One Fine Summer Evening

The new year is approaching and I need to fulfill a promise.

At the Po-Hi reunion in October 2016, I promised my friend and former neighbor Marcene (McGrew) Nelson, that I would once again take up my laptop and post something to my blog. I had missed it at the time, but work and family obligations had largely prevented it.

In my defense, I actually wrote one at about this time in 2016, but my computer literally died (no kidding) as I saved the email, and when my computer techs got it running again, the file was nowhere to be found. (I ask you, how many places on my computer would you expect the word to appear, but a complete disk search wouldn’t make it appear.

So here goes (the letter, not the computer I hope).

This blog is basically reminesces of how the former generation has helped shape me. But in this case it is not my parents but Marcene’s mother who was a huge early influence.

Without airconditioning and television to distract us, summers were a time for playing with the other neighborhood children, often involving almost twenty kids in the games. Marcene and her brother Keith lived across Ash Street and three houses north of us, so they were regularly among the gang.

One year, when I think I was in early grade school, Marcene’s mother invited us kids (after it got too dark to play the usual games) to join her in her home for snacks and a story. After snacking, we sat around the living room and we listened to a chapter a night from a book of her choosing, and I must have been enchanted with those cowboy tales, because I still remember them.

Now being read to was not a strange experience. My father read us to sleep at night and some of the teachers at Jefferson Elementary would read aloud after lunch. The fact that we were fascinated by western stories, of course, was a natural crowd pleaser. Most of the ten-cent Saturday matinees at the Ponca Theater included a Cowboy movie serial each week, and the main feature of did so too.

But for someone else’s parent to invite the neighbors in was pure gift. Taking in tired (cranky?) children at that time of night – who should have probably been at home in their own bed by that time — was first of all a gift to our parents, since they could linger in the breeze of the porch a little longer, and secondly I am sure it was not an easy matter to hold the interest of a gaggle of elementary school age children. I never wondered about it then, but I have since wondered what kind of woman it takes to reach out in that way.


It is, of course, such individual acts which build the strong secure communities that we sometimes wonder whether our children will experience.

I would, of course, be delighted if some of you could share other stories or any recollections you might have of special story hour experiences. 

Never buy a car in its first model year.

When I was growing up in Ponca City, Oklahoma, American automakers were about the whole game and they brought out radical revisions of their cars about this time each year. Most of my male classmates could tell you the exact model year for any passing American car on the road. The automaker's wholesale embrace of "planned obsolescence" changed manufacturing engineering permanently, although the annual cycle dissipated somewhat after the first OPEC oil crisis hit. [As an MIT professor pointed out on national radio that year, the most important thing to understand that it takes more energy to manufacture a car than that car will use in its lifetime. Therefore, it never makes energy sense to scrap a car to get a better mileage.] Dad's point was that when they redesign the essential features of a car (ignition, drive train, etc., not simply the size of the tailfins), there are many things that can go wrong, and sometimes disastrously so. The Ford Pinto gas tank is a classic case to most of my generation, though it postdates my father's advise on the subject. For the second time in the current century I have decided to ignore my father's advice. So in April Karen Kay and I drove to Virginia to pick up my new plug-in Prius hybrid car. Like my 2001 Prius, as a first-adopter I had to order the car on the web and then wait for the car to be be built and delivered. And like that earlier Prius, Toyota's strategy clearly seems to be to have a small group of first year buyers discover what couldn't be found in earlier testing. Thus, this year they only allowed dealers in twelve states to get the cars; hence, the trip to Virginia. The 2001 Prius definitely had its problems. The NiMH batteries for the electric motor would suck energy from the lead-acid battery used for the accessories and gas engine, thus resulting in the need to get a jump for its (golf-cart sized) lead acid battery. And Karen Kay had to use the warranty coverage to get a computer replacement in the car on a trip to Austin, Texas. The original Prius is still with us, has over 125,000 miles on the odometer, and finally had to have the battery replaced ($4000+). But, with that and other maintenance, it is probably good for another 125,000 miles. The new one has behaved itself well to date. We are about 500 miles form home on a 2500-mile journey to Cape Cod. The 2001 Prius mileage averaged in the low forties, this one is holding steady at about 53 mpg (as a hybrid). I say "as a hybrid" because at home I plug it in at night and do most of my day's driving around town on electricity. My roundtrip commute is slightly more than the roughly 15 miles I can get in EV (electric vehicle) mode, but I average over 100 mpg in both July and August (when we made no long out-of-town trips). And, thanks to a special program by our local power company -- a big thank you to IPL -- it costs about a penny a mile for eV operation and I have a smart meter and a 220V charging station at no cost to me. In the long run, even hybrids are a stopgap. But pure electrics like the Leaf and the Tesla are real hard to deal with when there is ice on the windshield and too low a battery charge to be able to both melt the ice and drive the car home. If I lived in Southern California, one of our family cars might be electric, but even the most dismal climate change enthusiasts don't expect that kind of warming for Indiana in the 21st century. Dad's advice was almost always good, so I had to think long and hard before violating it. (Both of my brothers have standard Priuses bought after the car had been available a few years.) But Dad also taught us to do what we believe in, and the need for Americans to adopt more energy efficient ways of doing things is high on what I believe. And it probably doesn't hurt that -- thanks in good measure to my parents assistance and encouragement -- I have more disposable income than they had. "A foolish consistency," Emerson said, "is the hobgoblin of little minds."

Daddism #2:Carry it one hand under! Part 2

The story is told that on the first day of practice, John Wooden, legendary basketball coach at the University of California at Los Angeles, had all players take off their shoes and socks and put them on again while he and the coaching staff watched. If any player failed to put the sock heel on his own heel or to properly tighten and tie the laces, that player had to do once more.. And, it is said, he even had players drop off the team rather than conform to what they considered trivial and/or demeaning.
But Coach Wooden's point was simple: The Devil really is in the details.

Remembering to carry the tray one hand under is a detail, but one which can avert the disaster of a spilled or broken load, just as a poorly mounted sock can wear a blister or a poorly tied shoe can lead to a stumble at a critical moment.

I am not enamored of details. My handwriting is sufficient proof to those forced to live through it, and it has taken me years to learn what my father seemed to know from his gut. Now he also knew that it meant that he couldn't try to achieve as many things. Of course, when you work 60+ hours/week in the back of a bakery, it limits what other achievements you can expect. So he tried to do each of the tasks systematically and to learn and apply the basics well.

Almost every Sunday morning before church he would be doing his "book work," that is, bringing the accounts for home and the shop up to date, paying bills, and trying to keep things running. By doing it in those early morning hours when no one else was around, he could concentrate on the details and be sure of the accuracy of the outcome.

Life is always a compromise. And while I have not been as good as he was at paying attention to the details, my life benefits from those times when I pull back, ask what I really need to achieve, and then putting in the detailed work it takes to bring about a transformation.

There are many things I would like to learn and to do, but my father's example tells me that unless I can put in the ante of careful participation, I really need to think about whether playing that particular game is worth it.