Cloister Commentary, Day 203: Fall-Away Day

Nicole and I dropped our absentee ballots off at the Boone County clerk’s office this morning. I wonder how many other counties offer on-line ballot-tracking to voters. That’s a good thing.

I had no school imperatives to deal with, so unsurprisingly I read. I had planned to knock a chunk out of three of the books I’m currently enjoying, but New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman’s The Triumph of Christianity: How a Forbidden Religion Swept the World, like the other Ehrman books I’ve read have done, held me transfixed. I am not a believer; Ehrman once was, but he is a mere historian now–a dogged, erudite, witty, and indefatigably curious one. Since it’s coming on list season, I also explored music writer Tom Hull’s “1000 Albums for a Long and Happy Life.” You’d think at the rate I’ve listened to albums since ’77 or so I’d have encountered few surprises, but I’ve only made it through the “I”s and Mr. Hull’s given me quite a stack to lean into. In this case, I’m thankful for streaming.

After she finished with school around five, Nicole joined me for one of our frequent Friday Fall-Aways at the kitchen table, when we just relax, fiddle around, occasionally sip something (this time, some good mescal), and listen to something indisputably euphonious (this time, Herb Ellis’ Nothing But the Blues, which I fished out of Mr. Hull’s list).

The evening ended with beers and conversation on our friend Shireen’s back deck, where we also got to catch up with our mutual friend Annell Boland. Her amazingly man-like young son Fred sweetly arrived to pick her up at the end of our visit; I have so many friends with sharp young college age spawn that I’m starting to think I’m old.

Streaming for Strivers:

I also had an amusing and refreshing social media conversation with my old friend and fellow southwest Missouri refugee John Schooley, which indirectly reminded me to play this. You should, too, if you need a jolt.

Cloister Commentary, Day 202: Comrades, Cousins, and Comedians

I had mentioned a few commentaries back that the inspirational Stephens prof Ann Breidenbach and I had teamed up for a fun educational project, but I withheld the details. Yesterday, the project went to ground: after we educated her women’s studies students about absentee voting, we created an opportunity whereby I was able to notarize her students’ ballots that required it. Few actually did need that service, but two of them just happened to be the top students from my virtual summer freshman comp class, whom I’d never met in person. Even though we were all masked, we recognized each other from about 30 feet away! As my friend George Frissell would have said (quoting Chief Dan George in Little Big Man, as was frequently his wont), it made my heart soar like a hawk.

I also had the pleasure of talking with my cousin Gregory on the phone for over an hour. I frankly do not enjoy blabbin’ into the blower for even five minutes, but Greg is one of those few exceptions. His insights, good cheer, sense of humor, and wise perspectives were quite welcome (roiling, rotten stuff happened to have been weighing on my mind at the time), and he’s really an inspirational human being. We traded stories, and I honestly had trouble hanging up the phone. May you have a rewarding weekend, cuz.

Nicole and I both had educational crises dumped in our laps after 5 p.m (it’s an occupational hazard of great regularity for all us edumacators), but we calmed our nerves with an old remedy we had not tried in over a decade: Southpark. “The Pandemic Special” proved Matt and Trey are still great at that thing they do. They have Tegrity.

Streaming for Strivers:

They say it’s his birthday!

Cloister Commentary, Day 199: Ah, Those Voiceless Volar Plosives

I sincerely hope I am in the company of many millions who are tired of chaos, calamity, callousness, and corruption. Hope, not bet. I am not a betting man.

Yesterday, I did some COVID clean-up: made a doctor’s appointment, a flu / shingles vaccination appointment, and an oil change appointment (to be clear, for my vehicle); watched a bathroom sink faucet replacement video; called three Missouri counties’ clerks for clarification; and listen to a slew of garage punk and hardcore punk albums I’d not checked out for a while (sorry for all those voiceless velar plosives–look it up, I did). It felt good.

Instead of installing the new faucet as soon as I got home, I sat on my ass and read thr new issue of The Week and listened to the first four discs of the recently released expanded version of Prince’s Sign o’ The Times. The excellence of the latter assuaged the despair elicited by the former.

As dusk fell, Nicole and I rejoiced in being able to eat fresh tomato and mayo sandwiches in October (!!!), and finished Watchmen fully satisfied that our time wasn’t wasted in the least.

Streaming for Strivers:

Regarding the above musical reference?

Cloister Commentary, Day 199: Ah, Those Voiceless Volar Plosives

I sincerely hope I am in the company of many millions who are tired of chaos, calamity, callousness, and corruption. Hope, not bet. I am not a betting man.

As dusk fell, Nicole and I rejoiced in being able to eat fresh tomato and mayo sandwiches in October (!!!), and finished Watchmen fully satisfied that our time wasn’t wasted in the least.

Streaming for Strivers:

Regarding the above musical reference?

Cloister Commentary, Day 199: Ah, Those Voiceless Volar Plosives

I sincerely hope I am in the company of many millions who are tired of chaos, calamity, callousness, and corruption. Hope, not bet. I am not a betting man.

As dusk fell, Nicole and I rejoiced in being able to eat fresh tomato and mayo sandwiches in October (!!!), and finished Watchmen fully satisfied that our time wasn’t wasted in the least.

Streaming for Strivers:

Regarding the above musical reference?

Cloister Commentary, Day 197: Respite

Yesterday was so nice it temporarily made me think nothing’s wrong.

Festivities opened at my mom’s breakfast table with cinnamon roll and coffee. Fortified, Nicole and I hiked around Monett, Missouri’s gorgeous park. I knew the city pool where I’d worked for a few years while I was in college had been closed, but I was shocked that it’d been “disappeared”–the space where it was would be perfect for a sandlot football game now. We saw several woodchucks, Nicole practiced identifying trees, and we sat with our ancestors and our dematerialized friends and pets for some meditation by the pond.

When we returned, we made a honey crisp apple run to Marionville, Mom gave Nicole a lesson in homemade chicken and noodle preparation (a family legacy) and I hauled the recycling to the city processing center–that doesn’t seem too exciting, but my brother Brian had ingeniously organized the receptacles in the garage and they hadn’t been emptied since he did so in August.

As afternoon unfolded, we had cocktails and played three hands of Canasta, I got some reading in, and Mom and Nicole talked about some family history. We wolfed down the chicken and noodles (two helpings for me!), then watched a drive-in(side) double-feature: Kingpin and Pride and Prejudice (the Joe Wright and Keira Knightly version). You can see how those go together, right?

That was enough to convince me all was right with the world until I started thumbing this out a few minutes ago. I’ll take any respite at this point.

Streaming for Survivors:

Speaking of the dematerialized, we might have invited this one.

Cloister Commentary, Day 196: Elasticity

While trying to finish up an audiobook yesterday that we started four months ago, Nicole and I pondered the strange elasticity of time in this pandemic:

“Where the hell did September go?”

“Yeah, but January seems two years ago!”

All the things that make time seem to slow down are in play in this weird era, but that’s not been the effect. And, as I’ve gotten older, though I think staying very engaged in life also plays a part, I’ve frequently gotten the feeling that my days are rushing by. Yet, again, the last two road trips we took with friends early this year–“It was just yesterday that we went to Springfield and Joplin with Janet and David,” I should be saying–almost feel to date from the middle of last decade.

How is time playing with you?

By the way, that book is Marjorie Spruill’s Divided We Stand, which explains much about how we became like we are in this country–and we still have five minutes’ worth of it to listen to. We recommend it.

Apparently COVID-19 is, as Willie Nelson once wrote, “extremely real.”

Streaming for Strivers:

It’s the anniversary of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s arrival on this plane, but I don’t think he’d mind me passing this along.

Cloister Commentary, Day 195: Discophilic Colonial Holdout

Nicole went in to work in her room yesterday, so I put some music scribbling work in–this double-blogging ain’t easy! I got fairly lost in the process; for as much time as I spend trying to decide the fate of these thousands of records, I sure do still enjoy having them at my fingertips, in the highest fidelity, organized, and in my eyeline. I suppose one could argue that all that nails me as a colonial holdout–I couldn’t really disagree. But I’m gonna sing in those chains like the sea, I guess, for the time I have left. Also, streaming ain’t that fun, it’s a tsunami to drown rather than lift you, and not everything is streaming, anyhow.

Columbia Housewashing, a local veteran-owned business, did a spectacular job on our two-years-dingy house (and on on our driveway–no worries, London, all is forgiven!) (and on our white plastic lawn chairs). The owner, Nic Thompson, was affable, diligent, and full of helpful future advice, and his wife Ashley
stopped just before he finished to make sure he didn’t miss a spot! Seriously, though, she, being a survivor of one of my Brit Lit classes and the Kewpie Gauntlet (OH-SEVEN!), wanted to say hello to me and introduce me to their cute tow-headed, blue-eyed child Levi. I will be employing Nic again, and I suggest you think about doing so, too,should you need that. His fee is quite reasonable.

We fell right to sleep, but suddenly, at around 12:30, I was awakened by the whistling of incoming text messages–Nicole had forgotten to silence her phone. Given the way things have been going on our live, I snatched my own phone up to see if something urgent was needing our attention, but it just fake news.

Streaming for Strivers:

For Jeffrey Melnick–“Wine is red / Poison is blue / Strychnine is GOOD / For what’s ailin’ you!”

Cloister Commentary, Day 194: Lynda’s Birthday

Nicole and I strive always to get our days off to a great start, so bagging up the possum some driver hit right in front of our house around dawn ensured us an excellent start. Leaving it for the city or someone else to take care of was out of the question, because between 6 and 9 a.m. our residential street in Parkade is like the Indy 500, and the corpse would have been reduced to pulp. Actually, we triple-bagged that sucker and boxed it; now we just can’t forget to put it out.

Seriously, that wasn’t a bad start, and with the windows open and the fall breeze blowing through, everything we tried to do, including work, was pleasant. Also, it was Nicole’s mom’s birthday, and every year since she passed we make sure to celebrate it with things she enjoyed. We’ve been doing pretty well avoiding meat, but we tucked into some delicious Booche’s cheeseburgers with everything for lunch, and later drove out to the A-Frame in Rocheport to share a bottle–excuse me, one and a half bottles–of
Moscato and watch the river and its barges roll powerfully by and the sun go brilliantly, easefully down. We know we won’t be going anywhere for awhile, but for fun (but in seriousness, too) we planned our next three trips: road trip to San Diego, steamboat trip (don’t call it a cruise!) from St. Paul to New Orleans (then a week in the Crescent City), and a pond-jumper to the U.K. Yes, a couple can dream.

We had a blissful ride back to Columbia with Art Tatum and Roy Eldridge trading magic solos on the sound system. And we slept in til almost 6.

Streaming for Strivers:

Fats Waller, upon noticing that Art Tatum had just arrived to watch him play: “God is in the house.”

Cloister Commentary, Day 193: Plottin’ Pedagogs!

When I was a full-time public school teacher, I truly loved plotting with fellow fun-loving educators (I think of Nicole Overeem, Karen Downey, George Frissell, Brock Boland, Jim Kome and Jill Varns) to pull off exciting and inventive educational experiences. Yesterday in the early morning, my very esteemed, beloved and influential Stephens College colleague Ann Breidenbach e-mailed me with a brilliant idea she required my assistance to execute, if I was game. I received the email right after she sent it, I replied (as is my wont), “Let’s do it now!” and in a matter of seconds, I was Zooming with her Women’s Studies class putting the idea into play. As I retiree, I can’t perfectly communicate how thrilled I am to be involved in this venture–and, NO, I’m not going to tell you what it is yet! I will give you a clue: it’s a particularly great brainstorm if you happen to be a teacher or a student in Missouri, Oklahoma, or Mississippi.

That’s about all I have, except this: I have always luxuriated in this time of year and its brilliant skies, mild weather, blazing colors, and bittersweet, reflective overtone. I never thought I would ever enter it with my current level of dread, disappointment, despair, and disgust. I have very few illusions about who, what, where, why, and how we are, and I do know it’s not all bad, but another “d” word is hovering in the air, Isaac, waiting for me to pluck it out for use: DESULTORY.

Streaming for Strivers:

Speaking of things that are not bad, I invite you to partake of the work of an underrated star in the American music firmament who’s celebrating the anniversary of her arrival today.