Where would you Time Travel?

When it comes to thought-provoking discussion topics, one of the most intriguing has got to be: “If you could go back in time, where would you go?”  I asked a friend of mine this question recently and he said, “I’ve never thought about it.”  I find this mind-boggling, as I’ve spent days of my life contemplating just the rules of such an endeavor, never mind the actual answer to the question.  There are so many variables to consider:

• How long can I travel back in time?  An hour?  A day?  A year?

• Do I get to choose when to come back, or is the duration predetermined?

• Can I stay if I choose to?

• Am I going merely as an observer, or do I get to interact with my environment?

• Will my actions change history?

• If I do interact with my environment, will I know the language of the people I meet?  Will I arrive with the proper clothing and currency?  Will I have access to basic toiletries and lodging?

• Can I go back as myself and relive an event from my own life?  If so, do I go with my 53-year-old brain and understanding of the world, or do I go back to the person I was at that time?

• Once I arrive, am I bound to the travel restrictions of that time?  For instance, can I visit multiple places with the snap of a finger, or would I have to walk or ride in a bus, boat or carriage?

• Can I die, be harmed or put in prison while I’m away?

It can get complicated quickly, and each answer to the above questions will radically change the central answer to the central question.

When I asked a few of my Christian friends, they didn’t need to think twice: witness Jesus’s resurrection.  Fair enough.  Another friend of mine thought that seeing her grandparents as young adults would make for a good trip.  I like that one a lot.  Some of my music-centric friends thought about attending one of the seminal concerts by their favorite bands.  One friend thought about witnessing the JFK assassination and paying particular attention to the grassy knoll to see if there’s any truth to the conspiracy theories.

For me, I’ll make the following assumptions:  I will not interact with my environment in a meaningful way, but I can make small talk, order food at a restaurant, etc..  I can observe people, places and events, I can eat food, and I can be visible if I choose to be or an invisible observer when appropriate.  I am not subject to injury, death or imprisonment.  I can travel via the methods appropriate for the time period.  I can sleep in some other dimension, as opposed to living along in a dingy motel somewhere.  Money is no object.  I can not change history.  I can stay for up to a month.

Given these assumptions, I would consider time-traveling to Milwaukee on September 23, 1957 and staying for at least three weeks.  I have the following in mind:

I’ll first attend County Stadium to witness the Milwaukee Braves game on Monday night, September 23, and watch Hank Aaron hit a game-winning, league-clinching, two-run homer in the bottom of the 11th inning and celebrate with over 40,000 other fans in attendance.  A few weeks later, I will attend games 4 and 5 of the World Series and watch the Braves beat the Yankees, and I’ll stick around in Milwaukee to watch/listen/cheer/celebrate with my fellow fans on October 9th and 10th while the Braves beat the Yankees in the Bronx.  I could try to travel to New York to see the games, but I think it might actually be more fun in Milwaukee.

Since there’s a lot of time to kill in between these two events, I’ve got some ideas. I’d like to take a bus to Memphis, Tennessee, and on September 27th see The Biggest Show of Stars, including Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, The Drifters, The Everly Brothers, Frankie Lymon and Paul Anka.  Not too shabby.  And two days earlier, on September 25th, I can see Elvis Presley at the Eagle’s Nest, also in Memphis!  Even better, the weather in Memphis that week looks to be in the mid-70s to the low-80s, so I’d try to take a boat tour, eat some good southern food and get a flavor for the area.

If possible, I’d then like to quickly travel up to Green Bay for their 21-17 victory over the Bears at the inaugural game at New City Stadium (now Lambeau Field).  I’ll be there with 31,000 other fans, and future president Richard M. Nixon (and current - at the time - Vice President) will dedicate the stadium at half-time.

During the following week I’ll go back to Milwaukee and visit both sets of my grandparents.  I knew my maternal grandparents, Elmer and Louise, quite well as a young adult, but I’d love to see them again, hear them laugh, watch them cook a meal, play cards, sing in the choir, etc.  I’d even take a few bus rides with my grandfather at the helm as a city driver.  What a hoot that would be.  And then I can go just a short drive away to my paternal grandparents, Edwin and Mildred, who I didn’t know nearly as well in my lifetime, and get a fuller picture of who they were.

I would also kick around the land where I grew up in Menominee Falls and Brookfield.  None of the homes I lived in will be there yet, but I’d still like to see how things looked prior subdivisions being developed.

During my downtime, I’ll watch current movies in theaters.  It’s hard to know exactly what films will be played during this three-week period, but they might include Jailhouse Rock, Sweet Smell of Success and A Face in the Crowd.  Maybe a few older films will be playing around town as well. And I’m sure there will be local concerts worth seeing. I’d also like to attend a Reform Judaism service somewhere in Milwaukee or northern suburbs and see what the services consisted of back then, and I’d like to visit Capitol Drive Lutheran Church where I’ll attend Sunday School a few decades later.

That sounds like a pretty good three-week time-travel vacation.  If the parameters were to change, so would my answer.  What if I can only go back for one hour?  What if I can change history?  What if I can snap my fingers and change locations?  What if I can interact with my environment with absolutely no worry about changing history? 

Oh, the possibilities are endless.  Sorta like this blog entry!

Where and when would you like to go?

Shoutout to Jomboy's Baseball Breakdowns

With all the talk about baseball needing a significant makeover considering that strikeouts and game lengths are up and batting averages, doubles, triples, stolen bases and excitement are down, it’s nice to see that the game can still be made interesting by sheer personality and incredible lip-reading.  Enter Jomboy Media.  Now, I’m not much of a YouTube guy because I like to waste my time in other meaningless ways, but I do have a 19 year-old son who will on occasion lead me to a channel that offers big entertainment value, a phrase not typically associated with Major League Baseball these days.

Jomboy Media has a history, multiple channels, podcasts and a slew of related entities that I don’t understand, and I encourage you to investigate all of them and then tell me in 30 seconds what I should pay attention to, but what I’d like to share with you today are its Baseball Breakdowns hosted by Jimmy O’Brien.  The breakdowns are an inside look of baseball’s intricacies, extraordinary plays, heated arguments between players, managers and umpires, and the best (and worst) of baseball fandom, all done with wit and a genuine appreciation for the game.  And did I mention the lip-reading?  Wow! This guy can tell you exactly what managers Craig Counsell and Tony La Russa are uttering in this incredibly interesting and entertaining breakdown of a challenge that may or may not have taken advantage of a significant loophole in the rulebook. 

For another taste of what O’Brien does best, check out this recent look at a Mariner comeback against the Astros:

Great stuff!  I’m a fan.  I might be as big a fan of Jomboy as I am of baseball itself.  You can also watch the videos and have better search functionality at Jomboy’s website.

Now excuse me while I piss away some more time on YouTube.

A Devil's Baseball Bargain

I’ve proposed the following scenario to a few Milwaukee Brewers fans, but you could just as easily apply it to fans of the Seattle Mariners or Texas Rangers, the Jacksonville Jaguars, Denver Nuggets or Buffalo Sabres, or any other sports team without a championship. 

A person or entity of some kind approaches you, and – knowing your lifetime loyalty to the Milwaukee Brewers (or some other ill-fated sports team) – says, “I can guarantee that the Brewers will win a World Series sometime in the next five years, but here’s the deal: your team will spend the subsequent twenty years in last place.”

You don’t know how or why, but you know this person is telling the truth.  Do you take the bargain?

I’ve offered this question to a couple of friends of mine and have been dumbfounded that each of them quickly and unequivocally said no; they’d rather have a fun, competitive team for many years than to hit the pinnacle for one year and spend two decades in the cellar.

Me?  I would take the deal in a heartbeat.

I wouldn’t have when I was fourteen years-old and the Brewers had just lost the World Series in seven games to the St. Louis Cardinals.  After all, they’d surely be back a year later to avenge their disappointing loss, right?  Right???

Nearly forty years later, I realize just how fleeting successes are, and how you can root for a team – even good teams – and never make it to the finish line.  Think the Utah Jazz, the Tampa Rays or the Buffalo Bills.  Or how about the Atlanta Falcons, who let the Super Bowl slip away when it was in the bag?  Brutal stuff.  Tell me a Falcon fan wouldn’t change the outcome of that game for twenty years in the doldrums.

The Packers have won two more Super Bowls than I ever expected them to win when I was following them through the awful 70s and 80s.  But now?  It’s all icing, baby.  They’ve done it.  Twice in my lifetime!  If they spend the next decade in last place, hey, that’s okay.

The Milwaukee Bucks just won their first championship since I was three years old.  I was thrilled.  I traveled up to Milwaukee and hung out with my sister and brother-in-law, walked amongst Bucks fans of all genders, races and sizes, and I loved it.  But I couldn’t express unadulterated jubilation, because I didn’t earn it.  I don’t think much of pro basketball as a sport, and while I was very happy for the city of Milwaukee, the fans who’ve slogged through season after hapless season and the players who seem genuinely grateful for having won a championship in a small-market city, I couldn’t revel in the victory as much as the next guy.  After all, the Bucks game I attended earlier this year was my first NBA game in twenty years.

But I’ve earned my heartache with the Milwaukee Brewers, and I will have earned the euphoria should they ever manage to win a World Series.  They’ve come close to getting there – in 2011 and 2018 – and those were fun rides to be sure, but they were not the finish line.  I want what true Bucks fans got last week.  I want it all.  I want to be in the stands when the Brewers complete a World Series victory.

I’d be willing to spend a lot of awful seasons for that Golden Moment.  Hell, I’ve lived through enough awful seasons without that golden moment.  What’s a few more?

Playing Music without Understanding Theory

My musical ear is decent – not great.  If you play me a complicated jazz tune or a song by King Crimson and the like, I will not be able to play along, but for most rock/folk/blues tunes, I can figure out what’s happening pretty quickly, and my ability to play the song isn’t usually beholden to a particular key.  Like many musicians, I can think of chord changes in terms of Roman numerals, which is hugely helpful when “hearing” changes and playing along.  I’m often made fun of in band practice because I’ll always ask what key a song is in before we start playing.  I can never remember.  Once I know the key, I’m good to go (usually).

What I find amazing is just how many musicians – good one, too – play their instruments without really understanding the language of music, what we often call music theory.  A friend of mine put it this way: it’s like learning a second language by memorizing a lot of sentences.  Yes, it’s impressive to learn so many sentences, and you may be able to utter hundreds of them correctly, like “I’d like my breakfast with two eggs and toast,” but if you instead want to say, “I’d like my lunch with three pickles and coleslaw,” you’ll be in a fix.

This is a great analogy for what some musicians do.  And I’m not knocking them.  I think it’s amazing.  What they do is actually harder than what I do, because they’re memorizing songs.  I’m usually not.  I’m following chord changes that I hear in my head.  I know guitar players who can play crazy difficult solos note for note but who don’t know what a C7#9 chord is.  By contrast, I can’t learn a complicated solo without a great deal of effort;  I can, however, play along to a tune and tell you that the iv minor chord that the band is playing is incorrect – that it’s a flat VII major 9 (as recently happened when my band was learning “Brass in Pocket”).  I’m relatively good at that kind of thing.  Different skill sets, I suppose, and my ear still isn’t what it should be.  A good jazz musician might wonder how I dare to call myself a musician when I don’t know what mode to play over the aforementioned C7#9 chord.  I’ve got a lot to learn, for sure.

But those among us who literally memorize their parts should be revered on some level, because it’s a huge feat to memorize parts and excel in doing so.  The problems arise when you’re trying to communicate with each other.  I’ve had bandmates who don’t know what I’m talking about when I ask them to go to a III major chord, or who can’t change song keys without a lot of preparation.  That can be problematic and, at times, limiting, just as I would be a limiting factor in a jazz combo.

But I think it’s also encouraging that there are multiple ways to approach and enjoy music, and that one can be proficient in some aspect of music but not in others. Ultimately, those differences might even be invaluable to the makeup of a band.

Memories of At-Home Fatherhood

In Meg Wolitzer’s insightful and punctilious portrayal of at-home mothers in New York City, The Ten-Year Nap, she writes of an at-home father:

…his appearance at the school in the afternoon was confusing; it threw off theories about how the world worked.  You were initially pleased by him, but then after a short while you felt slightly annoyed.  He seemed like a loiterer here in the world that the women had formed for themselves.

I read this with a nod of recollection.  It’s now been 24 years since my wife and I made the decision to have me stay at home with our twin daughters while she continued her career in human resources.  As I wrote in my song, “Daddy’s at Home”: 

I remember the time
When I found this wife of mine
Was earning more than I ever would
And as her due date arrived
We needed to decide
Which one of us would stay home for good
I wasn't tied to the workday that took me from nine to five
But now I'm wishing I could just rest my eyes

This song highlights the joys of at-home fatherhood – many of my songs do – and I unequivocally stand by the decision to stay at home and raise the kids.  I wish I could do it all over again.  I loved being a dad to young children.

But there was also a flip side to the journey: being an at-home father was often isolating, particularly on the East Coast where people are less open and tougher nuts to crack in general, but even in the friendlier Midwest.  And while one could theorize about why this was the case, I think Wolitzer offers a plausible explanation: because women were dubious about this interloper, a man entering a world that had been reserved for them.  I wasn’t invited to join their walks, their coffee outings, their phone call chats – and really, I shouldn’t have been.  I see more clearly now than I did then just how presumptuous it was for me to think that I should have been treated as a colleague. 

When I first took my twins to preschool in Illinois, many of the moms viewed me as a novelty, and I was able to establish a rapport with some of the friendlier ones.  Looking back now, I’m grateful for the few mom friends I made, who occasionally took my phone calls to chat about which park district program we were signing up for or to just unload about the trivial trials that parenting includes.  During dark winter days, when parenting could feel like a life sentence, these phone calls were a lifeline for me.  

Over time, some of the relationships I established graduated to in-person gatherings.  I think that what I had going for me more than anything else was a nonthreatening quality, some sort of signal that read, “I am not going to make a move on you.”  In a way, I preferred these relationships to any I could have established with fellow fathers.  Too often, I found dads to be a bore.  If you weren’t talking to them about sports, finances and home improvement, the conversations dried up.  The women I became friends with were more interesting, unafraid to express regret and uncertainly.  They were more self-effacing and more empathetic.  More human.

As my kids grew older, I saw other fathers walking their kids to and from school.  Most were working in some capacity, either out of the home or on odd shifts, but there were a few of us full-time stay-at-home dads roaming about.  It became less of a thing.  Less novel.  More accepted.  A quarter of a century later, I like to think that I helped them along in some small way.