i have not made many entries this past week: been a little down; still haven’t figured out this not-working thing, but i’m getting better. And this made me feel good. 

Sometime around 1942, Jimmy and Estelle Jewell bought a coffee table to go in the living room of the house they had just bought on Castle Heights Avenue. It was one of two adjacent homes just recently built. They were the last two houses on the block between West Main and West Spring. There was no other homes to the south until one reached a farm house or two past Leeville Pike (as i remember my father telling me).

The table was not a very large piece of furniture with an oval top twenty-eight inches in length, eighteen inches wide, and eighteen inches high. The top was glass, rimmed with a wood frame. The bottom had carved legs. It wasn’t very ornate, but it was pretty, and more importantly, it was serviceable.

It was replaced sometime in the 1950’s i believe. Mother had a local carpenter make her a much larger table with matching end tables. They had marble inlaid tops and were much more elegant and more serviceable.

i am trying to recall where they moved the old table, and they may have moved it into the attic off the upstairs bedrooms. i can no longer call my mother and researcher extraordinaire to set me straight. Now, i call Martha and Joe, my younger sister and brother because they may not have the incredible memory our mother had, but they remember a lot more than me. But it’s late here in the Southwest Corner, and it’s three hours later in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Queechee, Vermont, so i will have to rely on my faulty recall.

Regardless, when Mother died sixteen months ago, the three siblings and their families closed down the Jewell estate accumulated over more than three-quarters of a century. Somehow, i ended up with that small coffee table.

The cane which had held the glass top in place in the frame had broken into pieces, and the wood (i am not a furniture guy, so it’s a guess, but i think it might be cherry) had gathered some scratches and quite a bit of dirt.

i considered stripping it by getting someone to dip it. i have refinished several pieces of furniture in my past, but the stripping agents now are not as powerful, thank you, EPA, and my latest attempts to strip something myself has not turned out well. Finally this weekend, i went out in the workshop side of the garage, pulled out the table, did a jury rig on the cane to hold the glass in place, did a thorough cleaning, and finally used a furniture restorer.

The table will eventually need a more professional makeover. i decided i wanted to try and get it back to its original state as closely as i could.

Prior to this weekend, my chair in the family room had a glass and metal stand about ten-inches square. This was to hold the television remote control, my glass, my phone, my reading glasses, my book or magazine currently being read, and any snacks, cookies, etc.

Now, my parents’ coffee table is sitting by my chair. As it once was, it is serviceable.

i kind of like it.

Sometimes in the strangest of places and the strangest of times, i start thinking of a moment many years before, something sticking in my mind suddenly coming to the fore on its own, and i marvel at how it surfaced in my mind unprovoked.

Two nights ago as i just sat and watched a baseball game, this thought about my grandmother wringing a chicken’s neck came unannounced into my head. Oh, my sister and i have talked about the event several times in the past, but it just popped up with the score tied, two men on base, and a 1-1 count, and i was amazed.

When Maureen read this poem at breakfast this morning, she said she remembered her dad wringing the neck of a chicken in their home in Lemon Grove, a suburban neighborhood east of downtown San Diego. i wondered how many days in jail my grandmother and father-in-law would have spent had PETA been around back then. Probably some children protection agency would have gone after them too.

Crazy.

Chicken

i suppose it happened several times,
perhaps many,
certainly many times in the years before
the beginning of me;
but in the only time i remember
was when i was wanting to be seven,
the event was vivid to me,
can see it in my mind today
when Granny was fixin’ chicken for dinner.

i do not know where Granny got that chicken
but
suspect her brother-in-law
brought it in from his farm’s henhouse
where his wife gathered the eggs each morning around sunrise
for fixin’ breakfast of
eggs and bacon and grits and biscuits and buttermilk
from the early morning henhouse gathering,
the larder where they kept the cured bacon from their hogs,
the goods under the white linen cloths on the screened-in porch table,
and the churn;
and him a carrying that ill-fated chicken
in the former rumble seat of his Model A
which he used to haul his produce to the farmer’s market
and
where his carried his fox hounds to the hunts in the woods around the county,
where his cadre of “hunters”
would loose the hounds, calling them with their horns,
literally horns of their former cows,
and
sipped whiskey by the fire while they listened to their hounds on the trail;

but
the one time i saw this oft-repeated event of yore
Granny weighed in just shy of ninety pounds
but
it was a feisty, no-nonsense, loving with all of her heart, kind of ninety pounds;
and
she took that chicken, tucked firmly under her arm
where it could not get loose and run away,
down the back porch steps into the yard;
it was a task for her,
fixin’ dinner,
that’s all;

and
we kids out there playing barefoot in shorts
gathered round with curiosity,
before
Granny grabbed that chicken by the neck
and
snapped its head off
like Lash Larue snapping his whip for the good of western folks,
or
the fly fisherman whipping his rod to soar the fly into the shallows,
or
the Ninja slashing his enemy’s throat with his fine-honed blade,
but then,
we children watched in amazement
as the decapitated chicken ran around the yard,
flipping and flopping,
a body’s unfeeling response to a violent death;
being children we laughed in amazement;

later,
i helped pluck the dead bird,
and may, though thankfully i don’t remember,
have dug in and tossed out the gizzard and guts,
and
that night for dinner,
we had some of the best fried chicken, i’ve ever eaten:

sometimes i feel like i’m much like that decapitated chicken
from seventy years ago,
running around flipping and flopping,
a response with no thought,
yeah, no head, no brains;
i know a lot of people who act like that.

i wrote this at the end of my degree chasing at Middle Tennessee. It was certainly inspired by, if not homage to e.e. cummings.

tired.
shot all to hell
like a riddled card
against the tree
attacked
by Wild Bill’s six-shooter;
weather abates:
sultry heat,
hazy skies
demand rain.
but when will it fall
down
in pellets,
which riddle
the lawn like that gunshot
penetrated
pasteboard?

Yesterday was e.e. cummings’ 101st birthday. i learned that from yesterday’s “Writer’s Almanac” and checked a quote from him on the “Brooklyn Arden” website. i discovered his poem “Buffalo Bill” in a literature class at Middle Tennessee. i have admired his work ever since and read his poems frequently for inspiration. The quote i checked is below. i think i like him even more having read this:

The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for mostpeople—it’s no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. . . . You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs. – e.e. cummings

…and that poem:

This is a continuation of my lead up to a sports commentary, which i may never finish. My time at The Watertown (NY) Daily Times was a wonderful snapshot of my strengths. I was a very good sports editor and writer. I think i can still be good, but very, very different from what is mostly out there now when it comes to sports commentary. That job interviewee in 1972 solidified my belief in what i thought sports journalism should and shouldn’t be.

I should add that my decision to return to the Navy was mostly financial, but i loved my 15 years at sea, and the shore tours, NROTC Unit at Texas &M and Director of leadership, management and equal opportunity programs for the West Coast and Pacific Rim (with offices at the Naval Amphibious School, Coronado) were pretty good as well.

I love both the sea and sports writing. I made my decisions based on what i thought was right for my family and me at the time. I do not regret those decisions at all.

The background information continues:

As the sports pages at The Watertown Daily Times were beginning to take the shape i envisioned, my friend and the assistant publisher (i think that was his title; “Yanch,” as we called him in college, was the publisher in waiting) John Johnson approached me with the idea of going “cold type,” the initial computer publishing system. We agreed to publish the national sports news in the new cold type and the local news in the old “hot type” system.

The advertising sections of the paper had already migrated to cold type. The old guard in the newsroom were wary and reluctant to change. i readily agreed to give it a try.

It began well. i laid out the first sports page for cold type, inserting the AP news stories from the wires, editing, and writing the headlines. The second page was in hot type for the local news. The following pages would be extra hot type for local sports overflow and cold type for whatever space was available for national sports and commentary.

There was one problem. That new fangled computer driven system could kick out more sports news in one day than i had ever experienced. This was not so evident the first couple of days. I got the AP’s big news and the photographs, laid it out, and produced about three pages of newsprint on national sports; i laid out and filled up the second and third pages with local sports and ads, and it looked like it was going to work out just fine.

The size of the sports section then varied depending on the ads and the newsprint required to allow them to fit well into that edition. The sports section had been about one and one-half pages of newsprint. By the time i left, the section averaged over four-pages of newsprint daily.

Then came the first Thursday with the new system. For those who have not worked in the newspaper business, Thursday is grocery day. That’s the day all of the grocery ads are put in the paper. That means you have to have more newsprint, so the paper looks like a newspaper instead of four or five grocery ads. The new cold type system gave me the ability to fill up the space around ads. On the first Thursday of the new sports pages, the sports department, aka me, was overwhelmed. The paper that Thursday ended up with nine pages of sports section, something never even approached before. But there was only one of me to gather the sports articles and photos, lay out the nine pages, write the headlines, edit the articles (because even the giant wire services make mistakes), and get it to the printing press.

The deadline was 10:00. Somewhere around 9:15, i realized there was no way i was going to get my nine pages to the printing press by deadline. I ran to the general manager’s office and told him the paper was going to be at least a half-hour late because of the new system. He thanked me and said my alerting him would allow him to get the pressmen, the trucking staff, and the delivery boys ready to work faster than usual. I remember feeling good i had alerted him but bad i had missed deadline.

We got the paper out a little bit late but with not a great deal of disruption to the delivery system.

At the daily post-production meeting, the general manager stood at the front and addressed the editors and key personnel. “I want you to know Jim averted a potential disaster today by alerting me he was not going to make his deadline. This was understandable considering the amount of newsprint he had to manage for today, but him notifying me allow our delivery process to adjust and minimize the damage.

“I have been working here for over twenty years. I want all of you to know this is the first time I’ve ever experienced a staffer letting me know of a problem he caused in advance.

“I hope all of you learn from Jim’s example. He saved us a lot of money and anguish today by giving us a heads up, even though he was admitting to missing the deadline.”

As you can see, i’m still proud of that.

After a couple of months, it was apparent i needed full time help, and we advertised for hiring a sports reporter. I screened a couple of résumés and rejected them. Then one with some potential came pass by desk. I called the guy and set up an appointment. The next afternoon after the paper had been put to bed, the young man was escorted to the little area of the newsroom we had set up as the “sports department.”

I began to ask him about his experience. He began to spew out statistics like a slot machine that had hit the jackpot. He was Billy Beane’s and Bill Gate’s predecessor. Back then, we called them “geeks,” or “nerds.” And that wasn’t a compliment. I kept trying to get him to talk about athletes, how they played, and what were great moments in sports from him. I got batting averages, ERA’s, touchdowns, rushing yards, sacks, home runs, points, rebounds, and not one word about what he thought.

I didn’t hire him even though it could have meant i would be pulling another week or so of long hours by myself. But to me sports journalism was all of the things he didn’t mention. It’s become all of the things he thought was important. For the last two weeks, i’ve been sporadically watching the major league too-long playoffs (money, money, money). The airwaves are full of self-righteous former ball-players and announcers slobbering over every useless tidbit these idiots put out:

“The Royals are 36-2 when they are ahead going into the ninth inning.” Duh.

“He throws his changeup a lot after he’s gotten ahead with his fastball.” Duh.

I still believe there is a beauty in the game itself, in athletes overcoming odds and rising to the challenge. This is one reason i’m a terrible bettor: i always root for the underdog. I still think announcers need to let the game speak for itself. I don’t want to hear what these “experts” think i should know before every pitch or play from scrimmage. i have come to enjoy my television being on mute. I think all of these playoffs and “sudden death” playoffs in every sport are moneymakers for pro team owners and college coaches, and really don’t prove very much. If Ohio State beats Alabama in one game, they could get beaten in the next. The drama of last year’s college answer to the superbowl was exquisite, but such drama used to be in four bowl games on New Year’s day.

I believe the MLB season should be 154 games and there should be no wild card teams. Playoffs up the World Series should be best of three games.

If they are serious about shortening the games, then go back to not having the game time controlled by commercial time outs in baseball and football.

But i am old and out of date. I watch all of the descendants of that man who wanted to work for me in the stands, acting like complete idiots. Sports contests should be watched, not be a backdrop for maniacs. Andy Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” has diminished to five seconds of dressing like a clown and doing something stupid (with a “cute” sign of course). i see my wanna-be-hire’s progeny on tweets and other social media making useless comments about something they inaccurately think they know something about. I listen to radio sports talk shows (why?) to hear rants and observations from unqualified yahoos, both those being paid and those who call in.

I think there are some worthwhile and entertaining things about today’s sports. And i’m tired of ranting about all of the imbecilic money-based things and the pampered overpaid athletes acting like goons instead of showing respect and responsibility (we used to call it good sportsmanship).

So i am stopping with the rants. I plan for this “Sports Commentary” on my blog to be pleasant observations and sometimes humorous observation about the sports. I will be honest in telling you my sources and suspect a great number of them will come from the San Diego Union-Tribune.

A sample will be forthcoming here soon.

I hope you enjoy them.