My Very First Employer

This is a composite of the several dozen phone calls I received, along with some other salient details, from my very first employer, my neighbor Mario, of Pommel Place in West Des Moines, Iowa:

"Cleeeese! What are you doing? This is Mario. My machine is broken! Can you come cut my grass? I will give you warm Dr. Pepper as a refreshment. Despite the fact that I am in my late fifties and have a quite large gut, I rarely if ever put on a shirt during the summer months. Please be careful when you use the weed-whacker around my abortive attempt to reproduce the Trevi Fountain in my backyard. I am Italian but I teach Spanish at Drake. My wife spends 23 hours a day on the couch. Cleeeeese!"

Moving a Church in Manning, Iowa

Makes me a little nostalgic for the old home state. I would say that this video captures Iowa about as well as any 4-minute video ever could. From the National Geographic series "Monster Moves."

Iowan Dance No. 5

Chicago to Okoboji

Your correspondent at Addison and Clark.

We had quite the trip to Lake Okoboji in northern Iowa this past weekend. After a relaxing Friday on the North Side of Chicago, Neil got home from work at about 6:00 and then we picked up Rose from her job and drove to Des Moines. I spent the night at Joe Gallagher's place and picked Helen up from the airport at 11:15 am on Saturday the 23rd. Then over to Neil's folks' house in West Des Moines, where he, I, Helen, and Joe piled into Neil's car for the 4-hour drive to Okoboji.

Loading the SS Silver Banana.

We quickly found a campsite at Emerson Bay State Park on the southwest corner of West Okoboji Lake. Then it was off to the Village West resort to meet John Stoneback, another member of the West Des Moines posse from the early 1980s. We had dinner with some of John's family members at the "Main Event" bar and grill there at the resort and then John came with us back over to our campsite to listen to some of the audio tapes we had all made together as kids.

The tapes featured faux radio shows like "Pipe Talk," a talk show focused on the latest trends in plumbing; "Eyenitwit News," a news show; "In the Shadow of Breezy Paradise," a soap opera; "Bottle Cutting with Bernard," a craft show; and various commercials advertising products and services such as "The Jasper County Community Crockpot" and "Chemo-Spread" (slogan: "Removes all flavor from all foods").

Sunday morning at Okoboji.

For our second night at Okoboji we moved over to a campsite equipped with electricity so that we could plug in our movie projector and show Super-8 movies, also filmed during our youth, on a free-standing screen. Next to us, the air conditioner on an Airstream "Land Yacht" (actual brand name) motorhome hummed the evening away. The occupants inside never ventured forth, and the only hint of life inside the motorhome was when the futuristic TV antenna on top would rotate, indicating that someone had changed the channel.

Before the movies we ordered pizza from Domino's to be delivered to our campsite. A kid driving a late-model Cadillac delivered it. This was my first Cadillac-delivered pizza.

Waiting for dusk so we can start watching movies while our neighbor, the Land Yacht, abides.

Over the course of two and a half days at Okoboji I did a grand total of zero-point-zero hours of canoeing, although Neil and Helen did go out on the lake for oh, about 10 minutes. Which was exactly one-sixth as long as it took them to figure out how to strap the damn canoe to the top of Neil's Honda CRV back in West Des Moines.

On the other hand, we did go swimming at night ("nightswimming," I think it is called) and I floated around on a yellow inflatable mattress that was approximately the width of one (1) of my buttocks.

More photos on Ball of Dirt.