Vinyl Nostalgia

Okay, I’m going to date myself with this post. Remember records? You know, those huge, heavy, fragile disks that popped and scratched and hissed through every song? Yeah, digitally remastered is pretty cool, but I’ve always been a fan of the record. At the ripe old age of 6, I was trained by my parents on our record player, and was set loose among their albums, stored in an old wooden orange crate under the stereo. I still have the crate, which has served me well over the years, and could be considered an heirloom, as it was my parent’s first piece of furniture after they got married. I’m quite fond of it. And it is currently filled with my albums, a great many of which I inherited from my parents.

But just as fun as listening to the albums was looking at the album covers. While the record was playing I would sit on the green carpet in our living room, and look at the album covers, trace the raised lettering. Of course, I had favorites, albums that mesmerized me as a child for one reason or another, albums that were usually my favorites in terms of music as well. Here are a few of my top choices, my favorite album covers from childhood:


Sly & The Family Stone could probably be considered the anthem of my youth. And I loved the people, the multiples of everyone in the band, their bright funky clothing, and especially the woman with the white afro. On the inside cover there is a huge picture of Sly that I also used to adore.


Big Brother & The Holding Company. Some of Janis Joplin’s finest stuff. The album was drawn by Robert Crumb, which I didn’t know at the time, but makes it even cooler now. It tickled me that each song had a cartoon, and I could follow along on the album with the drawings. Of course, I missed the nature of many of the drawings, and the subtle, and not so subtle drug references, but the cartoons were still just really cool.


The Band. I loved this picture, and although I couldn’t have defined it at the time, I found it so haunting. There is this gaunt quality to the men, hollow cheeks and eyes, and an indefinable sadness that I was so drawn to. Plus, it’s a seriously great album.


Led Zepplin, Physical Graffiti. The coolest thing about this album was that the outside cover was just the building, with cut-outs where all the windows are. The inside sleeve had pictures printed on it that, when inserted in the cover, lined up with the window cut-outs. I loved to “look in the windows,” and pretend that it was a real apartment building. In which case, it would have been a seriously weird one, seeing as there were cartoons, naked people, Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra, and some things that I probably just didn’t even understand yet.

There were more – a really cool Wes Montgomery Album, Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, Sgt. Pepper’s, but these were the ones that I pulled out time after time, the ones that got battered from use. Looking back, it was awfully cool of my parents to give a little kid free reign with their albums. I can’t say that I’d do the same, but it definitely set up my musical education at an early age. I still like spending a Saturday afternoon sitting on the floor, surrounded by albums, looking at the pictures while I listen to the hissing, skipping records. You just don’t get that from an Ipod.

Deep Breath Day

My mother-in-law left this morning. Did I mention she's my landlord as well? Luckily, she's cool. She left in her wake a washer, a new fridge, a door to our sunroom, and a new deck. She also worked us like slaves. For two weeks.

I don't mind hard work. Especially when it's all to my own benefit. Our old refrigerator was about forty years old, one of those rounded jobs with the pull lever handle and a freezer the size of a shoebox that we defrosted once a week. It looked cool, vintage, but really sucked the electricity. Plus, it didn't keep anything cold, and so I have lived for years without ice cream. Or ice. Now, I have a lovely little fridge that has two ice trays and a pint of Haagen-Daz Dulce de Leche ice cream (my fav). Heavenly.

But there's a trade off. I'm a solitary soul. I need frequent periods of aloneness to replenish my energy, my goodwill, my serenity. Entertaining for two weeks is definitely a drain. She left this morning and I spent the rest of the morning doing laundry with my new washer, reading and drinking coffee. Then, out of the blue, I got a whopper migraine. It caught me upside the head, I wasn't paying attention to the signs. It just came because it could, because I was alone and had no obligations. I'm also one of those people who usually only gets sick on vacation because I have the time. Yup. So, then, I spent the rest of my solitary day with the shades pulled on the couch with my microwaveable herb bag wrapped around my head. Finally, by using all my hard-learned Jedi tricks, I banished it before it could blossom into a multi-day affair. So here I am, up all night probably. I think I'll take my solitary time now and curl up with my book and some mac-n-cheese (my ultimate comfort food).

Okay, that's like three whiney posts in a row. I promise, I'm done being a big baby now. Thanks for putting up with me.

And it all comes crashing down…

I’m freaking out. This is my process. I freak out, I cry, then I get down to business. I’m still in the freaking out stage. You see, I’m going up to Bemidji to start school tomorrow. TOMORROW. And suddenly it becomes apparent that we don’t have the wherewithal to send me to school. I should be working. I mean, I work up there, but basically with my travel expenses, I break even on the deal. So, I’m not so much contributing to the household, or our savings, or our future moving expenses. And now, with budget cuts at J’s school, and his loss of one class to teach, we are suddenly not sure we can pull it off. Oh, yeah, and J’s car is broken down, and, we fear, dead. We will find out tomorrow.

Yes, we have enough to live on. But, we will not be able to save enough money to move. Of course, the move is all dependent on me getting into a creative writing program somewhere. And we don’t know where yet – I’m working on that this fall. I have two freelance gigs which will bring some money in, but I hate to depend on freelance jobs, especially for non-profits, because they tend to be unreliable at best, and at worst, they disappear. So…

I started looking for part-time work. Found a potential part-timer at a cute shoe store in Park Rapids (which is probably a bad idea, as I will have to daily restrain myself, with shoes dangling in front of me like so much ambrosia). If I pick it up, this will bring my job count up to four. Four jobs. And school. And grad school applications. And, oh, yeah, writing, which is the whole point of this debacle, and is something that gets pushed by the wayside far too easily.

I’m freaking out. Soon, I will have a good cry. Then, I think I will make chocolate chip cookies, eat dough until I get sick, wait for J to come home and give me a hug. Then I can figure this out.

My Uncles Brian

I have two Uncles Brian, my dad’s brother and my mom’s sister’s husband (with me so far?). They are both dying. Not in the sense of “we’re all dying, day by day.” These guys are dying. They are both in stage four of cancer, the “we’ll just try to keep them comfortable” phase. One has malignant tumors on his spine, the other has them cropping up all over, but the ones that are going to do the deed are those that have sprouted in his lungs.

Whenever I talk to my parents, I get the updates on both of them (one lives in Wisconsin, the other in Florida). And I see it in my parents, their burgeoning realization that their friends, their peers, are dying. My dad, especially, is not dealing well. His brother Brian is his younger brother, and I think somewhere down deep he thinks he has failed to protect his younger brother. I just ache for him. He is not an emotive soul. He buries it down deep, and does his best to appear to be handling it.

As his child, and someone who uses the same techniques, I don't know whether to pierce the shell, or just let him try to find some peace behind it. I have a general rule: I don’t ask. If someone wants to talk, I will listen all night, but I don’t ask. I don’t like to dig into someone’s buried feelings without their permission. Even asking if someone is okay sometimes feels too intrusive. Although upfront and blunt about some things, I’m a pretty deeply private person and I try to respect that in other people. I want to be the one person that doesn’t ask what is wrong, the person who will simply recognize that all is not great, but allow you to exist for a moment in silence, or talk about something else.

But sometimes that feels like the wrong thing. Obviously, this is my dad, and I’m allowed to pry. I’m allowed to dig in there, to tell him up front that I know what is going on and I’m thinking of him. But it’s so counterintuitive for me. It feels awkward to me, and I'm sure to him, since we’re cut from the same cloth. Rusty lines of communication. For years, for most of our lives, my dad, my brother and I have existed with minimal communication, trusting completely in the love and loyalty of the others, so much so that we don’t affirm it very often. Maybe that’s wrong. I don’t know. When I brought it up to my brother, he said, “we know how we feel, we don’t need to say it for it to be there.” Which is exactly how I feel. But I don’t know if it’s right. In fact, I know it’s not right here. But I’m rusty, and I’m sure my dad is too. How do we start to talk again, or for the first time, about death and love and siblings and mortality and health and afterlife and religion. How do you begin?

Glutton for Punishment

So I've taken another job that I don't know how to do. I didn't lie or anything, in order to get the job. It is stuff that I have some experience in (archive inventory - excitement!), so I have not misrepresented. But I do have this habit of picking up jobs that are right on the fringes of my experience and knowledge. Like, "well, I pretty much know how to do that... after all, I did this..."

The details are these: I got into inventorying the archives of the Tamarac Nat'l Wildlife Refuge, my favorite hiking spot near my house. They have documents and photos going back to 1937, when the land was originally being acquired. It's a difficult job to focus on when faced with sheets of photos from the thirties of people in snowshoes and plaid jackets with pheasant tied to their belts, people in canoes wild ricing, people maple sugaring. Cool. At least, cool to me. It reminds me that I actually did like some of my job when I worked at the Museum from Hell. It's only recently that I've recovered from running the Museum from Hell. I certainly haven't been in the frame of mind to consider the things that I liked about that job, at least not until recently. Any love I had for any of my activities at the museum got sucked out of me through frustration until everything I felt could be described by one word: apathy.

Anyway, this project has reminded me that, oddly enough, one of my great loves is to try to organize vast amounts of unorganized material. I've done it with artifacts, I've done it with photographs. I've never done it with archives, and I'm having to try out a whole new set of parameters for this project. Which leaves me blundering around most of the time, despite the fact that to most people, I appear to know what I'm doing.

Point is, I've realized something about myself: I love to bite off more than I can chew. In some way it is comforting to me to know that a project is so insurmountable that any success can be viewed as a big success. And on the flip side, with a project that is almost certainly doomed to a certain degree of failure, there is the comfort of knowing that you can't really fail.

Mother-In-Law

The blog has gone by the wayside for the past few days, coinciding with the day that my mother-in-law rolled into town. Don't get me wrong - she's about as cool as you could ask a mother-in-law to be. In fact, she did a little matchmaking at the beginning of my relationship with J, not getting us together, but just nudging us along, you might say. I knew her, and worked with her, before I even knew J. He has a theory that she matched us up because she wanted me for a daughter. That's a nice thing to think, but there was a little more to it, I suspect.

Anyway, she is cool, but she keeps us hopping. Usually we are a pretty low-key household, but in the past three days we have torn apart a deck, bought and unloaded materials for a new deck (to be done tomorrow), hooked up a washer, shopped for a refrigerator and materials for shelves, gone to the dump, mowed the lawn, let's see, what else... (did I mention that she is our landlord, technically speaking?) So, although I am not blogging, I am definitely keeping busy. Oh, and did I mention that she brought us a case of homemade chokecherry wine? I think we'll let her stay...

Toad Lake Blotter - Cougar!

So yesterday my neighbor, JB, informed me that there has been a cougar sighting in the area, more specifically, on Harland Olsen’s property, just across the road from me (I wouldn’t make these names up, now, and feel no need to change them because I cannot conceive of anyone from my neighborhood stumbling across this blog).

Normally I take JB’s stories with a grain of salt, seeing as he’s of the old local school, and takes neighborly gossip as truth and spreads it with the fervor of a sixth grade girl. As the cougar spotting followed hard on the heels of JB telling his buddy Deke that I write books (JB’s dream for me is to be featured by the Oprah Book Club), I take it with little or no importance. Especially since we’re sitting in his garage at a card table drinking Crown Royal and Pepsi out of insulated mugs. But after checking around a little, I am forced to admit that apparently this is the real deal, confirmed by the DNR. And I do know, from my former life as a museum director and giver of too many Rotary speeches, that cougars were once prevalent in this area, and are still occasionally spotted.

Later that evening I couldn’t help remembering this information as I stood on my deck, at 2 am, checking out the amazing stars, and suddenly heard crashing around down in the reeds at the lakeshore in front of our house. A water source that is almost a direct line from Harland Olsen’s property. A big crashing. This was not a deer, or a beaver, or any of the number of woodland critters that parade regularly through our yard to get to water every night. This was something big. I stood on the deck, squinting at the stars, trying to ignore the sounds, while my id screamed “Cougar! Fucking Cougar!” and sent adrenaline pounding through my veins in classic fight-or-flight reaction. I have to say, I was leaning heavily towards flight. But I played tough, standing on my deck, knowing that I was hidden by a massive lilac bush and standing about ten feet from my back door.

So, of course, when I got back inside (forcing my feet to move slowly, instead of skittering through the back door as every nerve was shrieking at me to do), I hit Wikipedia. According to their comforting article, and I quote, “Due to urbanization in the urban-wildland interface, pumas often come into contact with people, especially in areas with a large population of deer, their natural prey. They have also begun preying on pets, such as dogs and cats, and livestock, but have rarely turned to people as a source of food.” Gee, I feel so much better now.

Knight Rider for President!

So I just woke up from one of those wierd dreams that you have when you wake up and go back to sleep. Those drifing nonsensical dreams. I only remember the end, but it's worth remembering.

I walked through a strip mall parking lot and went to Dunkin Donuts, where they made me pay $12.87 for six donuts. Of course, I couldn't find my wallet, and when I did it was full of change and no bills. But then when I looked again, it was chock full of bills, the smallest of which was a hundred (A lot of my dreams involve confusion regarding money, but you don't have to look deep into my subconscious to know that all that confusion is real). So I paid with the hundred, which had a picture of David Hasselhoff where a president should be (Kitt, I have to break a hundred for donuts). Of course, immediately upon leaving I crossed the parking lot and saw a tiny bakery, just a service window with wooden tables behind it and a Bavarian grandmotherly type working the window, handing out fresh and beautiful baguettes. But when I tried to get one the woman told me they were closed, and pulled a metal grate down over the window. Oh, well, I guess things could be worse. At least I still have donuts.


And I just had to post this picture, because: 1) how can you have too much David Hasselhoff (and his sweet eighties shoes)? and 2) wtf?

Sweet Corn & Porch Sleeping

These are two of perhaps the finest delights for me, and the best things about moving back to the Midwest. Sweet corn is in! Pickup trucks by the side of the road, a dozen for three dollars, slip your money through the rolled down window and take it out of the back. I love that. Mmmm. Sweet corn.

And the other object of this post: porch sleeping. Ah, the delights of porch sleeping. I'm aware that by no means is the Midwest the only place where you can porch sleep in the summertime. But really, in my opinion, the best part of summertime here is the nighttime. Light breeze, damp and cool, through the screen, loons and frogs and birds burbling around, critters crashing periodically through the trees. Faint sounds from parties and bonfires drifting across the lake. Sincerely one of my favorite things in the world, porch sleeping. When I was a kid we sometimes slept out on my grandma's pontoon boat tied to the pier. And when I was lucky, and my cousin wasn't around, I got to sleep at my aunt's house in my cousin's bed, which was on a big screened-in second story porch at their cottage on the other side of the lake. Of course, in general I'm a big fan of porches. In fact, among family and friends I am famous for commenting on every house we drive past, "Look at that great porch!" That and gushing over every lilac bush I come upon in the spring.

It takes so little to make me happy.