Dead Souls

Just had a very peculiar memory dredged up from fifty-odd years ago. Over at Nancy Nall's site Nance is talking about Peter Green of Fleetwood Mac dying, and how when she worked in the dead-tree newspaper biz her paper had pre-written obits for various famous or notorious people.

One she recalled was for the former Air Force GEN Curtis LeMay. And the weird LeMay thing I actually recall is his running as George Wallace’s VP candidate in 1968.

I was eleven, and was just barely aware of US politics, but my Eisenhower-Republican parents were horrified by the Wallace candidacy and that kinda rubbed off on me – not any sort of genuine understanding, just the general sense that there were these two horrible people called “goddamnWallace” and “thatidiotLeMay” who wanted to turn my little suburban piece of Chicago into the Confederacy (not that I understood that, either, except it meant bad things for the eight African-Americans who went to my 500-kid elementary school…)

So after Halloween my kid sister (nine) and I conducted our annual post-Halloween-tradition – taking the jack-o-lanterns out in the back yard, digging our father’s old wooden longbow out of the garage, and feathering the things with arrows (also the lawn, my mother’s hydrangeas, and probably the cat if he’d been stupid enough to hang around, which he wasn’t).

Only the Halloween of 1968 we officially named one of the punkins “Wallace” and the other “LeMay” so we could show the Bad People what we thought of them. Somehow it made the whole process more fun.

What’s kind of even more horrifying to realize about that is that in the 1968 election several weeks later about 13% of the American public voted for those two open and proud segregationists and white nationalists. They took five states: Arkansas, Louisiana, and the heart of Dixie (Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia).

I remember thinking back on that as a young man decade later as some sort of appalling low-point in American politics, the butt-ugly barefaced Ugly American in full poisonous flowering, and thinking how it was good that We the People had beaten that back and were in the process of becoming a Better Nation.

And, yet...here we are...

Life is Life: A Master Chief story

When my father was dying last spring several of you asked me to tell you something more about him. I don't know...yes, I do know why that occurred to me this morning; a friend of mine just lost her mother and I thought back to losing my father.

So. You recall that I told you that my father the Master Chief was a proudly intellectual man, an engineer, with an engineer's dislike of obfuscation and insistence on precision in both word and deed. That made him something of an uncomfortable man to be around; he was perfectly capable of the sorts of small evasions and elisions that we use to lubricate our interactions with others, but one could never be sure if, or when, he might simply state an unpalatable truth. Not rudely, perhaps, or as a weapon of social combat, but simply as he saw it.

I'm not sure when this was - probably some time in the early Seventies when I was between puberty and young adulthood and full of the sort of rudely anxious certainty that seems to come with our early teens - but I was holding forth at dinner on the unfair requirement that I perform certain chores during the long summer vacation, in that that vacation time was itself limited and the requirement to put my own entertainment on hold even further seemed grossly burdensome, a needless reduction of my already-painfully-short free time. The Master Chief listened to this gravely, and nodded, and replied:

"Well, yes, but you still have more free time than you will ever have again in your life. After your school days are over you will never have this much freedom again. Not just less but much less. You'll probably never have more than two weeks vacation the rest of your life. You'll work at your job that means five days a week or more, no spring breaks, no summer vacation, no half-days, no two weeks a Christmas. Just work and two weeks a year."

This seemed appallingly, punitively unfair, and I said so. Was that it? School and work, work and school, endlessly and forever with only the thinnest of hopes of a rest? What was the point, then? What was the end? When did it stop?

"Once you're older, perhaps, if you've planned and worked carefully, there might be a "retirement" when you will have all the free time you could hope for." he noted. I wailed that this seemed even worse; the only hope for freedom was to hope to be to ancient to enjoy it. What hope then?

"Well, then you die." was his conclusion. Dinner done, he retired to his chair to smoke a pipe and mark up the paperwork he'd brought home with him.

My mother was horrified; "Jack!" she exclaimed, and hurried to reassure me that life wasn't that bleak. But I think that my father was well satisfied to remind me, hedonistic youth of the hothouse hedonism of the Seventies and the relative wealth that his work had brought us, that at bottom what mattered was living up to your promises, taking satisfaction from work and life well-done, and dying without regrets, without leaving your works unfinished.

And that was my father, or at least a part of him.

John L. "Jack" Lawes Jr. 1927-2015

Out of the gloaming

When I was twelve my father and I used to go out back behind the big house in Chicago and throw the baseball back and forth, me with my "Ernie Banks" model first-baseman's glove and my pop with his 1940's style "giant puffy Mickey Mouse hand" mitt.

We would throw the ball until the light began to fade, in those long summer evenings, enjoying the small conversations, and good stretch of arm muscles, and the pop of the ball into the glove.

But the light would fade, and I would begin to lose track of the ball in the gloaming, until one evening the inevitable happened and the grimy gray ball sailed over my mitt and popped me square in the face.

My father came over to see why I was lying around not throwing the ball, checked me out to ensure I wasn't really hurt, and then picked up the ball and his son with the other hand and remarked, as we headed indoors to find my mother and a baggie of ice:

"Next time just make sure you keep your glove up."

That was good advice and I've kept my glove up ever since, Pop, thanks. Happy Father's Day.

Friday Bad Cartoon Trivia Bomb

So here's what happened.

I billed something like 59 hours this week.

That's billed. God knows how many hours I actually worked.

This was a hell-week, and finally Friday arrived, and I was able to get back to the shop, drop off my truck, and punch off the clock. Opened up the corporate timesheet program and started knob-dicking in my hours.

(Knob-dicking? Never heard that before? For some reason that was the term we used in the field artillery to describe typing entries into the battery fire control computer system. Knob-dicking. I have no idea.)

As you can imagine, I had a LOT of knob-dicking. Took me probably half an hour to knock all my time into the timesheet application. I was on my last line or two when...

The fucker locked up on me.

Now I'm a total devotee of the "save early/save often" school of computing. But it was late, I was in a hurry, so I didn't.

Yep. The fucker ate my fucking timesheet.

So - punctuated with a LOT of creative profanity - I re-created the vanished timesheet, and as I did for some reason I took breaks thinking about some of the bad cartoons I watched as a kid.

I was a kid in the Sixties and early Seventies, so there was a lot to go to, there. Underdog. Speed Racer. Whacky Races.

Not that there wasn't some classic comedy; you had Rocky and Bullwinkle, the old Bugs Bunny cartoons (though I had to get to adulthood before I got to see some of the really out-there stuff like Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips...).

But it got me thinking; it's kinda sad, how much useless information I know about those old Sixties and early Seventies cartoons.

And what's the use, if I don't put it to some use?

So here's your Friday Bad Cartoon Trivia Bomb.

No fair using Google unless you're REALLY stumped.

1. When Underdog says "the secret compartment of my ring I fill..." what's he got in there?

2. What sort of container does Henry Cabot Henhouse III drink his Super Sauce out of?

3. Why does Speed Racer wear a "G" on his shirt?

4. In the anime series imported to the U.S. as "Star Blazers", the spaceship "Argo" was originally the...

5. What kind of animal did George of the Jungle think his elephant pal was? (Bonus point - what was his pal's name?)

6. What was Jonny Quest's dad's first name?

7. What was the name of the explosive compound that Bullwinkle hid inside a banana? Why was it so awesome?

8. What was the actual title of the original cartoon that has recently been remade as "Mister Peabody and Sherman"?

9. Speaking of Mister Peabody, what did he call his time machine, and why?

10. What was the name of the character that Dick Dastardly and Muttley of "Whacky Races" were always chasing in the show they were later spun-off in? (Bonus point - what was the name of the spin off?)

Have fun.

I've almost got that goddamn timesheet fixed.

"To say before going to sleep"

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely --and why?We're still reminded--: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing onas back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.And became as lonely as a shepherd
and as overburdened by vast distances,and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.

"Childhood" by Rainier Maria Rilke