The time Brother Adrian came to dinner

 

Speaking of Brother Adrian, that reminds me of the time our family had Brother Adrian over for dinner. Apparently he had taught my father at Manhattan College in the thirties and was known for his leaf etchings.  In an act of bravado, my father suggested to the members of the local KFC that this artistic member of the Christian Brothers faculty at Manhattan College would make a good evening speaker for the next month's meeting. 

As part of the arrangement, Mother would treat him to a Southern dinner before his speech. My father may have had an ulterior motive here since he had been lobbying my older brother to attend his alma mater after high school He thought the good Brother could extoll for him the virtues of Manhattan. However, the cause was lost after my brother got accepted at MIT. 

Brother Adrian was an entertaining dinner guest, gave the family a leaf etching, then happily joined my father on the way to the Knights. Mother whispered that she hoped she hadn't fed him too many Manhattans. 

College reunions

 

Since I donate to my alma mater, Rutgers, every year I am on the mailing list for other publications of that esteemed institution. Recently, they have been trying to cajole me into attending my upcoming reunion for the class of 1974. I am not attending for the simple reason that I didn't have any friends in my graduating class. I was in the cynical group that felt that college was a meaningless waste of time and that its only purpose was to keep young people out of the labor market. My friends all agreed with me. When September came around, I was always surprised to see that all of my friends had dropped out of college. Each year, Sophomore, Junior and Senior I had to make new friends since my old pals had all dropped out of college. 

Being popular and a person of some prestige since I was on the college radio station, I had no trouble making friends. However, I have few college friends, certainly not from my class, that I could share a table with at a reunion dinner. 

My father had friends from his class at Manhattan College and loved to get out his green college ring and attend reunions with Mother. They had a celebrity in the class, Dennis Day. My mother talked to him one year and asked him how much his records were worth, since we had one of them. 
"About ten cents", the esteemed singer and comedian answered. 

Editor's note: I see from the picture that Manhattan College is now co-ed. Brother Adrian would be surprised. 

Cartesian and Aristotlean concepts of truth now supplanted

Those of us with a formal education have probably grazed upon Aristotle's concept of truth. Those of us with a college education have encountered Descarte's definition of truth, too complicated to delve into here. 

Happily, for many of us we are now being encouraged to see a modern interpretation of truth. In the future, we will be able to deny things have happened that may have negative impacts on our lives.

 

The employee will now be able to say, "Oh no I didn't come in late" even if that is far from the truth. For now if you deny, deny, deny, your falsehood will be able to be accepted as true and legally binding. 

If you say something false in order to elucidate a greater truth if not entirely factual statement you will be admired as a sage. Boys who break windows with their softballs will now be exonerated if they lie and all the parties will now agree that if one says something untrue but in a forceful manner, it will be accepted as if from the word of the Gospel as it will be directionally correct. 

 

Whiskeys

 

Recently I was reading Slate and discovered that Beyonce and Bob Dylan have their own whiskeys. That got me thinking about the whiskeys of my youth. 

One of the affectations of adolescence is to appear to be knowledgeable about adult things like the pros and cons of fine whiskey, I remember declaiming about my preference for George Dickel over Jack Daniel's in my dorm room. Although I was only parroting what I had heard my friend's older brother say, it gave me the air of being a man about town to the co-eds I was trying to impress. 

Once on a trip to Texas to visit mother's kinfolks, Mother brought back a bottle of white lightning. Her people lived in a dry county so my mother was assured the liquor was locally, if illegally, sourced. I remember it had a piece of charcoal at the bottom. Sometimes the bottle would get trotted out at family parties for entertainment.   Many years later when Ma and Pa retired in Texas, I always went to the liquor store in Longview Texas (affectionately called the Baptist Bookstore) for their   cheap Dickel. While hard to find in New Jersey it was plentiful in Texas. 

Today I usually just order a Jack Daniel's when I'm at a bar. Where I'm known, they pour it when they see me. 

Idle thoughts from an idle fellow

• 
  It's time the Democrats aim a bit at the old grouchy men at the bar. Most of us wouldn't recognize those celebrities at a police lineup
•  Robert F. Kennedy has dropped out. He was such an entertaining character. He would have confused uninformed voters that he represented the Kennedy line instead of all the weird stuff. Apparently, he offered his services to Kamala but she said "no thank you".
• If Kamela started her name with a "c" the Spanish pronunciation of camela would be obvious. Because her name starts with a "k" the tendency is to anglicize the pronunciation so that "ka" rhymes with "cat". 
• I'm getting tired of Tim Walz constantly touching his heart, I'm always afraid he's having a cardiac episode. The praying bit is also getting a bit old. 
• Men should wear ties at conventions and women should wear dresses. T shirts are for the beach not serious political gatherings. 
• The counting of delegates is a serious occasion. Hip hop music belongs in the nightclub not the convention.
• True I have supported Democratic causes in the past, but my text messages are inundated with pleas for money. Okay, I get it. 
• Too many relatives on the stage. Just because you saw your aunt ten years ago at Grandma's wake doesn't entitle you to go on the platform and drone on about how the candidate served you ice cream when you were five. 

Living in a Bohemian neighborhood

 

Like many recent college graduates, I ended up in a Bohemian neighborhood after leaving my home in New Jersey. In some ways, I started my adult life in the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Denver Colorado. Miraculously, I found a job within two days of moving to Denver. Leaving the downtown hotels, I walked around at random and found an apartment with a "to rent" sign on East 17th Avenue. The lady wanted $125 a month and I had my new home in a railroad apartment. 

This area of Northern Capitol Hill had all the earmarks of a Bohemian neighborhood. Within a few blocks was an Avant Garde theatre, a movie revival house, a hip record store, several bars, a nightclub, coffee houses and a vegetarian grocery store. One interesting feature of the grocery store was a peanut butter machine that ground peanuts and deposited the mixture to a jar placed below the machine. It's the only time I saw one of those machines. 

In my spare time I worked for a fledgling radio station that never got off the ground and through my New Jersey contact got invited to a variety of art openings. The food was always good at these things. One lesson I learned is not to allow a fledgling artist to paint a living room. Lessons learned. 

Over time I switched jobs and decided to buy a condo in Southeast Denver and left Capitol Hill. By that time many of the aforementioned haunts had closed and the place lost some of its luster. Today the area, like many bohemian districts, is no longer affordable for the young and recent graduates have to make do with Mom and Dad's finished basement. 

Editor's note: A good guide to Capitol Hill is Phil Goldstein's Denver's Capitol Hill. I remember his walking tours where he walked backwards through the neighborhood, 

Ties

 I recently finished an article in the New Yorker. It is an amusing piece on the history of ties. Made me think of how ties used to be everywhere and now they are hard to find in a normal day.  Growing up, wearing a tie was de rigeuer. They even remedied the danger of going to high school on your first day without wearing a tie.

A man wearing a tie meant that he was a grownup, and if you're a kid, not someone to be trifled with. Teachers, bankers, the man across the street with a briefcase, even dear old Dad. They all wore ties. For a boy, ties and jackets were worn on Sundays at church and special occasions. Fortunately for me, I attended a public school where I could dress as my mother saw fit, usually in a plaid shirt. 

Ties started to fade a bit after Vatican 2. Catholics could hear the mass in English and seemingly the tie and jacket mandate seemed to fade also. I seemed to remember going relatively tie-less until I embarked on the post college job interview trail. There's the old saw about the hippie who cuts his hair, shaves his beard, and wears his late uncles' tie and jacket for an interview. Not completely a legend. 

When I moved out west to pursue my fortune after being disappointed with job prospects in the northeast I lived in a relatively tie-less universe. Coming back to New Jersey to pursue my languishing professional degree, the tie manifested itself again in my life. Working as a public librarian I kept the tie on even after the dress code was revived. I figured a man with a tie could   better get the attention of a group of loud teenagers hanging out on a reference area table 

Apparently, it was the covid and working from home which ultimately killed the tie, at least according to the aforementioned New Yorker article. Used to working in their underwear, the returning to the office staffer was not going to suffer the indignity of wearing a tie. Anyway, ties don't work with t-shirts. 

Editor's note: In many Christian denominations, ties and jackets are still generally worn at church.