My dance aerobics mix: Edwin Starr's War, remixed by King Britt [5:13]. Followed, if you need more, by Azul Ezell, Chris Duarte Group [8:01]. We mostly jump up and down. Irish step dancing without the wiggly toes. Drinking Jameson's helps. Finished off with a slow dance, fingers on patrol across my wife's back: Simon Keeper by the Cowboy Junkies. Then go blow something up.
Today, Al Franken (D-MN) took his place behind the U.S. Senate desk previously held by defeated Republican (and good loser) Norm Coleman. Alas, under the desk? Coleman's dried boogers. Years of them. One for every false smile he ever flashed. Looked like Mammoth Caves.
Some movie. Only I have the real thing on my front stoop. A deer repellent (so it's billed). The base is dried blood. Mix it with warm water in a pail. Makes a brown-red slurry. Whisk it until you get the lumps out. Spray.
It smells. Like the packaging a steak comes in. Deer, being veggie (theory goes), turn their rapacious mouths away in disgust. [Expletive imagined], I hope so. A doe and her two bambi's roam our property. They invade the perennial beds each night now.
The flowers are just starting their display. The leaves are tender. Buds bursting. The deer rip through this bounty like paper shredders. And the things they didn't eat last year, like sedum? This year they are. With salt and a little dressing.
And so I spray blood. The beds have a month to recover before the party.
Simone washes three kinds of lettuce from the farmer's market. Slugs are a special nuisance this wet summer. She has me turn on the sink's garbage disposal. It begins chewing through her leafy discards. I happen to glance her way. With the tip of a steak knife, she's poking things down the disposal as it grinds.
"Are you [expletive deleted] nuts?!?" I jump to switch off the machine.
"What? I was being careful."
"There is no way you can call that being careful."
Strange little webinar today. Award for traveling farthest: Indonesia attended at 2 AM their time. Spain attended 8 PM their time. The oddity? I took two question breaks yet elicited just one question, by a young fundraiser who talked in nothing but jargon. Which I pointed out to her, and she laughed. It's one of the most important lessons: you can't talk this way to donors; they literally (by which I mean, psychologically and emotionally) cannot understand your jargon. She did say one thing that penetrated: Kids raised by the government tend to turn out badly. My question-incurious webinar in action:
My refuge: Traveler's Club Restaurant, a.k.a. the Tuba Museum, in Okemos, MI. It's that, too. More restaurant than museum, since the tubas hang from the walls unlabeled, and the specialties are draft beers and buffalo burgers. I'm having both, as I wait for the man-phobic cleaner to leave Jane's house. Today's pint: Dirty Bastard Scotch Ale, with "a punch" 8.5% abv, from Founder's Brewery in Grand Rapids; today's 2nd (and final) pint: Nut Brown Ale, from Michigan Brewing Company in Webberville. And if I get spirited, I can buy the Barack Obama presidential coffee cup here or the PB&J ice cream bar. This is one of my favorite spots on a Jane trip.
Listening to Eric Burdon's heavenly, riff-thick 9:32 rerecording of the 1960's hit, We Gotta Get Out of the Place. My college buddy, Bob Kingsland, used to play this song obsessively whenever he grew restless. Which was often. He spent his summers scuba-diving at archaeological sites in Central America or tuna-spotting from an airplane off the New England coast. Last I heard, he had welded himself together a steel sailboat and was cruising the Caribbean.
The day so far. We spent the morning shuffling Jane's medical files between the hand surgeon's office and the back specialist's office. Jane is Simone's 80-plus mom. A feisty, unsentimental, complex woman and mother of six. That's nine words, and Jane's a couple of good volumes' worth. She's exercised every day since the mid-1960s. She has the bones of T-Rex, thanks a milf-fed youth. But she's falling apart. She's a Honda with a million miles on it. She's been in unrelenting pain for a week, needs an intervention, but can't take any drug stronger than Tylenol because tomorrow she's due for carpal tunnel surgery. She has another problem we heard over breakfast: she can't have a hard bowel movement without extruding her intestines, so she's on a laxative that turns it all to pond scum. "God, I hate my body," she groused.
I'm about to decamp for an Internet cafe, where I can write, eat, email. I need to leave because Jane's house cleaner is due soon. Apparently, the woman is terrified of men. It's better if I'm gone when she arrives. No complaints here: one of my life goals is to scare as few people as possible. And, as it happens, this Internet cafe is the area's best pie company, too. On the seasonal pie clock, the hour hand now points toward strawberry rhubarb, probably my favorite after dutch apple with crumb crust.
To see how wine should be priced. I'm in East Lansing, MI, on Jane's deck, laptopping, sipping a wine purchased last night, Puydeval 2007, from the Pays d'Oc (i.e., Land where they say Oc instead of Oy [today, oui]). Our French house is there, in the Pays d'Oc. Puyvedal is quite nice: 60% cabernet franc, 30% syrah, 10% merlot. A sunny personality with a rind of plum, mid-fruity.
Cost here in Michigan, about $14 at the local rip-off wine merchant, Dusty Cellars. (OK, not that bad. Pretty typical, actually.) As Mr. T liked to say, "I pity the poor fool..." who has to purchase wine in America, where a $35 bottle of wine at Dusty's is seen as mid-range. Oh, duck! Quack, quack. Wine is NOT a luxury good. In France, a $10 wine is mid-range. And quaffable-to-delicious-to-shockingly lovely and different.
Maybe there are only tortoises or hares. Human metaphorically speaking.
The tortoise behind the bar deep inside the Minneapolis airport asks me if I want a shot to go with my wine. No. An offer worth exploring, though, if you're in the mood. I like the feel of a bar pressed into my sternum. He's wearing a pretty good Hawaiian shirt in an Polynesian-themed joint, so I ask him if the company supplies the duds. No: bought it himself; the company one was a fire-hazard, aesthetically anyway.
Next to me, this German guy in a dark suit shoulders in. Wants to cash out. Bartender asks how the trip's been. Oh, geez! The guy laments his long day from Frankfurt. Major suffering! Accepts his change, walks away. Leaves nothing. "You're very generous," the bartender coos toward the gods. You don't tip waiters and bartenders in France. Germany, too? I now wonder. Still, we're kissing Minneapolis here, so technically the German guy's just proven he's a thoughtless asshole. Learn the local customs, Siegfried.
"Last call" is the next thing. It's 9 p.m. I order a second glass of cab for the road. My next flight lands in Calgary at midnight. I feel lazy. A tiny bit drunk would be nice for the rest of the evening.
The tortoise sees me taking notes in my Mini Legal Pad, manufactured in Roaring Spring, PA. The pad advertises its STIFF BACK; its broken back now, after thousands of miles in the outermost pocket of my carry-on. They sell these mini-pads to nano-lawyers. Don't let their size fool you, though. They are every shocking thing lawyer jokes imply.
"You a writer?" asks the tortoise. Affirmative. "What'd'ya write?" I tell him. "Poet," he admits about himself. "Published a couple of chapbooks. Worked for a decade as a reporter on...." He names a rag I don't know. "Been working here since 9/11." In the airport bar. Journalism is a bad trade and getting worse. Nice Hawaiian shirt though. Leave him a tip and a half. Hope to see him again someday.
Kelly the roofer was wiry. He wove down the airplane aisle and pointed at the seat next to me, laughing. "I don't know what's up with them at Chili's," he said. "I was there at 6:30" in the morning "and the waitress asked me if I wanted a drink. I had three vodkas. Guy next to me gave me gum to chew so they'd let me on board. Canadians, ay? Love to drink." He smiled. "Don't worry about me, though. I'll be out in ten."
He liked take-offs. "Like the speed, ay?" The rest didn't interest him. He was en route from a drunken birthday party to a promised-to-be-drunken wedding where the bride-to-be avoided him as much as possible.
We talked about Clint Eastwood. Kelly had a favorite quote from The Unforgiven. This was the second quote from that movie I'd heard in two days, both from guys. One recalled the character William Munny saying, "It's a hell of a thing, killing a man. Take away all he's got and all he's ever gonna have." Kelly recited, giggling, "You better bury Ned right! Better not cuttem', otherwise harm no whores! Or I'll come back and kill everyone of you sons of bitches...." as Munny reared out of town in a downpour. The heavens wept. Oh, Clint: the classic pathetic fallacy. Although it always works on me: give me a heavy rain, in real life or in film; and you own me, emotionally.
I spent the four hours Kelly slept watching movies and listening to music. Air Canada. They've become a flying entertainment center. The back-of-the-seat touch screen offered a dozen recent films I could stop and start as I pleased, TV shows, news, an iTunes-like music selection, games, and satellite radio. When we landed, Kelly awoke as we braked at the gate. I offered him aspirin. He counter-offered to buy me a beer. But I had to run. I got through US customs and security and arrived at my gate with 10 minutes to spare. In Kelly's honor, I purchased the sacred beer, the time-to-let-your-hair-down glass that marks the end of a journey across North America and back in three days: Molson on tap, $10 Canadian with tip. And boarded the Beech 1900D through the rain. I was seated next to the right-side turboprop. It was like sitting on a vibrator for two hours, with a cold wind sailing between my shins.
