Day in a Life

  “Only a man in a funny red sheet

    Looking for special things inside of me.”

    “Superman (It’s Not East).” Five for Fighting

 

    Previous Steel Shavings focused on decades of the twentieth century and then one on the year 2000, featuring student journals as well as my own.  In 2003 I organized an issue around a single week-end, the Ides of March. That happened to be when the United States invaded Iraq on the false pretense that Saddam Hussein stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. I considered basing one on a single day but decided that was impractical, even though mundane journal entries might be of use to future historians. For that debatable reason, here are my activities for May 19 (sans several bathroom visits or morning and evening pill consumptions), beginning with brushing my teeth and splashing warm water on my face. With predictions of summery weather I picked out a red shirt, short-sleeved, for the first time this year.

 

While dressing I listened to “Mully and Haugh” on WSCR (The Score) excoriate White Sox manager Tony LaRussa, age 76 and a Hall of Famer, for criticizing rookie Yermin Mercedes. With Chicago leading 15-4, the Twins used infielder Williams Astudillo on the mound in the ninth inning.  When the count went to 3-0, LaRussa put on the take sign, but Mercedes hit a pitch thrown under 50 mph over the centerfield wall for a home run, then needlessly celebrated while rounding the bases. Obeying a manager’s signs is something players commonly learn as youngsters, and LaRussa called Mercedes clueless. Ageist radio jock Mike Mulligan, who has been on LaRussa all year for being out of touch with today’s player-driven game, claimed that Sox players might get demoralized and that LaRussa was inviting Minnesota to retaliate – as if they were looking for LaRussa’s permission. Despite all Mulligan’s moaning and groaning, the Sox, despite having lost two of their best players to possible season-ending injuries, have one of the best records in baseball.

 

As is my custom I watched the first 20 minutes of CBS Morning News co-hosted by Gayle King (who always refers to Wednesday as Humpday), Anthony Mason, and Vladimir Duthiers (substituting for Tony Dokoupil, on baby leave). Hostilities have erupted again between Israel and the Palestinian group Hamas, and Republican Congressional leaders are balking at the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine the January 6 attack of the Capitol.  Normally my breakfast on week days consists of fruit, cereal with blueberries and banana slices, a sausage link or bacon slices, and two cups of coffee. Because I’d be playing bridge at Banta Senior Center and not have lunch, save for a small cup of jello, I had bacon and two scrambled eggs plus an English muffin topped with strawberry preserves, a Christmas present from daughter-in-law Delia. 

 

For the past two weeks Banta Center volunteers took everyone’s temperature upon arrival and asked people to wear masks, but this week there were no restrictions. In duplicate I partnered with Naomi Goodman, first time she and I played together, and we finished around 50 percent, good for seventh out of 14 couples.  We started slowly, but near the end bid and made game two hands in a row, the only couple to do so, for high boards. 

 

When bridge ended, I gave a copy of my latest Steel Shavings, “Life in the Calumet Region during the Plague Year, 2020,” to life master Judy Kocemar, whom I mentioned in volume 50 because we won a game last January and she attended my Art in Focus talk in Munster on 1960 Rock and Roll Music on March 10, literally days before everything virtually shut down. Don Geidemann and Judy Selund have decided to host a bridge game at his place in June involving four couples, including Herb and Evelyn Passo, Charlie Halberstadt and Naomi, and us. We’ll first have lunch at Pesto’s and before the final round enjoy a homemade dessert (Don is a great cook). On the way out I noticed that someone had brought daffodil plants, so I took about eight of them to plant in our backyard garden.  It had rained earlier, so it didn’t take long.  The trip home took longer than usual because road construction (omnipresent this time of year) had without adequate warning blocked the entrance ramp to Indiana State Road 49, necessitating traveling south a few miles and turning around on Route 2.

 

Niece Lisa visited from Granger and had lunch with Toni at Lucrezia’s but left before I arrived. She brought Toni’s parents’ wedding picture, which had been in possession of her mother (Toni’s older sister), who died a couple months ago from pancreatic cancer, plus letters Toni and I had written to her parents, including one of mine to brother-in-law Sonny, a truck driver, on October 12, 1970, less than two months after we’d moved to Northwest Indiana and I’d begun my teaching career at IUN. I mentioning our playing golf and inquired about his becoming a Teamster union steward, noting, “It’s good that management has to contend with someone who will put them on their ass once in a while.” Then I mentioned how teaching was going:

 All my classes are on Monday and Thursday, so during the rest of the week I can prepare lectures and work on articles (necessary for tenure).  I teach three courses, one at 8:30 A.M., one at 2:30, and the third at 7. My afternoon class is small and has been exciting at times, with good discussions.  The evening class is in an auditorium, where 105 students sit above me (like Roman judges at a gladiator contest) while I teach at a stage-like area.  At first, I was nervous as I passed students on the way up front. After a minute, people in the back claimed they couldn’t hear me, even though I thought I was yelling.  Since then, however, that class is my favorite.  I use the same material as at 8:30 and leave out things that hadn’t gone well then.  In fact, the room transforms me into something of an actor and I have become somewhat of a ham.

    Toni is decorating curtains with peace signs and sayings.  Come out and see them sometime if you get a haul out our way. Fondly, Jim

 

Checking Facebook, IUN chancellor Keen Iwama announced that the university will be back to normal for the Fall semester and open for business on August 2. I noticed that, as usual, it’s been a busy week for Dave, a teacher, tennis coach, and senior class adviser at East Chicago Central.  He posted a photo of seniors honored at a sports banquet and a video of him playing the piano for English Arts teacher Aaron Duncil, a Portage H.S. and VU graduate, singing “Superman (It’s Not Easy)” that they performed at the Student Government banquet.  The 2002 hit was written and performed by Vladimir John Ondrasik III, a huge L.A. Kings hockey fan, who called his group Five for Fighting, a term for penalties meted out to pugilists on the ice. Among the Facebook friends Aaron and I have in common are Performing Arts instructors Kevin Giese and Mark Baer, so I surmised correctly that Aaron has remained active in theatrical productions. 

 

Upper Dublin classmates Connie Daemon and Pat Zollo mentioned that a mini-reunion took place at Guiseppe’s in Ambler with 16 people in attendance including a few spouses and siblings. The sad news: Jim Coombs suffered a stroke and is “recovering but not doing well,” whatever that means.  Susan McGrath’s husband Joe’s recovery from a stroke is painfully slow, causing him frustration and her much anguish over how costly a physical therapist is.  On Mother’s Day, she reported, the PT was helping a granddaughter with her Spanish.

 

While enjoying a couple 16-ounce Coors Lights, I read a few articles on the Cubs by Chicago Sun-Timescolumnist Mike Ryoko (1932-1997) that appear in the anthology “For the Love of Mike.” So-called “lovable losers” during Ryoko’s day, he wrote that the only pennant-winning team in his lifetime consisted of “a bunch of wartime 4-Fs, but at least we had the best 4-Fs” – at least until the 1945 Tigers beat them in the World Series, 4 games to 3. The star player of Ryoko’s youth, Stan Hack, was “always drunk or hung over.”  Due perhaps to a deformed middle finger, shortstop Roy Smalley would often “heave the ball completely over the first baseman’s head and the dugout.” During the 1950s a top prospect married starlet Mamie Van Doren and never made it out of spring training, as did a 38-year-old rookie with a gold earring. His favorite skipper, Leo Durocher, “could kick foul-ball powder on an umpire’s shoes better than any other manager.”

 

Having completed Bradford Pearson’s “The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War America,” I found a Washington Post review by Samuel G. Freedman, titled “At a shameful detention camp, an improbable football team.” Freedman compares the feats of the Heart Mountain football team, led by Tamotsu “Babe” Nomura and George “Horse” Yoshinaga (they met while their families were imprisoned at Santa Anita racetrack) to the Notre Dame teams of the 1920s as a counteracting force against anti-Catholicism and the Florida A & M squads of the 1960s promoting racial pride and equality. Despite losing their freedom due to Franklin Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, Japanese-Americans became subject to the draft, and 63 members of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee, who insisted they were loyal Americans, were convicted and sentenced to three years in federal prison for demanding that their rights as citizens be restored as a condition of their serving in the military.

 

Switching to Coors regular as dinner approached, I sat down to a delicious pork roast meal with mashed potatoes, gravy, salad, and cooked vegetables. Toni has recently completed “Queen’s Gambit” by Walter Tevis, which I had gotten from the library just four days before, so after a few hands of bridge with Toni (we’d each bid two of the four hands and the person getting the bid would play the hand) and before retiring into the bedroom to watch the Cubbies, I read a few pages and see how so many readers got hooked.  Orphaned at age eight, young Beth is sent to a home where wards of the state were given two tranquilizer pills a day to “even their disposition.”  Beth’s life is transformed when she becomes fascinated with a chess board that she spots with a custodian in the basement of her new home.