Part 2: Accounts of the Life of Edmund Callipeaux

Contributors:
Edmund Callipeaux – artist, college instructor, lives in St. Louis Park.
Kidpowertool – unemployed dairy professional, lives in Key West.
Leadership 5 – woodworker, camping enthusiast, lives in Missoula.
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Edmund Callipeaux – 15 January 2009, 11:30am

I just got home from being at the grocery. An elderly woman insisted that I cut in front of her because I only had two items and she had an entire cart full of stuff. I thanked her and we chatted a bit as we waited. She said that I had to return the favor by letting someone in on the freeway, or some other similar act of kindness.

I confided in her that luckily, I had cured myself of my road rage this past summer. So, I’ve been enjoying not getting upset with other drivers and it’s no problem any longer when someone cuts me off. I’ll have to pay close attention for my opportunity to repay her in some other way. Perhaps I’ll come up with a plan to do something nice for someone if I make myself some lunch. I find that I come up with my best ideas over lunch. - EC
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Leadership 5 – 16 January 2009, 4:00am

I see that dawn is approaching as I finish composing my first contribution to the blog concerning the life of Edmund Callipeaux. I have known Edmund since we were children growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota. So, it’s been fun for me to think back to my experiences with him. One of my earliest memories of Edmund is the two of us riding the bus to school as children. Those were some cold bus rides during the winter months. I just looked online and saw that it is currently -20 degrees in St. Paul. Weather like that always reminds me firstly of a road trip I took to Chicago with Edmund, and his wife, and secondly, of a dog that we saw during that trip on Interstate 90.

It was January of 1995, and I had flown from my home in Missoula, Montana to St. Paul to visit my family and friends. I had seen Edmund and his wife a few months before during that previous summer. They had visited me while I was in Vermont attending a log cabin building school. As a child, I always was interested in woodworking and building things with my hands. As I write this essay, I am sitting in the log home I built for myself after learning how to work with raw timber in Vermont. That August, Edmund and his wife were traveling cross-country in their little Chevy S10 pickup truck. And one day they appeared unannounced at my door. Of course, I was thrilled to see them. We hadn’t seen each other for a long time, and we had a great time exploring the beautifully wooded terrain that surrounds Montpellier. I was not very pleased however, to find a bag of hotdogs in my freezer some weeks after their departure. I have detested hotdogs since I was a child. Knowing this full well, Edmund had planted several wieners unbeknownst to me as a joke before they left Vermont for Minnesota. He thinks he’s a funny guy.

After completing my training in Montpellier, I relocated to Missoula, Montana. There I set out to build my log house. I hadn’t been back to Minnesota for some time, so once I had a break, I bought a plane ticket. I remember being greeted at the Minneapolis airport by Edmund and his wife, whereupon they informed me that we were to embark post haste on a road trip to Chicago for a little fun. They weren’t concerned that it was almost 11:00pm and it didn’t take much cajoling to convince me that a road trip was a good idea. I had lived in Chicago for a brief time after graduating from college. And Edmund and his wife had visited me at my tiny apartment just south of Wriggly Field on Clark Street at Belmont Avenue. Those were great times. I love Chicago. Standing at the Minneapolis airport, they informed me that the itinerary was all set. They had lined up a cheap hotel to stay at and the food for the two-day trip was covered. Edmund had been to the grocery store that day and bought a ton of stuff to make sandwiches with. Furthermore, they proclaimed that the best time to leave Minneapolis for a trip to Chicago was near midnight because after the six-hour drive, you hit the city before rush hour traffic.

The plan seemed perfectly acceptable to me. We piled into the cab of their Chevy S10 pickup truck and hit the road. Edmund had prepared the sandwiches ahead of time, so we were able to eat without stopping on the road. He had taken what looked like three or four loaves of bread and mass-produced these incredibly tasty sandwiches made from a variety of sliced meats, lettuce, tomato, sliced cucumbers, alfalfa sprouts, cheese, mustard – the works. They were great sandwiches. He took all these pre-made sandwiches and stuffed them back into the plastic bread bags. He then placed the bread bags full of sandwiches into empty shoeboxes, stacked the shoeboxes into a red cooler and threw the cooler into the bed of the pickup truck. I’ll never forget how the three of us were crammed side by side across the bench seat of that little truck, with no legroom, each munching on a sandwich. I can see it now. Edmund played a book-on-tape of the movie Star Wars. The factory sound system in the truck was pretty lousy and we had the volume cranked way up to hear the voices of the actors clearly on the crappy speakers. Whenever R2D2 talked, his squeaks and whistles would blast our eardrums. So, we were constantly trying in vain to predict when he had something to say so that we could quickly turn the volume down…but that plan didn’t work that well and we suffered through his chirps.

As predicted, we hit the city well before rush hour. It is at this point in our journey when we saw the dog. We were cruising along I90 coming into downtown from the west. I was watching for signs regarding our exit when Edmund said, “What’s that?” We all three looked to our left, and as we passed through a short freeway tunnel we saw the shape of a large black dog. We drove by the form so fast that we weren’t sure what to make of it. Being up all night, packed shoulder-to-shoulder in the cab of a little truck, doing 80 mph across the frozen North, eating sandwich after sandwich, having your eardrums killed by crappy speakers that are competing with the constant roar of the truck’s engine can make it tough to trust your senses. But later, we all agreed that we saw a dog, a black lab to be exact, fully grown. He or she had been run over by a car. Run over by about a hundred cars, more than likely. This poor dog had been flattened by the Chicago traffic and frozen solid by the subzero temperatures. Someone had taken the time to get out of their car (probably while stuck in a traffic jam) and had set the dog up on its legs like a cartoon character – its silhouette made him look like a regular dog, but it was only a few inches thick while leaning slightly against the tunnel wall.

We drove on in silence as we exited the freeway and found our way to the hotel downtown, not far from Navy Pier. After checking into our little room, we immediately hit the town. None of us had slept that night before, but when you’re young, sleeping isn’t a factor when you’re in a town like Chicago. Before we left the hotel, I remember counting that there were three remaining shoeboxes of sandwiches. We braced ourselves against the cold and went around to all the free stuff we love to see in Chicago. I remember that it was on this trip that I first saw one of Gerhard Richter’s candle paintings at the Art Institute - an unbelievably masterful painting.

We stayed two nights in the city before heading back to Minneapolis. We saved money by eating Edmund’s sandwiches and we found a cheap bar not far from the hotel to have a few beers each night. When we left for Minnesota, we had but one shoebox of sandwiches left. Within this last shoebox, a chemistry experiment was taking place. The water from the lettuce and other components of the sandwiches had created brine that had soaked into the bread, rendering each sandwich inedible. It was a bummer because those were great sandwiches.

We returned to the Twin Cities and after about a week I flew back to Missoula. Chicago is such a great place and there’s nothing better in my mind than taking a spontaneous road trip with friends. I’ve spoken to Edmund about the dog from time to time since then. We both agree that it’s not our favorite memory of that trip to Chicago. And yet, it’s those bizarre incidents that stay with you for years. Road trips are usually a healthy mixture of heaven and hell. As an aside, I might also add that the last shoebox of sandwiches became another element from that road trip that did not fade into memory for long. Those sandwiches eventually taught Edmund a lesson about the indifference of nature.

Upon arriving home from Chicago, Edmund threw his red cooler along with everything else from the road trip into a pile in his living room. As the months ticked by, more and more junk and crap was added to this pile. Eventually, and despite all laziness and procrastination, Edmund could no longer ignore what had become a monstrous heap. So, one fine summer afternoon he conquered the pile, whence he worked his way down only to discover the neglected cooler from months past. Without thinking, he threw the lid open. Panic grabbed him as he momentarily set eyes on a fuzzy, mold-covered shoebox shape within the cooler. He told me that he slammed the lid down as fast as humanly possible, but that by then the stench was out in the open rendering the apartment uninhabitable. The pour bastard had to leave the building for a few hours to let the smell settle down! After which, he carefully brought the cooler down to the dumpster behind the building. He said that he didn’t even try to save the cooler for reuse, and due to his pretension toward thriftiness, and because he had traveled across almost the entire North American continent with that red cooler, he considered it a great loss. – L5
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Kidpowertool – 16 January 2009, dinnertime

Before I moved to Key West, I lived for a time as a dairy professional in Northern Florida. Florida is not known for its dairy industry and work was scarce in my profession. Times were hard, but I always looked forward to the times that Edmund Callipeaux and his wife would come down south to visit me. They had this little Chevy S10 pickup truck that I remember Ed purchasing during our time together in Alaska. When Ed bought the truck from his boss, he was wearing a t-shirt from station number twelve of the San Francisco Fire Department. Therefore, he called the pickup, Truck 12. Being a great lover of road trips, Ed had driven Truck 12 all the way down from Alaska to the Lower 48. And during the summer of 1994, he and his wife took a massive road trip through the eastern part of the country. They had quit their jobs, moved out of their apartment, sold everything they had at a garage sale, and hit the road.

If my memory serves me, they first drove from their home in Minnesota to visit me in Florida. They then made their way up the east coast, through Georgia, South and North Carolina, into Pennsylvania, over into New York, and up into Vermont where they visited another friend who was attending a log cabin building school in Montpellier. I distinctly remember them rolling into the parking lot of my apartment building at about ten in the morning one summer day and I was so glad to see them. Like I said, working in the dairy industry in Florida was rough in those days…and isn’t much better today. So, I was especially happy to see my friends. We’ve always had great times together. One memory of that time in Florida that always makes me smile – and also makes me glad that Ed isn’t planning my dinner menu everyday - was when were at a local Winn Dixie supermarket and Ed found these hotdogs.

We had gone to Winn Dixie because it was the cheapest place to get food in town. We were all pretty much broke and we were hunting for bargains. Prior to the trip to Florida, Ed had bought four cases of Creamy Chicken Flavored Ramen Noodles in Minneapolis. He and his wife had eaten them all the way to Florida and needed to expand the menu a bit. He bragged that he had bravely secured the Ramen at the sale price of 10 packets for one buck. I think there were 45 packets to each case, so Ed had 180 packs of Ramen for $18.00. He used to love the Creamy Chicken Flavored Ramen and so therefore, that was the only kind he bought on his eighteen dollar shopping spree. Of course, too much of a good thing never really works out that well in the end. Now days, Ed can’t eat Ramen. When I asked him recently as to the best way to eat Ramen, his reply was one word: Fast. Get the experience over with quickly. The flavor becomes a bit rough after years of eating them nonstop. Ed’s problem was that he never deviated from the Creamy Chicken flavor. Everyone knows that you must always diversify when you’re thinking long-term. But when presented with Pork or Shrimp flavored Romen, Ed wouldn’t have anything of it, and he always went back to that damn Creamy Chicken – the siren flavor that invariably drew him to the deadly rocks.

At any rate, we were in Winn Dixie and Ed found these hotdogs on the meat island. I knew that we would find trouble in that grocery store and I wish to this day that we had gone to a better grade store, like Publix. As I approached, Ed turned to me with his eyes practically popping out of his head as he proceeded to hold up two bricks of hotdogs with round orange stickers that read 99¢. He exclaimed: “Buy one, get one FREE!” That’s a pack of 48 hotdogs for 99¢, buy one, and get one free. My eyes rolled back into my head as I did the math. That’s just over one penny per dog (or as I check my calculator now, it’s 1.03125 cents per repulsive wiener). Like everyone alive, I don’t like to think about what hotdogs are made of…but the really cheap ones? Man, what do they put in those babies?

Ed placed his precious hotdogs on the checkout counter and slapped a one-dollar bill down and held out his hand for his penny in change. We had to beg like hell for him not to buy four packages of those damn pale links. Luckily, his wife put her foot down on that idea. Ed had seen his menu laid out for him for the next few months at the price of pennies and his wife had seen otherwise. (This is why, to this day, if Ed is perceived to have the most reasonable plan of action amongst all the people present in a group, I know that there’s something wrong and we need to keep brainstorming.) The teller gave Ed his change and we left the grocery store only to be tortured over the next ten days with every possible way of eating hotdogs. It didn’t take the fool long to realize that he could cut up the wieners into his beloved Ramen, and thus have a meal for just over 11¢. Yuck! (You’ve got to hand it to him though, eleven cents for a meal is pretty good considering that every time I go out to eat these days it seems I have to shell out at least eleven bucks.)

Crazy days. We did have fun though. Eventually, Ed and his wife left me in Florida and traveled up the coast. They camped along the barrier islands of Georgia and North Carolina, which is something that I’ve always wanted to do. I received a few phone calls from them along the way. Despite Ed’s generous offer, I had insisted that he take all the remaining hotdogs with them, and not leave me with a few spares in Florida. His wife later told me that by the time that they had reached Georgia (which was only a few hours from where I lived) the bag containing the hotdogs had leaked wiener juice out into their red cooler while it sat in the back of Truck 12. Under a hot summer sun that easily maintained 100+ degrees, the ice in the cooler had melted, mixing with the brine of the hotdogs and covering everything with the salty, stinky essence of extremely low quality meats. She said that all the soda pop cans tasted like hotdogs and that she didn’t know if she’d ever make it back to the Midwest before losing her mind. I had told him that he needed to tie that hotdog bag off better. But Edmund Callipeaux has his own way of doing things, and that generally means that he learns his lessons the hard way. - KPT