It only took me a month, but I’m finally done writing about our trip in Japan. Reading the whole thing could take a while, so, you’ve been warned. Anyway, it starts here and goes through here. If you click on either of those, you can then jump forward or back to the day before or after and read through the whole trip.
As part of my graduate fellowship this year I was required to attend a celebratory dinner for the Taft Fund, which is where my money is coming from. The Taft Fund is money that comes to the University of Cincinnati through the Taft family, made famous when one of the Tafts became President of the U.S., William Howard Taft (and later Chief Justice - the only president to have done that). Anyway, one of William Howard Taft’s siblings, Charles Phelps, married into the Sinton family, also of Cincinnati, and with his wife’s inheritance (a cool $15 million in 1900), and his family’s business interests, became one of the wealthiest families around. Annie Sinton Taft, after Charles’s death, gave a massive gift to the University of Cincinnati to encourage ideas in the humanities and social sciences. The department of sociology at UC is part of the funded programs and I received a fellowship through them this year.
Anyway, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the fund, they held a large conference at UC capped by a dinner at the Taft Museum of Art downtown on the riverfront. The keynote speaker was Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, a Harvard economist and philosopher. Next to Professor Sen, the most famous guest was Governor Bob Taft, the current governor of Ohio (recently indicted and not running for re-election). Nancy Zimpher, President of UC, was also there, along with a battery of professors from UC and the members of the Taft Executive Committee. Anyway, it was an interesting experience… And by interesting I mean, I didn’t really understand Professor Sen’s short talk (who spoke primarily about some historical figure in India - which the historians may have appreciated) and there wasn’t a vegetarian option - so I was served salmon and prime rib - yum! But the conversation was good, the museum was impressive, and it was generally a nice experience… I spoke with a lot of people from different disciplines and realized that the governor is balding - you can see the top of his head quite well when he’s sitting and you’re not 
We’ve also had a busy weekend - we went to one of my professor’s houses to play poker last night and visited a Hindu temple today for one of my 3 yearly church visits… Now it’s off to teach dance.
Oh, one more thing - we had a nifty little incident that made lots of noise last week occur right by our little condo. Rapper T.I. was at a club about 1/2 a mile from our house when the anger bug got going, leading to a shooting and death on I-75, which is also very close to our condo. Not surprisingly, the only reason Debi and I even heard about it was because traffic was packed on Reading Road - our usual route to work/school in the morning. I-75 was closed for almost 10 hours as the shooting was investigated. The congestion on Reading led us to look up what happened and that’s how we found out about it. Thanks to Tivo and cable, we never watch the local news - we prefer John Stewart and the Daily Show…
I just talked to my mom on the phone and she told me that my paternal Grandfather passed away this morning. If I’m not mistaken, he was 97 years old. His wife, my paternal Grandmother, died about 6 years ago and his health had been declining progressively ever since. He was my last living grandparent. He was a pretty good man. He worked hard, running the family farm and cherry orchard for many years and was also a school principal. My family often talked about how he was very close to finishing his PhD at Utah State University but never did. He was clearly intelligent and spent much of his retirement doing genealogical work and writing family histories. I must have 10 to 15 thick volumes filled with letters and stories from the Cragun side, all of which he compiled and/or wrote.
I think my favorite memory of him comes from when I was a teenager. When we would visit him he used to pinch our legs when we weren’t expecting it. He didn’t tickle, he pinched. Sometimes it really hurt, but it was usually just the surprise of it. It was something of a game for him to see if he could catch us off guard and sneak in a pinch. He had a great smile he’d follow it up with when he snuck one in successfully.
We used to make about a monthly trek out to their house (about a 45 minute drive from where I grew up). We always went on a sunday and spent a good five or six hours there. Sometimes it was boring, but we were pretty resourceful and found things to do. For instance, there were two guest bedrooms in the basement along with a laundry room and a very large, multi-purpose room that also housed the furnace. In the multi-purpose room was a hollow bench where they stored a bunch of old clothes that were kept specifically for the grandkids to use for dress up. My younger siblings and I regularly put on plays for the rest of the family using those clothes. We also devised a number of odd, ever-changing games to play in that basement multi-purpose room (e.g., throw the ball at someone or something, etc.).
The house also had a very large, well-manicured yard. When my older siblings were still in the picture (hadn’t moved out yet), we’d usually start the evening off with a game of football or baseball or sometimes even soccer. We also used that lawn during some Easter celebrations for a hard-boiled egg slide. They’d spray down the lawn with water and see who could slide their peeled, hard-boiled egg down the hill the farthest.
My grandpa took great pride in his lawn, probably because his house is the first one you see when you drive up the main road into Pleasant View. His yard was always filled with an amazing variety of plants and flowers and he dutifully managed them all until he was no longer healthy enough to do so. He also put up elaborate light displays (along with a nativity) during the Christmas season every year, though that also lapsed when his health declined.
Another couple things I remember in the house are kind of fun. My grandpa had a den or office right in the center of the house that actually had windows looking into the main living room (probably the result of an addition to the original house). The den was one of my favorite places to hang out because it had a lot of old, cool things in it. One of the most unique was a massaging chair that must have been 20 years old when I was born. I remember it being ancient but still working and we regularly sat in it.
The house also had a front room that was pretty formal and seldom used for hosting or even sitting. I remember it being color-coordinated and having the carpet that had parts shaved and other parts shag, so you could always find strange patterns in it. Anyway, in the room, from when I could remember, they had a globe with fiber-optic lights sticking out of it. I don’t know the history of fiber-optics… okay, I just looked it up, anyway, the globe must have been an “early adopter” purchase because I didn’t see one anywhere else for a long, long time. I thought it was cool. Also, I used to sit on the dining room chairs, which rotate like an office chair, and spin around looking at the ceiling until I was dizzy. As the ceiling was one of those that had the glittery spray on it, it made for pretty cool dizzy spells - it was like looking at glittery stars on a white background instead of a black one.
Anyway, those are some of my memories of my grandfather. Like I said, he was a pretty good guy. I think he was a bit patriarchal by today’s standards, but probably not by his day’s standards, so he can’t really be faulted for that. But he was good-spirited and a hard worker and instilled those values in his children, which led to me inheriting the hard-work meme as well. So, to Earl Budge Cragun, my last grandparent - 1/24/1909-5/6/2006.
