At Milwaukee airport early on Packer GameDay, the Air Trans staff manning the gates is wearing the home green of his favorite player, No. 30, fullback John Kuhn. I’ve boneheaded my way to another travel mishap, somehow managing to mislay my driver’s license so I have no official photo ID to travel with on Sunday morning (Nov. 20), hours before Aaron Rodgers will again helm his Concussionites to victory, this time over the Tampa Bay Bucs, 35-26.
I’m here early, 6 a.m., and suspicious with not a single Pack bit of gear – not a T-shirt, or a toque, or a Cheesehead, or one of those colorful diorama pens showing a play-action pass along the line of scrimmage in shimmering liquid, say, or a tiny replica Super Bowl XLV trophy – anything to pull out and show the TSA supervisor that I’m no threat to land or liberty, but he’s so good natured on Packer GameDay, he waves me through without a second look after seeing my name on a Visa card and on an insurance coverage card that proves that at least someone in my economic unit is gainfully employed.
(Note to self: Travel by air to Milwaukee during off hours on Packer GameDay, when Rodgers is quarterbacking. There isn’t anybody who’s not going to be in a good mood.)
M and I travel a few times a year to Brown Deer, Wis., to visit with M’s mom, who is ailing but still feisty enough at 99. Witness:
“Mom, you have to help us put together a list of people you want to come to your 100th birthday party.”
“What?”
“You know Dad had one. And you’re on your way. He was 102.”
“He’s dead.”
“Mom!”
“He’s got nothing going on.”
And then at a lovely Thanksgiving dinner before Thanksgiving, the discussion turned to looks:
M: “And Mom, don’t you like L’s hair?”
Mom (prolonged stare): “You call that a haircut?”
M and I like to be in Milwaukee. On Saturday (Nov. 19) we drove a family car to a parking area next to the boarded-up North Shore burger and shake shop. (Milwaukee is home to a public art bronze of The Fonz . . . and turtle flavor frozen custard at Culver’s; me, I was holding out for copperhead) We’re farther north than we’d originally planned because J, M’s brother, had called to say we should perhaps alter our plans to take into account that Saturday morning the Santa Claus parade was coming to town.
It doesn’t happen often in my New York life that I think of childhood in Canada. But in Milwaukee I do. It seemed early to me, Nov. 19, for the parade. In Owen Sound I remember it fell the first weekend in December and how I cherished the first sight of Santa’s float. Never tall enough to see it as it approached, but it was the one parade float with high up on top, its color-cardboard throne, Santa perched there, with the aid of a mike, crackling in the cold, “Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas,” and tossing candy in plastic wrapping like gold from such hands, descending like confetti; grampa among the grandchildren, spilling his pocket full of pennies, scattering them and watching as we rug rats collected as many as we could, as much for the candy it would buy as to gain grampa’s approval.
Also the Christmas assembly. I’m six, I’m thinking. And I remember the date: Dec. 2. We’re marching to music, choreographed, the only “dance” show I would ever do, with I dunno twenty other kids, marching with colored sticks in our Sunday best, handing them off, and tossing them, back and forth, a rhythmic show, too military in style by far, wondering if the “Maple Leaf Forever” isn’t playing, more parade ground than modern dance, but it’s 1961 in rural Canada, sons and daughters of World War II vets, so what do you expect?
It’s a quiet walk. Blustery off the lake. Hardly a gull wheeling above the hard chop of Lake Michigan. M and I had coffee at our hotel so we don’t stop at Alterra, the best café in the Midwest, in the old waterworks building. Better as a summer stop anyway, so we stroll, an hour or more before we come upon the Calatrava wonder, the ship on the lake, The Milwaukee Art Museum http://bit.ly/ub5nmj, where an Impressionist exhibition is on, the Monet drawings and the asylum window with bars, bottles and jars in the foreground, by Van Gogh http://bit.ly/sVrq2I especially noteworthy, the walls loud with quotes, the one I like best is Camille Pisarro’s “It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.” (Degas’ “Art is vice” not so much.) Because that’s the secret, isn’t it? You have to keep doing it.
Later, I’m out for my 1:05. North of town, a mile from shore, and the ground is prairie-flat, past Brown Deer High School to a recently opened exercise-way extension of the Oak Leaf Trail, except for the beginnings of a little forefoot pain, feel that I can run forever on this gentle grade, the highlight the quiet solitude, not a soul out on this night before Packer GameDay, and finally, like thunder, the raucous sound of the blackbirds, a small cloud of them, lifting off from the hydro tower wires, thousands upon thousands of them, placing and replacing themselves on the wires.
Next: Running for Your Life: After Thanksgiving
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