Readers and writers blog

It’s too bad global warming couldn’t be just in the Northeast just in the winter.

I don’t know about you guys, but at our house, we’re spending the warm-weather days wondering just how high the guaranteed price of heating oil is going to be for this winter under our prepay plan.

Meanwhile, we’re not just wondering. We’re taking whatever steps we can to reduce our use of oil, including an alternative for heating our water and a small construction project to close off even more of our house for the winter.

The letter outlining the new prepay plan hasn’t come yet from our heating oil dealer, but it’s going to be ugly. We know this for a reason that is beyond the current skyrocketing price of crude oil — namely, that the letter hasn’t come yet.

By this time last year, we already had signed up for 850 gallons of No. 2 heating oil at a guaranteed price of $2.50 a gallon. Even with a 5-cent-a-gallon discount for prepaying, the whole thing still came up to $2,124. Now we’re people of moderate means, and that was a hard amount to come up with. That’s why we wear sweaters and keep our thermostat under 65 degrees in the winter.

At the end of the heating season in April, we had run 12 gallons over our guaranteed amount, and that extra 12 gallons was billed at $3.70 a gallon.

What’s next — $4.50 a gallon?

I don’t know, but I called our heating oil dealer a week ago and was told they were “still working on” the capped price program.

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Update: We just got the letter from our heating oil dealer. The base guaranteed price will be not $4.50 but $4.70 a gallon — for us, a total of about $4,000, payable up front.

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Is it any wonder our friends are talking about putting in wood stoves? Not me. I grew up with wood stoves and later wood furnaces. They’re a lot of work and, no matter how airtight, a lot of smoke.

My stepfather, a logger, always brought home slabs and other leftovers from the sawmill, but even he wasn’t keen about burning wood. We were cutting up wood one day in the early 1960s — heating oil then was about 25 cents a gallon, I think — when he turned to me and said, “I keep praying for oil to go back down to 19 cents.”

It never did.

We’re hoping to knock off 250 gallons of our oil use by installing a tankless water heater that will keep the furnace from coming on just to heat its water tank. Sure, the new heater will use either more electricity or perhaps LP gas, but it won’t waste energy heating a water tank. The new heater will cost around $2,500, but at the current price of oil, that’s what we would waste in about two years of furnace-supplied hot water.

You know, Jimmy Carter warned us about this problem almost 30 years ago, just after the OPEC embargo caused our first big petroleum crisis, and he was ridiculed for his “malaise” speech:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.

Carter called for a massive program toward energy conservation and independence. Then along came Ronald Reagan, told us nothing was wrong and dismantled the energy program. Twenty years later, having learned nothing, we put two oilmen in the White House. We know how that has turned out.

Meanwhile, the auto makers are still advertising SUVs, the neighborhood adolescents are still roaring around on ATVs, and the Nascar types are still going around in circles.

I hope the bastards all freeze this winter.

Today in our Works section:

• Chapter 11 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess and Brian awaken together in bed where they are interrupted by the arrival of his sister, Rachel. She seems to accept Tess in her brother’s life but resists his attempts to curb a growing drug problem in her own.

• Chapter 23: Golden Gate Park of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard meanders into the park, thinking he has to find some way of getting away from Ginny, when he witnesses a confrontation between a graying hippie and two young Marines. The hippie has a machete.

– Sid Leavitt

I was looking for two of my blogroll buddies the other day when the Internet threw me a couple of curveballs. Mike’s Circular File told me I wasn’t authorized to view it, and The literary thug looked like it had been mugged by Amazon book hawkers.

It was enough to make me say, “What th’. . .?”

Well, actually, what I said was what the Internet, in a usage that seems to me snickeringly adolescent, has acronymized as WTF. No, it doesn’t stand for Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. It’s shorthand for ‘What the f—,’ and I see it everywhere.

I prefer not to use the f-word or its derivative, WTF, in written discourse such as this on R&W Blog. Not that I have anything against the word ‘fuck.’ It’s just that emphatic words lose their power when they’re overused.

By the way, the best expletives of all time are found not in classic literature like Lady Chatterley’s Lover or on HBO’s “The Sopranos” but in, of all places, the old Popeye cartoons. You know, the ones where the squint-eyed sailor’s foil was not the latter-day Brutus but the mumbling, grumbling Bluto.

In their confrontations, both Bluto and Popeye threaten each other with phrases like “Why, I oughta . . .” and “Well, I’ll show you . . .” so far under their breath that the words are barely understandable — and never fail to make me laugh.

What’s so funny to me is that all the phrases are innocent but they’re all delivered in such an arch, roguish style.

Want a sample. Take a look at the 1937 cartoon Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba’s Forty Thieves. It’s a long one — nearly 17 minutes — so you can shortcut it by moving the ‘play’ slider to the 8:00-minute mark where the mumbling-grumbling expletives begin. At the 9:40 mark, by the way, even the band of thieves starts mumbling and continues to 10:20.

Anyway, I’ve emailed Mike Pontillo to ask how I can get into his weblog again. I had a similar problem last fall when Mike’s Circular File originally was posted on our blogroll. It had something to do with a redirect function on Pontillo’s Internet service provider.

And poor Robert Lashley, a fine young poet and thinker at The literary thug. His site is now a billboard of Amazon books — ranging from conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg’s expose on Liberal Fascism to liberal pundit Cliff Schechter’s expose of The Real McCain — followed by blocks of words strung out in gibberish.

I don’t have an email address for Lashley, and I could kick myself for not copying it when his site was accessible.

I hope both he and Pontillo get back on cyberspace soon.

Today’s new offerings in our Works section:

• Chapter 22: Haight Street of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. By March of 1967, Gerard has become a hippie, consorting with a variety of free-floating women, but he knows the hippie movement is already over: “The music, long hair, beads, dope, bare feet, brown rice, free love . . . all that was nothing but advertising by people who’d already taken acid to get other people to take acid, and by then, the advertising was getting mistaken for the only thing that really went on. A few minds got blown on acid. That was it.”

• Chapter 10 of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. After months of cautious waiting, Tess Dyer and Brian LaChance finally consummate their mutual attraction.

– Sid Leavitt

My wife and I are getting together with some of our friends July 4th to read and discuss Henry IV, a Shakespeare play that is more often talked about than read, mostly because everyone’s heard of two of its characters — the lively young Prince Hal and his ne’er-do-well sidekick John Falstaff.

I’ll be the beard.

Well, I may be corrupting an expression that I associate only with New York, although it dates back to Chaucer: ‘To beard’ or ‘to be a beard’ is to act as a romantic cover for someone else, as in the movie ‘Broadway Danny Rose’ when Woody Allen takes Mia Farrow to a nightclub so that the nightclub crooner can pick her up later without his wife finding out. (”I’m only the beahd,” Woody says in his Brooklyn accent to a couple of gangsters who have taken him for Mia’s boyfriend.)

In my case, I’ll be just covering for my own romantic interest — my wife, Bonnie — who hasn’t read the play, hasn’t been feeling well and has been so busy with work and with family matters (not the least of which was our recent trip to Indiana) that she won’t have time to read it and wondered one recent day if I had.

“That way, you can sit there and talk about it, and I can just sit there,” she said.

“Hell, I do that even if I haven’t read the book,” I said.

Bonnie, ever the honest but considerate one, just smiled back, not wanting to agree that I would be such a pompous ass to do such a thing but not wanting to lie and say, “No, that’s not true.”

Over the years, I’ve read a number of Shakespeare’s plays, but I couldn’t remember whether Henry IV was among them. When I looked it up, I quickly realized it wasn’t. It’s a two-part play, and I would have remembered that.

Now before you get the wrong idea about my literary background, it’s a basic 1950s plumber’s model that included Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school, King Lear in college and a handful of other Shakespeares when I was in the Army and didn’t have either the finances or the energy to be a young Falstaff myself.

And don’t get the wrong idea about our reading friends. Although I have referred to them as the Woodstock Reading Group, a lofty appellation entirely of my own invention, it’s just a loose-knit group started by a couple of friends who run a publishing company in nearby Woodstock.

People show up as they will, whether or not they’ve read the book that we all agreed would be the subject of the gathering. And we may or may not get around to the subject. Basically, the book is just an excuse to get together to eat a little food, drink a little wine and talk about stuff — maybe the book, maybe the world, maybe just ourselves.

The books aren’t all hoary classics, either. Selections have included Zadie Smith’s 2005 novel On Beauty, Raymond Chandler’s hardboiled detective novel from 1939, The Big Sleep, and Naguib Mahfouz’s Palace Walk from his 1956-57 Cairo Trilogy.

Among the selections have been two of my recommendations — The Redheaded Outfield, a less-read Zane Grey book about minor league baseball, and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America — and the group basically hated them. (I have to admit the Zane Grey book was a favorite from my adolescence, which is how those who read it saw the book. I recommended de Tocqueville because everybody talks about his book but nobody ever reads it. For good reason. Much of this huge work from the 1830s reads like an annual report of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But some parts — the young French aristocrat’s prescience about what would happen in the young America in the decades and centuries to come — I just loved.)

And now, if the group members read this blog, they’ll know about my beard on the bard. Ah well.

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter Nine of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess uses paint and canvas to put new life into a dying orchard outside the apartment where she has taken refuge in a small Maine town, and she finds new life growing in herself toward her neighbor Brian.

• Chapter 21: Foghorn Fish-and-Chips of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. One of Gerard and Ginny’s occasional roommates, a one-eyed hippie named Thulin, marries a high school girl named Wanda but later abandons her and their unborn son. Wanda gets the last word: She names the boy Popeye.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

*The photo at top is from the Royal Shakespeare Company showing Ian Holm as Prince Hal and Hugh Griffin as Falstaff.

This blogroll thing -- namely, the difficulty I have in keeping up with our blogroll on a daily basis -- has been weighing on my mind. And, of course, I have come up with a solution that won't do much to solve that problem.

But it will improve the blogroll.

And so we add to our official roll the weblogs of two of our favorite writers, both contributors to R&W Blog — R.J. Keller and Jennifer Weber. Their sites are, respectively, Ingenious Title To Appear Here Later and I’m Having A Thought Here.

I figured we might as well add them. I read them all the time, anyway. To make room (mostly in my reading schedule), I’ve shifted philosophy of art to our inactive list and said goodbye to Riding with the Top Down.*

R.J. Keller, whose novel, Waiting for Spring, we are serializing by chapters here, is in real life a Maine resident named Kelly Hewins who lives in a small town with her husband, two children, a family cat, and works overnight in a local convenience store when she isn’t writing a novel, screenplay or blog entry.

Although not a native, I lived in Maine some years as a child in its small towns and as an adult in one of its cities, and not only Hewins but the characters in Waiting for Spring come across to me as real Mainers. The state isn’t just some quaint place with simple but happy natives. There’s a lot of sadness in Maine — and that gives rise to some of the best, and smartest, humor I’ve experienced. It is, as they say, wicked.

Just read Hewins’ three-entry series May 13-18 called ‘No Pants Lady,’ an account of an early-morning patron at the convenience store. The title gives you the premise, and Hewins’ ability with words gives you the bitter and sweet of life in small-town Maine.

(You also may be as amused as I was at some of her cultural references ranging from “Law & Order” and “South Park” [Cartman’s ‘authori-tah’] to Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘MacGuffin’ and the Fuller Brush man, something I used to be briefly in one of my aimless years.)

Jenny Weber, whose poetry we published and wrote about in our May 15 entry, is one of those Southern belles — Columbia, S.C. — in whom, I learned while living in Savannah, Ga., one should not confuse gentility and charm with tractability.

The woman has both a backbone and an attitude. She tells her readers right at the top of her weblog that it “doesn’t pretend to be rocket science so if that’s what you’re looking for, go to www.NASA.gov. Also I have a tendency to be sarcastic, so if that kind of thing distresses you or causes you to become dyspeptic, you might want to go and see if the Easter bunny has a blog.”

Then, always the charmer, she adds: “But I sure hope you stay.”

Much of her blog writing is about her family — her husband, Greg, their four children and two grandchildren — and much of it is delivered with a gentle humor. It’s that gentility that produces some of the humor — for example, when she caught me off guard in a June 6 entry about seeing her first Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field in 1982 when she was pregnant with their first daughter:

Other than the fact that I had no desire to go to the game in the first place, I remember exactly three things about that day: (1) I was nauseated and retaining water; (2) it was approximately 105 degrees in the shade so we made every effort to stay out of the shade; and (3) we parked in Wisconsin to avoid paying what they charged for parking near the venue.

I smiled at her discomfort and lack of desire to be there, and parking in Wisconsin seemed funny, too, but I missed the zinger about the temperature until I reread it. I think Greg may have paid for that ‘every effort to stay out of the shade.’

Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Chapter Eight of R.J. Keller’s Waiting for Spring: Tess is disturbed to see Brian’s younger sister hanging out with an unsavory guy in a sports bar and then finds herself approached by an equally sleazy one. She feels it’s time to paint again, to put some fresh life on canvas.

• Chapter 20: Shrader Street of Gerard Jones’ Ginny Good: After their first acid trip together, Gerard and Ginny take a new apartment in San Francisco and host a variety of roommates and other strangers.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTES:

*I enjoy RWTTD, but it’s a webring of nine women writers, and our two additions make that category disproportionate on a blogroll that is supposed to be diverse. Besides, the RWTTD writers blog a lot about their work, and when it comes to women writers who write about writing (whew), we’ve got the best — Bernita Harris. As for philosophy of art, it’s been quiet since Jan. 2, a long pause even for philosophers.

By the way, the subhead on the scroll at top is borrowed from the old TV series “Night Court” in which a young judge played by Harry Anderson is occasionally visited by his father, a former mental patient played by John Astin. The father’s stories about his past weird behavior, told with Astin’s goofy grin, always end with, “but I’m feeling much better now.”

This is going to be shortest entry I’ve written for this weblog because I’m going to let Gerard Jones write most of it. And he’s not going to have to work too hard because he’s already done it.

It’s Chapter 19: La Honda of his nonfiction novel Ginny Good, and it contains the best description of an LSD trip I’ve ever read. Now I’m not recommending drugs to anyone — not caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, marijuana and certainly not LSD. What I’m recommending is the words.

Jones is a careful writer. His book, which we’ve been serializing by chapters since April 6, has a straightforward, conversational, almost casual style that reads easily, comfortably, simply. It’s been my experience that achieving those qualities while telling a complex story requires a lot of work and talent.

Chapter 19 is barely halfway through the 35-chapter novel and yet is one of its zeniths. In this chapter, Jones gives us a peek at his considerable talent with words, building a simple narrative into progressively ornate images that to me border on poetry.

It was late afternoon. The sun was about to go down. Nothing happened for a while. The bed in the cabin was soft and springy. We lay down next to each other. She put her head on my chest. I put my arm around her. She was contrite. We didn’t talk. The first thing I noticed was a tingling little itch in my throat, but deeper, like somewhere down inside the autonomic nervous system of my esophagus. We got up and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at each other again. She must have been feeling the same tingling itch. Then not much else happened for another little while.

We went outside. When we got to the edge of the steamy blacktop road, we stopped, looked and listened — then we held hands and ran as fast as we could across the street and deep into the redwood forest. It was still warm, the tail end of a day that had gotten up into the mid-eighties. Insects had started to become more noticeable, I noticed. That was about it. Flies and gnats had always left little vapor trails in the air, but the vapor trails I was beginning to see seemed to be lasting slightly longer than usual.

The itch in my esophagus had extended into my chest and was working its way down into the pit of my stomach. The last of the sun’s rays showed spiders’ webs covering everything. That wasn’t particularly unusual, either. In the woods, just before the sun goes down, spiders’ webs do cover everything, but these spider webs were thicker than usual. They were, like, replicating themselves as I watched — and pretty soon the whole forest floor was half-an-inch deep with spider webs, sparkling like snow. That was unusual. The floor of a forest on a warm day in May doesn’t sparkle like snow. Something was definitely going on.

The tingling itch had settled in my groin. I could taste the fillings in my teeth. A fly circled my head, but slowly — so slowly, he almost stopped in midair. His huge hairy body was luminous green. The veins in his wings had black insect blood coursing through them. Then he flew away, leaving a bright, phosphorescent green stream of light behind him in the air. The stream of light stayed in the fly’s wake until it began to sort of . . . melt. Another bright fresh trail from a smaller insect cut through the air and stayed there, then another and another. Insects were leaving bright vapor trails everywhere. . .

That’s just the beginning of a strange odyssey in which all sorts of life, hitherto unseen, open to the narrator. Check it out. It won’t make you want to take drugs, but it will make you want to read on.

Also today:

• Another short story, ‘Pennies from Hell,’ from James L. Fox. This time, the Mojave Hermit tells of a man who learns about his friends — and enemies — by handing them a penny.

• Chapter Seven of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess Dyer and Brian LaChance share another television-and-beer night in which she learns more about this attractive younger man with sad and earnest eyes.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is a design by an artist named zero blade (zero-blade@demonnet.org) found in the art section of the website ouim.org, which describes itself as a ‘psychedelic activation portal.’

O mighty Caesar. . .
Are all thy conquests,
Glories, triumphs, spoils,
Shrunk to this little measure?

–Shakespeare, ‘Julius Caesar,’ act 3, scene 1

In my case, the answer is yes, but I’m at a point in my life where even little victories are triumphs, and I am proud to report that this week has brought me three of them.

The principal one is a poem from a new contributor, Laura Elliott of Derby, England, who submitted a work called ‘This Is Your Rock Opera,’ a lyrical piece that brings to my mind images that Picasso or Salvador Dali might have painted. But that’s me. You decide for yourself.

The poem also has special meaning to us at R&W Blog — and perhaps to Laura as well — because it is the first work she has ever submitted for publication, and I’d be lying if I didn’t admit we’re flattered to the bottom of our socks that she chose us.

She is a 2004 graduate in English and history who writes both poetry and fiction. Her contribution expands the scope of our Works section, which already includes nonfiction, fiction and poetry by writers from the East to the West Coast of the United States and several provinces in Canada, now to the seat of the empire, the United Kingdom.

That also is one of the reasons I led this blog entry with poetry emanating from that same place.

Well, in comparison, my other two victories this week are little indeed, and while I worry that they may seem too much like the personal trivia that I shun in daily-diary blogs, I offer them to show how the horizons of a life can creep closer as the years advance:

• I’ve caught up on my blogroll reading — again. Our blogroll has 39 active sites and five inactive sites, all of which are as diverse as I could make them and all of which I’ve tried to read as new entries are posted. Well, that worked for a while — before we started receiving more and more contributions to our Works section from other writers, which is, after all, the whole point of this weblog. But I also like to continue reading what a diversity of other bloggers are writing, and I certainly feel obligated to keep current with those we have listed on our blogroll.

My attempts to limit our blogroll to those I can keep up with have been only partly successful. Because I find myself reading other blogs as well. I’m going to have to do something about that.

I’m still not overworked, but I find myself spending more and more time at R&W Blog.

• I beat the heat. Literally. I’m no longer an outdoors person, but I still hate to be trapped indoors, which is what the heat wave early this week threatened to do. High temperatures in southern New York on Monday and Tuesday were a humid 97 and 98 degrees, respectively. We use air conditioning, if at all, only late at night, so the daytime temperature in our house on those days was about 85 degrees. So Monday, instead of doing my daily mile walk on the treadmill, I decided I’d go outside.

Big mistake. I got only six-tenths of a mile around the church parking lot across the street before the ozone made my lungs feel like they were being ripped apart. I finished the mile indoors on the treadmill. Thank goodness for that treadmill. If it hadn’t gotten me in shape to do an easy mile, I’d have sworn I was having a heart attack.

I was smarter on Tuesday. I walked a mile around the perimeter of our back yard. Grass is cooler than asphalt, and there’s a lot more shade. I figured if I keeled over, I could crawl to the porch and make it inside the house.

Enough personal minutiae. Today’s new offerings in Works:

• Laura Elliott’s poem, ‘This Is Your Rock Opera.’

• Chapter 18: Ocean Beach of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Their friend Elliot drops out of sight after his father commits suicide, and Gerard and Ginny, after separating during one of her post-holiday binges, get together in the spring of 1965 and make plans for an acid trip.

• Chapter Six of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. A visit to the hospital to see her sister-in-law’s newborn baby stirs painful memories in Tess Dyer about the failure of her own marriage. Her husband wanted children, but to Tess, she told him, “just the thought of being a mother makes me sick to my stomach.”

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top shows Marlon Brando as Mark Antony standing over the body of the murdered Caesar (Louis Calhern) in the 1953 movie “Julius Caesar.”

It’s one thing when your own milestones fade into the past — in retirement, in age, in health — but it’s another thing when your country’s, maybe your civilization’s, do.

Our days of gasoline-driven mobility are over, period.

Maybe that’s a good thing, but it’s going to be a long time before alternative sources of energy replace petroleum, and there’s going to be a lot of pain and hardship in the meantime.

What brought this realization crashing down on me was our trip to Indiana. In the 1,700 miles we drove there and back, I saw exactly eight recreational vehicles on the road. In the old days, I might have seen that many in a mile.

I know whereof I speak. Twenty years ago, I lived year-round in an RV and did so for about seven years. It wasn’t my love of travel but my desire to survive in the cheapest way possible. Stay in a place for a while, then drive on a few miles to another place where you wouldn’t attract attention for another while. Never in an RV park.

My vehicle was small and efficient — a 1985 Toyota one-ton truck outfitted into a mini-motor home with a four-cylinder engine that got gas mileage in the mid-20s and camouflaged by me to look like a commercial vehicle instead of my home with all my belongings. Take a closer look, if you wish.

I was always conscientious about using gasoline. I stayed more than I went, and when I went, it was always with a definite destination in mind, even if it was only the next town. Wherever I stayed, I walked a lot. Saw a lot of America that way.

Gasoline in those days was barely a dollar a gallon. Crude oil ran $15 to $25 a barrel. When we got home Friday from our trip, the price of crude increased more than $10 — now at $138 a barrel. Gasoline was averaging $4 a gallon.

Crude oil and gasoline prices may come down again, but not much. Because even now, they’re cheaper than they should be. A lot of us who pay attention to Europe have known that for a long time.

So please join me as I say goodbye to carefree driving.

Well, back to work — actually, I should say Works — and today’s new offerings in those sections:

• A new installment, Chapter Three, of Jeri Cafesin’s novel Disconnected. Lee helps Rachel bake a pie for her Thanksgiving reunion with her family, always a source of tension, and she finds more to him than the smooth-talking source of drugs that initially attracted her.

• Chapter Five of R.J. Keller’s novel Waiting for Spring. Tess Dyer is settling into her apartment in a new town, but memories of her ex-husband and their life together continue to be unsettling, even as she grows closer to Brian LaChance.

• Chapter 17: Vietnam of Gerard Jones’ nonfiction novel Ginny Good. Gerard and Ginny listen to their friend Elliot’s strange visions from Vietnam, and while none of them can explain it, they all know what he’s been talking about — and that they are going to do things with each other, share things.

– Sid Leavitt

Now that the earth has rolled 550 miles beneath our wheels away from Indiana, I find myself thinking back about our visit to the Hoosier State and ahead to our return to New York.

The anticipation about being back in the Empire State and in our own beds again is tempered a bit by what I — and I mean I, because my wife, Bonnie, is allergic to dust — am going to face before we resettle into that comfort zone. I’ll get to the math later, but we are being awaited by two cats who have been oversupplied with food, water — and litter.

Back to Indiana for a moment. One of the things the state celebrated while we were there — other than the fact that we were there, of course — was that a young fellow from West Lafayette, Ind., won the Scripps national spelling bee. Now I’m fairly sure Sameer Mishra, 13, doesn’t come from an old Indiana family, but folks there were pretty happy about his victory. The runnerup, by the way, was a 12-year-old from Michigan by the name of Sidharth Chand.

Ah, the Midwest. Not everybody there grows soybeans and corn, although my father-in-law did a fine job of it for many years. Young Sameer says he’s going to be a neurosurgeon, and I believe him.

Other things I have learned over the years about Indiana. You might call it Indianiana:

• Much of the state, like much of its citizenry, is very quiet. Especially the town of Warren, just south of Huntington, where we stayed for four days. It’s so quiet that when I was up in the middle of one night to have a cold glass of soda, I had to slide the ice cubes into the plastic glass sideways to avoid waking Bonnie, then found the sound of the soda fizzing over the ice so loud that it caused her to stir. I told her later that what I needed was not Diet Pepsi but Quiet Pepsi. She thought that was funny (I think).

• No one is quite sure about the origin of the word ‘Hoosier,’ although it’s been used since the 1830s by Indianans, few of whom, by the way, refer to themselves as ‘Indianans.’ Some claim there was an early construction contractor named Samuel Hoosier who liked to hire Indiana men for their good work habits. Some trace it to the Polish word for ‘hussar’ used by Thaddeus Kosciusko, a Polish aristocrat who fought alongside the colonists in the American Revolution and for whom a county in Indiana is named. Some say it was just the corruption of a common phrase used by Indiana settlers for strangers approaching their cabins — “Who’sh ‘ere? (Who’s there?).”

• Place names in Indiana also can be a source of bemusement. A friend and former coworker of mine, Frank Kimmel, a bemused sort of guy, once told me a somewhat-naughty joke he had heard about why so many non-Hoosiers are confused about Indiana: “It’s because South Bend is in the north, North Bend is in the south, and French Lick ain’t nothing like it sounds.” Neither my wife nor her parents — all Indiana-born and bred — had ever heard the joke.

Oh yes, the cats. Our outside cat, Guy, is being amply supplied by food and water dispensers in the basement where he also has a two-way portal to his beloved outdoors. Our two inside cats, Blackie and Nothing, have been set up with even bigger food and water dispensers for the nine days we will have been away, and those dispensers are loaded with at least a 30-day supply.

Their customary one litter box has been lined up with four others in the kitchen, all loaded with fresh litter that should go at least two weeks.

Cleaning them won’t take that long. It’ll just seem so.

– Sid Leavitt

NOTE:

The image at top is ‘Going and Coming,’ a painting by Norman Rockwell for a Saturday Evening Post magazine cover in 1947.

Well, we’ve reunited today with all the relatives, and considering there are not many youngsters among them, they all seem hale and hearty. Then again, in Indiana, they wouldn’t tell you if they weren’t.

The Indiana weather, on the other hand, hasn’t been so taciturn. The tornado warning came in Friday night as we sat in a local restaurant while most of the other patrons filed outside to take a look. As we drove back to our motel, folks along the way were gazing at the sky as the tornado front bypassed us to the north on its way to Fort Wayne. A lot of hail, I’m told.

No one seemed too disturbed by it all.

There was more excitement at the reunion, held in honor of Maxine Stetzel, otherwise known as my wife’s Aunt Maxine. She will turn 90 on Monday, so several dozen of her relatives, in-laws and friends gathered with her today at her residence in Huntington, Ind., to celebrate the occasion. That’s her in the photo above, greeting guests as they arrived.

There was some talk about the tornado, but mostly folks were just glad to see each other, some for the first time in a long time. My wife Bonnie’s aunt and uncle, Pat and Paul Maddox, drove about 325 miles from Kentucky to be here. Bonnie and I and her parents, Glenn and Virginia Sunderman, drove about 750 miles from New York.

Our trip — well, I should say my trip — was both prosaic and proverbial. The proverb is the one about the nail that falls out of the horseshoe and, through a series of increasingly serious mishaps, eventually brings about the loss of a kingdom.

For want of a power cord, this entry might never have been filed. I left that cord, which powers this laptop I’m working on, at a motel in Pennsylvania when I obsessively tossed the coverlet over the bed as we were leaving, not realizing I also had covered over the neatly wrapped power cord. The more prosaic side of this story is that, like Jimmy Durante and his old novelty song, “I’m the Guy Who Found the Lost Chord,” I not only located mine but also a replacement to serve until we get back to Pennsylvania.

But it did have me flustered for a while. I discovered the loss of the cord at 3:30 a.m. Friday at a motel in Ohio, awoke my ever-suffering wife to get her cellphone, made a series of frantic calls to no avail, got lost driving to the local Walmart, which didn’t have a replacement, waited until 9 a.m. for the local Radio Shack to open, which did have a replacement but no three- to two-prong adapter, which Walmart also didn’t have but where I vowed I would do it myself, so I bought a pair of pliers to rip off that damned third prong.

The worst part is that when I went into a local quick-stop gas station to get a cold Pepsi to soothe my fevered self, I mistakenly bought not one but two Diet Pepsis with a chemical additive claiming to be ‘wild cherry.’ Jesus, that stuff was awful.

But here’s one of the good parts about the trip — the ‘well met’ reference in the headline: About 9:30 a.m. Friday, just when I was at my gloomiest, I heard my father-in-law, Glenn, sitting outside their adjoining room, playing an old song on his banjo. He likes to do that in the morning, so I went outside to play a little rhythm guitar for him. That’s when one of the young men from several units down the way came over toward us. I could see he was African-American and, oh shit, he’s probably angry that a couple of white guys were playing hillbilly music so early in the morning.

No sir, he was curious. As I was explaining to him that our little family band specializes in old songs, I started absent-mindedly playing “Amazing Grace.” Damned if we both didn’t start singing it.

So thank you, Orlando Corbin, one of the outreach ministers in United Restoration Ministries, for turning a bad morning into a good one for me.

United Restoration, which started in California and since has spread east to include 32 sites, specializes in restoring drug addicts, alcoholics and others who find themselves helpless in life. The organization’s Ohio headquarters are at the Toledo Restoration Church, 546 Western Ave., Toledo, Ohio 43609, telephone (419) 279-3351 or (419) 242-0497, pastored by the Rev. Eddie Mendivel Jr. They accept donations.

Corbin introduced me to Brother Ken, who at the time was sitting in the driver’s seat of the van that would carry the group on its travels for the day. Corbin said it was Brother Ken who brought him into the ministry. I looked at Brother Ken — about 400 pounds, I’d guess. If he reached out for me, I think I’d go along, too.

– Sid Leavitt

p.s. Sorry about the delay in filing. I usually try to get the entry up by noon Sunday, but there was that big Indiana reunion party.

p.p.s. Apologies also for not having new offerings today in our Works section. Despite my advance planning, I no longer seem able to access the files in which the new chapters of R.J. Keller’s Waiting for Spring and Gerard Jones’ Ginny Good have been processed.