memories

history / Indiana / IU / memories / music / photo / running / video / Wednesday — Comments Off on Ancient wisdom: Indoors shoulders gather no snow
8
Feb 17

Ancient wisdom: Indoors shoulders gather no snow

To break up my 11-hour day I went for a run. And just after we started jogging, The Yankee and I, we went by a window and saw snow flakes. And so being indoors was a good idea. Because I could look like this:

But we ran in this gym instead:

That’s Wildermuth, an intramural facility, where I ran eight miles tonight. From 1928 until 1960 it was the home of the basketball team. And, on this day in 1946, it looked like this:

I’m glad I never had to stand in line to register for a college class. I think my freshman year my alma mater was on their second year of phone registration. At an orientation session they plopped in a VHS tape and made us watch a corny — even by the standards of the day — video about how to sign up for classes. But that system only lasted a few more years. Before I graduated they were doing it all online.

Not in line, online. And that probably changed things, too.

Anyway, a few more views on my snowy walk back from Wildermuth to Franklin Hall, where a sports show was recorded tonight:

You reach a certain point with these sort of pictures where you think “Hey, more snow. Yeah, yeah.” And that is almost always just behind “I can’t feel my hands.”

And as an aside about nothing, we had gumbo for dinner tonight. So I washed the dishes while listening

A Louisiana boy singing Delta and soul blues while snow was on the ground outside.

It makes perfect sense while you’re standing at the kitchen sink.

Friday / IU / memories / music / photo / video — Comments Off on I remembered to forget to remember
3
Feb 17

I remembered to forget to remember

Some kind of busy day. It started last night.

I got in at about 10 p.m. last night, just in time for frozen pizza and then bed. Woke up a half hour earlier than usual this morning. I grabbed a bit of breakfast on the way into the office and, when I got there, I loaded up a cart worth of stuff to send to the surplus store.

If you need a handful of old standard definition television cameras or other outdated gear, I know where you can get it.

After that, the morning show:

The two ladies on the right are national champion cheerleaders. They told me it gets harder every year. They’d know. One has two championships, the other has three. Their team has won five of the last six titles. Harder every year. But, for one, her cheer career is almost over. She wants to work in that business, perhaps as a coach. The other is planning to go to medical school.

So this was the second episode of the new morning show. It looks promising and you’ll see it here when they upload it.

I pretty much lived in the studio today. After the morning show there was anchor training and then some other folks came in and used the room for some interviews. We did critiques of the news shows and then I went back to the studio for more of those interviews and a series of pesky emails and so on.

When the day was over I headed to the grocery store. On the way I found a local country station, a 3,800 watt shop with a liner that says “Fox News is coming up next, after this country classic!”

And then Elvis played. “Devil in Disguise.” Even in 1963, with his powers not yet fading, saw that song go top ten on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the R&B charts. That was no country song. Neither was Jerry Lee Lewis’ cover of “Me and Bobby McGee,” but it showed up a few songs later. There was also Linda Ronstadt and Buck Owens and Merle Haggard and there was nothing wrong with any of that. But Elvis? Or, that Elvis?

He had 54 hits on the country charts, including 11 number ones. Altogether, he stayed on the country chart for almost 12 years. Surprisingly, there’s a lot of contradiction on the individual song data online, but this was Elvis’ most successful country song:

Thirty-nine weeks on the country charts. It was written by Stan Kesler and Charlie Feathers wrote it, two more Mississippi boys. It was covered by everyone so it is basically a standard. Should have heard that on the radio.

Oh, which reminds me, I met Elvis once:

Barbecue restaurant, out in the pine tree woods of Georgia, like you do.

books / Friday / history / memories — Comments Off on James and Willie and me
20
Jan 17

James and Willie and me

You go through your young life in Illinois and enlist the Army right out of high school at 17. By the time you are 20 you have fought in Guadalcanal, been wounded and learned both your parents died while you were away. You go AWOL three times before, finally, your bouts of drinking and fighting become too much to overcome, you get discharged. And then you write classics like “From Here to Eternity” and “The Thin Red Line.” That was Jim Jones. Later still, he was also a journalist covering Vietnam. And I bring him up to you because he was a friend of Willie Morris, that Mississippi scoundrel who was editing Harper’s Magazine by the time he was 33. They become such good friends that Jones asked Morris to finish his last book for him after he died. And he did, “Whistle” became the last of Jones’ war trilogy, and Morris wrote the last three chapters in 1977-78.

Two decades later Willie died. He’d been teaching at Ole Miss after he moved back from New York and had compiled and released a book of his essays that I’d find in a bookstore. I wish I could remember which one. It doesn’t matter, but it probably does. Either way, Terrains of the Heart he wrote at Oxford and I bought it in Alabama, quite literally because of the cover.

And this was a great choice. Willie, like all gregarious storytellers, was pleased to hold court in the warm embrace of a room of people that loved his stories. Willie, like the best storytellers, could make a place come alive and — no, that’s not quite accurate. Willie Morris, who was concerned about entropy and stillness and mortality and life could make the South hum. He could bring the sweet smell of the South to your mind, through your nose, and the dew in the fields to your heart through your toes. And Willie taught me the second thing I learned about writing. The first was that if you can figure out how to bring a smell into the story you’ve done some serious writing. And the second was I wanted to teach myself how to write like Willie Morris.

I tell you this because on this day, every four years, I think of a conversation Willie Morris recounts of his friendship with James Jones:

Morris

Who knows what all we’ll think four years from now, or at any time in between, but that’s an important observation to keep in mind.

family / memories / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on To fine Southern ladies
12
Jan 17

To fine Southern ladies

We were standing in a viewing room in this fancy Texas funeral home. Fanciest one you’ve ever been to, probably. My mother and stepfather had let the grandchildren in. There are four of us. I was the step-grandchild and the oldest and whatever else I was and I was standing back there behind the grandkids as they looked at their grandmother. I watched them thinking whatever they thought as our folks left the room and after a while I finally said this thing that I’d been thinking about all day.

The thing I’ve learned in the last few years is that the thing about grandmothers, or any person that has that much importance in your life, is that no matter what has happened or what will happen or what you might imagine for yourself later, they are still there. She’s still around you and with you. The things she tried to teach you and the good times she showed you and the lessons she really hoped you’d learn, they’re all still there. She’s always still going to be with you as an influence and a guide. That’s the great thing about the people that are important to you. They always stay with you. There comes a time, in your own time, when that occurs to you. And that is a really, really, really comforting thought.

It had come to me just today. It had taken me almost two-and-a-half years to figure that out and I think I needed to hear it as much as I wanted to say it.

grandmothers

Two of my grandmothers. (The way my family tree works I’ve had a handful of amazing grandmothers and great-grandmothers.) Dortha, my step-grandmother, is on the left. Bonnie, my mother’s mother who remains one of the most important people in my life, and impacts all of my big decisions, even still, is on the right. This was taken on a trip they made with my folks to the Butchart Gardens in Canada in 2014.

I wonder what flowers they might discuss now.

memories / Tuesday / Twitter — Comments Off on “We, the People, give it power.”
10
Jan 17

“We, the People, give it power.”

I was in a newsroom the night President Obama was elected. It was my first fall working with students. I had to gently suggest a way they could cover, and perhaps localize, such an historic moment as a presidential election. Journalism is an art and a craft and, sometimes, a learned thing. And, looking back, there was a lesson in that for me, too.

I was on our sofa when the president delivered his formal farewell. It was long, which is usual for him, longer than it had to be. But it was the president doing what he has become known for. It’ll be judged against others tonight and tomorrow and over time, and like all things presidential, that will tell the tale. But, tonight, it was an event, which is what they were after.

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