Leslie likes to shop at Carson's and listen to WJOB.
Without the will to swirl chocolate, you might as well fold up the tent and leave the tailgate. There is no joy in consistently losing. You can say – “hey, it’s just good to be part of the competition.” But that only lasts so long. Sooner or later, you need to win.
It’s Christmas Eve morning. Still dark out. The sun won’t come out for another couple of hours. There’s supposed to be snow, but I haven’t looked. What I was thinking of doing, if it has snowed, was to take the mountain bike for a ride down the Little Calumet River. There’s a certain peacefulness of the tires rolling over virgin snow. You make your own tracks. With the grip of fresh snow, your front tire is less likely to slide, less chance of doing a face plant on the day before Christmas.
I don’t know why, but I have the urge to ride my bike to the boyhood home of Jean Shepherd. It’s not that far and I’ve never been there. It’s on Cleveland St. somewhere. I could find it easy enough, but is it really worth the effort?
Part of the urge to make this pilgrimage – because that is what it would be – is that “A Christmas Story,” Shep’s one mega-hit, is all over the television these days. The three or four of you can turn on your cable right now and watch Ralphie get his mouth washed out with soap. You can see a leg lamp, a jar of Ovaltine, a turkey in the mouth of the Bumpus’s dog. There is humor and there is Hammond. Why not ride your bike in the snow to Jean Shepherd’s house on Christmas Eve?
I have developed this habit of listening to old Shep recordings from the 1960s. That’s when he did the late-night show on WOR that became the precursor for the whole genre of talk radio. It wasn’t political talk, as is popular now. It was just talk.
And what Shep talked about most was his childhood and teen years in Hammond, Indiana. He talked about fireworks and the tax appraiser, ham radios and his first date. Shep brought his Midwestern childhood to the Easter seaboard, and they ate it up.
But there’s a part to this equation that I think about a lot when I’m lying there before bed listening to Shep. it’s what happened right after the events of “A Christmas Story.”
It turns out that Shep’s dad, played eloquently by Darrin Gavin in the movie, worked at the candy factory that sits empty in north Hammond. There he met a secretary. And not too long after “A Christmas Story,” Shep’s dad left his mom and skidaddled with the secretary.
It’s a story that repeated itself a lot in the 1930s, the 40s, the 50s and now. You go off to work, meet a curvy woman who’s nice to you, and you succumb to the spell. Workplace romance could happen to anyone, man or woman.
But it happened to Shep’s dad. I only read this once somewhere, so I’m not entirely certain about the details surrounding the departure of Shep’s dad.
But no matter how it exactly came down, it makes sense that Shep would romanticize that final Christmas together. That’s how I watch “A Christmas Story.” It’s not just the retelling of a tale of a Midwestern Christmas in simpler times to a New York audience. It’s a man who was hurt deeply not too long after it happened. He remembers that one Christmas more fondly than any other Christmas because it was the last before the axe fell down.
…. By the way, what does it mean when you’re typing along in the darkness, with the only light a glow from your Apple laptop, and all of the sudden a huge bug appears in the corner of the screen? There’s a message in there somewhere. You tell me what it is.
…. Speaking of pilgrimages, Alexis and I made the hour drive to Lighthouse Mall in Michigan City yesterday. There’s outlets there from just about every store you can think of.
I wasn’t much help with the shopping. I worked my ass off of in radio for the past few weeks, took a final, went to tons of Christmas celebrations, and now I’m a used dishrag. This is a dangerous combination, by the way – Not being in the Christmas spirit as Christmas comes around. I’ve lived through the celebration of the birth of Christ several times in my life not feeling Christmas at all. It makes you feel un-American.
The mall at Michigan City is outdoors. You walk from store to store in the face of a 25-mile-an-hour wind straight off of Lake Michigan. Yesterday, it was only 29 degrees, but the wind was angry. You could feel it in your nipples every time you lugged a bag from the Coach store over to Banana Republic, from Eddie Bauer to Yankee Candle. I didn’t mind the lugging so much. It was just good to have my wife to myself. I’m selfish in that way. You can say what you want about growing older and not needing that alone time as a couple as much, but it’s all bullshit. When you find someone you like to spend time with, you’re a goner.
Scale a sand dune until
you run out of breath.
Without railroad tracks
to guide your way, you
lose your way to Michigan City.
There’s a brewery there
that serves fish tacos.
Me and my wife of 26 years
go there sometimes and laugh.
There’s a beach a couple
blocks away where we
took our girls to roam.
There’s a photo of my
wife on a retaining wall
wearing John Lennon sunglasses.
She smiles. Behind the
shades is worry, but we
won’t talk about that.
Let’s just recall that at
sunset there’s no place
like the pier and lighthouse
at Michigan City. I left
something on the sand there.
It wasn’t my wife of
26 years or my kids or
even my lighter. It
was just so long ago.
I lost my youth.
Sunsets at Michigan City
make you want to write
a letter to your grandma
or ride your bicycle
for ten miles. Moments
that don’t limit possibility
freak me out. I wind up
looking for them over and
over again. The trick
is that it’s gone forever.
Go ahead and look your
ass off. You’ll never
find it. You’re stuck with
the Now. And the zacklies
every time you wake up.
There is radio in here somewhere. It’s right down the street from Lighthouse Mall that WIMS AM 1420 sits. Alexis and I once held the FCC license for said radio station. But here’s where the regulation of the FCC comes in. Technically, we still had to have a presence in Michigan City to own WIMS. That’s just how the rules were ten years ago. Last month, Ajit Pai and the rest of the band of FCC brothers took that rule away. You now can own a radio station in Topeka, Kansas, and one in Hammond, Indiana – and you don’t ever have to go to Hammond, Indiana. You don’t have to have a full-time engineer there. You don’t have to maintain a studio there. You don’t have to do much more than play the station ID at the top of the hour and paint the tower every few years.
That’s a huge change. If it had come earlier, we might still own the AM station there. Who knows? What matters right now is that Alexis and I came out of the mall and drove across the street to the Shoreline Brewery, where we split an Atomic 29 IPA and ate fish tacos. There’s a certain beauty in sharing an IPA with your wife and no one else. I really didn’t want to fall in love and be married for, now, half my life. It wasn’t in any Tarot cards I ever heard of. But it happened and my liver’s probably better off for it.
Love screwed me up.
It really was gonna be a life
of partying and random
sexual acts, smoking weed
and running 10 miles a day.
I set out to be one and only
one. The day it dawned on
me that I was in love
was the most surprising
day of my life.
What? Not me.
Even as I went through the
charade of kissing under the
covers and sharing a milkshake,
I figured it was just another
experience. Leaping from
one experience to another
to the next, like a frog among
lillipads, is what I expected.
I did not expect to grow old
holding hands and laughing
after dinner.
This is someone else's life.
The other me is warming
up pizza and nursing a
hangover. I feel like a
cat accidentally caught
in a trap in a farm field.
This trap is not for me
but I like it anyways.
… There’s other stuff about radio. Yesterday morning I went over to the stations on the campus of Purdue to pick up a check… and wound up staying for a good hour. That’s how it goes when you own your own radio stations. Most of the time there’s people coming and going, office staff, hosts, advertisers, guests, someone coming in to record a spot.
So when the station is empty, you relish the solitude. You plop into a chair and dink around with things. You might fiddle with a piece of equipment, or you might pull up the aging of the accounts where you’re owed money. Whatever it is that you do, you do it with appreciation at being given this radio life. It’s Thanksgiving every day when you live a life of local radio, although at the end of the day, someone’s gotta wash the pots and pans. If you’re the owner and morning host, that probably means you. You wash the pots with love of radio. And you dry the pans with relief that can now move onto the next job.
I concoct an analogy to washing pots and pans because that’s what I do in my own house. I am a trained dishwasher, among other things. My mom showed me how at the sink on Madison with the window above the faucet. You could, if you were over five foot tall, look out the window onto the street where all of us kids would play. It wasn’t altogether different of a childhood from that of Jean Shepherd, except that my dad didn’t leave the family. My mom did, though. She got sick for a lot of years and then died of cancer. It may be a cancer that is related to all of the lead poisoning that is in the news in East Chicago, Indiana. She lived for a while near the plant where the EPA just on Thursday announced that a group of six companies will have to pay up to 85-million dollars to clean up the soil – more than 50 years after they left the place. Talk about legacy liabilities. Your pain, as a youth longing for that last Christmas as a family or as a company smelting lead, never really goes away. Even after you die. Some of the companies are long gone, but someone must be around still or the EPA wouldn’t go after them. And, right now, if any of the three or four of you are up at this hour, you could walk downstairs and watch on TV the pain that won’t go away for Jean Shepherd.
Me, I’m not gonna go watch his pain again. I might go ride my bike by his house. Merry Christmas.
I don’t know why, but I have the urge to ride my bike to the boyhood home of Jean Shepherd. It’s not that far and I’ve never been there. It’s on Cleveland St. somewhere. I could find it easy enough, but is it really worth the effort?
Part of the urge to make this pilgrimage – because that is what it would be – is that “A Christmas Story,” Shep’s one mega-hit, is all over the television these days. The three or four of you can turn on your cable right now and watch Ralphie get his mouth washed out with soap. You can see a leg lamp, a jar of Ovaltine, a turkey in the mouth of the Bumpus’s dog. There is humor and there is Hammond. Why not ride your bike in the snow to Jean Shepherd’s house on Christmas Eve?
I have developed this habit of listening to old Shep recordings from the 1960s. That’s when he did the late-night show on WOR that became the precursor for the whole genre of talk radio. It wasn’t political talk, as is popular now. It was just talk.
And what Shep talked about most was his childhood and teen years in Hammond, Indiana. He talked about fireworks and the tax appraiser, ham radios and his first date. Shep brought his Midwestern childhood to the Easter seaboard, and they ate it up.
But there’s a part to this equation that I think about a lot when I’m lying there before bed listening to Shep. it’s what happened right after the events of “A Christmas Story.”
It turns out that Shep’s dad, played eloquently by Darrin Gavin in the movie, worked at the candy factory that sits empty in north Hammond. There he met a secretary. And not too long after “A Christmas Story,” Shep’s dad left his mom and skidaddled with the secretary.
It’s a story that repeated itself a lot in the 1930s, the 40s, the 50s and now. You go off to work, meet a curvy woman who’s nice to you, and you succumb to the spell. Workplace romance could happen to anyone, man or woman.
But it happened to Shep’s dad. I only read this once somewhere, so I’m not entirely certain about the details surrounding the departure of Shep’s dad.
But no matter how it exactly came down, it makes sense that Shep would romanticize that final Christmas together. That’s how I watch “A Christmas Story.” It’s not just the retelling of a tale of a Midwestern Christmas in simpler times to a New York audience. It’s a man who was hurt deeply not too long after it happened. He remembers that one Christmas more fondly than any other Christmas because it was the last before the axe fell down.
…. By the way, what does it mean when you’re typing along in the darkness, with the only light a glow from your Apple laptop, and all of the sudden a huge bug appears in the corner of the screen? There’s a message in there somewhere. You tell me what it is.
…. Speaking of pilgrimages, Alexis and I made the hour drive to Lighthouse Mall in Michigan City yesterday. There’s outlets there from just about every store you can think of.
I wasn’t much help with the shopping. I worked my ass off of in radio for the past few weeks, took a final, went to tons of Christmas celebrations, and now I’m a used dishrag. This is a dangerous combination, by the way – Not being in the Christmas spirit as Christmas comes around. I’ve lived through the celebration of the birth of Christ several times in my life not feeling Christmas at all. It makes you feel un-American.
The mall at Michigan City is outdoors. You walk from store to store in the face of a 25-mile-an-hour wind straight off of Lake Michigan. Yesterday, it was only 29 degrees, but the wind was angry. You could feel it in your nipples every time you lugged a bag from the Coach store over to Banana Republic, from Eddie Bauer to Yankee Candle. I didn’t mind the lugging so much. It was just good to have my wife to myself. I’m selfish in that way. You can say what you want about growing older and not needing that alone time as a couple as much, but it’s all bullshit. When you find someone you like to spend time with, you’re a goner.
Scale a sand dune until
you run out of breath.
Without railroad tracks
to guide your way, you
lose your way to Michigan City.
There’s a brewery there
that serves fish tacos.
Me and my wife of 26 years
go there sometimes and laugh.
There’s a beach a couple
blocks away where we
took our girls to roam.
There’s a photo of my
wife on a retaining wall
wearing John Lennon sunglasses.
She smiles. Behind the
shades is worry, but we
won’t talk about that.
Let’s just recall that at
sunset there’s no place
like the pier and lighthouse
at Michigan City. I left
something on the sand there.
It wasn’t my wife of
26 years or my kids or
even my lighter. It
was just so long ago.
I lost my youth.
Sunsets at Michigan City
make you want to write
a letter to your grandma
or ride your bicycle
for ten miles. Moments
that don’t limit possibility
freak me out. I wind up
looking for them over and
over again. The trick
is that it’s gone forever.
Go ahead and look your
ass off. You’ll never
find it. You’re stuck with
the Now. And the zacklies
every time you wake up.
There is radio in here somewhere. It’s right down the street from Lighthouse Mall that WIMS AM 1420 sits. Alexis and I once held the FCC license for said radio station. But here’s where the regulation of the FCC comes in. Technically, we still had to have a presence in Michigan City to own WIMS. That’s just how the rules were ten years ago. Last month, Ajit Pai and the rest of the band of FCC brothers took that rule away. You now can own a radio station in Topeka, Kansas, and one in Hammond, Indiana – and you don’t ever have to go to Hammond, Indiana. You don’t have to have a full-time engineer there. You don’t have to maintain a studio there. You don’t have to do much more than play the station ID at the top of the hour and paint the tower every few years.
That’s a huge change. If it had come earlier, we might still own the AM station there. Who knows? What matters right now is that Alexis and I came out of the mall and drove across the street to the Shoreline Brewery, where we split an Atomic 29 IPA and ate fish tacos. There’s a certain beauty in sharing an IPA with your wife and no one else. I really didn’t want to fall in love and be married for, now, half my life. It wasn’t in any Tarot cards I ever heard of. But it happened and my liver’s probably better off for it.
Love screwed me up.
It really was gonna be a life
of partying and random
sexual acts, smoking weed
and running 10 miles a day.
I set out to be one and only
one. The day it dawned on
me that I was in love
was the most surprising
day of my life.
What? Not me.
Even as I went through the
charade of kissing under the
covers and sharing a milkshake,
I figured it was just another
experience. Leaping from
one experience to another
to the next, like a frog among
lillipads, is what I expected.
I did not expect to grow old
holding hands and laughing
after dinner.
This is someone else's life.
The other me is warming
up pizza and nursing a
hangover. I feel like a
cat accidentally caught
in a trap in a farm field.
This trap is not for me
but I like it anyways.
… There’s other stuff about radio. Yesterday morning I went over to the stations on the campus of Purdue to pick up a check… and wound up staying for a good hour. That’s how it goes when you own your own radio stations. Most of the time there’s people coming and going, office staff, hosts, advertisers, guests, someone coming in to record a spot.
So when the station is empty, you relish the solitude. You plop into a chair and dink around with things. You might fiddle with a piece of equipment, or you might pull up the aging of the accounts where you’re owed money. Whatever it is that you do, you do it with appreciation at being given this radio life. It’s Thanksgiving every day when you live a life of local radio, although at the end of the day, someone’s gotta wash the pots and pans. If you’re the owner and morning host, that probably means you. You wash the pots with love of radio. And you dry the pans with relief that can now move onto the next job.
I concoct an analogy to washing pots and pans because that’s what I do in my own house. I am a trained dishwasher, among other things. My mom showed me how at the sink on Madison with the window above the faucet. You could, if you were over five foot tall, look out the window onto the street where all of us kids would play. It wasn’t altogether different of a childhood from that of Jean Shepherd, except that my dad didn’t leave the family. My mom did, though. She got sick for a lot of years and then died of cancer. It may be a cancer that is related to all of the lead poisoning that is in the news in East Chicago, Indiana. She lived for a while near the plant where the EPA just on Thursday announced that a group of six companies will have to pay up to 85-million dollars to clean up the soil – more than 50 years after they left the place. Talk about legacy liabilities. Your pain, as a youth longing for that last Christmas as a family or as a company smelting lead, never really goes away. Even after you die. Some of the companies are long gone, but someone must be around still or the EPA wouldn’t go after them. And, right now, if any of the three or four of you are up at this hour, you could walk downstairs and watch on TV the pain that won’t go away for Jean Shepherd.
Me, I’m not gonna go watch his pain again. I might go ride my bike by his house. Merry Christmas.
RSS Feed
