Chicago-a view from the ground

Midway airport 8pm

I want to be hot

More snow is on the way this week. I am ready to be miserably hot.

T-shirt sticking to the back hot, sand in the wallet hot, walking on the sides of your bare feet hot, can't hold the steering wheel hot, 5am with sweat beads on your forehead hot, sunburn on the top of the head hot, bramble and stickers on your jeans hot, dust devils on a dirt road hot, asphalt melting/trout killing/blister raising hot. Yeah, nice and toasty.

I want to get burned by nails in my deck, I want to see roses shriveled up and brown in my back yard, I want birds to flock to my sprinkler, I want to need mosquito spray, I want to see flies around old watermelon rinds, I want to see blood mixed with sweat when i do yard work, I want to run out of cigars, i want bandaids to not be able to stick to me, I want to look like I just got out of the shower when I walk across a parking lot.

I want to cut the grass, clean out the garage, smoke a pork roast, slap a bloody mosquito onto the side of my neck, I want to sit in my back yard in shorts and a t-shirt and listen to baseball.

"...there has been much throwing about of brains."

In October of 2010 I decided to read the complete works of William Shakespeare. Every play, every sonnet. I have had it on my ipad. Almost all of the reading has been while on the bus, commuting from home to downtown Minneapolis.

For the first year or so I was reading Shakespeare and the KJV of the Bible side by side. When I finished the Bible, I picked up speed with Will. This project required a deeper level of concentration than I am accustomed to.

Today's snowstorm gave me a two hour bus ride. I knocked off the last fifty pages.

I don't feel smarter, just a wee bit more refined.

While most of it was terribly boring, there were a few times when a passage grabbed me with its beauty and compexity. Like this, from The Twelth Night. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have said about you...

His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles,
His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate,
His tears pure messengers sent from his heart,
His heart as far from fraud as heaven from earth.

Goodbye Mr. Shakespeare.

A time to move

Tomorrow we close on the sale of our old house. How quickly the place we called "home" for over ten years has become relegated to status as "the old house".

I am sitting on the steps to the kitchen, trying to put a few thoughts together. Collect the memories.

I lived here for almost a year by myself. From August 2003 to June 2004. While Rob finished high school, while Rachel rebuilt her life after a Peace Corp tour was cut short by war, while pre-teen Caroline dealt with the trauma of leaving the street where she learned to walk and talk, while Robin prepared for one more move, I was here alone. After 24 years of marriage, one year of relative solitude was not what I was expecting from my life. But it came and it went and it was good and it was bad. I would recommend it to others. It reminded me of how much my wife is part of me, and I of her.

I had little furniture. What I had Rachel had helped me move with a UHaul. A bed, a dresser, a treadmill, a lazyboy, a recliner. A coffeepot.

We moved the family here on June 16, 2004. Our 25th wedding anniversary.

This was Caroline's home more than any of the other children. I remember her shaking in fear as a first epileptic seizure gripped her on the stairs. The helplessness of parents who could only hold her and pray. But it was also in this house she met much of the wonder and trial of junior high and high school. Birthday parties, sleepovers, helping me put up Christmas lights and smoke the perfect pork shoulder.

It was a good place for a man and wife to enter their fifties, and be confronted with their own mortality. There were health scares, big and small, that reminded us of how much we need and love each other, and how limited is our time together in this place.

I remember Rob bringing his future wife, Laura, to this home for the first time.

I remember  Rachel screaming "I passed" and leaping in the yard, when bar exam results came in the mail.

I remember watching my wife sit quietly at the dining table, reading her Bible, taking notes. Pausing to stir a pot, start a load of wash, say a prayer.

I remember our loyal friend Rocko. He who was oblivious to the move from St. Louis, and was always happy to see any of us. How he aged so, and how the walk around the block eventually turned into a walk to the end of the street. He's still here, under a rock that is under a tree that borders our back yard.

I remember special meals shared with those we love so much and special visits from family members Judy Jarrett, Betty Walker, Kristin Walker, Hannah Izard, Emily Izard, Rodney Welch, Kevin Welch, Audrey Welch, Barbara VanAntwerp, Becky Amos, Shelby Campbell, Katie Welch, Audrey Welch, Laura Welch.

I remember the joy on Robin's face when her big sister Betty showed up for a surprise weekend visit.

I remember long drives to see our children, drives that started and ended in this driveway. To Chicago, to St. Louis, to New Orleans, to Waco.

I remember winter snows that seemed they would never end, as the drifts piled higher and higher. I remember learning how not to plow when the wind is blowing.

I remember watching our team win a couple of World Series from this place, how we all called or skyped each other as the last pitch of the last game was thrown.

Thank you Lord for a home where prayers were answered. For jobs, for relationships, for guidance in the big and little decisions of life, for physical healing. Lord, our prayers of thanksgiving from this place were lifted often it seems, but never ever enough.

The March Lion prowls my bus stop

The winter that will not end

It is mid-March. My thermometer refuses to move above freezing. 

The white Christmas blanket covers my world well into Lent.

Winter now just lingers, past the anticipation of October, past the appreciation of December, deep into the disgust of March.

Like the last guest on a boring evening
Like the last chapter of a dull novel
Like the swill at the bottom of a child's soda bottle
Like tennis elbow
Like leftover cabbage



 

14164 and 14254

The DJIA closed today at 14254, an all time high, finally taking out the 14164 set on October 9, 2007. On that day I was in Philadelphia for a client meeting. I took the train that afternoon to DC and had dinner with a friend and his wife. He also happened to be a member of Congress. It was a good day. I spent the rest of the week in DC at an investment industry conference.

I don't recall discussing the new high that day with anyone, though I may have. We might have had a sense that it was a false high, an undeserved one, for we were in the early days of the housing market collapse. At that point we were probably just calling it a normal downturn. Don't remember.

This one will get a lot of attention, as it should. We've waited a long time. A bit of a victory for capitalism, though one that could have come much sooner had it not been for interference by the United States.

One group will be glad and think the credit is theirs for keeping the government at bay. Wrong. Another group will try and use it to justify giving some of that wealth to an imagined class of victims. Also wrong.

Anyway, most of the time the stock market should be near its all time high. That is the normal condition. We've been off track for a few years. Still, the market is twenty times the level it was when I first started in this business in the early 80s. Lot of wealth created, a lot of it destroyed. Creative destruction. Many more winners than losers.

Today is an uneventful day. No meetings, just catching up on previous projects. Like last time, if there is anything bad just around the corner, it is not on my mind. Later, i will think it was.  

Bullets and Patriots

There are sports teams I really don't like. Sometimes it ever borders on a form of hatred, though thats pushing it a bit. Some for a good reason, some for not. Fan allegiance is a strange thing and we find ourselves loving and hating teams for lots of different reasons. Like the way we feel about certain people, some biases make no sense.

Here are my sports prejudices, along with the reason.

Chicago Cubs - Obvious
Duke - Most obnoxious fans in the world and Daughter1 hates them
Drury College - Rival of my Alma mater
KU - Of course. Cheaters. jayhawkers.
Boston Patriots - Cheated to steal Super Bowl from Rams
Boston Red Sox - swept Cardinals in WS
Florida Marlins - won the Series after only four years as a team. that's not illegal but should be. ( i have a vivid memory of some lady screaming into a camera "weve waited so long for this!" really? talk to a cubs fan about waiting)
San Diego Chargers - no explanation, just never liked them, always want them to lose
Washington Bullets - for changing their name to the wizards
Toronto Blue Jays - dont like the bird, dont like the logo, like the country
Marquette - because my Son hates them
TCU - because Daughter2 hates them

Baby it's cold outside, sorta

While temperature is a measurable certainty, the longer I live in Minnesota the more I appreciate the psychological side and how it affects how cold or hot we feel. Today is a good example.

Driving in to work the temp outside was -7. If it were November this would be terrible and depressing. It would be dark as I drive in and a crust of ice would be rapidly forming on the lakes. Even worse would be the looming sense that things are only going to get worse.

But it is February. When I get out of my car I can tell it really is below zero. I feel the cold sidewalk through the bottom of my shoes. The tiny bits of moisture in my pants and overcoat freeze and make a swishing sound as I walk. It feels like I'm wearing a thin layer of cardboard. When I get back in my car this afternoon, it will hurt to hold the steering wheel. I may wear gloves and ear muffs inside the car for the first ten minutes or so of the drive home.

But it is February. March is a week away. The sun is in the sky at 7am, not buried below the horizon as in November. The ice houses are coming off the lakes. When I step out of my car the day feels cheery. (And i'm not a cheery day kind of guy). There is the knowledge that warmth is coming, even if it is not here yet. Winter was fun but we're ready for a change.

If you close your eyes, that snowmobile you hear in the distance sounds like a lawnmower.

Valentines Day Luncheon

Unlike elementary school, today there is no thought over the number of cards I will get, or whether the cards I send will be as nice as the ones from the rich kids. No delving into the meanings behind those little candy hearts... "does she really mean 'be mine'?"

Just one card from the only person I want to remember me.

Lunch was one turkey sandwich from the store downstairs, apple juice and a bag of MMs that my valentine included with the card. Sweet.

Winter wanes

It is mid Feb now and spring is still weeks away. Yet, there is a sense here that the most brutal days of winter have passed on. A few weeks ago, on a day when the high was -4, Mr Winter came as deep into our lives as this cycle of the sun would allow. Now when we spot him, as during yesterdays snow, he has his back to us, heading North, temporarily defeated.

We saw a bald eagle yesterday, near where this photo was taken. I was in my 30s before I saw my first one, while trout fishing in North Arkansas. This winter they have been a weekly sight.

Burning the red sox hat 2013

Starting off the new year just right. A lunch of black eyed peas and rice for good luck followed by this annual tradition.