Category: My life

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Classical music

I liked classical music when I was a kid and my favorite among the few scratched records we had around the house was Scheherazade. I could whistle almost the whole thing, a skill most people found passing annoying. It is not really the kind of music you can properly whistle and some people think no kind of music is the kind you should whistle.

My taste was not sophisticated, but my mother encouraged me. Her taste was also not sophisticated but we tried. A lot of our suggestions came from a commercial selling the “Great Classics.” It featured some classy looking guy with an English accent telling us that so many popular tunes were actually the great classics.

Another source of classical music for me were “Bugs Bunny” cartoons, that featured soundtracks with classical music.

In those benighted days, before we had all the advantages of Internet and YouTube, the capacity to be an aficionado were truncated. Mostly you had to listen to radio. Only the rich or serious collectors could have more than maybe a dozen records and they did not sound very good on our cheap equipment. I am still sometimes amazed at the richness of sound in my old favorites when played on modern machines.

I can still recall most of what my mother had. Besides Scheherazade, she had “New World Symphony,” “Liebesträume & other Hits” (which I thought was lebensraum. I was much surprised in world history when I learned that that Germans were fighting for that in WWII. Didn’t seem worth fighting for.) a couple by Tchaikovsky, the rather lowbrow “Beethoven’s Greatest Hits” featuring famous cuts, and “Victory at Sea.” That was it. Maybe Christine Matel Milewski recalls others.

As much as my mother was proud of my esoteric tastes, I was ashamed of them. My friends thought I was weird enough, so I tried to keep it a secret. I still recall with horror a time when my friends came to “call for me” and my mother told them that I would be out later because I was listening to a symphony. I had to put with the ridicule for weeks and that opprobrium has a half life of years.

Kids can be very cruel and their memories are long for mistakes. There was a kid who peed in his pants in kindergarten. We called him “pee pants” until he grew bigger and stronger than most of us and the teasing diminished.

Anyway, I just finished enjoying this music.

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My old house

My old house is up for sale. It was a nice place to grow up; it seems to be nicer now. They have exposed hardwood, replaced appliances and updated the bathrooms. I would not mind living there again, if I lived in Milwaukee.

Always like the neighborhood. That also has improved some. There is some gentrification.
Look at the pictures of back yard. On your left is a basswood tree and on the right a silver maple. The basswood is fifty years old. I brought it back from the woods on College Avenue, then just a woods but now Cudahy Forest. It had only two leaves when I brought it home on my bike.

I loved that forest. I spent a lot of time walking around in it. It was a comfort when my mother got sick and died. It was across the street from my cousin Ray’s house, and I would often visit him and Carol, his wife.

Sorry to go off on such a tangent, but it brings back feelings of home and that is a joy to remember it. I am going to indulge myself. I invite readers down the path with me, but will not be surprised or troubled to walk alone.

It is a maple-basswood forest. Just about a half mile nearer Lake Michigan there are beech trees, but this forest is just far enough from the lake’s cloud shadow that beeches do not thrive. I have seen a few beech trees, but they are few and far between. Beech trees are common in Virginia and they range naturally from the Atlantic Ocean, through New York, Ohio and Michigan, but they stop in Wisconsin, with only a sliver hugging Lake Michigan by the time it gets to Milwaukee.

The story I heard about this woods was that it was a virgin forest. That is why and how I found it. The paper reported on a controversy that someone wanted to cut the trees down and make a parking lot for trucks. I wanted to see it for myself. I wrote a letter to the County to protest. I doubt anybody read it, but there were enough others complaining that the County acquired the land and made a park. I think it unlikely that this is a real virgin forest, in that never been cut, but it is a very old growth. Likely somebody used this as a woodland, for wood and hunting. The maple-basswood system is old succession; it took at least 100 years to reach that stage. The trees in it are old and the soil is deep. Maybe it is a virgin forest, at least parts never cleared.

Anyway, returning to the 50 years old tree in the picture. Consider how it still is not really that big. Some basswood trees in the Cudahy forest were much bigger. Imagine how old they must have been.

A few more additions form Memory Lane. Christine Matel Milewski might enjoy. Tony Dunigan, Dorothy Bozich & Barbara Levreault also lived in the house for a while. Our house and the two up hill were built at the same time. Our’s is different because the porch was taken up when my parents built the front room The siding is redwood, but they have painted it over now.

My parents contracted Banner Builder and I recall all the complaining. The foundation is made of cinder block. The first guy they had setting it up was literally moonlighting. He showed up at night and worked by lantern light. It was a crap job. My parents demanded a better job and they got it.

My father had the blue siding put on. He hired a couple of drunks. They did a good job when they were working but they were not working much. My father had a special place in his heart for drunks and kept them on. They finished the job okay and it is still holding up. I am not sure what year they did that, but it was before 1975 (I think).

I am sure that they updated the boiler. My father and grandfather built the old one with scavenged parts. It was very inefficient. It was built to burn coal, but it was converted to natural gas. I do not know how that works. I am sure that my father did not either, so it is good that he did not try to do that work himself. My father was a mechanic in the Army Air Corps during World War II. I always wondered about that, since his mechanical ability seemed something like mine.

My parents bought the house from my grandpa soon after they were married. I don’t know when grandpa bought it. Grandpa lived with my parents until he died, soon after I was born.
Anyway, nice to see the old house. It is 101 years old this year. Somebody in my family owned it for at least half that time.

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There is no such thing as society

Margret Thatcher is sometimes praised and often criticized for saying that there is no such thing as society.

This is the whole of what she said, and she was right – “There is no such thing as society. There is [a] living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us [is] prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”

I have been reading a lot about emergence and society. Humans are an immensely social species. We are cooperative in ways no other animals are, while (so far) avoiding the tyranny termites, ants and bees. Our conflicts about cooperation are about how much, not if it is going to happen.

Those of us who believe in free market democracy are often accused by progressives and always by socialists of being somehow in favor of a cruel competition. In fact, my views are much closer to a true interactive community than most progressives and all socialists. Community presupposes interactions and reciprocal help and obligations among all members, as Mrs. Thatcher says. Contrary to socialism (or worse) that rely on centralize planning, command and control, free market democracies rely on the people and their emerging cooperation based mostly on free associations among individuals to guide societal change.

Barack Obama drew the ire of many, me included, when he chided successful people by saying “you didn’t build that.” He was actually correct in what he said, but wrong in why he said. it. None of us is independent and almost nobody really wants to be. We live with the accumulated wealth, wisdom and (yes) mistakes of humans who came before us and those that currently share our planet. This is like the fish not knowing he is in water. It does not preclude individual free will, but rather supports it. It also supports our freedom and autonomy. We are in the tapestry and cannot escape, but within that we have choices that make life better or worse for us and for others. We choose. We are not carried along like a cork in a stream, but the most effective decisions are informed by understandings of currents and possibilities.

Some things come easily to us humans. We usually think of those are “natural.” We can easily determine nuances in languages, verbal and non-verbal, that we cannot teach to our most sophisticated computers. Others are harder for us. The math problems that computers can solve in nanoseconds, befuddle most of us. These are learnable, but “unnatural”. And some things we just cannot have, no matter how much we want them. (I always thought that quotation “Some men see things as they are, and ask why. I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.” was inspirational until you thought about it and saw it was just claptrap) Distinguishing among these things, preferentially choosing natural paths when possible, pushing through the less natural when necessary and avoiding things we cannot have, even if we really want them, is what makes life for individuals and societies better or worse.

So nobody is an island, entire of themselves, but we all have autonomy (if we choose to take it) and we all have contributions to make and enjoy. However, only those who choose the somewhat more difficult path of looking to what they can contribute, rather than what they can have, looking to responsibilities as well as rights, can have the chance of being complete human beings.

I know I make a value judgement here and I am indeed saying that we are not all equal in what we do and the outcomes we seek. I am not saying I always know the right, but I am saying that it is incumbent on all of us to seek it.

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Drinking our part against the Corona virus

I am doing my part, even if it costs me some money and mild headaches in the morning.
Chrissy and I like to go to Blackfinn. It is right across the street from us and we especially enjoy eating and drinking out on the patio when the weather cooperates. We know some of the waiters by sight and they know us. They seem content with our tipping policy. Since it takes similar effort to serve a high priced meal as a low one, we have a minimum tip policy of $15 for any check up to $50. This can make a couple beers pretty expensive, but we can afford it.

We cannot eat or drink at Blackfinn anymore, but we are still patronizing the carry out. We are not buying any more canned beer for the duration of this Corona crisis, but rather will get the growler from Blackfinn. The guy there says that they need to empty their barrels and we are willing to shluck down what we can.

Espen bought the growler bottle a couple years back. The guy at Blackfinn told us that they no longer sell them, but they are willing to refill them.

We are currently trying to finish off their Blackfinn Pilsner barrel.

Someday, I expect that Blackfinn will erect a statue of me to commemorate my heroism in schlucking all that beer, risking the personal hardship of headaches and morning sluggishness for the team. Maybe the statue will be very small, maybe made of plastic, an improvised action figure, but a tribute nevertheless.

Anybody who lives near me is welcome to come and help. They have to sit six feet away, but I will provide the beer. We can sit on our deck outside.

My first picture shows me with the growler on the deck. Next is the Lincoln Memorial. Alex sent me the picture. He went down there yesterday to see Mr. Lincoln and be inspired. He kept his distance from others. I have never seen the monument so empty. Last picture is my great-grandfather Haase. I do not recall his first name. Chrissy is doing a lot of house cleaning, seeing as how she is stuck in the house. She found this among the old pictures. It is sort of relevant today.

Great-grandpa was from the old Kingdom of Prussia, from Pomerania. He immigrated to the USA maybe around the 1870s, after being discharged from the Prussian navy. Who even knew they had a navy? The family story is that his father had owned a distiller, but lost his business because he loved his product too much. Anyway, great grandpa felt opportunities in the USA were better, but he never lost his respect for the King of Prussia, and the Kaiser of a United Germany. The Kaiser was not very popular in the USA during World War I.

Great grandpa evidently never got the word and used to voice unpopular sentiments, something like, “the Kaiser is gonna kick Mr. Vilson’s ass,” maybe not his exact words, but you get the idea. The old man evidently went to a local tavern for his daily beer. They filled a bucket he brought along. The story is that he was saying his usual things when someone tossed some old bread into his beer bucket. Not an extremely hostile reaction, since he lived in a predominantly German community, but the story was passed down, maybe apocryphally, to my mother and to me.

On the picture, the old man looks like s sharecropper. Family lore tells me that his trade was a shoemaker. I have no real evidence.

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Memories of the working class

An old picture reminded me of my working days at Medusa Cement on KK Avenue in Milwaukee.

In the original posts I wrote that I did not know who the people in the wedding picture were, beyond my father. I learned a little more. The guy in the picture is Frank Radomski. He was one of my fathers best friends. They knew each other as young men and my father helped Frank get a job at the cement company, where they worked together for three decades.
I got to know Frank when I worked a the cement company. He was in charge of filling the bags that we loaded onto trucks and pallets. Our job was hard; his was boring. Imagine sitting all day attaching bags to a funnel and then kicking them down the belt with your left foot, and doing this for twelve hours a day.

Frank was very nice to me, probably because he liked my father, but he was generally a nice guy. I was young and not as nice to him as he deserved. My co-workers at the end of the line, the ones who loaded the bags that Frank filled, disparaged Frank. They call him the dumb Pollack, ironic since about half the cement company’s workforce was Polish, like my father, John Domelski and … well … me party. They criticized him when the bags were too full or not full enough. Guys working in hard and boring jobs can be very cruel to each other, maybe because nobody wants to be there. You look forward to leaving and dread coming back, so maybe you take it out on your fellow workers.

Frank was no great intellect. In fact, he was noticeable not smart. As I said, I was not as nice to him as I could have been, but I did try. My father told me to talk to him and I tried, but it was tedious for me and I think for him. Frank’s nickname was “Hud”. My father told me that he got that nickname as a young man when they used to play baseball. They used to call him Houdini because of his skill at stealing bases. It was hard to picture the Hud I knew ever being able to do that or ever being young at all.

Frank retired a couple years before my father gave it up. We went to his retirement party. It was a sad affair. Frank was ready to retire. His health was not good. But he was sad to go. His job was, IMO, one of the worst possible – physically hard at least for one arm and one leg, environmentally unhealthy (lots of dust), and intellectually enervating – but Frank evidently liked it.

When the cement would stop flowing through the ducts, Frank would shut down the line and pound on the duct with a mini-sledge hammer. My co-workers would yell “bang-bang Frank’s silver hammer,” riffing off the Beatles song. The boss, a big guy called John Broderick, gave Frank that hammer at his retirement party.

This upset my father. He complained all the way home that it was no way to treat a man who had given so much of his life to the company. I did not see it the way my father did. I understand it better now. My father was actually talking about himself. He was could see the end of his own working life – his own productive life – and it bothered him that what his lifelong friend had to show for it was an old hammer.

I could not have known it at the time, but I was working in the twilight of working-class Milwaukee. In 1970, we were a working city, with lots of jobs, lots of industrial feeder shops and a hard-working blue collar outlook. Our breweries were world class. Our steel helped build the world and the cement my father and others filling into truck was building the Interstate system. A guy could graduate HS, get a job and start a family. Ten years later, we were one of the buckles on the rust belt.

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Sicily

Chrissy & I went to Smithsonian for a program “Sicily: Eternal Crossroads of the Mediterranean.” It was a disappointing program. I thought it would be something like what the title suggested. In fact, it was more a semi-technical art history discussion with some (not all) of the art and architecture happened to be in Sicily. The lecturer was well expert on the art, but her talks were more like watching slides from her vacation than an integrated program about cultural crossroads.

One thing I found interesting about the talk was about the talk itself. There was a big crowd there and many people seemed to like the program a lot. Chrissy and I talked about it. It might be that it was a lot like being a tourist. She took you through the buildings like a tour guide. I wanted the connections, not the tourist sites. That is the great thing about pluralism. We do not all need to like the same things.

No matter. It got us out and down in Washington on a nice day. They provided what they called a Sicilian lunch. We got a prosciutto ham sandwich, olive salad & some cannoli. I do not think these things are especially Sicilian (Prosciutto comes from Parma, not in Sicily) but it was good.

We went to Spain last year and were very favorably surprised by the wonders there. Sicily is another of those crossroads. It was an intellectual and cultural hotbed for a few centuries. I think that is the next place outside the USA for us to visit.

First picture is Smithsonian castle looking good in spring. Next is me at the mall. Lighting is not the best. Last is from the lecture itself.

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A new town

A whole new town sprung up where there were fields & parking lots not long ago. It is called “the Buro” and it is a mixed use development. Mixed use is good. For many years after WWII zoning rules discouraged or disallowed the mixing of residential, commercial or industrial. This sounded like a good idea, but it is not how people really like to live.
Espen told us about this place. I had been up there maybe a couple years ago when I dropped off my car for service at Honda dealer. I had no place to go, so I just walked around and walked up where Boro is now. I saw construction but didn’t pay much attention.
Whole Foods is one of the anchors. Being inexpensive is not one of the store’s traits, but it is very pleasant with high quality food.

But the thing that interested me (and Espen, which is why he mentioned it) is that they have beer on tap a few places around the store. You get a card and then tap as much as you want.

I am surprised at the flowering of beer culture in the USA. Tapping a beer on a Sunday morning and then freely walking around a store with it while shopping is strange.
I recently finished a book called “Over the Rhine”. This is a history of a German section of Cincinnati, Ohio. Like Milwaukee, St Louis and thousands of other towns in middle America, there where big and dynamic German presence in the 19th Century. The native Americans – the Yankees – often did not like them. For one thing, they came in large numbers and kind of took over. For another, they drank a lot of beer.

There was a strong temperance movement among the native Americans at that time and the beer drinking ways of the Germans was just another reason to dislike them.
Prohibition was a progressive American nativist project. To a large extent, it was aimed at immigrants from Germany, Italy or Eastern Europe, with their love of wine and beer. Prohibition hit these communities hard. (For reference, there is another good book about these times called “Last Call.”) Proponents of prohibition wanted to eliminate the influence of beer and wine and if it took out the culture of the Germans and Italians, that was a side benefit.

But we have now had our vindication. Beer is now firmly ensconced in the American mainstream, even more firmly today than it was when I was young. I just like beer. I no longer drink beer to get drunk, I just like the idea of it and I am glad that I am in tune with the culture around me, at least in this case. We live in a golden age of beer. Savor it; all good things must end and it is the curse of men that they forget.

My first picture shows a pineapple slicer. Pealing a pineapple hard. Brazilian Portuguese even has this idiom – “descascar o abacaxi”, peel the pineapple, to describe a tricky and unpleasant task. This machine just does it. Next is the doughnut shop. They have wonderful crullers. After that is me taping into the beer and finally is the street scene outside.

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Life's twists

I questioned my memory. After all, it happened so long ago and seemed incongruous. Today, however, at the Tree Farm meeting I was talking to a woman from Wisconsin who asked me if I had a degree in forestry. I told her that I did not, that I had started off in forestry, but never finished because the authorities at the university told us that our chances of getting good jobs in the field were slim.

I referenced I meeting I recalled where the authorities at UWSP told us aspiring foresters that we should consider other majors. I told her that I recalled that they said that we were too white and too male and that our chances for employment were low, given hiring goals (quotas were still legal back then) that discriminated against people like us. They wanted to lower our numbers.

She remembered this and said that her husband also got that talk. He was couple years ahead of me and had a bigger sunk cost. He decided to stay in forestry and after being lucky enough to get a couple part time jobs that nobody else wanted, he did manage to find steady work in the field in Wisconsin. His wife, the one I was talking to, told me that she had an easier time because of her gender.

What I remembered was the advice. They told us that if we wanted to work in forestry, the only chance we would have would be either to buy our own forest or move to the South, where there were more jobs. Ironically, I kind of did both things.

I have no right to complain. Life worked out well for me. I got the best of all worlds. I am my own boss in forestry and I enjoyed a great career in diplomacy, a job I had no idea even existed back in 1974. It is a good example of what seemed a roadblock turned out to be a better bridge to the future.

At the time, however, it seemed a big issue. I considered being a HS history teacher and coaching swim on the side. My subsequent goal was to be a college professor, but I was behind the curve on that too. I was a middle baby boomer. The early boomers got there first. They got their PhDs during the Vietnam period and filled most of the jobs. Timing is important and a few years makes a big difference.

On the other hand, I was lucky with the FS. I took the test just before a hiring boom in the middle of the Reagan time. Well, boom is relative, since they hire only a few hundred FSOs every year, but hiring a few more opened it up. You don’t need to be so smart if you are lucky.

My pictures are from our Tree Farm meeting in Baltimore and the walk from the train station. I prefer the train to driving. I got into Penn Station and did the easy walk to the Inner Harbor along Saint Paul. Baltimore is a very nice city, but some areas are risky for crime. Mariza told me that this route was safe and she was right. It was a pleasant walk. I was lucky that the rain stopped in time for my transit.

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Lighten Up

I still get StoryWorth questions, even though my subscription ran out. I can no longer post to their webpage. I suppose they hope I will re-up, so they keep sending questions. It costs them almost nothing.

“What would you consider your motto?”

This one made me think a little. I have a lot of habitual sayings, but I am not sure if any are mottos. But I came up with one that I use a lot and think is good for my life & others.

“Lighten up”

Most people take things way to seriously. They inflict on themselves all sorts of needless pain and stress. They get easily offended by slights real and (more often) imagined. And their serious attitude makes it hard for them to enjoy life. They are so dull that they inspire dullness in others.

They just need to lighten up. It is a choice. I know lots of people are going to come back with all the reason why their lives suck and most of those reasons will be valid from their point of view. I would just point to the corollary to lighten up – “get over it,” and the addition to that, “nobody wants to know how you feel about everything.”

Serious people, those who always feel the weight of the world on their shoulders are narcissistic. Let me stipulate that there are some people who really have big responsibility and some times when we all do, but if you let it grind you do, if you take it personally, you are doing nobody any good.

Graveyards are full of indispensable men.

Lots of people are credited with that thought. I first heard it attributed to Charles de Gaulle. Even if he was not first to use it, he is the kind of guy who should have said it, and he was right.

This brings me to another motto, this one much more erudite, Latin no less – “sic transit gloria mundi” – so passes the glory of this world. I always thought it was a classier way of telling me to “lighten up.”

Or maybe from Casablanca, “Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Lighten up.

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My Virginia

My Virginia
I am a Wisconsin guy by birth and a Virginian by choice. I have been in Virginia, with gaps for diplomatic duty, since 1984. Some people say that you cannot be a Virginia unless your family has been here for at least three or four generations. I don’t know about that, but I feel part and accepted in my adopted state. I have owned a home in Virginia since 1997 and forest land since 2005. All three of my kids graduated Virginia public universities: UVA, James Madison and George Mason, respectively.

A “disposition to preserve” combined with an “ability to improve.”
That is what I found in Virginia, what I treasure about Virginia. The deep history and heritage is remarkable. We can visit Washington one day, Jefferson, Madison & Madison the next. I know that people now sometime disparage our history.

It takes a smart man to be cynical but a wise man not to be.
My guess is that I know history better than most of those critics. They generally are intellectual adolescents, who have discovered flaws and are eager to signal their “insight” aggressively. They don’t yet know what they don’t know. Intellectual adults understand that all humans have significant faults and individuals who accomplish great things also often have bigger than average ones. The same energy that produces greatness enables and accentuates good can also empower flaws, or at least make them more salient. The same fire that makes our civilized lives possible can also burn and destroy.

Putting down deep roots
The Virginia I know best, however, are the Commonwealth’s forests. This was a big surprise for me. I didn’t think of Virginia as a forest state, but 62% of Virginia is covered in forests. Trees cover only about half of Wisconsin, and a lot of that is up north in national and state forests. Most of Virginia’s forest land is owned by non-industrial individuals and families, and I could get in on that.

What a hare-brained idea, an urban Yankee becoming a forest landowner in rural Virginia. I had a lot to learn. I knew next to nothing about forestry in Virginia and some of what I did know was wrong, but I got a lot of help. My new neighbors in Brunswick County were eager to give me good advice. They knew “my” land intimately, having hunted, hiked & sometime cut timber there for generations – literally generations. Loggers and other contractors were honest and easy to work with. The Virginia Dept of Forestry guys were so available. Virginia Tech and others provided free, or low-cost events to learn the business. The evidence of their friendliness and competence is that an unconnected novice like me could so quickly thrive.

I drive a lot around in Virginia and there is no part of Old Dominion that I have not visited, yet I am always finding something new and interesting. Change is inevitable. Virginia has changed remarkable in my time here and I expect it will continue. This fitting and proper and I welcome positive change, but I take offense at the implication that we should reject and even obliterate old Virginia.

I think we need the ability to improve, but with the disposition to preserve.