Personal Pieces posts

“She loved horses more than she loved most people,” my sister wrote in the obit, “but she liked people enough that she coveted the middle seat on an airplane.”

My mother died two weeks ago, August 8, 2019, at Jones-Harrison nursing home in Minneapolis. I was on my way to see her. I was waiting in the security line at SeaTac airport when I got word.

After my sister Karen told me the news I asked if should delay coming out. “Are you kidding???” she said. “You know how much there is to do???” Truer words. There should be a book on it. “So You‘re Going to Die...” or “So A Loved One Is About to Die...” or “1,001 Questions to Answer Before You or a Loved One Dies.” I’m not talking existential questions, although those, too. I'm talking the mundane:

• Open casket?
• Which casket? 
• Which vault? 
• What's a vault?
• Embalming?
• Makeup? Hairdo?
• Flower arrangements?
• Minister? Pastor?
• Funeral procession?
• From where? 
• Chapel service?
• Deceased's father's name?
• Deceased's mother's maiden name?

On some of the bigger questions, I knew where Mom stood. Considering that she'd had a stroke in Sept. 2016 and couldn't speak afterwards, just nod or shake her head, we actually had some fairly deep conversations. This year, for example, on a Saturday morning in May, I found her crying in bed. She'd been crying a lot since the seizures began in December and they'd put her on anti-seizure meds. We were never sure if it was the meds, the seizures, or what, and we'd tried different meds, and different doses, and some seemed to work better than others, but not completely. Mostly we were in the dark.

When I found her that day, crying like she no doubt found me crying at the age of 7, or 3, or 3 months, we had the following conversation. 

• Are you in pain? Physical pain? (No.)
• Is someone here hurting you? (No.)
• Being mean to you? (No.)
• Do you feel like it's the anti-seizure meds? Chemistry? (Confused. No.)
• Are you scared? (Yes.)
• Are you scared of dying? (Yes.)

Pause.

• Are you scared of being judged after you die? (Yes.)

I did my best with that. I told her that if we‘re judged on our actions in this life, and she, of all people, is judged wanting, then heaven wouldn’t be a very populated place. It certainly wouldn't be a place I'd want to be. 

I confirmed she didn't want to be cremated; she wanted to be buried. Two weeks ago, it was up to my sister and I to figure out the rest.

Some of our answers to the 1,001 questions helped answer the other ones. My sister wanted a closed casket (open caskets creep her out), so we didn't have to worry about hairdo and makeup, and since burial was within six days of death, we didn't have to embalm, either, thank god. My wife's advice was to avoid the ornate and go simple, and we tried, even though the impulse is to spend, spend, spend. What—don't you care? We chose a finished pinewood box which promised that for every such casket purchased, 100 trees would be planted in Wisconsin. We eschewed the gaudy floral arrangements for flowers from the Farmers Market—a place Mom loved. We did the photos ourselves. The chaplain at Jones-Harrison was away on vacation but my sister had a friend who was a minister who agreed to do the service. Initially it was a graveside service. But after visiting cemeteries in the Twin Cities, and deciding on Lakewood Cemetery near Lake Calhoun/Bde Make Ska, we found out they had a chapel there we could use for free, and which was gorgeous. So that's where we did it. Lakewood is where Hubert H. Humphrey is buried (Mom would‘ve loved that), and it’s only a little more expensive and you get so much for that: Not just the chapel, and the beautiful grounds, but a sense of space in figuring out what you want. I felt rushed and pressured at the other place but none of that from Lakewood. The rep there gave us space; and she was so helpful. If you want a name to contact, let me know; I can't recommend her, and Lakewood, highly enough.

There was also an obituary to write, and a eulogy (below), and a service to put on. Thankfully Karen married into a talented family and had talented kids. Here's Jordan singing one of the songs we went with, “Anytime (I Am There),” from the musical “Elegies,” by William Finn. He played it for Karen and I in the basement, and reprised it for me here after the ceremony. As impressive as the singing is, it's equally impressive that he suggested it—that he plucked this perfect song for the occasion, and it dovetailed so nicely with what I was writing in the eulogy, and with what I was thinking and feeling. We'd Googled “funeral songs” but that wasn't among them, and it's much better than the others. Apologies for the hand-held camera.

And now I'm back in Seattle, and there's nothing else to do for her now; there's just a bone-deep sadness.

Here's the eulogy.

Shortly after Mom’s obituary went up on the Star Tribune website, and was shared on my sister Karen’s Facebook page, and then mine, I got a text message from my sister-in-law, Jayne. Over the past 10 years Jayne has lost several family members to cancer, including her mother and sister, so she knows her away around this. She knows what to say. She sent her sympathies, of course. She also added this thought: 

We only get one mother and no matter how many years we get with her, it’s somehow never enough.

It was the perfect sentiment for that imperfect time.

 It certainly resonated with me. Thursday morning, just five days ago now, I was working at home in Seattle when I got the call from Karen. Jones-Harrison, where Mom has been living since the stroke in Sept. 2016, called and said Mom wasn’t good and we’d all better gather soon. As I made my plane reservations, I was already thinking of what I wanted to say to her. I wanted to say that because of her, I was able to move through life knowing there was someone, somewhere, who loved me unconditionally. There’s a lot of strength in knowing that. You always have a base somewhere; and she’d given me that base.

I remember when I first moved to Seattle, I arrived abruptly, unprepared, and without much money. I felt like a failure and didn’t want people to know where I was. She was the first person I told, the first person I reached out to for help. Because I knew she would give it without judgment. And she did. She sent me money, even though she didn’t have much of her own, and helped right me again.

The Seattle story I tell more often, though, because it’s funnier, is one from a few months earlier, when I was simply visiting Seattle for the first time. My sister was living there then, and Mom had come out a week earlier and so she knew the lay of the land. She got to show me around. I think she liked that—showing me the ropes. On my first full day there, we walked down Queen Anne hill to take the bus downtown. When the bus arrived—I don’t know why, maybe because she's my mom, maybe because I thought she had a bus pass for both of us—I assumed she would pay. So I just walked in and down the aisle until the bus driver called me back. “Hey, hey, didn’t pay!” I walked back, digging into my pockets for coins. Mom was still standing next to the coin box. “You have to pay,” she said. I did; I dropped the coins in. “Now ask the man for a transfer.” I didn’t have to. The bus driver, suppressing a laugh, just handed it to me. And when I turned to go back down the aisle, I saw an entire busload of people smiling with suppressed laughter. But she was happy. She was showing me the ropes. 

We all have such stories. One of Mom’s best, oldest friends, JoAnna Vail, a nurse like mom, who actually introduced Dad and Mom, and so is the reason we’re all here—certainly Chris, Karen, and myself—she called these stories “Bettyisms.” One time, for example, they were cooking dinner and Dave Vail, her husband, tasted the sauce and said, “Needs a certain je ne sais quoi." Mom said, “You mean salt and pepper?”

Mom had a tendency to collapse hierarchies. She was the farm girl who liked working people and the British royal family. When my father was a young reporter, he introduced her to the owner of the Minneapolis Tribune and she responded, “Oh, you work for the paper, too!” In the late ’60s, a party was thrown for John Berryman, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, who had recently returned from Ireland on a Guggenheim fellowship. It was thrown by the mayor of Minneapolis, Art Naftalin, and was full of the movers and shakers of the Twin Cities. Plus Mom and Dad. At one point in the evening, John Berryman gave a poetry reading, which he dedicated to three women in the room: Fran Naftalin, the wife of the mayor and hostess; Maris Thomes, the wife of his friend and physician, Boyd Thomes; and Betty Lundegaard. At the mention of the third name, all of these people, the movers and shakers, turned wondering, “Betty Lundegaard?” And there was mom, sitting on the floor, almost preening, as proud as could be.

She didn’t have much formal education. There’s a movie that reminds me of mom and me: “Philomena,” with Steve Coogan and Judi Dench: His college smarts learning her wisdom. Mom was just so kind and genuine. She liked people. She loved animals and they loved her. Everyone here knows about the horses. She was all about the horses. I can’t have a eulogy for Mom without mentioning Jody’s Nifty Bee, her favorite.

She loved being a nurse. That’s why she kept doing it until she was 80: open-heart surgery, eye surgery. If any of us were sick in the middle of the night, she would be ready in the bathroom with a cold washcloth for our forehead. Me especially. I was a sickly kid. Mom was a nurse for 50 years but 60 if you count my childhood. She had a nurse’s instinct. She knew Karen was pregnant just by talking to her on the phone, long before Karen told anyone.

She loved doctors. She would quote her favorite, Dr. Segal, as if her words had come down from Mt. Sinai. Her time nursing also made her somewhat blunt about medical matters. I once came home and found the following on my answering machine. It was her stern voice, meaning something serious had happened: “Erik. This is your mother. Uncle Roger is in the hospital. He’s bleeding from his rectum.” 

But my sister-in-law Jayne is right. We get so many years but it’s somehow never enough. I was waiting in the security line at Sea-Tac airport when Karen called again with the news that mom had passed on. At the Minneapolis airport, my brother-in-law Eric picked me up, and we drove out to Jones-Harrison. It was past midnight. My sister made sure they didn’t move the body until I arrived, so I had time with her. So I could say the things I wanted to say. And I did. I told her that because of her, I was able to move through life knowing someone, somewhere, loved me unconditionally, and what a gift that was. But it wasn’t the same. Of course not. There’s a blunt finality to death. When I was talking to her, she didn’t react, as Mom always reacted; Mom lit up when you talked to her. And when I kissed her goodbye, her forehead was the one thing mom never was: cold.

But I’m glad I had that moment. And the truth is I’d been saying these things to her as soon as I’d heard the news in the security line at SeaTac airport. Ever since, I’d been talking to her and telling her things. Going through security, waiting at the gate, on the plane. It’s like in the beautiful song that my nephew Jordan just sang. “I am there each morning/I am there each fall/ I am present without warning/ And I am watching it all.” My wife’s mother died six years ago and she says she talks to her every day. I imagine I’ll be the same. I’m already talking to her about all this: Mom, look at this chapel. And free. What a deal Karen got! And did you hear the songs your grandsons sang? Thank god they have Eric’s voice. And look at all the nice people who showed up. What a time, Mom. What a time.

Talk soon.

The other night I called to my wife from my office and asked her: “How does it feel to be married to a New York Times columnist?” When she looked confused (and maybe momentarily hopeful?), I showed her this:

“It's in a book,” I said, “so it's all true now.”

The book is “Mapping Smallville: Critical Essays on the Series and Its Characters,” and this essay, by Roger Almendarez, is called “Model Immigraton and Superman's Impossible Dream,” a title, and an essay, that feels like it needs an upgrade for our current nasty times.

Anyway, I did have an Op-Ed on the history of “Truth, Justice and the American Way” in The New York Times in June 2006. And that was that. But I appreciate the promotion, Roger. 

In fact ... Can I put this on my resumé now? “New York Times columnist”? Since it's been in a book? Doing so wouldn't be the truth but it's not far off from the American way.

I was working late the other night, occasionally distracted by the usual social-media suspects when I came across this on Twitter: one of my guys commenting on one of my other guys. 

Every day I come to this platform to say the same blessed things as this great heart, binding me in fellowship to every other sacred soul in our glorious human drama. And then some pratfalling fuckstumble tries to tell me what he really thinks and my words just end up different. https://t.co/LdlCtTpeV9

— David Simon (@AoDespair) January 8, 2019

I love that Simon called Miranda “this great heart.” I also love “pratfalling fuckstumble,” but that's par for Simon's course. The creator of “The Wire” is also the creator of the best epithets in social media. Or anywhere, really. He's a Mozart in the arena.

Anyway, I responded with the obvious: “We need you both.” I was kind of thinking “The Enemy Within,” the fifth episode of “Star Trek” TOS, when Kirk gets split in two—the kind that bleeds and the kind that cuts—and how each needed the other. Mostly I was thinking how both men are heroes to me. We need both to help keep us sane and interested and honest and engaged.

Very quickly I got this. 

So my year is done. I can't ask anything more of it. 

OK, maybe if our pratfalling president fuckstumbled his way out of office. I could dig that, too.

Trying to clean up my desktop this afternoon, I came across a spreadsheet labeled “NYR-2018” and wasn't sure what it was. 

I opened it up and went, “Oh, right: New Years Resolutions from last year.” It looked like this:

That's as much as I tabulated. Eight days. I kept doing this stuff, but the goal, the resolution, was to tabulate it in order to encourage myself to do it every day. At least situps and Chinese. Plus one of the three: running, walking, biking. But ... poof.

Some small comfort in case, on Day 5, you're already having trouble with your 2019 resolutions.  

Here's another tale of modern living. 

Last month I received several copies of the same letter from our mortgage company. It began:

Thank you for responding to our request for proof of a current hazard insurance policy on your property. Please note that your acccount has not been charged for any lender-placed hazard insurance.

Well, thank god for that. But wait: Who responded to whose request for what? I didn't respond to any request. I didn't even get a request.

There was a phone number to call. Do I call it? Was it a scam to get me to buy insurance? I wound up tossing it in that pile of stuff I should do something about one day but never do. But yesterday I received another such letter—my fourth—and said fuck it and called. 

This was not our original mortgage company, by the way. When we refinanced in 2016, we shopped around and went with a local bank. They had an office nearby in case we had questions. We could walk in. We could see people. But last year, less than a year after the refinance, the local bank sold our mortgage to an outfit in Irvine, Ca.: a loan management service. Sometimes they call themselves “debt collectors.” They often feel slightly off or cut-rate to me. I get the feeling there's just executives and drones and that's it—no middle people doing real work.

I also wonder what other services get to do this besides mortgage banks. Can a gym sell your membership to another gym? “No, sorry, you work out across town now. You work out in Irvine, Ca.” Can your bank sell your savings account to another bank? Why is it allowed with the most important thing you own?

Anyway, the phone call. That letter thanking me for responding to their request for proof of insurance? That was the request. They were asking for proof of insurance. Read it again. It's the worst ask I‘ve ever read.  

Oh, and guess why they wanted to know? Because, they said, our previous insurance policy had expired. Except it hadn’t. What they thought was our insurance company wasn‘t, and hadn’t been for years.

Meanwhile, the correct insurance company didn't respond to their subsequent request for information since they had a different mortgage lender on our policy. And not the local one either. The one before that. So I spent a long afternoon sorting shit out.

Lessons:

1. There's a lot of bad data floating around, like garbage orbiting the earth, that may one day cause havoc with everything.
2. Write clearer sentences.

I think the metadata on me floating around between corporations and their handers is screwed up in some fashion. Everyone I know says when you hit 50, when you immediately hit 50, you begin to get AARP magazine. Or you get some notice from AARP. They reel you in, in other words. I'm 55 (and a half) and I haven't gotten bupkis from them. I almost feel bad about it. 

I was hoping it was because I looked young, but today I got some spam snail-mail from Neptune Society that puts that to rest. Literally:

Dear Erik,

Time passes so quickly. Before you know it, a year has passed, then two. You start thinking about all those things you should do, but haven‘t. Take the time now to make an affordable, sensible choice. Cremation is dignified, inexpensive and has less impact on our environment. 

I’ve passed retirement and gone straight to death. 

No, honey, not Betty Page.

Last weekend I did something I hadn't done for six years—and before that, whoosh, decades. I attended a comic convention. Specifically, the Emerald City Comic Con 2018. ECCC to friends. 

Speaking of: I went stag, which is a bad way to go—although it does make it easier making it through crowds. It also helped that I wasn't in any hurry. Plus I'm still thin enough to—apologies, sorry, my bad—squeeze through when necessary.

My goal again was the comic resellers in the far back of the main room—the whole point of the comic convention when I was a kid, and now an afterthought. I‘ve been reading a book, “Take That, Adolf!” about WWII-era superheroes who, on their various covers, deck Hitler (Captain America) or choke him out (Cat-Man), and I was curious if there were more books about same, or, ideally, not exorbitant copies of originals. Not the popular ones, mind you (I’m a working man), but heroes who didn't last long: Uncle Sam, Steel Sterling, The Shield. How much does a Shock Gibson go for these days? I was curious. 

I remain curious. There was one table that laid out their Golden Age comics in easy-to-rifle-through fashion, even as I was extra careful in doing so. These things were almost as old as my father, after all; they had made it through so much just to get here. Some, shockingly, were affordable—i.e., less than $250. I kept thinking, “Hey, I could buy this!” And I kept having to rein in that thought. Because ... to what end? I don't collect. When I was young I had the desire but not the money; now I have the money but not the desire. Well, not an overwhelming desire, but there's something there. Just holding a copy of Action Comics #28 was thrilling. Just the smell of old comics took me back. It's my madeleine. 

At one point, thinking practically (i.e., relating it to my day job), I asked after copies of “Betty Bates, Lady at Law.” Ever since I found out about her, about 10 years ago, I‘ve been intrigued that she became a comic-book character at a time when women were, what, two percent of law school grads? And probably less of practicing lawyers? And probably less of comic-book characters? The guys at the Golden Age stand nodded and directed me to another seller, where, they said, they’d seen such a copy. But when I arrived, I didn't see any “Betty Bates”; I saw “Betty Page.” Had I been misunderstood? I asked again. And again, they thought I said “Betty Page.” When I clarified, they exchanged glances and eyed me dubiously, then looked her up in their comic-book catalog. Bupkis, as they'd suspected. I got a “Check yer facts, kid,” look, to which I nodded. I should‘ve checked my facts. She existed, she just never had her own comic. She was always part of “Hit” Comics. (And now a book is available that collects all over her old comics in one place; I might have to get it.)

It wasn’t a bad few hours. I checked out the wares, checked out the cosplay. On some level, these should be my people, fellow nerds, but I feel like an interloper now. This thing that used to be just skinny nerds and overweight resellers has been turned it into a party, a real party, and I'm late to it. I'm late to a party I left early.

DUN duh-nuh-nuh-nuh DUN DUN...

It was January 20, 2016, my birthday, and I was checking out social media, as we do, when I was distracted by a trending headline about director Spike Lee and #OscarsSoWhite. I kind of rolled my eyes. OK, what did he say now? Turns out Spike's thoughts on the controversy were similar to mine—that the lack of black artists up for awards is less an Academy problem than an industry problem. The roles needed to be there in the first place for the Academy to honor them. “We need to be in the room where it happens,” he said, and the writer helpfully added that this was an allusion to the new hit musical “Hamilton,” then even more helpfully included a link to a cast member singing that song on YouTube. 

Me: Oh right. That hip-hop musical about the first treasury secretary, with people of color playing the founding fathers. Sounds dreadful.

But I clicked on the link.

First viewing: “Hey, this is pretty good.” Second viewing: “Holy crap, this is good.” I searched for more on “Hamilton,” then came across a 2009 White House video of some guy rapping about Hamilton and was blown away again. That guy, it turned out, was Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created it all. Did iTunes have the Broadway soundtrack? It did! I listened to several songs before downloading the entire thing as a birthday present to myself. I figured, while I probably wouldn't listen to all the songs, there was enough there to make it at least a little bit worthwhile.

Well, I did listen to all of the songs. Over and over again. Ask my wife. For six months it was about all I listened to. I listened to it like I was running out of time. My world would never be the same. 

I searched for tickets to the Broadway show, too, but they didn't have anything for like a year. I probably should've tried harder. Then Miranda and other members of the original cast left the show in July. That door was closed now; it would never be open again. 

But two weekends ago, in Chicago, I finally got to see the show. 

My sister got tickets for her family and my wife made sure one of those was for me. So even though I'd just spent two and a half weeks in Europe, I packed up again and headed to Chicago.

I didn't expect to be blown away. It wasn't the original cast, it wasn't on Broadway, and I had the whole musical already in my head. What could they give me that I didn't already have? What could they tell me that I didn't already know? Mostly I was just interested in seeing how the tone of this one differed from the tone of the original. 

But I was blown away. After the show, my sister reposted on social media Joe Posnanski's great essay about seeing “Hamilton” on Broadway last year with his daughter, and it includes this graf:

The thing about seeing Hamilton RIGHT NOW at its peak moment is that even before it begins, the entire theater is filled with wonder. Every single person would rather be here than anywhere else in the world. As a sportswriter, I often feel that sort of energy at the biggest events, at the Masters or the Super Bowl or the Olympics, but it's even more pronounced in this theater. People look at each other with the same wide-eyed expression: “Can you believe we're here?”

That was the feeling in Chicago. The crowd was buzzing, smiling “I can't believe I'm here” smiles, and taking turns taking photos near the stage. As the house lights dimmed and the opening chords to the opening number played (DUN duh-nuh-nuh-nuh DUN DUN), unsuppressed squeals of delight were heard. And when Daniel Breaker as Burr asks “What's your name, man?” and Miguel Cervantes as Hamilton responds, “Alexander Hamilton,” the crowd burst into applause.

The talent on the stage was amazing. The dancers rocked. Alexander Gemignani took the familiar King George songs and made them funny again. He just owned the stage. He brought the house down multiple times and viewed us all with the disdain of an 18th century half-mad monarch. Loved Chris De'Sean Lee as Lafayette (less his Jefferson, which felt over-the-top), and Ari Afsar as Eliza. Meanwhile, the actress playing Angelica, Aubin Wise, has a combination of high cheekbones and dimples that seems decidedly unfair to the rest of us. You should get one or the other, not both. Plus she has the pipes. Get this: she was the understudy.

But I was particularly impressed by Breaker as Burr. Right from the start, right from the “Aaron Burr, Sir” song, you not only heard him singing but saw him acting. His reactions to this pestering kid seemed just right: putting Hamilton at a distance, then being won over by him (kinda sorta), then the rivalry and the seeming constant betrayal—until the big one during the election of 1800. Also the pain of realizing he was, and would always be, the villain in our history.

That's the thing that was surprising in Chicago: feeling the pain of being Aaron Burr. In the original, Miranda plays a sympathetic, sensitive Hamilton who wears his heart on his sleeve the way Miranda often does. He's all big sensitive eyes and overwhelming dramatic emotion. Cervantes' Hamilton is colder and more ruthless. It feels truer to the historical man but also less dramatic. We care less for Hamilton here, and more for Burr. I didn't cry when Hamilton's son died or when they sang “It's Quiet Uptown,” as I had done numerous time at home listening to the soundtrack; but I nearly teared up when Burr realizes the tragedy of his life. “Was I supposed to care so much about Aaron Burr?” my sister asked after the show. It was the play turned upside down. It makes me wonder what other variations there might be to this story that has lived with me for 18 months, and that I thought I knew so well.

• Days gone: 18
• Countries visited: 2. Three if you count the Charles de Gaulle Airport.
• Lonely Planet guidebooks brought: 2. But we really could've used one for the Charles de Gaulle Airport. 
• Minutes to make our connecting flight at CDG: 70
• Minutes by which we missed our connecting flight: 5
• Minutes subsequently spent at CDG: 480
• Museums visited in 18 days: 17
• Museums visited alongside field trips of howling school kids: 16
• Churches/kirkes/kerks entered: 20
• Towers climbed: 6
• Paintings by Dutch masters gazed at: 142
• Van Goghs seen: 69
• Canal tours taken: 1. Copenhagen.
• Visits to the Little Mermaid: 2. Once from the canal side. 
• Visits to Tivoli: 2. Once in the evening. 
• Visits to castles: 8
• Visits to Shakespearean castles: 1. Hamlet's, yo.
• Number of Yankee caps seen on the heads of Europeans who think “NY” is “like the rebel image”: 99
• Number who know the Yankees are the richest team in baseball: 0
• Polish Carlsberg workers with whom we debated whose country's president was the more embarrassing while sharing an outdoor table at a charming pizza place in the former meatpacking district of Copenhagen: 3
• Number of nodded concessions that, while the Polish president was an embarrassment, his idiocy didn't affect the world: 5
• Number of times I crossed the street in advance of looming bikes, cars or trams, or just before the light turned red, and Patricia missed the cue, and we wound up staring at each other from opposite sides of the street: 212
• Number of times we consulted Google Maps and then went in the wrong direction anyway: 53
• Times we visited Hope in Copenhagen for breakfast in our five mornings there: 2
• Mornings when we thought, “You know, we really should've just gone to Hope again”: 3
• Number of times in the morning I thought, “Wow, Danish people are really good-looking”: 4 
• Number of times in the late afternoon I thought, “OK, maybe not”: 4
• Number of times I was absolutely turned on by women in Amsterdam: 24
• Number of times this happened in the red light district: 0
• Number of scheduled cyling days on our bike-barge trip along the IJsselmeer in the Netherlands: 6
• Actual days spent biking due to weather: 3
• Number of times we had more trouble finding the boat in the new port than we did making the actual journey: 3
• Number of cyclists on the trip: 19
• Number of Pacific Northwesterners: 8
• Old-style windmills seen: 8
• Wind-energy turbines seen: 211
• Times I thought of Trump because of this: 211
• Pannekoeken eaten: 5
• Cappuccinos drunk: 27
• Frites: 8
• Netherlanders impressed that I pronounced “bedankt” with the “t” at the end: 15
• Number of tickets we tried to buy with credit cards/debit cards in train-station kiosks: 12
• Number of times the credit card/debit card was rejected: 12
• Number of times the cards were rejected elsewhere: 0
• Postcards sent: 36
• Postcards bought but never sent: 111
• Refrigerator magnets bought: 12
• Text messages warning us that we were about to exceed, or had already exceeded, or were hopelessly in excess of, our international data package: 4 
• Plane hours home: 9
• Money spent: TBA

Here's a story from last week about the difficulty of overcoming your true nature. Also about the idiocy of construction companies even in rural areas.

A week ago Sunday, Patricia and I were driving down to Rochester, Minn., for a Monday/Tuesday appointment at the Mayo Clinic. We were driving my mother's old SUV and as we left the Twin Cities it had about a quarter tank left. I'm a pretty risk-averse guy—whenever the tank gets below the quarter-mark I usually fill it up. But here, as we drove down 52 South, I only saw gas stations on the other side of the highway. I kept waiting for one on our side. I figured: I can handle this. I'll subsume my true nature for the sake of efficiency. 

And I kept waiting. And waiting. 

Soon it was just cornfields everywhere, and the gas gauge was nearing empty. So when the next exit offered “gas” I went for it. Again, it was on the other side of the freeway. Worse, the station wasn't even visible. I drove a bit. Nothing. Where was it? A mile ahead? Two? I said, “Screw this” and got back on 52 South.

Then the gas gauge light went on, which never happens to me.

It would soon be dark, and I didn't like the idea of running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. No matter what, I thought, I'll get gas at the next exit. 

That one looked promising. Near the town of Zumbrota, I could actually see the gas station, a SuperAmerica, on the other side of the highway. So we took the exit, drove over the bridge, and ... ran into an orange construction barrier. The road to the gas station was completely blocked. We could only go right or left: right was the exit ramp for 52 North, while left was the entrance ramp back onto 52 North. I shook my head. I looked around more carefully. The gas station was about 100 feet away but there was no way to get to it. It was that classic American dilemma: couldn't get there from here.

“Is this completely ...?”

“It is,” Patricia said.

I sighed. “Any thoughts?”

“Maybe try the other side of the freeway? There's a McDonald's there. Maybe there's something else, too?”

But there wasn't, so we returned to the construction sign, thinking we'd simply missed something. We hadn't. I parked next to the sign and got out. 

“I'll see if I can just buy a canister of gasoline,” I said. 

In the evening light, I walked down a steep hill full of spongy grass and into the SA. Two girls were chatting behind the counter.

“Did you know that the construction over there is blocking anyone from that side from entering this place?” I asked. They looked up, then craned their necks to the construction site. No, they didn't know. “So is there another way to get here?” I asked. The older girl mentioned driving further north about a mile and coming in from the eastern side, but I imagined myself getting hopelessly lost that way.

“So ... Do you have any canisters for sale?” 

The girl looked blank for a moment, then perked up, “Yes,” and led me to a wall where ... there was nothing. “Oh, I guess we don't. I guess we're out.” 

“Huh. How about one I could borrow?”

I wouldn't have been surprised if she'd said no, but she agreed. I thanked her, filled it up, carried it over the grassy hill to the car ... and couldn't figure out how to work it. The nozzle was made of plastic, and we figured you were supposed to pull back on it, twist it, and it would lock in place, allowing an opening for the gas to flow out. But it wouldn't lock into place. I actually had to hold it in place, and wound up spilling gas all over my hands. Even then it came out in a glurging trickle. Meanwhile, other cars kept driving up and looking as confused as we had by the construction signs. Patricia always gave them a shrug of commiseration.  

Eventually we filled up the tank—about a quarter full—and I returned the canister, asked for a bathroom to wash my hands, washed my hands about five times but couldn't get rid of them smell. I also gave the girl $10 for her trouble. But I'd learned my lesson. Never subsume your true nature for the sake of efficiency. It's never efficient. 

Last night I dreamed we were watching a TV show or movie about drug wars or gang wars, and the setting was a rival gang in Mexico or Colombia or somewhere else in Latin America. An attack was imminent, we knew that much; the gangmembers were without character, unknown to us. They were just there to be eliminated as an element of the plot. The attack began at night when one man, maybe sleeping on a wooden table, with a tent-like canvas behind him, popped his head up and was shot in the head through the canvas. He was the first. Then the bullets started whizzing and winging. They just kept coming, and the camera with them, deeper and deeper into the gang's headquarters, toward its nominal leader, and men kept falling. We never saw the attackers, we just heard and felt their bullets. It was like a million other cheap massacres I'd seen on screen but it began to hurt, watching it. Each bullet was like a bee sting, and there were a lot of bullets. “I'm tired of this,” I said. 

Then we were watching the aftermath of the attack. It was the next morning and authorities were carting the bullet-riddled bodies away and trying to clean up the mess left behind. Two men were labeled with first names but the last name was sort of the Spanish equivalent of John Doe. “Right,” I thought, “because how would they know who these guys were? How could they identify them?” That seemed like an entire investigative arm of the police I hadn't considered before. The men and women who try to figure out the names and lives of nondescript dead men.

That's me on the right later today. But hopefully better dressed and with less drama.

Wait, that's wrong, isn't it? He's dragging Elaine away from a wedding. Oh well, you get the idea.

Also, what other movie image to go with? “The Godfather”? He's going to abuse her, then one brother will beat him up while another will have him killed. “Diner”? That's about fear of marriage. “Romeo and Juliet”? Doesn't end well. So, this. Plus Dusty's one of my patron saints. 

I‘ll see you in my dreams. Or not. 

Last night I dreamed that “Hamilton” was touring and playing in Minneapolis, so P and I visited  the Twin Cities to see it. We hooked up with my old college roommate and his wife, who knew less about the musical but were game; they went along on my say-so.

The theater was crowded and chaotic. It felt like a movie theater in that the afternoon show was leaving as we were arriving. I ran into an old bookstore friend, who was dressed in an odd outfit (he’d always been odd), and he told me the touring show wasn't great. I kept thinking, “I don't want to know this.” It felt like spoilers.   

We were staying in a hotel above the theater, and I was in our room fixing a drink, and thinking of watching it all on TV, when I began to hear the opening strains of the overture from below: Dun de-de-de dun dun.... And I'm like, “Wait. TV??? We came all this way to see the play. I need to be down there.” But then I had to go to the bathroom. And then I couldn't find the key to our room. And then I couldn't fit the key into the door. The hallway was crowded and people were watching, and I seemed to be bending the key out of shape to try to get it to work (Freudians, have at), and all the while I kept thinking, “I'm missing it, I'm missing it...”

One of those awful anxiety dreams. Dreaming like I'm running out of time. 

I had another “Hamilton” dream about a month ago. In that one, Lin-Manuel Miranda himself gave me tix to the Broadway show. P and I were already in New York, and the tix were for six days in the future—on the other side of the New Year—so we had to rearrange our schedules to make it all work. That, too, became an anxiety dream about where to stay, where was our stuff, etc. 

In neither dream did I see the musical. So even in my dreams I don't get to see “Hamilton.”

I‘ve told this story before but not here. So one more time. 

In spring 2001, I was working on the first Xbox iteration of “NFL Fever,” a short-lived game that never could compete with “Madden NFL”—despite, I should add, our cover guy that year, Peyton Manning. One day he and his father, Archie, another football legend, arrived at RedWest in Redmond for a meet-and-greet with the team. Hell, I can even tell you the exact day: April 16. I know because that evening I went to Safeco Field to “greet” Alex Rodriguez on his first day back in Seattle after signing a $252 million contract with the Texas Rangers. That game was a proud moment for me. Before then, Mariners fans had always been rather polite with returning players. We’d always applauded them. Not A-Rod. We showered unrelenting abuse and paper money on the bastard for nine innings. It was the beginning of something new, for both us and him. 

Anyway, on the Microsoft campus, everyone on the team got their photo-op with our cover guy. Peyton stood in the cold and drizzle, polite, smiling, gracious, as each of us took our turn. Some folks, in their photos, had Peyton handing off to them, etc., but I was too shy for that. And all of us were too shy to ask for what we really wanted. 

Almost all of us. One upper-level mucky muck wasn‘t. When the photo session ended, standing 20-25 feet away, he clapped his hand, held them up, and said, “C’mon, toss it here.” Peyton did: a nice lob. Almost before it arrived, the mucky-muck was shaking his head. “No, no, no,” he said, and tossed the ball back. “I mean really throw it.”

A small smile passed over Peyton's face. 

I swear, the arm motion of the second throw was exactly the same: easy, smooth. He wasn't rearing back or anything. But the ball just shot out of his hand like a rocket and landed right in the guy's gut. I still remember the small satisfactory “oof” sound the mucky-muck made. But give the dude credit. He asked. He can say, “I caught two passes from Peyton Manning.” Me, I just got this picture. 

Well, one more thing. The football in question was mine, so later in the afternoon I had to chase Peyton down to get it back. “You want me to sign it?” he asked. “Sure,” I said. He got out his black marker but paused. He turned the ball around in his hands, reading. “What are all of these other signatures on it?” he asked. I didn't go into the whole permatemp situation at Microsoft; I merely said that I'd left the team last year and this was my going-away present back then, and everyone signed it with little messages like “Great working with you.” One line, from a guy named Jimbo, I still remember. I was the only non-gamer on our team, so whenever we had to do a group test for like “Motorcycle Madness,” I would always lose, but everyone would have to wait for me, with my handle “Withak” (as in “Erik with a k”), to finish. So on the football Jimbo wrote, “Withak, hurry up and finish!” which I thought was pretty funny. 

Anyway, on the football, Peyton, with another small smile, gave me his autograph then added, “Great working with you!” which I also thought was pretty funny.

I had that football for about 10 years. But I didn't try to protect it or anything. The opposite, really. My friend Gavin and I used to toss it around the Microsoft parking lot during (for him) smoke breaks. Eventually, it began to shed and a few years ago I just threw it away. NFL Fever? Microsoft tried three iterations before throwing away not only that title but the whole sports division of Microsoft Game Studios, including NBA Inside Drive and NHL Rivals. This week, it was Peyton Manning's turn. On Monday, he announced his retirement from professional football.

A-Rod endures.

I wrote this about 17 years ago, at the dawn of the Internet age, but I never sold it; I might not even have tried. I thought of it again when Playboy decided to stop featuring nude women in their magazines.

Recently I was surfing the Web for pictures of pretty girls when a name I hadn’t thought of in years popped into my head: Gig Gangel. She had been Playboy’s Miss January 1980. I remembered her not just for the usual anatomical reasons, nor for the happy coincidence of the four hard G’s in her name, but because she was the only playmate I ever pinned to my wall.

I was 16, living in an all-male household—the divorce had split us up along gender lines—and I already had posters of several booby actresses in my room (Cheryl Ladd, Lt. Uhura); so why not a naked one? Yet Gig lasted less than a week. One night my father brought home a date, a woman I’d never met, whose politeness I mistook, with the egotism of adolescence, for flirtation. Wasn’t I wearing a high school letter jacket? What woman could resist?

I was waiting for friends to pick me up so we could cruise around town and do our not much of anything, and for some reason my father wanted to show her my room. Because I was so neat? I forget. Anyway, they were halfway up the steps when I remembered Gig. I think I made some noise of protest but it was too late. The lights were flicked and there she hung. The next day, still mortified, I took Gig down, and, as the saying goes, we lost track of one another.

The Web gave us a chance to reunite. Typing Gig’s name into the search engine elicited a surprising number of sites—I thought her more obscure than that—but I immediately focused on the only one that didn’t sound like a perverted man panting. After several seconds, lo and behold, Gig began to download. It was her centerfold shot: a Bob Fosse fedora tilted seductively over one eye, red red lipstick, and a fishnet body suit. For the week she was on my wall I used to mentally trace the lines of that fishnet, which stretched to the point of bursting over her voluminous chest, and then slowly converged until the lines became indistinguishable and intermingled with whatever was going on below her waist. (Full disclosure: I had no idea what was going on below her waist.)

Gig: mid download

Manipulating the URL I discovered I could call up other centerfolds from my teen years, such as Candy Loving, the 25th anniversary playmate, and Lou Ann Fernald, Miss June 1979, playfully pouring a pitcher of water over herself, as girls do.

But I soon became less interested in the centerfolds than in the stat sheets accompanying them: Turn-Ons, Turn-Offs, Favorite Movies, Secret Dreams. These have long been a national joke (a big warm bed on a cold rainy night, etc.) but provoked interest now for cultural reasons. Generally, a playmate’s favorites include both high culture (to make the girls appear smart) and low culture (to make them appear fun), and the two don’t mix well after 20 years. Gig’s favorite movies, for example, were The Godfather and The End; and apparently when Liz Glazowski, April 1980, was finished with Harold Robbins, she immediately reached for Ernest Hemingway.

Overall, there wasn’t a lot of difference in these various likes/dislikes. One prefered autumn, the other spring; one blue eyes, the other brown. Most liked roses. No one cared much for crowds or traffic or hairy backs. The September ’79 playmate, Vicki McCarty, said she was tired of hearing about Ronald Reagan, so you get the feeling the ’80s were a bit of a drag for her. Well, not just her.

It was when I began reading the “Goals” and “Secret Dreams” of these girls, though, that the whole thing turned sadder than I’d anticipated. It was like flipping through an old yearbook and wondering whatever happened to this “Most Likely to Succeed” or that “Most Talented.” Did Sandra Joyce Cagle (February 1980) get to ride a hot air balloon cross-country? Did Henriette Allais (March 1980) learn to play the flute? Was Vicki Witt (August 1978) ever shipwrecked on a desert island with Lee Majors?

Most wanted to be famous actresses, of course, but a quick search through IMDb reveals that neither noun nor adjective took much hold. Rosanne Katon, Miss September 1978, was featured in The Swinging Cheerleaders and Motel Hell, and even managed to share scenes with future Oscar winner Tom Hanks in Bachelor Party; but then “Girl #3” roles began to go to younger playmates and her career fizzled.

Yet Ms. Katon is Meryl Streep compared with the other playmates. More common is the experience of Lee Ann Michelle (February 1979), Sylvie Garant (November 1979), and Liz Glazowski (April 1980). Each hoped to light up the silver screen; each appeared in not much. Garant wound up on two episodes of two Canadian TV shows, while Glazowski’s sole credit is a bit part (as “Liz”) in “The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood.” I find nothing on Michelle.

As for Gig, who wanted to be a famous singer? She did appear in the 1993 straight-to-video actioner “Killing Device,” opposite Alan Alda’s son Antony, and under the stage name (or married name?) “Gig Rauch.” But there’s nothing on her on iTunes.

In my youth, playmates seemed mythical beings; they generated such fantasies. Now I realize they're just another group of people for whom the world didn’t turn out as planned.