Indiana Oh Indiana

Stubborn Remnants of Childhood

We all have childhood memories, some of which we actually share. It’s wonderful when a friend says about something from many years ago, “Oh yeah, I remember that too!” Having grown up in Northwest Indiana, I find it difficult now as a resident of both Colorado and Florida to find people, who recall some of the same things with which I grew up, especially from the 1950’s.

There have been times when people looked at me as though my top floor were completely unfurnished after my heartfelt descriptions of things like TV shows from that early era. For instance, there was in 1956 and 1957 an afternoon television program called, “Susan’s Show,” starring a twelve-year-old with a brunette page boy hairstyle, who showed Popeye cartoons and conversed with a library table named Mr. Pegasus, whose only drawer was the mouth through which he spoke, the drawer moving in and out to the sound of his voice. I’m not making this up!

For years I thought occasionally that I had merely imagined some of those Hoosier entertainments, but now in the age of Google and other means to achieve instant research success, there is photographic proof that I have not just fabricated those characters.

Another Chicago-based children’s TV program from 1952 until October of 1976 was Garfield Goose and Friends, a show with puppets as characters depicting an ongoing narrative about a goose named Garfield, who thought he was king of the United States of America. This fantasy was bolstered by the other characters like, Chris, nephew of Garfield, who was born on Christmas Day (Christmas Goose), a sleepy bloodhound named Beauregard Burnside III, Romberg Rabbit, and Macintosh Mouse. The only actual speaking character was Frazier Thomas, the accommodating “prime minister,” who humored Garfield’s egocentric delusions by wearing a royal jacket with gold epaulets and many sparkling medals. The Little Theater Screen showed cartoons, like Clutch Cargo. Who would believe all this unless he has seen it for himself?

Then there was a program called, “The Happy Pirates,” a noontime confection with two guys dressed up as friendly pirates, who sang, danced and showed cartoons, like Felix the Cat. One of the pirates was Two-Ton Baker, who would often sing, “I’m a Lonely Little Petunia in an Onion Patch.” I’m not kidding!

There were other more famous kids’ shows, like Soupy Sales, Howdy Doody, and Pinky Lee, a live TV show on which I saw Pinky having an actual heart attack one afternoon during his funny dance routine, which the next day was front page news all over the nation.

I have other memories of a collection of strange little books, a series by Betty MacDonald called Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, who was a kind of nanny with cures for every juvenile behavior problem from not picking up one’s toys to bullying. The story that haunted me for many years was called, “The Radish Cure” about a little girl named Patsy, who absolutely refused to take baths or wash herself until she was encrusted by dirt so thick that Mrs. Piggle Wiggle planted radish seeds in Patsy’s arms, legs, and on her head while she was asleep. Of course, the radishes sprouted until Patsy looked like a mobile vegetable garden. Horrified, Patsy eventually began taking baths twice a day. In the year 2000 I finally found and purchased that entire series of these bizarre little stories and use them now to prove I didn’t just dream them up myself.

All of us keep recollections of childhood that are the most arresting, but perhaps we don’t share them after we “grow up” and become, ”level-headed” and more rational, afraid that others may think we are weird (which with any kind of luck we actually ARE). Nevertheless, those memories stay with us in one way or another, sometimes lingering just below the surface of our consciousness. They remain forever as parts of who we are.    JB

I’m guessing here that I’m not the only one whose life saunters merrily along until that moment when I discover after opening the refrigerator door that the contents have become a no man’s land of chaos and unidentified life forms packed so skillfully together that the remaining spaces could be measured only by a micrometer.

My thrifty nature is responsible for much of the problem. If, for example, there is a cup of cooked rice left from chop suey, a smidge of spaghetti sauce, a fragment of mushroom omelet, the mere memory of a pork chop, or crumb of cheese, my brain concocts an instant fantasy of gourmet creations for later, worthy of the Food Channel. If I were to turn loose the contestants on the cable cooking show, “Chopped” on the contents of the fridge on any given day, their resulting culinary creations could probably feed a small village for several days.

If I had the time and inclination to clean out the fridge contents today, I would have to discard such things as a jar of capers from 2008, which has no doubt capered its last, a container of what may be either plump raisins, or old radishes, and some geriatric celery too old and limp now even to stand on its own without crutches.

I’m certain that there may be bacteriologists somewhere, who if they directed their full attention and funding to the study of that fridge’s contents, might find cures to any number of current diseases, not to mention the discovery of any number of fascinating new illness-causing microbes. Who knows? So before I roll up my sleeves and put on my medical mask to clean out the many remnants and recollections of those former meals, maybe I should pause to consider the possibility, however remote, that something like that little container of expired tomato soup could provide a cure for cancer or diabetes. Who am I to dismiss such a possibility by throwing it away? I’ll clean the garage first.

Finally, I would like to think that when I die, if my body is found at home, having expired from starvation due to an empty but perfectly clean refrigerator, my dream would be that the fridge is at last pristine in its lack of any leftovers and that those who find me will be impressed beyond measure if they look inside it. “Well, this guy was certainly clean and organized, Pete. Look at the inside of this fridge. There’s nothing there. Cleanest one I’ve ever seen!”       JB

We’ve All Been There

No one has a “perfect life.” There is simply no such thing. All the people whose lives I think are “better” than mine never broadcast their grief, sadness, disappointment in life, their sense of loss or regret…but they ALL have these things in varying degrees. One thing I’ve learned is to look at the good things in my life and to shun the regret and self-pity that I could so easily have quite often about deaths of family and friends, not being rich, not being a famous author, not having health insurance, etc. Such thinking would render me a manic depressive…or worse. Every morning when I wake up, I ponder briefly just before getting up what and whom I have in my life that makes getting out of bed a good thing. I have woes, like everyone else, but dwelling on the absence of what I think might make life more heavenly is a waste of time and yields only a nonproductive melancholy that has no purpose in my getting on with things. One of my favorite quotations is, “Life is filled with doors to open or close….and rooms we cannot go back to.” Thinking too much about those doors we can no longer open or the “rooms” we can’t go back to serves no purpose except to create a ponderous sense of regret that impedes living in the present with whatever good things are there. I don’t know if any of this makes sense, but these thoughts help to keep me at times from being put into a padded cell at Shady Pines.   JB

No one stays the same. We all change over time, especially in this age of rapid technological development. The past thirty years have taken me from LP records to CD’s, from VHS tapes to DVD’s, from a primitive Commodore computer to a powerful PC, and from network television to streaming and Netflix.

The most fascinating and most useful achievement in electronics to me is the GPS (global positioning system). I’ve been using and updating my Garmin for the past four years and become rather dependent upon it locally and especially for cross-country driving. It must be understood here that Helen Keller would make a much better pathfinder than I ever could. Hence my dependency.

I’m assuming that because GPS mechanisms depend upon satellite signals, all those devices work pretty much the same way. I chose a female voice with a British accent as my navigator and named her Abigail because of a wonderful biography I read a few years ago by David Mc Cullough about John and Abigail Adams, two of my favorite characters in the history of our country. Abbie’s voice has a realistic human timbre with an accent somewhere between those of Margaret Thatcher and Mary Poppins, and I find myself talking to her and even apologizing when I miss a turn as she says, “Recalculating.” I also lose my temper occasionally when Abbie tells me to make an impossible U-turn in the middle of heavy traffic on an expressway. She will also sometimes say things like, “Now keep right and then keep left,” or “Now keep left and then keep left.” I don’t even know what those directions mean. How does one change from left to left, or right or right?

And then occasionally Abbie will be silent for frighteningly long periods, when I imagine her napping or stepping out for a coffee break or a couple of martinis. Then suddenly she will inject a new direction, providing a sense of relief and renewed faith that she hasn’t abandoned me. In the end I always reach my destination, which only increases a dependency that thirty years ago I couldn’t have imagined. Now I’ve reached a point at which I practically need the GPS to find my car keys.    JB

The term “oldster” irritates me, probably because it is supposed to represent that stratum of society of which I am now a member. The word sounds demeaning, at least to me, perhaps because it is the polar opposite of the word “youngster,” which as a ten-year-old child, I disliked because I was beginning to crave being taken more seriously. Both terms are meant to imply an affectionate dismissal with a pat on the head, as though for a puppy or a very old dog. Funny how our perspectives change over time, even though, in some ways, we end up pretty much where we started, if we live long enough.

Though I taught high school for thirty-five years, I have come to that juncture in my life, where I find it awkward to be around teenagers. A case in point was a dinner I attended three weeks ago at the lovely home of friends in downtown Denver, an interesting gathering including two vegans, the host and hostess (both gourmet cooks), my partner Jim and me, and two nephews of the host, one a high school junior and the other a sophomore. Jim managed to engage both boys in a surface conversation about gaming at War Craft, and Star Wars. The eyes of both boys lit up briefly. The rest of the evening neither boy said anything much, except an occasional “No” or “Uh huh,” despite the rest of us trying hard to draw them into conversation. Both boys are intelligent, doing all right in school but confined by what seem to be narrow boundaries of interest in or knowledge of reading or news about the world around them. This, of course, is not rare.

Maybe I’m complaining about something that has always been the case, though I do expect teenagers to know something about current events beyond the fluffy, personal revelations of Facebook. I didn’t want to grill the kids beyond asking what they liked to read, what they enjoyed best about school, and what their keenest interests were. Shrugs were the pat responses to those inquiries. I mean, teenagers have always been figuratively “a different species,” but I remember having wonderful discussions and debates with terrific feedback from the teens in classes I taught. Of course, it has been ten years since I was still a school teacher, so it may be that since that time teens have retreated ever more deeply into that tiny world of iPhones and the artificial preservative of texting that has, in many homes across the country (and world), replaced actual conversation and other human contact as we once knew it.

Then again, I do remember the dormitory in college. We didn’t have raves or crowd surfing, but much of what we did then wasn’t fodder for conversation with adults either. The rope harness my roommate created to sneak onto the third floor of the girls’ dorm, the contests in the study lounge to see who could break a wooden plank over his head, the chugging competitions with whisky smuggled inside dozens of English Leather men’s cologne bottles, and contests in the main dormitory lounge to see who could tumble over the big ottoman most like Dick Van Dyke ( one guy broke his collar bone in a valiant attempt to emulate Van Dyke). No, I too must have remained silent during many adult conversations with aunts, uncles, grandparents, and my parents’ friends, when asked what I was up to.

Maybe teens haven’t changed as much as I imagine they have. After all, the world of teens is still a citadel, where adults are foreigners, or at least tourists or trespassers. Even with a temporary visa, an adult can feel as dull in a teen’s environment as the teen can feel in the world of adults, where cocktails and politics remain alien territory.   JB

The Sun Coming and Going…

Sometimes we need music that stimulates the spirit so that we want to dance, sing, or shout with joy together with those we love. Then there are those times we are so overcome by the beauty of the moment that silence is what we need with perhaps no more than the sound of a bird singing, the quiet rush of a babbling brook, or a cricket chirping. It is those moments of monumental beauty in nature that stop us cold so that no words suffice, because we are humbled by a radiance and splendor that leave us speechless but somehow grateful for the gift of living.

As I age, I am becoming more deeply moved by sunrises and sunsets. Getting up to see the sky splashed with amber and gold is such a pleasant reminder of being alive to see another day. The birds are usually singing then too, and the glorious combination of the audio-visual loveliness simply makes one grateful to be here.

I often sit on the upper deck of the house in the evenings to watch the remarkable sunsets over the trees and mountains here in Colorado. The deep, rich colors and textures of the clouds catching the final sunlight of the day remind me of life’s finality too and that we are here for a while to enjoy the beauty of this world before our time is up, and the darkness comes. That cycle of the hours from morning through evening is a powerful prompt to inspire an acknowledgement of this gift of life and its relative brevity. There are times when the sun melting over the mountains is a kind of benediction to the day, and no one can experience such splendor without being profoundly affected, no matter what his spiritual affiliations may be.

I’m going to include here photos I’ve taken of several sunrises and sunsets, along with quotations I’ve collected from my reading.

“How sweet the morning air is! See how that one little cloud floats like a pink feather from some gigantic flamingo. Now the red rim of the sun pushes itself over the London cloud-bank. It shines on a good many folk, but on none, I dare bet, who are on a stranger errand than you and I. How small we feel with our petty ambitions and strivings in the presence of the great elemental forces of Nature!”
― Arthur Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Volume I

“What breaks in daybreak? Is it the night? Is it the sun, cracked in two by the horizon like an egg, spilling out light?”
― Margaret Atwood

“Sunrise over the mountain-forest was gorgeous – Aurora brushing out her golden tresses with a comb of dark-needled pine and bare-limbed oak.”
― J. Aleksandr Wootton, The Eighth Square

“Far over the Great River, and the Brown Lands, leagues upon grey leagues away, the dawn came, red as flame. Loud rang the hunting horns to greet it. The Riders of Rohan sprang suddenly to life. Horn answered horn again. Merry and Pippin heard, clear in the cold air, the neighing of war-horses, and the sudden singing of many men. The sun’s limb was lifted, an arc of fire, above the margin of the world. Then with as great cry the riders charged from the East; the red light gleamed on mail and spear.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

                                                          Emily Dickinson

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Harry looked down and saw deep green mountains and lakes, coppery in the sunset.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“A large drop of sun lingered on the horizon and then dripped over and was gone, and the sky was brilliant over the spot where it had gone, and a torn cloud, like a bloody rag, hung over the spot of its going. And dusk crept over the sky from the eastern horizon, and darkness crept over the land from the east.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“One might fancy that day, the London day, was just beginning. Like a woman who had slipped off her print dress and white apron to array herself in blue and pearls, the day changed, put off stuff, took gauze, changed to evening, and with the same sigh of exhilaration that a woman breathes, tumbling petticoats on the floor, it too shed dust, heat, colour; the traffic thinned; motor cars, tinkling, darting, succeeded the lumber of vans; and here and there among the thick foliage of the squares an intense light hung. I resign, the evening seemed to say, as it paled and faded above the battlements and prominences, moulded, pointed, of hotel, flat, and block of shops, I fade, she was beginning. I disappear, but London would have none of it, and rushed her bayonets into the sky, pinioned her, constrained her to partnership in her revelry.”
― Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

“And yet day and night meet fleetingly at twilight and dawn,” he said, lowering his voice again and narrowing his eyes and moving his head a quarter of an inch closer to hers. “And their merging sometimes affords the beholder the most enchanted moments of all the twenty four hours. A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.”
― Mary Balogh, A Summer to Remember

“The redness had seeped from the day and night was arranging herself around us. Cooling things down, staining and dyeing the evening purple and blue black.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“How clear, how lovely bright,
How beautiful to sight
Those beams of morning play;
How heaven laughs out with glee
Where, like a bird set free,
Up from the eastern sea
Soars the delightful day.

To-day I shall be strong,
No more shall yield to wrong,
Shall squander life no more;
Days lost, I know not how,
I shall retrieve them now;
Now I shall keep the vow
I never kept before.

Ensanguining the skies
How heavily it dies
Into the west away;
Past touch and sight and sound
Not further to be found,
How hopeless underground
Falls the remorseful day.”
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“It was growing dark on this long southern evening, and suddenly, at the exact point her finger had indicated, the moon lifted a forehead of stunning gold above the horizon, lifted straight out of filigreed, light-intoxicated clouds that lay on the skyline in attendant veils.

Behind us, the sun was setting in a simultaneous congruent withdrawal and the river turned to flame in a quiet duel of gold….The new gold of moon astonishing and ascendant, he depleted gold of sunset extinguishing itself in the long westward slide, it was the old dance of days in the Carolina marshes, the breathtaking death of days before the eyes of children, until the sun vanished, its final signature a ribbon of bullion strung across the tops of water oaks.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

John Bolinger

I don’t know why I have become so utterly fascinated by the television shows, HOARDERS and DOOMSDAY PREPPERS. I can say only that as someone who is mildly OCD in terms of caring for my own home, I see the hoarders and “preppers” almost as creatures from another world altogether. There is something so obsessive and unworldly about their fears, that I look at them the way folks used to look at exhibits of freaks in old traveling carnival shows of the 19^th Century.

I ask myself how it is possible for anyone to allow his or her home to become a nest of contagion through sheer piles of trash, often covered in vermin, not wanting to discard any of it. That seeming lack of awareness of one’s environment builds over time, not just in a week or two and reminds me of an eight-hundred-pound man looking into a mirror suddenly one morning to say, “Gee, I’ve really let myself go!” The cause, as far as I can determine from the experts, who so sensitively and judiciously deal with the hoarders, is a tragic loss, so often the trigger for the hoarding behavior, a behavior that the hoarders themselves often refer to with unintended humor as “collecting” or “accumulating.” They become so terrified of losing anyone or anything again, that they hold on to every bottle cap, rubber band, and empty toilet paper roll with the false hope that the item will serve some purpose later on for a “craft project.” In the end, it’s all about control. In losing a loved one, there is a sense that the world is falling apart, and there can be a terrible need to hold on to something that is left in some wildly irrational grip on whatever is in one’s environment, even if it’s an old band-aid or a dead cat.

I love the episodes in which the hoarders begin to see why they have been accumulating irrationally and actually change in ways that get them back their dignity and joy in living. The before-and-after shots of those homes are gratifying to watch and leave the viewer with a sense of hope for hoarders, whose lives seemed so hopeless earlier in each program.

The other sense of gratification I get from each episode I watch is that after turning off the television set, I can look around my own house to feel content that, even if there is a coffee cup on an end table, or a cereal bowl in the sink, I have no feeling of being overpowered in any way by something and can easily remedy any feeling of being untidy. My house always looks especially good after watching one of those TV episodes.

There are three million hoarders in the United States, according to the statistics given on the show, and there are also three million “doomsday preppers.” Unlike the show HOARDERS, the DOOMSDAY PREPPERS program doesn’t attempt to change the behavior of the preppers, perhaps because their fears and obsessive behaviors don’t affect other people in the same ways, and there is no sense that the result of their cause will be the spread of dangerous disease through nests of rats or unsanitary conditions. No, the obsessions of the preppers have some other level of dignity and safety. In fact, safety is the main idea, a need to feel safe in a world in which these people feel horribly threatened by a coming, even if only imagined, holocaust, doomsday, or Armageddon of some kind.

The irony of their behavior for me is that they spend every waking moment in preparation for something unspeakably horrendous in order to achieve a sense of safety and inner peace. In fact, it seems that they live in constant fear, just like the hoarders, of losing what they have, often passing this sense of terror on to their children. It strikes me as a dilemma based upon sacrificing the joy of this life in preparation for the next one. It seems almost like preparing to live in a hell they feel is inevitable. I wonder too, what kind of life a destroyed world would offer, that would make one spend all his time preparing to live in it. Finally, both programs show us people, who have an almost pathological need to be in control in a world which they feel is taking from them or is going to take from them something precious. Perhaps what is precious for them has already been lost, that sense of joy, peace, and gratitude for who and what are here right now, but whatever the reason, I suppose people have to find their own level of inner tranquility, as long as it doesn’t infringe upon that of others. I am at once sympathetic with the hoarders and preppers, while being awed by their somewhat twisted devotion.    JB

In the world of fashion for men, I’m pretty sure that I would be considered a genuine country bumpkin. As someone who was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, I’ve kept what I’d like to call a down-to-earth, practical view on what men wear. Of course, we men generally have a different, perhaps more comfortable view on this subject from views that women have. Though we can be very competitive in other areas of endeavor, most men, if they’re being honest, consider clothing a necessity for warmth, coolness (regarding temperature), and modesty. Often, women are the ones who choose our neckties (those silk items that add a hint of color and interest to suits that otherwise all look pretty much the same). If we could, we men would wear faded blue jeans and flannel shirts to weddings, funerals, banquets, cocktail parties, ball games and church. Swimming might be the only activity for us that could require different attire.

I taught high school for thirty-five years, collecting over fifty silk neckties as gifts and personal purchases by me. I wore those neckties mostly with sport coats and sweaters and occasional dress suits over those years, but when I retired, I had a friend quilt those ties into toss pillows, which the dog and cat both enjoy now as cushions for napping. I saved one black silk necktie for funerals and another more colorful tie for any dress-up emergency for which I am expected to be more formal without looking too much like a Puritan minister.

The world in general has become much more casual, especially here in Colorado, where there are horses and ranches everywhere, so I seldom see suits and neckties, except as the iron maiden apparel of bankers and lawyers, who evidently feel more trustworthy through the stiffer dignity of Armani ensembles than through the relatively looser and more casual comfort of the Pa Kettle look, which happens to be a favorite of mine.

My real surprise comes from my occasional reading of publications based mostly in New York City with ads for Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Bottega Veneta, Versace, Dior for men, and Hermes. Simple suits in these ads cost many thousands of dollars, and even a silk necktie can cost more than I’ve paid for some of the cars I’ve owned. Prestige is perhaps the most expensive commodity on earth and something for which many people are willing to pay almost any price.

This morning I saw an ad for Versace slip-on sneakers that looked for all the world like ones I’ve also seen at Target for less than $80. The Versace price tag was $1125. My Hoosier, homespun common sense kicked in, and I felt revolted. My apparently corn-fed value system saw this and other such ads as useless excesses in a world of starving children and abandoned pets needing rescue. Something strongly Midwestern grabbed my conscience and unsophisticated sense of fashion. There’s no hope for me, I guess.

Maybe I should be more grateful that there are at least some creative deviations in men’s clothing, which otherwise has not really changed much during the past century. I should also be thankful that we are no longer expected to wear knee britches, powdered wigs, or buckled shoes. Finally, men’s fashion for me is a kind of spectator sport, one that I observe happily from a distance, and at which I observe $700 silk neckties and $1200 sneakers as through a Hubble telescope…from many light years away.     JB

SPINACH SQUARES

4 T butter
3 eggs
1 cup flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. baking powder
2 10-oz. pkgs chopped frozen spinach (thawed and well drained)
1 lb. grated Monterey Jack cheese (or combination of your favorite cheeses)
1/4 cup chopped onion
1 cup buttermilk

Cook spinach and drain well.  Melt butter in a 9X13 pan.  Beat eggs and milk together.
Add flour, salt and baking powder.  Mix well.  Mix in spinach, cheese and onion to egg mixture.  Pour into pan and spread evenly.  Bake 40 minutes at 350 degrees F (preheated oven).  Top will be slightly brown.  Cool a little and cut into squares.

*  It takes a pretty big bowl in which to mix everything. Here is what the mixture looks like when placed in the oven: