Half Cleveland Dad

Cute Pictures of Child Playing in Snow

Most of the readers of this blog are my parents, so, really, it's about time for some darn CUTE PICTURES!



Thanks for the snow clothes, Grandma & Grandpa!

あけまして　おめでとうございます！

Remembering California

During my early and middle childhood, my family lived all up and down the state of California.  And although Sweet Potato, Beeb the Mom, and I visit California fairly regularly, I never lived there after 7th grade.  So, in spite of having spent a good deal of time in the state, I don't have any familiarity with the place, and my memories of childhood places are disjointed.

One of the key things I remember from childhood is the character of sunlight.  I remember a white, hard light, with shadows razor sharp, heat distortion down the street, and a hollow quality to the air, a feeling of emptiness in the ear, through which you felt that you were waiting for sounds to reach you. 

Because I have a harsh, disjointed feeling about childhood, I figured it just shaped my recollection of the physical environment.  But recently we were driving up the coast a few miles north of San Diego, and there was, in the chilly winter morning, that same hard light.

My new theory (or, rather, the presumption I will use in conversation) is that the dryness of the air creates that harsh light and hollow sound. 

I couldn't convey my nostalgic tinge to Beeb, of course.  All I could do was try to point out the details:  the low raking angle, the high contrast shadow, the overexposed color sense.

Camo Jacket

Walking around in a big city, I’d be on the street with everyone else in the city.  In a small city, like Cleveland, sometimes it’s just me and some bums.

First of all, I don’t know how to refer to these folks spending all day out on the street.  It seems presumptuous to call them “homeless”; and “street people” is awfully categorical.  So, without much more consideration, I've reached for an out-dated term, and taken up “bums.” 

I’ve resisted writing about bums here because I hadn’t been able to make the tie-in to being Half Cleveland Dad, but every time I sit down nowadays I think about them, and I think of Sweet Potato, and our world, and the future, and our place embedded in the endless brilliant continuum of suffering pulsing through the rich sticky biomass slathered all over the whole hopeless surface of our hopeless earth. 

A few times a week I used to see a guy in a cotton camo jacket.  He had a particular limp, in which his left leg would describe an outward, circular stride.  Stomp swing-out, stomp swing-out.  He would get a bowl of cereal from the Salvation Army truck across Superior Avenue from the Renaissance Hotel, then take his jaunty, swinging strut over the bridge spanning the Cuyahoga River, to St. Malachi or West Side Catholic.  We did the “all right” nodding thing for a couple of years; then began exchanging morning salutations.  At some point we addressed each other as “brother man,” which led to greetings that involved something of a hug, like politicians do before a debate.  I do not know his name.  In the early summer I saw him at lunchtime, in the library garden, where he declined to share my lunch.  He looked like he’d just put his lunch into his arm.  I missed him for a couple months, but then he overlapped my schedule again.  He looked about 30 pounds thinner, with spit in his beard, and an unfocused fear in his eyes, like he’d had a stroke.  When we did whatever that tripartite handshake is called, soul-shake or whatever, he held my hand for a while, like an old man needing to get steady and take a breather.  The last time I saw him he was standing on the sidewalk, facing a parking lot fence, stiff and drooling, pants at his calves, wet foul shit down his leg. 

Now the hard weather’s come in, and the men are keeping their faces down on their daily, migratory drift over the bridge.

Radio

Here's one of the great things about Cleveland, available for you to enjoy through the magic of the internet: WRUW.  The website offers downloads of each program for the current week; that is, you can listen to this week's On the One, but after Sunday night the fresh show is posted.  I love this site, and listen to most of these programs every week:

• On the One.  Beautiful groovin' music.  One of the programmers is named Charles; he picks his music from someplace deep and wide awake.
• Aaja Nachle.  A Bollywood and hip-hop mix that I never would have imagined.
• Bluegrass Breakdown.  WRUW also used to have a show that featured old-timey and bluegrass music by women, programmed, I think, by the same dj who did separate shows of music from Romania and Australia.
• Good Brains Gone Bad.  Nostalgia for the old guy.
• Blackout Tuneout.  What rock sounds like when it doesn't suck.
• Exploding Plastic Inevitable.  A marvelous show programmed by a sexy (my imagination), oddball genius (not my imagination). 
• Prosper Hazzard.  Comfort music for someone who always loves to hear things like new music for soprano and theorbo.
• Diversified Inc.  This show is so long and eclectic and full of surprises, it's like browsing an $2 record store on an weekday afternoon in a city you're visiting for the first time when you're 19 years old.  (Which in turn reminds me of Lightnin' Hopkins and the Revillos.)

I guess I can also link to my old radio love, WKCR.  Without much of a chance to stream it, I wonder how Phil Schaap is doing. Good morning everybody.  It's eight-twenty a.m. and you're listening -- to Bird Flight .... 

Now it's great to hear Rachel Grimes or Modest Mouse for the first time on the internet, but the magical thing about old radio was how delicious it was to participate in the truly ephemeral event.  There was always the serendipitous tingle. When your "favorite song" came on you weren't just glad to hear it -- you felt lucky, too. 

More fall

For leaves, fall this year was particularly beautiful.  I’m not quite sure how to write about leaves; I’m not that much of a nature guy, and I haven’t thought about it much before.  The colors were particularly intense, and the sky was soft enough to let them glow, and the weather was mild enough not to blow all the leaves off right away.  One day we drove past an orange tree (not an orange tree), and Sweet Potato said wow!  ...  I was talking with a Burmese man who’s learning English.  He said, autumn.  I said, yes this is autumn.  He said, beautiful.  ...  In the car you notice that the leaves are a little different in different places, maybe because someplace gets more sun or a wetter breeze or something, who knows, but you notice it along I-77 or near the zoo.  And you notice that it changes noticably, over a couple of days; leaf peak is quicker than I had thought; its contour passes over the landscape like a slow wave.

Sweet Potato’s been collecting natural objects all fall:  rocks, sticks, leaves, berries.  Acorns.  The back seat of our car makes me think of a raccoon’s nest. 

Beeb the Mom’s been quiet and steady and her mellow beauty seems to be growing richer.  She knits and we watch movies and read books we check out from the library. 

I’m busy with work and sometimes when I'm by myself I wonder if I'm acting like a dick.  I guess I could ask around.

Funny

Steve Martin’s memoir Born Standing Up is a sweet, controlled book starting basically with Martin's first job in the magic shop of Disneyland and continuing through his explosive Saturday Night Live days.  He writes about developing his act through endless practice, gigging, performing.  He makes it clear that funny is a matter of work, and luck, too.

Sweet Potato’s working on her funny.  She’s disposed to the unexpected, the absurd, and the non-existent (maybe well characterized as a humor of disappointment).  She'll say, I'ne not looken atchoo! and turn away.  The gag is to get her to turn around.  I'll say, Hey big girl, I have a present for you!  It’s a pretty butterfly!  I have another present for you!  It’s a lot of delicious chocolate ice cream, and I’m eating it all by myself!  And on and on, describing all the things she likes, until she turns around; then she has a look of total delight, and laughs her head off.  She also likes laughing in the dark.  Sweet Potato will carry her step stool to the light switch, climb up and turn the light off.  Then we take turns describing ourselves:  I have a big mouth that says SNAP! and rough skin, and pointy feet, and a big strong tail!  Then Sweet Potato flips on the light, and we shout, just pretend! 

She tries to categorize things as “funny”:  I did a behy-fahp -- is deht fah-nee?  She sings a lot of songs, and substitutes words:  Ohd Nik-DEHDEE hed a fohm, ee-ai-ee-ai-DEHDEE!!  She said her favorite daycare teacher is Miss Alice, because szee’s funny and tahlks a lot! 

She’s tuning in to the social side of funny, working on different laughs and sounds, rolling her eyes, making goofy sounds (kazoos, speaking through toilet paper rolls).  When Beeb and I laugh, she asks why we’re laughing, then contributes a laugh to ours.  She also uses her physical shtick defensively:  she sometimes goes into it when we want her to do something she would prefer not to, like put on her shoes or get ready for bed.

I was perpetually interested in funny throughout my childhood.  Part of it was my love of the books, and finding kids’ jokebooks in the libraries of the many schools I attended.  One book that seemed to be in every library was called The Big Red Rock Eater.  Its titular joke was, what’s big and red and eats rocks?  A big red rock eater!  Elephant jokes were a breakthrough for me:  How are an elephant and a grape the same?  They’re both purple fruit, except the elephant.  That’s funny, man.  The tautological joke still gets mileage around here.  Beeb the Mom’s favorite:  What’s brown and sticky?  A stick.  (Cf. What’s brown and sounds like a bell?  Dung.)  Anyway, there’s the internal funny, and the external funny.  I loved the leap and the click of jokes, the way the ideas sparked together.  I also thought it would be great to share laughs with people, but I succeeded less in sharing my funny than in just laying my dorkiness on everyone real thick:  I would just memorize jokes out of books, and tell them to various people, over and over.  You know that knock-knock joke about Amos’n’Andy?  I probably told that a thousand times over the course of my third grade year or thereabouts, and never until a couple of years ago knew what Amos’n’Andy were.  I kept telling it, even though I always knew it couldn’t really be funny.  Same thing with that one that goes orange you glad I didn’t say banana again?  I was just testing the joke -- what was it? -- trying to figure out where the funny was, socially.  Why is this a joke? 

Another bomb was the acquisition of some racist jokebooks, and some Playboy jokebooks, which, with my earnest bookworm delivery and my age (11 or 12?) … actually finally seems funny.

I did eventually learn a great knock-knock joke:  I know a great knock-knock joke; you start it.  The other person automatically says, knock knock.  You go, Who’s there?