Happy Birthday Joe!

   

   Yesterday I launched into my 76th year. My life has been interesting to myself, but it would appear boring to others so I will write instead about the changes I have seen in my country. When I was born, Hitler had been dead less than two years. All of America's rivals were down. Europe and Japan were wrecked, Russia was reeling, and China was a land of half a billion peasants. America's factories, which had turned out unlimited weapons of war, switched over to consumer goods. The vets went to college, built houses and filled them with those consumer goods.

   Our TV was filled with documentaries about how we had won the war, along with nightmarish films about the holocaust. On holidays the still young veterans marched in their uniforms, or watched from the sidewalk with a trouser leg pinned up. My grandfather taught me to put my hand over my heart when our flag went by.

   The streetcar tracks were paved over and busses took their place. The small patches of woods in our neighborhood were cleared and filled with new homes. Old carriage houses went down and were replaced with homes. The chicken runs of immigrant families disappeared. The cry of the rag man and the rattle of his horse drawn carriage died away forever. The double and triple decker houses endured though and have gained iconic status.

   The church loomed larger then. We were steeped in incense and candle wax. Our teachers rustled in their wimples, their beads clacking against their crucifixes. The devil had gravitas. Now he's retreated to other lands. Pain relief is better now. The doctor is our priest. The churches are more intent on legislation. Some.

   My mother and the mothers of my friends stayed home and cared for their children and their homes. The dads got second jobs and new used cars appeared in front of the houses. The playground was flooded in winter for skating and the sledding hill was covered with snow for weeks. It's grown milder by the coast and kids skate in the arena now and go north to ski. Any local snow melts in a few days.

    When my grandfather sent me to get the morning paper, there were five available. The papers were printed in large buildings downtown. Everything was heavy and solid, telephones, cameras, binoculars. That solidity was a sign of quality. Those things have been reduced and consolidated. My phone fits in my pocket. It takes great pictures, contains detailed maps, and the entire world of literature and entertainment is available on it. My sense of community has widened and thinned.

   When the subway train to downtown passed through the run-down part of the city, Blacks and Asians got on. Their situation has improved a little. We still have miles to go. I only saw Indians in cowboy movies, but they were in their own ghetto at the time. There was love between men and women when I was a kid. There still is, but the dynamics have changed. They are changing still. There was a Cold War when I was young. It's been flaring up and down ever since. Money was scarce back in my youth but it bought a lot. Now money is available on easy terms, but you need a wheelbarrow to haul it away. It's value falls and rises like the tides. 

   I sometimes feel nostalgic for the old days and departed friends, but I have adapted to the new world. It's mostly better. Last weekend there were lots of Saint Patrick's Day parades around the country. In the old days, the parade was always on the 17th. It was a civic holiday in our city so we were out of school anyway. All the holidays were celebrated then on the day they were supposedly celebrating. Now most of the holidays have slid over to Monday to provide a three day weekend. And that's ok.

   We're living in an age of convenience. We expect to get any goods or services promptly and at a reasonable price. We expect to be happy. The pandemic put a damper on our expectations which may create new methods to satisfy our desires. When I was a kid, we worried about vague enemies allied with the devil dropping the atomic bomb on us. We still worry about evil forces working to destroy our way of life. But we have more and better ways to ease our anxiety now.

   As for me, I like to look at the sky and let my imagination, abetted by my phone, carry me beyond the clouds and the blue, across the universe of space and time. When I consider the billions of galaxies out there, I feel insignificant. But when I consider the billions of electrons dancing on a pinhead, I feel just about right. Maybe I'll write my memoirs after all.

Very most interesting

Bam!

 

   Does everyone remember Emeril? Emeril Lagasse: restauranteur and cooking show star. When he adds a special ingredient to his dish he says bam! He calls it kicking it up a notch and invites the audience to take a swig of their beverage.

   Emeril is based in New Orleans, but I liked him because he was born in my home state of Massachusetts. As a youth he was a good drummer. Maybe that's where he got his bam. He was offered a scholarship to a music conservatory but he went to chef school instead.

   While Emeril has mastered Cajun and Creole cuisine, my specialty is pizza. My love of pizza goes back to the days when my brother and I would scrounge up a dime or ten pennies and run to the local hole-in-the-wall pizza joint run by real Italians. From Italy. We'd sprinkle hot pepper flakes on top of our slice, cut it in half, then run to the park to ease our burning tongues at the big water fountain.

   I never considered making my own pizza. You don't make baguettes when you live in Paris. When I moved to Minnesota we found an excellent pizza place in our St. Paul neighborhood. But when we moved north six hours to Roseau things changed. We were reduced to eating frozen supermarket pizza. But were we really condemned to a life of cardboard pizza? 

   I had already taught myself to bake bread. Couldn't I just spread the bread dough onto a cookie sheet and go from there? Thus began my long apprenticeship in making a delectable pie. We ate a lot of questionable pizza in those years, but I kept kicking it up notch by notch, and eventually guests at the dinner table declared my pie toothsome. If I see a former guest after a long absence, his eyes will mist over and he'll say, "Pizza man."

   On a family trip to Ireland I made the mistake of bringing my pizza pans along. Mozzarella cheese is not a staple in Ireland and it took many euros to get each pie to the table. Also, our lodgings had new-fangled convection ovens and I kept scorching the top of the pizza while the bottom remained raw or vice versa. My sister's kids had made friends with the Irish kids in the next condo and they scarfed down the pizza which I considered way below my standard. One of them dubbed me 'Papa Joe,' God love him.

   That brings up the point that even bad pizza is pretty good. I tell that to people who want to learn how to make pizza. You'll create some embarrassments at first, but persevere. Keep on kicking it up a notch. People will love it that someone else is making supper. I've learned from bitter experience to have plenty of appetizers on hand. It's hard to bake more than one pizza at a time if you're not a pizzeria.

   Perfection is elusive, but improvements can be had. I'm always tweaking. Last fall my friend Ginny gave me a bag of Italian 00 flour. The Italians use this extra fine flour for pastry and pizza. I tried it mixed with bread flour in various proportions and realized this was a real kicker-upper.  But the 00 flour was only available in Italian markets or online and was ridiculously expensive. But I had to have it. After surfing the web awhile I found I could buy it in bulk for only three times the cost of regular flour.

   The new flour behaved a bit differently in the oven. The bottom was getting done before the top. The solution was to move the pan under the broiler for the last 90 seconds. Bam! I don't know what the future holds, but like to I imagine a line of mourners at my funeral coming to the pulpit and saying things like, "I don't care what you say about Joe, he did make a pretty good pizza."

My muse

Bring Back the Pig

    I love museums. Especially museums with lots of funky stuff in them. The old Roseau County Museum used to have a big jar of formaldehyde containing a two-headed pig just inside the front door. A bit beyond that was a pair of shredded overalls that had been struck by lightening. The young woman who had been wearing them at the time went on to lead a productive life, according to the explanatory index card.

   After the Roseau flood of 2002, a new museum was built and the overalls and pig(s) went into museum limbo. Many years ago I visited the North Dakota State Museum in Bismarck, North Dakota. It was filled with dusty down-home items. After the tear-down and rebuild, the arrowheads and scythes were replaced with anodyne educational displays about big agriculture, the aboriginal past, and the energy sector future. 

   One museum immune from such changes is the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. When Mrs. Gardner gave the museum to the public, she stipulated that her collection must remain as she had arranged it. There's a rumor that if the current board changes anything, Harvard University gets the museum. During a visit to the museum one time, my sister pointed out a pair of well dressed gentlemen. "Those are the guys from Harvard keeping an eye out," she said.

   Isabella was born in New York in 1840 and grew up in Manhattan, the daughter of a wealthy linen merchant. When she was 16 the family moved to Paris. Isabella visited the great Renaissance art in Italy and she vowed if she ever had money she would build a house and fill it with art for people to visit, which is exactly what she did thanks to an inheritance from her father.

   Not too far from Fenway Park in Boston she built a Florentine style palace. She became a patron of the arts and bought lots of paintings. There are no two-headed pigs in the collection but there's lots of bric-a-brac in addition to the Botticellis and the Titians. It's all arranged in an old fashioned and wonderful way. One of the strangest sights are the eleven empty picture frames, for it was on this day in 1990 that the world's largest art heist took place at the museum.

   Early in the morning two thieves dressed as Boston police officers gained entry to the museum and subdued the two guards. In 81 minutes they collected eleven works of art including two Rembrandts and a Vermeer. They also took the cassettes in the security cameras. Total value of the stolen paintings is half a billion dollars. A ten million dollar reward has been offered for information leading to their return. Will they ever return? Like Charley of the MTA, their fate is still unlearned (what a pity).

If your name is Isabella, you get in free. That's funky.

For Want of a Selfie Stick

    Guinness Stout has been the ruin of many a poor boy, and Lord, I know I'm one. The most recent time was in the liquor store in Thief River Falls. Steve and I had come to town that morning to recycle our glass bottles. Guinness is a dollar cheaper per six pack in Thief River, so Steve always stocks up on Ireland’s best when in town.

  St. Patrick's Day was coming when I make my traditional Guinness beef stew, so I needed a six pack myself. But when Steve grabbed his three six packs, the rest of the packs failed to slide down the rack so I couldn't reach any of the black stuff. I looked around for a stick, but sticks aren’t something you usually find lying around a liquor store. I told another guy my plight and he said, "They let you go around back to get what you want." Ah, a beer cave.

   The guy pointed to a double door labeled "Employees Only.” That couldn't mean me I surmised. I walked past an office and into a large heated room full of cases of beer. Where's the six packs of Guinness, I wondered. I was about to seek help when a beer truck driver came in the back door pushing a load of cases on a dolly. He opened a heavy cooler door and I followed him through the slit plastic inner barrier.

   I then followed my inner GPS to the corner where the Guinness had to be and, luck of the Irish, there it was. I grabbed a six pack and pushed the other packs down the rack. I was feeling proud as I headed out to pay, but the cashier gave me a such a look of surprised disapproval as I hadn't gotten since I was in the custody of Sister Eubestrabius back at Holy Name School.

   The cashier had welcomed us on our arrival, but now she was all business. Her body language said it all. "I wasn't supposed to go back there was I?”

"No."

"A guy told me I could."

"Was he an employee?" She knew he wasn't.

I stuck my card into the reader. Shelly (her name) didn't thank me for my business. Nor did she ask if I wanted a receipt (I didn't). I thought of making a jest about spraying the beer racks with Pam, but when I saw her right hand twitching the way Sister Eub's used to twitch before she pushed the button under her desktop to summon Father McLain from the Office of the Inquistion, I decided to shut up.

Outside, Steve was lounging in the late winter sunshine. "Where ya bin?" he asked. "Shut up and drive," I suggested.

The devil's buttermilk, say some.

Old John Harvard

   

   On our recent visit to Massachusetts we went one day up to Cambridge to visit Harvard's Natural History Museum. From the subway station in Harvard Square we walked through Harvard Yard to reach the museum, passing the statue of John Harvard after whom the college is named.

   It was on this day in 1639 that the college was named in Harvard's honor. Harvard, a clergyman, bequeathed half his estate plus his library to the college at the time of its foundation just before he died of tuberculoses at the age of 30.

   John Harvard was born in London in 1607. His father was a tradesman and there was enough money to send John to Cambridge University to study for the ministry. In 1637 John and his wife Ann emigrated to the newly formed Massachusetts Bay Colony and settled in Charlestown across the harbor from Boston. 

   Religion was important to the early settlers and a college was proposed to "advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches." Within a few months of his arrival in the New world, John was on his deathbed. He left half his monetary estate and their house to Ann. The rest went to the new college. John died in September, 1638.

   Harvard has tremendous cachet just by being the oldest college in the U.S. At first the college existed to educate ministers for the church. It didn't become a research university until after the Civil War. In 1879 Radcliffe College opened for women. Harvard professors were paid to repeat their lectures to the women students. The two schools merged in 1999. By the middle of the 20th century the school was admitting students not just because of their lineage and wealth, but also because they were talented. 

   By 2022 John Harvard's £400 had grown to $53 billion, the largest academic endowment in the world. It also has the largest academic library in the world. But does all this make Harvard the best university in the world? It's a subjective judgement, but according to the U.S. News & World Report rankings of global universities for 2022, Harvard is #1. Number 2 is MIT, a mile down the avenue from Harvard.

   Stanford University is #3. Number 4 is 30 miles up the road at Berkeley. Oxford is #5. Cambridge is #8 and the next eight are in the U.S. The top 25 are are all in English speaking countries until the Swiss Federal Institute (26). Tsinghua University in Beijing is tied for #26 with the Swiss. The University of Minnesota is #55. Not bad. Could be worse.

Proof of vaccination is on the plaque below.

   

Too Many Irons

    During our recent visit to the family in Massachusetts, I was telling my brother Steve how much we were trying to cram in. Steve said I had too many irons in the fire and reminded me of a story I had told him about Jerry Solom. Jerry was a machinist who lived two miles south of of us back in Wannaska. In a corner of his shop he had his grandfather’s old blacksmithing tools. 

   Jerry still used his grandfather’s forge for small jobs. I was watching him once as he heated several iron rods for bending. At one point he picked up a rod that had burned completely through the middle. “This is what happens when you have too many irons in the fire,” he said.

   I told my brother Steve this little anecdote as an example of seeing a cliché in action. We use lots of expressions without realizing where they come from. The word cliché itself is another example. It would be a bit of a cliché if I explained right now why cliché is a cliché.

   I tell Steve these little vignettes because I know he won’t forget them. Indeed he brought it up the other day after a gap of many years. Steve’s wife Jean then said, “Tell Joe what you know.” Steve said, “I know two things for sure: adsorption is like Velcro and absorption is like a sponge.”

   I had studied Latin in high school and remembered that ad means 'to' and ab means 'from.' Adsorption takes place at the molecular level so it was hard to picture atoms velcroing themselves to each other. I expected more from absorption.   

  I got my “irons in the fire” moment a few days later at another family gathering. I was making a big batch of carbonara at my son Matt’s place. Heather had started a pot of water for me and as I put in the first pound of linguini, I realized the pot was too small for two pounds, so I started another pot.

   I was a bit unsure of my measurements for eleven diners. The recipes on the internet were all over the map (cliché) so I took the middle ground. The first pound of linguini was cooked several minutes before the second. I drained the linguini and returned it to the pot then poured on half my cream and egg yolk mixture. I quickly realized I had been precipitate. There was far too much liquid in the pot even after stirring in the parmaesan cheese.

   “It will absorb,” Heather said. Heather always remains calm in a crisis. I covered the pot and left it on low heat. By the time the second pot was ready, the soupy cream in the first pot had been absorbed from the pot by the linguini. Ab can mean 'by' as well as 'from.' I realize this is not as good an example as Jerry's burnt out iron rods, but I needed a subject for this post so I struck while the iron was hot.

Saint Jerry, patron of fix-iters.