Random musings

 An immigrant can live in America for decades and still not know very much about it.  I mentioned in an earlier post how a Japanese woman who has lived in this country for decades had never heard of malted milk and didn't know what it was.  She'd also never heard of a milk shake or a root beer float.  In fact, she'd never even drunk a root beer or eaten a bologna sandwich, did not even know what bologna was. 
One time I made some brownies and was sharing them with some friends and acquaintances.  I offered them to a Taiwanese woman who had gone to university here and had worked for a Taiwanese company in the states for some years.  She looked at them and said she didn't like black bread.

And recently I read something by a Vietnamese immigrant, also in this country for decades, who was unaware of Garrison Keiller's much beloved fictional town of Lake Wobegon and the stories about it he told on his long-running radio series, A Prairie Home Companion. A paraphrase of the legendary closing line, "That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average," he did not recognize at all.

A British immigrant, likewise in this country for decades, was unaware there was an airport named for John Wayne in Orange County, Calif., and thought a reference to it was some kind of joke.  He also has that typical British superciliousness to all things Californian, even though a few questions elicit the fact that he knows nothing at all about the state, yet he still assumes he knows all there is to know. 

In contrast, I know several Mexicans who know absolutely everything about American pop culture, far more than I know, and absolutely adore it.  They love Whataburger and Lady Gaga.  They are crazy about Las Vegas and think the USMC is the greatest military organization in the world.  When people talk about northern Mexico eventually forming part of the United States, in fact if not in law, a sort of Tex-Mex political entity stretching far and wide, and the rest of Mexico drifting into the orbit of central America, I can believe it.

I was grumbling to my dad that although I had managed to jury-rig a repair to my time machine's transmorgrafier, now the darn discronificator had gone on the fritz and I couldn't find a replacement anywhere. 
He said, "Why don't you try Edmund Scientific?"
So I looked them up but they went out of business years ago.  There is some outfit using their name to import overpriced Chinese crap, but I wouldn't trust any of it to perform as advertised.  Dad said that when he was a kid he could get anything he needed to make anything he wanted by checking out the local Army-Navy surplus store, the Western Auto hardware store or ordering from Edmund Scientific. 
I said, "Yeah, but you are talking about making stink bombs to clear out the school auditorium during assemblies and making M80-powered rockets to launch Barbie Doll astronauts and I'm talking about a time machine." 
He said, "How do you know I didn't make a time machine?  How do you think I met your mother? I stopped off at Ur in 2,000 BC and there she was dancing in this temple...."
I said, "Dad, I'm not 10-years-old anymore.  You can't pull that stuff on me now."  He winked at me.  Boy, did he have me believing some weird stuff when I was a kid.  Like where my brothers came from. 

We needed some electrical work done on an old structure we are repairing and the earliest appointment we could get was in October!  So we snagged the date.  All those kinds of licensed and bonded service technicians around here are swamped with work.  It's funny how society is stratified to class lawyers and doctors higher than well drillers, farm machinery operators, HVAC specialists and so forth, but these latter seem to be in much greater demand and earn a lot more money.  And a lot of these guys don't even bother to go to trade schools.  They enlist in the service with high enough scores that they can pick their specialties and go for ones they know they can convert to a civilian career.  So they get paid to learn, get OJT, plus see a bit of the world.  That's using the old noggin.

I was solicited to join the VFW a while ago and did so because, among other reasons, one of my relatives or ancestors or whatever you'd call him was the architect who designed the building way back when, along with the local courthouse, the commercial hotel and the railroad station. 
The railroad station is still around but train passenger service is not even a distant memory for anyone alive today.  These days it houses a restaurant and some offices. 
The same is true of the commercial hotel, which is dedicated mostly to a local medical group and various legal services, plus apartments on the upper floors.  The downstairs restaurant is the same one that opened when the hotel did more than a hundred years ago. It specializes in prime rib and steak on the dinner menu and roast beef sandwiches and burgers on the lunch menu.  The breakfast menu serves steak and eggs, but the most popular order, I'm told, is sausages and buckwheat cakes with maple syrup, all locally sourced.

It has an adjacent bar that is very masculine, all dark mahogany and brass with a painting of a sensuous nude over the bar.  There is also a woman's face painted on the floor. No, really. Although it's not roped off, no one ever steps on it.
It's always cool and quiet in there, with subdued conversations at the booths in the back.  There is no TV or piped-in music.  There's a Steingraeber baby grand piano always kept in tune in one corner.  I like to play it when I stop by.  I'm always welcome to do so, with the caveat, "No boogie-woogie or any of that modern stuff!" So a little Chopin or Liszt.  One time while I was playing Chopin’s Prelude in D-flat Major, Op. 28: No. 15, a guy in a cashmere three-piece suit swung by on his way out and stuffed a hundred-dollar bill into my empty Shirley Temple glass.  "Use it to take a piano lesson," he said.  But he smiled as he said it. 
Oh, right, the VFW.  Well, the reason it came to mind is that while I was sitting on a bench waiting for el jefe to pick me up, a couple of men walked by and I heard one of them say to the other, "If I wanted to hear someone talking out of his ass, I'd have dinner at the VFW on chili night."