Something for the Kitties!

Mike and Tammy have a baby on the way and I know that people are thinking about things to get the baby, but they also have kitties and I know they will feel somewhat left out by the attention the new baby is getting, so I found some things I could get them so they would feel appreciated. Nate and Dana could use these as well, so I may be getting my Christmas shopping done early. 

First up, a chance for kitty to show off his/her creative side, the SUCK UK cat scratching DJ deck. You may have to buy your cat a baseball cap to wear while using this, but it seems a small price to pay to "hippify" your cat. I think the stickers are what make it especially cool.  

And for the cat on the go, what better way to get there than in a fire truck, also from SUCK UK:  

 Or maybe one of these playhouses expresses your inner kitty's dreams better:  

And for the cat who dreams of a galaxy far, far away, there are Yoda and Chewbacca chew toys. I'm sure they look better in person.  

So, let me know what the stylish kitty on your list needs the most to fulfill his dreams. I'm looking for the ice cream truck in a larger size for Whimzy to sleep out in the backyard this summer.   

Things I Hope I Did This Summer

So, first off, the McHenry Outdoor Theater opens May 6 with Guardians of the Galaxy 2 followed by Beauty and the Beast. I'm hoping it's the new sing - along version where the words appear on the screen (I'm not making this up) because we would stay for that, but if not we will probably leave early. The first show probably starts at 8:30 when it's getting dark, so the late show will run until close to 1 AM. Unfortunately the drive - in is no fun in the rain, and I hear there is a shower scheduled for that weekend blowing from Chicago out to Des Moines, so we'll probably go on Tuesday and sleep in on Wednesday.   

The great band Chicago is going to be at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee the next Friday, May 12. Here's a promo from their 2015 tour. We might have to miss this because it is pretty expensive, but we'll see. The video below is from their 2015 tour. Love the trombones, trumpets, and saxophones. Their first album included "Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?" and went platinum in 1970 when I was a freshman in college. It would be a stand-up concert; no sitting down during this one. Lots of old people jumping around. Sounds great, doesn't it.   




We haven't been to a Printers Row Lit Fest in a while, I think because it seemed to rain every year when we went, so it's probably time to go back. Billed as the Midwest's biggest free outdoor ode to literature (by the Tribune which sponsors it), it contains something for everyone. Among the speakers lined up already is Melanie Benjamin, who wrote The Aviator's Wife, which Ann just had to read for her book club. There are also kids books, comic books, a great mix of fiction and nonfiction, much of it with a Chicago or Midwest connection. It runs Saturday and Sunday, June 10 and 11, on Dearborn Street just south of the loop. Nathan's first college apartment was in the Printers Row neighborhood, so we have a lot of fond memories of that area.   

This may also be the year to head back to the Wizard World Chicago in Rosemont at the end of August. Bruce Campbell (Evil Dead) and Nathan Fillion (Firefly and Castle) are expected to appear. Get your geek on!   

There was something else going on this summer, if I can remember it. Oh yeah, I'm becoming a grandfather in June. Mike and Tammy are expecting their first child, so I would guess there will be a lot of trips to Des Moines this summer and fall. Time to hit the gym and strengthen those biceps so I can hold the baby for longer than five minutes.   

Have a great summer.   

World Series Thoughts I

Ann and I drove to the sporting goods store today in Algonquin to look for a Cubs Championship hat. It was 2:00 and we probably weren't thinking clearly. By then, they were sold out of caps and were down to just t-shirts. A police car outside the store was proof of the story on the radio that the Algonquin store had called the cops because the crowds were too large and unruly. The Dick's Sporting Goods store is very large. Even so, the line to check out stretched from the front of the store all the way around the perimeter and back to the front. My guess is that it was probably a two hour wait to check out. We opted to go home and order a cap online, along with a hoodie sweatshirt. 

It is hard to describe why buying a Cubs hoodie sweatshirt mattered. It's only a game after all. But the amount of time invested in that game this season in particular and every season for the past 40 years is not insignificant. Ann and I went to four games this summer, two day games and two in the evening. We normally are lucky to make it to a game or two. This year just seemed extra special from the beginning. It started in March, when we traveled to Arizona to watch the Cubs in spring training. We've never done that before. But in January, on the spur of the moment, we bought game tickets, airline tickets, and hotel rooms, in that order, for the third week in March. We did lots of other things in Arizona. Ann especially liked the off road 4-wheel ATV drive through the desert north of Phoenix. I enjoyed it, but struggled to keep up with Ann's vehicle and our guide's vehicle. And we saw the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix. That was definitely worth the time we spent. But the ball game was the driving force behind the trip. And we've already made plans to go back next spring, this time with Mary and a newly-retired Dave. This time, we will be seeing the World Champion Cubs, not just the "This Could Be The Year" Cubs.   

Roger Angell has been writing about baseball for a long time. His mother was the first fiction editor for The New Yorker, his father was the head of the ACLU for a time and his stepfather was E. B. White, who wrote Charlotte's Web and co-authored a book on writing called The Elements of Style, commonly known as "Strunk and White." Roger started writing for The New Yorker  in 1944. He is 96 now and, 20 hours ago, wrote an article entitled "At Last" about the Cubs victory over the Indians. In Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion, published in 1977, he answers the question of why buying a Cubs hoodie sweatshirt matters:   

What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our games are all about: this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazard flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

It's a long off-season and winter is coming. You could do a lot worse in January than reading Roger Angell, even if he is a Mets fan. It will get me ready to board that airplane in March and start this all over again.  

Disasters I Have Known... And Teaching

Someone asked me what my speech for high school graduation was about, and I decided "Disasters I Have Known... and Teaching" pretty well summed it up. Graduation went very well - no air horns, no eggs handed out during the handshake. Students behaved well, as always. Parents, not so much, but better than last year (no air horns). 
I think because I was standing in the library with my 7th grade class watching the Challenger shuttle when it blew up, it has bothered me more than most disasters, even to this day. It was supposed to be such a glorious event, the first teacher in space, but it jarred all of us who were watching. It made this a difficult speech to get through. But it was well received by the audience, and I even got a couple of laughs from the kids.  




Commencement Address
May 22, 2016

Wauconda High School                                                                                                

John Armstrong                                                                                                                     

Parents, friends, faculty, and members of the fraduating class of 2016:

On behalf of the District 118 School Board, I am pleased to welcome you to the 100th annual commencement of Wauconda High School.

I was standing in the hallway outside the auditorium at Wauconda High School after Honors Night a few weeks ago, when I was approached by Mr. Roy, one of the school counselors. He told me he hoped that my graduation speech was funny, because he enjoyed them more when they were. I know the Board of Education agrees with him and probably most of the rest of you would as well.

So I was thinking about jokes I could tell, but I realized that after teaching high school math for many years, a lot of the jokes I knew were math jokes. Like, when I grew up, I lived out in the country surrounded by farms and one day my Dad and I were leaning on the fence talking to my neighbor and my Dad asked him how many cows he had now. And the neighbor said it all depended on where they were. We didn’t understand that at all and asked him to explain and he said, “Well, if they are out in the field there are 196, but when I round them up, there are 200.”

And then I realized that maybe because I grew up in farm country, that a lot of the jokes I knew were about cows. Like two cows are standing out in the field and one of them says, “Did you hear there was another outbreak of mad cow disease going around?” And the other cow says, “Good thing I’m a helicopter.” And then I thought maybe I’ll just save the jokes for someone else.

There are certain events that are so traumatic on a national level that people automatically remember where they were when they happened. I was in the hallway outside Mr. Martindale’s Social Studies classroom when I heard over the loudspeaker that JFK had been shot. And I was in my own classroom when I heard about the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. And lately I’ve been thinking about another such incident because we just passed the 30^th anniversary. Partly because I am such a math/science geek, but primarily because I grew up 10 miles from where Neil Armstrong grew up, I have always been fascinated by the NASA Space missions. It was even more exciting when, in 1984, in my 10^th year of teaching, Ronald Reagan announced the Teacher in Space program. NASA wanted to find an ordinary person, a teacher, to be the first civilian in space. More than 11,000 of us applied for the job. In 1985, Christa MacAuliffe from Concord High School in New Hampshire was selected. And in January of 1986, she boarded the space shuttle Challenger with six other crew members. I was standing behind my 7^th grade math class in a junior high school library watching the TV as Challenger lifted off. In the library was a poster some of the older folks here today may remember – it had a picture of Christa MacAuliffe in her space suit and the words, “I touch the future – I teach.” Most of my life, as a child and an adult, has been spent in schools, on one side of the teacher’s desk or the other, so it is not a surprise that all of these events occurred while I was in a school. And those words “I touch the future – I teach” had a huge impact on me as a young teacher. And I would guess that the teachers sitting beside you today take that message to heart as well. I would like you to give some thought to that message as well.

There was a time a few years ago that I would not have encouraged a young person to give some thought to teaching. The ideas and procedures of No Child Left Behind were guaranteed to steal the heart and soul out of good teachers. The thought that all that was expected of you by those outside of teaching was to teach your students to do well on the state tests seemed to be a mockery of Christa MacAuliffe’s phrase “I touch the future – I teach.” But in recent years, things have started to turn around somewhat.

Now, I know that many of you have a specific career in mind right now. You may want to be an engineer or a physical therapist, a finance person or a dentist, a soldier or an entrepreneur. And those are all worthwhile careers. But one of the things we know now is that careers don’t tend to last as long as they used to. The fraction of the work force that stays in one career for 45 years, and then retires is significantly smaller than it used to be. A large percentage of employees are going back to a community college in their thirties, forties, and even fifties to be retrained for a new career. 

And so, it may be that, 20 years from now, you may find the prospect of getting a teaching certificate is intriguing. I hope that you give that some serious thought. You have a lot of good role models sitting near you today. And if you become a math teacher, you may get to hear what I heard from a 7^th grade student, “Mr. Armstrong, Do you know what Zero said to Eight? Nice belt.”

Thank you for listening and congratulations on reaching this milestone in your life.

It's That Time of the Year, Again.

Graduation season is upon us again here in Wauconda, Illinois. The middle school ceremony was last Tuesday. I threw out the speech I had because it refused to be tweaked into something decent. Ended up doing a modification of an old high school speech pitched to eighth graders. Seemed to go over well. I'll put it up here even though it's not new. It does give me a place to go that I know I can find them if my computer blows up.

Commencement Address

May 17, 2016

Wauconda Middle School / Matthews Middle School

John Armstrong

Parents, friends, faculty, students:

Promotion day is often a time to look back, to reminisce about the last three years of middle school life:  the classes, the games, the dances; what we did in Mrs. Robb’s class, what Ms. Carlson told us, what activity Mr. Prostka had planned for us.  It is an enjoyable exercise: to look back; to remember the good times, laugh (finally) about the bad times.  It is a time to celebrate all that has gone before.

But now we are where we are, another new stage of life with it's own unknown challenges and questions, happiness and sorrows.  Over the next few months, there will be many changes.  You will lose old friends and make new friends.  You will find things you used to do are no longer interesting and you will develop new interests.  You will find the high school has more choices than you have had before, more activities like Math Team and Photo Club; more sports, like golf or bowling; more variety for classes, like Foods and Environmental Science.  It is a whole new world for you and part of our job as a school district is to ask you to consider how you are going to respond to those changes. 

I was privileged to see the historian David McCullough speak at a school board convention in Chicago not too long ago and it prompted me to read one of his books.  In the book he talks about what he sees as an alarming shift in the mindset of what kind of country the United States should be.  Historically, he wrote, it has been a country that valued achievement over safety.  When people moved from Europe to the United States in the 1600’s, they knew they were taking a tremendous risk.  When people loaded their possessions in a wagon in the 1800’s, and headed west, they knew they were taking a tremendous risk.  And when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin climbed into the lunar module of Apollo 11 in the summer of 1969 and headed for the Moon’s surface, they knew they were taking a tremendous risk.

Lately, it seems, risk has become a bad word.  Safety and security have become the watchword for our country.  And when I speak to young people about what they will do with their lives, I can hear the echoes of lots of adults telling them to play it safe.  We adults have tried to protect you as you grew up and as a consequence you have heard us say over and over again to say no to this and say no to that.  I am here to appeal to you to take some risks as you make decisions about what you will do with your time in high school.  I don’t mean that you should ride in the car without a seat belt or put things in your body that will mess up your health or your psyche.  But as you move from middle school to high school, trust in yourself.  Dream big.  Don’t play it safe. Maybe being in the school play has sounded interesting, but you weren’t sure you could do it. This may be the year to get involved, either on the stage or behind the stage.  Maybe math team will spark some interest. Or you like playing tennis. Spend some time working hard at that this summer and decide whether you would like to try out for the tennis team. Do something that will make you stretch and grow.  And trust in yourself. 

I had dinner last week with a 48 – year old friend whose company decided to hire an outside consulting firm to do the work that his department does.  After 15 years with the company, he is out of work.  He has been an accountant all his life.  But what he wanted to do 30 years ago when he went to college was teach science.  At the time, you couldn’t make much money in teaching, so he decided to play it safe.  Next Tuesday he has an interview with an organization in Chicago that helps people earn alternative teacher certification if they are willing to work in inner – city Chicago.  It will be a big change in his life and he will have to start all over.  But he is very excited about his future right now. 

Helen Keller said, "Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.” 

I hope your next four years are a daring adventure. 

Thank you. 

Loss of an Icon

When Ann and I were visiting Mike and Tammy recently, we got a chance to relax and listen to some albums on their new turntable. They have a very nice set-up and, although they don't have a lot of albums yet, there are enough to easily fill an afternoon of playing board games.    

 I have been fascinated these last few years as vinyl becomes a thing again. We were in the Barnes and Noble store a few weeks ago and found a selection of albums prominently displayed back in the music section. Some albums from newer artists like Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift were there, but David Bowie and Chicago were in the mix as well.   




I use my Kindle quite a bit to read, but still go to the library every two or three weeks because I enjoy having a physical book to read, with pages to turn and a place to put my bookmark. I get that same feeling when I handle a record album. Seeing the artwork, looking at the list of songs and composers on the back side, reading the liner notes to find out what's new with the band. That was very much a part of my high school and college days. I have albums from The Association, James Taylor, The Kingston Trio, and even an Aaron Copland classical album.   



So I'm excited that the kids are into vinyl. Nate's collection is pretty large. He has been buying albums for quite some time. Unfortunately one of the best places to look for albums is now gone. The Jazz Record Mart, which long billed itself as “The World’s Largest Jazz and Blues Record Store,” closed its doors due to rising rents at 11:30 a.m. Monday, 10 minutes after a deal was completed to sell the business, according to the Chicago Tribune. Wolfgang’s Vault – a Reno, Nev., operation that buys and sells music, film and other cultural items – has acquired the store’s inventory and the Jazz Record Mart name and web site.   

I've been in the store once or twice in the past when I've been downtown for something else and I know Nathan goes in whenever he has time and a little extra money, so The Record Mart will be missed. The Logan Hardware is still open on Fullerton. Its website promises:  

Looking for a working Fun Chicken? We have one. Looking for that Polish language LP from 1971 about the goat and the ostrich? We've got it.   

Old School Records in Forest Park is not a big store, but I enjoyed looking through their albums last time we were out in that direction shopping. And just down the street is Defiant Comics, which is also a fun place to stop.   

Mike asked for some advice on picking a jazz album to add to his library, so when we got home, I ordered him "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis. It shows up on most top five lists for best jazz album ever. If you don't know it, here's a sample. Enjoy.   
  


  

Oh Happy Day

A couple of years ago, we were taking Mike back to Midway Airport to catch a 6 PM flight when the skies opened up and, within minutes, streets became flooded and impassable. We slowly worked our way over to Midway, but couldn't make it in time for him to catch his flight. He went inside and checked in with customer service and found out he could catch a flight the next morning at 6AM. So, the next morning, we left home about 4 AM and headed for Midway again.  I dropped him off in plenty of time and headed for home. I was feeling pretty tired and a little hungry because we hadn't eaten anything on the way to the airport (important rule - don't fly on a full stomach) so I drove through Palatine and stopped at one of our favorite guilty pleasures: Spunky Dunkers. It was about 5:30 and I was surprised to find that they were already crowded. Imagine my surprise and pleasure when I found out that it was an important day in the life of a doughnut shop - Paczki Tuesday.  

If you are not familiar with these fluffy balls of goodness, paczki (pronounced "PUNCH-key," "POONCH-key" or "POANCH-key" depending on which part of Poland you are from) are a traditional pre-Lenten feast. According to The Huffington Post, making the fried, cream-filled paczki was a way observant Catholics could empty their stock of lard, sugar, eggs and fruit — foods typically avoided during the Lenten fast — before Ash Wednesday. Traditional paczek (the singular of paczki) fillings include rose-hip, cherry and prune, though most bakeries include more modern fillings like custard, chocolate, raspberry and lemon curd.  

At Spunky Dunkers in Palatine, all they had for sale on the Tuesday I was there were paczki - no apple fritters or eclairs or cake doughnuts with sprinkles. And I was fine with that because they are amazingly good. This year Paczki Day is next Tuesday, February 9th. So make plans to get out and celebrate your Polish heritage next Tuesday. I'm pretty sure they are on your diet, so don't worry about that. Just enjoy.   

Just Walk Away, Michael

Michael Brown, the brilliant leader and keyboardist of the rock group, The Left Bank, passed away last year at the age of 65, according to the Los Angeles Times.  Brown was the main songwriter for the group, though he left in 1967 after just one album. At the age of 16, he co-wrote and wrote, respectively, the band's best-known songs, "Walk Away Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina", both odes to unrequited love. The band's use of strings and harpsichord earned them the label "baroque-pop," while their sound echoes on in the work of acts such as Belle & Sebastian, Elliott Smith and Jens Lekman, whose "Black Cab" sampled the band's "I've Got Something On My Mind."   

I was a big fan of Left Banke in freshman year at Michigan State University in 1969. They just seemed to hit a chord for a young man with a heavy background in high school chorus and pop music who was living away from all of his family and friends for the first time. Almost every evening had Association, Left Banke, Simon and Garfunkel, and CSNY songs filling the third floor of Fee Hall.  

For your enjoyment, Walk Away Renee: