Thoughts on life at Strikers, with a bit of Robert Frost

Doc’s report: 

 

It was only a year ago that Harry, the G-Man and I were visiting the newly launched MI Table.

I noted then that it’s funny how the scents, sights and sounds of nature take you home, especially, for me, in autumn:

• The yellow mums crowning in the pots downtown on Washington,
• The musky scent of sugar beets refining in the crisp autumn air from the southwest.
• The rumble of the 18-wheelers up Center, Columbus and Kosciuszko hauling those beets over the Lafayette Bridge to the refinery on our still-unfixed damn roads.

It’s comforting to know, in uncertain times, that some things never change.

But, of course, everything has changed in the last year:

• My boyhood hero, Al Kaline, died in April.
• The professor at the University of Michigan who directed my dissertation died, also in April.
• I couldn’t help remembering that the cofounder of this blog, Dan Nowak, also died in April, more than six years ago.

Things change; you strike out. I left my job at the end of September.

Everyone anticipates the Nov. 3 election with a frame of reference spanning political touchstones from Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” to Orwell’s “1984.”

I’ve found myself attracted to women wearing masks -- because of the mask! In particular, cat masks. What’s that about?

So meeting Harry and the G-Man at Strikers on a late-afternoon Wednesday in mid-October was exactly what I needed to secure the tenuous grasp, as it were, in this context of uncertainty. The boys are rocks.

For his part, Harry has emerged as a gentleman farmer, with a virtual cornucopia of backyard successes and horticultural tips. He’s giving pickles away almost as fast as he can print the labels and telling us why it’s time to plant garlic. He’s also experimenting, with mixed results, on growing figs, even in this temperate climate. They’re toxic before they’re ripe, he tells us. So were my three ex-wives.

Ever one to bring salt to the wound with the telling statistic, the G-man -- oh, the horror! -- is running low on vodka and looking to name his most recent concoction: rum, butterscotch schnapps and strawberry lemonade. God help us. Any takers?

I messaged a friend to join us, because she’s the right sort. But she wrote that she was at her parents’ house in Pinconning, cutting record coasters. Why not just say you had to wash your hair, and be done with it?

I would like to add that our experienced bartender Rochelle was as charming and competent as they come.

And that I know Harry and the G-Man are meeting secretly several times a week to practice their pool table skills, for the sole purpose of humiliating me publicly.

So, between our visit to Strikers and the election, we have Halloween on the last Saturday of the month. Harry told us he normally gets 450 kids for Halloween but he’s expecting fewer this year because of the coronavirus. He might address the issue of leftover candy with his friends and something from the garden.

Me? Well, I’m helping a couple of the neighborhood kids with their costumes. One little girl is going as the self-check-out machine at Meijer. Instead of saying “Trick or treat,” she says: “Please put items in the bagging area.”

Her brother, on my counsel, is handing out Allen wrenches, construction paper and a diagram in Swedish, and challenging adults to make his costume for him. He’s an Ikea sales rep.

At the end of Robert Frost’s poem “A Lone Striker,” the narrator impulsively leaves his factory job for the comfort and inspiration of nature, though he leaves the door open:

But he said then and still would say 

If there should ever come a day 

When industry seemed like to die
Because he left it in the lurch,
Or even merely seemed to pine
For want of his approval, why,
Come get him -- they knew where to search.

I hope our site visitors will find something of that grounding in camaraderie and common sense here, too, even in our next post, after the election.

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See the hairy guy’s report on Strikers: The Empire (some of it) returns, with pool tables, fried pickle fries and bowling (or not)