Going South

Vice Chancellor David Malik was showing newcomer John Novak, the Associate Chancellor for Institutional Effectiveness and Research, around and came upon me at my computer with the 27-inch screen, which he helped me obtain. We’ve had a series of administrators charged with helping faculty get grants, none of whom seem to have been very effective. Let’s hope Novak, a Purdue grad, is more helpful to faculty.

The phrase “Going South” has come to mean “be in decline,” such as happened to the stock market a couple years ago or sales in 2008-2009 thanks to the Bush recession. Next week Toni and I are driving south to Florida, so in preparation I got my toe nails cut at L.A. Nails (as usual I was the only male customer), had my hair trimmed at Qwik Cut, checked out audio tapes of books at the library, did some food shopping and leaf raking, and put in a load of wash. Lay down briefly after a long bath. Only one contestant knew the answer to “Final Jeopardy,” Russian short story master Anton Chekhov. There was also a “Fifties Fiction” category where the answers included “Peyton Place” and Kurt Vonnegut. "Peyton Place" seems tame today with the proliferation of porn, but was a real pot boiler when I was a teenager. Another category was “April Fools.” On a more X-rated note “going south can refer to a bj.

I wanted to play an April Fools prank on Alissa, telling her that I was outside “watering the rocks” (Toni’s phrase for taking a leak on top of our driveway) when high winds caused a tree to topple over and miss me by mere inches. Unfortunately she was busy and couldn’t talk. When she lived with us, Alissa used to get us with bogus stories. One time I got her back by claiming to have cut down one of her favorite trees.

While listening to MGMT’s CD “Oracular Spectacular” I looked at the 2000 journal that I published eight years ago as part of Shavings volume 33. I used song lyrics to introduce various sections, such as Mark Knopler’s “Sailing to Philadelphia/To draw the line” when describing my trip east to attend my fortieth high school reunion. Asked to supply an anecdote from my teen years, I talked about driving around or “cruisin’” with buddies Bob Reller, Dick Garretson, Bob Elliott, and Joe Ricketts. One night Garretson brought a STOP sign into Rel’s car. As we were tooling down a back road, a cop passed in the opposite direction and then appeared to be turning around. The sign went out the window. Momentarily caught in the wind, it hovered off the ground about windshield height. Right after it landed, the cop came around the bend, stopped Rel, and searched for booze. Close call. Had the sign clipped the cop’s car, we’d have been dead. Rel had no recollection of the incident although he did remember that Garretson had some road signs in his bedroom.

Phil’s family stopped in on their way to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, so I made a hearty breakfast of pancakes, scrambled eggs, and kielbasa. Victoria has a new hairstyle that is really cool, and Miranda has a half-dozen bruises on her legs from varsity soccer. She plays midfielder and in her last game, a 2-1 victory, she had a breakaway but was tripped from behind.