No pain no gain?

I wrote earlier about my arthritis and my failed attempt at an MRI. Since that time, I have gone through a bout of physical therapy and been pretty regular about going to the gym, and my shoulder is getting better and better. Last summer, I went with my son and his family to a circus, and between acts, clowns would come out and work the crowd. One of their techniques was to shoot those long thin balloons into the crowd, and they shot one near me, and I reached out instinctively with my left arm to grab one, and man it hurt.
Most of what I learned to do do in the formal PT sessions was stretching, not heavy weight lifting. The therapist would have me pull against light resistance elastic bands, or rotate my shoulders with very light weights, and I thought it wouldn't work. No pain no gain, and I felt no pain. But in the 2 weeks I had formal training, I got more and more movement from my shoulder. As best I could, I replicated at the gym what I did in PT, and things got better. Because I duplicate with my right side what I do with my left, (as per instructions from the therapist) my right shoulder is much better too. I hadn't been able to throw over hand for a couple of years. Anyone for a game of catch?
I'll bet now if I were at a circus and a balloon came whizzing by, I'd reach out thoughtlessly with no regrets at all.

Inside Knowlege

I had one of those odd experiences with recorded messages about a week ago. I got call from Visa fraud detection department, and as soon as I heard that, I took out my wallet and dumped it on the hassock in front of me. My Visa card was not there. The woman with the cheerful Indian lilt on the other end of the line was detailing some charges made the day before in a place about 20 miles west of where I live, and of course, wanted to know it I or my wife had made them. We hadn't, and she needed to talk to my wife too, then me again as primary card holder, and then I had to listen to a recorded message and agree that I understood that I was getting a new card, that I would destroy my old one (which my wife as doing as I listened). After I agreed to all of this, I closed the phone.
My wife and I talked for a while, and decided that I had likely separated myself from my Visa card the day before at Sam's Club, when I fumbled around exchanging it for my Discover card. Then my phone gave its voice mail chirp, and I had another message from Visa again, and I deleted it without listening, assuming the last call had finished my business.
The next morning just after 8 am, I got another call from Visa, and this recorded voice told me that there had been a request made to issue another card for me, and that the contract I had with Visa required me to affirm that I wanted a new card. I was to choose between 1 or 2, but the question the voiced asked, as far as I could tell, was whether I wanted to maintain this service. I couldn't tell whether pushing one would issue me a new card or not. Ditto for number two. The voice calmly repeated itself, and after a while suggested that I call the 800 number on my card. But of course, the card was in shreds.
I called back the number on the phone and was asked, by another recorded voice, to enter the last 4 digits of my Visa number, the shredded one. I closed the phone in frustration, but then tried again, this time entering random numbers, until I was again hearing the cheerful lilt of an Indian woman, eager to help me. Every thing now is apparently fine. We got new cards, a statement came and there are no fraudulent charges on it. But I could not get clarification of why the call I got about whether I wanted to get new cards was so indirect.
This same sort of thing has happened to me before--the institution I am dealing with assumes I have some sort of inside knowledge. Years ago registering for a conference for work, the non recorded voice on the other end asked me what hotel I was booking, and I said the name. And she asked the same question again, and this went on for 30 seconds. She wanted the name of the city the hotel was in, it turned out, and she had no answer when I asked her why then didn't she just ask for the name of the city. At work one time, responding to a memo about getting a work study student, I got a call from a clerk asking me whether I was requesting a federal or state worker. When I said "How do I know. That's not my job" she got upset. Much later when I decided to have my hair cut radically short, the young lady asked me what number of clipper insert did I want. I asked, how would I know what any number meant, if 1 was the shortest or the longest, and she'd never been asked that before.
So, is this problem universal? Have others had similar experiences,or am I alone?

Half Pint

Half Pint

Maybe because she was nearest my age, for some years growing up, Karen and I were pretty tight. When we lived in the neighborhood of the house that burned down I remember playing a wedding game based on the wedding of aunt Sally to Duncan. We called it Sally and Duncan. She and I would walk slowly side by side while we sang

Here comes the bride

Fair fat and wide.
Where is the groom?
In a saloon on forty second street.

as loud as we could. Sometimes others joined as a singer or a bride, and we all thought it was funny every time.

Craft projects were Karen's main activity, even when she was really young. I can still see her bending over her work, her tongue out a bit, her page boy haircut flopping down almost touching her work. She always had the craftsman's interest in fit and finish.

Mopsy was a feature in the Chicago Daily News, and on Saturdays, included paper dolls. Karen would not only cut out the clothes, she would get a shirt cardboard from dad's drawer and cut around the Mopsy model making it a properly stiff paper doll.

I think she saved them for a while. The house we lived in had a picture window that faced the south, looking over a field that was slowly growing into a kind of forest. I can still see her and Lois playing with paper dolls in the heat and warmth that streamed in from that window on a cold winter's day.

Later, she was the seamstress of the family. There were fewer ready made pants sold in those days. Dress pants came with legs that were not finished. I wasn't more than about 14 when I began to buy most of my own clothes, and I would almost almost always buy a new outfit for church at Easter time. I would stand on a chair, and Karen with pins in her mouth, would mark and pin were the cuff would be. The pants would come back to me perfect.

Our first family vacation was in, I think, 1947,seven of us in an old prewar Plymouth (which was not as nice looking as the picture,

but we traveled all those hours, 7 in the car, six of us and Dad). We ended up near Hayward, Wisconsin on Blueberry Lake, but Karen did not come all the way with us. We had stopped off in Rockford, where Dad had relatives or old friends, and somehow, Karen stayed there and one of the sons of the family came with us. And I missed her.

The next vacation, when Dad had a new car,

Karen came along the whole way, and she and I started a a game we played for all of the vacations our family took. It was based, I am sure on counting horses. Each of us would buy what came next on our side of the car, and then could lose what we had bought if something bad came around the next bend. I have no idea anymore of how we calculated the worth of our purchases, nor what it was that triggered losses, but we played the game even on our last trip together in Dad's 1956 Ford when we were both teenagers, and, as the tallest of my sisters, Dad could not legitimately call her half pint anymore.

Karen was the only one of the 6 of us who had musical talent, as far as I know. But what I remember most was her lightheartedness. On weekends when we all did some household chores (she and Lois much more than I), she'd sing “Up in the air, Jr. Birdman,” making an O with her thumb and forefinger, and holding them to her eyes with her palms inward and the other three fingers spread on her cheeks, which made her elbows stick out.

Up in the air, Jr. Birdman,
Up in the air upside down.

One Saturday night, when Dad came in the living room and seeing Karen in this mode, he tried and tried to get his hands like hers, and laughed with us for a half hour. Another favorite was

Why'd you go away and leave me in Big Wamu.
You left me for another, alone and so blue...

and there are more words that I can't remember . She sang this country and western style, loud and brassy. Another, was “Some day my prince will come” sung with both a wistful expression and intonation. All for fun.

As we got older, we saw each other less. I began to run the neighborhood with guys, riding my bike to creeks and vacant spaces, or playing sports, and at a young age, working summers for my father. But on many Saturday nights, Karen was still the snack maker--fudge, Rice Krispy Treats, pop corn balls, were all in her repertoire, and one memorable night when just she and I were home, a pizza made with cheddar cheese and breakfast sausage.

After my father died and his will was settled, we saw less of each other as a family. There was no central place to come. But she and two male friends came to my place for a holiday meal (I remember it as Easter, my wife remembers it as Christmas), and one of them was Hal, her future husband. I gave her away at her wedding, and her marriage began her years of traveling and living overseas. She always remembered our children at Christmas and on birthdays, and when we did see each other, it was as if time had not passed. We could be back to that time when she was a half pint, and I was her little brother hanging out with her on a Saturday night.

A Political Relfection

The late 80'' and early 90's were, for me, exciting times at work. We were moving to computerized classrooms, and the Post Secondary Enrollment Option Program was bringing to my classes many more bright, motivated students. In these first years, it seems to me, many were home schooled (principally, I think, to not have to study evolution).

Early on, I was in the library with a class which was being helped with research. Some could be done, or supplemented with computers, and some still needed to be done on the in the library. I happened to be by a computer that had a disk in it with a comprehensive list of all the names and addresses in the U.S. I started typing in names of childhood friends (with no idea where they were living) and getting, as I remember it, way too many options. Then I typed in Al's last name, and there were only 2, a Jr. and Sr. in Colorado.

I called Al Sr. the next day and left a message: “If you lived on School Street in Lombard, Illinois, call this phone number. This is Dave...”

He called on his Watts line later, and we talked for probably an hour. Among other things, he told me th at when he was going over his father's papers when he died, he discovered that the subdivision we lived in was covenanted. To buy a lot, one had to be a member of the caucasian race.

And then, sort of bang bang, Time Magazine had a two page article about how, when lynching was practiced in the south, it was memorialized by post cards of the often times mutilated body hanging from a tree. The article showed samples of them. A local entrepreneur, like a druggist, would take the pictures, have them developed into postcard sized pictures, and sell them. There were old post cards showing that the sender had circled his position by the body, proud to have been part of the action.

At about the same time, PBS had a program on Levittown, the Long Island housing development that started just after WW II, offering housing for veterans for no money down, and modest monthly payments—unless the prospective veteran was black. Then one could not buy (or rent) at all.

I began to use this information to challenge some of my more conservative students about what America was and is. And I thought of it in terms of my own family.

My father came to the U. S in 1922 or '23 when he was 18. He died in 1958. He was here only about 35 years, and even though he was widowed with 6 children in 1942, 5 of them graduated from college (3 with Master's Degrees). It happened, at least partly, because of where we lived. We went to the excellent York High School. Put what my father was able to do, and how that benefited me in some context,

I am positive that in the Chicago area, there was a black man as bright as my father, and as successful, but that man would not have been able to live where his children would get the benefit from such a good school system. There are other possibilities. It is likely that in 1922, young black men were migrating north, maybe a young man whose father had been lynched, the extremist form of racism.^* Confused, angry and ill educated, restricted to ghetto areas, what chance did that man or his kids have? How many generations of his family would be affected by this loss of opportunity?

Or maybe, he was a World War 2 vet with an honorable discharge, and could not get his family out of New York's ghetto to Long Island because loans were not even offered to him. And again, his children, and maybe even his children's children would be affected. Between about 1924 and 1930, my father sort of wandered around the upper midwest. Swedes were frequently foremen of construction crews, and he could come onto one, talk a little Swedish and get a job for a few days. He told a story of claiming to be a bricklayer, and then being found out on the second day of his tenure on the job when he got to something really complicated. But the foreman was from Smoland too, and he got another couple of day's work as a hod carrier, something he did know how to do. Such a chance for a black man at the time would have been rare to impossible.

It is fashionable among some circles to use Lincoln's words against him, to make him out as a racist, and some are not nice by today's standards. But even in his 20's when he was running for his first political office in Illinois, he thought and said that slavery was wrong because all men should be allowed to earn their own bread by the sweat of their own brows. He could never offer any great solution to the problem, but he did understand that slavery was fundamentally opposed to the standards of the republic. This position seems to me to be even more remarkable considering that Lincoln was queasy about the mixing of the races.

Even if blacks were lesser men, they were men and The Declaration of Independence should protect them, too. What I offer is not a solution, either, but at least something to think about.

None of what happened to my mythical black men was constitutional, either literally or more comprehensively in the words of the Declaration of Independence. But that it happened makes me suspicious of the notion that devolving power to the local, or smaller political movement would somehow bring more liberty. How long was the South able to prevent blacks from voting? As long as they were a permanent minority, bad things would happen to them. It was, ultimately, the federal government which changed the South. Of course we should be suspicious of the federal government. But we should be suspicious of our state legislators, town councils, and school boards, too.

_________________________________________________________________

*There were about 5000 lynchings between about 1870 until 1950. This is likely a conservative number because of the difficulty in counting. It is interesting, that even in fairly modern times, apologists of lynching used the claim of governmental inefficiency to condone it. If the government—generally meaning the federal government—got on the blacks for their rapes of white women, good citizens would not have to do it.

If you Google lynching numbers, you will have a lot to read and think about.

The Loop from afar

I was born and raised in Du Page County, Illinois. When I lived there, there were commuter towns stretched along the rail lines that ran west from Chicago, but north and south of them were farms. The Washington Street that ran in front of my house in Lombard was said to be on the exact latitude as the one in Chicago--we were straight west of the Loop, in other words.
About once a year, I'd hear from someone who was driving east on a particularly clear morning--usually it was told to me by a kid reporting what his father had said--that they saw the tall buildings of the Loop from Lombard. I always doubted it. It is 20 or so miles, and I just thought it couldn't be true.
My wife and I went back to spend Thanksgiving with her sister, and for a night we stayed on the eighth floor in a hotel on Butterfield Road, maybe the most rural place I was able to get to as a boy, at least in bike riding distance. Maybe 3 miles, no more, south of where I grew up. It is not rural anymore. I woke up before light, and looked out the window, trying to get my bearings, wondering which way the window was facing. The beginning of the sunrise told me I was looking east. When I came out of the shower, and looked again, there on the gray horizon, it looked like I could see the Loop. I did not believe it at first, but it sure enough was. I'm pretty sure I made out the shape of Big John.
Is the eighth floor 80 feet off the ground? I still don't think anyone saw the Loop from ground level, but if the light were right.....?

An Entry Door Saga

Since moving into the house we live in now, I have been bugged by the garage entry door. It had no door knob, but just a lock. If the door were unlocked, the key stayed in the lock. On the bottom 1/4 of the door the veneer was peeling, and there were general scuff marks everywhere. When I took it off about a month ago, I saw it was beyond repair.
I ordered from Lowe's a similar door, and when I went to pick it up, it came to the will call desk with some of the veneer pulling away from the slab on one of the narrow edges. I took the door home when they knocked $25 off the price. It was a smooth slab, with no hand holds, a heavy thing to load on my truck. The first thing I did when I got it home was to glue and clamp the split in the veneer, and then to prime and paint it. The closer I looked, the worse it looked.
As I expected, underneath the veneer, it consisted of 1 1/2" fiberboard piped with 1 by 2 pine. The veneer, though, was something I did not expect. It was not a layer of veneer glued to the fiber board, but a layer of Masonite onto which the thinnest veneer I had ever seen was glued. Paper thin, a film of wood if that's possible. That means that any bump on the surface will poke through the veneer, and disturb the Masonite, turning it to fuzz. To patch it, both the veneer and the Masonite needs to be removed and then a patch of wood glued on, and then filled and sanded.
Almost every time I moved it, there would be a separation of the veneer from the slab underneath. Just walking it on its corners across the floor would cause it to splinter on the bottom, making me take time to do more gluing and clamping.
My neighbor came over on a Sunday to help me hang it. He also thought the veneer was inherently unstable. And even with 2 of us, the door's weight made working with it difficult. There would be slips and bumps that would lead to spits, nicks, and contusions.
Later, when I drilled through the door for the lock set, I found another problem. The fiber board separated. I used a hole saw, and all the other times I have done this, the saw goes all the way through the door, and getting the billet of wood out of the saw is a problem. This time, after about 3/4 of an inch, the fiber board crumbled, and the billet came out in 2 pieces with lots of sawdust in between. That was it for me.
I put the core of the lock set into a bag, and took it to Lowe's. When you order a custom door, the clerk makes it clear that it is a non-returnable item. But this seemed like a defect, and I went back to the door department with a chip on my shoulder, and showed them the crumbling fiber board, and also complained about how easily the door got scuffs, and Lowes made no effort to knock the chip off. The clerk agreed that I should get my money back. Good for her, and good for Lowe's.
This story will continue. I have another door ordered, a steel one, the one I probably should have ordered in the first place. I'll post about that one when my neighbor and I get it installed.

Interview Story

My first college teaching job was in West Virginia. I wanted out (and maybe my dean wanted me gone too) when one of the many applications I sent out struck fire. I had an interview in North Dakota. It was already late summer, and the school was 1,200 miles away. But there was no question that we would go to the interview. We made arrangements to drop our son and dog off at my wife's sister's where she lived near Chicago, about a 12 hour drive to North Dakota.

The drive north and west was neat. It had been our dream to live in the north, albeit the woodsy north, and it became clear as we drove west and north of Minneapolis, we were moving away from the woods. But, with some differences, it reminded us of Illinois when we were very young. The land was flat, and between the little, clean towns, there were prosperous looking farms with big red barns. We made good time, and instead of registering at the Holiday Inn, we decided to drive the 30 miles to the town the school was in. There was plenty of daylight left to check it out.

It was immediately clear that we did not need to go back. We found a motel that would lodge us for $8 instead of the $20 or $25 that the Holiday Inn would have charged, and a good, inexpensive place to eat for the evening, and a diner for the morning that baked its own sweet rolls. We were impressed.

I was really impressed with the school. It was a residential campus, with many buildings from different eras, with lawns and mature trees—it looked like a college. The interview itself was, well, another thing.

The dean was a small man, apparently totally dedicated to the school. He lived nearby and, for after hours and weekends, had a school phone extension that rang in his home office. When the tour stopped and the interview started, he invited my wife into his inner office with us, and included her in the conversation. Odd, I thought. What he had to say was typical for the day. Two year schools had a special mission, a failure of a student is like a failure of the school itself. I was of course nervous, and I can't remember my responses, but things seemed to be going well. Then the phone rang, and the dean, a little short, reminded his clerk that he was not supposed to get calls, and...and then he said “Oh,” and excused himself with apologies. It was a very important call.

He did not, however, punch the hold button on his phone and hang up. Rather, he placed the receiver right on his desk and went to the outer office to talk. With a little straining, we could hear both sides of the conversation, and we learned that there was only one other candidate for the job I was applying for, and that the fellow on the line was he. Oh, man. I have no exact memory of the dialogue between the two, except that we could hear it all fairly clearly. If the exact words are wrong, they reflect what I think I heard:

“University of Colorado at Boulder? I undergraded there. “

“I thought maybe that was true. When I told Professor Gould that there was an opening there, and gave your name, he said maybe he knew you...”

“George Gould? He was my mentor. I don't know if I'd have made it through...”

And my heart sinks. Let's see, we've already driven 24 hours out of the last 48, and by 1 PM, we'll be on the road again for the 12 hours back to Chicago...

“As long as we are dealing with coincidences, your last name is Aldrich...”

“You know my dad? He thought maybe it was you when he saw your name in the announcement.”

“Well, small world. You'll be here tomorrow, then...”

And I stopped listening. Maybe the part about being the son of a long lost friend is a trick of my memory, but it could have been, judging by how I felt. He came back into the office with a smile, and got back to his business at hand. Did he notice that we were a little down? I don't know what happened next except that, finally, we shook hands, and the head of the English department met up with me for a chat, and told me to ignore the stuff about not failing students. I remember nothing more. Even the drive home was glum. First to Chicago, then to West Virginia.

And in West Virginia, I heard nothing. A week passed, and I called North Dakota. It seemed like no one had heard of the dean, until I finally got a hold of the English Department head. “No,” he said, “you're the guy. Both Vernon and I wanted you. I don't know what the problem is.”

I couldn't quit a job and pack up and go to North Dakota on that slim hope, and I stayed another 2 years where I was. I found out that I had won the job, but that the dean got ill, was rushed to the Mayo Clinic, and in the meantime, the college president put a hold on hiring.