My apologies; for the second time so far, I've not found any images to go with a particular journal entry...
After the sheer amount of happening that happened on Day 15, I actually managed to fall asleep at a reasonable hour. I woke up on a sunny Wisconsin Friday morning and headed upstairs to meet Dan's family, at breakfast.
There's always a little bit of hesitancy involved in meeting a person's parents; particularly if the person happens to be of a vaguely furry persuasion, and particularly if you're not sure what their parent's think of that, or even if they know about it. Thinking back, I'm not sure what my reason for being in Wisconsin rather than Tasmania that morning is supposed to have been, but any misgivings I'd accumulated were groundless. Not only didn't Dan's parents subject me to any kind of scrutiny other than friendly curiosity, but they were simply two of the sweetest, most generous-spirited people you could hope to meet (I'm not entirely sure Dan's father would want to know I called him 'sweet', so if you want, you can substitute a more suitable adjective if you show this to him.)
As it happened, Dan's mum had a bit of a thing for Australia, or Tasmania - I forget which - because she had a pen-friend here, so my geographical origins alone got me off to a good start. Still, Dan told me afterwards that she seemed genuinely fond of me. For some reason this isn't the first time I've had this effect on people's parents. It seems to be entirely the opposite effect to that which I have on bureaucrats, heads of departments, and, for some reason, about half the world's convenience store/milk-bar attendants (an example from Mackay, Northern Queensland, 1984: "Thank you, now go away.")
(BTW if this entry wanders somewhat, I've just had two fillings and an extraction, and subsequently, 45 mg of codeine. For instance, this is a paragraph I originally wrote later in this entry, which concerned itself with Dan's mother telling me about the local cats who came visiting on the public land outside the back window, but it didn't seem to fit in down there. It doesn't fit here either, but nonetheless, here it is.)
I had always meant to send Dan's mum some postcards from Tasmania. I went and bought one of those fold-out thingies, and then just sat it aside. I didn't send it, and suddenly it was too late: some six months after my visit, she passed away. I will always regret that I never got to see her again; and sad too, that this is something of a motif of my visit to Wisconsin: special people I won't meet again. With respect, I'd like to dedicate this journal to those people, and I know Dan will realise I mean anything but disrespect when I mention his mother along with a wolf, in that context.
Dan's father (Ralph? God help me, I can never remember names) was doing the breakfast honours. I don't know what it was he was serving up; all I can remember is that they were cold, had a lot of gravy on them, and that I couldn't get enough of them I am (I suspect they were something my diet would now prohibit.)
Dan got on the blower to JES and left a message, trying to organise a repeat visit on the Saturday, then we hit the road for what was, by comparison with the previous day, a leisurely afternoon's touring around the Fox Valley and environs.
First of all we stopped off at a second-hand record store in Oshkosh. CD�s are about half the price in America as in Tasmania, and it's a minor miracle that I managed to contain myself to only buying a couple of albums. If I were 16 again, I'd probably have come back with a container-load.
The first thing that struck me about this place were all the singles and EP�s and albums by Australian indy bands. These are bands which nobody has heard of outside of their _hometowns_ back home. What were they doing out here in Wisconsin?
I bought a CD by a band whom I have long defended against an overwhelmingly hostile reaction from practically every musically literate person I know. 'The Best of Amon Duul II.' Early 70's German acid rock. This is the sort of thing I was still ingesting when all my more tasteful friends were listening to Simple Minds, and Bauhaus.
I have to admit that I don't have much sense of where we went after this. I just remember we kept driving past Fox River's, and Wolf River's, and Fox Valley such-and-such's, and that eventually we ended up in a big shopping mall.
Big shopping malls are fairly common in Australia, too, though less so in Tasmania. What's impressive about the American versions though, is that it only seems necessary for a town to have a population of about 400, in order to sustain a shopping mall the size of Dallas-Fort Worth Airport. This is typical of the America-Tasmania comparison. Here, in a city of 150,000, you can't get hot food three minutes after the lunch-hour. In America you can be in a minuscule town in the middle of nowhere, and still get a decent feed at 4 am. I suppose then, that the fact one frequently runs into malls bigger than the towns outside of them shouldn't come as that much of a surprise. At least this particular one wasn't so big that you need to take signal flares and Sherpas, like some of the ones in California.
Somewhere along the line I bought my only physical souvenir of Wisconsin: a fairly unimaginative shirt with 'Outdoors' written on the pocket, and a wolf on the back. What I didn't buy was the gorgeous big Wolf plushie in one of the nature stores Dan took me to. I was thinking I should watch my money, and maybe I'd see one later, when I'd know if I could afford it. I never did.
I got a stack of photos developed, and we headed home, and went subterranean again. We watched a video of 'Dragonheart', against the backdrop of the ranks of animal T-shirts hanging from the ceiling of Dan's expansive underground quarters. For the record, I like Eddie Murphy's dragon better than Sean Connery's.
Before I turn the lights out on this rather short journal entry, I must mention it was kind of nice to see an Amiga A500 hooked up to the internet. This was my first computer. I graduated from there to an A1200 - an elegant machine which thoroughly shames this thuggish Pentium. I understand Dan too has finally succumbed and now runs a high-powered PC, but in my memories of Wisconsin, a 1985-designed Amiga still multitasks away at 7 Mhz...
