Pedestrian View

Leatherheads is a little piece of local history by Chuck Frederick of the local News Tribune. I saw a promotion at Barnes and Noble a couple of weeks ago, and I had a gift card burning a hole in my wallet, so I picked it up.

I don’t read a lot of history, especially local history, so it was a little departure. I actually follow sports, especially the NFL, a little closer than I’d like to admit, so it was interesting to think about the early days in the 1920s when this violent game came into it’s own on a professional level. Some things I learned are:

• College football was around since the late 1800s. The “professional” game was not welcomed by the college ranks.
• It was probably played just as violently back then, and with far less protection (leather helmet).
• Teams came and went every season, like the Minneapolis Mariners, the Milwaukee Badgers, the Kansas City Cowboys, and of course, the Duluth Eskimos.
• The only recognizable teams today from those early years are the Green Bay Packers, the Chicago Bears, and the New York Giants.
• Teams scheduled their own games, and sometimes bailed out part way through the season.
• The kicking game was far more revered than it is now. Drop kicking was common (completely unknown now). A guy who could punt the ball was a big star.
• You could tackle an unfair umpire, knocking him out of a game, with very little repercussion.

The focus is Ernie Never’s Eskimos from Duluth, on the theory that they saved the NFL. I’m not sure that Frederick proves his case, but the Eskimos had two crazy seasons in 1926 and 1927 where they barnstormed around the country, playing only one home game, using Never’s star power to basically promote the league. They were sort of like the Harlem Globe Trotters, except they were beatable.

At times, the reading got a little tedious because most chapters are basically a series of game summaries. In addition to Nevers (who I hadn’t heard of), Frederick also precedes nearly every figure in the book with the word “legendary” at one time or another, such as the legendary Johnny “Blood” McNally, or the legendary Ole Haagsrud. As Frederick admits in his introduction, records were scarce and unreliable, and interviews often conflicted, so it’s no surprise, perhaps, that “legendary” is the watchword for the book.

Still, it’s a fun read, and it made me hanker for the days of yore when Johnny Blood could get caught reading poetry in his boxer shorts to some fans on a street corner in the snow. Pep talks with Payton Manning aren’t quite the same.

Kylie turned 18 yesterday. We all woke up this morning and raced through the customary scramble to get to school as though nothing had changed, but something has. I just haven’t figured out exactly how.

The cliché regarding this passage, and it’s absolutely true, is that it seems like yesterday we were holding her for the first time. Her birth was pretty typical, really. There were 20 hours of brutal labor (which I can’t imagine). There was the relief of an epidural (which I also can’t imagine). There was my mother-in-law efficiently kneading Sherry’s back between contractions, briskly but gently humming a fight song, possibly “Cheer, Cheer for Old Grygla High,”? though not “Hurrah for the Red and White.”? There was the doctor who was summoned just after midnight, then called again 45 minutes later because he’d fallen back to sleep. Poor sleepyhead. He was there for the birth, so I bear no animosity. There was my first glimpse of her hairy crown, and her struggle to get past the ears which I blamed on genetically large Peterson ears (turns out her ears were of normal size, so I was wrong on that one). Finally, at 2:36 a.m. she was out, a red squawking spider of arms and legs, messy, adorable, the center of the universe, and it feels like yesterday.

It also feels like yesterday that she was about five years old, watching The Lion King or maybe Aladdin, and so mesmerized that, though she was terrified during the climactic scenes, she could not tear herself away. She’d watch the final scenes of those movies peeking out from behind the sofa, trembling but commanding her parents not to turn the movie off.

Yesterday there was also junior high, angst filled and complete with fiery email

missives regarding how unfair (aka: stupid) her parents are. Somewhere in here she discovered injustice on a broader scale, too, and cried for people she’d never met.

Then there’s been high school, real problems, real friends, real friends with real problems, real boyfriends with even worse problems, real joy, and very real pain. Did I mention tears? There have been tears. This yesterday bleeds into today, by the way.

The real yesterday, however, she stood on stage performing in Central’s competition One Act play. The brave cast was in front of an audience of boorish peers, and
Kylie was fearless. About eight minutes into the show (these things are precisely timed), she enters on heels, a short skirt, and a wig, saying, “Mrs. Smith, there’s a telephone call for you in the office.”? She does this breathlessly, like she’s a gumshoe’s secretary from a 1940’s radio drama, and the boors believe her. So do I. She’s amazing. Thrilling. Terrifying. Terrific. Like the angel Gabrielle in Sunday School Musical, or perhaps Uma Thurman. In that moment, she’s the exact center of the known universe - unknown, too — and though I don’t know how she got there, I’m glad. Proud.

What happens next is even better. She gracefully steps aside from her moment of glory and helps the rest of the cast blaze, one at a time, each in his or her own moment. By the end, the constellation is just right — each star brilliant and perfectly balanced with the others.

I still don’t know what’s happened in 18 years, but it’s been progress toward something authentically wonderful.

Happy Birthday, little spider. I love you.

My friend Kathy Fahrion, a great recommender of books, placed this in my hands one day last fall, saying I had to read it. Forever Lilly is Beth Nonte Russell’s memoir of an adoption trip to China, and Kathy, I’m glad I read it.

To be honest, I started it once and laid it aside because it didn’t grab me. Russell sprinkles her adoption narrative with a series of dream sequences that eventually lay out a parallel story set in feudal China. The whole “dream” seemed too Disney to me, like I was reading the first draft of Mulan.

Recently I picked it up again, and it grabbed me when Russell finally meets the baby. Her description of the plight of Chinese orphans, particularly females, is compelling. I have a better understanding of the conditions there for millions of babies, and Russell tells a good story. The details of her first adoption, given the fact that she originally set out as a spectator, are fascinating.

The whole understory that supposes that she’s playing out an unfinished drama from feudal China is still a bit much for me to swallow, but the last two thirds of the book were a great read.

An offshoot of our Marshallese sojourn last summer was our Hawaiian visit with old friends Dave and Cindy, who we’ve vaguely kept in contact with over the past 15 years. They’re two of the most courageous people that I know.

Dave and Cindy Staley lived kitty corner from us in the old Shiprock High teacher compound back in our Rez days.

From our front yard, we looked over Dave and Cindy’s roof to see Tse’bit’ai (Rock with Wings) itself. Dave and I taught English together, tried (failed) to start a band together, were John Kelly disciples together (see future blog “John Kelly: Man or Myth”), and hiked canyons together. Sherry and Cindy baked bread together, read books together, and had their first babies within a year of each other (Philip is just under a year older than Kylie).

We last saw them in 1992 at the Emmanuel Mission, 14 miles down the roughest dirt road on the Rez (possibly the planet). Rattling our vehicle over those 14 miles, Dave once joked that he and Cindy called it the “road to divorce.” Ironic.

The past fifteen years have seen Dave and Cindy through some rough times. Without going into detail, they’re no longer married and both have new partners. They now live on The Big Island, Hawaii, in the Kona region. To see them, though, they’ve weathered about as much as Shiprock, or Mauna Kea (pick your mountain). They’re great parents to Phil, Ron, and Andy and make a difficult lifestyle look, well, worth living.

Cindy, now Cynthia, lives with her partner, Cindy, north of Kona and works for the TSA at the airport (she knows all of the Homeland Security colors). Off duty, she met us at the airport and took us out to dinner that night with the kids. Though it was clear she had weathered mighty pecular storms, she was the same Cindy we knew fifteen years ago - a person of faith and courage, a mother who knows her children intimately, a person who cuts through the superficial stuff of life. Note how Cindy has acclimatized to Hawaii. She looks cold.

Below, you can see the whole group - from the left, there’s Andy, Kyle (a friend), Phil, Ron, Cindy, and a camera-mugging bunch of weirdos.

One highlight of the evening was Phil’s description of the day’s catch. He’d caught a sea urchin, which he slowly tormented all day by pulling out it’s spines. Upon our return to it, it looked like this.

It once looked something like this.

Dave, something of a sea urchin himself, met us the next day at the hobby store that he runs with his parter, Sara. The store is called Tioli, which is Italian for Take It Or Leave It (OK , it’s an acronym that’s deceptively Italian). Here, Dave showed us all things remote controlled - airplanes, helicopters, cars - and all things craft or art related.

Dave used to be a teacher, then a principal, and then one day he just up and walked away into the world of entrepreneurship. Tioli, he describes, is kind of like Cheers in that every day the store fills up with regulars who hang around, playing the remote control simulators or flying real copters around the store until something gets broken. Around noon, someone inevitably brings in some food. No beer, but life is pretty good.

Sing with me. “Making your way in the world to day takes everything you’ve got. Thank goodness for friends with high-tech toys” (doesn’t really work, does it).

Dave was the same old Dave - a wise, loving father; a quietly wicked sense of humor, still caching me off guard; a knack for finding what’s off the beaten path, even in tourist trampled Hawaii. For example, we tried to get a tour of Goodall Guitars (for you, Buck!) and were asked to leave.

We ate authentic Hawaiian cuisine at the Pine Tree Cafe, where I ate roast pork and cabbage from a styrofoam box (real food, and not a tourist in sight).

After lunch, we headed up the west side of Mauna Kea (the island is one big mountain, after all) for a hike in the jungle in search of feral pigs and mongoose, both non-indigineous and overrunning the islands. Sunny Hawaii was lost from view in the fog, so being from Duluth, we felt right at home. Emerging from the fog up high, we found this sign, a statement of real Hawaiian hospitality.

We also had lots of dicoveries on a jungle path. For example, we found Kurtz’s hut from Heart of Darkness.

Wild ginger.

And a clever hidey spot (yikes, someone needs to work on those eyes!).

No pictures, but I saw a pack of pigs cross the road, and the mongoose were everywhere.

Some of us, at least, will be heading to the Marshall Islands again in the next few years; therefore, there’s a good chance that we’ll be able to see Dave and Cindy and company again. After fifteen years there were some new bends, and water is flowing in unexpected directions, but it’s great to see the same river, and it will be great to see it again.

As usual, I’m several years behind the book club curve, but I finally got around to Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner over break. It’s a definite must read in these times.

The well drawn characters of Baba and Hassan, and riveting, painful scenes move the novel along, but what was most compelling to me was the portrait of Afghanistan as it moved from pre-Russian invasion, through the invasion era, and finally to the Taliban period. I was terribly ignorant of much of this and was particularly struck by two things.

One was the ethnic antagonism between Pashtun and Hazara. I’m forever flabbergasted that such human hatred exists in the world, and forever surprised to find out about a new history of butchery. We’ve been hearing about the genocide in Darfur for awhile now, not to mention the Sunni/Shi’a mess in Iraq, and currently the same news echoes out of Kenya. I grew up loving maps, but I’m realizing again how false the lines of Nations, mostly drawn by the West, divide up the world. It’s not that simple.

The other thing that sticks with me is the violence, duplicity, and oppression of the Taliban. Granted, Hosseini is writing fiction, but I have to believe that the things he portrays are at least a partial reflection of actual Talibanic events. How any group could justify such events as being of God is absolutely unfathomable, except that it’s been done some many times throughout history it shouldn’t surprise anyone. God must get really tired of that.

While the long section about the narrator’s courtship was a tedious contrast to the rest of the novel, and the way that the circularity of events closes was almost too perfect to believe, Hosseini avoids an easy ending. I’m going to read A Thousand Splendid Suns soon.

Catching up with the classics, and with my daughter and her AP English class, I read Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness over break, too. What can I say, except perhaps, “Oh! The horror!”

I remember reading Moby Dick a few years back and feeling the same way. I’m glad I read it, but it wasn’t easy.

As sort of a pre-psychological exploration of “madness,” Kurtz and Marlowe are interesting portraits of someone gone mad with power, and someone obsessed with someone mad with power. It’s also a very damning portrait (unintentional on Conrad’s part, I think) of colonialism. Chinua Achebe long ago labeled Conrad a racist, and rightly so.

There are two other things I found difficult about reading it. One is that Conrad gives no one else besides Kurtz and Marlowe names, a stylistic choice, no doubt, emphasizing that neither character values anything about the world beyond their own obsessions. The other European characters get labels (ie. the manager, the Russian) and the natives are described in barely animalistic terms (hence the racism charge). While I could see Conrad’s reason for this choice, I found it difficult to engage with the novel as a reader. The effect of all these vaguely described characters kept everything at too much of a distance for my liking.

The other barrier for me is that Conrad just tends to prattle on. Hemingway would have captured a ten page Conrad scene in two sentences.

Still, I’m glad to have read it, and I’m looking forward to seeing Apocalypse Now again soon.