Part 2 of The Break-up

[NOTE: Revised and expanded version of part 2.  Again, this is fiction.  No one should assume they are the basis of any of the characters.]

Thursday when Kirk arrived for lunch, Irene saw him arrive on his bicycle and was at the door to invite him in.  On the oval maple dining table surrounded by six chairs was a simple but neat setting of Melmac plates in pastel yellow, green and blue, with dark flecks of color in them.  Tupperware cups of similar colors, yellow by the yellow plates, green by the green plates, and blue by the blue plates.  A red pitcher of orange Koolaid was on the table.  Beige paper napkins were neatly folded, placed under the spoon to the left of the plate. The table was set for five.  Kirk, Irene, Mrs. Manders, Clark, and Violet, Irene’s twelve year-old sister who, on Kirk’s previous visit, was at her cousin’s house.  The four Manders were obviously awaiting Kirk’s arrival, for as soon as he was ushered into the house, they entered the dining area from two locations: Mrs. Manders and Clark from the living room, and Violet from a hallway.  On the wall in the dining room was a plaque with a representation of an old man sitting at a table with hands folded in prayer, a loaf of bread on the table in front of him, and on the plaque the words “Give us this day our daily bread.”  Kirk liked that phrase.  To him, it was saying “enough is enough.”

They all took their assigned seats, the location they had always sat during the daily family meals.  Mr. Manders’ seat was unoccupied.  Kirk was directed to Roy’s spot.  Roy was Irene’s eighteen year old brother, who was working at a neighbor’s farm for the summer to save up some money for when he would be at State in Lansing in the fall.  While all the children were getting seated, Mrs. Manders pulled a plate stacked with sandwiches out of the Frigidaire and placed them on the table near Kirk.

”I hope you like ham salad, Kirk,” said Mrs. Manders, “that is one of our favorites for summer lunch.”

Kirk did not like ham salad.  In fact, if his mom tried to force him to eat a ham salad sandwich, he’d likely take a bite, then have to run to the bathroom to vomit into the toilet.  He thought there should be a Levitical prohibition against ham salad sandwiches, and not because of the pork.  Rather it was for the same reason he thought there should be Levitical prohibitions against casseroles, based upon the same reasoning, fathomable only to God, for prohibiting clothing made of mixed fibers, like the prohibition against clothes made from wool and flax.  Ham should not be ground together with pickles and mayonnaise.  Things should be discrete.

“I love them, Mrs. Manders, and especially on white bread with extra mayo.  How did you know?”

To Kirk, ham salad already looked the color and consistency of vomit, like that time Billy Wilkins in fourth grade had a baloney and mayo sandwich on white bread at lunch, then about 2 in the afternoon just after recess he had an upset stomach and threw-up in the back of the classroom.  The janitor was called to come mop it up and sprinkle some of that powder on it to try to take away the odor.  Most of us grew up close enough to dairy or other animal farms to know that after a short while, you just stop noticing the smell.  What else could Kirk say?  He was having lunch with Irene, and most of her family.  This would be a growing up experience.  Eat what you are served, eat it as if you like it, and try to make compliments about it is the advice his mom often gave him when he’d go to a cousin’s or friend’s home.  Kirk survived the ham salad sandwich on white bread, washed down, or having the flavor drowned, by orange Koolaid.  Other than the sandwiches, there were carrot and celery sticks on a tray on the table.  Desert was a peanut butter cookie, genuinely Kirk’s favorite cookie.  He never figured out what the spoon to the left of the plate was for, unless it was to keep the beige paper napkin from blowing away.

Over the next several weeks of driver’s education, Kirk made numerous visits to Irene.  They began to actually get to know each other, to understand each other, and become friends.  When you talk about music you like or don’t like, about the recent episode of Bonanza or The Beverly Hillbillies, about annoying siblings, about the neighboring farmer who just spread manure from his “honey bucket” (as manure spreaders were euphemistically known) on his field upwind from your house, about visiting cousins in Bay City, about the family reunion at Gun Lake, you begin to know a person.  It feels very strange for a fifteen year old.  He had friends that he played with on the playground at school, ride bikes with, went sledding with, attended parties with.  But he didn’t think that he get to know them.  Certainly he didn’t think of it as getting to know another person.  That is adult language.  At age fifteen, Kirk’s and Irene’s minds were beginning to take a decided turn toward adulthood, not knowing all the complications that would bring.  A good thing too.  If fifteen year old kids knew anything about the complications adulthood would bring, the teen suicide rate would be much worse than it already is.  Being fifteen is like late March or early April.  Winter isn’t exactly over, Spring hasn’t exactly begun.  It is the between season.  Slush, ice, mud, sunny 55 degree days, wet snow, breezy warm days, more mud.  Winter won’t quite let go, and Spring won’t just take command.  Yet the earth has tilted back to where it was in mid-September when we still had plenty of 70 degree days.

This Platonic relationship went on into the entire first month of autumn classes.  Kirk and Irene moved up from freshman Biology to sophomore Chemistry.  They had Mr. Johns for third period sophomore Chemistry.  Mr. Johns was a skilled teacher.  He should be skilled since he had been teaching for forty years.  He also had a high but sometimes unwarranted trust of students.  He looked like an advertisement for an anti-smoking campaign: gaunt, yellowish skin, especially his fingers and around his nose, as well as the yellowish-gray cropped hair.  He smelled like one would imagine an ash tray smelling.  He’d start class, get the students working on a chemistry experiment, then go to the teachers’ lounge for a cigarette.  He’d return hoping that the only smoke was what was exhaling out of his lungs, not some iniquitous boys devising their own chemistry experiment in the trash can.  Mr. Johns had lobbied the school board for years to get the teachers’ lounge moved from near the principal’s office to closer to his classroom.  The school board refused always alleging two grounds: the budget was tight, and there was no suitable space nearer his classroom to renovate as a teachers’ lounge.  Mr. Johns thought that the actual reason was so that the principal could keep a closer eye on any rumored shenanigans in the teachers’ lounge, like the gossip that Mr. DeMaagd, the band teacher, daily mixed whiskey in his coffee.  Mr. Johns didn’t believe the gossip.  The tattled smell of alcohol on Mr. DeMaagd’s breath was, from Mr. Johns’ chemistry perspectives, just the remains from heavy drinking the night before.

The school provided fan buses to take students, for fifty cents, to away football games by signing up in advance with a parental permission slip.  For the second Friday of October game at Lakeview, Kirk managed the resolve to ask Irene if she’d like to go to the football game.  Sort of as a date, you know, just to go to the game together.  Irene agreed, eagerly it seemed to Kirk.  That was a huge relief.  One of the worst experiences for fifteen year olds, boys or girls, is to approach someone you like, express your like for them, and have it rejected.  No rejection of Kirk by Irene.  So they went.  Did Remus High Rams win, or was it the Lakeview Lakers?  They didn’t remember, they didn’t care.  The only memorable part of the evening was the bus ride.  Twenty-five miles in the daylight to Lakeview, and twenty-five miles back to Remus in the dark.  In the dark, jammed close together near the back of the yellow Ford bus on green vinyl seats, trying to get closer to each other than would be required if you were not so interested in each other.  It was Irene’s first time of having a boy that interested in her, putting his arm around her shoulder.  She snuggled in close, not vastly different from when she’d snuggle close to dad on Sunday nights watching Bonanza or the Wonderful World of Disney together.  When she snuggled in close to Kirk, there was this feeling in her belly that she never felt when snuggling close to dad.  Too, Kirk smelled so differently from dad with his coffee and sweet roll smell.  Kirk was, compared to dad, nearly odorless.  It was a sweet smell, like candy, maybe a hint of mint.  It must have been the soap.  Irene smelled clean, fresh, like a lightly scented flower.  It wasn’t strong.  It was barely noticeable.  Fresh.  Kirk was thinking the lyrics from “If,” a song by David Gates for a group called Bread:

“If a picture paints a thousand words,

Then why can’t I paint you?

The words will never show the you I’ve come to know.”

Dates were rare, since neither was old enough to have a driver’s license yet.  They did go to a Michigan State University football game with Irene’s church youth group.  It was cold in Spartan stadium in late October.  The grass looked blue.  Spartan turf.  It was a bit more blue than green, not very natural looking but then again it wasn’t natural.  The seats were so high up in the stands that watching the game didn’t seem much different than seeing it on the television at home, except live it was in color and the family television was still black and white.  The players were ant-sized.  The football was not visible from that distance.  Kirk tried to determine where the ball was, if they were running or passing, by the way the ants scurried on the blue turf.  At halftime, from those seats you could appreciate the marching band formations and sequences.  But it required a little imagination.  The marching band did its formations for the direction of the stands where the highest paying customers sat.  From Irene’s and Kirk’s side of the stadium, the formations were upside down.  Did the Spartans play Indiana?  Or was it Iowa?  Illinois?  They wouldn’t remember.  All they remember was the ninety minute ride each direction, plus the thirty minutes getting into and out of parking in the thirteen passenger church vans with the adult youth group leaders as chaperones.  Again Kirk was thinking lyrics from “If”:

“If a man could be two places at one time,

I’d be with you.

Tomorrow and today, beside you all the way.”

The Breakup, Part 1

[NOTE: this is the revised draft of the first part of a short story I am inventing; I expect to complete it in later posts]

He knew it was going to be awkward.  He didn’t know it would be that awkward, unpleasant, and hard.  It was also a mark in his life he wouldn’t forget.

Kirk had known her since first grade.  They were star academic pupils for their teachers.  However, Irene was the overall star for the teachers.  Kirk could be self-willed, obstinate, disrespectful, and disobedient.  No one knows why he continued that way.  On his report cards, there was a list of character traits and attitudes on which all pupils were graded.  Not just math, reading, penmanship, science.  But also citizenship, the qualities that would one day make Kirk a good employee for some boss.  The grades a pupil could receive for attitudes and character were O for outstanding, S for satisfactory, and U for unsatisfactory.  While Kirk got As for all his academic subjects, he was a rather consistent U on attitude and character.  When he did, it was the teacher’s way of notifying the parents to instill a bit more discipline in their charge.  And that they did, leaving discomfort in Kirk’s ability to sit for a while.  It was almost a certainty that Irene was an O.  Yet Irene was never called “teacher’s pet.”  Irene was just all-around good without being irritating or snotty to her classmates.

While they had known each other since they were seven, they hardly ever noticed each other until they were fifteen as high school freshmen.  Strange, or rather natural, how boys and girls start noticing each other around age fifteen.   They saw enough of each other each day.  The hallway lockers for each student were assigned by alphabetical order based on last name.  Irene Manders had locker number 289, Kirk McInnes had locker number 291.  Maybe it was something about Irene seeing the back side of Kirk peering into his locker, or Kirk seeing the back side of Irene reaching to put books into the top shelf of her locker.  But Kirk didn’t pay attention to the back side of Irene until later.

For one thing, while both grew up in a rural areas and went to a rural high school in Remus, Kirk lived southeast of Remus about a mile past Halls Lake, ten miles away from where Irene lived a few miles north of Remus, close to Lake Twentyeight.  Irene scarcely realized that she lived near Lake Twentyeight.  Kirk, on the other hand, was well aware of the proximity of his home to Halls Lake.  Once old enough to ride a bike, he’d take a fishing rod, ride the mile to the lake, and fish near the public access sites.  By the time he was thirteen, his parents would let him put the row boat in the back of the pickup truck and drive himself to the lake for a morning, afternoon, or evening of fishing.  With homes ten miles apart, they did not play together at neighborhood parks.  In fact, since they both lived on rural roads, far enough away from even the small village of Remus, there were no neighborhood parks for them, just farm fields and small woodlots.  Outside of school, they’d never encounter each other.  Parents shopped at different grocers, attended different churches.  From the beginning of June until the beginning of September, Kirk and Irene would never have thoughts of each other.  And before being fifteen, you wouldn’t expect them to.

Irene was terribly beautiful.  A little plain, but beautiful.  She had long blond hair and small features.  She was small.  Folks might have thought she could get blown over in a strong wind.  Except that she was thin enough that wind would barely affect her.  With her beautiful face, large eyes, and symmetrical features, one would be attracted to her face-side, not her back side.  And that is part of what caught Kirk’s attention as a fifteen year old.  Too, he was smart, and she was thought to be the smartest of all the freshman class.  That, unlike the stereotype of fifteen year old boys, is what attracted him to her.

While general aesthetic features of Irene and her evident intelligence initially attracted Kirk to her, sitting in Mr. Alders’ freshman Biology class changed some of Kirk’s perceptual attention.  Irene was assigned a seat by Mr. Alders one row in front of Kirk’s back row seat, three seats to the left of Kirk.  Irene was close enough to Kirk’s peripheral vision.  He could look to the front of the class while Mr. Alders was lecturing or demonstrating or writing on the board, and catch glimpses of Irene in the long blonde hair at the edge of his vision.  This is where Kirk began to notice the back side of Irene.  It was the spring semester for freshman Biology.

Hip-hugger jeans had recently become the fashion.  These were jeans where the waist line was below the navel.  Some of these were so far below the navel that they were referred to as submarine.  Irene had a pair that weren’t exactly submarine, but I am sure her parents had a life jacket in their hands ready to toss to her.  Sitting at her desk, leaning slightly forward to take notes, with a blouse that wasn’t long enough to be tucked in, there was a bit of skin showing.  If she leaned enough, Kirk’s attention was no longer on the homely Mr. Alders.  Kirk was trying to see, without noticeably staring, the very top centimeter of the point of the natal cleft where the gluts split into the left and right sides.  There is that slight dimple, sometimes one on either side of the spine, just above the natal cleft.  For a fifteen year old boy, his brain was about to explode.  And he was in freshman Biology with Mr. Alders of all people.  He had to turn away, but it was a Siren call.  This Odysseus had no crew to call upon to lash him to the mast.  And it would have been too great an embarrassment to admit he needed one.

But Kirk never got the nerve to establish any more than casual contact with her.  A “hello” or “good morning Irene” or “have a good evening, see you tomorrow” at the locker was about the extent of it.  And soon, school was out for the summer.

While Kirk’s eye became attracted to Irene through Spring in freshman Biology, once classes were over at the beginning of June he expected to not see her again until classes began in September.  That was the summer when Kirk would be taking driver’s education.  Living ten miles from high school, his mom, if she could, would drive him in the morning to school where some teachers, for summer employment, would conduct driver’s education.  One would think that a teacher would be smart enough to not put himself, and all were men, in an automobile with three other pubescent teens, most of whom have had little driving experience unless it was the tractor on the farm.  But they were educators, and who better to conduct driver’s education?  It probably wasn’t too stressful doing the classroom instruction.  It was more interesting having students, in the school parking lots, practice starting, stopping, using turn signals, parallel parking, and so on.  This is critical to learn well, since most accidents occur at low speeds in parking lots.  Most of them result in no injury.  But insurance companies still put out a lot of money to repair parking lot bumps.  The most stressful for the instructor was the three hours daily with three different students at a time on the road getting practice and experience.  Instructors were known to pop Tums like eating peanuts.  The drive always involved a fifteen minute break at a café, where the instructor would suck down two cigarettes, two cups of coffee, and a donut.  The students might have a coke and donut, the minor’s version of the adult coffee, cigarette and donut.

Some days when Kirk’s mom would take him to school in the summer mornings for driver’s education, Kirk would put his bicycle in the back of the family Suburban, and he’d have to ride the ten miles home.  Some days, when weather was particularly nice, Kirk would ride his bicycle to school in the morning and home in the afternoon.   On the days when he had classroom or parking lot instruction in the morning, and on the road with two other students and the teacher in the afternoon, there was a ninety minute break for lunch.  One day, early on, Kirk decided to ride his bike the four miles from school to Irene’s home to see if she was there, to just drop in and say hello.  It was an awkward moment.  Kirk rolled his bike into the gravel driveway about noon.  Leaning his bike against a tree, hoping he wasn’t too sweaty, he stepped up to the aluminum screen door and rattled it with a knock.  An eight year old came to the door, Irene’s younger brother Clark.

“Hi,” Kirk said, “I’m Kirk, a classmate and friend of Irene’s.  Is she here?”

“Ireeeene,” he yelled as if it were a three syllable word, “a boy is here who wants to see you” with his sing-song voice going louder on “boy” and much higher on “see.”

“Don’t yell,” an adult woman’s voice said.  “Clark, go tell Irene a boy is here to see her.”  Then coming to the door and pushing the storm door open, Beverly, Irene’s mother, said “would you come in please?  I am Mrs. Manders, Irene’s mom.  And you are?”

Having been taught proper etiquette by his parents, he responded without hesitation, “I am Kirk, Kirk McInnes, a classmate of Irene’s.  Her locker is two over from mine because of our last names.  We had Biology together with Mr. Alders, and were lab partners for some of our work.  I was at school today for driver’s ed; we’re on lunch break and I thought I’d stop by to see how summer is going for Irene.”

Kirk felt like a parent was owed a rather full explanation.  Not, mind you, complete disclosure.  He would never tell her that he admired the dimples on her daughter’s lower back, just above the natal cleft.   Still, one had to offer a good enough explanation to get accepted by the parent to have access to the daughter.

Irene appeared, “Hi Kirk.  What are you doing here?”

He went through the explanation again as Mrs. Manders stood behind Irene, with Clark an arm’s reach behind Mrs. Manders.  “Come on in,” Irene said, and she walked him into the living room.

There they sat for an hour and chatted about how boring some of their summer has been so far.  Early in the summer for three weeks Kirk had ridden his bicycle a couple miles from his house to pick strawberries with other teens for a local farmer, making ten cents per quart picked.  They’d pick from sun rise until about 11 am.  He’d been fishing at Halls Lake at least once a week.  Driver’s training is interesting.  It is funny to see Mr. Calhoun not in a classroom trying to teach us how to be safe drivers.  It was especially funny to see him about to have a cow as Melissa pulled out onto Remus Road about as slowly as a tractor might.  A truck was approaching quickly; she shouldn’t have pulled out then.  You know all the instructor has on his side of the car is a brake, and that time he about put his foot through the floor where a gas pedal might have been if they had one on his side.  We dared not laugh.  Melissa was crying.  I have to admit we were a bit scared too and felt like yelling at Melissa to floor it while under our breath we muttered the name of the Savior of the world.  We held our tongue as we held our breath.  When we stopped for our usual donut and coke break, even Melissa laughed about how Mr. Calhoun about blew a vein in his neck.

“I have to go to get back for the afternoon session,” Kirk announced, figuring he stayed to the last moment where, if he rode his bicycle pretty hard, since he didn’t have a headwind to go into, he could make it back just in time.

“Will you visit again?” intoned Irene.

“Yes,” Mrs. Manders added, “come again and have lunch with us.”

“Thank you,” Kirk responded, “I have an afternoon session again on Thursday.  Will it be okay if I stop by again on Thursday?”

Irene looked to Mrs. Manders, who smiled approvingly.  “Certainly Kirk, we’ll see you then, and plan on having lunch with us.”

As Kirk got on his bicycle to leave, he hoped he’d do nothing uncoordinated or stupid, like having his foot slip off a pedal resulting in his crushing his manly parts on the top tube.  He rode with a speed he could rarely muster back to school.  It at least felt like the wind was at his back.

Great Meals

An older gentleman told me that sermons were like his wife’s meals.  Most pastors probably think (or at least wish) that all their sermons were great, that all of them had a lasting impact on members of the congregation.  Pastors often complain about people walking out the door and within a day, if it even takes that long, forgetting what the sermon was about.  As if it is a fault with the congregants.  The pastor thinks he is the next Rick Warren, or Bill Hybels, or Max Lucado, or Billy Graham, or C.H. Spurgeon, or Jonathan Edwards, or George Whitefield, or Philip Melanchthon, or John Chrysostom.  So the gentleman was asked mid-week by an elder in the church about the pastor’s previous sermon, with which the elder was deeply impressed.  He couldn’t recall it.  He was asked if he paid attention, if there were any sermons that he could recall.  It was in that context that he said sermons were like his wife’s meals.  All of them sustained him that day.  Most of them were tasty, and he does not remember ones that weren’t, but he thought that probably some weren’t.  Most of them were made with planning, forethought, and delivered with care—at least he doesn’t remember the ones that weren’t.  Still you know, he told the elder, none of them sustained him for more than a day.  And thinking back on all the years of her serving him meals, he hardly remembers any of them.  Yet he is alive and healthy today, so they must have done what they were supposed to do.

While I too would be hard pressed to recall any great sermons, I can recall some great meals.

Fifteen years ago I ate for the first time at The Manitou.  It is a small restaurant on M22 north of Crystal Lake.  It is almost hidden on the south side of the road right near Long Lake (there are dozens of Long Lakes in Michigan).  It specializes in local fare with fresh ingredients made from scratch.  They only do dinner.  After they seat you, while looking at the menu you are given a small crudités tray with dip.  With that alone, you know this is a special restaurant.  Then the music.  I remember that first visit, listening to Shawn Colvin “Sunny Came Home.”  The music is what is known in the radio world as Adult Contemporary.  The menu includes enough items for those who are not adventurous.  But even that isn’t plain.  Please order soup.  I can remember great French Onion soup, and Southwest Tomato soup, and Potato Cream soup.  I almost always get fish, almost always whitefish since that is always fresh, never frozen.  Usually I have it broiled, but once (shame on me) I had it beer-battered deep fried.  Whitefish is too good to have that done to it.  But I had never before (or since) had it deep fried, so I wanted to try it at The Manitou of all places.  Prices are affordable for me.  An “Early Bird” (which, being interpreted, means “senior citizen”) menu is available 4:30-6, with prices right around $12 for an entrée with soup or salad (and get the soup, especially in the cooler months).  Portions are smaller, which means they are right-sized.  You can also order from the full supper menu, with prices right around $22.  I think The Manitou is terribly romantic.

About eight years ago I ate at a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia.  I was at a philosophy conference.  I can’t recall, nor would I be able to sleuth it and find out, the name of the restaurant.  But I remember the meal.  Spinach linguine with morel mushrooms in a Marsala sauce.   One might expect that there might be half a dozen morels, maybe sliced, in the pasta dish.  No, there were fifteen or eighteen.  Granted they weren’t the three inch long morels; they were more like half that size to two inches in length.  Never before and never since have I been at a restaurant that served morels.  Maybe I just don’t get out enough.  That is true.  I don’t eat out a lot.  For the $15 I might spend at a restaurant, I can fix three very good meals, with equally exquisite ingredients.  Still, at some point it seems I would have been at a restaurant serving a dish containing morels.

Thirteen years ago in Switzerland we did a day long hike.  We were staying in a chalet in Huemoz, in the Villars-Gryon area, just east of Lake Geneva about twenty miles.  We had some friends drop us off in Solalex for a day long hike.  Prior to going to Switzerland we had seen an episode of Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door where he visited some small villages near the area we would be staying.  He raved about this small “Heidi-like” village, Taveyanne, that had a small restaurant worth the hike.  For that reason, Taveyanne was on our itinerary for the hike, our lunch stop.  The restaurant is small.  Were it in America, the local health department would shut it down.  Inside is a round hearth where some of the cooking is done.  There is also seating outside, with the views, well, it is Switzerland.  It was early June, and we sat outside.  The menu is written on a chalk board.  Two choices.  Jambon cru, and Champions au croute.  For my wife and fifth and sixth grade children, I ordered Jambon cru, thinking it was cured ham: thin slices of ham served with fresh bread and an assortment of vegetables.  I ordered them that because I knew they didn’t like Champions au croute, mushrooms served in a brown sauce over hard bread.  My meal was excellent, three different kinds of mushrooms.  The sauce was delicious, soaking into the hard bread.  But I was wrong on their meal.  What they got was more like prosciutto, a dry-cured ham very different from Southern or Virginia or salt-cured ham.  Thin slices of Jambon cru served with bread and some fresh vegetables, including small onions.  They ate the bread.  I ate the Jambon and onions, in addition to my Champions au croute.  I thought it all delicious.  They were hungry the rest of the hike.  And it was a long hike, perhaps twelve or fifteen miles.  From Taveyanne we went over to Encex, down to Bretaye, up to Chamossaire.  At Chamossaire Beth and Jayne boarded a train back to Villars, then walked down to Huemoz .  Kevin and I continued our hike down the back side of Chamossaire eventually to our chalet in Huemoz.

Until I was twenty-four, I did not like mushrooms.  Until I was eighteen or nineteen, I liked almost no vegetables.  If they count, the only vegetables I liked were corn and potatoes, what some might call livestock feed.  I grew up in poverty, at least what various government and social service agencies would call poverty.  I was never hungry, at least not involuntarily so.  If I was hungry, it was because I refused what my mother served.  At our house, with very limited funds (but not limited resources—my mother was very resourceful), you ate what was served or didn’t eat at all.  And if food was put on your plate, you finished it completely.  It was a sin to put food on your plate, not eat it all, and scrape some into the trash.  We didn’t scrape food into the trash.  If anything, we scraped it into a bowl to take out to feed the dog.  Our dog was hungry.  I remember sometime in my early elementary days having my mother put peas on my plate.  Similar to the scene in “A River Runs Through It” of the boy required to eat his oatmeal (“man has been eating God’s oats for a thousand years; it’s not the place of an eight-year old boy to change that tradition”), I could not leave the table until I finished my peas.  Finally when they were cold, and probably worse tasting than had I got them hot, I bolted them down.  Then I ran to the bathroom and puked it all up.  Involuntarily, as I thought.  The taste was so disgusting I just puked, like retching when you smell fetid roadkill too intimately.

Sunday dinners at our house were one of the following: fried chicken (mmm better-than-finger-lickin' good), baked breaded pork chops (“Shake ‘n Bake, ‘cause I helped!”), or roast beef.   Almost always it included mom's home made rolls, her version of Parker House rolls, but the best.  To this day, anyone who has her rolls declares them the best they have ever had.  If we are having a family gathering for a meal, her task is always the rolls.  As well, no one makes roast beef as good as my mom.  It was a cheap cut of beef; we were poor.  Slow cooked in an iron Dutch oven with potatoes, carrots, and onions.  It was so tender and tasty, the meat flaked apart.  No knife was needed.  But I couldn’t take the carrots and onions.  I barely could take the potatoes.  I didn’t mind potatoes baked or mashed.  But in a roast or stew where they took on the flavors of the other ingredients—that was not to my tastes.  If the Sunday dinner was roast beef, my mom made enough for leftovers.  Then what would she do?  She’d destroy them, at least in the mind of this twelve year-old.  She ran all the leftover beef, potatoes, carrots, and onions through a grinder and turned it into what she called “hash.”  She’d spread it into a 9”x13” baking dish, top it with ketchup, and bake it.  That is what we’d have Monday or Tuesday or both.  That was another day I was voluntarily hungry unless there were any of her rolls leftover, which fortunately she did not grind into the hash.

It was after I moved away from home that my repertoire of edible foods expanded.  It expanded quickly.  Within a year I learned to like almost every kind of vegetable.  I was at a place where I had to eat what was served and couldn't afford to buy my own groceries.  I tend not to like canned vegetables (especially peas; serve me canned peas to this day and I am likely to dash to the bathroom retching).  I like most vegetables fresh.  For cooked vegetables, I like them fresh or frozen.  I am sure I would now eat my mom’s hash.  I am also pretty sure I would not relish it; in fact, I might still go hungry if that is all that was on offer.  Now if I go to spend a day with my parents, my mom likes to fix her version of an Irish dinner.  Cabbage, onions, celery, potatoes, and usually smoked sausage, sometimes corned beef.  Pretty good stuff.  I used to hate casseroles.  Like my mom’s hash, I didn’t like things all mixed up.  I am sure there is some Levitical prohibition against eating foods all mixed up (like keeping wool away from flax, or dairy away from meat).  If she made a stew, I’d separate the meat from the potatoes (both of which I could be compelled to eat) from the onions, peas, beans, carrots, and tomatoes (none of which I would eat).  Now casseroles are one of my favorites, especially from October through April.  My wife makes excellent casseroles.  It is almost impossible to find a restaurant that serves casseroles.  Now that would be a niche market.  Making single-sized servings freshly of casseroles.  I have been to restaurants that serve Shepherd’s pie, for example.  But that is rare.  Maybe casserole is too much “home style,” and if people wanted home style they’d just stay home and not go out to eat.  Just as likely, no one wants to wait nearly an hour for the casserole to cook.

When I was perhaps five years old, a memorable meal I had was in the Hankinsons’ work shed, around November 17, around midnight.  My dad and his buddies got three deer, and had a deer cutting party at the Hankinsons’, very close family friends, the sort of friends that you could call on in the worst winter weather if you were stuck in a ditch.  It was a cool night in Borculo at the Hankinsons’.  The men were cutting up the deer, women were packaging it.  Part way into the project, Marilyn brought out to the shed an electric skillet and some butter.  Thin slices of backstraps were sautéed.  Excuse me, we didn’t use the word sautéed; rather they were fried.  I have had lots of venison since then.  But I haven’t been able to replicate the taste from that night of (if I were running a restaurant) “medallions of venison sautéed medium rare in clarified butter, served with red-skinned potatoes and Brussels sprouts.”

Finally, I mention something that was not a meal, at least it should not be considered a meal in itself although I could eat enough of it to consider it a meal in itself.  Georgia Wright made the best German Chocolate cake.  I called her Grandma Wright.  She was not physically my grandma, but a grandma to me nonetheless.  When I got my first deer with a bow at age sixteen, she helped me drag it out of the woods and load it into the trunk of my car to drive out the two-lane behind her farm.  She made great fried chicken, from free range birds (the one’s in her yard), butchered with her own hands.  When I was in high school, in the fall I’d head up north to Hoxeyville most weekends.  If Grandma Wright thought I’d be coming up, she’d make her German Chocolate cake.  One weekend I was there when I hadn’t been there the weekend before and she told me she had made it the previous week expecting me.  It was probably not just the German Chocolate cake that tasted so good.  It was her coffee that she made to go with it.  She made coffee in a vacuum pot.  A vacuum coffee maker has two vessels, an upper and a lower.  The principle of a vacuum coffee maker is to heat water in the lower vessel of the brewer until expansion forces the water through a narrow tube into the upper vessel containing coffee grounds. When the lower vessel has more or less emptied itself, the pot is removed from the stove.  The heated water by gravity runs over the ground coffee through a strainer back into the lower chamber from which the brewed coffee can be poured.  I have never known anyone else who made coffee with the vacuum method.  Compared to contemporary coffee snobs, her coffee would be declassee.  She wasn’t using some special roasted bean, or roasting her own beans.  It was probably Chase & Sanborn or Hills Brothers for God’s sake.  And it tasted so good.  Maybe it was because most of the brewed coffee I drank (and I drank more instant coffee than brewed coffee back then) was brewed in a percolator, which was usually too hot and probably boiled and burnt the coffee.  The vacuum method did not burn the coffee.  Her coffee and her German Chocolate cake are for me a taste of autumn.

Another Failed New Year's Resolution

I have been feeling remorse or regret the last two months.  I succeeded in my New Year’s resolution all the way until the end of July.  Then I fell off the wagon.  Not in the usual sense.  But I failed.  I couldn’t carry it through.  And I didn’t think I set the bar too high.  I thought it a simple, but deeply important task.  I was going to remember and name one person each day of the year who has had an important positive impact on my life.  I would write their name in my pocket calendar, one each day.  Pretty simple.  I am over half a century old.  In that time, surely there are three hundred sixty-five people in this non-leap year that I could name.  Of course I know the names of three hundred sixty-five people.  But these had to be people who made a positive impact on me.  I got to two hundred twelve: thirty-one in January, March, May and July; twenty-eight in February; thirty in April and June.  Then I ground to a halt.  Actually it was grinding to a halt starting in May.  Getting through June and July was pretty tough.  By the end of July, I was stuck, couldn’t go on, fell off the wagon of my resolution.

January was easy.  I began with family, my dad on the first, my mom on the second, my wife on the third, my children on the fourth and fifth.  I named folks who have had a deep impact on my character, personality and maturity.  These included close friends, and spiritual, intellectual, and coaching leaders who contributed much to my growth as a person.  I identified brothers, sisters, their spouses and children.  I identified team mates and teachers from college.  By February I was reflecting on friends from high school, almost all of whom I have had almost no contact with since graduating from high school.  They probably, most of them, don’t remember me, or if they could if prompted probably wouldn’t unless prompted.  I also was getting on to students of mine for whom I had some mentoring role in their lives, with the natural consequence that I was mentored by them as well.  In March I was on to colleagues I have had, few of whom I was close with, but all of whom I had cordial relations with and all of whom challenged me to think deeper or more carefully.  By April I was getting on to people that made a generally positive impact on me, but for whom I had, shall I say, less warm feelings.  Still, in April there were several named toward whom I have very warm feelings. In April, I had to start digging deeper into my memory.  I began to recall other high school classmates, elementary, junior high, and high school teachers that were good for me and to me.  In addition, having moved to a new area of the country just nine months previously, I was now meeting new people who were beginning to impact me, had been very kind to me, were beginning to welcome me into their lives.

I was starting to think of people who have impacted me but they would have never known it.  For example, I named some living authors of books I had read, whose words and thoughts made a very deep impact on me, some of whom I have met (David James Duncan, Julia Annas, Martha Nussbaum, Nick Smith, Mark McPherran, Nick Wolterstorff, Richard Mouw, Al Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Alasdair MacIntyre, Ed Dobson, among others) but most of whom I have never met in person (Donald Miller, Philip Yancey, Anne Lamott, Rob Bell, Saul Kripke, among others).  By May and June I was naming dead authors, only one of whom I had spent some time with before they died: Flannery O’Connor, C.S. Lewis, Gregory Vlastos, R.M. Hare (the one I spent time with), Ludwig Wittgenstein, Donald Davidson, G.E.M. Anscombe, J.L. Austin, Bertrand Russell, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Rene Descartes, among others.

Clearly, I was getting desperate.  I began to expand my criteria for “an important positive impact on my life.”  I began to include those who had a positive impact by being an example of the kind of person I did not want to become: an unhappy and mean-spirited junior high teacher; a closed-minded, dogmatic and authoritarian pastor.

And now that I am thinking about it, I am beginning to recall more.  I am going back to the beginning of August and starting to add more names.  As well, I am including people whose names I can’t recall, and maybe never even learned: the eighty year old mailman we had in Toledo, the UPS delivery guy (was it Steve?) for our neighborhood in Toledo; Tim and Clyde from Nashville, gentlemen African-American waiters twenty years older than me who taught me in the early 1980s how to be a successful waiter at the very expensive Marino’s Italian restaurant, where we waiters wore white jackets and bow-ties.  I now have August just about complete, and am ready to move on to September.  The regret and remorse are diminishing.  Maybe I’ll just pull this one off.  Check back with me the beginning of January.  Try it.  It is much harder than getting three hundred sixty-five Facebook “friends,” most of whom are not friends but barely acquaintances.

I am, in the process, lowering the standards or broadening my horizon on my criteria for “an important positive impact on my life.”  I am beginning to realize that there were many people who had an important impact on my life without being in-my-face sort of people.  Ben and John at Japanese Auto Repair in Toledo, the most honest and trustworthy car repairmen I have ever known, who always had time to chat with me about anything.  Paul, Mike, and John, guys who ran bicycle shops where you could hang out and drink coffee with them and they didn’t make you feel like you were getting in the way of business.  Housekeeping staff at places I have worked who have been kind and friendly, perhaps too because I respected them and their work.  Doctors and dentists who treated me as a person, not as a thing on a production line.  Clerks at stores or shops I frequented, who genuinely seemed happy to see me, got to know my name, treated me like I mattered to them.

I am now down to the last week of September and, as I write, today is the last day of September.  In Michigan, it is the last day of trout fishing season on the small streams for the small trout.  Whether I make it or not all the way to December 31 identifying three hundred sixty-five different folks who had an important positive impact on my life, I will, in my first post in January 2012, list all the names I have.  And if I missed your name, you will have to let me know about it.

Why is Self-Control So Hard?

From Kindergarten through much of elementary school (in the 1960s), grade cards that I had to bring home to get signed by my parents (and the teachers were wise to forgeries) included not only grades (A, B, C, D, E) for reading, writing, and math, but also grades (O-utstanding, S-atisfactory, U-nsatisfactory) for behavior and attitudes.  One of the behavior and attitude areas was Self-Control, and I almost invariably got a U.  Didn't matter that I got all As on the academic subjects.  My parents would have been prouder had I gotten Cs on academic work and an O on self-control.  In retrospect, I don't think it was lack of self-control; I think it was a combination of smart-aleckiness and quick-wittedness.  I could catch teachers in their grammatical and mathematical mistakes, find humor in their amphibolous sentence constructions, or identify puns based on homophones (like the word “homophone” itself: a telephone for a gay male; that would get me sent to the principal’s office).  I was not a fully passive, fully compliant kid.  I have a history of interest in the topic of self-control.  It ended up being around the fringes of my Ph.D. dissertation on Aristotle on reasoning about action.  I ended up publishing a couple of scholarly articles on akrasia.  Akrasia is the Greek word that refers to the failure to carry out our intentions (a “lack of” krasia “power”).  It is that puzzling notion of failing to do what I want to do, and not because someone else is restraining me.  I know now that tonight I do not want to eat half a bag of potato chips.  And I know that even when, tonight, I open up the bag of chips.  But once I open up the bag of chips, smell the aroma, taste the first few, and get distracted watching bull riding on the television (and get distracted thinking of the amphiboly in that phrase), I end up eating half the bag of chips.

A couple of weeks ago while looking at my library's new books shelf, a book caught my attention.  Daniel Akst, We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).  On the cover is a chocolate covered donut with sprinkles, but attached to the donut is a lit fuse, making the donut look like an explosive.  It wasn’t the cover that attracted my attention; it was the title and subtitle.  The subtitle captures the theme of the book well.  There were good old days when self-control was not as hard.  Think of the days before there were bags of potato chips, days when almost all your food was made from scratch.  You could not just reach in the cupboard, grab a box or bag of ready-to-eat food, and stuff yourself.  You had to plan.  Go down to the cellar to get a couple of potatoes, get a fire going in the stove, get out the fry pan, put in a scoop of lard or bacon grease, slice the potatoes thin, put them in the pan and fry them for thirty minutes.  In the mean time, you have not milked two of your cows, or hoed the weeds in your bean patch, and now your butter or bean supply is going to be short.  Now we live in an age of excess, where distractions to our intentions are all over the place (like the internet on which you are now reading this post).  It is just so easy to be distracted, to procrastinate, to not do what we say we really want to do.

Akst ranges over scholarly work from philosophers, psychologists, and brain scientists.  Humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences.  For instance, near the beginning of the book (around p. 13) he reports Harry Frankfurt's distinction between first order and second order desires.  First order desires are immediate, felt, action-motivating desires.  Second order desires are desires we have about our desires.  Example: "I desire to eat a deep-fried peanut butter, banana, and bacon sandwich" expresses a first order desire, while "I want not to desire to eat such a fat bomb" expresses a second order desire.  Think of the person who has an addiction, and wants to not have the addiction.  On almost the last page of the book, Frankfurt is referred to again.  In between he refers to Homer, Hesiod, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and numerous 20th century philosophers who have had important things to say about akrasia and self-control.  From the social sciences he relates large quantities of studies, many of which suggest that humans do not have as much control over their actions as they sometimes suppose. One thing I found fascinating were the studies on "priming."  If I hand you a warm cup of coffee or hot chocolate, and ask you to describe a memorable grade school teacher, I will much more likely hear from you about a teacher that you liked, enjoyed, for whom you have "warm" feelings.  If I hand you a glass of ice water and ask the same question, I will much more likely hear from you about a teacher that you didn't like, didn't enjoy, for whom you have "cold" feelings.  Were I to ask you why you selected that teacher to describe, you would not recognize that I primed you to select that one.  We are not as free or in control as we sometimes think we are.  From the natural sciences, Akst relates much research about recent work on neurophysiology, on functions of different parts of the brain, on neuronal activity in the various parts of the brain, and in varying effects of chemical neurotransmitters (like dopamine and serotonin).  For example functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brains of murderers shows a much decreased, compared to the rest of the population, neuronal activity in the pre-frontal cortices (the part of the brain that has executive, decision-making functions).  Reduced dopamine concentrations in the prefrontal cortex are thought to enhance distraction, to make it easier to not stay on task.  Is your lack of self-control more a matter of natural, uncontrollable aspects of your brain, or is it more a matter of your history of decisions, your environment, things you can control?  We know that serotonin levels are correlated with depressive states.  Serotonin levels can be adjusted chemically (for example, with Prozac).  Serotonin levels can also be adjusted by psychobehavioral therapy (helping the person to identify events that contributed toward the depression, and modifying the behavior to diminish symptoms and feelings of depression).  Prozac is cheaper than behavioral therapy (one therapy session costs as much as a two month supply of Prozac), so for insurance companies it is the favored remedy.  So even if you think it is nature (“I have low serotonin, therefore I am depressed”), it doesn’t follow that you can’t do something about it.  You can take Prozac, hoping it functions analogous to training wheels on a bicycle.  It keeps you from crashing while you learn to balance eventually without it.  In any case, we don’t have all the control of ourselves that we sometimes think we have.

While Akst ranges over the work of scholars and researchers, it is not meant to be a book for them.  It is a book for a learned audience, for people who continue to be curious about themselves and the folks around them.  I dare say that folks in leadership positions (supervisors, coaches), and in positions where they need to influence others for decision making (salespersons), ought to find the book fascinating.  Too, those who are being supervised and being influenced by others might want to read it to gain a greater measure of self-control in their lives.  And for those of you who, unlike me, have issues of self-control, you might learn a few tips to help you in your second order desires.  One such tip is the notion of “pre-commitment.”  In our cool, calm, collected moments, we arrange aspects of our lives in order to fend off in advance likely temptations.  We don’t go to the grocery store hungry.  We buy a year-long membership at the health club, and pay in advance for a personal trainer, so we don’t skip out on exercise.  We have someone else handle our finances and give us a weekly allowance so we don’t blow our family budget on beer and the lottery.  We drive an indirect route to work so we don’t go by the convenience store to pick up a pack of cigarettes and a jumbo soda.  We put a photo of ourselves when we were thin on the refrigerator to keep us from reaching in for the ice cream.  We keep photos of our spouse and children on our desk or in our wallet to keep us from pursuing liaisons that would be destructive to our spouse and children (and ourselves).

Now where did that bag of chips go?  Did someone hide them from me?

Smalltown Bandshell Concerts

Wednesday evening I went to a small town fifteen miles from home to attend their Wednesday evening summer concert in the park series.  I didn’t find out about the concerts until a week ago.  Last week I listened to barbershop music, something I haven’t heard in thirty-five years.  A barbershop choral society, a group of about thirty men, performed eight or ten song.  After a short intermission, five or six barbershop quartets performed three songs each, interspersed with bad jokes.  By bad jokes, I mean the ones that make you groan as much as laugh.  For example: “the title of our next song is ‘Don’t Worry, You’ll Get Your Blanket Back’.”  “No wait, it is ‘Fear Not, For Thy Comforter Shall Return’.”  This week it was Irish and Scots music.

It was another beautiful evening.  The concert began at 7 pm, and they begin on time.  Last week we got to the parking lot right at 7 pm and they were already singing.  So this week we got there ten minutes early.  They run a tight ship.  We joined the over two hundred folks there sitting on collapsible chairs, placing our lawn chairs about in the middle, about thirty yards from the stage.  A week ago with the barbershop music, we were among the few in a crowd of about five hundred who did not have white hair and need a rolling grocery bag cart to haul our lawn chairs.  This week, the average age seemed to be just below our age, and a noticeably smaller audience.  Last week’s audience was also better dressed, with many more having their hair “done” at a salon.  This week, more looked like their hair was “done” at a saloon.  We were facing the northwest, the stage and band shell facing the southeast.  It was partly cloudy, about 80 degrees.  As the music played, I tilted my head back and watched the clouds.  One large cloud was shaped like North America, complete with Gulf of Mexico, Central America down to Panama, Maine and Maritime Provinces, Alaska and the Aleutian chain.  A stunning likeness, as Irish and Scots folk songs played.  The local high school marching band was practicing a quarter mile away, and at times it seems that their drum line was playing a rhythm that matched what was coming from the stage.  The vibrantly red-headed woman who was lead singer, and played bodhran, guitar, and bouzouki (one Irish, one Spanish, one Greek), moved to the rhythm of the marching band drum line.  There was an occasional gentle breeze which, with the low humidity, felt especially good.  Sometimes the breeze would bring in the smells of a nearby dairy, just enough to be pleasant and not offensive.  Just to the northeast of the stage were some tennis and basketball courts.  On the basketball court a sixth grade boys’ basketball team was running drills and practicing with a coach.  They all seemed so coordinated for their age.  They ran plays and made moves that I can’t remember us making when we were their age.  They were skilled.  A couple of seven year old boys rode bikes back a forth a few times in front of the stage, never in anyone’s way, lugging bags of popcorn until they were empty, and then throwing the bags into the trash can.  When the concert ended at 9 pm, the sky was clear and it was 72 degrees.

The band included three men in their mid-fifties to mid-sixties, and a woman in her late-thirties. One man played guitar and sang.  Another played a variety of flutes and penny whistles, playing the lead lines.  A third played fiddle.  The woman, red-headed as I said, late-thirties as I said, playing bodhran, guitar, and bouzouki as I said, was attractive as most folks I know count attractiveness, or at least as most Americans would, who are also most folks I know.  And she had a good voice.  There was a distinct Irish accent to it, and I couldn’t tell if it was native or affected.  The band’s website says that when you hear her singing, “be prepared to be transformed to a different time and place.  Let the music help your soul to remember your own past, present, and future.”  Perhaps.  Perhaps her three band mates wrote that, for when they play their instruments and hear her sing, observing her attractiveness at twenty years or more their junior, they are transformed to a different time and place.  Not that anyone would or could reasonably blame them.

They were entertaining.  The musicians were skilled and accomplished.  I don’t know enough to detect minor mistakes, and I certainly didn’t detect any mistakes.  The vocals were pleasant.  They also told some bad (groaner) jokes.  For example: “Two Irishmen walked out of a bar.”  For many people when they think of Irish & Scots folk music, they think of the fun and happy dance songs, the jigs, reels and waltzes.  Most of the dance songs are non-vocalized.  Some of the sung music tells quite funny stories, some with ironic twists at the end.  Much of the vocal music are Caoineadh (pronounced kwee-nah, meaning crying) songs.  To me (with my weak musical knowledge), these are played in a minor key, and at a slower pace.  Given that many of these songs originate from the mid-nineteenth century, a common theme is exile or emigration, a friend, family member, or lover who is taken away or decides to go away and never returns.  They are songs about hopes crushed, desires unmet, wanting left empty.  You have to have a pretty hard heart to listen to those songs and not feel the pain.  In barbershop music, I doubt that there are any blues, any sad songs; they are all fun and games.  I like Irish and Scots folk music better, and the range of emotions in the music might be an important contributing factor to my preference.

Less than a week ago at the same band shell and for a different event, a local festival and not the Wednesday concert in the park series, I listened to a country music band whose subtitle is ”Real American Country Music.”  They played 1950s and 1960s style country music.  On their Facebook page they describe themselves as “Neo classic Country music band.  For fans of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Lefty Frizzell, Merle Haggard, Jimmy Rogers, and so on and so forth.”  The band was composed of five guys ages 18-32, three of whom, from banter between songs, seemed to have been together for a dozen years, while the newest member, bass player Matt, playing an acoustic bass with an electronic pick-up, looked to be all of eighteen years old.  He had blushed-red cheeks, a big cowboy hat pulled down over his ears like the way the bull riders wear them.  I guessed he was the newest member because he had a music stand set in front of him with sheet music of the songs.  He focused on the sheet music, and between each song flipped the front sheet to the back of the stack. The lead singer is Czech, which has to be rare for country music since few Czechs settled anywhere south of the Mason Dixon Line and the Ohio River or west of the Mississippi. They looked like they were having an awfully good time playing and entertaining.  They played a few Johnny Cash and Hank Williams songs (famously, “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)”: “Jambalaya, a-crawfish pie, a fillet gumbo…son of a gun we’ll have big fun on the bayou”), but mostly played their own compositions.  These were in a style of Cash and Williams, and Owens, Frizzell, Haggard, Rogers and so on and so forth, and in the vocal range mostly of Cash.  To my ears, what they played was not just genuine American country music, it was real.  Like Irish and Scots music, their repertoire included dance tunes, funny songs, and sad songs of loss and longing.  Perhaps again it is the range of emotions that helps explains my preference for “Real American Country Music.”

Real American Country Music, or RACM, was followed by a “Nashville Recording Artist” from mid-Michigan, whose band plays in the style called “contemporary or new country.”  That is a style fusing more traditional country with a pop and rock sound.  I am baffled about the “traditional country” part.  Maybe it is traditional in two senses: the themes that are expressed in the lyrics are traditional (sorry to stereotype: dogs, horses, beer and whiskey drinking, pick-up trucks, infidelity, no-good men and loose women, and family values), and the vocalists have or affect an American southern accent.  See, you can grow up in Michigan or even Liverpool and sing in an American southern accent.  The Nashville Recording Artist, or NRA, was entertaining, her vocals were strong and precise, the band was skilled, and there was a slight change in the audience in the transition from the RACM to the NRA.  The volume amplified for the NRA was significantly more than for the RACM.  And I was getting tired; it was Friday 9 pm after a long week of work.  So after about three songs from NRA, I was ready to head home.

Half an hour after sundown, clear sky, low humidity, temperatures in low 70s, windows down, cicadas, crickets, dairy, fresh-cut hay, and I am hungry for jambalaya and cheap beer.