Beacon

 I have always been writing something.  Even in high school I was writing these little humorous pieces that sometimes got into the school newspaper.  In college I took narrative writing courses.  I can't say I actually learned anything there, like stuff you could put on a test, but it got you to write and to read what other people had written and to discuss it among yourselves, and that's about as good it gets for a writer.

It seems hard to believe but all those stories were handwritten.  What a chore it must have been for the teacher to read all those pages of script, but that's the way it was in those days,

Then on a visit to my folks I saw that they had an old portable typewriter which they gave me and I got a book out of the library and I taught myself to type with all my fingers.  Most of my life I have been pretty lazy and I am proud of that little moment of get up and go that I had.  

I like to talk.  I like to hear the sound of my own voice.  I like the way I can just turn on the spigot. and I like to hear what comes out.

Writing is a little different.  It is more formal, you have to type it and you are aware of things like punctuation and paragraphs, and you just have to pay more attention to what you are saying, you have to say it better and it has to make sense.  

Most people don't write.  That kid in fourth grade who is talking a blue streak to all his buddies and disrupting the class, put a paper and pencil in front of him and ask him to write what he did over the weekend or anything at all, anything off the top of his head and he has nothing, absolutely zero to say.  Most people are like that.  I don't know why.

As Beagles has noted I have a ton of this shit.  I was looking through my archives last night and I saw stories that I have forgotten about.  Here is a little short one.

 When the lights go down the curtains stay closed and then the music begins and grows louder, and then you hear the soft shoes, slow at first, but then growing faster.  The curtain opens and there is Mary O'Connor, "The best little hoofer to ever come out of Beacon High," as the music teacher, Mr Cahalan, likes to say.

 She is wearing a peppermint striped little jacket, and a rakish boater, and she has a cane as a prop.  She gets to have her solo here and she hoofs up a storm.  And then I come out of the wings, kind of drifting towards her at centerstage, an easy loping rhythmic stride, and I begin to sing:

 "Are you from Beacon?

Are you from Beacon?"

 She cups her little pink shell of an ear in my direction as I drift into my position beside her.

 "The Illinois River.

The verdant farmland."

 This is directed more towards the audience than at Mary, and then I take a deep breath so I can sing out that last line loud and proud.

 "Beacon U S A."

 Then a little silence with just the sounds of our hooves, I guess to give the viewers who have dropped their programs in all the excitement a chance to retrieve them.

 And then little Mary's bell-like chime:

 "Yes I'm from Beacon.

Yes I'm from Beacon."

 Probably it is just me that notices how for the next two lines she goes more distant, bored, almost sarcastic.

 "The Illinois River.

The verdant farmland."

 But she has to tone it all the way up for the next line.

 "Beacon U S A."

 And then we do one of those dosey doe things, linking our arms and dancing in a circle.

 "Oh we're from Beacon,

Oh we're from Beacon.

The Illinois River,

The verdant farmlands.

Beacon U S A."

 I wrap my arm around her waist then, which strictly speaking isn't part of Mr Cahalan's directions, but Mary doesn't mind, not at all.

 And then just after the U S A part, this other couple, kind of dance wander onto the stage, and Mary and I sing out to them:

 "Are you from Beacon?

Are you from Beacon?"

 And then the whole thing again, ending up with the four of us in kind of a pinwheel at the end.

 And then two more couples coming on, and after that four more, which is really too many, because the first two are pretty good, but the next four are not so hot and they really can't dance at all.  It is all they can do just to run to keep in place at the end of the pinwheel.  And when it comes time to sing towards the audience they are all gasping, but anyway we all sing low, just so that we can hear Mary's voice ring out.

 "Are you from Beacon?

Are you from Beacon?"

etc.

 The first two rows are taken by our classmates who return the favor:

 "Yes we're from Beacon

Yes we're form Beacon."

etc.

 And then together:

 "Oh we're from Beacon

Oh we're from Beacon."

etc.

 And then the first two rows of the audience turn back towards the rest of the audience and etc, and etc, and etc.

 And then, and then, and then, it goes on and on, just repeating itself, over and over, way more times than you would have thought were possible.

 I was a pretty good dancer.  It was just something I could do, like some guys can do those yo-yo tricks.  I didn't live to dance or anything like that.  But I was okay with it when Mr Cahalan wanted me to be in his annual Beacon Blast.  If I had known that I would end up in that peppermint coat, boater, and cane, singing that song over and over I never would have done it, but then when I heard that Mary O'Connor would be dancing next to me, I guess I would have done it even knowing how it was going to turn out.  Anyway I did it.

 I never got any further with Mary O’Connor than that arm around her waist.  She had a jerk of a boyfriend who got her pregnant and then they moved somewhere.  It's been over fifteen years now since I knocked the Beacon off my boots, and some things have turned out really well for me, and somethings have turned out very badly, but wherever I go and whatever I do, I will always know:

 I'm from Beacon. 

Another Keeper!

 I'm beginning to realize that Uncle Ken must be just full of this stuff.  How does he do it?  

People have been telling me all my life that I should write but, as Uncle Ken said, writing in those days was a more laborious process than it is today.  My father had a clackety clack typewriter, but I never learned to type with all my fingers, and I could manually write with a pen about as fast as I could type on one of those things.  It wasn't until decades later, when my daughter gave me her old laptop, that I found I could two finger type on a modern keyboard about as fast as I could think of what I wanted to write next.  I never thought much about selling anything, I just wanted to share my wit and wisdom with people who seemed to need it.  The trouble is the people who need it most don't have the patience to read anything longer than a Tweet, so there you go.  

A long time ago, a barmaid who had been overhearing my legerdemain for months offered me a bit of advice. She had studied psychology in college, but said that her experience tending bar had taught her more about human nature than she ever learned in school.  She told me that I was one of those people who needed to talk to maintain my sanity.  "Now you could talk to a psychiatrist for 50 bucks an hour (I told you it was a long time ago.), you could talk to me for the price of a beer, or you could sit on a log in the swamp and talk to your dogs, or even yourself, for free and it would provide the same benefit."  Funny she should say that because people had been telling all my life that I talk too much, and now this one tells me I need to talk even more.  Since then, I have discovered that posting on the internet seems to fulfill my need to talk so well that I can't remember the last time somebody told me that I talk too much in real life.   

Jenn again

 Actually I did send something to the New Yorker years ago and got a no.  When I was quite young I thought that I was going to be a writer and so I never actively pursued a responsible job, so as not to sell out you know, but of course that was a thinly disguised reason to hang out with my buddies and drink a lot of beer.

I did send stuff out those days.  And that was when you had to use a typewriter which meant if you did a typo there went the page, or you could attempt to fix it with one of those gadgets whose one side was a hard rubber circular eraser and the other a brush, then there was white out, and later than that a tape you could put over your paper and type in the letter you had hit by accident.  All were a pain in the ass and none quite covered up the error.  And then you had to take the whole mess and shove it into an envelope with some kind of snappy cover letter and include another envelope with postage on it so that you could get it back when they rejected it.  If you were lucky you would get a little handwritten note at the bottom of the rejection letter.  Nice try old chap, you show promise, try us again.

I did manage to get a handful of those notes, but that was as far as my writing career ever went.

Now in the cyber age you can write your opus with a word processor and send it out for free with the click of a send button.  Which is so easy that a lot more people send stuff in.  Magazines all claim that they have somebody read every manuscript, but I imagine it is a bleary-eyed intern who knows if he brings something to his betters, Hey guys you ought to look at this, they will likely be annoyed at the waste of their time.  Still now that it has been mentioned and, as I have pointed out, it takes so very little time, perhaps I will give it another go.

But for the nonce Gentlemen, I give you the conclusion of Jenn.

Women, well they can’t help it, they are the gatherers of the tribe you know.  Empty space in the fridge is something they abhor.  They have to fill it up with something, so that when the hunter returns with two six packs of Old Milwaukee, which he was able to get at an incredible price because the liquor store was dumping the brand, and which is best served very well chilled, and throws open the refrigerator door, he finds a full house.

 Compromises have to be made.  The game is already in the third inning, so three-four cans should do it. Eight cans can be set on top of the fridge for the time being.  And you know, that square blue container is just about two cans long on each side.  What could it hurt for it to sit on the kitchen table for an hour or two? 

 Who ever expects extra innings or a rain delay, and especially who expects both?  And who expects that when making tuna salad, something which even I know can go bad quickly, the gatherer wouldn’t use a transparent rather than an opaque blue container so that the hunter could see what was inside and maybe choose something else to displace to make room for the Old Milwaukee?    

 Anyway in the excitement of the thrilling extra-inning victory, and the couple celebratory more beers, and the nap that ensued, perhaps that blue container remained on the kitchen table too long, which it wouldn’t have had I known it contained tuna salad, which I would have known had it been in a proper transparent container.  

 And you know, she’s always talking about losing weight, and she was fit as a fiddle just a couple days after the unpleasantness.  So I don’t know why she makes such a big production about it.

 But she does.  Every time we have a little disagreement about anything the tuna salad incident comes up.  There’s no point in interrupting her, the story will be told.  The best thing is to play along, like I’m agreeing to what she is saying, almost like the two of us are discussing some third person.

 And this is not so unfortunate because this will give that maddeningly slow barmaid time to make her lackadaisical way to our end of the bar.  So all in all things are going well. 

 “I thought I would die,” she finishes, and fixes me with that piercing look.   

 “First of all,” I begin, raising my finger to illustrate that this will be the first of many points that I will raise in my defense, and begin with the folly of placing a perishable food in an opaque container, and before I even get to the part of so many transparent ones being right at hand, to my astonishment the barmaid has slipped a new beer in front of me.

 This is the purest serendipity.  There is no way that I would have ordered a beer at this sensitive point in our conversation, but the barmaid has clearly mistaken my enumeration of points for that very act.

 And so there it is, the tenth beer, or the twelfth if Jenn’s probably slanted calculations are accurate. But the point is it is the cornerstone, the acme of the evening, the pathway to fulfillment.  Oh, there will probably be some unpleasantness from Jenn, but I will be able to deal with this from the pleasantness of a comfortable barstool with my hand tightly wrapped around the cool base of the capstone beer. 

 And actually this is the best way for this little spat to proceed.  Were I irritable from being cut short, then I might speak sharp words to Jenn.

 This would be unforgivable.  This woman had this very evening, spurning my offer of help, prepared me an excellent meal.  To repay that kindness with wounding words would be most unfair.  How much better it was then for me to be ensconced and enbeered and kindly disposed to deal with the situation.

 So this was all for the best.  But then right at this point when all was going well with the world, as I was pushing my money towards the bar, I realized that I only had three dollar bills.  I was a dollar short.  Two options came immediately to mind.

 The first was the quick nod to Jenn accompanied by a sheepish look, my eyes darting from where the dollar was missing to Jenn’s purse.  No, that had best be discarded.

 The second was finessing the barmaid.  It was only a lousy buck after all, and hadn’t I enlivened her evening with my enchanting conversation?  Hadn’t I enhanced my volume so that she could partake of it?  Yes, this would almost surely work.  I shoved the three bills towards her with a little complicit shrug, imploring eyes, and that sheepish look which always works so well with women.

 And yet it doesn’t work.  “That will be another dollar,” she says, and worse yet she does not relinquish her firm grip on the glass.

 It is standing there right before me.  Right before me.  And yet for want of a buck I would be denied what fate had so clearly granted.  I give Jenn the quick nod, sheep it up to max. I even extend my hand towards the steely clasps of her purse so she won’t have to reach so far to slip me that single slim bill.

 Jenn’s a wonderful woman, a caring considerate woman who, noting that her man was immersed in the news of the day, would not disturb him by requesting his aid in a meaningless banging of pots and pans, even were he to generously offer his assistance.  Hardly would a woman of this nature deny him one paper thin, almost worthless really, scrap of paper.

 Yet she does, and worse yet she yanks the purse back off the bar and into her lap leaving my hand dangling where once the clasps had clasped, where surely behind this purely mechanical contrivance in sweet perfumed comfort resides at least one lousy buck.

 “Jenn,” I say, and then I say her name a little more softly, a little slower, a little deeper.  Women love a deep voice.  “Jenn, may I borrow a dollar?”

 “Borrow?” she asks.  “Borrow?  You mean in the sense that you will be paying me back?” 

Oh here is a sore point.  There have been times in the past when I have treated Jenn to an enchanted evening at a fine restaurant only to discover, when the bill was presented, that the previous evening when I had stopped at the bar for one quick one, but had unexpectedly met up with a lively and philosophic crowd, that the ensuing give and take, symbolized by the buying of rounds, had depleted my wallet, and I had required her financial assistance.

But this is all in the past.  We are living in the present now, this little present of just one more beer which is presently sitting before me, little bubbles rising from its base like giggles. 

And then in a second incident of serendipity the pool players are ready for another round and are being quite vocal about it and the barmaid has released her grip and then she is gone, gone down the bar, and my glass of beer is all my own, steady in my hand.

I seize the beer and the moment, take a quick quaff, and the whole thing is a fait accompli, the triumph of logic accompanied by a couple small quirks of fate, a heroic ending for my quest. 

Oh the glare from Jenn’s gimlet eyes.  There is trouble ahead, and more troubling yet is the realization that, what with all this consternation, this beer will not be the capstone anymore.  One more after it will be required.

 But with all my legerdemain, and with my current lucky streak going strong, I don’t see how this will be a problem.

Great Story!

 That's a great story Uncle Ken.  I had a vague idea of what legerdemain meant, but I looked it up to be sure.  I had mostly seen it used to describe magic tricks, but you're right that it can be applied to any skillful, possibly deceptive, display of adroitness including, of course, bull shit.  Did you know that it comes from the French language and is literally translated as "sleight of hand"?  I hope that "Jen" is the beginning of another saga and not just a stand alone story because I would really like to read about the Tuna Salad Incident.  

I knew that "vittles" and "victuals" both meant the same thing, but I thought they were two different words.  I had no idea it was one word that is pronounced differently than it is usually spelled.  

From where I live, crossing the Mackinac Bridge and the U.P. is indeed the shortest route to the Canadian border.  From Chicago, however, it might be shorter to cross at Detroit, but I suppose it depends on where in Canada you want to go.  

Crossing the bridge

These recent tales by Uncle Ken are pretty good and I'm glad they are seeing the light of day.  Years ago, when I first read about the Catfish, I think I mentioned to Uncle Ken that he should get a literary agent and shop it around   The advice still stands; wouldn't it be swell to see his stories in The New Yorker?

-----

Ah, the Mighty Mac!  A fuzzy childhood memory of mine is crossing the strait via ferry as the bridge was under construction, maybe the summer of '57.  I've crossed the bridge a few times since and it can be spooky, especially on a motorcycle.  One lane is a steel grating and it's a very long way down to the water, as you can plainly see if you look down.  Those steel surfaces grab your front wheel and make it wander a bit, adding to the drama.  Will a gust of wind blow you into the next lane, knocking you over as you hit the deck like a piece of cheese on a box grater?

While it's true that the bridge doesn't directly connect the US to Canada, you still have to cross that bridge if you want to cross the border many miles further north.  It's worth the trip, though, and you can marvel at the Soo Locks as you cross the border for some fresh vittles at Tim Horton's.  But maybe you don't want to go to Canada, that's fine.  The Upper Peninsula is a special place in it's own right and is highly recommended for those that want to get away from it all.  A lot of history and mining towns up there, to say nothing of the savory pasties.

-----

Wait, did I type vittles?  I meant victuals.  That's a funny word, victuals, because it's pronounced vittles.  I fell down that rabbit hole years ago when I thought they were two words meaning two different things.  Silly me, I should be used to the screwball nature of the English language by now.  I wonder how well those smarty-pants kids at the Spelling Bee will do when they are asked to spell "vittles."

-----

Just when we were getting used to the threat of the Delta variant of Covid-19, here comes another one.  Let's all give a warm welcome to the Lambda variant, arriving soon from South America!  I hope the vaccines we have can keep up with all these new versions; maybe we'll get lucky.

 

 

Jenn

 So Jenn is wandering through the kitchen, looking for God knows what, just banging around the way women are wont to do, God knows why.

 And I'm sitting at the kitchen table, you know, legs crossed but not in a feminine way, elbows outthrust in a manly way, reading the paper, digesting the News Of The Day, preparing it in a way that Jenn can understand when, in my dignified, but not pompous manner, I shall share it with her.  But, you know, I'm a little bit hungry too. What the hell is she doing in there anyway?

 "Where's them vittles woman?"

 Is not what I ask, not in this modern age, what I ask is, "May I help you in the kitchen dear?"  Of course I'm betting that she will refuse my request because of a few incidents in the past where afterwards things were perhaps not tidy enough.  They looked perfectly fine to me, but you know how women are.

 So it's a win-win.  I've expended no energy, and I've booked a little credit on my account.  "I offered to help."  Maybe I can cash it in later.

  

Like that night when I've finished my ninth beer and I just know that the tenth one will put me exactly where I want to be, and as I am raising my finger to the barmaid I feel Jenn tugging at my sleeve.

 "I'd like to go home now." 

 Geez what an inopportune time, my tenth, the keystone beer, the apogee of the evening, is only a wave of the finger away. 

 Now why the hell should she want to go home?  The bar is full.  Her man is brilliantly holding forth with tales of his triumphs, bold bawdy stories with rapier like digs of wit here and there.  Everybody is clearly enthralled.  She has to be bathing in Ken's reflected glory.  Oh how swell to be Ken's girl the other girls must be thinking.

 If there were any, which strangely enough there aren't.  Just four or five guys who appear to have been doing shots for the last hour.  Well surely they will tell their girls later and those girls will then think how lucky it is to be Ken's girl.  And that will be like a reflection of a reflection which everybody knows is twice as strong.  But still she is tugging so it's time to cash in the win-win credit, to shove those big fat table-setting, sauce-stirring, chips to the center of the table.

 "I offered to help with dinner Dear," I calmly refute her request.

 "What?" she replies in a totally unwarranted sharp manner.  Maybe she doesn’t realize how big and fat those chips are.  I will have to make it clearer.

 I put my arm around her and whisper confidentially, "Earlier this evening I offered to help with dinner and you know dear I would have been glad to do it, but you refused me, and so maybe you wouldn't mind if I had one more quick one, and then we could think about going."  Reasonable request.  Reasonable people would have to agree.

 "What?"  A little sharper now.  Who would've thought that little Jenn would have the strength to slam my hand to the bar, just missing, I might add, my quarter-full pint of Mad Hatter's pale India ale?

 "Huh," I reply judiciously, playing for time and noticing that the barmaid is at the far end of the bar pulling off the caps of PBRs for some newly-arrived pool players.  She won't even be in the vicinity for another couple minutes.  So we have time to talk this out, a couple minutes to get things straight.

 "Huh?" she asks, returning the ball to my court.  The barmaid has begun collecting the money for the PBRs.

 “You know what I’m thinking Jenn, is that what we’ll do is, I’ll just have this tenth beer, it’s a nice round even number, don’t you think?  And then we can go straight home.” 

 “That’s your eleventh beer that you’re finishing right now,” she says with such intensity, that I think that maybe she could be right.  But that’s a remote possibility because I always watch my intake carefully, and I’m pretty sure it’s just been nine.

 Well anyway the important thing is that one more beer, tenth or twelfth whatever, is the beer that is necessary to reach the acme of the evening.  If you think about it I’ve already had nine pints at four bucks apiece and that comes to 36 bucks so it would really be foolish not to spend four lousy bucks more to put a shining cap on the investment.  See how well I can do the math, nothing wrong with me. 

 But this argument is a little too complex, a little too numerically oriented for Jenn in the state she’s in to understand.  So I kind of do a shorthand on the whole thing, quick so Jen can see that I have this thing under control, and just agree and go along with the program.  “I’ll just have one more,” I say with impeccable logic.

 Which seems to go right over Jenn’s head, and she even ups the ante as she replies, “Call me a cab.”

 Perhaps I could deflect this whole thing with humor, and you know I have that rapier wit thing going so I might as well use it.

 “You’re a cab.”  Okay a very corny retort, but it’s all in the delivery.  I give her that sly look that says, I know it’s corny, and so that means I’m being ironic, and could a guy who’s drunk, who has had more than the carefully calculated, and well-monitored intake that would necessitate his precipitous departure be capable of this?  Not likely. 

 And I don’t lay it on heavy, not in a mean way that says, don’t you feel foolish, having witnessed the fine display of legerdemain that your man has just displayed, that you suggested, in a rather arch way I might add, that he forego the crowning beer of the night?

 Legerdemain, such a fine word, I really should share it with Jenn, let her know what a fine command of the language her man has, work it cleverly into the conversation.

 “Some legerdemain, huh?” I say.

 Not only is it a fine word, but due to its polysyllabic nature, it would be hard for one who has had too many to pronounce without slurring, which okay, maybe I do a little bit, but if I do I am being ironic.

 But then it occurs to me that I really don’t know what the word means.  I was thinking it meant kind of like fancy footwork, like tap dancing, only with words, clearly agile and not the least bit encumbered in mind or body.  But then after that only slightly slurred pronouncement, a little sour taste hits my tongue, and it occurs to me that it could also mean bullshit.

 “I am not a cab.”  She says, pronouncing each word slowly and precisely.  Has my irony, like all of my finely carefully crafted arguments for one more beer, flown right over her pretty little head? 

 Okay this will take a little time to explain to her.  Meanwhile the barmaid has completed her transaction with the pool players and is now moving in her maddening meandering way to our end of the bar.  Decisively I down the remaining quarter of my Mad Hatter.  While I am explaining my little ironic joke to Jenn I will surely be able to unobtrusively raise my finger to the barmaid, and the whole thing will be a fait accompli.  I will have a full beer, and we couldn’t possibly leave until I finished it.

 “What I meant dear was-“ I commence my explanation, but she quickly cuts me off. 

 “I know what you meant Dear.  I get the lame joke Dear, but maybe your timing is a little off dear.  You know how you sometimes lose track of time dear,” she begins.  Dear me, all those dears, I know where this is going, the unfortunate tuna salad incident. 

home again, home again

 Well it was an excellent trip. The first time I have been out of town in almost two years.  You know there is a thing about hunkering down where it is just kind of easy.  So much easier to just stay home and do the same thing every day, no need to pack, no need to worry about when the train is going to leave and if it will get stalled Kankakee for an hour or so.  But when  you take a trip it is something you can remember when you are out puttering around in your garden whereas you never remember all those Tuesday nights watching Portlandia on Netflix.  And there is this thing about being old where you wonder if you should be gallivanting around at your advanced age.

But like I said, it was an excellent trip, the people on the train, in the bar, in other bars, at the restaurants, and at the party were all jolly, and if you talked to them they would comment on how jolly everybody was and then one of you would observe, "Well I think it is just pent up merry making after that long pandemic, which as plain as the nose on your face it certainly was.  There was the original panic, the long slog of just not going anywhere, the dull worry that maybe the idiot on the train with his mask below his neck was shedding covid and in a week you might end up at the other end of one of those awful machines dead to the world. and a fifty/fifty chance you would remain that way forever.  Hopefully we are at the end of that road, though recent delta developments are worrisome.  My covid website seems to have stopped at July 2nd, but it was just beginning to rise a bit after a long plateau.

I really didn't know where the Mackinac bridge was and I guess I assume that living there at the tippy top of Michigan I think that if you just happen to make a wrong turn on the way to the drugstore you might find yourself eating your bacon round.

For a long time the House of Chin would not accept credit cards, and George, the owner, confessed to me once that he kept two sets of books for purposes of avoiding taxes and did not want the feds to be able to trace how much he was making.  That is another reason people want to go cashless, to make people pay their taxes, also how can you bribe you congressman with a credit card?

A lot of places want the server to share their tips with the busboys and the cooks, and if the waiter gets a cash tip it is no problem to slip a few bills into his pocket and not share them.  But also I guess if the restaurant is putting all the tips in one pile and divvying them up they could shave a little bit of that off for themselves also.

I guess I forgot that I had presented that Val story previously.  I will start the next one long the next time I post because I am still catching up on things.