Don’t listen to your parents

This is probably not the best advice at this time of year, but I assume most of my readers are not expecting fantabulous gifts under the tree from Santa or their parents.

I’ve had lots of fun with the mantra:

Don’t listen to your parents!
They tell you to act your age.
If you act your age, you’ll grow up.
If you grow up, you’ll get old.
If you get old, you’ll die.
So, why act your age?

I’ve done my share of listening to my parents and other parental figures, and taking their advice to heart.  I’ve also done my share of ignoring advice, either because of orneriness or because the advice was just plain wrong.

I think the best advice was just plain encouragement: get good grades.  Sometimes that encouragement also took the form of a dime or a quarter for each A on my report card.  A dime?  That’s not much!  Ah, but I grew up at a time when a movie ticket was ten cents, and candy bars and ice cream cones were a nickel.

My encouragement was also by example.  We had lots of magazines and newspapers in the house, and my brother and I were given books from time-to-time.

My parents were divorced before I started school, and my father “bribed” us with neat Christmas gifts that encouraged creative play.  Among these were train sets and Erector sets.  Our imaginations soared, even as we had difficulty getting every square nut to turn easily on the small screws.

Then there was the advice that was off-the mark or just plain wrong.

One year about St. Patrick’s day we were getting dressed to go somewhere and my brother and I wondered about wearing green.  My mother replied, “We’re Orange Irish!”  As far as we knew, Magree was an Irish name, but we had no knowledge of any ancestor coming from Ireland.  Plus, because of the divorce, my mother had very little contact with her father-in-law and knew very little of our father’s family history.  If she did, she never shared it with us.  On her side, her grandparents were born in England or Germany.

Many decades later, I pieced together that my Magree line was resident in the United States since at least 1830.  An irony was that my great-grandfather was born in England, though he sometimes claimed to be born in Brooklyn.  His father was probably born in Baltimore, and the closest record I have of him having any Irish connection is being the master of a ship in 1851 bringing mostly Irish immigrants from Liverpool to New York.

So much for being Orange-Irish.

When I proposed to my wife-to-be (Jan), my mother didn’t think she was suitable for me and that the marriage would not last.  Sorry, Mom, but it has lasted longer than your two marriages put together.

Before I met Jan, I had flunked out of Case Institute of Technology.  I considered going to Ohio Wesleyan in the middle of Ohio, but my mother didn’t like that.  I wouldn’t be in Cleveland where she could see me more often.  Well, I did go to Ohio Wesleyan and got good enough grades to get into graduate school at Case.

Because of the divorce, I didn’t see my father much and so didn’t get much advice from him.

I did ask him for a loan of $107 to pay for my meals at Ohio Wesleyan for one semester.  When I tried to pay him back, he refused to accept it.

None of his seven children followed his example on education.  He dropped out after the eleventh grade.  All finished high school, five received college degrees, and two of those did graduate work.

But the advice from my Dad that I chuckle about the most is that music must be foot-tapping.  Probably ninety percent of the time that I turn on MPR the music has a strong beat.  Today, it was L’Arlésienne by George Bizet (and I identified it within two minutes!)  If you are not familiar with it, it is the piece that “The Prisoner” times over and over again, getting a different time for each record.

My mother remarried when I was fifteen.  My stepfather insisted that we use Desenex (and only Desenex) on our feet every morning and that we polish our shoes every week.  He did have a point because he had been hospitalized with athlete’s foot some years before.  I haven’t checked with my brother, but I rarely powder my feet.  If I do, it’s with Desenex only because I happen to have it on the shelf.  Polish shoes?  One does not polish today’s athletic shoes, and I can’t even get myself to oil work boots with any regularity.

My last piece of ignored advice is not from a parent, but a teacher.  In my high school boys had to take a semester class called “Personal Regimen”.  I won’t go into the details of the class, but we could get an F for wearing Levis.  I had been wearing Levis since junior high school ($4.95 a pair) and my mother liked them because they were easier to wash than many other pants.  Sixty years plus later, I wear jeans almost all the time: to church, concerts, theater, restaurants, and more.

Oh, one last word.  The best thing I got out of Personal Regimen was learning to tie a tie.  If I really need to, I can still tie a Windsor knot without looking in the mirror.

When people ask Mel’s age, he tells them to guess.  The latest guesser took six tries to guess, all but the last under.

Walk on the random side

“Life is a journey, not a destination” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

This concept can be put into a single word: serendipity, coined by Horace Walpole in 1754.  It means finding good things where you weren’t looking for them.  It comes from “The Princes of Serendip”, an Arabian tale.  Serendip was also featured in Prokofiev’s “Love of Three Oranges”.

Ah, this whole column is going to be very serendipitous.  I thought of this column as about the twist and turns of my own life.  But like my life, this column is going to turn up ideas I wasn’t looking for,

The March from the “Love of Three Oranges” by a Soviet composer was, irony of ironies, used as the theme song for the radio program “FBI: In Peace and War”.  One of the FBI’s tasks at the time was finding Communists.  On the other hand, many of Prokofiev’s works were anti-establishment.  Think of “Lieutenant Kije”!

After my parents divorced when I was about five or so, my mother moved in with her aunt and uncle.  Once I started school, I was often free to roam.  I knew all the vacant lots and stores, where the library was, and where a super-duper playground was.

When I was nine, my aunt and uncle bought a house on the other side of town.  I don’t know which came first, a new job or a new house.  Whichever, my mother’s uncle still worked within walking distance.

Again I explored an ever wider area, learning where the movie theater was, a great sledding hill, and the community center and the Y.  I had a take a streetcar to the downtown library.  I made a new set of friends, and eventually joined some of them in a Boy Scout troop.

After my first year of junior high, my mother decided to get her own apartment back on the other side of town.  Again, I had freedom to roam.  No sledding hill, but a vacant lot for baseball and an actual ball diamond a bike ride away.  I also frequented a drug store for malts, ice cream sodas, and sundaes.  That lead me to drop my paper route and work 5-10 after school three times a week.

After I started high school my mother remarried and we moved back across town.  I was supposed to go to a high school with about 3,000 students, but I got district permission to go to the high school where my Scout friends went.  And this road made all the difference.  Would I have gone to Case if I had a different math teacher who didn’t punctuate his remarks with “When you go to Case…”

When still in high school I also decided on my own to go to a Methodist Church within walking distance. I wound up being active in the Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) even into my college years.  This lead to some pressure to go into the ministry.  This and the long daily commute to Case created several conflicts.

While in college I decided to run for the President of the MYF subdistrict.  Also sitting on the subdistrict were a couple of attractive high school girls, both of whom I dated.  But I preferred the second one.  Fifty-six years later, neither of us regrets the choice.  And my wife still doesn’t regret voting against me because she thought MYF was not for college students.

During my tenure on the council I didn’t do so well in my junior at Case.  I was asked not to come back for the spring term.

I don’t remember what led to my choice of Ohio Wesleyan University other than it was Methodist.  Possibly it was my new girlfriend was starting there in the fall.

When I visited OWU before applying, the registrar recommended that I major in mathematics, which I did.  Surprisingly, after my dismal last two semesters at Case, I got all As in math except for a single B.

Prior to graduation I applied to Case for a graduate assistantship in the computer center.  I also applied for an assistantship at the University of Michigan in communications, which included computer science.  I heard from Case right away and was even offered a summer job in the computer center.  I didn’t hear from U of Mich until late July or even early August

When I graduated from OWU we got married and rented the upstairs of a duplex in Cleveland.  This also meant that my wife would have to go to college in the Cleveland area.  She chose Baldwin-Wallace way the other side of the metro area..  Fortunately, she could commute with an instructor who was friend of her mother.  By the way, this friend was also the one who recommended the duplex.

We both liked canoeing and made a few day trips to Portage Lakes.  But our dream was to go to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota.  We did so in August 1961.  The trip was a mix of adventure and misadventure.  We didn’t know it at the time, but it changed our lives forever by offering a wide range of unexpected choices.  Many of them were “the least traveled” and “made all the difference.”

That covered about 25 years of my life. I have notes for the next 50 but have run out of space and have other articles lined up for the next few weeks.  If you really, really want more, tell me so when you see me.

Mel thinks he has each day well-planned but something else always arises.

This was also printed in the Reader Weekly of Duluth, 2014-09-25 at http://duluthreader.com/articles/2014/09/25/4105_walk_on_the_random_side.

My illustrious second-rate sports career

As long as I can remember, I’ve done quite a bit of physical activity – from riding on the back of somebody’s bicycle at 3 or 4 to lots of snow shoveling this winter.  The first-named led to a bleeding ankle; the last-named led to a sore back.  Not all my physical activity has led to injury, but there have been quite a few “incidents”.

In between I’ve climbed trees, sledded, rode bicycles, played pickup games of baseball, touch football, and basketball, canoed, hiked, and a few organized sports.

In the summer of 1952, nine or more of the boys I hung out with formed a Class F Baseball team.  I sometimes pitched, sometimes played third-base, and maybe sat on the bench.  The most memorable incident was that I pitched a 0-1 no-hitter.  The other team got their run by a combination of walks and stealing.  This “feat” made it to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but they misspelled my name as Melvyn MacGree.

Class F baseball still exists in Cleveland and is still sponsored by the Cleveland Baseball Federation.

In my first year of high school gym, I ran a “mile” in 5:12 and 5:19.  The coach suggested I join cross-country team.  I never made the cut for the seven that counted, just part of the crowd that might push some in the other sevens down in finish ranking.  In one race I did slow down to help one of our seven who had been hit in some way by an opposing runner.

I also joined the cross-country team in my second year of college.  But I didn’t do so well as I developed “shin splints”.  I got some therapy for them, but they plagued me now and then.

I did take a fitness class at a Y in my forties.  That included gradually increasing running distance.  I was proud of myself when I ran a mile in about eight minutes.

Now it’s a big deal for me to walk from my house to UMD.

A high-school classmate recommended that I join the wrestling team.  I did and managed to be the 133 lb. wrestler for a couple of years.  There was no one else in that weight class.  If there was, I generally won the wrestle-off for a meet.  I had a miserable record.  I was often taken down in less than a minute.  The coach selected five or so wrestlers to go to state, none me, of course.  Every year at least one of those guys won a state title.  My last year I had a better record, I think 4-3.  It should have been 5-2, but being a January starter, I graduated the night before my last allowed match.  Guess what lots of high-school graduates do.  At least, I lost on points rather than by a takedown.

I practiced with the Case Institute of Technology wrestling team.  I wrestled in intramurals at 147 for a fraternity I didn’t join.  The first guy was a well-muscled rock.  That was how he behaved.  When he had the down position, I could not budge him.  I even sat back on my heels to give my opponent a chance to move.  He didn’t.  When I had the down position he gripped me tight but made no move to get better control.  The score: 0-0!  I won a referee’s decision for being more aggressive. My second was with another team freshman.  This was a much more interesting match: 4-4.  Again, I won on referee’s decision.  The last match should have been the hardest.  I won 7-2.  However, I never made the cut to wrestle in a team match.

After I flunked out of Case, I went to Ohio Wesleyan University.  I wrestled once in the intramurals at 154 as an independent.  I really don’t remember any of the matches, but I won all of them.  I had practiced with team, but I never made the cut for a match.

I took up skiing in the early sixties.  I took a week off work to learn at Buck Hill.  After the class I did snow-plows on my own.  On one run I was heading straight for the lift.  My best tactic was to fall.  One ski came off, windmilled, and hit me below the knee.  My four-dollar ski pants have a hole in them!  There’s blood in there!  I’ll spare you more details, but the doctor put extra-padding on the stitches.  I did learn enough that week to move beyond the snow plow.

I do have many more ski stories, but I’m running out of space.  In the spirit of my “second rate” career, let me tell a bit about my amateur racing.  At Spirit Mountain, I qualified for going to the NASTAR nationals.  Why?  The top three in each gender-age-speed category qualify.  Since there were never more than three male racers in my age and speed category, I qualified five times.  I went to Park City in 2004 where I was 21 out of 23 and to Steamboat Springs in 2007 where I was 14 out of 15.  My times were about twice those of the winners!

I still have a season pass at Spirit Mountain, but I’m getting wimpy about when I go.  If the temperature is not above ten degrees Fahrenheit, I’m not too interested.

So, other than sporadic visits to the Essentia Fitness Center, my exercise is some woodcutting, some lawn-mowing, and some snow-shoveling.  Now I have a sore back from all this season’s snow shoveling.

Hey, when my back doesn’t bother me, I can do over 30 pushups!