Our times

RUSTY of St. Paul writes: “For about the last 10 years, I have had on my ‘To Do’ list putting up a ‘No Solicitors’ sign on my front door, though clearly that is not a Minnesota Nice thing to do. Which might be why it hasn’t happened.

“Even when I don’t answer the doorbell, it is uncomfortable knowing there is a stranger on my steps, and I can’t carry on until that person has vacated — especially uncomfortable if they knock on the door after the doorbell didn’t summon me. And when the knock didn’t work, either, then maybe a final ring of the doorbell will. (We have one of those old tubular-bells doorbells, and when it rings, the house reverberates.)

“Last month, my wife, my visiting son and I all came down with COVID. I was over mine, but isolating from my positive son, so I wore an N95 mask indoors.

“I spied one of those healthy, vibrant, genuinely ‘I’m gonna save the Earth’ young persons with her clipboard working the homes across the street. (Nothing wrong with that; I’m all for the Earth — but how about don’t knock on my door during the supper hour?)

“What I didn’t observe was the hardy, earnest male donor-asker working my side, who now was coming up to my stoop and could see me through the front-door window. Busted! But I had my trusty N95 on.

“I opened the door and watched his smiling face fall when I told him this was an active COVID household. I might also have coughed a fake cough. In fact, as his smile was falling, he was backpedaling on the walk as fast as he could while saying ‘No problem. Hope you feel better soon!’ Minnesota Nice all the way.

“I had an ‘Aha!’ moment. Instead of a not-so-kind ‘No Solicitors’ sign on my door, I might keep my N95 handy in the front entry to don right before opening the door. And maybe give a fake cough or two as I open it.”

Keeping your eyes open

Grandma Paula reports: “Subject: Sunrise.”6:46 a.m., March 4th. If you were not awake, looking out a window that faces east, you missed it!”

Where we live . . . Or: What goes around . . .

ORGANIZATIONALLY CHALLENGED of Highland Park: “The smelt should be running soon. This time of year was a pretty big deal up on the Iron Range where I grew up (maybe it still is), and a lot of people went smelting. If I remember correctly, they would go at night. My guess is that a lot of beer was involved.

“There was a story of how my grandma received a bucket of smelt from someone. She generously gifted it to the neighbor, who generously gifted it to their neighbor, and it went all the way around the block before it ended back up with my grandma. Normally she would beer-batter and fry them, but this time, apparently, they became fertilizer for the garden.”

Older Than Dirt? . . . Or: Know thyself (if no one else)!

THE DORYMAN of Prescott, Wis.: “Subject: The long and short of it.

“Years ago I remember writing a piece here about my theory that aging creates an appreciation of lawn ornaments . . . .

“I’ve moved on. These later days, I’ve noticed that every child I see is as-cute-as-can-be — and just about every adult I see reminds me of someone whose name I have forgotten.”

Life (and death) as we know it

BETTY writes: “Subject: The Last Leaf Upon the Tree.

“‘And if I should live to be / The last leaf upon the tree / In the spring / Let them smile, as I do now, / At the old forsaken bough / Where I cling.’ I have always loved the poem (“The Last Leaf”) by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. Lately I have been thinking about it a lot. I feel that I am that leaf. It’s not a sad feeling. It’s more a calm, relaxed feeling. A feeling that I am done. I have done all that I could do and I can be at peace now.

“My parents lived into their 70s. They never used preventive medicine. People in that community went to a doctor only when they were very ill. We had never heard of cholesterol. My sister and brother lived to the age of 86.

“Yes, I am alone now. My parents, my siblings and even my children have predeceased me. There is no one to talk to about the old times. No one who remembers the same things that I do. There are simple things such as a recipe that Mom used to make, and there is no one else who remembers it. Who was the man who used to sing ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’? No one remembers. Whatever happened to the quilt that my mom had? No one knows.

“I have many friends, but it somehow seems lonely to be the only one left from that family.”

BULLETIN BOARD SAYS: Here is one fine version (of many versions, some finer than others) of “Jimmy Crack Corn”: tinyurl.com/crack-corn

Our living language . . . Plus: Not exactly what he had in mind

A pair from the paper, courtesy of BILL OF THE RIVER LAKE: (1) “Subject: A new adjective and a noun?

“Monday’s Pioneer Press Sports section had an interesting article about a Twins pitching prospect, 24-year-old David Festa.

“He’s working on a new breaking ball. He says: ‘I really don’t have anything that’s slow and depthy to change the hitters’ timing, so I’ve been kind of working on that.’

“He also said: ‘I think lifting the volume will help me out in the future.”’

“A couple of newish uses of words.”

(2) “Subject: A surprise.

“Tuesday’s ‘Word Sleuth’ in the Pioneer Press was titled ‘Things With Holes.’

“Most of the wide variety of words were expected and obvious — like buttons,
sieve, donuts and bundt cake.

“But the last word kind of caught me off guard.

“It was Titanic!

“Guess there was a hole large enough to sink that historic luxury liner over 100 years ago.”

The sign on the road to the cemetery said “Dead End”

DONALD: “Subject: To the point.

“My wife has a sign in the laundry room that reads:

“‘Be nice

“‘Or leave’”

Live and learn

From AL B of Hartland: “I’ve learned:

“My wife’s extra-sensitive toothpaste doesn’t like it when she uses another brand.

“Bad rainbows are sent to prism to give them time to reflect. If they’ve had a colorful past, they are given light sentences.

“When you clean a vacuum cleaner, you become a vacuum cleaner.

“Lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but nobody knows where that place is.

“Politicians are those who will double-cross that bridge when they come to it.

“The cold that a man gets and the one a woman catches are different. No man has a casual cold. Every cold contracted by a male is catastrophic.

“Worrying works. Most of the things we worry about never happen.”

Fun facts to know and tell

AUNTIE PJ writes: “For those of the BB readers who remember Howard Hughes, Bemidji native Jane Russell, and the old commercials for bras that lift and separate, here is a fun bit of trivia:

“Howard Hughes was a man of many talents, including aerospace engineering and being a film producer and director. Jane Russell was a talented singer and actress. Hughes hired Russell for her film debut in ‘The Outlaw,’ a 1943 Western. Russell was quite a buxom lady, with 38-D’s, and Hughes saw there were problems with properly costuming her because of her ‘uniboob.’ Being an engineer, Hughes was able to design a bra that lifted and separated Russell’s bosoms. Per the official description, the bra had structural steel rods sewn into each cup, allowing the bosoms to be separated and pushed upward. Though Russell never wore the specially made bra in the film, it was later exhibited in a Hollywood museum.

“The design led Playtex to manufacture and sell a similar bra, with the tag line ‘lifts and separates.’”

Gaining everything in translation

KATHY S. of St. Paul writes: “Subject: Adventures in Languages.

“In 1969-70, and some years before and after, six local private colleges offered two-semester Area Studies courses. Each one covered an ‘area’ such as Russia [Bulletin Board interjects: the Soviet Union, perhaps?] or Latin America, and I wish I could have taken more than East Asian Studies. My Library Science major was not accredited by the A.L.A., so I had to fit in another full major — in my case, History.

“East Asian Studies covered Japan and China, before President Nixon went to China. Fall semester covered history, geography, and political science. Spring semester covered literature, music, art, and sociology. We discussed Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia in class that spring, and the Macalester students left school to ‘teach the people’ about the war in Vietnam. I resented studying for a final exam they got to skip. But the final included one fun question from Sister Mary Davida. We were to identify Asian art objects as Japanese or Chinese. I was stumped by a bowl decorated with a five-fingered dragon, since it could have come from either country — until I turned it upside-down and saw the ‘Made in Japan’ mark.

“A bit of advice from the Sociology teacher stuck with me. He said we should not try to bow with Asian people, since we would inevitably make a mistake and cause offense — advice reinforced for me by an experience of an American WWII vet whom I met while dabbling with learning Japanese at Guy World. He was to read a paper at a gathering in Japan, and got coaching to improve his limited and rusty Japanese. Unfortunately, his audience concluded that his Japanese was much better than it was, and he struggled with Japanese for the rest of it.

“The reason I’m sharing this now is that a new version of the miniseries ‘Shōgun’ debuted last week. I listen to languages, and often identify which one is being spoken. But when I took an interim crash course in Japanese in January 1972, I could not ‘hear’ it. For two of the four weeks of this class, covering most of a semester of Japanese, I was yelling at the language — and proving that Mom was a saint for putting up with me. The only Japanese spoken on TV back then was sayonara or tora tora tora, in movies about World War II. The 1980 miniseries ‘Shōgun’ was a groundbreaker, and I really wished it had come out sooner.

“The interim class was pass/fail — and I didn’t need the credit — but the teacher was very lenient to pass me. Of course, more languages and cultures are now common on our media. And I have taken Duolingo Japanese classes for over two years, starting during the COVID shutdown. I can now understand some Japanese, both spoken and written. But I will never be good at it — and I will probably never get to see Japan, per my long-ago plans.

“So, what I learned back then: You can’t learn a language until you ‘hear’ it. And I’ll add what I learned in Paris in 1980: You can be exhausted, dealing with a foreign language. That day I could understand what people around me were saying, including insults against Americans who don’t bother to learn languages, but I could not speak — until I noticed that a little girl had lost her mother, and I waved over a clerk to tell her ‘No maman.’ (No mom.) As the clerk escorted the girl away, she looked at me over her shoulder. I figure she had decided that I wasn’t as dumb as she thought.”

Hmmmmmmmm

Here’s LIZA THE LIBRARIAN (via Tia2d): “Oh, the adventures of a new library. When I started, they gave me a bag of labeled keys to everything in the building. Some of the keys were labeled ‘Mystery Key.’ What did they do? I don’t know! It seemed magical, so I kept them.

“A few weeks later, I found an old Ziploc bag with more keys. The bag had an aged note that read: ‘Keys, Important.’ None of the keys went to any of the doors or fixtures in the building that I could find. I told the staff that I would reward them with chocolate if they could determine where these keys came from. No one could figure it out.

“Last week, when I crashed the library computers, I decided that I needed to move the refrigerator to a different outlet. Wanna guess what I found behind the fridge? More keys! And again, we had no idea where they came from.

“It was truly mind-boggling, but also magical. There is nothing better than a good library mystery!

“Today, while searching for the missing weather radio, I opened an obscure cabinet and found a box of door knobs! Most of the mystery keys went to these knobs. Now the keys and door knobs have been reunited, and once again everything is right in libraryland.”

BAND NAME OF THE DAY: The Fake Coughs

Your stories are welcome. The address is BB.onward@gmail.com.

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