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Hi everyone. We offer stories about life in Southeastern Massachusetts at our sister site: SippicanCottage.blogspot.com Monday through Friday, generally. Visit us there, too, after you've maxed out your credit card buying our Sippican Cottage Furniture. Sippican Cottage Recommends:
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March 23rd- We're having a big spring special on our Miles' Admiring Shelves. Order one by June 22nd and get a $30 discount, and free shipping to boot! A tremendous value. Customize yours from our list of available colors and finishes. Order one or a dozen today! February 27th- Don't miss our St. Padraig's Day special. Order our fabulous Tiger Oak Shamrock Table by March 17th and shipping is free! That's a $30.00 savings you can put towards construction paper and glue sticks for your shamrock decorating. January 11th- Our new best friends at NECN are nothing if not professional. They've already got a video dub of my appearance on New England Dream House on their website. Here you go: Is it tall, dark and handsome in here, or is it just me? January 10th- It's 2009 already? Does the calendar have a snooze button? Yikes. If you live in New England, and have electricity and cable TV this week, you can see Sippican Cottage Furniture featured on NECN's New England Dream House at 10:00 AM on Sunday, January 11th.
They show it again at 7:00 PM in the evening, so if you can't believe just how handsome I Iook on television, you can tune in again and check. Set your DVRs now! December 8th-
Our handsome Mount Lebanon Table got a nice mention in the Denver Post last week. "Affordable Antique Looks." Denver is a wonderful city (since the Broncos stopped beating the Patriots every year in the playoffs). Sippican Cottage Furniture has lots of customers out west, including the states of Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Nevada, Arizona, and Colorado. Now if someone in New Mexico will buy something, we can have customers in contiguous states from Maine to Washington. (We could cheat and use the Four Corners to connect the states, but that wouldn't be sporting) Thanks, Denver Post; we're pleased to be included on a page with The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Not Debbie Reynolds; the real one. November 4th- We've got another new item for you: The Mennonite Work Table. the Mennonites came to America and Canada and brought forth the bounty of the land with good, honest work. Our Mennonite Table allows you to carry on the tradition of good, honest work with our reproduction of their farmhouse favorite. Makes a great desk. Based on a real antique. Sure to be a favorite in your family until the sun winks out. See it here. September 30th- Don't miss our new item: The "Super" Ten Finger Stepper. Same great utility as our regular Ten Finger Stepper, but with a solid Tiger Maple top step and whimsical fingerholes. Customize yours from a wide array of choices. Order one by Hallowe'en and get Free Shipping! It's scary how good a deal it is. March 31st- Ah, Spring is but a hide and seek proposition. I don't care what the calendar says, it's still too cold to be Spring. But think ahead a little. The flowers will soon bloom, and you'll need a stylish bench to sit on to take off your Wellies after tilling your garden. Order a Harry Longbaugh's Bench by Memorial Day, and take advantage of our Free Shipping special. Save $30, and do it sitting down. February 7th- Late winter greetings all! Lots of action at the Sippican Cottage these days. How about a new item for the catalog? Check out our Mount Lebanon End Table. All solid maple construction with a solid tiger maple tabletop. Nicely tapered legs make it look like it's going to get up and dance. You'll dance around your living room when you buy one, just to see the tiger maple grain shimmer as you shimmy by. Buy two and we'll like you twice as much as we do already. Just $325.00 plus shipping is a tremendous bargain. Order yours today before we come to our senses and raise the price. January 28th- Brrr. Put another log on the fire and think of Beltaine. You can enjoy St. Patrick's Day in style with our late winter special. Buy a Shamrock Table by March 17th and get free shipping anywhere in the lower forty-eight states. That's a $25 value! You'll be in the clover early. September 11th- Hi everyone. Don't miss our Autumn Special. Purchase a Harry Longbaugh's Bench and get free shipping anywhere in the continental United States. That's a $20 savings. Harry Longbaugh's Bench is the most useful thing we sell. It must be, as it is the most useful thing anybody sells, and we're anybody too.
July 20th- Hi. The sun is hiding her face again today. Hot and muggy. It's more Mobile, Alabama than Massachusetts outside. We drink our lemonade and are fine with it. What's summer by the shore without a little bead of water at the end of your nose from time to time? Let's have more pictures of items we shipped recently. These went to longtime customers the Connollys in New Jersey. Nice people. Nice tables.
Oh, I've let a couple cats out of the bag early there. That's a new table design, and a new tabletop color, too. Don't tell anybody until I get the new webpage coded, OK? July 19th- Hello Everybody. The sun is shining here today after days of rain. Lovely. We're very busy making furniture, and are too thrifty with new photos for you, our beloved visitors. So let's see some picture of items we've shipped recently. They've gone all over the country. First, to Pennsylvania. Here's two Ancient Mariner Bedside Tables, in Clapboard White, with Lovely Tiger Maple tops, lightly distressed. Spiffy. Click on the picture to enlarge.
May 24th- We have a Summer Special for all you nice people that like a little organization with your madness. Buy one of our Treasure Island Shelves by September 3rd, and receive free shipping on your order. That's a $30 value! Don't trip over tank engines all season. Put those treasures away. Jamuary 29th- Hi everybody. We've updated our Kipling Table page with many more new pictures, and lots of new color combinations too. Click here to see it. January 25th- Hello again everybody. Busy, busy, busy. Lots of orders from all over the country. We'll have lots more pictures soon, including many new items. You've asked for it -- here it is: A Color Selection Page. We'll add more pictures to it as we get them, but it's bound to help right away. Enjoy! January 9th, 2007- Hi everybody! Thanks to everyone for all the orders in 2006. We had lovely people From Washington State to Maine, Minnesota to Texas, and most places in between on the customer list. This year, we want more states to enjoy the value and beauty of our Instant Antique Furniture. And we need someone -- anyone-- from North Dakota to sign up for our catalog mailing list. We have folks from all the states but one! Come on North Dakota! Everybody can sign up here. Don't miss out on our Saint Patrick's Day special. Order one of our lovely, solid "Tiger Oak" Shamrock Tables by March 17th, 2007, and get Free Shipping. That's a twenty five dollar savings. Visit our Shamrock Table page here. October 10th- Goodness, we're busy here at the Sippican Cottage. We're filling orders right now from coast to coast in this great land of ours. And we get print catalog requests every day. We're offering an Autumn Special with all the catalogs we send out. What's that? You want a print catalog too? Sign up here. Amaze your friends. Sow envy among your enemies. But you can get that same Autumn Special right here on the internet: Buy a Harry Longbaugh's Bench, get free shipping. Don't wait. The offer only last until December 25th. Hmm. That date rings a bell. Can't quite place it. Oh well; it will come to me. May 31st- I trust you had a pleasant Memorial Day holiday. Our older son marched in the parade and played the trombone. Fabulous. We've got a new picture of a Sippican Cottage Console table on the site. The old picture, and the one we used in the print catalog, really didn't do it justice. This one's much better, don't you think?
We delivered one to Wrentham Antiques Marketplace, another sold before it was done, and we have two more about for immediate delivery. This batch is a rich, smoky cinnamon color, with magnificent prominent tiger striped grain. You really should order one today, as your life has been devoid of meaning and beauty lately, and only tiger maple can cure that. Everybody knows this. Get one here. May2nd- We delivered furniture to our friends at Wrentham Antiques Marketplace in Wrentham, Massachusetts today, and last Thursday too. Lots of wonderful things there before, now it's way past wonderful. We're partial to our Extra Longbaugh Benches. Here's a picture of one in clapboard white:
Jayne at Wrentham gave us the idea for the longer length, and at exactly 5 feet, they make a terrific seating bench for our Grandma Barker's Kitchen Table. Use one in your foyer to sit and take off your boots when you come in --it's mud season in New England. That's the season just before bug season. Go to Wrentham and get one or two for only $349.00 each. That's so cheap for such a versatile and handsome item, it's like stealing. We won't report you though, we'll just make more. Go to Wrentham and see all sorts of wonderful Sippican Cottage items now, with more coming every week. Go! March 20th- Hello again everyone. We're making furniture like gangbusters this week. We're filling orders for our existing line, of course, but we have some new things in the works, too. As usual, the best ideas for things to make come from the customers; if all businesses would pound that into their collective heads like a railroad spike, life would be much more pleasant, wouldn't it. A lovely correspondent from the midwest couldn't fit our Longbaugh Bench where she needed it to go. She asked for a smaller one. It' s almost ready to ship, and it's cute as a button. Perhaps we'll offer it as well as the usual size. We'll post a picture of it here when the paint's dry. Just to confuse matters, we're making a Longbaugh Bench that's five feet long, too, to serve as the seating for our Grandma Barker's Kitchen Table, which is also five feet long. A customer wandered into Wrentham Antiques Marketplace on Rt. 1A in Wrentham, Mass, and wondered if she could have one that big, and wandered off without ever knowing what a good idea it was. My boys refuse to sit on anything else now, and the prototype will never make it out of our house, I fear. Don't worry, we'll make more, and post pictures of them here too. Thanks go out to our mysterious stranger. She'll be back I bet, as Wrentham Antiques Marketplace is so darn pleasant, and she'll probably see the bench, forget her earlier desire for just that item, and say to herself: "What a great idea! I wish I thought of that!" February 27th, 2006- Hello everybody. What's new? Lots and everything, of course. We got another article written about us In Furniture Today Magazine. It's always nice to see your name in print, and spelled correctly for good measure. Furniture Today's E-Business Editor, Brian Carroll is a very pleasant person to talk to, and is very accomplished at writing informational articles in a manner that avoids dryness. No mean trick, that. The latest article is written about our approach to marketing on the internet. It goes into detail about what we're doing, and why, and since the Internet is still the Wild West in many ways, the approaches to selling on the internet vary wildly. I've been contacted by a few other retailers, and found out that some people have been told to copy my technique to the letter. I'm going to advise you here to avoid that. Instead, copy my approach. Here it is, and it's a lot older than the internet: I'm trying to make the best possible things I can, in the most efficient way I can devise, and sell it as inexpensively as is possible, while continuing to feed all our families down here at Sippican. I assume my competitors are on the same page here. If, not, look in the mirror, friend, not on the internet. That being said, how do you market on the internet? How do you market anywhere? The purpose of marketing is to make people who would be interested in your product aware that it exists. Really, that's about it. I'd like to stake out on a sand dune the marketers that are in the business of fooling potential customers into thinking they want what the guy's got to sell, no matter what it is. "There's a sucker born every minute" is no way to go through life. And in the long run, it never works out for anybody. Now, I assume that the whole world doesn't want what I've got. That's fine. But the internet allows me to find -- check that; allows people to find me -- that are interested in what I've got. And so I'm just a small fish in an enormous pond, but I'm in the correct pond, and all the anglers are looking for my kind of fish, as it were. That's the key to the internet marketing thing. Don't try to sell cotton candy at Funeral Homes. You're wasting your time. Why mindlessly try to attract people to your website if you don't sell what they want? You're wasting everybody's time, including your own. I don't try to get people looking for chrome and glass dinette sets to get hijacked to my page, hoping they'll buy something I do have when they get here. People are paying for play in the search engines, and I'm always deeply suspicious of them. If you have what I want, why do you have to pay to force your way to the front of the line? I put all this stuff on the internet because I want the customer to understand what they're getting, and who they're getting it from. I used to live in a town, hours from the ocean, that featured a sailboat on the official town sweatshirt because they didn't know what to put on there that encapsulated the town. Kinda sad, really. I moved from there to a town on the ocean, because I wanted the reality, the substance, not an illusion. Tell your customers who you are, and what you've got, and maybe they'll buy it from you. Try to spell all the words correctly. Be pleasant. Don't try to appear to be something that you're not. Did I mention the spelling? January 24th 2006- Greetings. As promised, here's a picture of the jelly cupboard we fashioned to complete the assortment of items for the " All Sippican Cottage Kitchen."
It's a bad picture, but it's a fine cabinet. It's based on our "Treasure Island Shelf," with doors and a Solid Pine top added. I'm thinking of adding it to our line. Anybody else want one? Besides Mrs. Sippican, I mean. She's demanding one since she saw this one. January 23nd 2006- Good day everyone. Snow today. Bundle up! Well, we've got a picture of the all Sippican Cottage kitchen from one of our favorite customers. We've made a custom design china cabinet based on an antique from Johnston's Antiques in Franklin, Mass; to the right we have a variation on our Ma Barker's Kitchen Table; and a supersize version of our Mile's Admiring Shelf hanging over it:
Fabulous, n'est pas? But wait, there's more; tomorrow we'll show a picture of the jelly cabinet that goes along with it. There's a Ten Finger Stepper in the kitchen too. Thanks Janice, the room looks fantastic! January 2nd 2006- Happy New Year to ye, one and all. "A place for everything, and everything in its place." What a magnificent sentence. Like most trite things, it's true, and expressed in a lapidary fashion. Hell, the sentence is practically a palindrome, but it doesn't suffer from its simplicity. There's an ethos there that far exceeds: "Put your clothes in the hamper or no cookies." Why is it "zen" if it's foreign but just pedantic nagging if it's domestic? Let's see what we can glean about it:
Wow. Thanks for that, really. Who wrote that, Cotton Mather? Himmler? For gosh sakes, there's more there than that, isn't there? Or is it just me? I've devoted great chunks of my life to domiciles and the things that go into them, and seen exactly what the truism means, played out on innumerable domestic stages. In my experience, it's the first half of that old saw that's always lacking, and causes 99% of the problems you find with the second half. People --I include myself here; I'm people too -- are always struggling to fashion proper homes for their belongings, and until they do, those belongings, cast adrift in their homes, circulate like bedouins from one horizontal surface to the next, and annoy their owners to distraction. It's not just effort or fortitude that makes life orderly; it's just not possible to have one half of the equation missing and get the end result. Let's try somewhere else:
No, no, no. Marshall McLuhan is a one note piano. I'm an ignoramus, and even I know this expression is older than Gutenberg. What a maroon. For the life of me, I can't understand how people like Mr. McLuhan leverage a few (in his case, one) sound bite about one thing into a career. "The medium is the message," he said, (wrongly) and everyone falls all over him in perpetuity for his opinion. He's like a workman with one tool in his toolbox -- a hammer -- so the whole world looks like a nail to him. Bless Mr. Taylor, he didn't give up there, but kept on sledding and found: "There is a place for everything Well, now, since Augustine was born in Tagaste which is now in Algeria, in 354, methinks Mr. McLuhan should go back to talking ragtime about television, where he can be innaccurate and puerile about the correct millenia. Notice the relationship, baldly stated. It needs to have a proper place to have a proper use. A coffee table is a useful thing. If you crack your shin on it four days a week because your house is cluttered, its usefulness is diminished. And we've all pitched perfectly good things in a dumpster because we couldn't make them fit in our humble homes, or our lifestyles. A shame, really. But we're not done yet. Let's keep looking.
"A place for everything, and everything in its place." indeed. So buy an Admiring Shelf, or a Treasure Island Shelf, or something with a drawer to put your things in, and make them fit in your life properly, at hand but not cluttered. If anyone asks why, tell them Omnia tempus habent... December 14th- Greetings to all, and Happy Holidays. I've been involved in the construction of many different things in my life. I've built a birdhouse, (by myself) and a football stadium, (I had help) and most everything in between. I've frozen and sweated, and strained to lift a heavy load as well as frustrating myself over the most delicate filigree. I've been in thousands of homes from modest to palatial. The ones I haven't been in, I've read about. But last week, the most extraordinary thing happened to me. A real first. I still make custom furniture. I hate to admit it, really, because when people find out you can and will make things, they haunt you day and night in the most pleasant way. Sippican Cottage is an idea, really, and the idea is to serve the largest possible number of nice people by selling standard items. And no matter how much I love making something original and unique for nice people, it limits the range of people you can serve. And so what is surely a blessing, loyal and faithful customers that want just that special something, can also be a distraction, like a scenic overlook on a highway-- you just can't help yourself -- you've got to stop and enjoy it, though the highway beckons. A lovely woman and her husband commissioned me to make them a china cabinet, based on a very old and interesting example at Johnston's Antiques in Franklin, who we've mentioned here before. The original is of an age and provenance such that it becomes important, not just interesting. Few of us can afford important furniture, and even if Bill Gates adopts us all, there isn't enough important stuff to buy anyway. It is, by definition, rare. And so, we copy. And like the very best customers, they ask me to improve upon the original, to make it more useful, and perhaps, more comely, instead of a slavish copy. That's always a tall order, to improve on something that's good already, and you deliver the item with the feeling one has when performing in front of an audience for the first time. Practicing the violin in the garage helps, but it's not the same as Carnegie Hall, after all. So you stand there, and hold your breath, and they say they adore it, and for a moment you know what the diva holding the roses at the end of the opera feels like. That feels good, believe me, but that feeling is not new to me, thank goodness. I've lived long enough for the curtain calls to start to outnumber the throwing of rotten tomatoes, as it were. What was truly extraordinary, was that the customer wished to commission additional items, and began to search for something to show me to get an idea of what she wanted. Now, I've been shown scraps of wallpaper, and chips of paint, and pages torn out of magazines from Popular Mechanics to Art Digest. I've been shown cocktail napkins, and plans stolen from architect's offices, and out of print books with the text in Greek. I've been handed the catalogs of my competitors, my colleagues, and the mighty retailers from Ralph Lauren to Home Depot. But for the first time, someone handed me a Sippican Cottage Furniture catalog, and pointed to an item in it, and used it to describe the general outlines of the thing she wanted. I can't die happy yet, though, until someone tries to sell me one of my own items in an antique store. Get your free catalog here.
November 1st- Hi everyone. We've got lots new here at Sippican: For starters, we have a new look on our home page, with better graphics and so forth. Hope you like it. We had a crack team of subliminal message experts working on the masthead for forty days and forty nights, and all they came up with is that when you roll over the picture, it looks different. Oh well, it's nifty, at any rate. We've got a new print catalog coming out soon. Now you can get genuine Sippican ink on your fingers. Sign up for the free catalog, (and e-mail notification of new items and specials too, if you like,) right here: Yes, I want a fabulous print catalog sent to my house, and soon. I've got yelled at a lot because my picture wasn't on the website. Why you'd want to see the owner of Sippican Cottage Furniture is beyond me, but you can see it on our new, improved, About Us Page. If I'd known I'd live this long, I would have taken better care of myself. At any rate, the furniture's nice. You can find a limited supply of our furniture at: Cameron House Interiors and Gifts, 4817 West Park Boulevard, Plano, Texas. 75093 Drop by and tell Christine we sent you. We're excited to be in the Lone Star State! We've got lots of new items we're adding to the catalog. Check back often.
Don't forget, you can see, touch, and buy our furniture at: Wrentham Antiques Marketplace Rt 1A in Wrentham Massachusetts, and at: The Old Company Store 5 Elm Street In Wareham, Massachusetts. More locations coming soon. And you can now read our commentary page at : http://sippicancottage.blogspot.com August 1st- What's up? In an obvious attempt to lose half my readership, I write today about cats. It doesn't matter what I write. If I write that I like them, the dog people ... (crickets) See, they're gone already, they didn't even stick around to see if I was going to link to the haha funny home video of the cat grabbing at a string on a ceiling fan and going helicoptering around for a spell before being hurled into the sliding glass door. But they've all already seen it ten times, and e-mailed it to their friends, they know if you're not in on it already, you're not in on it at all. You are an apostate. You like those cats. Yes, yes I do. When I was growing up, I wanted a dog. My dear mother was petrified of animals, and disliked untidiness, so no go. And your parents know you better than you know yourself, after all, and knew I couldn't care for such a beast. Not for more than a week. Now, the information available about dogs is very sketchy, too patchy for me to make a valid assessment really, but I gather the creatures live longer than a week. No dog for you. No cats either, a creature that gave poor mom the willies more than a dog, even. At least a dog, well, how do I put this? The dog goes outside. Any Venusian who visited our planet would know who's in charge around here immediately, by observing which one craps in a box, and which one empties it. And so as a child, we had a succession of wildlife that taught you nothing about the wild, or about loyalty, or about ferocity, or greed or want, or anything else. Goldfish, gerbils, that sort of thing. For a while, we had little turtles in a dish. You can tell you're through with them when they turn white, by the way. And so my mother was right of course. I've killed more fauna than a hunter gatherer tribe. But the desire is not a slave to the intellect. I needed another mammal around the house, one that wouldn't do anything I'd tell it to, and the best I could hope for is predicting its behavior a little. No I'm not referring to my wife, although the description is an apt one. Cats. Cats are the pet for you, if you must have a pet, but don't deserve one. They are what all housepets are, animated furniture. They become part of the fabric of your lives, no question, and fray all the fabric in your life, it's true, but they're in the background, and don't bother. Feed them in a desultory fashion, and every twenty five days or so, they'll deign to sit in your lap and go prrrrrrrrrr. I'm up for that. My friends have dogs. They never go anywhere, or do anything, without first thinking of how this will affect their creature. They're better people than us, it takes so much tenacity of will to sign up for that kind of responsibility, to be trusted so supremely with the wellbeing and care of another being. One that will never grow up and mow the lawn for you, I mean. Get up one half hour late one morning, and go to the door to let the cat in, and he'll be gnawing the head off a rodent outside the door, and look up at you and you'll know what he's thinking: "I had to do this myself, you big stiff; and I'm going to throw up parts of this on your couch later, that'll learn you to sleep in." And so I like the solitary nature of the cat, and its mystery, and the fact that the minute he goes outside, he reverts to his feral self, and the only difference between the little beast and a tiger is its size, and the pink collar he's wearing. He'll shred my wife's clothes for saddling him with that, I bet. Ruins his feral vibe with the woodland creatures. Two cat is best, three cats is madness, four or more and you're a newspaper article. We got two black cats at the animal rescue place, to replace the two beloved animals we buried in our yard after living at our new house for a short while. Of course they were dead before we buried them, what are you, dog people? Anyway, they had lived a long and happy life, and dreamed every night by the fire of mice with lead shoes, and passed away old. The Big One was just a little lad then, and we asked him to name the new ones. Moonshine and Sunshine he said. I laid some groundwork for editing by pointing out that they were both identically black, and neither was likely to answer to "Sunshine." He liked "Lady Godiva," for the chocolate color, not the streaking incident, and so it was Moonshine and Lady Go. Two black cats. Bad luck perhaps. Moonshine was headstrong and roamed far afield, and I found her after a short spell by the road, where curiosity... well, you get the picture, and I buried her in the woods next to the others. Tears were shed. Lady Go was sad, if cats can be sad. My wife loved that animal. She is kind to all things great and small, and raises we three male beasts in addition to the cat. Pets are tests of your kindness and reliability, and Moonshine tested our hearts. He appeared out of the woods that surround our house not long after, skinny, sickly, disheveled, wild. White with gray and black, mottled. He'd pace around the perimeter of the lawn like a panther, lean, hungry, feral. My wife considered it a sign, so soon after Moonshine's demise, and she fed that beast. She'd put out food at night, though I told her it was crazy; raccoons and possums and foxes and god knows what else would show up each night looking for the buffet. No matter, HE might get some of it, and that was enough for her. Occasionally we'd see him, closer now, but you couldn't approach him or he'd disappear for days. My boy remarked the patch of grey atop his head made him look like he had a page boy haircut, although he didn't know to call it that, he just said: He looks like Moe! So Momo it was. My wife is kind, and animals know "kind" when they see it. But a cat is cautious, oh yes. After nine month of patience and caution, he allowed her to touch him once, while he ate greedily from the bowl, still nowhere near the house. Just like me, he was finished. Soon he was eating on the back step, and sleeping on a pile of straw left over from a Hallowe'en display, at the corner of the house. And then one day, when a year had passed, she put the food in the back hallway, and left the door open.. He came in over a period of ten minutes, still terrified, but curious. She closed the door behind him. And he went CRAZY. He made that traverse of 38 feet from end to end of the house over and over, launching himself at the windows in the doors, crashing to the floor, and racing to the opposite end for another leap and collision. My wife and little boy scurried around shrieking and trying to reach the doors to open them before he got there, but he was everywhere, and frantic, and they were trapped in the house with a wild beast. They finally got one open, and he was gone. As my wife recounted the tale to me when I arrived home from work, I had to stifle a smile. She thought she had blundered, and he was gone forever. She doesn't know men very well, I thought to myself. Though all she gets all day is we three men, men, men. She had become the sun around which that little creature orbited, as had we all, and sure enough the next day he was back. And shortly thereafter, he was sleeping by the fire, and making that prrrrr noise, a little peeved about THAT UNFORTUNATE INCIDENT AT THE VETERINARIAN, but exhibiting to this day the only attitude that cat owners generally envy their dog friends. Gratitude.
July 29th- Greetings. I love this picture. I love the Spanky style clothes, and the leather shoes, and the hissing radiator, and the chipped basin, and man oh man, look at that cowlick. The poor little fellow isn't going to get anywhere with that, though he's giving it a go. Only momma's spit can paste down a cowlick, and this poor little fellow's mom had to go off to work, and leave him to wrestle his devil ears by himself. The year was 1943, and I imagine she's making something for the armed forces, and the little fellow's dad is too, or is in the armed forces. And so he's left in the care of someone barely visible on the right, and among his peers. I like watching my own sons pal around with their friends, and try to watch the proceedings without participating as much as possible. Your very presence intrudes, and staying in the background allows them to sort things out as much as possible among themselves. And it's fun to watch them try to do things that you take for granted, but they're still learning. The effort of it, and the satisfaction after is amusing. When they're older, the mileposts of accomplishment get fewer and farther between, and instead of daily trophies, you get yearly diplomas. Whoah, wait a minute. A daycare center for working mothers in 1943? That's unpossible. I thought all you Stepford Wives were freed from domestic bondage in 1968 or so, when your 1950s Ozzie and Harriet manacles were finally broken. But there are hundreds of pictures like this in the Library of Congress, from all over the country, and innumerable picture of Rosie the Riveter to go along with it. 'Splain it to me Lucy. I'm going to make 100% of the audience angry now, which is hard to do. Usually, either 50.5% or 49.5% hate you for what you say. But I'm going for the whole enchilada today: A. There was no evil man-plot to keep women out of the workplace before. B. There was no evil government plot to destroy the family by ramming women into the workforce. For all you folks that think we evil white men get together twice yearly and plan how we're gonna oppress everybody, you need to look at our closets. We can't dress ourselves without help, just like the little fellow pictured above. Secretly ruling the world is unlikely. For all you folks that think it's all a government plot to bring socialism to middle america on black helicopters, you need to visit the Post Office. Look around. The government can't figure out what it's doing. If you can barely tell what you're trying to do, it's unlikely you're trying to wed it to an evil purpose. It's all, as Homer Simpson says, "just a bunch of stuff that happened." My wife stays home and cares for our children a little, and me a lot. Many people see that as example "A" above. Not so. It suits us both, and our children, and we can, so we do. Earlier in our lives, our oldest was shuffled off to daycare so we could both work, and many people saw "B" above. Well, we needed money. Half of it did go to the government, after all. But he's pretty well adjusted. He doesn't recite "Let A Million Flowers Bloom" and scream 'Death to the Capitalists" because he swapped germs with a dozen of his peers when he was two. And his mother gives him a whiffle in the summer, so no cowlick. In short, we all survived. Then what are we to make of it? It easy: A. We're all rich B. People are valuable. Women work now because there's a shortage of people. Women worked in 1943 because there was a shortage of people, of the male, induction age type. And women, like men, can be lured away from the joys of the home if it pays good enough. And since as the years pass, and the amount of heavy lifting required continues to diminish, and the jobs get more sophisticated and lucrative, and human ingenuity and sophistication becomes more important, employers must do everything they can to lure people into the workforce. Like pay the world. And overlook the occasional childbirth interruption. People blithely say the world is overrun with people. Okay, smart guy, try putting an ad in the paper looking for help. Let's say you're fussy. You don't want meth smoking child molesters or people that sleep at their desks. You're gonna have to offer a lot to get anyone, and if you're fool enough to exclude enormous swathes of the population because they're, well, girls, you're going to be sitting waiting for the phone to ring for a long time. And we are all rich. Let's not be ingrates and complain about opportunity in America. We have problems, because human beings are imperfect. But the largest problem among poor people here is obesity. Tell someone in central Africa that any of us is not rich, and they'll likely disagree. And ask you for a dollar to eat for a month. We're a rich enough nation to pay people to be poor, and get obese. That's rich. And so, some of us work outside the home. Some of us work from the home. Some of us work in the home. Some of us place our children with other children when they're one or two. Some wait until they're five. Some of us wipe bottoms. Some of us pay to have those bottoms wiped. Some people don't work, because they have money, but ignore their children and leave it to nannies to take care of them. Some people work, and spend every waking hour left with their children. It's just a bunch of stuff that happened. July 28th- Dudes. I used to play darts. I know, "how exciting." Well, I needed to find an activity you could participate in with a Guinness in one hand, and softball requires a taste for warm light beer that I lack. So off to the Irish pub, and the boards. Not any more. I'm a big old man, with children and a wife and bills and so forth, and the idea of hanging around in a bar seems strange now. But I was single once, and was a "Norm" at Liam's Irish Tavern, which isn't there any more. That's fine, as I'm not there any more either. Anyway, I thought I was good. You had to win to keep playing, and the other Joes at the bar were pretty good, so I practiced toeing that stripe and mechanically pumping (both) elbows for a good long while until I was proficient enough to avoid sitting down. I was streaky, and enraged many a better player by stinking it up for most of a game, and then pulling it out late, and seeming like a sandbagger. It didn't hurt that I'm 6'-2" tall with long arms, and leaned over pretty good, and seemed to be inserting the darts, not throwing them. At any rate, I started playing in leagues and so forth, which are the kind of thing the average person had no idea existed, until you happen upon them, and you realize there's entire worlds of people doing all kinds of things you never even heard of in a very serious way. The internet has become an engine for these peculiar worlds. Go to Google, and type in ANYTHING you can think of, and you'll get a ton of sites, and an education. Anyway, I thought I was good, all those years ago. Then I got an education about perspective. Our dart team traveled to a club in South Boston. It was a real club, too, not a restaurant or bar like usual, but an old fashioned members-only club, where you rang a doorbell while standing on an unlit threshold in a parking lot, and a disembodied voice says: who are you over an intercom. There was a problem. Women weren't allowed into this club, and we had brought one. Now, this is twenty years ago, but it was just as jarring a bit of news then as it is now. We were struck by the unfairness of it, or whatever you'd call it: not letting a woman in. We protested that if she couldn't come in, our team wouldn't play. The voice said, if she's on the team, that's different. Inside, he explained that women were barred from the club because all the men would have fistfights over them in the club, and for the men's and women's own sakes, these knuckleheads had to be segregated. They weren't fit company for the women. I realized I was very far from home, though I had been born not ten miles away. There were a great many illegal Irish immigrants in the place, and I began to see why brawls had to be avoided at all costs, as a visit from the police meant more than a trip to the pokey and a black eye to many of the devotees of the place; they'd be deported too. My own Irish relatives had drifted down from Antigonish, Nova Scotia to Boston a hundred years ago, after fleeing Ireland, and did all the work no one else would deign to do, just like these rough and tumble fellows, and I was sympathetic. And they played darts. They mopped the floor with us , though they were blind drunk. They never even put down their drinks, they just walked to the line, and fffft fffft fffft, it was over. And so you learned that being good means judging yourself in the context "compared to what?" And compared to them, well, let's just say that after the match blessedly ended, and our beating was over, I was chosen as our "champion" to play the king of the club, one match, for a little money. He hadn't even played up until then, and I couldn't imagine he'd be worse than the guys who had just annihilated us, but I wasn't ready for, well, the "compared to what" education I received. I threw my three darts. My score was recorded in chalk. The Irish champion went to the line, and pulled out three nails. Three great big nasty twenty penny spikes. Bang, bang, bang into the board. He never missed anything he threw at. And he did it with nails, to show me I wasn't worthy of an even fight. It was over almost immediately, and I knew "compared to what" was now "compared to that," and where I stood in the Pantheon of Darts wasn't on any sort of pedestal, it was around back, near the men's room. Every single one of those drunken roustabouts was unfailingly polite to us men, and exquisitely deferential to the only woman in the bar, the one we had brought uninvited. But we left immediately, to get back to a universe we understood. Which brings me to the subject of our essay today, and a long and circuitous route we've taken. Take a look at this guy: Blind Teen Amazes With Video-Game Skills He's seventeen years old, he's completely and utterly blind, from birth no less, and he'll kick your ass at video games. I love this story. Now, playing Mortal Kombat without being able to see it doesn't make you Mozart, or Ray Charles even. But it does make you extraordinary. Think of the trial and error, think of the concentration that this required. The hours and hours of groping, over and over, looking for that next rung on the ladder to: you can't beat me. And what is trivial becomes sublime, when it's done in this fashion. He'll whup you, with his back turned. We live in a world prosperous enough to support professional skateboarders, never mind baseball and football players, and where Tron Guy becomes an instant celebrity. It's enough these days to simply capture the imagination of a great many people, however you might do it, because the internet can open up a great audience to you, hungry to be amused, or amazed, or feel part of a community, or look at Brice, in his darkness, and say: "Compared to him, I'm a shirking piker" And for all you in the audience who say, big deal, it's just video games, they're not important, I say, yeah, not important? Compared to what? July 27th- Hail fellow well met. Let's talk about something important. Joe. Oh yes. Coffee Joe. Java, jamoke, kaffa, kahveh, sludge, silt, bilge, mud and a shot-in-the-arm. Mud in your eye. Hojo, qahwah, latte, moche, just gimme that coffea whatever you call it. Look, I'm not fooling here. Listen to me. Coffee is not a beverage. Coffee is the eighth sacrament. Gimme Gimme Gimme. Ray Charles knew:
A blind man could see it. Howsa 'bout a cup? Let's lay down some rules. First and foremost, we lay a pistol on the table for anyone that approaches with anything decaffeinated. You pod people that drink that dyspeptic dishwater stay clear, I'm warning you. I need that jolt, and I don't mean soda. Second, there was a period of time in this world when the idea of instant coffee made a certain amount of sense, I guess. People watched two guys named Neil walk on the moon, and were inspired to drink Tang and so forth, and the idea of Nescafe didn't seem all that strange. At the time, you'd have to go to a disreputable diner to get a cup of ready made coffee, and it was probably fresh during the Truman administration, and been warming since, or you'd have to get out a real percolator, grind some beans, and make your own. They are now opening up Starbuck franchises in the Men's Rooms of Dunkin Donuts. You can drive up to every other window in any city and get coffee thrust out at you. Men named Neil do not trod the moon any longer. Outlaw instant coffee. Bring back the death penalty for serving it. Perhaps an amendment to the Constitution is in order. They want to amend the Constitution to prohibit flag burning. I say, give an exception if the burning flag is used to heat water for joe. I prefer Dunkin Donuts to Starbucks. I go in, I say: Give me coffee. They say: Give me money. It happens. I leave. We are both content. Go into Starbucks. You are disoriented. The signs tell you you can get a pineapple chutney lotus blossom chive and dill brisket rhododenron flavored latte grown at a "fair trade" plantation where the inmates eat gruel twice a day, instead of once like everywhere else, I guess. I didn't know I wanted that. I thought I wanted coffee. But if you go up to the counter, the girl with the jewelry in her nose snorts at you if you order coffee. I'm not sure I'm supposed to order coffee from her anyway. Her name tag says she's a "barista," and I assume that's Spanish for lawyer, because she seems put out by my request for coffee. I look for people behind the counter with aprons and coffee urns, but they are scarcer than non-relatives at the barista's indie band shows. Hie thee to Dunkin Donuts. Approach the counter. Hold out five quarters. I guarantee you will walk out with a cup of joe without saying a word. Some lady spilled coffee on her lap once, and sued McDonald's. She won a pile in the misery lottery. She said the coffee was too hot. Now, I drink my coffee cooler than most. I prefer the european method of brewing, with water well below boiling to make the coffee, and it's about ready to drink when it finishes its journey through the glorious beans. McDonald's makes American coffee. Bubbling hot. God bless'em. Some people like real hot coffee, and some people add milk, or cream, and so forth, which cools the coffee. Coffee to go is often transported to remote locations before being enjoyed, and it's really not possible to serve it too hot, as if you prefer it cool, as I do, you can just wait a little. But if you like it hot, it's gotta start hot. McDonald's doesn't serve superheated nuclear power plant reactor coolant with a lump of lava in it. It's not even boiling water, which means it's less than 212 degrees. If you stab yourself with a spork is that McDonald's fault? If you eat the fish sandwich with the wrapper on it, and get indigestion, is that McD's fault? I say no. There may be a circle in hell for people that sue over the mundane, if it's not already full of lawyers. But hell in the afterlife is not good enough for her, the old lady with the hot lap. She needs punishment now. And I decree: NO MORE COFFEE FOR YOU. That'll learn you. Your money won't buy you happiness if it won't buy you coffee. When I was a wee laddie, shopping was a rough go for my mother. She had four kids, and we ate like we were in a contest throughout most of our waking hours. Pre-made food was expensive, and rare, and mom bought raw materials, food ore that needed smelting, not frozen pizzas. She's take us on her shopping expeditions, and had to make many stops to get all she needed. I remember one to this day. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. That's the A & P to you young folks. The place looked vaguely Victorian, and there were flies buzzing around mounds of lettuce and so forth. But you'd buy coffee beans there, raw, and as you were checking out, there was a grinder right in the checkout aisle. I imagine that when I'm a million years old, and I've forgotten who I am, and everyone I know, and every other thing that ever happened to me, and everything that happened to everyone else, I'll still remember that glorious aroma, and be content. Then I'll eat the puzzle in the Nursing Home community room. July 26th- Mr. Pom Pom Hello. As I told you, we were at Lake Winnepesaukee last weekend. The was more than just frolic, however. There was meaning too. I learned a little about hope, courtesy of Mr. Pom Pom.
Main Entry: [2]hope Bah. Now that I look at it, "hope" won't do. Because the desire we all shared for Mr. Pom Pom had no expectation of or belief in fulfillment. It really seemed hopeless, for a time. Let's try something else:
Main Entry: [1]faith There, that's better. Lots of people had faith in Mr. Pom Pom, but they had faith in something else too, and went through the motions of "hoping" when the "expectation of fulfillment" of their wishes seemed very remote indeed. And Mr. Pom Pom taught us all a lesson: Sometimes you do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, and goodness is its own reward and all that; because sometimes unlikely things happen and it's best not to take your eye off the prize just because you're likely to be disappointed. Now, who is Mr. Pom Pom, and what did he do, exactly? The first question is easy. Mr. Pom Pom's dad is my good friend Steve. Steve is the most productive person I've ever met, and more fun than Mardi Gras, and a good father to Mr Pom Pom, and his big brother Flapdoodle too. Mr. Pom Pom used to be Mr. Po Po, and I'll always think of him as that. Mr. Po Po is one of those silly names you call your kid, or he calls himself that seems to stick for a while. One day, Mr Po Po had gotten mildly older, and decided that the sobriquet "Mr. Po Po" wasn't very dignified, and announced that he no longer wished to be called "Mr. Po Po." Call me Mr. Pom Pom. Much more dignified. They say every man has the right to decide what he is called, but no man chooses his nickname. Mr. Pom Pom did both, which is rare indeed. . O.K., but what did he do? Mr. Po Po, um, I mean, Mr Pom Pom? He played the drums badly on Saturday night. You see, Steve was playing music in a band with his friends for the assembled throng of his New Hampshire neighbors on that Winnepesaukee beach Saturday night, and his sunny disposition shined right on through those songs, and entertained us all. Steve's been playing in some permutation of that band for most of his life, but now the fires of celebrity are banked low in his furnace of music, and they perform only with a lot of begging and pleading. But he's lost nothing off his fastball. He still "does the show." I first met Mr. Pom Pom back when he was still little Mr. Po Po, and I was hanging around with Steve as he was practicing for a show. Mr. Po Po, who couldn't have been more than three, came into the empty nightclub with his brother and mother, listened to his father play for a minute, and announced: "It's too loud in my ears," and left. Kids are smart. Mr Po Po was no exception. But Mr. Po Po, um, er, I mean Pom Pom, is exceptional, I guess. He's a big old teenager now, and a year ago or so, he wrecked his car. Really wrecked it. And he wrecked himself in the process. Really wrecked himself. When Steve told me about it, I could offer nothing, no words of encouragement, nothing I can remember saying that was any use to the guy. Mr. Pom Pom might not live. If a miracle happened and he did, he probably wouldn't be more animated than the furniture he was placed in. What could you possibly say to help a person deal with that? Well, we all said lots of useless things. Mr. Pom Pom and his family are loved and respected by all and sundry and the outpouring of concern and grief and help, such as you could give, was outstanding. Still, there's nothing but faith, and when no one's looking, hope too. Prayer is a kind of hope. When you ask an unseen, unknowable thing to help you, when you hurl your little troubles into the maw of a universe of hurt, you know in your heart that prayer's not a lever you pull and out comes the candy. You are making your peace with the idea of what might happen, with the faith that it all meshes into something worthwhile somehow, and you're simply saying: This is not up to me. Help that boy. So you hope, even though no one's peddling hope anywhere near the kid. And he lays there, mute, bruised, bleeding, gone from sight; and his parents, his family, his friends- they wait. I don't remember when the encouragement and love you saved for his parents was transferred over to Mr. Pom Pom himself; maybe it was when you saw him in a picture, still a mess, but eating ice cream in the hospital cafeteria. It was a long slog, but not so long as it might have been, and where would we go? We had hope, you see. And so Mr Pom Pom got up on stage with his brother, in front of his beaming father and the assembled throng that knew him, and where he had been, and how he had returned, and he played a few songs, just like he'd done before any of this hope was necessary. The scar was still bright on his forehead, and he walks ever so slightly stiffly, and sometimes there's a little hitch in his speech, but not so's you'd notice. This too shall pass, it's only been a year. And they call their makeshift combo: "Those Amazing Vegetables." Steve used that as a joke band name after he saw it on a nutrition poster in a Doctor's office many years ago. It must sound wry and tasteless, and a little like whistling past the graveyard, if you didn't know it predated Mr. Pom Pom's accident by many years. He was almost a vegetable. Now he's just amazing. July 25th- G'Day We traveled to New Hampshire this weekend, to Lake Winnepesaukee. Or as my son calls it, Lake Hockeypesockey. It's a long haul from Marion, Mass, but a new wonder has appeared on our horizon. In a fit of benevolence, generosity, and good sense, The Big One's Nonni (Grandmother for all you non-Italians) gave a portable DVD player to him for his birthday present, and to celebrate his scholarship this last term. She has re-discovered fire, or a close approximation of it. Because one run through The Spongebob Movie and The Rutles, and we were already at the Lake before the kids even knew we had left home. Alexander, Caesar, Magellan, Columbus, Newton, McCormick, Edison, Einstein- pfffft. All pikers compared to Nonni, and whoever got up one morning, drove to work, and said to the people in the cubicles outside their office: "Let's make a DVD player you can take in the car. Have it on my desk by close of business Friday." The lake's a whole different animal from the ocean. It's really enormous, so the scale of it doesn't suffer, but it's a "power boat" place. Sailboat types don't care for power boats, and vice versa, but you "get" the whole power boat thing at Winnepesaukee. Walk to the end of the path, walk to the end of the dock, step on board, and blast out to the middle of the lake. We did just that, in the middle of our first night, with only the full moon for our illumination, and were safe and content, and owned that lake from end to end, or so it seemed. There's really no sound more pleasant on a hot summer night than shutting off the motor on a boat, and drifting across the moonlit water, the gentle windblown waves lapping the side of the skiff, and the sound from countless lakeside homes drifting out across the lakes, soft and indistinct, but recognizable as the sound of laughter and conviviality, and, well, fun. During the day, swimming, and jet skis, and waterskiing, and the dumb fun of being dragged on an inner tube. The Wee One sits in the water to his waist, and splashes, and giggles, while the Big One practices his backstroke swimming lessons ten feet further out: Eagle, Soldier, Monkey, Eagle Soldier, Monkey... The Queen watches both easily, as the beach is filled with people just like us, and everybody is everybody else's friend instantly, and the children drift easily into hijinks with their numerous new compatriots. No one is really a stranger, if they have children and a mortgage. The rest is details. At night, there was a party, right there on the sand, and a band played everybody else's favorite song, and wasted no time with anything obscure and nothing angry sounding. Music that sounds fun is rarer than it should be these days. The music industry has become a competition to see who can express deep emotional scars and trumpet dissonant lifestyles to go with the dissonant chords, wrapped in chainsaw sounds and screaming, and forgetting that life's really not all that bad. I've noticed that among people who's lives truly aren't easy, they never listen to depressing music. Life's too short to have misery for entertainment too. Teenagers like nasty sounding stuff, but I suspect that people with four square meals a day, a summer house, and a jet ski have little to complain about, and must enjoy snarling pop music mostly as a change of pace from their easy life. I suspect that ghetto music has become nastier as life has improved there as well. Forty years ago, it was no picnic to live in a Detroit slum, and they listened to Motown. Now rappers spit out venom, and live like pashas. Such is life. The Motown still sounds, fine, if you're interested. We heard some, on Saturday, and it still encapsulates our shared experience, and the pleasure of a simple melody, well sung:
Perhaps as you get older, and the number of funerals you attend begin to outnumber the weddings, and you've tried to catch the curve balls that life throws everyone, rich or poor, and dropped a few, you begin to value the person that can distill a smile, or better still, a pat on the back or a hopeful dream, and can sugar-frost that mental medicine with music and recharge your batteries.
How did those men from Detroit know all about my wife, and sing about her, four months before she was born? It's a mystery. July 22nd- Hi. The weather is perfect. Warm, dry, sunny. We're delivering some furniture to Wrentham Antiques Marketplace today. They were featured on Boston's Channel Five "Chronicle" newsmagazine last week. Chuck McStay had some sound advice for people shopping for home furnishings: Buy what you like. The hosts of the show discussed that approach at the end of the show for a little while, like it was a revelation to them. It's funny how far out on an intellectual limb you can climb out before the advice " stop sawing" starts to sound good. The idea that you should fill your home with items that you chose yourself because you like them is news? All good advice sounds like news, I guess, since it's so much rarer than bad advice. Chuck and Kathy are charming and their store is elegant and fun. Who knew they were so smart, too? I've written about Wallace Nutting here before. I have a great regard for his insight into American furniture. His injunction: "If it's new, it's no good." would seem to be at cross purposes with "Buy what you like." It's not. We are not blank slates, but neither are we all finished before we start. We can get advice along the way, and take it or leave it as we see fit. We have a catalog of misfortunes and triumphs, attempts and retreats, information and bunkum in our head that we use as our ruler to measure the world. We get into trouble when someone has The Answer, and we end up with a leopardskin chair that looks like a giant shoe in our living room. And we wonder: What was I thinking? The short answer is: You weren't. You were following some advice you got, or intuited, that this was the Hot Thing, and it wasn't tempered by the idea that this might not be look so swell to me in a few years. Months, maybe. Actually, It kind of struck me funny while I was unwrapping it. Nutting wasn't being rigid in his thinking, just generalizing. He was also very careful to point out that just because something was old, that didn't make it good. It just meant it was still around. He was very incisive in his judgments between one antique and another, and set the tone for really good decorating advice from professional appraisers since. Good decorating advice is an attempt to inform and lead, not shove. Home decoration is a very personal thing, and trying to bend your life into a rigid framework of another's making is a recipe for disappointment. And discomfort. Nutting knew that furniture design in the past had been based on the three big legs that hold up the furniture world: Commodity, Firmness, and Delight. In other words, is it comfortable, is it sturdy, is it lovely? Ask your self that question every time you purchase any item that will add or subtract from the sum total of your happiness. Faddish items almost always lack at least one of the three characteristics, and sometimes two, or all three. We live in a society unknown to our forefathers, where making things deliberately ugly, and making people uncomfortable, is considered artistry. Eventually, decorators and furniture makers pushed as far as you could go, and variations on the theme of Commodity, Firmness, and Delight were tougher to invent. There was only one easy way to be a trailblazer: I'll make it ugly, on purpose. I'll exaggerate its proportions, to disorient the viewer. I'll make it uncomfortable, to challenge the user. I'll make it flimsy looking, to unsettle the user, or actually flimsy, who cares if it lasts? And I'll use my iconoclasm to aid in my self-promotion, and bad will be good, and I'll be unusual. I'll make music that sounds like a china closet being pushed out a window onto a herd of dyspeptic elephants. At least no one will say I was trying to copy Mozart. Apply this sort of thinking to the other aspects of your life. Why not bathe in lava? Water's so yesterday. Why not eat poison ivy salad with motor oil vinaigrette? Insalata mista is on too many menus already. I must do something new! Why just get two breast implants? Three would be better. Three is better than two, right? What Nutting was talking about, and what Chuck McStay was talking about, and what Mary Richards and Peter Mehegan were talking about Chuck talking about, and what I'm talking about talking about talking about, is using the old approach to serving humanity to choose the items that ennoble and lend interest and comfort to your life, and your backside if they're upholstered. Commodity, Firmness, Delight. July 21st- Hola amigos I'm rereading a book about houses in 18th Century Williamsburg. Strangely enough, it's called "The Eighteenth-Century Houses of Williamsburg." by Marcus Whiffen. If it was published today, it would have a cover that said something like: "Torn From Yesterday's Headlines-The Exciting True Story of the Heat and Passion of our Passionate Hot Forefathers and Mothers:" "The Desperate Bodice Stitchers of Williamsburg!" Or something. It was published in 1960, so they just told it like it was. I'd rather read one book like this than a metric tonne of fiction anyday. The only bodices that get ripped are because they caught them on a stray nail while burning quicklime in a brick kiln, but I can do without the "excitement." It's interesting enough as it is. Colonial Williamsburg seems like an interesting place, one that I might like to visit. I've been to Washington DC's monuments, and Mount Vernon and so forth, but never Williamsburg. We'll have to wait until the Wee One is a little older, I think, as he will no doubt try to single-handedly re-enact the sack of Washington by the British during the War of 1812, and discommode the passersby, but we'll get around to it eventually. John D. Rockefeller Junior bankrolled the collection and restoration of the houses there, if I recall correctly, and good for him. I always insist that the history that truly matters is not military history, but the march of events in the life of the great mass of citizens of a great nation that defines its progress. The clashing armies are important in that they define the ability and willingness of a society to defend itself, and its will to do so. What they are defending is just as interesting to me. How did people live? Dress? Labor? Raise children? Learn? What did they sit on, and what kind of dwelling did they live in? Places like Williamsburg catalog just these quotidian details, and bless them for it. Really dry books like "Houses of Williamsburg" have the scholarly details that lend perspective to our own lives, when we see how far we have come, but also how much we still retain. I found one particularly telling detail in it. It's a contract for Indenture between an orphaned boy and a bricklayer. Here it is:
To the modern eye, this looks like two paces from slavery. But not to the modern tradesman's eye. Because what you just read was essentially the same as the situation my peers and I entered into when we entered the building trades in the seventies. It wasn't written down, but it was spoken, or understood. I'll serve you faithfully if you teach me a trade is the bargain we all struck with someone older, wiser, and more experienced, but didn't mind having a seventeen year old around to pick up the 90 pound sacks of cement for him. And the only two questions asked of the prospective applicant were: Will you work hard? and: Will you stick around long enough to make my investment in your learning pay off? Answer yes, and you'd be pointed to a stack of something heavy that very minute. In a very real way you were adopted like this fellow was. You were talking to the tradesman in the first place because you were his child, or nephew, or neighbor, or the son of a fellow churchgoer or lodge member. Somebody had vouched for you before you ever got to stand nervously in front of the guy, while he wondered if those little arms of yours could lift what he needed lifted. "Art, Trade, and Mystery" is wonderful. I've never heard it described better. Good construction work is an art, and so many poor souls flounder around these days because they learn the "art" in a desultory fashion, get stars in their eyes, and go out on their own without learning the "Trade" which refers to the business end of the deal. "Mystery" is the magnificent capstone to the trio of benefits. Specialized skills and knowledge are the heart of any trade, and customers know better than anyone that hiring a tradesmen to do anything for you is a descent into mystery. The plumber knows the mystery of making the contents of the toilet bowl disappear, and for that mystery you're glad to pay him. There's sound advice for the young man later in the deed, (it is a deed we're reading from, just like title to a piece of property) although it's more than just advice in a contract like this:
If I had a nickel for every fellow tradesman I knew, whether working alongside me or employed by me, that had ignored exactly this kind of advice and ruined their lives, I'd be rich as Croesus. Tweak it a bit, and make it the first week of instruction in Vocational High School, and you'd have my support. What's in it for the Apprentice?
So at the end of five years, the young man would know everything he needed to know to be his own man, and be able to go out in the world and make his living. It's interesting to note that he's promised what is essentially a living wage for single young person and an education, nothing more, but nothing less either. He's not promised the 1700's version of and I-pod, or bachelor pad, or a bitchin' truck, or a sports car, or Nike shoes, or restaurant meals, thrice a day. The employer has some serious obligations as well, alike in kind and importance to the contract. And I doubt the interdiction against gambling, booze and monkeyshines with girls is prudery, it's probably rooted in the knowledge that your clumsy efforts won't support that kind of easy living for a long time yet, or egads, not a wife and family yet, so knock it off. Anyway, there were no snout houses at Williamsburg, and no public welfare housing for people on the dole. Both the plans for the houses and the contracts for the workmen were drawn up by amateurs, not professionals, and they're ten times better than what we have for the same things now, drawn up by legions of professionals and lawyers. There's a lesson in that somewhere. I'm not exactly sure where. I'm an amateur philosopher, not a professional. But I assure you, in 1975, I would have signed that document, and been the better for it. July 20th- It's been hot here. Sticky hot. The Queen takes the children to the beach each day. It's at the end of the street we live on, just a few miles. The beach in our town is an afterthought, really; the town's anima is centered around being on the water, not in it. But the Big One has swimming lessons at the beach, and the Wee One sits in the gentle lapping waves, up to his waist, and dredges sand through his fingers, and is content. The beach has a lot of rules. I think the beach should have one rule: DON'T BE A JERK. That would about cover it. But things are never that simple anymore. People get together and start laying out the rules landscape, and forget when to stop. After a while, the rules, and especially the impetus behind the rules, starts to conflict with itself. And after a while, you could sum up the rules as: DANGER -WARNING -NO FUN ALLOWED. GAMBOLERS WILL BE CHASTENED. Safety is paramount, to an idiotic degree. There's a float you can swim out to, and rest a spell, and swim back. Woe be it to anyone who dives off the float into the water. This is strictly impermissible. A few years ago, a youngster broke his neck diving into the water, and the town, with an eye towards lawsuits, forbade diving. But as I understand it, the poor fellow that hurt himself did so because he didn't dive off the float, he dove off a rock near the shore, into shallow water. If he had done what is now proscribed, he would have been fine. It's curious. Judgement and reason are assumed to be beyond the capabilities of the average person here. And the idea that children should be policed by their parents is apparently no longer current. Any plastic device for amusing yourself is not allowed. Now, I understand why the sign says: No Glass. Accidents happen, and broken glass at the beach I can live without. But glass is easily replaceable by other containers, and so no ox is gored. But the interdict against boogie boards, and inner tubes and so forth extends to water wings. They're plastic, so no dice. In other words, safety is paramount to the nth degree- someone might get hurt!, so everything is banned, but taking a chance on a tot drowning for the lack of two little rings of airfilled plastic is preferable to allowing some barbarian to show up with anything so declasse as, well...plastic anything. Dogs are banned, of course. But why? It's not because the dogs really can't go to the beach and coexist with bathers; it's because civility has broken down to the point where people can't be expected to take responsibility for their animals. People bring really mean animals to public places now, and take pleasure in menacing people. They always put you off with a "My dog doesn't bite," if you ask them to restrain their pit bull named "Satan" because he's menacing your children. And he leaves the brown, cylindrical objects in the sand that smell disagreeable when you step in them, and his owner can't be bothered to clean it up, or bring the dog off the beach when he's in the grunting mood. So no dogs. More rules, because no one remembers the Golden Rule. No not that one, the one I just coined, the new one: DON'T BE A JERK. The beach is mostly empty these days, although the steamy heat has driven that Demosthenes of Boston, Hizzoner Mayor Tom Menino, to the radio each day announcing a weather alert and telling us in mumbled spoonerisms to drink lots of water and look in on shut-ins. Thanks for that, really. I was planning on sitting in front of the open oven door all day in a ski parka until you warned me off it. Note to Tom: After Demosthenes cured his faulty speech by filling his mouth with pebbles and yelling over the sound of the surf, he took the pebbles out. You seem to have left a few in there. I read in the paper that eleven people have died of heat related causes in Phoenix this week, and it reached 116 degrees on the thermometer there. If you investigated a little further, you found that ten of them were homeless people, and you can't force them to stop drinking dehydrating liquor and come in out of the sun, there's a rule against that, and they died of heatstroke. The eleventh person was an elderly woman who was found in her apartment, which was equipped with air conditioning, which she had turned off. Waste not, want not got her. So maybe mumbling Tom has a point. But people who used to look after the elderly, like their friends or relatives, did so because it was the right thing to do, not because the Mayor told them to. We live in a time where the national legislature feels the need to pass legislation called "Good Samaritan Laws," making it a crime to see someone in distress and refuse to help. But isn't it all the other laws and rules and codes and statutes that they passed, and the insane litigation that they turn a blind eye to, and sometimes encourage, that made us so distant from one another in the first place? People are afraid to interfere in anybody's affairs, not through an aversion of being a busybody, but because they're afraid of being sued. Or assaulted. The Queen and the Wee One and the Large Child settled themselves on the blanket in the sand yesterday, and tried not to break any rules. Another party settled down beside them. They had brought a nuclear powered boom box, and felt no compunction to respect the wants or wishes of others a few feet from them, and blared rap music at flight deck volume. No one ever seems to blast Respighi at that volume, I've noticed. Now my wife could go to the authorities in town, and dutifully, in a few days, the DPW would come on down to the beach, and add another line to the "Prohibited" sign, to specify music. And so the worst of us will make it impossible to have any music at the beach, which is unfortunate. That's not the way it should be done, and they'll find another way to annoy everybody next time, anyway. Because rules are for squares you know, the people who don't need rules on civility and parental probity in the first place. You know, people that don't want to listen to hateful misogynist singsong or death metal at the beach. Rules only apply to the people that need them least. I say: Take down the sign with the laundry list of real and imagined threats to civility and safety. Replace it with a smaller one: DON'T BE A JERK And give the lifeguard a pistol. Problem solved. July 19th- Buon Giorno. I've done construction of one sort or another at a lot of houses. I've seen good, bad, indifferent, and superb architecture. I've worked on brand new stuff, as well as houses where people hid during King Philip's War to avoid a severe haircut, and everything in between. And I've seen the march of events in housing, framed with the perspective that comes with experience with what came before. And I have a library card. Anyway, I think America has the best housing in the world. In almost any category you wish to measure, we live in the most comfortable and spacious digs on the planet. The average person in America has better and more reliable services to support that house to boot. Potable water comes out of the tap. Losses of electricity are rare, and usually of a short duration. When you flush the toilet, it goes somewhere. The phone always works. And we take these things for granted, and woe be to anybody who lets that reliability slip. A California governor tried an experiment a few years ago in intermittent electricity, and he's standing by the side of the road now holding a sign that says: "Will Run A State for Food" The way Americans seamlessly integrate the manifold blessings of the world's factories and laboratories into their lives exceeds even the Victorians. Computers, voice mail, cable television, satellite television, satellite radio, game consoles, e-commerce, e-mail, flat screen monitors, i-pods, compact disks, DVDs, and on and on. People find useful things, well, useful, and, well, use them, and don't give them much thought. Things are not the same everywhere. When I visited Italy six years ago, we visited some long lost Italian relatives, who were considered very middle class by Italian standards, had no where near the creature comforts we enjoy here in the States. They had one little 21 inch television. He drove what was considered a big car in Italy, a four door Peugot that I could put in the back of my truck. My Italian cousin's teenage boy coveted a cell phone, and peppered me with questions about how much a cell phone cost in America. Now, something may have been lost between my pidgen Italian, and his third language English, but the gist of the conversation was that a cell phone cost a fortune in Italy, and there was an involved procedure to get one. I explained to him that not only was the cell phone I had free, but the person who gave it to me for signing up for a monthly pittance of a service delivered it himself, to my home, for free, the day after I ordered it. He looked at me like I was Baron Munchausen, telling tales. I think they counted the spoons when we left. I invited my relatives to visit us in America, to try to reciprocate for their hospitality to us, but they weren't interested, and seemed to have the impression that America was something along the lines of the Wild West, and was too scary somehow. Not violent scary exactly, although there was a hint of that too, just too rollicking, or fast, or big or something. Yes, yes we are. How fast do things move along here? Here's some perspective: Seven years ago I worked on a new big house near here. It had about 15,000 square feet of living area. That's big, isn't it? And it wasn't just a big old plastery space inside either; it was elaborately appointed as well. The owners were people I had worked for many times over the years, and are terrific people, generous and pleasant, and were raising a big crop of delightful children. The father of the brood had made a pile for himself by excelling in his field, and they decided to build a big old house with all the bells and whistles. It was pretty opulent. The wife supervised the day to day activities as the house took shape, and we'd see the husband from time to time when he arrived home from work and looked in. One day, when the house was nearing completion, he visited the site, looked over the progress and the bills for that progress, and joked to us: "I gave my wife an unlimited budget for this place, and somehow she exceeded it." We all laughed, and he did too. Such is construction, no matter how much you're spending. I never saw him really irate about any aspect of the proceedings, except once. The kitchen cabinetry was being installed. It was extremely well designed and made, and won't be out of style or worn out anytime soon. The kitchen featured everything kitchens in a house that elaborate always had: Granite counters, Jenn-Air grill, SubZero refrigerators- two, side by side; trash compactor, two dishwashers, big stainless range; in short, the high end of the spectrum, and lots of it. The architect was there. He and the wife were planning on a location to add a wine refrigerator. The husband became perturbed, and then visibly and audibly angry. He considered a wine refrigerator an expensive and superfluous item. He said it was extravagant, and he had ten thousand dollars of refrigeration available already, and his wine could go in there. The house had a mahogany paneled dining room, a library, a conservatory, and murals on the ceilings, but it wasn't going to have an extravagance like a wine refrigerator. And so it was excised from the plans. I was in Home Depot the other day, and I noticed a pile of wine refrigerators stacked to the ceiling. They were having a special on them. They cost well under $200.00. Here's a link to Price Grabber.com; they have one for $99.00. I am beginning to see them in two bedroom ranches now. Seven years.
July18th- Howdy. We attended The Queen's family reunion over the weekend. She has a large extended family, and they gather once a year at one home to gab and gambol and make googoo eyes at the newest babies. It's quite pleasant. There is a stale Hollywood and literary formula about gatherings such as these, always highlighting internal tensions and conflicts. Everybody's always dysfunctional and fight like scorpions. Well, it just ain't so. Everybody loves one another at the one I attended, anyway. They have an appetite for simple games that can be played in the yard, like horseshoes and badminton, and everyone jostles and chats amicably, all eased by the simple fun of the activities, and the cold can. And because I married into it, I am slightly less involved than those born to it, I guess. They make me feel welcome, of course, but I get more of an outsider's perspective. And it occurs to me that the stale formula I mentioned might be spot on for the kind of people who write movie scripts. They go through the motions of reuniting with their family, but it's a hollow and staid occasion, there's no feeling of blood, and kin, and shared experience, and commonality that enlivens the gatherings of families who really do care for one another like my wife's family does. The only really familial situations Hollywood finds interesting anymore are mob weddings and poolside gatherings at porn movie makers' homes. Meh. They never seem to find "family" where it actually is. Because I was not part of the "war effort," the important business of seeing that everyone was fed, and covered in sunscreen, and so forth, I was able to wander away unnoticed for a time, and walked the street in the host cousin's central Connecticut neighborhood. It was a languid, hot, sunny day, more Alabama than New England, and since the street has no traffic, you could walk right down the middle of the hot pavement, and watched out only for morning doves in the trees. The street's lined with small ranches, built in the fifties and sixties, all cared for by their owners, who would wave as you passed before returning to their flower beds. I was struck by how little the houses had changed in the intervening fifty years since being constructed. There might be a satellite dish next to the TV antenna it replaced on the roofs, and there were no Dodge Darts with push button transmissions on their dashboards in the drives anymore, but it was about the same as it ever was. It looked like the sort of place where people who got on with their lives, got on with their lives. No pretension, but nothing gone to seed either. There are rooms inside my house messier than the flower beds I saw. It looks essentially like where I grew up, preserved in amber. Then I heard it. I hadn't heard it in so many years. I thought it was a joke, some hipster had it for a ringtone on their phone or something. Ice Cream Man Music. It was real, alright, and I traced the progress of the music and the unseen truck through nearby streets like a bloodhound. Pavlov couldn't come up with anything that talked to me, that affected my very brain stem, like that sound. Every single hot, dusty summer day in the sixties came rushing back to me at the same time, my friends' manifold noses lifted to the air like dogs to a scent; the whispered question: Did you hear that? And the shushing, and waving, and the faraway gaze with the head cocked to capture the sound and use your inborn direction finder. And the crazy tune all those trucks played would come into range, and you'd all sprint for home, to ululate at your mother: The Ice Cream Man, The Ice Cream Man, Hurry up Mom,! I mean, can I have a quarter? Hurry, please please please. And you'd gather in the scrum of kids at the window of the truck, and get a popsicle, and it was like water in the desert on Christmas Day for five minutes. And when you were done, you'd sharpen the popsicle stick to a point by dragging it back and forth on the curbstone, and show it to your friends; and that was all the danger you'd ever have in that little neighborhood. I went back to the yard, and everyone of a certain age commented on the Ice Cream Man, and how long it had been since they'd heard it, and how wonderful it was to recall their childhood instantly from that little tuneless tune those trucks played. Someone got a bright idea and said: "Hey kids, the Ice Cream Man is coming!" Let's go! The kids turned, and looked at us like we had enrolled them in Latin classes at a Reform School. They had ice cream in their refrigerator, every day, ten kinds, and watched DVD movies in their cars on the way to the party. They were swimming in a pool we would have coveted fiercely when we were young, and bounced on a trampoline we couldn't have even imagined having in someone's yard 40 years ago. They had whirligigs and cameras, (film, what's film?) and fifty delicacies laid out to try to tempt them to eat just one more. And I realized that Ice Cream Man Music is only used in the soundtracks to bad horror movies these days, when someone's reaching for a carving knife, not a sharpened popsicle stick, and no kid in their right mind who's got a freezer full of Ben and Jerry's wants to haul ass out into the street to get a Creamsicle made by the low bidder, served to them by a moody loner who's registered at the police department, and has an GPS ankle bracelet. Time marches on. I am glad for the easy prosperity I enjoy, and our children have. But I wonder what will be my boys' version of the Ice Cream Man music. The actual thing ain't cutting it. July 15th- Howdy. I wish to tell you a story about humility. It won't take long. The Big One was in the fourth grade this last year. By a trick of the calendar, he is the youngest there. If he was born three days later, he would have been in the third grade this last year. He's bright, and a tall drink of water, you know, so the 11 months between him and many of his schoolmates doesn't show much. He attends what we used to call a parochial school. They're a little more interested in academic excellence there than in the local public school, and a lot more interested in the character of their charges, so we pony up the money and his mother schleps him the ten miles or so to school every morning, and back in the afternoon. The building he sits in all day isn't much to look at, and if it was the public school in town, it would have been replaced by now with something more elaborate. The world is upside down from when I was a child; now the private school just scrapes by, and the public school is palatial and new. This might sound a little simplistic, but I asked my wife only one question about the school after she first found it and toured it with an eye to enrolling our boy: Are the desks in rows, or are they arranged in circles? Rows, she said. Case closed. He likes it there, and he thrives. Now, The Large One got excited about his science fair. It's a big one, he intoned. In the gymnasium. The whole school displays at once. Judges of knowledge and stature form the surrounding environs, including engineering students from the local college. I must win. Winning's hard, I warned him. Everyone wants to win. It's in the trying, that we learn about winning, I told him, and pulled up short before lapsing into "giving 110%" and "stepping up," and so forth. He'd have none of it. He had to get the ribbon, or perish trying. He really did exert himself. I'd never seen him pay attention to anything except Playstation like this project. He went to the library, and picked his topic and books. He had his mother cart him over to Staples, to get poster board and such, and then to the supermarket, where he bought cooking oil, and molasses, and drew a few stares at the checkout line. He returned home, and went over his experiment. What in the blue sky are you doing I asked? Why exhibiting and measuring miscibility on water of various common substances, father, he said in the tone of profound condescension I didn't expect 'til he was shouting in my ear trumpet, after he put me in a home in forty years. What made you pick that? Idunno. I wish I could spell out the way he says I don't know. It's all one word, said in a comic fashion, and sounds approximately like I ugh no or perhaps ightno, and pronounced by a slav with a sore throat. It's his all purpose term for I dunno, and whatever, and so be it, or perhaps que sera, sera as well as occasionally: Don't bug me about whatever you're buggin' me about any more. But he usually says that when you ask him how his day at school was while he's conquering the universe with his thumbs. It was jarring to hear him tell me, by inflection, that he was busy with his experiment, and wasn't interested in being questioned about it right now. And he showed how the oil and the water didn't mix, and the density of the molasses made it fall to the bottom of the glass of water, but eventually dissolve, and something about emulsification I can't remember now for the life of me, that makes me think it won't be as many as forty years before I'm in that home. He did it all himself. The he took out the poster board, made a triptych, and started scrawling all over it in his childish hand. The Big One's smart, but his penmanship is AWFUL. And he showed his hypothesis, and his procedure to test it, and his data, and his results and conclusions, and you needed a sort of infantile Rosetta Stone to decipher it. Is that an A, or an N? God he was proud of it, and we couldn't help being touched by his earnestness. And then I forgot all about it. The Science Fair is tonight Dad! You forgot. You have to go! I'm going to win! I had forgotten, and had to rush around to make myself presentable and get him there on time. The Queen stayed home with the wee one. The Wee One, who is two, would have performed a different kind of experiment at the science exhibit. What happens when I tear all these things into little pieces and break them all into bits, and stomp on them, I wonder, and run around like a cave man troglodyte road raider? So it was me and The Big One. We entered the big room, and I was taken aback. Every exhibit looked like it was made by PHDs, with help from a team of Fine Art Majors, and a Computer Graphic specialist on standby. Well, every exhibit but one. My boy's stood out, that's for sure. Someone had slaved over choosing the fonts on the laser printed charts on the surrounding exhibits, and it showed. Miles still had magic marker on his fingers from scrawling his runes on the cardboard backboard. He had performed his experiment multiple times for his peers and the judges, and I leave it to your imagination what it looked like after a nine year old boy had mixed cooking oil, molasses, and water, over and over again, with his own unsteady hands. It looked like someone had been testing all natural hand grenades at this exhibit, and had to hose it down afterward. The principal got up and started reading the list of winners. The winners would have their pictures taken for the local paper. The Big One was electrified. I'm going to get my picture in the paper! The Principal droned on. The prizes were being distributed lickity split. I looked at my son's Great Molasses Disaster of 2005, and glanced up and down the aisle at the other exhibits. They were all magnificent. Someone had an entire solar system, in a slick black box, with each planet rendered beautifully in full color, and had managed to get the strings suspending the orbs to disappear. I couldn't see how they had done it. Another produced static shocks for the participants, and looked as though it could charge a quarter a play, and people would line up for it. I thought I'd better temper The Boy's enthusiasm, lest he be too disappointed. Before I could say anything, he says: Dad, only the blue ribbon for the best of show overall is left, we should stand down front so I can go up to get it right away! And he took off, leaving me standing there with: "Son, you know there's no shame in ..." half formed on my lips. I hustled up to the front, amongst the scrum of expectant children and parents, and my boy. Of course he won. I was agog. More exactly, I was sticky from molasses, and I was agog. The Boy walked up and got his prize, and said a few inaudible words two feet below the microphone, and I was, well proud of him, but humbled. Because the judges had seen what I should have seen and didn't. My boy had done it himself, and it showed. Boy did it show. But no matter. His experiment worked. It showed the properties he was trying to show. He drew the right conclusions, and scrawled them on his display. In short he did it, when others had it done for them, and the judges recognized it. But the real lesson was learned by his old man. I'll never doubt that little urchin again. July 14th 2005- Good day to ye. Let's be positive today. Nary a discouraging word, as they say. O.K. I'm positive that Hollywood hasn't made ten movies as good and entertaining as "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" in the intervening 57 years since it was made. Yup, I'm positive. Hollywood is in a slump, according to Variety. People don't plunk it down reflexively at the box office any more. Lots of head scratching up and down the Sunset Strip. Well, let me give you some hints, over there on the west coast, about why we're not buying as much of this piffle as previously: It's because it's crap. It always was crap, I know. When I was a kid, TV was in black and white, and had three or four channels. You watched whatever was on it. Period. And if you were home sick from school, propped up with pillows in the bed, fortified with those wonder drugs, aspirin and ginger ale, the one treat you got was the 11 inch black and white TV at the foot of your bed, and bad movies all day long. TV, with only those three or four channels, still didn't know how they could possibly fill all those hours. They'd show any drivel: Candlepin bowling for a couple of bucks, or maybe just a gift certificate. Community Auditions. Anyone who's ever seen Community Auditions can't watch American Idol. Once you've seen the spectacle of an overfed adolescent in a tutu twirling a baton to a lounge combo version of a Sousa march, nothing else will do. But of all the dreck, Dialing for Dollars was king. Dialing for Dollars was a local show, where a bad radio announcer would host an interminable movie in the afternoon, and occasionally pause to pick bits of a shredded phonebook out of a rotating basket, and call the phone number on the scrap. At first, the available technology didn't even allow you to hear the person being called, making the tableau seem even stranger than it was. If the person was home, and watching the movie, and could identify the movie, and knew the exact amount of cash they were giving away, they won a few bucks. Think of those odds. The unintentional comedy factor was pretty high; picture watching, watching mind you, a bad emcee count on his fingers and intone: One ring. Two rings. Three rings. Four Rings... People would actually answer their phones back then, and talk to whoever was on the line. No call screening. No unlisted numbers. No cold call salesman. No answering machines yet. Hell, the host would still reach party lines occasionally back then. For you |
