Go Cup Crazy!

Do you know what you can do with $500?

You can buy a new TV. You can get twenty new hardback books or sixty paperbacks at retail, and several hundred books used if you know where to go. You can get a new DVD player and every movie worth watching that was made in the last thirty years, which, granted, is not a large number of movies, but work with me here.

Or you could get one - one - nosebleed seat ticket to see tomorrow's Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Finals in Chicago between the hometown Blackhawks and the Philadelphia Flyers. That doesn't include parking, gas, tolls, refreshments, souvenirs, meals, or taxes. Just the ticket.

I've been a Flyers fan for most of my life, with varying degrees of intensity. It's a sport I enjoy watching no matter who's playing, and they are by far my favorite team in it. I can remember the last time they won the Stanley Cup, in 1975 - my brother and I were in the bedroom we shared as kids, not sleeping at all, when all of the sudden horns started blaring and it sounded like the Russians had invaded Philadelphia in search of cheesesteaks. We didn't find out what the story was until the next day, by which time I might have been writing in Cyrillic had things gone differently. I've actually gone to a few games, too - once as a kid when my dad scored some tickets, and twice courtesy of my brother's in-laws, who gave me a game from their season tickets a couple of years' running. Both times they beat the Carolina Hurricanes 4-3 in overtime, oddly enough. And when Tabitha was born I put a Flyers pennant (and an Eagles pennant, which was a leap of faith at the time) over her crib, in the fond hopes of raising another fan. It sort of worked, as much as she follows any sport.

Part of the effort, way back when.

This year I've been following the Flyers' improbable march through the playoffs as best I can out here in the nation's tender midsection. It has not been easy.

For one thing, there is the fact that NHL hockey in general is not exactly a major draw out here. The local newspaper does not regularly print standings, let alone scores or stories, during the regular season, and while you can often get video of high school girls basketball on the local news they rarely give you NHL scores even on the bottom-screen crawl.

For another thing, the Powers That Be were not all that interested in showing the Flyers on their little television network when the playoffs rolled around. There were eight playoff series in Round 1, and they televised some 35 games, not one of which included the Flyers. We were the only series that didn't get a minimum of two games. Some got seven.

On one level I can sort of understand that, since the Flyers qualified for the post-season literally on the last shot of the season, winning a shootout on the last day of the regular season just to get in, and very little was expected of them. But their opponents were a 2-seed, the division winner, and you'd think that would count for something.

But you'd be wrong.

So I listened to them on internet radio as they beat the New Jersey Devils. And when the network finally decided to show some of their games, I watched them go down three games to none in a best of seven to the Boston Bruins, only to pull off the fourth ever comeback from that deficit in North American sports history to win in seven. This despite going down 3-0 fifteen minutes into that seventh game. Apparently they like a challenge, this team. I then watched them take care of the Montreal Canadiens with some efficiency, because there are only so many challenges one's heart can take in one season.

And now it is the Finals. In Chicago, a city within easy driving distance.

Kim told me I should go see a game. "It's not like they do this every year," she said. "You may never get this chance again."

So I looked into it.

$500.

There is just nothing appropriate for a married man to spend that kind of money on for three hours of entertainment. I've thought about it and the only things that qualify as worthwhile on that scale of dollars-per-hour involve large quantities of alcohol, several new acquaintances of questionable virtue, and fevered attempts to reconstruct events from police reports over the following weeks. This might conceivably have worked when I was 22, but even if it sounded attractive to me now I don't think I would survive it.

So I guess I'll watch from home this year, which is just fine.

Go Flyers!

Run, Tabby, Run!

Tabitha comes from a long line of people who run in circles.

When I was in high school I ran track for a season and a half, before the coach cut about half the team one day. We were never sure why, as a group, but I can't say it crushed me, not being the star of the team even in my fevered imagination. I was a "c - heat" sprinter, one of the extra guys too fast to ignore and too slow to win anything, though I was quick off the mark. If there had been a 4-meter race, I'd have been state champ.

Kim also ran track back in her high school. They took one look at this 5' 3" woman and said, yes, folks, here is our hurdler. She also ran unimpeded races.

Grandpop was another hurdler, back in the day.

I've always been impressed by people who could do that. As a friend of mine once put it, "It's bad enough they make you run all that far, but then they put things in your way."

Today was the city-wide fourth-grade track meet, and Tabitha was entered into several events representing Not Bad President Elementary. So we trekked down to the town football stadium and settled in to watch our girl give it her all.

It was a beautiful day, bright and sunny, and not as hot as it had been recently, though after a few hours sitting on metal benches facing the morning sun it did get a bit warm. I now have sunburned knees, which is not something I get to say very often. It's hard to imagine a context in which it would naturally come up, in fact.

Not long after we got there the buses carrying the NBPE team came and the place was suddenly filled with buzzing children wearing vocal-yellow tee shirts. It certainly made them stand out against their competitors, who were attired in more sedate colors such as red, blue, and orange. They gathered out on the track in front of us and sang the University of Iowa fight song in honor of their departed gym teacher, a UI grad. I had never heard that song before, not even when I was a student there.

And then it was down to business!

After you haven't done it for a while you forget the barely controlled chaos of a track meet - the milling athletes, the droning announcers trying to get people to where they need to be, the incessant gunfire from the starter's pistol, as if you're in downtown Baghdad. It was an entertaining morning, with all of the runners doing their best and getting cheered on from the sides.

Tabitha's first event was the long jump, and here she scored her greatest success - taking second place overall in this city-wide event! She got a nice red ribbon and the admiration of her parents and friends - she's already exceeded my win quota from my entire career - and then she moved on to other events.

She competed in the frisbee toss and the fifty-yard dash, both events featuring wild excitement all around.

And finally at the end there was the 4x50 relay, which took place on the infield - conveniently marked off in yard lines already. They lined the teams up from sideline to sideline - there must have been a dozen teams in each heat - and let them rip.  Chaos doesn't begin to describe what happened next, but they had a good time running and (speaking as someone who was single-handedly responsible for almost three hours of team baton practice in my ill-fated track career) I was impressed with the baton passes. They did a really nice job.

It was a great morning.

Congratulations, Tabitha. We're proud of you.

A Bridge to the Future

Wanna buy a bridge?

Last night was Bridging Night over at the Daisies. This is what Girl Scouts call their graduation ceremonies, and really it's a nice little metaphor. Graduation and commencement are all about leaving one place but not really about landing in another - that's up to you. Here's your diploma, what's your hurry, don't let the door hit you as you leave. But bridging implies that somewhere on the other end is a place for you. This is yet one more reason why the Girl Scouts are better than real life.

Lauren has been a Daisy for two years now, and it was time for her to move on to the big, exciting world of Brownies. So we wrapped her up in her bright blue vest and headed off for Greatest President Elementary, there to bridge.

These ceremonies are nice, simple and short - key qualities for events scheduled on hot, muggy days in elementary school gyms. The parents and siblings gather in the audience, having deposited all manner of treats in the school cafeteria for after. The scouts parade in - and there were a lot of them on this night, since not only does Lauren's troop of Daisies number around three dozen but there is also a Brownie troop that meets at the same time and they were there too. There are a few words from the troop leaders - brave women all.

Then each girl walks across the bridge and underneath the raised arms of the other, nonbridging girls, to receive her certificate.  At that point there is an explosion of camera flashes trying to capture the moment - unsuccessfully, it turns out, because it happens at warp speed (they redo it later for the parents to take pictures that are in focus) - and then the cycle repeats for the next troop.

And then there is food - lots of it, mostly sugar that has been dyed colors not found in nature - and a fair amount of energy being burned off through motion and noise.

Congratulations, Lauren!

Nailed

This is one of those “friend of a friend” stories, the kind that are invariably jokes, hoaxes or viral marketing campaigns but are just too good not to pass along. I’d like to think it’s true, but then I’d like to win the lottery too. Could happen; not likely.

My friend Josh used to work for the National Park Service, and this is the story more or less as he told it to me.

A friend of his in the Park Service was leading a group of tourists through a historic site that dated back to colonial America, sometime in the 1600s or so as I recall. One of the buildings was a frame house, and the guide was explaining the various features of the building when one of the visitors spoke up.

“This is a reconstruction,” he said.

“No,” the guide replied, “this is the actual building, constructed in the 1600s.”

“No,” the tourist insisted, “it is a reconstruction. This is not the original. It cannot be the original. It has nails holding the boards together. They didn’t have nails then, only wooden pegs.”

“Well, sir,” the guide responded, “it is true that wooden pegs were sometimes used in construction at the time, but there were also nails. They were expensive, but people at the time did use them to construct their buildings.”

“No they did not,” said the tourist. “They did not have nails then. Nails were not invented until the 1800s.”

“Sir, nail-making has a very long history. I assure you that they did have nails.”

“Now you see here. I know these things. They did not have nails that long ago.”

“Look,” responded the guide. “Jesus Christ was not Scotch-taped to the cross.  Trust me, they had nails.”

I really hope this story is true.

It's Not What It Seems

I am surrounded by liquor boxes.

It’s not that I am a heavy drinker. There are times when I’d like to be, but I’ve just never made that leap – not even in college, when I was supposed to be doing such things. Most of my visits to bars back then were because I was with the band (a handy way to get around being carded, I found), and at parties I was usually the other sober guy next to my roommate.

Beware of two smart-alec sober guys in a room full of drunks. That’s all that needs to be said about that.

No, this week is when I try to get my office cleaned out for the big carpet switch. There’s a lot of stuff in that office, and it has to get packed up somehow. And being from Pennsylvania, my first thought was: “Boxes? Liquor store.”

The rest of the country thinks we’re all lushes. We roll up in our moving vans, throw open the back doors of the truck, and start unloading boxes with proof content clearly stamped on them. This impressed my neighbors in Iowa no end, when I showed up there.

But it’s not that.

Pennsylvania has some of the most bass-ackward liquor laws in the United States, which is saying something. I once had a friend in Pittsburgh who moonlighted as a stand-up comic, and he had an entire 20-minute routine that was a 100% factual question-and-answer session on the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Laws. It was side-splittingly funny – “I want to buy a beer.” “Well, you can go to the bar.” “But I want to buy a six-pack.” “Then you have to wait until closing time and buy them one at a time, unless they serve food.” “Can I go to the store and buy one?” “No.” “But that store sells beer!” “That’s a distributorship, not a store. You can buy a keg there.” “Not a six-pack?” “No.” “A case?” “Maybe...” And on and on.

The key thing to remember is that all alcohol except beer is sold by the state (or was – it’s been a while since I lived there). Beer is sold at distributorships and some convenience stores. You go to the State Store (really – that’s what they’re called) for everything else. The Stalinist overtones of that are not coincidental – when I was a kid, the way it worked if you wanted a bottle of wine was you would go into the store – a grim, grey, soulless place with fading posters of wines being held by heroic workers tacked on the wall – walk up to the counter and look through a book. You’d point to the one you wanted, and the clerk would disappear into the back and return with your wine. It was part of the Commonwealth’s plan to curb drinking by making the experience unpleasant. It was about as effective as you'd imagine, and eventually they decided that making money from sales was a better way to go. When they set up a State Store as a regular store – with aisles full of merchandise that you could select from yourself – it was front page news.

When I got to Iowa in 1993 I went to the grocery store and there, on the shelves, were bottles of wine. I found this deliriously exciting and bought some just because I could. I may have still had it when I moved out in 1995, but the important thing is that I could buy more if I wanted to. One must have one’s victories in life.

The one nice thing about Pennsylvania’s system was that you could go to the State Store and get all the empty boxes you wanted, any time you wanted. Really, I had paid for them with my tax dollars (not that I paid many taxes as a college student or younger) and they were mine anyway. So every time I need boxes, I think liquor. It makes my stuff just that much more interesting.

My boxes will be filled with paper and gadgets rather than wine or whiskey, but I can dream.

A Break In The Action

There is nothing left to grade.

This is a difficult concept to wrap my mind around right now. There’s always something that I should be grading. There is always an essay or a quiz or some other example of the poor transmission rate of my teaching to my students’ learning that needs to be slogged through, commented upon in the fond hopes that maybe this time it will work, and returned. Sometimes it does work, which is one of those things that teachers live for. And sometimes I don’t even need to comment – once in a while, they just get it. Hail, happy day.

But the semester is over, and there is nothing else to grade.

I find myself searching my office for more. It does not seem likely that this burden has been taken from me. In truth it will be returned to me in a few weeks when the next cycle comes up anyway.

And really, that’s a good thing – it means somebody’s paying me to teach history, which is an all too uncommon thing to have happen in today’s job market. The Great Recession of 2008 was nothing new for people in my field. Historians have been in recession since the late 1980s. I remember when I first got to graduate school in 1989, the word was that soon the post-WWII wave of PhDs would begin to retire and new opportunities would arise for historians, opportunities the likes of which had not been seen since the Johnson Administration.

But those people did not retire right away, and when they did they were not replaced by full-time tenured faculty with any great speed or in any great numbers. The 90s were tight, the 00s remained so, and the current economic unpleasantness coupled with the relentless sustained assaults by modern conservatives on history (ironic, really) and education in general (who needs facts and expertise when you have paranoid fantasy and faith-based reality?) have rendered any general hope of improvement in that situation rather forlorn.

So any time someone is willing to hire me to do what I was trained to do – what I have spent an inordinate portion of my life working to be able to do, and what by most accounts I am very good at doing (I don’t believe in false modesty, since I have so much to be genuinely modest about) – it is a good day.

Grading still sucks, though, no matter how you slice it. It’s the cloud that goes with my silver lining.

But it’s over. For now.

Change is Good

I am not sure what it says about me that I managed to scrounge up four dollars in change out of my car this afternoon.

Probably just that they were selling ice cream at Not Bad President Elementary and the girls were hungry. It is amazing what you can do when there is ice cream at the other end of it, especially here in Wisconsin. This is a state where the ice cream section of the average grocery store is bigger than all of the grocery stories combined that I went to in the UK when we visited a few years back. But that is a country with warm beer, so what to they know about ice cream?

They also have coins that double as manhole covers, so removing enough coins from your car to pay for two ice cream cups would probably increase your gas mileage (kilometerage?) by nearly 40%. It was kind of a let down to spend a week or so carrying around the slag heap that is a pile of pound- and 50p-coins and then return to the United States and be handed a dime. How can we in the US even consider ourselves an economic powerhouse when our coins are that flimsy?

But it was walkabout day down at NBPE, in honor of the gym teacher who passed away last fall. They're trying to build a track with his name on it, and this was one of the fundraisers - most of the kids spent the day walking around the field surrounding the school to raise money, and the process continued after school let out as well. One of the local ice cream vendors showed up as part of it, with half the proceeds going to the track. So it was worth digging around in the car a bit.

I actually spent most of the day over at NBPE, which was a nice break from a hectic week of grading, exams, and other end-of-semester heartache.

A couple of months ago, Tabitha came home and said that her class was discussing the Underground Railroad and the local UGRR site. Now, it happens that I used to run that site, so I volunteered to come in and talk to her class about it. And then one thing led to another, and it morphed into two separate hour-long presentations, one to the fourth grade and one to the fifth, though in the end they were only 45 minutes each and the PTA chipped in to make a nice donation to the UGRR site, so it all worked out well.

Tabitha said I did not embarrass her any more than usual.

But I got there at noon, and with the walk-a-thon on top of everything I didn't get home until nearly 4:30, by which time my blood sugar levels had reached Kelvin-scale lows and I simply sat in my chair for half an hour eating until I felt better. That's not a bad way to spend time, really.

If only I'd found another eight quarters in the car, I could have gotten an ice cream for me too.