Rick Veach (1959–2017)

Rick Veach was our plumber and our heating and cooling specialist through almost all the twenty-seven years we’ve lived in our house. And he was our friend. I’m not sure how or why we first called him — probably on someone’s recommendation. He never needed to advertise.

A visit from Rick was a visit, for real. Whatever work there was to do, there was also time for conversation, conversation that went in any and every direction: our children, his children, the school system, building codes, guitars, vacation destinations. Rick told us once that he knew he could make more money by just doing the work and going to the next job, but that visiting with people was part of what he liked about his work. He told us that he thought of us as friends. And that’s how we thought of him.

Rick solved problems that many a person would have walked away from. I often quoted him to my students: “A problem is just a challenge that hasn’t been overcome.” I loved that, and I still quote it to myself. And Rick solved problems with absolute integrity. When the mini-split system that he installed in our house failed to work properly, Rick tried fix after fix. He called the manufacturer, repeatedly, and finally figured out the problem: the manufacturer’s specs failed to mention a maximum distance between units. Our two units were just over the limit. So what did Rick do? He replaced the system with one from another manufacturer — at his own cost. We couldn’t even pay him for his labor. But we did get him to accept a large gift certificate to a favorite restaurant.

Here is a song that Rick told us was one of his favorites: “Once Upon a Time.” He had the Jay McShann recording on his phone and played it for us once, and the three of us stood listening in our hallway.

A related post
Rick solves a minor mystery : One more Rick Veach story

Another resignation

Javier Palomarez, president and CEO of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, has resigned from Donald Trump’s National Diversity Coalition:

Over the past month, many corporate leaders have fled the councils and coalitions President Trump assembled at the beginning of his administration. I am proud to join them. While I will never cease advocating for policies that benefit America’s Hispanic-owned businesses, the moral costs of associating with this White House are simply too high. There is no place for a National Diversity Coalition in an administration that by its word and deed does not value diversity at all.

Palomarez notes that the National Diversity Coalition “never formally met — a stark sign of the president’s lack of interest in our work.”

This passage from a Times article that appeared earlier today speaks volumes:

As late as one hour before the decision [to end DACA] was to be announced, administration officials privately expressed concern that Mr. Trump might not fully grasp the details of the steps he was about to take, and when he discovered their full impact, would change his mind.

Which would seem to mean that Trump lacks even the competence to make a bad decision. The anguish and uncertainty that his decision visits upon hundreds of thousands of young adults and their families and friends is beyond reckoning.

A related post
More resignations

A Painted Rock Owl

[Click for a larger owl.]

A Painted Rock Owl, spotted yesterday at the entrance to a park. The owl’s habitat: some rock.

“The ’Clipse”

This post contains the text of a short piece of fan fiction, by me: “The ’Clipse,” a Timmy and Lassie story. The story is both inspired by current events and meant to serve as a brief respite from them. It’s inspired too by Fresca’s continuing attention to fan fiction. Lassie, in its Timmy Martin form, was a major factor in my imaginative life in childhood.

“The ’Clipse” assumes a working acquaintance with the Lassie world, “just outside Calverton.” The veterinary science in the story is, of course, hooey. You can click on each image for a larger view. Whistling the opening and closing Lassie themes is optional.











Related reading
All OCA Lassie posts (Pinboard)

Four more Lassie stories
“The Poet” (with Robert Frost) : “Bon Appétit!” (with Julia Child) : “On the Road” (with Tod and Buz from Route 66) : “The Case of the Purloined Prairie” (with Perry Mason and friends)

[Why image files? Because I prefer that fiction and poetry maintain a print-like integrity in blog posts, even if that makes changing Mrs. Martin’s inelegant “I guess” to “I suppose” a bit of a production.]

Labor Day

[“Loading oranges into refrigerator car at a co-op orange packing plant.” Photograph by Jack Delano. Redlands, California, March 1943. From the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Click for a larger view.]

Orange crate work.

The Library of Congress had made this photograph available via Flickr.

Related reading
All OCA Jack Delano posts

John Ashbery (1927–2017)

John Ashbery, from “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” in Houseboat Days (New York: Viking, 1977).

The poet John Ashbery has died at the age of ninety. The New York Times has an obituary. I chose the lines above for several reasons: the Wallace Stevens-like meditative voice, the intimations of mortality, the genial resolve to move along, like, say, Adam and Eve or Lycidas (“to be ambling on’s / The tradition”), the comic diction (“Therefore bivouac we,” “the big, / Vaguer stuff”). All in a poem that’s inspired by one Merrie Melodies cartoon (Duck Amuck) and shares a title with another.

And I chose these lines because “Daffy Duck in Hollywood” has special importance for me. The poem (available here) begins with a catalogue of items from the dowdy world that includes “the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile / Escritoire.” Who? A once-popular writer whose name I know only because of this poem. Years ago, I noticed one of Miller’s books at a library book-sale and sent it to John Ashbery in care of his agent. (Why not?) A year later, I received a letter of thanks, which I found in my mailbox right before walking into the poetry class in which I’d just taught an Ashbery poem.

In 2002, I visited New York City’s Museum of American Folk Art to see a Henry Darger exhibit and attend a reading by Ashbery, whose Girls on the Run (1999) was inspired by Darger’s work. (I was writing something about Ashbery and Darger.) I was second in line for the reading and sat in the front row (after vacillating). And who came in and sat down next to me? Yes, John Ashbery. I said hello (why not?) and he nodded back. “John,” I said, “you don’t know me, but I sent you a book several years ago by Helen Topping Miller.” “I still have that book,” he said. I said that I was glad. A little more conversation followed, before and after the reading. John Ashbery was not only one of the great poets of our time: he was a sweet, kind, generous man.

Related reading
All OCA John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“American cheese?”

“No, cheese cheese.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

“Popular with” athletes

One more comment on the New York Times article about academics and athletics at Florida State: to describe certain courses as “popular with” athletes is to be exceedingly decorous. The truth is that athletes who lack the ability to do genuine college work are steered, routinely, toward Mickey Mouse coursework that will pose no danger to their academic eligibility.

I recall, many years ago, meeting up with a student-athlete I had taught in a summer program for incoming freshmen. He was now a junior, with more than two years of junk coursework and without the prerequisites to begin work on a major — any major. How do you think that happened?

Football and grades at FSU

“Brazilian coffee is one of few places that has a carnival and the coffee place a major role just as much as the dancing and the food”: a college student’s writing, quoted in a New York Times article about football, grades, and a brave, ethical teaching assistant at Florida State University.

A related post
Modest proposals (Goodbye to Big Sports)
“Think middle school report” (A scandal at UNC)

A criminal exposed

Honoré de Balzac, Père Goriot, trans. E.K. Brown, Dorothea Walter, and John Watkins (New York: The Modern Library, 1950).