March Madness

The NCAA basketball tournament is underway, and two of my Final Four picks (I entered the Post-Tribune contest), Vanderbilt and Villanova, have already been eliminated. I picked Kentucky to beat Ohio State in the championship game and am still alive with them. Georgetown and favorite Kansas also stumbled, but two Indiana teams, Butler and Purdue (with East Chicago Central star E’Traun Moore) are in the Sweet Sixteen. The biggest remaining underdog is Cornel, with former IU star Randy Whitman’s son swishing three-pointers. While gaming yesterday with Tom and Dave I watched Michigan State beat my alma mater (PhD, Class of ’70) Maryland on a last second desperation shot. Alissa will be happy but probably was too busy working on her senior one-person senior show to have seen it. My favorite NCAA memories are 1987, when IU beat UNLV and then Syracuse on a last-second shot by Keith Smart, and 2002, when Maryland, led by Juan Dixon, defeated an IU team coached by Mike Davis. I started out rooting for IU but when the Terrapins led by 12 points near the end, I savored their victory.

At the high school level three Region teams – Gary Lew Wallace, Wheeler, and Gary’s Thea Bowman charter school - made it to the state finals in this the hundredth anniversary of Hoosier Hysteria.

I finished Anne Tyler’s novel “Saint Maybe” about Ian, a guy whose loose tongue causes his brother to commit suicide and then tries to atone for it by raising his widow’s three kids after she dies from an overdose of medicine. As in other books, Tyler tells the story from the point of view of several characters, and the novel is very much about Ian’s niece Daphne struggling to find herself. Ian’s dad Doug, a retired school teacher, struggles to fill up his days with things to do and is rather pathetic in a humorous way. Then there are a revolving door of Middle Eastern neighbors, students who are enamored with gadgets and speak fractured English but who are lovable in their own way and who Doug is more than willing to help out when they are in need of some practical home repair advice.

The Post-Trib’s cover story Sunday was the first in the series “City in Crisis.” The headline was “Gary’s Financial Woes May Be Unsolvable.” Reporter Jon Seidel identified me as “a longtime Gary historian” and quoted me as lamenting the tax breaks given to U.S. Steel and the lack of support from the Indiana General Assembly and Governor Mitch Daniels. I said that if Wall Street banks were considered too big to fail, “a proud city like Gary, in my opinion, is too big to fail.”

I had a fire going in the fireplace both Saturday and Sunday because the temperature got down into the low thirties. I’ll miss “real fires.” Our new condo has what I sometimes call a “fake” fireplace fueled by gas. While reading an article about Ben Stiller in the new Rolling Stone magazine (he’s in a must-see movie called “Greenberg”), there were references to one of my favorite 90s movies, “Reality Bites,” which Stiller directed and appeared in and which tries to capture the coming-of-age angst of so-called Generation Xers. I especially like the scene where Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Steve Zahn, and Janeane Garofalo are in a Seven Eleven store and the Garofalo character asks the man on duty to turn up the radio when she hears “My Sharona” by one-hit-wonders The Knack. As Ethan Hawke gets a pained look on his face, the three others start dancing to the music. The Knack’s Doug Fieger recently died of cancer. I decided to listen to my “Reality Bites” soundtrack CD, which leads off with “My Sharona.” Also on the CD are songs by Squeeze, U2, Crowded House, Lisa Loeb, and others, but my favorite is Lenny Kravitz’s “Spinning Around Over You.” Thirty years ago our neighbors’ youngest son, Grag Bernsten, would play “My Sharona” at a deafening volume as he washed his car.

Nephew Bob’s wife Niki gave birth to their second child, which they named Crosby (Bob is a big Pittsburgh Penguins fan whose star is Sidney Crosby). Niki has been sending pictures of daughter Addison, a real charmer, and sure enough an email containing a cute photo of Crosby awaited me when I arrived at my Archives computer.

In the news: The House finally passed the health care bill after President Obama signed an executive order banning federal funds for abortions. The Republicans acted like we are on the road to a socialist state even though, as Obama admitted it is a middle-of-the-road bill very similar to past Republican proposals. Their Tea Party shock troops were at Capital Hill shouting racist and homophobic insults at Representatives John Lewis and Barney Frank. One Congressman yelled out “Baby killer” during final debate and Minority Leader John Boehner kept saying “Hell no!”

I gassed up the Corolla on the way to school and said hello to the Middle Eastern lady – possibly Palestinian – who works at the Ogden Dunes Marathon station. Last year she told me I could pay with a credit card at the pump, and I replied, if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to wish you a good morning. She is very nice but still almost always says “debit or credit” when I go to slice my Discover Card.

Went to see “Green Zone” with Matt Damon, which follows a soldier in Iraq in 2003 who comes to realize that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and that the dismantling of the Iraqi army had a horrendous effect on the country we invaded. The lesson: Iraqis have to decide the fate of their country, and we made a bad situation worse by posing as a champion of democracy.

Angie had us for a delicious dinner after which Rebecca was dancing in front of the mirror to a Miley Cyrus song. I joined her and got James to participate, at least to the extent of moving his shoulders up and down in time with the music.