in memoriam Archives – James D. Hogan

An Over Forty Victim of Fate

On September 2, 2023

IN MEMORIAM

Cheeseburgers and ice cold beer and departure signs in airports and grapefruit have an unusual allure in this stage of life.

Roughly anyone alive in the last fifty years who listened to the radio has almost certainly heard the chirpy steel drums and layered recorder intro to Jimmy Buffett’s ubiquitous “Margaritaville.” The trop-rock favorite saturates every summer, and together with the other Core 8 songs he was known for playing at every live show, the song anchored any beach trip soundtrack.

One of my strongest memories of “Margaritaville,” though, came when I was in college. I honestly didn’t care too much for Jimmy Buffett at the time–all for reasons that aren’t really worth defending anymore, but largely because in the early 2000s it felt like he was at the bottom of the value trough between his original luster and his late-career popularity*.

I was sitting in the back of Chris Hall’s Chevy Tahoe with some friends, four of us carpooling together to a high school about half an hour from our college. We were student teaching, the capstone to our education degrees that is effectively an entire semester of unpaid labor, and gas had gotten expensive, so we took turns driving every week to save money.

There is still a light that shines on me

By James D. Hogan

On March 17, 2020

In diary

I miss her fried chicken.
I miss her lasagna.
I miss her dessert inventions.

The fried chicken was brined overnight, battered by hand, and crisped in an ancient cast iron skillet greased with lard. I usually only got such a treat once a year as my birthday supper request. Mary spent the bulk of an afternoon working on it, flour spread about the kitchen, grease splatters near the stove. The results were ethereal: crispy, tasty outside, juicy, tender inside. Heaven.

The lasagna featured a sauce often made at least a day (or a few weeks) before, which gave it time to blossom into bountiful flavor. She made it ten pounds at a time, it seemed. It didn’t come out of the oven so much as it emerged, bubbling with ricotta and mozzarella goodness. When Kelly and I had kids, and when we decided to leave out grains and pasta from our kids’ diets, Mary reinvented the lasagna to include mandolin-thin sliced zucchini, which to our astonishment improved the recipe. She made Dad slice the zucchini.

Ronnie

By James D. Hogan

On October 22, 2019

In writing

On the legend of a man who had more stories than any single person could remember.

Ron Kraybill was there when the Yankees won the 1977 World Series in the sixth game against the Los Angeles Dodgers, and after they won, he joined a mob of people who jumped over the outfield wall in celebration. When he made it to the field, Ronnie tore up a roll of sod from the outfield, and brought it back to New Jersey, where he planted it in my grandparents’ back yard.

There was the time at a different baseball game that a player was injured, and Ronnie’s instinctive response was to jump the wall (again) and help the man himself. He realized when he saw security chasing him that it was a bad decision. He was arrested.

Ronnie occasionally brushed up against the law, sometimes quite literally. There was the time that he was so distracted at a police check-point, what with trying to quickly summon his driver’s license and registration, that he inadvertently nudged his car against the officer.

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