Author: hkraushaar (Page 2 of 15)

it’s the end of the year, and I know it. I think I feel fine, but at my age, who’s to say what’s lurking right around the corner. I guess time will tell, but that does not alleviate my year end concerns.

I find myself in a rather introspective mood in dealing with my bout of neoannophobia, or fear of the new year. Fueling my thoughts were the Grateful Dead, specifically a live version of Ramble On Rose which was recorded at Winterland during the final show at the legendary venue before it closed on December 31, 1978, to make room for condos and a Burger King.

I am not sure what led me to listen to Rose, as it is not a song I listen to often, and frankly, I am not much of a Deadhead. I, however, realize that the lyrics are damn near perfect for year-end phobia driven musings, as I was trying to get mentally prepared to enter 2024. So perfect, that I had to replay Rose several times, thereby extending my retrospection.

Somewhat predictably, my curiosity about Winterland did not stop with Rose, and I somehow ended up listening to The Band, another group I do not listen to often. Now the The Last Waltz concert, with its bluesy, Americana feel, downloaded in lossless audio, is playing on my KEF wireless speakers, as I tap the keys on my keyboard and ruminate about 2023.

At 68, soon to be 69, I have yet to bow to the realities of my exalted age, but I am standing somewhat less vertically than ever before. I spent 2023 working, though at a lesser rate. I am still running my fractional CFO consulting business and enjoying it. I spent 2023 working out, averaging between five and six workout days per week, focusing on maintaining muscle mass, balance and flexibility so I can still get off the toilet and walk without assistance. So far, it’s working, as I ran about two miles on my tread this morning without falling off. I’ll have to see what happens in 2024.

A couple of highlights of 2023 included the 50-year anniversary of the night Pam and I attended our Senior Prom and 2023 also included the night we attended our 50th high school reunion. The former passed without too much fanfare and the latter was a hoot. The biggest issue I had there was reading name tags, as the font in which the names were printed was tiny and headshots from 50 years ago were not too useful in helping me recognize the faces of the people at which I was peering.

Our kids and grandkids are doing well, and we get to see them often, as we all still live in LA.

After a whole Covid pandemic full of procrastination, Pam and I decided 2023 was the year to bite the bullet and do most of the maintenance on our house that we had been deferring, including redoing our 90+ year old front hardscape and driveway, redoing our 20+ year old kitchen, replacing our rotting 90+ year old living room windows and repainting the outside of our house. Yeah, it cost a pretty penny, but it was worth it, even though we had to pay twice to have the outside painted, as we hated the first color we chose. We had no choice, as Pam thought it looked like baby diarrhea. Sadly, she was not wrong. We have a few more things to do, but I am pretty sure they can wait. If they can’t, we sure can, possibly until 2025.

So much for the highlights of 2023. Unfortunately, there are a couple of lowlights that portend a tumultuous 2024. The cork-like buoyancy of Donald Trump continues to cast a pall over 2024 and calls into question the mental state that exists in our country. The abject assininity of the Progressive Left continues to demonstrate just how much we have to fear from them as well. Now that I am on Medicare, I have to endure the infamous donut hole in my health care coverage. Unfortunately, I have to endure it in politics, too, as none of my candidates will ever get their party’s nomination. Which of course, leaves me wondering if I will ever collect my social security, something I may have foolishly been deferring for the past couple of years.

Of course, I dread 2024 for a couple of other reasons, not the least of which is the splintering of the Pac 12, a conference I have followed since the 1960s, and it makes me feel like my splintering is destined to be right behind it. Additionally, Pam is retiring in mid-2024, which will be great for her, so Iam happy about that. I still have to come to grips with how I want to spend my quality time remaining, and while that is weighing on me, I can put it off for now. Of course, I have yet to identify any New Year resolutions I want to make for 2024.

As I listen to The Last Waltz playing on my KEFs, Neil Young just sat-in with The Band for a version of Helpless. Seems sort of fitting.

Happy New Year!?

With all due respect to Pete Seger, for the past couple of decades I have been asking myself, “Where have all the Golden Delicious Gone?”

My earliest apple fixation was with the Golden Delicious apple cultivar. Its taste profile just resonated with me. It was not too hard. It was not too soft. It was not too sweet. It was not too tart. Its skin was not too thin. Its skin was not too thick. For me, it was damn near perfect.

I ate them throughout the 60s, 70s, 80s and most of the 90s. They were easy to find at the market with their distinctive yellow skin. At some point, they started getting to the market while they still had green skin, a sign that they were picked before they were ripe and then stored. No matter how long I let the green ones sit at home, they never ripened into a yellow color and they never tasted right. Needless to say, I was not fixated on eating them. I did not like them at all, and I had a hard time finding any other apple cultivar that I did like.

It is sort of odd that I couldn’t find an apple to eat. There are over 7,500 cultivars of apples, with about 90 or so in commercial production, meaning that there was a high probability that I would find one I liked. Sadly, until recently, I never could. In fact, I just skipped eating apples altogether, unless I ate some Granny Smiths I had put into an apple pie.

I used to listen with envy as Pam and Kimberly discussed apples. What they liked. What they didn’t. I don’t remember if Shelby contributed to the conversations because all I remember about Shelby eating apples is her spitting out a mouthful of apple as she exclaimed, “Ugh, that sucks!” I could never contribute except to complain about the lack of yellow Golden Delicious apples in the store.

To some extent, the Golden Delicious cultivar was a freak of nature. It was found in the 1890s in the eastern US as a chance seedling of either a Grimes Golden or a Golden Reinette cultivar. It was wildly popular in the early 1900s and maintained its popularity for decades. It is still one of the top 15 apple cultivars in production. It just does not get to the market in a state I will eat.

Many other apple cultivars are based on the Golden Delicious, including the Jonagold, Gala, Mutsu, Pink Lady, and Ambrosia, Opal apples, to name a few. It shocks me that I do not really enjoy any of these varieties. But I just don’t.

One day last year while I was at the market during apple season, I happened to spot a yellow apple. I always look at the yellow apples, hoping against hope that they are Golden Delicious. Generally, the yellow ones I see are the dreaded Opal apples. To me, Opals are just a tease. With their mellow yellow coloring they look like I will like to eat them but their texture and taste are off-putting to me. On that day as a looked at the yellow apples on display and read the sign, I noted it did not say Opal. Instead, it read Lemonade, a variety I had never seen before. Smiling broadly, I bought some.

It’s a good thing I did because they come closer to meeting my Golden Delicious apple expectations than any other cultivar I have ever tried. I really enjoyed them.

It turns out that, unsurprisingly, Lemonades are descendants of Golden Delicious apples. They were cultivated by crossing a Royal Gala and a Braeburn cultivar. Braeburns were created by crossing a Granny Smith and a Lady Hamilton cultivar. The Royal Gala was created by crossing a Kidd’s Orange Red and a Golden Delicious cultivar.

The Lemonade was first cultivated in New Zealand in the early 2000s. As far as I can tell, it first made its way to the States last year when I saw them. As far as I am concerned, it was about time they got here, and I salute the company that is importing them.

So, I am back to eating apples. They are still Golden Delicious, sort of. They just have a weird name.

I am in a bittersweet mood, and I blame it on Clifford, though it was not his fault. He was just the unintentional catalyst that put me into my nostalgic state this morning, but to be fair, I would have been in it soon enough anyway.

I met Clifford in September 1960 when I began going to Horace Mann School for kindergarten. His presence filled a room. He was an outgoing, blonde kid who, ironically, had a big dog, though the dog was not red (duh). Everyone in my kindergarten class knew Clifford, even though he was in the other class.

Despite only interacting with Clifford a handful of times in the 50 years since we graduated from Beverly Hills High School, my memories of Clifford remain as bright fixtures in my mind. He was the quarterback on our Horace Mann School flag football team. I was his left end. When we speak, he only mentions the catches I made. Thankfully, he omits talking about the ones I didn’t make. Those were good times and most likely account for why I feel like I still know him well to this day.

As bright as my memory of Clifford is, it is not as bright as my memory of Jill, the girl who I had not met before and whose hand I held 63 years ago when I walked into my kindergarten classroom for the first time. We were not good friends in either elementary or high school, but, hey, holding hands can leave a seriously indelible impression. Just think of the Beatles.

My memory of her may also be enhanced by the chance, yet somewhat pre-ordained, meeting we had in a Berkeley motel parking lot as we were both dropping off our kids to begin their college experience at the University of California.

Over the past couple of weeks, Ellen, another of our Horace Mann School classmates, and Clifford have been reaching out to me to help them organize an informal elementary school meetup the evening before our 50th high school reunion.

Clifford called me this morning to talk about who might or might not be coming to our meetup and to the reunion. When Clifford called, I was chewing on a piece of rye toast while sitting in my den, which due to the ongoing remodeling of our kitchen, is also serving as our breakfast room.

Of course, I put the call on speakerphone when I answered, even though I had the replay of the Amsterdam Formula 1 race blaring from the TV. He either didn’t mind or couldn’t hear it. For some reason, Pam, my saint of a wife who was also in the den, didn’t bother to admonish me to turn it off.

Pam graduated from high school with Clifford and me and was listening to our conversation. When Clifford started saying he was having issues locating many of our Horace Mann classmates and it became clear that neither Clifford nor I could remember a good number of the names of the kids in our class, Pam, being the packrat she is, sprang into action, grabbing my 1969 Horace Mann yearbook off one of the bookshelves in the den and locating whatever lists of contact information she had from our prior reunions. I knew I had the yearbook, and I knew it was somewhere in the den, but it felt like too much work to search for it. It never ceases to amaze me that Pam knows where everything is while I only have a general idea.

I started scanning the yearbook, focusing on each of the 95 faces and names that made up our eighth grade graduating class. The last time I looked at it was probably 10 years ago. My perusal of it at that time did not generate the feelings I was feeling this morning.

I realize it is pretty normal to lose touch with classmates as time goes by, but as I looked and looked, it was quite evident that I had lost touch with over 95% of them. Some had moved away. Sadly, some had passed away. Some had lost interest in being found. Sure, I still speak with a couple of them somewhat regularly. Sure, I interact with a handful of them on social media, and that should count for something, I guess. But those facts did nothing to quelch my feelings, which I think were spawned more by the stark reality of the passage of a great amount of time than anything else.

Every sweet face on that page was filled with youthful energy and the joy of moving on in life. We were still young and generally naive. While we were beginning to grow apart as we aged, we still had way more in common than not. We were early in our march to adulthood, and we couldn’t wait for it to happen.

Well, a lot has happened since then, almost an entire lifetime worth of stuff. Stuff that I am yearning to learn more about, as I think I am finally enough of an adult to make that stuff more meaningful to know.

Pam and I knew it was time to fix our kitchen. While we are never exactly on trend, we knew our kitchen was dated. I mean, it has wood cabinets and green granite. I think it is damn near perfect the way it is, but even I knew it needed updating for functional and cosmetic reasons. Pam just wanted it clean and new and white. So, we decided it was time to deal with it. That was over three years ago.

It started as a simple refresh, repainting our existing cabinets and keeping our flooring and most of our appliances. We got quotes and bought some new cabinet hardware at the end of February 2020, right before COVID. That put a hard stop on our plans. We thought about restarting it about 18 months ago. We put a stop to that restart once we realized the supply chain issues were still too severe. We waited until early this year to really get going. We got a new contractor. We got new quotes. Along the way, we got the might as wells and dropped the refresh and turned it into a full-blown redo. Of course, the budget when up exponentially. So here we are on the eve of destruction. Literally.

We have spent the past couple of days purging our kitchen, dumping old stuff and moving all the remaining stuff into other rooms and the garage as we prepare for our remodel, which begins tomorrow.

It was sort of shocking when we started opening up kitchen drawers and cabinets. We found items that expired in the early 2000s. We had to clean the pantry, which still had some of our un- or partially-consumed food items we bought, but did not really want or need, during the height of the hoarding days of COVID. We laughed at the pots, pans and utensils that we found that have not been used in decades but were lurking deep in drawers. It was like a reverse treasure hunt. Every unused item just added to the time it took us to purge the kitchen.

In theory, our remodel should be simple. In theory, it should not take more than six weeks or so. In theory, we should not drastically exceed our most recently increased exponential budget. In theory, we know what to expect, as we did a much more complicated version of this over two decades ago, at a time when we had kids living in the house. I hope the theory is right.

I mean, we are not moving or altering any walls. We will be replacing our current cabinets, counter tops, backsplashes and flooring. Due to code changes, we will be ripping out our drywall in order to redo the kitchen wiring. We are adding some HVAC ducts in the kitchen walls. We are moving some plumbing and changing our overhead lighting. We are putting in new appliances, including the built in griddle on our range top that Pam thinks is my ultimate boondoggle. Simple stuff. We will have at least one inspection. We have spent an eon deciding on our counter tops, backsplashes and floors. We have selected and bought our new appliances. Everything else has been ordered and is either in stock or arriving soon, except for the backsplash tile which is on backorder for at least a month. We are good to go. Simple. Right?

We think we have come to grips with life without a kitchen. In theory, we have it all figured out. Our kitchen table is in our den, along with our microwave, coffee maker and coffee bean burr grinder. A spare bathroom has our slow cooker and toaster oven. The contractor says our refrigerator and washer and dryer will be usable. All we are missing is our cooktop, ovens, dishwasher and insinkerator, which we use a lot less often than we used to use now that we are trying to do more composting per city decree. We got this covered. Really.

Tomorrow, they start demolishing the kitchen. By tomorrow night, we will testing our planning and preparation, not to mention our patience.

50 years is an effing long time. Or, as my kids would say, “Mom and Dad are old AF!” They are not wrong. Pam and I were seniors in high school 50 years ago, and recently I have been thinking about that time in my life.

Today, I felt the need to watch the clip of the pool scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, not because it’s such a great scene, even though it is, but because the setting has shaped my life for the past 50 years.

In 1973, Pam and I were attending Beverly Hills High School, the location of the pool in the iconic scene. It is a unique pool because, for some ungodly reason, the designers felt the need to combine a pool and a basketball court in the same space, resulting in space savings but not yielding either a fully functional basketball court or pool.

But that is not the reason I am writing about the pool. The pool holds a significant place in my life because it connected me with Pam, even though we were not swimming or dancing in the pool at the same time.

It was the final quarter of the school year, and for some reason unbeknownst to me, the school district thought it would be a great idea to offer scuba diving classes as part of the physical education curriculum. At the time, Beverly Hills High School was a truly unique place to go to public school. I mean, how many other schools, public or private, had a planetarium on campus? None, that I have heard of. But that is not the point.

I thought it would be fun to learn to scuba dive. The school hired an outside firm to teach us how to use the diving equipment, and they supervised our class time in the pool. They also said that if we wanted to, we could become certified by doing a series of ocean dives on Saturdays in Corona Del Mar, some 50 miles away from the pool. As the cost of a gallon of gas was a paltry 39 cents at the time, I felt it was a good investment to make all the drives to get certified to dive.

Pam wanted to get certified, too, and while I don’t remember the reason why, she asked me if I could drive her to Corona Del Mar for the beach dives. I dove right into that one and said, “Sure!”

So, Pam and I spent several Saturdays in my car making the drive to and from Corona Del Mar.

During that time one of our classmates, Michelle, had a pre-prom pair-up party. I went. Pam went. Though we did not go together, we ended up spending time together at the party once Pam came to the unfortunate realization that her first choice as a prom date, Roger, was already taking someone else. I, along with most other dateless guys at the party, were her potential Plan B prom dates. Having had spent so much car time with Pam, I felt I had a good shot at being The Plan B Guy. So, after the party, I summoned up the courage to ask her to be my date at the prom, an event which occurred 50 years and one day ago. She said, “Yes!”

Thanks mainly to the pool, partially to Michelle, and partially to Roger’s date saying yes, Pam’s life has been intertwined with mine for 50 years, enabling me to have a wonderful life.

It’s Christmas Day, and I am writing this while listening to various covers of John Denver’s Country Roads, something that has never crossed my mind to do before.

I owe it all to Bryan, Shelby, Portia, and Ford. They went to Louisville to celebrate Christmas. On the surface, it made a lot of sense—to them, at least. I mean, who wants to travel with two kids under four during the week of Christmas. As Bryan is from Louisville and his family still lives there, they had a great reason to go. Pam and I knew it was the right thing, but it put a slight damper on our Christmas activities, not that we do that much on Christmas anyway. But still….

Pam and Kim decided that since we would not be with Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford on Christmas Eve, I should make a Christmas Eve brisket, leaving us leftovers for dinner on Christmas Day, thereby eliminating the need for us to scour the city for a non-Chinese restaurant that would be open. Not that we do not like Chinese food, we do, but we had a lot of it last weekend, making it out of the question this week.

Having finished night one of the brisket, thankfully sans latkes, which I am still digesting after the last time I made them a couple of years ago, Pam and I settled down to watch Glass Onion on Netflix. I cannot say I was thrilled, but I agreed to watch it. It was reasonably amusing and somewhat entertaining. I loved the whole malapropism theme, as it reminded me of Shelby, who was the queen of them when she was younger. The other thing I enjoyed was the soundtrack, which was great.

About halfway into the movie, my subconscious began to register a tune that was, at least for me, out of place with the lyrics. Suddenly, I stopped listening to the dialog and focused on the song, which was Country Roads, yet it wasn’t. The chords and notes were all there. The lyrics were, well, off. I was captivated, trying somewhat unsuccessfully to get a handle on it. Clearly, it was a cover with altered lyrics, but not in the sense that Weird Al turned a cover into a parody. This was a real song, just different, and it was good.

Though I never told my friends and would have lost several fingernails before I admitted it, I have always been a John Denver fan, even before he was popular, even before he released Country Roads, even when I was in high school. For a kid from West LA, this is quite an admission. In an era when it was cool to spend hours eroding the grooves on vinyl albums like Surrealistic Pillow, Woodstock, Live at Fillmore East, I was content to idle my post high school day afternoons away by myself listening to Aerie, the album John Denver released prior to Poems, Prayers & Promises, the album that featured Country Roads. I did not know it then, besides the phrase was not coined yet, but John Denver was one of my guilty pleasures, albeit a sub rosa one.

Which is a long, winding way for me to get back to Country Roads. Thanks to Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford, I found myself with not much to do today. So out of the blue I googled the Glass Onion soundtrack. I noted that the song that fascinated me was sung by Toots & the Maytals, a long-lived Reggae group of which I had never heard. I listened to their cover more than once. It turns out that they recorded their version of it in 1972, soon after John Dever’s release. Who knew. I didn’t, but I do now.

Not being content to leave it at that, I started listening to too many, if you ask Pam, one would have been too many, covers of Country Roads, a song that has been covered way more times than I would have suspected. It turns out that it is an amazing song to cover. Its simplicity and heartfelt lyrics lend itself to a wide range of artists. I played several of the covers, beginning with the versions by Loretta Lynn and Olivia Newton-John and a gaggle of versions by no-name artists before listening to Brandi Carlile’s 2021 version, a stripped-down, soulful rendition which highlights the purity of her voice. It was the best one I heard.

So here I sit writing this, enjoying some great music and feeling quite sure that I will be doing something similar on Christmas Days to come. I just need Bryan, Shelby, Portia and Ford to go back to Louisville.

Merry Christmas.