Some Fun in Retirement

I'm trying to find some creative things to do in retirement -- especially here in a Minnesota winter!
by Charlie Leck

I've created a line of postcards. I don't think I'll ever sell them. I don't have the tenacity to sit at some outdoor market or art fair, trying to hawk postcards that I print right here in my own comfy study. I don't have the nerve either. Yet, I do have one good customer -- c'est moi, as they say in Avignon (that place has been on my mind a lot lately).

My thought is that, if I produce a number of these postcard designs, I might begin writing more notes to family and friends by hand. The art and kindness of the hand-written note seems to be disappearing in this era of email. It's ineludible, I guess. Nevertheless, I urge you to fight this inevitability.

I'll tell you one of the secrets about nice postcard notes. It's nice postage stamps. Don't just put some very unsurprising and common flag stamp on your nice postcards. Go searching for something else that's appropriate either to your message or to the theme of the postcard itself.

Do I sound at all like Martha?

This afternoon I'm going out looking for a better weight, or thickness, of paper than I have here at home among my photo stock.

So, don't be surpised if you get a postcard from me one of these days just to let you know I'm thinking about you!

Change of Subject
By the way, the wonderful Trout & Caviar Blog I've sent you to a couple of times lately has a new post today with suggestions on making a Southeast Asian style chicken noodle soup. It sounds wonderful. You might want to give this one a try. I'm doing some short ribs tonight, but I'll try this soup very soon.

Great Nation My Backside!

Is all hope fading that we can ever be a great nation?
by Charlie Leck

A friend wrote to me yesterday about how depressed he’s feeling about our nation. It kind of rocked me because he had been the one of the two of us who kept holding out hope. He still believed in Obama and thought we were going to see real change.

“It’s time to focus in on our own problems,” he wrote, “infrastructure, education and the economy… and we need new leadership… I so thought we were gonna get it with Obama… and it seems like we’re going in circles… it’s so disappointing. Charlie, I’m depressed. We could be such a great nation!”

Everything around me went deadly silent and I could hear my heart thumping. This guy had slashed at the stuff I’ve been writing and contended that Obama was still our hope. I rode on his enthusiasm and optimism. Now he was bailing out! I trembled a bit. I didn’t want to be believed. I didn’t want to be correct. Was I just bleating out a self-fulfilling prophesy?

I felt glum and things around me were stalling out. I sent back a reply.

I didn’t want you to do that. One of us has got to keep the faith – to keep hope alive.

I don’t want you to be disappointed. We could be a great nation! Indeed. Write out for me… just in a jotting fashion… what it would mean to be a great nation… I would like to see what you think on a piece of paper so I can print it out and think about it also and perhaps refine and add to it.

Perhaps we could all buy a place in a rural area in the south of France and go home to civilization… or a spot in eastern Canada would not be so far away… but I like the sound of France better… perhaps outside Avignon… nothing fancy… we’ll learn to speak and read French at last and all 3 of us will wear des berét and walk into town and drink café au lait and eat good French pastries and not worry about du merde. I could do it, my friend. Yes, I could really do it. Anne? Close, but I don’t think she could leave the children behind. I couldn’t do it without her.

If you listen to the alternatives to Obama, my friend, there is no hope – no hope at all that we will ever learn what it means to be a great nation.

Abe Lincoln had it figured out. He had a reconstruction plan and an extraordinary dream. And then some [expletive deleted] went and shot him.

Your email made everything go very quiet here in the house. I can hear and feel my heart thumping.

We should be a great nation, but someone keeps [expletive deleted] it up.

Have you ever been in the south of France, my friend? Oh, my God it is lovely. There is, of course (mais oui) a train straight to Paris. There’s another to Cannes and Nice and the sea. Wouldn’t need a car! Just a lot of bookshelves (and your iPods). The hell with [expletive deleted] computers. We’ll make sure there is a big, spare room for when friends or family wants to visit from the U.S.. We’ll make them pretend they are civilized people from a civilized nation. We’ll dig three holes right away, so that when one of us dies the other two can drag the body and drop it in the hole and then cover it and say “Bon huit, mon ami!”

Tell me what it takes to be a great nation. Why can the French do it and we can not?

It’s too quiet right now. It frightens me that you are losing hope.

Charlie

My friend wrote back. If you've got the guts, read it and tremble!

What does a great nation look like? To me?

First I’ll say that I cannot separate my present ideas from my childhood memories... and I don't want to. A child's mind is so much cleaner and clearer. It lacks the greed and envy that comes later and corrupts us. America, the way it was to us as kids, never really existed outside of our minds; yet that could be our guide to greatness.

Imagine America as part of a great world. Think of Americans as having pride, not at the expense of the weak, not pride in being the best or strongest nation, but pride in our generosity, our willingness to share, to teach, to experiment for the benefit of our brothers and sisters.

Our borders are our ruination. We've been so busy being better, stronger, wealthier, that we've become poorer, weaker and angrier.

I don't know when it became more important to be an American than a human – when our little part of one continent became more important than our planet – or how we got to be okay with dumping our waste out of sight in the ocean or over the border; behind a wall.

When did it become acceptable to buy our freedom with the lives of the less eloquent, the less powerful? And how did we not notice the cheap cloth we were using for our flag? Or the hollow words we were making our anthem?

Can any nation be great in a hungry world? Can a child grow into a leader of men on a planet where most children lack breakfast, let alone the opportunity to prosper, to invent, to reach out to another?

We've become a nation of the frightened, angry and greedy. We hide in the guise of a religious morality that is a sham. We are people who buy off our guilt with a twenty dollar donation to Haiti or Africa, but won't share the same sidewalk with a stranger after dark.

We need to sacrifice. We need to consume less, to give more, to help more... No, I need to do that... I need to contribute to the life of another human – the way you did fifty years ago in Mississippi.

As a nation, as a people, we've got to give it away. We can't have freedom built on greed. We can't starve the kids because we fear the parents. The wall that separates North and South America is the same wall that imprisons our spirit.

Charlie, we need a guide. We need an epiphany – maybe some spirit will land in a ship from the universe – that will be big and bright enough for us to trust and follow. Jesus reborn isn't gonna’ do it and neither is Moses or Mohammed. They aren’t large enough for modern America and people don’t understand them anyway.

Maybe America needs to lose its freedom and its confidence to relearn humility. 9/11 didn't do that – not yet it didn't. I can't imagine what it would take. I want to think we can change, that we can follow a humanitarian principle or a few simple commandments -- 10?

END BLOG

The Jalopy

Trying to remember that old vehicle causes me to strain and grimace, but, with the help of an old photo, I remember it!
by Charlie Leck

Lots of news is bombarding us today from Afghanistan and Washington, and I've gone through the Sunday NY Times pretty thoroughly, but I'm not in the mood for analyzing the news this morning. I was flipping through some old photos that one of my brothers sent me and they bring back faint memories. Maybe this is something all old men do; that is, trying to remember their boyhood days. I do this regularly here, but not for myself, but to leave a record of growing up in America. Can you imagine the treasure trove future historians are going to have when, a hundred years from now, they can look back on the blogs written by the world's very common people. I do not pretend to do it for important historians. I do it for my grandchildren and their grandchildren, so they will have, when I am among the stars, a more personal record than a historic one of their funny, old grandpa.

The photo above is the only one I've come acrosss of the crazy vehicle and it (the photo) was really in bad shape -- faded, and filled with scratches, chips, creases and stains. It took some patience, working with good, old Photoshop (perhaps, itself, a nearly forgotten item of history when you are old enough to read this) to get the snapshot into some kind of reasonable condition. As you look at it, the vehicle is behind my father's old, general store in Chester, New Jersey, in an alleyway between the store and an old storage barn just fifteen feet behind it. That old barn was off limits. We were not supposed to go into it because it was in such bad condition and really wasn't included in the lease arrangements that my father had with the owner of the buildings and the property. You can probably guess that we went in there anyway and climbed around in the rafters and curiously looked through all the old, old junk that was stored in there. Just being boys, you know!

Out ahead of the old Ford is Main Street, running to the left (west) and right (east). Across the way is an old building where one of my best pals lived (Buddy). The town library was also housed in that building for a portion of my growing up years. The very back end of the automobile that sits across the street indicates to me that the photo had to be taken after 1946 or '47. By the '50s, I think this old, decrepit car was gone.

Today I'm trying to remember everything I can about the jalopy. That's what we called the old Ford when we were little. It was a hybrid before it's time -- half car and half pickup. Other folks pointed to us when we drove down the road -- especially when we were in the big city -- and we'd wave to them and simply enjoy their reaction.

The Model A Ford in that photo was built with a rear passenger compartment called a rumble seat. Someone – my old man or someone else – removed the seat and installed a box back there to convert the vehicle into a pickup truck. The box wasn’t any more than 3’x4’ but it held a couple of milk cans or a couple of kids on a hot, summer afternoon.

So my memories of it come from when I was no more than 10 years old and, likely, younger. It's not easy to remember things in very great detail from those years in one's life; yet there are memories of this beat up old auto that come back to me in strange detail. If I try really hard, I can even remember the old, musty smell of it when I was riding up there in the front seat while my dad was driving down the street toward the Borough Hall. We were hauling a couple of our old, empty milk cans to the town pump, to get drinking water. In those years when I was little, before I was 10, we didn't have running water in our home. There was an old pump in our kitchen, from which we could get water of a sort, but not anything we would want to drink or do our cooking in. So, we'd fill the milk pails right up to the top from the town's public well. I remember how icy cold the water was and how I’d gather a bowl full in my cupped hands and try to drink it down before it spilled or leaked away between my fingers.

There weren't many people in town who didn't have plumbing and running water in their homes, but there were a few of us.

I remember mainly the drive all the way into the Bronx in that old beater of a car. We’d get more and more toots and hoots as we got closer and closer to the urban, sophisticated regions, nearing the George Washington Bridge. The Ford kept humming along (chugging in a way) and it was thrilling to go bouncing across the Hudson River, so high above it. I was little enough that I had to lift myself up and strain to see out the window. It was spectacular to see the mighty river so far down below us.

I remember we hauled my Grandpa Svejda with us on the return trip back out to Jersey. I got tucked in the middle of the front seat with the two big and old men on either side of me. The gear shift handle was between my legs and my old man warned me not to kick it. It was only about 45 miles from my Grandpa’s place out to our place in Jersey, but the drive took a couple of hours. My grandpa couldn’t make the whole trip without stopping to “see a man about a horse.” I wasn’t allowed to join them on these stops. I had to stay in the car and protect the luggage left out in the open truck box in the back. Grandpa and Dad went into a bar across a busy street, to go to the toilet they said; but I could smell the liquor on my Grandpa’s breath when he returned and slapped me on the knee and laughed at me. They’d brought back a bottle of Yoo-Hoo Chocolate Drink for me.

My dad shook me awake when we were on the North Road, close to entering the Borough of Chester.

“Almost home,” he said.

It had grown dark outside and the weak headlights of the jalopy were bouncing up and down as we rolled up Main Street toward the old, old general store that was our home. I was hungry and thirsty and had to get to a toilet quickly.

Life was going to be good for a while. My grandpa was here and we were going to listen to Dodger games together on the radio. He’d tell me about every batter that came to the plate and explain how the pitcher was going to place the ball and how the infield had curled around toward right field or was playing him tight at the corners. My grandpa loved his Dodgers more than any man on earth and he understood baseball better than anyone in the world. He’d get worse than angry when Stan Musial banged one over the right field fence against his Dodgers and I thought he was going to kick the big radio. He’d let out a mighty string of swear words, but they were in another language – Bohunk, I think – so they didn’t count with my mother as did the nasty cuss words I’d get my mouth washed out for saying.

“Go get me a Schaefer,” my Grandpa would tell me, “before they get this new pitcher warmed up. Take it from the back of the cooler so it’ll be colder.” While my Grandpa visited we kept a case of his beloved Schaefer beer tucked in the bottom of the milk cooler out in the store.

My brothers and sister all learned to drive behind the wheel of the old jalopy. I remember my sister taking it off to a dance one time. She came home aggravated about how the boys had made fun of her old car. She’d beg my parents to go out and get a respectable vehicle.

One day, after we’d installed running water and joined the semi-civilized world, my old man did go out and buy a real car. I think it was around 1951 and my mother hadn’t turned real sick yet and money was okay, so he bought a big, maroon 1947 Desoto Deluxe. It was a pretty slick looking automobile compared to the old jalopy. The Desoto was a “previously driven automobile” as they nowadays refer to used cars. It seemed in pretty good shape, but one rear fender began to lose its color a month or so after we got it and faded to a misty gray tone instead of maroon. One of my big brothers, both of whom knew everything in the world, told me it had been in an accident and the cheat-salesman hadn’t told my old man that it had been repainted. It wasn’t as much fun as the jalopy because it had big huge seats and I couldn’t see out the window when I sat in the car. It also had a back seat, I didn’t get to sit up front between my grandpa and my old man. Times had changed, however, and we weren’t hauling milk cans full of water from the town hall pump anymore. We had a bathtub now with hot and cold water and a toilet that flushed, and I was combing my own hair now.

I missed the jalopy and thought about it lots for a year or two after we got the Desoto. It sure was more fun to go down the street and see the people pointing at us and laughing at the sight of that beat up, old car.

I never stop being amazed at what hard work writing well is. I keep trying, though, and I keep trying to get better and better. I’ve got some dreams I’d like to fulfill, but it sure is hard work.

“Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful” [Alfred North Whitehead]

War in a Time of Cholera

Why doesn’t a nation feel it more? Why does it seem so comfortable and normal at home while the troops are always in harm’s way?
by Charlie Leck

During World War II, people thought about and talked about the war every single day. When you sat down to dinner in the evening, your family said grace and prayed for the boys at war.

I was just a little boy, yet I remember the mood and the atmosphere. Sure, life went on. People had jobs that had to be done. Kids had to go to school. Children had to be cared for and watched over. There were still dances and movies and ballgames. Yet, the war pervaded every moment of every day. On the East Coast, we went through regular air-raid drills and had black-out exercises, when all the lights in the community would go off, and we'd spend time in utter darkness.

Starting in Korea, that seemed to change. I don’t know why. I won’t pretend I do. It just changed. It was that way in Vietnam, too. Maybe it’s because these weren’t real wars. What was it they called the war in Korea, a police action?

Congress didn’t declare war in Korea and it didn't declare war on Vietnam. It didn’t declare war on Iraq or Afghanistan either.

But, folks, there’s a war going on -- two wars actually. Real young men and women are going to those wars. Some are dying. Others are coming home severely damaged. Their lives are being disrupted and, perhaps, that disruption will last forever for them.

Why don’t I feel it? Why don’t I hang near the radio, as my parents did, waiting for some announcement of victory on the battlefield? For some movement up Hill J409? The placement of our flag atop some mountain?

Again, as I said a few paragraphs ago, I’m not going to guess. I don’t know; yet I keep thinking about it and wonder why we don’t understand that it is some perverse entanglement of the Industrial-Military Complex. Remember, President Eisenhower warned us against it? Is it possible that war keeps the economy moving? And now, in this terrible time of unemployment and economic catastrophe for so many people, we pour more billions into the machinery of war.

In a remarkable article in yesterday’s (13 Feb 2010) NY Times, C.J. Chivers takes his readers into an intense battlefield movement by U.S. Troops in Afghanistan: Afghan Attack Gives Marines a Taste of War. It is an extremely well done piece that enables you to feel the war and the fears of the men and women who fight it.

“The Taliban let the Marines walk into an open field and approach a tall stand of dried grass. Then they opened fire in a hasty ambush. The Marines dropped. They fired back, exposed. Gunfire rose to a crescendo.

"Corporal Drake shouted over the noise to the team in front, 'You got everyone?' He shouted to the team behind him, which was pressed flat in the field. 'Everyone O.K.?'

The Taliban firing subsided. 'We’re moving!' the corporal shouted. The patrol stood and sprinted toward the withdrawing Taliban, and then ran across irrigation dikes and poppy fields and entered the compound that had been struck.”

Maybe all of us back home should be forced to read such stuff every day. I don’t want to forget there is a war going on; yet, I need to remind myself that these guys are fighting so we can be free and go on with our lives. Nevertheless, it doesn’t seem fair.

I keep thinking that we would push the war to an end if we felt the pain more. We should be forced to pay war taxes as long as the boys are away fighting. The war should be paid for in cold, hard cash pulled from every citizen's pocket. We should all do some kind of volunteer work to assist in the war effort. We should gather in a park each month to hear the names of the dead read off to us one by one; and then we should pray God their souls to keep.

It seems so wrong to have American young people off dying and getting seriously mangled and injured while we just go on dining out, going to the theater and playing in the backyard with the dog.

I’ve just finished reading a couple of enormous works about the Civil War. It was the ugliest, costliest and most painful war in our history. More men died there than in all our other wars combined. Yet, while troops were falling in and around Richmond, near Gettysburg and all through the south to Atlanta, Mobile and Vicksburg, life went on peacefully in Minnesota and Illinois and Vermont.

War is perverse! It seems we should be bright enough to figure out ways to avoid it. Yet, human beings are vain, covetous and cruel, and they send young people off to fight old people’s wars. Old people should go fight their own wars and the young should be allowed to grow and mature in a healthy, sane environment.

War is too easy in America. We went to Vietnam too easily. We sprang upon Granada for absurd and scandalous reasons. We created a big lie so we could invade Iraq. Now we are entangled in Afghanistan, trying to stay on mission and putting young people’s lives at risk each and every day.

War is a disease in our land. It is too quickly the answer when there might be other approaches. I’m no peacenik and I’m not a pacifist, but I know there may often be other answers when the wolves are crying “war.”

If you have sympathy for my words, you are likely familiar with the Non-Violent Peace Force; and if you are not, you should be. I’m a member and I like what they do.

Lincoln's Birthday

We don't make much of it these days, now that we've mushed things into Presidents Day.
by Charlie Leck

February 12th was a day that meant something to me when I was a boy! It was old Abe's birthday! In grade school, it would be a day that we spent some important time talking about Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President of the United States of America. As I remember it, only George Washington and Lincoln were singled out for special recognition on their birthdays each year. One, of course, would expect it about George Washington because of his stature as our very first President and his heroic role as a General in the Revolutionary War (or war of independence).

No single kid in those school days was left to wonder about why the 16th President was given such important recognition. We were not to forget, you see, that Abraham Lincoln was our greatest President and our most important one. Historians pretty well agree on that even today.

We were told, each year, the story of Abraham Lincoln's ascendancy to the office of President -- his rise from rail splitter to leader of the nation in its most perilous time. The stories that teachers told of Abe when I was a grade-schooler were inspiring and meaningful; yet the better and finer stories were told about him by the old men who would come to my dad's general store in the wintry month of February and sit around the old, warming stove in the center of the store. They'd reel off grand and fascinating stores about their hero, Abe Lincoln. Many of them had been born less than three decades after Abe's frightful assassination. Their own parents had been contemporary's of Abe Lincoln and had lived through the desperate times of the Civil War. When these old guys spoke of Abe, their talk was so intimate it was almost as if they had known him. They favored most the tales of Abe's commonness and how he liked a good yarn and enjoyed recounting them for anyone who wanted to listen.

"Yes, sir," they'd often repeat, "old Abe saved the Union at a terrible time and it cost him his life, don't yuh know!"

I fell in love with reading about Abe. I do believe it is what turned me into a decent student and an above average reader. I began tackling more complex books about Abraham Lincoln and Civil War History at an age before most kids were ready for such reading. The woman who tended the town library, just across the street, would called me when something new about Abe Lincoln came in. In order to promptly read it, I'd often neglect that boring business about fractions and their conversions into decimal numbers.

There was the oft' told tale of Abe walking many, many miles to return, with his apologies, a few pennies to a woman who had paid too much for an item she purchased from him. As a boy, I marveled at such honesty every single time I heard the story. There are hundreds and hundreds of such apocrypha in children's literature about Lincoln and maybe as many in adult works about him, too. Still, there is enough solid, historical fact to make Abe one of the extraordinary figures of American history -- if not its most extraordinary figure. A reading of Doris Kearns Goodwin's opus grandé about Lincoln's presidency (Team of Rivals) captures the real man, Lincoln, and yet does not, by one wit reduce the wonder and enormity of the man.

"Now that reminds me of a story...," Abe would often sit back and say -- perhaps in a Cabinet meeting or perhaps sitting before a campfire with a group of union soldiers. It became a trademark with Abe and he'd follow that up with tales that drew laughter or awe from his listeners. He had hundreds of them and he held his listeners spellbound in his telling of them.

It was probably this enormous sense of humor -- dry as it was -- that enabled Abe to make it through the darkest of those dark, dark days.

A report was brought to him one day about the loss of life of several brigadier-generals and their horses in some Virginia valley. "Too bad about the horses," Abe muttered quite softly, "I can make brigadier-generals."

A Lincoln contemporary, the Reverend Theodore L. Cuyler, Pastor of the Lafayette Avenue Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, perhaps, said it best: "If Washington is the most revered, Lincoln is the best loved man that ever trod this continent."

And if you get the impression that it is only in history that Lincoln is held in such admiration, you need then to examine the feelings of those who were closest to him to find the truth. For instance, his own, personal first-secretary, John Hay said quite spectacularly of his boss: "Lincoln, with all his foibles, is the greatest character since Christ."

More than one scholar has referred to Lincoln as the "psychotherapist" to the nation during the awful years of the Civil War. Even in the darkest moments, Lincoln could say a soft thing or tell a humorous tale; and these things seemed to keep the country sane.

“Gentlemen, why don’t you laugh?" Lincoln said to his Cabinet one day when they failed to laugh at one of his stories, thinking it might be inappropriate to do so in such a hard time. "With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day, if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I do.”

I close my rambling about President Lincoln with these words that were written by the poet, Walt Whitman:

“As is well known, story-telling was often with President Lincoln a weapon which he employ’d with great skill. Very often he could not give a point-blank reply or comment—and these indirections, (sometimes funny, but not always so,) were probably the best responses possible. In the gloomiest period of the war, he had a call from a large delegation of bank presidents. In the talk after business was settled, one of the big Dons asked Mr. Lincoln if his confidence in the permanency of the Union was not beginning to be shaken—whereupon the homely President told a little story: “When I was a young man in Illinois,” said he, “I boarded for a time with a deacon of the Presbyterian church. One night I was roused from my sleep by a rap at the door, and I heard the deacon’s voice exclaiming, ‘Arise, Abraham! the day of judgment has come!’ I sprang from my bed and rushed to the window, and saw the stars falling in great showers; but looking back of them in the heavens I saw the grand old constellations, with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and true in their places. Gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.”

I have no quarrel with the general assumption of historians that Abraham Lincoln was our greatest President.

Faithful Friends

Faithful friends who are dear to us!
by Charlie Leck

This is one of my favorite photos among all the thousands of photographs we have posted in photo albums, stashed in drawers, crushed into boxes and hung on the walls of our home and other buildings around the farm. I have wanted to write about this photograph for a long time, but I'd lost track of it and I've been unable to scan it and download it for you. Strange how we stumble on to things, isn't it. I was searching for another photo this morning (posted at the end of this blog) because a friend wanted a copy of it to frame and hang in his home. While looking, I stumbled upon this dear photograph and my entire morning and my whole spirit was lifted to the joyous level.

I've always called the photograph "Faithful Friends." The two lovely ladies are Elise and Lisa. That will do for names, but many of my readers will recognize these two girls and will be able to paste more information about them into this blog. I count them among the kindest, loveliest and most faithful friends that we have ever had and we will be forever grateful to them for being so loyal and committed to our friendship.

In the little play act we conducted so many times over a number of years they fulfilled the role of servants and staff to us. In our hearts they were never that, however. They were just buds along for the ride and we had so much fun and so many laughs with them. Had it not been for them we would not have been able to go off on very many of the great adventures we pursued.

To make us sparkle and look splendid and dashing when the curtain rose, these two worked feverishly and, often, from before sunrise to long after sunset. To them, the princess and her carriage and horses needed to be as perfect as humanly possible. I was often dazzled by their performances in supporting roles and knew in my heart that they were stars of each and every one of our little plays.

The photograph at the head of this blog shows them sitting on the groom's seat of our wonderful Park Drag carriage. We're on the driveway leading from Newport Country Club, out along the Atlantic Ocean in Rhode Island. They took us to places like this for well over twenty years.

They'd drive trucks, muck out horse stalls, polish leather and turnout horses as beautifully as anyone ever has. It never seemed like a chore to them and I never heard them gripe about their schedules and responsibilities, as the workers in other parties always seemed to be doing. They often slept in uncomfortable beds in less than splendid rooms. When they did, they'd laugh and joke about it.

At the end of each of our little voyages and make believe adventures, they'd always be exhausted; and so they should have been considering the effort they had put forth so that we could reap the praise and rewards. What we paid them was a pittance compared to what they deserved. What they gave us was far more treasured by us than they will ever know.

We love them dearly -- even as members of our own family -- and we count them among the most beautiful people we have ever met.

Dear and faithful friends, after so many wonderful years, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

The two photos below were taken by Bob Mischka, an extraordinary photographer of carriages and horse drawn activities.
See Bob Mischka Sports Photography!

Unwritten Thank You Notes

Why am I spending so much time writing my near-daily blogs when I haven’t even written a single thank you note for my Christmas gifts yet?
by Charlie Leck

This past autumn, while doing some Christmas shopping, I was in a neat little book store very near my home town; and I saw a little gift book called The Art of the Thank You Note. Having been sent out to do a few chores for Santa, I thought it would make a neat stuffer for some one of the 18 stockings that hung from the mantel and a dozen other places in the living room during Christimas-time. Once at home, before hiding the little gifts for Santa’s later retrieval, I decided to read through the little volume about writing thank you notes. Frankly, no one needs it more than I. It’s kind of sad, too, because I really am appreciative of all the gifts I get. It’s just that I find it difficult to take pen in hand anymore because of all the hours and hours I spend at a keyboard. If one does not keep up with writing by hand, one’s handwriting can certainly deteriorate.

Well, it was a good little book. It had some neat things to say about how to make a thank you note sincere and meaningful. I didn’t want to then, after finishing it, just shove the book away, so I included it in one of the stockings. On Christmas morning that person, of course, took the gift as a backhanded way of saying that she didn’t write very good thank you notes. I abdicated myself from all blame and placed it squarely on the shoulders of Santa. Whew! That was a close one.

We are steaming along, well into February now, and I still haven’t put pen to paper to write my own thank you notes. I received a host of wonderful gifts. My dear wife gave me a number of shirts and the v-neck sweaters that I love to wear autumn, winter and spring. Santa chipped in some really neat slippers and one of the dear kids put together my traditional Italian deli box from a fantastic shop way across the city. It’s stuffed with far more goodies than I could ever consume before it goes stale, yet I refuse to share any of it and hide it away so no one else can get into it. This year it included a container of Tuscan Paté that is made at that marvelous deli. It’s the first time I had ever tasted it and it is spectacular. The same kid, and her husband, gave me a stack of books that would keep the normal guy busy for the year. I would have finished them all by now, but there is one I just can’t get enthused about (The Downhill Lie by Carel Hiaasen) and another (Good Book by David Plotz)that I’ve just put over on "someday pile' on my "someday table." The hit of that stack of books was Death of a Writer by Michael Collins. It was really a creative and captivating murder mystery that I highly recommend. Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet was a really creative work by an English professor at West Point. If there was a central question in the book it was likely a matter of how one teaches great literature to soldiers who will be going off to war. How does it prepare them? How does it help in making it all sensible? How does the experience change her – she who teaches this literature? Her students often write back to her about their reactions to some of their readings now that they are hunkered down in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“Unlike many soldiers in Iraq, Andy had no email access, and our correspondence had a distinctly old-fashioned feel. Anticipating a shortage of paper, he planned ahead by taking a lot of blank notebooks to Iraq. Writing, short stories but especially poetry, provided an escape and ‘something to fuss over’ whenever he was not conducting police patrols and raids, building desks for schoolchildren, or defusing land mines. Andy’s letters are funny and finely crafted, just as his essays had been: ‘The Fertile Crescent,’ he reports in one, ‘is fertile compared to the desert, but not compared to say, France or Ohio. In this way, I think it is a misnomer.’"

There’s a long section in the book about her correspondence with Andy. It’s pretty remarkable stuff. The reader is drawn into a friendship with both the soldier and the professor. And the soldier is not always Andy. It might be Tom or Phil or Joel or a number of other surprisingly touching relationships the professor builds with her students. Believe me, this one is worth the read. It’s a really neat book.

What the World Eats
My grandkids in Chicago, who have very bookish parents (one’s an English professor and the other a librarian), sent me a couple of books, too. Both of them are worth telling you about and they’re probably books you may want to look at.

The first is a photographic essay written by Faith D’Aluisio and photographed by Peter Menzel. It’s title is: What the World Eats. By clicking on that link, you can take a look at a dozen or so pages from the book and get an idea about how this very creative work was put together. The author and photographer paid visits to 21 countries around the world and spent time with families in each nation and report back to us about the things that each of these families eat. The families are photographed and so are their meals. It's a brilliant work in all respects and I’ve spent hours and hours going through the book, learning about the vast differences in diets and menu in various nations. For instance, an Australian eats approximately 247 pounds of meat each year. A person in Butan eats less than 7 pounds. Try this on for size: In Chad only 42 percent of the population has access to clean drinking water. The life expectancy in Chad is 47 years. It’s 78 in the United States and 81 in France.

There are a couple of dozen very unusual recipes in What the World Eats and you’ll find them fun to read through and some you may want to try. For instance, how about Hubert’s Knuckle from Poland. The authors picked it up on a visit to the Sobczynscy family in Konstancin-Jeziorna. Next time you want to cook Pig’s Knuckles, let me know and I’ll send along this recipe. My old man loved this dish and my mom would frequently cook it for him. As a kid I wasn’t attracted. Now, as an adult (or somewhat an adult) I’ve tried the meal and really like it. While we’re looking at the Poland section of the book, I’ll report to you that that nation has a 100 percent literacy rate. Not even the United States has that.

I definitely keep this book on the coffee table and I find myself picking it up a few times each week and leafing through it to another country and family. I loved meeting the Madsens in Greenland, where I tried seal stew, and the Cabañas in the Philippines, where we had a Karaoke lunch of chicken, crab and spring rolls. Our visit in the United States is with the Revis family in North Carolina. We paid a visit to the neighborhood Subway shop and we tried Mrs. Revis’ stuffed green peppers.

Within the Frame
Now another gift that came in from Chicago was a book I had hinted about because I’d heard so many good things about it. Don’t turn away when I tell you it’s a photography book, because it’s really so much more than that. David duChemin is the author/photographer of this very, very special book called Within the Frame. It is not about how to take photographs. It is about trying to put soul and feeling in your photographs – the soul of the subject, but also the feelings of the photographer and his subject. Joe McNally, one of my favorite photographers and a highly recognized photographic artist, says the following about the book in his foreword:

“This book is like a great photograph. It is seamless, intuitive, and filled with minor details blended with larger themes. It has impact – the color play is so strong it’s like a hard, fast punch to the visual gut. Still, there is nuance and subtlety that shimmer like a catchlight.”

I agree. Above, in the title section of this blog, without the permission I’ve tried to secure, I’ve included one of duChemin’s photographs to try to provide an example of his work. I hope he’ll forgive me and consider it a promotion of his extraordinary book.

Mr. du Chemin tries to help the photographer understand that the frame must be filled with more than just a photograph. It needs to be filled with feeling, drama, soul, spirit and a story. Take the time, he urges us, to do more than snap a shot. Take the time to capture a moment in real life. Many photographs we take have been taken hundreds of times by other people. Why not search for that special photograph – that special moment, or that look in someone’s face, or that place that no one else would think to photograph. It’s powerful stuff that duChemin writes and his photographs are even more powerful.

“I need to both hang on to my wonder and explore it from every angle until I’ve found the one that best allows me to communicate my vision.”

If you like to take photographs and would like them to have a more original and satisfying look, this would be a book with which you should spend some time.

Original Artwork Arrived from Portland
The grandkids in Portland (Oregon) did up something original for us. They put together frames and canvasses of bright and differing colors and then set their hands in paint and pressed them upon the textile. There they left beautiful images of beautiful little hands. We cherish the pretty works and have hung them in our kitchen, where they brighten things up and remind us so often of little loved ones we wish we saw more often.

Oh, to all of this I can add the snow shovel, the bottles of wine, the new socks, the tie rack, the photographs, accessories for my camera, and dozens of little tasty looking items that were put away in the pantry.

It was a remarkable Christmas morning and I’m filled with gratitude. It’s just that I haven’t spent the time to write to each of these dearly loved ones to thank them for their gifts. What a lout am I!