I know a lot of people who don’t like New Year’s. They think it’s either overblown, a lot of hype over something that happens every single day anyway, or else they’re simply resentful because they’ve been told that it’s only fun if you have someone to kiss at midnight, and they don’t. It’s not about any of that, as far as I’m concerned.
I think they’re missing the whole spirit. First, I’ve always cherished the ritual of turning the page on the old year, reflecting on what’s past, and looking at the new year with a fresh outlook and optimism for what could be. In some senses, I treat Dec. 31/January 1 the way we Jews are supposed to look at Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year). However, the Jewish High Holy Days are fraught with entirely too much cosmic portent to be “celebrated”, per se. They’re not exactly joyful, since you’re spending way too much time (or at least I am) worrying about whether the Omnipotent Celestial Dude In The Sky has decreed you will have a good year or a bad year, live or die. We’re taught that your name is written down in the book of life for a good, bad or ugly year, and within 10 days of the Jewish New Year, when the shofar sounds again on Yom Kippur, the Big Book of Everything Important That The Great Fearsome Cosmic Muffin Has Decreed is closed, and poof, your fate is sealed. I always imagine this book being closed with an extremely loud “kerTHUNK”, accompanied by a giant, choking billowing cloud of dust emanating from the pages, or as a friend put it, like something you’d see when Hermione Granger is closing one of the giant “How to Piss Off Voldemort” volumes in the Hogwarts library. Yes, like that exactly. I’d be very unhappy if that isn’t really what happens. Of course, nobody’s going to tell you what’s written in The Big Book. You have to endure the year to see if you get to figure it out. The chance always exists, of course, that you what you’ll be finding out is that you won’t live to see the next Rosh Hashanah. Well, that’s too scary and potentially depressing for me. And although Rosh Hashanah has its requisite apples and honey, it doesn’t come with champagne or football games, so it definitely lacks the je ne sais quois of January 1. And I don’t have to wear my nicest suit or go near a synagogue on December 31 or January 1. Wardrobe and destination matter a lot in my smaller, not so dusty book.
So secular New Year is better than Jewish New Year. And it’s better than Thanksgiving or Christmas. Thanksgiving is a family ritual. Don’t get me wrong, it can be great, and there’s a lot to be said for roast turkey, stuffing and enjoying the warm glow of family, but Thanksgiving can also be akin to root canal sans anesthetic for some. It all depends on the year and circumstances. No matter what, you have a script written by others that you must follow, or else. Thanksgiving's good, but not the favorite.
I don’t like Christmas much at all. Lest you think my distaste stems from my being Jewish, it doesn’t. Celebrating a kid’s birthday sounds nice, I think. I’m all for birthdays. Handel’s “Messiah” is also one of my all-time favorite pieces of classical music, and I generally have it in my car during the month of December. If the Hallelujah Chorus and For Unto Us a Child is Born don't stir you, check your pulse. You might not be alive. I don’t, however, like spending a month or two celebrating Wal-Mart, Target, Macy’s or Your Local Jeweler. That last part is critical. I spent 10 years in the retail world, almost half of it working for a jewelry store in a mall. You are probably lucky in not knowing what it’s like to have some freckle-faced teenager shuffle up to you, put some crumpled bills and scattered coins on the counter in front of you, and say “Uh, I have a hundred twenty dollars and 47 cents. What kind of diamond can I get my girlfriend?”. Dude, you don’t want to get engaged, you want to get laid. There’s a big difference. Keep your money, buy some condoms, and leave me alone.
Of course, I couldn’t say any of that. I was duty bound to try to help the poor kid, and I did that for entirely too many days and nights in the cold, bleak winter months, while my ears were assaulted with “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”, which bothered me as well, since it seemed to me that’s a holiday jingle about adultery, and that is just not right at all. Also, of course, I am Jewish, and I think I should therefore be exempt from all the Christmas-related ads and shows during November and December. It’s not like WE subject YOU to Yom Kippur songs and exhortations to buy the right prayer shawl or you’ll be shunned the rest of the year, right? There are exceptions, though, other than Handel. I love Dr. Seuss, so the Grinch can stay. Cindy Lou Who, who was no more than two, is the worlds’ most adorable kidlet ever, and she always melts my heart. And I’m an inveterate Dickens fan, so A Christmas Carol can stay too, but only the classic black and white ones made in Jolly Olde England. Frosty and Rudolph need to go back into the vault for another number of years, though. The claymation hasn’t worn well, I don’t think.
July 4 is great, but New Year’s is global. It’s both a world holiday and a personal one. I always do a mental summing up of the past year on December 31, reminisce about what went well and what I’d like to forget, and then I forget it (note: this is NOT a cue for the whole riff on forgetting credit cards and undergoing mental acuity testing as a result. Been there, done that). Even when I didn’t have a sweetie, I looked forward to New Year’s eve. I’d get together with friends, and enjoy my one and only cigar of the year. Patricia is eternally perplexed by that….I HATE HATE HATE the smell of cigarettes or cigars, but once a year, I make a ritual exception. It’s hard to explain. It just is. Even though I don’t drink more than the occasional red wine, I do like champagne. Nothing tastes quite as good as a very fine glass of champagne is a proper crystal flute. I love getting together with dear friends on December 31, enjoying a fabulous meal (for me, outstanding roast beef or leg of lamb exists to be enjoyed at the new year) and toasting each other’s success in the months to come. The promise and hope of an unknown, but possibly wonderful new year is so enticing and seductive. I savor the feeling that anything’s possible. (Baseball fans: the same emotion occurs again a few months later, at Opening Day)
Then there’s the best part. On New Year’s Day, I sleep until 10 or 11 in the morning, get up, make a big pot of coffee, and plant myself in my big comfy chair. The attire doesn’t vary much from year to year: slippers, sweatpants and t shirt or sweatshirt, remote in hand. I do NOT answer the phone for anyone I don’t want to talk to. I don’t leave the house. I don’t even comb my hair. Not a great visual, perhaps, but tough. It’s my holiday. All football, all day. It starts with the second-tier bowl games that don’t matter all that much but could be fun and exciting anyway…the Outback Bowl, the Gator Bowl, the Citrus Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Crystal Bowl, the Slightly Chipped Salad Bowl, etc. There’s a lot to keep track of. You need sustenance, too. You’ve gotta lay in a supply of noshing food. Nothing too fancy. Ribs and cole slaw or potato salad are ideal. Deli sandwiches. Roast beef and fixins left over from last night. Ritz crackers and peanut butter. Any champagne left? We have orange juice, right? Mimosas it is. Cider’s good, too. Once the afternoon’s gotten a good head of steam, it’s time for the Rose Bowl, “the granddaddy of them all”, as the great Keith Jackson used to call it. Even if it’s pitting two teams that aren’t foremost in my football constellation (Southern Cal and Illinois this year), I can always develop a rooting interest for or against one of them. (Fight On, USC!) After all, it’s the Rose Bowl, on that immaculately groomed field in Pasadena. The evening games are always the ones that you have to see, generally the Sugar or Orange or Fiesta Bowl. More often than not, my beloved Syracuse isn’t involved on January 1, but that doesn’t matter. I’m a sports fan, and January first is a day for sports fans. I watch all day, until it’s time to toddle back up to bed at 11:30 or so, totally content that I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing on my very favorite day of the year.
However you celebrate it, and even if you don’t, may you have a peaceful, safe and happy new year. Please don’t call me, though. I’ll be busy.
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Travel Nightmares R Us
The final line of the previous post was “What are the odds of getting home safely at the end of the week without more snow? Let's not bet on it.” Boy howdy, was I prescient. When the nasty storms are swirling about and you hear on the news “thousands of flights were delayed or cancelled today, due to the 43 feet of snow that fell on metro Whoville”, it’s hard to understand how that affects the travelers to and from Whoville, plus those who are just connecting through Whoville on their way to the North and South Poles. Lucky for you, I happen now to have a freshly baked story of what happened to me when I attempted to fly home to Whoville a few days ago after two long, intense weeks away from my Cindy Lou Who and the whole Who family.
I left my client in Chicago a little after noon on Thursday. I had a confirmed seat on American Airlines’ 7:30pm flight to Boston, but since I was done early with my training, I decided to head to O’Hare to get myself on an earlier flight. American told me that I could get on the standby list for the 4:30 flight, and I stood at least a fighting chance of making it. So that’s what I did. When I got to O’Hare, I checked in, and put myself on standby for the 4:30. At the outset, I was #8 on the standby list, but of course that would change. I knew that Boston was due to get 1-3 inches of snow, but P told me on my to O’Hare that we already had a good six inches of new snow on the ground, and it didn’t look like it was stopping soon. That was bad sign #1.
Not long after I got to the airport, the 4:30 flight was pushed back to 6:15, and the board showed the troubling word “NO” where the departure gate should be. That’s never a good sign. So I was looking at an indeterminate wait time. I checked into the American Airlines Admiral’s Club on a 1-day pass, so I could remain productive and comfortable while I was wondering if I should consider an O’Hare-area hotel for the night. Emails and calls with client and company staff, plus calls with P and my folks kept my spirits up for few hours. The staff at the Admiral’s Club weren’t optimistic, though. “The time has backed up to 7:45, and you’re now #22 on the list for your standby flight. Feel free to go to the gate and see if you get on, but don’t get your hopes up. You’re not going to make it”. In the meantime, the departure time for the flight I was ticketed for was backing up, too. The snow hadn’t completely stopped at Logan. It was just pausing off and on. So I went to the gate and waited. Amazingly, as I was resigning myself to going to the next flight’s gate, I got the next to last available seat. I happily settled in, feeling lucky. By now, I’d already been at O’Hare for about 7 hours, but the weird part hadn’t even yet started.
As we pulled away from the gate at around 8pm Central time (9pm Eastern), the pilot got on the PA and greeted us for the first of what would be dozens of times over the next number of hours with his first piece of bad news. Because of traffic flow problems out of Boston as a result of the snow, we were not going anywhere for another 50 minutes. We were already delayed from the getgo. This was delay #2. We ended up leaving only about a half hour later, and “saved” 20 minutes. We hoped the worst was over. Silly us. Kafka had boarded the flight, but we didn’t know it yet.
The flight was late, but reasonably uneventful until we got closer to Boston, and it started feeling like when we should have been descending, we were doing a lot of circling. That was because when we were supposed to be descending, we were doing a lot of circling. The pilot informed us that Boston traffic control needed us to wait awhile longer, since the ONE functional runway was repeatedly being closed down to plow the snow that was still falling in Boston. Remember the words “snowplow” and “runway”. We’ll return to them. At the time, the most pressing problem wasn’t actually the snowplow, but the pesky reality that we were running low on fuel, and we couldn’t wait as long as Logan wanted us to. So (this is where I expected him to say we were landing right away), we were instead going to land at Bradley Airport, outside Hartford, to get refueled. Oy. When that was done, the pilot said, we’d be able to fly directly to Logan and reach our destination. It sounded like a rather nice promise at the time. At 11:15pm, we landed at Bradley. I called P and said “Hi sweetie. The good news is we just landed. The bad news is we’ve landed in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.”. She laughed entirely too loudly and too long at that one. She said the American Airlines website was promising we’d be at Logan just after midnight. I knew that was, as P and I like to say, “NBL”, or Not Bloody Likely. Theoretically, we should have been able to get refueled, de-iced and back on our way within a half hour.
This was not a night for theory. We sat in the middle of the tarmac. And sat. Around midnight, the pilot came on again, sounding as exasperated by now as we all felt. It seems that after hours, Bradley has a grand total of one person who’s responsible for refueling, and he must have been busy doing something else, because he wasn’t on his way yet. It took sometime longer for us to finally get gassed up and de-iced. Almost two hours after touching down in Hartford, we were once again going to be on our way to Logan. It should be, the pilot assured us, a “19 minute flight”.
This was already a strange day, but suddenly Kafka made an appearance. We hadn’t left the plane. In fact, most of us, me included, hadn’t left our seats, as there was nowhere to go. Still, there must be some FAA requirement that a commercial plane is prohibited from taking off before the flight attendants go through the obligatory safety lecture, reminding you how to use a seat belt, and that smoking in the lavatory is a federal offense. We’d heard this spiel once already, hours ago at O’Hare. Just in case we had forgotten, though, they bored us one more time with things we already knew and didn’t care to hear again at this annoyingly late hour.
So at 1:05am, we took off. Some time later, the gentleman sitting next to me, a thoroughly delightful guy, complained that “this is the longest 19 minutes of my life”. “That’s because it’s already been more than a half hour”, I replied. At that point, it was time, once again, to hear from our old buddy, the captain. Kafka was by this time sitting in the co-pilot seat.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll notice we haven’t landed yet”. (No shit, Sherlock. We’d gathered that.) “It seems that luck is not on our side tonight.” (Ya THINK?) “The reason we haven’t landed is that a snowplow has gotten stuck at the end of the runway that we need at Logan, and they’ve shut down the runway temporarily to get the snowplow removed, so everyone’s in a holding pattern up here, until they get that out of the way”. (Uh huh. How much gas do we have?)
A few minutes later, it got curiouser and curiouser. Now, he explained that a SECOND snowplow had gotten stuck, and we had to wait for that one to get cleared. By this time I had determined he was just making up stuff as it hit him, and maybe he had lost track of where Logan was located. Perhaps we were actually circling Gander, Newfoundland, and he didn’t have the heart to tell us he was lost and didn’t know how to ask for directions.
Finally, he said that we could land, but it would be on a different runway, and our runway of destination “still had a bit of snow on it”, so that he was going to use the plane’s power brakes to “make sure we stopped, and stayed on the runway”, and as a result the landing might be “a little more abrupt” than we’d otherwise expect. The guy in the next seat gave voice to my ensuing thought “Is that a kind way of saying that we should put our heads between our legs and kiss our ass goodbye?”. However, our pilot, Kafka, assured us that we “had nothing whatsoever to worry about”. At this point, it’s two in the freakin’ morning, dude. I could have left my client site in Chicago at noon and driven home and I would have been closer than I was at that moment.
Amazingly, we actually did land at 2:15 am Boston time. I’ve had many, many worse landings. I’ve only had a handful of flights where the passengers broke into spontaneous applause, and this was the first one where I joined in. While I wasn’t technically home yet, at least I was finally back in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and on solid ground again. Of course, by solid ground, I mean Logan Airport, still holding the rank of damn near the worst major airport in the US. Baggage took 40 minutes to arrive, and as is Logan’s wont, was delivered on the wrong carousel, without any announcement cluing passengers in to that little glitch.
My car pulled up to my house in Maynard at 3:45 am Friday, a little over 14 hours since I had left the south side of Chicago. In another 3 hours, I’d need to be awake to get to the office for a morning meeting.
Yes indeed, I love travel. Happy holidays, and for those of you who don’t have to fly anywhere this winter, count your many blessings. I’m due back in Chicago on Sunday, January 6.
I left my client in Chicago a little after noon on Thursday. I had a confirmed seat on American Airlines’ 7:30pm flight to Boston, but since I was done early with my training, I decided to head to O’Hare to get myself on an earlier flight. American told me that I could get on the standby list for the 4:30 flight, and I stood at least a fighting chance of making it. So that’s what I did. When I got to O’Hare, I checked in, and put myself on standby for the 4:30. At the outset, I was #8 on the standby list, but of course that would change. I knew that Boston was due to get 1-3 inches of snow, but P told me on my to O’Hare that we already had a good six inches of new snow on the ground, and it didn’t look like it was stopping soon. That was bad sign #1.
Not long after I got to the airport, the 4:30 flight was pushed back to 6:15, and the board showed the troubling word “NO” where the departure gate should be. That’s never a good sign. So I was looking at an indeterminate wait time. I checked into the American Airlines Admiral’s Club on a 1-day pass, so I could remain productive and comfortable while I was wondering if I should consider an O’Hare-area hotel for the night. Emails and calls with client and company staff, plus calls with P and my folks kept my spirits up for few hours. The staff at the Admiral’s Club weren’t optimistic, though. “The time has backed up to 7:45, and you’re now #22 on the list for your standby flight. Feel free to go to the gate and see if you get on, but don’t get your hopes up. You’re not going to make it”. In the meantime, the departure time for the flight I was ticketed for was backing up, too. The snow hadn’t completely stopped at Logan. It was just pausing off and on. So I went to the gate and waited. Amazingly, as I was resigning myself to going to the next flight’s gate, I got the next to last available seat. I happily settled in, feeling lucky. By now, I’d already been at O’Hare for about 7 hours, but the weird part hadn’t even yet started.
As we pulled away from the gate at around 8pm Central time (9pm Eastern), the pilot got on the PA and greeted us for the first of what would be dozens of times over the next number of hours with his first piece of bad news. Because of traffic flow problems out of Boston as a result of the snow, we were not going anywhere for another 50 minutes. We were already delayed from the getgo. This was delay #2. We ended up leaving only about a half hour later, and “saved” 20 minutes. We hoped the worst was over. Silly us. Kafka had boarded the flight, but we didn’t know it yet.
The flight was late, but reasonably uneventful until we got closer to Boston, and it started feeling like when we should have been descending, we were doing a lot of circling. That was because when we were supposed to be descending, we were doing a lot of circling. The pilot informed us that Boston traffic control needed us to wait awhile longer, since the ONE functional runway was repeatedly being closed down to plow the snow that was still falling in Boston. Remember the words “snowplow” and “runway”. We’ll return to them. At the time, the most pressing problem wasn’t actually the snowplow, but the pesky reality that we were running low on fuel, and we couldn’t wait as long as Logan wanted us to. So (this is where I expected him to say we were landing right away), we were instead going to land at Bradley Airport, outside Hartford, to get refueled. Oy. When that was done, the pilot said, we’d be able to fly directly to Logan and reach our destination. It sounded like a rather nice promise at the time. At 11:15pm, we landed at Bradley. I called P and said “Hi sweetie. The good news is we just landed. The bad news is we’ve landed in Windsor Locks, Connecticut.”. She laughed entirely too loudly and too long at that one. She said the American Airlines website was promising we’d be at Logan just after midnight. I knew that was, as P and I like to say, “NBL”, or Not Bloody Likely. Theoretically, we should have been able to get refueled, de-iced and back on our way within a half hour.
This was not a night for theory. We sat in the middle of the tarmac. And sat. Around midnight, the pilot came on again, sounding as exasperated by now as we all felt. It seems that after hours, Bradley has a grand total of one person who’s responsible for refueling, and he must have been busy doing something else, because he wasn’t on his way yet. It took sometime longer for us to finally get gassed up and de-iced. Almost two hours after touching down in Hartford, we were once again going to be on our way to Logan. It should be, the pilot assured us, a “19 minute flight”.
This was already a strange day, but suddenly Kafka made an appearance. We hadn’t left the plane. In fact, most of us, me included, hadn’t left our seats, as there was nowhere to go. Still, there must be some FAA requirement that a commercial plane is prohibited from taking off before the flight attendants go through the obligatory safety lecture, reminding you how to use a seat belt, and that smoking in the lavatory is a federal offense. We’d heard this spiel once already, hours ago at O’Hare. Just in case we had forgotten, though, they bored us one more time with things we already knew and didn’t care to hear again at this annoyingly late hour.
So at 1:05am, we took off. Some time later, the gentleman sitting next to me, a thoroughly delightful guy, complained that “this is the longest 19 minutes of my life”. “That’s because it’s already been more than a half hour”, I replied. At that point, it was time, once again, to hear from our old buddy, the captain. Kafka was by this time sitting in the co-pilot seat.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll notice we haven’t landed yet”. (No shit, Sherlock. We’d gathered that.) “It seems that luck is not on our side tonight.” (Ya THINK?) “The reason we haven’t landed is that a snowplow has gotten stuck at the end of the runway that we need at Logan, and they’ve shut down the runway temporarily to get the snowplow removed, so everyone’s in a holding pattern up here, until they get that out of the way”. (Uh huh. How much gas do we have?)
A few minutes later, it got curiouser and curiouser. Now, he explained that a SECOND snowplow had gotten stuck, and we had to wait for that one to get cleared. By this time I had determined he was just making up stuff as it hit him, and maybe he had lost track of where Logan was located. Perhaps we were actually circling Gander, Newfoundland, and he didn’t have the heart to tell us he was lost and didn’t know how to ask for directions.
Finally, he said that we could land, but it would be on a different runway, and our runway of destination “still had a bit of snow on it”, so that he was going to use the plane’s power brakes to “make sure we stopped, and stayed on the runway”, and as a result the landing might be “a little more abrupt” than we’d otherwise expect. The guy in the next seat gave voice to my ensuing thought “Is that a kind way of saying that we should put our heads between our legs and kiss our ass goodbye?”. However, our pilot, Kafka, assured us that we “had nothing whatsoever to worry about”. At this point, it’s two in the freakin’ morning, dude. I could have left my client site in Chicago at noon and driven home and I would have been closer than I was at that moment.
Amazingly, we actually did land at 2:15 am Boston time. I’ve had many, many worse landings. I’ve only had a handful of flights where the passengers broke into spontaneous applause, and this was the first one where I joined in. While I wasn’t technically home yet, at least I was finally back in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and on solid ground again. Of course, by solid ground, I mean Logan Airport, still holding the rank of damn near the worst major airport in the US. Baggage took 40 minutes to arrive, and as is Logan’s wont, was delivered on the wrong carousel, without any announcement cluing passengers in to that little glitch.
My car pulled up to my house in Maynard at 3:45 am Friday, a little over 14 hours since I had left the south side of Chicago. In another 3 hours, I’d need to be awake to get to the office for a morning meeting.
Yes indeed, I love travel. Happy holidays, and for those of you who don’t have to fly anywhere this winter, count your many blessings. I’m due back in Chicago on Sunday, January 6.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Stormy Weather
So I’m back on the road again. I’ve long since stopped chronicling every single damn trip I take here at blahblahginger. It would bore me to write about each time I’m sentenced to Arkansas, upstate New York, or the Middle Of Nowhere, Ohio. And if it bores me, it will certainly bore the crap out of you.
This month, though, it’s Chicago. With all due respect to Drew Carey, Chicago rocks. I'm staying right downtown, in the middle of The Magnificent Mile. Restaurants and shopping and lights, oh my! However, winter doesn’t rock. Last week, that monster ice storm that crippled the state of Oklahoma grazed northern Illinois on its way toward the east coast, where it dumped around a foot of snow on the Boston area. Chicago lucked out. They were predicting a nasty, treacherous ice storm. While some of the far suburbs had a rough time, the city itself escaped with not much more than lots of very cold rain. Later in the week, though, I started hearing from P during our phone calls that there was a doozy of a winter nor’easter ready to blow into Boston over the weekend, precisely when I was planning to turn around and head back to Chicago for week two of my client project.
Only getting to spend around 36 hours at home with the wife and doggies before re-packing and leaving again is bad enough. Dealing with another nasty winter travel adventure makes it worse. P had a horrible time getting home from work on Sunday morning, and had to wait for a plow to come and touch our street for the first time. Her Mazda would have had no shot at negotiating nearly a foot of freshly fallen snow otherwise. Saturday night, hours before the first snowflake fell, American Airlines called to cancel my Sunday noon flight to Chicago. They rebooked me on the 4:30 pm flight, but I thought that was just a formality. I would have bet folding money that I wasn’t getting out until Monday morning at the earliest. Well, it’s good I didn’t make the bet. After the 10 inches of snow, and a light crust of sleet, it turned to just rain, and my flight to Chicago was one of very few all day to escape Logan nearly on time. The last little bit of good luck? When American switched me to the later flight, they also gave me a free upgrade to first class! So I made it back here to the land of Da Bulls and Da Bears without a hitch. And my hotel room is exactly across the hall from the one I had last week!
What are the odds of getting home safely at the end of the week without more snow? Let's not bet on it.
This month, though, it’s Chicago. With all due respect to Drew Carey, Chicago rocks. I'm staying right downtown, in the middle of The Magnificent Mile. Restaurants and shopping and lights, oh my! However, winter doesn’t rock. Last week, that monster ice storm that crippled the state of Oklahoma grazed northern Illinois on its way toward the east coast, where it dumped around a foot of snow on the Boston area. Chicago lucked out. They were predicting a nasty, treacherous ice storm. While some of the far suburbs had a rough time, the city itself escaped with not much more than lots of very cold rain. Later in the week, though, I started hearing from P during our phone calls that there was a doozy of a winter nor’easter ready to blow into Boston over the weekend, precisely when I was planning to turn around and head back to Chicago for week two of my client project.
Only getting to spend around 36 hours at home with the wife and doggies before re-packing and leaving again is bad enough. Dealing with another nasty winter travel adventure makes it worse. P had a horrible time getting home from work on Sunday morning, and had to wait for a plow to come and touch our street for the first time. Her Mazda would have had no shot at negotiating nearly a foot of freshly fallen snow otherwise. Saturday night, hours before the first snowflake fell, American Airlines called to cancel my Sunday noon flight to Chicago. They rebooked me on the 4:30 pm flight, but I thought that was just a formality. I would have bet folding money that I wasn’t getting out until Monday morning at the earliest. Well, it’s good I didn’t make the bet. After the 10 inches of snow, and a light crust of sleet, it turned to just rain, and my flight to Chicago was one of very few all day to escape Logan nearly on time. The last little bit of good luck? When American switched me to the later flight, they also gave me a free upgrade to first class! So I made it back here to the land of Da Bulls and Da Bears without a hitch. And my hotel room is exactly across the hall from the one I had last week!
What are the odds of getting home safely at the end of the week without more snow? Let's not bet on it.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
A high wire act
I have a friend named Mike Lowe (LOWE, not Lowell). Mike has a day job, but on the side he does something wholly remarkable. He is a devotee of the life, times and particularly the words of John F. Kennedy. Mike doesn’t do JFK impressions, like Vaughn Meador did so famously while JFK was in office. Mike is serious. He’s memorized many (most?) of Kennedy’s greatest speeches, from the Inaugural (“Ask not”) Address to the pivotal address at Rice University explaining the space program. If you saw HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, that’s the speech in the opening, featuring “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”. Mike has not only memorized them, he performs them with eerie accuracy, accent, tone and timing. He doesn’t just sound like JFK, he damn near becomes JFK. You have to see Mike in person to understand what I mean. He is scary good at what he does, and even if you’re a pedantic history buff as I am, and you know the exact phrasing of the speech, Mike more than passes muster. The guy is the real deal. He’s entertaining and thought-provoking, at the same time.
The reason I’m thinking about Mike now is that I saw him perform in Concord a number of months back. In Mike’s repertoire is one of my favorite JFK speeches, the one delivered to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960, in the thick of the campaign. At the time, people were terrified of a Roman Catholic in the White House, one who would take orders directly from the Pope in Rome. The text (and some video) of the speech can be found here. In this amazing address, JFK basically said “Look, this is my religion, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the job I’m seeking. Separation of church and state exists for a reason, and I’m all for it. People need to respect that. Nobody’s going to be giving me orders, from Rome or anywhere else. We’re a nation founded on religious freedom, so knock it off with the intolerant hypocrisy.” (he said it a lot better than that though, and he was far nicer in his wording…you really should read it) It was a courageous and difficult high wire act to pull off, and Kennedy did it in a way that nobody else could have. He was never seriously questioned on the religious issue again. The speech was sheer oratorical brilliance. As JFK’s no longer around to replicate it, I highly recommend you see Mike do it in person sometime. You’ll have tears in your eyes.
So what? So Mitt Romney is about to try that same high wire act now, only he isn’t taking the Kennedy stance, and he isn’t Mike Lowe. Romney’s going to attempt to sound presidential tomorrow morning at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, while explaining his views on religious liberty, tolerance and the Mormon faith. The problem is that if he really dives into the discussion as he’s promising, he’s going to get himself in trouble faster than you can say Salt Lake City. He’s going to have to explain to people why Mormons think that authentic Christianity disappeared in a puff of apostasy not long after Christ’s lifetime, and didn’t return until Joseph Smith had a series of remarkable dreams in the 19th century. Also, why Joseph Smith’s dreams and revelations, which became the Book of Mormon, and refute huge sections of the Bible, are the only true word of God, as dutifully recorded by Mr. Smith. There will also be the old “plural marriage” issue that the LDS church has been steadfastly trying to move away from for over 100 years, along with the messy racial doctrines of the LDS church, which up to the late 1970’s weren’t what many people would call enlightened. The dilemmas go on and on. Oh, and the LDS church doesn’t like being questioned. You don’t ask why. That’s important. If you do, you are not a true believer, and you risk excommunication. Mormons would make terrible Jews. We question everything, including why tonight is different from all other nights.
Up until very recently, for obvious reasons (as in, he’s not stupid), Romney wasn’t interested in giving this death-defying address. He’s only doing it now because his campaign has noticed that Governor Mike Huckabee, who’s a devout and vocal Baptist, is doing very, very well in Iowa, leading up to the caucuses next month. And Romney wants to “set the record straight”. To paraphrase the late, great Lloyd Bentsen, Mr. Romney, you’re no Jack Kennedy.
No matter how you slice it, this speech is a bad idea. It’s going to be a complete no-win scenario, because the more he starts talking about the LDS church, the less he’s going to be talking about his own candidacy, and the more he’s going to get mired in irrelevancies and religious quicksand. How about “I believe what I believe, everyone else has a constitutionally protected right to their beliefs, Ronald Reagan didn’t talk about his religion and I’m not going to discuss mine because it’s not germane to how I will govern as President, now let’s just move on,”? If he succeeds in explaining his faith to his own satisfaction, it’s still going to open up a can of worms by reporters who will say they’re just fact-checking, and Governor Romney, if you’re a member of a peace loving faith, could you please explain this wholesale slaughter of an entire wagon train, known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Mormon militia, in 1857? Distracting questions like that (or “could you explain again why you don’t have multiple wives?”) will consume some part of every subsequent discussion relating to Romney. It’ll be fair game, because he brought it up. If the speech bombs, he’s cooked right then and there. It will be about as bad as Ed Muskie’s tears, Tom Eagleton’s psychiatric record, or Gary Hart’s Monkey Business. Done. Finis. Game over, drive home safely.
If he’s smart, Romney will ask Mike Lowe to help him out in rehearsing JFK’s Houston speech. Or he’ll just ask Mike to perform it for him at the Bush Library. I don’t think that’s likely, though. I expect Mitt’s going to give it the old college try tomorrow, all by himself, and he’s going to regret it.
Still, I plan to check it out. I just love a good, old fashioned, political train wreck.
The reason I’m thinking about Mike now is that I saw him perform in Concord a number of months back. In Mike’s repertoire is one of my favorite JFK speeches, the one delivered to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960, in the thick of the campaign. At the time, people were terrified of a Roman Catholic in the White House, one who would take orders directly from the Pope in Rome. The text (and some video) of the speech can be found here. In this amazing address, JFK basically said “Look, this is my religion, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the job I’m seeking. Separation of church and state exists for a reason, and I’m all for it. People need to respect that. Nobody’s going to be giving me orders, from Rome or anywhere else. We’re a nation founded on religious freedom, so knock it off with the intolerant hypocrisy.” (he said it a lot better than that though, and he was far nicer in his wording…you really should read it) It was a courageous and difficult high wire act to pull off, and Kennedy did it in a way that nobody else could have. He was never seriously questioned on the religious issue again. The speech was sheer oratorical brilliance. As JFK’s no longer around to replicate it, I highly recommend you see Mike do it in person sometime. You’ll have tears in your eyes.
So what? So Mitt Romney is about to try that same high wire act now, only he isn’t taking the Kennedy stance, and he isn’t Mike Lowe. Romney’s going to attempt to sound presidential tomorrow morning at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, while explaining his views on religious liberty, tolerance and the Mormon faith. The problem is that if he really dives into the discussion as he’s promising, he’s going to get himself in trouble faster than you can say Salt Lake City. He’s going to have to explain to people why Mormons think that authentic Christianity disappeared in a puff of apostasy not long after Christ’s lifetime, and didn’t return until Joseph Smith had a series of remarkable dreams in the 19th century. Also, why Joseph Smith’s dreams and revelations, which became the Book of Mormon, and refute huge sections of the Bible, are the only true word of God, as dutifully recorded by Mr. Smith. There will also be the old “plural marriage” issue that the LDS church has been steadfastly trying to move away from for over 100 years, along with the messy racial doctrines of the LDS church, which up to the late 1970’s weren’t what many people would call enlightened. The dilemmas go on and on. Oh, and the LDS church doesn’t like being questioned. You don’t ask why. That’s important. If you do, you are not a true believer, and you risk excommunication. Mormons would make terrible Jews. We question everything, including why tonight is different from all other nights.
Up until very recently, for obvious reasons (as in, he’s not stupid), Romney wasn’t interested in giving this death-defying address. He’s only doing it now because his campaign has noticed that Governor Mike Huckabee, who’s a devout and vocal Baptist, is doing very, very well in Iowa, leading up to the caucuses next month. And Romney wants to “set the record straight”. To paraphrase the late, great Lloyd Bentsen, Mr. Romney, you’re no Jack Kennedy.
No matter how you slice it, this speech is a bad idea. It’s going to be a complete no-win scenario, because the more he starts talking about the LDS church, the less he’s going to be talking about his own candidacy, and the more he’s going to get mired in irrelevancies and religious quicksand. How about “I believe what I believe, everyone else has a constitutionally protected right to their beliefs, Ronald Reagan didn’t talk about his religion and I’m not going to discuss mine because it’s not germane to how I will govern as President, now let’s just move on,”? If he succeeds in explaining his faith to his own satisfaction, it’s still going to open up a can of worms by reporters who will say they’re just fact-checking, and Governor Romney, if you’re a member of a peace loving faith, could you please explain this wholesale slaughter of an entire wagon train, known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, by Mormon militia, in 1857? Distracting questions like that (or “could you explain again why you don’t have multiple wives?”) will consume some part of every subsequent discussion relating to Romney. It’ll be fair game, because he brought it up. If the speech bombs, he’s cooked right then and there. It will be about as bad as Ed Muskie’s tears, Tom Eagleton’s psychiatric record, or Gary Hart’s Monkey Business. Done. Finis. Game over, drive home safely.
If he’s smart, Romney will ask Mike Lowe to help him out in rehearsing JFK’s Houston speech. Or he’ll just ask Mike to perform it for him at the Bush Library. I don’t think that’s likely, though. I expect Mitt’s going to give it the old college try tomorrow, all by himself, and he’s going to regret it.
Still, I plan to check it out. I just love a good, old fashioned, political train wreck.
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