At The Three Brothers Restaurant
Thursday evening, Oct. 11, 2012
Tom Koplin, CPA, and Wis Guthrie, artist
both of the 1st Congregational Church
100 E. Broadway, Waukesha
dined on Burek, Mousseka and other Serbian fare
after their celebratory toast with Branco's famed house wine.
They waited happily while the fresh-cooked repast
was prepared in the small ethnic kitchen,
from scratch.
A neighboring diner offered to take a picture of us, three brothers in our own right.
Our reservation was for 5 PM, when they open. Notice the sky still showing some light
when we got there. The tables filled fast, per usual. We shot our pictures with available light,
no flash, so as to capture the actual interior lighting which is afforded by small
table lamps. The red OPEN sign brought us from our waiting vehicle and to the imminently unlocked door.
Another group arrived on the street shortly after we did. The are seated to our right.
They were customary celebrators of some family event, we assumed.
The 3 Bros. seems changeless, with old fixtures and cacti spanning of the years
since the 1960s when Wis and this writer first went there with a group of Carroll College revelers.
Later that evening, we went folk dancing at a South Side Milwaukee tavern hall.
There, Port of Milwaukee foreign ship personnel were welcomed.
Wis, recent Waukesha Guitartown large instrument creator, is now 94. The SRN editor is 76.
Tom, our driver and benefactor, is a Carroll grad of unknown age, but youthful.
He surreptitiously took the below photo of this editor
without our knowledge, and sent it along for inclusion this AM.
Part of the joys of a trip to the 3 Bros. is sometimes the foil-wapped left-overs
for next day's breakfast. This is beef burek. Delicious! "I even like the foil!"
Today, good to the last bite. We now finish our breakfast and retire to the loft office
to write about the experience.
It was unforgettable.
Thanks to Tom Koplin, who drove us in from Waukesha to Bayview
and picked up the tab.
We were the joyful three brothers at a place bearing that name.
HISTORY
.............................
Ghostly Pterodactyl-like woodpeckers
appear before Norb Blei's camera
in Door County
Rarely seen, two Pileated woodpeckers hammer trees near Norb's Ellison Bay home.
He sends frequent Door County photos.
.........
The will to live
As of 10.11.12
Indeed, the day of the Glorified is arrived.
(See The Marseillaise anthem)
Guests on Saturday who'd come to see our dwelling above the Five Points
had to be told the caveat that the ambitious and goal-oriented volunteer
Morning Glory vine that twined its way to the top of the tall window
had seemingly folded its withering leaves and single blossom of victory,
and cashed in its truly ephemeral chips.
Our friends came in part to rejoice in this downtown phenomenon,
a peaceful happening in the midst of some only partially-identified nercantile strife.
We pronounced an honoring benediction over the little and
'insignificant' green creature.
After reading the UCC devotional following, we planned to revere the very
counterclockwise vine, even without leaves or blossoms.
But, too soon. Today the determined plant blooms again.
As of 10-6-12
As of 10-12-12
As we told you, the Morning Glory seed rode into 311 Odd Fellows with another plant,
sprouted, and started climbing up the tall window. At the top.it now it must take a sideways route.
.........................................
From near the Morning Glory, the rooster crows
sited above the downtown bowels at:
The Odd Fellows
308 South St., Waukesha
View seen from alley across the street next to the Masonic Temple. Blue X marks the entry to our hdqtres.
.............
A borrowed passage involving Morning Glories:
Mark 10:5
"But Jesus said to them, 'Because of your hardness of heart he wrote this commandment for you.'"
Reflection by Donna Schaper
Hardness of heart is a spiritual matter in love relationships, divorces, between siblings – and in the garden. Often mid-summer I make a mistake that turns up just about now, right before the first snow. I pull out the morning glories that didn't produce, like a cruel boss does when she fires a worker who gets behind on his numbers. One grower in Florida made this point quite well to me, as we stood in his tomato field. "Sure, Reverend, I could pay these workers more per bushel. But have you any idea how many stand right behind them, willing to pick the tomatoes for what I pay?"
Like that boss, I have lots of morning glories. A new non-blooming strain has shown up in my garden, right alongside the blue and pink and purple and tri-color beauties. I pull the non-bloomers off their stakes in the summer, leaving the colorful to dine and twine.
When I look at the morning glory stakes in October, after the first frost, I see nothing left but the twine of the vine. And that twine is often beautiful, symmetrically attached to its stake, circle by circle. In October I get a good look at my summer mistake. Some stakes are barren. I had become a formulaic gardener, one who privileges bloom over shape, like a baseball fan who only likes home runs. Plus, who knows when a new strain of morning glory is going to erupt from the genetic modifications clearly afoot? What about next year or two years from now? What hardness of heart cost me the patience of love?
Why bother with these useless thoughts in fall, the season of preparation, the time when the light fades early? Because you can't go forward well without looking back well. You can't prepare without evaluation. You also never prepare in a vacuum but in something more like a vacuum bag, one full of dust and the left behind and the no longer appreciated or that second earring that had been lost a long time.
Jesus was advising his disciples about the rules around divorce. I wonder, sometimes, why my first marriage ended. I even wonder if it should have ended. The rules about hardness of heart are made for people like me.
Prayer
O God, let me value bloom but even more send me to the twine in the vine, the hope in fall, the promise that is knocking on the door of our garden, even on a cold, dark night.
|
(From UCC Daily Devotionals)
.......................
The Maimed
Chris Hedges gave this talk Sunday night in New York City at
a protest denouncing the 11th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan. The event,
at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, was led by Veterans for Peace.
Many of us who are here carry within us death. The smell of
decayed and bloated corpses. The cries of the wounded. The shrieks of children.
The sound of gunfire. The deafening blasts. The fear. The stench of cordite. The
humiliation that comes when you surrender to terror and beg for life. The loss
of comrades and friends. And then the aftermath. The long alienation. The
numbness. The nightmares. The lack of sleep. The inability to connect to all
living things, even to those we love the most. The regret. The repugnant lies
mouthed around us about honor and heroism and glory. The absurdity. The waste.
The futility.
It is only the maimed that finally know war. And we are the
maimed. We are the broken and the lame. We ask for forgiveness. We seek
redemption. We carry on our backs this awful cross of death, for the essence of
war is death, and the weight of it digs into our shoulders and eats away at our
souls. We drag it through life, up hills and down hills, along the roads, into
the most intimate recesses of our lives. It never leaves us. Those who know us
best know that there is something unspeakable and evil many of us harbor within
us. This evil is intimate. It is personal. We do not speak its name. It is the
evil of things done and things left undone. It is the evil of war.
It is impossible to portray war. Narratives, even anti-war
narratives, make the irrational rational. They make the incomprehensible
comprehensible. They make the illogical logical. They make the despicable
beautiful. All words and images, all discussions, all films, all evocations of
war, good or bad, are an obscenity. There is nothing to say. There are only the
scars and wounds. These we carry within us. These we cannot articulate. The
horror. The horror.
We wander through life with the deadness of war within us.
There is no escape. There is no peace. We know an awful truth, an existential
truth. War exposed the lies of patriotism and collective virtue of the nation
that our churches, our schools, our press, our movies, our books, our government
told us about ourselves, about who we were. And we see through these illusions.
But those who speak this truth are cast out. Ghosts. Strangers in a strange
land.
Who are our brothers and sisters? Who is our family? Whom have
we become? We have become those whom we once despised and killed. We have become
the enemy. Our mother is the mother grieving over her murdered child, and we
murdered this child, in a mud-walled village of Afghanistan or a sand-filled
cemetery in Fallujah. Our father is the father lying on a pallet in a hut,
paralyzed by the blast from an iron fragmentation bomb. Our sister lives in
poverty in a refugee camp outside Kabul, widowed, desperately poor, raising her
children alone. Our brother, yes, our brother, is in the Taliban and the Iraqi
insurgency and al-Qaida. And he has an automatic rifle. And he kills. And he is
becoming us. War is always the same plague. It imparts the same deadly virus. It
teaches us to deny another’s humanity, worth, being, and to kill and be
killed.
There are days we wish we were whole. We wish we could put
down this cross. We envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate
goodness of America and the righteousness of war and celebrate what we know is
despicable. And sometimes it makes us wish for death, for the peace of it. But
we know too the awful truth, as James Baldwin wrote, that “people who shut their
eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on
remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns
himself into a monster.” And we would rather be maimed and broken and in pain
than be a monster, and some of us, once, were monsters.
I cannot heal you. You will never be healed. I cannot take
away your wounds, visible and invisible. I cannot promise that it will be
better. I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish optimism that is the
curse of America. I can only tell you to stand up, to pick up your cross, to
keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat
away at you, at the nation—this plague of war.Sometimes I feel like a
motherless child
Towering about us are banks and other financial institutions
that profit from war. War, for some, is a business. And across this country lies
a labyrinth of military industries that produce nothing but instruments of
death. And some of us once served these forces. It is death we defy, not our own
death, but the vast enterprise of death. The dark, primeval lusts for power and
personal wealth, the hypermasculine language of war and patriotism, are used to
justify the slaughter of the weak and the innocent and mock justice. ... And we
will not use these words of war.
We cannot flee from evil. Some of us have tried through drink
and drugs and self-destructiveness. Evil is always with us. It is because we
know evil, our own evil, that we do not let go, do not surrender. It is because
we know evil that we resist. It is because we know violence that we are
nonviolent. And we know that it is not about us; war taught us that. It is about
the other, lying by the side of the road. It is about reaching down in defiance
of creeds and oaths, in defiance of religion and nationality, and lifting our
enemy up. All acts of healing and love—and the defiance of war is an affirmation
of love—allow us to shout out to the vast powers of the universe that, however
broken we are, we are not yet helpless, however much we despair we are not yet
without hope, however weak we may feel, we will always, always, always resist.
And it is in this act of resistance that we find our salvation.
....................
Three people tied together now
Old friend The Rev. Leroy
ref: Flip Wilson's character
does the fish trick in his motor boat. Catching a fish, he held it up close to the camera to make it appear bigger.
Noy,
Laotian close acquaintance of the The Rev.'s
winning his heart in a cultural way
he is not used to; and
Leona,
Leroy's mother, former custodian with his father
of Festoon Fox, who is now living her last days
in a nursing home after Leroy spend years
caring for her in his home.
Leroy was the only child of my dear former customers.
(To them, Nastrowie!)
Leroy was the only child of my dear former customers.
(To them, Nastrowie!)
Leroy introduced Noy to Leona
and they took to each other
at a late stage of the game.
Asian love takes different forms in kindness.
Asian love takes different forms in kindness.
Further developments re Leroy and Noy are perhaps in the wings.
SRN will keep posted.
..............
SRN will keep posted.
..............
Our mother, Ruth Elies, when she met father Leslie at Sun Prairie high school, where he taught history and band. 1931
Parents' Day
I breathed shallow as I looked for her
in the crowd of oncoming parents, I strained
forward, like a gazehound held back on a leash,
then I raced toward her. I remember her being
much bigger than I, her smile of the highest
wattage, a little stiff, sparkling
with consciousness of her prettiness—I
pitied the other girls for having mothers
who looked like mothers, who did not blush.
Sometimes she would have braids around her head like a
goddess or an advertisement for California raisins—
I worshipped her cleanliness, her transfixing
irises, sometimes I thought she could
sense a few genes of hers
dotted here and there in my body
like bits of undissolved sugar
in a recipe that did not quite work out.
For years, when I thought of her, I thought
of the long souring of her life, but on Parents' Day
my heart would bang and my lungs swell so I could
feel the tucks and puckers of embroidered
smocking on my chest press into my ribs,
my washboard front vibrate like scraped
tin to see that woman arriving
and to know she was mine.
~ELECTRIC~
STOVE OF BOX STORE GLEANING,
I SIT BEFORE IT IN THE CHILLY DAWNING
OF A NEW DAY
AND SEE ABOVE THE DANCING FLAMES
TO THE WINDOW WHERE ANOTHER ELECTRIC THING
A PLUG-IN JACK-O-LANTERN
SITS DIAGONALLY TOWARD THE GLASS
AND IT REFLECTS THE HAPPY HALLOWEEN FACE
FURTIVELY GRINNING AMONG THE TURNING LEAVES
OF A TREE OUTSIDE IN FRONT OF THE
DORMANT CLARKE HOTEL
SO WELL DISGUISED
YOU CAN BARELY SEE IT,
ORANGE ON ORANGE.
PICTURE TAKEN WITH THE NEAREST CAMERA
the lower crustacean cell cam
Downtown Bowels taken likewise while getting the mail
Postscript:
Dee comes back from a trip to The Steaming Cup for some good coffee
with two tales:
1. She stood in line at The Cup with two guests staying at the Clarke.
They said they really liked it. They travel the country a lot and always try to stay in
old or different hotels to catch local flavor of the places they'e visiting.
They said they were the only apparent guests there, a bit spooky,
but it was VERY nicely appointed. They would definitely return to The Clarke.
and 2.
A school bus blew its horn at Dee as she was coming home.
It turned out to be Linda Mathie who asked the driver to honk.
Linda is an aide who starts her day riding/supervising a Headstart school bus.
She works at the school as an aide. She's also from the Congo (1st).
.......
in the crowd of oncoming parents, I strained
forward, like a gazehound held back on a leash,
then I raced toward her. I remember her being
much bigger than I, her smile of the highest
wattage, a little stiff, sparkling
with consciousness of her prettiness—I
pitied the other girls for having mothers
who looked like mothers, who did not blush.
Sometimes she would have braids around her head like a
goddess or an advertisement for California raisins—
I worshipped her cleanliness, her transfixing
irises, sometimes I thought she could
sense a few genes of hers
dotted here and there in my body
like bits of undissolved sugar
in a recipe that did not quite work out.
For years, when I thought of her, I thought
of the long souring of her life, but on Parents' Day
my heart would bang and my lungs swell so I could
feel the tucks and puckers of embroidered
smocking on my chest press into my ribs,
my washboard front vibrate like scraped
tin to see that woman arriving
and to know she was mine.
~ELECTRIC~
STOVE OF BOX STORE GLEANING,
I SIT BEFORE IT IN THE CHILLY DAWNING
OF A NEW DAY
AND SEE ABOVE THE DANCING FLAMES
TO THE WINDOW WHERE ANOTHER ELECTRIC THING
A PLUG-IN JACK-O-LANTERN
SITS DIAGONALLY TOWARD THE GLASS
AND IT REFLECTS THE HAPPY HALLOWEEN FACE
FURTIVELY GRINNING AMONG THE TURNING LEAVES
OF A TREE OUTSIDE IN FRONT OF THE
DORMANT CLARKE HOTEL
SO WELL DISGUISED
YOU CAN BARELY SEE IT,
ORANGE ON ORANGE.
PICTURE TAKEN WITH THE NEAREST CAMERA
the lower crustacean cell cam
Downtown Bowels taken likewise while getting the mail
Postscript:
Dee comes back from a trip to The Steaming Cup for some good coffee
with two tales:
1. She stood in line at The Cup with two guests staying at the Clarke.
They said they really liked it. They travel the country a lot and always try to stay in
old or different hotels to catch local flavor of the places they'e visiting.
They said they were the only apparent guests there, a bit spooky,
but it was VERY nicely appointed. They would definitely return to The Clarke.
and 2.
A school bus blew its horn at Dee as she was coming home.
It turned out to be Linda Mathie who asked the driver to honk.
Linda is an aide who starts her day riding/supervising a Headstart school bus.
She works at the school as an aide. She's also from the Congo (1st).
.......
Big Bird Wings It To 'Saturday Night Live'
NEW YORK (AP) — In a week when Big Bird was in the news, it seemed fitting to find him perched at the parody news report on NBC's "Saturday Night Live."
But joining Seth Meyers at the "Weekend Update" anchor desk, the popular "Sesame Street" character declined to comment on presidential hopeful Mitt Romney's vow to cut federal funding for PBS. Explaining why, Big Bird said he didn't want to "ruffle any feathers."
He told Meyers how he had learned of being mentioned on Wednesday's debate. He said he'd gotten "a million tweets." From real birds, that is.
Since then, he said he was feeling very famous, standing tall above every other 8-foot talking bird.
...................
CODA
The Sewer Raccoon is not for everybody
................................
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And I was poised to take them both
And be two travelers, long I stood
And looked down once as far as I could
To where it bent the truth and killed the growth
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was expedient and wanted wear,
Had brought me closer to power and fame
And both that evening equally lay
In
leaves no honest man had trodden black
Oh, I walked the first (and second) for another play!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back
I shall be telling this with a smirk
Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood and I (a jerk)
Took both roads with perfidious work
And that has made all the
difference
Sub(Mitt)ed by Rev. Dr. Thomas Bentz, presently of New Jersey
