Journal

Although the Chamber of Commerce & Visitors Center, an entity known mostly for fundraising to keep itself in business, hasn’t made any formal announcement of plans for the Roundup Rodeo Parade on July 2, rumors abound about the festivities.

Insiders from the various groups that partner with the Chamber, including delegates representing every entity in the county, have said that, by order of Governor Body Slam, masks will not be required. In fact, the governor wants the people to not wear masks at all to demonstrate to all the world how much we cherish our freedoms and how we won’t act like sheep.

That’s a bit grandiose in scale. Attendance is usually limited to locals, a few folks from adjoining counties and tourists who typically describe the event as “quaint.” It is hardly worldly.

The theme for this year’s gathering is inspired by the 1970 chart-topping “Close to You,” by the Carpenters. The subtext is “Viral Infections Along a Parade Route in Small Town America.”

Slated to act as Grand Marshall of the Roundup Parade is Rep. Jim Jordan, the Republican loud-mouth from someplace in Ohio who is still operating under the mistaken belief that Trump won re-election.

Those questioning the wisdom of hosting the parade at all have been asked by management to sit down and keep their anti-American, anti-business mouths shut. Better yet, they should just pull up their little paper masks and leave.

“One year of no parade was enough,” noted an anonymous source, who asked to remain anonymous to maintain his anonymity. “How much do the townspeople have to suffer just because 560,00 Americans have died from a fake disease? Obama did nothing about it and now Biden is sitting idly as our economy crumbles in front of us. We, the people, need the bars to open to full capacity. The pipers must pipe, the Shriners must clown, and the beer must flow.”

The economy notwithstanding—on which a three-hour display of floats, fire trucks and horses will have minimal impact—parades are not enjoyed by everyone. I happen to be one of them.

There’s never been a Thanksgiving when somebody hasn’t called to ask if I was watching the Macy’s parade, which is only ever interesting if a gust of wind blows and happens to cause a four-story-high blow-up of Goofy to be launched into the stratosphere. That rarely happens and when it does, it’s all over the evening news. So, I tell whoever asks, that I’m busy doing other things like trying to avoid viewing the crass commercialism that drives our crass consumerism. If disaster strikes, I’ll catch the highlights later.

While our town’s little parade isn’t void of commercial aspects—every realtor and insurance agent who owns a convertible sticks magnetic signage on the front doors of those cars and wave imperiously to the people who line the streets watching them drive by—it’s more focused on community things. Every charity and do-gooder group are well-represented, as are all of the folks who own farm equipment or horses. (You’ll never see a Deere harvest combine on Central Avenue South.)

The fire engines blare their sirens if I happen to be fewer than twelve feet away. The politicians hand out enough election propaganda to carpet the streets in glossy paper, just under the detritus of discarded packaging from the street food that is consumed from the taco, gyro and hot dog stands that pop up along the route.

As a downtown business operator for twelve years, I came to dread parade day. It required me to triple the staff to deal with the crowds and reinvent what we did as a restaurant, down to one year serving a Sunday brunch to about twelve people; we were prepared for forty. Pastas are hardly parade fare. One year I made two gallons of gazpacho, eventually throwing out all but one serving. The next year, no fewer than a dozen people asked why I wasn’t serving gazpacho.

One year we made some little knots of baked pizza dough. Who knew so many people liked to dip them into ranch dressing, a condiment I didn’t stock? One year we had a keg of Bud Light on tap. At the end of that day, we had nine-tenths of a keg of Bud Light. Fine wines at $7-$8 per glass were eschewed by people wanting something in the $3 range, which is wine probably not worth drinking.

Nobody has ever accused me of being a good businessman, especially my wife. In fact, my most successful business venture was redeeming for two cents each the soda and beer bottles I found as a five-year-old in the alleys of Chicago’s west side.

I was driven by a desire to create good food, an inviting atmosphere—figuring that the books would take care of themselves. I was wrong much of the time. But parade day was never a salvation. In the end, I realized that I would have done better to have sat in the window and watched as the parade passed me by.

Parades have at their very heart a sense of belonging to the military—traditions of troops marching in stride to show the strength and fortitude of a nation’s power. I have never found that appealing. From the brass bands to the goose-stepping soldiers, it has always seemed to be a patriotic ritual that leads to nationalism and onward then to war.

And speaking of misplaced patriotism, there seems to be a movement afoot to erect a 100-foot tall flagpole in the middle of the park to hoist a flag the size of Connecticut on the morning of July Fourth. I don’t get it. Does an out-sized flag somehow represent a greater sense of the American sensibility than that already displayed by the beautiful array of simple flags that surround our park on holidays?

Or am I taking this in the same way I recognize that the oversized pickup trucks are some kind of compensation for something small?

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Chicken Cacciatore

The Italian hunter’s chicken is easy and delicious. Adjust the seasonings to your taste.

8 chicken thighs
salt
freshly ground black pepper
all-purpose flour, for dredging
olive oil
1 large red bell pepper, chopped
1 large green bell pepper, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2-3 stalks of celery, chopped
3-4 garlic cloves, diced
1 cup dry white wine
1, 28-oz. can diced tomatoes with juice
1 cup chicken stock
1 1/2 tsp. dried oregano leaves
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh basil leaves

Generously season the chicken with salt and pepper.
Dredge the chicken pieces in the flour to coat lightly.
In a large heavy sauté pan, heat the oil over a medium-high flame. Add the chicken pieces, skin side down, to the pan and sauté just until brown, about 5 minutes per side. Transfer the chicken to a plate and set aside.
Add the peppers, onion and celery to the same pan and sauté over medium heat until the onion is softened, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook another minute or two. Season with salt and pepper. Add the wine and simmer until reduced by half, about 3 minutes.
Add the tomatoes with their juice, broth, and oregano. Return the chicken pieces to the pan and turn them to coat in the sauce. Bring the sauce to a simmer. Cover and continue simmering over medium-low heat until the chicken is just cooked through, about 30 minutes.
Transfer the chicken to a platter. If necessary, boil the sauce until it thickens slightly, about 3 minutes. Spoon the sauce over the chicken, then sprinkle with the basil and serve.

As if the last year hasn’t presented enough challenges that even Gabriel García Márquez or Thomas Mann might have had trouble navigating, there now appears to be a ketchup crisis that is emotionally crippling the vast number of Americans who eat fries with every meal.

While the grocery stores have plenty of the ketchup that comes in those squeezable bottles that cannot remain upright, the chain drive-thru restaurants have been forced to ration the little plastic packets of a condiment that began life in either China or Great Britain as a sauce made from anchovies, mussels and walnuts, among other odd ingredients.

I’m guessing it was the Brits who were so desperate to create something that would improve England’s food.

There was a time when those little packets were tossed into to-go bags of alleged food by the handful—much like candy at Halloween. At year’s end, many a kitchen drawer was filled with them, along with similar packets of soy sauce, unopened Fortune Cookies and rolls of plastic bags to pick up dog poop. But the demand for the packets has forced retailers to limit their distribution to one packet per order, barely enough to coat the ends of more than four or five fries. This is a cruel dilemma for those who regularly eat in their vehicles and haven’t thought to keep a bottle of ketchup in the glove compartment—a beneath-the-dashboard bin in which gloves have never been kept.

Allegedly, this shortage has been created by those unwilling to share the bottles of ketchup found on many restaurant tabletops or use the pump dispensers near the soda machines because of a possible exposure to COVID-19. But since most of the fast food joints have been closed to dine-in customers since the middle of March 2020, that makes no sense. And many of those same people afraid to share ketchup also believe that wearing masks is an infringement of their rights. Go figure.

To simplify a national food crisis with the idea that people are merely picking up more food to-go, is to deny our current reality.

What does make sense, of course, is a dark government conspiracy—orchestrated by Joe Biden and John Kerry (who married into the Heinz family and reportedly has eleven private jets, ten of which are always airborne)—to create ketchup shortages that would increase the value of each packet by at least thirty percent.

The nutritional value of ketchup was determined during the Reagan Administration when it was designated a vegetable (the ketchup, not Reagan), and a minimum daily consumption recommendation was established at six ounces. Now it’s time, ketchup producers say, to make more money.

I’m not sure how ketchup became the favorite sauce in which to dunk a deep-fried strip of potato. It should never have happened.

In Belgium, where French fries were invented when some chef was trying to create a potato chip for the newly established Frito-Lay company, fries are consumed with a sauce of a “ketchup-like” substance of dubious origin and sprinkled with diced raw onion.

In Spain, fries are known as patata fritas, a popular tapas that are usually served with packets of spicy salsa from Taco Bell.

France claims to have pretty much created every culinary contribution in history, without ever acknowledging that everything they know about food was learned from Italians. Nonetheless, pommes frites, with which Thomas Jefferson seemed so enamored, are served with homemade mayonnaise or a Mornay sauce with Gruyère cheese.

That sauce, delicate unless used on the Kentucky state sandwich of turkey and bacon called a Hot Brown, no doubt inspired the people of Quebec, Canada, to create poutine. Maybe. Poutine is made with fries, cheese curds and brown gravy, and has become as revered in that province as has barbecue in Texas, hot dogs in Chicago, cheese steaks in Philadelphia, and corn dogs in Iowa.

I had poutine once. Once was more than enough.

Ireland, the island nation whose citizenry refused to eat fish during the famous potato famine—choosing instead to emigrate to Boston or starve to death—does not have French fries. Potatoes are eaten boiled. Period.

But back to ketchup, which in the time of this pandemic has been called the “new toilet paper.” I find that to be a rather disturbing image.

In this time of condiment hardship, I would suggest that people broaden their horizons and dip into new sauces. For a ketchup lover, such a suggestion may seem as unseemly as asking a Proud Boy to give up his automatic weapon, but I believe it’s a sacrifice we need to make.

It’s also the only way to thwart Biden’s evil plan to upset this nation’s dietary code and line the pockets of ketchup moguls, who are currently adding secret ingredients that will, when exposed to the gamma rays of G5 transmitters, allow Bill Gates to know where each of us are 24/7. The new, improved ketchup will also act as a booster vaccine to combat COVID-19.

The anti-vaxxers will need to make a condiment switch, leading the nation away from the newly hatched plot by the unhinged radical liberal that is Joe Biden. His behavior from the Oval Office is clearly out of control. He’s obviously coming after our guns, as well as our ketchup, and is promoting a commie agenda that encompasses the ideas of equality, a clean environment, the well-being of us all, and civil rights, human rights and voting rights.

This madness has to stop.

Clearly, there will be a shift of the earth’s axis as thirty percent of the country switches to mayonnaise for its fries.

Photo creation by Courtney A. Liska

Tomato Ketchup

6 oz. can of tomato paste
1/4 cup honey
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/4 cup water
1 tsp. sugar
3/4 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. onion powder
1/4 tsp. garlic powder

Combine the ingredients in a medium saucepan over medium heat; whisk until smooth.
When it comes to a boil, reduce heat to low and simmer for 20 minutes, stirring often.
Remove from heat and cover until cool.
Chill and store refrigerated in a covered container.

My mother was all of seven years old when the stock market crash ushered in what would become known as the Great Depression.

On October 24, 1929, as nervous investors began selling off over-priced shares in a trading frenzy, the crash that some had feared happened at last. A record 12.9 million shares were traded that day, known as “Black Thursday.”

Five days later, on “Black Tuesday,” some 16 million shares were traded after another wave of panic divestment swept Wall Street. Millions of shares ended up to be worthless, and those investors who had bought stocks with borrowed money were wiped out completely.

Financial ruin swept across the nation from Lower Manhattan, where reckless speculation had led countless Americans to pour their savings into stocks. As a result, the market underwent rapid expansion, reaching its peak in August of 1929.

But by then, industrial production had declined, and unemployment was on the rise, leaving stock prices much higher than their actual value. Wages at the time were sagging, consumer debt was rising, and the agricultural sector of the economy was struggling due to falling food prices and shortages brought about by a drought that would see the nation’s bread basket turn into the Dust Bowl. Banks had an excess of large loans that could not be liquidated.

Less than a year after the crash, my mother began her day by making soup from the leftovers from the night before. Left to simmer while she attended school in the small town of Callaway, Nebraska, she would come home and serve the soup and scraps of stale bread from the town’s bakery to the “traveling men” from the front porch of her family’s white-washed clapboard house.

These men, unlike the settlers who had homesteaded much of the West, represented a diaspora that would forever change the face of both the nation and that of the American family.

Homesteaders, their eyes filled with hope for a bright new future, came looking for opportunity. The men to whom my mother ladled soup—sad-eyed, their suits worn, their fedoras sweat-stained and weathered—came looking for a chance at survival. Opportunity must have seemed fanciful. Having left their families, they traveled in search of elusive jobs that might provide enough income to send home.

By 1930, the country’s industrial production had dropped by half. For those who were lucky enough to remain employed, wages fell and buying power decreased dramatically. Bread lines, soup kitchens and rising numbers of homeless people became more and more common in America’s towns and cities. Farmers couldn’t afford to harvest their crops, and were forced to leave them rotting in the fields while people elsewhere starved. That same year was when the severe droughts in the Southern Plains brought high winds and dust from Texas to Nebraska, killing people, livestock, and crops.

The Dust Bowl inspired a mass migration of people from farmlands to cities in search of factory work, and from the plains to California to become field laborers. John Steinbeck found poetry in the sufferings of those he portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath.

In 1933, the financial stress on the American people could be measured in a 24.9% unemployment rate. From 1931, the same year my father quit school to join the work force as a 12-year-old, until 1940, the unemployment rate never reached above 14%. Half of the American people were living below subsistence levels. More than half of the nation’s banks had failed.

While there don’t seem to be many statistics about the effects of the Depression on the structure and stability of the American family, it can be safely assumed that many of the men never returned home or were successful enough in the pursuit of jobs to send money home.

From 1930 to 1940, the number of employed women in the United States rose 24 percent from 10.5 million to 13 million. Though women had been entering the workforce for decades, the financial pressures of the Great Depression drove women to seek employment in ever greater numbers as male breadwinners lost their jobs. Marriages dropped 22 percent during that time.

As war loomed on two fronts, my father lied about his age and enlisted in the Army. Other enlistees, as well as those conscripted into service, became part of a workforce that would make a large dent in the unemployment numbers. In anticipation of war came a massive increase in industrial, i.e., armaments, production. The low-paying jobs of nursing, sewing, and teaching that FDR’s Works Progress Administration had created for women, were replaced by what came to be symbolized by Rosie the Riveter.

The end of World War II ushered in an era of prosperity and helped restore, if not, create, a middle class. It also saw the African-American diaspora from the rural south to the industrial north—all in search of jobs and opportunity, without the oppressive racism that permeated the south. Or so it was believed.

I had an uncle who had been too young for service in WWI and too old for WWII. He worked at the General Electric factory on Chicago’s West Side throughout the war. He drew no salary, opting rather for stock options. As he toiled on the assembly line, he honed his vision of the future. He figured that at war’s end, the GIs would come home, buy a car, marry the girls they’d left behind, and move into cracker-box suburban houses.

He was right, as demonstrated by his becoming a wealthy man through the Lincoln-Ford dealership he started, followed by his partnering with a lumber company to develop Naperville, Illinois.

But the rise of suburbia signaled yet another diaspora as returning GIs left their family homes to settle elsewhere.

America had become a country on the move, perhaps no better symbolized than by Bing Crosby’s hit recording of the Gordon Jenkins song, whose refrain promised: I’m gonna settle down and never more roam / And make the San Fernando Valley my home.

When thousands of GIs passed through that Los Angeles valley on the way to the Asian front, they saw from the train windows what must have seemed a paradise of lush orange orchards. The Valley was quickly settled after the war, the orange groves plowed under to make room for housing.

The dispersal of our citizenry led to a distancing of our families. As my family continued to relocate further and further west from Chicago, we became more distanced from my paternal grandmother, which, in retrospect, I regret (although it was not my doing). Grandmothers have a special way with their grandchildren that provides special senses of learning and security—as well as cookies.

There was a time when newlyweds moved in with parents, and when the newlyweds got around to having their own place, the parents moved in with them. All told, it was not a bad system.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Mary Pickford

The actress was married to Douglas Fairbanks and presumably did not suffer terribly during the Great Depression. My babička named this ground beef and noodle casserole for “America’s Sweetheart,” perhaps hoping to lend a sense of elegance to what is clearly a Depression era dish. But I’m not sure. I just loved it as a kid.

1# ground beef
1 small onion, diced
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 stalk celery, chopped
½ bell pepper, chopped
1 can of tomato soup
Salt & pepper
1 Tbs. chopped parsley
12 oz. elbow macaroni

Sauté the onion in a Tbs. of neutral oil for 4-5 minutes over medium heat. Add the celery and bell pepper, cooking for 2-4 minutes. Add the garlic and cook until fragrant. Turn the heat to high and cook the ground beef.
Meanwhile, cook the macaroni according to the package instructions.
Add the tomato soup to the cooked meat mixture. Stir in the cooked macaroni. Garnish with parsley and serve.

It never occurred to me that one day I might compose these words: I really am beginning to miss the son-of-a-bitch.

For four years I slept restlessly, wondering what catastrophe or disaster or embarrassing tweet awaited my awakening. Cold sweats in mid-sleep would be accompanied by my blood-curdling screams into the night air. “The Best Is Yet to Come,” became my anthem to counter the idea that maybe things couldn’t get worse.

And yet they always seemed to.

But now, where is all the lunatic screaming and name-calling, the profiteering golf trips, the posturing, the show-and-tell bill signings, the crowds of toadies surrounding the most powerful man in the world? Why can’t we see world leaders rolling their eyes at presidential boorishness? Where are the teams of special prosecutors?

Where are the suggestions of bleach injections and the rectal Klieg lights, the projections of a mere fifteen cases before this little health issue would pass? Missing also are accusations of cancel culture, the support for Proud Boys, Fat Boys, Meth Boys, QAnon and white supremacists; the disdain for a domestic terrorist organization—antifa—that doesn’t exist?

No insurrections, no snowstorm of daily lies, no posing in front of a church holding a bible.

Who would want to live in such a world?

After 60 days of relative calm, of watching the American government climb back to the business of being responsive to the travails of a nation while working to provide its people both protection and opportunity, I wake up with a blood pressure reading that is through the roof.

Could it be that if I don’t have serious concerns to rant and rave about—issues to preach about stridently to the choir—that my system feels deprived and becomes hypertensive? Is this the punishment for wearing one’s  progressive liberalism on one’s sleeve?

I know it’s not because President Biden used “cheat sheets” at his first press conference since taking office. Trump would have done well to have a few facts at hand during his briefings, conferences, and rallies. And I know it’s not because Biden has the occasional verbal gaffe. Trump’s gaffes were multiple and far more impressive in that his vocabulary was equal to that of an average fourth grader. Hard to make too many mistakes when you only know about four hundred words, yet he misspoke more often than Norm Crosby.

I believe that Biden wants us to know the facts about the problems we face and his Administration’s proposed solutions. Hence, the cheat sheets. Maybe, just maybe, the truth is making me ail.

After starting medication on Tuesday, my blood pressure readings were still at ceiling level. By Friday, I had added a pounding headache, whose every throb seemed in time with the beat of my heart, and my vision had blurred as if I was looking through somebody else’s reading glasses. The doctor I had seen on Monday advised me to go the emergency department, where medications could be administered that would control my hypertension immediately.

Unless your heart has been pierced by a wooden stake, shot in the groin, or your jugular vein severed, few things happen immediately in the ED.

Nine different people were involved in my nearly five-hour stay. A scan of my head showed no bleeding from the brain, which is always good news. (The last time I had a brain scan, the doctor told me there was nothing there. He thought that was funny.) The EKG showed a change from the last one, perhaps due to the heart attack I had two years ago. My BP started dropping, indicating to the doctors that additional meds would not be needed and that the diuretic was starting to work.

But nobody there could offer a reason why, after four years of Trump, I experienced a mild health crisis after sixty days of Biden. Maybe there is no connection, but I remember when my sister died, I told the attending physician it was because Trump had just taken office. He agreed. And that was in the pathetically red state of Indiana.

Back in the ED, the subject of the Holocaust came up. One of the attendants, upon hearing that nearly thirty percent of American adults don’t believe it even happened, noted that the figure coincided with Trump’s base.

And in the meantime, I’m reading an article in The New Yorker about the devolution of the Republican party into a party—at least its far-right faction—as an occult of Trump. There is no policy; only a personality that encourages free-wheeling abhorrence of civility, decency and lawlessness.

I’ve also read more than one suggestion that Biden is the new FDR. While I find that comforting, in a way, I doubt that he’ll have the Congressional support to put in place programs that pay for themselves—as did Roosevelt’s. America’s infrastructure is in dire need of repair and Biden would be wise to establish a Works Progress Administration to address the issue.

But I wonder about the source of my blood pressure problems. Unhappy with Trump for four years, now my hypertension soars.

I made an appointment with my shrink, Dr. Günter Klaus von Grubersteingruber, who, as you might remember, works days as a diesel mechanic.

“There is a certain sense of loss, a sense of abandonment, a sense of emptiness,” he said, his Austrian accent more pronounced than the last time we met when he spoke those exact same words. I was lying on a folding chaise lounge in the crowded backroom of his shop. The room was decorated with Hustler centerfolds and it smelled of cigarettes, burnt motor oil and sauerkraut. The space heater heaved from power surges. There was the occasional spark.

“You miss Trump for the same reasons you miss Nixon.”

“How so?” I asked.

“You don’t have him to kick around anymore.”

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Easter Lamb with Peas

This is a stew that is easy, festive and delicious for the Christian holiday coming next week.

2# lamb shoulder, boned and cut into large chunks
1/4 c. extra virgin olive oil
2 onions, chopped
1 large carrot, sliced
1 celery stalk, chopped
5 garlic cloves, crushed
2 oz. anchovy fillets in oil
handful thyme sprigs
1 red chili pepper, sliced
9 oz. dry white wine
1 oz. white wine vinegar
10 oz. frozen peas
1 large potatoes, cut into bite-size pieces
8 oz. cherry tomatoes, halved
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Season the lamb with salt and black pepper. Set aside.
Heat the olive oil in a large, lidded pan and fry the onions, carrot, and celery for 4–5 minutes, or until softened. Add the garlic, anchovies, thyme and chili, and continue to cook, stirring, until the anchovies have almost dissolved into the oil. Add the lamb chunks and fry for a further 4–5 minutes, or until browned all over.
Stir in the wine and continue to cook until the volume of the liquid has reduced by half, then add the vinegar. Reduce the heat to low, cover and simmer gently for 20 minutes.
Add the peas, potatoes, and tomatoes, cover and continue to cook for about an hour, until the sauce is reduced by half.
Serve hot with plenty of bread to mop up the sauce.

It’s been too long since I’ve indulged in a conversation about bagpipes. Actually, I’ve never had such an indulgence in this space.

Just so there’s no misunderstanding, I detest bagpipes in the same way I detest haggis—a Scottish culinary creation that is made by shoveling whatever is left over from butchering a lamb and stuffing it into the lamb’s stomach and cooking it until the evil spirits are driven out of the house. Then it is transported, somewhat ceremoniously, by wheelbarrow and thrown away in the vicar’s garbage can as a tithe offering.

The Scots, besides their history of aggressive lawn care, have contributed many things to the world. Golf, for instance, a game played on grassy fields made to ruin a perfectly pleasant afternoon. And Scotch, a delicious beverage to help salvage an afternoon ruined by golf.

Bagpipes are believed to have been invented by the Scots when there was a leftover sheep’s stomach from the annual haggis bee. Somebody there had two tubes which he stuck into the stomach. Hoping to scare all the wee lads and lasses, he blew into one tube, forcing air—and noise—out of the other while squeezing it between his elbow and his rib cage.

This history is somewhat suspicious because there’s an entire sura in the Quran devoted to warning Muslims that using a bagpipe is a mortal sin.

I have a friend who likes the bagpipes so much that he has traveled more than once to Scotland to visit the pipes’ ancestral home. He might have other faults that I don’t know about. And the fact that he’s a Scotch drinker tells me that “the pipes” aren’t the only attraction to a country where English is spoken only while gargling marbles.

I am curious to know if bagpipes—created as a war instrument to keep the British away—sound different there, echoing about the brae-filled countryside. Since pipers seem to only know one song, I somehow doubt it.

Every year, except this past year due to Covid-19, our little town hosts a Fourth of July parade on July 2nd (don’t ask). There are farm implements, antique cars, Shriners, and no fewer than sixteen bagpipe bands—separated by mule trains—all playing the only song they know, the pipers…mules know no songs. After the parade, the bands invade all of the bars in town, demanding free drinks in exchange for not playing that one song over and over. By the end of the evening, our little town is littered with drunk folks in kilts.

I was the best man at a friend’s outdoor wedding and had to arrange for a bagpiper to perform for the bride’s stroll down the aisle, which I estimated would take three minutes, tops. I found a piper who wanted to play not only the three minutes, but between the sets a band would be playing as well. I told him that three minutes would be more than enough and that we were willing to play him for four hours’ work.

He seemed upset, but not nearly as upset as he was when he asked me how I would recognize him on the day of the wedding.

“I assume you’ll be only man there wearing a plaid dress.”

SPEAKING OF WOODWINDS, consider the oboe. Unlike its cousin, the bassoon, there is nothing remotely humorous about the oboe.

Oboists are special in myriad ways. Usually, their eyes are narrow set and they know and accept, for instance, that the most common cause of death among them is when their heads explode while trying to force a stream of air through a mouthpiece whose diameter is roughly the same as a human hair—and that’s just when tuning the orchestra. When this happens in an actual concert it pretty much puts a damper on the day for everyone.

Oboists can only talk about their reeds. They are not conversant in any other subject. As every crossword puzzle enthusiast knows, the oboe is a double-reed instrument. The reeds are sensitive to every climatic element known and oboists spend a lot of time wringing their hands worrying about climate change. I was at a party once where two oboists were telling stories to each other as they sipped their white wine spritzers through their reeds. They were red-faced and crying.

I’ve always wondered what the attraction to playing the oboe is. Of course, I’ve always wondered who is attracted to sadomasochism as well. My simple theory is that in fifth grade, the children line up outside the music room at school and are given clarinets until they run out of them. A few trumpets are handed out next, then a trombone or two. The last kid in line gets an oboe and a jelly jar with distilled water to keep the reeds wet, which they must carry dutifully like the cup of mare’s sweat in A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum.

The handful of kids who refuse to stand quietly in line get snare drums.

I grew up in Chicago where there was no shortage of accordions, probably because there was no shortage of Germans, Poles, and other Eastern Europeans who seemed to share an affinity for both the instrument and it best-known use: the polka. Many showed an affinity for kielbasa as well.

Vital to modern klezmer music, an instrumental tradition of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, the accordion was the core of the Lawrence Welk Show that vaulted Myron Floren, aka “the happy Norwegian,” to international fame.

In my childhood neighborhood, if there was an accordion in your house it meant that your parents couldn’t afford a piano, which is like a large accordion without all those little buttons on the left side. Of course, you don’t squeeze a piano; nor is it as easy to move from one place to another.

Accordions are rarely featured on movie soundtracks, unlike the banjo. Deliverance, Smokey and the Bandit (Parts 1-103), and Petticoat Junction tell you all you really need to know about the banjo.

Photo montage by Courtney A. Liska

Cock-a-leekie Soup

For a quick indulgence in authentic Scottish fare, try this delicious soup before venturing into haggis territory. I can’t for the life of me figure out why one would put prunes into what is basically chicken soup.

3 chicken legs, or 6 drumsticks
4 cups water
1 onion, chopped
2 leeks, sliced
2 carrots, chopped
12 prunes, chopped
2 sprigs of thyme
1 bay leaf
salt

Heat the oven to 400˚
Roast the chicken pieces for about 30 minutes, then place in a heavy bottomed stockpot along with any juices. Pour water over the chicken until it is covered. Bring to the boil and then simmer for 1 hour to make a stock.
Add in the vegetables, prunes, herbs, a good grinding of pepper and half a teaspoon of salt. Cook until the vegetables are tender, around 20 minutes. Remove the chicken, take the meat from the bones, and stir back into soup.
Discard the bones and the herbs, check for seasoning and serve.

It was January of last year that I first broached the topic of “decluttering.” Although I made no promise or resolution to actually declutter, it has occurred to me that I am on the verge of having wasted a perfectly good pandemic by not having spent the last year of isolation decluttering my life and environs.

First of all, I’ve drawn this conclusion because I really have nothing better to do than sit around thinking about the most inconsequential of matters, which this surely is. Alienation from a normal life shared with others leads to random and disconnected thoughts, frequently fantastical and mostly dumb. Under normal circumstances, this activity would be considered a monumental waste of time. But these are far from normal circumstances. So be it.

Let’s start with the word “decluttered” and its active verb form, “decluttering.” I’ve addressed this issue before, but I think it bears repeating. While one can certainly live a cluttered life—from piles of unsorted papers and books upon desks and nightstands, to a head filled with confusion—how does one live a decluttered life?

The implication, of course, is that a decluttered life describes a life that was once cluttered and is no longer due to active efforts to rid stuff by the person with those random piles of stuff.

Decluttering, I don’t believe, is even a legitimate word, despite its having been in limited (until now) use since 1950. That one’s life becomes cluttered is probably not an aspiration by the clutteree…it just happens. Nobody answers a question about today’s activity by saying, “Oh, just cluttering up my life—one room at a time.”

There was a time when one cleaned up and threw out stuff or gave it away. To some, decluttering might make the task more significant or important than mere cleaning, much along the lines of that moment when janitors became custodial engineers. Think how those in mid-career must have felt when their new titles became a replacement for what had become a perceived inferior standing in both society and the workforce.

(I had a friend who had an after-school job working as a petroleum transfer engineer. He pumped gas at a Texaco station in Van Nuys, California.)

This has taken on newer political correctness in that house-keeping services in hospitals are now called environmental services, which is pretty lofty in tone and implies something, perhaps, about climate change and the Paris Accords and less about waxy buildup on the floors.

And while we’re on the subject of hospitals, why is the Emergency Room now the Emergency Department? Granted, while there are more than one exam or treatment rooms in most hospitals, the ED sounds lame compared to the ER. Really, would anybody have watched even one of the 331 episodes of the NBC prime time drama that ran between 1994 and 2009 had it been called “ED”? Might as well just put a Mr. in front of it and make it a sitcom about a talking horse.

Or, could it have survived as a drama about Erectile Dysfunction for 19 seasons?

I’d also like to know what a “hospitalist” is. The word first appeared two years after the premiere of “ER” and it refers to a doctor who sees patients whose hospital confinements are longer than their regular doctor’s shifts. Another made-up word, there is already of society of hospitalists, a web site, and a blog detailing the adventures of hospitalists.

I’ve spent many weeks in hospitals over the past few years. I was visited by innumerable doctors, none of whom introduced themselves as hospitalists. And there was a Jamaican woman who had held her ex-husband at gunpoint until he cleared out of their Brooklyn apartment after she discovered his having had an affair. She had a definite voodoo quality and she called herself a “maid” as she swept beneath my bed and sang beautiful songs in a foreign tongue. (Actually, the songs might have been about rodents and rabid bats, but since I didn’t the understand the language their melodies sounded beautiful.)

But I digress.

I saw a New Yorker cartoon not so long that had two men staring at an open garage packed with stuff. “Someday, son, this will all be yours.”

We have two storage bins—one that is 10’ x 20’; the other, 12-foot-square. The rent alone is a monumental waste of money. We have only vague notions of what could possibly be stored in those places that we rarely visit. The reason we don’t go to visit our stored belongings is because we don’t need any of them.

Part of our cache is about 3,000 jazz LPs. The irony is that we don’t have a record player.

I know we have a windsurfing board that somebody gave us. I don’t know why we accepted it as a gift since we gave up windsurfing as a family just before moving to Montana. But I’d be happy to re-gift it.

We have a wicker bassinette and multiple cartons of infant wear. We’ve not had an infant in the house for more than 30 years, and it’s highly unlikely for there to be any time soon. I believe there are also several beds and frames, boxes of kitchenware and dishes for the cabin we’ll never have, remnants of drum sets, and a marimba.

And that’s probably just the half of it.

The smaller unit houses the remains of our restaurant, including 12 bar stools. Belly up!

With each passing day I am more and more tempted to do something useful—like getting rid of stuff. There’s a six-foot-long shelf with every classroom assignment our two kids ever completed from kindergarten to high school graduation. Since neither of them wants the stuff, I’ve been eyeing that shelf of filed papers and construction paper handicrafts with the idea of depositing it all in the trash.

I hope I can get it done before the next pandemic.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Pasta with Ham, Asparagus and Cream

I’ve been making this bowl of comfort long before ever reading the recipe in Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, the undisputed bible of Italian cuisine. It works with boiled ham or smoked, whichever is your preference, and the asparagus can be substituted with peas, green beans or any leafy green vegetable.

1# dried penne regate
1# fresh asparagus, trimmed and cut into 1-inch pieces
1 large onion, choppe1/4 cup butter
1/2 pound cubed fully cooked ham
1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
Salt and pepper
Shredded Parmesan cheese, optional

Cook the pasta following the package directions. Drain, but do not rinse. Reserve a cup or so of the cooking water.
Sauté the onion in the butter. When soft, add the asparagus and ham. Continue cooking for 5-6 minutes. Add the cream and let reduce for a minute or two. Add the pasta and mix well. Serve with the Parmesan cheese.

Something is afoot in our domicile that seems not quite right.

Like most couples, there is much about which to compromise at the beginning of a marriage. We all know this. One of you doesn’t squeeze the toothpaste properly and it becomes an insurmountable issue until you get a double bathroom vanity twenty-three years later and lay claim to separate toothpastes—with one of you finally getting the brand you like.

There are other things, too, like one of you secretly paying off Las Vegas gambling debts acquired in your salad days. One of you might drink more than the other thinks is prudent. One of you can’t stand the mother-in-law. One of you can’t grasp the concept of a laundry hamper’s purpose or why a bed should be made unless you’re changing the sheets.

The list goes on and on.

One of Geri’s and my first nuptial agreements is, I believe, being encroached. For more than forty-two years Geri has upheld her promise to stay out of the “room where there are ice cubes,” in exchange for my not cooking lamb, seafood, or any animal protein that once romped unsupervised through forest and field.

Geri’s lack of cooking skills is renowned—in that lots of people know this about her. She doesn’t like to cook and if you don’t like doing something it’s unlikely you’ll ever be very good at it. She also is not particularly interested in food beyond its use as fuel. She has yet to meet a processed food she doesn’t like. As I compose these words, she’s eating a micro-waved soft pretzel with Cheez Whiz, one of the few condiments known to all of mankind without an expiration date. Note: Real food, in time, rots. Even Velveeta, which I believe is a petroleum-based concoction, rots.

What I find interesting about this lapsing moment is that the pretzel she’s eating was made in New Jersey, the Garden State whose claim to culinary fame is the Taylor Ham, or pork roll, a breakfast sandwich like an Egg McMuffin with soul. A decent pretzel comes from Philadelphia—also known for its Philly cheese steak sandwiches, topped with grilled onions and Cheez Whiz. There should be no other use for Cheez Whiz.

Just last night we dined on cheese steaks—delicious despite our not having access to Amaroso hoagie rolls. Wheat Montana sufficed nicely.

Geri has become a big fan of a PBS show about baking. “The Great British Baking Show” features amateur bakers competing against each other in a big tent with KitchenAid stand mixers and stainless steel ovens. They seem about as amateurish as NASA rocket scientists. Other than baking Christmas cookies, which meant that there would be more flour on the floor than in the batter, I didn’t know why Geri has become so interested in baking, just like her liking “Chicago P.D.” does not necessarily mean she wants to become an almost-corrupt cop. Our Sunday afternoon activities, which mostly involve reading or finding a reason to move to a different chair, now are structured around this show.

Much of this strikes me as odd.

Historically, Geri, who is Irish and was actually raised on the Emerald Isle, doesn’t much care for the British. She grew up hearing the stories of thirty years of British tyranny and suppression delivered upon the Irish, who quaintly refer to those years, that had their beginnings in 1601, as “the troubles.” This seems to me to be akin to referring to the American Civil War as a tiff.

The show is actually quite entertaining. There’s Mary, the exacting dowager (I’m guessing here), and her partner Paul, probably half her age. They are both bakers and they start the show by each baking something rather elaborate with which the other assists. After tasting whatever is they baked—dissecting each serving with surgical precision, and consumed with hot tea, of course—they challenge the six or eight contestants to do as good a job. None of them do, but one always emerges almost triumphant in his/her effort despite the slightly soggy bottom of a sponge cake or the rather untidy dripping of an icing.

In the course of all of this, one can’t help but notice that British dental care has greatly improved.

Geri isn’t interested in baking any of these entries, though she seemed oddly interested to know what castor’s sugar is. (In America, it’s commonly known as baker’s sugar—extremely fine ground.)

I like a good piece of cake or a pastry from time to time. I’m not much interested in baking, though, probably because there are too many rules to follow to ensure things turning out as they’re supposed to. I prefer the more slapdash approach that savory cooking allows—even encourages.

Considering the fanciful and detailed nature of the show’s assignments, I am certainly not interested in attempting such creations. Most of the time, the contestants are given two-and-a-half hours to complete their efforts. At this point, I’m really not interested in spending more than a half-an-hour to make a complete dinner.

While I don’t hold out much hope for Geri to start baking elaborate cakes scented with lavender and decorated with exotic fruits, I did happen to notice one day last week that she was watching a program that featured a suitably fat chef from New Orleans making po’ boy sandwiches.

The Depression Era sandwich is traditionally stuffed with roast beef and gravy, and is garnished with lettuce, tomato, and pickles. I’ve eaten a lot of po’ boys over the years, but never one with roast beef. I like mine with breaded fried shrimp, crawfish, oysters and/or crab, which means Geri won’t be making me my favorite any time soon.

If, however, Geri will sneak into the room with ice cubes and prepare a Bakewell tart, an English confection consisting of a short-crust pastry with a layer of jam and a sponge using ground almonds, then the original nuptial contract will have been broken.

Then I’ll be free to make seafood po’ boys, or a leg of lamb, or a saddle of venison.

Please, Geri, bake some scones and set me free.

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Po’ boy sandwiches

1 pound assorted seafood
3/4 cup fine cornmeal
3/4 cup flour
1 Tbs. Cajun seasoning
1 tsp. salt
2 eggs, beaten
Peanut oil for frying
1/2 head iceberg lettuce, shredded
2-3 tomatoes, sliced about 1/4 inch thick
4 French sandwich rolls

Remoulade
1/4 cup mustard
1 1/4 cups mayo
2 tsp. prepared horseradish
1 tsp. pickle juice or vinegar
1 tsp. hot sauce
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 Tbs. sweet paprika
1-2 tsp. Cajun seasoning
Blend all the ingredients together and set aside.

Pour enough peanut oil in a large frying pan to come up about 1/4 inch, and set the pan over medium-high heat until a small amount of flour sizzles immediately when you drop some in.
Mix the cornmeal, flour, Cajun seasoning, and salt in a large bowl. Working with a few at a time, dredge the seafood in the egg, then in the cornmeal-flour mixture. Fry for 1-2 minutes, remove from the oil and drain.
To assemble the sandwiches, slice the sandwich loaves almost all the way through and smear remoulade on both the top and bottom.
Place a layer of shredded lettuce on the bottom of the sandwich, then arrange the fish on top.
Lay 3-4 slices of tomato on the shrimp and press the top of the bread down.

Now that sanity, and that elusive sense of the ephemeral realizations of equality, reason and scientific thought has returned to the State Capitol in Helena, I have a few questions regarding procedures and protocols.

The Legislature wants us to be able to fully protect ourselves and others, so we no longer have to wear masks, but we can carry guns. What I’m wondering is if I’m at the grocery store and an unmasked person sneezes in my direction and he is not six feet away can I shoot him right there in the produce aisle or do I need permission from the department manager?

He has, after all, endangered me and I apparently have the right to protect myself. Or does this just apply to violent attacks—like a shoot-out on Main Street or a back alley rumble with the Crips or the Bloods? Although I do tend to think that infecting somebody with a potentially lethal disease is a fairly violent act, I’m not sure if an inconsiderate act of an uncaring and mean-spirited individual is deserving of a deadly vigilante reaction.

And yet, somewhere in the backs of the tiny little brains that much of the Legislature seems to possess, there was a sense that while schools and bars are completely safe places to have guns, they won’t be allowed in the Capitol building because that could jeopardize their safety.

Guns in bars and schools bother me but mostly in bars. Bars serve alcoholic beverages that have been known to alter a person’s simple reality. Add guns to the mix and tell me what could possibly go wrong. I’m just not comfortable sitting anywhere near a guy with a pistol setting next to his bourbon ditch. I understand that might be sheepish, so b-a-a-a.

Returning to beat what should by now be a dead horse over the mask issue, Governor Body Slam sees the wearing of masks as being a huge stumbling block to making money, although tax cuts for his wealthy friends can be done from behind masks that will also disguise his snarky smiles as he heaps more misery upon the underclass. He certainly doesn’t seem to have the best interests of the people he’s taken an oath to serve much in mind. When it comes to heeding the advice of medical and science experts, he follows his own moronic instincts.

Remember, he’s the only U.S. governor who believes that “The Flintstones,” was a documentary, and that the six-hundred-year-old Noah didn’t deplete the U.S. treasury by drawing social security entitlements. This guy makes Judy Martz a beacon of light and hope.

Turning to other medical news, the Montana House Judiciary Committee just passed HB 415, sponsored by Rep. Jennifer Carlson (R-Manhattan), that would prohibit hospitals, child care providers, governmental entities, employers, and others from requiring that employees, customers, or others be vaccinated against communicable diseases, or from “discriminating” in any way against those who choose not to be vaccinated. This comes right out of the QAnon playbook and plays into the hands of dangerously stupid people, many of whom now carry guns. I have a pale white spot on my arm from a childhood vaccination against polio. It worked.

People with actual knowledge of such matters are opposed to HB 415. And the dimwits who liken vaccines to Auschwitz, should—if they’re even capable—read some history. Just yesterday, I had a rough day after getting my second Covid-19 vaccine. In no way did it seem like an incarceration in a death camp. Not even remotely.

To even suggest such a comparison does not only show the depth of one’s ignorance, but it serves to be completely disrespectful to the memory of the six million innocent Jews who died in the Holocaust. And yes, it happened.

Rep. Jedediah Hinkle (R-Belgrade), another willing consumer of the Kool-Aid, said that this conspiracy-driven anti-vaxxer tripe is “the most important bill of the session.” Second in line must surely be the one that addresses youth sports in which there might be transgender participation. I’m guessing that third in line must have something to do with legalizing discrimination against the entire LGBTQ+ community. Where’s the progress on behalf of human rights and decency? Who are these repressive-minded people whose lives are not in the least bit affected by some stranger’s sexual orientation?

Weaponizing education against those who are educated has been a favorite pastime over the last four years for about a third of Americans. It doesn’t seem to be abating in Montana—at one time a pleasantly purple state whose alluring moniker, The Last Best Place, has served as inspiration to those who want to keep it that. From the dynamic and progressive Mike Mansfield, we’ve sunk to being represented by Steve Daines, an avowed Trump toady.

The Montana House passed HB 269 which seeks to dismantle local public health authority and replace it with a rule to require elected officials to approve rules and regulations for wastewater. This is a job that has been done by local boards of health and trained municipal staffs for decades—efficiently. Besides trying to fix things that aren’t broken, these yahoos seem to just want to wrest away power from people who actually know what they’re doing.

I’m not sure how wastewater is managed but, since there doesn’t seem to be much of a backlog of it, I assume it’s being dealt with successfully. Beyond suspecting that the wastewater from our house somehow ends up at a filtration plant where it is bottled by a subsidiary of Nestle’s and then sold at convenience stores, I don’t want to know.

I’m satisfied to know that I am competent at a few things. For everything else, there are the Yellow Pages.

But what would a week of law-making have been without an invocation and a moment of silence to honor bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, and racism all wrapped up in the name of the hate-filled Rush Limbaugh, a man who was as deserving of a Medal of Freedom as I would be for Olympic Gold for watching a diving event on television?

And let’s not forget to thank the Legislature for keeping Montanans safe from a group that doesn’t exist, while ignoring those that do, and which pose quite real threats. That’s right, Antifa has been declared a terrorist organization. It is quite possibly the first time since the Middle Ages that a mere idea or concept has been declared an act of heresy.

Meanwhile, the Oathkeepers, Proud Boys, the KKK and any gathering of three with AK-14s and cell phones are upstanding, law-abiding, God-fearing organizations that exist to protect the rights of the evangelical extreme right wing of the crumbled Republican Party.

As has been noted, General Eisenhower was antifa.

And just for good measure, the Legislature is trying to stick its collective nose into the state’s higher education system which, as it turns out, is in violation of the Montana Constitution—a document they have sworn to uphold and protect. Nowhere, however, does that oath suggest that even a cursory reading of that document is necessary.

There are few entities the far-right hates more than NPR and its member stations. They’ve already shown their contempt for divergent ideas, so they propose HB 542, which would defund public radio and prohibit universities from entering into licensing agreements with public radio.

If you don’t like what somebody says, after all, make sure they have no voice with which to say it.

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Tomato Soup

Many tomato soups strike me as bland and watery. This one is neither. Dare I suggest a grilled cheese sandwich as an accompaniment? This is comfort food in a time of great discomfort.

1/4 cup unsalted butter
10-15 sprigs thyme, tied together
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
2 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
1/4 cup tomato paste
2 28-ounce cans whole tomatoes
1–2 tsp. sugar, divided
1/4 cup (or more) heavy cream (optional)
Kosher salt, freshly ground pepper
1 tsp. Aleppo spice (4:1 — sweet paprika:cayenne)

Melt butter in a large heavy pot over medium heat. Add thyme, onion, and garlic. Cook until onion is completely soft and translucent, 10–12 minutes. Increase heat to medium-high; add tomato paste. Continue cooking, stirring often, until paste has begun to caramelize in spots, 5–6 minutes.
Add tomatoes with juices, Aleppo spice, 1 tsp. sugar, and 8 cups water to pot. Increase heat to high; bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium. Simmer until flavors meld and soup reduces to about 2 quarts (8 cups), 45–55 minutes. Remove soup from heat; let cool slightly. Discard thyme sprigs. Purée soup until smooth. Add cream , if using, and reheat.

Dear Sam,

You’ve been gone a long time now, but your memory is for a blessing in so many ways, which might be about the most for which any of us can hope. It has been my blessing.

I not-so-long-ago spoke with your granddaughter, Amy, whose birth I remember. I would have been in my early teens when you and Harriet were blessed with your first grandchild and there was great excitement at your house on Bristol Avenue in Westchester, just minutes west of Chicago.

She’s doing fine. You’d be proud of her. She’s made much of her way in life by representing working people through labor unions. From our too-brief telephone conversation, I could sense that she was well aligned on her family’s political spectrum.

When we spoke, Amy told me how she’d turned down an early opportunity to earn a Master’s degree to accept an internship with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. She said her mother was not pleased, but Harriet, who I remember as having worked as a seamstress, as had my grandmother, was delighted.

I remember when I got my first union card from Chicago Local 10 of the American Federation of Musicians, at about the time it merged with 208, the Black local. I was pleased to have my ticket, as it allowed me to pursue good jobs for fair pay and decent working conditions; you were border-line ecstatic. It was a coming-of-age moment and you were like the proud Uncle at the bar mitzvah I’ve yet to have.

You might remember our house on 18th Avenue. It was kind of a B-flat, brick split-level on a postage-stamp sized lot in a blue-collar neighborhood. It was where you came to give my sister Jo her weekly marimba lessons. You gave music lessons at Frank and Sylvia Triner’s music store on Roosevelt Road (as well as at schools all over Chicago), but there was no marimba there, so you schlepped your leather briefcase, crammed with manuscript papers, scores, sticks, mallets, a sandwich (tuna salad, wasn’t it?) snacks, and a plaid-patterned Thermos of black coffee the block or two to our house.

From a child’s perspective, that three- or four-block stretch of Roosevelt Road on the West Side was a complete world. You must remember. My dad’s True Value hardware store was there. It was a real hardware store with a wood-plank floor where he sold nails by the pound, cut glass, mixed paint, and threaded pipe for the trades. There was a Ben Franklin, where I would buy my mother a lace handkerchief for Mother’s Day and could add to my baseball card collection, secretly chewing the gum that my mother forbade me to chew. Uncle Joe had his medical practice there. Mr. Wolff, who drove a snazzy red T-Bird, had his photography studio just off the corner of Roosevelt and 17th. There was a pizza parlor and a Chinese restaurant, a coin-operated laundry, and a Rexall drug store. And there was Vondrasek’s hobby shop, the smells of airplane glue and Testors enamel filling the shop in a heady swirl; Mimi’s sandwich shop and soda fountain; Hildebrand Sporting Goods sold guns, brightly colored Rapala fishing lures with menacing treble hooks, and baseball gear, including a Wilson’s Roy Campanella catcher’s mitt I so coveted; Barthell’s dry cleaners, where they blocked men’s hats and did alterations; and the three-chair barber shop with a myna bird whose wolf whistles would redden the faces of passing girls as the customers leaned forward in their chairs for a better look, and where I’d thumb through Argosy magazine, awaiting the butch cut I sported. There was a small corner grocery store where the fresh, in-season produce was placed into brown paper sacks, their prices written in grease pencil, and the meat came wrapped in white paper, sealed with a piece of paper tape. Wisconsin Farms was a deli and fresh dairy with off-street parking. It was there that I would lunch on smoked whitefish and dill pickles, sometimes with a chocolate Yoo-Hoo, and it was there that I redeemed the soda bottles I’d have scavenged in the neighborhood’s alleys for 2¢ each. There was the savings-and-loan, whose philandering president had been a Notre Dame football star, that gave me a Brownie camera when I opened a passbook savings account with a $10 deposit.

And there was Triner’s, my favorite store, where Sylvia (we shared a birthday and celebrated them together with a chocolate soda at Mimi’s; she turned 61 the day I turned 16) gave private lessons on the Hammond organ and Frank taught piano and they rewarded their students with gold stars. There were six or seven teaching and practice rooms in the back of the store; when they were filled, there was a pleasantly noisy cacophony made by trumpets and flutes and clarinets and violins and it sounded like a beehive. There were racks of sheet music with cover pictures of Doris Day and Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and Rosemary Clooney, and there were bins of LP records and 45s and displays of shiny brass and silver and ebony band instruments, violins, and violas. A sparkling silver Ludwig drum kit sat on a pedestal in the center of the store and Zildjian cymbals—sizzles and rides, crash and hi-hats—hung on painted pegboard behind the cash register. I could listen to records there through clunky headphones like the ones worn by radio announcers and deejays. I’d pretend I was Wally Philips or Dick Biondi as I listened to “Purple People Eater” or “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini” or “Chantilly Lace.” Sometimes, I’d find a song I liked on a record and then buy the sheet music for 15 cents and I’d take it home for my mother to play on the Starck spinet piano her parents had given her as a wedding present. Can you believe it? I still have that piano.

Jo had a three-and-a-half octave Musser marimba, its rosewood tone bars suspended over dulled aluminum resonators, and you would sit next to it on the piano bench (I still have that, too, its needlepoint seat having been crafted by my grandmother) giving my sister a half-hour of instruction that usually lasted an hour. I would stay in the kitchen and bang along on a couple of pots with wooden spoons.

My first lesson from you came when I had been assigned to play a drum in the kindergarten pageant at Lindop Elementary School. The drum was a deep, marching-style tenor snare with a painted wood shell and a calfskin head. My mother wanted me to learn how to hold the sticks and play something appropriate for the pageant.

With its sling adjusted to fit me (sort of), the bottom of the drum reached my ankles. You showed me how to hold the sticks in the traditional style and actually wrote out on a piece of pale green staff paper a four-note military tattoo (you might have called it a “ruffle”). At age five, I couldn’t read anything more basic than “See Spot run,” but I mimicked what you played while I stared at the music paper: Flam, stroke, stroke, roll; Flam, stroke, stroke, roll.

Not only could I play a drum, I could read music!

I was your youngest student and within a few weeks of that rather auspicious kindergarten debut, I was taking weekly lessons. Jo had her lesson, with me accompanying her from the kitchen, and then I would have mine.

Dad built a practice pad for me out of scrap wood and a thick square of rubber (it hangs above my office desk) and from Triner’s I got a pair of Ludwig 2B sticks (those I don’t have).

That practice pad was my life for a year or so before I got my first snare drum, a Ludwig model whose “sparkling gold” finish was the percussive definition of kitsch. Guess what? I still have it.

Soon after I had my first complete kit, built slowly piece-by-piece over time, my parents suffered some kind of financial set-back (they never really talked about such things) and we moved to a small, third-floor walk-up apartment on Roosevelt Road, the traffic passing noisily below. You continued to give Jo her marimba lessons, with our new downstairs neighbors erupting into joyous celebration when, after weeks of trying, she finally got through a difficult passage of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5. (The mere mention of my grandmother’s goulash always triggers that melody.)

Drums were not allowed to be played in the apartment building and I begrudgingly returned to the practice pad. You solved the problem as only Sam Dean would: The Kluzak boy was one of your students and Tommy played his drums in the basement of his parents’ funeral home, which was right on my way home from school, and you had arranged for me to practice there. For the next couple of years I would go the funeral home, check out the dead people laid-out in each of the four viewing rooms, and go to the basement and play as loudly as I wanted among the stored caskets.

“You can’t wake the dead,” George Kluzak would say, laughing as only a mortician could.

I remained your student—off and on—for almost fifteen years.

You were the kind of teacher whose methods, sadly, have gone out of style. You never mollycoddled me (today—would you believe it?—they give out participation trophies) but you coaxed, coerced, cajoled, threatened, yelled, screamed, threw things (sticks and mallets), stormed out of the room, then stormed back in with a renewed sense of purpose. There were times I wanted to cry, but I never would. I’d fight back the tears. You’d light a cigarette, take a deep drag and, exhaling two thick assertive streams of blue-gray smoke through your nostrils, say, “Are you ready?” Then you’d swat the music paper with a drumstick and say, “Again. From the top.” On several occasions you quit as my teacher, claiming that if I wasn’t going to put in the effort to learn then you sure as hell weren’t going to waste your time or my parents’ money.

On those occasions I cried…just never in front of you.

You see, Sam, you were the best teacher I ever had and like all great teachers you had a profound sense for knowing what a student could accomplish and you simply wouldn’t settle for anything less. Your sense of fairness would never have allowed it.

It’s not the way things are done today, but you were building my self-esteem by helping me to be good at something. There were no gold stars for showing up. Trophies went to winners.

I don’t even have to close my eyes to picture you—you with the dark sharkskin trousers, pointy-toed Italian slip-ons, knit shirts and cardigan sweaters. (Your sartorial style was passed down to me when you recommended I buy my tuxedos and band clothes from Smokey Joe’s on Maxwell Street—there was no other place that could outfit an entire band with matching sequined tux jackets off the rack.)

When I first knew you, you towered over me. Of course, your physical stature lessened as mine increased, but you were always an imposing figure. I’m guessing you were around five-foot-eight, and you were very thin. You were dark-skinned, had slicked-back black hair and a long, hawkish nose. I remember your teeth, of which you seemed to have several more than most people; they were nicotine-stained from the ever-present Pall Malls that dangled from your lips. You were incredibly articulate, your words delivered in brisk staccato bursts that seemed fittingly percussive, your tongue charging violently against the backs of those teeth.

I still have the red, three-post, two-pocket binder that I neatly labeled the Sam Dean Book of Drumming. It’s dog-eared and full of hand-written patterns and figures and exercises, with scrawled notes and instructions. There are such notations above a practice routine as “as written”; next to it, the “as played” instructions. You taught me all the basics of swing, blues, bossa nova, the rhumba, the waltz, and the cha-cha-cha; hand-drawn illustrations showed brush patterns, the left hand swishing in a looping, clock-wise circle while the right hand dodged the circle in any number of rhythmic patterns.

With only the rudimentary basics, I started playing with Frank Triner—at your suggestion—as a nine-year-old kid (“Little Jimmy at the drums” read the marquees) and as I grew older I began working in various rock ‘n’ roll bands, small acoustic combos for dances, proms and parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduations and club dates. From week to week, I’d have to give you complete rundowns of every gig I played, demonstrating the rock rhythms I was learning from my friends armed with cheap Silvertone guitars and Vox tube amplifiers and, at your insistence, even singing my chorus parts on “Gloria” (G-L-O-R-I-A) and “Louie, Louie” (A-Lew-ee Lew-I, oh no, Me gotta go, Aye-yi-yi-yi). Talk about embarrassing!

And then I got my first gig playing with a big band. In rock, the drummer must be loud and powerful, but mostly loud; in jazz combos, the drummer’s job is to be rhythmically insistent and display great finesse. The big band thing calls for driving power and finesse. I brought the charts to my lesson and I started playing them for you.

By then I was taking my lessons at your house on Bristol Avenue in Westchester, just a mile or two from my early childhood home. You had a basement studio, paneled in knotty pine with black-and-white photographs hung rather haphazardly around the cramped space. There was that wonderful charcoal caricature of you behind a drum set, your nose drawn like that of an Arab sultan. There were a couple of drum sets (one belonging to your youngest son, Hal, whose life’s story turned so sad), a marimba, a xylophone, a vibraphone, conga drums, timbales, Chinese temple blocks (my favorite), and a closet filled with various hand-held percussion instruments—a batterie of tambourines and cowbells, triangles and finger cymbals, whistles and bongos and castanets (“Everything but the kitchen sink,” you’d say)—all of which I learned to play there.

Do you remember this, Sam?

Anyway, I played through the first chart, or started to, when you stopped me and asked, “What are you afraid of?”

It was less a question than an observation.

“Nothing.”

“You’re playing like you’re afraid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Look. You’re behind the wheel of a 14-piece band and you’re in charge. That’s the drummer’s job and you’re playing namby-pamby like you’re in a little trio. Play! Drive the band!”

I started from the top.

“No! No! No! Play it like you mean it! Be in charge!”

I tried again.

“No! What? Afraid you’ll make a mistake, and everyone will hear it?”

I shrugged.

Sam, you then taught me the most important thing I’ve ever learned in my life; a lesson I’ve tried to apply to everything I’ve attempted since.

“If you make a little mistake and nobody notices, so what, right? No one’s the wiser. But what have you learned? Nothing, not a damned thing. You just play along making the same little mistakes over and over and over because they don’t matter, because you think nobody’s heard them. Play like you mean it. Be in charge. Make every note count. And when you make a mistake, make it a big mistake and you’ll never make it again. That’s how you learn.”

The last time you quit me was bittersweet. You told me and my parents that you had nothing more to teach me which, on the face of it, was a lie. You sent me, the reluctant graduate of the Sam Dean School of Drumming, off to Northwestern University to study with the erudite and exacting Terry Applebaum, and fall under the influence of Gordon Peters and Al Payson—symphonic percussionists with college degrees who’d written scholarly treatises about prehistoric xylophones and inter-tribal drum communications. From then on, I spent my Saturdays in Evanston, with regular stops at Frank’s Drum Shop and Rose Records on South Wabash Avenue along the way, and then a couple of summers, adding theory and ear-training and arranging to my studies. Then I headed off to Interlochen Arts Academy for my last two years of high school to study with Rick Kvistad, whose teaching skills and performance talents were clearly leading him on his way to becoming a percussion legend, and to play with an orchestra every day of the week, along with colleagues Peter Erskine and Clark Chaffee—friends to this day. There, I also played with chamber groups and percussion ensembles and in any number of spontaneous groupings.

On holiday breaks I returned to Bristol Avenue and you and I would go down to your studio and I’d show off.

Do you remember coming to the Oak Park-River Forest Auditorium and, a night or two later, coming to Chicago Orchestra Hall to hear me play with the Interlochen orchestra again? We played a concert program that included Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. I had played the xylophone, orchestra bells and triangle parts and you told me how proud you were of me. That really meant a lot, Sam. It really, really did. My parents were proud as well, but they didn’t understand what it took to play those parts, to get to that place.

Only you did.

I went to a few of the concerts of “legit” music you gave with community orchestras around Chicago during my college years. (I’m convinced you became a Shriner just so you could play in the Medinah orchestra. And how appropriate it was for you to join the Masonry, essentially a labor union whose discipline is based on the teachings of King Solomon.) Those were great concerts drawing on the symphonic repertoire, played for free by great musicians in some pretty sketchy, inner-city neighborhoods.

“Playing music is an act of giving, an act of love,” you’d say.

You’d drive us to those gigs, and we’d smoke cigarettes and stop for corned beef sandwiches piled high on rye bread, topped with chopped liver and onions, and drink cream sodas, and then I’d help you set up—everything in its due and proper place, like a line cook prepping his station for dinner service. And after the concerts, we’d go back to your house and we would go downstairs and you’d show me how you had played that xylophone passage, or the snare drum part, or how you “primed” the tam-tam so the attack would sound right on the beat.

“You never shake maracas. You hold them in front of you, parallel to the floor and then tap them with your index fingers. They’ll cut through a full orchestra. A triangle needs to be struck away from the break, it lets the sound out.”

You were always teaching.

Then we’d go upstairs to have coffee and poppy-seed or cheese kolacky at the kitchen table with Harriet, and we’d all smoke cigarettes and talk about politics and unions and civil rights and the persisting horrors of anti-Semitism.

I don’t remember there being a record player in your house, and I can’t recall your ever talking about other musicians or any drummers you might have admired. You worked nights as what you called a “jobbing musician,” meaning that you could do it all: nightclubs, concerts, weddings, parties, clubs, jingles. You probably didn’t have the time to hear much music that you weren’t making.

By the time I last saw you I had quit playing and was making my way as a jazz writer and critic in Los Angeles. We talked about music, of course, and I remember mentioning the great jazz drummer Shelly Manne and how I had come to know him and how much I admired his playing.

“He was always my favorite,” you told me.

“Really?”

“I taught you to play brushes just like him. He was the best.”

I might argue with you, Sam. You were the best.

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Kolacky (Bohemian Cookies)

4 cups flour
1/2 tsp. salt
1 lb. Crisco
1 small can Pet milk
1 egg, well beaten
2-1/4 tsp. yeast

Combine yeast, egg & milk. Let stand for 10 minutes.
Combine flour, salt & Crisco; work like pie dough.
Add yeast mixture to dough.
Roll in damp cloth & refrigerate.
Roll out into thin sheets; cut into cookies.
Place on ungreased sheet pan.
Top with a scant tsp. of your choice of fruit mixes (Solo brand).
Bake at 400 deg. 20-30 minutes.

As a child growing up on the west side of Chicago, I was afforded no Second Amendment rights.

My father, having served under fire as a Captain from D-Day at Omaha Beach until a third bullet wound landed him in a hospital in Paris for six months, had little use for guns. He would frequently say that he’d seen all the guns he could ever have wanted to see in the war.

For similar reasons, he didn’t care for fireworks displays.

After serving nine years in a “well regulated Militia,” which he called the Army, he had little sense of needing to protect himself from the government he had served.

Our family included no hunters, preferring to buy our animal proteins from the butcher shops along Cermack Road on Chicago’s west side. We loved the pheasant, duck and squirrel brought to us by friends who did hunt, however.

We lived in a compact home on a quiet street, just off Roosevelt Road—one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city. There was a one-car garage with a window placed oddly high, and behind the frame building was a narrow sandbox I shared with the neighborhood cats and where I dug trenches with a rusted yellow Tonka steam-shovel.

One summer afternoon, I scaled the boxes beneath the garage window and opened the cedar chest that contained the remnants of my father’s Army service. The chest had not been declared off limits; in fact, I don’t recall noticing it until that day. There were pleasant and intriguing aromas of wood and wool, oil and mothballs; there was his dress uniform wrapped in crinkly brown paper and there were colorful campaign ribbons and shiny brass pins, loose black-and-white photographs, manila envelopes closed by strings between paper discs, and a stack of onion-skin correspondence with my mother’s handwriting neatly bundled with frayed, brown cord.

These were strange and intriguing things—things I didn’t know existed.

There was also a handgun—an Army-issued sidearm—that I removed from its oil-stained holster and proudly carried out of the garage and down the driveway, its muzzle pointing to the pavement. I remember looking at Dad crouching in the narrow driveway when he looked at me and slowly stood erect, and in a firm and steady voice said, “Stop. Don’t move.”

I froze in my tracks. My eyes met his. I glanced around, looking for my mother and sister who seemed to have vanished. I can’t see them in my memory, although they had been there only moments before.

I hadn’t the time to move before my father had rushed to my side and disarmed me, swiftly dumping the shells from its chamber onto the driveway—their brass casings clinking musically as they bounced on the cement—with a deftness he must have retained from Basic Training.

He picked up the shells, shoved them into his pants pocket and stormed away. I was not yet five years old and I stood there scared and ready to cry. Dad had disappeared into the house and Mom seemed to appear from nowhere, standing outside the kitchen door, my sister clutched in her arms. They stared at me with looks I had never seen, fear and anger deeply set in their eyes.

Suddenly, Dad was back in my view.

“Get in the car.”

I climbed onto the front seat of the faded emerald green Ford coupe. He got behind the wheel, tucked the pistol between his thigh and car’s bench seat and started the engine. He gave my shoulder a comforting squeeze as he turned to back down the driveway.

We drove in silence for what seemed an eternity, though it was only a few minutes. We arrived at a house I didn’t know in a neighborhood of grim, red-brick row houses with no driveways or front yards. Dad pulled to the curb, stuck the gun into his jacket pocket and bounded up the few steps to the house. A fat man in a white T-shirt answered my father’s knock and my father disappeared through the front door. Mere minutes elapsed before he returned to the car, his expression unchanged from that moment in the driveway when he had told me not to move.

“He’s a gun collector,” he said by way of explanation. We drove home slowly, his deep-set, steely blue eyes looking straight ahead.

My parents fought that night, as only my parents fought—a cascading torrent of all the imaginable “what-ifs”.

AN OLD FRIEND OF MINE DIED a couple of weeks ago. In laic terms, he was what could be considered a “gun nut.” He worried deeply about the “what-ifs” that could befall him if he weren’t appropriately armed for every occasion.

I imagine that his biggest death-bed regret was that he never had the opportunity to take up arms against the government, of which he was woefully suspicious. The thought made me chuckle.

His politics were libertarian and his racism slowly emerged in concord with his abandoning a comfortable suburban life for a hardscrabble existence on a patch of arid dirt on which he raised chickens. A one-time business executive had devolved into a racist red neck.

His racism was, if fact, what ended our friendship.

At the time we met, I was developing an interest in hunting and he became my mentor. He taught hunter education and we went hunting once together.

I had a rather romantic notion of hunting—one in keeping with the imagery of Robert De Niro in The Deerhunter—adherence to a “one-shot” philosophy while afield.

Our hunting location was near Paso Robles, California. An abandoned almond orchard to which we had access was home to a small herd of Coastal deer. They were about the size of German shepherds, with dappled buttocks. After spending the day lounging around the pool at our motel, we drove to the orchard, unfolded our lawn chairs, and sat waiting for the deer to come into range. When they didn’t, we packed up and drove to nearby Templeton for steak dinners at A J Spurs Saloon.

It was there that we spoke about gun control, which at the time didn’t allow public carry or the ownership of machine guns or other fully automatic weapons.

And it was there that I saw the emergence of a man who believed that everybody should have as many guns in as many styles as one wants to protect themselves from—you guessed it—the government.

Had he not heard of tanks?

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Hunter’s chicken (poulet sauté chasseur)

In Italy, there are as many ways to prepare the hunter’s chicken (pollo alla cacciatore) as there are grandmothers. In France, this classic dish is well-defined—with variations not necessarily encouraged.

3-4 lb. chicken, cut into eight pieces
1/2 cup plain flour
1-2 Tbs. unsalted butter

For the stock
Wings, backbone, and neck from the butchered chicken
1 carrot, chopped coarsely
1 medium onion, chopped coarsely
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 Tbs. tomato paste
2 cups canned beef stock
Trimmed mushroom stems
1 bouquet garni (bay leaf, thyme, parsley stems)

Brown the chicken pieces to a deep color without burning. Add the carrots, onion and garlic and cook until fragrant. Stir in the tomato paste. Add mushroom stems, bouquet garni; cover and simmer for 30-40 minutes.

For the sauce: Prepare and have ready
2 Tbs. shallots, minced
8 oz. white mushrooms, halved
3 Tbs. cognac
1/2 cup dry white wine
2 cups chicken stock
2 Tbs. unsalted butter
1 Tbs. fresh tarragon (1 tsp. dried)
1 Tbs. flat leaf parsley
Salt and pepper to taste

Season chicken pieces with salt and pepper, and coat with flour. Melt butter in a Dutch oven and add the chicken, skin side down. Cook until the pieces are golden-brown. Cover and place into a 350° oven for about 25 minutes. Remove chicken and cover to keep warm.

Sauté the mushrooms in butter over medium heat for a couple of minutes. Add the shallots. After a minute or two, flambe with cognac and cook down. Deglaze with the white wine and reduce. Add the chicken stock and reduce.

Off heat, whisk in some butter. Stir in the herbs. Add the chicken pieces to warm. Serve with rice or potatoes, garnished with a sprinkling of fresh parsley.