Anniversary, pt. 4: House on the Rock, Wisconsin

How long will these anniversary postings continue, you ask? I promise this will be the last one of the year.

Many thanks to my grandparents for the card they sent us, and for the cash, which this month was sorely needed.

Speaking of anniversaries: Martin’s parents recently had their fortieth. At their banquet, they inquired about me (Martin said). They told Martin they wished to take me out to dine again some day. (When I lived with Martin & Mary, I used to tag along whenever Martin’s parents would dine with M&M.)

It warms my heart to know how gratifying it is for people to take me out to dine.

I should say something about the House on the Rock, our last stop in Wisconsin. Touring it is like walking for three hours through the strangest passages of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away.

It has Japanese gardens.

It has musical instruments that play themselves.

It has gigantic machines: steamship engines, train engines, music machines, Rube Goldberg machines, machines that do who really knows what.

It has thousands of carrousel beasts: hybrids of all forms, originating in mythology and in nightmare.

It has a room in which a gigantic whale – part sperm whale, part killer whale, part various other whales – battles a gigantic squid.

It has at least two gift shops. The postcards sold in these gift shops convey the merest hint of the weirdness, the overwhelmingness, of the whole complex. On the tour, strange artifacts are piled up all around you, and there is nothing to do but to follow the path, follow the path, until at the end you come out into the light. Then, in one last garden, there are kittens: extra-friendly ones begging to be scratched.

Anniversary, pt. 3: Madison, Wisconsin

I’d like to say that in Wisconsin we kept a sharp lookout for hodags. We didn’t, though – except in Madison. The State Capitol there is adorned with statues of small mammals.

Clearly, this statue is of a badger.

But this one? Badger, or hodag?

(Photos not by me or Karin.)

Another feature of the Capitol is its collection of fossils embedded in banisters, stair-steps, etc. We obtained a brochure about these fossils and dutifully sought them out. (This is the sort of tourism that Karin enjoys. She also likes finding her way through corn mazes.) To our frustration, no fossils revealed themselves. Then we realized we were misnumbering the floors. We retraced our steps and easily found an old starfish in a stair-step.

We walked out toward the University. Having years earlier forsaken UW–Madison for Cornell, I was eager to see what I’d missed. It boiled down to two things.

(1) The lakes. Of course, Cornell also has a nearby lake. But at UW the shore of Lake Mendota goes right up to the campus.

(2) The restaurants. Madison, I read, has more per capita than any other U.S. city. Had I lived there, I would’ve spent all my money eating out.

Karin & I stopped at a Peruvian restaurant near the campus. This, for me, was the high point of the trip. I ate lomo saltado and Peruvian ceviche, which, lacking tomato, is very different from Ecuadorian ceviche. Afterward, I told the chef that Ecuadorians put ketchup in their ceviche, which surprised and disgusted him.

Another nice feature of UW is its row of pompous old churches. The Lutheran church, of course, is by far the largest.

I seriously considered going to the Engineering Building to look up Nick Hichton of the Up documentaries, but I didn’t. (Too far to walk.)

We had a scare trying to check into our Super 8. Our reservation was for the previous night. But the helpful clerk got our fee refunded, and our refund was larger than what we paid that night, so we came out ahead.

Anniversary, pt. 2: Sheridan Road, Illinois; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Google Maps

We chose Wisconsin because we thought the travel would be easy. It wasn’t. According to Google Maps, the House on the Rock – our final and most remote tour stop – lay less than five hours from South Bend. And yet our return took us nearly eight hours. Our rests were brief; our detours were minor; traffic in Chicago was relatively painless. Google just got it wrong.

Around 12:00 last night, we reached home and joyfully were reunited with Ziva and Jasper.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The trip to Wisconsin was lengthy by design. In Illinois we kept to the Sheridan Road, hugging the lake. I wanted to see the mansions in Evanston, Kenilworth, and other obscenely rich towns. Then we drove through some merely well-off towns; through the grimy naval town of North Chicago; through Waukegan, where I’d lived as a three-and-four-year-old; and through Zion, where I’d spent the third grade. I showed Karin my old haunts (the fast food restaurants). We stopped at my old church, which now seemed very small, and I pointed out all my acquaintances in the photos on the missions bulletin board. We then went downstairs and interrupted a baby shower. I said hello to the pastor’s wife, who made me greet her husband on the phone.

Then it was north through dismal Kenosha and west to Milwaukee, where our goal was to eat some famous bratwurst. The bratwurst was so delicious and the pretzel so enormous, we’ll probably never eat at that place again (the food was felt well into the night).

The music inside the bratwurst pub was very loud. This distressed Karin, who’d never been inside any kind of pub. (She also was distressed when one drunk young man swung around and serenaded me with “Call Me Maybe.”) Traffic downtown in Milwaukee was bad. Parking was expensive. We called it a night and settled into our Waukesha Super 8. The TV was showing a marathon of Law and Order (the version with Lenny Briscoe and Jack McCoy).

Next entry: Madison, etc.

Anniversary

Nearly one year married. Tomorrow, off with Karin to Wisconsin for a brief (and hopefully very cheap) holiday. Milwaukee; Madison; House on the Rock.

Mary will look in on the kitties.

Red harvest

Just finished Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. Strange literary specimen. Hugely, rightly influential – film-and-TV debtors alone include Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome, Miller’s Crossing, Twin Peaks, Deadwood, etc., etc. (Recently read entertaining Fatale by Jean-Patrick Manchette; same sort of thing.)

And yet: Not all that good.

Influential due to setup. Isolated locale ravaged by corrupt, rich, warring factions (even “good” factions basically bad). Outsider hero – or, readers might prefer, anti-hero – resolves to clean up locale. Cannily plays factions against each other until factions eliminated and locale rosier, i.e., redder (anti-capitalist undertone).

Book itself rather sloppy. Warring factions not clearly defined. Motives nowhere near subtle. Plot nowhere near tidy. Deeds and settings under-described: little physical sense of action or place. Language too cute.

Mother’s Day

On Mother’s Day, I was with my in-laws – especially, with Karin’s father’s family. This photo depicts us in Goshen, Indiana, at the house of Karin’s paternal grandparents.

(Brianna – who belongs to Karin’s mother’s family – sits next to Karin. The older man with the NRA thermos isn’t Karin’s father. I don’t know who he is.)

(I, of course, am the one standing with his fingers in his pockets.)

Karin had to explain to Brianna (who’d never visited the Goshen house) who all the relatives were. “And my Uncle So-and-So was married such-many times and has such-many children – and there are a few others who may or may not be his children. …”

I asked: “Does this mean that some people may or may not be my cousins?”

“Yes,” said Karin.

“You look too delighted about that,” said Brianna.

I was even more delighted to be reunited with Sammy, Karin’s grandpa’s small, grumpy dog. (Sammy and I get along so well that he barks and barks whenever I’m about to leave.) At seventeen, Sammy has frosted eyes and a walk that’s decidedly creaky. When he barks, both his front paws rise off the ground.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Returning to South Bend, Karin drove in the wrong direction. Then, after she righted the course, she speeded and was given a ticket. She was sad for a bit, but she recovered. We dropped Brianna off at Karin’s mother’s house, and I was reunited with – and climbed all over by – George, the nice dog that Karin’s stepfather brought home one night.

Brianna tries sushi

For Mary’s birthday, we went out for sushi. I hadn’t done that in years. Robert, the chef, recognized me and called out from across the restaurant.

“I think you mean David, my brother,” I called back. But no, Robert meant me. I approached him afterward, and he was well aware of the distinction.

Waiting for our food, our group played “Authors,” the card game. I didn’t play (Karin & I arrived late). Instead, whenever someone asked, “Do you have A Tale of Two Cities?” (or whatever), I was like, “Oh yes, I have X copies of that book,” which probably got tiresome after a while.

Karin’s little sister, Brianna, was with us. She tried – but failed – to enjoy the sushi. She did hit it off with the waitress, who joked with her all night.

This morning, Brianna was a visitor in our still-not-tidy apartment. She was extraordinarily caffeinated. She set herself to shelving books. What I hadn’t accomplished in two weeks, Brianna finished in a few hours. As a bonus, she alphabetized my Agatha Christies. I told her to apply for a shelving job at the public library.

El gordo Kaviedes

Iván Kaviedes, one of Ecuador’s most skillful and troubled footballers – of whom I’m extremely fond – has come out of retirement at the age of thirty-nine to play for Deportivo Santo Domingo, the lower-tier club of his natal city.

Once known as El Flaco, he is now rather fat.

This hasn’t prevented him from scoring. Here is a report of his debut match. It includes a video that shows him scoring the tying goal.

The video also shows glimpses of Santo Domingo, the city in which my parents reside.

Two books about the upper crust

Barcelona defeated Botafogo in these teams’ second meeting, securing qualification to the knockout stage of the Copa Libertadores.

It was an Ecuadorian team’s first victory on Brazilian soil since 1986.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The kitties have regained their old selves. Little Ziva is doing her favorite naughty trick, which is to tip over our drinking glasses.

She broke Karin’s favorite Pony glass: the blue glass on the far right, the one with Rainbow Dash on it.

But Karin isn’t angry. She loves Ziva very much.

Today, Ziva took a long, lovely nap with me before I went to my job.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’ve just finished reading two very different “histories” of high society.

First: The Secret Rooms by Catherine Bailey. This book is about the dreadful Dukes and Duchesses of Rutland:

John – the morbid and chronically unhappy ninth Duke (and, incidentally, one of the intruders upon King Tut’s tomb).

Violet – his controlling, spiteful mother.

Henry – his vulgar, ham-fisted father.

And others.

(On the other hand, John’s sister, the Lady Diana Cooper – the famous socialite and memoirist – comes off rather well.)

These are people with a shocking sense of entitlement, whose daily lives seem miserable. They are dominated by two preoccupations: (1) forcing each other into a single, inflexible cast in order hold on to their land and prestige; and (2) stifling their constant feelings of guilt and mutual loathing.

For comparison: The aristocrats in Downton Abbey are much, much nicer, though they have basically the same concerns.

The book includes a great deal about World War I and the upper-class hypocrisies that facilitated it. For me, this was the most unsettling theme.

It would be a fine book were it two hundred pages shorter. Excluding notes, it comes to about 425 pages. The book is spoiled by too much irrelevant detail.

Especially tiresome are the many dull letters it quotes in full. Their sheer number is astounding. Everyone in the upper classes seems to have written several letters each day. (Nowadays, text-messaging is a chore, but the obligations of the letter-writing culture seem to have been even more onerous.)

Sadly, none of the correspondents is a stylist of any distinction.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Compared to the Rutland aristocrats, the high society of Savannah, Georgia, is witty and graceful – even, perhaps, joyful – certainly, more colorful. Eccentricity is celebrated among these people. Chapter after chapter of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil scrutinizes some behavior which, taken alone, would be bizarre – and yet is not bizarre, at least not when understood as a part of an organic unity.

For a partial list of the characters, I’d might as well quote from the back cover:

Genteel society ladies who compare notes on their husbands’ suicides. A hilariously foul-mouthed black drag queen. A voodoo priestess who works her roots in the graveyard at midnight. A morose inventor who owns a bottle of poison powerful enough to kill everyone in town. A prominent antiques dealer who hangs a Nazi flag from his window to disrupt the shooting of a movie. And a redneck gigolo whose conquests describe him as a “walking streak of sex.”

(As I type this, I’m reminded how many of the characters are not, strictly speaking, top-shelf; and yet each of them carries himself with an aristocratic grandeur. The drag queen, for instance, insists on being known as the Lady Chablis.)

This book is a bestiary of the sort one encounters in the later chapters of the Book of Job, where God lovingly describes each of his creatures.

Our new home

On moving day, thankfully, there was very little rain. The next day, it rained much harder.

While our helpers were carrying furniture and boxes into our new apartment, Jasper and Ziva were hiding under the bed. (Or, rather, Jasper was keeping his head under the bed, like an ostrich.) Only after the helpers left did the kitties venture to the living room. Since then, they’ve been sniffing around the apartment. They seem to like it well enough.

Still, they’ve been clinging to us more than usual. When Karin went to work this morning, Jasper cried most piteously; and he did it again when I was about to leave.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The unpacking will be completed by the end of the week – I hope.

Unused to such hard labor, Karin & I sleep soundly. At bedtime, we can hardly move.

Karin (lying in bed last night): “That was such a weird movie, Sweetie.”

John-Paul (almost too pained to speak): “Which movie?”

Karin: “Pineapple Express for Kids.”

John-Paul: “Pineapple Express for Kids?”

(Pause.)

Karin: “Yeah. You know. Superbad.”

We watched Superbad quite a while ago. Why would Karin be reminded of it – or of The Pineapple Express, for that matter? Maybe because of our neighbor, who’s often smoking in his parked car.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

This is one of the better apartments I’ve lived in. The main window lets in a good deal of light. There’s plenty of counter space in the kitchen. The rooms are fairly large. The crime rate is fairly low.

As I’ve mentioned, the river is across the street. Next to it is a good trail for running. Karin says she’ll go with me if I run lazily enough.