I live in Ohio now, have since the summer of 1997.
It seems fitting, then, that these two items are so strongly tied to my adopted home. At least it would make sense if they actually came to me because of that move.
They didn't, however. They came to me from my grandfathers.
The buckeye lives in my car, a totem that rests at the bottom of the storage cubby where I leave my wallet most of the time. I could call it a good luck charm - because that's what my paternal grandfather considered it, but I don't think of it bringing me any sort of luck. I certainly don't call it what he called it (I'll link, but I won't type it). To me it's just Grandpa's buckeye.
The glass is one of two of its type, both bought long ago as promotions from some filling station in Louisville. They're nothing special in any way, just short, round drink glasses. But I remember them from my maternal grandparents' house in Louisville. I remember Grandpa drinking out of it and always wanting it as my glass whenever I was at their house as a child.
Grandpa Goehe passed away during my junior year in high school. I remember the events of his passing oddly, remember seeing him on the day of his death, his frail body rattling in his bed at home, remember my mother getting a phone call when we got home that day telling her that he had passed on the thirty-minute drive back to our house.
I say that I remember his passing oddly because I know that my memories of those events are false ones, somehow built up in my brain to cover up what must have been a pretty traumatic time in my life, the first death of someone truly close to me, a passing that took place on my birthday that high school year. I remember spending the afternoon and evening at the funeral home, remember the funeral service and the drive to the cemetery all but across the street from my other grandparents' home. I remember the military burial ceremony and the visitation at their house afterward.
And I remember my grandfather every time I drink out of that Bengals glass.
I remember going fishing with him on Lake Cumberland. I remember driving to Bernheim Forest with him, remember spending a week in his hometown of Staunton, IL with him. I remember his bald head and breakfast of grape nuts with orange juice instead of milk in the bowl. I remember Christmas Eves spent at his house with him reading the Christmas story directly from the bible. I remember his garden with the hedge border. I remember him eating parsley directly out of that garden. I remember putting together model airplanes with him.
And I remember him with every drink from those glasses.
The buckeye is with me more often, spending time with me whenever I'm in my car. The buckeye rested in a fruit bowl in my paternal grandfather's house, a house at 1918 Ekin Avenue in New Albany. The house was across the street and over one house from the national cemetery where my other grandpa was laid to rest. The house was just barely more than half a mile from the house where I lived until I was in junior high school.
I could walk from my house to my elementary school and onward to my grandparents' house, my junior high, and my high school in probably twenty minutes and by only making a couple of turns along the way. I spent a lot of time at that house and spent at least some time at their house every day after school until I was in junior high school.
I remember my Grandpa's thin pancakes fried in Crisco. I remember the smell of his shed, a place where he would park his car every night but that smelled of tobacco spit, sawdust, and varnish. I remember Grandpa's chair and his huge, cabinet television that he watched from it. I remember his giant lathe on which he turned wood creations that I am lucky enough to have in my home today. I remember his work shirts and his shoe stretchers kept in the closet that you had to duck your head to get into. I remember Christmas days spent at his house with him sitting in his other chair in the living room.
I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about what I remember about my two grandfathers, but I remember them both whenever I say my full name: Robert Lorenz Dusch.
Grandpa Dusch was Robert Fred Dusch. Grandpa Goehe was Lorenz Henry Goehe.
When the two men passed, I went through their houses with my family, choosing things that mattered.
There wasn't much that I wanted from either house - a few photos, some glasses, a couple of buckeyes.
There was a time, an era if you will when mixtapes were a big thing.
I'm sure the mixtape era lasted longer than I remember it - people clearly had cassette tapes and recorders before 1990, but I didn't start making mixtapes until I was in high school, until The Girl came into my romantic world. Before that, I'd been content to play music in whatever order had been prescribed to me by a DJ in Louisville or by an artist in some distant land, sequencing their own songs in whatever way they wanted me to listen to them.
And then came dating...I needed to say something...I didn't entirely know what that something was, but it was definitely something, and I needed to say it. Only I didn't know how, so I searched for songs that already said it for me. Then I started making mixtapes. I don't know that I had codified the rules quite as well as Nick Hornby's Rob ever did, but I knew that the song choice mattered but so did the order of the songs. There had to be a flow, a rhythm, a sequence that somehow added to whatever it was that I needed to say.
So I made mixtapes, keeping notebooks of possible songs, sequencing them in my head, playing them through on my little portable stereo, on my parents' larger stereo, recording a song, recording another, rewinding and rerecording something else because the flow wasn't right, the something wasn't being said correctly by the songs in that order. Things had to be switched. Songs had to be taped in the other way because otherwise that something wouldn't get across with the listening.
There had to be enough songs already known to resonate with The Girl - things that she knew and loved but that said that thing well enough, songs would tell her that I was cool enough to recognize the music she already liked, that would put me into the group of people who already got the good music. But there also had to be songs that she'd never heard before because I couldn't just parrot her tastes right back to her. I wanted to be able to introduce her to new music that she would love, that we could come to enjoy together. The lists of possible songs kept growing and growing, longer and longer, only rarely with songs getting crossed off because either they ended up saying the wrong something or because they'd been chosen to step up to the big leagues and be used on a tape.
But then, when, the mixtape was as perfect as it could be, it would become finalized. The songs would be patiently written on the tape cover in pen - pencil was too temporary for something of this import. Pen was the only way to go, and the penmanship had to be at its finest and most mistake-free.
When the mixtape was given isn't something that I remember. I don't remember ever passing mixtapes in the halls, but I'm guessing that it wasn't something handed over in any momentous ceremony, either. The mixtape was supposed to be something given casually, as though it didn't take any effort to make, no biggie, just something I threw together without any subtext of needing it to say that something that I couldn't manage in my own words.
Whatever I needed those first mixtapes to say, they must have said well enough because there were more mixtapes after that first one. There were the ones that I made for The Girl...
There were the ones that she made for me...
You'll notice that most of the mixtapes have picture covers. That's something that I'm thinking The Girl came up with. I might've been the first there, but I doubt it. It meant that each tape had a name - Knitting Girl, Fleas Navidog, Booster Gold, Licking Dog, Golden Star, whatever, and each would be referred to by name. We would be talking on the phone and would ask what the other was listening to - "Oh, Knitting Girl right now." It was an easy connection across whatever divide there was - three blocks back in The Hometown or a couple hours drive between Crawfordsville and Bloomington.
The mixtapes faded, of course, as did the use of cassette tapes - pretty much at about the same time. I haven't played any of the tapes in a few years now, only pulling them out from time to time for nostalgic reasons. I don't know that I would go back into a burning building to save them, but I do know that it somehow reassures me to know that they're around, that I could listen to them, that I could play them again to know where I first learned about "Wholly Humble Heart" and why "Crimson and Clover" is supposed to follow it every time.
When the first post-college computers showed up, I made a cd mixtape for The Girl, but it just wasn't the same. It was too easy to rearrange the songs, too nice and tidy to print up a cd cover, and I didn't need to say that something any more. We were living together. I'd said it.
To give you an idea of what a mixtape was, here are the playlists from a few of the ones in the photos...
Knitting Girl...from her to me...
"Hound Dog" by Willie Mae Thorton
"Shake a Little" by Bonnie Raitt
"If I Had a Boat" by Lyle Lovett
"The Sweater" by Meryn Cadell
"Wholly Humble Heart" by Martin Stephenson
"Crimson and Clover" by Tommy James & the Shondells
"Angel" by Jimi Hendrix
"The Violin" by Brian Dewan
"What'll I Do" by Nat King Cole
"Boom Boom" by John Lee Hooker
"Blood in My Eyes" by Bob Dylan
"Komm, Gib Mir Deine Hand" by the Beatles
"Skinny Dip" by Garrison Keilor (the beginning of side B)
"Fields of Gold" by Sting
"Thank You" by Led Zeppelin
"Crash Into You" by Dave Matthews Band
"Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies
"Her First Mistake" by Lyle Lovett
"I've Been Loving You So Long" by Otis Redding
"East of the Sun" by Billie Holliday
"Lover Lay Down" by Dave Matthews Band
So many of those are specific memories for me...listening to A Prairie Home Companion on Saturday evenings in her apartment...her taking an entire three-credit class on the Beatles at IU... her introducing me to Lyle Lovett...her beginning to mix in older songs thanks to her two three-credit History of Rock courses...
Booster Gold...from me to her
"Since You Been Gone" by Weird Al Yankowicz
"Love Me Do" by the Beatles
"Nobody Like You To Me" by Harry Connick
"Stand By Your Man" by Lyle Lovett
"Killkelly" by Mick Moloney
"Memories are Made of This" by Johnny Cash
"Morning Song" by Jewel
"Emotionally Yours" by the O'Jays
"Tangled Up in You" by Bob Dylan
"Happy Christmas" by the Pogues
"Freakers' Ball" by Bunion
"Close to You" by Stevie Ray Vaughn
"Cruel Spell" by Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (starting side 2)
"If God Sends His Angels" by U2
"Emotionally Yours/Winterlong" by Bob Dylan
"Where You Lead" by Carol King
"I'm a Believer" by the Monkees
"Save Your Kisses for Me" by the Brotherhood of Man
"Satellite" by Dave Matthews Band
"Meet You on Monday" by Carrie Newcomer
"Never Mind the Strangers" by the Saw Doctors
"Eight Days a Week" by the Beatles
Clearly - to me, anyway - this was made after I'd gotten back from Scotland...I first heard "Killkelly" with The Girl at a Celtic concert at Wabash and was in tears by the end of Mick Moloney's performance of the song, balling my eyes out in Wabash's new performing arts center...we saw Jewel opening for Neil Young in one of our first concerts together after my return...Bunion was a cover band that I heard a number of times when I was in Scotland...Big Bad Voodoo Daddy was one of the many nuvo-swing groups that were popular at the time...
I want to try to get all of these songs digitally so I can make a couple of 8tracks playlists for myself. Sometime, perhaps...
There was one other person with whom I traded mixtapes, a friend with whom I never had any romantic connection. This was the other Kristin that I met in Scotland, Kristin Reichow - now Kristin Butler. She and I became fast friends in Scotland and continued to correspond and visit each other while she was in the Midwest - at Kenyon College in initially and then visiting the flyover states a couple of times - but have since lost touch. While we were still in contact, however, she and I traded mixtapes back and forth.
These weren't quite so fraught with emotion as I was only trying to come up with music that I thought my friend would enjoy not music that would say that something. Here are the mixtapes that came my way from Kristin the Red...
The one in the bottom middle was a collection of U2 rarities that she made for me. The one to the left of that was a recording of the aforementioned Bunion, a band that played at our favorite bar in Scotland. I see three others there that were all Celtic music, a love that she had before going to Scotland and one that I developed while I was there. The other two are true mixtapes, jumbled and unsequenced in everyway. I love them all.
In a song that I came to know thanks to Lyle Lovett, Guy Clark once wrote a song about the objects that surrounded him and how little they might mean to anyone other than him. The Lyle Lovett version is titled "Step Inside This House" and includes the following verse...
Here's a book of poems I got From a girl I used to know I guess I read it front to back Fifty times or so It's all about the good life And stayin' at ease with the world It's funny how I love that book And I never loved that girl
The song is a beautiful one, something that speaks to me. That verse in particular speaks to me of today's object that matters to me.
I've only ever been in relationships with four women, one of whom gave me this copy of Richard Bach's Illusions. She was a student of Alma College in Michigan but was spending the second semester of her junior year at the University of Aberdeen where I was spending the entirety of my junior year. I'd dated only The Girl when I headed to Aberdeen but had spent time with two other American students during my first semester, settling into a relationship with one of them when Kristin (or Kristen - sad that I can't actually remember the exact spelling of her name - I'm sure I could check the numerous hand-written diaries that I kept throughout that year) arrived on the northeast coast of Scotland.
I met Kristin (that's the spelling I'm going to go with for the remainder of today's post) on her first or second day in Aberdeen having been asked to assist with the campus and city tour for the group of students who were joining the program for the second semester. She mentioned to me later that she'd noticed me initially but that I'd been dating another American student (Jenn "Ffej" Willis) at the time.
Things between Jenn and I went south not too long after that, and I found myself spending a bit of time - and eventually dating - Kristin. The word love was used between Kristin and me. At the time I felt right in using the word, but in looking back from my vantage point a decade and a half later, I know that the word was used far too early and far too easily by both of us. We were together throughout the end of our time in Scotland and promised to see each other once we both returned to the States - she to Michigan, me to Southern Indiana - but never did. I'm the one to blame there and wasn't willing to simply break things off cleanly when I started dating The Girl once I got back to the US. The way Kristin was forced to end things between us isn't something that I am proud to have forced - through my inaction, admittedly - but it is something that I am able to acknowledge now.
I took only three books with me to Aberdeen - one of them I'll write about later in this series - and was looking for new reading material a few weeks into the first semester so I wandered to the local book store and purchased Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and Hell's Angels by Hunter S. Thompson. The Thompson was because I'd read and enjoyed many of his works but hadn't read his first book. The Bach was almost on a whim because I remembered the book from my parents' book shelves at home. I didn't know anything about the book other than that I recognized the seagull imagery from those bookshelves that were then separated from me by a couple thousand miles.
Both of those book came back with me when I left Scotland. They're on the downstairs bookshelves, but they're not the ones that matter. Jonathan Livingston Seagull (JLS) did, however, lead to the one that matters to me. In perhaps the most unlikely of outcomes, I very much enjoyed JLS, reading its slim length two or three times through. The book is generally seen as a motivational book, a self-help, discovery, vaguely Christian tale - all characteristics away from which I would normally steer but which spoke to me for some reason.
I mentioned this to Kristin somewhere along the way, and she gifted me with Bach's follow up: Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Inside the front cover, she wrote an inscription to me.
At this point in the story, I should quote that inscription. It spoke of her hope that I would enjoy the book whether she and I would be together.
But I can't quote the inscription. I planned to do that, but I cannot because when I went to look for the book, I found that it wasn't on the bookshelves anymore. So I went through the house looking for it and found nothing. I also looked back at my post about those shelves and saw that the book wasn't in its place then, either. The book is gone. I can't imagine that I would ever have gotten rid of it, but I just might have loaned it out to a friend. If so, it hasn't come back yet.
I'd read its slim length- 192 pages - a dozen times before it disappeared from me. I loved the words, and I loved the feeling that I got from the book, and I loved my memories of how the book came to me.
Last year, I saw the Princeton Vikings lost a nail biter to the Northland Vikings in the boys basketball state finals. In 1996, I saw the New Albany Bulldogs fall in two overtimes in the state championship game to Ben Davis. I wasn't in Indianapolis for the 1980 championship defeat of New Albany by Broad Ripple, and there was no way I was able to see New Albany's lone boys basketball championship in 1973 over South Bend Adams.
But I have proof, record that it happened, because I have the stein to prove it.
Originally, I'm sure my dad had the stein to prove it, and I'm guessing he was there at the game to see the high school where he worked - where he works - where he attended - win their only boys basketball championship. I know him well enough to know that he wouldn't have missed that game.
I saw originally because the stein is mine now. (No clue whether I'm effectively outing myself to my family here, but I do have some things in my house that weren't exactly asked for when I left home.) It's been my stein since I left for Wabash in 1992, and I think it was in my room, on my shelves before that even.
The flip side has the team roster and all of the tournament scores.
We're going to forgo wondering whether a championship won in the 2000's would ever be commemorated with a drinking stein (we can't even give out glasses as prom favors) and just revel in the coolness of that mug.
The gold accents, the bulldog shield, the jackboot stomping of Clarksville, the lack of classification in the title Indiana State Champions all are just little glimpses at the awesome.
I took the stein with me to Wabash - and my high school yearbooks, too - because I was and am proud of my time at New Albany. I dug high school. Dug the high school radio station, dug the hometown, dug tennis road trips and home basketball games.
I know I left the hometown, but I still love visiting and love having the stein on my shelves.
Oh, and by the way, NAHS also won a girls basketball championship in 1999, but they didn't make steins.
That's the view from above down into my mug of trinkets: sea glass, stones, and odd coinage from my times abroad.
I've lived most all my life near water, the Ohio River, to be specific. Grew up in New Albany, Indiana, just across from Louisville on the Ohio River. After a brief sojourn to Crawfordsville where the biggest water was - and still is - Sugar Creek, I packed up my things and moved to Cincinnati, an hour and a half closer to the confluence.
But I've only ever spent one year near the ocean. See, my family wasn't the kind to spend a week in Florida every summer lounging on the beach. We didn't, in fact, go on many vacations at all (New York City was a working vacation for my dad, the Arizona trip was to visit family, and Washington was the only other trip longer than a weekend that I can ever remember taking), so I wasn't a kid who ever fell in love with the beach. To this day, I have no interest in spending a day at the beach just hanging around, playing in the sand and surf.
For nine months, however, I went down to the beach once a week because the long stretch of sand was a fifteen minute walk from home, and because I had a whole lot of time on my hands. To fill those hands, then, I started picking up sea glass, bits of broken bottles that had been ravaged and beaten by the waves and washed back to shores probably far from whence they'd come.
There aren't any pieces that would be judged exceedingly rare or attractive, I'm guessing (at least not from what I understand from my minor reading about sea glass), but they're all pieces that I picked up. They're things that I found while wandering the sands of Scotland - and Spain just after the new year. They wouldn't matter to anybody else in the world other than the person who had picked them up.
Also in the mix are a couple of worn stones that I don't even remember where and when they came to me. I remember thinking - as I still do - how gorgeous the longer, browner stone was when I picked it up because it had a single hole worn halfway through it, repeated drips in exactly the same place for years into the sandstone. It could be from Turkey Run State Park or the Isle of Aran for all I remember at this point, but I wouldn't give it up for its weight in gold.
In that same mug - more on the mug in a moment - are the pecuniary remnants of my memories. There are bimetallic coins from Italy, a last token from Aladdin's Castle (the second video game arcade that I remember), a golden penny from one of my many labs, a heptagonal 20pence piece from the UK, Deutsch marks, liras, pounds, French francs, US half dollars, a steel penny, a silver dime, coins from countries I've not visited and whose names I can't make out in the native language on them, even a penny slug.
They've all come to me in various ways - from our Pasta for Pennies campaign, in pocket change while I was in the nation, as a chance to play a few more games of Dragon's Lair, transformed by me from copper to 'gold', but they're all mine, and once every couple of years, I get them out and look through them.
They're mine..they matter.
As does the cup that that they're in...because it's my dad's.
Well, it was his anyway. It was - I think I have this right - presented to him by his 1979 swim team. I would've been three at the time and probably had been around the pool - which would've been the junior high pool back then, and he would've had another five years coaching before he hung up the whistle.
I can't imagine my students ever giving me a stein - a book or two, sure, but not a pewter stein. I don't care about the mug because of itself but rather because it reminds me that I come from a pretty good teacher.
All in all, the mug and its contents matter to me.
I like to think of myself as a fairly non-materialistic person.
When people ask me what I want - for birthdays, for Christmas - I tend to just say that I don't need anything, that I have put myself in a place where I can simply buy the few things I want and don't really want to have too many things around that don't really matter to me.
I love music and books and movies, but I love enjoying them, not having them around me. I don't want to own most book; I just want to read them and then pass them along. I don't want to have six hundred cds on my shelves; I just want to have the music stored in my computer so I can enjoy it when I want to. And there are very few movies that matter enough to me to have the DVDs on my shelves (the Kevin Smith collection, in fact, is probably going to hit the road soon because I haven't watched any of those films in at least half a year - most in more than a year now).
But there are a few things that I own that matter to me.
Today I begin what is likely to be an irregular series of posts (kind of like the A Glimpse series of posts a year or so ago).
The buckeye is with me more often, spending time with me whenever I'm in my car. The buckeye rested in a fruit bowl in my paternal grandfather's house, a house at 1918 Ekin Avenue in New Albany. The house was across the street and over one house from the national cemetery where my other grandpa was laid to rest. The house was just barely more than half a mile from the house where I lived until I was in junior high school.
