In previous postings, I’ve talked about my adventures with the sidecar, a popular World War I-era cocktail. I was curious when it was mentioned in several episodes of the British series “Upstairs Downstairs,” so I researched it and made one for myself. And liked it. A lot.
The popularity of the drink faded long ago, and I gave up trying to order a one in a restaurant. Only experienced mixologists know how to make a sidecar. Most bartenders, especially wait staff who are pressed into service behind the bar, have never heard of it.
Yesterday I went into our local Outback to buy a gift card for a friend. The hostess directed me to the bar, tended by a very pleasant young woman who, at 3:00 in the afternoon, had no other customers. She was ringing up the sale, and just on a whim, I asked, "Do you know how to make a sidecar?"
She stopped what she was doing, looked off into space, and after a significant pause, said doubtfully, “Do you mean, like for a motorcycle?”
Never mind. Thanks anyway.
Tuesday, April 3, 2018
Friday, March 30, 2018
Move over, Dolly Parton
What do I have in common with the Titanic, Gertrude Ederle’s swim across the English Channel, and Betty Grable’s legs?
Insurance by Lloyd’s of London, that’s what.
Lloyd’s is not actually an insurance company. It was started in 1686 by a dude named Edward Lloyd who owned a coffee shop on Tower Street in London. Lots of sailors and ship owners hung out there, and he and some other guys decided they would offer financial backing for maritime enterprises, for a fee, of course. Today Lloyd’s basically comprises syndicates that share the risks for underwriting all manner of things. Much of it is routine, like the policy I just bought to cover the property I inherited from my recently-deceased aunt in Washington state.
But Lloyd’s has gained a reputation for being willing to underwrite all sorts of unusual things, like Dolly Parton’s breasts, David Beckham’s legs, and Tom Jones’ chest hair. They also wrote the first automobile policy in 1904, which at the time seemed pretty strange.
For the record, the legs of Pin-up Girl Betty Grable were insured for $1 million. When Gertrude Ederle came ashore after her swim in 1926, Lloyd’s forked over £1,863. And the Titanic cost them $10 million, which was a bundle in 1912.
I was pretty excited to learn that my aunt had also left me her shares in 21st Century Fox, the Murdoch mass media company. I started thinking about how I would spend my share of the profits. They brought in $28.5 billion last year.
Then among her papers I found the stubs from the dividend checks. Last year her 21st Century Fox stock earned her $5.76.
Oh, well. Maybe I'm just not ready for show biz.
Sunday, March 25, 2018
Like paying the doctor with a chicken?
Since the domicile of my recently-deceased aunt is in Washington State and I am in Michigan, I have hired an attorney out there to take care of the basic legal matters relating to her will and probate and such like. I was lucky to find a very nice man, Michael by name, who is retired now but still takes cases, especially for the elderly, partly to keep busy but mostly just to help people out. He does some pro bono work, but even for paying customers like me, his hourly rate is low.
We talked on the phone a couple days ago. I had several questions for him, and before we concluded the call, he wanted to make sure I understood that he does not bill clients for the time spent talking on the telephone. He stressed that I should feel free to call him any time I needed legal advice about my aunt’s estate.
Most lawyers bill a client for every minute they spend even thinking about their case. This guy is unique, and I told him so.
He said people are usually surprised, and he told me about one man for whom he handled a legal matter. The man stopped by Michael’s house with some papers, and they spent the better part of an hour talking about the case, among other things. When he was preparing to leave, he asked, “What do I owe you for today?” He was surprised when Michael said he owed nothing. “I don’t charge for conversations we have at my kitchen table drinking coffee,” he told him.
This man, who had what Michael called a “hobby farm,” knew the lawyer was an avid gardener, so by way of thanks, he stopped by Michael’s house the next day with three bushel baskets of cow manure for his garden.
“I can’t think of anything more appropriate,” Michael said, “than a lawyer being paid with bull shit.”
We talked on the phone a couple days ago. I had several questions for him, and before we concluded the call, he wanted to make sure I understood that he does not bill clients for the time spent talking on the telephone. He stressed that I should feel free to call him any time I needed legal advice about my aunt’s estate.
Most lawyers bill a client for every minute they spend even thinking about their case. This guy is unique, and I told him so.
He said people are usually surprised, and he told me about one man for whom he handled a legal matter. The man stopped by Michael’s house with some papers, and they spent the better part of an hour talking about the case, among other things. When he was preparing to leave, he asked, “What do I owe you for today?” He was surprised when Michael said he owed nothing. “I don’t charge for conversations we have at my kitchen table drinking coffee,” he told him.
This man, who had what Michael called a “hobby farm,” knew the lawyer was an avid gardener, so by way of thanks, he stopped by Michael’s house the next day with three bushel baskets of cow manure for his garden.
“I can’t think of anything more appropriate,” Michael said, “than a lawyer being paid with bull shit.”
Wednesday, March 21, 2018
In vino veritas
My wife doesn’t often drink anything but Diet Coke, but we ate out last night and she enjoyed a glass of wine with her dinner. She said she wished she would remember to order it more often.
Wine was not part of my family's life. My first experience with wine came when I was about 14 years old and some people who came to our house for dinner brought a bottle of Manischewitz Concord Grape. I was allowed a sip, and I decided that if that’s what wine tasted like, I didn’t want any part of it.
Because of that I abstained from drinking wine for a lot of years, until I discovered there were plenty of wines out there that taste way better than Manischewitz. That was in the mid-1970’s when you could pick up some cheap but acceptable vino from wineries like Gallo or Carlo Rossi for about $1.50 a bottle.
To earn extra money when I was in graduate school, I gave guitar lessons at the local music store on Saturday mornings. The store owner didn't take anything out of the $3 I got for a lesson. It was just a way for him to lure customers into the store.
Sometimes lessons were paid for a month in advance, sometimes a kid would forget to bring money, and sometimes there were no-shows, so my income varied a lot from week to week. One particular Saturday I had given several lessons, but I finished the day with only $3 in cash.
On the way home, I stopped at a liquor store and bought two bottles of wine with my earnings. While driving home, I suddenly thought, “Well, ain’t that just like your basic drunk -- gets a day’s pay and immediately spends it all on cheap hooch.”
Wine was not part of my family's life. My first experience with wine came when I was about 14 years old and some people who came to our house for dinner brought a bottle of Manischewitz Concord Grape. I was allowed a sip, and I decided that if that’s what wine tasted like, I didn’t want any part of it.
Because of that I abstained from drinking wine for a lot of years, until I discovered there were plenty of wines out there that taste way better than Manischewitz. That was in the mid-1970’s when you could pick up some cheap but acceptable vino from wineries like Gallo or Carlo Rossi for about $1.50 a bottle.
To earn extra money when I was in graduate school, I gave guitar lessons at the local music store on Saturday mornings. The store owner didn't take anything out of the $3 I got for a lesson. It was just a way for him to lure customers into the store.
Sometimes lessons were paid for a month in advance, sometimes a kid would forget to bring money, and sometimes there were no-shows, so my income varied a lot from week to week. One particular Saturday I had given several lessons, but I finished the day with only $3 in cash.
On the way home, I stopped at a liquor store and bought two bottles of wine with my earnings. While driving home, I suddenly thought, “Well, ain’t that just like your basic drunk -- gets a day’s pay and immediately spends it all on cheap hooch.”
Monday, March 12, 2018
Half A Thousand Origami Cranes
The crane, like the dragon, is a kind of mystical creature in Japanese lore, and there is special significance to folding one thousand of them from paper. Depending on which legend you believe, 1000 paper cranes will get you either a wish granted by the gods or a lifetime of happiness and/or good luck. Some think they all need to be strung together in a garland.
A bride or a newborn baby might be given 1000 paper cranes as a wish for their future, and people will also hang them in their homes as a kind of talisman. It is also sometimes said that these 1000 cranes have to be folded all in one year to be effective.
I’ve been folding paper for a number of years, but I found the crane difficult. About a year ago, I decided that any origamist worth his or her salt ought to be able to fold a decent crane, so I started practicing, and they started to turn out pretty well. I used various types and sizes and colors and prints of paper and scattered them all around the house in places where my wife would find them (stuck in the frame of the bathroom mirror, in the seat of her recliner, on top of the toaster). She thought they were so pretty and wonderful she actually said to me, “You can leave those all over the house if you want to.”
She has never said whether she regrets saying that. In any case, I began folding more cranes with an aim to making it to 1000. Unfortunately, I didn’t get them done in a year, but I am halfway there. I folded my 500th crane yesterday. Since I thought it should be special, I made it a gold one.
There are still cranes all around the house in baskets and on shelves, but most of them are in my office in big glass jars. Empty jars await the next 500, and if I can get them done before another year goes by, maybe the gods will grant me half a wish.
A bride or a newborn baby might be given 1000 paper cranes as a wish for their future, and people will also hang them in their homes as a kind of talisman. It is also sometimes said that these 1000 cranes have to be folded all in one year to be effective.
I’ve been folding paper for a number of years, but I found the crane difficult. About a year ago, I decided that any origamist worth his or her salt ought to be able to fold a decent crane, so I started practicing, and they started to turn out pretty well. I used various types and sizes and colors and prints of paper and scattered them all around the house in places where my wife would find them (stuck in the frame of the bathroom mirror, in the seat of her recliner, on top of the toaster). She thought they were so pretty and wonderful she actually said to me, “You can leave those all over the house if you want to.”
She has never said whether she regrets saying that. In any case, I began folding more cranes with an aim to making it to 1000. Unfortunately, I didn’t get them done in a year, but I am halfway there. I folded my 500th crane yesterday. Since I thought it should be special, I made it a gold one.
There are still cranes all around the house in baskets and on shelves, but most of them are in my office in big glass jars. Empty jars await the next 500, and if I can get them done before another year goes by, maybe the gods will grant me half a wish.
Sunday, March 4, 2018
I'll get around to gun control later
Last night I read some poems by Judith Viorst, one of my favorite writers. There's one called “If I were in charge of the world,” my favorite line from which is:
“If I were in charge of the world
“A chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts would be a vegetable.”
Naturally, that led me to thinking about the state of the world if I was running it, and I concluded that:
If I were in charge of the world, children under 12 would not be permitted in any public place; vodka martinis could be drunk by the gallon without causing intoxication; all blackjack tables in all casinos would deal single-deck pitch for $2 minimum bets; and no person would be admitted to a Walmart store wearing pajama pants.
That’s all I’ve come up with so far, but I’ve only had 24 hours.
“If I were in charge of the world
“A chocolate sundae with whipped cream and nuts would be a vegetable.”
Naturally, that led me to thinking about the state of the world if I was running it, and I concluded that:
If I were in charge of the world, children under 12 would not be permitted in any public place; vodka martinis could be drunk by the gallon without causing intoxication; all blackjack tables in all casinos would deal single-deck pitch for $2 minimum bets; and no person would be admitted to a Walmart store wearing pajama pants.
That’s all I’ve come up with so far, but I’ve only had 24 hours.
Tuesday, February 27, 2018
A Sad Goodbye
My Aunt Blanche died last month. Making arrangements and dealing with the inevitable things that need to be dealt with has kept me busy, but I'm just going to take the time now to reflect a little on her life and her part in mine.
Memories come flooding in – her taking us kids (my brother and our cousins) to Brookfield Zoo, she and her friend Dorothy taking me with them to hear concerts in Grant Park, she and my friend Marcy going with her to see the Ice Capades. There were her elaborately-decorated Easter eggs, fancily-wrapped Christmas presents, and intricate Christmas tree ornaments made with beads stuck with pins into Styrofoam balls. I also remember how much we both loved poppy seed kolačke, Bohemian bread dumplings, raised glazed donuts, and green olives.
I will never forget the New Year's Eve after everyone else had gone home when she and I crawled under the Christmas tree with a bottle of whiskey and sat there drinking the new year in.
One oddball thing suddenly came to me the other day that I had totally forgotten – we kids sometimes called her Auntie Branches. I don’t know who started that, but I think she kinda liked it.
She was my father's youngest sibling and what they used to call a bonus baby -- one who arrives long after the mother’s child-bearing years were thought to be over. The next youngest child was 11 years old when Blanche was born in 1927. Gently teased by her lady friends about this late pregnancy, my grandmother said, “This baby is going to take care of me in my old age.”
Blanche started taking care of her family, like her sister and brothers before her, by leaving school to get a job. She worked in a defense plant during the war, and after that spent the next 35 years working as a machine operator in a factory that made power tools.
She never married, and never expressed any regret about that, at least not in my hearing. She and Dorothy, her close friend and co-worker, took vacations together for over two decades, traveling all over North America by Greyhound bus. It was on those trips that she started collecting salt-and-pepper shakers as souvenirs. She had hundreds of them.
When she was in her mid-30’s, Blanche startled the entire family by taking driving lessons, got a license, and bought a car, a brand-new 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air. Thereafter she and Dorothy and some of their other friends could drive to vacation spots. And, one imagines, bring home lots more salt-and-pepper shakers.
Blanche fulfilled her mother’s prophesy, living with and caring for her mother until she died in 1972 at age 81.
A few years later, Blanche and my widowed father moved in together, and she took care of him until he died in 1978.
Her sister Mae, 18 years her senior, was living in Washington State in 1982 when her husband called Blanche to say he was dying of cancer and asked her to come take care of her sister after he was gone. Mae had had a stroke several years before.
Blanche quit her job, gave up her apartment, sold her furniture and her car, put the rest in storage, and headed out to Washington to take care of yet another relative. After Mae died in 1983, Blanche decided she liked it out there, especially the temperate climate so different from the hot summers and cold, snowy winters of Chicago. Her sister and brother-in-law left her everything, so she was pretty much set for the rest of her life.
I used to tell people my aunt lived in a tree in Washington. In truth, it was a double-wide trailer in the woods on the edge of the Olympic Mountains in an unincorporated wide place in the road called Joyce. For shopping, doctor, or other necessities she could drive the 15 miles to Port Angeles in the big 1980 Chevy van she inherited and drove until it died two years ago.
There were also magnificent sights to be seen within a few short miles of her home, with Olympic National Park to the south and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north, and Canada beyond.
Despite needing occasional home-nursing care, Meals on Wheels, and a little help from her friends and the EMTs who arrived when she pushed her help-I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up button, Blanche lived there alone until about a week before she died at age 90.
I think I will always smile when I remember her, for her kindness, her sense of fun and adventure, and, especially, for her endearing but hysterical hack of the English language. I posted a story about that in this here blog thing once (see “Mrs. Malaprop, I presume?” from October 16, 2010), so I won’t repeat myself here beyond including what is probably my favorite thing she ever said to me: even though it's narrow, the cars go down the street two at a breast.
After taking care of everybody else, in the end there was nobody to take care of Blanche Virginia Knez, formerly of Berwyn, lately of Joyce, so she took care of herself for 90 years, and did it quite well.
Rest in peace, Auntie Branches. I’ll miss you.
Memories come flooding in – her taking us kids (my brother and our cousins) to Brookfield Zoo, she and her friend Dorothy taking me with them to hear concerts in Grant Park, she and my friend Marcy going with her to see the Ice Capades. There were her elaborately-decorated Easter eggs, fancily-wrapped Christmas presents, and intricate Christmas tree ornaments made with beads stuck with pins into Styrofoam balls. I also remember how much we both loved poppy seed kolačke, Bohemian bread dumplings, raised glazed donuts, and green olives.
I will never forget the New Year's Eve after everyone else had gone home when she and I crawled under the Christmas tree with a bottle of whiskey and sat there drinking the new year in.
One oddball thing suddenly came to me the other day that I had totally forgotten – we kids sometimes called her Auntie Branches. I don’t know who started that, but I think she kinda liked it.
She was my father's youngest sibling and what they used to call a bonus baby -- one who arrives long after the mother’s child-bearing years were thought to be over. The next youngest child was 11 years old when Blanche was born in 1927. Gently teased by her lady friends about this late pregnancy, my grandmother said, “This baby is going to take care of me in my old age.”
Blanche started taking care of her family, like her sister and brothers before her, by leaving school to get a job. She worked in a defense plant during the war, and after that spent the next 35 years working as a machine operator in a factory that made power tools.
She never married, and never expressed any regret about that, at least not in my hearing. She and Dorothy, her close friend and co-worker, took vacations together for over two decades, traveling all over North America by Greyhound bus. It was on those trips that she started collecting salt-and-pepper shakers as souvenirs. She had hundreds of them.
When she was in her mid-30’s, Blanche startled the entire family by taking driving lessons, got a license, and bought a car, a brand-new 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air. Thereafter she and Dorothy and some of their other friends could drive to vacation spots. And, one imagines, bring home lots more salt-and-pepper shakers.
Blanche fulfilled her mother’s prophesy, living with and caring for her mother until she died in 1972 at age 81.
A few years later, Blanche and my widowed father moved in together, and she took care of him until he died in 1978.
Her sister Mae, 18 years her senior, was living in Washington State in 1982 when her husband called Blanche to say he was dying of cancer and asked her to come take care of her sister after he was gone. Mae had had a stroke several years before.
Blanche quit her job, gave up her apartment, sold her furniture and her car, put the rest in storage, and headed out to Washington to take care of yet another relative. After Mae died in 1983, Blanche decided she liked it out there, especially the temperate climate so different from the hot summers and cold, snowy winters of Chicago. Her sister and brother-in-law left her everything, so she was pretty much set for the rest of her life.
I used to tell people my aunt lived in a tree in Washington. In truth, it was a double-wide trailer in the woods on the edge of the Olympic Mountains in an unincorporated wide place in the road called Joyce. For shopping, doctor, or other necessities she could drive the 15 miles to Port Angeles in the big 1980 Chevy van she inherited and drove until it died two years ago.
There were also magnificent sights to be seen within a few short miles of her home, with Olympic National Park to the south and the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the north, and Canada beyond.
Despite needing occasional home-nursing care, Meals on Wheels, and a little help from her friends and the EMTs who arrived when she pushed her help-I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up button, Blanche lived there alone until about a week before she died at age 90.
I think I will always smile when I remember her, for her kindness, her sense of fun and adventure, and, especially, for her endearing but hysterical hack of the English language. I posted a story about that in this here blog thing once (see “Mrs. Malaprop, I presume?” from October 16, 2010), so I won’t repeat myself here beyond including what is probably my favorite thing she ever said to me: even though it's narrow, the cars go down the street two at a breast.
After taking care of everybody else, in the end there was nobody to take care of Blanche Virginia Knez, formerly of Berwyn, lately of Joyce, so she took care of herself for 90 years, and did it quite well.
Rest in peace, Auntie Branches. I’ll miss you.
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