Today I learned that a hack saw, a fine-tooth blade designed to cut metal, will slice through plastic with no trouble. Go figure. The plastic I was cutting was a little winged flange near the top of one of the outdoor garbage cans. I’m sure it provides strength or stability, or both, to the rim, but it’s also tearing at the weather stripping in the trunk of my car.
It’s doing that because I have to take the garbage the seven miles to the convenience center. Today was that day, so I deployed the hacksaw. And, wouldn’t you know it, the can got in the trunk just that much easier. In the backseat, two more bags a tub of recycling and a handful of cardboard. It’d been two weeks since I’d made this run, hence the extra haul. It took three minutes to unload, and about 26 minutes to make the round trip.
It was sunny, but cold today. A bit windy. I talked myself out of a bike ride. Listen to your body, they say. I didn’t argue the point. I just didn’t feel enthusiastic about it, given the temperature. Tomorrow, then, when it’ll be two degrees warmer.
Besides, Joe The Older was outside. We have two neighbors named Joe. The one across the way is Joe The Older. Retired developer and buckle-winning horseman. He built most of this neighborhood. Knows everyone in the tri-county area. Related to Betsy Ross. Apparently an uncle of his once owned FDR’s favorite yacht. Stand there and talk to Joe The Older for a while and you’ll get a history lesson of the Forrest Gump order. He’s a delightful man.
Just this weekend we met Joe The Younger, who is on our side of the street. They’ve only been here about a year longer than us. He’s in regional sales. New dad. Keeps an impressive yard. Big, easy smile. And so this is how I will keep them straight: Joe The Older, and Joe The Younger.
Anyway, I had a plumbing question. Figured the wise older gentleman would have an answer. Turns out, he did! The answer: nothing. It’s the best kind of solution, really.
We chatted for a while, he was taking a break from washing his truck and telling me about the deer and the foxes and the neighbors and the soil. A man so thoroughly invested in the land he knows where the marl ends and the sand begins. I told him my seven soil category story. No one likes that story, but Joe The Older respected it. My kind of guy.
I finally framed this newspaper plate. It was a stressful little exercise, trimming aluminum to fit a frame with oversized tin snips. This plate is for the front page of a 2015 newspaper. It’s a one of a kind, so there were no do overs. I checked my measurements very carefully.
This is the campus newspaper that I advised a lifetime ago. Every year we got a few of the plates from the printer. We gave one to the outgoing editor-in-chief as a thank you and keepsake. I kept one too, and for this very reason.
I had Sydney in a class her freshman year. She was the quiet, smart one. Severely smart. Sat in the back. She just wanted to do the work. I don’t know how you can be that quiet and, still, have everyone around know what you’re about. She is kind. Everyone came to admire her. Everyone saw how hard she worked, and how talented she was. In her senior year of college she was a section editor of two local papers and the editor-in-chief of her campus paper. I think she took over at least one of those locals that year, too. She was also a 4.0 student. She had, and she earned, every accolade.
Sydney won a Pulitzer Prize last year for a national reporting story she worked on for the New York Times. I work that into every conversation I can. And that’s why I have this plate on display.
This was a successful newspaper. Alongside Sydney on that year’s editorial board there’s a big shot investigative reporter. There is a business owner, two people at different agencies. Another does PR for a national construction concern. One of the prominent writers is now the director of a museum out west. They’ve earned a lot of success for themselves in just a few short years. I think about them from time-to-time. And, now, I’ll have that to glance at. A Pulitzer Prize winner put that together in her early days, and I had the good fortune to work with her for four years.
I’m about two chats away from telling Joe The Older about it.
Let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I am playing all of my old CDs in the order in which I acquired them. I’m writing about them here to pad out the site a bit, but also to enjoy the trip down memory lane, and to publish some great music. And that’s where we are today, talking about a record that was published in 1992, but I bought it in 2004.
I bought it, in fact, on August 7th, 2004, the night that I was admitted to grad school. I went to the movies and bought two CDs that night. It was, as you might imagine, a big celebration.
The record was “Hollywood Town Hall,” by The Jayhawks. I’d just finished “Tomorrow the Green Grass,” and wanted to backfill the catalog, and so those CDs were older Jayhawks projects. They were as good a choice as graduate school was.
This is the first track. The right guitar, the dreamy organ, Gary Louris with Mark Olson singing the harmony. It was a terrific start.
The singer-songwriter Joe Henry wrote the liner notes. Today it reads like this is a concept album. Henry has worked with the Jayhawks on a few records, but he doesn’t appear in the credits here. Maybe he was just being clever.
The album cover feels like that, too. Someone had to drag that sofa out into the snow for this photo series.
The album, which got to 11 on the Billboard Heatseekers chart and number 192 on the Billboard 200, takes its name from that place, population 1,060 in 1992. It’s no bigger today. I wonder if anyone there knew the record and enjoyed it. It certainly seems out of place in 1992. There was grunge, late-stage guitar rock, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston and Ice Cube. And then up in Minnesota these guys were playing music that sounded like the Flying Burrito Brothers.
This song is one of my favorite alterna-pop tunes of all time. I play this on repeat every time I play the record. Since 2004 I have occasionally tried to figure out what falling rain and water sounds like. The paper and napkins I’ve scribbled on, trying to balance onomatopoeia, simile and metaphor. To everyone’s delight, I never get it right.
So this was August 2004 for me. I listened to these records, and probably not much else, for the next six months. So, apologies to anyone who had to be in a car with me. Because of that, though, when I saw them live late the next spring my future wife was well versed in the catalog.
In the next installment of the Re-Listening project we’ll hear The Jayhawks’ 1997 record. I bought that one the same night, but the five years between them was a lot of time. The “Sound of Lies” was different. A bit out of step, and out of time, but their own time. Karen Grotberg returned, Marc Olson left, Tim O’Reagan stepped in. The band was re-shaping itself, in the studio, in front of their fans. The experiment continued with sweaty drinks and art galleries. Or something. For me it was sunny days, blaring stereo speakers and trying to figure out what that one sound was … but we’ll get to that.
