Category Archives: Culture

Culture, direct mail

You Gotta Know How To Fold ‘Em

You know you’ve been COVID-locked down and masked up waaaaay too long when you have time to dissect a napkin fold. But there it is, lying before me in our favorite Thai restaurant, “Green Basil” in Vernon Hills, IL. –a beautifully constructed paper napkin. It is neatly folded and tucked to a soldier position at the side of my placemat.

I am captivated. Why?

Well, as a direct mail designer, I know the importance of format. As I was once told early in my career, by a great, professional copywriter, Chris Tomlinson, Toronto, “Before you can write good copy, you have to learn how to fold.” This, and a lot of other good advice is in my book, Many Happy Returns, expressly written for people who earn their living through direct marketing.

Anyway, as we were waiting for our food–shrimp rangoon and pot stickers– I was captivated by the napkin fold that was before me. I immediately unholstered my cell phone to photograph the construction of this napkin. I hope you get it, and try it out for yourself!

Here is the diner’s first view of the napkin. Notice the diagonals and neat corner fold which is used to tuck in another corner.

So I unfolded the napkin, all the way, and here’s its starting position.

Fold in half:

From the top, down, fold in half again.

Fold up one loose corner.

Flip it over. You are ready for the close!

Start the vertical folds, into the center. See the diagonals forming at top and bottom?

And again, fold into the center, and tuck in the corner.

The finished product is simple, yet elegant, and conveys the sense of purpose that the Thai restaurateur has for pleasing their diners. You know the napkin will be left in a crumpled mess, but no effort was spared in preparing it for the pleasure of the guest who sat before it.

The meal was perfect!

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Agriculture, Culture, Mystery, Science

Standing On The Edge

Please forgive me for my absence! For the past few months I have been carefully editing a new novel, Edge of Destiny.

We have all found some escape route that has led us through the endless months of COVID, and mine was writing a story about two kids who grow up in a hurry on the eve of World War Two. This is a tantalizing and compelling tale that takes place in a small town which is on the brink of recovery from the Great Depression. Reppen is located in Norfolk County, and its ticket to greatness will be the fast-growing, world demand for Virginia ‘bright leaf’ tobacco. Claudia and Theo are high school seniors that are watching that future crash before them as the Nazi and Soviet threat unfolds in Europe.

They graduate from Reppen High and leave for college quite literally as war is declared by Hitler, September 1, 1939. Over the next year the couple navigate the streets of Toronto, the halls of university, and the growing pressure to enlist and fight, all the while learning about themselves. Claudia is a brilliant girl who up-ends the physics department as she enters that long-established male bastion. Theo, straight off the farm, faces the prospects of joining the RCAF.

Their trajectory comes crashing down when Theo is mysteriously swept away by unseen forces that drop him into the future, 80 years later. He seeks help from amazed and puzzled strangers in a desperate, impossible search to re-unite with Claudia.

This is a story that delivers a narrative about small town life, farming and the grit and reality of urban living. The characters reveal the unbeatable optimism of youth in the face of military conflict and raw, undisguised evil.

Above, my personalized offer for U.S. residents.

Edge of Destiny is available for all Canadian residents online at Amazon.Ca.

I will add, that U.S. readers can order direct from me using PayPal.Me/pmb1267, or mailing me a check. In return, I will personally sign and dedicate your book and get it delivered, pronto! The details are in the enclosed brochure, here.

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Culture, Thanks

They Earned Remembrance

Nearly two years ago I was invited to get involved in a writing project focused on my hometown. More specifically, about a generation of kids who lived in Norfolk County and died in World War II. The task looked academic in nature, and I was drawn to it, as much for the opportunity to write as well as to learn about the sacrifices these young adults made.

John Luxton, RCAF 23 years old

I did not realize what I had signed up for. The penny did not drop until I cracked open my first case.

George Brockington, RCAF 21 years old

Norfolk County is a picturesque spread of land that rests on the northern shore of Lake Erie. From the air, its most distinguishing characteristic is the long spit of land that creeps eastward into the center of the Great Lake. That’s Long Point. The next recognizable feature is Big Creek which is fed by countless streams and brooks, and runs from north to south through the heart of Norfolk, and spills into the bay created by Long Point.

The land is primarily agricultural and its sandy loam has been the productive real estate for a century’s worth of tobacco, fruit and vegetables. By 1939, Norfolk had a population of more than 35,000. Most lived in the countryside. Some 6,000 of these residents took it upon themselves to join the million-plus Canadians who went to war in support of Great Britain and its allies.

159 soldiers, sailors and aircrew never came home.

In the greater scheme of things, the casualty rate doesn’t seem shaking. Less than three percent. Covid-19 has been just as lethal. Joseph Stalin was once quoted as saying, “when one person is killed it’s a tragedy. When a million die, it’s just a statistic.”

Donal McLeod, RCAF 21 years old

A small group of Norfolk citizens decided to push back on this detachment. Why? The names of the 159 are engraved on a brass plaque in Simcoe, the county seat. Once a year there’s a ceremony to celebrate and honour the dead, but beyond that, those youthful volunteers are lost in the fog of time and current events.

Glendon Theakston, RCIC 20 years old

To that end, this motivated group decided to write the short life stories of the young fighters. They enlisted researchers, including secondary school students, retirees and part-timers. The Norfolk County Public Library gave structure to the project, and a generous benefactor provided seed money to deliver an astounding book about this lost generation of kids.

The source of detail on the men, their families and service record was retrieved from Ancestry.Ca, local newspapers, as well as from personal accounts provided by living family members.

What was not well understood at the outset of this project would be the effect it had on us doing the research and writing. As a seasoned Baby Boomer, I have taken a lot for granted in my upbringing, and I bet most of my peers, their children, and grandchildren have not a clue about the grave developments that gave us 1933-1945. Sure, we’ve seen the movies, and read a few books. A tiny fraction, a scintilla of us, may ever have seen a military cemetery up close. And the raw, territorial aggression of three malevolent dictatorships that spawned the war is unfathomable by today’s standards.

Eighty years ago the scene was different, and Norfolk’s young adults, mostly in their late teens or early twenties–college-aged by today’s measure– safely protected by the Atlantic Ocean, left their homes, and committed to fight a fight three thousand miles away.

Doyle Culliford, RCN 22 years old

I was lucky to receive thirty boys to write up. We wanted the stories to bring to life their upbringing, their family background, their hobbies, schooling, girlfriends, wives, and in some cases, children. In the telling we found family photos, portraits, service records, military journals and diaries, medical reports, post mortems, letters from home, letters from defense departments, character references, heartfelt pleas from parents, and yes, burial details. As one worker commented, “I had to stop every once in a while, just to process it.”

The end result of this revealing expedition is the publishing of an incredible book ‘Norfolk Remembers World War II’ that gives an honourable recognition of just who these 159 kids were. And in many cases, what they could have been had they not been struck down in the cause of freedom.

As Remembrance Day occurs, I will give more heed to what these heroes did for us, and as the book wished, I will remember them throughout the year.

Thanks for reading and sharing. I hope you will keep a lookout for Norfolk Remembers World War II which will be available later this year.

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Agriculture, Culture

At The Edge of Cliff and Water

Niagara Escarpment, Wisconsin

Twenty-one months into COVID hibernation, we often wonder when we’ll see our kids again. They reside on the other side of the border, a thin imaginary political line of separation. While thinking of that, it dawned on me that we do share some common geography.

Living near the shore of Lake Michigan, outside of Chicago, we share the same water basin as those kids who live in Toronto, on the shore of Lake Ontario. So while we may be some 600 miles distant, I take some comfort knowing that we drink from the same trough.

Paddle To The Sea

I am reminded of that wonderful book, Paddle-to-the-Sea by Holling Clancy Holling. A young boy dreamed one late winter of sending his small carved canoe “Paddle Person” from the melting ice of Lake Nipigon down into the Great Lakes, and ultimately to emerge in the Atlantic. It’s an excellent illustration of our connectedness by way of the water.

Paddle Makes His Trip

Less well known is our connection due to the Niagara Escarpment. As a boy raised in Southern Ontario, I have always taken the escarpment as one of those unique wonders of Canadian geology. The escarpment appears–and I will elaborate on that in a moment–to originate at the Niagara Falls, the escarpment’s namesake. Being some 170 feet high, the Falls are an incredible sight of raw nature, and have attracted millions over the years to view them, and feel the mist on their cheeks. They drain Lake Erie, and feed Lake Ontario. Back to our young boy, his Paddle Person will plummet over those falls in the story.

The Escarpment Starts in Rochester

What any Ontarian knows is the migration of the escarpment west to Halton County where it turns north, moling through the terrain, eventually emerging on the Bruce Peninsula, which forms the western shore of Georgian Bay. At the northern point, Tobermory, the escarpment slips under water and emerges at Manitoulin Island near Georgian’s north shore. For Canadians, myself included, the escarpment ended there.

Upper Level of the Door County Quarry

Imagine my surprise a few years ago when a friend in Green Bay Wisconsin pointed out that the Niagara Escarpment actually formed Green Bay itself, on the northwestern shore of Lake Michigan. Who knew? Our public education system failed to make that clear, decades ago. Let me just add, that as of thirty years ago, living in Toronto, I had no idea even where Green Bay was. My ignorance of Great Lake geography was woeful. The escarpment arcs in a southwesterly direction from Sault Ste. Marie, and forms a ridge that descends as far south as Appleton in northeast Wisconsin.

Potawatomi Park

Only then did I appreciate the true size and dimension of this iconic limestone ridge. As a frequent visitor to Door County, Wisconsin, I marvel at the escarpment’s height and color. Well I should, as The Door owes its existence to the rugged cliff. The county’s maximum height is around 150 feet above Green Bay, close to that of Niagara Falls. At hundreds of sites along its coast, viewers can see the craggy cliffs that jut out of the waters. Inland, the roads nudge up against the towering limestone and dolomite rocks comprising thousands of distinguishable layers of sea floor, exposed to the air after hiding nearly 400 million years underground.

The Caves on Lake Michigan

How did that happen? What made the pre-historic promontory raise its head?

The escarpment’s genesis is a long story told well in a short paragraph. Over a period of some 24 million years, during the Silurian age, an ancient sea was the home of jawed and bony fish and arthropods. They lived, died, and floated to the bottom to be pressed into limestone for the next 400 million years. You can see the remains of these creatures in the cliffs as long flat layers of cream-to-gold colored crumbling rock.

Early May Cherry Blossoms

For your confirmation, the Jurassic period was only 200 million years ago. During the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, the region surrounding the Great Lakes was submerged under a two-mile thick layer of ice. The weight of the ice pack actually depressed the land beneath it. When the ice melted, the weight was removed, and the land popped back up. The melt water helped dissolve much of the outcropping, and the escarpment was revealed. The process is called post glacial rebounding, and it continues even today.

A New Planting of Grapes

Door County is the beneficiary of this geological epiphany. It is sandwiched between the temperature-moderating waters of Lake Michigan and Green Bay. The 40-mile spit of land is ideal for growing grapes, cherries and apples. The bi-products are wine, pie and cider. This agriculture is very similar to the escarpment in the Niagara Peninsula which also flourishes with similar viticulture and orchards.

Trilliums in Abundance

We visit Door frequently, and as I stand on the shoreline of Lake Michigan, I think that as far away as Ontario may be, the water, and the cliffs connect us. Living in the Great Lakes region is a wonderfully inclusive thing, and the little Paddle Man proves it.

Thanks for reading! I hope that COVID has not prevented you from seeing your family, but hopefully you have mutual reference points, a star, a TV show, a sports team, perhaps a song that brings you closer together.

Paddle-To-The-Sea was written and first published in 1941. Beautifully written and exquisitely illustrated, its ISBN is 0-395-29203-4.

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childhood, Culture, Sports

Scrubbed

It’s an odd word. Historically, ‘scrub’ was a pejorative meant to dismiss people of poor moral content. More recently, it meant to be cleaned whole. And in sports, a match was scrubbed due to some other factor: weather, disqualification, illness, schedule. But for me, Scrub is the game we played as kids in my hometown of Delhi. I was reminded of it as the Yankees and White Sox emerged from the cornfield in Dyersville Iowa last Thursday night.

White Sox and Yankees emerge from the magic corn in Dyersville, Iowa

There are whole libraries devoted to baseball, so I won’t try to start another, but Scrub was a derivative of the game that frankly was a lot more fun than nine against nine players. What made it attractive was the balance of a strict empirical order of play versus wild random luck. You could be at bat, and a moment later, lost in right field.

Scrub used the same diamond as regular baseball. Our school had two diamonds, and any recess in the spring would find them full, playing this all-inclusive game.There were no teams. Everyone was welcome. Players were positioned by how quickly they responded to the invitation to play.

“Who wants to play Scrub?” This invitation was announced usually by the guy who brought the bat and ball.

Immediately, all involved named their positions as they were sequenced: first batter, second batter, third batter, catcher, pitcher, and so on out to left field. You had to be quick to get high up in the order. And there could be numerous players. That is, the outfield could have ten fielders, who were numbered as such.

The play of the game was initiated by the pitcher who as always, trying to strike out the batter. But failing that, a fly ball was an option to be caught out, and the interchange between fielders and basemen was the other avenue to get the batter out. And here, the numbers worked against the outed batter. They went to the very end of the line, maybe as far back as tenth fielder, while everyone else moved up a notch. So it was that everyone had a chance to play every position. What better way to sharpen one’s skills?

The beauty of this game however was the introduction of pure, wild random luck. If the batter popped up a fly, and it was caught, that catcher traded places with the batter, thus skipping to the head of the line. Catching a fly in Scrub was like winning a lottery, albeit a very small one.

An additional merit of Scrub, absent any team requirements, is that no one suffered the ignominy of being the last chosen for a team. I think that’s why I enjoyed Scrub so much.

There may be some baseball allegories in life: ‘striking out’, ‘getting a walk’, ‘popping up’, ‘a home run’ for example but Scrub was a receptacle for all of these. You could be on top one moment, and out in left field the next, and before you knew it, right up to bat again.

Thanks for reading and sharing! I hope you had the opportunity to watch the “Field of Dreams” game the other night. Apart from the crowds who came onto the field, and then invited to walk through the corn, it was an eye opener too: what kind of corn grows nearly twelve feet high??

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Culture, Economics, Science

Getting Charged Ain’t Easy

The nation is getting its head around all-electric powered cars by 2035. It sparked me -haha- to wonder if electric cars really generate a carbon footprint smaller than gas-driven cars. My research confirmed it: in a “well-to-wheel” comparison, an electric car generates about one-third the level of carbon compared to the gas guzzler. So case closed on that.

But what troubles me is the generally held notion that we will just plug our car into an outlet every night, and be ready to drive by daylight. Where is the electricity coming from? That is a thornier question, and it doesn’t appear to have a satisfactory answer yet.

Here are some numbers worth knowing. 

  1. The US annual consumption of electricity in 2020 was 3,800 Twh. A ‘Twh” is a terrawatt hour. Because I know you really want to get into this, a terawatt is one trillion watts. That’s with 12 zeros.
  2. The US annual production of electricity for the same year was 4,009 Twh. 

Understanding these two numbers, you see we have a margin, say, a surplus of 209 Twh. Just for fun, that’s 209,000,000,000,000 watts.

What is interesting though is that the US also sells and buys electricity during the year, based on peak demands and capacity levels. But net, we imported 47 Twh last year. So we did not actually have enough to go around, based on our own production capacity.

Not having enough is generally a foreign concept in America, but there you have it.

So: will we have enough electricity for the car in our garage come 2035? That troubles me. Here’s why.

In 2016, American automobile mileage was 3.22 trillion miles. We are “trillionaires” for everything, it seems. Assuming that electric cars replace all the gas guzzlers, and that we still drive the same distance, happily guilt-free of carbon fears, will we have enough electricity?

I am not so sure. Tesla’s 2018 Model 3 has a commendable “mileage” rating of 26Kwh. That is, it can drive 100 miles using only 26 kilowatt hours of electricity. This is the best there is, today, beating out the Chev Volt, VW Golf, and BMW i3. By the way, 26Kwh is the equivalent of burning a 40-watt light bulb over your stove for 27 days. Doesn’t seem so bad, really.

But the total mileage of 3.22 trillion divided by Tesla’s 26Kwh/100 miles will require a total of 837Twh of electricity. That’s additional energy over what we use today. And we only have a margin of 200Kwh.

We do get one break. By shutting down the unnecessary gasoline refineries, we will save 47Twh. So our actual new requirement for electrical power is only 790Twh. That’s 790,000,000,000,000 watts.

Meanwhile, the State of California is enduring periodic black outs. Why? Because in the effort to be a good environmental steward, they have been closing their coal and nuclear power generating stations in favor of wind turbines, solar and hydro-electric power, aka, power dams.  Unfortunately, when there is no wind, no sun, and no water, there is no power. Local cynics refer to the disruptions as ‘Green Outs”. 

It turns out that the engineers in public and private sectors have been noodling on this. Some of the more common solutions are wind turbines. Did you know that today there already 67,000 turbines thrumming the winds in America?  And solar panels? There are 2,500 such farms today.  Of 80,000 dams in the country, some 2,400 are hydro-electric power generators.

These solutions generally fall under the heading “renewable energy” sources. In total, renewable energy supplies 20% of all the power generated in the US.

There is another solution which is being developed, and that is the reversible battery charger. It allows for energy to flow both ways from your electric car. You might plug it in for one night last week to charge for six hours, and then you left your car undriven, and cooling in the garage for several days. During that time, if you have a permit, the power company may take electricity back from your car to top up the grid. You would get a credit, and maybe an empty battery, but you would be a good person.

The lack of surplus electrical energy is not top of mind for many right now, but as we approach the next decade, the subject will arise much more frequently. Stay tuned, and as usual, turn out the lights upon leaving.

Thanks for reading and sharing! Will you get an electric car? Will you get the charger too?

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childhood, Culture, Science

Darwin’s Warning and The Good Old Days

We have come a long way in avoiding the classic dangers so present in our youth. But sometimes I still wonder how we got here. We can laugh today at the hapless winners of Darwin Awards, but that is only because the past three generations have regulated us to observe the principles of Charles Darwin.

I recently toyed with the idea of taking a stab at etching, for the purpose of creating an art print. Etching is the ancient science of scratching an image onto a wax-covered copper plate, and dipping the plate in acid. The plate gets engraved in the process, and when it is inked, the plate is pressed onto a paper which receives the image.

To learn more, I could have Googled the subject, but instead, I turned to the Popular Mechanics Do-It-Yourself Encyclopedia, published by J.J. Little and Ives in 1955.

Popular mechanics Do It Yourself–our small town bible.

In my hometown of Delhi, a small but once influential tobacco-growing community in southern Ontario, the PM DIY Encyclopedia was a bible. Actually, it was a collection of 13 illustrated bibles bound in red and black leatherette, handsomely gold-embossed, and proudly displayed in its own pre-engineered wooden shelf by my father, and countless other DIY-ers at the time. You didn’t have to go far to learn about plumbing, carpentry, automotive repair, sewing machines and gardening when you had these books sitting right there beside the record player.

So I was pleased on picking up volume 4 “EL to GA” and finding the lowdown on etching on page–wait, there are no page numbers–on the pages between “enlargers” and “extension cords”.

Etching– the art and science of engraving metal.

Excited now, I read on. The thoughtfully drawn black and white illustrations showed an enthusiastic, friendly looking craftsman decanting fluid into a tray. Reading more closely, I saw that for etching glass, and/or metal, the active ingredients were tallow, hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, potassium chlorate, asphaltum paint, glacial acetic acid, sodium fluoride…and washed up with gasoline, before pouring down the floor drain with plenty of water.

Gadzooks!

I decided some time spent on Youtube was a better idea, and put that off for later.

But thumbing through the book “EL to GA” I was stunned to learn about all the other DIY projects we pursued back in 1955.

“Electroplating With Gold and Silver” was particularly instructive.

Electroplating..all that glitters!

A well-drawn and focused craftsman is mixing up a solution of sodium cyanide and caustic soda in a pitcher of water. When dissolved, the reader is advised that rubber gloves and ventilation are a must, to avoid deadly hydrocyanic acid fumes. To this concoction one adds some copper cyanide. The book says to hook the brew up to a six-volt battery, and dunk the target object in for an hour or so, and voila: a silver-plated stapler, shoe horn, ticket puncher, egg beater–whatever suits your fancy.

I felt like I had my hands on a secret, forbidden book– techno-porn is the only way I could describe it.

Now tantalized by this collection of ideas, I thumbed to “Electrical Rotating Contact”.

The electric rotating gizmo..for all ages!

This gem only took half a page, even with the helpful drawing. Mission: to create a spinning brush-style power source that would rotate as some electrical engine drove around it.

The picture tells a thousand words easily. A pole is positioned in the middle of a backyard wading pool. At its top is the ingenious electrical rotating contact which is attached to an electrical cord plugged into the engine of a child’s model boat, floating in the pool. The pole is cleverly hooked up to an extension cord plugged into the house, drawing from the 120-volt line. Two excited kids stand by the pool, gleefully cheering as their model racing boat  circuits the water, leaving them smiling in its frothy wake. One can only imagine the hours of joyful entertainment as the craft orbits the sparky contraption.

The book is filled with helpful suggestions for mixing your own weed killer, building a forge, a blast furnace, and simply maintaining your home coal furnace.

Thinking back, we were, if not fearless, certainly adventurous. In our house, we were frequent users of gunpowder. Simple chemistry would be put to use with benign, parental encouragement, and a helpful smiling assist from the local druggist.

Powering up the acid solution.

A typical exchange was,
“Hi Mr. Taylor! Can I have half a pound of potassium nitrate and another half of sulphur please?”
With a wry smile, his response, “Heheh, okay, and don’t blow yourselves up.”
When I consider that discussion, and our brazen, guileless approach, I should have added, “and a dozen prophylactics too, please.” It would have thrown him off course, I am sure.

Somehow, the ingredients were mixed with a third, which I will omit for current security concerns, and we would enthrall and impress our friends with carefully rolled fireworks, stink bombs and countless rocket duds that never made it off the launch pad.

Through all of these semi-innocent shenanigans, we never paid a serious price, but I am sure that there were others not so lucky. In any event, today, 65 years later, these escapades are pretty much eliminated from the experience of young kids, and I am thankful.

Back then it was just part of growing up. But Darwin was right.

Still, I have to see Volume 3, CO to EL.  I can only imagine.

 

Thanks for reading!  I hope you are thankful for all the precautions and safeguards we now have in place today. Still, you have to wonder how we made it this far.

 

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Culture, Thank You, USPS

The Letter We Didn’t Get

Zoom friends from places near, far, and unreal.

One of the great facilitators during the COVID pandemic and its obstructive lockdowns has been Zoom and FaceTime technology. While we can’t have and hold our distant loved ones, nor sit beside our business associates in a real meeting, we can still stay in video touch. And a plus: who knows where our correspondents actually are, given the virtual backgrounds.

Now we can sympathize with those resolute souls drifting out there on the International Space Station.

But closer to home, our more traditional communications technology has taken yet another hit. Last business quarter, October 1- December 31, 2020, the United States Postal Service delivered only 4,214,093,000 letters. Understand that these are single-piece letters in the three months ending with the nation’s biggest holiday season.

Writing the Thank You Note: A Lost Art

That includes birthday cards, get well cards, condolences, love letters, thank you notes, party invitations, wedding announcements, birth announcements, bridal showers, baby showers, graduations, promotions, retirements, Thanksgiving cards, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa cards, letters to friends and family. It will also include payments to utilities, healthcare companies, credit cards, presidential campaign donations, doctors, lawyers, landlords and landscapers, to name a few.

You may consider 4.2 billion pieces a lot of mail. It is not. In 2012, just 8 years ago, the USPS delivered 6.3 billion single piece letters.  Today’s effort has shrunk by a third since then.

And we can’t point to the monthly billing and statementing habits of utilities and financial houses as the culprit either.  In 2012, for the same period, they mailed 9.9 billion pieces. Eight years later, the 2020 volume only shrank 15%.  Meanwhile, personal letters dropped 33%.

The USPS picks up at your door.

It’s easy to shrug it off as a sign of the changing times. We are happy to resort to email to send our personal messages. Postal mail takes too long.

Except now, in this pandemic we live in a communications desert devoid of real, personal contact. And with time on our hands, there is the opportunity to take pen to paper.  

To wit: last June, we received a post card from an enterprising lady in Kansas who announced her personal goal to write cards to everyone she knew.  She wrote and mailed over 300! We have another friend who makes it a regular effort to mail us a short letter, just to keep the lines open with family news.  We have neighbors only four houses down the street who send a thank you note by mail for the simplest of favors received.

A simple etiquette

Who does that any more?  What kind of forgotten politeness is that? But yet so important when you consider the time and energy taken to practice this simple etiquette. 

Another instance, I released Norfolk Chronicles last July.  In it I wrote a chapter “Will You Write Me?”  Lo and behold I received a number of handwritten letters from my readers, totally unexpected. It struck a nerve.

This lockdown has taken away the traditional time restrictions we used to incorporate in our daily lives. We aren’t commuting.  We aren’t traveling to meetings. We forgo vacations.  Stuck at our home offices with flexible hours, in our pajamas, the time for composing and writing is opened up. And when the USPS will pick up at our door, what’s the obstacle?

747s chilling in the Mojave

Meanwhile, we didn’t get 226,580,000 letters just last quarter. They did not show up. Because we failed to write them.

In real terms, the USPS reported that the quarterly shortfall weighed 1,837 tons. If that weight is too hard to visualize, think of nine empty Boeing 747s lined up on a desert in Nevada. There’s your missing letters.

 

 

 

Thanks for reading! I hope you have a few family friends and neighbors that deserve your written words.  Just as an aside, the USPS did have an astounding quarter delivering parcels. In 2012, they delivered 752 million pieces in the three months leading to Christmas. This past 2020, they topped out at 2 billion-plus.

 

 

 

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Culture, Entertainment, Music

Tom Rush: Concerts and Conquering COVID

“Normal” is something we all want to retrieve. It’s out there somewhere, some day. Mean time, here is a great example of a guy who just won’t quit, despite the continuous obstructions of a COVID lockdown.

Tom Rush is a singer entertainer from the near dark but enlightened ages of the 60s. He has remained musical, entertaining and present even today, despite the virtually complete shut down of group entertainment.

If you are of, or enjoy the 60’s-70’s vintage of coffee house music, Tom Rush is part of your past and hopefully present. We first listened to this bluesy story teller at the Riverboat in Toronto. Hailing from Massachusetts, he made the trip north to hang out with Gord Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Jim Kweskin, Eric Anderson, Richie Havens, James Taylor and Livingston Taylor and a host of other free-range folk singers entertaining small groups in Yorkville, Toronto’s original coffee house district.

While many entertainers went to the big stage, Tom Rush centered himself in small gatherings of a 100 fans or so. He delivered a rich medley of stories and songs that telegraphed heartaches, pains, humor, trains, cowboys, dirty deed doers and other colorful characters. His presence was magnetic, personal, and his shows were always full.

Fast forward 50 years and we find that Tom is still composing, strumming and singing, seemingly unaware he was supposed to retire. Did not get the memo. He has a website and a newsletter, and a regular itinerary up and down the east coast, and occasionally wandering into the Carolinas and the Midwest. The venues remain the same: small crowds sitting at tables tapping their feet and soaking up the vibes.

So what do you do when a pandemic shuts down the tour? Many entertainers escaped to the islands. Others are on their boats. Some have postponed concerts and floated out new dates a year or so into the future. But who knows? Meanwhile, they sit by their phones and wait for a call to get their vaccination.

Tom took a different approach. He went back to his website followers, and invited them to sign up for a weekly concert. Rockport Sundays is just that: a podcast from his kitchen in Rockport Mass. It is available for streaming every Sunday morning. At a measly $10 a month, his fans get a morning wake up call where Rush and his genius accompanist Matt Nakoa perform a song, tell a story, and just tune in for 10 minutes or so. It is a comfortable setting, with Rush maybe shoeless, surrounded by some beautiful guitars, and frequently flanked by Nakoa and his six foot wide keyboard, totally COVID compliant.

The experience is profound. This guy was a folk blues icon when most of his fans were just getting into university. For more than half a century (ouch) he has not let go. In fact he has grown into our present as a constant reminder of where we came from. And the beauty is, it’s current stuff. He sings old songs, tells stories about his many travels and sidekicks, but also unloads new music. Through it all, the website allows for comments, and would you not know it? He responds.

If you like a little bit of kitchen table music and playing, dressed up with a background story, you should check out Rockport Sundays. It is indeed a treat.

It actually feels a bit like normal.

 

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Agriculture, Culture, Thank You

Orange Ya Glad?

As a kid living in the country we enjoyed a seasonal treat sent to us by my grandad who vacationed at Vero Beach every winter. He sent a bushel of citrus fruit packed in green straw for Christmas. Inside we found dozens of oranges and monster grapefruit, tangerines, and strange little kumquats.

The memory comes back to me now as last Friday the USPS delivered a box to our front door. Puzzled, we opened it to find a similar trove of tangelos. Nearly three dozen, unbidden, but happily accepted. It turns out that a distant friend in California went out to his backyard and picked them for us.

Tangelo Box

I say unbidden, because we had no idea he lived in Claremont, California, and that his home was built on 40 acres of grapefruit. He sent these along, perhaps as a thank you for a couple of books which I had sent to him. The return of the tangelos was a happy surprise, but the best was yet to come.

Tangelo 10

We in the north do not grow citrus fruit, or certainly not to eat. I have a few Texas grapefruit plants in a pot taking up the winter sun in the den. They get outside in the summer. These plants will be converted to bonsai. It takes about 25 years, so I am planning on that. But that’s another story.


Tangelo Peel Light

The tangelos are larger than tangerines, but smaller than oranges. At least these were. In fact, they are hybrid of a tangerine and pomelo, a type of grapefruit. They peel like a tangerine, very easily, and are particularly absent of any pips.


Tangelo 3

After reading the friend’s accompanying letter, I learned that he picked these from two trees in his backyard. That in itself is nearly astounding. We are forking out $$1.99 a pound for oranges at the grocery store, and he’s growing them wild over the shed out back.


Tangelo Box 3

He went on to explain that they are easily peeled, but his preferred entree is chilled and then quartered to be eaten like Don Corleone did in The Godfather. Orange smile!

So, waiting no longer, I grabbed one, and literally popping off the skin, sectioned the fruit into segments and stuffed them into my mouth. One bite, and the juice spurted out like a tomato, and the flavor of fresh citrus exploded in my mouth. The tangelo was sweet and tangy, and rich. I could sense thousands of little vitamin Cs all lining up for a march across my tongue.


Tangelo 1

We could not believe our good fortune, or the thoughtfulness of our distant friend who marched his product down to the post office for our pleasure. Paying it forward, we bagged up a dozen for an older couple who lived down the street. At their door I assured them these were a sure complement to any COVID vax they might get, a certain cure for scurvy, and twelve doses of pure delight.

Our task ahead is to finish up the box rapidly while these little gems convert to pure sugar.

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