Labor Day Begins

"That long black cloud is comin' down
I feel like I'm knockin' on heaven's door."

Starting with a Bob Dylan quote from “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” Jeff Manes wrote a great SALT column about Chris Christian, a cook, rock musician for the band Pegasus, and old hippie whose father, Chris Hristodoulou came from Greece in 1904. Growing up in Gary’s Horace Mann district, Chris told Manes, “When I was in seventh grade, we were the first school to be one-third white, one-third black, and one-third Latin. By ’72 there were only about five white kids left at Horace Mann.” Fired from Inland Steel in 1980 after caught playing poker, he moved to Seattle and then Alaska. He recalled, “I was climbing Mount Si when Mount Saint Helens blew; I watched the Northern Lights, man. And I got to do stuff like that when I was young and could really enjoy it, man, not as a tired-out, hunched-over retiree.”

Reached Fritz and Lisa Teuscher’s impressive house in Granger IN near South Bend in under an hour with a trunk full of pillows and blow-up mattresses plus rye bread and a pot of golumpkis (stuffed cabbage rolls). It being cool and windy, Toni’s sister Mary, up from Florida, had a sweater on and was shivering. Eight year-old Grace offered me what she described as a mint Oreo cookie only she had replaced the insides with toothpaste. Living right next to a golf course, younger brother Oliver had scrounged hundreds of golf balls from the rough and sells them for a quarter or half dollar, depending on the condition. Sonny was watching a replay of yesterday’s 12-11 Phillies victory on MLB.com, featuring a nine-run inning climaxed by Chase Utley’s grand salami. Afterwards, looking for the news, he came across “Sonny With a Chance” on Disney Channel. “They stole my name,” he quipped. The Dietz family poodle Chloe did lots of barking, which did not bother the Teuscher’s mellow dog Jack. Nickolas and Sophia found a climbing tree to their liking and were near the top in a flash. While others visited Notre Dame’s football stadium tunnel, Fritz and I went to his country club links. He hit some great shots on a very windy day. I mainly rode around in the cart but did try a few pitch shots (nothing to write home about) and putts (most went past the hole, but I sank two fairly long ones). Told Fritz about the time in the Bahamas when ten year-old Dave accompanied Ivan Jasper on a round of golf. He let my son drive the cart and he overturned it but was unscathed. Ivan warned him not to tell us under threat of death, and we didn’t learn about the incident until 25 years layer. At the seventh hole Tom, back from the Notre Dame tunnel, replaced me and played the final 11 holes with Fritz.

Looked over Laura Ingraham’s “Obama Diaries,” which Mary was reading, and found it patronizing and prejudiced (Stephen Colbert slammed its “hideous, hackneyed racial stereotypes”). Ingraham’s main criticisms of the President are that he doesn’t wear his religion or patriotism on his sleeve and that he’s too full of himself (takes one to know one). She portrays Vice President Biden as a vain lecher who, after ogling Columbian pop singer Shakira, writes in his diary, “Honestly, if they all looked like this hot tamale, I’d tear down the border fence myself.” Washington Post reviewer Steven Levingston notes that Laura can’t decide between satire and polemics and by flip-flopping from one to the other “only leaves a ruinous imbalance” and “causes her to squander her literary deadeye on vapid hyperbole” such as her concluding statement that “this is freedom’s last stand.” Pu-leeze! Freedom for the rich to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.