From The Braver Institute

Gunfight At The Starbucks Corral

2012-02-24T11:29:00.000-05:00

Not long ago the Starbucks coffee chain found itself in the middle of a commonly contentious issue. They came under fire for allowing people to do something in their stores that is perfectly legal.

You see, in over 40 states it is perfectly legal to “open carry” a handgun. Now open carry does not mean that you can walk around with a gun in your hand, but it does mean that you can carry a holstered handgun that is in plain view. Starbucks (along with countless other places) has a policy that basically states that they will allow people to do that which is completely legal - in this case, openly carry a handgun.

Now let’s be clear here, Starbucks doesn't have big banners welcoming the gun toting public, they just have a policy. This policy is where the trouble begins for some. An anti-gun organization that I forget the name of ordered a boycott of Starbucks in protest of this policy. Rather quickly a group of gun owners began a movement to show support for Starbucks policy by patronizing Starbucks coffee shops - a buycott - and they encouraged the use of $2 bills to show Starbucks how many people supported their policy.

You may not be aware of the fact that most states allow the open carry of handguns. With this in mind, you may wonder why the whole country isn’t full of lawless cowboys like in the old west, carrying six-guns on their hips, and getting into gunfights with the first hombre that looks at them sideways.

Well things weren’t really like that in the old west, and they aren’t really like that today. Even with most states allowing open carry, most people do not walk around with a gun on their hip.

At the end of it all I have no idea who “won” the battle of Starbucks (all things considered it was probably Starbucks that came out on top, and no minds changed on either side of the gun debate), but I don’t recall hearing any stories about crazed gun owners shooting up Starbucks.

For the most part registered handgun owners are law-abiding citizens. They have no interest in going on shooting sprees. Those who carry handguns do so primarily for personal protection, or during the course of hunting or other outdoor activities. They are not looking to make someone a victim of crime, but at the same time they do not want to be a victim.

Ever since I was old enough to do so, I have owned at least one gun. When I was 25 or 26 I purchased my first handgun. At the time I was living alone in the woods. I spent a lot of time walking through the woods, and along the many dirt roads that surrounded my place. I would carry my handgun with me most of the time because you never knew who or what you might come across that would make you wish you had a gun.

While I was perfectly within my rights to carry my gun in plain view on my belt, it did make me feel uneasy about how I might make a person feel whose path I crossed. A person walking around the woods with a gun is nothing unusual, but in those days you didn’t see too many people with a handgun on their belt. I believe that a many of the people who do openly carry a handgun are desperately saying “look at me”. I have never been one to draw unnecessary attention to myself, so I decided that the best thing for me to do was obtain a concealed weapons permit (CWP).

At that time you needed to be authorized by the local chief of police, or sheriff to get a CWP. Aside from my teenage years, I had been an upstanding, law abiding citizen. I knew the chief of police well, and he had no hesitation in signing the authorization form. He knew me well enough to know that I wasn’t one to go on a shooting spree. Then again, if I had planned on shooting someone - a highly illegal thing to do - why would I care if I was illegally concealing my handgun?

Until recently, I had several handguns that were mostly just sitting around in locked boxes. I wasn’t really using them. Oh sure, when I would head out into the woods I would take one along, but that isn’t really using them. Now by using I don’t mean killing people. Carrying a gun is just that - carrying. But using a gun involves shooting it, and shooting - accurately shooting - is an enjoyable thing for me. I like target shooting. The collection of guns I had were not much for accuracy. They were fun to shoot at targets, but actually hitting the target consistently was a real challenge, and every one of them was too small for my hand. It was time to get rid of them, and get a gun that I could (and would) actually shoot.

I have finally sold a few of my guns, and used the proceeds to purchase a new one. I now have a handgun that fits my hand, that I will actually use. Once again I am faced with the problem of wearing it on my hip, and making people nervous.

Things have changed in Michigan since I obtained my first CWP. First of all Michigan doesn’t issue concealed weapons permits anymore, they now use a CPL (concealed pistol license). These days you don’t need to get permission to conceal a handgun, but you do need to go through pistol safety training course (this was not required in the past, and it is not required to own, or openly carry a handgun). CPL holders are well trained, law abiding citizens, and the next time the safety course is offered in my area, I will join their ranks - which number over 300,000 in Michigan.

300,000 armed citizens is an awful lot of people with guns. Yet, with all of those CPL holders, we don’t have wild west shoot-outs in our streets. How can this be? Maybe it is because these license holders are responsible, law-abiding citizens who have no interest in harming other people, in Starbucks, or anywhere else for that matter.

This piece first appeared in the February 23rd, 2012 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website:http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Be Mine Some Other Time

2012-02-17T09:41:00.000-05:00

By the time this week’s column goes to press, Valentine’s Day should be safely behind us for another year. Normally I would try to write about a holiday or observance before the actual day of such a thing, but since I am talking about Valentine’s Day in what some may call a dim light, it is better that I do this after the fact. That way, I can’t be blamed this year for giving some guy the idea to not do what is expected, and all of this will be forgotten by the time it rolls around next year.

My impression of Valentine’s Day is that every woman out there is eagerly awaiting one of two things. First, she is awaiting the delivery of flowers, chocolate, a card, dinner, and/or any combination of the preceding, or second, a reason to get really mad for not getting any of the preceding.

For some reason, this doesn’t work the other way around. Men don’t expect anything or get upset if women forget that it is Valentine’s Day.

While women look at the calendar and think how wonderful it is that Valentine’s Day is here again, guys look at the calendar and think, how can Valentine’s Day be here again? That is, of course, if they remembered it at all.

I don’t understand exactly why we have this one day out of the year when we are all supposed to exchange sappy sentiments with our significant others. I don’t see why this isn’t something that is done or expected at random times throughout the year. What does it say about a relationship where a Valentine’s Day type of sentiment is exchanged only on Valentine’s Day? Isn’t buying flowers, or chocolate, or cards, or dinner on the one day a year that everyone else is doing it, just because they are supposed to do it, a little disingenuous?

The thing that really kind of gets me is that Valentine’s Day is turning into a mini-Christmas of sorts. Once upon a time – maybe back in the stone age – it was perfectly acceptable to give a handwritten card with a heartfelt expression of love inside. Then Hallmark came along and decided that they needed to really screw things up. Their little slogan, “When you care enough to send the very best,” somehow became lodged in the minds of potential recipients that anything other than a card from Hallmark was somehow unacceptable. These days, the “very best” doesn’t stop at the card, no sir. Things have changed. These days, you had better be planning a stop at a new car dealership on the way home, and don’t even consider something without heated seats.

Now I don’t want to take anything away from the local flower shops that are able to cash in on this annual boon, but I would think that they would really think it was great if people decided to send flowers to that special someone in their life at other times of the year, too.

If there ever is another Mrs. Braver, she will have to accept that Valentines Day might fall on Oct. 12, or March 2, or July 5, or April 15.

And now a side note:

Roughly three-and-a-half years ago, I had written an article on Lance Armstrong’s return to the sport of cycling. I had sent this article to several newspapers, including the Pioneer-Tribune. The editor, Paul Olson, contacted me, and informed me that he was not interested in a one-off article, but was looking for someone to write a weekly column, and he asked if I would be willing to give it a try. I had never given a thought to writing a column, but since I was writing almost daily, I figured that I should try it. I don’t really know how long I had planned on trying it for, but the years have managed to slip by in that trial period.

There have been weeks when the column has come easy, and there have been weeks where it has been a fight to get the words out, but all in all it has been an enjoyable experience. I looked forward to sending my column off to Paul on Tuesday mornings, no matter how easy or hard it had been to arrive at that point.

It will be a little awkward to not e-mail the draft of my column to him anymore, but like everything in life, change is inevitable, and I will get used to that change.

I wish Paul the very best in whatever lies ahead for him. I greatly appreciate the opportunity that he has provided me.

To paraphrase the way I closed every e-mailed submission for the last three years:

Thanks as always. WB

This piece first appeared in the February 16th, 2012 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website:http://www.pioneertribune.com/

And to Think that I Saw the Donner Party on Mulberry Street

2012-02-10T09:27:00.001-05:00

The complaint goes something like this: There is never any good news, there is only bad news. Why can’t there ever be any good news?

While this may not be an exact wording of the sentiment, it pretty much sums up the standard bad news complaint. I myself have even wondered why there aren’t more good things reported by the news sources out there, but I never dwell on this question for very long, because the answer is abundantly clear. Good news is boring.

Okay, that might be a little extreme, but lets face it, hearing that everything is normal and routine is not particularly interesting. Good news largely reflects an uneventful day. Don’t get me wrong, though. I am happy when there are slow news days.

Now you might say that there is plenty of good news out there that is interesting. That might be true, but I will bet that all of the best good news stories, or just good stories themselves, have some sort of adversity attached to them.

If you look the word “adversity” up in the dictionary you will find that adversity is pretty much a bad thing. With that in mind, good news is only really good if it comes riding in on the coattails of something bad. Sort of like the old “good news, bad news” routine: The good news is that many members of the Donner party survived being trapped in the mountains. The bad news is that they ate those who didn’t.

It’s little surprise that the Donner party is the only group of settlers that anyone in the modern age is even aware of. If they had made it without eating anyone, or had simply died like so many others did, they would have been relegated to the dust bin of history. Since they survived by doing what is largely unthinkable, they have a pass in the Sierra Nevadas named after them.

Adversity is the substance of great stories. Overcoming that adversity is cause to cheer. Look at the story of the Chilean Miners a couple of years back. A mine caving in is really bad news. Miners being trapped in the collapsed mine is bad news. Finding out that these miners are alive is good news. The fact that they may not make it out alive is bad news. The fact that they did make it out alive is great news. All of this makes for a really great story.

Now take this really great story and remove a few elements – let’s take away all of the collapsed mine stuff – and all you are left with is that the miners are alive. They went to work and then they went home at the end of the day. Sure, that’s a good thing, but it isn’t the least bit interesting.

The same thing with Jessica McClure, who fell down a well as a baby back in the ’80s. We all held our breath as the rescue unfolded on TV. When she was pulled from the well the world gave a collective sigh of relief and we were all happy about the good news. The story was so good it became a TV movie, and baby Jessica now has a huge trust fund set up with money that was donated to her.

Now, once again, let’s remove an element of the story to see what we end up with. Let’s say that Jessica didn’t fall in a well and just went home that day. This, in reality, would be very good yet extremely boring news. It would make an awful story. Throw in the adversity of being trapped in a well, and you have a story that will go down in the annals of news reporting history.

Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that I would have rather had these stories come to a tragic end. I am just saying that without that potential, there really isn’t a story.

If we, the public at large, could be satisfied with news and stories that lack adversity, we would be content all of our lives watching Captain Kangaroo and reading Dr. Seuss.

Speaking of Dr. Seuss, to make things interesting, most of us would have to embellish the story of our day, much in the way Marco, the protagonist in Seuss’s “To Think that I Saw it on Mulberry Street” does when planning what he will tell his dad that he saw on his walk home from school, which was nothing more than a horse and a wagon. There is nothing interesting about a horse and a wagon (at least not at the time of the publication of the book), so Marco imagines fantastic things that he saw to tell his father about when he gets home.

I guess the good news is that for most of us, nothing significant happens every single day. But if you want that nothing to be interesting, throw in some adversity. The fact that you are sitting there reading this paper is mundane. That you survived reading this column – now that is a story of great triumph.

This piece first appeared in the February 9th, 2012 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website:http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Heritage as a Reason to Plunder

2012-02-03T08:34:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I watched a very strange yet very interesting movie called “Valhalla Rising,” which is not in any way related to the book of the same name, in case you were wondering. This film got me thinking about our human desire to maintain the traditions of our past, to maintain the heritage of our ancestors, although the idea of tradition and heritage are in no way related to the movie either.

For reasons that I do not completely understand, many of us feel it is of incredible importance to hang on to our heritage. We believe that keeping in touch with our ancestral past helps us to understand where we are from, and where we are going.

We wrap our past around us like we are somehow special and the rest of the world and its traditions are somehow inferior. We wear the perceived traits of those who came before us like some kind of badge. If it suits us, or the moment, we will adopt that perceived trait as our own. Being strong-willed (or some synonym thereof) seems to be the most universal of these traits. I am constantly hearing things like, “Well, I’m (insert nationality here), so of course I am (stubborn, tenacious, tough, etc.).”

No one ever says that their ancestors were the very best losers, although those who say things like “we were a peaceful people” come fairly close, since there was very little peace throughout the world in the days of antiquity.

Sorry, I have gotten just a little sidetracked.

“Valhalla Rising,” as the name implies, is a story about Vikings (Valhalla being the Viking equivalent of heaven), or at least it has to do with the Norse and late Viking-era culture. I highly recommend the film, but don’t watch it for a history lesson or if you are hoping for some kind of action-adventure film. The film is more like a Viking acid trip.

What does all of this have to do with anything?

Well, I’m getting there.

Ever since last week’s column, where I mentioned the image of a Viking in an old encyclopedia, I have had the whole subject on my mind, and anything remotely related to Vikings has been of interest to me.

And that is where the whole heritage thing comes in. My nationalities are primarily Swedish and Danish. My blood is made up of two out of the three Scandinavian nationalities (sorry, Finland, your people aren’t technically Scandinavian), and Scandinavia was the home of the Vikings.

My ancestors were Vikings. “Valhalla Rising” has done much to keep that at the back of my mind.

Now in this age where clinging to the traditions and customs of our ancestors is a widely accepted and even encouraged thing to do, I have pretty much decided that I would like to explore my Viking heritage.

Sure, I could attend a traditional Scandinavian Midsummer festival, but that does precious little to placate the ambitions of an aspiring Viking. There are 364 more days in the year with which to live in the manner of my ancestors.

I think that I may have to return to Viking ways on the small scale at first. Raiding the towns and villages along the shores of Lakes Michigan and Superior would be a little too much for me to handle alone. It’s not that I couldn’t take these places on, it’s just that I would have a hard time making off with that which I had plundered.

I think a better place to start would be the yards and garages of my neighbors. I could put on my horned helmet (even though Vikings didn’t wear them, I wouldn’t want to be mistaken for some kind of Saxon) and my battle gear and strike out to raid the yards of the unsuspecting. I would attack those places which were poorly defended. Yards without fences would be my first choice.

The only problem with raiding the yards of neighbors is that there usually isn’t much in the yard that I would want. I mean really, what am I going to do with an extra leaf rake or a lawnmower? I would probably be doing some guy a big favor by taking them. I can hear the morning conversation in the neighbors’ kitchen now:

“Honey, when are you going to mow the lawn?”

“I can’t mow the lawn. The mower was lost in a Viking raid yesterday.”

I suppose that I could round up a larger group of Vikings. There must be other Scandinavians who would want to keep the ways of the past alive. Imagine the fear that would run through the helpless people who live in waterfront communities at the sight of a longship or two landing on their shores. We could kill everyone in sight and make off with all of their iPhones, Kindle Fires and flat-screen TVs.

I know that all of this may sound a little bit harsh, but we Scandinavians are losing our cultural identity. Raiding the communities of others would just be us trying to preserve our heritage, and heritage preservation is a good idea, no matter how brutal it is.

This piece first appeared in the February 2nd, 2012 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website:http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com.
Visit the Braver Institute at www. braverinsitute.com.

The Wanted And The Needed

2012-01-27T11:16:00.001-05:00

I have found myself in somewhat of a dilemma that is bordering on crisis. The trouble is that in my house I am very limited on storage space, so much of what might otherwise be stashed away in a basement or a garage (if I had a basement or a garage) must be made to somehow work with my decor.

For a long time, boxes on the floor and boxes stacked along walls were the prevalent theme in my decorating, but over time I have managed to work the contents of these boxes into some form of function or interior decoration. Some of the boxes, and the items contained therein, I have decided that I can live without, and as a result have sent the contents, via thrift stores, to live with folks who apparently cannot live without them.

It is in the drawing of lines between that which I need and that which I want where things get difficult.

There are certain things that I do not need, and do not use, but still have a strong attachment to. A good example of this is one of my sets of encyclopedias. Yes, I have more than one set. You see, the vast majority of my home library consists of reference books.

I could easily, and most likely will, part company with the other encyclopedia sets, since the space they take up is something that I would actually use, unlike the contents of these books, but I have one set that has been a near-constant companion since the mid ’70s. I have grown attached to it.

For a period of time during my elementary years I attended a private school. Someone had donated a new set of World Book encyclopedias to that school, and they were kept in my classroom. I thought it was really great to have access to this wealth of information – almost anything I wanted to know on almost every subject. Secretly I wished that the set were mine to keep.

In time that wish came true. The school I was attending closed for reasons that are not clear to me, and they had a large rummage sale to empty the contents of the place. To make a short story even shorter, the World Books were now safely in my control.

I do believe that I have looked at every single page in that set of encyclopedias, and while I know that I have not read each one cover-to-cover, I have read every word under every heading of every subject that even remotely interested me or happened to catch my attention while flipping through the pages, as I frequently did. I would get lost on a journey through the land of information. One subject would lead to another, and another ...

These encyclopedias helped me complete countless homework assignments, and have done much to make me no fun to play Trivial Pursuit against (I’m not bragging).

These days, though, they never leave the bookshelf. They haven’t for years. I never go to them when I need to look something up. In fact, the last time I used them was to look up a Wagnerian image of a Viking warrior that I knew was in the article on Vikings. I wanted to look for a clue as to the origin of the image so I could find it on the Internet.

Of course, it is this whole online business that has kept my encyclopedias as part of what would appear to be a static display of reference books on my bookshelves.

These days when I want to know something, the Internet is my source of information. Wikipedia is a fantastic site to find quick information on almost anything. Sure, it has its problems, or potential problems, in that it is made up of user-created content, and the material is only as good as its source, but wasn’t that case with encyclopedias, too? At least an online source can be corrected with little effort, but once a book is sitting on the shelf in the study, it is a little hard to change erroneous entries.

The Internet also allows me to check other sources if what I am researching is of any real importance, or where accuracy is crucial. That was a little difficult for me to do in the past; I had to completely trust World Book. That is, until I acquired more reference books, but even then there are limits.

At any rate, I find myself sitting here trying to think of good reasons not to get rid of the encyclopedias. I have yet to come up with a single one. The only thing preventing them from being recycled is the past.

Since I never have been able to find the Viking image contained in my encyclopedias online, perhaps they are worth keeping for that reason alone.

This piece first appeared in the January 26th, 2012 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com.

Visit the Braver Institute at www. braverinsitute.com.

Selective Hearing

2012-01-20T15:34:00.003-05:00

Last week we had a “snow storm,” or at least there was a rumor running around about one that was on its way. As it turned out, the area where I live received very little snow, but judging by the way people were constantly asking me if I was ready for the big storm in the days and hours leading up to the non-event, you would have thought that the end of the world was only moments away (silly people, the end of the world isn’t until next December).

I find it kind of funny how people hear about a winter storm that is on its way, but they fail to pay attention to where it is on its way to. Our local radio and TV stations cover a very large area, and they, as a result, report on the weather for almost the entire Upper Peninsula. Now people being people, they tend to hear only what they want to hear. After the word “storm” they stop listening and fail to hear the rest, which usually says something like:

“for Keweenaw, Baraga, Marquette, Alger, northern Schoolcraft, and Luce counties. Snow totals of up to (insert insane amount of snow here) are expected for the higher elevations, and blah, blah, blah.”

Well, northern Schoolcraft County is practically in Lake Superior, and the higher elevations are west of Marquette. The weather in these places is usually dramatically different than it is in the southern portions of the Upper Peninsula.

All of this gets filtered through a few retellings by gas station attendants and grocery store cashiers, and the next thing you know Manistique is going to become Cordova, Alaska, and be buried under 15 feet of snow in the next few hours.

When the weather prognosticator is calling for 2 inches to 24 inches of snow across the region, in the minds of many everyone everywhere is going to get two feet of snow.

No one cares about 2 inches of snow. There are no bragging rights to surviving such a thing, so whenever there is a range of expected snowfall that has 2 inches at the low end, people will default to the higher end of the range, even if the higher amount is expected 100 miles away.

Of course, anticipated weather isn’t the only place where people exercise their gift of selective hearing and interpretation. No, far from it.

I have held several jobs over the years that involved me ordering things for people. As you might expect, it takes time for an ordered something to arrive. Naturally, the customer wants to know how long it will be before they can take possession of their ordered something.

If the supplier has promised the ordered something in a week to 10 days, I would keep the whole idea of a time range to myself. I have learned that the customer will only hear the “week” part and totally ignore the “10 days” portion.

When a week passes and their ordered something has not yet arrived, the customer is mad at you – the ordered something orderer – until it arrives on the 10th day. With that in mind, I would simply tell the customer that their ordered something should be here in 10 days. If it arrived earlier than that, I was a hero.

This was something I had learned from my dear departed friend, Alva J. Matnick. Alva owned a pizzeria, as well as a couple of other business ventures. He would work all week long at these places, and then he would deliver pizzas on the weekends to give his regular staff some time off. He had been running himself ragged, so I offered to help him out by delivering pizzas every other weekend.

A pizza took roughly 20 minutes to make, and most places in the delivery area were less than 10 minutes away. Most of the time, the pizza was at the door within half an hour.

Alva told me to never tell a customer who called in an order that it would be delivered in half an hour. He said that I should say it would be ready in 45 minutes. That built in a little time cushion to absorb unforeseen delays or other deliveries. No one was ever upset if their pizza arrived in 40 minutes instead of 45, but if their pizza showed up in 40 minutes after having been told it would be there in 30, you could expect to see the customer’s displeasure reflected in their tip.

This strategy of keeping people happy when it comes to things governed by variables has served me well over the years. Knowing that people will only hear the portion that best serves their needs, I use the least appealing part of the variable as my answer, and without fail the people are almost always happy when it is all said and done.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to make sure that I have enough gas for my snowthrower. A waitress was telling me that we are supposed to get 18 inches of snow later this week.

Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com.

Visit the Braver Institute at www. braverinsitute.com.

This piece first appeared in the January 19th, 2012 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

A Dozen Fan Belts, Two Spare Tires, and a '73 Vista Cruiser

2012-01-13T09:12:00.002-05:00

The song says that life is a highway. I am assuming that the highway in this case is a metaphor for adventure, and I would agree that the highway can provide that very thing.

These days I drive a seemingly reliable vehicle. I can take it on long road trips with little or no question about its ability to get me to my destination and back. Unexpected breakdowns are a very rare occurrence indeed. Any adventure to be found out on the open road most likely requires external circumstances, and not some sort of vehicular malfunction.

Of course, a breakdown is certainly not out of the realm of possibility. After all, the world is still an imperfect place, and problems do rear their ugly heads even in brand new cars. But these breakdowns for me have become less and less frequent with each passing year. I am sure that it is in part due to the fact that I drive better cars now, but I would think that it must also have something to do with cars being more reliable.

In the late fall of last year, after visiting my parents’ house, I decided to take the back roads home. I hadn’t driven some of these roads in 10 years or more. It was also very apparent that not many other people had either. Years ago, the adventure of these roads had much to do with my vehicle surviving the journey. This time, the adventure was only a question as to whether the road was still passable or not. The prospect of having to turn around and take another route is only a setback and an annoyance at best. Setbacks and annoyances don’t add up to much of an adventure.

I do not long for the days when I drove rolling scrap-heaps, but there is something about them that I miss. Sometimes just getting a car going in the morning was an adventure – one wrong move during the starting process and the carburetor was flooded. Sometimes the carburetor could be cleared of fuel by holding the pedal to the floor and turning the engine over until it started. Sometimes you were better off removing the air cleaner and sticking a pen or a screwdriver in the carb to hold the choke open. Either way, there was a high risk of killing the battery with all of the excess engine cranking.

It used to be that taking a trip across the country was a bit of a gamble, even in a newer car. Fan belts and radiator hoses failed far more frequently than they do on cars these days. So did tires, thermostats, brakes, fuel pumps, headlights, etc., etc. You could never be completely prepared for everything that could go wrong, and of course a breakdown never happened in a good place.

I remember coming back home from Ohio with my parents, who instead of driving through Lower Michigan on our return trip had decided to go through Wisconsin to visit my grandparents, who had a farm there. Of the countless places that we could break down, our car had to choose the Chicago Skyway to do it on. The Skyway is a toll road with limited access, and therefore it was not exactly easy to coast into the next gas station. I suppose that in a way it was better than breaking down in the middle of nowhere, but it was night time, and we were being towed into an area that appeared to be less than safe. My mother talks about being towed down a very dark and narrow alley to the place where the car was repaired. In my youthful ignorance it was just another day for me, but it was an unwelcome adventure for my folks.

Youthful ignorance is also the very thing that allows for vehicular adventure. In fact, it may be the very source of much of it.

When they were little more than kids, my big sister, Sorta, set out for California with her husband in a car that I wouldn’t have trusted to go to the mailbox at the end of the driveway. Since I wasn’t with them, I can’t tell you about any near-death experiences they may have had, but I am sure that they had them, and I’ll bet their car was responsible for most of them.

Thinking a little harder on the subject of vehicles of adventure, I find that I am being a bit hypocritical, since they are exactly the type of vehicle I drove for many years. I had vehicles that caused me to walk more miles than I drove. Almost every time I put the key in the ignition I was on my way to an adventure with an unknown outcome. The adventure may not be as exciting as being robbed and murdered in a dark, narrow alley, but a 10-mile, all-night walk back to town because of a flat tire on a seldom-travelled road makes for a good story, even though it is hard to perceive it as such at the time. Of course, having plenty of cigarettes and beer makes the walk more enjoyable.

Thinking of the open road, and the adventures that wait be to found there, makes me want to buy a dozen fan belts, two spare tires, a gas can, a gallon or two of anti-freeze, and a 1973 Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon to haul it all in, and head out on a trip to the mountains and deserts of the Southwest, just to see what adventures said Vista Cruiser would provide.

This piece first appeared in the January 12th, 2012 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Winter Fashion

2012-01-06T08:24:00.002-05:00

The first real snowfall of the season forced me out of my hibernation to clear the driveway of the frozen precipitation that had collected there.

Not being sure what the temperature outside was, I decided to use a very scientific method of determining such a thing – I guessed. A look out the window gave me every indication that it was indeed cold out there.

Keep in mind that cold is relative to time of year and other factors, of course, and for me any temperature at or around the freezing point would require little more than a sweatshirt and gloves, since it is easy for me to get overheated while shoveling snow.

On this particular day it looked colder than sweatshirt-and-gloves temperature outside, though. It didn’t look like relative cold; it looked like for-real cold.

Now cold weather does not really bother me, at least it doesn’t these days. For years I worked outside all year long, and over those years I had acquired a fair collection of cold-weather clothing. I can still recall the first time I put on my three-season waterproof work coat. It was during the dead of winter, and that coat felt like I was wearing a summer vacation. As a matter of fact, it still feels that way when I put it on. So do my lightweight pac boots, which are rated to 100 degrees below zero – not saying that I ever want to find out if the manufacturer’s claims are true at that temperature.

Modern technology has made outdoor winter comfort a reality.

When I was growing up, though, things weren’t so pretty.

As I had mentioned in an earlier column, winter boots for us were what we called “swampers” – green rubber boots with yellow laces and the words “steel shank” proudly emblazoned on the sides near the instep. We would wear three pairs of socks in them, fooling ourselves into believing that our feet were actually going to stay warm. We also wore two pairs of long-johns, three shirts, a sweater, a pair of mittens that our grandmother knitted which had a string connecting them together that ran up one sleeve, across your shoulders, and down the other sleeve (this kept them from getting lost), snow pants (if we were lucky enough to have a pair that fit), and a parka. If you are over 40 you probably remember parkas. They were olive green, or sometimes dark blue, with a fluorescent orange lining and fake fur around the hood. This was the standard winter uniform, unless you were one of the super-lucky kids who had a snowsuit.

Now that I think about it, though, kids who owned snowsuits weren’t really that lucky at all. If you know anything about staying warm in the winter, you know that a one-piece suit is not the way to go. You need ventilation to let perspiration escape. You never see mountain climbers or polar explorers wearing snowsuits. A snowsuit would be a death warrant, not to mention they are a real pain when you need to use the restroom.

The problem with all of the clothes that we used to wear as kids is that we got so warm in them while running around that we started to sweat. Most of what we wore was also made of cotton, and cotton has zero moisture-wicking qualities. It doesn’t take any of the perspiration away from your body.

All of our perspiration would stay close to our skin instead of being wicked away by our clothes. The only wicking that was going on was done by gravity. Gravity would cause the sweat to find its way to our feet, and since our wise parents told us to tuck our pant-legs into our boots, all of that sweat would collect inside those very waterproof swampers. They eventually wound up being like individual wading pools for each foot. The limited amount of body heat that our feet produced could not keep all of that perspiration above 32

degrees, and eventually our feet would freeze into solid blocks of ice.

We would return home soaked to the bone under our clothing, which was more like a suit of armor, since any of the moisture that did manage to find its way closer to the surface had frozen solid.

The next three or four hours were spent undressing and getting into dry clothes. All of this, of course, was contingent on getting your swampers off, which could take up to two-and-half hours themselves to remove.

Frozen and miserable, we would spend the evening waiting in anticipation for the next day, so we could go outside and do it all again.

Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com.

Visit the Braver Institute at www. braverinsitute.com.

This piece first appeared in the January 5th, 2012 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Not Everyone...but I Can

2011-12-30T09:38:00.002-05:00

Many of us can say great things about our dads. I am sure that many of you could talk about experiences that you have had with your fathers that few others could make similar claims to. I know that I can, and I am happy to do so, because such things are the fiber of great memories.

Not everyone can say that whenever they were in the middle of some childhood argument the police came to sort it all out, but I can. Almost every petty dust-up I was involved in as a child also involved the police. As I have mentioned before, my dad was a police officer, a Chief of Police at that. He would frequently settle the disputes between the kids in my neighborhood. Having a father who is a police officer can have both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage was that you really had the law on your side when you were right. The disadvantage was that you had both the law AND your dad to deal with when you weren’t. Fortunately for me, by the time I was getting into real trouble my dad was no longer a police officer.

Not everyone can say that they were dropped off at school by their dad in a police car when they were young, but I can. My dad’s office was a block from my school, and for various reasons that I do not recall, there were times when I rode with him instead of riding the bus.

Not everyone can say that they were locked into a jail cell by their dad, but I can. By this time my dad was the undersheriff, and stopping by the county jail was a frequent occurrence. On one of my early visits my dad took my family on a tour of the new jail facility, and I was able to experience what it was like to be locked in a cell. I learned at a young age that it was a place where I did not want to be.

Not everyone can say that they went with their dad to help pick out a brand new semi-truck, but I can. TV shows like “Moving On,” and movies like “Smokey and the Bandit” had elevated semi-trucks and the guys who drove them to the top of the pop-culture status pile. Truck drivers were the rock stars of the highway, and it was during that heyday when my dad made a return to truck driving. He had been a trucker who hauled logs, fuel oil, and other things before he went into law enforcement. Now once again he was going to be out on the open road, and I was there to help pick the truck he would do it in.

Not everyone can say that they have traveled the country nearly border to border and coast to coast with their dad, but I can. Hitting the four points of the compass had never been planned; it just worked out that way. I had taken three long trips with him that coincidentally took us very near both oceans, to the Gulf of Mexico, and to within a few miles of Mexico itself. Numerous shorter trips took us all over the upper Midwest and into Canada.

Not everyone can say that they worked for, and with, their dad, but I can. I was the office manager for the trucking company that my parents owned. Originally my parents had two other partners in the business, and since none of them trusted each other, they brought in an outside manager, who did a very good job of bringing the company to the verge of bankruptcy. The whole works was essentially handed over to my parents. They had looked at selling the company, but it was in such poor financial health that it was essentially worthless. Even if we sold all of the equipment, we still couldn’t pay off what the company owed, so we did the only thing that we could. We worked harder. Working with my dad and our dispatcher, in spite of our many arguments and my many threats to quit and walk out the door, we managed to turn the company around. We sold the trucking company to the same business man who wanted to buy it a few years earlier.

Not everyone can say that they have been able to write about their dad now and then in a newspaper column, but I can. Over the years I have been happy to tell you about how good he was at getting vehicles stuck, how he taught me how to play chess, how he gave me my first bike, about playing poker with him, how he took me hunting, and how he got our Christmas trees. I am glad that I have had the opportunity to share a little bit of my father with you, the reader.

Thank you for taking the time to hear me out. I apologize if this week I am overly sentimental. This column will most likely be the last time I talk about my dad for a while.

Goodbye, dad. I will miss you.

Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com.
Visit the Braver Institute at www.braverinsitute.com.

This piece first appeared in the December 29th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Proof

2011-12-23T12:03:00.002-05:00

I was putting up my Christmas tree not long ago, and it got me thinking about what it was like at this time of year when I was a kid. I was thinking about my family’s traditions, and the traditions of others, and how sometimes those traditions change, and how some stay the same.

I can’t say when my first memories of Christmas take place. I could not tell you how old I was, nor could I tell you which of my earliest childhood Christmas memories came first, but I do know that in my lifetime my family has always celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve. That is the one thing that is certain.

For a portion of my childhood we always had a real Christmas tree, as was universally traditional at the time. Later we had a fake tree that looked really great – in fact, I still own that tree – but there really aren’t any great memories or stories that are associated with fake trees, and in the long run the fake tree became an ancillary object. It was just there for the ride.

I remember going out into the woods one year with my dad to cut a tree. That was the only time I recall getting one from the great outdoors. I don’t even remember what it looked like. When you are a child, all Christmas trees look great.

One year, just before Christmas, we heard a loud HO-HO-HO coming from our basement, followed by the sound of the door to our garage closing. We ran downstairs to see what was going on, only to find a Christmas tree sitting inside the door. As kids we really didn’t know what to think. It wasn’t Christmas yet, but we certainly heard Santa Claus. I guess we just accepted the idea that Santa had gotten into the tree-delivering business. Of course now I know that Santa really hadn’t fallen on hard times and felt the need to diversify, and that it was really my dad’s friend dropping a tree off that my dad must have picked out earlier.

You see, my dad worked with a guy who sold Christmas trees every year out of his front yard. The whole family would usually go to pick one out. This is how I remember getting most of our real trees. I had no idea what went into deciding which tree was the right one, but we always managed to go home with it. Once again, as a kid they all looked great. Our tree could have been a broomstick with a string of lights wrapped around it. This is probably the reason that we, as kids, readily accepted the fake tree when it came along. We didn’t care what it was made of as long Santa piled up presents beneath it.

Naturally, the idea of presents brings to mind the question each growing child deals with: how is it possible for Santa to deliver all of those presents to all of those kids out there ... overnight? At a younger age, I never gave a thought to the logistical nightmare such an undertaking would be. Once again I didn’t care, as long as I got mine. As I grew older, I started to realize just how impossible such a task is. That is when I finally understood why my family got Christmas presents on Christmas Eve and most of the rest of the world had to wait until the next morning – Santa had to start somewhere, and he started with us.

We didn’t have to deal with any of that going to sleep and waking up early nonsense. We just stayed up late, and Santa – being the sneaky guy he is – would manage to slip in and slip out while we weren’t looking.

Our house was always full of people on Christmas Eve. People in the kitchen and dining room, people in the basement, people in the living room by the tree. Every year it would seem that whoever was in the living room got to see Santa, but us kids never did, because he always showed up while something wonderful was happening in another part of the house.

Of course, as I grew older my suspicions also grew as to whether or not Santa Claus was even real. I started thinking about how convenient it was that us kids were never in the living room when he showed up, yet grown-ups always were. I started to suspect that these ever-present grown-ups were pulling a fast one on me. I, naturally, was much smarter than those grown-ups, and announced that I would be spending the entire evening in the living room, and I would wait for Santa with the grown-ups, foregoing all of the fun kid things that were going on. Wouldn’t you know it? That year Ma Braver had everyone get together in the basement so my great aunt Maude could play the piano while we all sang Christmas carols. No one was left up-stairs.

At some point in the evening my mother sent me up to get something out of the refrigerator. It was dark upstairs, but I could see enough with the light coming from the stairwell. In that half-light that spilled across the living room I could see what appeared to be the most amazing pile of presents ever. Not quite sure of what to do, I crept closer to them and gave them the once over. It was amazing. The best looking present had my name on it. I was breathless.

No one had ever left the basement all the time we were down there singing carols. I am sure of that. As a result, that year I didn’t even need to see Santa as proof that the grown-ups weren’t pulling the wool over my eyes.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com.

Visit the Braver Institute at www. braverinsitute.com.

This piece first appeared in the December 22nd, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Zuzu's Petals

2011-12-16T08:34:00.003-05:00

These days it is a bit rare to see a black-and-white movie on TV. When I was a kid, new movies were all made in color, with the exception of films made in black-and-white on purpose, like “Young Frankenstein,” or due to low budgets, like “Night of the Living Dead.”

As a kid, black-and-white movies on TV meant only one thing – boredom. Since black-and-white films were so boring, they would not keep my attention very long. We had only two or three TV channels in those days, and on Saturday afternoons the local network affiliates – with their limited financial resources – would play movies that they could afford to pay for the rights to, and that usually meant some crappy black-and-white movie.

In those days, due to my youth, a black-and-white film was capable of holding my attention for only two or three minutes, and it was watching those two or three minutes of film, here and there, that would kind of set the tone for a lot of my film viewing as I grew older.

Over the course of my life I have seen countless “chunks” of films, and even to this day I find myself watching only bits and pieces of movies, usually because I do not have enough time to watch the whole thing, but when I was young, and a black-and-white came on TV, I gave up on it because I just knew that the film would bore me to death.

In spite of my penchant for not watching black-and-white movies, I do remember some of the film chunks I did see on Saturday afternoons. I remember one where some kids were using coal shovels as snow sleds. They were going down a hill and out onto the ice of some frozen pond. One kid slid too far out onto the ice and into open water. I never did stick around long enough to see what happened because I was on my way out the door to try this shovel sledding thing for myself.

Another black-and-white film I remembered part of involved a bunch of people at a high school dance where the dance floor was built over a swimming pool. The floor split apart in the middle using some sort of mechanism, and a couple of pranksters had set the works into motion, causing it to open up, and everyone dancing fell into the pool below. That was some interesting action, but in the next scene the movie became boring and I changed the channel.

One more black-and-white that I remember from my childhood was some film that had something to do with an angel who granted the wish of some guy who wished that he had never been born. This guy was then able to see what would have happened to the world he lived in if he hadn’t been there. It was a little bit interesting, but once again, since it was black-and-white, I gave up on it after a short time.

It wouldn’t be until my young adult years that I would discover that these three films were actually different parts of the same movie. That movie is “It’s a Wonderful Life,” of course.

While the film is not really a Christmas movie, the very beginning and the end of the film take place at Christmas time, and for some reason that was enough to make it a staple of Christmas film must-sees.

The rights to “It’s a Wonderful Life” had been accidentally allowed to lapse somewhere in the ’70s, and after cable television really started taking off in ’80s, cable networks operating on budgets smaller than local TV affiliates would play the film almost constantly around Christmas time. You could hardly change the channel without seeing Jimmy Stewart yelling, “Zuzu’s petals! Zuzu’s petals!”

It was during this bombardment of what is now recognized as the most inspirational film of all time (according to the American Film Institute) that I fell in love with the movie, and I watched it every chance I got.

Through workings that are not completely clear to me (though I don’t really care), the rights to the film were restored to some corporate entity out there, and “It’s a Wonderful Life” was no longer being broadcast 24 hours a day between Thanksgiving and Christmas. At most it is broadcast only a couple of times during the season.

I had grown so accustomed to watching it frequently around Christmas that I was very disappointed when these limited airings began. Ma Braver must have picked up on how distraught I was over my lack of access to this film, because she gave me a videotape of it as a gift one year for my birthday. Now I could watch it at will.

Last week, my little sister, Badger Annie, announced that she thought she might watch it over the weekend. She proclaimed that she had never seen it before. I was stunned. How could anyone who was even near a TV in the ’80s have not seen this film?

It was then that I realized that I had been depriving my own daughters of this great movie experience. I had never shown it to them. Since they have always lived in a world where boring black-and-white films do not permeate the airwaves, they have had no real chance of ever seeing this movie, in chunks or otherwise.

Last weekend, taking a cue from the Badger, I sat down with my daughters and we watched “It’s a Wonderful Life,” and just like every time that I have seen it in the past, I realized that its title is very, very true.

Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com.
Visit the Braver Institute at www.braverinsitute.com.

This piece first appeared in the December 15th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

When Given The Choice Between The Truth And A Lie - Take The Lie

2011-12-09T08:27:00.002-05:00

Having spent a lot of time working with, and much to my chagrin, having to exist among the general public, I have learned that there are a lot of things to avoid talking about unless you really want to hear what the other person has to say, good or bad, like it or not.

During a stint as a bartender I learned firsthand about the error of discussing politics and/or religion. Both subjects in discussion seem to have a tendency to turn people ugly and hostile, though neither subject should ever do such a thing, especially if one truly expects to get a point across. Trust me here, I have been using brute force for years to try and beat people into joining the Lunatic Fringe Party, and have yet to sign a single person on, no matter how angry I make them.

Politics and religion are the well-known subjects that should be avoided, but I have found that there are more or less subtle discussions that I have chosen to avoid.

It has been a longstanding policy of mine not to be the first – upon meeting another person – to ask the question “how are you?” unless I really and truly want to know and I am not just making small talk. Pleasantries like “How are you?” and its sibling questions, “How’s it going?” and “How’s she going?” are surefire things to ask if you want to run the risk of getting more information than you had bargained for.

The first reason I don’t ask this type of question is that most of the time people flat out lie with their answer. People always answer with one of a standard set of replies: I’m fine, it’s going pretty good, she’s got to go, etc., etc., and really there is little that could be further from the truth.

The second reason I don’t ask this type of question is that there is the outside chance that a person will tell the truth. I have found that I would much rather be lied to in such circumstances than to know what is really going on behind the scenes. Personally, I would rather not hear about how someone is struggling with toenail fungus, constipation, open sores the size of golf balls on their legs, and lumbago.

For years now I have tried to use something less apt to invite a conversation about things I don’t care to hear about when exchanging these required pleasantries. I will say things like, “it is good to see you” (thus allowing me the opportunity to be the first liar), or a simple, “hey there.”

If the other party is the first to offer up the “how are you?” I will lie and tell them that everything in my world is perfect beyond belief, and then feeling obligated to do so, I will ask the same. More often than not, that person will reply with the standard “fine,” as well. For some reason there is an element of safety in being the reciprocal asker. You are less likely to be ambushed by an answer you don’t want. I have found this to be true on all occasions, with only one exception.

One day I ran into a guy who asked me how I was, to which I replied fine, and then I asked how he was. He too said that he was fine, and then he said a word that made my blood run cold – that word was “except.” I knew that this was going to be followed by every miserable thing that could ever be wrong with a person who was still managing to draw a breath. I knew that I was now going to catch every bullet I had managed to dodge thus far.

His “except” was followed by something like this:

I was run over by three cars while crossing the street today. My dog ate my wallet with my winning Powerball lottery ticket in it. My wife ran off with a lawyer, who is now suing me for damages. I just got out of the hospital after breaking most of the bones in my body after being pushed out of the boxcar of a moving train by migrant Swedes. I lost every earthly possession I had when the tornado, an earthquake, and a snowstorm all hit my house at the same time. I’ve been eating ketchup and crackers for the past three ... well, you get the picture.

Really I am making all of that stuff up. He didn’t say those things. What the guy really said was much worse, but I don’t remember it all, since my eyes had rolled back in my head and I was praying for a quick and painless death.

Since that time, I have been looking for ways to make sure the above scenario never repeats itself. My new strategy may be having to pretend that I do not to speak the language. Either that or joining a group of Trappist monks who have taken a vow of silence.

This piece first appeared in the December 8th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

The Accidental Collector

2011-12-02T09:35:00.002-05:00

I am a collector. I have a collection of collections.

I don’t think that I am a conventional collector. Sure, I had messed around with a stamp collection when I was a boy, but I lost interest in it after a week or so. I also had a matchbook collection for a while, too, but then I started smoking. Goodbye, matchbook collection.

Like many people, I have a collection of music and movies, but unless a collector of such things has an inordinate quantity of them, they aren’t really collections in the context we are using here. They aren’t any more of a collection than my collection of socks is.

To be a collector of something you almost need to make the conscious decision to add to the collection you already have.

When my grandparents moved out of their house and into an apartment, my grandfather had given me an assortment of tools he would no longer be needing. Among these tools was a Yankee screwdriver (also known as a Yankee drill or a push drill if you are using drill bits instead of screwdriver bits in it).

I had been fascinated with Yankee screwdrivers for years – ever since I watched my friend Pete’s dad, Russel, use one to install a window. This was back in the days before cordless screwdrivers. I think that Russel would have laughed at a cordless screwdriver, since they were a lot slower than he was with a Yankee.

Not long after I received the Yankee from my grandfather, I had the opportunity to acquire another, so I did. That was when I decided consciously to start collecting the things, and every time I come across one to buy, I do. I have even had people give them to me knowing I collect them.

My Yankee screwdriver collection is unique to me in that it is the only thing I collect that I have intentionally started collecting.

Ever since childhood I had always been fascinated by maps. I would draw maps of the area I grew up in; all the trails through the woods; all of the swamps, streams and ponds. I liked maps so much that I even took a cartography class in the eighth grade when it was made available.

During my early teens I had somehow acquired a number of outdated Air Force maps of various regions of the U.S. From that point on I have been a map collector. Now I have hundreds of them. They somehow multiplied while I wasn’t looking. I sold several a few years back, and have regretted it ever since.

Map collecting is somewhat uncommon. That fact is something I had learned from another collector of uncommon things. I am an amateur radio operator, and I had the opportunity to once meet another operator on the air who asked me if I collected anything. He told me that he had been collecting a list of what it is that other ham radio operators collected. I told him that I collected maps. He then told me that in all the years he had been collecting his list of what is collected, he had only met one other map collector.

I kind of fell into my map collection, and it would seem to be the case for everything else that I now collect.

Years ago, my older sister, Sorta, was cleaning out a bunch of stuff from her house with the intention of donating it all to a charity thrift store. Among the items she was parting company with was one of those wooden tiki spoons that were popular as wall decorations in the ’60s and ’70s. The spoon was usually paired with a fork. They were cheesy things, to say the least.

The spoon took up a largely unnoticed residence at my parents’ house, until one day when a bunch of family was visiting and we invented a game we called spoonball (which is a story for another time), which, as you might expect, used the spoon for a bat of sorts.

After spoonball was invented, the tiki dinnerware became somewhat of a joke, and we started buying all we saw at thrift stores, just to decorate the lattice on my parents’ deck.

I had been acquiring quite a number of these spoons and forks with the intention of surreptitiously decorating at my parents’ house, but it never happened. I kind of started to collect them myself. It had always struck me kind of funny that these decorations were always spoons and forks, and never any tiki knives.

I realized that I had truly became a tiki dinnerware collector when, as a gift for my birthday one year, Ma Braver gave me a set of tiki-ware, complete with that holy grail of wooden dining implements – the elusive tiki knife.

Over time I have found that I have inadvertently become a collector of old metal desk fans. Old fans had style. Someone took the time to make them look good. The plastic fans of today are pure gimmick and function. Years ago they looked great and removed carelessly placed fingers.

It would appear that I am also a collector of chess sets, small oiling cans, scales, incense burners, coffee brewing devices, and quite possibly every type of audio patch cable on the planet. Not a one of these collections was intentional.

I am an accidental collector.

This piece first appeared in the December 1st, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

I Am Thankful For Jail

2011-11-25T09:47:00.002-05:00

Last year at this time I wrote about the people I was thankful for, and at that time I thought it might be a good idea to make that an annual theme at Thanksgiving. In the year that has transpired, I have changed my mind. Being the recluse that I am, I have discovered that there just aren’t that many people who I am thankful for, and aside from a fantastic handful of members in the food service industry, I would be thanking the same people as last year.

That said, I would still like to write about Thanksgiving in some fashion.

There is a lot I am thankful for, perhaps most importantly the fact that once again a turkey will not have to give up living to spend the day sitting on my table. The same may not be said for other livestock, though. Sorry, Porky.

Now, at Thanksgiving people usually are thankful for their families and friends; both of which are fine things to be thankful for, and I too am thankful for mine, but this year I have been thinking about how thankful I am for the experiences that I have had in my life.

I have had many experiences that have made my life one that I have enjoyed very much.

Perhaps the most significant of these experiences was the opportunity at a young age to travel this country nearly border to border and coast to coast. Those travels taught me a lot about all of the great things that this country has to offer. It taught me about both the ugly parts of it and the beautiful parts, and that if it weren’t for the ugly, the beautiful would be less impressive.

Those travels have made me thankful that I am able to call the Upper Peninsula my home. It seems that every place worth taking a photo of makes the claim of being God’s country, and while I cannot claim to be a spokesman for God, nor can I document which part of the globe he would choose to call home, I would have to say that given the choice between here and, say ... Nebraska, God would probably choose here as his home, or at least as a vacation getaway. That said, I would have to assume that God would choose Nebraska for his garden, and with that in mind, I am thankful for Nebraska, but having seen the place, I am also thankful not to live there. Flat land and farms are not for me.

I am also thankful for the unpleasant experiences I have had, maybe even more than the good experiences. Just like with the ugly places, if there were no bad experiences, the good ones would not be as good.

I am thankful that I got into a lot of trouble when I was a teenager. I am thankful that I got it all out of my system before I was old enough to really get in trouble for it. I am thankful that my parents don’t know the half of it.

I am thankful to have spent one night in jail when I was teenager. That was enough. I am thankful I have not been back.

I am thankful for all of the stupid things I have done that should have gotten me killed, but for some reason did not. Maybe a better way of phrasing that would be, I am thankful that all of the stupid things I have done did not get me killed for some reason.

I am thankful for having owned a very long list of vehicles that would have made the world a safer place if they had been taken straight to the junkyard instead of my driveway. Driving around in rolling scrap metal for years has made me appreciate the vehicles I drive these days.

I am thankful that I know what it is like to sleep outside in the winter. I am thankful for being grossly unprepared for such events.

I am thankful for having needed to wear bread bags on my feet in the winter as a child. Bread bags were what we used before the days of waterproof boots. These days I have at least five pairs of waterproof boots, and for them I am extremely thankful. There is little that can ruin your day as quickly as cold, wet feet.

I am thankful for having been hungry, and only having enough money to buy a pack of generic onion soup mix. Nineteen cents at the time, to be exact.

I could go on, and on, but then I would run out of things to be thankful for next year, and then I would have to write about politics, which I am thankful for not having to write about.

There is one thing that I mentioned last year that I am thankful for, and it does bear repeating this year. I am thankful for each and every one of you who take the time to read this column. I cannot stress that enough.

It is my sincere wish that you all have a very happy Thanksgiving.

Waye Braver can be contacted on Facebook or by e-mail at waye@braverinstitute.com.

Visit the Braver Institute at www. braverinsitute.com.

This piece first appeared in the November 24th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

First Hunt

2011-11-18T07:02:00.000-05:00

It is deer hunting season here in Michigan. With the arrival of annual events and observances, I am often reminded of the same events and observances in years past. Such is the case with the arrival of deer season.

My father has been on my mind a lot during this past year, and as a result I was thinking about the first time he took me deer hunting. I must have been 7 or 8 years old at the time. It could have been the opening day of deer season. It could also have been the last day of deer season, or any point between the two. It really didn’t matter to me. All that I cared about was that I was going hunting with my dad. Of course I was too young to actually shoot a deer, but at least I was old enough to go out with my dad.

That morning we were up well before dawn. I remember putting on my snow pants and my swampers.

Swampers were what we called green rubber boots with yellow laces. They were the only thing we had ever known as snow boots back in those days. We didn’t have boots with fancy wicking liners, 2,000 grams of Thinsulate insulation, and capable of withstanding temperatures that would make Siberia feel like a summer vacation. No. All that we had were swampers and an extra pair of wool socks.

When you pulled your swampers on over an extra pair of wool socks you knew that there was little hope of ever removing the things. So tight was the seal between sock and swamper that they created a vacuum effect when you tried to remove them. As you started to pull them off, the suction would pull them right back on again. You resigned yourself to the fact that your swampers were now your new feet.

Anyway, this story is not about swampers.

While I was not old enough to carry a rifle at the time, I felt that the hunting experience would not be right without carrying some form of gun. My dad told me that I could bring along my big brother’s old BB gun. Perfect. I was ready for hunting.

We loaded our gear into my dad’s Jeep and struck out for our hunting area, which was really just down the road, since we basically lived in the woods.

My dad pulled the Jeep off of Mangum Road and on to the remnants of an old logging road that was seldom traveled anymore. We sat in the Jeep and waited for the sun to rise. Dad had brought along a thermos full of coffee, and he poured me a cup. I didn’t really like coffee yet, but since we were hunting, I knew that I had to toughen up and drink it.

LeVasseur Creek flowed perpendicular to Mangum Road, and my dad decided that we should walk north along the creek. I know that this walking business may be a foreign idea to some readers, but back in those days men still hunted deer by actually hunting, instead of buying truckloads of bait and sitting in blinds that would rival the Taj Mahal.

There was fresh snow on the ground, and my dad explained to me how to tell the difference between a fresh deer track and an old one. Given the benefit of being an adult now, it seems simplistic that an old track would be filled with snow and a fresher one would have little if any snow in it, but everything is learned at some point in your life, and that is when I learned about deer tracking.

As we walked along, my dad explained the importance of being quiet while tracking a deer. He told me that I should avoid stepping on branches and twigs that could crack underfoot. I did my best to try and step in his footprints.

In time, my arms grew tired of carrying the BB gun. My dad suggested that we lean it up against a tree, and we could pick it up on our way back. I was concerned that we would not be able to find it again. How would we know which tree we left it leaning on?

Once again my dad taught me what is now painfully obvious. We’ll just follow our tracks in the snow back to it again, he explained. We leaned the BB gun against a large hemlock with sprawling branches. My dad told me that if it started to snow hard, the thick cover that the hemlock boughs provided would keep the snow off of the BB gun.

For me it seemed we had walked for half of the day, but it was most likely just an hour or two. We turned around and headed back south toward Mangum Road. Of course the only thing on my mind was finding that BB gun again, but just like my dad had promised, the gun was leaning against the tree, right where we had left it.

We made our way along the bank of the creek back to the Jeep. Once in the Jeep, my dad started it and let it warm up. He poured more coffee and broke out a couple of roast beef sandwiches that my mom had made. I think they were the best roast beef sandwiches that I have ever had, even to this day.

We hunted in one or two more locations that day, but since the area where we lived was not known for having much of a deer population, we never did see a single deer.

I realize now that my dad knew that there was little chance of us getting a deer. It didn’t matter though – he was hunting with his son.

This piece first appeared in the November 17th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website:http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Lighten Up. Seriously.

2011-11-11T09:16:00.000-05:00

Lighten up, Francis.

Many of you have probably heard that phrase somewhere along the line. A few may even know the origins of it.

A scene in the 1981 Bill Murray film “Stripes” shows a group of Army recruits who, at the direction of their drill sergeant, are introducing themselves in their barracks during basic training. One recruit, named Francis Soyer, insists that everyone call him Psycho instead of Francis. He claims that he will kill anyone who calls him Francis. Sgt. Hulka (brilliantly portrayed by Warren Oates) responds, “Lighten up, Francis.”

I can’t help but think of this line when I am faced with people who take themselves entirely too seriously.

Don’t get me wrong. There is a time and a place for being serious – you should take your job seriously, you should take your health seriously, etc., etc. There is a whole host of things that you should be serious about, but being serious, and taking yourself too seriously, are worlds apart.

Let’s face it, people who are so serious about themselves and the rest of the world are no fun at all. People who take themselves too seriously have few friends, and frequently find themselves sitting alone in a bar with no one to talk to except the poor sucker who had the misfortune of sitting next to them. The only other exception may be the bartender, but then again, the bartender is paid to listen to customers but may not actually want to.

People who take themselves too seriously tend to be angry people. I believe that people who take themselves too seriously are not happy unless they are angry. It would seem that the quest for things that anger them completely consumes them. They are on the never-ending search for the holy grail of anger.

When people who take themselves too seriously run out of others in close proximity – like former friends, family and bartenders – to anger them, they branch out to people that they don’t know to focus their rage upon. They frequently direct their seriousness (read anger) at other ethnic groups, or those of a differing religious or political viewpoint. When you are too serious, you are ready to fight anyone or anything that sees the world in a way that differs from how you see it, because when you are too serious you cannot possibly be wrong – you are blind to that possibility.

People who take themselves too seriously typically spend too much time watching 24-hour news channels, waiting anxiously for something to happen that will make them good and angry, and then they complain about it when they get what they have been waiting for. People who take themselves too seriously try to force the rest of the world to be what it is not.

People who take themselves too seriously waste their lives waiting for the world to change into what they want it to be, and never realize that it isn’t going to happen. People who take themselves too seriously are never satisfied.

I know all about taking oneself too seriously. I have been down this road. When I was younger, I also took myself way too seriously. I wanted to be taken seriously by others, and in order to get that kind of respect I felt that I must take myself seriously, but, as often is the case with many people, I took that seriousness too far. The big problem was that in doing so, I was unable to see the true humor in the world around me. I would snap to rage so quickly that I would totally miss the fact that it was all a joke. Nothing is funny when you are serious. When you take yourself too seriously, anything that is remotely humorous ends up flying so far over your head that it might as well charter itself out as an airplane.

When I learned to laugh at myself, I discovered that my life became much easier. There was a wonderful world to be found when you look beyond everything that is bad out there, but the seriousness and the anger blinds a person to all of the great things that still exist.

Make no mistake, there is no Utopia, and I do not see the world through rose-colored glasses, but the glasses I see it through are not covered in dirt either. This non-Utopian world is not quite as rotten as it all might seem. Look for the dirt and you will find it, but it is just as easy to find the good when you focus your energies on that quest. I didn’t discover that until I stopped taking everything, and myself, so seriously.

What I believe to be the truth is that the world is a worse place for all of the people who take themselves too seriously. Tyrants and terrorists on all scales take themselves too seriously. Few could argue that things wouldn’t be better without either of those.

Lighten up, Francis.

This piece first appeared in the November 10th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique,Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Wishing it Away

2011-11-04T07:08:00.000-04:00

When I was five years old I wanted nothing more than to be six years old. There was no real reason for this desire other than wanting all of the status that goes along with being a six-year-old. You can hold such a thing over the heads of all of your friends who are still only five. At the age of six it is very beneficial to be a few months older than your peers. You can use the authority of having spent a few thousand more waking hours than your friends to your advantage. Being six gives you clout in the eyes of a five-year-old..

When I was eight years old I wanted nothing more than to be twelve years old. You see, when I was eight my dad handed me a .410 gauge shotgun, and told me that when I was twelve I would be able to use it to go bird hunting, and by bird hunting I mean partridge hunting, and by partridge hunting I mean ruffed grouse hunting, because that is what we called ruffed grouse - partridge - which is technically incorrect, but it is not an uncommon colloquialism. Whenever bird hunting was mentioned, everyone knew what you meant. No one ever thought a person who was going bird hunting was out hunting ducks, even though they too are birds. People hunting ducks went duck hunting. People hunting partridge (or grouse) went bird hunting. I couldn’t wait to go bird hunting, so I sat there and patiently waited for the next four years to tick by. I really think my dad was trying to torture me.

When I was twelve years old I wanted nothing more than to be sixteen years old. Hunting had been my first passion, but automobiles were my second. I could not wait to get behind the wheel of a car, or a truck, or anything else with an engine. By the time I was twelve I did have some experience behind the wheel. My dad had taught me how to use his Jeep to plow snow out of the driveway. He showed me how to let out the clutch without stalling it. He showed me just the right way to drop the plow blade, and angle it perfectly to get the snow to go where I wanted it to go. He taught me just the right time to straighten the blade out, and when to start raising it in order to push the snow higher up on the pile at the end of the driveway. There is real science to plowing snow,and by the time I was twelve I knew all of the tricks. I was ready for the road.

Since my dad had given up law enforcement, and had returned to the world of truck driving, he was gone a lot. In the winter we would frequently get snowstorms that would block up the driveway while he was on the road. Somehow I had managed to talk my mom into letting me plow the driveway. I convinced her that I knew how - and I did.

In time I learned how to shift from first gear into second and third. My dad needed a lot of room for his truck we had a U - shaped driveway that went completely around our house. Since I wasn’t allowed to drive on the road I had to plow a path across the front yard so I could go around the house with out turning around. This plowed circle also made the yard a bit of a winter racetrack, and after I was done plowing I would run hot laps around the house. Sixteen would mean that I could apply my skills to the open road, and I could not wait.

When I was sixteen years old I wanted nothing more than to be eighteen years old. I wasn’t so much enthralled with the adulthood aspect of being eighteen as I was with the idea that I would finally be able to vote. I have always felt that voting was a very important civic duty, and I could not wait to stand in line at the polls. When I was young, and idealistic I had a lot more respect for the political system than I do now. I had always felt that voting is the way to change the world. Over the years I have become rather jaded to the whole political machine, but I still believe that our votes are capable of changing the world, we just need to stop voting for the wrong people. I am not saying that I know who the right people are but it is abundantly apparent to me that no one else does either.

When I was eighteen years old I wanted nothing more than to be twenty-one years old. Even though I had been able to purchase alcohol since I was sixteen (not everywhere, but since I have been adult sized since I was twelve, some places truly believed that I was old enough), I still wanted to be able to buy a libation any time I felt like it, and at any place that served them. The night that I turned twenty-one I could not go to my regular bars and expect a free drink since the staff of these places had been serving me for two years already. I had to go to bars that I had never been to in order to get a freebie.

When I was twenty-one years old there was nothing more that I wanted. I had nothing left to look forward to. All of my rites of passage were behind me. It was somewhere after that when I started to find that it was the small things in life that made me happy, and I no longer needed to look forward to the big things. I stopped wishing it all away.

Even though I do not look forward to specific years of age I still look forward to one thing; I must admit that it is nice to hear someone say “I hope you have a very happy birthday”.

The Yin and the Yang of the Epicurean

2011-10-28T09:17:00.000-04:00

Last week, my good friend, Wayne Genghis, asked me if I would help him and his son, Goodness, with a small log cabin restoration project. I was a little reluctant at first, since my weekends are usually filled with all kinds of plans of doing important things like sleeping in and watching bad movies, but since I really enjoy log restoration work, I decided that it would be a worthwhile way to spend a Saturday.

The day went well, as expected, and as we were packing up our tools, Wayne suggested we get something to eat on the way home.

We were working in an area of the U.P. that is home to a restaurant I had often heard of but had never been to. According to Wayne, it was a five-star place as far as restaurants in the U.P. go.

In the past, I had heard that this place was mediocre at best, but Wayne insisted it was a fantastic place to eat, and I trust his judgment on fine dining.

You see, years ago, when I worked for Wayne, we would seek out fine dining when we were working on the road. We would look for the best restaurants in whatever area we were working in. Sometimes these restaurants were great little home cooking, family restaurants, but more frequently they would be fine dining establishments, places that were just shy of requiring formal dress for entrance. It was not unusual for us to walk through the doors of one of these places straight from the job site, and judging from the looks on the faces of the patrons out for the evening in their finest attire, our arrival completely ruined their dining experience. Such was the case this particular Saturday evening.

The three of us were seated at our table, and when I looked at the menu I knew we would not be disappointed. For starters we ordered garlic toast with goat cheese and crab meat, along with an order of escargot. Thus far our dining experience had been everything we had hoped for, and maybe even more.

For our main course, Wayne and I had each ordered prime rib with jumbo shrimp wrapped scallops. Goodness ordered chicken. When our entrées were brought to our table, it all looked fantastic upon first glance. Then Wayne looked carefully at his cut. At one edge the prime rib was roughly an inch thick, just like it should be, but at the other edge it was as thin as a razor blade. The whole thing looked kind of like an ax head made of meat.

My prime rib was a uniform thickness across the entire cut. I have no idea what the chicken Goodness ordered looked like, but I am sure it looked more like a cut of prime rib than Wayne’s cut of prime rib did.

Wayne immediately brought this to the attention of our waitress, who then gave him a look that seemed to imply that he was just going to have to live with it. This look immediately started me thinking about how, for every great dining experience we have had on the road, there was at least one horrible experience to offset it. The yin and the yang of the epicurean.

I thought about the time we ate at a restaurant in the little village of Paradise near the Tahquamenon Falls which claimed that the pressed and formed beef patties it served in its burgers were magically transformed into steaks when served alone without a bun, and the rest of the menu was made up of garbage from the frozen foods section of the local grocery store. The service the staff provided was as good as you would expect from the burrito section of the cooler at a gas station, and to top it off they added a mandatory gratuity for groups of five or more.

The last time I was in Paradise I was very pleased to see that this place had been completely removed from the face of the earth. Not a trace was left, and thankfully so. Paradise isn’t really Paradise, but it is a little closer now that this restaurant is gone.

While working downstate years ago, I was tempted by the sign of a regional chain of fast food restaurants. The workday was done, and now it was time to eat. None of the crew was interested in going out, so I wandered across the street and ordered what the restaurant claimed to be a “heavenly” burger. While waiting for my order, I noticed that I was the only customer in the place. It was 7 in the evening, and the fact that there were no customers should have been a giant warning sign to me, and if that wasn’t enough of a red flag, the 30 or so already-cooked burgers sitting on the grill should have been. There was no telling how long those things had been there, and I knew one of them was going to end up as part of my meal. I should have run for the door, but they already had my money and I was too tired to go anywhere else.

Now here we were once again, teetering on the edge of a bad dining experience. This was about to be the first one that had elements that were both very good and very bad.

The waitress asked Wayne if there was something she could do to make things right for him. He politely stated that he would like a different piece. The waitress smiled, and said, “of course,” and quickly returned with an appropriate cut of prime rib.

All was right in the world.

Stupid Kids

2011-10-21T10:11:00.000-04:00

This piece first appeared in the October 20th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Since the beginning of time – or at least since the first person old enough to start a sentence with “when I was your age” – old people have been complaining about everything that is wrong with young people these days.

“I don’t know what is wrong with kids these days?” is asked in a tone that sounds like such a question has never been asked before. It is as if the geezers in the 1920s never complained about all of those crazy kids with their flapping and 23 skidoo-ing.

Lately, I have heard with strange regularity the declaration that, and this is a direct quote here, “kids don’t know nothing these days.” This statement has been made as both a slam to the kids and to the educational system.

Every time I have heard it I have thought to myself, “old people don’t know anything about double negatives.” They must not have been taught about such things in the one-room schoolhouse days. I have been tempted to mention such a thing, but I know it would be met with an angry stare, since pointing out hypocrisy never goes over well when brought to the attention of the person who does know nothing.

Yes, it is true that kids today don’t know anything, but the question I have is, what is the anything that they know nothing about? In the mind of the average AARP member, the ability to milk goats and pickle pigs’ feet is tantamount to a college education, and kids these days are idiots for not knowing how to do those things. While these may be skills that would come in handy if the whole world fell apart, I doubt that they would get you far today, especially since no one likes goats’ milk or pickled pigs’ feet. These things are just plain gross.

The kids of today wouldn’t stand a chance in the world of yesteryear. They have no idea what the real world is like, but does that mean that they don’t know anything? Of course it does. Kids are idiots – just look at the clothes they wear.

I am just kidding, of course. The most visible kids may be giving a bad name to the rest, and the same could be said for our schools. Stupid kids and bad schools make the news; the smart kids and good schools go unnoticed.

The truth is that it is the people who are my age (and I am not that old) and older who don’t know anything. Us old timers are the idiots – just look at the clothes we wear. Black knee-socks, sandals, plaid shorts and a tank-top is a sure sign of diminished mental capacity, and the older we get, the more appealing this get-up sounds. Reruns of the “Lawrence Welk Show” start sounding good, too. The world of old people is a very sick world to live in.

Old people struggle with cell phones because they don’t want to take the time to figure them out. They want it all to be so easy. They expect to have everything without having to work for it. They think that they should just be able to pick the thing up and dial a number. Better yet, they would like to be able to just pick the phone up and say, “Operator, get me Pennsylvania 6-5000.” Old people are too lazy to want to go through all of the hassle of entering the number themselves.

Old people these days don’t know how to hook up DVD players. They don’t know how to download MP3s. They still use e-mail to forward amazing (and completely untrue) news stories that somehow escaped the real news media, stupid chain letters, and unfounded warnings of computer viruses that will bring about the end of time to each other. They don’t have a clue about social networking, GPS, pay at the pump, and self checkout lines.

Old people long for the days of 8-track tapes, because 8-track players didn’t have all of those confusing buttons on them. Anything newer – for example, a cassette player – has buttons labeled with things like play, stop, fast forward, and rewind. Talk about confusing.

Old people are stuck in the old days, and they think that young people should be stuck there with them. These old people who seem so sure that the kids of today don’t know anything seem to be completely ignorant to the fact that change is inevitable. They must not have learned that in school, either.

The old days are gone, and good riddance to them

Young people know how to function in the world of today, and they are prepared to function in the world of tomorrow, but not in the world beyond tomorrow. The world of tomorrow is where the young people of today will get primed to complain about the young people of the world of the day-after-tomorrow.

Occupy AuTrain

2011-10-14T08:17:00.000-04:00

For the most part I have no interest in following trends. For the most part I also have no interest in following the news. Now if a trend becomes news, that is something totally different. In such cases I feel compelled to join right in. News-making trends, when they come along, make me wonder where I can sign up. Far be it from me to not want to jump on the trendy news bandwagon.

The news-making trend that has popped up in recent weeks is this business of places being occupied. I can’t help but think of the little signs on the latches of rest room doors that read “occupied” whenever I use that word.

It all started with an idea to “occupy” Wall Street as some form of protest where no one seems to be really sure what they are protesting, except that somewhere in the mix is the idea that corporate greed is bad. I think there are few of us who could disagree with that, and we are all happy to support something that is against corporate greed – that is, as long as we can still wear name-brand clothing and use our iPhones while we are doing it. I mean, if we couldn’t have our corporately-made goodies, we would all have to wear handmade clothing, make the things that we need ourselves, and ride around in horse-drawn wagons. Somehow I just don’t see the hipsters in New York being too keen on becoming Amish any time soon.

Anyway, all of this occupy stuff has started to spill out across the country, and instead of just streets being occupied it is now whole cities – or at least that is what they are calling these shindigs. Occupy Memphis, occupy Cleveland, occupy St. Paul ... you get the picture. I suppose they are being called this since there are not that many cities out there that have a major financial district located on a street named Wall. Occupy Albuquerque has a nice ring to it. Occupy Maple Street just doesn’t have the same impact.

The cities that are being occupied have all been larger cities, from what I can tell. Perhaps these are the only places with enough people with nothing better to do than occupy something for a reason that no one is really sure of. Change for change’s sake, maybe.

Maybe they are only in the larger cities because the smaller cities are completely unaware of this movement – either that or they just don’t care. At any rate, if it is because they are unaware, maybe something should be done to raise awareness of the “occupy” things trend.

Small towns always get left out of trendy things, and I thought that maybe I should do something about it. I think that a small town needs to be occupied to raise awareness of the occupy trend. It would bring a little bit of the big city goings on to the smaller communities.

While in Marquette last weekend I saw four or five people occupying a street corner, so that just shows that Marquette is too big for my occupy awareness occupancy extravaganza. The town needs to be much smaller, and by smaller I mean barely map-worthy. A wide spot in the road would be ideal.

The trouble with that idea is that there are so many excellent candidates here in the Upper Peninsula. Occupy Melstrand. That sounds clunky. I like occupy Osier, but that sounds a little too contrived.

I really do think it would be kind of funny if a few thousand people showed up in AuTrain to decry the injustice of small towns not getting their fair shake at all of the occupy glory that is going around.

The people who show up could also bring along their own personal laundry list of grievances, since that is apparently what is happening in the larger occupancies. Since there is no clearly defined target of the protests, along with no clearly defined solutions to whatever problems there are, we could complain about anything we dislike and demand that it be changed.

I have a grievance I could get behind a bullhorn with. It really bothers me that cereal boxes show pictures of cereal that are larger than the real thing. I would like to protest that. Of course the box makes the claim that the image is enlarged to show texture, but I know the evil truth – the image is enlarged to make it look bigger. Damn corporate tricksters.

Of course we couldn’t forget the underlying reason why we were all there, and that would remain the fact that we want to be a part of something, even if we don’t know what it really is.

We might be able to make this dream a reality. Let me know which berg or hamlet deserves to be occupied. E-mail your suggestions to: waye@braverinstitute. com. I can’t promise anything, but if there is a good enough suggestion and I can fit it into my schedule, maybe we’ll occupy it.

The small towns of America have been unoccupied for long enough. Now is the time to flip the latch to “occupied.” After all, we wouldn’t want anyone walking in on us.

This piece first appeared in the October 13th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, ichigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Vanishing

2011-10-07T07:47:00.000-04:00

This piece first appeared in the October 6th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

It seems that you never know something is gone until you see it again. I know that sounds like a bit of a Yogi Berra-ism, but I have found this to be true on a few occasions. In a way, it is much like the adage of “you don’t know what you’ve got until it is gone,” except in this case you may actually be glad that it is gone.

I think for me the most common reminder of things that aren’t anymore is in the world of automobiles.

Some models of cars that are introduced stick with us forever, but many more silently slip off to the land of forgotten vehicles.

Over the years assorted makes of vehicles have slipped away, most recently Pontiac and Oldsmobile, but the offerings from these lines were so homogenized with the rest of the GM lineup that the only thing that was going away was a name badge.

When brands of automobiles disappear – that is the stuff that makes it into the headlines. It is the extinction of certain models that largely goes unnoticed.

Two things have brought this to mind for me lately.

While at a gas station a couple of months ago I noticed a Ford Pinto – which were cars that were everywhere at one time – and it wasn’t until I saw this one that I realized that I had not seen one in years.

The Pinto was an unremarkable car. It was a sub-compact introduced to compete with the emerging threat of the Japanese imports. Chevrolet had the Vega and AMC had their Gremlin. Ford brought out the Pinto and its Mercury counterpart, the Bobcat. All of these vehicles slipped into oblivion with little or no ceremony.

Good riddance.

The Pinto at the gas station was kind of unique in another way, as well – it was a Pinto station wagon – which leads me to the other thing that brought this whole subject to mind.

I met my good friend, the fearless J-me, for breakfast last weekend. After breakfast we were standing in the parking lot of the restaurant, and she pointed out her car to me. It was a gigantic Chevrolet Caprice station wagon. Modern school buses are smaller than this highway behemoth.

Now station wagons were, at one time, the ultimate in family transportation. Almost every make of American automobile offered up a full-sized station wagon. The things were everywhere, and then in 1996 it all came to an end. Production of full-sized wagons ceased, and then they disappeared from the highways. No one noticed. No one cared. I know that I didn’t.

I remember the announcement that there would no longer be full-sized station wagons manufactured, since the equally (and possibly more) unexciting minivans had taken over the market for vehicles with high passenger capacity, but I really didn’t expect wagons to slip into oblivion quite the way that they did. It wasn’t gradual at all. It was as if they were all wiped from existence under cover of darkness. It was as if they were all secretly stolen in the night by aliens with a giant vehicle fetish. Of course none of these mechanical dinosaur vanishings were reported to the police because no one wanted to admit that they owned one, since it was now even less cool to do so.

Now I don’t mean to pick on station wagon owners here. I myself have owned a car that was both instantly recognizable and yet so completely unspectacular that no one cared when they went away. For a few years I was the proud owner of a Chevy El Camino.

Chevy El Caminos and Ford Rancheros were part car, part pickup truck. At one time these cars were not uncommon. They were unique, but they didn’t turn heads the way they do now. Now they are more of a circus sideshow attraction – step right up, ladies and gentlemen, see the car that is a truck! Or is it a truck that is a car? You be the judge!

How can you go wrong with a vehicle that is both a car and a pickup truck all at the same time? They were like a peanut butter cup on wheels. Two great tastes that taste great together. Who could ask for anything more? These cars were cool.

On the other side of the coin, though, is the fact that there is no real reason to have a car that is a pickup truck all at the same time. Sure, my El Camino was cool looking, and it was fast too, but it was also barely a pickup truck, since you really couldn’t haul anything with it. On top of that, it was barely a car, since you really couldn’t haul anyone in it. In reality, it was a very stupid car, and if you really think about it, there is nothing cool at all about a car that is a pickup truck

The Facade

2011-09-30T08:19:00.001-04:00

This piece first appeared in the September 29th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

Being what we are not seems to be some sort of requirement to be a human.

Perhaps it is a rite of passage.

I think most of us will go through a moment, or a phase, of it at some point in our lives. An example that comes to my mind would be the child, who by virtue of wearing a superhero costume believes that he has convinced the rest of the world that he is in fact capable of shooting webs from his hands.

I have experienced such beliefs personally.

My moment of delusion came as a young boy, before being taken to a Northern Michigan University wrestling match one evening. A good friend of my family was the wrestling coach at NMU and had invited us to come and watch.

At this point in my life the only thing I knew about wrestling was what I saw on TV on Saturday nights at my grandparents’ house. All-Star Wrestling consisted of brutes in tights throwing each other around a wrestling ring while making menacing faces and tricking the referee into looking the other way in order to get a few illegal moves in. Thinking back on it now, there always seemed to be a loud woman in the audience yelling, “break his arm.”

Between matches the host of All-Star Wrestling would conduct interviews with wrestlers, and during these interviews the wrestlers would claim to be willing to take on anyone who felt up to the challenge. I had the idea that I might be just the guy to take one of them up on such a call-out.

In the event that such a thing should happen, I needed to be prepared. I put on a long-sleeved jersey-type shirt and stuffed two Nerf balls into the sleeves where my biceps should be. For those of you who are too young to know, Nerf at one time pretty much only made sponge balls that were roughly 5 inches in diameter. The way I had it figured, my foam pseudo-muscles would put the fear into any wrestling chump out there. In my mind there was no way that they would ever believe that I was some 8-year-old kid with sponges up my sleeves. I had put on a facade that I was convinced no one could see through.

Of course, I was also completely disappointed when I discovered that the only similarity between collegiate wrestling and All-Star Wrestling was the word wrestling. Not a single one of those college guys gave any indication that they could take on anyone. Chickens.

To me it seems that the earlier a person goes through such a charade, the better. You can never be too young to get it out of your system. If you wait until adulthood, you’ll end up riding around on a motorcycle trying to convince the world that you are a bad-assed biker instead of a doctor, lawyer, or an accountant.

Of course, not everyone puts on the facade in such an overt fashion.

In adulthood the show can be a little more subtle. Grown-ups will buy fancy things that they hope to use to convince others that they are something that they are not. There are a lot of guys out there with the money to buy every tool on the planet, but not enough knowledge to know which end of the nail goes into the wood. None of that matters, though, since the important thing is looking the part, and the look is readily available at your local home improvement center.

Back in my bartending days, I recall seeing people who bought $1,000 McDermott pool cue sticks, believing that owning a great stick would make them a great player, thus allowing them to skip right over that oh-so-important “years of practice” part. I think they also hoped that others would be impressed and just trust them that they were really good, instead of taking them to the table and thus proving that they were not.

At one point in my life I was a member of a dart league. The league was made up of a great bunch of people for the most part, but there were also those who put on the facade. I recall a girl on one team who would start to pitch a fit whenever she threw a dart poorly. She would go into a great deal of theatrics. Her show was impressive, to say the least. She stomped around, hollered, swore, and flopped around on the floor like a participant in a Haitian voodoo ritual. She would then spend several minutes in complete disbelief that she had thrown so poorly. I think this was supposed to help mask the fact that she may have been the worst dart player on the planet, which was hard to believe since she had a very expensive set of darts. Her show gave the impression that it was a rare thing for her to miss what she was aiming for, when the truth was that she missed on nearly every throw. I remember wondering what she was getting so mad about since she wasn’t throwing any worse than normal. I would have thought that she would have been happy to just hit the board since it wasn’t unusual for her to miss it completely.

I guess my big question here is, who do we think we are fooling when we put on our facade? Most of us can spot a phony a mile away, yet we readily walk out with our Nerf balls stuffed into our sleeves and hoping the rest of the world believes they are muscles.

Of course, a child can be forgiven for such a thing. It might actually be called cute. But what is my excuse here as an adult? I’m still guilty of doing it. Just look at me sitting here all dressed up like a writer.

The Tax Nightmare

2011-09-23T09:31:00.000-04:00

This piece first appeared in the September 22nd, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

There I was, minding my own business, in a place that I cannot seem to recall now, but I think I may have been at a park, if I am remembering correctly. It was a beautiful day, the kind that makes you glad to be alive.

Anyway, I’m standing there and this guy walks up to me. I have never seen this guy before in my life. He is a complete stranger. He looks seriously at me as he approaches, which raises my guard a little. When he gets within arm’s reach, he hands me a piece of paper.

At first glance, it looked as if it were covered with what appeared to be the handwriting of a child. I looked at the paper a little more closely, trying to get past the confusion of why this guy was handing it to me in the first place. Upon closer examination, I realized that it was a page out of an elementary school-type workbook, the kind with the tear-out worksheets.

I was very puzzled as to why this guy was handing me this worksheet, and why he was doing it without giving me any explanation.

Looking for answers, I started to read what was written on the paper, and it was then when I realized that what was on the paper was written by me, and that it was written many years ago, when I was a child.

This whole thing was getting stranger by the moment, and as a result I was finding myself at an increasing lack for words. What do you say to a stranger who apparently knows who you are, since he is handing you a paper from your childhood that you had apparently written?

As I read the paper I became a bit bothered by what I found therein. It turns out that the worksheet was a kind of promissory note that I had written to the IRS. It really didn’t make sense to me that I would have owed the IRS money as a child, but the more I thought about it, the more the whole thing started coming back to me, and I could vaguely remember filling out the promissory note, but I could not remember why. I didn’t recall ever earning any real money as a child. I certainly didn’t have a job.

The paper gave me a little bit of a nostalgic chuckle – the way looking at something done in the innocence of youth can – due to the fact that the worksheet stated that I owed the IRS $8.66, and that I had promised to pay it.

$8.66?

Why $8.66? If I had been taxed at 10 percent, it would have meant that I had earned $86.60, which to a child would have been the equivalent of a million dollars, and I am pretty sure that I was not a millionaire in my youth.

I started thinking that this must have been part of an assignment in grade school that taught us about money and how things worked. This had to have been an assignment to help us understand what taxes were and why our parents complained about them.

But that didn’t explain the lingering question as to why this stranger had this paper, and why was he giving it to me now?

As it turns out, the guy handing the paper to me was an agent of the IRS, and he made it clear that he was here to collect what I had promised to pay, and that I also owed for interest and late fees.

I had to laugh at him at first, but then it became obvious that the guy was serious, since he wasn’t laughing along, and he was not laughing along in a way that you would expect a serious IRS agent to not laugh along.

I still couldn’t believe the guy was seriously looking to get the $8.66 I had apparently promised to pay back in my pre-adolescent years. I became serious myself, and I started to question just how legally binding such a contract would be with a minor, but then I recalled other dealings with the IRS, and for as many tax loopholes as there are out there for people using sneaky accounting tricks to slip through, there are an equal number of secret traps the IRS could spring on you, and there was little that you could do to get around them.

I remember saying to him, “Willie Nelson owed you guys $32 million, and you gave him a $26 million break, and you’re coming after me for a lousy 8 dollars and 66 cents?” I was incredulous.

The IRS agent turned and walked away, telling me that I could file an appeal.

That is when I woke up, and I realized that the whole thing was just a nightmare.

Now I know that this is not the type of dream that most people would classify as a nightmare. There wasn’t even anything frightening about it, not even the IRS agent. It was simply a weird dream that made no sense at all, and served no useful purpose, and that is exactly what makes it a nightmare for me.

I look forward to dreams as being a source of entertainment, and when a dream is just pointless – with zero entertainment value – I look at it as a complete waste of my time and I feel ripped off. That night I felt that I had been cheated out of a great dream. I felt as if I had been robbed by the IRS. The way I see it is that the IRS owes me for ruining my dream.

True Love & Claritin

2011-09-16T08:27:00.001-04:00

This piece first appeared in the September 15th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website: http://www.pioneertribune.com/

September has arrived, and I could go into a list of things that would turn this into a “well, it’s that time of year again” cliché, but since I can’t stand such things, I will just say that September makes me think of being in love. Now I know that many people think of springtime as the time to be all amorous, and that is good for them, but September has nothing to do with me falling in love; it just makes me think about being in love – and being sick. They both go hand-in-hand.

Between my freshman and sophomore years in high school I fell deeply in love with a girl named Jodi. It was a serious situation, as is all love that happens during the middle-teen years. She and her family were from the Lower Peninsula and were vacationing for the summer at a cabin on a lake near my house. I was with her every possible moment that I could be. We did everything together: canoeing, hiking, biking, swimming, drinking stolen beer – it felt like summer would never end.

But obviously it did, and when it was over Jodi would be moving to Melrose, Fla.

Melrose, Fla., was an absolutely heartbreaking distance for a boy who didn’t even have a driver’s license yet. She might as well have moved to Peru. There was going to be so much distance between us that it would have been difficult for her family to have moved any further away and still remain in the continental United States.

Being an optimistic young man, I was happy that at least she wasn’t moving to Capetown, Calif. Capetown, Calif., would have been the furthest place to move to and still remain in the continental United States. It would have been as if she had moved to Mongolia – putting an ocean between us – instead of moving just down the street to Peru, relatively speaking.

The Thursday before Labor Day was when Jodi’s family would be pulling out. It was the day my happily ever after would end. It was the day that I would meet the tragedy of young love face-to-face. It was the second day of my sophomore year in high school.

I couldn’t stand the thought of not being there when Jodi left, so I skipped school that day, and I walked down to her cabin. Since it was too early to knock on the door, I sat on the porch of a vacant cabin nearby. I smoked cigarettes and shivered in the damp morning air while I waited for signs of life in Jodi’s cabin.

A couple of hours later all of the belongings they had brought with them were loaded into a small U-Haul trailer. Jodi and her family climbed into their Cordoba and drove away.

The end of the school day was still hours away, and I couldn’t go home yet. I killed time by hanging around her cabin, brooding and feeling sorry for myself. I also felt a cold coming on.

That Labor Day weekend I suffered with a cough, a sore throat, and constant sneezing. I didn’t think much of it, although I did assume that my having the blues had weakened my immune system. It would appear that love, and the loss I was experiencing, contributed to me getting sick.

I never gave another thought to having been sick after the illness ran its course. It had just been one of those odd summer colds, and I put it out of my mind – that is, until a year later, when Labor Day weekend rolled around again.

Once again I caught a cold just as the weekend was starting. I thought that it was a strange coincidence that I would get a cold on almost exactly the same day a year later. After that cold passed, it too was forgotten.

Then it happened again the following year.

I became convinced that this was no coincidence. It was obvious that some internal clock of mine was lamenting the departure of Jodi on an annual basis, and this was its way of holding vigil. This was a sure sign of real and never-ending love. It was destiny, and I was truly love-sick.

Every year that followed I would get sick at roughly the same time – Labor Day weekend.

As the years passed I stopped believing that my illness had anything to do with Jodi. As much as I wanted to think that it did, I knew that the connection was nothing more than nice romantic thought – and a coincidence – not some great cosmic connection. My annual illness did a good job of making sure that I thought of her at least once a year, though.

Though I no longer believed that my Labor Day cold had anything to do with Jodi, I was still puzzled by its great sense of timing for all of those years.

Eventually, though, my annual illness did come to an end. It was the same year that Claritin became available over the counter. It would seem that my suffering at the hands of an annual love sickness was, in reality, nothing more than seasonal allergies.

Poker According To Braver

2011-09-09T08:03:00.000-04:00

As far back as I can remember, my dad, his brothers, and other friends and family members on my dad’s side would get together for occasional poker games. These weren’t some kind of regularly scheduled poker night things. They usually took place at family get-togethers during the holidays or at funerals – you know, the times where you would rather take money from others than listen to them talk.

When I was a kid I had decided that playing poker must be fun because we, as children, were always told to get away from the table and go play somewhere else. Any time grown-ups don’t want kids around you know that whatever they are doing must be fun.

It was that idea of fun that drove me to learn how to play poker, and not just how the game is played, but how to play the game well. While most of my friends growing up were content with the poker wisdom Kenny Rogers had imparted, I was reading books on the subject.

My favorite was a book called “Poker According to Maverick.” The book was created to capitalize on the popular TV show of the late ’50s and early ’60s (which I had never seen, incidentally), and the cover featured James Garner as Brett Maverick.

While I am sure that Mr. Garner had never even looked at the book – let alone written anything in it – it did have some useful advice beyond the rules of the games. I learned a lot about the do’s and don’ts of poker playing. Things like never draw to a three-card straight or a three-card flush, never play with people who can’t afford to lose, and never play if you can’t afford to lose. I also knew the odds of attaining certain hands and whether they were probable or not. Perhaps the most important things I learned were the psychology of poker and that poker was “civilized bushwhacking.”

I honed my skills against my friends while I was a teen, and it became clear that Maverick knew a lot more about poker than Kenny Rogers did.

I learned how to hook players into the game. I learned to be calm and cool, and I learned when others were starting to panic, or get greedy, and I took advantage of that panic and greed once it had set in.

By the time I was in my 20s I found myself getting into games on a nearly nightly basis, and I subsidized my income substantially by doing so.

So assured was I of coming out on top that other people would gladly stake me in a game. At the end of the night I would repay their stake and split my winnings with them 50-50. I had a tidy little business going.

The only time that I didn’t fare so well was when I would sit down with my dad and my uncles. I could hold my own against them, but I could never manipulate them like I could my regular group. You see, the patsies I normally played poker with were close to my age and lacked serious experience. I would make them feel like the next hand was a sure winner for them, and I made them think that my winning was just dumb luck.

My dad and his brothers had been around the Horn a few times. They were too seasoned to fall for my tricks. While they never cleaned me out of money, they certainly left me humbled and somewhat humiliated. You could say that they taught me a thing or two, and they put me in my place. That was a none-too-comfortable feeling.

My mother asked me recently if I thought that my dad might like to get into a game of poker. As my regular readers know, my dad has Alzheimer’s disease and is living at the D. J. Jacobetti home for crazy old veterans in Marquette. I said that I thought he might like that, and I was sure that he would remember how to play, although he may forget who bet what and raise against himself, but that would just make for better stakes and a more interesting game. His short-term memory and lack thereof would make it easier for me to clean him out. I could deal his cards face up – if I were so inclined – and he would forget that I had done it moments later.

While taking advantage of my dad’s condition sounds like a good time initially, the reality is that playing two-handed poker is insanely boring. A good game will have four or five people, and that meant that we would have to drag his brothers into the mix.

Now I have not forgotten the lessons that I have learned at the hands of these guys, but I am confident that they are not as sharp as they once were. While they don’t have Alzheimer’s like my father, they surely must have experienced some decreased mental capacity. I am counting on that. This weekend there will be only one thing on my mind when we sit down at the poker table – revenge!

This piece first appeared in the September 8th, 2011 edition of the Pioneer Tribune, a weekly newspaper from Manistique, Michigan. Please visit their website:http://www.pioneertribune.com/