One of the distinct joys of parenthood is exposing my kids to the movies that I loved when I was a kid. And my kids’ ages cover such a wide span (age 3-17 years old) that it gives me an excuse to re-visit childhood favorites more than once.Last night we revisited one of my wife’s favorite films from her childhood, a not-widely-known classic from 1989 called Shag with Phoebe Cates, Annabeth Gish, and Bridget Fonda. The film takes place in 1963 and follows four high school graduates in South Carolina who go to Myrtle Beach for a secretive, end-of-summer adventure. It’s a cute little movie, and my kids liked it.Mission accomplished.As I thought about the film, it occurred to me that it was the third 1980s film in a row that I’ve shown my kids that takes place between the mid 1950s and mid 1960s: Stand by Me was released in 1986 and took place in 1959, and Back to the Future was released in 1985 and took place largely in 1955.What are the chances? Well, the more I thought about it, I discovered the chances are pretty good. A slew of movies in the 1980s were set in the years between 1955 and 1965. Among them: Porky’s (took place in the mid-fifties), Losin’ It (1965), The Outsiders (1965), Peggy Sue Got Married (1960), Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Dirty Dancing (1963), Dead Poets Society (1959) and many others.And that doesn’t include the biopics from that time like La Bamba, which told the story or Ritchie Valens and took place in the late fifties, or Great Balls of Fire!, about Jerry Lee Lewis in the fifties. Or the films about historical events that took place during that time period like Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Born on the 4th of July, or Mississippi Burning.When I first started thinking about this, I thought I had the answer. The directors of these films were probably teens in the fifties and sixties, and by the eighties they were the people making the movies. They romanticized their younger years in a huge wave of nostalgia.If that were true, then we might expect films of the past ten or fifteen years to look back at the 1980s. Many directors now would have been teens in that decade, so it only makes sense that they’d make movies in a similar wave of nostalgia.But then I tried to think of a film made in the past ten or fifteen years that was set in the 1980s. And I came up with…Go ahead, try.It’s not easy, is it?There’s The Wedding Singer, but that was made in the late nineties, and made fun of the eighties. Hot Tub Time Machine took place in the eighties. (It’s no Back to the Future.) Rock of Ages celebrated eighties hair bands. Perhaps the only film that I can think of that actually describes the sort of phenomenon I have in mind is a wonderful movie called Adventureland, which was made in 2009 and tells the story of some 1980s kids working at an amusement park.The lack of modern films set in the eighties begs the question, what does Hollywood have against the eighties?Your guess is as good as mine.It’s interesting, however, that the fascination with the sixties that was so prevalent in the eighties, continued beyond that decade. In the early nineties Mermaids, which takes place in 1963, and The Sandlot, which takes place a year earlier, were released. And since then, the trend has continued: Catch Me if You Can, The Help, That Thing you Do, Moonrise Kingdom, Across the Universe and Down with Love all revisit that time period. And that doesn’t even account for the biopics: Capote, Walk the Line, J. Edgar, etc.Maybe it’s because the contemporary films in the eighties, those made about the eighties, in the eighties, are so damn good that no one wants to be compared to them. After all, how do you improve on The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Risky Business, Can’t Buy Me Love, Revenge of the Nerds, Goonies and on and on?And really, would Back to the Future be half as exciting if it was released today and Marty McFly went back thirty years to end up 1984 instead of 1955? Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.
It's More than just Picking your Own Food
There are few things as basic and essential to human life as food. Another basic need is family. So it makes sense that when you combine food and family great things happen.Much has been made in recent years about the importance of families eating dinner together. It provides a chance for everyone to come together, talk about their day, and interact with each other.The other part of dinner time that has been the focus of millions of words over the past few years is the desire for people to know where their food comes from. The local food movement continues to grow, and thankfully farmer’s markets are sprouting up in towns across the country. It’s probably easier to find local food today than in any time since the disastrous western industrial food era began.Today I enjoyed one of my favorite family activities, and it just so happens to involve food.We went raspberry picking.
If you’ve never gone to a farm and picked your own food, you’re really missing out. Backyard gardens are fantastic, and provide the same type of benefit, but they also require a fair amount of talent, patience and commitment. We’re more than a century removed from the time when most people grew their own food, and we’ll never return to those days. But picking your food at a local farm is the next best thing.Luckily, u-pick is becoming more popular as the local food movement grows. My family and I make frequent trips to Garwood Orchard, a family farm in LaPorte that’s been farming for six generations. Despite the name, Garwood offers much more than apples.Our trips to Garwood begin in early June with the strawberry harvest. Next up are blueberries, raspberries, pickles, green beans, bell peppers and hot peppers. And that’s all before apple picking season even begins! In addition to the seventeen different varieties of apples available throughout September and October there’s also tomatoes, tomatillos, and eggplant. There are more pumpkins and squash than you can shake a stick at. Unfortunately, Mother Nature ruined this year’s cherry, nectarine, peach and plum u-pick crops.Incredible things happen on our outings to pick our own food. When kids see where the food comes from, they’re enthusiastic about it. Most kids have never seen cherries hanging from a tree, or a bush so full of raspberries that the branches are hanging down toward the ground. And they’ll never have green beans as tasty as the ones they picked from the plant.We’ve become so separated from our food sources that it’s easy to forget how those pickles ended up in the jar, or that pizza sauce doesn’t magically appear in a sealed can. Going out to the field and seeing the vines, bushes, and trees on which these fruits and vegetables grow, looking at the flowers that will become fruit, tasting the freshness of something attached to a plant until you picked it and put in your mouth, reminds us just how basic to our existence our food is.Or how basic it should be.While we meandered the acres of berries, peppers and pickles today, crews of workers bent over and harvested the same fruits and vegetables that we picked. There’s a market at Garwood that sells produce already picked for you.It occurred to me that a cynic might laugh at us for essentially paying Garwood to allow us to work for them. However, even if we didn’t pay less for the u-pick items than the items in the market—which we do—I wouldn’t mind. Getting into the fields, seeing the plants, feeling the sunshine, and hearing the still silence of a rural farm is worth something.And teaching my kids that those apples they love so much actually began as buds before becoming flowers, and then small apples, is worth something. Letting them experience the sometimes-difficult work of picking enough raspberries to fill a container is worth something. Teaching them the difference between bell peppers that are ripe versus those that need a few more days is worth something. Teaching them the proper way to pick an apple without damaging a branch is worth something.Reminding them of the importance of our food and not to take it for granted is worth something.But the experience of doing it together, as a family, is priceless.How about you get an e-mail every time I write one of these things? Enter your e-mail address and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.
In Defense of Running Out of Gas, Repeatedly
I have run out of gas eight times. I think. There are eight times that I remember, and that’s the number that I usually mention when telling my running out of gas stories, but it might actually be more than that.Yes, I have running out of gas stories. Don’t you? It’s not just me, is it?A quick internet search revealed a post on the popular Freakonomics blog called “Why Don’t People Run out of Gas Anymore?”So maybe it is just me. And come to think of it, the only other running out of gas story I recall hearing is from my dad. So maybe it’s hereditary. (Sorry, kids!)Anyway, before you think that I’m a complete nincompoop, let me explain.It all started in high school. The high school parking lot, to be exact. I’d been driving my dad’s beatup 1978 Chevy Caprice for a few days. The thing was huge. My friends and I used to pile six of us in there. Comfortably. It had plenty of room. It also had a large hole in the floorboard, which meant that I could see the road pass beneath me as I drove.What it didn’t have was a working gas gauge. So when it stalled after school one day, I immediately knew the problem. And when I looked down at the gas gauge the needle rested on E, just as it always did.And that’s when I learned one of the bedrock lessons of my life: gas gauges can’t be trusted.That needle rested on empty every single time I got into the car. How the hell am I supposed to know when the thing’s really empty and when it’s just pulling my leg? I’d pour twenty gallons of gas into its cavernous tank, and still the gauge would taunt me with the needle resting on E, as if to say, “Give me more!”“Well that was five or six cars ago! What’s your excuse now?” a skeptical reader might ask.And to that reader I’d say that a working gas gauge is not much better.Automakers try to fool us into thinking we can trust the gauge. They’ve gone and made it digital on some cars, as if disappearing LED bars are more reliable than a needle. Or even worse, they’ve included the deceitful, “Miles to Empty” calculation on my minivan’s dashboard.I’d like automakers to explain to me how I had 357 miles to empty after I filled up, then drove 80 miles, and now only have 263 miles to empty. Are some miles longer than others?Since gas gauges are unreliable, deceitful, and enjoy mocking me, I treat them the same way I’d treat a person with similar characteristics: I ignore them!And what happens most of the time? Nothing.Not a damn thing happens because the gas gauge is lying when it says that the tank is empty. There’s more gas in there. Automakers tried to get around this inconvenient truth by adding a warning light, which just proves my point. If the gauge were accurate, we wouldn’t need a light, would we?The warning light’s no better though. The “Check Gauges” or “Low Fuel” or, my favorite, the picture of a gas pump, all light up as if to say, “You’re low on fuel, and I mean it this time.”Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go suck on a gas pump.Maybe I’d take these things more seriously if there was some universal standard by which they operated. If automakers would agree that the light would come on when one gallon of gas remained, fine. SUV owners would know to rush to a gas station, and Prius owners would know they could only drive for another week before filling up.That’s not going to happen though. There’s no uniformity in the world of gas gauges. E doesn’t really mean Empty. It means something more like Almost Empty. If it meant Empty then the needle should never pass it, should it?So until there are better gas gauges, I’ll continue to ignore them. Sure, maybe I’ll run out of gas again, but I’m happy to report that the last three times I ran out of gas I was able to coast to a gas station, so I’m not too worried about it.Besides, running out of gas makes for good stories.Type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.
Can’t Do it Yourself? Just Hire Someone Younger!
The phone rang and I heard my wife’s voice on the other end of the line. “Something’s wrong with Trevor’s car.” Trevor is our seventeen-year-old daughter’s boyfriend.“It’s the starter. Or the radiator. Or the alternator. Is that a thing? An alternator. I mean, I know it’s a thing, but is it something on a car?” (One of my wife’s endearing qualities is her complete disinterest in cars. I could never have married a woman who’s into cars. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t. I dated a woman who was into cars. It didn’t work.)The problem with Trevor’s car didn’t really matter, but it brought her to the main reason for her phone call. “He’s trying to earn some extra money to fix it, so I was thinking I’d have him clean out our gutters.”“That’s a good idea,” I said without thinking. We discussed how much to pay him, settled on a price, and hung up.The gravity of the conversation didn’t hit me until much later:I’d become the guy who used to do things for himself, but now has to have a younger guy take care of it.A few short years ago I was the guy out there on the big extension ladder, sticking my hand in all sorts of stinky, organic muck and flinging it into a garbage can on the ground.(Two side notes here: 1. There’s no smell worse than rotting gutter vegetation. Try as you may that smell isn’t coming off your hands for days. And try explaining to Bob in the next cubicle that the stench he’s been complaining about all morning is coming from your hands. 2. Someone should invent an easy way to dispose of all that gross gutter goop. It’s practically impossible to accurately heave it all into the grounded garbage can from fifteen feet in the air, and you risk a broken neck if you try to bring a garbage bag onto the ladder with you. There’s a Shark Tank pitch there somewhere.)But now my wife had suggested, and I agreed, to pay a kid less than half my age to do it for me. Tell me I shouldn’t worry that this is the beginning of the end!I like to think of myself as a handy guy. I can fix most things that go wrong around the house, and many things that go wrong with the car. In fact, I’m good enough that relatives have actually called me to fix things for them.And clearing leaves from a gutter is precisely the sort of home maintenance chore that falls to the man of the house. I’m not one of those macho guys known to drone on about being the king of the castle or the man in charge or whatever, but letting this kid come over and clean out the gutters feels a little bit like I’m surrendering the helm of the ship.Today it’s the gutters, but what’s next? Cutting the grass? Killing spiders? Carving the Thanksgiving turkey?My wife has always preferred that we have someone else clean out the gutters. And she has a point. They’re high off the ground. I have to climb an impressive ladder to reach them, and the job is usually done in the fall or early spring, when the weather is crappy and the risk of a catastrophic fall is high.It’s also possible that I wouldn’t have given this a second thought had I not noticed that I’m a little older than I used to be. I’m only thirty-six, which isn’t old. But it’s not eighteen, either. Things are creakier and a little more sore than they used to be.The other way to look at it is that we’ve come to the point where we’re adult enough to actually pay someone to do something that we don’t want to do. That’s a common goal of everyone growing up isn’t it? In grade school you wished you could pay someone to eat your veggies, or in high school you wished you could pay someone to take that test for you. After college you might have paid someone to find a job for you. And now, I’m paying someone to clean my gutters.I can still take care of the spiders though.Like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes. Do it. Now. Please. You can also type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.
Dry it in the Water Makes More Sense After you Learn It
One of us has a new blog and like “they” always say, it’s not you, it’s me. So welcome to my new (emphasis on "new" there, since this ain't my first rodeo, bloggishly-speaking) blog, Dry it in the Water.Words of wisdom are priceless, so I’m looking forward to sharing some things that I’ve learned, both as a person and as a parent. Not that parents aren’t people and vice versa.Oh, wait a minute, I’m confusing words of wisdom with the Mona Lisa. It’s the Mona Lisa that’s priceless. Words of wisdom are sometimes annoying, often self-serving, and usually unwelcome. But still, they’re offered up non-stop as if they’re worth something, so I might as well add my voice to the crowd. (And by the way, given a good set of watercolors, I’m pretty sure I could do better than the Mona Lisa as well.)If you can’t figure out what Dry it in the Water means, don’t worry, you’re not alone. It’s the name of my blog and I’m not entirely sure I know what it means. But, since every blog needs a story, here’s the story of this here blog.Rewind to a few weeks ago, when we still had hopes of having an actual summer, and not this upper-70s, low-80s, half-hearted attempt at summer. I was swimming at the beach with my family—because nothing says summer more than wading into 55-degree water and freezing my ass off, while becoming Mr. Hyde if someone splashes so much as a drop of that shrinkage-inducing water on my still-warm upper body—when my youngest daughter, Girl’10 (her gender and year of birth, FYI), started complaining about her feet being too sandy. After trying to explain to her that people quite often end up with sandy feet when they go to a beach with trillions of grains of sand, I suggested that she put her feet in the lake to rinse them. So she did.The water did its trick and washed the sand right off. (Good thing she couldn’t see the countless bits of God-knows-what that probably attached to her feet courtesy of Lake Michigan.) Another problem quickly arose when she discovered that although her feet no longer had sand on them, they were wet.Now, wet feet at a beach might not seem like a big deal to you, but to Girl’10 there are few things more repulsive than wetness. I subscribe to the paper-towels-are-the-Devil theory, and I’ve been successful in brainwashing my two sons to believe the same. But Girl’10 apparently doesn’t fall for cultish ideas and refuses to see the light. God forbid I have even a drop of water remaining on my hands after washing them and wiping them on my pants to dry. If I try to hold her hand, Girl’10 will admonish me, “Daddy, your hands are still wet,” and then pull her hand away faster than Teddy Duchamp’s ear. (I know I’m stretching it with that reference, but look it up.) Then I have to not only dry my hands, but make sure to get the four drops of water off of her hand.So to her, wet feet at the beach are a beach. My wife, in her ability to somehow instantly cure whatever ails any one of our children, suggests that Girl’10 dry her feet with a towel. This sounds like a perfectly reasonable suggestion to me, in spite of the fact that she’s going to have sandy feet again a few minutes later and the process might begin anew. Girl’10 had other plans though. Instead of drying her feet with the towel, she says, “No, momma, I’ll just go dry them in the water.”Girl’10 goes to the water, dips her feet in, comes back, and is perfectly content.That’s bizarre enough, but shortly thereafter she wants to clean her sand toys, so she tells us, “I’m going to go dry these in the water,” and toddles away, while singing a little diddy, “Dry it in the Water,” which is sung to a song I’d never heard of until my wife told me about it, “Mermaid” by Train. Dry it in the Water has been in her repertoire ever since.Of course, being a thinking adult with a rudimentary understanding of chemistry and thermodynamics, I had no idea I could dry anything in the water. But now I know. And so do you.Those are the kinds of things I learn.If you like what you've read, type your email address in the box and click the "create subscription" button. My list is completely spam free, and you can opt out at any time.