Horn Bar

Ali, you were a fighter for all of your five months.

R.I.P., and tell Snuggles hi for us….

Friday night, Debbie and I traveled to Eastern Hancock
to see her son Sam, and the mighty Lapel Bulldogs
play high school football.
I was haunted by Macy’s email this morning, telling me that
JT and HSE were playing "Big-Boy football" in Zionsville tonight,
but he asked what "God forsaken cornfield Lapel was playing in"…

In truth, it was surrounded by corn on only three sides, and I-70
on the North side.  The visiting grandstands were maybe 50 yards
from the four-lane highway, and the truckers were honking at us all night.  We eventually stationed a cheerleader out by the road to at least organize their enthusiasm.

As we settled into our comfy aluminum bleacher seats, still saturated by the all-day rain,
I saw a guy and his wife approaching our side, and recalled that I’d seen him at
each Lapel game this year, and he had looked really familiar.
I had a hunch, but it didn’t completely make sense, so I asked another Lapel
parent in the stands, and my hunch proved correct.

Jerry Miller grew up on Winding Way, near the "new" Edgewood School,
and neighbors with the Ginleys, Funk’s, Vance’s, and Kendall’s, to name a few.
His dad, Harold, was our basketball coach at North Side Junior High, but
he taught us so much more than how to beat the zone press.
I’m not sure when the Miller’s moved out to some farmland way out on West 8th Street,
but we lost track of Jerry long before we forgot Coach Miller.

I do recall that Macy, Funk, and I will readily attest that the hardest day of work we EVER
did was the day we baled hay for Coach Miller, and Jerry never wavered in the summer
heat, as he threw the 50# bales UP into the barn, as the rest of us struggled lift our
flannel sleeves to wipe our dusty, sweaty brows. 
We gained eternal respect for Jerry that day.

I knew I had recognized him these past few games, and I’m glad I finally approached him tonight.
We talked, and caught up until the game started, and then we turned our attention to our Bulldogs.

By the way, in real life,  Jerry has been with the Anderson Police Department for over 20 years,
and I don’t recall how long he said he has been a Detective, but it’s been awhile.
It was good to reconnect with an old familiar face, although I may have more remembered
the face from the attached 1969 Edgewood School yearbook. 
Jerry is smack in the middle of the bottom row.

I’ll take my camera to the next Lapel game for an updated shot.

oh, and Lapel won on Friday night, and Sam had his 3rd interception of the year.

I love high school football games……

In October of 2004, I was unexpectedly, and reluctantly granted early release from my 12 year marital sentence in Detroit.  However, like Morgan Freeman’s Red in "Shawshank Redemption", though I had resigned myself to the previous life, it didn’t take me long to embrace the freedom and opportunities of the next life, once I was out. 

But I could have used the money under that special rock.

The first thing I had to do was find a place to live alone in Detroit, and after a much too brief search, I bought a nice condo near the waters of Lake St. Clair in Harrison Township.  I now know that I bought more than I needed, but there was a part of my divorce recovery that called for a rebuilding of my self-esteem, and I couldn’t bring myself to live in a tiny, run-down apartment, and I had my half of a tiny chunk of money from the sale of our house, so I thought I had to invest it in property.  Who knew that the housing market would crash, and take me with it.

In the three years I lived on Portside Court, I thought I did an admirable job of decorating and color-scheming, and the very few people who ever saw the place said it looked nice.  It wasn’t until recently that I have come to realize that I may have not really been decorating to suit my own tastes.   When Debbie and I visited there to move the last of my stuff out, she had commented that  the condo looked nothing like she had envisioned the space I would have carved out for myself.

As I pondered that, I realized that my condo looked alot like the house my ex-wife had decorated in Roseville, and it occurred to me that I may have taken great pride in setting up my own space in a way to show my ex that I could do it on my own, and not live like she fully expected me to live.  (She was never a big fan of all the  NASCAR memorabilia in the basement, but I don’t even collect that anymore!)  Even as I created my new space,  I knew full well that she would never see it, as we’ve had no contact since we signed the divorce papers and sold our house.

My condo and cave became the unopened and undelivered letter to my ex that she would never read.

In 2007, I left Detroit for my hometown in Indiana, and put my condo up for sale.  Today, September 11, 2008,  after a year and a half on the market, and a year of paying a mortgage on an absentee condo, a lady named Ernestine is closing on the purchase of my old space.  Though my original property investment took a 35% turn south, I managed to avoid foreclosure, and the lenders accepted a "short-sell" negotiated settlement.  And as of 4pm today, I will finally, officially no longer be a resident of Harrison Township, Michigan. 

Physically, financially, or emotionally.

Goodbye Detroit……

Last month, my sister’s mother-in-law, Lois passed away, and her funeral and service was in her hometown of Harrodsburg, Kentucky.  The visitation was on a Saturday, and Kristin’s twin brother, Kirk, and I decided to drive down into Kentucky to be with our sister, and maybe help keep an eye out for her own seven year old twins that afternoon.  It might have helped if I could have kept up with them, but they had a forty year jump on me.  So they did what children do at a funeral service….they ran in circles until they were red in the face.

And we did what adults do at a funeral visitation….we shared stories.

And nobody in Harrodsburg, Kentucky can tell a story like Cousin Rex.  That man can spin a yarn.    

Rex grew up in, and never really left his hometown for most of his 45 years.  He mostly grew up in the farm house of his grandparents, and his life around them was full of great memories.  Like the his & hers spittoons beside both Grandpa and Grandma’s sittin’ chairs, as they both chewed pure tobacco from early teen years until they died in their nineties.  

Their farmhouse sat on a modest five acre plot of Kentucky land, made modest only by the hundred acre farms that surrounded them on either side.  For some reason, Grandma never liked or trusted the Phone Company, and when they began to plant telephone poles along their country road, she intercepted them, and made it clear that they would not be planting poles along her front yard, and she waved her shotgun at them to emphasize her resolve. 

Rex naturally supported his grandmother, and on that day in his tenth year, when Grandma had finished making apple pies, she handed him a pie tin of gone-bad apples to toss out into the fields.    

As Rex approached the nearest field, he was forever distracted by the man working on top of the telephone pole across the property line, and the apples never reached the fields.  Instead, Rex started chunkin’ the rotten apples at the Telephone Man at the top of the pole in the next yard.   Once he got his attention, Rex had the guy on the pole duckin’ and hidin’ behind the pole, as best he could.  Rex was out of apples when Grandma came out and began to holler at him.   But the guy on the pole shouted back to Grandma that it was ok, cuz he hadn’t been hit, and it looked like the kid was fresh out of apples anyway.  

I don’t recall if Rex got apple pie after dinner that night. 

You could tell that Rex loved to tell this, and many other stories, and he could easily draw a crowd, just as he had at the funeral parlor.   Then he told us of a business luncheon a few years back he had attended while working for his cable and electronics company.   As the large group of telecommunications workers enjoyed their post-lunch coffee, Rex got to tellin’ his stories, and naturally, the Apple story was widely enjoyed by all.  And then an older, retired gentleman at the fringe of the group stood up, cleared his throat, and said, "The boy’s tellin’ the truth."          Everyone turned to see who had spoken, and one man asked how he could be so sure of it.

"Because it was me on top of that pole dodgin’ apples that day".