lucky. It is a liqueur of sorts, one whose overriding flavor is “bitter” with a dash of “regret,” though it also includes an ever-changing blend of herbs and infusions such that no two bottles are ever quite the same so even within those parameters it is something of a guessing game. It’s the sort of rite-of-passage beverage that most people only consume on a dare and yet it is inexplicably popular in Chicago and I’d wanted to try it for a while now but purchasing an entire bottle of the stuff was just out of the question. And there it was!

It fully lived up to my expectations.

The living room had been cleared for action, and we joined in. It took me a while to find the range, but in the end Nolan and I very nearly won our game of Beer Pong, a game I had never played before despite being a proud graduate of three different universities, all of which had football teams at the time. Kim and Max actually did win their game.

Mostly we spent the time hanging out. Sometimes I was talking with the other parents.

I spent a fair amount of time talking with Anita’s grandmother, who has led a fascinating life.

And sometimes I was with Lauren and her friends, some of whom I have known since they were in middle school and some of whom I met at the party. They’re good people, and I enjoy talking with them.

It was quite a group.

By this point it was nearly game time so most of the college students went over to the stadium, where they watched the home team get pretty conclusively thumped by one of their main rivals. Kim and I took a quick look at the temperature (a balmy 18F by then, not including the gale force winds) and decided that our best option was to take in the game at a local bistro. Fortunately Maxim works as a bouncer at just such an establishment and he got us in. It was loud, crowded, and busy, which is why I suspect that when the medical office called me back they knew pretty much instantly where I was (or at least at what sort of establishment and event I was) but to their credit they didn’t flinch and we rescheduled my appointment without incident. Tailgating in Wisconsin is a hallowed tradition, after all.

Eventually we all ended up back at Lauren’s apartment where we warmed up for a while before Lauren, Maxim, Nolan, Kim and I headed out to an international grocery store because that’s the sort of people we are. From there we went to an actual local bistro for dinner in a much quieter and less frigid atmosphere.

Tailgate for the win!

Thanksgivings

My brother’s favorite way of dividing the world into two kinds of people is to point out that there are people who relax by doing something and there are people who relax by doing nothing. Me, personally, I’m a “doing nothing” sort of person – my idea of relaxation involves very little motion of any kind – but I am not the planning part of the family and Kim is very much a “doing something” person. I generally end up having fun at these somethings and being glad that I did them, it has to be said, though I often end up rather tired.

Such was our Thanksgiving break.

I don’t know if you noticed, but Thanksgiving was incredibly late this year. Most people down at Home Campus were ready for it to be about a week – maybe two – before it actually was, and that’s just the faculty and staff. Fortunately for me three of my five classes didn’t meet that week – I told my First Year Seminar students that they had to schedule an advising appointment to choose classes for next semester instead, and my Zoom class goes out not only to Far Northern Campus but also to anywhere up to half a dozen high schools in that area, all of whom are closed that entire week because it’s Deer Season (a capitalized event in Wisconsin) and it just wasn’t worth holding class for the two or three students who would show up. They’d probably just sit there and be unhappy because they hadn’t gotten their deer yet.

We had two Thanksgivings, because one was clearly not enough.

I’m okay with that, actually. Thanksgiving has become one of my favorite holidays over the years mostly because it is one of the very few holidays on the American calendar that does not ask for more. It simply asks us to be glad for what we already have. You don’t get gifts. You don’t get candy. There are no fireworks. You’re not expected to buy flowers. It’s just there to remind you that even with all of the problems in the world you probably still have things to be grateful for and you should acknowledge those things now and then.

This is why I have very little patience for the killjoys who insist that the holiday is somehow irrevocably tainted by its origins or the football games or whatever. I am well aware of such things. But you know. That’s not what I’m celebrating here.

Our first Thanksgiving this year was with Kim’s side of the family – our annual jaunt up to Rory and Amy’s house. We are responsible for many of the baked goods for this event – the year we had to stay home because we all had the flu was calamitous that way – so we spent that morning baking all sorts of things. Pumpkin pie. Apple cranberry pie. Buns. Biscuits. And, of course, pizzelles, which are my contribution to all of this. I’m not sure I’d be allowed in without them, and at this point I’m not going to test that theory. Plus they’re fun to make. I set up my pizzelle iron in front of the television and watch large men chase a small object for an hour or so while I make them, and then the whole house smells of anise. There are worse ways to spend an hour.

Kim, Oliver, and I piled into the car as soon as the last pie was out of the oven and headed on up to the festivities. Lauren and Max drove over separately, though there was some confusion as to when we should arrive so they got there well before we did. It is strange to know that your child can just get there on her own with her boyfriend – it feels like a whole new stage of people gathering from separate places, even if it isn’t all that different from us picking them up on the way. Not sure why.

The evening was the usual chaos of food and family, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. I usually end up sitting in the front room or the dining room and talking with whoever happens by, which this year was mostly either Grandpa or Amy’s dad, along with our subgroup. Sometimes I’d wander into the kitchen and talk with people there, which had the advantage of also allowing me to graze on the appetizers set out on the big kitchen island. It’s all good. I don’t seem to take many pictures at Thanksgiving for some reason – perhaps I’m just happy to be part of a holiday instead of trying to record it as I usually do with events – but I got a couple.

We got back fairly late, moved the leftover bits of the pies from the van to my car since there was no room in the fridge and at this point in the year the garage is essentially one big cold storage unit, and left them there until Sunday when we had Thanksgiving II: The Turkening.

We wanted to do a smaller Thanksgiving on our own to go with the big family feast, perhaps just as a way to have more leftovers, and Sunday was pretty much the only day that we had open for that. And for reasons that will be explained in a future post, it worked out well as far as getting together, as Lauren and Max had come by on Saturday. So Sunday it was.

Kim did most of the cooking for this one – turkey, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, “dad rice,” cranberry sauce, and Aunt Linda’s Baked Pineapple Dish without which no holiday is complete, which is a lot for five people but then the leftovers were the point after all. We’ve already put Thanksgiving III: Bride of Turkey on the menu for later this week. My role was mostly hauling the turkey up from the basement to be prepped for cooking and then getting the table extended and the dishes set. We always bring out our wedding china and the silverware I inherited from my parents for this sort of thing, as well as the silver-rimmed glasses that were my dad’s pride and joy, since you might as well use the stuff.

Also, now that it is December and past the official date of Thanksgiving I will acknowledge the existence of Christmas, so Oliver, Max, and I put up the one stand of blue Christmas lights that we always have across the front of the house, a task that was both easier (more hands, plus no giant bushes in the front to work around this year) and harder (15F without the wind chill) than usual, but now the lights are up and glowing peacefully.

We had a lovely meal.

Afterward we all ended up in the living room collectively working on an online geography quiz because that’s just how we roll. You get a blank map of Africa and have to name all of the countries (we got about 95% of them) and then Europe (100%), Asia (95% or so), Oceana (100% but there aren’t that many), South America (100%) and North America (which has a lot of countries if you include all the Caribbean islands and we would have gotten 100% if the quiz had accepted the answer we kept trying to give it until it decided we were wrong and then gave us that same answer). You have fun your way, we’ll have fun our way.

Thus was our Thanksgiving break bookended. Of course, that left the two days in between, and naturally both of those were filled with events as well.

Something, not nothing, after all.

Twenty-Nine

After twenty-nine years you get to know someone.

You know most of what they like and don’t like. Not all, but most. You know the sorts of things that interest them. You know whether they want you to join them in this or that activity or just want to hare off and do it on their own.

You’ve heard the old stories. A lot of them, anyway. There are always a few surprises, and people find new things to like or become interested in after all. But if someone hasn't told you a story in nearly three decades chances are they're either not going to tell you or they've just completely forgotten about it themselves.

But all that means is that you get to make new stories together.

It’s been twenty-nine years since that crisp autumn day when Kim and I got married, here in Our Little Town. We’ve shared a lot since then, raised a family, traveled, seen, done, done again. We’ve told each other a lot of stories and gotten to know each other pretty well.

And here we are, making new stories.

Happy Anniversary to us!

Further Adventures in Technology

I spent most of my Saturday morning grading essays for an online class I teach, because that’s the kind of wild man I am these days. It’s one of those classes where the only real contact I have with students is grading their essays – everything else is front-loaded into the class site and they proceed at their own pace through the class, turning in essays as they go.

I’m not sure how I became a tech guy as far as classes go. It seems to have just happened gradually over time. I am the proverbial frog boiling in a digital soup.

I’m not much of a technological person. Computers are just black boxes where the internet is stored as far as I know, and don’t even get me started on the mysteries of what most of the “apps” on my phone are doing there. As far as I can tell their main purpose is to extract my email and sell it to spammers, which they do quite well. I am still getting spam advertisements in Hungarian from this summer, for example, because I had to put one of these apps on my phone in order to ride the trams in Budapest. Every so often I will copy the text of one of them and paste it into Google Translate to see whether it is congratulating me on my recent purchase of a bridge over the Danube or something similar, but so far it’s mostly been increasingly desperate attempts to get me to renew my tram pass. And you know, next time I am in Budapest I definitely will! But not now.

Most of my current confusion regarding technology these days seems to center around the various security measures that devices are implementing in order to make sure that only Russian intelligence officers have access to my accounts because they’re probably better at remembering my passwords than I am, after all.

Why the Kremlin would want to follow me on Instagram is kind of an open question, particularly since I have never actually posted anything there, but I have faith that answers will appear in due time.

Both my desktop computer at home (yes, kids, I still have one of those, now get off my lawn) and my phone have biometric security systems in place. My computer came with a keyboard that has a button on it where you put your fingertip (you do get to choose which finger) and it reads your fingerprint and logs you in. My phone relies on its camera for that, scanning my face to determine if it’s really me or not.

I wasn’t all that thrilled about either of these things, but they seem to work most of the time and that’s fine. It is a nuisance having to pick up my phone and stare directly into it in order to log into anything rather than just leaving it on my desk and tapping out a password, but as problems go these days it’s relatively minor after all.

The thing that I don’t get is that every so often both of these devices require me to enter my password in order for these biometric security systems to keep working.

Why?

I’m not sure how a random selection of characters (including at least one capital letter, one number, one “special” character, one Marvel character, three characters from the last movie I saw prior to setting this password, and the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem) is more secure than my fingerprint or my face. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t I have to use the biometrics to keep the password working?

There are probably technical reasons why they make me do it this way and I am sure that if someone were to explain them to me I would stare blankly at them and eventually say “That’s nice” in a vague sort of way until they gave up, so I’ll probably just live with the mystery of it.

In the meantime, I kind of enjoy giving my computer the finger.

The Family Cookbook

Sometime around the turn of the millennium my mother decided that what this family really needed was a cookbook, a collection of recipes from all across the family, and that she was the person to make this happen.

It turned out she was right about that.

In that pre-social-media age she sent out emails and made phone calls and in the end she collected a fair number of recipes including more than a few from her own parents, who had recently passed away. That might have been part of it, now that I think of it – a desire to see those old favorites preserved and passed down. My mother was a storyteller and she put little introductions in front of most of the recipes sharing some of those stories and had a forward to talk about the project, and at some point we all got a small package with a 3-ring binder full of family favorites.

It proved to be very useful, in the end. Not only was it a nice way to honor the various family members who contributed, but we’ve been making things out of that cookbook for nearly a quarter century now.

Three cheers for Aunt Linda’s Baked Pineapple, without which no holiday meal is complete!

But that was a surprisingly long time ago, and some of the people who contributed to that cookbook are no longer here and some other people in the family who are routinely cooking meals for themselves and others these days weren’t even born yet, so last Christmas my cousin Chris and I decided that what this family really needed was a Revised & Expanded Second Edition of the family cookbook and that we were the people to make this happen.

We were right about that too. I tell you, this family has some pretty good fortune-telling skills. It’s a shame we don’t play the lottery more often.

Chris and I put out a call to all of the various branches of the family early this year – or at least as many as we could. There were some we inadvertently missed and not everyone was interested, but over the next few months recipes came pouring in from all over the US – we’re a pretty spread out bunch these days, especially when you expand out to include all of the various in-laws who have made our lives richer over the years.

We are legion.

Chris is a graphic designer by trade so he handled all of the layout and artwork for the book. I’m a word guy who actually enjoys copy-editing, so a fair amount of that ended up as mine, and I ended up in charge of soliciting and receiving recipes though in the end both of us did that anyway. Chris also understands how Google Docs work so all I had to do was send him everything I received and then log in and make edits.

I found a printer here in Our Little Town who would put it all together for a reasonable sum, and they did a very nice job of it. It’s nearly two hundred pages long, this revised edition, and nicely coil-bound. I gave them the pdf that Chris finalized and then picked up the completed cookbooks a couple of weeks ago.

The printers also advised me to get it copyrighted, to avoid some copyright troll with a bot scraping Google Docs and publishing it as their own. That process turned out to be fairly simple, so now all three of us – me, Chris, and my mom – are listed as the copyright holders for the book. Family can share it, of course. But no bots.

There are two post offices here in Our Little Town – a big one out in the mall sprawl land, and a much smaller one downtown that’s only open around lunchtime. Not many people even know it exists, which is why I went there to mail them all off. It’s much nicer when you’re not holding anyone up and you can stand there and have a conversation with the postal worker who’s cranking out the mailing labels, one at a time.

They started to land last week and so far people seem to like them. This makes me happy.

This is the picture Chris chose for the cover. That’s my grandmother – my mom’s mother – and my dad in the little yard behind my grandparents’ house. The white building in the background was an octagonal gazebo that my grandfather used as a tool shed. It’s Labor Day, 1967, and the family has gathered to celebrate and eat, there being precious little distance between those two activities as far as my family is concerned. I’m somewhere running around the yard, a toddler dressed in something adorable no doubt. Neither Chris nor any of our siblings have been born yet, but my second cousins are both there. I can tell that my dad made the hamburgers because he firmly believed that hamburgers should be roughly spherical objects and dismissed anything more disc-like as “hockey pucks.”

I’m older now than my grandmother was in that photo. So is Chris. Time flies.

I love that they look happy. I love that we can continue this tradition of sharing good food with good people.

News and Updates

1. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is wasting no time in assembling the Worst Cabinet Ever – a motley collection of suck-ups, Fascists, pedophiles, white supremacists, delusionals, and blistering incompetents chosen solely for their sycophantic loyalty and guaranteed to make any situation worse – and it’s going to be a very, very long four years for anyone with more than six working brain cells. But even in the midst of collapse, life goes on. And sometimes you just have to look away from the horror show and focus on other things.

2. We got to celebrate Lauren’s birthday last week – rather later than her actual birthday, but there is never a bad time for a birthday celebration, really. We had a lovely dinner and lively conversation and then stopped over at Max’s house to say hello to David S. Pumpkin, and there are good things in the world, yes there are.

3. I have spent most of this week grading exams and discussion posts because last week was kind of a lost cause for focusing on anything other than the current crisis and students really don’t need that kind of thing reflected in their exams. I’m almost done now – I just have to get my last batch of exams scanned and sent off to all of the various places that my US1 class beams out to. They did pretty well, and that’s always a nice thing to see.

4. Facebook has decided I’m boring and honestly kudos to them for figuring that out but I have to say that I don’t think I’m boring in precisely the way that Facebook seems to believe. For much of the last month it has been showing me vast amounts of content from a site called “Death Stairs,” which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin – apparently there are people who go out and photograph unsafe staircases and post them online with descriptions ranging from prosaic (“You could fix this with a couple of two-by-fours and a good set of pliers, you know…”) to purple (“…and then the Angel of Death shown ‘round about me …”) and then other people comment underneath. These posts compete for space with various reels showing people doing household projects in new and presumably innovative ways, which is a genre that might as well be in Sanskrit for all I can make sense of it. I find it kind of compelling that I have so soundly defeated the algorithm’s attempts to understand anything at all about me. Some AI overlords these guys are.

5. Kim and I have been discussing getting a new TV for a while now, or rather Kim has been doing that and I’ve mostly been nodding approvingly since I don’t watch enough television to have it matter one way or the other and she might as well get one she likes. The one we have is getting antiquated – they do that faster than they used to do now that they’re essentially computers – and with the Grand Tariff And Trade War in the offing we figured it was a good time to take care of such a purchase. They’re even on sale at Costco now, right in time for the holidays, so we went down and picked the smallest one they had and it seemed like a good fit until I tried to get it into the van, which should have been my first warning. Fortunately, three-dimensional chess with objects being stuffed into vehicles is one of my hidden talents and we did get it home, where we discovered that we’d been Warehoused. Things don’t seem big in a warehouse. You think the thing you’re buying is a perfectly reasonable size. Then you get it home where the ceilings are a normal height and realize that no, whatever is the proper word for the size of this thing it isn’t “reasonable.” And then you feel really, really grateful that you didn’t succumb to temptation and get any of the larger sizes on offer. We haven’t had time to set it up so it’s just sitting in a box in our living room, slowly deforming the joists underneath and blocking the cat’s path up to the window. Perhaps we’ll get to it this weekend.

6. We’re also trying to get the new showerhead put in. The old one finally died of lime poisoning and old age so Kim found one she liked and put it mostly in before calling me up to finish the tall parts. This didn’t go well and a small plastic gasket – the sort of thing that probably cost them three cents to make – snapped in half. It turns out that this brand of shower heads doesn’t allow replacement parts to be sold by third parties such as your local hardware store. Also, their customer service center is only open during weekdays for forty-five minutes a day, and their website was designed by Neolithic goat herders who had heard of the idea of exchanging money for goods but wanted nothing to do with it. In the end I finally did speak with a customer representative who told me that the gasket was “not a replaceable part” so they were going to send me an entirely new showerhead. “You realize that this is not a sustainable business model,” I told her. “I know,” she said, “but it will be there in a few days.” It’s sitting in the dining room now, not all that far from the television, and someday we’ll get to that as well.

7. We are deep into this year’s rendition of Great British Bake Off and so far so good even if my personal favorite was just voted off. They’ve cut down the nonsense (so far no “tackos”) and focused more on actual baking, which is nice. And the contestants are the usual assortment of decent people who get along and try to help each other. It’s nice to know that such a place exists.

8. It may actually be autumn now, halfway through November. I finally started wearing long sleeve shirts anyway, though the rabbits are still outside since we have not really had any extended freezes that would force us to bring them in. Honestly if we’d covered the garden for those two nights in early October we’d probably still be harvesting tomatoes and peppers.

9. Over the last two weeks of my classes I have gotten to tell three of my all-time favorite history stories – all of which have, at one time or another, been featured here in this space – and they never get old.

A Note for the Future

In the end they didn’t even need to stage a coup. The voters of the United States simply handed power back to a twice-impeached convicted felon running on a platform of open fascism, a man who tried to overthrow the government and who hasn’t been able to form a coherent sentence since 2019. An adjudicated rapist, self-declared sexual predator, and serial adulterer who publicly lusted after his own daughter and buried his ex-wife on a golf course. On and on.

If this election proved anything it is that the American public would rather elect a fascist than a woman. That 71 million Americans do not regard committing rape as a disqualifier. That 71 million Americans would gladly trade the rights of their fellow citizens for the illusion of a future with cheaper eggs.

How cheaply my fellow Americans sell their rights and freedoms.

We had four years of conclusive evidence that the man was unfit for office, that he was a small, petty little grifter incapable of rising to any occasion larger than his own personal greed, and yet here we are.

You will notice that the American left (as much as the US has anything even remotely like a left) is not throwing a toddler-level tantrum over this – not claiming that it was somehow rigged, not threatening violence over the results, not filing dozens of frivolous lawsuits alleging hallucinatory conspiracy theories and fleecing donors to fund it all. Adults understand that sometimes things don’t go the way you want them to.

We just understand, in a way that the rest of the country hasn’t figured out quite yet, that this isn’t going to go well for anyone, not just us.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is everything the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to prevent and everything the Greatest Generation went to Europe to fight, and yet in January he will be installed into power. He has no grasp of law, Constitutions, morals, or anything other than raw power and insatiable greed.

Look for reprisals against “the enemy within.” Look for pogroms against anyone not Just Like Him. Look for the darkness spreading out like a cancer from his supporters.

We’ve seen this movie. It didn’t end well in Germany in the 1930s and it won’t end well here.

So what do patriotic Americans do now?

We resist.

We stand for the things that make this country better, not worse.

We do whatever we have to do to keep fascism at bay.

And in the end we will see if the American republic still stands in January 2029 or not.

Here I stand. I can do no other.

An Election and a Warning

Sometime Tuesday night, probably around 9pm Eastern Time, Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump will declare victory in the presidential election.

He will do so in the same rambling, semi-coherent monotone he has used for the last few years as his mental condition has deteriorated into an angry and paranoid dementia, smug with the reassurance of a man who feels the world owes him whatever he wants whenever he wants and who has never once in his life faced any consequences for his actions.

He will do so regardless of the actual vote totals. He will likely do so more strenuously if the results show him losing, in fact. It’s not about reality. It’s about creating a pretext for action.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has not been trying to win a majority of the votes, after all. He has tried twice before and been overwhelmingly rejected both times, though once – thanks to the partisan gerrymandering of the Electoral College – he slithered into power anyway. He knows he cannot win the majority of the votes of Americans. He will lose the popular vote by somewhere between two and eight million votes, just as he has always done. It’s been eight years with this sad clown. Nobody has changed their minds about him in his favor. He has made no effort to broaden his base of supporters or reach out beyond the hardcore MAGA cult. His entire campaign has instead been a setup, laying the groundwork for the next stage of the ongoing right-wing coup against the United States.

When Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump makes his declaration, the extremist right-wing machinery that surrounds him and props him up like the hollow man he is will shift into high gear and launch its all-out war on the electoral process. There will be lawsuits. There will be threats. There will be hoarsely shouted assertions that the only acceptable alternative is to install Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump into power because any result that doesn’t do that must by definition be fraudulent.

There will be blood.

Make no mistake, folks. The neofascist right has been gearing up for this moment for years, ever since they were forced to back down in January 2021. They recognize no laws but their own privilege. They recognize no morals but their own desires. They think they can shoot their way to power. It has happened before, after all, in other places and other times, and the United States is not immune to history. The FBI and US intelligence agencies have reported that the chatter in right-wing circles online almost exactly mirrors what it was in early January 2021 when the neofascists nearly overthrew the government and installed their dictator into office against the will of the American people. The leaders and masters of that insurrection have walked free so far, and an insurrection that goes unpunished is called a dress rehearsal.

They have the support of millions of GOP voters who think they’re not neofascists but are deluding themselves - a PRRI survey conducted in the last couple of weeks noted that 24% of Republican voters think Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the actual outcome of the election. That’s what dictators do. That’s what Fascists do. That’s what 24% of Republicans think is appropriate in the United States.

One out of four, more or less.

The neofascists do not control the levers of power at the moment, however. They do not control the military. They do not control the security forces. And most Americans want to see this country continue the centuries-old tradition of the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next, a tradition that was brutally shattered in January 2021. The flip side of that PRRI poll, after all, is that three out of four Republicans – along with near unanimous majorities of Democrats and Independents – reject the idea that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump should seize power regardless of the election results, as all Americans should do. Unless all of that changes the neofascists cannot win, but they can do damage.

Americans must be prepared to face this onslaught and see it defeated. Americans must be prepared to block those who would destroy the republic and replace it with dictatorship.

Americans must be ready.

We will say to the neofascists, we outnumber you. We will say to them, we will see you fail. We will say to them, we will see you forgotten, your plans turned to dust, your names turned to ashes, your memory erased.

Watch your back, my fellow Americans. Tomorrow is not the end of this contest, but simply the beginning of the next phase.

Birthday Wishes

There aren’t many milestones in American culture once you get past the age of 21.

There’s a few, of course. You can rent a car at 25. You can also run for the House of Representatives. You have to be 30 to be a Senator, and 35 to be president, if that’s something you think is interesting. You start to qualify for senior discounts at 50, and sometime after 60 you get to retire though they keep pushing that date back and eventually it won’t happen at all so be quick about it.

But there’s a long gap after 21 and to be honest not many of those other things are all that exciting to most people. Either way there are no milestones associated with turning 22. It’s one of those years where it’s kind of more of the same only older.

Those birthdays are worth celebrating as well, though.

It is a lovely thing to have made it one more trip around the sun, a thing guaranteed to nobody so it should be celebrated when it happens after all. You learn new things, experience new things, and grow in new directions. Those trips have added up over the years, and it’s always a strange thought to realize this vibrant, interesting adult isn’t a child anymore because it all happened so quickly. From one year to the next it doesn’t seem like anything changes but then you look at the cumulative effect and suddenly things really are different and you’re not sure how .

That’s why I write things down.

We’re not going to see Lauren tonight – it’s Halloween on a big college campus and there are more than enough other things going on to keep her occupied – but we’ll get together next week to celebrate. Holidays happen when you have time, and the important thing is to celebrate them together. Eventually she will hare off into her own life far from here and these opportunities will grow few and far between so we’re going to enjoy them while we have them.

And we will celebrate, because Lauren is worth celebrating.

Happy birthday, Lauren.

I’m proud of you.

The Reviews are In!

You know what I think of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump. I’ve made no secret of my contempt for him since he first metastasized across the American body politic in 2015. But what do the people who know him best think? The people who have worked in his administration? Who are members of his own party? Who support conservative causes in general? Perhaps even part of his family?

Let’s find out, shall we?

--

General James Mattis (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Defense

Trump's use of the Presidency to destroy trust in our election and to poison our respect for fellow citizens has been enabled by pseudo political leaders whose names will live in infamy as profiles in cowardice. Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people - does not even pretend to try. Instead, he tries to divide us.

General John Kelly (USMC, ret), former Secretary of Homeland Security and former Chief of Staff

He certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure. He never accepted the fact that he wasn’t the most powerful man in the world, and by power I mean an ability to do anything he wanted, anytime he wanted.

He’s certainly the only president that has all but rejected what America is all about, and what makes America America, in terms of our Constitution, in terms of our values, the way we look at everything, to include family and government — he’s certainly the only president that I know of, certainly in my lifetime, that was like that.

A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution and the rule of law.

General Mark Milley (US Army, ret), former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Trump is a wannabe dictator. We don't take an oath to an individual. We take an oath to the Constitution, and we take an oath to the idea that is America - and we're willing to die to protect it.

A fascist to the core.

Fiona Hill, former advisor on Europe and Russia

He was extremely vulnerable to manipulation. And that became a problem for him as a president. And what I mean by that is, he had a very fragile ego, and he was very susceptible to flattery, as well as taking massive offense, as we all saw, to any kind of criticism.

Mark Esper, former Secretary of Defense

I do regard him as a threat to democracy, democracy as we know it, our institutions, our political culture, all those things that make America great and have defined us as, you know, the oldest democracy on this planet.

Trump is not fit for office because he puts himself first and I think anybody running for office should put the country first.

John Bolton, former National Security Advisor

In no arena of American affairs has the Trump aberration been more destructive than in national security. His short attention span (except on matters of personal advantage) renders coherent foreign policy almost unattainable.

Mike Pence, former Vice President

I believe anyone that puts themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States and anyone who asks someone else to put them over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again.

It should come as no surprise that I will not be endorsing Donald Trump this year.

Alyssa Farah Griffin, former Communications Director

He is wholly unfit to be in office.

Rex Tillerson, former Secretary of State

There were multiple occasions where, in my view, the actions the president wanted to take were not consistent with our national security objectives. ... His understanding of global events, his understanding of global history, his understanding of U.S. history was really limited.

Miles Taylor, former official in the Department of Homeland Security

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)

He’s a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot. He doesn’t represent my party. He doesn’t represent the values that the men and women who wear the uniform are fighting for.

Dick Cheney, former vice president for George W. Bush

In our nation’s 246-year- history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump. He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power, after the voters had rejected him. He is a coward. A real man wouldn’t lie to his supporters. He lost his election, and he lost big.

Representative John Boehner (R-OH), former Speaker of the House

Trump incited that bloody insurrection for nothing more than selfish reasons, perpetuated by the bullshit he’d been shoveling since he lost a fair election the previous November. He claimed voter fraud without any evidence, and repeated those claims, taking advantage of the trust placed in him by his supporters and ultimately betraying that trust.

Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY)

The president could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), former Senate Majority Leader

Many politicians sometimes make overheated comments or use metaphors. ... That’s different from what we saw. This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories, orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.

Mick Mulvaney, former Chief of Staff

I am working hard to make sure that someone else is the nominee.

Anthony Scaramucci, former Director of Communication

Trump's going to make things rougher for people. He has already said he's going after his adversaries using the Department of Justice. When someone's telling you they're going to flex and be a dictator on day one and go after their adversaries, this is against the 200+ year experiment of America.

Open letter signed by 13 former Trump administration officials

Donald Trump's disdain for the American military and admiration for dictators like Hitler is rooted in his desire for absolute, unchecked power. This is a man who threw his own Vice President – Mike Pence – at a violent mob in a desperate bid to hold on to power. When Donald Trump says he wants to be a "dictator" on "day one" and deploy the military against American citizens he deems “the enemy from within" - he means it.

Open letter signed by 233 mental health professionals

Trump exhibits behavior that tracks with the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s (DSM V) diagnostic criteria for “narcissistic personality disorder,” “antisocial personality disorder,” and “paranoid personality disorder,” all made worse by his intense sadism, which is a symptom of malignant narcissism. This psychological type was first identified by German psychologist Erich Fromm to explain the psychology of history’s most “evil” dictators. … To make matters worse, Trump appears to be showing signs of cognitive decline that urgently cry out for a full neurological work-up, including an MRI and neuropsychological testing. These symptoms include: a dramatic decrease in verbal fluency, tangential thinking, diminished vocabulary, overuse of superlatives and filler words, perseveration, confabulation, phonemic paraphasia, semantic paraphasia, confusing people (not just names), as well as exhibiting deteriorating judgment, impulse control, and motor functioning (including a wide-based gait). We suspect the results of such an evaluation would be disqualifying.

Open letter signed by over 100 former national security officials (including ambassadors, admirals, generals, and civilian officials)

Mr. Trump threatens our democratic system; he has said so himself. He has called for the “termination” of parts of the Constitution. He said he wants to be a “dictator,” and his clarification that he would only be a dictator for a day is not reassuring. He has undermined faith in our elections by repeating lies, without evidence, of “millions” of fraudulent votes. He has shown no remorse for trying to overturn the 2020 election on January 6th, promises to pardon the convicted perpetrators, and has made clear he will not respect the results of the 2024 election should he lose again. That alone proves Mr. Trump is unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

William T. Kelley, professor of Marketing at the Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania

Donald Trump was the DUMBEST GODDAM student I EVER had.

The American Conservative Magazine

Trump has basically made himself into Putin’s prison bride.

Tara Setmayer, former Communications Director for Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)

He demonstrates daily how unfit he is to have the most powerful position in the world.

J. Michael Luttig, conservative former US Circuit Court of Appeals judge

Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. They would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election, but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020. I don't speak those words lightly. I would have never spoken those words ever in my life, except that that's what the former president and his allies are telling us

Mary Trump, niece and a trained mental health professional

I don’t care what his cult says. I know him personally. And here’s the truth: My uncle is the only person I know without one redeeming quality. Not a single one.

Doing My Bit

I have done my bit for democracy.

I have cast my ballot in this most critical of elections – the most recent of them, anyway. It is easy to get jaded by all of the “most critical elections” that we’ve been having recently, but the sad fact is that whenever an outright Fascist has a chance to win it really is critical that he be destroyed at the ballot box so that we don’t need to do that in the inevitable violence that will result if he wins. Fascists do not tolerate dissent well, and they like the Big Shiny of jackbooted thugs enforcing their whims. We’ve seen this movie before. It didn’t end well. It needs to be cut off before it starts.

Do not be jaded, because it really is that important. Do not be discouraged by the prophets of doom who see no hope, because while there is life there is hope and if they want me they can goddamn well take me themselves because I’m not turning myself in. Do not be misled by the propagandists who tell you that your vote doesn’t matter, because they wouldn’t be trying so hard to stop you from voting if that were true.

Do not go gently into the long dark night of Fascism, but rage against the dying of the light until the fading stops and the light returns.

I left work a bit early today, as it is a Friday and for long and frankly rather aggravating reasons that I will not go into here there are vanishingly few classes taught at Home Campus on Fridays and therefore equally few students who want to make appointments with their advisor on that day, and I headed over to City Hall. Here in Wisconsin we’ve been able to do early in-person voting since the beginning of the week and I have to say that this is an idea that has definitely found its audience.

I got there at 3:30 or so on a Friday afternoon, about an hour before the place closes, and there was quite a line in front of me. 

It took me over an hour to get to the voting machine.

It has to be said that the line moved pretty briskly. It wasn’t stagnant – it was just that long. If nothing else, this gives me some hope for the survival of American democracy.

They’ve redone the process since the last election where I voted early. You used to get a big paper ballot and you’d fill in the bubbles by hand with a marker and then you’d fold it three or four times to get it into the envelope and turn it back in to the clerk. Now you get a thin blank ballot – maybe 4 inches by 11 inches or so – and you take it to a touchscreen computer. You feed it into the slot, then vote on the computer and when you’re done it gives you a chance to say “Yes, that’s what I wanted to do” or “No, let me change that one” and then when you say you’re done it prints out the ballot with your choices on it. You fold that in half, stick it in the envelope, and then give it to the volunteers at the next table. You have to sign it in front of them, but then you can go.

They did give me the traditional sticker, which I appreciated.

We are facing a future where an outright Fascist, a 34-time convicted felon facing more than four dozen other criminal indictments, a self-declared sexual predator, a coddler of dictators and spiraling dementia patient whose previous term in office was marked by blistering incompetence, overt bigotry (not surprising, given the endorsements he received from every major neo-Nazi and white supremacist group in America), a response to a global pandemic so deliberately botched that peer-reviewed scientific papers attribute the unnecessary deaths of over a quarter million Americans directly to his leadership, a recession that started even before that, an unprecedented two impeachments, and a treasonous insurrection, somehow has an even money chance to be reinstalled into power.

This cannot happen if the American republic is to survive.

I have done my bit.

If you value the republic, you will do the same.

A Wedding Up North

Many years ago, somewhat on a whim, I signed up to be an ordained minister in the Church of the Latter Day Dude. It’s based on the old movie The Big Lebowski and its basic theology is “don’t be a jerk.” I can go with that. I think more people should subscribe to it, actually. It would make the world a better place.

Not long after that a friend found out about this when she was planning her wedding and asked me if I would officiate, so I double checked with the local County Clerk about that and we determined that since the LDD Church was not a registered 501c3 nonprofit it didn’t qualify under Wisconsin law but that I could just as easily sign up for the Universal Life Church – whose basic theology is much the same and which is a 501c3 – and do it that way, so I did. I officiated her wedding and another a few years later.

This past weekend I got to do my third.

I’ve known Sherry since we were both shelving books at the library here in Our Little Town way back at the turn of the millennium and we’ve been friends ever since. When she brought Evelyn over for dinner a couple of summers ago we could tell there was something special there and it is nice to be right about the good things.

The wedding was up in northern Wisconsin, so on Friday Kim and I drove up to our friend Joe’s house, not that far away. It is good to see friends when you can, especially if they’re more or less on the way and are happy to let us stay with them and fill us up with good food. We had a lovely time hanging out with Joe and Lisa and the various dogs, and Kim got a chance to wander around in the woods which doesn’t happen very often here in Our Little Town, particularly with me around, so it worked out very well.

Saturday afternoon we continued our way north to Hayward, where the wedding would be – an outdoor sculpture garden next to the local library. Most of the guests were either librarians or people associated with librarians so it all fit together nicely. It was brisk and a bit rainy for the rehearsal but we managed to get all of the blocking down – who enters when from where, what do they do when they get there, what music plays when, that sort of thing. Sometimes it helps having spent three or four decades backstage. Kim and I checked into our AirB&B afterward and then went back into town for the after-rehearsal party at a nice little winery there.

We had the early part of Sunday to ourselves and spent a fair bit of it talking with our AirB&B hosts, who seemed like nice people. We found a wooded trail to walk for a while, had lunch at a local diner, and then wandered around downtown Hayward taking in the place a bit. It’s an entertaining place to visit.

And then the time for the wedding was at hand.

I like weddings. They’re generally happy affairs, and it’s a lovely thing to see two people who love each other enough to want to spend the rest of their lives together. Sherry, Evelyn and I had worked out the basic structure of the service beforehand and I spent much of the last couple of weeks working on the details.

It went very well.

It was a bright and sunny day, rather warm for northern Wisconsin in late October but pretty much exactly the sort of day you’d design for an outdoor wedding if you had the chance. All of the various parties made it up to their positions without mishap. I got through my homily (“Abide with each other”) and did not lose the rings. They wrote their own vows and did them well. They kissed. And then there they were – legally wedded, ready for a life together. There is good in this world, and when you get a chance to be a part of it you should take it.

Kim and I couldn’t really stay afterward – it’s a long ride from Hayward back to Our Little Town and Monday was a workday – but it was worth the drive.

Congratulations to Sherry and Evelyn! I wish you a lifetime of love and happiness.