Category: reflections

Music Can Heal

Here’s another post on music. This one got started while watching Eric Clapton Crossroads Guitar Festival 2019 last night on the Iowa Public Broadcasting Service channel. It’s great pizza and beer music. It was the fifth event of its kind since it got started in 2004. Part of the profits go to support the substance abuse treatment center in Antigua, founded by Clapton. Although inpatient treatment programs are currently suspended because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a virtual intensive outpatient treatment program is available.

I don’t mean to belittle Crossroads with the pizza and beer remark. I’m leading up to something and there is nothing wrong with enjoying music of any kind along with pizza and beer. Clapton and Peter Frampton did a superb job doing an old Beatles’ tune, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Clapton did the original guitar solo on that one, which I didn’t know. Sheryl Crow and Bonnie Raitt rocked out Bob Dylan’s “Everything is Broken.” Many of the artists were older than me (I’m no spring chicken although they are definitely not retired). However, a newcomer, Lianne La Havas, delivered an outstanding cover of “I Say a Little Prayer for You,” originally sung by Dionne Warwick, later by Aretha Franklin.

It was great fun listening to these old songs. Most of them, except for “I Say a Little Prayer for You,” did tend to remind me of all the trouble going on in the world now, including the pandemic, political vitriol, and violence. Come to think of it, we could all use a little prayer right now.

I thought about posting the YouTube videos of a few of the Crossroads Festival songs. But I noticed that one of the YouTubers carried a large number of deleted videos, possibly due to copyright infringement issues, and they’re relatively recent. I figured the posted videos might not last long.

This brings me to an old (meaning much older than the 1960s) classical work I heard recently, “Vaughn Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.” I saw it on the Light Classical cable music channel I wrote about a couple of days ago, the one about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor.

This one actually woke me up while I was sleeping on the couch. I frequently fall asleep to most classical music, partly because it helps me relax. However, the Vaughn Williams Fantasia didn’t just calm me—it also energized me. I’ve heard about the quality of music that can do that for people, but I was a bit skeptical. I have since looked for YouTube versions of the work, trying to find the same one I heard on the cable music channel.

I’m pretty sure I found it. It’s the one recorded by the Philharmonia Orchestra (London, UK) just last month, October 2020. I’ve listened to a couple of other highly praised recordings you can hear from a YouTuber called 2ndviolinist. One was by the Boyd Neel String Orchestra conducted by Boyd Neel in 1936. The other was done by the Halle Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli in 1946. Both are widely thought of as masterpieces.

The Philharmonia Orchestra players are all spaced at least 6 feet apart, adhering to the social distancing required to reduce transmission of COVID-19. If I close my eyes (or even if I don’t), this doesn’t make me nervous as I listen to the oceanic sonority of the music itself. Many comments about the recording attest to the beauty of the piece, making it a soothing treasure in our troubled times.

I’m less worried about the possibility of the video ever being deleted. I felt the same way about the one by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. It isn’t just because they’re old and copyright issues may be less of an issue. It’s more because they’re probably universally viewed as vital for healing our souls. At least I hope so.

Grab a pizza and a beer—and enjoy music that heals.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: What’s in a Name?

Last night I was half-dozing while listening to our cable light classical music channel. It was the usual lineup of 200-year-old white males of the 3-B variety—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. You see a photo or artist’s rendition of a guy in a powered wig, often looking depressed or constipated, alongside of short biographical blurbs. Many of the blurbs I mentally correct for grammatical or spelling errors.

Suddenly, I was struck by what I thought was a mistake in the name of the artist—next to a photo of a Black man. The name was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Even now I initially started to type Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which also didn’t make sense, because he was not a composer. He was a famous 19th century poet who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Kubla Khan, and other works I learned from my English Literature professor, Dr. Jenny Lind Porter (that was her real name; no mix up with the Swedish opera singer, Jenny Lind).

I learned a lot from Dr. Porter, although I didn’t learn anything about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was a famous 19th century composer in England. He happened to have been of mixed racial parentage, like I was. His mother (Alice Hare Martin) was white and his father was black—exactly my situation. His father (Dr. Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor) didn’t know about Samuel and they never met. I knew my father—and probably picked up some of his bad habits. Alice gave Samuel the name Coleridge because she was a fan of the poet. My name is Jim, but people often call me John, which was my father’s name.

How I got confused was a simple mental transposition of the last names. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a white man who was hooked on laudanum and wrote great poetry. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a mulatto who was not hooked on laudanum and wrote great music.

I had never seen any composers of African American descent on the cable music Light Classical channel—and we’ve been cable subscribers for many years. I have to wonder whether I just have not been paying attention or whether this is a recent phenomenon and a sign of the times.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his wife, Jessie Walmisley (a white woman), had two children. They named his son Hiawatha, after the native American in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, The Song of Hiawatha. It turns out Hiawatha (also known as Ayenwathaaa or Aiionwatha) was a real guy, an important Native American leader. Longfellow’s poem is actually about the legend of Hiawatha, which is probably not connected in any plausible way to the real life of Ayenwathaaa or Aiionwatha. Some speculate that naming their son Hiawatha might have been related to Hiawatha never knowing who his father was, which Samuel might have identified with.

The Coleridge-Taylors also had a daughter, who they initially named Gwendolyn Avril. Gwendolyn then later changed her name (why not?) to Avril Coleridge-Taylor.

Both Avril and Hiawatha went on to have distinguished careers in music. Avril was a conductor-composer in her own right—which makes me wonder why I’ve not seen any women highlighted on the Light Classical cable music channel.

Samuel was an influential and respected musical, cultural, and political leader. Sadly, he died young, of pneumonia. He was 37 years old.

I hope this helps you feel a bit less confused about all the names in this story. If you’ve got it straight, please drop me a note explaining it—so I can finally get it sorted out.

Sources I used were the Wikipedia entries for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as well as the Royal College of Music web presentation on Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The photo of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is in the public domain, to my understanding.

Pleiadian Zombie Turkeys

We noticed the wild turkeys hung back close to edge of the woods this morning. They didn’t move out across the open land or trot across our back yard like they usually do. It’s easy to imagine that they might be more wary because they know it’s Thanksgiving Day.

Usually a dozen or so get out foraging in the early morning. I’m not sure if a dozen counts as a rafter, which is another name for a flock of them.

I’ve never heard them gobble, but you can hear them from as far away as a mile, or so I’ve read. I think the turkeys in our area might not be ordinary turkeys.

Maybe they’re more of a landing party rather than a rafter—of alien, zombie turkeys from the Pleiades. I would suspect that Pleiadian Zombie Turkeys (PZTs) can fly space craft about as well as any other alien species. That means they regularly crash them, if you believe the whole Roswell saga. I’m not sure why we think aliens are so much more intelligent than earthlings if they can’t drive any better than us.

The zombie aspect likely comes from turkeys who are slaughtered as the main course for the Thanksgiving Day menu and then are beamed up through a wormhole to the Pleiades, where they become zombified. After that, as PZTs they make regular missions to Earth to try to free their turkey brethren.

These missions often fail. It turns out that PZTs ae no better at rescue missions than driving spaceships. They can peck at assorted crap on the ground and scratch the dirt underfoot for more, which they could use as ammo for ray guns—except they can’t carry (much less shoot) ray guns. They can fly up to 55 miles an hour, leap tallish trees at a single bound, see poultry seasoning salesmen coming from a long way off—but compulsively dance in the dirt when they should be rescuing their brethren.

Well, that’s food for thought anyway. By the way, I’ve seen Pleiadian spelled a couple of different ways, so please cut me some slack today. Have a nice Thanksgiving.

Happy Anniversary

The basic definition of the word “anniversary” is the date on which an event occurred in a previous year. There are many events to which it can be attached. However, wedding anniversaries most often ring the bell, literally for those of us who got married at the Little Brown Church in the Vale in Nashua, Iowa.

Sena and I pledged our wedding vows there 43 years ago. We rang the church bell. If I posted the snapshot of that, my days would be numbered. I wore a suit tailored for a skinny young man. That outfit included the shoes. I had an afro haircut, which was the style back then.

Sena was beautiful. She still is. In the picture, she is laughing out loud as we ring the bell.

We stopped by the Little Brown Church about five years ago. We took a picture of the church bell rope. We didn’t ring the bell because there was no official person there who would have let us do that. The church recently reopened the church for services but because of the coronavirus pandemic, the web site cautions visitors about touching anything.

So, I have to try to imagine the bell ringing. I guess that’s fitting because many good and great things start with imagination.

We imagined moving to Ames, Iowa, where I graduated from Iowa State University in the mid-1980s. ISU has a pretty campus and the bells of the Campanile Carillon are there. We imagined a trip to Hawaii in 1997—and it happened. We imagined a trip to New York City in 2017 where we saw the Imagine mosaic memorial to John Lennon in in the Strawberry Fields section of Central Park.

Sena has a fertile imagination, which has led to many beautiful back and front yard gardens over the years. Some of the flowers remind me of bells.

Happy Anniversary. Let’s ring the bell.

Camping in Our Basement: Week 2

It’s week 2 of camping out in our basement because our wood floors underwent sanding and resealing. Today, the workers finished up and the floors look great.

But we still can’t move back upstairs because that would ruin the finish just applied on the floors. The final coat went on last Friday. It’ll be this coming Friday before we can move furniture back. We can’t even walk on them unless we’re in stocking feet. We have not mastered the art of levitation, which, incidentally, you can learn at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa. Well, maybe that’s more like butt-hopping, otherwise known as yogic flying.

The views from our downstairs windows display the back yard, which has been full of birds feasting on the berries on the trees out there. I think those are Winterberry trees. The deer munch on the leaves. Blue jays, it turns out, save nuts and berries for later by hiding them under leaves.

So, we’re still in the basement, sleeping on the air mattresses. It’s pretty much like sleeping on the floor. We’ve discovered there’s a trick to getting in and out of them, since they’re only 12 inches high. I call it “roll in and roll out.” At first, I noticed that my calves were pretty sore after the first night. It turns out it was because I was trying to get off the air mattress the same way I get out of our regular bed. Because I swung my feet out first and tried to stand, it was like trying to do major squat exercises. I usually just sat back down pretty hard. It’s a lot like yogic flying.

Now I roll out on my hands and knees, which makes it easier to gather my legs under me and get on my feet. Getting into the air mattress is just the reverse.

I suppose we could have avoided these gymnastics by buying a queen size air mattress. It’s more the height of a regular bed—but that would have cost hundreds of dollars, believe it or not. Sena bought ours for a fraction of the price.

It’s good to be frugal.

Camping In Our Basement

We’ve been camping in our basement since yesterday. We’re having our upper level wood floors sanded and resealed. This has led to a new sense of togetherness for me and Sena. We had to get all the furniture off the floor. We were lucky enough to be able to find places to move them.

We briefly considered renting a motel room for the duration. However, the cost would outweigh the inconvenience. We opted for the total inconvenience plan. This meant we had to make the basement as comfortable as possible. We had to think of all the necessities and some of the conveniences we take for granted on the upper level and somehow make those happen downstairs.

Sena came up with the idea to use air mattresses. We’ve never used them before. I had visions of me turning blue trying to blow them up. I can’t even blow up a toy balloon. Fortunately, Sena found a model that inflates just by plugging it into a regular electrical outlet and turning a knob. It doesn’t stop filling automatically, though. The instructions warn you not to inflate more than 5 minutes because that could burn out the motor. But there is no warning about the danger of an exploding air mattress. Be careful with the levitation mode.

The last two days have been pretty noisy. If you’ve ever listened to heavy duty sanding machines, the din is tremendous and nearly constant all day long. It’s like living in a giant’s wood shop. When the screeching stops, the buzzing starts. When the buzzing stops, the whirring starts. In fact, the sound is similar to the noise of Frank’s stump grinder (see post 10/2/2020). We were a little surprised when one of the workers sanded all the way through the floor and landed on our new folding table while we were having lunch. Good workers like that are hard to find.

Sanding wood floors raises a regular haboob of dust, so we were sort of barricaded by heavy plastic on the stairway. We could sometimes hear the workers sneeze and cough, but most of the time they were muffled by masks. We never needed to wear masks against the dust because of the measures the workers took to protect us. We wore them when we talked face to face with them for the same reason—to protect them (and us) from coronavirus.

Heavy sanding also raises the temperature and it got pretty warm upstairs. On the other hand, it tends to be chillier downstairs and the furnace doesn’t come on. We’re lucky to have a little space heater.

I mentioned togetherness earlier and a smaller space like the basement has brought us together more. It’s more crowded in the kitchen (I guess I should say wet bar). The refrigerator is a blessing, even if it’s smaller. Doing the dishes can be a little bumpy, but we haven’t broken anything—yet.

Frank and His Stump Grinder

This is a follow-up post on Frank and his stump grinder estimate from last week (“Stumped”). By the way, he was the only stump grinder to return my call about getting a quote for the job. The name of his business is Corridor Stump Grinding (CSG) and the web page says it all: “We Remove Stumps.” Indeed, they do.

He brought his big rig over yesterday afternoon and chewed up our front yard stump in less than an hour. Frank is friendly, safe on the job, thorough, and offers a senior discount as well as complimentary ink pens with the CSG logo. I highly recommend him.

Frank has been in the stump grinding business for about 4 years and he’s pretty busy, although he’s in his 70s. He was retired for a couple of years before he embarked on this path in his life and now.

He’s also got a pretty good sense of humor and two other qualities are immediately obvious: kindness and respect. He’s proud of his family, a loving husband, father, and grandfather—and a sharp businessman. His Carleton stump grinder cost him tens of thousands of dollars and he’s doing very well.

Frank has had to repair the 21-inch cutting wheel because of obstacles like fence posts, including T-bars—which I’m sure he was glad we had removed prior to his arrival.

We wanted to shake hands after the job was done and we had talked a while. We couldn’t of course, because of the coronavirus pandemic. Anyway, Frank doesn’t mind my sharing a few pictures and a video about him and his stump grinder.

Retirement and Loss of the Crusade

I recently read an article about Maintenance of Psychiatry (MOC) written by Dr. Henry A. Nasrallah, MD and published this month in Current Psychiatry. The title is “Revamp the maintenance of certification program.” It brought back memories of my crusade to do the same thing in past years.

I lost my connection to that crusade when I was in my last year of my phased retirement contract. In a way, though I don’t miss MOC itself, I miss the sense of meaning and purpose I had while I opposed MOC through working with the Iowa Medical Society, through a petition to oppose Maintenance of Licensure (MOL, a state based version of MOC), and through writing articles and blogging about why I think psychiatrists and physicians in general don’t need these expensive, time-consuming activities which have led to anti-trust lawsuits being filed against certification boards.

In his article, Dr. Nasrallah criticizes the MOC as a monopoly perpetrated by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology (ABPN) and cites his own informal survey of 319 Current Psychiatry readers. He found that 86.5% of them recommended abolishing MOC. He tends to agree there should be an alternative to it. He recommends bringing back the oral exam.

I think it’s an interesting suggestion and I respect Dr. Nasrallah’s effort to not just oppose MOC, but to come up with another way for Psychiatry diplomates to keep their knowledge and skills up to date.

I remember my own oral board certification exam. It was very anxiety provoking, but I passed on the first try. There are reasons in addition to the anxiety they caused for why the oral boards were phased out after 2008. You can find them on the first page of a very entertaining post by Dr. Maria Yang. It’s a very long article, but the gist of the reasons for abolishing the oral boards is outlined on the first page. It was almost impossible to eliminate the wide variability of the live patient interview experience for diplomates while not being a guaranteed method for assessing a candidate’s knowledge and skills.

Dr. Yang lists several horror stories that make up the unverifiable yet terrifying lore about the process.

Even Dr. Nasrallah admits that the usual way the oral exams were conducted back in the day was almost unbelievably complicated logistically and also extremely expensive. He suggests that conducting them by videoconferencing could cut down on the costs, which is plausible. The justification for reinstating oral board exams is that it provided examiners a method for assessing a candidate’s interview skills and ability to collect and synthesize history and observation into a thorough diagnostic assessment and comprehensive treatment plan.

In fact, the academic medical center where I taught held what are sometimes called mock oral board exams regularly, which produced a tolerable mimic of the oral board experience in a less anxiety-provoking environment.

 Making the oral exam, even in virtual format, the alternative to MOC would probably still make candidates nervous. It could also by logistically challenging as well. Would they be vulnerable to some sort of hack, such as Zoom bombing?

I spent a lot of time opposing MOC while I was working. It was frustrating. On the other hand, I thought it was important for me to let trainees know that life after residency would include challenges in addition to patient care and teaching, and that lifelong learning activities they engaged in might cost them a lot of money and personal time that they might find burdensome. I thought of myself as an example of a responsible protester in basic agreement with the principle of lifelong learning and improvement, although objecting to the certification boards’ methods.

The anti-MOC movement was a crusade that gave me a sense of purpose. I’m retired now. I salute Dr. Nasrallah.

Jenny Lind Porter Scott: In Remembrance

I met Dr. Jenny Lind Porter Scott, one of my favorite teachers, in the mid-1970s during my first two years of college at what was then called Huston-Tillotson College (now Huston-Tillotson University or HTU). It’s one of America’s historically black colleges. I didn’t graduate from there, instead transferring credit to Iowa State University and taking a degree from there which eventually led to my graduating from the University of Iowa College of Medicine.

I’m sure there are no records of my attendance at HTU. I was recruited by Dr. Hector Grant, a professor of religious studies and philosophy who was traveling around the country and giving presentations to various church organizations to garner financial support for the college. I was awarded a $1,000 tuition grant under the auspices of the 17/76 Achievement Fund of the United Church of Christ.

 I have neither degree nor transcripts from HTU. But I have my memories, and one of the most special memories is of Dr. Porter. One of the main reasons for today’s post is my finding her obituary on the web this morning. She died at the age of 93 in July of this year. I saw two obituaries, one apparently written by the funeral home on the Texas State Cemetery web site and the other appears in the Austin American Statesman.

Both list her many achievements as an educator, a leader among women, and a gifted writer. They also cite what might seem to be a minor detail to anyone but me and other students who knew her in the 1970s, which is that she “…established a Creative Writing program at Huston-Tillotson University…”

One of the products of that program was Habari Gani, a poetry anthology created and supported by the HTU student government and sponsored by Dr. Porter. “Habari Gani” is Swahili, which means “What’s going on?”

There was a poetry contest which preceded the publishing of Habari Gani. Mine didn’t make the cut and I left the school before I could get a copy of the anthology. Luckily, after a short web search, I was able to connect with the HTU librarian, who was kind enough to send me a digital copy in 2016. I like the introductory poem:

“Let your hum be the dream

Of an understanding universe…

Let your hum be a perfect

Utopia of love”

–Patricia Lloyd

Around that same time and in previous years, I would sometimes hear about Dr. Porter. Just when I had forgotten her, it would seem like somebody would send me a message about her. That began around 2011 when I left the one and only review on Amazon about one of her books of poetry, The Lantern of Diogenes and Other Poems, first published in 1954. It’s the only one I have. I was never able to connect with her after I left HTU.

Sadly, in 2016, I found out that the City of Austin, Texas was proposing to demolish her house. I watched the video-recorded public proceedings of the city council meetings involving the Austin Historic Landmark Commission. Those who knew Dr. Porter wanted to preserve the house as an example of the work done by a famous local architect (which they believed they could verify) and to honor her stature in literature and education. The meetings were painful to watch. I gathered that Dr. Porter’s house had fallen into disrepair and little could be done to preserve it. She had also developed a dementing illness which impaired her ability to manage her own affairs. Her husband had died several years earlier and it sounded like a decision-maker had been appointed to help her.

I had email messages from the Historic Preservation Officer and the local architect who planned to build a house with similar architectural style for a client. The plan included a micro free library, a small replica of the original house at the corner of the lot, and other items. The project was to begin about 8 months after demolition and I’ve not heard anything since. A Google Map search dated March 2019 shows a weed-covered empty lot at 1715 Summit View Place. There are hard facts of life I would rather forget sometimes. But I keep a few memories.

What I remember most vividly is her live poetry reading performance at the annual Faculty Talent Show on campus. It was held in the Agard-Lovinggood Auditorium (now a campus administration building).

Her act brought down the house because it was a strip tease. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing salacious about it. It was absolutely typical for her legendary sense of humor and style. Of course, it was the ‘70s. Too bad I didn’t have a camera.

Dr. Porter loved her students. We believed in her courage, kindness, and strict attention to the sense and structure of English literature and language. My poem didn’t make it into Habari Gani for any other reason other than it was bad poetry. The important thing was—our lives mattered a great deal to her. She tried to teach me about Rosicrucianism, but it was over my head. The lead poem from her book is pretty down to earth.

The Lantern of Diogenes

by Jenny Lind Porter

All maturation has a root in quest.

How long thy wick has burned, Diogenes!

I see thy lantern bobbing in unrest

When others sit with babes upon their knees

Unconscious of the twilight or the storm,

Along the streets of Athens, glimmering strange,

Thine eyes upon the one thing keeps thee warm

In all this world of tempest and of change.

Along the pavestones of Florentian town

I see the shadows cower at thy flare,

In Rome and Paris; in an Oxford gown,

Men’s laughter could not shake the anxious care

Which had preserved thy lantern. May it be

That something of thy spirit burns in me!

Stumped

Ever since the derecho last month, we’ve been stumped by stumps—tree stumps. It has been a lesson in the value of persistence. The tree in our front yard got knocked over almost right at ground level. I cut it up with a 20-inch hand saw. But the stump has me stumped so far. You can google “stump removal” and get an idea of what your options are.

One method is to use chemicals, involving drilling holes into the stump, into which the chemical is poured along with water and waiting patiently a few years. One guy’s review of a product revealed what appeared to be a basic misunderstanding of the procedure. It involved mixing the chemical with peanut butter, applying it to the stump which he then set on fire to make a smoke signal which could allow lost hikers to be more easily rescued. And by the way, it also hastened the rotting of a tree. The reviewer even included a photo of the heavily smoking concoction. I suspect the manufacturer published the review mainly for entertainment.

We took a half-hearted stab at chemical rotting. I mainly used a bow saw, believe it or not. That didn’t get the stump low enough below ground level to assure grass would grow above it.

Manual labor methods usually include recommendations for using a chain, a truck with 4-wheel drive, a wrecking bar, shovel, mattock, axe, and a few sticks of dynamite.

Manual labor has been the main method so far. There was a wire wrapped around the stump and three steel T-bar fence posts, which were probably placed when the tree was first planted several years ago. We got two of the T-bars out but couldn’t get the last one loose (only breaking it in half) until I got a hatchet and a pry bar. Thick roots were wrapped every which way around it and meandered off in all directions. I chopped and pried for hours until I could finally yank it out with vise grips. We hacked a softball-sized chunk of root out of the tangle, and managed to amputate several others away from the main stump. That is why I’m not a big fan of the manual labor method.

And then there’s a guy named Frank, half of a duo owning a stump grinding service. I called him and he came over the following day, shortly after I had removed the T-bar—which probably would not be the best thing for the 21-inch blade on his giant stump remover. He plans to grind it sometime in the next week.

I knew I could rent a stump grinder, but I would never do a thing like that. I’m not the handiest guy in the world, putting it mildly. I’m lucky I didn’t amputate a digit (along with a root) with the hatchet.

We talked with Frank in the front yard as he examined the stump. He said, “Oh, that’s nothing.” He quoted a fair price, which was far less than how much I would have had to pay to rent a stump grinder—and to cover the costs of emergency room charges, damage to the machine, the house and the neighborhood from a runaway grinder.

Frank is pretty busy and we speculated about what the main reasons might be, naturally one being the derecho. Frank thought the coronavirus pandemic might be another one. People sit at home either in self-isolation or quarantine and they have more time to stare at longstanding problems around the house and in the yard.

Having time on your hands can lead to boredom and brooding, which can happen to retirees like me. There are times when I would rather hack at a tree stump than read the daily news. I have to keep focused on where I’m aiming the hatchet or how I’m holding the power pole saw, which occupies me, makes time go by faster, and makes me tired and sore at the end of the day. I feel like I accomplished something. Frank retired several years ago and only later set up the stump grinding business.

We’ll see what happens next week with the stump. Frank’s business card has a picture of his giant machine. He can operate it by remote control. You can see what that looks like in a couple of videos at the website which markets the grinder he uses.