Birthday cakes. An absurd variety of pies for Thanksgiving. Cookie time at the cottage on Bass Lake in Knox, Indiana.

I have no idea what the occasion for celebration was in the picture above, but it seems representative of my Grandma. She obviously loved her family and showed it through cooking and baking; she always seemed to be preparing for and then hosting special events--from holidays to birthdays to mundane Sunday night family gatherings.

Hand and foot. Scrabble. Pinochle. Bananagrams.

Grandma loved to play card games and word games with my Grandpa before he died and with her kids when they'd gather for parties. During summer vacations at Bass Lake, every night featured epic card games in the kitchen with my aunts and uncles while my cousins and I attempted to sleep (often unsuccessfully).

Oxygen. Dialysis.

Grandma moved in with my parents shortly after my Grandpa died. At that point, she needed an oxygen machine to help her breathe 24 hours a day and needed to go in for dialysis several times a week--both as a result of secondhand smoke. She was extremely tired and wasn't able to bake anymore, but she still played games with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

My mom called this morning a little before 9:00 to tell me that her mother, my Grandma Deenik, had just passed away. She was my last living grandparent.

One of my first "unofficial" jobs was working for the billboard company for which my mom was an office manager. I swept floors, organized gallons of paint by Pantone color, and painted over old plywood panels and billboard flex (the large vinyl sheets billboards are painted on) for reuse. Not particularly exciting stuff ...

The painters, though, seemed to be really cool things, especially to my 14-year-old eyes. It was endlessly interesting to watch the art for ads go from small designs on paper in the office to huge paintings on vinyl in the cavernous shop. The one or two guys who hand-painted directly on walls throughout the city were especially revered (and you can see why below). In fact, our shop was the company that painted the famous Bigsby & Kruthers wall along the Kennedy on the north side of Chicago. During one of the Bulls' championship runs, Dennis Rodman was featured prominently on the wall and the painters would change Rodman's hair color on the mural every time he changed his; it became such a traffic nuisance, they had to remove it.

I was intrigued, then, to see "Up There," a short documentary about the dying art of hand-painted billboards in a new digital age. Watching the apprenticeship process and the years of training necessary to paint wall murals gave me newfound respect for the guys I worked with so many years ago. Though painting ads probably isn't what many of these painters would like to be doing with their considerable skills, their dedication to the process is fascinating.

My dad's mom passed away this week in Arizona and I won't be able to make it out to the funeral, but my thoughts, of course, have been there with my family all week. Here are some memories of my grandma that I sent over to my dad.

Rob and I have moved around quite a bit in the almost-ten years we've been married. Most of our possessions have found their way to us through thrift stores, garage sales, hand-me-downs, curb sides and dumpsters, so when we box up our lives, there are very few objects I'm overly concerned about packing well. Among those very few is a teapot Grandma Marge made for me in her ceramics studio.

Maybe it came from spending her formative years around so many men--her father, brothers, husband, sons--or maybe it came from having parents with deep roots in the sometimes dour world of Dutch Calvinism, but Grandma wasn't overly sentimental. And yet, her affections for her long-distance grandchildren found ways of coming through. I still remember the excitement of greeting her and Grandpa in the terminal in the days when such a thing was still possible. She'd be wearing white sandals with hose, an Arizona tan and all pastels. During her visits, she'd play with our hair and give an occasional hard squeeze or pinch on the cheek with her characteristic inside out laugh.

As Grandma and Grandpa grew older, so did I, and soon I was the one showing up on their doorstep with my overnight bag, ready to pick citrus fruit and play Rummikub, ready to enjoy tater tot casserole and bran muffins. On one visit, I admired the glaze on a set of ceramic coasters she'd made--a foggy blue gray misting over a brown background. Then, not too long after I returned home, I was browsing a thrift store when a set of four Chinese teacups caught my eye. They were lovely, but wanting for a teapot. I don't remember exactly how the conversation with Grandma went, but within a couple of months, a package quietly arrived containing a set of blue-gray ceramic coasters and a teapot to match.

This past spring, I unpacked my teapot to find its place in what will hopefully be our home for a long time: a second floor apartment above an 1865 storefront in Three Rivers, Michigan. The last time I talked with Grandma on the phone, she said she didn't think she'd be able to make it up the stairs to see our new place when she came to visit next. I doubted that was true, and told her so. I guess neither of us knew how very true it would be.

Over and over again, we humans prove true that even while we mark the deaths of our loved ones, they continue to live on in memory, in objects, in ways of being that make their ways through generations in both nature and nurture. In that sense, Grandma's here in our home every day; neither a cross country flight nor a flight and a half of stairs can get in her way. She and Grandpa watch over me from one of their wedding photos as I write at my desk; the massive flower bouquets and the ocean of a train on her dress are almost as big as their smiles. And of course, among the less tangible traits she's passed down to me through my dad, there's always the teapot, waiting to offer a hot beverage as a symbol of hospitality to our guests as they come in from the cold of a Michigan winter. And maybe some day, a cup of tea will be one of the concrete ways I demonstrate my love to my own grandchildren, along with laugh and a squeeze and a pinch on the cheek.

This is the amount all U.S. Banks charged in overdraft fees in 2009, according to Harper's. $38,900,000,000. Having had a good deal of personal experience with overdraft fees, I would wager that most of that figure is just plain robbery of the poor by the rich. Many fees simply don't need to be assessed and only seem intended to add to bank profit.

For example, when a checking account is overdrawn, it would seem reasonable that the debit card associated with that account would be declined in an attempted transaction. This would be a false assumption. Instead, banks charge you at least $30 per transaction for their overdraft "service" to cover the transaction cost. While this kind of service makes a good deal of sense to cover checks, it seems plainly ridiculous to extend for debit card use.

We recently experienced this very thing firsthand. A large automatic transaction posted to our account sooner than expected while we were on a trip. As I am not in the habit of checking our bank account daily, I didn't realize this payment had been deducted. Over the course of one day, we purchased several small things (coffee, parking, lunch, etc.) while our account was overdrawn. When we returned, I discovered that we had been assessed a whopping $420 in fees, almost all of which were debit card transactions that could have easily been declined at the point of sale--which would have also informed me that our account was overdrawn.

Now, I've heard the argument about how these fees are intended to promote responsibility. Sure, I get that. But in the end, this isn't a question of responsibility; it's a question of access to resources. Wealthy folks generally don't incur these fees because they have enough resources to keep them from overdrawing. This doesn't mean they're more responsible; it simply means they have more money.

Unfortunately, most people who are assessed these fees are living paycheck to paycheck, trying to work out of low income or high debt situations. In the end, then, overdraft fees are only charged to the people who can least afford them. These folks aren't necessarily irresponsible, they just don't have enough resources; if they had enough money, they wouldn't be overdrawing their accounts. And it would help if banks were more honest about assessing fees.

Thankfully, Kirstin and I are in a position to recover from our recent "gift" to our bank (though not happily). For many in more precarious situations, though, this kind of thing serves only to keep them on the edge financially or, worse, sink them entirely. And that just seems like unjust policy to me. At the very least, banks should have smarter and less predatory policies for debit card transactions.

Okay. End of rant.

Cornel West's advice to President Obama: "Don't just be the friendly face of the American empire."

I wish the Promised Land didn't still look so far away ...

Yesterday, Kirstin and I celebrated being together for half of our lives. We've now been dating or married for 15 years ... and we just seem to like each other a lot more as we go along! :)

On October 14, 1994, my brother and I had a big party at our house while our parents were away for their wedding anniversary. No, there wasn't any drinking at the party; but the music was (apparently) so loud that people from across the Boerman Expressway in South Holland (my parents house backed up to I-94) complained about the noise, leading the police to shut things down within a few hours. Some folks ended up staying, though--hanging out, walking around the neighborhood and talking late into the night. Sometime during the course of the evening, Kirstin and I realized we liked each other. I mean ... like liked. And the rest, as they say they say, is history.

See mom and dad: that party wasn't nearly as bad as you thought!

It's a bit surprising to see Audi promoting diesel through connecting it to political history (even taking shots at American automakers along the way). It's actually refreshing to see such a frank assessment (from a car company, anyway) of how our transportation choices have far-reaching and often unintentional effects.

Now if only Volkswagen and Audi would start bringing more diesel options to the North American market!

On July 15, 2004, I blogged about having reached 100,000 on our beloved Volkswagen Jetta TDI (read: Diesel). Well, today we reached the next milestone in mileage achievement:

Two things to note:

1. Yes, we did take this photo while driving 60 miles per hour.


2. The check engine light is on, but it's for something different than the check engine issue indicated in the 100,000 mile photo.

The 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 is this month and it bears remembering. Led primarily by students and intellectuals, the protests centered around hope for democratic and economic reforms.

After weeks of protests and government crackdowns around the country, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to emphatically quash the protests and reassert government authority. On June 5, as the tanks were rolling into position, one anonymous man found himself face to face with authoritarianism and, for a brief moment, stood his ground. Several photographers captured the remarkable moment, which became an icon of popular resistance against totalitarian power.

Though it has never been confirmed, it is widely assumed that the Tank Man of Tiananmen was eventually executed. His legacy, though, has spread around the world, inspiring thousands to stand up in the face of oppressive regimes from positions of relative powerlessness--a remarkably Christ-like gesture.

Unfortunately, government censorship in China has prohibited public conversation about the Tiananmen events (and continues to do so). Indeed, most Chinese college students have never even seen the image above and don't know the significance of the next few days.