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- The Pig StoryJanuary 4
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Jerome Shea
Sunday, January 4, 2009Welcome to 2009, friends. Looks like things will probably get worse before they get better, so let’s start the year off with my all-time favorite joke. (I always thought of it as a “shaggy dog story” [“shaggy pig story”?] but my research into that wonderful genre suggests that a purist might give me an argument. Whatever.
We start with very early spring in Milwaukee and a young man we’ll call “Bob.” Bob is saving up for something—to return to college perhaps—and is working at a foundry for six days a week and as much overtime as he can wangle. It is punishing work in a place that would do credit to Dickens. And the weather is worse than the job. No one has seen the sun since October. It’s cold and wet all the time; piles of snow, weeks old, are covered in grime; everywhere, you step in slush up to your ankles. Compared to this place, hell is a getaway destination.
One Sunday morning Bob crawls out of bed, staggers to the kitchen sink, and pulls open the curtain. He is eye-level to the sidewalk in this hovel of a basement apartment. But what he sees is…THE SUN! Yes, the sun is shining for the first time in months! Delirious, he pulls on some clothes and jumps into his scabrous old Ford Pinto. It coughs to life, belching smoke. For this one day, Bob will be free. With this one day of respite, he knows that he can bear another few months in the foundry.
- Adios, 2008December 30 2008
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Jerome Shea
Monday, December 29, 2008Well, it’s hard to say if 2008 is leaving us like a grand symphonic coda or like dishwater circling a drain. A little of both, I guess. Herewith, a look at some highlights large and small.
The daddy of all big news had to be the November election. After the longest primary and then presidential campaign in our history, we elected Barack Obama as our first black president. Thousands were electrified by his acceptance speech in Chicago’s Grant Park. And John McCain’s concession speech showed us the John McCain we used to know. Bless his heart for that, because things had got pretty ugly. Obama was tarred by association with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and with Bill Ayers, former Weatherman. We were told repeatedly that Barrack Hussein Obama was “not one of us,” and the crazies insisted that he was a clandestine Muslim who would sell us out to Bin Laden. We kept watching for McCain’s legendary temper to erupt. We watched Obama and Clinton (sometimes both Clintons!) duke it out. When Sarah Palin sashayed into the spotlight, half of us cheered and half of us gawped in dazed disbelief. And then we all watched Tina Fey do her Sarah Palin number on Saturday Night Live and laughed till the tears came. Closer to home, Democratic candidates swept the field in New Mexico, as they did in many other states. In George Bush’s words, his party got the “thumpin’” that even some st
- SitkaDecember 21 2008
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Jerome Shea
Sunday, December 21, 2008Grab your toothbrush—we’re hitting the road again. Unlike Belize, you won’t need your swim trunks, because this time we are going “North to Alaska.” Specifically, we are going to Sitka, one of my favorite places in all the world.
How does Shea know about Sitka? Because our son-in-law went to school there, at Sheldon Jackson College (now defunct). He stayed on, and he and our daughter started their married life there, on Monastery Street. Our two granddaughters were born there, and nursed by grizzly bears (ok, I made up that last part).
Sitka fronts the Pacific on the Alexander Archipelago, that string of islands in the southeastern part of the state that hugs Canada. With 8,000 people, it is the only settlement of any size on Baranof Island. The rest is mountain wilderness. The climate is very much like Seattle’s: a couple of relatively sunny months that freak out the citizenry, and the rest overcast and rainy. In the summer there are about 18 hours of daylight, in the winter, 18 hours of dark. It’s a gloomy place, more black and white than Kodachrome, but there are those who love it.
Sitka was the capital of Russian Alaska. In a famous battle, the Tlingit Indians under their leader, Katlian, chased the Russians out, but the Russians, avid for sea otter furs, fought back and re-established the town. Today there is the old Russian fort, the Orthodox Cathedral of St.
- BelizeDecember 14 2008
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Jerome Shea
Sunday, December 14, 2008I’ve got a real jones for Belize.
Of course, there are a lot of places I would like to visit, or revisit, someday. Australia has always been near the top of the list. Ever since our first visit, in 2007 (see the “A Grouch Abroad” series of wonks), I have had a soft spot for Florence—and Fiesole and whatever else of Tuscany we can manage. I would love to go back to Sitka, Alaska, and hike up Mt. Verstovia in the fog once again. And as a Shea/Driscoll, I should certainly go to Ireland someday and make obeisance to the ancestral haunts before I shuffle off the coil.
But Belize was a surprise. The tropics have an Edenic appeal, certainly, but Belize never jumped out at me, and it was only when I got the details of a trip from one couple we know, and added those to an email recounting of a spring break trip from another couple we know, that the idea got its hooks into my head. Before the week was out I had bought myself a travel guide.* It immediately became my bathroom book (not to be confused with my bus book). We may never get there in the flesh—I’m told that the airfare, for one thing, has gone through the roof—but whenever I am closeted in the loo I can pretend, in short increments, that I am there. Because imagination is often more powerful than reality (a child is supposed to have said, back in the 1950s, that she liked radio better than that new thing, television, b
- Hardware High RevisitedDecember 8 2008
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Jerome Shea
Sunday, December 7, 2008I realized a couple of years ago—and with no small bemusement—that the deep satisfaction that I once felt in a hardware store I now feel equally in an office supply store. At first blush this seems a comedown. The macho builder has been downgraded into the scholar, the teacher, the writer, the man who deals not with hammers and saws and socket wrenches but with legal pads and ring binders, paper clips and post-it notes. I guess this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, I have earned my living with my brain rather than my hands for many years now. I just tested this out with a walk around the campus bookstore. Sure enough, as I paced the rows of fresh, virgin notebooks, presentation folders, enormous spring clips, big rubber bands, and all the rest of it, as my eye settled on all the pens, swoopy and sexy as Ferraris, and all the seductive colors, the old feeling deliciously returned. Home Depot and Office Max are the same to me now!
And probably for the same reasons: the Promise of the Project, the thing accomplished. An essay or a well-planned presentation is no less an achievement than a dog house or an end table, I would protest.This truth—call it the Office Max insight—recalled to me an essay that I wrote a quarter century ago, and which you will find below. I am grateful to my old friend Barrett Price, the guiding spirit of Century magazine (now, alas, defunc