Comfort in Familiarity

Writing my last post got me thinking of the fondness we have for familiarity.

Writing about Bernice’s rolls reminded me of the time of a returning visit from an old friend who had moved away. On the weekend of her visit, she attended our church and after the service there was a potluck. On her way to the area of the church were the potlucks are held she came up to us (I was sitting with two friends) at the last pew commenting how everything is still the same. She then moved on the repeat the observation when coming to Bernice’s rolls at the end of the table; right where she left them. She seemed delighted to be surrounded by familiarity.

There is some of that in each of us. It is what makes our own beds comfortable and inviting above all others. The first night in your own bed after a long vacation is magical. Also when returning home from somewhere unfamiliar one of the first places we go to is our own restroom. Time has done this. We come to love those things we have a history with. We are most comfortable in familiarity.

Right now, I am living outside of my hometown and on returning to it, after an extended period of time, I enjoy driving through town. I go through the old downtown, through the older tree lined neighborhoods of unique houses (very different from the modern cookie-cutter track homes). It is especially nice to drive streets I know well, streets I have been traveling all my life. The people walking those streets even look familiar though they are strangers.

Bernice's Rolls

Reminiscence and nostalgia come naturally come when thinking of or discussing certain topics, and food is one. Whenever in a discussion about food there is always the mention of mothers, grandmothers and sweet old ladies. And by nature these mothers and sweet old ladies are also some of the most devoted members of the local churches.

This gives rise to the glorious tradition of the church potluck. These potlucks may take place in the present but they draw their strength from the past. It is an old tradition. Often it dates back to the birth of the church.

You gather together with people you have known and loved all your life. Then you eat from the multitudes of vastly varying homemade foods from recipes that have been passed down from one generation to the next to be made by the skilled hands moved to a perfection achieved through the life time of cooking experience of your Sunday school teacher.

Bernice’s rolls are a large part of my understanding of church potlucks. Of the various foods offered on those ‘Love Feasts’ Bernice’s rolls enjoyed a special popularity and became a requirement for every event. They were consistently perfect. They always came in the same pans and sat in the place at the ends of the tables making finding and retrieving them easier. Without them the potluck would be incomplete.

I guess each church has its own special potluck dishes provided through the years by beautiful people and fine cooks. What are yours?

Workmanship of Craftsman

Something that I admire that has come from generations past is a pride in workmanship. For me the purist example of this still present today is Craftsman tools. Each Craftsman tool automatically comes with an unlimited lifetime warranty that lasts as long as the original buyer owns the tool. They have been doing this since 1927. If your grandfather bought a wrench in 1927 and it broke today he would get a new one today. If you by a Craftsman tool the only reason you would ever buy that tool again would be if yours was lost or stolen.

The funny thing about the warranty is that it is all but rendered useless by the high quality of their tools. I have never heard of the need to return a Craftsman tool, and everybody uses them. I have literally never even heard a farfetched myth that a Craftsman tool has ever broken. These tools have outlasted their original owners. They get traded and sold at yard sales, swap meets and car shows.

At times, I wonder if it were not for the fast growing population Craftsman’s fine workmanship would soon push them into bankruptcy. You would think a set of tools would just be passed from one generation to the next. It does not happen that way. No one wants to part with their tools.

Th African Queen

Often when watching old movies I begin to wonder what it is that makes them so different, so special. I believe it is a number of things, and that acting is one of the most influential. The actors in those old movies are the greatest of film.

The African Queen starring Humphrey Bogart and Catherine Hepburn is the greatest acted film ever made. Just recently I watched the movie after not seeing it for a while and was stunned once again by the perfection of the performances. I was so awestruck by the acting that I watched it again the next day (something I almost never do).

The skills and talents of Bogart and Hepburn were so great they demanded deeper discussion. Why is the acting in this movie stand so stark against everything else? One reason would be the simple fact that this is the greatest actor of all time teamed with quite possibly the greatest actress of all time. And they have a natural chemistry!

Bogart and Hepburn are in the later years of their careers when the movie was made, and were at the peak of their abilities. Because it was later in their careers they not only had natural talent but the wisdom and skills only experience can give. They are give a clever script then placed alone on the small setting of a river boat so their performances are not dragged down by lesser talents. The African Queen is great acting and only great acting.

Their performances are what make the film so precious. I have been using the words ‘acting’ and ‘actors’ but they are really misleading. Watching the movie, their performances are so natural and real there are many moments where you will lose yourself forgetting you are watching a performance through the glass. They remove the boundaries separating you in realty and them in your TV causing you to feel you are watching the true reactions of people rather than the prepared actions of characters.

The superiority of their acting to anything else ever filmed has to be seen to be believed, but once you see it you will believe.

Mystery Fuels Adventure

One of my favorite books is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Within the opening pages of Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s narrating character, Marlow, speaks of the wonder, mystery and adventure hidden within the blank spaces of maps. When the story was told, when the book was written these blank spaces were shrinking. The potential adventures were shrinking with those blank spaces.

"Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps . I would look for hours at South America,or Africa, or Australia and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there… True, by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness."

I remember as a child the unknown provided room for the imagination to stretch. The less you understood of the world the more adventure there was in it. This could be the reason we grow less adventurous as we grow older.

Going back to the mystery of the blank maps, those spaces have been filled and the endless possibilities of adventure lost. So far this adventure has never been completely lost. When the European explorers sailed to the ends of the earth exposing all that was mysterious, human sense of adventure took to the unknown lands. The manifest destiny sent adventurous pilgrims west. Once the seas and lands were fully explored we took to the skies. The adventurers were the Wrights, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart.

The concurring of the skies led to the jet age which opened a whole new mysterious void to renew our adventurous spirit, space. Those of that time quickly grasped the mysteries and explorations of space, and once again imaginations ran free and wild. We have massive amounts of science fiction as artifacts of those times. We also have the products of the good and evils of space age technology. My high school had a bomb shelter under a library that was built during the Cold War.

With the increase in technology and the use of satellites and space probes the once huge and overwhelming mysteries of space are quickly being filled. What will be the mysteries that fuel the adventures of future generations? Where will our imaginations lead us now?

A Few Things Automobiles Have Lost Over the Course of Time

HARDTOPS- Some of today may not even fully understand what a hardtop is. It is a car (mostly two-doors) without posts. When you roll the windows down everything is wide open. Hardtops were originally designed as a more practical and reliable alternative to the convertible. They were great. They were stylish, provided great visibility and made for roomy, spacious cabins. When wondering why hardtops are no longer made my first thought was that safety standards may not allow it but that can’t be so because they still make convertibles.

SUICIDE DOORS- Despite the dangerous sounding name, they really weren’t especially dangerous (they did have their cautions mainly when entering and exiting in traffic but that’s true of any door). Suicide doors have their hinges towards the rear of the car opening towards the front of the car. What makes them so great is the ease of entering and exiting. think of entering and exiting a conventional door. When seated in the car you are facing forward but your door opens backward. To exit you must open the door turn completely around and walk out in the direction opposite of which you started. They were abandoned by automakers when they began repelling the safety conscious in the 1960s but with child safety locks this may be less of a problem.

COLORED INTERIORS- I am tired of looking into new cars, many that are beautiful and well built to see that the automaker has failed to provide an interior worthy of and complementing to the rest of the car. It used to be, interiors were made to compliment the exterior. This included the option of many more colors than today’s neutrals of grey, tan and black. Black cars came with white, red and black interiors. Blue cars came with the option of black, white and several different patterns and shades of blue. Red cars came with white, peaches, and reds. Cars with dark exteriors were gorgeous with white interiors. Many cars had two-tone dashes and steering wheels; the top matched the exterior for looking in from the outside and the bottom matched the interior for those inside the car. Red interiors are classy and classic. A few years ago Pontiac offered a red leather interior in its GTO which was beautiful and unique in a world of tans and grays. Unfortunately, the exterior had little curb appeal so it was short lived. This showed the sad state of consumers today where outer appearances are everything.

TIRES THAT MATTERED- In the Disney movie Cars, one of my favorite cars is the old Mercury police car. It’s so classic with its big sleek look in that black and white pattern (Oh, the beauty of black and white). One of my favorite things about that car is the white walls tires that came complete with curb-feelers meant to protect them. Once again the designers and makers of cars in the past proved more capable in designing a completely marvelous car without a single detail over looked. That’s why white walls, redlines, raised white lettering and white lines mattered. They were more than tires they showed the auto industry and the drivers cared.

Beauty's Lack of Color

There is a special,elegant kind of beauty reserved for the contrast and simplicity of black and white. Watching black and white movies or looking through black and white photographs puts you in a softer mood then you were in the color of reality. Black and white has several advantages, especially in art. Not only does it create a nostalgic feel but it adds several visual and emotional appeals.

The emotions and tones of black and white films seem much more complete than color. Black and white romance moves are more romantic than color movies. Black and white suspense movies are more suspenseful than color. Film noir is often defined as black and white by requirement. It creates stark shadows, brilliant rays of light with clear paths of travel, and beautifully lit and textured faces.

Another element of black and white film is the greater freedom and responsibility of the viewer to create their own images and interpretations much like the readers of a book must use his imagination. In black and white film the viewer is given an incomplete view and must fill in the blanks of color. In Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times the female character greats Chaplin’s character outside of jail in what I have always understood to be a country blue and yellow dress. In reality it could be something very different. To another viewer it may be another color. Each viewer is free to make the film his own.

There are some movies in particular that are especially elegant in black and white and could not be any other way. Examples are: Hitchcock’s Psycho, Darryl F. Zanuck’s The Longest Day and the Humphrey Bogart movie The Treasure of Sierra Madre. In a Zagat’s review of the scenic camera work of The Treasure of Sierra Madre someone commented “color, we don’t need no stinking color” making a play of words on the famous line of the movie. The person who colorizes Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life will be the one who destroys Christmas.

There is also black and white photography that deserves mentioning. One of the most gorgeous things I have ever seen is the Ansel Adams photograph ‘Moonrise over Hernandez, NM.’ What I saw (it was in a museum) was an actual print by Adams; it was not a poster or a reproduction. It was easily the greatest piece of art I have ever witnessed, and quite possibly the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. The contrast was perfect making the photograph seem deep and real. The silvery brilliant white of the moon and distant clouds were perfectly set against the shining black of night. All the posters and prints seen everywhere else do little justice to the real thing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_SQyCJega8

Science fiction at its best

The Twilight Zone may have been science fiction at its best. It grew out of a time of great discovery, wonder, expectations and fears. It came out of the minds of those who saw atomic bombings, Sputnik, new technologies and man on the moon. What they did not see but imagined was equally as great and often depicted in the episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Part of the reason I feel Twilight Zone could be the best of science fiction is because it keeps the human spirit and experience at the forefront of the stories. No matter how far from reality the Twilight Zone may take us we know the elements of the human spirit and experience maintain a consistent relevance to our lives.

There are certain episodes that I often think of as being true to this. ‘The Obsolete Man’ is set in a totalitarian society where the state has outlawed anyone who is not beneficial to the state and proven the nonexistence of God. It tells of a man, Wordsworth, was declared obsolete and sentenced to death. He was a librarian in a state that banned books and a Christian in a state that ‘proved’ God did not exist. As part of his final rights he is give a say in the mode of his execution and a final wish will be heard. He asks that he be killed by an assassin by a mode and at a time known only by him and his assassin, this was granted. For his final wish he asks that his death be televised for all the state to view. This is also granted because it is believed it will glorify and display the ultimate power of the state.

The chancellor comes to Wordsworth’s room to see that everything is set up and to further glorify the state. Once in the room he turns to leave and finds the door looked. It is then that it is revealed that Wordsworth had a bomb hidden in his room set to go off at midnight. It then becomes a game of what is the greater weakness a faith in God or a faith in the state.

The episode explores the fears of man and “the worth, the dignity and rights of man” as Rod Serling so eloquently narrates.

Everything's Plastic, Everything's Fake

I just got an old record player. This thing is big beautiful and real. It is encased in about a five foot long, three foot tall solidly built, beautifully crafted wood cabinet. It has the classic RCA insignia of the dog listening to the victrola below reading “His master’s voice.” Listening to it and watching the vinyl record turning I was reminded that there was once a time when everything was real. I, on the other hand, have grown up in a plastic world.

I knew only plastic milk cartons rather than glass bottles, plastic car bumpers rather than chrome, Federal Reserve notes rather than silver dollars, vinyl records rather than plastic compact discs and plastic and particleboard furniture rather than solid wood.

I enjoy walking through antique shops and looking through all the creations of the past (often distant past) realizing they are real and lasting. I was always especially interested in and in awe of the majesty of the old wood furniture radios and record players, even the first television sets. They have the charm of the old time personalities they brought into the living rooms of American families. Looking at an old box radio I see a family gathered around it listening to radio shows acted out entirely through voices. Looking at an old cabinet record player I hear Nat King Cole’s ‘When I Fall in Love’ and ‘Unforgettable’ and Glenn Miller’s ‘Midnight Serenade’ and ‘In the Mood.’

I am reminded of a nation that was more united in both its weaknesses and its strengths. Thinking of the fears stirred by Orson Welles’ radio depiction of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. Also of President Franklin Roosevelt’s war speech ‘A Day of Infamy.’ Looking at these pieces I see and hear a see a world, a time, a people and a nation I never knew.

Rivalries

A rivalry between sports teams betters with age. The best rivalries are always the old rivalries, those with history. Also rivalries often stem from tradition, especially in schools. Part of the reason I have this topic in mind is this Sunday night’s football game is the Green Bay Packers vs. the Chicago Bears. I have always seen the Packers/Bears game as the epitome of professional football. Especially if played in harsh winter weather. Especially if played at Lambo Field. The football games of old rivals are usually passionate physical games, often in spite of how the rest of the season may have been for the teams involved. As a Miami Dolphins fan I have also enjoyed the Dolphins/Jets games. They are usually intense and close games many times going beyond the fourth quarter.

I also enjoyed the cross town rivalry between my high school and the new school in town. Because this rivalry was with a new school (about 10 years) the rivalry itself does not have much age. The reason the rivalry had the feel and character of an old rivalry was because of the age of my school, Redlands High School. RHS is and old school (over a hundred years) and for just about the entirety of those years it has been the sole high school of the town helping give it its small town feel. People in Redlands mostly stay in Redlands and when you have one high school it creates a community. Up until about a few years ago it seemed that everyone (going back 100 generations) in Redlands graduated from RHS. When the new school was built and began graduating classes the ‘old’ rivalry was started. Each year the game is played at Redlands University’s stadium and is sold out some years days in advance.

For the first seven to eight years of the rivalry RHS dominated mercilessly. I believe it was in the seventh year that the other team first scored against us (a single touchdown for six points). Even then it was scored after the first string had been taken out of the game and replaced by the Junior Varsity. After that year it has been a back and forth battle to obtain the year’s worth of bragging rights the victory brings. I thank God I graduated from a class that had that victory. It is something that will last for as long as I remain in Redlands. And it will grow sweeter with age.