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.

Traditional marriages! What are they?

I submitted the following to the Star Tribune over five weeks ago.  I think I can assume it will not be published.  It was my response to the ongoing heated exchange about the "Marriage Amendment" that will be on this fall's ballot in November.

I don’t know what all the fuss is about protecting marriage.  About the only protection marriage needs is from two people who can’t get along together.  And that has been happening for centuries.

My parents were married in September 1937 and I was born in March 1938, supposedly six weeks premature, at 8+ pounds!  They were divorced when I was five.

My father’s parents took a ferry from Chicago in 1905 to St. Joseph, Michigan, the Cupid Capitol, were married, had lunch, came back and told their parents.  At least my father, their eldest, had the decency to wait about four years to be born.

My father’s grandfather abandoned his wife and six children in Illinois and lived with another woman in Indiana for the rest of his long life.

His father, a sailor and ship’s master, married a woman in England and had a son there.  He brought them to New York and then abandoned them there.  He later had a son with another woman in Baltimore.

As for me, I’ve been married 52 years.  My brother has been married nearly fifty years.  My daughter has been married 25 years.  Given the above history, I guess the six of us just don’t have traditional marriages.

Often you really can't go home

"There's no place like home" and "Who say's you can't go home" are popular sayings, but for many people these don't apply because the home of their childhood is gone.

Even if a child's home life was good and the family never broke up, there are many instances where the only place to go back home is in one's memory.

This was "brought home" to me last night as I wandered around Ancestry.com.

I looked up my mother's father and found out that he had to register for the draft twice, once for World War I and again for World War II.  In the first case, he had a wife and a young child; in the second he was 55.

This second registration brought back memories for me.  He gave his address as E. 152nd St. in Cleveland, Ohio and his employer as Cardinal Drug.  I had been wondering about the name of that drugstore a couple of times last month.  Before my father built the house in Bainbridge Twp., we had lived above Cardinal Drug.  Some of my earliest memories are from that apartment: the first time that I poured milk myself and having a tank that gave off sparks as I pushed it.

I looked up the address on Google Maps and asked for the street view.  It was a parking lot!  OK, is the firehouse across the street still there?  I turned the "camera" around, and sure enough it was.  I don't think it is used as a firehouse anymore.  The doors are too small for modern fire trucks and there were no signs on the building.

This is not the only home I can't go back to.

Years ago I tried to take a picture of the house on Detroit Ave. that I lived in when I was 9 to 12.  I remember our ballgames in the tiny backyard and climbing the tree that was smack up against the garage.  In fact, I think I have a picture somewhere of my brother in that tree.  When I got back to Minnesota I discovered I had had no film in the camera.  On another trip it was gone.  The last time I visited Cleveland four years ago, there was only one house left of the group of five in a row.

I think it was last year that I looked on Google Maps for the apartment building that we lived in after the Detroit Ave. house.  It had been next to a vacant lot owned by the transit system.  We used the lot as a playground.  We had many a pickup baseball game in that playground.  Then the transit system expanded its bus lot and fenced in our old playground.  When I looked on Google Maps, even the apartment building was gone.

The house that my father built?  I only lived in it a year or two.  I remember the sledding ramp that my father built us one winter and my brother and I pulling each other around in an oil drum in a wagon.  The wagon tipped and I had to get stitches in my forehead.   My parents split and my mother moved us out and stayed with her aunt and uncle until we moved to the apartment building.  My father's house is still there with some extensions and my stepmother still lives there.  Some of my half-siblings say they will tear the house down and sell the property when she dies.  They will probably sell the 10 or 20 acres for somebody to build a McMansion.