A beach day

Not in the best of health. Even so, I spent the day out with my family, at a museum and at a windy, chilly Lake Michigan beach. We were joined by my old schoolmate, Dan, and his family. Funny how bearable an illness can be with old friends nearby. There were billowy clouds and lovely, white-tipped waves; we didn’t bathe, but the children enjoyed the playground. Daniel (my son) was so delighted that at leaving-time, he had to be carried away against his will (mercifully, he scaled the biggest hill himself).

We were mostly in touristy St. Joseph but also drove through Benton Harbor, the poorer twin, which has run-down churches with names like Aún Hay Esperanza.

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I’m reading Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, which I found in our local library’s equivalent of the Little Free Library. Ursula Todd (1910–1910, 1910–1914, etc.) lives, dies, is reborn, and lives her same life again. And again. Her lifespan lengthens because déjà vu teaches her to avoid mishaps. (It takes her a few tries to figure out how to avoid getting Spanish flu.) It’s like watching a video gamer replaying levels; or Groundhog Day, set in Downton Abbey’s England, not Punxsutawney. Atkinson skewers some characters, especially the loathsome doctor who delivers Ursula (the girl sometimes survives his care, sometimes doesn’t). The repetition is macabre and funny. Working out the metaphysic isn’t easy. Michael Huemer’s theory of reincarnation comes closest, perhaps. But on that theory the déjà vu wouldn’t transmit real memories; and it would be unlikely – or, strictly speaking, rare – that the same siblings should be sired after Ursula.

An oddball and I practice civic friendship

Two bang-average but worthwhile true crime docs:

Deadnorth (Tubi), set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula;

Lover, Stalker, Killer (Netflix), set in Omaha and its environs.

I watched one right after the other, knowing little about either. There was considerable thematic overlap. The true crime genre is, if nothing else, extremely useful as a catalog of behavioral red flags.

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Samuel went to the lake with grandparents, grandaunts, granduncles, and second cousins (an inexact tally). He came home this afternoon, sunburnt.

With just Daniel in tow, Karin & I went out for gyros. As we were finishing our meal, a nerdy, headset-clad man one table over, who’d been talking into his phone all lunch long, asked me to look after his food while he ran out to his truck. I nodded. His truck was a semi. I watched through the restaurant window while he fumbled around in the cab. Then he brought out a cigarette and smoked it outside the restaurant.

Finally, he returned to the bits of onion and tomato on his plate.

He grinned and thanked me. I nodded again.

My good deed for the day.

Weather; counties; coasts; body-text fonts, pt. 9: Primer/Century 751

I waited for snow to fall this year to begin reading my first Henning Mankell novel – Faceless Killers. A few pages in, I learned that it doesn’t snow a lot in southernmost Sweden. So much for the book’s cover photo.

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U.S. counties I’ve lived in/their respective distances from the nearest U.S. coastline, measured by the number of intervening counties:

Lake (Illinois)/0
Platte (Missouri)/16
St. Joseph (Indiana)/1
King (Washington)/0
Tompkins (New York)/1

Platte County is the outlier.

“Where the Coastal Snobs Live,” this map is called. Yes, the dark patch in the middle looks like a squirrel or maybe a kangaroo – but this isn’t Australia. (Does the concept of a coastal snob have much purchase in Australia, where the vast majority of the people live along the coast?)

Q. What three U.S. counties are twenty counties away from a U.S. coastline? A. Washington County, Kansas, and Jefferson and Thayer Counties, Nebraska.

Someone (not I) should work out the average distance between counties and coastlines, in terms of how many other counties intervene. It’d be a small number, I expect. Earlier this year, I checked out a book called The Heartland: An American History, by Kristin L. Hoganson. The “heartland” county whose history Hoganson recounts is Champaign County, Illinois. According to the above map, Champaign County’s shortest distance from a coastline is four counties. Similarly, the historian of Indiana, James H. Madison, has written or edited at least three books with the word “heartland” in the title. Indiana and Illinois touch the same body of water. One would be tempted to argue, on this basis, that even the core of the United States is not very far inland. But that would be misleading, since Lake Michigan, which borders Illinois and Indiana, is entirely within the United States. Illinois and Indiana have coastlines in the same way that Utah has a coastline, and no one would say that Utah is coastal.

Ignore proximity to Lake Michigan; re-shade the map. The heartland is more landlocked than the map says. Still, it’s more coastal than is commonly thought, since much of the Great Lakes’ coastline is U.S. coastline. The map has a point after all. The Great Lakes do matter, culturally. There is a great cultural difference between Platte County, Missouri, on the one hand, and Lake County, Illinois, or St. Joseph County, Indiana, on the other. And it isn’t just proximity to a big city; Platte County is next to Kansas City. I daresay that culturally, Lake and St. Joseph Counties are more like Tompkins County, New York, or even King County, Washington, than like Platte County. What matters is proximity to a boundary, to something unamerican, even if it’s just water; or to put it differently, how many layers of Americana a county is enveloped by.

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This month’s body-text font is Primer.

This sample may actually be of Century 751, a clone of Primer designed for digital typesetting. Here is a sample of the real deal, set with metal type, from an early article in Philosophy & Public Affairs. (When that journal switched to digital typesetting, it began using Utopia for body text.)

A few other works set with Primer: Play It as It Lays; The Executioner’s Song; Come Along with Me.

A flurry of activity

Four school friends:

Hoku, Dan, the Pedro, moi.

I thought we would have just one outing together, but one outing turned into three. Which is just as well. I’d last seen Hoku on my wedding day; and although Dan and the Pedro live nearby, I don’t see them as often as I’d like.

Our wives and children were with us, too.

Yesterday, we were in Michigan, at one of the beaches. Karin waded into the water with Daniel, and I held Samuel’s hands. It was the boys’ first time in the lake – or in any body of water larger than a bathtub.

Samuel wore a full-body swimsuit that Karin found at Goodwill just before we traveled to the lake. It has built-in flotation pads. It made Samuel look like a pint-sized linebacker.

At first, he was nervous in the water; but soon he was floating on his back, kicking gleefully, his wild hair spread out over the surface of the lake.

The sand outside the lake was like a bed of coals. The air was like a furnace. The water was warm and pleasant.

On the other days, we toured Bethel; we bowled; we strolled; we ate and drank; and we supervised the children’s play at various parks. Samuel became acquainted with the splash pad. It was a delightful weekend for him.

It was a delightful weekend for me, with peers I’ve known for decades, from whom I sense acceptance rather than the usual, palpable disdain.

Another celebrated South Bender

Last Sunday was cold, and our church met indoors, but today’s service was held in the parking lot, in balmy weather. After Karin and Samuel and I went home and ate lunch, Samuel refused to sleep, so I pushed him in his stroller around the block. “Enjoy the last day of good weather,” one neighbor said. Sure enough, the temperature is supposed to fall by twenty degrees.

Another sign of summer’s end: people have been towing their boats back into the neighborhood.

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Recently widowed, Karin’s mom went on holiday to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan, a two-and-a-half-hour ferry ride from the northern town of Charlevoix. Beaver Island seems to be a hideaway for the rich. The residents kept telling Karin’s mom not to walk on the beaches (which may well be their private property) or on the roads (which probably aren’t).

“You’re lucky you didn’t get shot,” her brother said.

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Pete Buttigieg’s failure notwithstanding, a South Bender will become a very high federal official. I mean the Notre Dame professor, the Catholic charismatic, conservative Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s SCOTUS choice. This is hardly the nomination that Pete’s fans would have wished for. As for me, I don’t mind Barrett like I minded Brett Kavanaugh. Although Barrett is both a textualist and an originalist, she might rule as justly as any SCOTUS judge could do (it’s U.S. constitutionalism and judicial review themselves that are problematic, I’ve come to believe).

But the hypocrisy! What was it the Republicans were saying four years ago, when Obama wanted to install a judge before an election?

I’m surprised that I continue to be surprised.

Here are some interesting remarks by a friend of a friend. (As always, to enlarge an image: click on it; then, right-click on it; then, open it in a new tab; and, finally, click on it again with the magnifying cursor.)

La reina rezaba por los niños pobres

… according to Duolingo’s sentence generator. Karin was amused.

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It’s Labor Day weekend. There isn’t a day when Karin & I don’t have at least one event scheduled with this or that acquaintance.

For us, this is unusual.

Today, we visited my friend Dan’s family. We went to the beach. Although the water was supposedly infested with E. coli, it contained many bathers.

We didn’t bathe. We walked down a pier to where, between the cities of St. Joseph and Benton Harbor, our own St. Joseph River empties itself out into Lake Michigan.

We also went on a carousel (I gather it’s impossible not to do so if one goes to the beach with Dan’s kids).

I rode the flamingo:

It had a slimming effect.

Dan and his wife, Lizzie, kindly gave us many things for our baby. Dan & Lizzie aren’t going to produce any more children. They have three who are cute but wild, especially at night.

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.

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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.