Friday Nights at the Heritage House

One of the best places to dine in Cresco is a place I have trouble calling a restaurant, really.  It’s called the Heritage House, and it really exemplifies that Midwestern spirit of making your own way.

The Heritage House used to be a church. I don’t know what denomination. I really want to say Protestant, just because all the Catholics in town gather at the Nortre Dame chuch/school/social center/probably bingo hall too.

Regardless, the church was closed down and abandoned. Then a woman bought it with the intention of making it into a restaurant (and still that word doesn’t seem right). Thus, the Heritage House was born.

So, why doesn’t the Heritage House feel like a restaurant? It does serve food, after all. And you have to pay for said food. That’s pretty much the defining characteristic of a restaurant. But the Heritage House also does things I’ve seen no restaurant do.

For instance, the Heritage House has no wait staff. None. What they have in place of a waitstaff is the local troop of Boy Scouts, who volunteer when the Heritage House opens for Friday dinner. The kids bring up food, clean plates and tables, man the drink station (one soda dispenser) and when not faced with an immediate task they mill around, talking amongst themselves and acting like they’re teenagers who came to volunteer because their organization signed up for it. Lest anyone think I’m  being mean to them, I’d like to point out that teenagers who actively try to help and seek out new tasks when their organization has volunteered is almost a statistical impossibility. The teenagers that are rushing around and looking for new tasks to do either suggested the volunteer work, or their parents are chaperones.  Also, in fairness, the Boy Scouts do a good job of making sure things are running smoothly.

Another thing that makes me refuse to believe I’m in a restaurant is the amateur feel. Not amateur as in “they don’t know what they’re doing,” amateur as in “unpolished.” The Heritage House is here to serve you food. That’s it. The chairs and the tables are of the fold-up variety, as though the place is just a restaurant some of the time—the rest of the time it will be hosting some grand event. I’ve gone there a few times, and each time I buy a meal with a check (no credit cards accepted) at a setup that reminds me of the ticket tables for high school basketball games. I mentioned low dining previously, and this is low dining at its finest. One of the great aspects of this is that you have to sit with other people. There are no tables for one or two. You will be joining a group, and you can only not talk with someone if you are really willing to work at it—and really, what fun is that? I’ve eaten with a couple Catholic priests (there for the fish), an old couple who knew practically everyone, and one of the few people I know in this town who was eating with his family. 

The final thing that makes me refuse to believe I’m eating in a restaurant is that I am eating in a church. There is no polite way to say this—once a building has been a church, it leaves that imprint on every future occupant. I’ve been to an advertising agency in Waterloo, IA that is a converted church, and it still has that reverent feel. Even when an office has two old first class airplane seats in it the place feels like a church. Perhaps the only place I’ve been that hasn’t felt like a church after being repurposed is the Temple Club in Lansing, Michigan. Even there, I saw the emptiness of the sanctuary converted into a dance floor and thought, “Someone’s going to hell.” There were cute girls dancing, though, so I eventually reached the compromise that I might indeed be condemned to Hell, but I would at least enjoy the trip.

I get that same sense in the Heritage House. Not that I’m going to Hell, but that eating and paying for it is not something you should be doing in a church. As I’m eating and staring at the stained glass windows along the walls I keep thinking that I’m butting into a weekly potluck, and since I didn’t bring a dish I have to pay for a plate.  No matter how often I eat there I keep thinking I should bring a casserole.

The only problem with the Heritage House is that I don’t know how much longer it will be open. I’ve heard the woman who opened it is extremely sick. If she doesn’t make it the future of the Heritage House is in doubt, which is really too bad. It would be nice to see something she founded go on, especially something that does such a great job of bringing people together.

Floating to Nowhere on a Mississippi Riverboat

“Tell you what,” said my co-worker “Spader”, “Let’s go the Lady Luck riverboat casino tonight! We’ll chow down at the all-you-can eat buffet and spend an hour playing at the casinos. What do you say?”

“No thanks,” was my first impulse. This was my first free weekend in two weeks, and I had two more full weeks ahead. I had been running on fumes for the past hour, and prior to Spader showing up, my Friday night plans had consisted of swimming, going home and watching TV. It was going to be a glorious night of dullness. Then I thought of my three brothers, each of whom would jump at the chance to do this, and I remembered that I had seen the riverboat casino a couple times when I had driven from Cresco to Madison. It was interesting. It was intriguing. Most of all, it was in northeast Iowa. What the heck.

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it after I get done swimming.” Spader agreed, and the night was sealed.

I have never been much of a gambler. I love to read about the gamblers of the Old West, and I’ve seen the movie Maverick a dozen times or so. In various role-playing games I’ve played gamblers who make their living by their wits, which stacks up to gambling in the real world in much the same way children fighting each other with broomsticks prepares them for Olympic fencing matches. Granted, I had been in a casino or two when our family visited Las Vegas when I was, say, 16, and I had been to a few gambling parties where I had sat at the blackjack table, promptly lost a quarter of my stash, then spent the rest of the night sitting at three-quarters of my original holdings, trying to win it back, and feeling that this qualified me as a master gambler while my friends were tripling their winnings at the same table. Still, I picked out a twenty dollar bill from the local ATM. It would be an interesting northeast Iowa experience, after all. And twenty dollars would at least let me gamble a little and report on the experience.

The Lady Luck Casino comes in two parts. The entrance is the buffet, while a flight of stairs takes you to a walkway that inexplicably bends as you cross the highway underneath to the riverboat, which holds the casino. Outside the buffet building, we saw a red pickup truck with an extended cab sitting underneath the casino sign. “Win this Truck!” the sign in front of it said. I should point out this wasn’t an offer. It was a command. An order from on high. Thou shalt enter the casino, thou shalt engorge thyself at the buffet, thou shalt win this truck. Of course, this is what casinos are all about, and as Spader and I walked inside the casino’s building I saw more offer-commands. Win the weekly laptop giveaway! Win at bar trivia until 10 pm! Everywhere you looked there was an opportunity to win, dampened only by the fact that inside the casino smelled like the lobby of a cheap motel. You can’t take offers to win seriously when you’re surrounded by the scents of cheap cigarettes, air conditioning and flop sweat.

The buffet was nice, if unexceptional. The focus was placed on quantity and variety. Quality was still present, but running a distant second. Not that the food was bad, mind you—it just all had the same bland cafeteria taste to it. I ate a couple broasted chicken drumsticks, for instance, then had a smallish flame-grilled sirloin steak which I realized was not a broasted chicken drumstick primarily because of its floppiness when I picked it up with my fingers. Not to denigrate the cooks, who were shoveling food into the stainless steel trays at a rate just below how quickly the buffet customers were shoveling the food onto their plates. The cook in charge of filling the steak and potatoes section, for instance, rushed out and filled up the baked potato tray with baked potatoes he held in a stainless steel bowl. Then he rushed back through the double doors and came out almost immediately with some crab legs. He rushed back in as I helped myself to some crab legs and went on.

Then there was the casino itself. I cashed in my $20 for chips, and astonished both myself and Spader by proceeding to lose $15 at craps. Personally, I thought the game was quite interesting, from the way the rules worked to the casino chatter to the guy with the beer gut straining at his black t-shirt who told me loudly to “get your hand outta the area!” Fortunately, a helpful casino worker explained to me that one of the superstitions of craps players was that no hands should be in the dice-rolling area. Apparently it messes with the dice-rolling mojo or something. While I’m not a stranger to dice-rolling superstitions, this one seemed particularly moronic. I could see it well enough from the other players’ point of view—if a roller bounces his dice off your hand and it comes up seven, you’re going to be blamed for the turnout of the dice. From the point of view of the roller, though, it doesn’t make sense. Dice are random, which is why you’re gambling when you use them. Still, I kept my hands out of the dice-rolling box,  and let the man in the black t-shirt lose until he left the table, while Spader proceeded to win forty-six dollars, which proves one of us knew something about gambling.

During this time, I noticed that the only people in the casino who seemed marginally happy or nice were the casino workers. They talked up the games, encouraged the gamblers when they bet, congratulated them when they won and consoled them when they lost. The gamblers, on the other hand, were focused solely on winning and losing, and the pain and pleasure thereof. You might find the same self-concern in a courtroom or a holding cell. Another interesting thing—these weren’t the sort of people who looked like they had won fortunes through gambling. No, these were people who were hoping for that one big win in their lives, the one that at least gives them an extra paycheck’s worth of money in the year, or the one that lets them live the life of luxury they’ve always wanted.

Neither Spader or I was going to press our luck any more that night, so we stopped by a Mississippi Stud poker game against the house. This was by far the most interesting part of the night. Two senior citizens and a woman who seemed to be an honorary senior citizen were busy looking at their cards and laying bets. Here, unlike almost every other table at the casino, the people playing were not only talkative but helpful. They were clearly enjoying themselves, and a gentleman with a ponytail and bear wearing a tan Hawaii shirt explained that the rules. Players got two cards, the dealer laid down three face down. The players looked at their cards and made their bets or cashed in, then the dealer flipped over the first card. Then the players raised their bet or cashed in. The dealer flipped over the other cards and cash was distributed or taken away. The rewards were helpfully printed on the table.

While the people at the table were enjoying themselves, I didn’t see any money being won over the long term. For me, this would be a clear incentive to stop playing, but these three were enjoying themselves. I don’t know why. Perhaps this was their entertainment, the same way other people eat at expensive restaurants or go to rock concerts. Perhaps they just couldn’t get enough of the game. Or perhaps they took an extreme long-term view, even longer than the night, and they actually won over time. Nevertheless, what absolutely riveted me was the stacks of five dollar chips each player had, and how they kept shrinking as the night went on.

It’s not hard to see the allure of gambling—one big win is all it takes to set you on the path to Easy Street. You can make your fortune if your timing is good and your luck is right. It’s also not hard to see why gamblers in fiction are so revered. It takes a special breed of person to, say, make a living winning poker games. Think James Bond, and how he rarely loses in Monte Carlo or Las Vegas. For that matter, in Casino Royale his whole mission is to break the bank of a weapons dealer’s casino so his plans fall through!

What I’ve come to see in real life, though, is that most of the big wins are supported by a slew of little wins. Mark Zuckerburg, for instance, didn’t become a billionaire because he was lucky. He became a billionaire because he had a good idea that he capitalized and exploited for years until it became ubiquitous. And he’s still working on that idea! Bill Gates didn’t get rich because he created Windows. He got rich by putting together a business and constantly working on said business. Yes, timing was probably involved, and if luck wasn’t involved, then they at least had the wherewithal to avoid the various pitfalls and setbacks that plague any businessperson. But they won slowly, gradually, until a newspaper reports that Zuckerburg and Gates and multi-billionaires and everyone thinks, “Hey, they just suddenly became billionaires! If only I could do that too!”

I thought of winning a little at a time at a steady pace on the drive back. The night had fallen earlier, and Spader and I both discussed the casino. Spader mentioned that there were two other casinos about an hour away from Cresco, and said we’d have to see them sometime. Personally, I wondered how many casinos northeast Iowa could support.

Kendo Camp

When you strip away everything from the martial art kendo, what you’re left with is how to swing a stick in a very precise way. If you have never practiced kendo, you could be forgiven for considering that this is both easy and somewhat silly.

On the other hand, if you were to think that you would also be ignoring centuries of tradition that have gone into making this martial art a beacon of discipline and effort. You might also risk getting killed by a practitioner of kendo, more for thinking it’s easy than because it’s silly. I used to practice kendo for a few years before moving out of range of any kendo dojos, and just started up perhaps five or six months ago. Maybe. Still, I remembered loving the kendo practices despite how strenuous they were and despite the fact that when I still lived in Michigan my Sunday routine was very simple—wake up, practice kendo, go back to apartment, sleep for the rest of the day.

Kendo on Sundays now is pretty similar, albeit now when I finish with the practice I have an hour’s drive back to my apartment. I’m not sure if this is an advantage over practicing kendo in Michigan or not. Still, I wanted to dive in to practicing kendo with both feet, which is why I signed up for kendo camp.

Kendo camp is held at a college, this time at the University of Wisconsin. You practice with other kendo practitioners (kendoka) from all over the Midwest, under the tutelage of two 8^th-dan senseis. These two senseis are so high-ranking that in Japan I wouldn’t be able to practice with them. I might be able to train with their students, but not a chance at seeing them. So this camp was something of an opportunity.

If I could sum up the camp in one word, it would be intense. I can safely say I have never practiced so hard for so long over so many days. I pushed myself to my physical limits, and I have to say I also had to fight against some mental barriers too. Still, at the end of it all, after my body was so sore on Sunday that I fell asleep shortly after I got home, I loved it.

One of the things I learned is that kendoka practice kendo to become better human beings. Granted, I learned a ton about kendo technique as well, but what really sunk into my psyche was the spirit of practicing martial arts, philosophies such as always seeking to concentrate and improve your performance, or the simple act of the mental and physical fortitude required to get through the final three hour practice on Sunday. It has really stayed with me, and I think more than anything that this is why I practice kendo—there is a lot to consider that, when applied to almost any area outside kendo, will help you to live a better life.

Another thing I learned is that it’s good to make friendships in kendo. It’s not just that you have a common hobby, but at kendo camp pretty much everyone can relate to the effort you’re putting in. I had some great conversations with people there, especially my roommate Jim, who had some great things to say about kendo philosophy. I should also give a shout-out to Yuki, Jim’s friend, who was fun to talk with and who also may be tougher than anyone else in the “shodan and under” category.  Then there was Majic, George, Phil, and several other people who I would be more than happy to see again.

Finally, I learned that kendo senseis are superhuman. They require less sleep than anyone else I know, they train as hard as their students do, and I suspect they can drink your standard fratboy under the table.  Just a hint for any would-be muggers out there—if you want to rob someone and you realize you have picked a sensei as your target, start running. Who knows, they might even give you a head start.

My Night With President Obama (Kind Of)

I got the news as I was driving into work to—Barack Obama would be visiting Decorah this evening at 5:15 pm! That was some very exciting news. It would be nice to see the President of the United States in person, although since I’d been away most of the weekend and hadn’t heard much about what was going on in Decorah, I’d be a bit behind the proverbial 8-ball as far as trying to see him.

As it turned out, I didn’t have to worry. They gave out a limited number of tickets to the town hall meeting President Obama held, and all of the recipients were people who lived in the town of Decorah. I have no idea how they were distributed, I have no idea when they were distributed, and I have no idea that you even needed tickets to show up at a town hall meeting. I kept thinking that perhaps the tickets should have been put in items at the Co-op organic grocery store to make things interesting. It wouldn’t be the most efficient way to distribute tickets, but I can guarantee the co-op would never have such a good day of sales.

I arrived in Decorah later than 5:15. More like 6:00, without being able to exercise or just relax and unwind at the end of a long day. Which is another way of saying I was tired, and ready to have dinner somewhere. Since I had heard that the White House had rented every room of the venerable Hotel Winneshiek on the main downtown street, I thought it might be best if I had dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, a neat high-end place called Albert’s. Albert’s is known for its ribs, and the restaurant on the whole is “award-winning,” according to the site, although they never get around to revealing exactly what award it has won. At any rate, if you are in Decorah and go to Albert’s, do try the ribs. They’re very good according to friends, and eventually I will get around to trying them myself and let you know what I think. However, when I sat down for dinner that night I was not in the mood for a heavy dinner. Soup, a salad and a sandwich served nicely, and I am happy to say that Albert’s serves wonderful French onion soup, an excellent-looking mixed greens salad, and a rib meat sandwich that is topped with cole slaw but still tastes wonderful. It’s nice to go to an expensive restaurant and feel as though you have actually gotten your money’s worth from it. Even better, it’s actually open seven days a week! This may not seem like a big deal for someone living in the Twin Cities or Chicago or New York, but trust me when I saw that in Decorah, a restaurant open at any time on Sunday is wonderful.

After dinner at Albert’s, I hung around in the lobby until a secret service agent politely told me that I wouldn’t be able to snap a picture of Obama. He was actually polite about it, I should point out and not just because I don’t want to wake up one morning to discover Navy SEAL Team Six pointing several submachine guns at me and suggesting that I write more encouraging things about the Secret Service. No, he was actually polite. Definitely firm, though.

One of the great parts about a high-ranking government official coming to visit is getting to talk with the supporting cast, as it were. These Secret Service people are very thorough in their attempts to secure the area for the President. They were in Decorah for a week and a half examining the area for security. Still, you can tell from their faces, it’s not enough. These people are paid to protect the President, to counter every single potential threat imaginable, from the crazy running up with the pocketknife to the terrorist organization with a large bank account and a high-powered rifle. When you think of it, it’s them versus an entire town, where the next threat might come from anywhere. And if it comes to it, they need to be able to lay down their lives for the President. I know most CEOs presume their lives are more valuable than their employees, but still, if a CEO ever wanted to get his VP of Sales to take a bullet for him there would be some yachts changing hands. For Secret Service agents this is a job requirement.

So I got to the street, where a sizeable crowd was gathering. I had no idea where Obama would be showing up, and several people confirmed that no one in the crowd had any idea either. We were waiting for him to maybe make an appearance, the same way other people would wait for Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber, only this crowd was much less cool.

As I milled around I heard a drum, a bass drum beating regularly from somewhere. No one else paid any attention to it, and the high school marching band was probably still practicing for the football season. Not to mention it didn’t seem Obama was going to come out any time soon. So I walked in the direction of the drumming.

I found the drummer one block away, sitting on a bench, playing a drum that looked for all the world to be homemade, down to the wooden drumstick with a leather band wrapped around the end. The drummer was an old man, dressed in extremely well-used clothes. To be honest, he looked homeless. But what kind of homeless person carries a bass drum like that? The man was a mystery, and when he saw me taking his picture he looked up at me.

“Wanna play?” he said.

It’s not often a potentially homeless man asks if you want to play his homemade bass drum. I suppose I could have turned him down, but something made me walk over and take the offered drumstick as he beat it with me for a couple of times. As it turned out, he was beating out a simple heartbeat, what he called the rhythm of Mother Earth.

The man, whose name was Michael, took out a cigarette and had a smoke break while I kept the heartbeat of Mother Earth going. We talked about a few things, and while I’m reasonably sure that Michael has some kind of mental disorder, he was also pretty nice. He and I discussed how Obama seemed to be a priest-king, that a lot of mayors and governors performed functions you would otherwise thing spiritual leaders would do, and that priest-kings had been around for awhile, and that kind of thing just didn’t go away overnight. I asked Michael what he would like to ask President Obama if he had the chance, and Michael thought for a minute then replied he’d like to know if Obama visited him in his dreams the night before, because the Obama he had dreamed about seemed different than the other times. Michael said he’d start by asking if Obama believed in dream travel, and if Obama said “no” then he probably hadn’t received a dream visit by the President. Personally, I thought that was a pretty good strategy.

After a few minutes, Michael had finished with his cigarette and I wanted to get back to the crowd, which was again growing. I let him tap out a couple heartbeats on the drum with me, and then walked back to the hotel.

As it turned out, after a lot of hoopla, the President would not be making an appearance, to the great disappointment of the crowd. I’m not entirely sure what was going on there, but my guess is that the Secret Service people thought there was too much of a security risk. I base this on the fact that on the roof of the hotel there was originally two Secret Service agents, scanning the area with high-powered binoculars. Later on, there were four of them, all watching, all pointing, all talking to one another.

The night wasn’t quite over, however, since the local Tea Party came to give their side of the story. Among their signs were one criticizing Obama (or, “the government”) for charging too much in taxes. Another claimed Obama wasn’t spending the tax money he had well. As I tried to figure out how they could tell their tax dollars were being misspent while at the same time wanting to lower their taxes, the leader began to speak. He started by telling everyone that he wasn’t some slick Washington politician, that he was a concerned citizen, and that he was going to tell everyone what the Tea Party was all about. If you’ve ever seen one of those campus pastors who don’t know the difference between projecting your voice and screaming, then you have a pretty fair idea of what this gentleman was like. His voice swelled in volume as he documented the multiple, multiple wrongs the government had inflicted on the citizens, including the two wars in which we are currently. Curiously, he also had a button on his baseball cap that said “King for Congress.” Steve King, by the way, voted for the war for Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. I wanted to bring that up, but the members of the Tea Party were being laughed at and heckled, mostly by college-age people who seemed to have a hard time believing that the leader actually believed anything he said Perhaps mentioning he was supporting the wrong candidate would be too much for his ego to take.

Still, I did try to help. When the Tea Party leader asked why the liberal media hated the Tea Party, I jumped right in. “It’s because they hate ball caps!” I shouted. Since almost all of the Tea Party members were wearing ball caps, you’d have thought this would be a good answer. Apparently, it was not.

I left with the Tea Party leader’s voice still reverberating between the buildings, and I thought he should really take credit for Obama not coming out. I don’t know how long they were out there, but they probably left like everyone else once the crowd dispersed.

For my part, I was disappointed but not upset. After all, it hadn’t been a given that Obama would do a meet and greet, and strictly speaking I wasn’t even part of the town. It had been a lot of fun to see all the people gathering around, at least half of the town, and even the Tea Party had been interesting in a pro-wrestling bad guy sort of way. The heartbeat of the world seemed to follow me home.

Losing a friend or two

You know how it is when something happens, and a lot of times you hear the immortal cliched phrase, "I didn't know whether to write about this or not..." and you think, "Great, this is about someone writing about their inner conflict. Just get to the point already!" It's a valid criticism--you don't want to read about a writer's inner agony, you want them to tell a good story. Writing about inner agony is a great way for a writer to vent, but on the whole it's not particularly compelling. Still, even knowing all this, I'm going to say I didn't know whether to write about this or not. It's not exactly something neat about northeast Iowa. If anything, it's the polar opposite--something depressing not in northeast Iowa. It's also more about me mourning than anything else. Still, the nature of writing is to be flexible and know when to break some rules, and this feels like a rule that needs breaking.

I knew Anne because I knew Lee, and I knew Lee because I wanted to be in on his superhero role-playing game. Lee's a good forty some-odd years older than I am, and can tell you stories about his life that will have you wondering what exactly you've been doing with yours. He was a navigator on spy planes during the Cold War, he's written several articles, studied all different types of weaponry, has a degree from Harvard, been a member of the Coast Guard, given several lectures about airplanes and flying, and that's just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head. Oh, and he's also been running a superhero role-playing game, Victims of the X-Virus, for a good thirty years now. That was how I met him. Lee's memory is that I just showed up after his demo game at the University of Michigan's U-Con had finished and just joined. There's some backstory there, but that's mostly what happened. I rolled up a character, Psychotron, and played my heart out with him and the constantly-shifting group for years and years. Eventually, I realized the focus of the game was not really superheroes as much as explorers of the unknown, and that performing superheroics at all was a good way to make things go haywire, but by then I was having way too much fun to quit.

Anne was married to Lee. Her role in the game was to bring up some supper for Lee. Lee would scold her for being fifteen seconds late, and Anne would witheringly reply that she had a pot of hot tea and it was right over Lee's crotch. Sometimes Anne would vary the responses, but that was the routine. In the mad combination of a warehouse and library that was the Carroll's household, Anne was definitely the support. You could tell--she was quiet, but always there if you needed something, and just there to get a book or a miniature for Lee right when he needed it.

Another thing about Anne--she was a great listener. That's a skill that's like being a good catcher on a baseball team. If someone is a good listener, you probably won't realize it because you're busy talking to them. If someone isn't a good listener, though, you'll notice right away. Anne listened. Lee offered advice. Sometimes I wonder if their minds were connected telepathically.

I remember one Christmas I dragged my family to the Carroll's house for their day after Christmas party. My mom was really into identifying antiques at the time, and I remember she and Anne talked a lot about some pieces Anne had. As it turned out, Anne really knew her stuff.

What I remember most, though, is how welcoming Anne was. In early 2010 I showed up on their doorstep on Sunday afternoon. I was passing through Ann Arbor and I wanted to visit, because I hadn't seen them in years. I'd heard Lee had been through a few medical problems, and I just wanted to touch base. I went up to the door, knocked on it, and there was Anne, surprised to see me standing out in the snow but still welcoming me in, getting Lee, and then we talked for hours. Literally hours. I had intended to get back to northeast Iowa by 10 or 11 pm, and instead I rolled in at about 3 am. It was so worth it.

The end came swiftly for Anne, and I think I'd prefer not to touch on many details. Suffice it to say that if it had happened in a movie, no one in the audience would buy it. They'd think the writer had destroyed all suspension of disbelief. That's what really gets me about this whole thing. I'll be a bit selfish here and say I wanted to say goodbye. It really would have been nice. 

This comes a couple months after another friend, Tara, died of cancer. Tara was younger than I am, and she was also one of the nicest people you could hope to meet. I don't know how she was so sunny and cheerful all the time. You may think I'm exaggerating, but every single time I saw her she was smiling, if not out and out beaming. Even when the cancer had confined her to a wheelchair, she wrote on Facebook how happy she was to be alive. I know she meant it, too. I heard on a Friday that she was being moved into a hospice for the remainder of her days, and then on Monday I'd heard she had died.

I have to be honest, I feel a bit angry at God for them dying. I know the rain falls on the just and the unjust, and I accept that we're all going to die eventually, but the two of them? That was pretty mean, God. There are terrorists, criminals, corrupt politicians and crooked businessmen out there who I'm sure would have been missed much much less than these two.

Mostly, though, I'm sad. I really want, one last time, to visit the Carroll's house, to go up to the door, knock, have Anne open it, and talk with the two of them for hours again.