A few years ago I was in line at an ice cream parlor and there was a little girl in front of me, maybe six years old. Her mother had had to pop out of line for a minute and the little girl was left, looking wide-eyed in the freezer case at the many ice cream containers, anticipating her choice. I said something incredibly neutral to her, like, “I think I’m getting that one there. Which one will you get?” And she turned to me, not turning her neck, but her whole little body, and stared wide-eyed and frozen, not saying a word. And then, like a possum, frozen into it’s false death, she determined at some point it was safe to turn, and hastily turned her back to me. When her mom returned, I heard her stage whisper, Continue Reading
Half Baked in the Time of COVID, no. 2 — Strange Times
I think one of the things that feels really disconcerting about this time of COVID is how strange even the most mundane and routine of activities feel. Things we have done mindlessly over a lifetime feel off-center, unexpected, and peculiar.
In the first few weeks of the pandemic, the stores looked post-apocalyptic with their ravaged, barren shelves. Even weird items like spam or canned sauerkraut…gone. That’s when there were 200 people in a single checkout line, carts overflowing with a combination of items that would never combine to make a meal of any value to anyone. I mentioned that spam and canned sauerkraut were missing from the shelves, Continue Reading
Half Baked In the Time of COVID, no. 1
Half Baked is a phrase I use to describe an idea, or sometimes a constellation of ideas that may hang out together but don’t fully form a cohesive concept or, in this case, blog post. In light of the COVID pandemic, I am introducing “Half Baked in the Time of COVID” — my first foray back into blogging in over a year; an attempt to connect and share and engage. I hope you enjoy it.
I am not going to lie to you, I have had an incredibly, almost impossibly difficult last six months or so. It has been challenging in ways that I could not have anticipated or known, and I recognize that, as Charles Bukowski says, “what matters most is how you walk through the fire”. But I’ve been walking through fire for long enough that my feet are singed. My knees burn. I need a break.
Varsity Holiday
A couple of years ago, my mom got me a sweater for Christmas. So what, right? I bet most of you are thinking that your uncle/brother/partner/friend bought you a sweater for Christmas a few years ago. And last year. And probably this year, too. But this is not an ordinary sweater. Like Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak, it is a garment that does much more than keep me warm in winter months—it transports me through time. It sounds unbelievable, I recognize, but I will explain.
I loved this sweater from the moment I laid eyes on it. It is a vintage letterman sweater from Central High School in Detroit. It is red, double thread wool with buttons likely made of bone, and it is in surprisingly good shape considering it is from 1948. That’s right. My sweater turned 70 this year, and is still trotting around, jaunty and attention-getting, all the way across the country from where it started.Continue Reading
Activism
I am a person who loves history. Particularly American History, but I am a dabbler in regional histories, too. A lover of architecture and forgotten cultural events the world over, and I think I’ve pretty much always been this way. When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I became particularly interested in the Vietnam War, with its murkiness and complexity. I read everything I could get my hands on—from old LIFE magazines to letters from soldiers to proper books on the history of this event. My mom took me to a VFW hall where I spoke with veterans, and wore a POW bracelet for a decade following. The one thing that became incredibly clear was that there was very little clarity about it. Unlike World War II or the Civil War, it was hard for my young mind to understand what happened and why. The Vietnam War represents the first time I was introduced to the idea of how complex the lens of history can be, Continue Reading