The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • The Man of Steel

    My dad is tougher than your dad. Yep. I speak the truth, so don’t even try to talk to me about it. My dad is taller than your dad, he’s funnier, and cooler, and you know what? He’s smarter, too. There’s proof. Uh huh, shut up there is!

    My dad once swam across White Bear Lake with two of his kids clinging to his back—just for fun. And then there’s the time he threw a softball way the hell down Arcade Street. It was almost bar time so there weren’t any cars out, a warm summer night at Vogel’s Bar. All the guys went out there and bet on him, some one way, and some the other.

    It’s important to get the facts straight and keep the myths alive, because dad is sick, and he’s not getting better. He’s getting ready to graduate to the Promised Land. The rest of us, his wife, his kids, grandkids, his sisters, and mother, we’ll be left behind to do the remembering.

    My dad is here, for now. He wakes up and he goes to sleep, such as it is with his illness. He sometimes sits in a lazy-back chair where his feet don’t touch the ground. It is not comfortable. My dad is brave. He can hear and speak and see and eat and sometimes he is right there with you, and sometimes he’s not. He holds dear the sound of our mother’s voice. When he hears it, he knows where he is, at least; he’s with her, and he loves her. There might come a time when he no longer recognizes her voice, and will have to take solace in touch. Like we all did, at first.

    My dad’s hands are thick and hard. They are the kind of hands that have always worked. He can kill mice with his bare hands. He can kill bats with a tennis racket. My dad would never play tennis. But he would kill a bat for you anytime. No trouble at all.

    My dad is very handsome, and wore a white dinner jacket à la James Bond to his wedding. He was most comfortable, and equally as handsome, in blue jeans. Once, a long time ago, I made my dad a pair of ugly slippers out of potholders. He could look good in anything.

    My dad has a heart of steel. People who know him appreciate the design. The flaws, the dings and scratches, only accentuate the authenticity of a classic. He loves his family, a fine meal, and a good laugh. He loves it when a job is well done and the bills are paid. His resting pulse is forty. My dad’s heart is like a powerfully built muscle car. A ’74 Mustang or maybe a mint ’79 Ford F-150.

    My dad knows things before anybody else does. If something bad is going to happen to you, say you’re about to get screwed on a used car or your rain gutters are loose, he’ll be the first to warn you of impending danger. If you don’t listen to him, then that’s your problem. What is he? Your mother?

    My dad is a superhero. One time my dad’s car got stuck deep in some mud, and he lifted the whole front end of the car out of the rut. No kidding. If you ask our mom about it, she shrugs it off. “It was a Volkswagen.” My dad does things that you should not try at home.

    Recently, I related the Volkswagen story to my husband. He gave me a sweet sideways half-smile, a look I know too well. It means he doesn’t believe me. Since I am the Prime Minister of Exaggeration, there are grounds for this breach of faith. My husband knows my dad is a good guy, an honorable guy, but also a human guy like the rest of us. My husband also knows that one of my recent hobbies is to babble on about my dad in order to stave off the tide of anxiety I feel about losing him, so he draws me close. “Tell me some more about your dad.”

    And in those indulgent arms I gabble, remembering everything I can, working around what I can’t. Every word of homage and praise a qualifier for sainthood.

  • Our Word, Not Yours

    My mother taught me that little ditty in 1968, when I was nine years old. We had just become the first black family within a country mile of our new home in the then lily-white southeast Denver. I was no stranger to the word “nigger.” I heard it often from the lips of black people. However, hearing it come from white people was a new experience for me and my mother wanted me to have a retort ready when it happened.

    So when I got “niggered,” I dutifully whipped out my rhyme, along with my fists and some other new words I learned that summer, many with only four letters. In 1974, I saw Blazing Saddles with some of the “brothas” and laughed at loud at the dialogue, which was laced with “nigger this” and “nigger that”. In fact, my posse was so badass cool that we could allow white people to sit next to us and laugh along with us.

    After all, it was “our” word. Only we could say it with the right attitude and inflection. How else could I accept my family’s regular references to blacks as “nigger” without simultaneously acknowledging that we were hypocrites for trashing white people who“niggered” us?

    I got my sisters—Renee, who lives in Huntsville, Alabama, and Rosalyn, who lives in suburban Denver—on a conference call to do my own family reality check. I told them about the political firestorm that consumed former Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner Rich Stanek over his admission that he had said “nigger” and told racist jokes twelve years ago. I told them that even before this came out, Stanek had been the target of at least two police brutality lawsuits, and not trusted by many black leaders around town. Both agreed he deserved to go down in flames.

    However, when I asked them if it was wrong for black folks to call each other “nigger,” the line went quiet for a long beat. Then, virtually at the same time, they both replied, “it depends.” I pushed them harder. “So, when it comes to using this word, we are privileged and white people are not?” Renee, who, along with her husband, boasts a Ph.D., replied, “Black people know the rules and understand the context. When my husband tells me that he is going out with ‘the niggas,’ I know what that means. We’re talking about ‘us.’”

    Okay, I said, let’s take it one step further. “We all agree that my Swedish-Irish wife is part of our African-American family now. Does she now have the right to use ‘the word’?” Again, there was another very long pause. Rosalyn offered, “If she is willing to work within our cultural norms, our context, and not use it to slam us, well, I suppose it would be okay.”

    My sisters’ views are consistent with those discussed in Randall Kennedy’s bestselling Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word. Kennedy, a Harvard Law professor, wrote that acceptable use of “nigger” depended on whether the user was trustworthy as far as black people were concerned. If the person was not a true friend of the “brothas and the sistahs,” then he or she was not to be trusted with the word. By that definition, for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be caught saying “nigger” would be a lynchable offense. Most African Americans see him as a Judas. Lyndon Johnson, however, who, as architect of the most sweeping civil rights legislation since the Civil War gained considerable credibility among black people, could be forgiven for his remarks to an aide in choosing to appoint the dark and well-known Thurgood Marshall over the lighter skinned and virtually unknown A. Leon Higginbotham: “The only two people who have heard of Judge Higginbotham are you and his momma. When I appoint a nigger to the Supreme Court, I want everyone to know he’s a nigger.”

    Are there any lessons from my musings with my sisters for the Rich Staneks of the world, who, as they floated along the river of life, have said “nigger,” “spook,” or “jigaboo.” Clearly, “nigger” is a loaded word, one that must be handled with extreme care, especially if the user is anyone other than a black person.

    However, it doesn’t matter if it’s Rich Stanek or Clarence Thomas, if a person has not demonstrated that he can be a trustworthy ally of black people, then being outed as having uttered “nigger” is a crime for which the statute of limitations never runs out.

  • Spring Forward

    I have never been a big fan of Chenin Blanc. If grapes were people, this variety would be your alcoholic uncle, all hail-fellow-well-met as he comes through the door, but a bit bland, short on attention span and interesting conversation, and liable to leave behind him a sensation somewhat different from the initial affable salute.

    A memorable 1961 Vouvray comes to mind, the pride of the cellar at a place where I used to work (such was the state of the academic job market in the Reagan-Thatcher years that I was in six establishments in seven years before the U of M snapped me up). Vouvray is always one hundred percent Chenin Blanc. It is a pale yellow wine from near Tours in the Loire valley, south of Paris, and is known for its keeping qualities. 1961 was a year with a fine reputation. Those in the know spoke in subdued tones of this treasure—it amounted to several dozen bottles. Quite enough, thought some, for one to be tested. The experiment was a revelation. Over the two decades these bottles had sat in the cellar, the contents had developed a flavor which combined the vapid nastiness of a Macintosh apple with the heady aroma of dry-cleaning fluid.

    The solution adopted to the problem of their disposal was not particularly kind. It followed the gospel principle that “every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine; and when men have well drunk, then that which is worse” (John 2:10). Some people at that particular staff farewell party may have been surprised at the lavish provision of liquids, but there were no complaints, which goes to show that even thinking people do not always think when they drink.

    Imagine then the pleasure of finding recently not one but two Vouvrays tasting as good as their mellifluous name (thrill to the delicious labiodental fricatives). Both are from the 2002 vintage, a year with a long sunny autumn—important if grapes are to ripen and become sweet in an area which is both inland and quite far north. Both may be had locally for about $10.

    The drier of the two is from the well-known domaine of Sauvion. It is a clear pale yellow. Its initial sweetness is followed by bright acid, but what lingers long after you have swallowed each mouthful is a delicious bitterness, like that of fresh grapefruit. I detected one note in it which would pick up the taste of gouda cheese. This would go down very nicely before dinner on a sunny evening, a pleasant variation from fashionable Sauvignon Blanc. Nor is it any dispraise to say that it would be an ideal wine to drink with potato salad, or one of those cold amalgams people put together for graduation parties that involve multicolored rigatoni, turmeric, and yogurt (or is it cottage cheese or mayonnaise—surely not Miracle Whip). It went well with a pasta sauce I make out of eggplants, browned onions, ricotta, and tinned tomatoes. It is surely no mistake that it comes from the region where the 16th-century French queen Catherine de Medicis had several chateaux, for it is she who is said to have introduced white sauce into French cooking from her native Italy—an Italy whose cuisine had in her day not yet integrated the tomato, a New World vegetable (or fruit—I am not getting into that one).

    Our other Vouvray is a similar pleasing pale yellow, but tastes somewhat sweeter. It is from the caves of Jean-Paul Poussin; caves not only in the French sense of “cellars” but also in the English sense, for M. Poussin’s bottles age in grottos cut out of the creamy local tufa limestone, caves which in the Middle Ages were used for disposing of bodies in times of plague. The wine gives the mouth a sense of fullness, in much the same way that champagne does (though this wine is not in the least fizzy).

    These are jolly good value, if you ask me, fine and fresh for spring. This is what wine might have tasted like in Eden, before the accumulated misdeeds of mankind made us sad and bland and boring. Drink them young.

  • Routine Maintenance or Major Overhaul?

    Today you are nothing unless you have flawless, supple skin. Lustrous, thick, bouncy hair. Icy white teeth and breath so fresh it cryogenically freezes your date to the couch. (Take that, Fear-of-Calling-Back Man!)

    Never mind that things are even worse for women. As more and more straight guys get “queer eye-tized,” I fear that it sets the bar even higher for girls, grooming-wise. I’m all for my man having clean teeth and fingernails, but I gotta tell you, sometimes a little butt fuzz is just about all that separates me from my favorite ape.

    My friend Lori recently said, “Men are the new women.” Then what, dear God, are the old women expected to be? Every time I turn around, it feels like there’s some horrid new procedure or potion that I never knew I needed in order to be well put-together.

    I am the kind of person who derives her beauty routine from what’s on sale at the all-night Walgreen’s and how much time is left at the end of the day. If I were to write a beauty book, its title might be something like Fifteen Bucks & Fifteen Minutes: How to Blindly Stab Your Way to Beauty—Some of the Time!

    Some days I moisturize, some days I tone. Some days I pluck when I should really be exfoliating, and Lord knows, I’m doing it all wrong. I’ll pay for it later, unless I pay for someone to help me with it now. Either way, I’ll pay.

    Every woman knows that achieving a “natural” glow for a night out can easily take two hours and involve ten different shades of powder, ranging subtly from champagne to mochachino. Somehow, this doesn’t bother most of us. We’ve accepted it. We even purport to enjoy it. Who doesn’t like to kick back, drink a glass of wine, and slather our scaly, tired feet with a microwavable packet of peppermint-oil sloughing mud? (Feels refreshing! Like you’re dancing on coals in hell!) You know, maybe round out the night drunkenly counting pores while gaping into a lighted, magnified mirror. A little “me time.”

    Undoubtedly, this is the seed of narcissistic desperation that eventually gives way to total self-absorption implosion. Or at the very least, complete body hairlessness. I’m no expert, but stay with me here, I’ve got a theory. If you look at something long enough, its meaning is pliable. Sometimes your makeup mirror is like those holographic mind-bender posters. Stare in it for too long, and you see David Gest staring back at you. Next thing you know, you’ve got a $10,000 Visa bill, six weeks of unpaid post-op recuperation time, and Melanie Griffith’s upper lip.

    Personally, my biggest beauty beef is that I’m at that “tween” stage of life where the lines around my eyes don’t disappear anymore when I stop smiling, and yet I have just about as much acne as your average tenth-grader. I’ve been to see the dermatologist and the pimples just keep popping up in all the same spots. My next step is to see a priest, because it seems that my chin is possessed. Once the holy man wrests the demon pustules from my visage, perhaps then, with a clear face, a clear heart and mind will follow.

    Or maybe the curse of boils has been visited upon me by the Big Kahuna himself—as a reminder to take care of myself, but not put too much stock in what is only surface politics. Those fifteen minutes at the end of the day for me might be better spent cultivating attributes like integrity and kindness to others. Girlfriends, any stylist worth his weight in false eyelashes can tell you that beauty is only skin deep, but ugly—now that’s an inside job.

  • Justice by the Gram

    Remember when Sammy Davis, Jr., belted out, “don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time” in the theme from Baretta? The message was that you should be willing to pay the price if you’re willing break the law. But the implication was that punishment for the crime had a clear beginning and end. In other words, once you did “the time,” you earned the right to move on with your life.

    Our Constitution expressly forbids trying a person twice for the same crime. The prohibition against double jeopardy goes to the heart of what our legal system is all about: equal justice under law. That sentiment should be extended to make sure a person is not punished repeatedly for the same crime, even a politically unpopular crime.

    The sad reality is, that has never quite been the case. Convicted felons have a hard time getting jobs and housing, and in many states, they never regain the right to vote or sit on a jury. In other words, they are sentenced to certain forms of punishment that endure for the rest of their lives.

    Fortunately, ex-cons at least have equal access to federal student loan assistance—unless they have a drug-related conviction. In 1998, President Bill “I didn’t inhale” Clinton approved a law, the brainchild of conservative House Republican Mark Souder of Indiana, that barred anyone with a drug conviction from receiving federal student financial aid. The law does not recognize differences between drugs, nor amounts used. Getting caught with an ounce of pot is the same as selling a kilo of coke: Either will get you permanently barred from eligibility for federal student loans and grants.

    Souder and his fellow drug busters believed that receiving taxpayer-funded federal student financial aid is a privilege, not a right. Money talks, goes their argument, and the consequence of losing financial aid dollars might prove a powerful deterrent to drug use.

    And yet, in a recent New York Times article, Souder conceded that the law went way too far. He claimed he never meant it to be so mean-spirited. He simply wanted to discourage students from experimenting with drugs. Souder now says that students who are denied federal financial aid for crimes committed before college should sue the government.

    Needless to say, this law has a hugely disproportionate impact on blacks. African-Americans make up twelve percent of the nation’s population and thirteen percent of its drug users; yet they comprise a whopping fifty-five percent of drug-use convictions—the same convictions that will disqualify them from ever getting a student loan.

    George W. Bush wants to amend the law by limiting its scope to those busted for drugs while in college. Those with criminal convictions for drug use before college would remain eligible for federal assistance, no matter how serious the conviction. So under the Bush plan, the crack cocaine dealer who got religion before applying to college would remain eligible for financial aid, but a current college student caught with a joint would lose her financial aid. According to studies, more than a third of all college students used drugs in the mid-nineties. Are the Bushies really prepared to yank financial aid from such a large chunk of the population? More to the point, Bush’s so-called “fix” completely sidesteps the underlying problem with this fundamentally ill-conceived law: it treats drug-users differently from other lawbreakers.

    Don’t get me wrong. I am adamantly against illegal drug use and believe that those who break drug laws should be punished. However, in meting out such punishment, we must ensure that we do not create a cure more devastating than the disease. Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank was absolutely right when he said, “We should abolish the whole rule. We should not encourage drug use, but you shouldn’t single that out as being worse than rape or arson or armed robbery.”

    Are all drug users really beyond rehabilitation, where rapists, arsonists, and burglars are not? Should any college student who indulges in drugs be promptly expelled, and have the doors of higher education forever slammed in his face? Why do drug users not get the same equal justice under the law?

    It’s time to reconsider how our so-called war on drugs is compromising basic Constitutional tenets of fairness. You do the crime, you do the time—once. Then you should be done.

  • Drinking What Comes Naturally

    Greeks and Romans thought the world looked like a fried egg. There was land in the middle, wholly surrounded by Ocean, with a sea (appropriately called the Mediterranean) bisecting the land. Even in the early Middle Ages, fishermen in what is now Normandy are said to have heard at dead of night the boats putting off from shore, carrying the souls of the newly dead off to the Isles of the Blest, out to seas colder than the Hebrides, “where the fleet of stars is anchored, and the young star-captains glow.”

    One of the wildest views of Ocean is to be had from the headland in northwest Spain called Finisterre (the End of the Earth). It was on the beach here that medieval pilgrims, after visiting the shrine of St. James the Apostle at Santiago de Compostela, would gather palmate shells as souvenirs.

    The bones of St. James were not discovered at Compostela until around 813 A.D., and the Apostle was quickly enlisted in the struggle of Christian Spain against the Muslims who had controlled much of the peninsula for more than a century. Legend says that St. James was seen mounted on a white horse doing battle in a manner that earned him the sobriquet “Moor-Slayer.” Christians were not alone in having such heavenly help.

    The earliest Muslims, the Companions of the Prophet, saw angels riding beside them at the battle of Badr. You can still meet Muslims—mild men, not wild-eyed enthusiasts who commit atrocities like the recent sad outrage in Madrid—who speak with regret about the way that Spain was lost to the Dar ul-Islam.

    These were regrets Christians of the Early Middle Ages found themselves unable to share. I guess it is all a matter of what you think is natural. Believing in Ocean or the Dar ul-Islam is no odder than believing in Manifest Destiny or the American Century. The trouble with most contemporary prattle about multiculturalism is that it underestimates the depth, the instinctive naturalness of cultural differences and convictions. These are not just a matter of preferring Pepsi to Coke.

    Or preferring neither. A friend recently recalled that when he lived in Spain he felt no need for either cola, indeed found it quite natural to take with his meals a genial red wine called Penascal. He and I proceeded to share a bottle. I liked it so well I bought one for myself—on this shore of Ocean I found the price varies wildly from $5 to $12. This is robust drinking, made mostly from the fruity Tempranillo grape, the variety from which they make the famous wines of Rioja. Tempranillo is known in Portugal as Tinta Roriz and is one of the constituents of port, so the color of Penascal is, as you would expect, a hearty deep red. Our ancestors called such wines Tent, from tinto (“colored”), to distinguish them from the paler, clearer clarets of Bordeaux.

    Penascal has a strong, oaky center—from the barrels it is matured in—but stops short of being unbalanced, harsh, or intrusive. It comes from the broad dry upland of Leon and Castile, whose northern steppes were traversed by pilgrims. The river Duero cuts through to the south (becoming the Douro—of port fame—once it has flowed west into Portugal), and it is in this river valley that Penascal has its origin, though it does not actually have the appellation Ribera del Duero.

    It stands up well to strong flavors, to garlic or paella or sharp or stinky cheese. I made the mistake of chomping on a red pepper while sipping some Penascal and found that the first half of the taste (the fruity bit before the oaky flavor) was still discernible, before the pepper burst into fresh flames on my tongue. This is an experiment you need not repeat. But Penascal itself—that you could get quite used to.

  • Rolling Heads

    March 17th, 8:45 p.m., St. Patrick’s Day. With a name like Colleen, there’s no way in hell I’m going anywhere today. I used to work at Mickey’s Diner right in downtown St. Paul. I’ve seen enough green vomit to qualify me as an exorcist. So… maybe I’ll read the paper.

    Business section headline. General Mills falls short of forecasts. CEO Steve Sanger blames sluggish stock value on slow response to “low carb” trend. Hmm. That would be a tough trend to follow for a flour company. Maybe they can transform the Doughboy into something with more Atkins appeal, like “Meatie Man” or “Cheesy Chap.” Hey, or the Bake-Off could award extra points for the entry with the least fiber content.

    Front page. I usually save that for last. Too depressing. “DFL fires an early salvo at Pawlenty.” Democratic Party runs TV ads slamming the Governor’s record on the release of sexual predators and his position on the death penalty. Yep. I remember that one. Last summer. He was going to let a bunch of risky pervs out of lockdown to save the state some cash. I guess the state’s goal of keeping known offenders from re-offending is expendable. I have an idea. What about blending non-essential programs? Imagine driving down that lonely stretch of Highway 100 North, the one close to the office parks beyond 494 without the street lights, and coming upon a reassuring green sign: “The next 100 yards patrolled for sexual predators by the Girl Scouts of America.”

    “Bubbles, noise may deter bighead carp.” State wildlife officials are proposing an underwater tube that will make a curtain of air bubbles across the Mississippi River to scare away invading Asian carp. You can scare away a hundred-pound fish with bubbles? I suppose that makes sense. Any time I see bubbles in the Bally’s swimming pool I get the hell out of there.

    Business section again. Gas prices approaching the $2-a-gallon mark. While the price represents a nasty inconvenience to SUV drivers, the problem could be disastrous for the trucking industry, which is obviously affected by fuel prices. You know, if we can’t afford to ship oranges and asparagus to the middle of the country in the next fiscal year, I think General Mills will have its profit recovery in hand. Carb loading will become a necessity of survival.

    Particularly for those who used to depend on Metro Transit. They’re having a tough time making it to the grocery store as the strike wears on, and I imagine they could use a product with a prolonged shelf life. Especially if they can’t get to work, stop paying bills, and their power gets shut off. With no refrigeration, a colorful pouch of substantial, rib-sticking flour will come to the rescue and feed those children! Note to General Mills CEO Steve Sanger: Here’s a new product line for the new permanent underclass. Pillsbury Paste! In eighteen colors and four mouth-watering meat flavors—just add water! Roll it into pellets, add some sugar and a talking bear, and call it breakfast.

    Back to the front page. “Bush ads call Kerry vote anti-soldier.” Kerry ads say Bush ads lie. Remaining soldiers in Iraq try not to get blown into anti-soldier matter.

    “Inquiry into Medicare bill ordered.” During the Medicare debate, Bush administration officials cited an estimate of $400 billion over ten years in their rehaul plan. A document prepared by Medicare’s chief actuary before the vote, but not shared with Congress, estimated the amount closer to $551 billion. In a bold move, Surgeon General Richard Carmona will chair a special task force that will hold as many as five “listening sessions” on the issue. “Operation Mollify” begins Friday.

    I’d better check out the metro section. Pawlenty again. “Pawlenty puts gambling on table.” Governor says if tribes refuse to share casino profits, “we are going to entertain other options.” Options under consideration include an all-you-can-eat buffet at the National Guard Armory, two-drink-minimum Williams and Ree concerts in the Capitol rotunda, and Ann-Margret for lieutenant governor.

    Comics page. Nothing funny here. Dilbert still hates his job. Cathy’s still fat. Garfield’s still lazy. And the Family Circle kids remain ignorant of Mommy’s burning desire to escape.

    This just in. Paul Douglas’s weather page says spring is on the way. What a job. He said that last year.

  • The Lo-Res Scarlet A

    In America, every accused person is innocent until proven guilty, right? Well, we may profess such lofty thoughts, but the cold reality is that most people believe that if you are in jail, you gotta be guilty of something. Look no further than the way people have reacted to Alfonso Rodriguez, Jr., the prime suspect in the Dru Sjodin disappearance. From the very first moment Minnesotans saw him under the glare of television lights, manacled and wearing a faded prison-orange jumpsuit, he was as good as guilty. What’s more, Rodriguez became exhibit A in the argument for bringing back the death penalty to Minnesota. The hysteria surrounding Dru Sjodin graphically illustrates the dangers of publicizing crimes before they’ve been prosecuted, publicly identifying “criminals” before they’ve been convicted of anything.

    Dakota County recently created a website identifying who is in the pokey. I am normally a big First Amendment kind of guy, but I think such websites, in the guise of “keeping the public informed,” provide the kind of information that makes a mockery of the notion of presumed innocence.

    The website, called the “Dakota County Jail Booking Search,” allows anyone with access to a computer to search the Dakota County jail records to find “anyone that has been booked or is currently in jail.” Now, keep in mind that not only have these individuals not yet been convicted, many have not even made their first appearance before a judge. The DCJBS home page cautions that “information contained herein should not be relied upon for any type of legal action.” Wait, it gets even better. The Dakota County Sheriff’s Office admits that it “cannot represent that the information is current, accurate, or complete. Persons may use false identification information. True identity can only be confirmed through fingerprint comparison.”

    So, if the website information should not be relied upon for “any type of legal action” and in fact may be flat out wrong, why in the name of truth, justice, and the American way would any sane organization post it? Dakota County Sheriff Don Gudmundson reportedly believes that it will reduce calls from lawyers, bail bonds workers, and others who want to see if someone is locked up. Chief Deputy Dave Bellows told the Star Tribune, “a lot of people do call to find out if their husband is in jail…we are just trying to make this department a little more user-friendly.”

    Which users does Deputy Bellows have in mind? Does he really think that some distraught spouse looking for her husband will get an “I could have had a V-8” moment, pop on to the jail website, and find her Waldo? More likely, the web-site users will not be bail bondsmen and worried wives, but others—like landlords or the habitually nosy. And, given that African Americans and other people of color are disproportionately arrested in this state, this is very scary stuff. According to Robert Sykora, publicizing this information could lead to lost jobs and denied housing. Sykora, a public defender and member of a Minnesota Supreme Court advisory committee looking at Internet access of court records, thinks that easy electronic access to such sensitive information is the start of a very slippery and dangerous slope.

    I think Sykora is absolutely right. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that the media could not obtain comprehensive FBI “rap sheets” from a central location. Why? Because the court decided that requiring people to physically retrieve this kind of information creates “practical obscurity” that helps to protect privacy.

    The jails are filled with the accused, not necessarily the guilty. An arrest is really only a criminal accusation, and to put an accusation online means that the accused have acquired the electronic equivalent of a scarlet A. Even if they are ultimately exonerated, there is a good chance they can be scarred.

    If “innocent until proven guilty” has even a ghost of a chance in our web-crazed society, we should accept that there is such a thing as “too much information.” We do not need to make access to arrest records easy. They are merely a starting point for legal action, not an end point, and the web implies that the case is already closed. Arrests should not be allowed to acquire the aura of established legal fact that a listing on the Internet can create.

  • Hope in a Bottle

    I have always warmed to authors who thank their spouses for preparing their index. Such marital harmony, such mutual society, help and comfort. You can imagine their kitchen: she sitting at the table rummaging through proofs and index cards, he standing at the stove turning Seville oranges into coarse-cut marmalade.

    It is surely gracious also for professors to thank their students, not (heaven forfend) because they have published their students’ research, nor from fake humility or a failure to put in the necessary hours in the library, but rather to acknowledge two important gifts. One is the sense that there are others who care about what one loves and wants to study—the pursuit of truth for its own sake can otherwise be a lonely business. The other is a sense of hope. A lifetime of teaching impresses on those who teach that the end is not yet, that people do become wiser, or at least more knowledgeable, given the opportunity. Some more generous professors, I am told, even take this view of telemarketers who call at dinnertime.

    I recently spoke to a friend at an English college where admission depends heavily on personal interviews conducted by the people who will actually teach candidates if they are admitted. Potential students in their very late teens, he said, were like young claret—the name given to the great wines of Bordeaux since the seventeenth century, when wines like Chateau Haut-Brion were already being enjoyed by the likes of Samuel Pepys, the diarist. Clarets do not leap into life fully armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus (or Dionysus from his thigh). Samples taken from the cask before the wine is ready to be sold taste largely of tannin. The initial impact on the tongue and palate and the taste left after swallowing (or spitting—in the cuspidor, that’s what it’s for, toreador) may suggest the pleasures of the finished article. But in between there is a hard, dry taste like leaf mold (no, I don’t, not often, anyhow) or dry tea leaves (politesse once obliged me to eat half a pound of dry tea leaves in a train on the Turkish-Syrian border, but that is another story).

    These tannins will be absorbed as the wine lies in its bottle, waiting to be drunk. Sometimes, as with a memorable bottle of 1975 Haut-Bages-Monpelou consumed in the late 1980s, they are never absorbed; this was a wine as inky in taste as it was in color. Sometimes one waits too long, the wine lies in the cellar howling “drink me now” through its cork, no one hears, and what is eventually poured is brown around the edges and acid. But more clarets die, I fear, of infanticide than of old age. What my English friend was trying to say was that his interview technique involved assessing the potential for mellowing exhibited by the tannins in his future pupils, while at the same time savoring their possible depth, complexity and fruit. He quoted Mark Twain at me: “When I was 18, I thought my father was an old fool. When I got to be 23, I was amazed how much he had picked up in five years.” Not a scientific method, I guess, but humane and effective.

    Not all the wines of Bordeaux are made for the long haul. Indeed, I recently enjoyed a bottle only three years old, which made up in pleasant warmth what it lacked in complexity. Like most red Bordeaux, the 2000 vintage of Chateau Saint Sulpice (Appellation Bordeaux Controlée) is a blend of Merlot (imparting mellowness) and Cabernet (imparting flavor)—in this case rather more Merlot than Cabernet. Upon opening there is little smell to it, but the first impact on the tongue releases a pleasantly “winey” aroma up inside the nose, followed by a light tanniny taste and a lingering flavor of grapes. Left to air for a little while, it mellows further. It would be good with cheese or pork; it made a homemade cauliflower cheese really quite palatable. This is not complicated wine, but it bears thinking about as it goes down. Moreover, at about $10 a bottle locally it does no excess damage to the budget—and that is surely a true foundation for domestic harmony.

  • Seller’s Remorse

    Wisconsin Estate Sale, Antiques, Collectables, Linens, Furniture. Quality Household Miscellaneous. Pole Barn Full of Tools. Everything Must Go! Friday,
    Saturday and Sunday. 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

    I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to write one of those ads. But let me tell you, it’s pretty hard to make the words “household miscellaneous” jump off the page. And I had a personal stake in it, too. My parents, their sale. Last November, and I’m still having nightmares about it. But when I catch a case of the sweats at 3 a.m., it’s not my father’s illness I’m thinking about, or the inevitability of his physical decline. I’m not thinking about my mother’s heart, either, which breaks a little more each day as she tries to ease her husband’s suffering. I think about those things in the daylight, in my world, where it seems safer: A world of belligerent teens and gassy old dogs, of crackpot schemes, and my own husband, who I’m beginning to realize just might love me as much as he says he does.

    In the daylight, as tough as things can be sometimes, it’s easier to put life’s trials into perspective. It’s possible to look at them more as rites of passage. But the thought process that I employ to force my fears into submission dissolves as soon as I hit the sheets. In dreams I’m racing through a field of lidless Tupperware containers, chasing after buyers and screaming “ONLY FIFTY CENTS! FIFTY CENTS! FIFTY CENTS!”

    I get it. It’s the futility of the situation that haunts me. In sleep, it’s just transferred to a related event of tangible effort. I can’t make my dad better, and I can’t take away my mother’s pain. Any more than I can put a dollar value on a rusted coffee can full of nails.

    I decided to run my parents’ estate sale when I found out that the only person who ran sales in their community would demand 35 percent of the take. I did a mental tally of what they had left at their house, and in the words of Ed Kruse, well, the hell with that. Any and all profits could stay with my folks. I took a week off from work to get the sale ready. Dear friends and family rallied to the cause. Heavy lifting was done. Coffee was made and drunk. Eye-catching groupings of mom’s tchotchkes were arranged and priced. Joyce, a church friend of my mother’s, enlisted the help of her handy husband Dwayne, and he personally knocked signs in the grass along the highway, five miles in each direction so that no one could miss them.

    One of my biggest concerns was the pole barn. It was, indeed, full of tools—some old, many new and never used. It was also full of dreaded Halloween bugs, those nasty ladybug wannabes that crawl into every last crack and corner and never ever ever die. They go dormant, like Cher. There was no way I could hope to empty the barn—much less run outside to staff it anytime someone wanted to buy a pitchfork or a mower. The day before the sale began, a wiry little man arrived early in a big truck. Delbert said he’d heard there were some tools for sale, and wanted to know if he could take an early look. I walked him out to the barn and told him I’d give him a deal. Five hundred bucks if he hauled everything away: my dad’s landscaping tools, his fishing tackle, the jigsaw and workbench. And the bugs. There was a moment of silence while Delbert calculated the merchandise versus the job at hand. Then he turned to me and said: “I ’spect I’ll take it.”

    The sale was a huge success. I worked in a white heat, re-arranging wares after each wave of shoppers swept through. In the waning hours of the last day, the new owner of the house showed up. A single man with a classic car collection. My sister Tracy had brought a bottle of champagne, which we poured into paper cups. The three of us stood out on the deck, and toasted good old times and new ones to come. The man told us how nice that pole barn was going to be for his cars, and I laughed in relief, thinking of Delbert.

    We cleaned up, ran a vacuum, said our goodbyes. I was the last to leave, but not the last to see the place. Tracy would come back in two weeks with our mom, for the closing. I’m still coming to grips with the fact that everything must go.