Dublin

                       

Recently, Pat and I hung out in Dublin for 10 days or so.  I never thought I would go to Ireland, but a friend of ours is working there for two and a half years and the opportunity presented itself, so off we went.  Our friend has been going to Ireland for decades, speaks fluent Irish, and is as close to a native guide as an American can get.  I thought you might find the tales of a rube in Dublin interesting, so here goes.

The first thing that struck me about Dublin is its history.  Dublin turned 1000 in 1988.  To put that into perspective, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, Dublin was just over 500 years old.  Living in Minneapolis, where buildings are torn down when they turn 40 years old, the narrow streets and very old buildings of Dublin lend the city an aura history and permanence.  America is the land of natural splendor.  Europe features architectural, historical, and cultural magnificence.

Dublin features Georgian buildings galore.   The buildings, usually four stories and a basement, were built between 1714 and 1830.  Rows of the stately buildings decorate the city to this day.  In the 1920’s and during the worldwide depression that began in the 20’s many of the buildings became decrepit as their wealthy owners fell on hard times.  There was no real love for the buildings in Ireland, at that time, because they symbolized English rule (which ended in 1922) and many of them fell into disrepair and were deserted.   However, many survived and were repurposed.

The Georgians were pressured again during the Irish economy’s boom years in the 1990s and early 2000s.  Developers looked to tear down the old buildings and put up condominiums, townhouses and strip malls.  This time, the city, along with coalitions of students and conservationists were able to get a strict preservation law passed that made it very difficult to knock down the Georgians.  So today, Dublin has preserved more examples of Georgian architecture than just about any European city.

                

If none of this is old enough for you, wait, we are getting to the real old stuff.  For example, Pat and I were wandering around Trinity College (founded in 1592) and we happened into the lobby of the Geology Building.  There was a fully assembled skeleton of a blumenbuch.  The blumenbuch was a giant Irish deer that went extinct about 11,000 years ago.  So you are as likely to see a blumenbuch today as a rational Republican.  Actually, I can’t verify this, but I think there was an ancient restaurant in Australia where you got a bloomenonion with every order of blumenbuch.

Buchen A, What the hell is that?

  

Ireland struggled with the English over their independence for 600 years.  Naturally, many remnants of that fight are still very close to the surface of Ireland’s psyche.  Traditional music recants many a sad and/or heroic event.  When you hear this music live and realize the fight went on till 1922, you can understand its resonance with the population.  You can still see the bullet holes in the columns in front of the General Post Office (the”GPO”) where the Easter Rebellion broke out on Easter Sunday in 1916.  We toured the Kilmainham Gaol, where leaders of 5 Irish rebellions were jailed between 1798 and 1916.  Thirteen of the Easter Rebellion leaders were detained and ultimately executed at the gaol.  It’s not that the British weren’t sympathetic jailers.  One of the Irish leaders was seriously wounded in the fighting and could not stand up to face a firing squad.  So the ever-accommodating authorities tied him to a chair and then shot him.  Another one of the leaders was given ten minutes to see his new bride in a semi private meeting and then taken out later that day and shot.  So, feelings run deep.

During the Potato Famine in the mid 1800s, the prison housed many children who were jailed for stealing bread or coal.  Things got so desperate, that as bad as it was in the prison, starving outside of it was worse, and people tried to get jailed for the meager rations that were supplied to the prisoners.

It’s hard to imagine that this is all very recent history in Dublin.  Of course, you can go visit Saint Patrick’s Cathedral if you want to go back to the date of its establishment in 1192.  Interestingly enough, there are no Catholic cathedrals in Dublin.  Some of the more prominent ones switched denominations back and forth depending on whether the King or Queen was killing Catholics or Protestants at any particular time, but they are all Anglican now.

Pat and I toured Saint Patrick’s and I noted a difference from the Catholic Cathedrals in Europe, North, and South America, I have visited.  The Catholic Cathedral’s statues are, by and large, of various popes and saints along with Mary and Jesus.  Saint Patrick’s was full of statues of politicians, judges, military officers, lawyers and other members of the ruling class.  The statutes were accompanied with plaques that explained what great people they were and who put up the money to have the statue placed in the Cathedral.  It triggered in me the same reaction, that all of these magnificent churches do, whatever their denomination.  I always wonder how much poverty could have been alleviated and I wonder how Jesus would react to such splendor erected in his name.  I always have to push such thoughts aside and just marvel at the beauty and breathtaking majesty man was able to create so long ago.

Jonathan Swift was the Dean of the Cathedral from 1713 to 1745 and is buried there.  He was a champion of the poor of Dublin as well as the author of “Gulliver’s Travels” and “A Modest Proposal”.  You probably remember “A Modest Proposal” from some English class you were forced to take in high school.  It was always held up as an example of satire as Swift proposed the cooking and eating of poor Irish babies as a means of reducing the number of poor and as an excellent source of protein.

If you are going to Ireland for the weather, I suggest you think again.  The temperatures were in the fifties and low sixties.  If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour and it will change.  Rain, sun, cloudy, windy can all happen, not just in one day, but more than once in any given day. Ireland is much further north than you might think, but the water that surrounds it moderates its temperatures.  Fortunately, the ingenious Irish, knowing that the weather could turn to crap at any moment, established an amazing array of pubs suitable for ducking into at the first sign of foul weather.  Our first night in Dublin, I was battling staying awake to minimize jet lag, when I came across a list of the ten best pubs in Dublin. Nancy, our host, asked me to read them to her and she said she had her own list of best ten pubs, doubling the establishments that would need to be examined.  We didn’t get to them all, but we did make it to quite a few.

In Dublin, there just doesn’t seem to be any new pubs.  When you enter, there is a well-worn sense of permanence that ties you to the generations who have gathered here before you.  We actually went to a pub called the Brasen Head that has seen a pub on that site since 1198.  That’s a lot of pints down the gullet.  We also went to the smallest Pub in Dublin, which was about the size of Paris Hilton’s shoe closet.  I distinguished myself there by being the first and only person to have to ask directions to the men’s room.

Many of the pubs feature music.  There are regularly scheduled shows and then there are, what they call 'sessions,' where musicians bring their instruments and jam.  It was in search of one of these 'sessions' that brought us to the Cobblestone one afternoon after we had toured the Jameson Distillery (any pattern you might think you are discerning here is illusionary).

The music was in the front of the bar.  There were nine or ten musicians participating, but the seating was very limited.  We ended up going to the back of the bar and sitting at a table next to a friend of Nancy’s.  Fergus was a traditional Irish singer and trade unionist and he and his friends were enjoying a few pints of Guinness.  In fact, they were enjoying them enough that they were drinking two pints for every one I put away.

As the afternoon turned to evening, the pub got crowded.  I went up to the bar to order another round, when I saw a guy about six foot three and wearing a blue and yellow afro wig standing by the bar.  He had a Swedish flag wrapped around his shoulders like a cape and had the greatest baby face you might ever want to see.   I brought our drinks back to our table and told Nancy and Pat about the weird character at the bar.

The night before, the Swedish soccer team had come to Dublin to play the Irish National Team and had effectively knocked the Irish out of World Cup.  I wasn’t sure if this guy was on a suicide mission or what, but it seemed a little risky going around the pubs in that garb the night after the Irish had lost.

Through a series of somewhat hazy circumstances, Andreas, the guy in the wig and cape, and his traveling companion, Pela, ended up sitting with us at our table.  It was then that I witnessed the Irish’s attitude about their sports, which they truly love.  People came over to the freakish pair and after some good-natured banter congratulated them on their team’s victory.  This consistently happened throughout the evening.  The Swedes told us they loved Dublin’s pubs, the people’s attitude, and the reception they were receiving.

Pela and I were sitting next to each other, and during the course of our conversation he told me he was a long time fan of American blues music.  He said he had been listening to blues records for thirty years but had never seen any of his musical heroes perform live.  When I told him that I had seen the likes of Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy and scores of other bluesmen numerous times he really came alive.  Meanwhile, Andreas told Nancy and Pat he was a big fan of American sports.  They told him I was the guy he wanted to talk with, so he got up and told Pela to move because he was going to talk sports with me.  When he heard that I had seen many of America’s sports heroes play, he reacted like Pela had when we were talking about the blues.

In separate conversations, both Pela and Andreas asked we what was up with the U.S.’s health care system.  They wondered how we, as a nation, could treat health care as a commodity and not a human right.  For me, it was one of those inexplicable questions, as I totally agreed with their premise.  These two guys from Sweden, who held generally favorable views of the U.S.A., just couldn’t wrap their heads around such a seemly illogical and cruel system.

The art of conversation has flourished in Ireland.  Cab drivers will wait for you to open the conversation and then give you a history lesson or a tutorial on Irish sporting life.  The people have a wonderful sense of humor.  For example they have nicked named the various public statues around town.  A statue of Molly Malone, the famous fish monger and rumored to have practiced a profession much older than fish sales in the evenings, is called, “The Tart with a Cart,” or “The Trollop with the Scallops,” or the “Dish with the Fish.”  In 2003, the Spire of Dublin was built on O’Connell Street just about a block from the Liffey River, which divides north and south Dublin.  The spire was almost immediately renamed, “The Stiffy on the Liffey,” or  “The Erection at the Intersection.”  Oscar Wilde and James Joyce’s statutes also have colorful monikers.  Generally speaking, we found the Irish to be friendly, engaging people with finely developed, self-deprecating, senses of humor.

The Stiffy on the Liffey.

No comment.

The Tart with the Cart.

The Irish love their sports.  They are into hurling, Gaelic football, rugby, soccer, and cricket.  There was American football on the TV in a couple of the pubs, but it was being ignored on a massive scale.  There are two major sports venues in Dublin.  One holds about 50 thousand and the other has an 83 thousand capacity.  The All Irish Hurling Championship game and the All Ireland Gaelic Football Championship games were played while we were in Dublin.  They both drew crowds of 83 thousand as well as a nationwide television audience.

Hurling is billed as the world’s fastest land game.  It is played with a horsehair ball covered in leather about the size of a baseball and a stick that looks like a shorter, thicker hockey stick.  There are 15 men on a team and you score by hitting the ball into a goal similar to a soccer goal for three points or scoring one point by hitting the ball between the uprights that extend up from the edges of the goal.  So imagine 30 men running around swinging sticks in crowds and driving the ball upwards of a hundred miles per hour toward the goal.  I imagine you have seen hockey goalies that look like the Michelin Man when they have donned all of their equipment and padding.  In hurling the goalie, or the “human sacrifice” as I like to call him, only has a stick to try and stop an opponent’s shot.  To the untrained eye it looks a bit insane.  The Championship Game ended in a tie and another game was going to be played in two weeks to determine the champions.

In the intervening week the All Ireland Gaelic Football Championship game was played.  The Gaelic Football League is made up of about 15 teams that represent various Irish counties.  The players don’t get paid and have to reside in the county their team represents.  The Championship game tickets are sold on a general admission basis so it is first come first serve with respect to the seating in the 83 thousand seat facility.  I just can’t imagine this in America.  I was told that fans from the two competing teams are mixed throughout the stadium and while there is some good-natured joking and ribbing that goes on, it remains peaceful and civilized.  Contrast that to England and other places where wearing the wrong team’s colors in the wrong neighborhood will get you beat half to death.  But the Irish keep their sports in perspective.  We saw that when we spent the evening at the Cobblestone with those two lovable doofs from Sweden.

Dublin honors its literary history.  They are rightly proud of the world-class writers that been produced on Irish sod.  It is not uncommon to see plaques with quotes from James Joyce or George Bernard Shaw placed about town.  There is a writer’s museum and various statues of the likes of Oscar Wilde and other literary heroes. Pat and I visited a museum dedicated to the life and writing of James Joyce.  I don’t know of an American city that has established museums to honor their writers, but there must be one somewhere.

On the roof of the James Joyce Museum

In keeping with the literary tradition, there appear to be many independent bookstores.  We only got into a couple, but the ones I saw were there for serious readers.  We ducked into one to get out of the rain one day, and frankly, I could have stayed right there for quite some time if I had been alone and it had been up to me.

As I think about it Dublin, it is a city after my own heart.  Pubs, history, sports, literature, humor, music, theatre, and more pubs are right up my alley.  On our last night in Dublin, we went to see a production of “A Street Car Named Desire” at the Gate Theatre.  I have seen about four “Street Car” productions and this one was probably the best.  I was curious as to how they were going to handle the Louisiana accents, but they did it so well you forgot these were Irish actors on stage. After the play, I was waiting for Pat and Nancy in the lobby when I looked at a picture hanging of the wall.  It was a picture of the Gate’s production of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock and the caption said Joe Dowling, the current Director of Minneapolis’ Guthrie Theatre, had directed it.  'Tis a small world.

To sum it up, Pat and I had a great time and I want to thank Nancy for being such a great host and having her own list of the top ten pubs in Dublin.  How can you not like a city where so many things are lovely, grand, or brilliant?

Big Gun, Tiny Weiner

The grouch picked up his newspaper the other morning and was treated to a picture of a fellow with a Glock  .40 caliber pistol, proudly strapped to his belt, attending a meeting at the state capital to discuss gun control within the capital building itself.  He was quoted as saying, he felt safer with his own weapon.  How it made the rest of the people attending the meeting feel didn’t seem to concern him.

Unfortunately, the newspaper didn't elaborate on why this individual felt so unsafe that he got up that morning and strapped on his gun and headed to the Capital for a hearing.  The newspaper choose to quote the fellow and let his words speak for themselves.  The grouch feels it is his obligation to delve a little deeper into why some people choose to arm themselves when they leave the house in the morning.

Our modern day Marlboro Man would probably tell me to just read the metro section of my newspaper to get a daily dose of mayhem.  That would seem to lend his case for packing some legitimacy if he lived in a handful of inner city neighborhoods where violence is a fact of daily life.  Much of the violence is tied to gang activity and the drug business.  Sometimes there is collateral damage when innocents intercept bullets, randomly fired during a dispute that has turned deadly.  No one can argue that the parade of dead young men is a too-long ignored social ill and there needs to be a societal response of innovative and honest proportions to help mitigate the bloodshed.  But our Marlboro Man doesn’t seem to be living in those neighborhoods and if he is not hanging around at three in the morning looking to get into the drug business, he probably is not going to be personally effected by the violence he is reading about and seeing on his evening “news” broadcast.

In fact, if you ever do take a look at a map that plots out violent crime in your city you will see the vast majority of violent crime occurs in a handful of poor areas the Marlboro Man wouldn’t set foot in to save his soul.  If you live in, say for example, Eden Prairie MN (a Twin Cities suburb), you can sleep on your driveway with hundred dollar bills stuffed in your pockets, and it is likely you will wake up the next morning with nothing more than a stiff back from sleeping on concrete.  The crime you need to be worried about in most suburbs and many neighborhoods in the cities is your neighbor, from the gated community, trying to get you to invest in a ponzi scheme.   You never see people from the neighborhoods that are suffering from the violence, out advocating for more guns and showing up at public meetings with their Glocks.

This is not to say that the level of violence in America is acceptable.  Shit Happens.  There are no guarantees of a completely safe life.  The point I am making is we have not reached the point where we would all be better off armed to the teeth, nor is the solution to bring more guns to the fight.   This is the position of the NRA and what is behind it is, as in most things, money.  The gun and ammo manufactures make a lot of money keeping our citizenry frightened and looking for simple answers.

I know we are living in a post racist America.  Five justices of the Supreme Court and Fox “News” have proclaimed it so. But I can’t help but think there might be just a tiny bit of racism and fear of others at work here.  It would certainly be interesting if Black and Hispanic guys started to apply for permits and started showing up in the parks and downtown Minneapolis with their pistols showing.  I suspect the permit application process would get tweaked pretty darn quickly.

So crime is an issue and the 24-hour news cycle requires its daily dose.  Given the crime and violence out there and its constant trumpeting it seems to be a miracle that millions of Americans go about their daily lives without feeling so unsafe they won’t go out in public without their shootin' iron.  If our shootist really wants to address the real danger in his life, he will buy himself a tank and try to avoid the annual carnage on our roads and highways.

This brings us to those individuals who want to pack heat because they think the government is about to round them up, take their guns, and throw them in concentration camps.  These are the folks who put the dumb in freedom.

For the sake of argument, let’s say their paranoid fantasies are all coming true.  Can any rational person believe that a country that spends more annually on defense than the next 13 largest militaries combined is going to have a hard time prevailing against a relative handful of patriots with small arms?  You might have your finger on the trigger of your Bushmaster but it won’t help much when the drone strike turns you into a fine mist.

Setting aside the fact that the only part of the Bill of Rights these pistol packers are concerned about is the Second Amendment, these defenders of democracy might want to look to Martin Luther King and Gandhi for successful ways to change the world.  Of course, non-violence takes a mighty big set of cojones and we are talking about people who feel the need to carry lethal weapons when they go to a church picnic.

But grouch, what about the school, church, and theatre massacres that happen far too often?  Wouldn’t it be a good idea to have armed civilians taking down the shooter?  If you ask the police, who train for this sort of thing, the answer is a definite no.  Intense training is provided to swat teams so that they can overcome the very natural instinct to hide or flee when confronting a situation like the theatre shootings in Colorado.  That training has to be continuous or your natural instincts will return and prevail.  The last thing those situations require is someone in a panic firing away.  The police have responded within minutes in these situations.  Of course, our Marlboro Man, through the NRA, will fight to the death not to limit the sale of semi-automatic weapons and large magazines, ensuring the shooter will be able to deal out the maximum damage as quickly as possible.

A recent story posted on Slate relates how an Arkansas Republican state senator, who advocates arming teachers in the classroom, participated in ”active shooter” training, using a rubber bullet loaded pistol, and mistakenly shot a teacher who was confronting a “bad guy.”  Nuff said.

Our Marlboro Man was also quoted in the paper as saying, “You have to be your own hero, on your own white horse.”  I remember when I was about thirteen, I would fantasize about taking on five or six dudes who had insulted the girl I liked or in some way had humiliated me, and beating them all to a pulp.  As I matured, just a tiny bit (I only claim a tiny bit of maturity), those fantasies faded and I set them aside.  I suspect our Marlboro Man hasn’t matured enough to forgo these hero fantasies.  That alone makes him dangerous.

Our Rambo has probably played too many video games and watched too many movies where the hero takes on hordes of heavily armed thugs and eventually guns them all down while surviving a hail of bullets.  I’m waiting for that scenario to be reported in real life.  Unless you have gone into the drug business, you probably can defend your family perfectly well with a shotgun.  The grouch has no problem with someone who wants to have a shotgun or a revolver in his home for protection. However, he should be aware the gun is just as likely to be used in a suicide, domestic murder, or an accident where his seven year old shoots his four year old, than it is to defend his home.  Precautions need to be taken to avoid unintentional disasters.  Of course, that takes a certain level of maturity that may or may not exist in this frightened fellow.

I don’t feel the grouch is alone when he feels queasy seeing an armed civilian walking around a Fourth of July celebration.  In order for everyone to feel a certain level of safety in these situations, the grouch is proposing a new permit process that would better weed out unfit guachos.

 Psychological testing has advanced enough to allow us to better assess people’s qualifications to carry guns to the Macy's flower show.  I propose that a test be a part of the application process that will identify the unreasonably frightened applicant and take that into account when issuing permits.  The test should easily be able to tell if an applicant believes the UN black helicopters are coming or that our Kenyan, socialist, communist, fascist, hater-of-white-people, President is about to throw them in a concentration camp and disqualify these people and get them help for their paranoia.  The test would identify individuals who harbor vigilante or hero fantasies and keep concealed weapons out of their hands.  Those with racist tendencies would be flagged in order to prevent the kind of confrontations that lead to kids being shot to death on their way home from the neighborhood store.  Finally, the permit process should automatically reject anyone who pays to listen to Glenn Beck’s podcast as those people are obviously suffering from all the conditions described in this paragraph.  Once this test is part of the permit process, I know that I, for one, will feel a whole lot safer.

I Do Better With a Deadline

So, last night (as we're watching the 3rd Packer Pre-Season game and eating beer-cheese pretzels - Vince Young? Totally viable 2nd string option - yes!), the Grouch casually mentions that he's working on his next blog post.  Shit.  In his last blog post, he said the teacher would be writing next.  Maybe that was a subtle push from the Grouch to get writing or maybe it was just an off-hand comment made during one of the 37 million pauses-in-action-due-to-inept-refs-throwing-flags.  Regardless, the effect was the same: a deadline was set and here I am.

Actually, I do better with a deadline.  That's why I taught summer school this summer.  Well, that and the excellent money which P and I have already spent on plane tickets to Zihuatanejo.  But really, it was because I need a schedule to be a productive person.  If I know someone else is counting on me to do something (or, you know, some kids need some edumacating), I'll get right off my hiney and get to work.  Otherwise, it's frozen pizza and bagged salad for dinner again and yes I did walk the dog in my pajamas for the third day in a row, what's it to you?  You see, I can't count on P to motivate me because we're married and he's too smart to tell me to do something over summer break.  Also, he's overly helpful, which in turn, makes me feel guilty about my 7 daily hours on the couch, but allows me to stay put.

So summer school forced me to get dressed, exercise (I had to/got to bike to school everyday since P worked at a school farther away), and get out into the world on a daily basis for 6 weeks.  It's a sickness that might be unique to United Statesians to not be able to relax and enjoy down time and I definitely have it.  And, I realize that this next statement is weird, as well, but I acutally like my job quite a bit, so those two factors combined to make me the perfect summer school teacher applicant.  I worked at another North Minneapolis school as an ESL teacher, co-teaching a science unit on Chemical Reactions to exiting 5th graders.  We got to explode stuff and it was great.

Studies say (and to which studies am I referring? No idea, but I've heard people say it and I'm repeating it - academic, I know) that kids start to make the decision to drop out of school in the 4th grade.  That's 9 and 10 years old, people.  Not OK.  Summer school in Minneapolis is about getting students re-energized about school.  Our main goal was to show our kiddos that it is possible to have fun and learn about science at the same time and if I do say so myself, I think we were largely successful.  We hypothesized, we made posters, we danced, we did aerobics, we exploded stuff, we went orienteering and canoeing.  We had a really good time and learned a bunch along the way.  You know, kind of like school is supposed to go.  Now, I'm not meaning to toot my own horn here too much, I had an amazing, inspiring co-teacher whose energy I hope to channel all year long in my regular classes and we had good curriculum/materials and GREAT KIDS.

 

Other stuff happened this summer - we went up to a cabin in Northern Wisconsin with my Mom's side of the familia and it was 50 degrees and raining.  In July.  Possibly the worst weekend of weather all summer.  But we trucked on and I caught two keepers (bass) and P caught two tiny fish (tee hee) and we enjoyed ourselves just the same.  P discovered that he enjoys gringo fishing (sitting in a boat and casting a reel), though he finds it ridiculously low energy.  He's used to climbing out on to craggy rocks and throwing a weighted line that has been wrapped ingeniously around a Coke bottle or battling the waves to throw out nets.  We did buy winter hats and mittens at a tent sale, so there's that.

What it's supposed to look like!

What it did look like.

We've also been going to obedience class with our puppy, Osa.  I can't remember if I've told all 5.5 of you about her, but she's our 6 month old black lab mix of who knows what and she's lovely.  She's the best puppy!  She was crate trained within 3 days at 3 months and if you've ever had a puppy, you know that's saying something.  She passed out of level 1 in two classes and we were such proud puppy parents and now we've been in level 2 for about 5 weeks and we're starting to be slightly antsy to move up, but there are so many puppies to play with at class and concentrating is hard.  Much like middle school.  We've also discovered dog parks, which is a whole new world to Osa and to us.  There are dog park norms and a whole society of dog park people that we didn't know about.  We've paid our dues (literally) and I think we're getting the hang of it - in fact, we're heading there as soon as I publish this puppy! (Pun intended, ahem.)

Brand-spanking new - Day one as our fur-baby!

That brings us up to the impending doom also known as the beginning of the school year.  Just two days from now, students will file off those blasted yellow school buses and into my head and heart.  I'm not ready, but I will be.  I'm both excited and terrified, but I know this feeling well by now and am used to it.  My good friend and co-worker had a baby, so I'm taking on the role of lead ESL teacher this year which means I need to be very organized and on my game.  I bought a large calendar and hope that helps.  School supplies always help.  Always.  Also, I'll be co-teaching with a new English Language Arts teacher this year and pushing in to Math classes as well.  Ohhhh boy.  I did not inherit my mother's math sense, I got my dad's... which means I might be uniquely poised to be confused right along with all of my students. It could be a benefit, it could be a deficit, only time will tell.

I just re-read that last paragraph and it made it sound like I don't want the kids to come.  That's not entirely true.  Mostly I don't want them to come yet.  I could do with one more week.  I want to go to the Fair on a Tuesday or any other day that is not a Saturday or Sunday.  I want to have a couple more days in my classroom to unpack and organize.  I want a couple more days to collaborate with my colleagues to make sure that we're all on the same page and to link our lessons so that our students make the connections that they'll need to incorporate all this new learning into their existing schema (see, I got the lingo down).  But, when do teachers have enough time? Never (that's the answer, in case you were wondering).  But you know what?  I feel o.k. because, as it turns out, I do better with a deadline.

Splish Splat

I believe it was sometime after the pickle factory, canning factory, volunteer coordinating, driving, house cleaning, and furniture moving, and sometime before, more driving, railroading, and being a paralegal, that I did my stint as a window washer.  Over the years I had also managed to pick up a history degree from the University Wisconsin-Milwaukee, which had few tangible employment benefits. So in order to keep the wolf from the door, I took a $6.00 an hour job washing windows and risking my life, on average, once or twice a week.

My first day I reported to work and was given a gray work shirt with the name of the company on the back and someone else’s name over the front pocket.  The guys who did this job for a living were a fairly surly bunch, especially around starting time.  They weren’t on the bottom rung of the employment ladder but they could see it from their perch.  They weren’t openly hostile. They just left the impression they didn’t know you and didn’t really care one way or the other.  In their defense, I suspect they looked at me and figured, here was another kid who was going to flee the job just as soon as something better came along.  In my case, they were right and I lasted about eight months before getting out.

We would meet up at 7:30am at the office and find out whom we would be working with that particular day and where the job was located.  To this day, I am still rather astonished how the workday often unfolded.  We would get to the job site at 8:00am and work till around 10:00, when we would all pile in the truck and drive to the closest tavern (In Milwaukee that is always a short drive).  The crew would then proceed to drink for an hour or ninety minutes, before returning to the job site.  Around 12:30 or 1:00 we would go to lunch, often at a bar, and more drinking was in order.  In the afternoon the lifers were friendlier and a bit more talkative.  I never really got to know these guys away from work but the profession seemed to have a rather high percentage of alcoholics climbing around on those ladders.  They looked as if life had treated them roughly and every now and then, one of them would get fired for disappearing from work for a week or two while they went on a bender.

Whenever anyone finds out I worked as a window washer, their first question is, “Did you ever work on a skyscraper?”  I understand the question and why it’s asked.  A lot of people have a fear of heights and the thought of dangling way up there in the sky is terrifying.  The fact is, working on a modern skyscraper is a lot safer than many of the jobs window washers do every day.  On the tall buildings there are well-maintained, redundant, safety systems in place. For example, on some buildings there are tracks attached to the building along which the stage (the stage is the oblong or square object you see the window washers standing in when they are up thirty or forty floors) is raised and lowered by remote control.  In addition to the stage, each of the workers is wearing a safety belt.  If, in the highly unlikely event, the stage should somehow fall, the worker will dangle by the safety belt until rescued. One of the first things you learn as a window washer is a fall from 500 feet or a fall from 50 will bring about the same result, a funeral.  Crawling around an old, poorly maintained building, or climbing ladders perched on unsteady surfaces, or having to stand on the very top rung of a ladder to reach the top of a window is far more dangerous than going up and doing the windows of a skyscraper.  By the way, I did spend one day washing windows on a 38-story bank building in downtown Milwaukee.

Piece of cake!

To illustrate the point, I will tell you a story about a job I did that had me thinking about it for a few weeks.  One day, I and another window washer were sent to an apartment complex to wash the tall windows above the entrance to the building.  Just above the doors there was a small-pitched roof and above that two, two story high windows.  In order to clean them, it was necessary to place the legs of a ladder on either side of the pitched roof and climb to the top to wash the windows.

There were two windows. So it seemed logical we would each clean one while the other guy held the ladder in place.  To complicate things a bit, there was a bit of a gusty wind blowing.  It wasn’t quite enough to be too concerning but it did add to my unease.  Our first decision was who would go up first and I volunteered on the theory that if I went second I would spend all the time my coworker was aloft worried about taking my turn and thus be miserable for twice as long.  So I went first.

When I got to the top, I made sure that when I reached out to the right, I would put weight on my left leg to balance the ladder.  When I had to reach out to the left, I reversed the weight shift.  It was a job for total focus because a mistake would get you a landing three stories down on a concrete surface.  As I finished my window, I remembered climbing down and experiencing a rush of relief that all I had to do now was hold the ladder.  That sense of relief vanished quickly as my coworker went up the ladder and I begin to realize I now had another life in my hands.  If I were to let the ladder slip or if my buddy did something wrong and fell, I didn’t know how I would cope with the result.  I found holding the ladder to be every bit as nerve wracking as going up to the top.

 

Afterword when we were back in the truck, I thought about how going up had been scary but having another person’s life, at least somewhat, dependant on you had been equally unsettling.  I had not expected those feelings when I volunteered to go first, thinking I could relax after my stint at the top was over.  It made me think about that sort of responsibility for a few weeks afterward.

One afternoon we got word that one of our coworkers had fallen about 25 feet.  He was one of the few young guys on the job and all we knew was that he had been taken to the hospital.  As it turned out, he was released about four hours later, bruised and sore but otherwise all right.  He luckily had fallen on a grass lawn and it seemed like one of those stories about guys who walk away when their parachute doesn’t open.  When I heard the details I shuddered because he fell washing the windows of the same bank I had washed the previous month.

Not all the jobs were dangerous.  There were times when we would get sent to a mall to spend the day washing the stores windows.  We called that leatherwork, as in shoe leather, because we worked on the ground.  Give me a great people watching venue and air-conditioned comfort over scrambling up and down ladders in the heat any day.

One day I was sent, along with a small crew, to do the inside windows of a floor of an office building.  It was one of those old time office set-ups with a secretary pool on one end, a lot of desks in open spaces, and a few enclosed offices not far from the secretary pool area.  This was back in the days when more people smoked and there were no workplace rules preventing anyone from lighting up when ever and wherever they felt like it.  As we entered the floor, I noticed the space looked rather shabby and the light had a murky yellow quality to it.  When we started to wash the windows the tar and nicotine and whatever other poison is in cigarettes started to stream down the windows.  There were actual clumps of tar that had to be scraped off with a razor blade.  It was truly disgusting.  The sight of that gunk rolling down those windows would have made a great public service anti-smoking ad.  When we finished the floor looked palatably different.  The light was brighter and everything looked considerably better when it wasn’t observed through a filthy yellow filter.  I imagine the workers liked their workspace a little better, until they, once again, smoked it into darkness.

I don't remember the rainbow.

The job that signaled the beginning of the end of my window-washing career started when, one morning we were told we were being sent to do the windows of a steel warehouse.  It was a big job and the guys who had been working it had fallen behind so extra people were being devoted to the job to help them catch up.  The building was four floors above ground and two floors below for a total of six stories.  The four stories above ground were made up entirely of glass and steel girders.

When we got to the job site, we were divided up into pairs and told what part of the factory we were to tackle.  My partner was a Native American who was the combination of almost all the stereotypes our culture reserves for Native Americans.  First, he had the classic Plains Indian face.  He would have been an extremely handsome man but for the scars and bruises that reflected a hard life.  He was at home in high places and was a picture of confidence, agility, and grace walking the girders several stories above the ground.  I found out later, he did have a problem with alcohol, but when he disappeared on a bender his job would be waiting for him when he got back.   He was an ex-marine and it was one of the fortunate things in my life that I was paired up with him that day.

The section we were assigned was four stories above the ground.   We were lifted up in a cherry picker to a boom of a crane that had been extended toward the windows.  We crawled along the boom until we were able to pull ourselves up on to a 20-inch girder.  From there we would move left to right cleaning the windows until we came to vertical girder.  That is where the real challenge began.

My partner demonstrated what needed to be done to get to the next section of windows.  He grabbed the vertical girder with his right hand and swung out and around and landed on the girder on the other side, all the while carrying his five gallon bucket with his squeegees and sponges in his left arm.  My four and half regular readers know, I will never be nominated for the Davy Crockett Bravery Award, so I don’t mind telling you, this maneuver terrified me.   I was good at baseball and to a much lesser extent basketball and football but I sucked at gymnastics.  Even circus performers get to practice dangerous tricks with a net until they master the stunt.  Here, I was expected to work without a net, without practice and without much, if any, native ability.  I found myself starring at the girder unable to make myself move.

My partner saw my predicament and came back and offered some advice and tried to build up my confidence.  I still could not make myself move.  Finally he convinced me to swing out and he would grab me and bring me around the girder and place me on the horizontal girder.  Out I swung and he reached over and caught me and brought me around and literally placed me on the horizontal girder.  When the maneuver was completed our faces were about twelve inches apart and he broke out in a big grin.  At the time I though he was just being friendly and encouraging.  As I think about it now, I think he probably was suppressing a guffaw when he looked at me looking at him the same way the Lone Ranger looked at Tonto the first time Tonto saved his ass.

We repeated this move every twenty to twenty five minutes for the rest of the day.  By the end, my guardian angel was basically standing by to grab me if I didn’t quite make it.  I never worked with him again but I do believe he probably saved my life that day.  On the drive home that evening, I decided to look for another job.

About three weeks later, I called to find out if I was going to be hired by a company to drive vans, step vans, and small trucks around metro Milwaukee delivering everything from envelopes to turbines.  Ironically, the day I found out I had the job, I had been sent to the same factory that had convinced me to seek another career, to wash some windows that could be reached by ladder. I worked till noon and then loaded up and went back to the office and quit.  Dying on the job for $12.00 per hour was one thing.  Dying for $6.00 per hour was against my moral code.

Next:  The Teacher says her piece.

Perry

                       

I had just returned home after undergoing four interviews with members of the law department of a financial services corporation in Minneapolis, when the phone rang and they asked me if I would be willing to come back for another interview the next day.  I was wondering what more there was to say, but I needed a job, so I agreed to come at 10:00am the next morning to interview with a Vice President and Assistant General Counsel.

It was early 1984 and I was trying to break into the white-collar world.  I had determined that my future as a railroad trackman was limited and in the summer of 1983 I had completed a paralegal certificate program at Roosevelt University in Chicago.  Since then, I had been working temporary jobs and trying to land my first real job in the legal field.

So the next day, I put on the second of the two suits I owned, the second of the three ties in my collection, and my last clean dress shirt and headed back downtown.  When I arrived, the HR manager I had been dealing with asked me if anyone had talked to me about Perry.  I said no and was told he could be a bit gruff.  Being duly warned, I joined the manager as we rode the elevator to the law department.  We were met there by the Deputy General Counsel of the company, who took me aside and asked me if anyone had talked to me about Perry.  I remember thinking that after working on the railroad, “gruff” was not going to be a problem.

When I entered Perry’s office he was sitting with his back to me with his legs propped up on the credenza behind his desk.  I noticed about six inches of very white, hairless leg was showing and he was reading something while smoking a cigarette.  Another cigarette was burning in the ashtray on his desk.  As he slowly turned around I saw a large bald head that vaguely looked like a bald eagle peering at me over a pair of glasses propped on the end of his nose.  His shirtsleeves were rolled up and each forearm was decorated with sailing ship tattoos (this was long before every teenage girl got tattoos).

After looking me up and down, he said, “I like your shirt.”  I wasn’t sure how to interpret that opening, so I just thanked him.  As he looked over my resume, he started asking me about the railroad.  Where had I worked?  What were my duties?  Had I ever worked as a brakeman?  Did I operate any heavy machinery?  Had I worked on rail gangs?  This went on for about twenty-five minutes and then the interview was over.  As I left his office, I thought, “Damn, he doesn’t think I can handle this job.”  I had wondered how my last three jobs, window washer, truck driver, and trackman were going to play in the white-collar world and now I thought I had my answer.

I went home thinking my job search would continue.  Early that afternoon, a law firm I had interviewed with called and offered me a job.  I asked for a day to consider the offer.  Around 3:00 the financial services company called and offered me a job that I immediately accepted.  The financial services job paid two thousand dollars a year more ($14,000 to $12,000) and I had a feeling that the corporate job was a better fit for me. I was probably right, as I would spend the next 25 years with the company.

So I went to work for Perry.  One of the first things I noticed was the fierce pride he took in his work and the work of his subordinates.  He helped me define professionalism.  He was interested in excellence and when you fell short of his expectations you heard about it.  He did not suffer fools gladly and patience was not his long suit.

His reputation around the company was one part awe and two parts trepidation.  I quickly learned that being perceived as his lieutenant could be used to my advantage as people often preferred to deal with me and would meet me more than half way rather than tangle with Perry.

There are many, many stories about Perry. One of the many I witnessed and/or participated in illustrates the fear he could engender.  John was a second year law student who was working as a summer law clerk.  He worked directly with Perry and had, what I perceived to be, a good relationship with him.  One day Shelly, Perry’s long time secretary, told me that John was going to be married in a week and he had not told Perry that he needed a week off for his honeymoon.  Shelly had been telling John for more than a month he needed to talk with Perry and let him know he would be gone the week following his wedding.  Shelly offered to tell Perry for John but he kept saying he would do it but never did.  On the Wednesday before the wedding Shelly finally walked into Perry’s office and told him John was getting married on Saturday but was apparently to frightened to tell him he would be gone the next week on his honeymoon.  Perry looked at me and grinned and told Shelly to go get John and bring him to his office.  When John walked in Perry told him that the company had just been served with a large class action lawsuit and it was going to require us all to work Saturday and Sunday.  John got a little pale, hesitated for a moment, and said “OK,” and walked out of the office.  I stood there with my mouth open, unable to believe what I had just witnessed.  I was already envisioning the conversation John was probably formulating in his mind in which he tells his bride he has to work on his wedding day.  Perry told Shelly to go get John and then congratulated him and told him he understood he would be out the following week.

After I had worked for Perry for a couple of years, budgets were tight and we were short a worker or two and the workload required we work on Saturdays.  Perry would pick me up Saturday mornings around 7:30 in a great big green 1977 Cadillac.  The thing was a mile long and had the famous Cadillac fins. Everything in it was immaculate except the ashtray. We would first meet to discuss what he wanted me to spend my time on and then we would each work separately.  At 11:30 we would go to lunch and I would go to school.  I was allowed to ask any questions I had and he took the time to not only give me the answer but to explain the whys and wherefores.  He would share insights and viewpoints that I as a lowly paralegal would have had no way of knowing about and taught me how to think through issues.  He took the time to educate me far beyond what was necessary for my immediate job and I consider what he did to be a gift I could never begin to reciprocate.

Sometimes at lunch, he would tell me about his life.   He had been orphaned and was living on the streets of Minneapolis with his 13-year-old cousin.  They made their money selling newspapers and he started smoking when he was about five or six years old.  Eventually his uncle, who was a railroad engineer (the type that drive the trains) came down to the Twin Cities from Thief River Falls Minnesota and took both of them in and raised them in northern Minnesota.  Quite a few of his uncles worked on the railroad.  That is when I learned that what I had perceived as a negative in my job interview, had been, in fact, a huge advantage.

When World War ll broke out he ran away at age 16 and tried to join the marines.  He was in boot camp in California before his uncle was able to track him down and return him to Minnesota to finish high school.  He graduated at 17 and with his uncle’s permission, enlisted in the navy.

If you have seen WW ll movies of fighter planes with the glass bubble on the bottom with the machine guns, then you know where Perry spent approximately two years during the war.  He told me he had seen and participated in some horrible things but he never went into much detail.  He knew I was interested in history and I think that led him to open up a little bit about his war time experiences.  Like most veterans who were actually involved in heavy combat operations, he didn’t talk about it much.  He once told me, he had talked to me more about his experiences in the war than anyone else, including his family.  One time he looked up and said, “It’s strange to think that the most important thing you did in your lifetime was done when you were 19 years old.”

I doubt Perry could survive in today’s corporate culture, let alone flourish.  He had no trouble speaking truth to power and considered it an essential part of his job.  That is an attribute that became increasingly rare over my 25-year career.  One time a young attorney was having trouble scheduling dates for the deposition of a couple members of the executive team including the CEO.  They kept blowing her off and treating her requests for dates as a nuisance.  When she told Perry the problems she was having, Perry told her to follow him as they went up to the CEO’s office.  When they got there Perry asked if the CEO was in and his secretary told him he was in but he was meeting with the other member of the executive team that was going to be deposed and they couldn’t be interrupted.  Perry walked into the CEO’s office and told him to get out his book (calendar, in those days people kept paper calendars).  Looking over the CEO’s shoulder, he quizzed him on the importance of certain meetings and events listed on the calendar, getting the CEO to admit he could miss several of the up coming events if necessary.  He told the young attorney that all of these dates were open for the deposition.  He then turned to the other executive in the office and told him to get out his book and repeated the exercise.

  It is almost unimaginable that such a scenario could play out today. Such a stunt would almost certainly spell career suicide.  After Perry retired, I felt the company missed his willingness to tell the business side the harsh truths they sometimes did not want to hear.

Perry was a man of high integrity and often told me, “They don’t pay me to cheat, lie, or steal.”  He would usually follow that up with, “If anyone is going to prison, it is our job to make sure it’s not you or me.”  He told me of a couple of times, in his career, when he had made it known that if certain decisions were made he would resign.  Luckily for him and the company he never had to take that step.

There was another side of Perry that surfaced at unexpected times.  One time a financial planner in Indiana got in trouble and was summoned by Perry to come to the home office in Minneapolis.  Before he got to town Perry did some research into this individual and found out the man had a very sad childhood and had been troubled all of his life.  When he entered the conference room where Perry, an outside counsel, and myself were waiting for him, Perry treated this man gently and elicited the necessary information while all the time being kind and considerate.  After the interview I was walking the planner to where he could get a cab to the airport when he told me that Perry wasn’t a bad guy and when he had talked with him on the phone a few days before he thought he was 7 feet tall and 700 hundred pounds.  Perry had demonstrated that there was no need to intimidate, brow beat, or judge this poor guy who was going to lose his job and quite possibly end up in prison.

Years later, I found myself in a similar situation.  A financial planner who had been fired for a combination of poor performance and alcohol use on the job had filed a wrongful termination suit against the company.  A Kansas judge had ordered the parties to get together and see if they couldn’t settle the case.  I was sent to Wichita to represent the company.  The meeting was to take place at 10:00am and at about 10:20 a woman walked into the conference room and identified herself as the wife of the planner.  She told me that she had been driving her husband to the meeting when he became so agitated and nervous that he had thrown open the car door at a red light and ran away.  She was late because she had been out looking for him.  I sat down with this poor woman and explained why the company had terminated her husband.  I could tell she had never heard any of this stuff before but her experience with her seriously alcoholic husband lead her to believe what I was telling her.  She agreed to go look for her husband and called about an hour later and we set up an afternoon meeting.  This time he came and one look at him told me this was an individual who was going to hit rock bottom soon and get help or he wouldn’t live to be a middle-aged man.  Remembering Perry’s demeanor years before, I tried to make the man feel at ease and eventually offered him $500 to make his suit go away. The $500 let him feel he had, in someway, won something and had been treated with respect.  It was a tiny fraction of what it would have cost to defend the lawsuit.

Whenever people who worked with Perry get together and his name comes up the stories start to flow.  He was a unique character and one of the most intelligent men I have encountered in my lifetime.  He had argued and won a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, taught at Marquette University Law School and was friends with the likes of Walter Mondale.  When he retired, the company hired two attorneys to replace him.

I worked with Perry for the last six years of his career.  During the course of those six years I learned many invaluable lessons that helped me one day rise to the level of vice president.  Our personalities were very different ( believe it or not, I was known as a nice guy), but lessons on integrity, professionalism and empathy transcend style.  I will always be grateful to him, not just for the knowledge he imparted, but also for his willingness to invest the time and effort to help a trackman find his way in an alien culture.  The day he retired, I said to Shelly, “ I don’t know what the future will bring, but I very much doubt it will ever be this much fun again.”  I was right.