December 6, 1999
Greetings, everyone!
We
hope your holiday season is delightful, surrounded by friends and family. We
also wish, for everyone we know and like, that the next millennium is at least
as good to you as this one has been.
(Barring a discovery by astronomers that the calendar has been
miscalculated and must be reset back a few years, it is unlikely I will be able
to write that in a holiday letter again.)
I had
dinner this fall at Eastcliff, the University President’s home, with a group of
faculty and the members of the Board of Regents of the University. At my table sat, among others, Regent Bob
Bergland (former U.S. Secretary of Agriculture, from a family long settled in Minnesota) and a faculty
member who described herself as a Jewish New Yorker transplanted to Minnesota. Adjusting to the culture, she said, has been
a challenge. Bob Bergland told her that
she had to understand one thing: good
Minnesotans always begin a conversation with the weather. And then they talk about the weather.
So
I’m a good Minnesotan, right, because I always intersperse Minnesota weather reports in my
letters? When I composed the closing
portion of last year's letter, I wrote that we were seeing record warm
temperatures for December. That ended
right after I mailed the letters; right before Christmas, 1998, the mercury
took a dive to below zero. After a balmy
fall and early winter, we got back to normal in the country's icebox. This fall, however, we saw the same in
November--record warmth.
Towards
the end of last year, Pat and I had a conversation about organizational
management. Pat worked for a small
marketing firm; their business is handing out samples (primarily food and
beverage) at events or on street corners.
They make proposals to clients, and then sign contracts to distribute x
million Dove candy bars in 25 cities across the country during a certain
period. As far as I could tell,
proposals are constantly changed up to the last minute, until the sales folks
are going out to the airport to get on the plane to go meet with the
client. Pat often came home having
pulled her hair out trying to get stuff ready.
On
the other hand, I work for a university (of Minnesota, if there's anyone on our card
list who doesn't know that). When Pat
came home frazzled, I cheerfully told her that I'm working projects that will
take years, perhaps decades, to come to fruition. Universities are paradoxical places, in some
ways. They are the source of an
extraordinary number of new ideas, inventions, thoughts, investigations,
research--things that can change society enormously, we hope for the good.
At
the same time, universities are themselves enormously resistant to change. (It
took Cambridge University over 50 years to decide
whether to drop its Greek requirement.)
A study a few years back pointed out that since Martin Luther founded
the Lutheran Church in 1520, there are 66
organizations in the western world that existed then that still survive: the Lutheran Church,
the Catholic Church, the parliament of Iceland, and the parliament of the Isle of Man--and 62 universities. A medieval scholar, walking into a modern
university, after adjusting for the changes in way we live (for example, cars,
computers, microwaves, airplanes, etc.), would be able to slip reasonably
quickly into being a teacher and scholar at a modern university. Many of us who live and breathe in a
university environment believe they must be doing something right, because they
have survived virtually intact through wars, depressions, the toppling of
empires, and all the other vicissitudes of history. (Harvard, founded in 1636, must be among the
oldest, if not the oldest, of all organizations in the United States. The University of Minnesota,
founded in 1851--before Minnesota
became a state--is no more than the second-oldest surviving organization in the
state. The claim of being the oldest
school is held by another university, Hamline.)
So I
work daily on endeavors and projects that I know will eventually bear fruit in
a year or two or more, and Pat worked on endeavors and projects that have to be
ready to bear fruit in minutes. She
complained, at the end of this conversation, that there must be some place she
could work where decisions needed more than three minutes but less than three
years to be made.
I
defend the snail's pace at which universities generally make their
decisions. Sometimes we do things
painfully slowly, but we eventually do decide, and mostly when the faculty, the
administration, the regents, and sometimes "the public" (both in the
literal sense and, sometimes, in the specific sense of the legislature,
representing "the public") agree that a change is useful and
necessary. One does have to have a great
deal of patience working on the policy-making end of a university. I must have developed that patience, because
I understand the history and necessity of it.
Or maybe it's just habit. I know
it drives a lot of people crazy.
The
upshot of the story here is that Pat quit her job at the marketing firm. It was for reasons in addition to the
disorganization (one, that the company moved from downtown Minneapolis to Brooklyn Park, on the edge of Maple Grove, turning her
drive to work from 15 minutes to an hour or more). She went to work for the Minneapolis Medical
Research Foundation, which is the fund-raising and research-grant-funding arm
of the Hennepin County Medical
Center. She's delighted with the new position, as
chief staff support to the administrative vice president--she's working for an
organization that does good AND does well.
She finally found a job at a place that takes more than 3 minutes but
less than 3 years to do things.
As
she became more disappointed with the marketing firm, Pat also reflected that
as time passed, she didn't feel particularly satisfied working for an outfit
that contracted with breakfast and candy food companies to hand out
samples. She wanted to get back into a
social service organization, one that was dedicated to helping people, rather
than one simply devoted to making a lot of money for the company owner.
I
want to note in this letter a special event hosted annually by our friends Joe
and Genie Dixon, who each New Year's Eve invite us and 3 other couples over for
an absolutely marvelous multi-course dinner that starts about 7:30 and lasts
nearly until midnight. It is the best
meal we eat all year, without doubt, and is accompanied by wine drawn from
their vast cellar. Each of these dinners
remains a fond memory for the entire year thereafter. This event has been going on for years and
years; I think if they ever decide to stop having them, Pat and I will stay
home and pout, because little else we could find to do could match the good
food and good company. The 1998-into-1999
dinner was as exquisite as usual, but I have noticed one change: over the years, the adjournment time gets
earlier and earlier. We all barely made
it to midnight last year.
One
thing our friends the Dixons requested of the rest of us, however, was that we
take responsibility for New Year's Eve, 2000.
We toyed only momentarily with something exotic, like the Caribbean, but decided that wouldn't work. So, hardy Minnesotans that we are, we have
reservations at a resort on the north shore of Lake Superior, about an hour and
half northeast of Duluth. I know we
won't get the same quality dinner we're accustomed to, but I trust that we'll
make do. It will, no doubt, be colder
than blazes up there.
Footnotes
on our dog story. You may recall that
last year I related we got a dog that was far younger and far bigger than we
had determined was appropriate. Millie
is a loveable and gentle creature, but she developed the bad habit, when we
were gone during the week at work and the kids were at school, of chewing up
things. We kept the family room cleared
(where she is confined during the day), but she even went up on tables and into
the TV cabinet and chewed up gloves, the controller for the kids' Nintendo64,
Elliott's toys, and so on.
During
the year Pat had from time to time hinted that we should get a second dog, to
keep Millie company. I was flatly and
vehemently opposed. But after the
chewing began, and could not readily be controlled, I told Pat one Saturday
morning that maybe I would change my mind, and that maybe a companion would
stop the chewing. Heavens, Pat was out
of the house within an hour, and returned 5 hours later with another dog whose
ethnic background is open to dispute--perhaps part Golden Retriever, part
Australian Shepherd. He, Bacardi (whom
we renamed Cody), was also about as laid back as any creature can be, friendly,
attentive, playful. So now we had two
dogs, of all things, neither of which would bark if an army of strangers
entered the house. Pat's in heaven, the
kids loved them, and I vacuumed up dog hair.
Our
cat Vickie was not amused by Millie's appearance, and was even less amused by a
second black monster. But she, who
weighs about 10% of what either of them do, had them buffaloed. Vickie at one point had Millie backed into a
corner in the kitchen and was hissing at her.
The dog didn't know what to do, and didn't dare move, and gave Pat this
pathetic look, like "get me out of this." Neither of the dogs was
really very interested in the cat--they don't chase her, or even bother
her--but one time they had her stuck in the basement, mostly out of curiosity,
as far as I could tell. She just charged
at one, hissed, and they backed off. Woe
be unto the cat if the dogs ever figured out that she has no front claws.
The
denouement of the dog tale, however, is somewhat sad. Millie, our first and most loved, developed
uncontrollable bladder leakage, so was spilling urine inside the house. This began the night before Krystin, her
friend, and I were leaving for the east coast--Millie leaked in Krystin's bed. While we were gone, Pat had to make a
decision. The verdict of the vet was
that she could try various medications, at considerable cost and with no
guarantees. We said "no," and
were going to have her put down. The
vet, however, found a family that agreed to have an animal with medical
problems, so Millie's now safely housed elsewhere. It was a very hard decision, but our
checkbook is not open-ended and our carpeting is not annually replaceable.
Now, of course, the dog we got to keep Millie company was
lonely. Cody went into (what seemed to
be) a deep depression after Millie left.
So, there was nothing to do but go find another dog! We acquired from the humane society a canine
we thought was half Rottweiler, half German Shepherd, although small for both,
because he was not as big as one might expect from those two breeds. After six weeks, we returned the latest
addition to the humane society--he chewed up a number of the plants on our deck
and items in the house, occasionally chose not to believe he was housebroken,
and developed (probably) arthritis in one of his legs. We decided, after all this, that we could
happily be a one-dog family. Cody has
been extremely affectionate and extremely healthy, and will have to survive
psychologically as the only dog.
Millions of dogs in American families manage; I presume he can as well.
On
the kids front, we continue to be intrigued by Elliott's talents. Because he likes to draw so much, we hired
private tutors for him, students at the University and at Macalester College. Wary about being a parent who thinks his kid
is far more talented than he really is, I contacted one of the staff at the
Minnesota Arts school. She asked me to
fax some of his drawings to her. I did
so. She and I then talked; she said that
his drawings were "extraordinary" for an 8-year-old, and recommended
he be provided supplementary teaching.
We are doing so.
Beyond
his drawing, however, he has an intriguing spatial/conceptual abilities. When he plays with Legos or K'nex (a plastic
modern day cross between Tinker Toys and an Erector Set), he manages to
construct the most interesting "things" and then animate them (in his
mind) with stories. He looks at pictures
of things, builds a copy of them, and then elaborates on them. If this kind of ability is genetic, it's
clearly in recessive genes, because neither Pat nor I could draw a paper bag
and have it look right.
To
our dismay, Elliott's art and other talents went into relative disuse after
last Christmas, when we bought a Nintendo 64 for him and Krystin. He loves to play it, by the hour. (Krystin plays it on occasion, but not with
the enthusiasm he brings to it.) When it
comes to spending money, he is a first-rate con artist. He saves his allowance, and whenever out shopping,
he always tries to talk me into buying toys for him (which I sometimes do, if
he's been a really good kid, which he is the vast majority of the time). But after he got tired of the first few games
we bought for the Nintendo, Mr. Tightwad--after spending virtually none of his
allowance or Christmas money from his grandparents for months--in May and June
bought 3 new Nintendo games. At $53 a
crack, he let loose--but of course managed to persuade me to kick in $15 for
each of them as well. I am a sucker.
Krystin
is a teen-age girl. That about sums it
up. The important things in life are
friends, music, chat rooms on the web, clothes, magazines, and (ugh) make-up. School work ranks rather far down on the list
of priorities--right down there with chores. Neither gets done without repeated
prompting from her parents. (Although I will say that as I prepare this letter
for mailing, in early December, Krystin has begun to show a great deal more
responsibility for her homework, even if she doesn't like it any more
than she has. So we're encouraged.) One fortunate side benefit (for us) from the
interest in clothes is that she has insisted on learning how to run the washer
and dryer, so she at least occasionally washes clothes. We've had to insist, however, that she not
run the washer for only 2 or 3 articles of clothing--if she's going to run it,
she has to do a whole load! (Krystin,
instead of trying to pry loose parental money for Nintendo games, tries to get
it for clothes--and some of the time, either Pat or I give in and buy her
things, even though we give her a clothing allowance. Unlike her brother, Krystin cannot keep money
in her pocket for more than a day, so her clothing allowance is often gone by
the second or third day of the month.)
We are both suckers.
Krystin
had about the busiest summer a normal middle-class teenager could have. Three days after school ended, she flew down
to Dallas to
stay with family friends for two weeks.
(She decided she did not like the heat in Texas.)
She was back in town for about 40 hours, and took off on a Monday
morning for Spanish camp in northern Minnesota
for two weeks. She was home from camp
for a week, and then I took her and one of her best friends, Christine Lenzen,
on a 3-week trip to the east coast (the last week of which Pat and Elliott
joined us for Pat's family gathering--more on the trip shortly.) She was home for two weeks after that, then
went to Camp Needlepoint, a week-long camp at the
YMCA camp outside Hudson, Wisconsin, open only to kids with
diabetes. She came back from that and
five days later started 9th grade at Minneapolis
South High
School.
But that we could have summers like that as adults.
Spring
in Minnesota
this year did not give any confirmation to the thesis of global warming (which,
in my view, is much more than a thesis; all the data suggest it is a
fact). In the first two weeks of June,
the daytime temperatures were not much above 70 and the nighttime temperatures
kept dipping into the 40s. Many days
were overcast with occasional drizzle or rain.
Our potted impatiens on the deck were pathetic--they weren't dying, but
they sure weren't growing much. Most of
our plants did well, however--because most of our plants are hostas, and
they'll grow despite the best efforts of the gardener and the climate to do
them in. The grass in the back yard we
no longer had to worry about, because 2 large dogs using the yard as both
playground and waste removal location meant the grass never had a chance. But by the time we hit the summer solstice,
on June 21, it had not felt like we'd had much of a spring and certainly not
any summer--and then the days began to get shorter!
Traveling
for 3 weeks with two 14-year-old girls was an experience. Originally the trip was to be only Krystin
and me. The more we thought about it,
the more we thought Krystin might have more fun with a friend along--they could
gripe together at all the places I would drag them to. Christine was first choice, and her mother
(and Christine) was excited enough that she withdrew Christine from a theater
camp and sent her along. (Christine had
never seen an ocean, and except for Disney World, had never been to the east
coast. So it promised to be all new for
her.) In the course of three weeks, it
is safe to say that they got on one another's nerves some of the time, but they
did manage to remain friends afterwards.
At
first I had planned on driving, but then a long-time faculty friend who has a
home on Martha's Vineyard invited us to visit
for a few days. That meant two 14-hour
days driving out to Cape Cod, then driving down the coast visiting friends
along the way, ending up in Myrtle Beach, SC--and then two 14-hour days driving
back home. The closer the day came the less
I liked this idea, and I finally said "to heck with it, we're going to fly
and rent a car." Which we did. The two girls endorsed this decision
enthusiastically. We flew into Boston, drove to Woods
Hole, Mass.,
and took the ferry to Martha's Vineyard.
When
we were riding the courtesy bus from the parking lot to the ferry on that
Saturday, I overheard someone talking about a plane crash. It turned out that we arrived at Martha's Vineyard the morning after the JFK, Jr. plane
crash. Except for one small area on the
southwest part of the island--where there were quite a number of media vehicles
and satellite dishes--the events surrounding the crash had no impact on our
visit. (Pat later related that
Christine's mom Peggy called her--Pat--in the middle of the day Saturday and
asked if she had heard about the plane crash.
Pat said for a split second she had been terrified that Peggy was going
tell her the plane that the two girls and I were on had crashed. Then she realized that Peggy would have been
frantic and in tears--and she learned about the JFK crash. But her heart was briefly in her throat.)
My
overriding memory of this 3-week trip will be that it was hot. Even Martha's Vineyard
was hot, which is unusual. Virtually
every day was over 90, and most were over 95, with humidity to match. The east coast was baked in mid-summer this
year, and we were there much of the time the oven was on "high." Despite the heat, we poked around and saw the
sights of Martha's Vineyard; one of the more
interesting aspects of the island is its enormous geographic diversity in a
very small place. It doesn't have
mountains or a desert, but just about everything else. Christine finally got to see the ocean.
From Martha's Vineyard we drove to stay with friends in
suburban Philadelphia. The most hilarious point of the entire trip
occurred when we were driving around looking for my friends' home. We passing a strip mall, and Christine was
reading out the names of the retail establishments and noting which ones were
also in the Twin Cities: "we have
Sears, we have Chili's, we have Walgreens, we have no Dicks." (There was some retailer with a name like
"R. B. Dick.") There was utter
silence in the car for a few seconds. I
burst into laughter; Christine, in an incredulous voice, said "what did I
just say?"
While in the Philadelphia area, I
dragged the girls to Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell, so they could see
where the Declaration of Independence was signed and where the Constitution was
debated and signed (and when we got to Washington, they then went to see
the originals of both). They got to see
Betsy Ross's house (she the seamstress of the mythical first U.S. flag) and
Ben Franklin's grave (I took a picture of Krystin at the gravesite, because she
and Franklin are first cousins about 13 or 17 times removed--one of Ben
Franklin's siblings is one of Pat's forebearers). We also went to a small Amish
village--Intercourse, PA--which was mostly a tourist trap. I told Christine she could not buy a
t-shirt with "I love Intercourse" emblazoned across the chest. We also went to Valley
Forge, which is interesting but no more than that. It was also difficult to envision the dire
circumstances that Washington
and his troops faced in the winter of 1777-78 when it was close to 100 degrees
while we were there.
One
interesting place we visited that I had never heard of was Longwood Gardens,
built in the 1930s as the summer home of Pierre DuPont and his wife. The DuPonts bequeathed the estate to Pennsylvania on the
condition that it become a public garden.
I have never seen so much space enclosed under glass, with amazing
gardens--I would guess at least a couple of football fields' worth. There were also spectacular outdoor gardens,
including one with evergreens trimmed into geometric and animal shapes. Of course, it was hotter than Hades (as usual
on the trip), but it was still quite an experience.
One
day I took the girls on a train to New
York City. We
took the subway to Battery Park, and the ferry to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The
latter has been splendidly redone by the Park Service (and, on a large outdoor
circle with steel plates containing the names of about half a million of the
immigrants who came through, I think I found the names of several of my
great-grandparents and one of my grandparents.)
When we got back to Manhattan,
we took the subway to Times Square (42nd and
Broadway, which is really a rather tacky area), and then walked up Fifth Avenue from 42nd Street to Central Park, at 57th Street. It was late Friday afternoon, the temperature
was in the 90s, and I think all of the people who live on Manhattan were out on the sidewalks. I wanted the girls to see some sites; they
wanted to go shopping. We
compromised: I let them go shopping at Gap
(like they could find something there that they couldn't find at a Minneapolis
Gap!), and then dragged them into St. Patrick's Cathedral (which the day before
had had a memorial service for the Kennedy plane crash victims) and to Central
Park and a quick peek at the lobby of the Plaza Hotel.
Both the girls said later that they
never wanted to go back to New York--mostly
because I kept rushing them along, in the heat, to get places. Of course, trying to see Manhattan in one day is a ridiculous
undertaking in the first place. I apologized
later to them for making them walk so far and fast in such heat. (And to add insult to injury, we were
supposed to meet our friend Denise at the Empire State Building at 5:00, so we
could go up to the top, and then catch the last train back to Philadelphia. At 4:45
we were at 57th Street,
the Empire State Building
is on 34th Street,
and we could not get a cab for love nor money.
So we walked the 23 blocks. By
the time we got there, it was time to go catch the train. But Denise told us there was a 2-hour wait to
get to the top of the building, so we wouldn't have gotten to see it
anyway.) I accused them, however, of
being wimps; I made the walk fine, and I'm 33 years older than they are.
With
this day trip, Christine observed, we had now taken trains, planes, ships, and
automobiles.
From Pennsylvania we went to Washington, D.C. Krystin and I, for Christine's benefit, did
the monument tour for about the 6th time (I had taken Krystin to Washington several times
before, when Pat's family gatherings were on the east coast in earlier
years). Normally the museums of the
Smithsonian are within easy walking distance of each other. On this trip, however, we would stand at the
front of one and look to the next, and realize that we would wilt by the time
we got there. So we didn't cover as much
ground as I had hoped and as they had wanted.
We did, however, get to see the restoration of the Star-Spangled Banner
that the Smithsonian is doing. (The flag
that flew over Fort McHenry in Baltimore, which Francis Scott Key rushed out to
see by the dawn's early light, during the War of 1812.) We watched for a few moments as the staff
worked at removing the backing attached to the flag earlier in the
century--stitch by stitch, on a flag that is perhaps the size of the main floor
of our house. (These folks were using
what I am sure are ergonomically correct chairs--sitting essentially backward
on an armless desk chair, with a padded chest support rather than a chair back,
and a bright light on the area of the flag where they were working. My back got sore just watching them as
they leaned into the light, ripping out old thread.)
One
new site worth seeing is the FDR Memorial, built in the last couple of
years. It's a completely different kind
of memorial, not like the massive marble mausoleums for Lincoln and Jefferson;
it's a series of open plazas. In trying
to get there by car, I accidentally ended up on the bridge that takes one to Arlington Cemetery. Since they had wanted to see it anyway, we
went to the gravesite of JFK and Jacqueline Kennedy. (That ended our link to the Kennedy family on
the trip.)
We
also took a day and went to Annapolis,
and toured the Naval
Academy. Nice campus.
We saw the crypt of John Paul Jones, so the two girls learned about the
Bonhomme Richard and "I have not yet begun to fight." We went into the Maryland State Capitol,
which is a small building sitting on a rise in the city, surrounded by a small
boutique shopping area and residences. I
was amazed; the principal administrative and bureau offices must be somewhere
else, because this was a completely uncongested little area that showed no
signs of being a capitol complex.
On
the way out of DC heading south, I took the girls to Mount Vernon (Krystin's and my second visit). One great relief was that the Lady's
Association of Mount Vernon (the name of the corporate body that owns and
operates it) has air-conditioned it.
General Washington, I am sure, would have liked that in his time. We only took time to see the house and the
crypt where the Washingtons
are buried (you can look into the crypt and see the two coffins). Christine asked me if the bodies were still
in good shape. I said I didn’t know, and
asked one of the staff. She said she
also didn’t know, but told us that when they moved the crypt in 1830 (at Washington’s
instructions, to get it away from the Potomac),
the bodies were in good shape then.
I
hate Interstate 95. It runs from Maine
to Florida, is the major thoroughfare to get up and down the coast, so is the
only logical way to drive unless one has a lot of time to take smaller
highways. But every time I am on the
east coast and have to drive on 95, I get caught in traffic jams. If somebody sneezes, there is a traffic
jam. I noted with great amusement, on
the way back from Myrtle Beach to DC to fly home, that there is now, north of
Richmond on the way to DC, a large permanent green freeway sign (like the one
that tell you it's 42 miles to Minneapolis, or whatever) that says I95 will be
congested. No electronic part, which
comes on at particular times; just "it will be congested." And the sign is right. Of course, leaving Washington to go to Durham, NC
(to stop to see an old friend of mine), we got caught in a traffic jam. What is most annoying is that there is no
immediate event that causes these backups, such as an accident or road
construction. There are simply,
constantly, too many cars and not enough road.
After
a stop in Durham
(where we visited the Duke
University campus, and
where Krystin decided she would like to go), we went on to Myrtle Beach.
Or, I should say, suburban Myrtle
Beach. There is
an uninterrupted string of beach houses and multi-story hotels/condos that
stretches from the North Carolina
border well down through Myrtle Beach
and on south. We were just south of the
NC border, perhaps 10 miles north of Myrtle
Beach, although all the municipalities run
together. It was at this point that Pat
and Elliott met up with us, who flew out for the annual Stephens family
reunion.
As with
the rest of the trip, it was hot, hot, hot.
The temperature actually broke some about the third day we were there,
but now we were far enough south that "normal" in August was still
hot. I decided that I was glad to have
visited Myrtle Beach,
but have no great desire to return.
There are four things one can do while there: golf (if one golfs, one has died and gone to
heaven; there are over 100 courses within several miles of MB), swim/play in
the ocean, eat out/go to shows (a la Las
Vegas or Branson), or shop (there are several large
shopping malls in the area). Since it
was so hot, and we were worried about sunburns, we did not let the kids play in
the beach from about 10:00 a.m.
until after about 4:00 in
the afternoon. So mid-day, we either
stayed inside (in the air conditioning) or went shopping. I like to shop antique and interesting
places, but shopping for the sake of shopping is not my favorite activity. But we found a few deals.
One
day Pat and I took a drive down to Charleston,
SC, and dragged Elliott
along. We did a bus tour, and then went
out Fort Sumter, where the Civil War began. Or what's left of it; the Union troops
bombarded it with an estimated 7 million pounds of shells, 1861-1865 (the North
lost the Fort at the very beginning of the war, but then got into a position
where they could shell it, which they did).
I was impressed, in listening to the narrative of the bus driver and
conversation with a few other locals, that there are still people who do not
accept the fact that the North won the war, 134 years ago.
Once
we reached Minneapolis
again, I decided that I would not again complain about the cool/cold in the Midwest. I did not
do well in that heat, even staying in air-conditioned places and driving
air-conditioned vehicles. And on the
other end of the summer, cool came promptly, with frost in some areas around
the Twin Cities on September 21. (It
felt good to me.) Earlier than normal,
we had taken in all the houseplants that live on our deck during the
summer. (And of course they grow
during the summer, so that each autumn when we bring them back in, they are
somewhat larger than they were before--except for the ones that our last dog
reduced in size by chewing on them. We
shall soon need to remodel again, to add a greenhouse for the plants. I tried an experiment, to see if I could grow
hosta indoors all winter. I can’t; they
must need to winter, because they all turned brown.)
With
the onset of fall came also the onset of school. Krystin likes senior high school, thus far,
but has some attitude adjustment to go through if she really believes she's
going to go to Duke. That is, her
attitude about homework has to change (and, as I noted, perhaps it is)! She did once again pick up soccer, after a
hiatus of a year. She was on one of the
freshman teams, and practiced or played most days of the week.
Elliott
marvels at how fast time flies for him.
I marvel at his perception. I
told him he leads a charmed life. Every
day goes by quickly, every day is fun, rarely does anything happen to disturb
his equilibrium. He told me he thought
second grade (last year) went by in just a few weeks. Every Friday he says he can't believe the
week is gone. He concluded that he'll be
80 years old before he knows it. I've
checked him over to see if he has some bizarre medical condition that's making
him age prematurely.
High
school class reunions are interesting sociological phenomena. My 30th was this fall.
I developed several hypotheses about them, not all of which were supported. One, only the trim attend. True, probably only one-third of the class
was there (out of about 750), but I heard two different stories about people
who would not come because they were embarrassed by their weight. Not everyone was svelte and in the shape of a
runner (these are, after all, 48-year-olds), but most people there were in
pretty good shape. (I do not believe that only the trim should attend,
and I thought it rather sad that people would stay away because of their
weight.)
My
second hypothesis, shared with a friend, was that despite the passage of 30
years, and whatever our various accomplishments in life, we would still be
instantly stuck back into whatever role we played at 17 when we were in high
school. I decided that I would simply
abandon the conversation with anybody who tried to put me back in that
role. I was sort of nerdy (and may still
be, I suppose, but don't think of myself that way), and was not about to be put
in that role. Fortunately, those of with
whom I spoke didn't revert to form. (Could
anyone revert to 17-year-old form?)
My
third hypothesis was that in a class of 750, there were many people I did not
know, or knew only vaguely. At this
point, 30 years later, I have no doubt that I might like some of those people
quite well, enough to be social friends.
The inherent problem with reunions is that there is almost no way, in a
3-4 hour period, to learn if one might like others. That hypothesis was only partially supported;
I did reconnect with a couple of people, Pat and I are having dinner for
another group, and some buddies and I may reconvene a long-inactive poker game.
Who
would have thought it? On Halloween day,
I was outside potting plants for inside the house. I was actually getting quite warm, standing
in the sun, and had to get short-sleeved.
October was unseasonably warm and pleasant; we got to sit out on our
deck much later than we expected. When I
took Elliott and two of his friends out trick-or-treating, it was warm and
pleasant for the first time in several years.
The last couple of years it was raining and cold (and in 1991, of
course, we got something like 31 inches of snow, beginning Halloween evening,
but with an azure sky, bright sun, and over 70 degrees, that didn't happen in
1999).
An
amusing (to me, at least) tale of the information age. We had a faculty member from the U of Hawaii
visiting the U of Minnesota last academic year, studying the administration,
and the two of us had occasion to exchange email messages from time to time. Her office was three floors below mine. Rather than go through the monkey business of
setting up an email account at the U of Minnesota, however, she found it easier
simply to receive email at her U of Hawaii account and have it forwarded to Minnesota. So, every time I exchanged messages with her,
the words went to Honolulu
and back to Minneapolis—they
thus went about 15,000 miles to go perhaps 150 feet. What strange phenomena the electronic world
brings.
The
days of (early) November, unlike those for the Edmund Fitzgerald, were glorious
in the Twin Cities this year, breaking high temperature records. Walking across campus in short sleeves in the
second week of the month is unheard of.
We hit 78 degrees on the 9th! Pat
even toyed with the idea of wearing a summer dress, but then figured that was
pushing it a little.
After
having nothing (administratively) to do with college athletics since 1986, when
I changed jobs at the University, I found myself up to my neck in them again
with the internal responses to allegations of academic fraud in the men's
basketball program. I worked with a
small faculty committee that wrote a report calling for significant
reorganization of the responsibility for athletics, and attended a conference
in Des Moines
on reforming college sports. (I can
attest, after driving down and back, that the land between Minneapolis and Des Moines is still flat.)
I don't know that we will have resolved
the fundamental dilemma of college sports--that colleges need to recruit
outstanding athletes who sometimes are not exactly college student material in
order to have competitive teams that draw spectators and generate money--but
maybe we made some small improvements.
The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education commissioned a major nationwide
report on college athletics that decried the over-emphasis on winning, coaches
that were paid too much, athletes who were not academically qualified and who
received illicit financial and academic aid.
The report was issued in 1929.
Nothing much has changed, except that now teams play on TV and there is
even more money (from TV) at stake. (A
university president who chaired another national commission on college sports
in the 1970s once said that the reform movements in college sports reminded him
of the warrior monuments in Washington, D.C.:
"the pose is heroic, the sword is held high, and the movement is
nil.")
Just
drop athletics, some say. I have asked
the last three University
of Minnesota presidents
if they believed they could have dropped Gopher athletics; all three of them
said "no," and that they would have been run out of office had they
tried. (In the case of the last
governor, Arne Carlson, whose official portrait at the state capitol has him
wearing a U of M sweater, he was such a fanatic U of M sports fan that I think
he personally would have come to the campus and taken pot shots at
then-president Nils Hasselmo had Hasselmo even hinted at de-emphasizing
athletics.) So we do the best we can;
society demands we have these sports spectacles, and since we are a public
institution, we think it would be unwise to try to eliminate them.
Only
one major institution in the country has dropped athletics: the University of Chicago,
in 1936. But Chicago is private, and the president at the
time, R. M. Hutchins, a supremely confident man, declared that a university
could have a great president or a great football team. (Hutchins also declared that football bears
the same relationship to education that bullfighting does to agriculture. He could get away with saying this, and Chicago remains one of
the most elite private and prestigious universities in the country.) No public institution has ever given serious
consideration to dropping sports.
All
of this athletics stuff increased my workload significantly, when I didn't
really have room for it to be increased.
But this, too, shall pass--for a few years. I managed to escape it intellectually,
however, by coming home and reading a wonderful biography of Elizabeth I. Living with the contrast between college
sports and Elizabeth's
England
of 400 years ago was quite refreshing.
"If
you see Bulbasor, hit him with a pluster ball and he'll turn into a
Ditto," Elliott told Krystin one night in November. Thus we have learned the language of Poke'mon. We have Poke'mon cards and Poke'mon games for
the Nintendo64 and Poke'mon games for the Gameboy. The only articles of clothing that Elliott
has been interested in in his entire life (clothes not being a high priority
with 9-year-old boys) are the three t-shirts with Poke'mon characters on them
that he received for his birthday. Boys
(at least Elliott and his friends) have no interest in baseball cards; they
collect and trade Poke'mon cards.
One
of my closest colleagues over the last couple of years is a woman whose husband
had left her, several years ago, after 25+ years of marriage. Early in the year, another of my long-time
good friends on the faculty, also a woman, called me to tell me that her husband
of 29 years had left her for a younger woman; it was a shock. Pat and I thought it would be helpful if we
invited the two of them for dinner, so that the one who went through it earlier
could talk with the one who was going through it. (They did know each other fairly well,
professionally, but had not talked about this.)
It was a good evening.
Then,
a couple of months later, another faculty friend, also a woman (who was
one of my Ph.D. advisors) called me to tell me that her husband of 20+
years had left her. So, I said to
myself, I guess we can have another dinner--and we invited the first two plus
the third over to talk. The first one
said jokingly that it was very thoughtful of us to be running a lonely hearts
club but that we might not be able to keep up with the demand, as things were
going. (Although if there were ever
three women who were such extremely successful and highly competent
professionals--all nationally recognized scholars and active and well-respected
in the University--in our house at the same time before, I don't know when it
was.) Again, I think all three thought
it was a good talk.
Pat,
however, began to give me odd glances as these conversations took place, and
wondered if the same thing was going to happen to her. I assured her it was the farthest thing from
my mind. I think she wonders, however,
after seeing these very three very decent and thoughtful and considerate women
face the unexpected and abrupt end to their long-time marriages.
Aging
is annoying. While a holiday letter is
hardly the place to detail one's medical gripes, I am taken--and not in the
positive sense--with the slow deterioration of the human body. The hearing in one of my ears is gradually
worsening, I have to use reading glasses on top of my contact lenses, and
sometimes my memory isn't so great, either.
And all this on the low side of 50.
A friend summarized this all quite nicely in an email to me, after
alerting me to surgery that his wife needed to have in the summer: "There is something to be said for
aging. There is much more to be said
against it."
Speaking of aging, my grandmother (at 97) fell in January
and broke her hip. This required surgery
the next day to implant a plate and bolt.
My brother and I, and our spouses, conferred before the surgery, and
concluded she had no more than a 70/30 chance of surviving. She had a hip replacement in her 70s, and
then had it replaced at 91--because the parts wore out. During the second surgery, she had cardiac
arrest on the operating table but pulled through. To our great relief, she again pulled
through; the surgeon said the operation went without a hitch. Pat and I knew she was OK, when we arrived at
the hospital later in the day after her surgery and she was having a spirited
dispute with her nurse about what it was she was going to have to eat.
After
her second surgery in 1992, when she was 91, she was placed in a nursing home
afterwards for physical therapy and recovery, but within a matter of a couple
of weeks she checked herself out and went home--she detests nursing homes. After this most recent surgery, she was
placed in the nursing home facility that is part of her seniors' residence, and
was expected to be there 6-7 weeks. She
did the physical therapy and got herself back into a new "apartment"
after about two weeks. Apparently there is something to be said for pure grit,
and intense dislike of nursing homes, to pull one through. Of all the people we know, none are 98 (which
is what she is now)--and certainly none are of the strength of character to do
what she has done. I should even be
alive at 98, much less arguing with nurses and not wanting to be around all
these old people sitting around in wheel chairs.
My
Dad continues to do well. The
Parkinson's remains an annoyance more than anything.
My
brother and sister-in-law and family, after 13 years in semi-rural Wisconsin (where they
both worked for The Turkey Store), moved back to the Twin Cities this
fall. An organizational shake-up left my
brother believing his future at the company was not bright, so he changed jobs
to a company in the Twin Cities. While
we are glad to have them back here, we shall miss the trips up to their home
(on a lake), the idyllic Christmas setting (a snowy woods), and all the
extremely cheap turkey products.
At some point commentary on these letters may cease, I
suppose, but the three people who have expressed an opinion favored these
epistles. (I'll choose to ignore the wry
reaction from one friend that "you need a good editor.") One friend wrote, after receiving last year's
letter, that "your Christmas letters remind me of swimming in a northern Minnesota lake early in
the summer--once you wade in it's a lot of fun." The compliment I loved the most--if you'll
pardon a little horn-tooting--was from a faculty friend; apropos holiday
letters, she wrote that mine (and another friend's) "are the best, most
complete, and most reminiscent of an earlier era when literate people took
correspondence seriously." Of
course, in an earlier era, people also wrote them by hand, personally for each
recipient, something I haven't the stamina to do for everyone
individually. I hope only to write them
in such a way that they remain fun, once one takes the time to plow through
them.
On that note, I bid you all have a warm and wonderful
holiday season and a successful and happy 2000.
Do stay in touch.
