I’m so glad that I outgrew trick or treating before the no-fun-niks of my particular subculture deemed Halloween the evil holiday of Satan and all he stands for. Tonight was perhaps the first time in 14 years of marriage that Sherry and I distributed candy for Halloween; there might have been once when we lived on Fry Ave. but we can’t recall. Oh, and yes, tonight–Oct 30–is Trick or Treat night here in Tiffin. Scuttlebutt has it that the Catholic schools have something big going on Wednesday night and were able to convince the locality to move the candy feast.

At any rate, as we sat on the porch handing out candy, Sherry all spiffied up and me wearing an Eddie Bauer sweater, I observed some things:

• I had forgotten what a wonderful lesson in manners Halloween is. The pattern of the night is quite recognizable: one approaches another and makes certain noises requesting a good or service–Trick or Treat; the good or service (candy in this case) is provided; the recipient says “Thank You.” Every child tonight either said thank you, was prompted to say thank you, or had a parent quizzing them if they said thank you. It was all very proper and nice.
• I became disturbed by the number of extremely small children dressed up as pumpkins. “Yes, dear, we’re going to dress you up as something we cut the head off of, scoop out the innards, and then carve into grotesque caricatures. We love you.” Just seems the unconscious is working overtime.
• Sherry actually scared some of the kids.
• Sherry is an incredibly liberal giver of candy. She started out giving THREE pieces to each kid. Mind you, we didn’t cheap out on the tiny little Bit O Honeys or other stuff that ends up sitting on the kids closet floor till Easter. No, we had Reese’s and Blow Pops and Nerds and KitKats. By the end of an hour, she was down to TWO. And then we were done. Unfortunately for some, the Trick Or Treating time here in Tiffin was TWO hours. Next year, we’ll have to ration more carefully.
• Some girls from Heidleberg came by collecting canned goods for the homeless. That was cool.
• We were trying, with our candy selection, to perhaps get a good rep on the block. You know, the cool house where they give good candy. Unfortunately, with Sherry dressed up and me sitting there in jeans/sweater, I think we just added to the more likely rep of weird house on the corner.
• I don’t care what the naysayers spout, between the parents getting out with their kids, the children learning manners, the kids having positive interactions with neighborhood adults, and the good clean fun of dressing up, this whole Trick or Treat thing seems like exactly what living in small town America is supposed to be.

Yup, assuming we’re not busy, you can bet on us next year to be buying more candy, sitting on the porch, and contributing to the cavity and obesity problems of our youth.

So, this morning Sherry and I are in the car driving to school. I’m nattily attired in sport jacket, shirt, and jeans. Sherry is sharply dressed. We pull out of the driveway–obeying all traffic laws–behind a school bus toting its young charges to the local elementary school. We’re minding our own business, listening to Morning Edition, when all of a sudden I notice that two little girls on the school bus–they must have been all of eight years old–were giving Sherry and I the “shame” sign: pointing an index finger at us and stroking the finger with a perpendicularly postioned other index finger. And their faces were quite solemn.

At first I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. The bus turned the corner, and I asked Sherry, “Were they shaming us?” Sherry said that she believed that they were. We, too, turned the corner and found ourselves waiting for a stop light behind the bus, and once again the young girls began shaming us.

I checked my shirt–buttoned–the headlights–on but not bright–distance from the bus–perfectly fine. Believing that we were being unfairly shamed, I pointed my finger and shamed right back at them. At which point, the girls, having been discovered and responded to, spun around in their seats in a giggling fit. I thought that all was well, until the next stop light when, as we parted ways with the bus, we were once again shamed.

Sherry and I have often thought that a good college slogan would be “Stamping out ignorance and bringing back shame,” but this, I say, is too far: little girls randomly shaming people out the back windows of school buses. Next thing you know they’ll be waggling their fingers at passersby.

Don’t talk to me the least little bit about the final installment of Monsieur Harry Potter. Being somewhat snobbish on the issue, I’ve ordered mine from the UK, so I probably won’t receive it until next week, but then I’m leaving for the Glen. And Sherry and I like to read them together aloud.

Until then, I’m (hopelessly) attempting a media blackout on that subject. No spoilers PLEASE!

One of the difficulties of living on the edge of nowhere is that it is something of a challenge finding out what the actual temperature outside is. Sure, I can go outside today and say, “It’s hot.” But how hot?

My personal digital thermometer says it was 100 degrees here in Tiffin. However, checking various web weather sites gave me temps ranging from 91 to 96. The main problem is that when I dug a bit, not one of those readings was actually from Tiffin. They were all places NEAR Tiffin, but far enough away that, for instance, a four degree difference would be perfectly believable.

So, today in Tiffin, the high was either 91 or 93 or 96 or 100.

Regardless, it was hot.

Today was the kind of day that makes people discover reasons to dislike me.

After a fairly good class this morning, I headed to my office hours where I motored through lots of paperwork. After finishing my work, I walked outside where the sun was shining, the sky was blue, and a gentle breeze wafted the spring air. At home, I participated in my first ever Pilates workout. While not overly strenuous, I was feeling it all day. In a good way.

When I finished working out, I noticed that the time was getting close to 2:00, the time of the Indians Season Opener. Unfortunately, we don’t have the cable channel on which Indians games are shown. I thought for a while that I could try to find a radio broadcast, but I was really hungry. I thought then that what I should do was head out to a local eatery for some lunch and a cable-supplied TV. Thus, I found myself savoring a patty melt at The Clover Club as Grady Sizemore sent the second pitch of the 2007 season out of the park. There was a small but friendly crowd on hand, and we enjoyed watching Cleveland totally dismantle the White Sox.

My day was going along extremely nicely. The weather was still nice, and I still had a good bit of afternoon left. What would be more natural than heading out to the park for a round of disc golf? When I got to the first tee, the wind picked up, and it would play with my discs all day. However, for whatever reason, I ended the front nine with a personal best -2. I kept myself in check, however, because I know that there are two holes on the back nine that are almost always 4’s for me. Sure enough, heading into the 16th hole, I was back to even. I had a beautiful drive on 17 that I converted into a deuce. Going into the final hole, I had the chance to finish Hedges-Boyer under par for the first time. Alas…

One of golf’s cruelties is that you can shoot your personal best round and still leave the course with a bad taste in your mouth. My drive went high and dove into the line of trees. While I made a rather good out shot, I was lucky to get a 4 and thus end with a personal best even par. I’m trying to focus on the even par, but I keep thinking about the final drive.

Such is golf.

As the dust settles and we wait to hear what’s going to happen in the Virginia and Montana senate races, I thought I’d share some random observations from my tiny little couch here in rural northwest Ohio.

Ohio voters proved themselves smart
I was really impressed with the Ohio electorate yesterday. We were faced with two competing issues on smoking bans: Smoke Less (issue 4) and Smoke Free (issue 5). The apparant similarities between the issues made choosing potentially confusing. Big Tobacco added to the confusion by mounting a campaign supporting Smoke Less whose ads looked rather similar to the Smoke Free ads. Adding to the confusion was the fact that Issue 4 (Smoke Less) was a constitutional ammendment while Issue 5 was a state law. If both issues passed, the less restrictive Issue 4 would have trumped Issue 5. Further, while Issue 4 supporters tried to paint Issue 5 framers as draconian and invasive, they failed to mention that had Issue 4 passed, it would have recinded several county smoking bans already in effect.

With all of that confusion, I would not have been suprised to see both issues either pass or fail. But Ohio pleasantly surprised me. By soundly defeating Issue 4 and soundly supporting Issue 5, the voters of Ohio proved they could see through the smokescreen and make a clear choice. While I voted for Issue 5, had the election gone the other way, the point would still stand. When faced with a confusing choice between two very similar bills, the people were able to pay attention to the details and make a clear, informed decision.

And that’s good for America.

Liberal Bias?
It’s beating a dead horse to decry bias in the media, I know. But that doesn’t stop the poor thing from getting pummelled. Just last week I was hearing on the radio all sorts of talk about how the Democrats chances for victory were being overplayed by a media elite that wanted them to win.

So, with all of this liberal media bias, I was quite surprised last night by the coverage in Toledo and Cleveland of the Ohio Senate race speeches. Due to our geographic location, we get stations from both Toledo and Cleveland. When Senator DeWine gave his defeat speech, all the stations covered it, and most of them aired the entire speech. That’s fine. However, when Senator-elect Sherrod Brown rose to give his victory speech, he recevied decidedly different coverage. Every single station only showed a short portion of his speech. Once he got past his nice soundbite about the middle-class in the middle of the nation winning, the stations quickly cut to other election coverage; one station even began running tape of Kenneth Blackwell’s gubernatorial defeat speech.

Now, I suppose I can understand that DeWine is the sitting Senator, and perhaps he deserves some defferance. But Brown is our new senator. Isn’t it important–no matter who you voted for–to hear what the newly elected representative has to say about where he wants to lead us in the next six years? Others might argue that Brown’s speech was running into the 11 o’clock hour, and the stations were going to local news shows. Was there any more important Ohio news at that time? Was there anything more important happening at that minute? Surely the weather update could wait a few minutes.

In the end, it was rather disappointing that after an evening of basically fair coverage that the stations chose to act in this fashion. Biased or not, the conspiracy theorists are now going to have even more evidence to point to conservative bias in the media. And that’s just what we need: more beating on dead horses.

Blackwell’s Desperation
Back in May or June, certain groups raised a question about Kenneth Blackwell both running for governor and serving as Secretary of State. The Sec. of State is in charge of running election, and folks thought that it might look bad for someone running for governor to also be in charge of running the election. Given Blackwell’s position at the center of several controversies surrounding the 2004 presidential election, their concerns didn’t seem to be outlandish. Blackwell pooh poohed the notion, but another controversy about his owning stock in the company from which Ohio bought voting machines also called his ability to run a fair election into question.

Going into yesterday’s election, Blackwell was far behind in the pre-election polls. Adding the previous controversies to his poor performance as a candidate, it’s hard to read another Blackwell mis-step as anything other than partisan skullduggery. Early Tuesday, a Cuyahoga court ruled that election officials must allow 300 poll observers statewide into the polls. Blackwell, however, only saw fit to inform the workers at Cuyahoga County locations, arguing ostensibly that the judge’s authority only counted in the county. A contempt hearing is scheduled for today.

So, here’s the thing. Why, Blackwell, would you do such a thing? If there’s nothing shady going on, why keep poll observers from watching the polls to make sure the elections are run properly? Yes, the motion was made by Democrats. But if that’s the only reason, then Blackwell’s actions, at best, look like a petulant child throwing a tantrum. At worst, they suggest that there really was something that needed observing that he didn’t want witnessed. Given how badly the Republican’s lost yesterday, it’s hard to see how any shenanigans that weren’t off the charts obvious, would have made any difference, which leaves me with the petualnt tantrum.

And that’s not good for America.

Today Sherry and I joined Wade and several of his friends and their relations at the 2006 Bucyrus Bratwurst Festival.

You can read all about it and the deep-fried Twinkie on its own special page. Don’t miss the photo of Miss Ox Roast Festival!

2006 Bucyrus Bratwurst Festival

So, Monday is our 13th wedding anniversary, and we had planned on celebrating by going to an Indians game Friday night, attending the Cleveland Irish Festival Saturday, and maybe going out to a nice dinner on Monday.  The week leading up to the weekend couldn’t have been less inspiring.  We returned from Chicago with Todd having a cold.  Monday, Sherry had gum graft surgery.  Tuesday, in addition to mouth pain, Sherry developed the most monstrous sinus headache known to man.  Then on Thursday, it appeared that Sherry was coming down with Todd’s cold.

We did manage to drag ourselves to Cleveland Friday for the Indians game; unfortunately, the Indians couldn’t be bothered to show up.  We sat with Ted and Nancy through four hours of painful baseball as the Twins beat up the Indians 14-6.  Fortunately, the seats were nice and the after-game fireworks really great.  We spent the night at T&N’s, woke up late, and decided that Sherry was too sick to go to the festival.  Instead, we spent 5 hours playing hearts.  After a dinner break, we decided it would be rude to eat and run, so we played more hearts.  The real bummer was that in all that time I didn’t win a single game.

The drive from Cleveland to Tiffin takes about two hours.  About half of that is on the Ohio Turnpike.  The rest is on rural two-lane highways.  At night, the main problems on the road are big trucks and–as we’ve come to learn–animals.  Before moving to Tiffin, I drove for 17 years without killing a single creature larger than a mosquito.  In the last two years, I’ve hit and killled three mammals.  Tonight, as we were heading into Republic, a large raccoon trundled across the road in front of us.  I was slowing from 60 to 45 and a car was coming the other direction.  I had nowhere to go, and we hit it squarely.  There were two sickening thumps as both the front and rear wheels impacted the poor creature.  Sherry was very upset; I was almost angry.

Just a couple of weeks ago, driving home late from N. Ridgeville, I was driving Pat’s car and hit a possum; we were going 60-65 at the time.  Last year, I also killed a rabbit.

I must say, this week could have been better.

On the plus side, we brought home a Baker’s Square raspberry pie, and Ted and Nancy are sharing seasons 5 & 6 of The West Wing with us.

I’m going to eat some pie now in remembrance of the raccoon.

About halfway through the show Friday night, Sherry leaned over and asked me why Arlo Guthrie kept interrupting his great stories with all these songs. Her question was a testament to the quality of Guthrie’s storytelling more than a comment on the music, which was rich, varied, and engaging.

Witnessing Guthrie weave old and new original compositions across the warp of old folk tunes, my eye was drawn to the crumbling plaster ornaments surrounding the balcony of Tiffin, Ohio’s Ritz Theater. The Ritz was built in 1928—twenty years before Arlo Guthrie was constructed—during Tiffin’s heyday. A renovation in 1998 returned much of the Italian Renaissance glory to the once posh entertainment center, but it’s almost 80 years of service are obvious, and the theater’s financial woes speak to both the fall of Tiffin since the Interstates bypassed the city and overseas outsourcing has gutted the manufacturing base of the community. Like many former glorious theaters in small towns, The Ritz is a monument to the reality that doing things right doesn’t always pay. Seeing Guthrie in a venue like this drives home the fact that humble songsters making music with meaning are a rarity that commercial money machines find difficult to promote.

Like the mix of folk standards and new compositions that Guthrie sings, the crowd at the Ritz is an eclectic mix. Tiffin’s upper crust are ensconced in the up close floor seats ($51); some seem to be there more out of fealty to their subscriptions than out of love for the performer, but I daresay he wins them over in the end. Guthrie’s pull as a 60’s counterculture icon also brings in the aging wish-I-were-an-ex-hippie boomers, some of whom drag their kids along. Taking up the two rows before us in the balcony are a group of bikers, decked out in leathers, head scarves, and dirty jeans. Throughout the first set, the entire group was never present as one person was always making a beer/bathroom run. By the second set, the beer had erased any inhibitions they might have had, and they were getting restless. Sure, Guthrie’s down-home tales of dealing with the Secret Service and meeting Bob Dylan were as entertaining to them as anyone, but it was clear that they came for one reason and one reason only. This was a group that would be demanding a refund if they didn’t hear about pickles, tickles, and motorsickles.

Guthrie describes the writing process as fishing. You sit by the river with your line in the water waiting for songs to go by. When one drifts past, you take your pen and nab it, quickly writing it down before it gets away. If you’re smart, you’ll make sure you’re not downstream of Bob Dylan. (We heard many asides about the prowess of Bob Dylan and his lack of humor.) Guthrie claims to have had the experience of true inspiration, of pulling a whopper out of the river, only a few times in his life. And he was just a bit disappointed when at the end of an almost religious experience he found himself writing “I don’t want a pickle…”

Fortunately for all of us, he sings “The Motorcycle Song.” After high-fiving as though they had scored a touchdown on an imposing linebacker, the motorcycle gang, much to the embarrassment of the two ladies in their presence, exit the balcony en masse and, I imagine, wobble home.

In 1968 The New Yorker described Guthrie’s signature song “Alice’s Restaurant” as “funny, personal, deft, surprising, and wild.” On the 20th anniversary of the song, Guthrie commented that “he wouldn’t do it again until 1997 because once every 10 years was plenty.” Now, in the midst of the Alice’s Restaurant 40th Anniversary Tour, Guthrie is again playing the tune. He’s tried to update it some, but it’s clear that the song is no longer surprising, and 40 years have worn out any deftness and wildness that it once had. Whether it’s because the draft is distant memory for most of the audience (and a mystery to the rest) or because there are precious few movements to be found in the post-Nixon malaise, the song seemed more tired and dinosaur-like than any of the folk tunes twice its age that Guthrie pulled from his childhood memories.

As much as “Alice’s Restaurant” may seem tired, Guthrie has breathed new life into two of his father’s old songs and used them to make compelling the call to action that fell flat at the end of the story song. As the concert wound down, the band—including Arlo’s son Abe on keyboards and Gordon Titcomb on steel, banjo, and mandolin—kicked into a rollicking rendition of that old Woody Guthrie favorite “This Land is Your Land.” As we wound around to the second verse, Guthrie stopped the band and began to preach about Joseph, the son of Israel. As you might remember, Joseph’s brothers—the 12 sons of Israel from whom the tribes originate—sold him into slavery in Egypt. Joseph, making use of his uncanny ability to interpret dreams, rose to great power. Several years later, in the midst of a drought, Joseph’s twelve brothers came to Egypt seeking food. To make a long story short, the Israelites are eventually welcomed back into Joseph’s good graces, and they settle in Egypt. Flash forward a few hundred years and the nation of Israel has grown in momentous proportions and the Pharaoh, forgetting Joseph, enslaves the Israelites. Moses, the Exodus, Ten Commandments, King David, King Solomon, and the Babylonian captivity all follow and eventually culminate in the birth of Jesus of Nazareth. What’s interesting is that none of that—nor the bulk of human history for the last 2,000 years—would have occurred if an unnamed man in a field hadn’t seen Joseph wandering around in a field looking for his brothers. When Joseph asked the man if he’d seen his brothers, the man said—in the Guthrie paraphrase—”they went that-a-way.” If the man doesn’t guide Joseph to his brothers, he doesn’t get sold into slavery, and the whole sequence of events doesn’t unfold. Not only has all of human history been changed by the actions of a single man, but there was no way that man could have known that simply answering a simple question could have had such an impact. As the band picked up the refrain, Guthrie encouraged us to act; we have no idea how big of an impact even the smallest action can have.

Woody Guthrie died leaving hundreds—if not thousands—of unrecorded song lyrics behind. Unfortunately, he didn’t leave the tunes. A recent project of the Woody Guthrie Foundation has been to farm these lyrics out to artists who write tunes for them and record them. Arlo Guthrie concluded his concert with a song he’s just recently set to music. After playing the simple tune once, he asked us to join in. The last music that the Ritz Theater heard Friday night was hundreds of people singing

My peace, My peace
Is all I've got
That I can give to you

I don’t remember the first time I heard a recording of “Alice’s Restaurant.” It could have been shortly after an uptight high school English teacher kept me after class to ask if my parent knew I was reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. (They did.) Or it could have been during my first year of college when I was initiated into the counterculture clubs of Athens, Georgia, hearing live folk music for the first time and eating hearty organic mushroom soup. Whatever the case, I do know I was mesmerized by Guthrie’s humor, storytelling, and easy—going manner, a personality that made you feel like this was a person you’d want to spend time with and who wanted to share with you good music regardless of who wrote it. When I heard that Arlo Guthrie was coming to the Ritz, I wasn’t sure if it was a great thing for Tiffin or a sign of how bad the music industry treats its treasures and its past. Like the Ritz, Guthrie has some crumbling plaster, but whether he’s singing about his pet goose Al or calling us to share our “little-p” peace with those around us, he opens the curtains a bit and lets us glimpse how grand music can be while making us feel as welcome as the next door neighbor.

So come right in, it's around the back,
Just a half—a—mile from the railroad track.
You can get anything you want
At Alice's Restaurant.

I had forgotten just how loud teenage girls can be. I mean, like, wow. Loud.

Last night we went to the Ritz Theater in Tiffin for the last night of the Ohio Jazz Summit. On this night, the featured artists were all vocal bands, largely acapella. The audience, though it did contain a sprinkling of Tiffin residents–like us–mostly comprised members of high school vocal groups who had been attending workshops all day. (Yo, Mom & Dad, there was a contingent from North Olmsted High here.) When opening act, Up In The Air launched into some currently popular song, I do believe my ears wanted to bleed, but they were afraid to.

Up In The Air is flagship vocal group from Tiffin University and is directed by Brad Rees (who also happens to direct the choir at our church). They’re totally acapella and tend to perform a blend of R&B and pop, a very contemporary sound.

While Up In The Air is very “now” and in the popular groove, the second group of the night was what I would call a traditional jazz vocal group. They were the Jazz Singers from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Their set was much more intellectual musically, featuring all sorts of wicked harmonies and chord progressions. The group was backed with piano, bass, and drums, which allowed the singers to wander off into all sorts of musical tangents without having to worry about the rythm section. Like a jazz band, most of their compositions featured various solo breaks that featured lots of scatting. They didn’t get quite the raucous reception that Up In The Air did, but I thought they were quite splendid, exactly what I would expect to hear stepping into a smoky, jazz club in the city. Actually, by the end of their set, I thought that if you took the female singers from the Jazz Singers and the male singers from Up in the Air, you’d have a majorly kickin’ ensemble.

The night concluded with headliners In Pulse. Now, I mean no disrespect to the other three members of the group; they were quite wonderful and energetic and likeable and keen. But the delight of the evening, the performer that consistently made Sherry and I turn to each other in amazement, the one whose sound convinced Sherry that he was some kind of mutant rather than a normal human being, was vocal percussionist Paul Donnely. Beck may need two turntables and a microphone; this dude only needs one third of that ensemble. He stopped the show several times with amazing renditions of any style of drumming you could name, all produced with his voice. At one point, all the other singers left the stage, and he performed a “drum” solo that spanned jazz, rock, rap, and marching band style solos.

All in all, it was a wonderful night of listening to people make wonderful noises with their faces.

BTW, did I mention the screaming teenagers?