I remember him

He liked whiskey sours and Miller High Life.

He liked a cigarette with his second cup of coffee.

He liked tennis.

He liked golf ... and it frustrated him.

He loved ice hockey.

He missed Ted Williams and Milt Schmidt.

He liked Frank Howard and Sonny Jurgensen.

He fell asleep in his rocker-recliner.

I never saw him in jeans. I never saw him in a T-shirt. He wore boxers.

He liked his Jaguar and his Fiat Spider.

He liked to grill.

He liked maple walnut and butter pecan ice creams.

He had freckles across his shoulders.

He was a Marine.

He liked to whip potatoes. And pancake batter.

He didn't like the beach.

I never remember him raising his voice.

He tossed footballs and teed up golf balls.

He met us at the bus and took us to see the Senators.

He drove us home after we'd fallen asleep in the car.

He was outspoken at work, or so I have perceived, and it may have cost him.

He would have loved laptops and iPads.

He climbed to the roof to rotate the TV antenna so we could watch locally blacked-out games on a more distant station.

Neighbor kids bugged him.

He loved Christmas.

He didn't call his Mom often enough, but loved reuniting with his sisters and brothers.

He laughed at Cheers.

He played along with Jeopardy and the $10,000 Pyramid.

He squirmed during Jaws.

He whistled Strangers In The Night.

He took me to a lacrosse game and a hockey game in the same day.

He still gives me confidence to be in the spotlight.

He told this joke once: A driver picks up a hitch-hiking hippie. They come to an intersection. "See anything," said the driver. "Just a dog, man" said the hippie. The driver pulls out and ... CRASH. They come to in the hospital. The driver says, "I thought you said it was just a dog." Says the hippie, "Yeah, man, it was. A Greyhound, man."

He laughed with his mother-in-law for many years.

He loved my mom.

He would have been 80 today.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

Hey. Web person. Build this.

I get mad that I am not smart enough to write code or mash API's or do whatever it is programmers or designers or developers or whatever the job title is for the people who create smart websites and mobile apps ... yeah, what they do.

Because this is what I would do.

I would have a place to type in keywords. As many as I want.

Homes 3+ bed 2.5+ bath, open houses, lunch, spaghetti, sports bars, sports, dry cleaners shirts $1.95, traffic, history, live theatre, news, what are they building there, cherry ice cream.

I would have a place to type in a route. As long as I want.

SE 4th to Park to SE 14th to Grand to 9th to Locust.

I would have a button that you could click that says "Map."

And then, coded so that it made sense, I would see my map.

And it would show, within 3 blocks of my route:

All homes for sale with 3 or more bedrooms and 2.5 or more baths. Free to the Realtor. FSBO's pay.
All open houses. Free to the Realtor, FSBO's pay.
All restaurants with lunch specials (yes, paid advertising) today.
All restaurants with spaghetti specials today (yes, paid). OK, maybe through the coming weekend.
All sports bars with what they are showing on their live TVs tonight. Free.
All sports events through the weekend. Free. And the results from last night.
All dry cleaners who do shirts for $1.95 or less (light starch). Paid.
All potential traffic delays, including wrecks, construction, detours, school zones.
All sites of historical events.
All live theatre venues and what is coming through the next weekend. Free.
All sites of news stories from the daily newspaper in the past 72 hours.
All sites where there is commercial development with what's is coming or going.
All places where I can get cherry ice cream or a cherry sundae or maybe even a maraschino cherry on top of an ice cream cone.

And if you don't like cherry ice cream and history, then you can type your own keywords. Except I wouldn't call them keywords. Maybe "My stuff." Or maybe just "Me."

And if you aren't living here with my mother-in-law, you can type any route you want. Yes, you are right. I wouldn't call it route. Maybe "My way."

And you'd push "Map" and it would do the same thing for you.

No pull down menus. I want to choose what I want to choose, not what someone tells me to choose.

No boing, static AroundMe, Yellow Page-esque listings. I want it on a map. With one of those little blue dots that flashes to tell me where I am. And I want it to change when there's a new wreck,  a new listing, a new commercial lease, a new bulldozer, a new headline, a new ad sale. Right then, not a day late. Not when the ad assist gets around to scheduling it. Not when the reporter decides it is time to send in a graf or two.

Now.

And a link to more information.

Web and mobile. And maybe there's some Bluetooth kind of thing so if I need it to talk to me while I'm driving I can do that without getting in a wreck. And showing up on the map myself.

So, if you are one of those developers or programmers or designers or whatever the hell you are, you can have the damn idea. Just tell your boss where you got it.

Don't tell me, "yeah, but, yeah, but, yeah but." If I have to put quote marks around some of those longer "Me" words, fine.

Just let me know when it is done.

I'll bookmark you.

And I'll pay $2.99 for the app.

It's a lot more than 25 cents

I hoard state quarters. I've stashed away about 70 of them since I moved to Des Moines six-and-a-half weeks ago. Yes, that's 10 a week I've tucked away.

Who know how many I have back in Reno, sorted alphabetically if I don't need them in one of those folders.

One more Maine and each child will have a set. Two more Maines after that one, well, let me know if you've got a real neat, geeky kid like me.

If I get Philadelphia-minted quarters of Montana, Hawaii and some other western state, then I'll have a P & a D for every state, too. And then there are the uncirculated sets still wrapped up and untouched.

Sometimes I spend one in a pinch. To feed a parking meter. Maybe if I'm really thirsty and the machine says, "Exact change required." Frequently I just go thirsty.

I know which quarter has a sailboat on it. Which one has George Washington on both sides. Which one commemorates a landmark which sadly has crumbled since the coin was minted.

It's because of Grandma and Grandpa, who drove us across the country every summer to visit my uncle in Seattle.

In little apothecary bottles, we'd collect a sample of dirt from each state through which we drove and, when we got home and school resumed, Grandma would take the bottles to show her first-grade class in a geography lesson.

We'd make lists of the rivers we crossed and baseball stadiums we passed. Any wonder I'm following Chris Apel's cross-country sports trek.

When I drove to Sioux Falls a week ago, I saw the signs for Wall Drug and the Corn Palace, regular stops each summer. They stick in my mind even more than the most famous South Dakota landmark and the one which graces the back of its quarter. Grandma once sent us a set of post cards from Rock City and you know, it always will mean Tennessee to me more than Graceland or the Opry.

I miss my Grandma. The quarters help me keep her close.

I'm house-hunting for the fifth time in my life, slipping into other people's homes, peering into their closets and kitchen drawers and showers and garages.

One can't help bit feel a bit voyeuristic glimpsing at the bulletins board notes, window-box frames, and bedside tables.

In one master bedroom hung a framed now-yellowed sheet of paper upon which a frat boy typed 32 years ago a dozen or so rhyming lines about a diamond and the hopes of a lifetime and the request to spend it with a true love.

It was when I had finished reading those lines I realized this may well be the last time I go house-hunting.

After all, in the next four years, one will start high school and another will be a year away. A mother-in-law will turn 90.

So this may well be the house where:

the tooth fairy makes her last call;

prom corsages are pinned on dresses;

letters arrive from college admission offices;

two empty-nesters reminisce;

a young suitor asks for a daughter's hand;

grandchildren cultivate memories which they will pass down to a generation I may never know.

I guess I better find the right house.

How is it supposed to feel?

My mother-in-law and I watched tonight. As the crowd gathered in front of the White House, waving flags, chanting and singing, I asked her what happened when word came that Hitler was dead.

She was almost 20 at the time. She didn't recall.

"We all went downtown when the war ended," she said. "But I don't know about when Hitler died."

I suspect there has never been a night like tonight, when the people of a networked world learned of the death of a monster and then had to figure out how to react.

A night of accomplishment. A night of justice. A night of satisfaction.

A night of joy?

Some questions may best be answered with contemplative silence.

Forgive me, Zoe ... and Schneider ... et al

OK, OK. Yes, it is a little disconcerting to have editors -- and notably copy editors -- reading your blog when you've just posted an item which contains things such as:

• "... grand old weathered building which architecture buffs marvel at."
• "The globe, 19-feet around, with marks countries like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia ..."

So, to Zoe, Heather, Jody, Alice, Carol, Linda, Kelly, Cindy, Beryl, Tom, Schneider (yes, I did that on purpose), Carolyn, Karen, Maria, Bob, Maribel, Kate, Mike, Rich, Shawn, Terry, Tony, Valerie, Linda, Billy, Vicky and whomever I've missed ... please be tolerant.

Character and perspective

The first memory I have of Des Moines is the weather beacon whose lights flash the forecast from a television transmission tower in downtown. I first saw it more than 40 years ago as my grandparents drove us across the country.

"Weather Beacon red, warmer weather ahead.

Weather Beacon white, colder weather in sight.

Weather Beacon green, no change in weather foreseen.

Weather Beacon flashing night or day, precipitation is on the way."

In the 15 years or so that I've come to know Des Moines a little more, it is only fitting that the beacon still flashes here. It is a reminder of simpler times, before we could get the weather on a smartphone, when transmission towers were more symbolic of TV than a cable or dish, when downtowns boasted department stores and hotels with coffee shops and mezzanines.

The department stores are gone from downtown Des Moines, but there are decades-old hotels with coffee shops and mezzanines and up and down Locust and Walnut, grand old weathered building which architecture buffs marvel at. I work in one of those old buildings now.

From the moment you enter the marble-ladened lobby of the Des Moines Register, you feel it. The tradition. The character.

• The pictures of 15 journalists who've combined to win 17 Pulitzers. 
• The globe, 19-feet around, with marks countries like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and which sadly no longer rotates but still occasionally draws a curious visitor. 
• The old mail chute which runs from way up on the 13th or 14th floor all the way to the lobby, right by the elevators, just like the one at the old Hotel Fort Des Moines around the corner or down the street at the Savery or Kirkwood.
• The staircase, whose steps from the first floor to about the third are worn from decades of shoes. By the fourth floor, not so much. The steps are smooth. The elevators are busy.

I've never been fortunate to work in a building like this and I was waxing on about it to one of the building/maintenance staffers the other day.

"Character. It's got character. It's really neat," I said.

"Character? That's what you call it," was the harrumph-saturated reply.

"I'll tell you what I call it. I call it a place with a million-year-old HVAC system which is always too hot or too cold for someone. I better not say what else I'd call it."

We both laughed.

Nothing like a little perspective. For both of us.