B.J. – shoutforjoy.us

“Did your mother drink?”

On Saturday, I was taking a break from wrestling with the lazy Susan. I was sitting on the Jimmy Hoffa bin on the front porch with our good friend and co-quarantiner, Tony. He is one of the many people who has encouraged me to write my life story in a book. So I shared with him a few more chapters. This is one of them. Oh yes, the “Jimmy Hoffa bin” is what we call the plastic poolside storage bin that we use to store our recycling and our garden tools, etc., on our entry porch. We nicknamed it that, because it is large enough to hide a body in.

As I mentioned previously, my dad built the house in Golden Valley in the summer of 1961, where I lived from first grade until Bethann and I got married in July, 1975, after my second year in college. Until we bought our first house, just after Thanksgiving, we lived in a tiny, one bedroom apartment on 19th and Upton in Minneapolis. I was going to grad school full time in the mornings. We were both working full time, 3pm to 11:30pm in housekeeping at North Memorial Medical Center. I am the youngest of my parents’ four children. The other three were already out of the house and had houses and kids of their own (or at least on the way). So my parents decided to sell the big house with the big yard, and move into a condo on the other side of Golden Valley.

One large house with six people for fourteen years can accumulate a lot of stuff. One Friday afternoon in October, between school and work, B.J. called. (B.J. is my mom. It’s short for Betty Jane.) She said, “We’re having a garage sale tomorrow. If you want any of your things, come early, so you can buy them. The sale starts at nine.”

Now my other siblings are all older than I am and had been out of the house for years. They had been living in their own houses, with real closets and attics and garages. So they had room to put things and opportunity to retrieve things that they may have wanted to keep. I had been out of the house for three and a half months. During that time, I had gotten married in Pennsylvania, started seminary full time, taking Greek and Hebrew and a senior theology elective, and was working full time.

My car wasn’t nearly this nice. It was about 18″ long, went straight forward and turned left in reverse.

I arrived at B.J.’s garage sale at 8:30am. I helped bring up the last of the stuff from the storage closets in the basement. I said good-bye to my childhood toys and games. I thought twice about buying my large “remote control” red sports car, but decided I had been too old for it when I bought it the first time. (Remote control is in quotes, because it had a 6′ cord from the controller to the car.) I think that all I went away with was a few books, some brass bells, and the chalk painting of my grandpa Ingham’s horse, Lady, which Wathena, his wife and my godmother, had given me when I was 10.

When I was done telling Tony the story, he looked at me and asked, “Did your mother drink?”

Burning Trash

Among my household chores were taking out the garbage and burning the trash. The garbage was table scraps, egg shells, coffee grounds, etc. Usually, it was wrapped in newspaper. Back then, everyone got at least one daily paper delivered to their doorstep. For several years, we got both the morning and evening papers, both the Minneapolis Star and the Tribune, as well as our village’s weekly , the Golden Valley Sun. People used to use yesterday’s newspapers for all sorts of things; many of the things we use paper towels for now. The rest would get stacked in a dry spot and tied with twine into bundles to be recycled at the elementary school’s paper sale. The ‘trash’ was all of the stuff that we threw away that would burn. Now some people had a different standard for that than we did, and would only burn paper, wood and cardboard. We liked to keep more out of the dump and have more fun. We burned our plastic, too. I know now that that probably wasn’t the best choice for the environment, or for my potential health. When one is nine or ten, one is not necessarily taking the long look. Plastic was fun to burn, because I could hang a molten piece on the end of a stick and watch the flaming plastic drip and hiss as it fell to the ground.

I enjoyed watching the fire. I would stay by it until it was safely done burning. My mom, B.J., wasn’t quite so attentive. There was a swamp behind our yard, then a steep hill with four rows of mature American Elm trees on it. The trees divided the hill into three sled paths in the winter. B.J. managed, on three different occasions, to let the trash fire get out of control and set the swamp on fire. Once, the fire was so bad, and the grass was so dry, that it burned all the way up the hill and part of the Moffat’s fence caught fire. When these fires occurred, all of the neighbors would get out their hoses and connect them to ours and Shermans’ in order to reach the swamp to contain the fire. One time, someone called the Golden Valley Fire Dept. They showed up in three cars, no tank truck, no hoses, no gear. They proceeded to tell us to hook our hoses together to put out the fire. We all told them to please go away! We had already done that. If they couldn’t offer any real help, just get out of the way!

We used a wire basket trash burner. The only image I could find of one for this post was from a vintage salvage company in the Midwest that finds antiques for movie sets. Ours had wider spaces between the wires. The top ‘flaps’ would not function after the first couple of weeks of use, being weakened by flame and corrosion.

When I think about it now, it was quite remarkable how frequently B.J. burned the swamp compared to how rarely she burned the trash. She did note how lush and vibrant all of the wildflowers and reeds came back after a fire.

Polo & the Art of Negotiation

When I was eight years old, our family went to Fort Snelling during their restoration preparations for their big sesquicentennial in 1969. We were only six years early. They were already selling memorabilia to help pay for it. While we were there, we witnessed a polo game. It was the only time in my life I have done so. My mom grew up with horses, so this was mandatory. Lawyers had not gained as much of a foothold by then, so fans just sat on the grass, with no barriers between themselves and the field. Polo matches were rare, so there were no stands. When a ball got so nicked up that it was deemed too poor to continue in play, they would simply knock it to the sidelines.

A ball came hurtling out of the field. I went racing toward it. So did another boy. Now I was pigeon-toed and never that athletic, but I threw myself on that painted cork ball! I nabbed it fair and square! I took it home and found that it had a special charm. I placed it in a drawer of my maple desk with the Masonite drawer bottoms. When I opened that drawer, the ball would roll around and the divots in the ball would make the most interesting sounds and resonate in that drawer. For 12 years, I kept that drawer empty except for that ball, just so I could roll it around to make that special sound.

My mom never understood this special delight. Countless times I would come home from school and see a huge trash bag outside the back door with things from my room in it. Before entering the house, I would retrieve my polo ball and a few other choice possessions, then take out the rest to the trash. I would then enter the back door. I would holler, “Mom! Did you clean my room?” She would answer, “Yes.” I would say, “Did you throw anything out?” She would say, “No.” I would say, “OK.” And I would return the polo ball to its drawer. My mom had cryptic methods of education. Looking back, this was probably her way of training me for politics and negotiations. I am now 64. My mom has been dead since 1993. I still have the polo ball. Sadly, I don’t have the maple desk with the Masonite bottomed drawers.

Sewing Shite Shirts

My mom, B.J., as I mentioned before, taught me that if I could read, I could do anything. This was most literally demonstrated to me in my experience with sewing clothes. In About 1972, when I was in high school, I was working for my mom as a bicycle mechanic, salesman, and pretty much managing BJ’s Bike Shop in Brooklyn Park, MN, adjacent to BJ’s Viking Sewing Center, where she sold Viking Husqvarna and New Home sewing machines and Eureka vacuum cleaners.

One evening, she could not staff her shop, so I had to look after both stores. There was a door between them, so I could hear the door chimes on either side. A couple came in to look at a Viking sewing machine. They wanted to see how it did buttonholes. I told them that I had never used the machine and had never made a buttonhole in my life, but I would attempt it by following the step-by-step instructions in the manual that came with the machine. I sat down in front of the machine, turned it on, positioned the fabric, lowered the presser foot, opened the manual to the proper page, went through steps 1 through 5 and made a perfect buttonhole. I was astonished! They were not impressed. They were upset. They thought I was conning them and that there was no way it could be that easy. They felt I had to be an expert, when, in fact, I was a rank beginner.

After that I played around with little projects like making little book bags out old jeans legs and such. My first real sewing project was several years later. It was a pair of rusty maroon jeans. I tend to sew like my mom cooked. Sure, she always read the recipe; then improvised. On that first pair of jeans, I eliminated the outside, side seams. This meant I had to use the pattern to figure out curved darts from the waist band to my hips, where the side pockets insert. It meant I had to configure a whole different layout for cutting the fabric. I also stitched my initials in a sort of double line wave on the back pockets, instead of the boring zigzag the pattern called for. I mean if one is going to go to the trouble of making one’s own clothing, why would one want it to look like it came off of a store rack?

My second project was a pair of faux suede, dark green jeans. This time, I made them fitted to the knees, then straight down. I put a different style “CC” on the rear pockets. One day at Finland Mennonite Church, the man behind me asked me if I would make him a pair, only he wanted his initials on the pockets. His name was Chet Cassel. I said I had to maintain my artistic integrity and I could only sign them with my own initials.

The family on our front step on 4th St., East Greenville, July 1983. I’m wearing the outfit I made.

In 1978, I sewed myself a long, flowing, navy kaftan out of shiny, swimsuit fabric. I was working full time and going to seminary full time. A mentally handicapped neighbor came to our door and I answered it wearing it. She said, “Oh, I didn’t know you were a priest.” I told her I was in seminary. Then it dawned on me, that she was referring to the kaftan. In 1982 I made myself a set of Indian style drawstring pants and shirt in green and light green stripes. My friend’s NY Italian father asked her “Who’s the giant cucumber?” when we visited Manhattan. I walked with Bethann and our friends through Central Park, China Town and Little Italy, dressed in them.

In 2014, our friend, Kork Moyer, read about shite shirts and shite shirt nights in pubs in England. He is a rock musician. He said he really wanted one. I felt the same way. So, that August, while visiting our friends, Marie and Pete Mattson, in Lewes, Delaware, we went to Mare’s Bears Quilt Shop to pick up some fabric for twirl dresses. I spotted some beautiful avocado fabric. I love avocados! I use them a lot in my cooking. Then I found a gorgeous bundle of Robert Kaufman fabric fat squares. I persuaded Bethann to let me use my vacation mad money to buy these to make myself a shite shirt. I added to these bits of eggplants, corn, tomatoes, and peppers fabrics for the pockets and cuffs for a total of 15 different fabrics. I used 9 different buttons from Bethann’s stash. I have gotten comments everywhere I have worn this. I have shown it off at a few different fabric and sewing machine shops and received oohs and ahs. They seem to be amazed that a man was able to do such a thing. This was my first project on the serger machine. I also did various fancy topstitches over all of the seams in metallic gold thread to add a little more pizazz. I finished it the evening of September 17, 2014.

We showed my shirt to Bethann’s boss, Kathy, and her husband, Steve. They hired us to make him a short sleeved one. I did the major part of picking out the fabric. I pieced the fabrics together, topstitched the seams. The featured photo above the headline is the fabric at that point. Next I laid out the pattern and cut it out. Bethann assembled and finished it. It was finished on September 17, 2019, exactly five years after I finished mine! I modeled it for photos before Bethann delivered it today. Kathy and Steve were delighted! Steve is a pharmacist. I hope he wears it to work.

Bubble blowing class

For a few summers when I was little, the six of us would pack up a pile of gear and supplies into the back of my mom’s ’59 Pontiac station wagon for a week or more of family camp at Camp Lawton on Deer Lake near St. Croix Falls, Wisconsin. Just about everyone in Epiphany Episcopalian Church of New Hope, Minnesota, went. Epiphany was the third of the four churches my parents started, which is pretty unusual for a functioning agnostic and a Buddhist atheist.

There were all sorts of classes and activities for various age and skill levels; crafts, hiking, archery, fishing, swimming, etc. We all ate together. We had campfire together, then the children went to bed. There weren’t any beds. We were in sleeping bags on the old wood and canvas cots we brought from home. We did not necessarily go right to sleep. The parents stayed up for some late night conversation and libations. Did I mention it was an Episcopalian camp? Sometimes, we would mix it up and kids would “trade families” staying overnight in friends’ tents. We learned about how to do graffiti on the canvas by writing on it with toothpaste. The toothpaste would bleach it. Also, if you pressed on the canvas when it was raining, it would leak at that spot; a useful skill to annoy a bullying, sleeping, older brother.

There was a wood-fired sauna near the lake. We could get real heated up, working our way up to the top bench, then run down into the lake for a good shock to the system. This was on the “men’s” end of the beach. It was only designated this way for the moonlit skinny dipping. Some of the men would go full Finnish style in the sauna on those occasions. The women and girls were on the other end of the beach (about 50 yards away). My mom pointed out how, at that distance, in the moonlight it looked like everyone was wearing swimsuits, you know, with their tan lines. Sure, mom.

The stated topic was bubble blowing. Since we are finally at the lake …

Every year I had swim lessons I was in the beginner class, leaning over in knee deep water, blowing bubbles, turning my head, taking a breath and blowing more bubbles. I could never get out of bubble blowing class, because I could never float without moving my hands. My feet sank! I am now 64 years old. I still cannot float without moving. My feet still sink. I have heavy feet! I could never pass the test to go out to the floating raft to play and dive off with the rest of the kids my age. It got to the point where when it came time for bubble blowing class, I ran up the hill to our tent and hid under my cot, crying. It was no better when I went to Camp Manitou, the YMCA day camp. As part of their program we had swim lessons in the YMCA in downtown Minneapolis. We had to swim naked! They said that was so they could see who did it if anyone peed in the pool. It was not the best experience for this boy at nine years old, who could only blow bubbles and doggy paddle.

This was ridiculous! I lived in Minnesota, which is Sioux for “Land of Lakes” and I couldn’t swim! Finally, in 1966, the Golden Valley Country Club built a pool. My folks were very active there. In fact, my dad, Charlie, was president for a couple of years. The pool was open 9am to 9pm, 7 days. I basically lived at the pool. I was 11. I taught myself how to swim by mimicking the old folks who were swimming laps morning and evening. They were members of the “Mile-a-Week Club.” I also watched the swim team practice and tried out the other strokes. The pool opened the end of May. By the end of June I joined the swim team and the Mile-a-Week Club. I was the only child in the club. I still could not float unless I was moving. By the end of July, I was swimming two miles a day. A mile is 71 lengths of a 25 yard pool. I was never a speedster, but I could beat anyone on the team for distance. Also, whenever the coach wanted to demonstrate the form of a stroke, he would have me do it. He would use me at meets to compete in the long events above my age class where there were few or no entrants from other clubs. I was always entered in my maximum allowed events, so even though I wasn’t super fast, I racked up a lot of points for being there and finishing. Sometimes it made the difference between winning and losing a meet.

When I was 13 or 14, our family bought a lake place on Loveless Lake in Polk County, Wisconsin. Once a summer, I would swim around it, about 3 miles, with my sister, Sue Ann, guarding me on our waterbike.

The other day I swam four lengths of the pool. By the end, I was going so slowly my feet were sinking. It’s hell to get old.

Popovers (Yorkshire Pudding)

Popovers (The Brits call them Yorkshire Pudding.) are a simple, wonderful treat to upgrade any meal, or all by themselves for a snack. I have enjoyed them all of my life. It was only recently that I learned how simple they are to make. Most recipes are for one or two dozen. There are only two of us, now, so that would be far too many. They are best served fresh and hot, so we would either end up wasting food or having to wait for a special occasion with a larger gathering. So this recipe is for six popovers, which is just the right number for two. The recipe is so simple that I have made them to go with breakfast, lunch or dinner.

It is important to follow the recipe and to pay attention to temperatures in order for them to turn out right. Chemistry is involved.

Ingredients:

3 eggs, preferably at room temperature
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk, preferably at room temperature
1/2 cup flour. I use unbleached all-purpose flour.
olive oil

Directions:

Start the oven heating to 450° F. (If you forgot to leave the eggs out of the refrigerator to warm while you were taking your shower, you may want to set them on the back of the stove top to let the venting oven warm them a bit.)
Get your muffin tin out and oil 6 of the cups. I spray my tin. Refillable pump bottles are available which are more environmentally friendly than the aerosol type. Just be sure to give all of the cups you are going to use a generous coating. Then place it in the oven to preheat.
In a small mixing bowl or pan, whisk the eggs and salt until they are just mixed and a uniform yellow. Don’t overdo it. Add the milk and whisk together with the eggs and salt. Then mix in the flour until the batter is smooth with few to no lumps.
Once the oven comes to temperature, use hot pads to remove the muffin tin from the oven. The oil may look scorched. This is normal. Carefully pour the batter into 6 cups, trying to distribute it evenly. The cups should be slightly more than half full. There should be enough oil in the cups for it to climb up the sides of the tin enough for you to see it.
Place the tin in the oven and bake for 15 minutes. At 15 minutes, reduce the oven temp to 325° F. Look at the popovers, which are now puffed up tall. Decide how dark and crispy you want them to be and set your timer accordingly. My mom, B.J., made popovers that were dark and crunchy on the outside. We prefer ours golden brown and a bit softer. For softer, you make bake for as little as 5 additional minutes. For crunchy , bake for an additional 15 minutes.
After you make them a couple of times you will learn how your oven acts and what your preference is.

We serve them hot. We have our knives and butter ready! Most of the time they have holes in the bottom and we put a knifeful of butter in there , squeeze it a bit to help it melt, then munch it down. It’s good to have cloth napkins to clean up the flowing butter off of our faces and hands. These are a great side for bacon and eggs or next to a good soup or stew.

If you are having a party or have a larger family, just multiply the recipe for as many as you need.

Enjoy!

More than Pearl Harbor Day

As I start to write this, it is the 76th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. This was the provocation that galvanized the US public to get behind World War II. My parents remembered where they were when they got the news, just as everyone in my generation can recount where they were when they learned that JFK was shot, and the next generation knows when the Challenger blew up, and so on, until the post-modern world is ensnared together by a single polarizing event on 9-11.

December 7th is more complicated in our family than Pearl Harbor Day, however. Ironically, it became the day I learned to bake Christmas cookies. You see we had to, because my mom’s mom died, and she was too sad to make the krumkake, rosettes, spritz, jam thumb prints and bourbon balls. I was 12. My sister, Sue Ann, was 14. We were not going to have a cookie-less Christmas. Grandma Ingham had died in the wee hours of the morning. My older brother had driven (since he was sober) to the nursing home with my dad. She had been in physical therapy for a broken shoulder. The therapist didn’t heed her cries of pain, and forced it, and broke her spine. It was gruesome.

Sue Ann and I just took over the kitchen, read the recipes, baked cookies for four days. Tom, Alison and Dad were taking care of the details that needed taking care of; talking to relatives and friends, etc. Mom just shut down. She looked more like her mom than ever I had seen her. Her mother suffered from chronic depression and alcoholism. We didn’t have a single picture of her without a look of sadness in her eyes. Now that same look was in my mom’s eyes. It stayed there almost uninterrupted for at least two years.

All of the cookies turned out well, except the spritz I made. The dough was so hard I nearly broke the spritz press forcing the dough out of it onto the cookie trays. I had added green food coloring to make them festive. When they came out of the oven they had not spread and were a bit scorched. Most of them were now green and brown. We put them in a box and added them to the assortment when we put plates of cookies out. Everyone complimented us on our baking. Nobody broke any teeth on the spritz, thankfully.

We went through the visitations and funeral at the funeral home. The younger cousins learned from the two oldest cousins, my brother Tom and cousin Deb, that our grandpa had had another wife between our grandmother, Jane, and our step-grandmother, Wathena (whom we all called “Aunt Wathena”). They were only married for about two years. She wanted to move to California. Cranford just couldn’t do that, so they divorced. I didn’t cry over Grandma Ingham’s death until Christmas Day, when the maple rocking chair where she always sat when she came to our house was empty. One of the afghans she had made was draped over its back. (I cry and sob whenever I read this sentence to this day.)

On December 7, 1978, our second daughter, Rosalie, was born, at home, during a blizzard. The midwife was the ever vivacious, traditionally built Sandy Perkins. She arrived at our front door in East Greenville, PA, and immediately asked if I had water boiling. I replied, “What for? That’s just what they assign men to do to get them out of the way.” In her best black mama voice she said, “You mean to tell me you just made me drive over 45 minutes in a snowstorm, and you don’t even have my coffee ready!” Rosalie was born in our bedroom without complications. Sandy weighed her by hooking a blanket to a fish scale forming a sling and placing Rosalie in it and holding it up.

In late November, 2000, my sister, Sue Ann died. She was 47. It took my older sister, Ali, and me a month and a half of research to uncover the fact that she had committed suicide. Our dad wanted to keep that hidden. I flew out to Minnesota for the funeral. On the morning of the day of Sue Ann’s funeral, I went into Minneapolis to visit Grama Ethel Haanpaa at the Lutheran Home, the high rise retirement community where she had lived for several years. Ethel was not our grandma by blood, but by adoption. She was actually Becky Shostrom’s grandma. I had been engaged to Becky when I was a senior in high school until finals week of my freshman year of college. That’s when she told me she had fallen in love with the bus driver on the spring break choir tour. Grama Ethel and her husband, Emil, kept inviting me to all of the special occasions at their chocolate brown house on 25-1/2 Avenue North. We had become good friends, along with Ethel’s first husband, Al Shostrom, and his girlfriend, Mamie. We were a strange lot. When Bethann and I got engaged, I introduced her to Ethel and Emil. Ethel welcomed Bethann to the family with open arms. Emil passed away shortly after we moved to PA in 1977. Ethel became another grandma to our four girls. We exchanged Christmas gifts and birthday cards, letters and phone calls and always visited her when we got back to Minnesota.

When I got to the Lutheran Home, I did not find Ethel in her apartment. I inquired at the desk and discovered that she was in the hospice care unit. I visited her and can remember our conversation like it was yesterday. She told me that she didn’t want to take the pain meds, because they made her befuddled. She was dying and didn’t see any point wasting what little time she had left being befuddled. She said she needed to settle her accounts and needed a clear head to do that. She then recounted to me what she considered to be her failings and sins. Now she had been a Baptist all her life. Baptists don’t do confession. But I heard hers. We cried together. I assured her that God loved her and she was forgiven for all her failings and regrets. At the time, I was an Orthodox Christian layperson. When I got home, I told my priest, Father Boniface, about how I had heard her confession and assured her of God’s forgiveness. He said, “You did good.” As I left to go to my sister’s funeral, I knew that this was the last time I would see dear, sweet Ethel. She would never bless my “pointed little head” again. In fact, that was the last conversation she had. She slipped into coma and passed away a few days later, on December 7, 2000, at age 92.

So I lost two grandmas on the same day, 23 years apart, and gained a daughter in between.

Faux Mashed Potatoes?

I read an article in the Reader’s Digest about a better approach to nutrition and weight management about a new book by Gary Taubes, Why We Get Fat – And What to Do About It. He advocates a modified Atkins style diet which limits carbohydrates, but does not limit fiber, protein and fat. It is an especially good approach to managing diabetes and, as it turns out, reduces blood pressure and improves cardiovascular health. In one of the sidebars, was an example of a day’s possible food intake. One of the items on his dinner menu was “faux mashed potatoes” made from cauliflower, sour cream and bacon. Well I have been looking for more recipes that are diabetic friendly, so I bought two heads of cauliflower at Produce Junction. Then I Googled “faux mashed potatoes.” Several recipes came up. I chose one, then looked at the ingredients that we had and used it as a very loose guide. I think I am discovering how my mom, B.J., really cooked. She would always deflect when she got raves on her cooking, with “If you can read, you can cook.” But anyone who followed the same recipe she said she had used would not come up with anything quite like she had made. She collected cookbooks like crazy. I think she would mine them for ideas, then get creative with the ingredients she had available. I’m discovering that good cooking is less like science and more like jazz.

The advantages of substituting cauliflower for potatoes are that you end up with a much lower carb intake and you raise your intake of dietary fiber and cruciferous vegetables. Of course, it’s hard to eat healthy if it isn’t tasty. All of us loved this. Hilary even told me that I could make that again! So here is my recipe for mashed cauliflower. You can follow it or read it, then improvise.

Ingredients:

2 small heads of cauliflower (~6-1/2″ across)
~ 1/2 cup celery root diced to 1/4″ cubes
4 Tablespoon butter
~ 1/2 cup sour cream
~ 1/2 cup milk (more or less depending on how wet you like your mashies)
1/4 teaspoon Vegesal (or your preferred seasoning)

Directions:

Cut up the cauliflower into ~ 1″ pieces including the stems, but not any green leaves. Dice the celery root. Boil the cauliflower and celery root for about 20 minutes (until fork tender). Drain them in a colander, pressing down with a small plate or bowl to extract more of the water. Throw it all into a food processor along with the butter, sour cream and Vegesal. Process it until it is fairly smooth. Leaving the processor on, add some of the milk. Test it for consistency and flavor. Add more milk and/or seasoning and chop it in until it meets your desired consistency and flavor. Serve.

Enjoy! It will serve six to eight. The leftovers microwave nicely.

Cranford vs. the Oil Burner

The first two houses we bought were obvious handyman specials. Our third (current) house is, too, but we just weren’t aware of it, since we were bamboozled by its charm. (Note to self: Never buy a charming house. Buy an ugly one and make it charming enough to bamboozle the next owner.) Our first house was a frame bungalow with gas, gravity flow heat. This means there was basically a slightly oversized stove burner inside a giant tin can in the basement with big, round duct arms stretching out to the perimeter of the house. One of these was right over the workbench. I bumped my head into it regularly. At least that spot was a little bit cushioned by the fiberglas patches the previous owner had placed there. The heat came up through a grate in the center of the house, the living room floor. It was not very effective for heating the house on -20° days, but we were newlyweds, so it hardly mattered.

Our second home had oil heat with hot water radiators. The summer-winter hook-up had been disconnected and we had a gas water heater. The first winter we lived there was fairly mild, and neither of us had grown up with oil, hot water heat, so we didn’t notice any major problems, other than it seemed pretty expensive. The second winter was a different story. It was cold and no matter how we set the thermostat, the house would never get above 52°. We invited friends over quite a bit. The added bodies would warm the house, or, at least, we would be distracted from how cold it was. Our friends would say to each other, “The Coulters invited us over. Time to visit the refrigerator.”

I had this theory about hiring professionals. I didn’t think it was worth it to hire somebody to do something who made more per hour than I did. Of course, I was making very little working in a poultry meat processing plant. I didn’t understand things like overhead, liability insurance and transportation costs. I also didn’t appreciate the efficiencies involved when someone truly knew what they were doing, as opposed to someone who was reading the totally misnamed Complete Do-It-Yourself Manual, such as myself.

The house was cold. I was ready to try anything. An old plumber had told me that one could clean the electrodes in the burner by pouring a tablespoon of salt over them as it was firing. I figured he was old. He must have done this any number of times and survived. I would give it a shot. He had failed to mention that one should not use an electrically conductive, metal spoon.

So I get a tablespoon out of the silverware drawer and fill it with table salt. I go down into the basement. I gingerly set the spoon on a shelf while I remove the shield above the burner gun. I pick up the spoon and carefully empty it, so that it falls through the arcing electricity between the electrodes or cathodes or whatever you call them. Oops! The spoon made contact with one of them. The electricity travelled up the spoon and threw it against the opposite wall of the basement, with my arm still firmly attached to it.

Bethann heard me crashing against the shelves and various tools falling. She hollered down to me, “Is everything OK?” I answered weakly, “It’ll be fine.” Then I put the cover back on the oil burner and went back upstairs.

That did not solve the problem. In fact, it got worse. I looked at the situation again on another evening. I noticed the boiler was hot and the basement seemed warm, but it wasn’t circulating to the radiators. I surmised that the circulating pump was shot. I drained the system and took off the pump assembly. Sure enough, the impeller was totally shot. I replaced the pump assembly and filled the system. I turned on the heat, expecting a toasty warm house. No such luck.

I was about to give up and call a plumber. Just then, my friend, Jim, stopped by and offered moral support. Bethann said, “Why don’t the two of you go down and take one last look? You know, another perspective and all that.” Jim thought to bring a flashlight. We look around. Everything looks normal. The thermostat is set properly. The fuses are good. Then he shines the light toward the ceiling joists where we see this big valve painted bright red. It had a lever on the side of it and words cast into it to mark three positions: “OPEN” “RUN” “CLOSED”. The lever was in the closed position. I moved it to “RUN” and voila, we had heat in the house. It was the valve to set it on summer or winter for the water heater that used to be attached to it. This explained the smashed impeller. It had been pushing against a closed circulation valve for two years.

So once again, my mom was right. Reading is the key that unlocks every door.

Thursday was reading night.

In our home, when I was growing up, Thursday night was reading night. This was never, ever announced or even mentioned. It was never enforced. None of us kids were even aware of it. However, it was intentional, consistent and disciplined. My mom, B.J., told me about it when I was in college. I asked her about it, because I had realized that I had never seen any of the TV shows that were on Thursday nights.

My folks wanted to make sure that all four of us kids would enjoy reading and make it a part of our lives. They determined that the best way to do this was by providing opportunity and example. So they chose Thursday. On Thursdays, the television did not get turned on. Mom and Dad would sit in the family room and read. There were built in bookshelves on either side of the fireplace and they were filled with books. Of the approximately forty lineal feet of shelves, half were taken up with reference books: an encyclopedia, dictionaries, thesaurus, legislative manuals and almanacs. The other half were filled mainly with history and biographies, with maybe three feet of philosophical fiction and two feet of family photo albums. My brother and sisters and I each had our personal collections of books in bookcases in our bedrooms.

On Thursdays, we could pretty much do what we wanted. There was a stereo, pool table and fireplace in the basement recreation room. There were games and books there, too. There was a table for puzzles and crafts in the family room. We could play organ in the living room. But we would find our folks quietly reading. I don’t remember being told that we couldn’t turn on the TV. They were reading in front of it. It just wouldn’t seem polite.

We all grew up to be readers.

Years ago, I heard a story on NPR about Iceland being a super-literate country. Thursday was family reading night. All broadcast television would go dark on Thursday evening. It was practically considered one’s civic duty to write at least one book in your lifetime. I haven’t been able to run down the source of this story or substantiate it. Perhaps the internet and cable have erased this distinction there, by now. I did think it was curious that they also chose Thursday. We know a man whose full name is Samuel Shakir Kamees Massad, which translates from the Arabic as: “asked of God to be thankful for Thursday.” To that I say Yes I am!