Junior high Christmas caroling with Jay Buck: Deck the halls with buckets of slaw

Jay, Aaron and I practiced singing the Christmas carols a few minutes in Jay’s basement before heading out into the freezing neighborhood. We were terrible, three pre-pubescent boys with changing voices trying to belt out “Jingle Bells,” “Joy to the World “ and “Silent Night.” We gave up midway through each song and said it would sound better outside where there weren’t walls to echo our voices back to us. We didn’t really care how we sounded as long as we got paid, though. One of us had heard old ladies would give money to Christmas carolers.  

            We bundled up in our Starter coats, donned our winter caps and grabbed the printouts of lyrics and hit the streets around dusk. There was no snow yet, but it was very cold. We walked around the State Streets, looking for houses where generous old people might live. We could usually spot an old person’s house because they were pristinely kept.

As we walked, I voiced my skepticism that anyone would give us money. I had never heard of such a thing.

            “People do it all the time,” Jay Buck said. “Don't be such a pussy, Yanni.”

            “Well, should we ask them if they want us to sing?” I asked.

            “No way,” Jay said. “That gives them the opportunity to say no.”

            “Yeah, I say we just start singing,” Aaron said.

            So it was settled: Once a door opened, we’d just launch into a carol. I was sure we’d be chased away from all the front doors by old women with brooms.

            We walked the winding streets until finding a ranch we all felt was suitable. The lights were on, so that was a good sign. Jay knocked on the door and we waited, standing three abreast on the lawn with our sheet music. There was movement in the big bay window where a television beamed behind curtains. Someone was getting up from a chair and coming to the door.

            My nerves pulsed. Were we really doing this?

            An older woman with gray hair and gold earrings opened the door. From the gust of must that hit our faces, it must have been the first time in weeks.

            “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way!” we started, our voices off-key and wildly cracking. “O what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh. Hey!”

            We were out of tune and couldn’t keep a harmony. We skipped over some of the words and would sometimes be singing different lyrics at the same time.

            I was waiting for the woman to turn around and call the police. But then something miraculous happened. We kept singing and the woman actually smiled. She called her husband over and they stood in the doorway with their arms around each other’s waists while we sloppily made it through “Jingle Bells” and “Deck the Halls.”

When we were finished, the old man reached into his back pocket, pulled out a giant, thick wallet, peeled off a five-dollar bill and handed it to Jay, who was eagerly reaching for it.

            “Thank you, boys. That was lovely,” the woman said.

            I was floored.

            “Thank you!” we cried back in unison as we hustled away from the house.

            “I told ya!” Jay said joyously, holding up the fin for us all to see before cramming it into his pocket. "Come on. Let’s find another house."

            We went to about a dozen in the course of an hour and a half. I was slightly redeemed when an impatient middle-aged woman slammed the door in our faces before we could get to the second line of the song. But many of the people – even some younger folks our parents’ age – slid us cash for our caroling.

By the end of the night, I think we had amassed about thirty or forty bucks. We decided to go to Daly’s, an old 1950s drive-in burger place and Livonia landmark that was down the block from my house. We usually couldn’t afford it and never went there, instead opting for much cheaper fast food places like McDonald’s or Wendy’s. But now we were flush with cash and even though it took about a half hour to walk there in the cold, it was worth it.

Our faces were red from being outside. It felt good to be inside the warmth of the restaurant. Steam rose from a buffet in the middle of the room, fogging up the sneeze guard. We sat a few feet away from it in a booth at a checkered table and ordered their delicious hamburgers, which came with a choice of salad or coleslaw.

            “I'd like a bucket of slaw, please,” Jay Buck told the waitress.

            "Excuse me?" the waitress asked. She was old enough to have worked there when it first opened in 1959 and wasn’t amused by three junior high kids with a pocket full of money.

            Aaron and I thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard and couldn’t help but laugh.

            “I want a big old bucket of slaw,” Jay said.

            “So, you want the coleslaw?” she asked.

            “As long as it comes in a bucket.”

            “I’m putting you down for the coleslaw,” she said, shaking her head.

            She turned her head to me. I also ordered a hamburger.

            “Salad or coleslaw?”

            “I’d also like a bucket of slaw,” I said.

            We three sniggered and the waitress sighed, wrote down the order in the green pad.

            Aaron also ordered a hamburger and a bucket of slaw. The waitress shook her head one last time and went to the kitchen to put the order in.

            We erupted in laughter when she left.

            “I only eat my slaw outta buckets!” Jay Buck announced.

Jay Buck: An L-Town Elegy

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A new year, a new life

The classic image of the New Year is a baby.
A smiling, cherubic baby with a 2012 banner around its body, signifying the promise of the year to come.
This year, it won’t be so figurative for me.
That’s right, in 2012 -- around the first week of March, to be specific -- my wife and I will be welcoming our first baby into the world.
Already I’m worried. Terrified, really, about hundreds of things.
You hope everything with the delivery goes OK. You hope for ten fingers and toes. You hope for no complications and good health.
Even though Unnamed Baby Girl hasn’t seen the light of the world, I’m feeling the primitive urges that I’m sure date back to our cave dwelling ancestors: to make sure she is safe and happy.
And to buy her lots of toys.
Most of all, I worry about the things I can control, like whether or not I’m up to snuff for daddyhood. There’s things I’ve got to teach this kid, but without passing on any of my own bad habits which include, but are definitely not limited to, excessive snacking, sofa lounging and bar stool sitting.
I’m guessing all these worries are just the beginning, and that I have a long way to go.
“You never stop worrying,” is the common refrain.
Superseding all the frets and fears, though, is the joy.
Unnamed Baby Girl has had me in a tizzy from the moment I learned of her, even if I had just walked across the entire county.
This past summer, my brother, one of our buddies and I hiked across Manistee County. I eventually wrote a three-part series for the newspaper about our backpacking adventures.
But I left out a crucial tidbit. The day we hiked into Stronach, we were picked up and whisked back to my house where all three of us dirty, dog-tired fellows took showers. I hadn’t seen Meredith, my wife, for three days, but she didn’t let on that there was big news brewing in her uterus just yet.
She had known for days, but didn’t want to tell me over the phone.
She accompanied us to the Bungalow, where the dudes and I dug in on some much-needed cheeseburgers. It wasn’t until after the fellows left Manistee later that afternoon and Meredith and I were alone at home that her face started shining.
I was exhausted and only had thoughts of climbing on the couch and nursing the blisters on my feet.
Baby Girl had different plans. Meredith stopped me in the kitchen.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” Meredith said. “I’m pregnant.”
Despite my exhaustion, I was ecstatic.
I still am.
And I know raising her up right will be much more exhausting than a three-day hike. I still have to learn how to change a diaper, heat up a bottle and bathe a baby. I still have to learn how to operate on limited hours of sleep.
She will cry. She will scream. She will run. She will play. She will whine. She will be sassy. She will learn to tell jokes. She will learn to dance. She will try to wear unsuitable clothes. She will have suitors showing up at the door.
She will grow up and I can’t wait to be there for all of it.
And, future suitors of 2027, do be aware that Unnamed Baby Girl’s daddy knows how to use a shotgun.

A suspense bridge: Leaving my man-card in the U.P.

Like every good American man, I ain’t afraid of nothing.
I eat steaks, drink whisky and scoff at danger.
If I get a nail in my hand, I take a slug from the flask and pull the nail out with my teeth.
And silently bear the pain.
No crying. No bellyaching.
I’ve always tried to embody Hemingway’s dictum: “grace under pressure.”
Except when it comes to bridges. And, well, doing anything that would actually involve putting a nail in my hand. Give me a hammer and I’ll try pounding with the wrong end.
We all have our fears and phobias. I happened to suffer from a mild case of gephyrophobia, a fear of driving over bridges.
Don’t ask me how to pronounce it.
I failed to mention this to my wife this past weekend when we made a trip to the Upper Peninsula. Just as we reached the electric road signs that tell you to tune into the radio station for bridge information, she noticed a slight change in my driving demeanor.
“You OK?” she asked.
I didn’t tell her about my increased heartbeat rate. My dizziness. My cold and clammy hands.
“I’m fine,” I said. “Great.”
“Greetings from the Mackinac Bridge Authority,” a robot voice on the radio said. “We are experiencing very heavy winds today. Due to extremely frightening winds, we are escorting special vehicles across the bridge. Special vehicles include trucks hauling trailers, semis and anything driven by John Counts. If these types of special vehicles are not escorted across, the will surely plunge to a cold, horrifying death off the side of the bridge.”
That’s not what the radio said, of course, but that’s how I heard it. Then the main towers came into view, a bewilderingly 552 feet above water. The road itself is 200 feet high at midspan.
I shivered in my seat.
That’s a long way to fall.
I saw it all clearly my head: my car slowly moving across the bridge when a huge gust of wind comes whipping up from the Straits, lifting up the car and dropping it into the drink.
“Are you sure you’re OK?” my wife asked. “You look like you’re going to snap the steering wheel off.”
“I don’t like driving over bridges.”
There it is was. My confession. Now, my wife would know me for the weakling I am. But it’s been this way since I was a kid. The sight of the Mighty Mac has always made me dizzy in the same way that staring up the side of a skyscraper does in a big city.

It reminds me of how small we are, I suppose. That we are so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Which is probably why we build giant buildings and bridges to begin with -- to assert our domination.
Well, in regards to the Mighty Mac, I am the one that’s dominated -- with fear. I like to think it makes me humble.
I was ramrod straight, hand at two and ten o’clock on the steering wheel -- the way they teach you in driver’s training -- as I ascended the bridge.
My wife snapped a picture.
“Turn it off!” I screamed.
She giggled at me and put the camera away.
I stayed locked into the same driving position the entire five miles across the bridge. They call them suspension bridges, but I think of it as a bridge of suspense. Now, when you’re driving across the bridge, you can either go grate or rail. Both are not preferable. Driving in the outer lane, and you’re that much closer to the edge. Drive on the grate, and one of them is liable to come loose and drop you right through the road. Down and down 200 feet.
I always choose the grate because that seems slightly less likely to happen.
As I reached the toll on the U.P. side, I exhaled a giant sigh of relief. I smiled. I had made it over one more time without plunging to my death.
“Maybe we can take the ferry on the way back,” I said. “That might be fun.”
“They don’t have a ferry anymore. How about I just drive?” my wife said.
I didn’t argue with her.

Working stiffs: The Great American Job is dead and gone

Someone who is unemployed is watching television in their parents’ basement right now.
There are thousands of them. And they’re not young anymore. They’re in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.
They don’t have a job even though they’re dying to work.
In Bay City when I was a kid, it was common for the older guys in high school to blow off studying because they would just go work at “The Chevy” when they turned 18.
Now, kids in that town -- and towns across the country -- are probably lucky to get a fast-food job upon graduating high school, college, even graduate school. And, since there’s a recession on, they’re probably told they’re lucky to have it.
These McJobs will keep an entire generation in their parents’ basements if something doesn’t change.
The idea that you’ll be able to prosper in this country as long as you work hard just isn’t true anymore. The Great American Job is dead and gone.
The Great American Job once meant enough income to comfortably pay for a house (that you own), a car or two, food and sundries and maybe enough left over to save a little for retirement or college for the kids. If you were lucky, you’d even have enough for a vacation once a year.
Is that too much to ask?
In the manufacturing sector, jobs have been replaced by robots and shipped overseas. Try and apply for what manufacturing jobs that are left armed with a high school degree and you’ll discover the competition is fierce, and not with people just trying to get started in the workforce, but folks who have been there for decades.
In the professional world, bachelor degrees used to mean something a generation ago, but now they are the equivalent of a high school degree. A lot of people have them, but it doesn’t guarantee any opportunities. For highly competitive jobs, you need a half dozen internships and to graduate near the top of your class. That’s great for those do-gooders, but what happens to the vast people in the middle who are average? Should they be relegated to sitting in their parents’ basement watching television?
So what is the best way to create jobs for these people?
That’s all I keep hearing from Washington. And I honestly think no one has the answer, including myself. The government shouldn’t be the sole creator of jobs, but neither should private industry. We don’t want the Government to get its fingers too intertwined in the means of productions. We all saw what happens when ideas like that are implemented. A colorless, fearful world of repression.
But what these Tea Party, limited government yahoos don’t want to acknowledge is that Europeans already had an arguably government-less economy without any regulations back in the days of oligarchies, when the nobility ruled over a peasantry.
Do we want America to resemble this? A mass class of peasants who serve up Frostys or help swipe debit cards at the gas station?
A very small middle class that is successful only based on their loyalty to the nobility?
And then the few at the top controlling all the wealth of our nation?
Without regulations, this New American Nobility would pay you less and expect more work because that’s what makes the highest profit, and making the highest profit is the basic guiding principle of business.
Whatever they figure out in Washington, I hope it’s a mixture of both. And it better be quick. The pessimism has grown strong. We need to dig ourselves out now.
Or pretty soon we won’t have any basement to go home to.

Another Ice Age or Dark Age?

As a child, I used to go to the Outer Banks of North Carolina this time of year on family vacations.
We had planned on going again this year -- last week, in fact. I’m sure glad we didn’t.
Anyone with a television or an Internet connection knows about how Hurricane Irene swept up the East Coast and hit the OBX pretty hard.
Whenever wild weather happens, we can’t help but think the worst: global warming. Well, that’s what you call it if you’re a hippie. If you’re on the other side, it’s called climate change.
See, the far left thinks all business should cease until we can restore the planet to what it was like before the dodo bird became extinct.
The other side thinks global warming is B.S., that either the scientific data is wrong, or that the scientists are in a vast conspiracy to impose such an insidious belief on the masses. If the weather is changing, the argument goes, it could just be natural.
So, is it the beginning of a new Ice Age, as a certain faction of Republicans would have you believe, or is the far right trying to usher us back into the Dark Ages?
“I think we’re seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists that are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change,” said Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry in an Associated Press story recently.
Maybe Perry is listening to the “scientists” who designed the Creation Museum in Kentucky that has dinosaurs running alongside Jesus and other characters from the Bible. The far right’s definitely not known for its artistic prowess, but they also seem pretty deficient on that whole science subject too.
But you are the people they are trying to sell on these ideas. Do you believe them?
If you don’t believe in the science of global warming, ask yourself why?
Take out all the specifics, the details, and it comes down to this question: Do you think human beings have an impact on Earth?
If you live in a house and don’t open the windows for years, what would it smell like in there?
If you never had any maintenance done on your car, how would it run in a few years?
Do you really think billions of people crawling all over the planet doesn’t have some sort of effect?
It’s not political. There’s no conspiracy. It’s common sense.
I’ll leave the rest to the scientists the far right scoffs at, the same discipline that brought you such crowd-pleasing favorites as penicillin, airplanes and television.
In this regard, the far right is trying to drag us back into the Dark Ages where people were burned at the stakes for having any sort of opinion that ran counter to the Church. Now, instead of the Church, there’s Big Oil and every other interest that is tied to burning fossil fuels.
Is it too progressive or liberal to believe in science?
I hope I can still be considered a moderate if I think that Newton’s theories on gravity are OK. I hope I’m not considered a hippie if I believe the Earth is, in fact, round.
When it comes down to it, if you’re having a heart attack or stroke, do you want the science of rational folks who believe in evolution and global warming, or do you want a faith-based doctor -- I think they call them preachers -- at your side?

“All changed, changed utterly”: A view from Chicago on 9/11

Ten years ago I was 23 and living like most do at that age: desperate, impoverished, wildly irresponsible.
I had graduated from Wayne State University months earlier, in July, with a hopeless English degree. I could theorize with the best of them about the novels of French writer Albert Camus or quote from poems by William Butler Yeats, but I couldn’t land a decent job.
Throughout college, I had alternately lived with my parents in the burbs or on-campus in Detroit. After graduation, I followed my brother and then-girlfriend to Chicago. The girlfriend was still in school and lived in a sprawling, three-bedroom Northside apartment. I moved in, the only dude among three ladies.
I was ready to light the world on fire.
But so were the terrorists.
I truly hustled to find any kind of work I could. I scoured the Want Ads in the Chicago Reader, the town’s alternative weekly. I made dozens of calls.
Only one called back: The Chicago Opera Theater.
I had worked as a telemarketer during my teenage years, experience that landed me an interview. I hated the thought of selling, but it wasn’t like I’d be hawking something sleazy like male enhancement pills over the phone, I’d be helping to support the arts.
I got the job. My first day would be September 12.
On September 10, knowing that I was starting a new job and I wouldn’t have the luxury of spending my days watching television through a haze of cigarette smoke all day, I celebrated my newfound employment deep into the night.
Probably a little too late.
I was still asleep when the first plane hit.
It was a collision that changed my generation. And there I was. Asleep. Hungover.
I didn’t have a cell phone yet, so the call came in on the landline. I’m surprised it wasn’t being tied up by the gossiping gals.
It was my brother.
“Turn on the TV now.”
“Dude, I’m sleeping,” I managed to utter.
“I’m serious.”
Out in the apartment’s “family room,” which had the habit of attracting stray party people at anytime of the week, the TV was already on. Four or five people sat around on old, second or third-hand sofas and love seats watching the news.
I don’t remember who was there anymore. But I do remember seeing the second plane hit.
For a generation of kids who thought that “everything had been done before,” this was something that dropped all of our aimless jaws.
“What the ... !” we collectively said.
Chicago has big buildings, especially the Sears Tower. We dared not leave the apartment for the rest of the day. Patriotism, something not typical in the grungy Northside apartment, became fervent.
As Yeats said, “All changed, changed utterly.”
We were glued to the television, watching the world utterly change. All those needless deaths were sickening. The reverberations are still being felt. I would argue that the economy still hasn’t fully recovered. Nothing has ever been the same since that day.
All changed, changed utterly.
The next day, when I had to start the new gig as a telemarketer, I figured they would send us home, but they didn’t. For a few hours, I made calls asking people if they wanted to buy tickets to see Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte.”
Most people hung up.
One guy said, “Do you know what just happened yesterday?”
I apologetically said I did and told him I was just doing my job.
He, too, hung up. The supervisor finally let us go home.
And we all did. But they weren’t the same homes anymore, all across the country.
All was changed, changed utterly.