Not a care...

Gina's cats are demonstrating the emotion we feel after selling our house. This depiction is called "carefree." Later they'll pretend to be bloodthirsty Tigers who will devour any team that threatens the World Series.

Goodnight Herbert.

Big truck!

Boxes boxes boxes

Goodbye Herbert Ave.

We're moving out of our pretty house today.

Another one?

Is it me?

I've been busy these last couple weeks that I haven't been blogging. One of the things I've been doing is reading...and putting off reading.

See, I have this addiction. I have to buy books that have won awards. I read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, All the Names by Jose Saramago and Empire Falls by Richard Russo. Practically anytime I see a book that has won a Nobel or Pulitzer, I have to pick it up.

The latest, as I have mentioned, was the Known World by Edward P. Jones. It's a vividly imagined story about the little-known practice of when some freed slaves became slave masters. The topic is compelling, and the characters are intricately carved. But like my last failure, I can't get all the way into it. I'm about 187 pages into the Known World, and I'm really about to give it up.

(****Spoiler alert: In the 187 pages, the slave master died, a funeral was held, and now the wife has to decide whether she continues to live the life of a slave owner.)

Honestly, I don't see the point of all the characters and all their stories. Ugh. I should have my bachelor's degree in English revoked! Maybe if I gave it more time, I would see why all the stories of all the dozens of very detailed characters need to be told. But right now, I can't.

But it's so hard to put down a book. (Let alone two in a row. Sheesh!) My dad, in his typical decisive style, said, "Just stop reading it. It's like walking out on a bad movie." But is it? Bad movies don't sit on your book shelf with their shiny gold award stickers, mocking you, enticing you with the promise of beautiful phrases and heart-wrenching stories that change your life. Oh, the life of an addict!

Old time candy store

Well, apparently you can't go back in time. My mum and I visited this candy store on our path at the Wyandotte Art Festival, and I almost couldn't decide what to get. Baked beans? No. Lemonheads? Wax lips? Those swirlie sugary sticks that come in watermelon and strawberry and every other flavor?

Or my beloved zotz?

No, I chose my old standby -- the Swedish fish. The little plastic bag was about $2.69. (Retro candy ain't cheap.) Let's just say that I could only eat about four of them. And I tried again the next day to eat a couple more, but that is a lotta sugar.

So the Swedish fish landed in the trash. Poor fish. They are a nice memory that need to remain just that.

Whatever happened to the corner store?

An earlier post on a post got me to thinking about the corner store of yore.

When we were kids in Detroit, we had at least three terrific corner stores within a two-block diameter, I would say.

The best one was the Cass corner store across the street from our house. That's because it was, well, across the street. Cass also had the biggest back yard I've ever seen in a Detroit neighborhood (not counting the ritzy Boston-Edison or Palmer Park-type neighborhoods.) And he had the most beautiful grass you'd ever seen -- green as a Crayola crayon. Naturally, his sprawling, "don't-you-kids-dare-climb-over-the-fence" yard was also like a big trap just waiting to snag our stray baseballs and tennis balls. (We played a lot of street games, and a lot of our balls fell prey to that yard.)

Anyway, Cass had a great candy spread, and I remember often spending my allowance, which I seem to recall was a quarter at one time, at his store. (I don't know if Cass was the owner's last name, but we all called him Cass.) I liked things like Lemonheads or Boston Baked Beans or Pop Rocks.


The Dayton corner, around the corner from our house, had a good selection, too, but wasn't the store of choice (until I learned that a boy I *loved" in sixth grade lived on Dayton Street). The store around the other corner going right from our house on Central had the best offerings, if memory serves. I seem to recall that it was almost truly a candy-only store. (Maybe it had a few loaves of bread and milk as a facade, but I remember endless plastic containers of penny-candy.)

Remember those wax bottles filled with a strange sugary juice? I loved to buy those and then just chew on the wax. Along with Lemonheads, you could also find Appleheads. Yum. There were, of course, Bottlecaps, bubble gum cigarettes, licorice wheels (I looooooved those), burnt peanuts, Swedish fish (O, I adored those), wax lips, zotz (I still have to buy zotz whenever I find them), hot dog gum, hot tamales, and way more.

It was something fine to take your own hard-earned money and buy a plastic bag full of Swedish fish or burnt peanuts. I took forever just to decide how to spend my quarter because the candy sure didn't last long. But what a feeling. It's too bad so many of the corner stores have been eaten up by the big chains.

That was true city life.

Anyway, if you want to reminisce about all the candy of old, here is a great site.

Books, books, books

I wish I could be more like my brother (for many reasons), but an easy transformation would be gaining satisfaction from getting books from the library, like he does.

That's because I have a book addiction -- many of which I never read... or I start but can't seem to finish. But I'll say that there's nothing like the sound of cracking open the spine of a brand new book. And I do love my dog-eared pages.

But here are some that haven't been much cracked:

Paris to the Moon (A memoir that didn't quite have the same feeling as being there, as I'd hoped.)

Made in Detroit (I will read this. I will. But I've misplaced it it somewhere in the basement.)

Boiling Point (A book on "how politicians, big oil and coal, journalists, and activists have fueled the climate crisis." I will read this one, too, but first I had to get the reading bug back with some good page-turning fiction.)

Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling (The fascinating, dramatic tale of Michelangelo's efforts to paint the Sistine Chapel. I'm sure I'll get back to this. It really was a good read. Hmm. But when will I get back to it?)

Paris 1919 (Patrick confiscated this while I was trying to read it. I got through a good portion, but I've forgotten everything and would have to start from the beginning.)

Interpreter of Maladies (Nine short stories about the lives of people from India or immigrants from India. I read a few. Why couldn't I finish?)

Grapes of Wrath (I started this when I was reading the Cesar Chavez biography and thought it would have good synergy with the stories of Chavez's grape boycott. An excerpt: "The last rain fell on the red and gray country of Oklahoma in early May. The weeds became a dark green to protect themselves from the sun's unyielding rays.... " I do think it's criminal I haven't finished this book.)

Fast Food Nation (I read most of it, but just couldn't get to the very end.)

Guns, Germs and Steel (I used to love books about science so I recently bought this one. I started it then moved on to fiction. I think I'll get back to it when the reading bug is fully settled in my stomach, or head or wherever he resides.)

Anna Karenina (I have an English major so I feel obligated to buy the classics. And then they sit there.)

Keep in mind that I actually do finish some books. I really do. And I feel proud when I go to Barnes and Noble and see a number of the books I've tackled. But I also feel pained at how many I buy that collect dust. I guess I could have worse addictions. Right?

What to do...

...When you just can't get into a book? I mean, I'm trying, but I just can't take all the philosophical blather of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. What happened to books that just have an excellent plot like Lolita, Beloved, End of the Affair, or In Cold Blood? Or even just stupendous writing like Middlesex?

It's likely that Milan Kundera is just a genius whose writing style can't be comprehended by lightweights like me. But let me just say that I've tried on three different occasions to tackle the tale of the womanizing Tomas, a Czech surgeon forced to leave the country because of a Russian invasion, and the complex, tender, nightmare-plagued woman who loves him.

But I can't get into it. I don't want to constantly be interrupted by philosophical pontificating when I'm reading a novel. Is that too much to ask?

Problem is: I have a bad habit of trying to finish the books I start.

But I have an antidote. I bought another book today in hopes of curing myself of my nasty time-wasting habit. Let's hope The Known World doesn't disappoint.

Tea at Cotswold Cottage

Mmm. Scones, Devonshire cream and raspberry tea.

Historic baseball at Greenfield Village

We decided to have a quiet weekend, feeling like we needed to recover from our vacation. After touring funky Ferndale Saturday (more on that later), we decided to have a really lazy Sunday.

The highlight was seeing an historic baseball game at Greenfield Village in Dearborn. It was Lah-De-Dahs against the Rochester Grangers. The game was a blowout with the Grangers pummeling the Lah-De-Dahs 42-12, we were told. (We stayed through the seventh inning.) We were rooting for the Lah-De-Dahs -- the home team. Bummer!

How in the heck did the game get so out of hand, you ask? It's because of those damn 1867 rules.

Some highlights:

1) No gloves

2) Underhand pitches

3) When a hitter makes it to a base at about the same time that the baseman tags him, it's not the ump who makes the call. The hitter and the baseman talk it out and come to an agreement whether the hitter was safe or out. "It's a gentleman's game," one of the hitters told us.

4) If a struck ball lands in fair territory and rolls foul, the ball is fair.

5) A ball caught on the fly or ON THE FIRST BOUNCE puts the hitter out. (However, some people viewed the "first bounce" rule as childish.)

The best part of the game was that the crowd sits close enough on the field that balls are consistently hit into the group. There was a lot of ducking for cover.

Oh, and I got three historic baseball cards from the Rochester Grangers: Jerry "Lefty" Wynne, Bob "Anvil" Wynne and Stephen "Curly" Dawley. I didn't see the Lah-De-Dahs handing out cards.

If either of the two home teams have cards, I've got to get those of Josh "Ox Cart" Allen, Christian "Triple Stout" Fernholz or Jeffrey "Knuckles" Corliss.

Too bad the Cincinnati Kickin' Kincades soccer team didn't make cards. Wouldn't it have been great to look over the stats from Jen "Detroit Dynamo" Mrozowski or Pat "Leg Breaker" Murphy or Gina "Mac Attack" Daugherty or Paul "Redwood" Rindfleisch? Yeah, those would've been collector's items some day fetchin' tens of dollars on eBay, no doubt.